by Rice, Anne
I thanked the steward and approached these two gentlemen, inviting them into the suite, and moving deeply into the shadows as was my custom during such encounters, and begging them to forgive me for not turning on the lights. Indeed, the light coming through the veranda doors was quite enough, I explained, considering the poor condition of my skin.
Both these men were deeply troubled and suspicious, and once again I did my best to work the persuasive charm on them as I spoke.
“What has happened to Dr. Alexander Stoker?” I asked. “He is my personal physician, and I’m deeply concerned.”
The younger of the two men, a very red-faced man with an Irish accent, clearly did not believe what I was saying to him, and he could sense that something was very wrong with my manner and my speech. My only hope was to sink this individual into confusion so that he remained quiet.
But the other, the tall and educated Englishman, was much easier to spellbind, and he began to pour out the whole tale without guile.
Seems Dr. Stoker was not really Dr. Stoker, but a man from England named David Talbot, though why he had used the assumed name, he refused to say.
“You know, this Mr. Talbot had a gun on board this vessel, sir!” said the tall officer, while the other continued to stare at me in deep inarticulate distrust. “Of course this organization in London, this Talamasca, or whatever it is, was most apologetic, and eager to make things right. It was settled with the captain finally, and some persons at the home offices of Cunard. No charges were brought against Mr. Talbot when Mr. Talbot agreed to pack his belongings and allow himself to be escorted ashore and to a plane leaving immediately for the United States.”
“To where in the United States?”
“Miami, sir. In fact, I saw him to the flight myself. He insisted upon giving me a message for you, sir, that you should meet him in Miami, at your convenience. At the Park Central Hotel? He gave me this message any number of times.”
“I see,” I answered. “And the man who attacked him? The man at whom he fired the gun?”
“We haven’t found any such person, sir, though undoubtedly this man was seen on this ship earlier by any number of persons, and in the company of Mr. Talbot, it seems! As a matter of fact, that is the young gentleman’s cabin over there, and I believe you were in it, talking to the steward, when we arrived?”
“The whole thing is most puzzling,” I said in my most intimate and confiding manner. “You think this brown-haired young man is no longer on the ship?”
“We’re fairly certain of it, sir, though of course it’s quite impossible to engage in an all-out search of a vessel such as this. The young man’s belongings were still in the cabin when we opened it. We did have to open it, of course, what with Mr. Talbot insisting he’d been assaulted by the young man, and that the young man was also traveling under an assumed name! We have his luggage in safekeeping, of course. Sir, if you would come with me to the captain’s office, I think perhaps you could shed some light upon—”
I quickly averred that I knew nothing about all this, really. I hadn’t been in the cabin at the time. Indeed, I’d gone ashore yesterday in Grenada without ever knowing that either man was boarding the vessel. And I had disembarked this morning in Barbados for a day of sightseeing without ever knowing this shooting incident had taken place.
But all this calm clever chatter on my part was a cover for the persuasion I continued to use on both of them—that they must leave me now, so that I might change clothes and have some rest.
When I shut the door on them, I knew they were on their way to the captain’s quarters, and that I had only minutes before they returned. It didn’t really matter. David was safe; he’d left the ship and gone on to Miami, where I was to meet him. That was all I wanted to know. Thank God he’d gotten an immediate flight out of Barbados. For God only knew where James might be at this time.
As for Mr. Jason Hamilton, whose passport I was carrying in my pocket, he still had a closet full of clothes in this suite and I intended to avail myself of some of them at once. I stripped off the rumpled dinner jacket, and other nighttime finery—vampire drag, par excellence!—and found a cotton shirt, decent linen jacket, and pants. Of course everything was exquisitely tailored for this body. Even the canvas shoes were a comfortable fit.
I took along the passport with me, and a sizable sum of American dollars which I had found in the old clothes.
Then I went back out on the veranda and stood still in the sweet caressing breeze, eyes moving dreamily over the deeply blue and luminous sea.
