The Tale of the Body Thief tvc-4 Read online

  His skill was such-and please understand, he had got no skill from the Devil; the skill was his to begin with- that not only could he see that goodness, he could paint it; he could allow his knowledge of it, and his faith in it, to suffuse the whole.

  With each portrait he understood the grace and goodness of mankind ever more deeply. He understood the capacity for compassion and for wisdom which resides in every soul. His skill increased as he continued; the flash of the infinite became ever more subtle; the person himself ever more particular; and more grand and serene and magnificent each work.

  At last the faces Rembrandt painted were not flesh-and-blood faces at all. They were spiritual countenances, portraits of what lay within the body of the man or the woman; they were visions of what that person was at his or her finest hour, of what that person stood to become.

  This is why the merchants of the Drapers' Guild look like the oldest and wisest of God's saints.

  But nowhere is this spiritual depth and insight more clearly manifest than in Rembrandt's self-portraits. And surely you know that he left us one hundred and twenty-two of these.

  Why do you think he painted so many? They were his personal plea to God to note the progress of this man who, through his close observation of others like him, had been completely religiously transformed. "This is my vision," said Rembrandt to God.

  Towards the end of Rembrandt's life, the Devil grew suspicious. He did not want his minion to be creating such magnificent paintings, so full of warmth and kindness. He bad believed the Dutch to be a materialistic and therefore worldly people. And here in pictures full of rich clothing and expensive possessions, gleamed the undeniable evidence that human beings are wholly unlike any other animal in the cosmos-they are a precious mingling of the flesh and immortal fire.

  Well, Rembrandt suffered all the abuse heaped upon him by the Devil. He lost his fine house in the Jodenbree-straat. He lost his mistress, and finally even his son. Yet on and on he painted, without a trace of bitterness or perversity; on and on he infused his paintings with love.

  Finally he lay on his deathbed. The Devil pranced about, gleefully, ready to snatch Rembrandt's soul and pinch it between evil little fingers. But the angels and saints cried to God to intervene.

  "In all the world, who knows more about goodness?" they asked, pointing to the dying Rembrandt. "Who has shown more than this painter? We look to his portraits when we would know the divine in man."

  And so God broke the pact between Rembrandt and the Devil. He took to himself the soul of Rembrandt, and the Devil, so recently cheated of Faust for the very same reason, went mad with rage.

  Well, he would bury the life of Rembrandt in obscurity. He would see to it that all the man's personal possessions and records were swallowed by the great flow of time. And that is of course why we know almost nothing of Rembrandt's true life, or what sort of person he was.

  But the Devil could not control the fate of the paintings. Try as he might, he could not make people burn them, throw them away, or set them aside for the newer, more fashionable artists. In fact, a curious thing happened, seemingly without a marked beginning. Rembrandt became the most admired of all painters who had ever lived; Rembrandt became the greatest painter of all time.

  That is my theory of Rembrandt and those faces.

  Now if I were mortal, I would write a novel about Rembrandt, on this theme. But I am not mortal. I cannot save my soul through art or Good Works. I am a creature like the Devil, with one difference. I love the paintings of Rembrandt!

  Yet it breaks my heart to look at them. It broke my heart to see you there in the museum. And you are perfectly right that there are no vampires with faces like the saints of the Drapers' Guild.

  That's why I left you so rudely in the museum. It was not the Devil's Rage. It was merely sorrow.

  Again, I promise you that next time we meet, I shall let you say all that you want to say.

  I scribbled the number of my Paris agent on the bottom of this letter, along with the post address, as I had done in the past when writing to David though David had never replied.

  Then I went on a pilgrimage of sorts, revisiting the paintings of Rembrandt in the great collections of the world. I saw nothing in my travels to sway me in my belief in Rembrandt's goodness. The pilgrimage proved penitential, for I clung to my fiction about Rembrandt. But I resolved anew never to bother David again.

  Then I had the dream. Tyger, tyger . . . David in danger. I woke with a start in my chair in Louis's little shack-as if I'd been shaken by a warning hand.

