The Tale of the Body Thief (63 page)

We sat there in silence. The soft cacophony of the city rose and fell beyond the stained-glass windows, which caught the faint glow from the street lamps outside. The rain had come again, the gentle warm rain of New Orleans, in which one can walk so easily as if it were nothing but the gentlest mist.

“I want you to forgive me,” he said. “I want you to understand that it wasn’t cowardice; it wasn’t weakness. What I said to you at the time was the truth. I couldn’t do it. I can’t bring someone into this! Not even if that someone is a mortal man with you inside him. I simply could not.”

“I know all that,” I said.

I tried to leave it there. But I couldn’t. My temper wouldn’t cool, my wondrous temper, the temper which had caused me to smash David Talbot’s head into a plaster wall.

He spoke again. “I deserve whatever you have to say.”

“Ah, more than that!” I said. “But this is what I want to know.” I turned and faced him, speaking through my clenched teeth. “Would you have refused me forever? If they’d destroyed my body, the others—Marius, whoever knew of it—if I’d been trapped in that mortal form, if I’d come to you over and over and over again, begging you and pleading with you, would you have shut me out forever! Would you have held fast?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t answer so quickly. Look for the truth inside yourself. You do know. Use your filthy imagination. You do know. Would you have turned me away?”

“I don’t know the answer!”

“I despise you!” I said in a bitter, harsh whisper. “I ought to destroy you—finish what I started when I made you. Turn you into ashes and sift them through my hands. You know that I could do it! Like that! Like the snap of mortal fingers, I could do it. Burn you as I burnt your little house. And nothing could save you, nothing at all.”

I glared at him, at the sharp graceful angles of his imperturbable face, faintly phosphorescent against the deeper shadows of the church. How beautiful the shape of his wide-set eyes, with their fine rich black lashes. How perfect the tender indentation of his upper lip.

The anger was acid inside me, destroying the very veins through which it flowed, and burning away the preternatural blood.

Yet I couldn’t hurt him. I couldn’t even conceive of carrying out such awful, cowardly threats. I could never have brought harm to Claudia. Ah, to make something out of nothing, yes. To throw up the pieces to see how they will fall, yes. But vengeance. Ah, arid awful distasteful vengeance. What is it to me?

“Think on it,” he whispered. “Could you make another, after all that’s passed?” Gently he pushed it further. “Could you work the Dark Trick again? Ah—
you
take
your
time before answering. Look deep inside you for the truth as you just told me to do. And when you know it, you needn’t tell it to me.”

Then he leant forward, closing the distance between us, and pressed his smooth silken lips against the side of my face. I meant to pull away, but he used all his strength to hold me still, and I allowed it, this cold, passionless kiss, and he was the one who finally drew back like a collection of shadows collapsing into one another, with only his hand still on my shoulder, as I sat with my eyes on the altar still.

Finally I rose slowly, stepping past him, and motioned for Mojo to wake and come.

I moved down the length of the nave to the front doors of the church. I found that shadowy nook where the vigil candles burn beneath the statue of the Virgin, an alcove full of wavering and pretty light.

The scent and sound of the rain forest came back to me, the great enclosing darkness of those powerful trees. And then the vision of the little whitewashed chapel in the clearing with its doors thrown open, and the eerie muted sound of the bell in the vagrant breeze. And the scent of blood coming from the wounds in Gretchen’s hands.

I lifted the long wick that lay there for the lighting of candles, and I dipped it into an old flame, and made a new one burst into being, hot and yellow and finally steady, giving off the sharp perfume of burnt wax.

I was about to say the words “For Gretchen,” when I realized that it was not for her at all that I had lighted the candle. I looked up at the face of the Virgin. I saw the crucifix above Gretchen’s altar. Again, I felt the peace of the rain forest around me, and I saw that little ward with those small beds. For Claudia, my precious beautiful Claudia? No, not for her either, much as I loved her … 

I knew the candle was for me.

