The Tale of the Body Thief tvc-4

by Anne Rice

  I heard all this, I understood it, but I couldn't absorb it. "Think of it, David," I said, knowing that I sounded mad and only barely coherent. "David, I could be a mortal man."

  "Would you kindly wake up and pay attention to me, please! This is not a matter of comical stories and Lovecraftian pieces of gothic romance." He wiped his mouth with his napkin, and crossly slugged down a swallow of wine, and then reached across the table and took hold of my wrist.

  I should have let him lift it and clasp it. But I didn't yield and he realized within a second that he could no more move my wrist away from the table than he could move that of a statue made of granite.

  "That's it, right there!" he declared. "You can't play with this. You can't take the risk that it will work, and this fiend, whoever he is, will have possession of your strength."

  I shook my head. "I know what you're saying, but, David, think of it. I have to talk to him! I have to find him and find out whether this can be done. He himself is unimportant. It's the process that's important. Can it be done?"

  "Lestat, I'm begging you. Don't explore this any further. You're going to make another ghastly mistake!"

  "What do you mean?" It was so hard to pay attention to what he was saying. Where was that wily fiend right now? I thought of his eyes, how beautiful they would be if he were not looking out of them. Yes, it was a fine body for this experiment! Wherever did he get it? I had to find out.

  "David, I'm going to leave you now."

  "No, you're not! Stay right where you are, or so help me God I'll send a legion of hobgoblins after you, every filthy little spirit I trafficked with in Rio de Janeiro! Now listen to me."

  I laughed. "Keep your voice down," I said. "We'll be thrown out of the Ritz."

  "Very well, we'll strike a bargain. I'll go back to London and hit the computer. I'll boot up every case of body switching in our files. Who knows what we'll discover? Lestat, maybe he's in that body and it's deteriorating around him, and he can't get out or stop the deterioration. Did you think of that?"

  I shook my head. "It's not deteriorating. I would have caught the scent. There's nothing wrong with that body."

  "Except maybe he stole it from its rightful owner and that poor soul is stumbling around in his body, and what that looks like, we haven't a clue."

  "Cairn down, David, please. You go on back to London, and hit the files, as you described. I'm going to find this little bastard. I'm going to hear what he has to say. Don't worry! I won't proceed without consulting you. And if I do decide-"

  "You won't decide! Not until you talk to me." "All right."

  "This is a pledge?"

  "On my honor as a bloodthirsty murderer, yes."

  "I want a phone number in New Orleans."

  I stared at him hard for a moment. "Ail right. I've never done this before. But here it is." I gave him the phone number of my French Quarter rooftop rooms. "Aren't you going to write it down?"

  "I've memorized it."

  "Then farewell!"

  I rose from the table, struggling, in my excitement, to move like a human. Ah, move like a human. Think of it, to be inside a human body. To see the sun, really see it, a tiny blazing ball in a blue sky! "Oh, and, David, I almost forgot, everything's covered here. Call my man. He'll arrange for your flight . . ."

  "I don't care about that, Lestat. Listen to me. Set an appointment to speak with me about this, right now! You dare vanish on me, I'll never-"

  I stood there smiling down at him. I could tell I was charming him. Of course he wouldn't threaten never to speak to me again. How absurd. "Ghastly mistakes," I said, unable to stop smiling. "Yes, I do make them, don't I?"

  "What will they do to you-the others? Your precious Marius, the older ones, if you do such a thing?"

  "They might surprise you, David. Maybe all they want is to be human again. Maybe that's all any of us want. Another chance." I thought of Louis in his house hi New Orleans.

  Dear God, what would Louis think when I told him about all this?

  David muttered something under his breath, angry and impatient, yet his face was full of affection and concern.

  I blew him a little kiss and was gone.

  Scarcely an hour had passed before I realized I couldn't find the wily fiend. If he was in Paris, he was cloaked so that I couldn't pick up the faintest shimmer of his presence. And nowhere did I catch an image of him in anyone else's mind.

