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

by Rice, Anne

  I suddenly envisioned Dora and thought I might collapse where I was, shuddering and helpless and jabbering nonsense to anyone who came to help me.

  This was bad, this was the worst, this was simply cosmically awful!

  And what in God’s name had been the meaning of Roger’s expression in that last moment? Was it even an expression? Was it peace or calm or understanding, or just a ghost losing his vitality, a ghost giving up the ghost!

  Ah! I had been screaming. I realized it. Lots of mortals around me, high up in the night, were telling me to be quiet.

  I walked on and on.

  I was alone. I cried quietly. There was no one in the empty street to hear.

  I crept on, bent nearly double, crying out loud. I never noticed anyone now who saw or heard or stopped or took note. I wanted to reenact it in my mind, but I was terrified it would knock me flat on my back if I did it. And Roger, Roger … Oh, God, I wanted in my monstrous selfishness to go to Dora and go down on my knees. I did this, I killed, I.…

  Midtown. I suppose. Mink coats in a window. The snow was touching my eyelids in the tenderest way. I took off the scarf tie, wiped my face thoroughly so there was no blood from the tears on it.

  And then I blundered into a small bright hotel.

  I paid for the room in cash, extra tip, don’t disturb me for twenty-four hours, went upstairs, bolted the door, pulled the curtains, shut off the bothersome stinking heat, and crawled under the bed and went to sleep.

  The last strange thought that passed through my mind before I went into mortal slumber—it was hours before sunrise, and plenty of time for dreaming—was that David was going to be angry about all this somehow, but that Dora, Dora might believe and understand …

  I must have slept a few hours at least. I could hear the night sounds outside.

  When I woke, the sky was lightening. The night was almost up. Now would come oblivion. I was glad. Too late to think. Go back into the deep vampire sleep. Dead with all the other Undead wherever they were, covering themselves against the coming light.

  A voice startled me. It spoke to me very distinctly:

  “It’s not going to be that simple.”

  I rose up in one motion, overturning the bed, on my feet, staring in the direction from which the voice had come. The little hotel room was like a tawdry trap.

  A man stood in the corner, a simple man. Not particularly tall, or small, or beautiful like Roger, or flashy like me, not even very young, not even very old, just a man. A rather nice-looking man, with arms folded and one foot crossed over the other.

  The sun had just come up over the buildings. The fire hit the windows. I was blinded. I couldn’t see anything.

  I went down towards the floor, just a little burnt and hurt, the bed falling down upon me to protect me.

  Nothing else. Whoever or whatever it was, I was powerless once the sun had come into the sky, no matter how white and thick the veil of winter morning.

  FIVE

  “Very well,” said David. “Sit down. Stop pacing. And I want you to go over every detail again. If you need to feed before you do this, then we’ll go out and—”

  “I have told you! I am past that. I don’t need to feed. I don’t need blood. I crave it. I love it. And I don’t want any now! I feasted on Roger last night like a gluttonous demon. Stop talking about blood.”

  “Would you take your place there at the table?”

  Across from him, he meant.

  I was standing at the glass wall, looking right down on the roof of St. Patrick’s.

  He’d gotten us perfect rooms in the Olympic Tower and we were only just above the spires. An immense apartment far in excess of our needs but a perfect domicile nevertheless. The intimacy with the cathedral seemed essential. I could see the cruciform of the roof, the high piercing towers. They looked as if they could impale you, they seemed so sharply pointed at heaven. And heaven as it had been the night before was a soft soundless drift of snow.

  I sighed.

  “Look, I’m sorry. But I don’t want to go all over it again. I can’t. Either you accept it as I told you, or I … I … go out of my mind.”

  He remained sitting calmly at the table. The place had come “turnkey,” or furnished. It was the snazzy substantial style of the corporate world—lots of mahogany and leather and shades of beige and tan and gold that could offend no one, conceivably. And flowers. He had seen to flowers. We had the perfume of flowers.

