by Rice, Anne
“No, that’s not who I am,” I said. “I’m only what I told you and nothing more. But that’s who’s after me.”
“The Devil?”
“Yes. Now listen, I’m going to tell you everything, and then you must give me your advice. Meantime—” I turned around, yes, there was the file cabinet. “Your inheritance, everything, money you have now that you don’t know about, clean and taxed and proper, it’s all explained in black folders in those files. Your father died wanting you to have this for your church. If you turn away from it, don’t be so sure it’s God’s will. Remember, your father is dead. His blood cleansed the money.”
Did I believe this? Well, it sure as hell was what Roger wanted me to tell her.
“Roger said to say this,” I added, trying to sound extremely sure of myself.
“I understand you,” she said. “You’re worrying about something that doesn’t really matter now. Come here, please, let me hold you. You’re shivering.”
“I’m shivering!”
“It’s warm in here, but you don’t seem to feel it. Come.”
I knelt down in front of her and suddenly took her in my arms the way I had Armand. I laid my head against hers. She was cold but would never even on the day of her burial be as cold as I was, nothing human could be that cold. I had sopped up the winter’s worst as though I were porous marble, which I suppose I was.
“Dora, Dora, Dora,” I whispered. “How he loved you, and how much he wanted everything to be right for you, Dora.”
Her scent was strong, but so was I.
“Lestat, explain about the Devil,” she said.
I sat down on the carpet so that I could look up at her. She was perched on the edge of her chair, knees bare, black coat carelessly open now, and a streak of gold scarf showing, her face pale but very flushed, in a way that made her radiant and at the same time a little enchanted, as though she were no more human than me.
“Even your father couldn’t really describe your beauty,” I said. “Temple virgin, nymph of the wood.”
“My father said that to you?”
“Yes. But the Devil, ah, the Devil told me to ask you a question. To ask you the truth about Uncle Mickey’s eye!” I had just remembered it. I had not remembered to tell either David or Armand about this, but what difference could that possibly make?
She was surprised by these words, and very impressed. She sank back a little into the chair. “The Devil told you these words?”
“He gave it to me as a gift. He wants me to help him. He says he’s not evil. He says that God is his adversary. I’ll tell you everything, but he gave me these words as some sort of little extra gift, what do we call it in New Orleans, lagniappe? To convince me that he is what he says he is.”
She gave a little gesture of confusion, hand flying to her temple as she shook her head. “Wait. The truth about Uncle Mickey’s eye, you’re sure he said that? My father didn’t say anything about Uncle Mickey?”
“No, and I never caught any such image from your father’s heart or soul, either. The Devil said Roger didn’t know the truth. What does it mean?”
“My father didn’t know the truth,” she said. “He never knew. His mother never told him the truth. It was his uncle Mickey, my grandmother’s brother. And it was my mother’s people who told me the real story—Terry’s people. It was like this, my father’s mother was rich and had a beautiful house on St. Charles Avenue.”
“I know the place, I know all about it. Roger met Terry there.”
“Yes, exactly, but my grandmother had been poor when she was young. Her mother had been a maid in the Garden District, like many an Irish maid. And Roger’s Uncle Mickey was one of those easygoing characters who made nothing of himself in anyone’s eyes at all.
“My father never knew about the real life of Uncle Mickey. My mother’s mother told me to show me what airs my father put on, and what a fool he was, and how humble his origins had been.”
“Yes, I see.”
“My father had loved Uncle Mickey. Uncle Mickey had died when my father was a boy. Uncle Mickey had a cleft palate and a glass eye, and I remember my father showing me his picture and telling me the story of how Uncle Mickey lost his eye. Uncle Mickey had loved fireworks, and once he’d been playing with firecrackers and one had gone off in a tin can, and wham, the can hit him in the eye. That’s the story I always believed about Uncle Mickey. I knew him only from the picture. My grandmother and my great-uncle were dead before I was born.”
“Right. And then your mother’s people told you different.”
“My mother’s father was a cop. He knew all about Roger’s family, that Roger’s grandfather had been a drunk and so had Uncle Mickey, more or less. Uncle Mickey had also been a tout for a bookie when he was young. And one time, he held back on a bet. In other words, he kept the money rather than placing the bet as he should have, and unfortunately the horse won.”
“I follow you.”
“Uncle Mickey, very young and very scared I imagine, was in Corona’s Bar in the Irish Channel.”
“On Magazine Street,” I said. “That bar was there for years and years. Maybe a century.”
“Yes, and the bookie’s henchmen came in and dragged Uncle Mickey to the back of the bar. My mother’s father saw it all. He was there, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Nobody could. Nobody would. Nobody dared. But this is what my grandfather saw. The men beat and kicked Uncle Mickey. They were the ones who hurt the roof of his mouth so he talked as if something were wrong with him. And they kicked out his eye. They kicked it across the floor. And the way my grandfather said it every time he told it was, ‘Dora, they could have saved that eye, except those guys stepped on it. They deliberately stepped on it with those pointed shoes.’ ”
She stopped.
“And Roger never knew this.”
