by Rice, Anne
I could neither speak nor move. I felt her lips touch mine.
“You’re safe now, Lestat,” she said.
Or was it David’s voice?
“You’re with us,” she said.
Or was it Armand?
“We’re here.”
“Look, look at his feet. He’s got only one shoe left.”
“… at his coat, torn … the buttons are gone.”
“Darling, darling.” She kissed me.
I rolled her over gently, careful not to press her with my weight, and I pulled up her skirt, and I lay my face against her hot naked thighs. The smell of the blood flooded my brain.
“Forgive me, forgive me,” I whispered, and my tongue broke through the thin cotton of her panties, tearing the cloth back from the soft down of pubic hair, pushing aside the blood-stained pad she wore, and I lapped at the blood just inside her young pink vaginal lips, just coming from the mouth of her womb, not pure blood, but blood from her, blood from her strong, young body, blood all over the tight hot cells of her vaginal flesh, blood that brought no pain, no sacrifice, only her gentle forbearance with me, with my unspeakable act, my tongue going deep into her, drawing out the blood that was yet to come, gently, gently, lapping the blood from the soft hair on her pubic lips, sucking each tiny droplet of it.
Unclean, unclean. They cried on the road to Golgotha, when Veronica had said: “Lord, I touched the hem of your garment and my hemorrhage was healed.” Unclean, unclean.
“Unclean, thank God, unclean,” I whispered, my tongue licking at the secret bloodstained place, taste and smell of blood, her sweet blood, a place where blood flows free and no wound is made or ever needs to be made, the entrance to her blood open to me in her forgiveness.
Snow beat against the glass. I could hear it, smell it, the blinding white snow of a terrible blizzard for New York, a deep white winter, freezing all beneath its mantle.
“My darling, my angel,” she whispered.
I lay panting against her. The blood was all gone inside me now. I had drawn all of it from her womb that was meant to come. I had licked away even what had collected on the pad that had lain against her skin.
She sat up, modestly covering me with her crossed arms, bending forward as if to shield me from their eyes—David’s, Armand’s—never once having pushed at me, or cried out, or recoiled, and she held my head now as I cried.
“You’re safe,” she said again. They said we were safe. They all said Safe, as if it had a magic charm. Safe, safe, safe.
“Oh, no,” I cried. I wept. “No, none of us are safe. And we will never be, never, ever again, ever.…”
TWENTY-TWO
I wouldn’t let them touch me. I mean, I wouldn’t give up anything just yet, not my torn shoe, nothing. Keep away your combs, your towels, your comfort. I clung to the secret inside my coat.
A shroud, that’s what I asked for, some heavy thing to wrap about myself. They found it, a blanket, soft, woolen, didn’t matter.
The place was almost empty.
They had been steadily moving Roger’s treasures south. They told me. Mortal agents had been entrusted with this task, and most of the statues and the icons were gone down to the orphanage in New Orleans, and housed there in the empty chapel I had seen, where only the Crucified Christ had been. Some omen!
They had not quite finished these tasks. A few precious things remained, a trunk or two, boxes of papers. Files.
I’d been gone the space of three days. The news was filled with tales of Roger’s death. Though they would not tell me how it had been discovered. The scramble for power in the world of the dark, criminal drug cartels was well under way. The reporters had stopped calling the TV station about Dora. No one knew about this place. No one knew she was here.
Few knew about the big orphanage to which she planned to return, when all Roger’s relics had been moved.
The cable network had canceled her show. The gangster’s daughter preached no more. She had not seen or spoken to her followers. In newspaper columns and in bites on television, she learnt that the scandal had made her vaguely mysterious. But in the main, she was considered a dead end, a small-time television evangelist with no knowledge of her father’s doings.
But in the company of David and Armand, she had lost all contact with her former world, living here in New York, as the worst winter in fifty years came down, a snow from Heaven—living here among the relics and listening to them, their soft comfort, their wondrous tales, uncertain of what she meant to do, believing still in God.…
All that was the latest news.
I took the blanket from them and walked, one shoe gone, through the flat.
I went into the small room. I wrapped the blanket around me. The window here was covered. No sun would come.
“Don’t come near me,” I said. “I need to sleep a mortal’s sleep. I need to sleep the night through and the day and then I’ll tell you everything. Don’t touch me, don’t come near me.”
“May I sleep in your arms?” Dora asked, a white and vibrant blood-filled thing standing in the doorway, her vampiric angels behind her.
The room was dark. Only a chest was left with some relics in it. But there were statues still in the hall.
“No. Once the sun rises, my body will do whatever it will to protect itself from any mortal intrusion. You can’t come with me into that sleep. It’s not possible.”
“Then let me lie with you now.”
The other two stared over her shoulders at my empty left eyelids fluttering painfully against each other. There must have been blood. But our blood is staunched fast. The eye had been torn out by the root. What was its root? I could still smell the soft delicious blood I had from her. It laid on my lips, her blood.
“Let me sleep,” I said.