  Night had almost ended in England. I had to hurry. But when I finally found David, he was in a quaint little tavern in a village in the Cotswolds which can only be reached by one narrow and treacherous road.

  This was his home village, not far from his ancestral manor, I quickly divined from scanning those around him-a little one-street place of sixteenth-century buildings, housing shops and an inn now dependent upon the fickleness of tourists, which David had restored from his own pocket, and visited more and more often to escape his London life.

  Positively eerie little spot!

  All David was doing, however, was guzzling his beloved single-malt Scotch and scribbling drawings of the Devil on napkins. Mephistopheles with his lute? The horned Satan dancing under the light of the moon? It must have been his dejection I had sensed over the miles, or more truly the concern of those watching him. It was their image of him which I had caught.

  I wanted so to talk to him. I didn't dare to do it. I would have created too much of a stir in the little tavern, where the concerned old proprietor and his two hulking and silent nephews remained awake and smoking their odoriferous pipes only on account of the august presence of the local lord-who was getting as drunk as a lord.

  For an hour, I had stood near, peering through the little window. Then I'd gone away.

  Now-many, many months later-as the snow fell over London, as it fell in big silent flakes over the high facade of the Motherhouse of the Talamasca, I searched for him, in a dull weary state, thinking that there was no one in all the world whom I must see but him. I scanned the minds of the members, sleeping and awake. I roused them. I heard them come to attention as clearly as if they had snapped on their lights on rising from bed.

  But I had what I wanted before they could shut me out.

  David was gone to the manor house in the Cotswolds, somewhere, no doubt, in the vicinity of that curious little village with its quaint tavern.

  Well, I could find it, couldn't I? I went to seek him there.

  The snow was failing ever more heavily as I traveled close to the earth, cold and angry, with all memory of the blood I'd drunk now wiped away.

  Other dreams came back to me, as they always do in bitter winter, of the harsh and miserable snows of my mortal boyhood, of the chill stone rooms of my father's castle, and of the little fire, and my great mastiffs snoring in the hay beside me, keeping me snug and warm.

  Those dogs had been slain on my last wolf hunt.

  I hated so to remember it, and yet it was always sweet to think I was there again-with the clean smell of the little fire and of those powerful dogs tumbled against me, and that I was alive, truly alive!-and the hunt had never taken place. I'd never gone to Paris, I'd never seduced the powerful and demented vampire Magnus. The little stone room was full of the good scent of the dogs, and I could sleep now beside them, and be safe.

  At last I drew near to a small Elizabethan manor house in the mountains, a very beautiful stone structure of deep-pitched roofs and narrow gables, of deep-set thick glass windows, far smaller than the Motherhouse, yet very grand on its own scale.

  Only one set of windows was lighted, and when I approached I saw that it was the library and David was there, seated by a great noisily burning fire.

  He had his familiar leatherbound diary in his hand, and he was writing with an ink pen, very rapidly. He had no sense at all that he was being watched. Now and then he consulted another leatherbou
nd book, on the table at his side. I could easily see that this was a Christian Bible, with its double columns of small print and the gilt edges of its pages, and the ribbon that marked his place.

  With only a little effort I observed it was the Book of Genesis from which David was reading, and apparently making notes. There was his copy of Faust beside it. What on earth interested him in all this?

  The room itself was lined with books. A single lamp burned over David's shoulder. It was as many a library in northern climes-cozy and inviting, with a low beamed ceiling, and big comfortable old leather chairs.

  But what rendered it unusual were the relics of a life lived in another clime. There were his cherished mementos of those remembered years.

  The mounted head of a spotted leopard was perched above the glowing fireplace. And the great black head of a buffalo was fixed to the far right wall. There were many small Hindu statues of bronze here and there on shelves and on tables. Small jewel-like Indian rugs lay on the brown carpet, before hearth and doorway and windows.

  And the long flaming skin of his Bengal tiger lay sprawled in the very center of the room, its head carefully preserved, with glass eyes and those immense fangs which I had seen with such horrid vividness in my dream.

