The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [153]
It seems a century ago, not merely so short a time, that we moved south to these rooms, her father’s legacy of crucifixes and statues, of ikons which I handled so coolly as if I’d never loved such treasures at all.
It seems a century ago that I dressed decently for her, finding in some fashionable Fifth Avenue shop a shapely coat of old red velvet, a poet’s shirt, as they call it now, of starched cotton and ample flopping lace, and to set this off, pegged-leg trousers of black wool and shiny boots that buckled at the ankle, all this the better to accompany her to identify her Father’s severed head under the leeching fluorescent lights of some immense and overcrowded morgue.
One good thing about this final decade of the twentieth century is that a man of any age can wear his hair at any length.
It seems a century ago that I combed out mine, full and curly and clean for once, just for her.
It seems a century ago we stood so staunchly beside her, indeed even held her, this long-necked, short-haired, spellbinding witchlet, in our very arms as she wept over the death of her Father and pelted us with feverish and maniacally intelligent and dispassionate questions about our sinister nature, as if a great crash course in the anatomy of the vampire could somehow close the cycle of horror threatening her wholesomeness and her sanity and somehow bring her wicked conscienceless Father back.
No, it wasn’t the return of Roger, actually, that she prayed for; she believed too totally in the omniscience and mercy of God. Besides, seeing a man’s severed head is a bit of a shock, even if the head is frozen, and a dog had chomped on Roger a bit before he’d been discovered, and what with the strict “no touch” rules of modern forensics, he was—for me even—quite a sight. (I remember the coroner’s assistant saying soulfully to me that I was awfully young to have to see such a thing. She thought I was Dora’s little brother. What a sweet woman she was. Perhaps it’s worth it to make a foray into the official mortal world once in a while in order to be called “a real trouper” instead of a Botticelli angel, which has become my tag line among the Undead.)
It was the return of Lestat Dora dreamed of. What else would ever allow her to break free of our enchantment but some final blessing from the crowned prince himself?
I stood at the dark glass windows of the high-rise apartment, looking out over the deep snows of Fifth Avenue, waiting and praying with her, wishing the great Earth were not so empty of my old enemy and thinking in my foolish heart that in time this mystery of his disappearance would be resolved, as were all miracles, with sadness and small losses, with no more than little revelations that would leave me as I had always been left since that long-ago night in Venice when my Master and I were divided forever, simply a little more clever at pretending that I was still alive.
I didn’t fear for Lestat, not really. I had no hopes for his adventure, except that he would appear sooner or later and tell us some fantastical yarn. It would be regular Lestat talk, for nobody aggrandizes as he does his preposterous adventures. This is not to say that he hasn’t switched bodies with a human. I know that he has. This is not to say that he didn’t wake our fearsome goddess Mother, Akasha; I know that he did. This is not to say that he didn’t smash my old superstitious Coven to bits and pieces in the garish years before the French Revolution. I’ve already told you so.
But it’s the way he describes things that happen to him that maddens me, the way that he connects one incident to another as though all these random and grisly occurrences were in fact links in some significant chain. They are not. They are capers. And he knows it. But he must make a gutter theatrical out of stubbing his toe.
The James Bond of the Vampires, the Sam Spade of his own pages! A rock