The Tale of the Body Thief tvc-4

by Anne Rice

  "I need to leave you for only a little while," Gretchen said. "I have to get some food."

  "Yes, and I shall pay for this food," I said. I laid my hand on her wrist. Though my voice was still weak and hoarse, I told her about the hotel, that my money was there in my coat. It was enough money for me to pay her for my care as well as for the food, and she must get it. The key must be in my clothes, I explained.

  She had put my clothes on hangers, and now she did find the key in the shirt pocket.

  "See?" I said with a little laugh. "I have been telling you the truth about everything."

  She smiled, and her face was filled with warmth. She said she would go to the hotel and get my money for me, if I would agree to lie quiet. It wasn't such a good idea to leave money lying about, even in a fine hotel.

  I wanted to answer, but I was so sleepy. Then, through the little window, I saw her walking through the snow, towards the little car. I saw her climb inside. What a strong figure she was, very sturdy of limb, but with fair skin and a softness to her that made her lovely to behold and most embraceable. I was frightened, however, on account of her leaving me.

  When I opened my eyes again, she was standing there with my overcoat over her arm. Lots of money, she said. She'd brought it all back. She'd never seen so much money in packets and wads. What a strange person I was. There was something like twenty-eight thousand dollars there. She'd closed out my account at the hotel. They'd been worried about me. They had seen me run off in the snow. They had made her sign a receipt for everything. This bit of paper she gave to me, as if it was important. She had my other possessions with her, the clothing I had purchased, which was still in its sacks and boxes.

  I wanted to thank her. But where were the words? I would thank her when I came back to her in my own body.

  After she had put away all the clothing, she fixed us a simple supper of broth again and bread with butter. We ate this together, with a bottle of wine, of which I drank much more than she thought permissible. I must say that this bread and butter and wine was about the best human food I'd tasted so far. I told her so. And I wanted more of the wine, please, because this drunkenness was absolutely sublime.

  "Why did you bring me here?" I asked her.

  She sat down on the side of the bed, looking towards the fire, playing with her hair, not looking at me. She started to explain again about the overcrowding at the hospital, the epidemic.

  "No, why did you do it? There were others there."

  "Because you're not like anyone I've ever known," she said.

  "You make me think of a story I once read... about an angel forced to come down to earth in a human body."

  With a flush of pain, I thought of Raglan James telling me that I looked like an angel. I thought of my other body roaming the world, powerful and under his loathsome charge.

  She gave a sigh as she looked at me. She was puzzled.

  "When this is finished, I'll come back to you in my real body," I said. "I'll reveal myself to you. It may mean something to you to know that you were not deceived; and you are so strong, I suspect the truth won't hurt you."

  "The truth?"

  I explained that often when we revealed ourselves to mortals we drove them mad-for we were unnatural beings, and yet we did not know anything about the existence of God or the Devil. In sum, we were like a religious vision without revelation. A mystic experience, but without a core of truth.

  She was obviously enthralled. A subtle light came into her eyes. She asked me to explain how I appeared in the other form.

  I described to her how I had been made a vampire at the age of twenty. I'd been tall for those times, blond, with light-colored eyes. I told her again about burning my skin in the Gobi. I feared the Body Thief intended to keep my body for good, that he was probably off someplace, hidden from the rest of the tribe, trying to perfect his use of my powers.

  She asked me to describe flying to her.

  "It's more like floating, simply rising at will-propelling yourself hi this direction or that by decision. It's a defiance of gravity quite unlike the flight of natural creatures. It's frightening. It's the most frightening of all our powers; and I think it hurts us more than any other power; it fills us with despair. It is the final proof that we aren't human. We fear perhaps we will one night leave the earth and never touch it again."

  I thought of the Body Thief using this power. I had seen him use it.

  "I don't know how I could have been so foolish as to let him take a body as strong as mine," I said. "I was blinded by the desire to be human."

