The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [152]
So what did he want of me, I wondered. You were there, David. You could help him. Or so it seemed. Being his fledgling you hadn’t heard his call directly, but he’d reached you somehow, and the two of you, such proper gentlemen, came together to discuss in low, sophisticated whispers Lestat’s latest fears.
When next I caught up with him he was in New Orleans. And he put it to me plain and simple. You were there. The Devil had come to him in the guise of a man. The Devil could change shapes, being at one moment horrific and ghastly with webbed wings and hoofed feet; and then next, the Devil could be an ordinary man. Lestat was wild with these stories. The Devil had offered him a dreadful proposition, that he, Lestat, become the Devil’s helper in the service of God.
Do you remember how calmly I responded to his story, his questions, his pleading for our advice? Oh, I told him firmly it was madness to follow this spirit, to believe that any discarnate thing was bound to tell him the truth.
But only now do you know the wounds he opened with this strange and marvelous fable. So the Devil would make him a hellish helper and thereby a servant of God? I might have laughed outright, or wept, throwing it in his face that I had once believed myself a saint of evil, shivering in rags as I stalked my victims in the Parisian winter, all for the honor and glory of God.
But he knew all this. There was no need to wound him further, to shift from him the limelight of his own tale, which Lestat, being the bright star, must always have.
Under moss-hung oaks we talked in civilized voices. You and I begged him to be cautious. Naturally, he ignored all we said.
It was all mixed up with the entrancing mortal Dora, who was living then in this very building, this old brick convent, the daughter of the man Lestat had stalked and slain.
When he bound us to look out for her, I was angry, but only mildly so. I have fallen in love with mortals. I have those tales to tell. I am in love now with Sybelle and Benjamin, whom I call my children, and I had been a secret troubadour to other mortals in the dim past.
All right, he was in love with Dora, he’d laid his head on a mortal breast, he wanted the womb blood of her that would be no loss to her, he was smitten, crazed, goaded by the ghost of her Father and courted by the Prince of Evil Himself.
And she, what shall I say of her? That she possessed the power of a Rasputin behind the face of a nunnery postulant, when in fact she is a practiced theologian and not a mystic, a ranting raving leader, not a visionary, whose ecclesiastical ambitions would have dwarfed those of Saints Peter and Paul put together, and that of course, she is like any flower Lestat ever gathered from the Savage Garden of this world: a most fine and fetching little creature, a glorious specimen of God’s Creation—with raven hair, a pouty mouth, cheeks of porcelain and the dashing limbs of a nymph.
Of course I knew the very moment that he left this world. I felt it. I was in New York already, very near to him and aware that you were there as well. Neither of us meant to let him out of our sight if at all possible. Then came the moment when he vanished in the blizzard, when he was sucked out of the earthly atmosphere as if he’d never been there.
Being his fledgling you couldn’t hear the perfect silence that descended when he vanished. You couldn’t know how completely he’d been withdrawn from all things minuscule yet material which had once echoed with the beating of his heart.
I knew, and I think it was to distract us both that I proposed we go to the wounded mortal who must have been shattered by her Father’s death at the hands of a blond-haired handsome blood-swilling monster who’d made her his confidant and a friend.
It was not difficult to help her in the short