  This didn't mean he wasn't in Paris. Telepathy is extremely hit or miss; and Paris was a vast city, teeming with citizens of all the countries of the world.

  At last I came back to the hotel, discovered David had already checked out, leaving all his various phone numbers with me for fax, computer, and regular calls.

  "Please contact me tomorrow evening," he'd written. "I shall have some information for you by then."

  I went upstairs to prepare for the journey home. I couldn't wait to see this lunatic mortal again. And Louis- I had to lay it all before Louis. Of course he wouldn't believe it was possible, that would be the first thing he'd say. But he would understand the lure. Oh, yes, he would.

  I hadn't been in the room a minute, trying to determine if there was anything here I needed to take with me-ah, yes, David's manuscripts-when I saw a plain envelope lying on the table beside the bed. It was propped against a great vase of flowers. "Count van Kindergarten" was written on it in a firm, rather masculine script.

  I knew the minute I saw it that it was a note from him. The message inside was handwritten, in the same firm, heavily engraved style.

  Don't be hasty. And don't listen to your fool friend from the Talamasca either. I shall see you in New Orleans tomorrow night. Don't disappoint me. Jackson Square. We shall then make an appointment to work a little alchemy of our own. I think you understand now what's at stake.

  Yours sincerely, Raglan James

  "Raglan James." I whispered the name aloud. Raglan James. I didn't like the name. The name was like him.

  I dialed the concierge.

  "This fax system which has just been invented," I said in French, "you have it here? Explain it to me, please."

  It was as I suspected, a complete facsimile of this little note could be sent from the hotel office over a telephone wire to David's London machine. Then David would not only have this information, he would have the handwriting, for what it was worth.

  I arranged to have this done, picked up the manuscripts, stopped by the desk with the note of Raglan James, had it faxed, took it back, and then went to Notre Dame to say good-bye to Paris with a little prayer.

  I was mad. Absolutely mad. When had I ever known such pure happiness! I stood in the dark cathedral, which was now locked on account of the hour, and I thought of the first time I'd ever stepped into it so many, many decades ago. There had been no great square before the church doors, only the little Place de Greve hemmed in with crooked buildings; and there had been no great boulevards in Paris such as there are now, only broad mud streets, which we thought so very grand.

  I thought of all those blue skies, and what it had felt like to be hungry, truly hungry for bread and for meat, and to be drunk on good wine. I thought of Nicolas, my mortal friend, whom I'd loved so much, and how cold it had been in our little attic room. Nicki and I arguing the way that David and I had argued! Oh, yes, It seemed my great long existence had been a nightmare since those days, a sweeping nightmare full of giants and monsters and horrid ghastly masks covering the faces of beings who menaced me in the eternal dark. I was trembling. I was weeping. To be human, I thought. To be human again. I think I said the words aloud.

  Then a sudden whispered laugh startled me. It was a child somewhere in the darkness, a little girl.

  I turned around. I was almost certain I could see her-a small gray form darting up the far aisle towards a side altar, and then out of sight. Her footsteps had been barely aiidible.

  But surely this was some mistake. No scent. No real presence. Just illusion.

  Nevertheless I cried ou
t: "Claudia!"

  And my voice came tumbling back to me in a harsh echo. No one there, of course.

  I thought of David: "You're going to make another ghastly mistake!"

  Yes, I have made ghastly mistakes. How can I deny it? Terrible, terrible errors. The atmosphere of my recent dreams came back to me, but it wouldn't deepen, and there remained only an evanescent sense of being with her. Something about an oil lamp and her laughing at me.

  I thought again of her execution-the brick-walled air well, the approaching sun, how small she had been; and then the remembered pain of the Gobi Desert mingled with it and I couldn't bear it any longer. I realized I had folded my arms around my chest, and was trembling, my body rigid, as though being tormented with an electric shock. Ah, but surely she hadn't suffered. Surely it had been instantaneous for one so tender and little. Ashes to ashes . . .