  She was merely looking at me. Her hands were clasped in front of her and she was looking at me steadily and calmly with large hazel eyes.

  "Do you believe in God?" I asked. I pointed to the crucifix on the wall, "Do you believe hi these Catholic philosophers whose books are on the shelf?"

  She thought for a long moment. "Not in the way you ask," she said.

  I smiled. "How then?"

  "My life has been one of self-sacrifice ever since I can remember. That is what I believe in. I believe that I must do everything I can to lessen misery. That is all I can do, and that is something enormous. It is a great power, like your power of flight."

  I was mystified. I realized that I did not think of the work of a nurse as having to do with power. But I saw her point completely.

  "To try to know God," she said, "this can be construed as a sin of pride, or a failure of imagination. But all of us know misery when we see it. We know sickness; hunger; deprivation. I try to lessen these things. It's the bulwark of my faith. But to answer you truly-yes, I do believe hi God and in Christ. So do you."

  "No, I don't," I said.

  "When you were feverish you did. You spoke of God and the Devil the way I've never heard anyone else speak of them."

  "I spoke of tiresome theological arguments," I said.

  "No, you spoke of the irrelevance of them."

  "You think so?"

  "Yes. You know good when you see it. You said you did. So do 1.1 devote my life to trying to do it."

  I sighed. "Yes, I see," I said. "Would I have died had you left me in the hospital?"

  "You might have," she said. "I honestly don't know."

  It was very pleasurable merely to look at her. Her face was large with few contours and nothing of elegant aristocratic beauty. But beauty she had in abundance. And the years had been gentle with her. She was not worn from care.

  I sensed a tender brooding sensuality hi her, a sensuality which she herself did not trust or nurture.

  "Explain this to me again," she said. "You spoke of being a rock singer because you wanted to do good? You wanted to be good by being a symbol of evil? Talk of this some more."

  I told her yes. I told her how I had done it, gathering the little band, Satan's Night Out, and making them professionals. I told her that I had failed; there had been a war among our kind, I myself had been taken away by force, and the entire debacle had happened without a rupture in the rational fabric of the mortal world. I had been forced back into invisibility and irrelevance.

  "There's no place for us on earth," I said. "Perhaps there was once, I don't know. The fact that we exist is no justification. Hunters drove wolves from the world. I thought if I revealed our existence that hunters would drive us from the world too. But it wasn't to be. My brief career was a string of illusions. No one believes in us. And that's how it's meant to be. Perhaps we are to die of despair, to vanish from the world very slowly, and without a sound.

  "Only I can't bear it. I can't bear to be quiet and be nothing, and to take life with pleasure, and to see the creations and accomplishments of mortals all around me, and not to be part of them, but to be Cain. The lonely Cain. That's the world to me, you see-what mortals do and have done. It isn't the great natural world at all. If it was the natural world, then maybe I would have had a better time of it being immortal than I did. It's the accomplishments of mortals. The paintings of Rembrandt, the memorials of the capit
al city in the snow, great cathedrals. And we are cut off eternally from such things, and rightfully so, and yet we see them with our vampire eyes."

  "Why did you change bodies with a mortal man?" she asked.

  "To walk in the sun again for one day. To think and feel and breathe like a mortal. Maybe to test a belief."

  "What was the belief?"

  "That being mortal again was what we all wanted, that we were sorry that we'd given it up, that immortality wasn't worth the loss of our human souls. But I know now I was wrong."

  I thought of Claudia suddenly. I thought of my fever dreams. A leaden stillness came over me. When I spoke again, it was a quiet act of will.

  "I'd much rather be a vampire," I said. "I don't like being mortal. I don't like being weak, or sick, or fragile, or feeling pain. It's perfectly awful. I want my body back as soon as I can get it from that thief."

  She seemed mildly shocked by this. "Even though you kill when you are in your other body, even though you drink human blood, and you hate it and you hate yourself."

  "I don't hate it. And I don't hate myself. Don't you see? That's the contradiction. I've never hated myself."