  The table and chairs were harmoniously Oriental, the fashionable infusion of Chinese. I think there was a painted urn or two also.

  And below we had the Fifty-first Street side of St. Patrick’s, and people down there on Fifth going and corning on the snowy steps. The quiet vision of the snow.

  “We don’t have that much time,” I said. “We have to get uptown, and I have to secure that place or move all of those precious objects. I’m not allowing some accident to happen to Dora’s inheritance.”

  “We can do that, but before we go, try this for me. Describe the man again … not Roger’s ghost, or the living statue, or the winged one, but the man you saw standing in the corner of the hotel room, when the sun came up.”

  “Ordinary, I told you, very ordinary. Anglo-Saxon? Yes, probably. Distinctly Irish or Nordic? No. Just a man. Not a Frenchman, I don’t think. No, a routine flavor of American. A man of good height, my height, but not overwhelmingly tall like you. I couldn’t have seen him for more than five seconds. It was sunrise. He had me trapped there. I couldn’t flee. I went blank. The mattress covered me, and when I woke, no man. Gone, as if I’d imagined it. But I didn’t imagine it!”

  “Thank you. The hair?”

  “Ash blond, almost gray. You know how ash blond can fade to where it’s really truly a … a graying brown color, or colorless almost, just sort of deep gray.”

  He gave a little gesture that he understood.

  Cautiously I leant on the glass. With my strength it would have been a simple thing to have accidentally shattered the wall. The last thing I wanted was a blunder.

  Obviously he wanted me to say more, and I was trying. I could recall the man fairly distinctly. “An agreeable face, very agreeable. He was the kind of man who doesn’t impress one with size or physicality so much as a sort of alertness, a poise and intelligence, I suppose you’d call it. He looked like an interesting man.”

  “Clothes.”

  “Not noticeable. Black I think, maybe even a bit dusty? I think I would remember jet black, or beautiful black, or fancy black.”

  “Eyes distinctive?”

  “Only for the intelligence. They weren’t large or deeply colored. He looked normal, smart. Dark eyebrows but not terribly heavy or anything like that. Normal forehead, full hair, nice hair, combed, but nothing dandified like mine. Or yours.”

  “And you believe he spoke the words?”

  “I’m sure he did. I heard him. I jumped up. I was awake, you understand, fully awake. I saw the sun. Look at my hand.”

  I was not as pale as I had been before I went into the Gobi desert, before I had tempted the sun to kill me in the recent past. But we could both see the burn where the rays of the sun had struck my hand. And I could feel the burn on the right side of my face, though it wasn’t visible there because I’d probably turned my head.

  “And you woke and you were under the bed, and it was askew, and had been thrown over and had fallen back down.”

  “No question of it. A lamp was overturned. I had not dreamed it any more than I dreamed Roger or anything else. Look, I want you to come uptown with me. I want you to see this place. Roger’s things.”

  “Oh, I want to,” he said. He stood up. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world. It’s just I wanted you to take your ease a little longer, to try to.…”

  “What? Get calm? After talking to the ghost of one of my victims? After seeing this man standing in my room! After seeing this thing take Roger, this thing which has been stalking me all over the world, this herald of madness, t
his—”

  “But you didn’t really see it take Roger, did you?”

  I thought about it for a moment.

  “I’m not sure. I’m not sure Roger’s image was animated anymore. He looked completely calm. He faded. Then the face of the creature or being or whatever it was—the face was visible for an instant. By that time, I was completely lost—no sense of balance or locality, nothing. I don’t know whether Roger was just fading as it took him or whether he accepted it and went along.”

  “Lestat, you don’t know that either thing happened. You only know Roger’s ghost disappeared and this thing appeared. That’s all you know.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Think about it this way. Your Stalker chose to make himself manifest. And he obliterated your ghostly companion.”

  “No. They were connected. Roger heard him coming! Roger knew he was coming even before I heard the footsteps. Thank God for one thing.”

  “Which is what?”

