5

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¡ª"

"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¡ªlots 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 coming 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, this¡ª"

"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¡ªthe face was visible for an instant. By that time, I was completely lost¡ªno 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 die 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¡ªthe veil itself¡ªwhich 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¡ªhe 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.

There were too many different documents for me to assess the full value, only that it had been accumulated over time. It seemed Dora might have started a new Crusade to take back Istanbul from the Turks had she wanted to. There were some letters... I could pinpoint the exact date two years ago when Dora had refused all further assistance from the two trusts of which she had knowledge. As for the rest, I wondered if she had any idea of the scope.

Scope is everything when it comes to money. Imagination and scope. You lack either of these two things and you can't make moral decisions, or so I've always thought. It sounds contemptible, but think about it. It's not contemptible. Money is power to feed the hungry. To clothe the poor. But you have to know that. Dora had trusts and trusts, and trusts to pay taxes on all the trusts.

I thought in a moment's sorrow of how I had meant to help my beloved Gretchen¡ªSister Marguerite¡ªand how the mere sight of me had ruined everything, and I'd retreated from her life, with all my gold still in the coffers. Didn't it always turn out Hke that? I was no saint. I didn't feed the hungry.

But Dora! Quite suddenly it dawned on me¡ªshe had become my daughter! She had become my saint just as she'd been Roger's. NOW she had another rich father. She had me!

"What is it?" David asked with alarm. He was going through a carton of papers. "You've seen the ghost again?"

For one moment, I almost went into one of my major tremours, but I got a grip. I didn't say anything, but I saw it ever more clearly.

Watch out for Dora! Of course I would watch out for Dora, and somehow I'd convince her to accept everything. Maybe Roger hadn't known the proper arguments. And Roger was now a martyr for all his treasures. Yes, his last angle had been the right angle. He'd ransomed his treasures. Maybe with Dora, if properly explained. ...

I was distracted. There they were, the twelve books. Each in a neat thin film of plastic, lined up on the top shelf of a small desk, right near the file cabinet. I knew what they were. I knew. And then there were Roger's labels on them, his fancy scribbling on a small white sticker, "W de W."

"Look," David said, rising from his knees and wiping the dust from his pants. "These are all simple legal papers on the purchases, everything here is clean, apparently, or has been laundered; there are dozens of receipts, certificates of authentication. I say we take all of this out of here now."

"Yes, but how, and to where?"

"Think, what's the safest place? Your rooms in New Orleans are certainly not safe. We can't trust these things to a warehouse in a city like New York."

"Exactly. I do have rooms here at a little hotel across from the park but that...."

"Yes, I remember, that's where the Body Thief followed you. You mean you didn't change that address?"

"Doesn't matter. It wouldn't hold all this."

"But you realize that our sizable quarters in the Olympic Tower would hold all this," he said.

"You serious?" I asked.

"Of course I am. What could be more secure? Now we've work to do. We can't have any mortal connections with this. We're going to do all this toiling ourselves."

"Ah!" I gave a disgusted sigh. "You mean wrap all this and move it?"

He laughed. "Yes! Hercules had to do such things, and so have angels. How do you think Michael felt when he had to go from door to door in Egypt slaying the First Born of every house? Come on.  You don't realize how simple it is to cushion all these items with modern plastics. I say we move it ourselves. It will be a venture. Why not go over the roofs."

"Ah, there is nothing more irritating than the energy of a fledgling vampire," I said wearily. But I knew he was right. And our strength was incalculably greater than that of any mortal helper. We could have all this cleared out perhaps within the night.

Some night!

I will say in retrospect that labor is an antidote for angst and general misery, and the fear that the Devil is going to grab you by the throat at any moment and bring you down into the fiery pit!

We amassed a huge supply of an insulating material made with bubbles of air trapped in plastic, which could indeed bind the most fragile relic in a harmless embrace. I removed the financial papers and the books of Wynken, carefully examining each to make sure I was right about what I had, and then we proceeded to the heavy labor.

Sack by sack we transported all the smaller objects, going over the rooftops as David had suggested, unnoticed by mortals, two stealthy black figures flying as witches might to the Sabbath.

The larger objects we had to take more lovingly, each of us toting one at a time in our arms. I deliberately avoided the great white marble angel. But David loved it, talking to it all the way until we reached our destination. And all this was slipped into the secure rooms of the Olympic Tower in a rather proper way through the freight stairways, with the obligatory mortal pace.

Our little clocks would wind down as we touched the mortal world, and we would pass into it quickly, gentlemen furnishing their new digs with appropriately and securely wrapped treasures.

Soon the clean, carpeted rooms above St. Patrick's housed a wilderness of ghostly plastic packages, some looking all too much like mummies, or less carefully embalmed dead bodies. The white marble angel with her seashell holy water basin was perhaps the largest. The books of Wynken, wrapped and bound, lay on the Oriental dining table. I hadn't really had a chance to look at them, but now was not the moment.

I sank down in a chair in the front room, panting from sheer boredom and fury that I had had to do anything so utterly menial. David was jubilant.

"The security's perfect here," David said enthusiastically. His young male body seemed inflamed with his own personal spirit. When I looked at him, sometimes I saw both merged¡ªthe elderly David, the young strapping Anglo-Indian male form. But most of the time, he was merely starkly perfect. And surely the strongest fledgling I had ever produced.

