The Tale of the Body Thief tvc-4 Read online

  I found one in the hallway, an old dark mirror in a heavy gilded frame. Enough light came from the open library door for me to see myself fairly well.

  For a moment, I could not quite believe what I beheld. My skin was smooth all over, as completely unblemished as it had ever been. But it was an amber color now, the very color of the frame of the mirror, and gleaming only slightly, no more than that of a mortal who had spent a long luxurious sojourn in tropical seas.

  My eyebrows and eyelashes shone brightly, as is always the case with the blond hair of such sun-browned individuals, and the few lines of my face, left to me by the Dark Gift, were a little bit more deeply etched than before. I refer here to two small commas at the corners of my mouth, the result of smiling so much when I was alive; and to a few very fine lines at the corners of my eyes, and the trace of a line or two across my forehead. Very nice to have them back for I had not seen them in a long time.

  My hands had suffered more. They were darker than my face, and very human-looking, with many little creases, which put me in mind at once of how many fine wrinkles mortal hands do have.

  The nails still glistened in a manner that might alarm humans, but it would be a simple thing to rub a bit of ash over them. My eyes, of course, were another matter. Never had they seemed so bright and so iridescent. But a pair of smoke-colored glasses was all that I needed there. The bigger mask of black glasses was no longer necessary to cover up the shining white skin.

  Ye gods, how perfectly wonderful, I thought, staring at my own reflection. You look almost like a man! Almost like a man! I could feel a dull ache all over in these burnt tissues, but that felt good to me, as if it were reminding me of the shape of my body, and its human limits.

  I could have shouted. Instead I prayed. May this last, and if it doesn't I'd go through it all again.

  Then it occurred to me, rather crushingly-I was supposed to be destroying myself, not perfecting my appearance so that I could move around better among men. I was supposed to be dying. And if the sun over the Gobi Desert hadn't done it... if all the long day of lying in the sun, and then the second sunrise . . .

  Ah, but you coward, I thought, you could have found some way to stay above the surface for that second day! Or could you?

  "Well, thank God you chose to come back."

  I turned and saw David coming down the hall. He had only just returned home, his dark heavy coat was wet from the snow, and he hadn't even removed his boots.

  He came to an abrupt halt and inspected me from head to toe, straining to see in the shadows. "Ah, the clothes will do," he said. "Good Lord, you look like one of those beachcombers, those surf people, those young men who live eternally in resorts."

  I smiled.

  He reached out, rather bravely, I thought, and took my hand and led me into the library, where the fire was quite vigorously burning by now. He studied me once again.

  "There's no more pain," he said tentatively.

  "There is sensation, but it's not exactly what we call pain. I'm going out for a little while. Oh, don't worry. I'll be back. I'm thirsting. I have to hunt."

  His face went blank, but not so blank that I didn't see the blood in his cheeks, or all the tiny vessels in his eyes.

  "Well, what did you think?" I asked. "That I'd given it up?"

  "No, of course not."

  "Well, then, care to come and watch?"

  He said nothing, but I could see I'd frightened him.

  "You must remember what I am," I said. "When you help me, you help the devil." I made a little gesture to his copy of Faust, still lying on the table. And there was that Lovecraft story. Hmmm.

  "You don't have to take life to do it, do you?" he asked quite seriously.

  But what a crude question.

  I made a short derisive noise. "I like to take life," I said. I gestured to the tiger. "I'm a hunter as you were once. I think it's fun."

  He looked at me for a long moment, his face full of a sort of troubled wonder and then he nodded slowly as if accepting this. But he was very far from accepting it.

  "Have your supper while I'm gone," I said. "I can tell you're hungry. I can smell meat cooking somewhere in this house. And you can be certain that I intend to have my supper before I come back."

  "You're quite determined that I'm to know you, aren't you?" he asked. "That there's to be no sentimentality or mistake."

