Memnoch the Devil tvc-5 Page 2

  I flashed back on them. Yes, they were going upstairs, just as I thought. They had just left their table in the restaurant. The night was too wretched even for Dora, though she wanted to go to the church and to pray for her father, and beg him to stay there and pray too. Some memory played between them, in their thoughts and fragmentary words. Dora had been a little girl when my Victim had first brought her to that cathedral.

  He didn't believe in anything. She was some sort of religious leader. Theodora. She preached to television audiences on the seriousness of values and nourishment of the soul. And her father? Ah, well, I'd kill him before I learnt too much more, or end up losing this big trophy buck just for Dora's sake.

  I looked back at David, who was watching me eagerly, shoulder resting against the dark satin-covered wall. In this light, no one could have known he wasn't human. Even one of us might have missed it.

  As for me, I probably looked like a mad rock star who wanted all the world's attention to crush him slowly to death.

  "The victim's got nothing to do with it," I said. "I'll tell you all that another time. It's just we're in this hotel because I followed him here. You know my games, my hunts. I don't need blood any more than Maharet does, but I can't stand the thought of not having it!"

  "And so what is this new sort of game?" he said politely in British.

  "I don't look so much for simple, evil people, murderers, you know so much as a more sophisticated kind of criminal, someone with the mentality of an Iago. This one's a drag dealer. Highly eccentric. Brilliant. An art collector. He loves to have people shot, loves to make billions in a week off cocaine through one gateway and heroin through another. And then he loves his daughter. And she, she has a televangelist church."

  "You're really enthralled with these mortals."

  "Look right now, past me, over my shoulder. See the two people in the lobby moving towards the elevators?" I asked.

  "Yes." He stared at them fixedly. Perhaps they'd paused in just the right spot. I could feel, hear, and smell both of them, but I couldn't know precisely where they were unless I turned around. But they were there, the dark smiling man with his pale-faced eager and innocent little girl, who was a woman-child of twenty-five if I had reckoned correctly.

  "I know that man's face," said David. "He's big time. Interna­tional. They keep trying to bring him up on some charges. He pulled off an extraordinary assassination, where was it?"

  "The Bahamas."

  "My God, how did you happen on him? Did you really see him in person somewhere, you know, like a shell you found on the beach, or did you see him in the papers and the magazines?"

  "Do you recognize the girl? Nobody knows they're connected."

  "No, I don't recognize her, but should I? She's so pretty, and so sweet. You're not going to feed on her, are you?"

  I laughed at his gentlemanly outrage at such a suggestion. I wondered if David asked permission before sucking the blood of his victims, or at least insisted that both parties be properly introduced. I had no idea what his killing habits were, or how often he fed. I'd made him plenty strong. That meant it didn't have to be every night. He was blessed in that.

  "The girl sings for Jesus on a television station," I said. "Her church will someday have its headquarters in an old, old convent building in New Orleans. Right now she lives there alone, and tapes her programs out of a studio in the French Quarter. I think her show goes through some ecumenical cable channel out of Alabama." "You're in love with her."

  "Not at all, just very eager to kill her father. Her television appeal is peculiar. She talks theology with gripping common sense, you know, the kind of televangelist that just might make it all work.

  Don't we all fear that someone like that will come along? She dances like a nymph or a temple virgin, I suppose I should say, sings like a seraph, invites the entire studio audience to join with her. Theology and ecstasy, perfectly blended. And all the requisite good works are recommended."

  "I see," he said. "And this makes it more exciting for you, to feast on the father? By the way, the father is hardly an unobtrusive man. Neither seem disguised. Are you sure no one knows they're connected?"

  The elevator door had opened. My Victim and his daughter were rising floor after floor into the sky.

