by Rice, Anne
“Foolish,” he whispered, “so foolish. Mother!”
The left hand began to flop from side to side on the bed. Then I saw that his entire left arm was jerking, and indeed, the left side of his mouth was pulling to the side over and over again in the same repetitive pattern, as his eyes stared upwards and pupils ceased to move. The blood continued to flow from the nose and down into the mouth and over the white teeth.
“Oh, David, I didn’t mean to do it,” I whispered. “Oh, Lord God, he’s going to die!”
I think he said the word “Mother” once more.
But I could hear the sirens now, screaming towards Ocean Drive. Someone was pounding on the door. I slipped to the side as it was flung open, and I darted from the room, unseen. Other mortals were rushing up the stairway. They saw no more than a quick shadow as I passed. I stopped once in the lobby, and in a daze I watched the clerks scurrying about. The awful scream of the siren grew louder. I turned and all but stumbled out the doors and down into the street.
“Oh, Lord God, David, what have I done?”
A car horn startled me, then another blast jogged me loose from my stupor. I was standing in the very middle of the traffic. I backed away, and up onto the sand.
Suddenly a large stubby white ambulance came rattling to a halt directly before the hotel. One hulking young man jumped from the front seat and rushed into the lobby, while the other went to throw open the rear doors. Someone was shouting inside the building. I saw a figure at the window of my room above.
I backed further away, my legs trembling as if I were mortal, my hands clutching stupidly at my head as I peered at the horrid little scene through the dim sunglasses, watching the inevitable crowd gather as people stopped in their meandering, as they rose from the tables of the nearby restaurants and approached the hotel doors.
Now it was quite impossible to see anything in normal fashion, but the scene materialized before me as I snatched the images from mortal minds—the heavy gurney being carried through the lobby, with David’s helpless body strapped to it, the attendants forcing people to the side.
The doors of the ambulance were slammed shut. Again the siren began its frightful peal, and off the vehicle sped, carrying David’s body inside it to God only knows where!
I had to do something! But what could I do? Get into that hospital; work the change upon the body! What else can save it? And then you have James inside it? Where is David? Dear God, help me. But why should you?
At last I sprang into action. I hurried up the street, sprinting easily past the mortals who could scarcely see me, and found a glass-walled phone booth and slipped into it and slammed the door.
“I have to reach London,” I told the operator, spilling out the information: the Talamasca, collect. Why was it taking so long! I pounded upon the glass with my right fist in my impatience, the receiver pressed to my ear. At last one of those kindly patient Talamasca voices accepted the call.
“Listen to me,” I said, blurting out my name in full as I began. “This isn’t going to make sense to you, but it’s dreadfully important. The body of David Talbot has just been rushed to a hospital in the city of Miami. I don’t even know which hospital! But the body is badly wounded. The body may die. But you must understand. David is not inside this body. Are you listening? David is someplace …”
I stopped.
A dark shape had appeared in front of me on the other side of the glass. And as my eyes fell on it, fully prepared to dismiss it—for what did I care if some mortal man were pressing me to hurry?—I realized it was my old mortal body standing there, my tall young brown-haired mortal body, in which I had lived long enough to know every small particular, every weakness and strength. I was staring into the very face I had seen in the mirror only two days ago! Only it was now two inches taller than I. I was looking up into those familiar brown eyes.
The body wore the same seersucker suit with which I had last clothed it. Indeed, there was the same white turtleneck shirt that I had pulled over its head. And one of those familiar hands was lifted now in a calm gesture, calm as the expression on the face, giving me the unmistakable command to hang up the phone.
I put the receiver back into its hook.
In a quiet fluid movement, the body came around to the front of the booth and opened the door. The right hand closed on my arm, drawing me out with my full cooperation onto the sidewalk and into the gentle wind.
“David,” I said. “Do you know what I’ve done?”
“I think so,” he said with a little lift to the eyebrows, the familiar English voice issuing confidently from the young mouth. “I saw the ambulance at the hotel.”
“David, it was a mistake, a horrible, horrible mistake!”
“Come on, let’s get away from here,” he said. And this was the voice I remembered, truly comforting and commanding and soft.
“But, David, you don’t understand, your body …”
“Come, you can tell me all about it,” he said.
“It’s dying, David.”
“Well, there isn’t much we can do about it, then, is there?”
And to my utter amazement, he put his arm around me, and leant forward in his characteristic authoritative manner, and pressed me to come along with him, down the pavement to the corner, where he put up his hand to signal a cab.
“I don’t know which hospital,” I confessed. I was still shaking violently all over. I couldn’t control the tremours in my hands. And the sight of him looking down at me so serenely was shocking me beyond endurance, especially when the old familiar voice came again from the taut, tanned face.
“We’re not going to the hospital,” he said, as if deliberately trying to calm a hysterical child. He gestured to the taxi. “Please get in.”
Sliding onto the leather seat beside me, he gave the driver the address of Grand Bay Hotel in Coconut Grove.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I was still in a pure mortal state of shock as we entered the large marble-tiled lobby. In a haze, I saw the sumptuous furnishings, the immense vases of flowers, and the smartly dressed tourists drifting past. Patiently, the tall brown-haired man who had been my former self guided me to the elevator, and we went up in swooshing silence to a high floor.
