by Rice, Anne
Why not let the Devil take you? Go ahead! Refuse to enter Hell in fear. Just go for it.
TWO
I reached his house on the Upper East Side before he did. I’d tracked him here numerous times. I knew the routine. Hirelings lived on the lower and upper floors, though I don’t think they knew who he was. It wasn’t unlike a vampire’s usual arrangement. And between those two flats was his long chain of rooms, the second storey of the town house, barred like a prison, and accessible by him through a rear entrance.
He never had a car let him out in front of the place. He’d get out on Madison and cut deep into the block to his back door. Or sometimes he got out on Fifth. He had two routes, and some of the surrounding property was his. But nobody—none of his pursuers—knew of this place.
I wasn’t even sure that his daughter, Dora, knew the exact location. He’d never brought her there in all the months I’d been watching him, savoring and licking my lips over his life. And I’d never caught from Dora’s mind any distinct image of it.
But Dora knew of his collection. In the past, she had accepted his relics. She had some of them scattered about the empty convent castle in New Orleans. I’d sensed a glimmer or two of these fine things the night when I’d pursued her there. And now my Victim was still lamenting that she’d refused the latest gift. Something truly sacred, or so he thought.
I got into the flat simply enough.
One could hardly call it a flat, though it did include a small lavatory, dirty in the way barren, unused places become dirty, and then room after room was crammed with trunks, statues, bronze figures, heaps of seeming trash that no doubt concealed priceless discoveries.
It felt very strange to be inside, concealed in the small rear room, because I had never done more than look through the windows. The place was cold. When he came, he would create heat and light simply enough.
I sensed he was only halfway up Madison in a crush of traffic, and I began to explore.
At once, a great marble statue of an angel startled me. I came round out of the door and almost ran smack into it. It was one of those angels that used to stand inside church doors, offering holy water in half shells. I had seen them in Europe and in New Orleans.
It was gigantic, and its cruel profile stared blindly into the shadows. Far down the hall, the light came up from the busy little street that ran into Fifth. The usual New York songs of traffic were corning through the walls.
This angel was poised as if he had just landed from the skies to offer his sacred basin. I slapped his bent knee gently and went around him. I didn’t like him. I could smell parchment, papyrus, various kinds of metal. The room opposite appeared to be filled with Russian icons. The walls were veritably covered with them and the light was playing on the halos of the sad-eyed Virgins or glaring Christs.
I went on to the next room. Crucifixes. I recognized the Spanish style, and what appeared to be Italian Baroque, and very early work which surely must have been very rare—the Christ grotesque and poorly proportioned yet suffering with appropriate horror on the worm-eaten cross.
Only now did I realize the obvious. It was all religious art. There was nothing that wasn’t religious. But then it’s rather easy to say that about all art from the end of the last century backwards, if you think about it. I mean, the great majority of art is religious.
The place was utterly devoid of life.
Indeed, it stank of insecticide. Of course, he had saturated it to save his old wooden statues, he would have had to do that. I could not hear or smell rats, or detect any living thing at all. The lower flat was empty of its occupants, though a small radio chattered the news in a bathroom.
Easy to blot out that little sound. On the floors above, there were mortals, but they were old, and I caught a vision of a sedentary man, with earphones on his head, swaying to the rhythm of some esoteric German music, Wagner, doomed lovers deploring the “hated dawn” or some heavy, repetitive, and distinctly pagan foolishness. Leitmotiv be damned. There was another person up there, but she was too feeble to be of any concern, and I could catch only one image of her and she appeared to be sewing or knitting.
I didn’t care enough about any of this to bring it into loving focus. I was safe in the flat, and He’d be coming soon, filling all these rooms with the perfume of his blood, and I’d do my damnedest not to break his neck before I’d had every drop. Yes, this was the night.
Dora wouldn’t find out until she got home tomorrow anyway. Who would know that I’d left his corpse here?
