by Rice, Anne
ONE
I saw him when he came through the front doors. Tall, solidly built, dark brown hair and eyes, skin still fairly dark because it had been dark when I’d made him a vampire. Walking a little too fast, but basically passing for a human being. My beloved David.
I was on the stairway. The grand stairway, one might say. It was one of those very opulent old hotels, divinely overdone, full of crimson and gold, and rather pleasant. My victim had picked it. I hadn’t. My victim was dining with his daughter. And I’d picked up from my victim’s mind that this was where he always met his daughter in New York, for the simple reason that St. Patrick’s Cathedral was across the street.
David saw me at once—a slouching, blond, long-haired youth, bronze face and hands, the usual deep violet sunglasses over my eyes, hair presentably combed for once, body tricked out in a dark-blue, double-breasted Brooks Brothers suit.
I saw him smile before he could stop himself. He knew my vanity, and he probably knew that in the early nineties of the twentieth century, Italian fashion had flooded the market with so much shapeless, hangy, bulky, formless attire that one of the most erotic and flattering garments a man could choose was the well-tailored navy-blue Brooks Brothers suit.
Besides, a mop of flowing hair and expert tailoring are always a potent combination. Who knows that better than I?
I didn’t mean to harp on the clothes! To hell with the clothes. It’s just I was so proud of myself for being spiffed up and full of gorgeous contradictions—a picture of long locks, the impeccable tailoring, and a regal manner of slumping against the railing and sort of blocking the stairs.
He came up to me at once. He smelled like the deep winter outside, where people were slipping in the frozen streets, and snow had turned to filth in the gutters. His face had the subtle preternatural gleam which only I could detect, and love, and properly appreciate, and eventually kiss.
We walked together onto the carpeted mezzanine.
Momentarily, I hated it that he was two inches taller than me. But I was so glad to see him, so glad to be near him. And it was warm in here, and shadowy and vast, one of the places where people do not stare at others.
“You’ve come,” I said. “I didn’t think you would.”
“Of course,” he scolded, the gracious British accent breaking softly from the young dark face, giving me the usual shock. This was an old man in a young man’s body, recently made a vampire, and by me, one of the most powerful of our remaining kind.
“What did you expect?” he said, tête-à-tête. “Armand told me you were calling me. Maharet told me.”
“Ah, that answers my first question.” I wanted to kiss him, and suddenly I did put out my arms, rather tentatively and politely so that he could get away if he wanted, and when he let me hug him, when he returned the warmth, I felt a happiness I hadn’t experienced in months.
Perhaps I hadn’t experienced it since I had left him, with Louis. We had been in some nameless jungle place, the three of us, when we agreed to part, and that had been a year ago.
“Your first question?” he asked, peering at me very closely, sizing me up perhaps, doing everything a vampire can do to measure the mood and mind of his maker, because a vampire cannot read his maker’s mind, any more than the maker can read the mind of the fledgling.
And there we stood divided, laden with preternatural gifts, both fit and rather full of emotion, and unable to communicate except in the simplest and best way, perhaps—with words.
“My first question,” I began to explain, to answer, “was simply going to be: Where have you been, and have you found the others, and did they try to hurt you? All that rot, you know—how I broke the rules when I made you, et cetera.”
“All that rot,” he mocked me, the French accent I still possessed, now coupled with something definitely American. “What rot.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go into the bar there and talk. Obviously no one has done anything to you. I didn’t think they could or they would, or that they’d dare. I wouldn’t have let you slip off into the world if I’d thought you were in danger.”
He smiled, his brown eyes full of gold light for just an instant.
“Didn’t you tell me this twenty-five times, more or less, before we parted company?”
We found a small table, cleaving to the wall. The place was half crowded, the perfect proportion exactly. What did we look like? A couple of young men on the make for mortal men or women? I don’t care.
“No one has harmed me,” he said, “and no one has shown the slightest interest in it.”
Someone was playing a piano, very tenderly for a hotel bar, I thought. And it was something by Erik Satie. What luck.
“The tie,” he said, leaning forward, white teeth flashing, fangs completely hidden, of course. “This, this big mass of silk around your neck! This is not Brooks Brothers!” He gave a soft teasing laugh. “Look at you, and the wing-tip shoes! My, my. What’s going on in your mind? And what is this all about?”
The bartender threw a hefty shadow over the small table, and murmured predictable phrases that were lost to me in my excitement and in the noise.
“Something hot,” David said. It didn’t surprise me. “You know, rum punch or some such, whatever you can heat up.”
I nodded and made a little gesture to the indifferent fellow that I would take the same thing.
Vampires always order hot drinks. They aren’t going to drink them; but they can feel the warmth and smell them if they’re hot, and that is so good.
David looked at me again. Or rather this familiar body with David inside looked at me. Because for me, David would always be the elderly human I’d known and treasured, as well as this magnificent burnished shell of stolen flesh that was slowly being shaped by his expressions and manner and mood.
Dear Reader, he switched human bodies before I made him a vampire, worry no more. It has nothing to do with this story.
“Something’s following you again?” he asked. “This is what Armand told me. So did Jesse.”
