by Anne Rice
I sat up and pulled up my knees. I rose to my feet, with only a quick handhold on the side of the bed to steady myself. I stood naked looking at her.
Her eyes were filled with a deep rich gray light, and she smiled as she looked at me.
"Oh, magnificent," she whispered.
"Magnificent?" I said. I lifted my hands and pushed my hair back off my face. "Show me to the glass. Hurry. I'm thirsting. I'm thirsting again already."
It had begun, this was no lie. In a stupor of shock I stared into the mirror. I had seen such ruined specimens as this before, but each of us is ruined in our own way, and I, for alchemical reasons I couldn't proclaim, was a dark brown creature, the very perfect color of chocolate, with remarkably white opal eyes set with reddish-brown pupils. The nipples of my chest were black as raisins. My cheeks were painfully gaunt, my ribs perfectly defined beneath my shiny skin, and the veins, the veins that were so full of sizzling action, stood like ropes along my arms and the calves of my legs. My hair, of course, had never seemed so lustrous, so full, so much a thing of youth and natural beneficence.
I opened my mouth. I ached with thirst. All the awakened flesh sang with thirst or cursed me with it. It was as if a thousand crushed and muted cells were now chanting for blood.
"I have to have more. I have to. Stay away from me." I hurried past Benji, who all but danced at my side.
"What do you want, what can I do? I'll get another one."
"No, I'll get him for myself." I fell on the victim and slipped loose his silk tie. I quickly undid the buttons of his shirt.
Benji fell at once to unbuckling his belt. Sybelle, on her knees, tugged at his boots.
"The gun, beware of the gun," I said in alarm. "Sybelle, back away from him."
"I see the gun," she said reprovingly. She laid it aside carefully, as if it were a freshly caught fish and might flop from her hands. She peeled off his socks. "Armand, these clothes," she said, "they're too big."
"Benji, you have shoes?" I asked. "My feet are small."
I stood up and hastily put on the shirt, fastening the buttons with a speed that dazzled them.
"Don't watch me, get the shoes," I said. I pulled on the trousers, zipped them up, and with Sybelle's quick fingers to help, buckled the flapping leather belt. I pulled it as tight as I could. This would do.
She crouched before me, her dress a huge flowered circle of prettiness around her, as she rolled the pant legs over my brown bare feet.
I had slipped my hands through his fancy linked shirt cuffs without ever disturbing them.
Benji threw down the black dress shoes, fine Bally pumps, never even worn by him, divine little wretch. Sybelle held one sock for my foot. Benji gathered up the other.
When I put on the coat it was done. The sweet tingling in my veins had stopped. It was pain again, it was beginning to roar, as if I were threaded with fire, and the witch with the needle pulled on the thread, hard, to make me quiver.
"A towel, my dears, something old, common. No, don't, not in this day and age, don't think of it."
Full of loathing I gazed down at his livid flesh. He lay staring dully at the ceiling, the soft tiny hair in his nostrils very black against his drained and awful skin, his teeth yellow above his colorless lip.
The hair on his chest was a matted swarm in the sweat of his death, and against the giant gaping slit lay the pulp that had been his heart, ah, this was the evil evidence which must be shut from the eyes of the world on general principles.
I reached down and slipped the ruins of his heart back into the cavity of his chest. I spit upon the wound and rubbed it with my fingers.
Benji gasped. "Look at it heal, Sybelle," he cried.
"Just barely," I said. "He's too cold, too empty." I looked about. There lay the man's wallet, papers, a bag in leather, lots of green bills in a fancy silver clip. I gathered all this up. I stuffed the folded money in one pocket, and all else in the other. What else did he have? Cigarette, a deadly switchblade knife, and the guns, ah, yes, the guns.
Into my coat pockets I put these items.
Swallowing my nausea, I reached down and scooped him up, horrid flaccid white man in his pitiable silk shorts and fancy gold wristwatch. My old strength was indeed coming back. He was heavy, but I could easily heave him over my shoulder.