I went on into the living room. This was tolerably clean; the room where he relaxed and read and studied and fondled his objects. There were his comfortable bulky couches, fitted with heaps of pillows, and halogen lamps of black iron so delicate and light and modern and easy to maneuver that they looked like insects poised on tables and on the floor itself, and sometimes on top of cardboard boxes.
The crystal ashtray was full of butts, which confirmed he preferred safety to cleanliness, and I saw scattered glasses in which the liquor had long ago dried to a glaze that was now flaked like lacquer.
Thin, rather frowsy drapes hung over the windows, making the light soiled and tantalizing.
Even this room was jammed with statues of saints—a very lurid and emotional St. Anthony holding a chubby Child Jesus in the crook of his arm; a very large and remote Virgin, obviously of Latin American origin. And some monstrous angelic being of black granite which even with my eyes I could not fully examine in the gloom, something resembling more a Mesopotamian demon than an angel.
For one split second this granite monster sent the shivers through me. It resembled … no, I should say its wings made me think of the creature I’d glimpsed, this Thing that I thought was following me.
But I didn’t hear any footsteps here. There was no rip in the fabric of the world. It was a statue of granite, that’s all, a hideous ornament perhaps from some gruesome church full of images of Hell and Heaven.
Lots of books lay on the tables. Ah, he did love books. I mean, there were the fine ones, made of vellum and very old and all that, but current books, too, titles in philosophy and religion, current affairs, memoirs of currently popular war correspondents, even a few volumes of poetry.
Mircea Eliade, history of religions in various volumes, might have been Dora’s gift, and there, a brand-new History of God, by a woman named Karen Armstrong. Something else on the meaning of life—Understanding the Present, by Bryan Appleyard. Hefty books. But fun, my kind, anyway. And the books had been handled. Yes, it was his scent on these books, heavily his scent, not Dora’s.
He had spent more time here than I ever realized.
I scanned the shadows, the objects, I let the air fill my nostrils. Yes, he’d come here often and with someone else, and that person … that person had died here! I hadn’t realized any of this before, of course, and it was just more preparation for the meal. So the murderer drug dealer had loved a young man in these digs once, and it hadn’t been all clutter. I was getting flashes of it in the worst way, more emotion than image, and I found myself fairly fragile under the onslaught. This death hadn’t occurred all that long ago.
Had I passed this Victim in those times, when his friend was dying, I would never have settled on him, just let him go on. But then he was so flashy!
He was coming up the back steps now, the inner secret stairway, cautiously taking each step, his hand on the handle of his gun inside his coat, very Hollywood style, though there wasn’t much else about him that was predictable. Except, of course, that many who deal in cocaine are eccentric.
He reached the back door, saw that I’d opened it. Rage. I slipped over into the corner opposite that overbearing granite statue, and I stood back between two dusty saints. There wasn’t enough light for him to see me right off. He’d have to turn on one of the little halogens, and they were spots.
Right now, he listened, he sensed. He hated it that someone had broken open his door; he was murderous and had no intention of not
investigating, alone; a little court case was held in his mind. No, no one could possibly know about this place, the judge decided. Had to be a petty thief, goddamn it, and those words were heaped in rage upon the accidental.
He slipped the gun out, and he started going through his rooms, through rooms I’d skipped. I heard the light switch, saw the flash in the hall. He went on to another and another.
How on earth could he tell this place was empty? I mean, anyone could be hiding in this place. I knew it was empty. But what made him so sure? But maybe that’s how he’d stayed alive all this time, he had just the right mixture of creativity and carelessness.
At last came the absolutely delicious moment. He was satisfied he was alone.
He stepped into the living-room door, his back to the long hall, and slowly scanned the room, failing to see me, of course, and then he put his large nine-millimeter gun back in his shoulder holster, and he slipped off his gloves very slowly.
There was enough light for me to note everything I adored about him.