The Queen Elizabeth 2 was now thundering along at her famed twenty-eight knots, the bright translucent waves crashing into her mighty bow. The island of Barbados had completely disappeared from view. I looked up at the great black smokestack, which seemed in its immensity to be the very chimney of hell. It was a splendid sight to see the thick gray smoke gushing from it, and then arching back and down to the very water in the continuous blast of the wind.
I looked again at the distant horizon. All the world was filled with fine and beauteous azure light. Beyond a thin haze which mortals could not have detected I saw the tiny twinkling constellations, and the somber shining planets drifting ever so slowly by. I stretched my limbs, loving the feel of them, and the sweet ripples of sensation which moved down my shoulders and back. I shook myself all over, loving the feel of my hair on the back of my neck, and then I rested my arms upon the rail.
“I’ll catch up with you, James,” I whispered. “You can be certain of it. But I have other things I must do now. For the moment plot your little schemes in vain.”
Then I went upwards slowly—indeed as slowly as I could manage it—until I was very high over the vessel, and I gazed down at her, admiring her many decks stacked one atop the other, and trimmed in so many tiny yellow lights. How festive she looked, and how removed from all care. Bravely she advanced through the rolling sea, mute and powerful and carrying her whole little realm with her of dancing and dining and chattering beings, of busy security officers and rushing stewards, of hundreds upon hundreds of happy creatures who knew not at all that we had ever been there to trouble them with our little drama, or that we were gone as swiftly as we had come, leaving only the smallest bit of confusion in our wake. Peace to the happy Queen Elizabeth 2, I thought, and then again, I knew why the Body Thief had loved her, and hidden himself within her, sad and tawdry though she was.
After all, what is our entire world to the stars above? What do they think of our tiny planet, I wondered, full of mad juxtaposition, happenstance, and endless struggle, and the deep crazed civilizations sprawled upon the face of it, and held together not by will or faith or communal ambition but by some dreamy capacity of the world’s millions to be oblivious to life’s tragedies and again and again sink into happiness, just as the passengers of that little ship sank into it—as if happiness were as natural to all beings as hunger or sleepiness or love of warmth and fear of the cold.
I rose higher and higher until I could no longer see the ship at all. Clouds raced across the face of the world below me. And above, the stars burned through in all their cold majesty, and for once I didn’t hate them; no, I couldn’t hate them; I could hate nothing; I was too full of joy and dark bitter triumph. I was Lestat, drifting between hell and heaven, and content to be so—perhaps for the first time.
TWENTY-FOUR
The rain forest of South America—great deep tangle of woods and jungle that covers miles upon miles of the continent, blanketing mountain slopes and crowding into deep valleys, and breaking only for broad glittering rivers and shimmering lakes—soft and verdant and lush and seemingly harmless when seen through the drifting clouds from high above.
The darkness is impenetrable when one stands upon the soft, moist ground. The trees are so high there is no heaven above them. Indeed, creation is nothing but struggle and menace amid these deep moist shadows. It is the final triumph of the Savage Garden, and not all the scientists of civilization will ever classify
every species of painted butterfly or speckled cat or flesh-eating fish or giant coiling snake, which thrives in this place.
Birds with feathers the color of the summer sky or the burning sun streak through the wet branches. Monkeys scream as they reach out with their tiny clever little hands for vines as thick as hemp rope. Sleek and sinister mammals of a thousand shapes and sizes crawl in remorseless search of one another over monstrous roots and half-buried tubers, under giant rustling leaves and up the twisted trunks of saplings dying in the fetid darkness, even as they suck their last nourishment from the reeking soil.
Mindless and endlessly vigorous is the cycle of hunger and satiation, of violent and painful death. Reptiles with eyes as hard and shining as opals feast eternally upon the writhing universe of stiff and crackling insects as they have since the days when no warm-blooded creature ever walked the earth. And the insects—winged, fanged, pumped with deadly venom, and dazzling in their hideousness and ghastly beauty, and beyond all cunning—ultimately feast upon all.