"What will you do, where will you go?" Sybelle cried. "Armand, you can't leave us."
"You'll come back!" said Benji. "Here, gimme that watch, don't throw away that man's watch."
"Sshhh, Benji," Sybelle whispered. "You know damned good and well I've bought you the finest watches. Don't touch him. Armand, what can we do now to help you?" She drew close to me. "Look!" she said pointing to the dangling arm of the corpse which hung just below my right elbow. "He has manicured nails. How amazing."
"Oh, yeah, he always took very good care of himself," said Benji.
"You know the watch is worth five thousand dollars."
"Hush up about the watch," she said. "We don't want his things." She looked at me again. "Armand, even now you're still changing. Your face, it's getting fuller."
"Yes, and it hurts," I said. "Wait for me. Prepare a dark room for me. I'll come back as soon as I've fed. I have to feed now, feed and feed to heal the scars that are left. Open the door for me."
"Let me see if there's anyone out there," said Benji with a quick dutiful rush to the door.
I went out into the hallway, easily carrying the poor corpse, its white arms hanging down, swinging and banging against me just a little.
What a sight I was in these big clothes. I must have looked like a mad poetical schoolboy who had raided the thrift stores for the finest threads and was off now in fancy new shoes to search out the rock bands.
"There isn't anyone out here, my little friend," I said. "It's three of the clock and the hotel's asleep. And if reason serves me right, that's the door of the fire stairs there, at the very end of the hall, correct? There isn't anyone in the fire stairs either."
"Oh, clever Armand, you delight me!" he said. He narrowed his little black eyes. He jumped up and down soundlessly on the hallway carpet. "Give me the watch!" he whispered.
"No," I said. "She's right. She's rich, and so am I, and so are you.
Don't be a beggar."
"Armand, we'll wait for you," said Sybelle in the doorframe. "Benji, come inside immediately."
"Oh, listen to her now, how she wakes up! How she talks! 'Benji, come inside,' she says. Hey, sweetheart, don't you have something to do just now, like perhaps play the piano?"
She gave a tiny burst of laughter in spite of herself. I smiled. What a strange pair they were. They did not believe their own eyes. But that was typical enough in this century. I wondered when they would start to see, and having seen, start screaming.
"Goodbye, sweet loves," I said. "Be ready for me."
"Armand, you will come back." Her eyes were fall of tears. "You promise me."
I was stunned. "Sybelle," I said. "What is it that women want so often to hear and wait so long to hear it? I love you."
I left them, racing down the stairs, hefting him to the other shoulder when the weight on the one side became too hurtful. The pain passed over me in waves. The shock of the outside cold air was scalding.
"Feed," I whispered. And what was I to do with him? He was far too naked to carry down Fifth Avenue.
I slipped off his watch because it was the only identification on him left, and almost vomiting with revulsion from my closeness to these fetid remains, I dragged him by one hand after me very fast through the back alley, and then across a small street, and down another sidewalk.
I ran into the face of the icy wind, not stopping to observe those few hulking shapes that hobbled by in the wet darkness, or to take stock of the one car that crept along on the shining wet asphalt.
Within seconds I had covered two blocks, and finding a likely alleyway, with a high gate to keep out the beggars of the night, I quickly mounted the bars and flung his carca
ss to the very far end of it. Down into the melting snow he fell. I was rid of him.
Now I had to have blood. There was no time for the old game, the game of drawing out those who wanted to die, those who truly craved my embrace, those in love already with the far country of death of which they knew nothing.
I had to shuffle and stumble along, the mark, in my floppy silk jacket and rolled pants, long hair veiling my face, poor dazzled kid, perfect for your knife, your gun, your fist.
It didn't take long.
The first was a drunken, sauntering wretch who plied me with questions before he revealed the flashing blade and went to sink it into me. I pushed him up against the side of the building, and fed like a glutton.
The next was a common desperate youth, fall of festering sores, who had killed twice before for the heroin he needed as badly as I needed the doomed blood inside him.