Soft black hair, the Asian face that you couldn’t clearly identify as Indian or Japanese, or Gypsy; could even have been Italian or Greek; the cunning black eyes, and the remarkably perfect symmetry of the bones—one of the very few traits he’d passed on to his daughter, Dora. She was fair skinned, Dora. Her mother must have been milk white. He was my favorite shade, caramel.
Suddenly something made him very uneasy. He turned his back to me, eyes quite obviously locked to some object that had alarmed him. Nothing to do with me. I had touched nothing. But his alarm had thrown up a wall between my mind and his. He was on full alert, which meant he wasn’t thinking sequentially.
He was tall, his back very straight, the coat long, his shoes those Savile Row handmade kind that takes the English shops forever. He took a step away from me, and I realized immediately from a jumble of images that it was the black granite statue that had startled him.
It was perfectly obvious. He didn’t know what it was or how it had gotten here. He approached, very cautious, as though someone might be hiding in the vicinity of the thing, then pivoted, scanned the room, and slowly drew out his gun again.
Possibilities were passing through his mind in rather orderly fashion. He knew one art dealer who was stupid enough to have delivered the thing and left the door unlocked, but that dealer would have called him before ever coming.
And this thing? Mesopotamian? Assyrian? Suddenly, impulsively, he forgot all practical matters and put his hand out and touched the granite. God, he loved it. He loved it and he was acting stupid.
I mean, there could have been one of his enemies here. But then why would a gangster or a federal investigator come bearing a gift such as that?
Whatever the case, he was enthralled by the piece. I still couldn’t see it clearly. I would have slipped off the violet glasses, which would have helped enormously, but I didn’t dare move. I wanted to see this, this adoration of his for the object that was new. I could feel his uncompromising desire for this statue, to own it, to have it here … the very sort of desire which had first attracted him to me.
He was thinking only about it, the fine carving, that it was recent, not ancient, for obvious stylistic reasons, seventeenth century perhaps, a fleshed-out rendering of a fallen angel.
Fallen angel. He did everything but step on tiptoe and kiss the thing. He put his left hand up and ran it all over the granite face and the granite hair. Damn, I couldn’t see it! How could he put up with this darkness? But then he was smack up against it, and I was twenty feet away and stuffed between two saints, without a good perspective.
Finally, he turned and switched on one of the halogen lamps. Thing looked like a preying mantis. He moved the thin black iron limb so the beam shone up on the statue’s face. Now I could see both profiles beautifully!
He made little noises of lust. This was unique! The dealer was of no importance, the back door forgiven, the supposed danger fled. He slipped the gun in the holster again, almost as if he wasn’t even thinking about it, and he did go up on tiptoe, trying to get eye level with this appalling graven image. Feathered wings. I could see that now. Not reptilian, feathered. But the face, classical, robust, the long nose, the chin … yet there was a ferocity in the profile. And why was the statue black? Maybe it was only St. Michael pushing devils into hell, angry, righteous. No, the hair was too rank and tangled for that. Armour, breastplate, and then of course I saw the most telling details. That it had the legs and feet of a goat. Devil.
Again there came a shiver. Like the thing I’d seen. But that was stupid! And I had no sense of the Stalker being near me now. No disorientation. I wasn’t even really afraid. It was just a frisson, nothing more.
I held very still. Now take your time, I thought. Figure this out. You’ve got your Victim and this statue is just a coincidental detail that further enriches the entire scenario. He turned another halogen beam on the thing. It was almost erotic the way he studied it. I smiled. Erotic the way I was studying him—this forty-seven-year-old man with a youth’s health and a criminal’s poise. Fearlessly he stood back, having forgotten any threat of any kind, and looked at this new acquisition. Where had it come from? Whom? He didn’t give a damn about the price. If only Dora. No, Dora wouldn’t like this thing. Dora. Dora, who had cut him to the heart tonight refusing his gift.