I locked the door and lay on the floor, knees drawn up, warm and safe in the thick folds of the blanket, smelling the pine needles and the soil that clung to my clothes, and the smoke, and the bits and pieces of dried excrement, and the blood, of course, the human blood, blood from battlefields, and blood from Hagia Sophia when the dead infant had fallen on me, and the smell of the horse manure, and the smell of the marl of Hell.
All of it was wrapped up with me in this blanket, my hand on the bulk of the unfolded veil against my bare chest.
“Don’t come near me!” I whispered one more time for the ears of the immortals outside, who were so confounded and confused.
Then I slept.
Sweet rest. Sweet darkness.
Would that death were like this. Would that one would sleep and sleep and sleep forever.
TWENTY-THREE
I remained unconscious the full twenty-four hours, waking only as the sun died behind the winter sky the next evening. There was a fine outlay of my own good clothes for me displayed on the wooden chest, and a pair of my own shoes.
I tried to imagine who had made this selection from amongst all that David had earlier sent here for me from the nearby hotel. Surely he was the logical choice. And I smiled, thinking of how often in our lives David and I had been utterly entangled in the adventure of clothes.
But you see, if a vampire leaves out details like clothes, the story doesn’t make sense. Even the most grandiose mythic characters—if they are flesh and blood—do have to worry about the latchets on sandals.
It struck me with full force that I was back from the realm where clothes changed shape through the will of the clothed. That I was covered in dirt and did have only one shoe.
I stood up, fully alert, removed the veil carefully without unfolding it or chancing to look at it, though I thought I could see the dark image through the cloth. I removed all my garments with care, and then stacked them together on the blanket, so that not one pine needle would be lost that didn’t have to be lost. And then I went into the nearby bathroom—the customary chamber of tile and ferocious steam—and bathed like a man being baptized in the Jordan. David had laid out for me all the requisite toys—combs, brushes, s
cissors. Vampires need almost nothing else, really.
All the while I had the door of the bathroom open. Had anyone dared to step into the bedroom I would have leapt from the steamy downpour and ordered that person out.
At last I myself emerged, wet and clean, combed my hair, dried carefully, and put on all of my own fresh garments from the inside out, that is from silk shorts and undershirt and black socks, to the clean wool pants, shirt, vest, and double-breasted blazer of a blue suit.
Then I bent down and picked up the folded veil. I held it, not daring to open it.
But I could see the darkness on the other side of the fabric. This time I was sure. I put the veil inside my vest, buttoning the vest tight.
I looked in the mirror. It was a madman in a Brooks Brothers suit, a demon with wild, frenzied blond locks, his collar open, staring with one horrible eye at himself in the mirror.
The eye, good God, the eye!
My fingers moved up to examine the empty socket, the slightly wrinkled lids that tried to close it off. What to do, what to do. If only I had a black patch, a gentleman’s patch. But I didn’t.
My face was desecrated by the missing eye. I realized I was shaking violently. David had left for me one of my broad, scarflike ties, of violet silk, and this I wrapped around my collar, making it stand up like a collar of old, very stiff, the scarf surrounding it with layer after layer as one might see in some portrait of Beethoven.
I tucked the tails of the scarf down into the vest. In the mirror, my eye burnt violet with the violet of the scarf. I saw the blackness on the left side, made myself look at it, rather than simply compensate for it.
I slipped on my shoes, stared back at the ruined clothes, picked up a few bits of dust and dried leaf, and laid all that carefully on the blanket, so that as little as possible would be lost, and then I went outside into the hallway.
The flat was sweetly warm, and full of a popular but not overpowering incense—something that made me think of Catholic churches of old, when the altar boy swung the silver censer at the end of his chain.
As I came into the living room, I saw the three of them very distinctly, ranged about the cheerfully lighted space, the even illumination making a mirror of the nightwalls beyond which the snow continued to descend upon New York. I wanted to see the snow. I walked past them and put my eye up against the glass. The whole roof of St. Patrick’s was white with fresh snow, the steep spires shaking off as much as they could, though every speck of ornament was decorated in white. The street was an impassable valley of white. Had they ceased to plow it?
People of New York moved below. Were these only the living? I stared with my right eye. I could see only what seemed to be the living. I scanned the roof of the church in a near panic, suddenly, expecting to see a gargoyle wound into the artwork and discover that the gargoyle was alive and watching me.
But I had no feeling of anyone except those in the room, whom I loved, who were patiently waiting upon me and my melodramatic and self-indulgent silence.
I turned around. Armand had once again decked himself out in high-fashion velvet and embroidered lace, the kind of “romantic new look” one could find at any of the shops in the deep crevasse below us. His auburn hair was free and uncut and hung down in the way it used to do in ages long past, when as Satan’s saint of the vampires of Paris, he would not have allowed himself the vanity to cut one lock of it. Only it was clean, shining clean, auburn in the light, and against the dark blood-red of his coat. And there were his sad and always youthful eyes looking at me, the smooth boyish cheeks, the angel’s mouth. He sat at the table, reserved, filled with love and curiosity, and even a vague kind of humility which seemed to say:
Put aside all our disputes. I am here for you.
“Yes,” I said aloud. “Thank you.”
