The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [76]
“The priest turned. ‘What is this, some sort of sport for you? Some joke? You take advantage of an old man!’ he said. He slid the wooden panel back with a splat. Quickly I opened the door and stepped out to see him standing there. ‘Young man, do you fear God at all? Do you know the meaning of sacrilege?’ He glared at me. Now I moved closer to him, slowly, very slowly, and at first he merely stared at me, outraged. Then, confused, he took a step back. The church was hollow, empty, black, the sacristan gone and the candles throwing ghastly light only on the distant altars. They made a wreath of soft, gold fibers about his gray head and face. ‘Then there is no mercy!’ I said to him and suddenly clamping my hands on his shoulders, I held him in a preternatural lock from which he couldn’t hope to move and held him close beneath my face. His mouth fell open in horror. ‘Do you see what I am! Why, if God exists, does He suffer me to exist!’ I said to him. ‘You talk of sacrilege!’ He dug his nails into my hands, trying to free himself, his missal dropping to the floor, his rosary clattering in the folds of his cassock. He might as well have fought the animated statues of the saints. I drew my lips back and showed him my virulent teeth. ‘Why does He suffer me to live!’ I said. His face infuriated me, his fear, his contempt, his rage. I saw in it all the hatred I’d seen in Babette, and he hissed at me, ‘Let me go! Devil!’ in sheer mortal panic.
“I released him, watching with a sinister fascination as he floundered, moving up the center aisle as if he plowed through snow. And then I was after him, so swift that I surrounded him in an instant with my outstretched arms, my cape throwing him into darkness, his legs scrambling still. He was cursing me, calling on God at the altar. And then I grabbed him on the very steps to the Communion rail and pulled him down to face me there and sank my teeth into his neck.”
The vampire stopped.
Sometime before, the boy had been about to light a cigarette. And he sat now with the match in one hand, the cigarette in the other, still as a store dummy, staring at the vampire. The vampire was looking at the floor. He turned suddenly, took the book of matches from the boy’s hand, struck the match, and held it out. The boy bent the cigarette to receive it. He inhaled and let the smoke out quickly. He uncapped the bottle and took a deep drink, his eyes always on the vampire.
He was patient again, waiting until the vampire was ready to resume.
“I didn’t remember Europe from my childhood. Not even the voyage to America, really. That I had been born there was an abstract idea. Yet it had a hold over me which was as powerful as the hold France can have on a colonial. I spoke French, read French, remembered waiting for the reports of the Revolution and reading the Paris newspaper accounts of Napoleon’s victories. I remember the anger I felt when he sold the colony of Louisiana to the United States. How long the mortal Frenchman lived in me I don’t know. He was gone by this time, really, but there was in me that great desire to see Europe and to know it, which comes not only from the reading of all the literature and the philosophy, but from the feeling of having been shaped by Europe more deeply and keenly than the rest of Americans. I was a Creole who wanted to see where it had all begun.
“And so I turned my mind to this now. To divesting my closets and trunks of everything that was not essential to me. And very little was essential to me, really. And much of that might remain in the town house, to which I was certain I would return sooner or later, if only to move my possessions to another similar one and start a new life in New Orleans, I couldn’t conceive of leaving it forever. Wouldn’t. But I fixed my mind and heart on Europe.
“It began to penetrate for the first time that I might see the world if I wanted. That I was, as Claudia said, free.
“Meantime,