The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [544]
What a raw and painful moment. He was striving to reach her, and she was only telling him farewell. He had said other things, that he would tell her “the whole story,” that he would open the files to her, that she was needed on this very matter by them all.
But her mind had been drifting. She couldn’t tell him her “whole story,” that was the sorrow. She’d been drowsy again, the dream threatening as she hung up the phone. She’d seen the plates, the body on the altar. Their mother. Yes, their mother. Time to sleep. The dream wants in. And then go on.
• • •
HIGHWAY 101. Seven thirty-five p.m. Twenty-five minutes until the concert.
She had just come through the mountain pass on the Waldo Grade and there was the old miracle—the great crowded skyline of San Francisco tumbling over the hills, far beyond the black glaze of the water. The towers of the Golden Gate loomed ahead of her, the ice cold wind off the Bay freezing her naked hands as she gripped the steering wheel.
Would the Vampire Lestat be on time? It made her laugh to think of an immortal creature having to be on time. Well, she would be on time; the journey was almost ended.
All grief was gone now, for David and Aaron and those she’d loved. There was no grief either for the Great Family. Only the gratitude for all of it. Yet maybe David was right. Perhaps she had not accepted the cold frightening truth of the matter, but had merely slipped into the realm of memories and ghosts, of pale creatures who were the proper stuff of dreams and madness.
She was walking towards the phantom town house of Stanford White, and it didn’t matter now who lived there. She would be welcome. They had been trying to tell her that ever since she could remember.
PART II
ALL HALLOW’S EVE
Very little is
more worth our time
than understanding
the talent of Substance.
• • •
A bee, a living bee,
at the windowglass, trying to get out, doomed,
it can’t understand.
STAN RICE
Untitled Poem
from
Pig’s Progress (1976)
Daniel
ONG curving lobby; the crowd was like liquid sloshing against the colorless walls. Teenagers in Halloween costume poured through the front doors; lines were forming to purchase yellow wigs, black satin capes—“Fang teeth, fifty cents!”—glossy programs. Whiteface everywhere he looked. Painted eyes and mouths. And here and there bands of men and women carefully done up in authentic nineteenth-century clothes, their makeup and coiffed hair exquisite.
A velvet-clad woman tossed a great shower of dead rosebuds into the air above her head. Painted blood flowed down her ashen cheeks. Laughter.
He could smell the greasepaint, and the beer, so alien now to his senses: rotten. The hearts beating all around him made a low, delicious thunder against the tender tympana of his ears.
He must have laughed out loud, because he felt the sharp pinch of Armand’s fingers on his arm. “Daniel!”
“Sorry, boss,” he whispered. Nobody was paying a damn bit of attention anyway; every mortal within sight was disguised; and who were Armand and Daniel but two pale nondescript young men in the press, black sweaters, jeans, hair partially hidden under sailor’s caps of blue wool, eyes behind dark glasses. “So what’s the big deal? I can’t laugh out loud, especially now that everything is so funny?”
Armand was distracted; listening again. Daniel couldn’t get it through his head to be afraid. He had what he wanted now. None of you my brothers and sisters!
Armand had said to him earlier, “You take a lot of teaching.” That was during the hunt, the seduction, the kill, the flood of blood through his greedy heart. But he had become a natural at being unnatural, hadn’t he, after the clumsy anguish of the first murder, the one that had taken him from shuddering guilt to ecstasy within seconds. Life by the