His entire posture changed; he didn’t want to think about Dora again, and all the things Dora had said—that he had to renounce what he did, that she’d never take another cent for the church, that she couldn’t help but love him and suffer if he did go to court, that she didn’t want the veil.
What veil? Just a fake, he’d said, but one of the best he’d found so far. Veil? I suddenly connected his hot little memory with something hanging on the far wall, a framed bit of fabric, a painted Christface. Veil. Veronica’s veil.
And just an hour ago he’d said to Dora, “Thirteenth century, and so beautiful, Dora, for the love of heaven. Take it. If I can’t leave these things to you, Dora.…”
So this Christface had been his precious gift?
“I won’t take them anymore, Daddy, I told you. I won’t.”
He had pressed her with the vague scheme that this new gift could be exhibited for the public. So could all his relics. They could raise money for the church.
She had started to cry, and all this had been going on back at the hotel, whilst David and I had been in the bar only yards from them.
“And say these bastards do manage to pick me up, some warrant, something I haven’t covered, you’re telling me you won’t take these things? You’ll let strangers take them?”
“Stolen, Daddy,” she had cried. “They are not clean. They are tainted.”
He really could not understand his daughter. It seemed he’d been a thief ever since he was a child. New Orleans. The boardinghouse, the curious mixture of poverty and elegance and his mother drunk most of the time. The old captain who ran the antique shop. All this was going through his mind. Old Captain had had the front rooms of the house, and he, my Victim, had brought the breakfast tray each morning to Old Captain, before going on to school. Boardinghouse, service, elegant oldsters, St. Charles Avenue. The time when the men sat on the galleries in the evening and the old ladies did, too, with their hats. Daylight times I’d never know again.
Such reverie. No, Dora wouldn’t like this. And he wasn’t so sure he did either, suddenly. He had standards which were often difficult to explain to people. He began some defense as though talking to the dealer who’d brought this. “It’s beautiful, yes, but it’s too Baroque! It lacks that element of distortion that I treasure.”
I smiled. I loved this guy’s mind. And the smell of the blood, well. I took a deliberate breath of it, and let it turn me into a total predator. Go slowly, Lestat. You’ve waited for months. Don’t rush it. And he’s such a monster himself. He’d shot people in the head, killed them with knives. Once in a small grocery he had shot both his enemy and the proprietor’s w
ife with utter indifference. Woman in the way. And he had coolly walked out. Those were early New York days, before Miami, before South America. But he remembered that murder, and that’s why I knew about it.
He thought a lot about those various deaths. That’s why I thought about them.
He was studying the hoofed feet of this thing, this angel, devil, demon. I realized its wings reached the ceiling. I could feel that shiver again if I let myself. But again, I was on firm ground, and there was nothing from any other realm in this place.
He slipped off his coat now, and stood in shirtsleeves. That was too much. I could see the flesh of his neck, of course, as he opened his collar. I could see that particularly beautiful place right below his ear, that special measure between the back of the neck of a human and the lobe of his ear, which has so much to do with male beauty.
Hell, I had not invented the significance of necks. Everyone knew what those proportions meant. He was all over pleasing to me, but it was the mind, really. To hell with his Asian beauty and all that, even his vanity which made him glow for fifty feet in all directions. It was the mind, the mind that was locked onto the statue, and had for one merciful moment let thoughts of Dora go.
He reached for another one of the little halogen spots and clamped his hand over the hot metal and directed it full on the demon’s wing, the wing I could best see, and I too saw the perfection he was thinking about, the Baroque love of detail; no. He did not collect this sort of thing. His taste was for the grotesque, and this thing was only grotesque by accident. God, it was hideous. It had a ferocious mane of hair, and a scowl on its face that could have been designed by William Blake, and huge rounded eyes that fixed on him in seeming hatred.
“Blake, yes!” he said suddenly. He turned around. “Blake. The damned thing looks like one of those drawings by Blake.”