The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [156]
Let me return to the scene, the three of us gathered in the black-lacquered Chinese chairs around the thick glass table, and Dora coming in, at once struck by the presence of him, of which her mortal senses hadn’t given her a clue, a pretty picture with her short gleaming knavish black hair, cut high to show the fragile nape of her swanlike neck, her long supple body clad in a loose ungirdled gown of purple red tissue that folded itself about her small breasts and slender thighs exquisitely. Ah, what an angel of the Lord, this, I thought musing, this heiress of the druglord Father’s severed head. She teaches doctrines with every step that would make the pagan gods of lust canonize her with glee.
About her pale sweet throat she wore a crucifix so tiny it seemed a gilded gnat suspended from a weightless chain of minuscule links woven by fairies. What are such holy objects now, tumbling on milky bosoms with such ease, but trinkets of the marketplace? My thoughts were merciless, but I was but an indifferent cataloger of her beauty. Her swelling breasts, their shadowy cleft quite visible against the simple stitching of her dark low-cut dress, told more of God and Divinity.
But her greatest adornment in these moments was the tearful and eager love for him, her lack of fear of his mutilated face, the grace of her white arms as she enclosed him again, so sure of herself and so grateful for the gentle yielding of his body in towards her. I was so thankful that she loved him.
“So the Prince of Lies had a tale to tell, did he?” she asked. She could not kill the quaver in her voice. “So he’s taken you to his Hell and sent you back?” She took Lestat’s face in her hands and turned it towards her. “Then tell us what it was, this Hell, tell us why we must be afraid. Tell us why you are afraid, but I think it’s something far worse than fear that I see now in you.”
He nodded his head to say that it was. He pushed back the Chinese chair, and wringing his hands he began to pace, the inevitable prelude to his tale telling.
“Listen to all I say, before you judge,” he declared, fixing us now, the three who crowded about the table, an anxious little audience willing to do whatever he asked of us. His eyes lingered on you, David, you, the English scholar in your manly tweed, who in spite of love abundantly clear beheld him with a critical eye, ready to evaluate his words with a wisdom natural to you.
He began to talk. Hour by hour he talked. Hour by hour the words streamed out of him, heated and rushing and sometimes tumbling over one another so that he had to stop and catch his breath, but he never really paused, as he poured it out over the long night, this tale of his adventure.
Yes, Memnoch the Devil had taken him to Hell, but it was a Hell of Memnoch’s devising, a Purgatorial place in which the souls of all who had ever lived were welcome to come of their own accord from the whirlwind of death which had inherited them. And in that Purgatorial Hell, confronted with all the deeds they’d ever done, they learnt the most hideous lesson of all, the endless consequences of every action ever committed by them. Murderer and Mother alike, vagrant children slaughtered in seeming innocence and soldiers bathed in blood from battlefields, all were admitted to this awful place of smoke and sulfurous fire, but only to see the gaping wounds in others made by their wrathful or unwitting hands, to plumb the depths of other souls and hearts which they had injured!
All horror was an illusion in this place, but the worst horror of all was the person of God Incarnate, who had allowed this Final School for those who would be worthy to enter His Paradise. And this