  This was pure anguish. It wasn't those times I wanted to remember, no matter how long I'd lingered in the Cafe de la Paix earlier, or how strong I imagined I had become. It was my Paris, before the Theatre of the Vampires, when I'd been innocent and alive.

  I stayed a while longer in the dark, merely looking at the great branching arches above me. What a marvelous and majestic church this was-even now with the pop and rattle of motorcars beyond. It was like a forest made of stone.

  I blew a kiss to it, as I had to David. And I went off to undertake the long journey home.

  SEVEN

  NEW ORLEANS. I arrived quite early in the evening for I had gone backwards in time against the turning of the world. It was cold and crisp, but not cruelly so, though a bad norther was on its way. The sky was without a cloud and full of small and very distinct stars. I went at once to my little rooftop apartment in the French Quarter, which for all its glamour is not very high at all, being on the top of a four-storey building, erected long before the Civil War, and having a rather intimate view of the river and its beautiful twin bridges, and which catches, when the windows are open, the noises of the happily crowded Cafe du Monde and of the busy shops and streets around Jackson Square.

  It was not until tomorrow night that Mr. Raglan James meant to meet me. And impatient as I was for this meeting, I found the schedule comfortable, as I wanted to find Louis right away.

  But first I indulged in the mortal comfort of a hot shower, and put on a fresh suit of black velvet, very trim and plain, rather like the clothes I'd worn in Miami, and a pair of new black boots. And ignoring my general weariness-I would have been asleep in the earth by now, had I been still in Europe-I went off, walking like a mortal, through the town.

  For reasons of which I wasn't too certain, I took a turn past the old address in the Rue Royale where Claudia and Louis and I had once lived. Actually I did this rather often, never allowing myself to think about it, until I was halfway there.

  Our coven had endured for over fifty years in that lovely upstairs apartment. And surely this factor ought to be considered when I'm being condemned, either by myself or by someone else, for my errors. Louis and Claudia had both been made by me, and for me, I admit that. Nevertheless, ours had been a curiously incandescent and satisfying existence before Claudia decided I should pay for my creations with my life.

  The rooms themselves had been crammed with every conceivable ornament and luxury which the times could provide. We'd kept a carriage, and a team of horses at the nearby stables, and servants had lived beyond the courtyard in back. But the old brick buildings were now somewhat faded, and neglected, the flat unoccupied of late, except for ghosts, perhaps, who knows, and the shop below was rented to a bookseller who never bothered to dust the volumes in the window, or those on his shelves. Now and then he procured books for me-volumes on the nature of evil by the historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, or the marvelous philosophical works of Mir-cea Eiiade, as well as vintage copies of the novels I loved.

  The old man was in there reading, in fact, and I watched him for a few minutes through the glass. How different were the citizens of New Orleans from all the rest of the American world. Profit meant nothing to this old gray-haired being at all.

  I stood back and looked up at the cast-iron railings above. I thought of those disturbing dreams-the oil lamp, her voice. Why was she haunting me so much more relentlessly than ever before?

  When I closed my eyes, I could hear her again, talking to me, but the substance of her words was gone. I found myself thinking back once more on her life and her death.

  Gone now without a trace was the little hovel in which I'd first seen her in Louis's arms.

  A plague house it had been. Only a vampire would have entered. No thief had dared even to steal the gold chain from her dead mother's throat. And how ashamed Louis had been that he had chosen a tiny child as his victim. But I had understood. No trace remained, either, of the old hospital where they'd taken her afterwards. What narrow mud street had I passed through with that warm mortal bundle in my arms, and Louis rushing after me, begging to know what I meant to do.

  A gust of cold wind startled me suddenly.

  I could hear the dull raucous music from the taverns of the Rue Bourbon only a block away; and people walking before the cathedral-laughter from a woman nearby. A car horn blasting in the dark. The tiny electronic throb of a modern phone.