“Where did you see them?”
“Armand?” he asked. “A complete accident. In Paris. He was just walking on the street. He was the first one I saw.”
“He didn’t make any move to hurt you?”
“Why would he? Why were you calling to me? Who’s stalking you? What is all this?”
“And you’ve been with Maharet.”
He sat back. He shook his head. “Lestat, I have pored over manuscripts such as no living human has seen in centuries; I have laid my hands on clay tablets that …”
“David, the scholar,” I said. “Educated by the Talamasca to be the perfect vampire, though they never had an inkling that that is what you’d become.”
“Oh, but you must understand. Maharet took me to these places where she keeps her treasures. You have to know what it means to hold in your hands a tablet covered in symbols that predate cuneiform. And Maharet herself, I might have lived how many centuries without ever glimpsing her.”
Maharet was really the only one he had ever had to fear. I suppose we both knew it. My memories of Maharet held no menace, only the mystery of a survivor of Millennia, a living being so ancient that each gesture seemed marble made liquid, and her soft voice had become the distillation of all human eloquence.
“If she gave you her blessing, nothing else much matters,” I said with a little sigh. I wondered if I myself would ever lay eyes upon her again. I had not hoped for it nor wanted it.
“I’ve also seen my beloved Jesse,” said David.
“Ah, I should have thought of that, of course.”
“I went searching for my beloved Jesse. I went crying out from place to place, just the way you sent out the wordless cry for me.”
Jesse. Pale, bird-boned, red-haired. Twentieth-century born. Highly educated and psychic as a human. Jesse he had known as a human; Jesse he knew now as an immortal. Jesse had been his human pupil in the order called the Talamasca. Now he was the equa
l of Jesse in beauty and vampiric power, or very near to it. I really did not know.
Jesse had been brought over by Maharet of the First Brood, born as a human before humans had begun to write their history at all or barely knew that they had one. The Elder now, if there was one, the Queen of the Damned was Maharet and her mute sister, Mekare, of whom no one spoke anymore much at all.
I had never seen a fledgling brought over by one as old as Maharet. Jesse had seemed a transparent vessel of immense strength when last I saw her. Jesse must have had her own tales to tell now, her own chronicles and adventures.
I had passed onto David my own vintage blood mixed with a strain even older than Maharet’s. Yes, blood from Akasha, and blood from the ancient Marius, and of course my own strength was in my blood, and my own strength, as we all knew, was quite beyond measure.
So he and Jesse must have been grand companions, and what had it meant to her to see her aged mentor clothed in the fleshly raiment of a young human male?
I was immediately envious and suddenly full of despair. I’d drawn David away from those willowy white creatures who had drawn him into their sanctuary somewhere far across the sea, deep in a land where their treasures might be hidden from crisis and war for generations. Exotic names came to mind, but I could not for the moment think where they had gone, the two red-haired ones, the one ancient, the one young. And to their hearth, they had admitted David.
A little sound startled me and I looked over my shoulder. I settled back, embarrassed to have appeared so anxious, and I focused silently for a moment on my Victim.
My Victim was still in the restaurant very near us in this hotel, sitting with his beautiful daughter. I wouldn’t lose him tonight. I was sure enough of that.
I sighed. Enough of him. I’d been following him for months. He was interesting, but he had nothing to do with all this. Or did he? I might kill him tonight, but I doubted it. Having spied the daughter, and knowing full well how much the Victim loved her, I had decided to wait until she returned home. I mean, why be so mean to a young girl like that? And how he loved her. Right now, he was pleading with her to accept a gift, something newly discovered by him and very splendid in his eyes. However, I couldn’t quite see the image of the gift in her mind or his.
He was a good victim to follow—flashy, greedy, at times good, and always amusing.
Back to David. And how this strapping immortal opposite me must have loved the vampire Jesse, and become the pupil of Maharet. Why didn’t I have any respect for the old ones anymore? What did I want, for the love of heaven? No, that was not the question. The question was … did something want me right now? Was I running from it?
He was politely waiting for me to look at him again. I did. But I didn’t speak. I didn’t begin. And so he did what polite people often do, he talked slowly on as if I were not staring at him through the violet glasses like one with an ominous secret.
“No one has tried to hurt me,” he said again in the lovely calm British manner, “no one has questioned that you made me, all have treated me with respect and kindness, though everyone of course wanted to know all the details firsthand of how you survived the Body Thief. And I don’t think you know quite how you alarmed them, and how much they love you.”
This was a kindly reference to the last adventure which had brought us together, and driven me to make him one of us. At the time, he had not sung my praises to Heaven for any part of it.
“They love me, do they?” I said of the others, the remnants of our revenant species around the world. “I know they didn’t try to help me.” I thought of the defeated Body Thief.
Without David’s help, I might never have won that battle. I could not think of something that terrible. But I certainly didn’t want to think of all my brilliant and gifted vampiric cohorts and how they’d watched from afar and done nothing.
The Body Thief himself was in Hell. And the body in question was opposite me with David inside it.