It was for the brown-haired man who had loved Gretchen in Georgetown. It was for the sad lost blue-eyed demon I had been before I became that man. It was for the mortal boy of centuries ago who went off to Paris with his mother’s jewels in his pocket, and only the clothes on his back. It was for the wicked impulsive creature who had held the dying Claudia in his arms.

It was for all those beings, and for the devil who stood here now, because he loved candles, and he loved the making of light from light. Because there was no God in whom he believed, and no saints, and no Queen of Heaven.

Because he had kept his bitter temper and he had not destroyed his friend.

Because he was alone, no matter how near to him that friend. And because happiness had returned to him, as if it were an affliction he’d never fully conquer, the impish smile already spreading on his lips, the thirst leaping inside him, and the desire in him rising just to step outside again and wander in the slick and shining city streets.

Yes. For the Vampire Lestat, that little candle, that miraculous tiny candle, increasing by that small amount all the light in the universe! And burning in an empty church the night long among those other little flames. It would be burning on the morrow when the faithful came; when the sun shone through these doors.

Keep your vigil, little candle, in darkness and in sunshine.

Yes, for me.

D
ID you think the story was finished? That the fourth installment of the Vampire Chronicles had come to a close?

Well, the book should be ended. It really should have ended when I lit that small candle, but it didn’t. I realized that the following night when I first opened my eyes.

Pray continue to Chapter Thirty-three to discover what happened next. Or you can quit now, if you like. You may come to wish that you had.

B
ARBADOS.

He was still there when I caught up with him. In a hotel by the sea.

Weeks had passed, though why I let so much time go by, I don’t know. Kindness was no part of it, nor cowardice either. Nevertheless I had waited. I had watched the splendid little flat in the Rue Royale being restored, step by step, until there were at least some exquisitely furnished rooms in which I could spend my time, thinking about all that had happened, and which might yet take place. Louis had returned to take up residence with me, and was busy searching for a desk very like the one which had once stood in the parlour over a hundred years before.

David had left many messages with my man in Paris. He would be leaving soon for the carnival in Rio. He missed me. He wished I would come join him there.

All had gone well with the settlement of his estate. He was David Talbot, a young cousin of the older man who had died in Miami, and the new owner of the ancestral home. The Talamasca had accomplished these things for him, restoring to him the fortune he had left to them, and settling upon him a generous pension. He was no longer their Superior General, though he maintained his quarters in the Motherhouse. He would be forever under their wing.

He had a small gift for me, if I wanted it. It was the locket with the miniature of Claudia. He’d found it. Exquisite portrait; fine gold chain. He had it with him, and would send it to me if I liked. Or would I not come to see him, and accept it from his hands myself?

Barbados. He had felt compelled to return to the scene of the crime, so to speak. The weather was beautiful. He was reading
Faust
again, he wrote to me. He had so many questions he wanted to ask me. When would I come?

He had
not
seen God or the Devil again, though he had, before leaving Europe, spent a long time in various Paris cafés. He wasn’t going to spend this lifetime searching for God or the Devil either. “Only you can know the man I am now,” he wrote. “I miss you, I want to talk to you. Can you not remember that I helped you, and forgive me everything else?”

It was that seaside resort he’d described to me, of handsome pink stucco buildings, and great sprawling bungalow roofs, and soft fragrant gardens, and endless vistas of the clean sand and the sparkling translucent sea.

I didn’t go there until I’d been in the gardens up the mountain, and had stood on those very cliffs he had visited, looking out over the forested mountains, and listening to the wind in the branches of the noisy clacking coconut palms.

Had he told me about the mountains? That you could look immediately down into the deep soft valleys and that the neighboring slopes seemed so close you thought you could touch them, though they were far, far away?

I don’t think so, but he had described well the flowers—the shrimp plant with its tiny blossoms, and the orchid tree and the ginger lilies, yes, those fierce red lilies with their delicate shivering petals, and
the ferns nestled in the deep glades, and the waxen bird-of-paradise and the tall stiff pussy willows, and the tiny yellow-throated blossoms of the trumpet vine.