  “That I can’t communicate the fear to you. That I can’t make you feel how bad it was. You believe me, which is more than sufficient for the moment, but if you really knew, you wouldn’t be calm and collected and the perfect British gentleman.”

  “I might be. Let’s go. I want to see this treasure-house. I believe you’re absolutely correct that you can’t let all these objects slip out of the possession of the girl.”

  “Woman, young woman.”

  “And we should check on her whereabouts, immediately.”

  “I did that on the way here.”

  “In the state you were in?”

  “Well, I certainly snapped out of it long enough to go into the hotel and make certain she’d left. I had to do that much. A limousine had taken her to La Guardia at nine a.m. this morning. She reached New Orleans this afternoon. As for the convent, I have no idea how to reach her there. I don’t even know if she has the wiring in it for a phone. For now, she’s as safe as she ever was while Roger was living.”

  “Agreed. Let’s go uptown.”

  * * *

  Sometimes fear is a warning. It’s like someone putting a hand on your shoulder and saying Go No Farther.

  As we entered the flat, I felt that for a couple of seconds. Panic. Go No Farther.

  But I was too proud to show it and David too curious, proceeding before me into the hallway, and noting, no doubt, as I did, that the place was without life. The recent death? He could smell it as well as I could. I wondered if it was less noxious to him since it had not been his kill.

  Roger! The fusion of the mangled corpse and Roger the Ghost in memory was suddenly like a sharp kick in the chest.

  David went all the way to the living room while I lingered, looking at the big white marble angel with its shell of holy water and thinking how like the granite statue it was. Blake. William Blake had known. He had seen angels and devils and he’d gotten their proportions right. Roger and I could have talked about Blake.…

  But that was over. I was here, in the hallway.

  The thought that I had to walk forward, put one foot before the other, reach the living room, and look at that granite statue was suddenly a little more than I could accept.

  “It’s not here,” David said. He hadn’t read my mind. He was merely stating the obvious. He was standing in the living room some fifty feet away, looking at me, the halogens throwing just a little of their dedicated light on him, and he said again, “There is no black granite statue in this room.”

  I gave a sigh. “I’m going to hell,” I whispered.

  I could see David very distinctly, but no mortal could have. His image was too shadowy. He looked tall and very strong, standing there, back to the dingy light of the windows, the halogens making sparkles on his brass buttons.

  “The blood?”

  “Yes, the blood, and your glasses. Your violet glasses. A nice piece of evidence.”

  “Evidence of what!”

  It was too stupid of me to stand here at the back door talking to him over this distance. I walked down the hall as if going cheerfully to the guillotine, and I came into the room.

  There was only an empty space where the statue had stood, and I wasn’t even sure it was big enough. Clutter. Plaster saints. Icons, some so old and fragile they were under glass. Last night I hadn’t noticed so very many, sparkling all over the walls in the splinters of light that escaped the directed lamps.

  “Incredible!” David whispered.

  “I knew you’d love it,” I said dismally. I would have loved it, too, if I were not shaken to the bone.

  He was studying the objects, eyes moving back and forth over the icons and then the saints. “Absolutely magnificent objects. This is … is an extraordinary collection. You don’t know what any of this is, do you?”

  “Well, more or less,” I said. “I’m not an artistic illiterate.”

  “The series of pictures on the wall,” he said. He gestured to a long row of icons, the most fragile.

  “Those? Not really.”

  “Veronica’s veil,” he said. “These are early copies of the famous mandilion—the veil itself—which supposedly vanished from history centuries ago. Perhaps during the Fourth Crusade. This one’s Russian, flawless. This one? Italian. And look there, on the floor, in stacks, those are the Stations of the Cross.”

  “He was obsessed with finding relics for Dora. Besides, he loved the stuff himself. That one, the Russian Veil of Veronica—he had just brought that here to New York to Dora. Last night they quarreled over it, but she wouldn’t take it.”