  "Exactly." I drew back my lips and showed him my fangs for a second. They are very small, actually, nothing compared to the leopard and the tiger, with which he kept company so obviously by choice. But this grimace always frightens mortals. It does more than frighten them. It actually shocks them. I think it sends some primal message of alarm through the organism which has little to do with its conscious courage or sophistication.

  He blanched. He stood quite motionless, looking at me, and then gradually the warmth and the expression returned to his face.

  "Very welt," he said. "I'll be here when you come back. If you don't come back, I'll be furious! I won't speak to you again, I swear it. You vanish on me tonight, you'll never get another nod from me. It will be a crime against hospitality. You understand?"

  "All right, all right!" I said with a shrug, though I was secretly touched that he wanted me here. I hadn't really been so sure, and I'd been so rude to him. "I'll come back. Besides, I want to know."

  "What?"

  "Why you aren't afraid of dying."

  "Well, you aren't afraid of it, are you?"

  I didn't answer. I saw the sun again, the great fiery ball becoming earth and sky, and I shuddered. Then I saw that oil lamp in my dream.

  "What is it?" he asked.

  "I am afraid of dying," I said with a nod for emphasis. "All my illusions are being shattered."

  "You have illusions?" he asked quite honestly.

  "Of course I do. One of my illusions was that no one could really refuse the Dark Gift, not knowingly ..."

  "Lestat, must I remind you that you refused it yourself?"

  "David, I was a boy. I was being forced. I fought instinctively. But that had nothing to do with knowing."

  "Don't sell yourself short, I think you would have refused even if you had fully understood." "Now we're speaking about your illusions," I said. "I'm hungry. Get out of my way or I'll kill you."

  "I don't believe you. You had better come back."

  "I will. This time I'll keep the promise I made in my letter. You can say all you have to say."

  I hunted the back streets of London. I was wandering near Charing Cross Station, looking for some petty cutthroat that would yield a mouthful even if his narrow little ambitions did sour my soul. But it didn't quite turn out that way.

  There was an old woman walking there, shuffling along in a soiled coat, her feet bound with rags. Mad and bitter cold she was, and almost certain to die before morning, having stolen out of the back door of some place where they'd tried to lock her up, or so she bawled to the world in general, determined never to be caught again.

  We made grand lovers! She had a name for me and a great warm cluster of memories, and there we were dancing in the gutter together, she and I, and I held her a long time in my arms. She was very well nourished, as so many beggars are in this century where food is so plentiful in the Western countries, and I drank slowly, oh, so slowly, savoring it, and feeling a rush all through my burnt skin.

  When it was finished, I realized that I was experiencing the cold very keenly and had been all along. I was feeling all fluctuations of temperature with greater acuity. Interesting.

  The wind was lashing me and I hated it. Maybe something of my flesh had actually been burnt off. I didn't know. I felt the wet cold in my feet, and my hands hurt so much I had to bury them in my pockets. I caught those memories again of the French winter of my last year at home, of the young mortal country lord with a bed of hay, and only the dogs for companions. All the blood in the world seemed not enough suddenly. Time to feed again, and again.

  They were dereli
cts, all of them, lured into the icy darkness from their shacks of trash and cardboard, and doomed, or so I told myself, moaning and feasting amid the stench of rancid sweat and urine, and phlegm. But the blood was blood.

  When the clocks struck ten, I was still thirsting, and victims were still plentiful, but I was tired of it, and it didn't matter anymore.

  I traveled for many blocks, into the fashionable West End, and there entered a dark little shop, full of smart, finely cut garments for gentlemen-ah, the ready-made wealth of these years-and outfitted myself to my taste in gray tweed pants and belted coat, with a thick white wool sweater, and even a pair of very pale green tinted glasses with delicate gold frames. Then off I wandered, back into the chill night full of swirling snowflakes, singing to myself and doing a little tap dance under the street lamp just as I used to do for Claudia and- Slam! Bang! Up stepped this fierce and beautiful young tough with wine on his breath, divinely sleazy, who drew a knife on me, all set to murder me for the money I didn't have, which reminded me that I was a miserable thief for having just stolen a wardrobe of fine Irish clothes. Hmmm. But I was lost again in the tight hot embrace, crushing the bastard's ribs, sucking him dry as a dead rat in a summer attic, and he went down in amazement and ecstasy, one hand clutching painfully, to the very last, at my hair.

