by Rice, Anne
I realized he was staring at me. I had projected the thought, carelessly, yes, obviously with purpose. I felt a shock of connection. He saw me. He saw the glasses perhaps, and the light, or maybe my hair.
Very slowly I stepped out, with my arms at my sides. I wanted nothing so vulgar as his reaching for his gun. But he hadn’t reached for it. He merely looked at me, blinded perhaps by the bright little lights so near to him. The halogen beam threw the shadow of the angel’s wing on the ceiling. I came closer.
He said absolutely nothing. He was afraid. Or rather, let me say, he was alarmed. He was more than alarmed. He felt this might very well be his last confrontation. Someone had gotten by him totally! And it was too late to be reaching for guns, or doing anything so literal, and yet he wasn’t actually in fear of me.
Damned if he didn’t know I wasn’t human.
I came swiftly towards him, and took his face in both my hands. He went into a sweat and tremble, naturally, yet he reached up and pulled the glasses off my eyes and they fell on the floor.
“Oh, it’s gorgeous, finally,” I whispered, “to be so very close to you!”
He couldn’t form words. No mortal in my grip like this could have been expected to utter anything but prayers, and he had no prayers! He stared right into my eyes, and then very slowly took my measure, not daring to move, his face still fixed in both my cold, cold hands, and he knew. Not human.
It was the strangest reaction! Of course I’d confronted recognition before, in lands the world over; but prayer, madness, some desperate atavistic response, something always accompanied it. Even in old Europe where they believed in the nosferatu, they’d scream out a prayer before I sank my teeth.
But this, what was this, his staring at me, this comical criminal courage!
“Going to die like you lived?” I whispered.
One thought galvanized him. Dora. He went into a violent struggle, grabbing at my hands, realizing they felt like stone, and then convulsing, as he tried to pull himself loose, held mercilessly by the face. He hissed at me.
Some inexplicable mercy came over me. Don’t torture him like this. He knows too much. Understands too much. God, you’ve had months of watching him, you don’t have to stretch this out. On the other hand, when will you find another kill like this one!
Well, hunger overcame judgment. I pressed my forehead against his neck first, shifting my hand to the back of his head, let him feel my hair, heard him draw in his breath, and then I drank.
I had him. I had the gush, and him and Old Captain in the front room, the streetcar crashing past outside, and him saying to Old Captain, “You ever show it to me again or ask me to touch it and I won’t ever come near you.” And Old Captain swearing he never would. Old Captain taking him to the movies, and to dinner at the Monteleone, and on the plane to Atlanta, having vowed never to do it again, “Just let me be around you, son, just let me be near you, I’ll never, I swear.” His mother drunk in the doorway, brushing her hair. “I know your game, you and that old man, I know just what you’re doing. He bought you those clothes? You think I don’t know.” And then Terry with the bullet hole in the middle of her face, a blond-haired girl turning to the side and crumpling to the floor, the fifth murder and it has to be you, Terry, you. He and Dora were in the truck. And Dora knew. Dora was only six and she knew. Knew he’d shot her mother, Terry. And they’d never, never spoken a word about it. Terry’s body in a plastic sack. Ah, God, plastic. And him saying, “Mommy’s gone.” Dora hadn’t even asked. Six years old, she knew. Terry screaming, “You think you can take my daughter from me, you son of a bitch, you think you can take my child, I’m leaving tonight with Jake and she’s going with me.” Bang, you’re dead, honey. I couldn’t stand you anyway. In a heap on the floor, the very flashy cute kind of common girl with very oval pale pink nails, and lipstick that always looks extraordinarily fresh, and hair from a bottle. Pink shorts, little thighs.
He and Dora driving in the night, and they never had spoken a word.
What are you doing to me! You are killing me! You are taking my blood, not my soul, you thief, you … what in the name of God?
“You talking to me?” I drew back, blood dripping from my lips. Good God, he was talking to me! I bit down again, and this time I did break his neck, but he wouldn’t stop.
Yes, you, what are you? Why, why this, the blood? Tell me, damn you into hell! Damn you!