David sat there, the robust brown-haired young Anglo-Indian, juicy and succulent to behold as he had been since the night I made him one of us. He wore his English tweed, with leather-patched elbows, and a vest as tightly buttoned as my own, and a cashmere scarf protecting his neck from the cold to which perhaps, for all his strength, he wasn’t yet really accustomed.
It’s strange how we feel cold. You can ignore it. And then very suddenly, you can take it personally.
My radiant Dora sat next, opposite Armand, and David sat facing me between them. This left me the chair with its back to the glass and the sky if I wanted it. I stared at it. Such a simple object, a black lacquered chair, Oriental design, vaguely Chinese, mostly functional, obviously expensive.
Dora rose, her legs seeming to unfold beneath her. She wore a thin, long gown of burgundy silk, just a simple dress, the artificial warmth surrounding her obviously and keeping her safe. Her arms were bare and white. Her face was filled with worry, her cap of shiny black hair making two points on either side of her face, mid-cheek, the fashionable bob of eighty years ago and of today. Her eyes were the owl eyes, and full of love.
“What happened, Lestat?” she said. “Oh, please, please tell us.”
“Where is the other eye?” asked Armand. It was just the sort of question he would ask. He had not risen to his feet. David, the Englishman, had risen, simply because Dora had risen, but Armand sat there looking up at me, asking the direct question. “What happened to it? Do you still have it?”
I looked at Dora. “They could have saved that eye,” I said, quoting her story of Uncle Mickey and the gangsters and the eye, “if only those gangsters hadn’t stepped on it!”
“What are you saying?” she said.
“I don’t know if they stepped on my eye,” I said, irritated by the tremour in my voice. The drama of my voice. “They weren’t gangsters, they were ghosts, and I fled, and I left my eye. It was my only chance. I left it on the step. Maybe they smashed it flat, or smeared it like a blob of grease, I don’t know. Was Uncle Mickey buried with his glass eye?”
“Yes, I think so,” Dora said in a daze. “No one ever told me.
I could sense the other two scanning her, Armand scanning me, their picking up the images of Uncle Mickey, kicked half to death in Corona’s Bar on Magazine Street, and the gangster with the pointed shoe squashing Uncle Mickey’s eye.
Dora gasped.
“What happened to you?”
“You’ve moved Roger’s things?” I asked. “Almost all of them?”
“Yes, they’re in the chapel at St. Elizabeth’s, safe,” Dora said. “St. Elizabeth’s.” That was the name of the orphanage in its lifetime. I had never heard her say it before. “No one will even think to look for them there. The press doesn’t care about me anymore. His enemies circle his corporate connections like vultures; they zero in on his bank accounts and floating bank drafts, and safe-deposit boxes, murdering for this or that key. Among his intimates, his daughter has been declared incidental, unimportant, ruined. No matter.”
“Thank God for that,” I said. “Did you tell them he was dead? Will it all end soon, his story, and what part you have to play in it?”
“They found his head,” said Armand quietly.
In a muted voice he explained. Dogs had dragged the head from a heap of garbage, and were fighting over it beneath a bridge. For an hour, an old man watched, warming himself by a fire, and then gradually he realized it was a human head that the dogs were fighting over and gnawing at, and they brought the head to the proper authorities, and through the genetic testing of his hair and skin discovered that it was Roger. Dental plates didn’t help. Roger’s teeth had been perfect. All that remained was for Dora to identify it.
“He must have wanted it found,” I said.
“What makes you say that?” asked David. “Where have you been?”
“I saw your mother,” I said to Dora. “I saw her bottle-blond hair and her blue eyes. It won’t be long before they’re in Heaven.”
“What on earth are you saying, my darling?” she asked. “My angel? What are you telling me?”
“Sit down, all of you. I’ll tell you the whole tale. List
en to everything I say without interrupting. No, I don’t want to sit, not with my back to the sky and the whirlwind and the snow and the church. No, I’ll walk back and forth, listen to what I have to tell you.
“Remember this. Every word of this happened to me! I could have been tricked. I could have been deceived. But this is what I saw with my eyes, and heard with my ears!”
I told them everything, from the very, very beginning, some things each of them had already heard, but which all of them together had never heard—from my first fatal glimpse of Roger and my love for his brazen white-toothed smile and guilty, gleaming black eyes—all the way to the moment I had pitched myself through the door of the flat last night.
I told them everything. Every word spoken by Memnoch and God Incarnate. Everything I had seen in Heaven and in Hell and on Earth. I told them about the smell and the colors of Jerusalem. I told them and told them and told them.…
The story devoured the night. It ate the hours, as I paced, raving, repeating those parts I wanted to get exactly right, the stages of Evolution which had shocked the angels, and the vast libraries of Heaven, and the peach tree with both bloom and fruit, and God, and the soldier lying on his back in Hell, refusing to give in. I described to them the details of the interior of Hagia Sophia. I talked about the naked men on the battlefield. Over and over I described Hell. I described Heaven. I repeated my final speech, that I couldn’t help Memnoch, I couldn’t teach in this school!
They stared at me in utter silence.
“Do you have the veil?” Dora asked, her lip quivering. “Do you still have it?”
So tender was the tilt of her head, as if she’d forgive me in an instant if I said, No, I lost it in the street, I gave it to a beggar!