I was unable to tear my eyes off him, yet my heart was throbbing from what had only just taken place. I could still taste the blood of the wounded body in my mouth!
The suite we entered now was spacious and full of muted colors, and open to the night through a great wall of floor-length windows which looked out upon the many lighted towers along the shores of dark serene Biscayne Bay.
“You do understand what I’ve been trying to tell you,” I said, glad to be alone with him at last, and staring at him as he settled opposite me at the small round wooden table. “I hurt him, David, I hurt him in a rage. I … I flung him at the wall.”
“You and your dreadful temper, Lestat,” he said, but again it was the voice one uses to calm an overwrought child.
A great warm smile fired the beautifully molded face with its clear graceful bones, and broad serene mouth—David’s unmistakable smile.
I couldn’t respond. Slowly, I lowered my eyes from the radiant face to the powerful straight shoulders settling against the back of the chair, and the entire relaxed form.
“He led me to believe he was you!” I said, trying to focus again. “He pretended to be you. Oh, God, I poured out all my woe to him, David. He sat there listening to me, suckering me on. And then he asked for the Dark Gift. He told me he’d changed his mind. He lured me up to the rooms to give it to him, David! It was ghastly. It was everything I had wanted, and yet I knew something wasn’t right! Something about him was so sinister. Oh, and there were clues, and I didn’t see them! What a fool I was.”
“Body and soul,” said the smooth-skinned, poised young man opposite. He removed the seersucker jacket, tossing it on the nearby chair, and sat back again, folding his arms across his chest. The fabric of the turtleneck shirt showed his
muscles to great advantage, and the clean white cotton made his skin seem all the more richly colored, almost a dark golden brown.
“Yes, I know,” he said, the lovely British voice flowing naturally. “It’s quite shocking. I had the very same experience, only a few days ago in New Orleans, when the only friend I have in the world appeared before me in this body! I sympathize completely. And I do understand—you needn’t ask me again—that my old body is probably dying. It’s just I don’t know what either of us can do.”
“Well, we can’t go near it, that’s certain! If you were to come within a few feet of it, James might sense your presence and focus sufficiently to get out.”
“You think James is still in the body?” he asked, the eyebrows lifting again, precisely as David always lifted them when he spoke, the head tipping forward ever so slightly, and the mouth on the edge of a smile.
David in that face! The timbre of the voice was almost exactly the same.
“Ah … what … oh, yes, James. Yes, James is in the body! David, it was a blow to the head! You remember our discussion. If I was to kill him, it ought to be a swift blow to the head. He was stammering something about his mother. He wanted her. He kept saying to tell her that Raglan needed her. He was in that body when I left the room.”
“I see. This means the brain is functioning but the brain is severely impaired.”
“Exactly! Don’t you see? He thought he would stop me from hurting him because it was your body. He had taken refuge in your body! Oh, he figured wrong! Wrong! And to try to lure me into the Dark Trick! What vanity! He should have known better. He should have confessed his little scheme the moment he saw me. Damn him. David, if I haven’t killed your body, I’ve wounded it beyond repair.”
He had drifted into his thoughts precisely the way he always did in the midst of conversation, the eyes soft and wide and looking off into the distance through the floor-length windows, and over the dark bay.
“I must go to the hospital, mustn’t I?” he whispered.
“For God’s sakes, no. Do you want to be plunged into that body as it dies! You can’t be serious.”
He climbed to his feet with an easy grace, and moved to the windows. He stood there staring out into the night, and I saw the characteristic posture in him, I saw the unmistakable expression of David in troubled reflection in the new face.
What absolute magic it was to see this being with all his poise and wisdom shining from within this young form. To see the soft intelligence behind the clear young eyes as he looked down at me again.
“My death’s waiting for me, isn’t it?” he whispered.
“Let it wait. It was an accident, David. It’s not an inevitable death. Of course there is one alternative. We both know what it is.”
“What?” he asked.
“We go there together. We get into the room somehow by bewitching a few medical persons of various rank. You push him out of the body, and you go into it, and then I give you the blood. I bring you to me. There is no conceivable injury that the full infusion of blood won’t heal.”
“No, my friend. You should know better by now than to suggest it. That I cannot do.”
“I knew you’d say it,” I said. “Then don’t go near the hospital. Don’t do anything to rouse him from his stupor!”
And then we both fell silent, looking at one another. The alarm was fast draining out of me. I was no longer trembling. And I realized quite suddenly that he had never been alarmed.
He wasn’t alarmed now. He did not even look sad. He was looking at me, as if asking me silently to understand. Or perhaps he wasn’t thinking of me at all.
Seventy-four years old he was! And he had gone out of a body full of predictable aches and pains and dulling vision and into this hardy and beautiful form.
Why, I could have no idea at all of what he was really feeling! I’d swapped a god’s body for those limbs! He had swapped the body of an aged being, with death ever present at his shoulder, a man for whom youth was a collection of painful and tormenting memories, a man so shaken by those memories that his peace of mind was fast crumbling away entirely, threatening to leave him bitter and discouraged in the few years he had left.