  "You told me you were evil, you said when I helped you I was helping the devil. You wouldn't say those things if you didn't hate it."

  I didn't answer. Then I said, "My greatest sin has always been that I have a wonderful time being myself. My guilt is always there; my moral abhorrence for myself is always there; but I have a good time. I'm strong; I'm a creature of great will and passion. You see, that's the core of the dilemma for me- how can I enjoy being a vampire so much, how can I enjoy it if it's evil? Ah, it's an old story. Men work it out when they go to war. They tell themselves there is a cause. Then they experience the thrill of killing, as if they were merely beasts. And beasts do know it, they really do. The wolves know it. They know the sheer thrill of tearing to pieces the prey. I know it."

  She seemed lost in her thoughts for a long time. I reached out and touched her hand.

  "Come, lie down and sleep," I said. "Lie beside me again. I won't hurt you. I can't. I'm too sick." I gave a little laugh. "You're very beautiful," I said. "I wouldn't think of hurting you. I only want to be near you. The late night's coming again, and I wish you would lie with me here."

  "You mean everything you say, don't you?"

  "Of course."

  "You realize you are like a child, don't you? You have a great simplicity to you. The simplicity of a saint."

  I laughed. "Dearest Gretchen, you're misunderstanding me in a crucial way. But then again, maybe you aren't. If I believed in God, if I believed in salvation, then I suppose I would have to be a saint."

  She reflected for a long tune, then she told me in a low voice that she had taken a leave of absence from the foreign missions only a month ago. She had come up from French Guiana to Georgetown to study at the university, and she worked only as a volunteer at the hospital. "Do you know the real reason why I took the leave of absence?" she asked me.

  "No; tell me."

  "I wanted to know a man. The warmth of being close to a man. Just once, I wanted to know it. I'm forty years old, and I've never known a man. You spoke of moral abhorrence. You used those words. I had an abhorrence for my virginity-of the sheer perfection of my chastity. It seemed, no matter what one believed, to be a cowardly thing."

  "I understand," I said. "Surely to do good in the missions has nothing to do, finally, with chastity."

  "No, they are connected," she said. "But only because hard work is possible when one is single-minded, and married to no one but Christ."

  I confessed I knew what she meant. "But if the self-denial becomes an obstacle to work," I said, "then it's better to know the love of a man, isn't it?"

  -"That is what I thought," she said. "Yes. Know this experience, and then return to God's work."

  "Exactly."

  In a slow dreamy voice, she said: "I've been looking for the man. For the moment." "That's the answer, then, as to why you brought me here."

  "Perhaps," she said. "God knows, I was so frightened of everyone else. I'm not frightened of you." She looked at me as if her own words had left her surprised.

  "Come, lie down and sleep. There's time for me to heal and for you to be certain it's what you really want. I wouldn't dream of forcing you, of doing anything cruel to you."

  "But why, if you're the devil, can you speak with such kindness?"

  "I told you, that's the mystery. Or it's the answer, one or the other. Come, come lie beside me."

  I closed my eyes. I felt her climbing beneath the covers, the warm pressure of her body beside me, her arm slipping across my chest.

  "You know," I said, "this is almost good, this aspect of being human."

  I was half asleep when I heard her whisper:

  "I think there's a reason you took your leave of absence," she said. "You may not know it."

  "Surely you don't believe me," I murmured, the words running together sluggishly. How delicious it was to slip my arm around her again, to tuck her head against my neck. I was kissing her hair, loving the soft springiness of it against my lips.

  "There is a secret reason you came down to earth," she said, "that you came into the body of a man. Same reason that Christ did it."

  "And that is?"

  "Redemption," she said.

  "Ah, yes, to be saved. Now wouldn't that be lovely?"

  I wanted to say more, how perfectly impossible it was to even consider such a thing, but I was sliding away, into a dream. And I knew that Claudia would not be there.