I had crushed the bones of his arms, twisted his shoulder out of the socket, the last blood I could get was there on my tongue. I stuck my tongue into the wound, give me, give me, give me.…
But what, what is your name, under God, who are you?
He was dead. I dropped him and stepped back. Talking to me! Talking to me during the kill? Asking me who I was? Piercing the swoon?
“Oh, you are so full of surprises,” I whispered. I tried to clear my head. I was warmly full of blood. I let it stay in my mouth. I wanted to pick him up, tear open his wrist, drink anything that was left, but that was so ugly, and the truth was, I had no intention of touching him again! I swallowed and ran my tongue along my teeth, getting the last taste, he and Dora in the truck, she six years old, Mommy dead, shot in the head, with Daddy now forever.
“That was the fifth killing!” he’d said aloud to me, I’d heard him. “Who are you?”
“Talking to me, you bastard!” I looked down at him, ooh, the blood was just flooding my fingertips finally and moving down my legs; I closed my eyes, and I thought, Live for this, just for this, for this taste, this feeling, and his words came back to me, words to Dora in a fancy bar, “I sold my soul for places like this.”
“Oh, for Godsakes, die, damn it!” I said. I wanted the blood to keep burning, but enough of him, hell, six months was plenty for a love affair between vampire and human! I looked up.
The black thing wasn’t a statue at all. It was alive. And it was studying me. It was living and breathing and watching me under its furious shining black scowl, looking down at me.
“No, not true,” I said aloud. I tried to fall into the deep calm that danger often produces in me. Not true.
I nudged his dead body on the floor deliberately just to be sure I was still there, and not going mad, and in terror of the disorientation, but it didn’t come, and then I screamed.
I screamed like any kid.
And I ran out of there.
I tore out of there, down the hall, out of the back and into the wide night.
I went up over the rooftops, and then in sheer exhaustion slipped down in a narrow alley, and lay against the bricks. No, that couldn’t have been true. That was some last image he projected, my Victim; he threw that image out in death, a sweet vengeance. Making that statue look alive, that big dark winged thing, that goat-legged.…
“Yeah,” I said. I wiped my lips. I was lying in dirty snow. There were other mortals in this alley. Don’t bother us. I won’t. I wiped my lips again. “Yeah, vengeance; all his love,” I whispered aloud, “for all the things in that place, and he threw that at me. He knew. He knew what I was. He knew how.…”
And besides, the Thing that stalked me had never been so calm, so still, so reflective. It had always been swelling and rising like so much thick, stinking smoke and those voices … That had been a mere statue standing there.
I got up, furious with myself, absolutely furious for having fled, for having passed up the last little trick involved in the whole kill. I was furious enough to go back there, and kick his dead body and kick that statue, which no doubt returned to granite the instant that conscious life went completely out of the dying brain of its owner.
Broken arms, shoulders. As if from the bloody heap I’d made of him, he’d called up that thing.
And Dora will hear about this. Broken arms, shoulders. Neck broken.
I went out onto Fifth Avenue. I walked into the wind.
I stuffed my hands in the pockets of my wool blazer, which was far too light to look appropriate in this quiet blizzard, and I walked and walked. “All rig
ht, damn it, you knew what I was, and for a moment, you made that thing look alive.”
I stopped dead still, staring over the traffic at the dark snow-covered woods of Central Park.
“If it is all connected, come for me.” I was talking not to him now, or the statue, but to the Stalker. I simply refused to be afraid. I was just completely out of my head.
And where was David? Hunting somewhere? Hunting … as he had so loved to do as a mortal man in the Indian jungles, hunting, and I’d made him the hunter of his brothers forever.
I made a decision.
I was going back at once to the flat. I’d look at the damned statue, and see for myself that it was utterly inanimate, and then I’d do what I ought to do for Dora—that is, get rid of her father’s corpse.
It took me only moments to get back, to be going up the narrow pitch-dark back stairs again, and into the flat. I was past all patience with my fear, simply furious, humiliated and shaken, and at the same time curiously excited—as I always am by the unknown.
Stench of his freshly dead body. Stench of wasted blood.
