The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles)

by Rice, Anne

  “I know you do.”

  “Look, I never meant to kill you, I’m sorry, it was all a mistake, I should have picked someone.…” My hands were shaking. Oh, how fascinating all this would sound later, and right now I begged God, of all people, please make this stop, all of it, stop.

  “You know where I was born, don’t you?” he asked. “You know that block of St. Charles near Jackson?”

  I nodded. “The boardinghouse,” I said. “Don’t tell me the story of your life. There’s no reason. Besides, it’s over. You had your chance to write it down when you were alive, just like anyone else. What do you expect me to do with it?”

  “I want to tell you the things that count. Look at me! Look at me, please, try to understand me and to love me and to love Dora for me! I’m begging you.”

  I didn’t have to see his expression to understand this keen agony, this protective cry. Is there anything under God that can be done to us that will make us suffer as badly as seeing our child suffer? Our loved ones? Those closest to us? Dora, tiny Dora walking in the empty convent. Dora on a television screen, arms flung out, singing.

  I must have gasped. I don’t know. Shivered. Something. I couldn’t clear my head for a moment, but it was nothing supernatural, only misery, and the realization that he was there, palpable, visible, expecting something from me, that he had come across, that he had survived long enough in this ephemeral form to demand a promise of me.

  “You do love me,” he whispered. He looked serene and intrigued. Way beyond flattery. Way beyond me.

  “Passion,” I whispered. “It was your passion.”

  “Yes, I know. I’m flattered. I wasn’t run down by a truck in the street, or shot by a hit man. You killed me! You, and you must be one of the best of them.”

  “Best of what?”

  “Whatever you call yourself. You’re not human. Yet you are. You sucked my blood out of my body, took it into your own. You’re thriving on it now. Surely you’re not the only one.” He looked away. “Vampires,” he said. “I saw ghosts when I was a boy in our house in New Orleans.”

  “Everybody in New Orleans sees ghosts.”

  He laughed in spite of himself, a very short, quiet laugh. “I know,” he said, “but really I did and I have, and I’ve seen them in other places. But I never believed in God or the Devil or Angels or Vampires or Werewolves, or things like that, things that could affect fate, or change the course of some chaotic-seeming rhythm that governed the universe.”

  “You believe in God now?”

  “No. I have the sneaking suspicion that I’ll hold firm as long as I can in this form—like all the ghosts I’ve ever glimpsed—then I’ll start to fade. I’ll die out. Rather like a light. That’s what’s waiting for me. Oblivion. And it isn’t personal. It just feels that way because my mind, what’s left of it, what’s clinging to the earth here, can’t comprehend anything else. What do you think?”

  “It terrifies me either way or any way.” I was not going to tell him about the Stalker. I was not going to ask him about the statue. I knew now he had had nothing to do with the statue seeming animate. He had been dead, going up.

  “Terrifies you?” he asked respectfully. “Well, it’s not happening to you. You make it happen to others. Let me explain about Dora.”

  “She’s beautiful. I’ll … I’ll try to look out for her.”

  “No, she needs something more from you. She needs a miracle.”

  “A miracle?”

  “Look, you’re alive, whatever you are, but you’re not human. You can make a miracle, can’t you? You could do this for Dora, it would be no problem for a creature of your abilities at all!”

  “You mean some sort of fake religious miracle?”

  “What else? She’s never going to save the world without a miracle and she knows it. You could do it!”

  “You’re remaining earthbound and haunting me in this place to make a sleazy proposition like this!” I said. “You’re unsalvageable. You are dead. But you’re still a racketeer and a criminal. Listen to yourself. You want me to fake some spectacle for Dora? You think Dora would want that?”

  He was flabbergasted, clearly. Much too much so to be insulted.

  He put the glass down and sat there, composed and calm, appearing to scan the bar. Looking dignified and about ten years younger than he had been when I killed him. I don’t guess anyone wants to come back as a ghost except in beautiful form. It was only natural. And I felt a deepening of my inevitable and fatal fascination, this, my Victim. Monsieur, your blood is inside me!