There is no mercy in this forest. No mercy, no justice, no worshipful appreciation of its beauty, no soft cry of joy at the beauty of the falling rain. Even the sagacious little monkey is a moral idiot at heart.
That is—there was no such thing until the coming of man.
How many thousands of years ago that was, no one can tell you for certain. The jungle devours its bones. It quietly swallows up sacred manuscripts as it gnaws on the more stubborn stones of the temple. Textiles, woven baskets, painted pots, and even ornaments of hammered gold ultimately dissolve on its tongue.
But the small-bodied, dark-skinned peoples have been there for many centuries, that is beyond question, forming their friable little villages of palm-frond huts and smoky cooking fires, and hunting the abundant and lethal game with their crude spears and their deadly poison-tipped darts. In some places they make their orderly little farms as they have always done, to grow thick yams, or lush green avocados, red peppers, and corn. Lots of sweet, tender yellow corn. Little hens peck at the dust outside the small carefully constructed houses. Fat, glossy pigs snuffle and snuggle in their pens.
Are these humans the best thing in this Savage Garden, warring as they have done so long upon one another? Or are they simply an undifferentiated part of it, no more complex ultimately than the crawling centipede or the slinky satin-skinned jaguar or the silent big-eyed frog so very toxic that one touch of his spotted back brings certain death?
What have the many towers of great Caracas to do with this endless sprawling world that comes so close to it. Wence came this metropolis of South America, with its smog-filled skies and its vast teeming hillside slums? Beauty is beauty where you find it. At night, even these ranchitos as they call them—the thousands upon thousands of shacks that cover the steep slopes on either side of the roaring freeways—are beautiful, for though they have no water, and no sewerage, and they are crowded beyond all modern questions of health or comfort, they are nevertheless strung with bright, shining electric lights.
Sometimes it seems that light can transform anything! That it is an undeniable and irreducible metaphor for grace. But do the people of the ranchitos know this? Is it for beauty that they do it? Or do they merely want a comfortable illumination in their little shacks?
It doesn’t matter.
We can’t stop ourselves from making beauty. We can’t stop the world.
Look down upon the river that flows past the small outpost of St. Laurent, a ribbon of light glimpsed here and there for an instant from the treetops as it makes its way deeper and deeper into the forest, coming at last upon the little Mission of St. Margaret Mary—a gathering of dwellings in a clearing around which the jungle patiently waits. Isn’t it beautiful, this little cluster of tin-roofed buildings, with their whitewashed walls and crude crosses, with their small lighted windows, and the sound of a single radio playing a thin song of Indian lyrics and merrily beating drums?
How pretty the deep porches of the little bungalows, with their scattering of painted wooden swings and benches and chairs. The screens over the windows give the rooms a soft drowsy prettiness, for they make a tiny tight grid of fine lines over the many colors and shapes and thereby somehow sharpen them and render them more visible and vibrant, and make them look more deliberate—like the interiors in an Edward Hopper painting, or in a child’s bright picture book.
Of course there is a way to stop the rampant spread of beauty. It has to do with regimentation, conformity, assembly-line aesthetics, and the triumph of the functional over the haphazard.
But you won’t find much of that here!
This is Gretchen’s destiny, from which all the subtleties of the modern world have been eliminated—a laboratory for a single repetitive moral experiment—Doing Good.
The night sings its song of chaos and hunger and destruction in vain around this little encampment. What matters here is the care of a finite number of humans who have come for vaccination, surgery, antibiotics. As Gretchen herself has said—to think about the larger picture is a lie.
For hours, I wandered in a great circle through the dense jungle, carefree and strong as I moved through impassable foliage, as I climbed over the high fantastical roots of the rain trees, as I stood still here and there to listen to the deep tangled chorus of the savage night. So tender the wet waxen flowers growing in the higher more verdant branches, slumbering in the promise of the morning light.