  Inside the bookstore, the old man played the radio, twisting the dial from Dixieland to classical and finally to a mournful voice singing poetry to the music of an English composer . . .

  Why had I come to this old building, which stood forlorn and indifferent as a tombstone with all its dates and letters worn away?

  I wanted no more delay, finally.

  I'd been playing with my own mad excitement at what had only just happened in Paris, and I headed uptown to find Louis and lay it all before him.

  Again, I chose to walk. I chose to feel the earth, to measure it with my feet.

  In our time-at the end of the eighteenth century-the uptown of the city didn't really exist. It was country upriver; there were plantations still, and the roads were narrow and hard to travel, being paved only with dredged shells.

  Later in the nineteenth century, after our little coven had been destroyed, and I was wounded and broken, and gone to Paris to search for Claudia and Louis, the uptown with all its small towns was merged with the great city, and many fine wooden houses in the Victorian style were built.

  Some of these ornate wooden structures are vast, every bit as grand in their own cluttered fashion as the great antebellum Greek Revival houses of the Garden District, which always put me in mind of temples, or the imposing town houses of the French Quarter itself.

  But much of uptown with its small clapboard cottages, as well as big houses, still retains for me the aspect of the country, what with the enormous oaks and magnolias sprouting up everywhere to tower over the little roofs, and so many streets without sidewalks, along which the gutters are no more than ditches, full of wildflowers flourishing in spite of the winter cold.

  Even the little commercial streets-a sudden stretch here and there of attached buildings- remind one not of the French Quarter with its stone facades and old-world sophistication, but rather of the quaint "main streets" of rural American towns.

  This is a great place for walking in the evening; you can hear the birds sing as you will never hear them in the Vieux Carre; and the twilight lasts forever over the roofs of the warehouses along the ever-curving river, shining through the great heavy branches of the trees. One can happen upon splendid mansions with rambling galleries and gingerbread decoration, houses with turrets and gables, and widow's walks. There are big wooden porch swings hanging behind freshly painted wooden railings. There are white picket fences. Broad avenues of clean well-clipped lawns.

  The little cottages display an endless variation; some are neatly painted in deep brilliant colors according to the current fashion; others, more derelict but no less beautiful, have the lovely gray tone of driftwood, a condition into which a house can fall easily in this tropical place.
r />   Here and there one finds a stretch of street so overgrown one can scarce believe one is still within a city. Wild four-o'clocks and blue plumbago obscure the fences that mark property; the limbs of the oak bend so low they force the passerby to bow his head. Even in its coldest winters, New Orleans is always green.

  The frost can't kill the camellias, though it does sometimes bruise them. The wild yellow Carolina jasmine and the purple bougainvillea cover fences and walls.

  It is in one such stretch of soft leafy darkness, beyond a great row of huge magnolia trees, that Louis made his secret home.

  The old Victorian mansion behind the rusted gates was unoccupied, its yellow paint almost all peeled away. Only now and then did Louis roam through it, a candle in his hand. It was a cottage in back-covered with a great shapeless mountain of tangled pink Queen's Wreath-which was his true dwelling, full of his books and miscellaneous objects he'd collected over the years. Its windows were quite hidden from the street. In fact, it's doubtful anyone knew this house existed. The neighbors could not see it for the high brick walls, the dense old trees, and oleander growing wild around it. And there was no real path through the high grass.

  When I came upon him, all the windows and doors were open to the few simple rooms. He was at his desk, reading by the light of a single candle flame.

  For a long moment, I spied upon him. I loved to do this. Often I followed him when he went hunting, simply to watch him feed. The modern world doesn't mean, anything to Louis. He walks the streets like a phantom, soundlessly, drawn slowly to those who welcome death, or seem to welcome it. (I'm not sure people really ever welcome death.) And when he feeds, it is painless and delicate and swift. He must take life when he feeds. He does not know how to spare the victim. He was never strong enough for the "little drink" which carries me through so many nights; or did before I became the ravenous god.