The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [175]
Click of locks, feet on hardwood floors, the scent of incense and candles, of a woman’s rich perfume, of rich polish for fine things, of old canvases with cracked oil paint, of fresh and overpoweringly sweet white lilies.
My body was laid down gently into the bed of down, the blanket loosened so that I sank into layers of silk and velvet, the pillows seeming to melt beneath me.
It was the very disheveled nest in which I’d glimpsed her with my mind’s eye, golden and sleeping in her white gown, and she had given it over to such a horror.
“Don’t pull away the cover,” I said. I knew that my little friend wanted so to do it.
Undaunted, he gently pulled it away. I struggled with my one recovering hand to catch it, to bring it back, but I couldn’t do any more than flex my burnt fingers.
They stood beside the bed, gazing down at me. The light swirled around them, mingled with warmth, these two fragile figures, the gaunt porcelain girl, the bruises gone from her milk-white skin, and the little Arab boy, the Bedouin boy, for I realized now that that is what he truly was. Fearlessly they stared at what must be unspeakable to behold for human eyes.
“You are so shiny!” said Benji. “Does it hurt you?”
“What can we do!” said Sybelle, so muted, as if her very voice might injure me. Her hands covered her lips. The unruly wisps of her full straight pale hair moved in the light, and her arms were blue from the cold outside, and she could not help but shiver. Poor spare being, so delicate. Her nightdress was crumpled, thin white cotton, stitched with flowerets and trimmed with thin sturdy lace, a thing for a virgin. Her eyes brimmed with sympathy.
“Know my soul, my angel,” I said. “I’m an evil thing. God wouldn’t take me. And the Devil wouldn’t either. I went into the sun so they could have my soul. It was a loving thing, without fear of Hellfire or pain. But this Earth, this very Earth has been my purgatorial prison. I don’t know how I came to you before. I don’t know what power it was that gave me those brief seconds to stand here in your room and come between you and death that was looming like a shadow over you.”
“Oh, no,” she whispered fearfully, her eyes glistering in the dim lights of the room. “He would never have killed me.”
“Oh, yes, he would!” I said, and Benjamin said the very same exact words in concert with me.
“He was drunk and he didn’t care what he did,” said Benji in instant rage, “and his hands were big and clumsy and mean, and he didn’t care what he did, and after the last rime he hit you, you lay still like the dead in this very bed for two hours without moving! Do you think a Dybbuk kills your own brother for nothing?”
“I think he’s telling you the truth, my pretty girl,” I said. It was so hard to talk. With each word I had to lift my chest. In crazy desperation, suddenly I wanted a mirror. I tossed and turned on the bed, and went rigid with pain.
The two were thrown into a panic.
“Don’t move, Dybbuk, don’t!” Benji pleaded. “Sybelle, the silk, all the silk scarves, get them out, wind them around him.”
“No!” I whispered. “Put the cover up over me. If you must see my face, then leave it bare, but cover the rest of me. Or …”
“Or what, Dybbuk, tell me?”
“Lift me so that I can see myself and how I look. Stand me before a long mirror.”
They fell silent in perplexity. Sybelle’s long yellow hair lay flaxen and flat down over her large breasts. Benji chewed at his little lip.
All the room swam with colors. Behold the blue silk sealed to the plaster of the walls, the heaps of richly embellished pillows all around me, look at the golden fringe, and there beyond, the wobbling baubles of the chandelier, filled with the glistering colors of the spectrum. I fancied I heard the tinkling song of the glass as these baubles touched. It seemed in my feeble deranged mind that I had never seen such simple splendor, that I had forgotten in all my years just how shining and exquisite