  He turned.

  “You’re right,” he said in the most torn whisper. “You’re absolutely right. I can’t make some deal with you to fake miracles for her. It’s monstrous. She’d hate it.”

  “Now you’re talking like the Grateful Dead,” I said.

  He gave another little contemptuous laugh. Then with a low sombre emotion, he said, “Lestat, you have to take care of her … for a while.”

  When I didn’t answer, he persisted gently:

  “Just for a little while, until the reporters have stopped, and the horror of it is over; until her faith is restored, and she’s whole and Dora after all, and back to her life. She has her life, yet. She can’t be hurt because of me, Lestat, not because of me, it’s not fair.”

  “Fair?”

  “Call me by my name,” he said. “Look at me.”

  I looked at him. It was exquisitely painful. He was miserable. I didn’t know whether human beings could express this same intensity of misery. I actually didn’t know.

  “My name’s Roger,” he said. He seemed even younger now, as though he were traveling backwards in time, in his mind, or merely becoming innocent, as if the dead, if they are going to stick around, have a right to remember their innocence.

  “I know your name,” I said. “I know everything about you, Roger. Roger, the Ghost. And you never let Old Captain touch you; you just let him adore you, and educate you, and take you places, and buy you beautiful things, and you never even had the decency to go to bed with him.”

  I said those things, about the images I’d drunk with his blood, but without malice. I was just talking in wonder of how bad we all are, the lies we tell.

  He said nothing for the moment.

  I was overwhelmed. It was grief veritably blinding me, and bitterness and a deep ugly horror for what I had done to him, and to others, and that I had ever harmed any living creature. Horror.

  What was Dora’s message? How were we to be saved? Was it the same old canticle of adoration?

  He watched me. He was young, committed, a magnificent semblance of life. Roger.

  “All right,” he said, the voice soft and patient, “I didn’t sleep with Old Captain, you’re right, but he never really wanted that of me, you see, it wasn’t like that, he was far too old. You don’t know what it was really like. You might know the guilt I feel. But you don’t know later how much I regretted not having done it. Not having known that with Old Captain. And that’s not what made me go wrong. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t the big deception or heist that you imagine it to be. I loved the things he showed me. He loved me. He lived two, three more years, probably because of me. Wynken de Wilde, we loved Wynken de Wilde together. It should have turned out different. I was with Old Captain when he died, you know. I never left the room. I’m faithful that way when I am needed by those I loved.”

  “Yeah, you were with your wife, Terry, too, weren’t you?” It was cruel of me to say this, but I’d spoken without thinking, seeing her face again as he shot her. “Scratch that, if you will,” I said. “I’m sorry. Who in the name of God is Wynken de Wilde?”

  I felt so utterly miserable. “Dear God, you’re haunting me,” I said. “And I’m a coward in my soul! A coward. Why did you say that strange name? I don’t want to know. No, don’t tell me—This is enough for me. I’m leaving. You can haunt this bar till doomsday if you want. Get some righteous individual to talk to you.”

  “L
isten to me,” he said. “You love me. You picked me. All I want to do is fill in the details.”

  “I’ll take care of Dora, somehow or other, I’ll figure some way to help her, I’ll do something. And I’ll take care of all the relics, I’ll get them out of there and into a safe place and hold on to them for Dora, until she feels she can accept them.”

  “Yes!”

  “Okay, let me go.”

  “I’m not holding you,” he said.

  Yes, I did love him. I did want to look at him. I did want him to tell me everything, every last little detail! I reached out and touched his hand. Not alive. Not human flesh. Something with vitality, however. Something burning and exciting.

  He merely smiled.

  He reached across with his right hand and clamped his fingers around my right wrist and drew near. I could feel his hair touching my forehead, teasing my skin, just a loose wisp of hair. Big dark eyes looking at me.

  “Listen to me,” he said again. Scentless breath.

  “Yes.…”

  He started talking to me in a low, rushed voice. He began to tell me the tale.