  "He slips in and out of here when he wants. He's got bodyguards galore. She meets him on her own. I think they set it up by cellular phone. He's a computer cocaine giant, and she's one of his best- protected secret operations. His men are all over the lobby. If there'd been anyone nosing around, she would have left the restaurant alone first. But he's a wizard at things like that. There'll be warrants out for him in five states and he'll show up ringside for a heavyweight match in Atlantic City, right in front of the cameras. They'll never catch him. I'll catch him, the vampire who's just waiting to kill him. And isn't he beautiful?"

  "Now, let me get this clear," David said. "You're being stalked by something, and it's got nothing to do with this victim, this, er, drug dealer, or whatever, or this televangelist girl. But something is following you, something frightening you, but not enough to make you stop tracking this dark-skinned man who just got into the elevator?"

  I nodded, but then I caught myself in a little doubt. No, there couldn't be any connection.

  Besides, this thing that had me rattled to the bone had started before I saw the Victim. It had "happened" first in Rio, the stalker, not long after I'd left Louis and David and gone back to Rio to hunt.

  I hadn't picked up this Victim until he'd walked across my path in own city of New Orleans. He'd come down there on a whim to Dora for twenty minutes; they'd met in a little French Quarter and I had been walking past and seen him, sparkling like a fire, her white face and large compassionate eyes, and wham! It was hunger.

  "No, it's got nothing to do with him," I said. "What's stalking me started months before. He doesn't know I'm following him. I didn't catch on right away myself that I was being followed by this thing, this.. . ."

  "This what?"

  "Watching him and his daughter, it's like my miniseries, you know. He's so intricately evil."

  "So you said, and what is stalking you? Is this a thing or a person or ...?"

  "I'll get to that. This Victim, he has killed so many people. Drugs.

  Such people wallow in numbers. Kilos, kills, coded accounts. And the girl, the girl of course turned out not to be some dim-witted little miracle worker telling diabetics she can cure them with the laying on of hands."

  "Lestat, your mind's wandering. What's the matter with you?

  Why are you afraid? And why don't you kill this victim and get that part over?"

  "You want to go back to Jesse and Maharet, don't you?" I asked suddenly, a feeling of hopelessness descending on me. "You want to study for the next hundred years, among all those tablets and scrolls, and look into Maharet's aching blue eyes, and hear her voice, I know you do. Does she still always choose blue eyes?"

  Maharet had been blind eyes torn out when she was made a vampire queen. She took eyes from her victims and wore them -until they could see no more, no matter how the vampiric blood tried to preserve them. That was her shocking feature the marble queen with the bleeding eyes. Why had she never wrung the neck of some vampire fledgling and stolen his or her eyes? It had never occurred to me before. Loyalty to our own kind? Maybe it wouldn't work. But she had her scruples, and they were as hard as she was. A woman that old remembers when there was no Moses and no Hammurabi's Code. When only the Pharaoh got to walk through the Valley of Death.... "Lestat," David said. "Pay attention. You must tell me what you are talking about. I've never heard you admit so readily that you were afraid. You did say afraid. Forget about me for the moment. Forget that victim and the girl. What's up, my friend? Who's after you?"

  "I want to ask you some more questions first."

  "No. Just tell me what's happened. You're in danger, aren't you?

  Or you think you are. You sent out the call for me to come to you here.
It was an unabashed plea."

  "Are those the words Armand used, 'unabashed plea'? I hate Armand."

  David only smiled and made a quick impatient gesture with both hands. "You don't hate Armand and you know you don't."

  "Wanna bet?"

  He looked at me sternly and reprimandingly. English schoolboy stuff probably.

  "All right," I said. "I'll tell you. Now, first, I have to remind you of something. A conversation we had. It was when you were alive still, when we last talked together in your place in the Cotswolds, you know, when you were just a charming old gentleman, dying in despair—"

  "I remember," he said patiently. "Before you went into the desert." "No, right after, when we knew I couldn't die as easily I thought I could, when I'd come back burnt. You cared for me. Then you started talking about yourself, your life. You said something about an experience you'd had before the war, you said, in a Paris cafe. You remember? You know what I'm talking about?"

