The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [172]
And if that had not happened, if I had not sucked dry that awful vengeful brother, then they too were a dream, my Sybelle and my little Bedouin. Oh, please, was that the final horror?
The night struck its worst hour. Dim clocks chimed in painted plastered rooms. Wheels churned the crunching snow. Again, I raised my hand. There came the inevitable crack and snap. Tumbling all around me was the broken ice like so much shattered glass!
I looked above on pure and sparkling stars. How lovely this, these guardian glassy spires with all their fast and golden squares of light cut in ranks run straight across and sharply down to score the airy blackness of the winter night, and here now comes the tyrant wind, whistling through crystalline canyons down across this small neglected bed where one forgotten demon lies, gazing with the larcenous vision of a great soul at the city’s emboldened lights on clouds above. Oh, little stars, how much I’ve hated you, and envied you that in the ghastly void you can with such determination plot your dogged course.
But I hated nothing now. My pain was as a purgative for all unworthy things. I watched the sky cloud over, glisten, become a diamond for a still and gorgeous moment, and then again the white soft limitless haze took up the golden glow of city lamps and sent in answer the softest lightest fall of snow.
It touched my face. It touched my outstretched hand. It touched me all over as it melted in its tiny magical flakes.
“And now the sun will come,” I whispered, as if some guardian angel held me close, “and even here beneath this twisted little awning of tin, it will find me through this broken canopy and take my soul to further depths of pain.”
A voice cried out in protest. A voice begged that it not be so. My own, I thought, of course, why not this self-deception? I am mad to think that I can bear the burning that I’ve suffered and that I could willingly endure it once again.
But it wasn’t my voice. It was Benjamin, Benjamin at his prayers. Flinging out my disembodied eyes, I saw him. He knelt in the room as she lay sleeping like a ripe and succulent peach amid her soft tangled bedcovers. “Oh, angel, Dybbuk, help us. Dybbuk, you came once. So come again. You vex me that you don’t come!”
How many hours is it till sunrise, little man? I whispered this to his little seashell ear, as if I didn’t know.
“Dybbuk,” he cried out. “It’s you, you speak to me. Sybelle, wake up, Sybelle.”
Ah, but think before you wake her. It’s a horrid errand. I’m not the resplendent being you saw who sucked your enemy dry of blood and doted on her beauty and your joy. It’s a monster you come to collect if you mean to pay your debt to me, an insult to your innocent eyes. But be assured, little man, that I’ll be yours forever if you do me this kindness, if you come to me, if you succor me, if you help me, because my will is leaving me, and I’m alone, and I would be restored now and cannot help myself and my years mean nothing now, and I’m afraid.
He scrambled to his feet. He stood staring at the distant window, the window through which I had seen him in a dream glimpse me with his mortal eyes, but through which he could not possibly see me now, as I lay on a roof far far below the fine apartment which he shared with my angel. He squared his little shoulders, and now with black eyebrows in their perfect serious frown he was the very image off the Byzantine wall, a cherub smaller than myself.
“Name it, Dybbuk, I come for you!” he declared, and made his mighty little right hand into a fist. “Where are you, Dybbuk, what do you fear that we cannot conquer together! Sybelle, wake up, Sybelle! Our Divine Dybbuk has come back and he needs us!”
21
THEY WERE COMING for me. It was the building beside their own, a derelict heap. Benjamin knew it. In a few faint telepathic whispers I’d begged him to bring a hammer and a pick to break up the ice such as remained and to have big soft blankets with which to wrap me.