I could hear or sense nothing else. I went into a small room which had once been an active kitchen and still contained the remnants of housekeeping from the time of that dead mortal whom the Victim had loved. Yes, just what I wanted under the sink pipes where mortals always shove it, a box of green plastic garbage sacks, just perfect for his remains.
It suddenly hit me that he had chucked his murdered wife, Terry, into such a bag, I’d seen it, smelled it, when I was feasting on him. Oh, hell with it. So he’d given me the idea.
There were a few pieces of cutlery around, though nothing that would allow a surgical or artistic job. I took the largest of the knives, carbon-steel blade, and went into the living room, deliberately without hesitation, and turned and looked at the mammoth statue.
The halogens were still shining; bright, deliberate beams in the shadowy clutter.
Statue; goat-legged angel.
You idiot, Lestat.
I went up to it and stood before it, looking coldly at the details. Probably not seventeenth-century. Probably contemporary, executed by hand, yes, but it had the utter perfection of something contemporary, and the face did have the William Blake sublime expression—an evil, scowling, goat-legged being with the eyes of Blake’s saints and sinners, full of innocence as well as wrath.
I wanted it suddenly, would liked to have kept it, gotten it down some way to my rooms in New Orleans as a keepsake for practically falling down dead in fear at its feet. Cold and solemn it stood before me. And then I realized that all these relics might be lost if I didn’t do something with them. As soon as his death was known, all this would be confiscated, that was his whole point with Dora, that this, his true wealth, would pass into indifferent hands.
And Dora had turned her narrow little back to him and wept, a waif consumed with grief and horror and the worst frustration, the inability to comfort the one she most loved.
I looked down. I was standing over his mangled body. He still looked fresh, wrecked, murdered by a slob. Black hair very soft and mussed, eyes half open. His white shirtsleeves were stained an evil pinkish color from the little blood that oozed out of the wounds I’d accidentally inflicted, crushing him. His torso was at a hideous angle in relation to his legs. I’d snapped his neck, and snapped his spine.
Well, I’d get him out of here. I’d get rid of him, and then for a long time no one would know. No one would know he was dead; and the investigators couldn’t pester Dora, or make her miserable. Then I’d think about the relics, perhaps spiriting them away for her.
From his pockets I took his identification. All bogus, nothing with his real name.
His real name had been Roger.
I knew that from the beginning, but only Dora had called him Roger. In all his dealings with others, he’d had exotic aliases, with odd medieval sounds. This passport said Frederick Wynken. Now that amused me. Frederick Wynken.
I gathered all identifying materials and put them in my pockets to be totally destroyed later.
I went to work with the knife. I cut off both his hands, rather amazed at their delicacy and how well-manicured were his nails. He had loved himself so much, and with reason. And his head, I hacked that off, more through brute strength forcing the knife through tendon and bone than any sort of real skill. I didn’t bother to close his eyes. The stare of the dead holds so little fascination, really. It mimics nothing living. His mouth was soft without emotion, and cheeks smooth in death. The usual thing. These—the head, and the hands—I put into two separate green sacks, and then I folded up the body, more or less, and crammed it into the third sack.
There was blood all over the carpet, which I realized was only one of many, many carpets layering this floor, junk-shop style, and that was too bad. But the point was, the body was on its way out. Its decay wouldn’t bring mortals from above or below. And without the body, no one might ever know what had become of him … best for Dora, surely, than to have seen great glossy photographs of a scene such as I had made here.
I took one last look at the scowling countenance of the angel, devil, or whatever he was with his ferocious mane and beautiful lips and huge polished eyes. Then, hefting the three sacks like Santa Claus, I went out to get rid of Roger piece by piece.
This was not much of a problem.
It gave me merely an hour to think as I dragged myself along through the snowy, empty black streets, uptown, searching for bleak chaotic construction sites, and heaps of garbage, and places where rot and filth had accumulated and were not likely to be examined anytime soon, let alone cleared away.