I drank more slowly.
The thickest worst scars of my body yielded with much defense, itching, throbbing and only slowly melting away. But the thirst, the thirst would not stop. My bowels churned as if devouring themselves. My eyes pulsed with pain.
But the cold wet city, so full of rankling hollow noise, grew ever brighter before me. I could hear voices many blocks away, and small electronic speakers in high buildings. I could see beyond the breaking clouds the true and numberless stars.
I was almost myself again.
So who will come to me now, I thought, in this barren desolate hour before dawn, when the snow is melting in the warmer air, and neon lights have all died out, and the wet newspaper blows like leaves through a stripped and frozen forest?
I took all the precious articles which had belonged to my first victim, and dropped them here and there into deep hollow public trash cans.
One last killer, yes, please, fate, do give me this, while there's time, and indeed he came, blasted fool, out of a car as behind him the driver waited, the motor idling.
"What's taking you so damn long?" said the driver at last.
"Nothing," I said, dropping his friend. I leaned in to look at him.
He was as vicious and stupid as his companion. He threw up his hand, but helplessly and too late. I pushed him over on the leather seat and drank now for rank pleasure, pure sweet crazed pleasure.
I walked slowly through the night, my arms out, my eyes directed Heavenward.
From the scattered black grates of the gleaming street there gushed the pure white steam of heated places below. Trash in shiny plastic sacks made a fantastical modern and glittering display on the curbs of the slate-gray sidewalks.
Tiny tender trees, with little year-round leaves like short pen strokes of bright green in the night, bent their stemlike trunks with the whining wind. Everywhere the high clean glass doors of granite-faced buildings contained the radiant splendor of rich lobbies. Shop windows displayed their sparkling diamonds, lustrous furs and smartly cut coats and gowns on grandly coiffed and faceless pewter mannequins.
The Cathedral was a lightless, soundless place of frost-rimmed turrets and ancient pointed arches, the pavement clean where I had stood on the morning when the sun caught me.
Lingering there, I closed my eyes, trying perhaps to recall the wonder and the zeal, the courage and the glorious expectation.
There came instead, clear and shining through the dark air, the pristine notes of the Appassionata. Roiling, rumbling, racing on, the crashing music came to call me home. I followed it.
The clock in the hotel foyer was striking six. The winter dark would break up in moments like the very ice that had once imprisoned me. The long polished desk was deserted in the muted lights.
In a wall mirror of dim glass framed in rococo gold, I saw myself, paled and waxen, and unblemished. Oh, what fun the sun and ice had had with me in turns, the fury of the one quick-frozen by the merciless grip of the other. Not a scar remained of where the skin had burnt to muscle. A sealed and solid thing with seamless agony within, I was, all of a piece, restored, with sparkling clear white fingernails, and curling lashes round my clear brown eyes, and clothes a wretched heap of stained, misfitted finery on the old familiar rugged cherub.
Never before had I been thankful to see my own too youthful face, too hairless chin, too soft and delicate hands. But I could have thanked the gods of old for wings at this moment.
Above, the music carried on, so grand, so legible of tragedy and lust and dauntless spirit. I loved it so. Who in the whole wide world could ever play that same Sonata as she did, each phrase as fresh as songs sung all their livelong life by birds who know but one such set of patterns.
I looked about. It was a fine, expensive place, of old wainscoting and a few deep chairs, and door keys ranged up a wall in tiny dark- stained wooden boxes.
A great vase of flowers, the infallible trademark of the vintage New York hotel, stood boldly and magnificently in the middle of the space, atop a round black marble table. I skirted the bouquet, snapping off one big pink lily with a deep red throat and petals curling to yellow at the outside, and then I went silently up the fire stairs to find my children.
She did not stop her playing when Benji let me in.
"You're looking really good, Angel," he said.
On and on she went, her head moving unaffectedly and perfectly with the rhythm of the Sonata.
He led me through a chain of finely decorated plastered chambers.