  He did have some money in his pockets. What luck. I put that in the clothier's for the garments I'd taken, which seemed more than adequate when I did my arithmetic, at which I am not so good, preternatural powers or no. Then I wrote a little note of thanks, unsigned, of course. And I locked up the shop door tight with a few little telepathic twists, and off I went again.

  FIVE

  IT WAS striking midnight when I reached Talbot Manor. It was as if I had never seen the place before. I had time now to roam the maze in the snow, and to study the pattern of clipped shrubbery, and imagine what the garden would be come spring. Beautiful old place.

  Then there were the close dark little rooms themselves, built to hold out the cold English winters, and the little lead-mullioned windows, many of which were full of light now, and most inviting in the snowy dark.

  David had finished his supper, obviously, and the servants- an old man and woman-were at work still in the kitchen belowstairs while the lord changed his clothes in his bedroom on the second floor.

  I watched him as he put on, over his pajamas, a long black dressing gown with black velvet lapels and sash that made him look very much like a cleric, though it was far too ornately patterned to be a cassock, especially with the white silk scarf tucked in at the neck.

  Then he made his way down the stairs.

  I entered by my favorite door at the end of the passage and came up beside him in the library as he bent to rake the fire.

  "Ah, you did come back," he said, trying to conceal his delight, "Good Lord, but you come and go so quietly!" "Yes, it's very annoying, isn't it?" I looked at the Bible on the table, the copy of Faust, and the little short story by Lovecraft, still stapled, but smoothed out. There was David's decanter of Scotch also and a pretty thick-bottomed crystal glass.

  I stared at the short story, the memory of the anxious young man coming back to me. So odd the way he moved. A vague tremor passed through me at the thought of his having spotted me in three distinctly different places. I'd probably never lay eyes on him again. On the other hand . . . But there was time to deal with this pest of a mortal. David was on my mind now, and the delicious awareness that we had the night to talk to each other.

  "Wherever did you get those handsome clothes?" David asked. His eyes passed over me slowly, lingeringly, and he seemed not to notice my attention to his books.

  "Oh, a little shop somewhere. I never steal the garments of my victims, if that's what you mean. And besides, I'm too addicted to lowlife and they don't dress well enough for that sort of thing."

  I settled in the chair opposite his, which was my chair now, I supposed. Deep, pliant leather, creaking springs, but very comfortable, with a high winged back and broad substantial arms. His own chair did not match it but was just as good, and a little more creased and worn.

  He stood before the flames, still studying me. Then he sat down too. He took the glass stopper from the crystal decanter, filled his glass, and lifted it in a little salute.

  He took a deep swallow and winced slightly as the liquid obviously warmed his throat.

  Suddenly, vividly, I remembered that particular sensation. I remembered being in the loft of the barn on my land in France, and drinking cognac just like that, and even making that grimace, and my mortal friend and lover, Nicki, snatching the bottle greedily from my hand.

  "I see you are yourself again," David said with sudden warmth, lowering his voice slightly as he peered at me. He sat back, with the glass resting on the right arm of his chair. He looked very dignified, though far more at ease than I had ever seen him. His hair was thick and wavy, and had become a beautiful shade of dark gray.

  "Do I seem myself?" I asked.

  "You have that mischievous look in your eye," he answered under his breath, still scanning me intently. "There's a little smile on your lips. Won't leave for more than a second when you speak. And the skin-it makes a remarkable difference. I pray you're not in pain. You aren't, are you?"

  I made a small dismissive gesture. I could hear his heartbeat. It was ever so slightly weaker than it had been in Amsterdam. Now and then it was irregular as well.

