Blood Canticle - Anne Rice [48]
“Why did you knock?” I asked. “Why don’t you just tear my world to pieces instead?”
“I didn’t want you to forget your manners again,” he said in perfect French. “You’re atrocious when you’re ill-mannered.”
“What do you want? To make me suffer? Join the crowd. I’ve been tormented by much stronger creatures than you.”
“You haven’t begun to understand what I can do,” he said.
“You made a ‘disastrous mistake.’ What was it?” I asked. “I wonder: do you even know?”
He paled. His placid face became visibly enraged.
“Who sends you here to play with the living?”
“You’re not the living!” he said.
“Temper, temper,” I said mockingly.
He was too angry to speak. It made him all the more vivid, blanched though he was with anger. Or was it sorrow? I couldn’t bear the thought of sorrow. I had enough sorrow.
“You want her?” I asked. “Then tell her yourself.”
He didn’t reply.
I shrugged as best I could, being all snuggled up on the counterpane.
“I can’t tell her,” I said. “Who am I to say, ‘Julien says you should expose yourself to the sun and thereby enter into the Totality of Salvation.’ Or is it possible that my questions of last night were more than pertinent and you don’t know where you come from? Maybe there is no Totality of Salvation. No Saint Juan Diego. Maybe you just want her with you in a spirit world where you wander, waiting for somebody who can see you, somebody like Quinn or even Mona herself or me. Is that it? She’s supposed to want to be a ghost? I am showing you my best manners. This is my most polite voice. My mother and father would be pleased.”
There was a real knock on the door.
He vanished. I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Had Stella been sitting to my left all this time? Mon Dieu! I was going mad all right.
“Coward,” I whispered.
I sat up and crossed my legs, Indian style. “Come in,” I said.
Mona burst into the room, dressed in a fresh long-sleeved rose-colored silk dress and rose satin stacked heels, a quivering page of paper once more held aloft.
“Hit me with it,” I declared.
“ ‘It is my ultimate goal to transmute this experience into a level of life participation which is worthy of the immense powers that have been bequeathed to me by Lestat, a level of life experience which knows no moral shrinking from the most obvious yet painful theological questions which my transfigured state has made utterly inescapable, the first of which is, obviously, How does God view my essential being? Am I human and vampire? Or vampire only? That is, is damnation, and I speak now not of a literal Hell with flames, but of a state which is defined by the absence of God—is damnation implicit and inherent in what I am, or do I still exist in a relativistic universe in which I may attain grace on the same terms as humans can attain it, by participating in the Incarnation of Christ, an historical event in which I totally believe, in spite of the fact that it is not philosophically fashionable, though what questions of fashion have to do with me now in this transcendent and often luminous condition is moot.’ ” She looked at me. “What do you think?”
“Well, I think you ducked out of the paragraph on that ‘fashionable question.’ I think you should scrap the thing about fashionable and try to make a more solid finish, perhaps with some very concise statement about the level on which you believe in the Incarnation of Christ. And you can always use ‘transcendent’ and ‘luminous’ in another sentence. Also you misused the word ‘bequeath.’ ”
“Cool!” She dashed out of the room.
Naturally, she left the door open.
I went after her.
She was already pounding the keyboard, the computer humming on one of my many Louis XV desks; her red eyebrows puckered, her green eyes locked to the monitor when I took up my position, arms folded, looking down on her.
“Yeah, what, Beloved Boss?” she asked without stopping her writing.
Quinn was stretched out comfortably on the bed, staring at the tester. The