Once again, I was beyond all fear at the wet, crumbling ugliness of process. The stench of decay in the pocket of swamp. The slithering things couldn’t harm me and therefore they did not disgust me. Oh, let the anaconda come for me, I would love to feel that tight, swiftly moving embrace. How I savored the deep, shrill cry of the birds, meant surely to strike terror in a simpler heart. Too bad the little hairy-armed monkeys slept now in the darkest hours, for I should have loved to catch them long enough to bestow kisses upon their frowning foreheads or their lipless chattering mouths.
And those poor mortals, slumbering within the many small houses of the clearing, near to their neatly tilled fields, and to the school, and the hospital, and the chapel, seemed a divine miracle of creation in every tiny common detail.
Hmmm. I missed Mojo. Why was he not here, prowling this jungle with me? I had to train him to become the vampire’s dog. Indeed, I had visions of him guarding my coffin during the daylight hours—an Egyptian-style sentinel, commanded to tear the throat out of any mortal intruder who ever found his way down the sanctuary stairs.
But I would see him soon enough. The whole world waited beyond these jungles. When I closed my eyes and made of my body a subtle receiver, I could hear over the miles the dense noisy traffic of Caracas, I could hear the sharp accents of her amplified voices, I could hear the thick pounding music of those dark air-conditioned dens where I draw the killers to me, like the moths to the bright candle, so that I might feed.
Here peace reigned as the hours ticked away in the soft purring tropic silence. A shimmer of rain fell from the low and cloudy sky, tamping down the dust of the clearing, speckling the clean-swept steps of the schoolhouse, tapping ever so lightly upon the corrugated tin roofs.
Lights winked off in the small dormitories, and in the outlying houses. Only a dull red illumination flickered deep inside the darkened chapel, with its low tower and big shiny silent bell. Small yellow bulbs in their rounded metal shades shone upon the clean paths and whitewashed walls.
Lights went dim in the first of the little hospital buildings, where Gretchen worked alone.
Now and then I saw her profile against the window screens. I caught a glimpse of her just inside the doorway, seated at a desk long enough to scratch some notes on paper, her head bent, her hair gathered at the nape of her neck.
Finally I moved silently towards the doorway, and slipped into the small, cluttered office, with its one glaring lamp, and to the door of the ward itself.
Children’s hospital! They were all small beds. Crude, simple, in two rows. Wa
s I seeing things in this deep semidarkness? Or were the beds made of crude wood, lashed at the joints, and hung with netting? And on the small colorless table, was that not a stub of candle on a small plate?
I felt dizzy suddenly; the great clarity of vision left me. Not this hospital! I blinked, trying to tear loose the timeless elements from those that made sense. Plastic sacks of intravenous food glistening on their chrome racks at bedside, weightless nylon tubing shining as it descended to the tiny needles stuck in thin fragile little arms!
This wasn’t New Orleans. This wasn’t that little hospital! Yet look at the walls! Are they not stone? I wiped the thin sheen of blood sweat from my forehead, staring at the stain on the handkerchief. Was that not a blond-haired child lying in that distant little bed? Again, the dizziness swept over me. I thought I heard a dim, high-pitched laughter, full of gaiety and easy mockery. But that was a bird surely in the great outer darkness. There was no old female nurse in homespun skirts to her ankles, and kerchief about her shoulders. She’d been gone for centuries, along with that little building.
But the child was moaning; the light gleamed on her small rounded head. I saw her chubby hand against the blanket. Again, I tried to clear my vision. A deep shadow fell over the floor beside me. Yes, look, the apnea alarm with its tiny glowing digits, and the glass-doored cabinets of medicines! Not that hospital, but this hospital.
So you’ve come for me, Father? You said you would do it again.
“No, I won’t hurt her! I don’t want to hurt her.” Was I whispering aloud?
Far, far down at the end of the narrow room, she sat on the small chair, her little feet kicking back and forth, her hair in fancy curls against her puff sleeves.
Oh, you’ve come for her. You know you have!
“Shhh, you’ll wake the children! Go away. You’re not there!”
Everyone knew you would be victorious. They knew you’d beat the Body Thief. And here you are … come for her.