Mine was too sumptuous by far, I whispered, seeing the tapestry spread and pillows of old gracious threadbare gold. I needed only perfect darkness.
"But this is the least we have," he said with a little shrug.
He had changed to a fresh white linen robe lined with a fine blue stripe, a kind I'd often seen in Arab lands. He wore white socks with his brown sandals. He puffed his little Turkish cigarette, and squinted up at me through the smoke.
"You brought me back the watch, didn't you!" He nodded his head, all sarcasm and amusement.
"No," I said. I reached into my pocket. "But you may have the money. Tell me, since your little mind is such a locket and I have no key, did anyone see you bring that badge-carrying, gun-toting villain up here?"
"I see him all the time," he said with a little weary wave of his hand.
"We left the bar separately. I killed two birds with one stone. I'm very smart."
"How so?" I asked. I put the lily in his little hand.
"Sybelle's brother bought from him. That cop was the only guy ever missed him." He gave a little laugh. He tucked the lily in the thick curls above his left ear, then pulled it down and twirled its tiny cibo- rium in his fingers. "Clever, no? Now nobody asks where he is."
"Oh, indeed, two birds with one stone, you're quite right," I said. "Though I'm sure there's a great deal more to it."
"But you'll help us now, won't you?"
"I will indeed. I'm very rich, I told you. I'll patch things up. I have an instinct for it. I owned a great playhouse in a faraway city, and after that an island of fancy shops, and other such things. I am a monster in many realms, it seems. You'll never, ever have to fear again."
"You're truly beauty fall, you know," he said raising one eyebrow and then giving me a quick wink. He drew on his tasty-looking little cigarette and then offered it to me. His left hand kept the lily safe.
"Can't. Only drink blood," I said. "A regular vampire out of the book in the main. Need deep darkness in the light of day, which is coming very soon. You mustn't touch this door."
"Ha!" he laughed with impish delight. "That's what I told her!" He rolled his eyes and glanced in the direction of the living room. "I said we had to steal a coffin for you right away, but she said, no, you'd think of that."
"How right she was. The room will do, but I like coffins well enough.
I really do."
"And can you make us vampires too?"
"Oh, never. Absolutely not. You're pure of heart and too alive, and I don't have such a power. It's never done. It can't be."
Again, he shrugged. "Then who made
you?" he asked.
"I was born out of a black egg," I said. "We all are."
He gave a scoffing laugh.
"Well, you've seen all the rest," I said. "Why not believe the best part of it?"
He only smiled and puffed his smoke, and looked at me most knavishly.
The piano sang on in crashing cascades, the rapid notes melting as fast as they were born, so like the last thin snowflakes of the winter, vanishing before they strike the pavements.
"May I kiss her before I go to sleep?" I asked.
He cocked his head, and shrugged. "If she doesn't like it, she'll never stop playing long enough to say so."
I went back into the parlor. How clear it all was, the grand design of sumptuous French landscapes with their golden clouds and cobalt skies, the Chinese vases on their stands, the massed velvet tumbling from the high bronze rods of the narrow old windows. I saw it all of a piece, including the bed where I had lain, now heaped with fresh down- filled coverlets and pillowed with embroidered antique faces.
And she, the center diamond of it all, in long white flannel, flounced at wrists and hem with rich old Irish lace, playing her long lacquered grand with agile unerring fingers, her hair a broad smooth yellow glow about her shoulders.
I kissed her scented locks, and then her tender throat, and caught her girlish smile and gleaming glance as she played on, her head tilting back to brush my coat front.
Down around her neck, I slipped my arms. She leant her gentle weight against me. With crossed arms, I clasped her waist. I felt her shoulders moving against my snug embrace with her darting fingers.
I dared in whisper-soft tones with sealed lips to hum the song, and she hummed with me.
"Appassionato,," I whispered in her ear. I was crying. I didn't want to touch her with blood. She was too clean, too pretty. I turned my head.
She pitched forward. Her hands pounded into the stormy finish.