We should walk there together, he had said.

Well, that we would do. Soft the crunch of the gravel. And oh, never had the high swaying coconut palms looked so beautiful as on these bluffs.

I waited until it was past midnight before I made my descent upon the sprawling seaside hotel. The courtyard was as he had said, full of pink azaleas and large waxen elephant ears and dark glossy shrubs.

I passed through the empty darkened dining room and its long open porches and went down on the beach. I went far out in the shallows, so that I might look back from a distance upon the bungalow rooms with their roofed verandas. I found him at once.

The doors to the little patio were completely pulled back, and the yellow light spilled out on the small paved enclosure with its painted table and chairs. Inside, as if on a lighted stage, he sat at a small desk, facing the night and the water, typing away on a small portable computer, the tight small clicking of the keys carrying in the silence, even over the whisper of the lazy softly foaming surf.

He was naked except for a pair of white beach shorts. His skin was very darkly golden as though he spent his days sleeping in the sun. Streaks of yellow shone in his dark brown hair. There was a glow to his naked shoulders and smooth, hairless chest. Very firm muscles at his waist. A slight golden sheen came from the down on his thighs and legs and the very scant bits of hair on the backs of his hands.

I hadn’t even noticed that hair when I was alive. Or maybe I hadn’t liked it. Didn’t really know. I liked it now well enough. And that he seemed a little more slender than I had been in that frame. Yes, all the bones of the body were more visible, conforming I suppose to some modern style of health which says we must be fashionably underfed. It suited him; it suited the body; I suppose it suited them both.

The room was very neat behind him and rustic in the style of the islands with its beamed ceiling and rose-tiled floor. The bed was covered in a gay pastel fabric printed with a jagged geometric Indian design. The armoire and chests were white and decorated with brightly painted flowers. The many simple lamps gave off a generous light.

I had to smile though that he sat amid all this luxury, typing
away—David the scholar, dark eyes dancing with the ideas inside his head.

Drawing nearer, I noted that he was very clean-shaven. His nails had been trimmed and buffed, perhaps by a manicurist. His hair was still the same full wavy mop I’d worn so carelessly when I’d been in this body, but it, too, had been trimmed and had an altogether more pleasing shape. There lay his copy of Goethe’s
Faust
beside him, open, a pen lying across it, and many of the pages folded, or marked with small silver paper clips.

I was still taking my time with this inspection—noting the bottle of Scotch beside him, and the thick-bottomed crystal glass, and the pack of small thin cigars—when he looked up and saw me there.

I stood on the sand, well outside the little porch with its low cement railing, but quite visible in the light.

“Lestat,” he whispered. His face brightened beautifully. He rose at once and came towards me with the familiar graceful stride. “Thank God you’ve come.”

“You think so?” I said. I thought of that moment in New Orleans when I’d watched the Body Thief scurrying out of the Café du Monde and thought that body could move like a panther with someone else inside.

He wanted to take me in his arms, but when I stiffened and moved just a little away, he stood still, and folded his arms across his chest—a gesture that seemed to belong entirely to this body, as I couldn’t remember ever seeing him do it before we’d met in Miami. These arms were heavier than his old arms. The chest was broader too.

How naked it looked. How darkly pink the nipples. How fierce and clear his eyes.

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

“Really? Surely you haven’t been living as a recluse here?”

“No, I’ve seen too much of others, I think. Too many little supper parties in Bridgetown. And my friend Aaron has come and gone several times. Other members have been here.” He paused. “I can’t bear to be around them, Lestat. I can’t bear to be at Talbot Manor among the servants, pretending to be a cousin of my old self. There’s something really appalling about what’s happened. Sometimes I can’t bear to look in the mirror. But I don’t want to talk about that side of it.”

“Why not?”

“This is a temporary period, one of adjustment. These shocks will eventually pass. I have so much to do. Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come. I had a feeling you would. I almost left for Rio this morning, but I had the distinct feeling I’d see you tonight.”

“Is that so.”