  FOUR

  The point is, Old Captain was a smuggler, a collector. I spent years with him. My mother had sent me to Andover, then brought me home, couldn’t live without me; I went to Jesuit, I didn’t belong with anyone or anywhere, and maybe Old Captain was the perfect person. But Wynken de Wilde, that started with Old Captain and the antiques he sold through the Quarter, usually small, portable things.

  “And I’ll tell you right now, Wynken de Wilde amounts to nothing, absolutely nothing, except a dream I had once, a very perverse plan. I mean my lifelong passion—aside from Dora—has been Wynken de Wilde, but if you don’t care about him after this conversation, no one will. Dora does not.”

  “What was this Wynken de Wilde all about?”

  “Art, of course. Beauty. But I got it mixed up in my head when I was seventeen that I was going to start a new religion, a cult—free love, give to the poor, raise one’s hand against no one, you know, a sort of fornicating Amish community. This was of course 1964, the time of the flower children, marijuana, Bob Dylan seeming to be singing all the time about ethics and charity, and I wanted a new Brethren of the Common Life, one in tune with modern sexual values. Do you know who the Brethren were?”

  “Yes, popular mysticism, late Middle Ages, that anyone could know God.”

  “Yes! Ah, that you know such a thing.”

  “You didn’t have to be a priest or monk.”

  “Exactly. And so the monks were jealous, but my concept of this as a boy was all wound up with Wynken, whom I knew to have been influenced by German mysticism and all those popular movements, Meister Eckehart, et cetera, though he worked in a scriptorium and still did old-fashioned parchment prayer books of devotion by hand. Wynken’s books were completely different from those of others. I thought if I could find all Wynken’s books I’d have it made.”

  “Why Wynken, what made him different?”

  “Let me tell it my way. See, this is how it happened, the boardinghouse was shabby-elegant, you know the kind, my mother didn’t get her own hands dirty, she had three maids and an old colored man who did everything; the old people, the boarders—they were on hefty private incomes, limousines garaged around the Garden District, three meals a day, red carpets. You know the house. Henry Howard designed it. Late Victorian. My mother had inherited it from her mother.”

  “I know it, I’ve seen it, I’ve seen you stop in front of it. Who owns it now?”

  “I don’t know. I let it slip away. I ruined so many things. But picture this: drowsy summer afternoon there, I’m fifteen and lonely, and Old Captain invites me in, and there on the table in the second parlour—he rents the two front parlours—he lives in a sort of wonderland of collectibles and brass and such—”

  “I see it.”

  “—and there are these books on the table, medieval books! Tiny medieval prayer books. Of course, I know a prayer book when I see it; but a medieval codex, no; I was an altar boy when I was very little, went to Mass every day for years with my mother, knew liturgical Latin as was required. The point is, I recognize these books as devotional and rare, and something that Old Captain is inevitably going to sell.

  “ ‘You can touch them, Roger, if you’re careful,’ he tells me. For two years, he had let me come and listen to his classical records, and we’d taken walks together. But I was just becoming sexually interesting to him, though I didn’t know it, and it’s got nothing to do with what I have to say until later on.

  “He was on the phone talking to somebody about a ship in the harbour.

  “Within a few minutes we were off to the ship. We used to go on these ships all the time. I never knew what we were doing. It had to be smuggling. All I remember is Old Captain sitting at a big round table with all the crew, they were Dutch, I think, and some nice officer with a heavy accent giving me a tour of the engine room, the map room, and the radio room. I never tired of it. I loved the ships. The New Orleans wharves were active then, full of rats and hemp.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you remember those long ropes that ran from the ships to the dock, how they had the round steel rat shields on them—disks of steel that the rats couldn’t climb over?”

  “I remember.”

  “We get home that night and instead of going to bed as I would have done, I beg him to let me come in and see those books. I have to see them before he sells them. My mother wasn’t in the hallway, so I supposed she’d gone to bed.