  It was to this last trophy that David gave his full attention suddenly, and then taking his eyes off it with difficulty, went back to writing again. I tried to scan him. Nothing. Why had I bothered? Not even a glimmer of the mangrove forests where such a beast might have been slain. But once again he looked at the tiger, and then, forgetting his pen, sank deep into his thoughts.

  Of course it comforted me merely to watch him, as it had always done. I glimpsed many framed photographs in the shadows-pictures of David when he'd been young, and many obviously taken of him in India before a lovely bungalow with deep porches and a high roof. Pictures of his mother and father.

  Pictures of him with the animals he'd killed. Did this explain my dream?

  I ignored the snow falling all around me, covering my hair and my shoulders and even my loosely folded arms. Finally I stirred. There was only an hour before dawn.

  I moved around the house, found a back door, commanded the latch to slide back, and entered the warm little low-ceilinged hall. Old wood in this place, soaked through and through with lacquers or oil. I laid my hands on the beams of the door and saw in a shimmer a great oak woodland full of sunlight, and then only the shadows surrounded me. I smelled the aroma of the distant fire.

  I realized David was standing at the far end of the hallway, beckoning for me to come near. But something in my appearance alarmed him. Ah, well, I was covered with snow and a thin layer of ice.

  We went into the library together and I took the chair opposite his. He left me for a moment during which time I was merely staring at the fire and feeling it melt the sleet that covered me. I was thinking of why I had come and how I would put it into words.

  My hands were as white as the snow was white.

  When he appeared again, he had a large warm towel for me, and I took this and wiped my face and my hair and then my hands. How good it felt.

  "Thank you," I said.

  "You looked a statue," he said.

  '"Yes, I do look that way, now, don't I? I'm going on."

  "What do you mean?" He sat down across from me. "Explain."

  "I'm going to a desert place. I've figured a way to end it, I think. This is not a simple matter at all."

  "Why do you want to do that?"

  "Don't want to be alive anymore. That part is simple enough. I don't look forward to death the way you do. It isn't that. Tonight I-" I stopped. I saw the old woman in her neat bed, in her flowered robe, against the quilted nylon. Then I saw that strange brown-haired man watching me, the one who had come to me on the beach and given me the story which I still had, crammed inside my coat.

  Meaningless. You come too late, whoever you are.

  Why bother to explain?

  I saw Claudia suddenly as if she were standing there in some other realm, staring at me, waiting for me to see her. How clever that our minds can invoke an image so seemingly real. She might as well have been right there by David's desk in the shadows. Claudia, who had forced her long knife through my chest. "I'll put you in your coffin forever, Father." But then I saw Claudia ail the time now, didn't I? I saw Claudia in dream after dream . . .

  "Don't do this," David said.

  "It's tune, David," I whispered, thinking in a vague and distant way how disappointed Marius would be.

  Had David heard me? Perhaps my voice had been too soft. Some small crackling sound came from the fire, a bit of kindling collapsing perhaps or sap still moist and sizzling within the huge log. I saw that cold bedchamber in my boyhood home again, and suddenly, I had my arm around one of those big dogs, those lazy loving dogs. To see a wolf slay a dog is monstrous!

  I should have died that day. Not even the best of hunters should be able to slay a pack of wolves. And maybe that was the cosmic error. I'd been meant to go, if indeed there is any such continuity, and in overreaching, had caught the devil's eye. "Wolf killer." The vampire Magnus had said it so lovingly, as he had carried me to his lair.

  David had sunk back in the chair, putting one foot absently on the fender, and his eyes were fixed on the flames. He was deeply distressed, even a little frantic, though he held it inside very well.

  "Won't it be painful?" he asked, looking at me.

  Just for a moment, I didn't know what he meant. Then I remembered.

  I gave a little laugh.

  "I came to say good-bye to you, to ask you if you're certain about your decision. It seemed somehow the right thing to tell you I was going, and that this would be your last chance. It seemed sporting, actually. You follow me? Or do you think it's simply another excuse? Doesn't matter really."