  Maybe it wasn't a dream after all, only a memory. I was with David in the Rijksmuseum and we were looking at the great painting by Rembrandt.

  To be saved. What a thought, what a lovely, extravagant, and impossible thought. . . How nice to have found the one mortal woman in all the world who would seriously think of such a thing.

  And Claudia wasn't laughing anymore. Because Claudia was dead.

  FIFTEEN

  EARLY morning, just before the sun comes. The time when in the past I was often in meditation, tired, and half in love with the changing sky.

  I bathed slowly and carefully, the small bathroom full of dim light and steam around me. My head was clear, and I felt happiness, as if the sheer respite from sickness was a form of joy. I shaved my face slowly, until it was perfectly smooth, and then, delving into the little cabinet behind the mirror, I found what I wanted-the little rubber sheaths that would keep her safe from me, from my planting a child within her, from this body giving her some other dark seed that might harm her in ways I could not foresee.

  Curious little objects, these-gloves for the organ. I would love to have thrown them away, but I was determined that I would not make the mistakes I had made before.

  Silently, I shut the little mirror door. And only then did I see a telegram message taped above it-a rectangle of yellowed paper with the words in pale indistinct print:

  ORKTCHEN, COME BACK, WE NEED YOU. NO QUESTIONS ASKED. WE ARE WAITING FOR YOU.

  The date of the communication was very recent-only a few days before. And the origin was Caracas, Venezuela.

  I approached the bed, careful not to make a sound, and I laid the small safety devices on the table in readiness, and I lay with her again, and began to kiss her tender sleeping mouth.

  Slowly, I kissed her cheeks, and the flesh beneath her eyes. I wanted to feel her eyelashes through my lips. I wanted to feel the flesh of her throat. Not for killing, but for kissing; not for possession, but for this brief physical union that will take nothing from either one of us; yet bring us together in a pleasure so acute it is like pain.

  She waked slowly under my touch.

  "Trust in me," I whispered. "I won't hurt you."

  "Oh, but I want you to hurt me," she said in my ear.

  Gently, I pulled the flannel gown off her. She lay back looking up at me, her breasts as fair as the rest of her, the areolas of her nipples very small and pink and the nipp
les themselves hard. Her belly was smooth, her hips broad. A lovely dark shadow of brown hair lay between her legs, glistening in the light coming through the windows. I bent down and kissed this hair. I kissed her thighs, parting her legs with my hand, until the warm inside flesh was open to me, and my organ was stiff and ready. I looked at the secret place there, folded and demure and a dark pink in its soft veil of down. A coarse warm excitement went through me, further hardening the organ. I might have forced her, so urgent was the feeling.

  But no, not this time.

  I moved up, beside her, turning her face to me, and accepting her kisses now, slow and awkward and fumbling. I felt her leg pressed against mine, and her hands moving over me, seeking the warmth beneath my armpits, and the damp nether hair of this male body, thick and dark. It was my body, ready for her and waiting. This, my chest, which she touched, seeming to love its hardness. My arms, which she kissed as if she prized their strength.

  The passion in me ebbed slightly, only to grow hot again instantly, and then to die down again, waiting, and then to rise once more.

  No thoughts came to me of the blood drinking; no thought at all of the thunder of the life inside her which I might have consumed, a dark draught, at another time. Rather the moment was perfumed with the soft heat of her living flesh. And it seemed vile that anything could harm her, anything mar the common mystery of her-of her trust and her yearning and her deep and common fear.

  I let my hand slip down to the little doorway; how sorry and sad that this union would be so partial, so brief.

  Then, as my fingers gently tried the virgin passage, her body caught fire. Her breasts seemed to swell against me, and I felt her open, petal by petal, as her mouth grew harder against my mouth.

  But what of the dangers: didn't she care about them? In her new passion, she seemed heedless, and completely under my command. I forced myself to stop, to remove the little sheath from its packet, and to roll it up and over the organ, as her passive eyes remained fixed on me, as if she no longer had a will of her own.