The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [194]
What struck me more perhaps even than these scattered statues, standing like so many guardians of an old and sacred history, were the pictures on the wall that marked Christ’s road to Calvary: the Stations of the Cross. Someone had put them all in the proper order, maybe even before our coming into the world of this place.
I divined that they were painted in oil on copper, and they had a Renaissance style to them, imitative certainly, but one which I find normal and which I love.
Immediately, the fear that had been hovering inside me during all my happy weeks in New York came to the fore. No, it was not fear so much as it was dread.
My Lord, I whispered. I turned and looked up at the Face of Christ on the high Crucifix above Lestat’s head.
This was an excruciating moment. I think the image on Veronica’s Veil overlaid what I saw there in the carved wood. I know it did. I was back in New York, and Dora was holding up the cloth for us to see.
I saw His dark beautifully shadowed eyes perfectly fixed on the cloth, as though part of it but not in any way absorbed by it, and the dark streaks of His eyebrows and, above His steady unchallenging gaze, the tricklets of blood from His thorns. I saw His lips partway open as if He had volumes to speak.
With a shock, I realized that from far off by the altar steps Gabrielle had fixed her glacial gray eyes on me, and I locked up my mind and digested the key. I wouldn’t have her touch me or my thoughts. And I felt a bristling hostility for all those gathered in the room.
Louis came then. He was so happy that I had not perished. Louis had something to say. He knew I was concerned and he was anxious about the presence of the others. He looked his usual ascetic self, got up in tired black clothes of beautiful cut but impossible dustiness and a shirt so thin and worn that it seemed an elfin web of threads rather than true lace and cloth.
“We let them in because if we don’t, they circle like jackals, and wolves, and won’t go away. As it is, they come, they see and they leave here. You know what they want.”
I nodded. I didn’t have the courage to admit to him that I wanted exactly the same thing. I had never stopped thinking about it, not really, not for one moment, beneath the grand rhythm of all that had befallen me since I’d spoken to him on that last night of my old life.
I wanted his blood. I wanted to drink it. Calmly, I let Louis know.
“He’ll destroy you,” Louis whispered. He was flushed suddenly with terror. He looked questioningly at gentle silent Sybelle, who held fast to my hand, and Benjamin, who was studying him with enthusiastic bright eyes. “Armand, you can’t chance it. One of them got too close. He smashed the creature. The motion was quick, automatic. But it has an arm like living stone and he blasted the creature to fragments there on the floor. Don’t go near him, don’t try it.”
“And the elders, the strong ones, have they never tried?”
Pandora spoke then. She had been watching us all the while, playing in the shadows. I’d forgotten how very beautiful she was in a downplayed and very basic way.
Her long rich brown hair was combed back, a shadow behind her slender neck, and she looked glossy and pretty because she had smoothed into her face a fine dark oil to make herself more passably human. Her eyes were bold and flaming. She put her hand on me with a woman’s liberty. She too was happy to see me alive.
“You know what Lestat is,” she said pleadingly. “Armand, he’s a furnace of power and no one knows what he might do.”
“But have you never thought of it, Pandora? Has it never even entered your mind, to drink the blood from his throat and search for the vision of Christ when you drank it? What if inside him there is the infallible proof that he drank the blood of God?”
“But Armand,” she said. “Christ was never my god.”
It was so simple, so shocking, so final.
She sighed,