  "Like Magnus in your story," he said. "You'd make your heir, then go into the fire."

  "It wasn't merely a story," I said, not meaning to be argumentative, and wondering why it sounded that way. "And yes, perhaps it's like that. I honestly don't know."

  "Why do you want to destroy yourself?" He sounded desperate. How I had hurt this man.

  I looked at the sprawling tiger with its magnificent black stripes and deep orange fur.

  "That was a man-eater, wasn't it?" I asked.

  He hesitated as if he didn't fully understand the question, then as if waking, he nodded. "Yes." He glanced at the tiger, then he looked at me. "I don't want you to do it. Postpone it, for the love of heaven. Don't do it. Why tonight, of all times?"

  He was making me laugh against my will. "Tonight's a fine night for doing it," I said.

  "No, I'm going." And suddenly there was a great exhilaration in me because I realized I meant it! It wasn't just some fancy. I would never have told him if it was. "I've figured a method. I'll go as high as I can before the sun comes over the horizon. There won't be any way to find shelter. The desert there is very hard."

  And I will die in fire. Not cold, as I'd been on that mountain when the wolves surrounded me. In heat, as Claudia had died.

  "No, don't do it," he said. How earnest he was, how persuasive. But it didn't work.

  "Do you want the blood?" I asked. "It doesn't take very long. There's very little pain. I'm confident the others won't hurt you. I'll make you so strong they'd have a devil of a time if they tried."

  Again, it was so like Magnus, who'd left me an orphan without so much as a warning that Armand and his ancient coven could come after me, cursing me and seeking to put an end to my newborn life. And Magnus had known that I would prevail.

  "Lestat, I do not want the blood. But I want you to stay here. Look, give me a matter of a few nights only. Just that much. On account of friendship, Lestat, stay with me now.

  Can't you give me those few hours? And then if you must go through with it, I won't argue anymore."

  "Why?"

  He looked stricken. Then he said, "Let me talk to you, let me change your mind,"
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  "You killed the tiger when you were very young, didn't you? It was in India." I gazed around at the other trophies. "I saw the tiger in a dream."

  He didn't answer. He seemed anxious and perplexed.

  "I've hurt you," I said. "I've driven you deep into memories of your youth. I've made you aware of time, and you weren't so aware of it before."

  Something happened in his face. I had wounded him with these words. Yet he shook his head.

  "David, take the blood from me before I go!" I whispered suddenly, desperately. "You don't have a year left to you. I can hear it when I'm near you! I can hear the weakness in your heart."

  "You don't know that, my friend," he said patiently, "Stay here with me. I'll tell you all about the tiger, about those days in India. I hunted in Africa then, and once in the Amazon. Such adventures. I wasn't the musty scholar then as I am now . . ."

  "I know." I smiled. He had never spoken this way to me before, never offered so much. "It's too late, David," I said. Again, I saw the dream. I saw that thin gold chain around David's neck. Had the tiger been going for the chain? That didn't make sense. What remained was the sense of danger.

  I stared at the skin of the beast. How purely vicious was his face.

  "Was it fun to kill the tiger?" I asked.

  He hesitated. Then forced himself to answer. "It was a man-eater. It feasted on children. Yes, I suppose it was fun."

  I laughed softly. "Ah, well, then we have that in common, me and the tiger. And Claudia is waiting for me."

  "You don't really believe that, do you?"

  "No. I guess if I did, I'd be afraid to die." I saw Claudia quite vividly... a tiny oval portrait on porcelain-golden hair, blue eyes. Something fierce and true in the expression, in spite of the saccharine colors and the oval frame. Had I ever possessed such a locket, for that is what it was, surely. A locket. A chill came over me. I remembered the texture of her hair. Once again, it was as if she were very near me. Were I to turn, I might see her beside me in the shadows, with her hand on the back of my chair. I did turn around. Nothing. I was going to lose my nerve if I didn't get out of here.