  "Yes. I do. I told you that when I was a young man I thought I'd seen a vision."

  "Yes, something about the fabric of life ripping for a moment so you glimpsed things you shouldn't have seen."

  He smiled. "You're the one who suggested that, that the fabric had ripped somehow and I'd seen through the rip accidentally. I thought then and I still think now that it was a vision I was meant to see. But fifty years have passed since then. And my memory, my memory is surprisingly dim of the whole affair."

  "Well, that's to be expected. As a vampire, you will remember everything that happens to you from now on vividly, but the details of mortal life will slip rather fast, especially anything that had to do with the senses, you'll find yourself chasing after it. What did wine taste like?"

  He motioned for me to be quiet. I was making him unhappy. I hadn't meant to do this.

  I picked up my drink, savored the fragrance. It was some sort of not Christmas punch. I think they called it wassail in England. I set down the glass. My hands and face were still dark from that excursion to the desert, that little attempt to fly into the face of the sun. That helped me pass for human. What an irony. And it made my hand a little more sensitive to the warmth.

  A ripple of pleasure ran through me. Warmth! Sometimes I think I get my money out of everything! There's no way to cheat a sensualist like me, somebody who can die laughing for hours over the pattern of the carpet in a hotel lobby.

  I became aware again of his watching me.

  He seemed to have collected himself somewhat or forgiven me for the one thousandth time for having put his soul into a vampire's body without his permission, indeed against his will. He looked at me, almost lovingly suddenly, as if I needed that reassurance.

  I took it. I did.

  "In this Paris cafe, you heard two beings talking to each other," I said, going back to his vision of years before. "You were a young man. It all happened gradually. But you realized they weren't 'really'

  there, the two, in a material sense, and the language they were speaking was understandable to you even though you didn't know what it was."

  He nodded. "That's correct. And it sounded precisely like God and the Devil talking to each other."

  I nodded. "And when I left you in the jungles last year, you said I wasn't to worry, that you weren't going off on any religious quest to find God and the Devil in a Paris cafe. You said you'd spent your mortal life looking for such things in the Talamasca. And now you would take a different turn."

  "Yes, that's what I said," he admitted agreeably. "The vision's dimmer now than it was when I told you. But I remember it. I still remember it, and I still believe I saw and heard something, and I'm as resigned as ever that I'll never know what it was."

  "You're leaving God and the Devil to the Talamasca, then, as you promised."

  "I'm leaving the Devil to the Talamasca," he said. "I don't think the Talamasca as a psychic order was ever that interested in God."

  All this was familiar verbal territory. I acknowledged it. We both kept our eye on the Talamasca, so to speak. But only one member of that devout order of scholars had ever known the true fate of David Talbot, the former Superior General, and now that human being was dead. His name had been Aaron Lightner. This had been a great sadness to David, the loss of the one human who knew what he was now, the human who had been his knowing mortal friend, as David had been mine.

  He wanted to pick up the thread.

  "You've seen a vision?" he asked. "That's what's frightening you?"

  I shook my head. "Nothing as clear as that. But the Thing is stalking me, and now and then it lets me see something in the blink of an eye. I hear it mostly. I hear it sometimes talking in a normal conversational voice to another, or I hear its steps behind me on the street, and I spin around. It's true. I'm terrified of it. And then when it shows itself, well, I usually end up so disoriented, I'm sprawled in the gutter like a common drunk. A week will pass. Nothing. Then I'll catch that fragment of conversation again. ..."

  "And what are the words?"

  "Can't give the fragments to you in order. I'd been hearing them before I realized what they were. On some level, I knew I was hearing a voice from some other locale, so to speak, you knew it wasn't a mere mortal in the next room. But for all I knew, it could have had a natural explanation, an electronic explanation."

  "I understand."

  "But the fragments are things like two people talking, and one says-the one, that is—says, 'Oh, no, he's perfect, it has nothing to do with vengeance, how could you think I wanted mere vengeance?' " I broke off, shrugged. "It's, you know, the middle of a conversation."