“All right, I’m glad to hear I had them a little worried,” I said. “But the point is, I’m being followed again, and this time it’s no scheming mortal who knows the trick of astral projection and how to take possession of someone else’s body. I’m being stalked.”
He studied me, not so much incredulous as striving perhaps to grasp the implications.
“Being stalked,” he repeated thoughtfully.
“Absolutely.” I nodded. “David, I’m frightened. I’m actually frightened. If I told you what I think this thing is, this thing that’s stalking me, you’d laugh.”
“Would I?”
The waiter had set down the hot drinks, and the steam did feel glorious. The piano played Satie ever so softly. Life was almost worth living, even for a son of a bitch of a monster like myself. Something crossed my mind.
In this very bar, I’d heard my victim say to his daughter two nights ago, “You know I sold my soul for places just like this.”
I’d been yards away, quite beyond mortal hearing, yet hearing every word that fell from my Victim’s lips, and I was enthralled with the daughter. Dora, that was her name. Dora. She was the one thing this strange and succulently alluring Victim truly loved, his only child, his daughter.
I realized David was watching me.
“Just thinking about the victim who brought me here,” I said. “And his daughter. They’re not going out tonight. The snow’s too deep and the wind too cruel. He’ll take her back up to their suite, and she’ll look down on the towers of St. Patrick’s. I want to keep my victim in my sights, you know.”
“Good heavens, have you fallen in love with a couple of mortals?”
“No. Not at all. Just a new way of hunting. The man’s unique, a blaze of individual traits. I adore him. I was going to feed on him the first time I saw him, but he continues to surprise me. I’ve been following him around for half a year.”
I flashed back on them. Yes, they were going upstairs, just as I thought. They had just left their table in the restaurant. The night was too wretched even for Dora, though she wanted to go to the church and to pray for her father, and beg him to stay there and pray too. Some memory played between them, in their thoughts and fragmentary words. Dora had been a little girl when my Victim had first brought her to that cathedral.
He didn’t believe in anything. She was some sort of religious leader. Theodora. She preached to television audiences on the seriousness of values and nourishment of the soul. And her father? Ah, well, I’d kill him before I learnt too much more, or end up losing this big trophy buck just for Dora’s sake.
I looked back at David, who was watching me eagerly, shoulder resting against the dark satin-covered wall. In this light, no one could have known he wasn’t human. Even one of us might have missed it. As for me, I probably looked like a mad rock star who wanted all the world’s attention to crush him slowly to death.
“The victim’s got nothing to do with it,” I said. “I’ll tell you all that another time. It’s just we’re in this hotel because I followed him here. You know my games, my hunts. I don’t need blood any more than Maharet does, but I can’t stand the thought of not having it!”
“And so what is this new sort of game?” he said politely in British.
“I don’t look so much for simple, evil people, murderers, you know, so much as a more sophisticated kind of criminal, someone with the mentality of an Iago. This one’s a drug dealer. Highly eccentric. Brilliant. An art collector. He loves to have people shot, loves to make billions in a week off cocaine through one gateway and heroin through another. And then he loves his daughter. And she, she has a televangelist church.”
“You’re really enthralled with these mortals.”
“Look right now, past me, over my shoulder. See the two people in the lobby moving towards the elevators?” I asked.
“Yes.” He stared at them fixedly. Perhaps they’d paused in just the right spot. I could feel, hear, and smell both of them, but I couldn’t know precisely where they were unless I turned aro
und. But they were there, the dark smiling man with his pale-faced eager and innocent little girl, who was a woman-child of twenty-five if I had reckoned correctly.
“I know that man’s face,” said David. “He’s big time. International. They keep trying to bring him up on some charges. He pulled off an extraordinary assassination, where was it?”
“The Bahamas.”
“My God, how did you happen on him? Did you really see him in person somewhere, you know, like a shell you found on the beach, or did you see him in the papers and the magazines?”
“Do you recognize the girl? Nobody knows they’re connected.”
“No, I don’t recognize her, but should I? She’s so pretty, and so sweet. You’re not going to feed on her, are you?”
I laughed at his gentlemanly outrage at such a suggestion. I wondered if David asked permission before sucking the blood of his victims, or at least insisted that both parties be properly introduced. I had no idea what his killing habits were, or how often he fed. I’d made him plenty strong. That meant it didn’t have to be every night. He was blessed in that.
“The girl sings for Jesus on a television station,” I said. “Her church will someday have its headquarters in an old, old convent building in New Orleans. Right now she lives there alone, and tapes her programs out of a studio in the French Quarter. I think her show goes through some ecumenical cable channel out of Alabama.”
“You’re in love with her.”
“Not at all, just very eager to kill her father. Her television appeal is peculiar. She talks theology with gripping common sense, you know, the kind of televangelist that just might make it all work. Don’t we all fear that someone like that will come along? She dances like a nymph or a temple virgin, I suppose I should say, sings like a seraph, invites the entire studio audience to join with her. Theology and ecstasy, perfectly blended. And all the requisite good works are recommended.”
“I see,” he said. “And this makes it more exciting for you, to feast on the father? By the way, the father is hardly an unobtrusive man. Neither seem disguised. Are you sure no one knows they’re connected?”