“Nobody knows it who is alive,” she said. “Except for me, of course. My grandfather’s dead. For all I know, everyone who was ever there is dead. Uncle Mickey died in the early fifties. Roger used to take me out to the cemetery to visit his grave. Roger had always loved him. Uncle Mickey with his hollow voice and his glass eye. Everybody sort of loved him, the way Roger told it. And even my mother’s people said that too. He was a sweetheart. He was a night watchman before he died. He rented rooms on Magazine Street right over Baer’s Bakery. He died of pneumonia in the hospital before anyone even knew he was ill. And Roger never knew the truth about Uncle Mickey’s eye. We would have spoken of it if he had, naturally.”
I sat there pondering, or rather picturing what she had described. No images came from her, she was closed tight, but her voice had been effortlessly generous. I knew Corona’s. So did anyone who had ever walked Magazine Street in those famous blocks of the Irish heyday. I knew the criminals with their pointed shoes. Crushing the eye.
“They just stepped on it and squashed it,” said Dora, as though she could read my thoughts. “My grandfather always said, ‘They could have saved it, if they hadn’t stepped on it the way they did with those pointed shoes.’ ”
A silence fell between us.
“This proves nothing,” I said.
“It proves your friend, or enemy, knows secrets, that’s what it proves.”
“But it doesn’t prove he’s the Devil,” I said, “and why would he choose such a story, of all things?”
“Maybe he was there,” she said with a bitter smile.
We both gave that a little laugh.
“You said this was the Devil but he wasn’t evil,” she prompted me. She looked persuasive and trusting and thoroughly in command.
I had the feeling that I had been absolutely correct in seeking her advice. She was regarding me steadily.
“Tell me what this Devil has done,” she said.
I told her the whole tale. I had to admit how I stalked her father, and I couldn’t remember if I had told her that before. I told her about the Devil stalking me in similar fashion, going through it all, just as I had for David a
nd Armand, and found myself finishing with those puzzling words, “And I’ll tell you this about him, whatever he is, he has a sleepless mind in his heart, and an insatiable personality! And that’s true. When I first used those words to describe him, they just occurred to me as if from nowhere. I don’t know what part of my mind intuited such a thing. But it’s true.”
“Say again?” she asked.
I did.
She lapsed into total silence. Her eyes became tiny and she sat with one hand curled under her chin.
“Lestat, I’m going to make an absurd request of you. Send for some food. Or get me something to eat and drink. I have to ponder this.”
I found myself leaping to my feet. “Anything you wish,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter at all. Sustenance. I haven’t eaten since yesterday. I don’t want my thoughts distorted by an accidental fast. You go, get something for nourishment and bring it back here. And I want to be alone here, to pray, to think, and to walk back and forth among Father’s things. Now, there is no chance this demon will take you sooner than promised?”
“I don’t know any more than I told you. I don’t think so. Look, I’ll get you good food and drink.”
I went on the errand immediately, leaving the building in mortal fashion and seeking out one of those crowded midtown restaurants from which to purchase a whole meal for her that could be packed up and kept hot until I returned. I brought her several bottles of some pure, brand-name water, since that’s what mortals seem to crave in these times, and then I took my time going back up, the bundle in my arms.
Only as the elevator opened on our floor did I realize how unusual my actions had been. I, two hundred years old, ferocious and proud by nature, had just gone on an errand for a mortal girl because she asked me very directly to do it.
Of course there were mediating circumstances! I’d kidnapped her and brought her over hundreds of miles! I needed her. Hell, I loved her.
But what I’d learnt from this simple incident was this: She did have a power, which saints often have, to make others obey. Without question, I’d gone to get the food for her. Cheerfully gone myself, as though there were grace in it.
I brought the meal inside the apartment and set it down for her on the table.
The apartment was now flooded with her mingling aromas, including that of her menses, that special, perfumed blood collecting neatly between her legs. The place breathed with her.
I ignored the predictable raging desire to feast on her till she dropped.
She was sitting crouched over in the chair, hands locked together, staring before her. I saw that the black leather folders were open all over the floor. She knew about her inheritance or had some idea of it.
She wasn’t looking at that, however, and she seemed absolutely unsurprised by my return.
She drifted towards the table now, as though she couldn’t break out of her reverie. Meantime, I stirred about in the kitchen drawers of the apartment for plates and utensils for her, found some mildly inoffensive stainless-steel forks and knives and a china plate. I set these down for her, and laid out the cartons of steaming food—meat and vegetables and such, and some sort of sweet concoction, all of it as alien to me as it had always been, as if I hadn’t recently been in a mortal body and tasted real food. I didn’t want to think about that experience!
“Thank you,” she said absently, without so much as looking at me. “You are a darling for having done it.” She opened a bottle of the water and drank it all greedily.
I watched her throat as she did this. I didn’t let myself think about her in any way except lovingly, but the scent of her was enough to drive me out of the place.
That’s it, I vowed. If you feel you cannot control this desire, then you leave!
She ate the food indifferently, almost mechanically, and then looked up at me.