  "Yes," he said, "and you feel this Thing is letting you hear a little of it... just the way I thought the vision in the cafe was meant for me."

  "You've got it exactly right. It's tormenting me. Another time, this was only two days ago, I was in New Orleans; I was sort of spying on the Victim's daughter, Dora. She lives there in the convent build- I mentioned. It's an old 1880s convent, unoccupied for years, and gutted, so that it's like a brick castle, and this little sparrow of a girl, lovely little woman, lives there fearlessly, completely alone. She walks about the house as if she were invincible.

  Well, anyway, I was down there, and I had come into the courtyard of this building—it's, you know, a shape as old as architecture, main building, two long wings, inner courtyard."

  "The rather typical late-nineteenth-century brick institution."

  "Exactly, and I was watching through the windows, the progress of that little girl walking by herself through the pitch-black corridor. She was carrying a flashlight. And she was singing to herself, one of her hymns. They're all sort of medieval and modern at the same time."

  "I believe the phrase is 'New Age,' " David suggested.

  "Yes, it's somewhat like that, but this girl is on an ecumenical religious network. I told you. Her program is very conventional. Believe in Jesus, be saved. She's going to sing and dance people into Heaven, especially the women, apparently, or at least they'll lead the way."

  "Go on with the story, you were watching her. . . ."

  "Yes, and thinking how brave she was. She finally reached her own quarters; she lives in one of the four towers of the building; and I listened as she threw all the locks. And I thought, not many mortals would like to go prowling about this dark building, and the place wasn't entirely spiritually clean."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Little spirits, elementals, whatever, what did you call them in the Talamasca?"

  "Elementals," he said.

  "Well, there are some gathered about this building, but they're no threat to this girl. She's simply too brave and strong."

  "But not the Vampire Lestat, who was spying her. He was out in the courtyard, and he heard the voice right next to his ear, as if Two Men were talking at his right shoulder and the other one, the one who is not following me, says quite plainly, 'No, I don't see him in the same light.' I turned round and round trying to find this Thing, close in on it mentally and s
piritually, confront it, bait it, and then I realized I was shaking all over, and you know, the elementals, David, the little pesky spirits . . . the ones I could feel hanging about the convent... I don't think they even realized this person, or whoever he was, had been talking in my ear."

  "Lestat, you do sound as if you've lost your immortal mind," he said. "No, no, don't get angry. I believe you. But let's backtrack.

  Why were you following the girl?"

  "I just wanted to see her. My Victim, he's worried—about who he is, what's he done, what the officials know about him. He's afraid he'll blemish her when the final indictment comes and all the newpa- per stories. But the point is, he'll never be indicted. I'm going to kill him first."

  "You are. And then it actually might save her church, is that not right? Your killing him speedily, so to speak. Or am I mistaken?"

  "I wouldn't hurt her for anything on this earth. Nothing could persuade me to do that." I sat silent for a moment.

  "Are you sure you are not in love? You seem spellbound by her."

  I was remembering. I had fallen in love only a short time ago with a mortal woman, a nun. Gretchen had been her name. And I had driven her mad. David knew the whole story. I'd written it; written all about David, too, and he and Gretchen had passed into the world in fictional form. He knew that.

  "I would never reveal myself to Dora as I did with Gretchen," I said. "No. I won't hurt Dora. I learnt my lesson. My only concern is to kill her father in such a way that she experiences the least suffering and the maximum benefit. She knows what her father is, but I'm not sure she's prepared for all the bad things that could happen on account of him."

  "My, but you are playing games."

  "Well, I have to do something to keep my mind off this Thing that's following me or I'll go mad!"

  "Shhhh . . . what's the matter with you? My God, but you're rattled."

  "Of course I am," I whispered.

  "Explain more about the Thing. Give me more fragments."

  "They're not worth repeating. It's an argument. It's about me, I tell you. David, it's like God and the Devil are arguing about me."