  “Let me give you an image of my mother and this boardinghouse. I told you it was elegant, didn’t I? You can imagine the furnishings, heavy Renaissance revival, machine-made pieces, the kind that junked up mansions from the 1880s on.”

  “Yes.”

  “The house has a glorious staircase, winding, set against a stained-glass window, and at the foot of the stairs, in the crook of it, this masterpiece of a stairs of which Henry Howard must have been profoundly proud—in the stairwell—stood my mother’s enormous dressing table, imagine, and she’d sit there in the main hall, at the dressing table, brushing her hair! All I have to do is think of that and my head aches. Or it used to when I was alive. It was such a tragic image, and I knew it, even though I grew up seeing it every day; that a dressing table of marble and mirrors and sconces and filigree, and an old woman with dark hair, does not belong in a formal hallway.…”

  “And the boarders just took it in?” I asked.

  “Yes, because the house was gobbled up for this one and that one, Old Mister Bridey, living in what had once been a servants’ porch, and Blind Miss Stanton in the little fainting room upstairs! And four apartments carved out of the servants’ quarters in back. I am keenly sensitive to disorder; you find around me either perfect order or the neglected clutter of the place in which you killed me.”

  “I realize that.”

  “But if I were to inhabit that place again.… Ah, this is not important. The point I’m trying to make is that I believe in order and when I was young I used to dream about it. I wanted to be a saint, well, a sort of secular saint. Let me return to the books.”

  “Go on.”

  “I hit the sacred books on the table. One of them I took from its own little sack. I was charmed by the tiny illustrations. I examined each and every book that night, planning to thereafter take my time. Of course the Latin was unreadable to me in that form.”

  “Too dense. Too many pen strokes.”

  “My, you do know things, don’t you?”

  “Maybe we’re surprising each other. Go on.”

  “I spent the week thoroughly examining all of them. I cut school all the time. It was so boring. I was way ahead of everybody, and wanted to do something exciting, you know, like commit a major crime.”

  “A saint or a criminal.”

  “Yes, I suppose that does seem a contradiction. Yet it’s a perfect description.”

  “I thought it was.”

&n
bsp; “Old Captain explained things about the books. The book in the sack was a girdle book. Men carried such books with them. And this particular one was a prayer book, and another of the illuminated books, the biggest and thickest, was a Book of the Hours, and then there was a Bible in Latin, of course. He was casual about all of it.

  “I was incredibly drawn to these books, can’t tell you why. I have always been covetous of things that are shining and bright and seemingly valuable, and here was the most condensed and seemingly unique version of such I’d ever beheld.”

  I smiled. “Yes, I know exactly.”

  “Pages full of gold, and red, and tiny beautiful little figures. I took out a magnifying glass and started to study the pictures in earnest. I went to the old library at Lee Circle—remember it?—and I studied up on the entire question. Medieval books. How the Benedictines had done them. Do you know Dora owns a convent? It isn’t based on the plan of St. Gall, but it’s just about the nineteenth-century equivalent.”

  “Yes, I saw it, I saw her there. She’s brave and doesn’t care about the darkness or the aloneness.”

  “She believes in Divine Providence to the point of idiocy and she can make something of herself only if she isn’t destroyed. I want another drink. I know I’m talking fast. I have to.”

  I gestured for the drink. “Continue, what happened, who’s Wynken de Wilde?”

  “Wynken de Wilde was the author of two of these precious books that Old Captain had in his possession. I didn’t figure that out for months. I was going over the little illustrations, and gradually I determined two of the books were done by the same artist, and then in spite of Old Captain insisting that there would be no signature, I found his name, in several places in both books. Now you know Captain sold these types of things. I told you. He dealt in them through a shop on Royal Street.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I lived in terror of the day he was going to have to sell these two books! These books weren’t like the other books. First off, the illustrations were exceedingly detailed. One page might contain the motif of a flowering vine, with blossoms from which birds drank, and in these blossoms there were human figures intertwined, as if in a bower. Also, these were books of psalms. When you first examined them you thought they were psalms of the Vulgate, you know, the Bible we accept as canonical.”