“Oh, forgive me, do sit down, please. You can’t eat, can you? You can’t take this kind of nourishment.”
“No,” I said. “But I can sit down.”
I sat next to her, trying not to watch her or breathe her scent any more than I had to. I looked directly across the room, out the glass at the white sky. If snow was falling now, I couldn’t tell, but it had to be. Because I couldn’t see anything but the whiteness. Yes, that meant that either New York had disappeared without a trace, or that it was snowing outside.
It took her less than six and one half minutes to devour the meal. I’ve never seen anyone eat so fast. She stacked up everything and took it into the kitchen. I had to draw her away from the chores, and bring her back into the room. This gave me a chance both to hold her warm, fragile hands and to be very close to her.
“What is your advice?”
She sat down and pondered, or drew together her thoughts.
“I think you have little to lose by cooperating with this being. It’s perfectly obvious he could destroy you anytime he wanted. He has many ways. You slept in your house, even after you knew that he, the Ordinary Man, as you call him, knew the location. Obviously you aren’t afraid of him on any material level. And in his realm, you were able to exert sufficient force to push him away from you. What do you risk by cooperating? Suppose he can take you to Heaven or Hell. The implication is that you can still refuse to help him, can’t you? You can still say, to use his own fine language, ‘I don’t see things from your point of view.’ ”
“Yes.”
“What I’m saying is, if you open yourself to what he wants to show you, that does not mean you have accepted him, does it? On the contrary, the obligation lies with him to make you see from his perspective, or so it seems. Besides, the point is, you break the rules whatever they are.”
“He can’t be tricking me into Hell, you mean.”
“You serious? You think God would let people be tricked into Hell?”
“I’m not people, Dora. I’m what I am. I don’t mean to draw any parallels with God in my repetitive epithets. I only mean I’m evil. Very evil. I know I am. I have been since I started to feed on humans. I’m Cain, the slayer of his brothers.”
“Then God could put you in Hell anytime he wanted. Why not?”
I shook my head. “I wish I knew. I wish I knew why He hasn’t. I wish I knew. But what you’re saying is that there is power involved here on both sides.”
“Clearly.”
“And to believe in some sort of trickery is almost superstitious.”
“Precisely. If you go to Heaven, if you speak with God.…” She stopped.
“Would you go if he were asking you to help him, if he were telling you he wasn’t evil, but that he was the adversary of God, that he could change your mind on things?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I might. I would maintain my free will throughout the experience, but I very well might.”
“That’s just it. Free will. Am I losing my will and my mind?”
“You seem to be in full possession of both and an enormous amount of supernatural strength.”
“Do you sense the evil in me?”
“No, you’re too beautiful for that, you know it.”
“But there must be something rotten and vicious inside me that you can feel and see.”
“You’re asking for consolation and I can’t give that to you,” she said. “No, I don’t sense it. I believe the things you’ve told me.”
“Why?”
She thought for a long time. Then she stood up and went to the glass wall.
“I have put a question to the supernatural,” she said, looking down, perhaps at the roof of the cathedral. I could not see it from where I stood. “I have asked it to give me a vision.”
“And you think I might be the answer.”
“Possibly,” she said, turning and looking at me again. “That is not to say that all of this is happening because of Dora and what Dora wants. It is, after all, happening to you. But I have asked for a vision, and I’ve been given a series of miraculous incidents, and yes, I believe you, as surely as I believe in
the existence of and the goodness of God.”
She came towards me, stepping carefully through the scattered folders.
“You know, none of us can say why God allows evil.”
“Yes.”
“Or whence it came into the world. But the world over, there are millions of us—People of the Book—Moslem, Jew, Catholic, Protestant—descendants of Abraham—and over and over we keep being drawn into tales and schemes in which evil is present, in which there is a Devil, in which there is some element that God allows, some adversary, to use your friend’s word.”
“Yes. Adversary. That’s exactly what he said.”
“I trust in God,” she said.
“And you’re saying I should do that too?”
“What could you possibly lose by doing it?” she said.
I didn’t answer.
She walked about, thinking, her black hair falling forward in a curl against her cheek, her long black-clad legs looking painfully thin yet graceful as she paced. She had let go of the black coat a long time ago, and I realized now that she wore only a thin black silk dress. I smelled her blood again, her secret, fragrant, female blood.
I looked away from her.
She said, “I know what I have to lose in such matters. If I believe in God, and there is no God, then I can lose my life. I can end up on a deathbed realizing I’ve wasted the only real experience of the universe I’ll ever be permitted to have.”
“Yes, exactly, that’s what I thought when I was alive. I wasn’t going to waste my life believing in something that was unprovable and out of the question. I wanted to know what I was permitted to see and feel and taste in my life.”
“Exactly. But you see, your situation is different. You are a vampire. You are, theologically speaking, a demon. You are powerful in your own way, and you cannot die naturally. You have an edge.”
I thought about it.
“Do you know what happened today in the world,” she said, “just this one day? We always begin our broadcast with such reports; do you know how many people died in Bosnia? In Russia? In Africa? How many skirmishes were fought or murders committed?”