Now he had been given back his youth! He might live another whole lifetime! And it was a body that he himself had found enticing, beautiful, even magnificent—a body for which he himself had felt carnal desire.
And here I’d been crying anxiously about the aged body, battered and losing its life drop by drop, in a hospital bed.
“Yes,” he said, “I’d say that is the situation, exactly. And yet I know that I should go to that body! I know that it is the proper home of this soul. I know that every moment I wait, I risk the unimaginable—that it will expire, and I will have to remain in this body. Yet I brought you here. And here is exactly where I intend to remain.”
I shuddered all over, staring at him, blinking as if to wake myself from a dream, and then shuddering again. Finally I laughed, a crazed ironic laugh. And then I said:
“Sit down, pour yourself some of your bloody miserable Scotch and tell me how this came about.”
He wasn’t ready to laugh. He appeared mystified, or merely in a great state of passivity, peering at me and at the problem and at the whole world from within that marvelous frame.
He stood a moment longer at the windows, eyes moving over the distant high-rises, so very white and clean looking with their hundreds of little balconies, and then at the water stretching on to the bright sky.
Then he went to the small bar in the corner, without the slightest awkwardness, and picked up the bottle of Scotch, along with a glass, and brought these back to the table. He poured himself a good thick swallow of the stinking stuff, and drank half of it, making that lovely little grimace with his tight new facial skin, exactly the way he had with the older, softer face, and then he flashed his irresistible eyes on me again.
“Well, he was taking refuge,” he said. “It was exactly what you said. I should have known he would do it! But damn, it never occurred to me. We had our hands full, so to speak, dealing with the switch. And God knows, I never thought he’d try to seduce you into the Dark Trick. What made him think he could fool you when the blood started to flow?”
I made a little desperate gesture.
“Tell me what happened,” I said. “He knocked you out of your body!”
“Completely. And for a moment I couldn’t imagine what had happened! You can’t conceive of his power! Of course he was desperate, as were we all! Of course I tried to reclaim myself at once, but he repelled me and then he started firing that gun at you!”
“At me? He couldn’t have hurt me with it, David!”
“But I didn’t know that for certain, Lestat. Suppose one of those bullets had struck you in the eye! I didn’t know but that he might shock your body with one good shot and somehow manage to get back into it himself! And I can’t claim to be an experienced spirit traveler. Certainly not on a level with him. I was in a state of plain fear. Then you were gone, and I still couldn’t recapture my own body, and he turned that gun on the other, lying on the floor.
“I didn’t even know if I could take possession of it. I’ve never done this. I wouldn’t even attempt it when you invited me to do so. Possession of another body. It’s as morally loathsome to me as deliberately taking human life. But he was about to blow the head off that body—that is, if he could get proper control of the gun. And where was I? And what was to happen to me? That body was my only chance of reentrance into the physical world.
“I went into it exactly the way I’d instructed you to enter your own. And I had it up and on its feet instantly, knocking him backwards, and almost dislodging the gun from his hand. By that time the passage outside was full of panic-stricken passengers and stewards! He fired another bullet as I fled over the veranda and dropped down to the lower deck.
“I don’t think I realized what had happened until I hit those boards. The fall would have broken my ankle in my ol
d body! Probably even my leg. I was prepared for that inevitable splitting pain, and suddenly I realized I wasn’t hurt at all, that I’d climbed to my feet almost effortlessly, and I ran down the length of the deck and into the door to the Queens Grill Lounge.
“And of course that was the very wrong way to go. The security officers were on their way through that room to the Signal Deck stairs. I had no doubt they would apprehend him. They had to. And he’d been so awkward with that gun, Lestat. It was the way you described him before. He really doesn’t know how to move in these bodies he steals. He remains too much himself!”
He stopped, took another drink of the Scotch, and then filled the glass again. I was mesmerized watching him, and listening to him—to the authoritative voice and manner combined with the glistening and innocent face. Indeed, late adolescence had only just completed itself in this young male form, though I hadn’t thought about it before. It was in every sense only just finished, like a coin with the first clear impression stamped upon it and not a single tiny scratch of true wear.
“You don’t get as drunk in this body, do you?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I don’t. Nothing is the same, actually. Nothing. But let me go on. I didn’t mean to leave you on the ship. I was frantic for your safety. But I had to.”
“I told you not to worry on my account,” I said. “Oh, Lord God, those are almost the same words I used to him … when I thought he was you. But go on. What happened then?”
“Well, I stepped back out into the hallway behind the Queens Grill Lounge, where I could still see inside through the little glass window in the door. I figured they had to bring him down that way. I didn’t know of any other way. And I had to know if he had been caught. Understand, I’d made no decision as to what to do. Within seconds, a whole contingent of officers appeared, with me—David Talbot—in the very midst of them, and they ushered him—the old me—hastily and grimly through the Queens Grill itself and towards the front of the ship. And oh, to see him struggling to preserve his dignity, talking at them rapidly and almost cheerfully, as if he were a gentleman of great wealth and influence, caught up in some sordid annoying little affair.”