  It was quite fine. How he had tried to describe it to her. God, I felt as if I had known him from my youth and we had talked about all of these objects, and every surface for me was layered with his special appreciation and complex of thoughts.

  The Stations of the Cross. Of course I knew the devotion, what Catholic child did not? We would follow the fourteen different stations of Christ’s passion and journey to Calvary through the darkened church, stopping at each on bended knee to say the appropriate prayers. Or the priest and his altar boys would make the procession, while the congregation would recite with them the meditation on Christ’s suffering at each point. Hadn’t Veronica come up at the sixth station to wipe the face of Jesus with her veil?

  David moved from object to object. “Now, this crucifix, this is really early, this could make a stir.”

  “But couldn’t you say that about all the others?”

  “Oh, yes, but I’m not speaking of Dora and her religion, or whatever that’s about, simply that these are fabulous works of art. No, you’re right, we cannot leave all this to fate, not possible. Here, this little statue could be ninth century, Celtic, unbelievably valuable. And this, this probably came from the Kremlin.”

  He paused, gripped by an icon of a Madonna and Child. Deeply stylized, of course, as are they all, and this one very familiar, for the Christ child was losing one of his sandals as He clung to his mother, and one could see angels tormenting Him with little symbols of his coming passion, and the Mother’s head was tenderly inclined to the son. Halo overlapped halo. The child Jesus running from the future, into his Mother’s protective arms.

  “You understand the fundamental principle of an icon, don’t you?” David asked.

  “Inspired by God.”

  “Not made by hands,” said David. “Supposedly directly imprinted upon the background material by God Himself.”

  “You mean like Jesus’ face was imprinted on Veronica’s veil?”

  “Exactly. All icons fundamentally were the work of God. A revelation in material form. And sometimes a new icon could be made from another simply by pressing a new cloth to the original, and a magic transfer would occur.”

  “I see. Nobody was supposed to have painted it.”

  “Precisely. Look, this is a jewel-framed relic of the True Cross, and this, this book here … my God, these can’t be the … No, this is a famous Book of the Hours that was lost in Berlin in the Second World War.” />
  “David, we can make our loving inventory later. Okay? The point is, what do we do now?” I had stopped being so afraid, though I did keep looking at the empty place where the granite devil had stood.

  And he had been the Devil, I knew he was. I’d start trembling if we did not go into action.

  “How do we save all this for Dora, and where?” David said. “Come on, the cabinets and the notebooks, let’s put things in order, find the Wynken de Wilde books, let’s make a decision and a plan.”

  “Don’t think about bringing your old mortal allies into this,” I said suddenly, suspiciously, and unkindly, I have to admit.

  “You mean the Talamasca?” he asked. He looked at me. He was holding the precious Book of the Hours in his hand, its cover as fragile as piecrust.

  “It all belongs to Dora,” I said. “We have to save it for her. And Wynken’s mine if she never wants Wynken.”

  “Of course, I understand that,” he said. “Good heavens, Lestat, do you think I still maintain contact with the Talamasca? They could be trusted in that regard, but I don’t want any contact with my old mortal allies, as you call them. I never want any contact with them again. I don’t want my file in their archive the way you wanted yours, remember. ‘The Vampire Lestat.’ I don’t want to be remembered by them, except as their Superior General who died of old age. Now come on.”

  There was a bit of disgust in his voice, and grief, also. I recalled that the death of Aaron Lightner, his old friend, had been “the final straw” with him and his Talamasca. Some sort of controversy had surrounded Lightner’s death, but I never knew what it was.

  The cabinet was in a room before the parlour, along with several other boxes of records. Immediately I found the financial papers, and went through them while David surveyed the rest.

  Having vast holdings of my own, I’m no stranger to legal documents and the tricks of international banks. Yes, Dora had a legacy from unimpeachable sources, I could see that, which could not be touched by those seeking retribution for Roger’s crimes. It was all connected to her name, Theodora Flynn, which must have been her legal name, as the result of Roger’s nuptial alias.