Beneath a freeway overpass, I left his hands buried in a huge pile of trash. The few mortals hovering there, with blankets and a little fire going in a tin can, took no notice of what I did at all. I shoved the plastic-wrapped hands so deep in the rubble no one could conceivably try to retrieve them. Then I went up to the mortals, who didn’t so much as look up at me, and I dropped a few bills down by the fire. The wind almost caught the money. Then a hand, a living hand, of course, the hand of one of these bums, flashed out in the firelight and caught the bills and drew them back into the breathing darkness.
“Thanks, brother.”
I said, “Amen.”
The head I deposited in a similar manner much farther away. Back door Dumpster. Wet garbage of a restaurant. Stench. I took no last look at the head. It embarrassed me. It was no trophy. I would never save a man’s head as a trophy. The idea seemed deplorable. I didn’t like the hard feel of it through the plastic. If the hungry found it, they’d never report it. Besides, the hungry had been here for their share of the tomatoes and lettuce and spaghetti and crusts of French bread. The restaurant had closed hours ago. The garbage was frozen; it rattled and clattered when I shoved his head deep into the mess.
I went back downtown, still walking, still with this last sack over my shoulder, his miserable chest and arms and legs. I walked down Fifth, past the hotel of the sleeping Dora, past St. Patrick’s, on and on, past the fancy stores. Mortals rushed through doorways beneath awnings; cabbies blew their horns in fury at hulking, slow limousines.
On and on I walked. I kicked at the sludge and I hated myself. I could smell him and hated this too. But in a way, the feast had been so divine that it was just to require this aftermath, this cleaning up.
The others—Armand, Marius, all my immortal cohorts, lovers, friends, enemies—always cursed me for not “disposing of the remains.” All right, this time Lestat was being a good vampire. He was cleaning up after himself.
I was almost to the Village when I found another perfect place, a huge warehouse, seemingly abandoned, its upper floors filled with the pretty sparkle of broken windows. And inside it, refuse of every description, in a massive heap. I could smell decayed flesh. Someone had died in there weeks ago. Only the cold kept the smell from reaching human nostrils. Or maybe no one cared.
I went farther into the cavernous room—sme
ll of gasoline, metal, red brick. One mountain of trash stood as big as a mortuary pyramid in the middle of the room. A truck was there, parked perilously close to it, the engine still warm. But no living beings were here.
And there was decayed flesh aplenty in the largest pile. I reckoned by scent at least three dead bodies, scattered through the rubble. Perhaps there were more. The smell was utterly loathsome to me, so I didn’t spend a great deal of time anatomizing the situation.
“Okay, my friend, I give you over to a graveyard,” I said. I shoved the sack deep, deep among the broken bottles, smashed cans, bits of stinking fruit, heaps and stacks of cardboard and wood and trash. I almost caused an avalanche. Indeed there was a small trash quake or two and then the clumsy pyramid re-formed itself quietly. The only sounds were the sounds of rats. A single beer bottle rolled on the floor, a few feet free of the monument, gleaming, silent, alone.
For a long moment, I studied the truck; battered, anonymous, warm engine, smell of recent human occupants. What did I care what they did here? The fact is they came and went through the big metal doors, ignoring or occasionally feeding this charnel heap. Most likely ignoring it. Who would park next to one’s own murder victims?
But in all these big dense modern cities, I mean the big-time cities, the world-class dens of evil—New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong—you can find the strangest configurations of mortal activity. Criminality had begun to fascinate me in its many facets. That’s what had brought me to him.
Roger. Good-bye, Roger.
I went out again. The snow had stopped falling. It was desolate here, and sad. A bare mattress lay on the corner of the block, the snow covering it. The streetlamps were broken, I wasn’t certain precisely where I was.
I walked in the direction of the water, to the very end of the island, and then I saw one of those very ancient churches, churches that went back to the Dutch days of Manhattan, with a little fenced graveyard attached to it with stones that would read awesome statistics such as 1704, or even 1692.
It was a Gothic treasure of a building, a tiny bit of the glory of St. Patrick’s, and possibly even more intricate and mysterious, a welcome sight for all its detail and organization and conviction amid the big-city blandness and wastes.