  "How long will your skin stay dark like this?" he asked.

  "Years, perhaps, seems one of the ancient ones told me so. Didn't I write about it in The Queen of the Damned?" I thought of Marius and how angry he was with me in genera!. How disapproving he would be of what I'd done.

  "It was Maharet, your ancient red-haired one," David said. "In your book, she claimed to have done the very thing merely to darken her skin."

  "What courage," I whispered. "And you don't believe in her existence, do you? Though I am sitting right here with you now."

  "Oh, I do believe in her. Of course I do. I believe everything you've written. But I know you! Tell me-what actually happened in the desert? Did you really believe you would die?"

  "You would ask that question, David, and right off the bat." I sighed. "Well, I can't claim that I did really believe it. I was probably playing my usual games. I swear to God I don't tell lies to others. But I lie to myself. I don't think I can die now, at least not in any way that I myself could contrive."

  He let out a long sigh.

  "So why aren't you afraid of dying, David? I don't mean to torment you with the old offer. I honestly can't quite figure it out. You're really, truly not afraid to die, and that I simply do not understand. Because you can die, of course."

  Was he having doubts? He didn't answer immediately. Yet he seemed powerfully stimulated, I could see that. I could all but hear his brain working, though of course I couldn't hear his thoughts.

  "Why the Faust play, David? Am I Mephistopheles?" I asked. "Are you Faust?"

  He shook his head. "I may be Faust," he said finally, taking another drink of the Scotch, "but you're not the devil, that's perfectly clear." He gave a sigh.

  "I have wrecked things for you, though, haven't I? I knew it in Amsterdam. You don't stay in the Motherhouse unless you have to. I'm not driving you mad, but I've had a very bad effect, have I not?"

  Again, he didn't answer right away. He was looking at me with his large prominent black eyes, and obviously considering the question from all angles. The deep lines of his face- the creases in his forehead, the lines at the corners of his eyes and around the edges of his mouth-reinforced his genial and open expression. There was not a sour note to this being,

  but there was unhappiness beneath the surface, and it was tangled with deep considerations, going back through a long life.

  "Would have happened anyway, Lestat," he said finally. "There are reasons why I'm no longer so good at being the Superior General. Would have happened anyway, I'm relatively certain of that."
r />   "Explain it to me. I thought you were in the very womb of the order, that it was your life."

  He shook his head. "I was always an unlikely candidate for the Talamasca. I've mentioned how I spent my youth in India. I could have lived my life that way. I'm no scholar in the conventional sense, never was. Nevertheless I am like Faust in the play. I'm old, and I haven't cracked the secrets of the universe. Not at all. I thought I had when I was young. The first time I saw ... a vision. The first time I knew a witch, the first time I heard the voice of a spirit, the first time I called up a spirit and made it do my bidding. I thought I had! But that was nothing. Those are earthbound things. . . earthbound mysteries. Or mysteries I'll never solve, at any rate."

  He paused, as if he wanted to say something more, something in particular. But then he merely lifted the glass and drank almost absently, and this time without the grimace, for that obviously had been for the first drink of the night. He stared at the glass, and refilled it from the decanter.

  I hated it that I couldn't read his thoughts, that I caught not the slightest flickering emanations behind his words.

  "You know why I became a member of the Talamasca?" he asked. "It had nothing to do with scholarship at all. Never dreamed I'd be confined to the Motherhouse, wading through papers, and typing files into the computer, and sending faxes off all over the world. Nothing like that at all. It started with another hunting expedition, a new frontier, so to speak, a trip to far-off Brazil. That's where I discovered the occult, you might say, in the little crooked streets of old Rio, and it seemed every bit as exciting and dangerous as my old tiger hunts had ever been. That's what drew me-the danger. And how I came to be so far from it, I don't know."

  I didn't reply, but something came clear to me, that there was obviously a danger in his knowing me. He must have liked the danger. I had thought he was possessed of a scholar's naivete about it, but now this didn't seem to be the case.