That wasn't due only to the strength of my blood or my own trials and tribulations before I'd brought him over. I'd given him more blood than I'd ever given the others when I made him. I'd risked my own survival. But no matter¡ªI sat there loving him, loving my own work. I was full of dust.

I realized that everything had been taken care of. We had even brought the rugs last, in rolls. Even the rug soaked with Roger's blood. Relic of the martyred Roger. Well, I would spare Dora that detail.

"I have to hunt," David said in a whisper, waking me from my calculations.

I didn't reply.

"You coming?"

"You want me to?" I asked.

He stood there regarding me with the strangest expression, dark youthful face without any palpable condemnation or even disgust.

"Why don't you? Don't you enjoy seeing it, even if you don't want it?"

I nodded. I'd never dreamed he would let me watch. Louis hated it when I watched. When we'd been together last year, the three of us, David had been far too reticent and suspicious to suggest such a thing. We went down into the thick snowy darkness of Central Park.

Everywhere one could hear the park's nighttime occupants, snoring, grumbling, tiny whiffs of conversation, smoke. These are strong individuals, individuals who know how to live in the wild in the midst of a city that is itself notoriously fatal to its unlucky ones.

David found what he wanted quickly¡ªa young male with a skullcap, his bare toes showing through his broken shoes, a walker in the night, lone and drugged and insensible to the cold and talking aloud to people of long ago.

I stood back under the trees, wet with snow and uncaring. David reached out for the young man's shoulder, brought him gently around and embraced him. Classic. As David bent to drink, the young man began to laugh and talk simultaneously. And then went quiet, transfixed, until at last the body was gently laid to rest at the foot of a leafless tree.

The skyscrapers of New York glowed to the south of us, the warmer, smaller lights of the East and the West Side hemmed us in.  David stood very still, thinking what, I wondered?

It seemed he'd lost the ability to move. I went towards him. He was no calm, diligent archivest at the moment. He looked to be suffering.

"What?" I asked.

"You know what," he whispered. "I won't survive that long."

"You serious? With the gifts I gave you¡ª"

"Shhhh, we're too much in the habit of saying things to each other which we know are unacceptable to each other. We should stop."

"And speak only the truth? All right. This is the truth. Now, you feel as if you can't survive. Now. When his blood is hot and swirling through you. Of course. But you won't feel that way forever. That's the key. I don't want to talk anymore about survival. I took a good crack at ending my life; it didn't work, and besides, I have something else to think about¡ªthis thing that's following me, and how I can help Dora before it closes in on me."

That shut him up.

We started walking, mortal fashion, through the dark park together, my feet crunching deep into the snow. We wandered in and out of the leafless groves, pushing aside the wet black branches, the looming buildings of midtown never quite out of sight.

I was on edge for the sound of the footsteps. I was on edge and a dreary thought had come to me¡ªthat the monstrous thing that had been revealed, the Devil himself or whoever it was, had merely been after Roger....

But then what of the man, the anonymous and perfectly ordinary man? That is what he had become in my mind, the man I'd glimpsed before dawn.

We drew near to the lights of Central Park South, the buildings rising higher, with an arrogance that Babylon could not have thrown in the face of heaven. But there were the comforting sounds of the well-heeled, and the committed, coming and going, and the neverending push and shove of taxis adding to the din.

David was brooding, stricken.

Finally I said, "If you'd seen the thing that I saw, you wouldn't be so eager to jump to the next stage." I gave a sigh. I wasn't going to describe the winged thing to either one of us again.

"I'm quite inspired by it," he confessed. "You can't imagine."

"Going to Hell? With a Devil like that?"

"Did you feel it was hellish? Did you sense evil? I asked you that before. Did you feel evil when the thing took Roger? Did Roger give any indication of pain?"

Those questions seemed to me a bit hairsplitting.

"Don't get overly optimistic about death," I said. "I'm warning you. My views are changing. The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky."

He smiled, dismissively, as he used to do when he was mortal and visibly wore the laurels of venerable age.

"Have you ever read the stories of Hawthorne?" he asked me softly. We had reached the street, crossed, and were slowly skirting the fountain before the Plaza.

"Yes," I said. "At some time or other."

"And you remember Ethan Brand's search for the unpardonable sin?"

"I think so. He went off to search for it and left his fellow man behind."

"Recall this paragraph," he said gently. We made our way down Fifth, a street that is never empty, or dark. He quoted the lines to me: " 'He had lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded for his study.' "

I said nothing. I wanted to protest, but it was not an honest thing to do. I wanted to say that I would never, never treat humans like puppets. All I had done was watch Roger, damn it all, and Gretchen in the jungles, I had pulled no strings. Honesty had undone her and me together. But then he wasn't speaking of me with these words. He was talking about himself, the distance he felt now from the human.  He had only begun to be Ethan Brand.

"Let me continue a little farther," he asked respectfully, then began to quote again. " 'Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect¡ª' " He broke off.

I didn't reply.

"That's our damnation," he whispered. "Our moral improvement has reached its finish, and our intellect grows by leaps and bounds."

Still I said nothing. What was I to say? Despair was so familiar to me; it could be banished by the sight of a beautiful mannikin in the window. It could be dispelled by the spectacle of lights surrounding a tower. It could be lifted by the great ghostly shape of St. Patrick's coming into view. And then despair would come again.

Meaningless, I almost said, aloud, but what came from my lips was completely different.

"I have Dora to think of," I said.

Dora.

"Yes, and thanks to you," he said, "I have Dora too, now don't I?"