"You know where I was born, don't you?" he asked. "You know that block of St. Charles near Jackson?"
I nodded. "The boardinghouse," I said. "Don't tell me the story of your life. There's no reason. Besides, it's over. You had your chance to write it down when you were alive, just like anyone else. What do you expect me to do with it?"
"I want to tell you the things that count. Look at me! Look at me, please, try to understand me and love me and love Dora for me!
I'm begging you."
I didn't have to see his expression to understand this keen agony, this protective cry. Is there anything under God that can be done to us that will make us suffer as badly as seeing our child suffer? Our loved ones? Those closest to us? Dora, tiny Dora walking in the empty convent. Dora on a television screen, arms flung out, singing.
I must have gasped. I don't know. Shivered. Something. I couldn't clear iny head for a moment, but it was nothing supernatural, only misery, and the realization that he was there, palpable, visible, expecting something from me, that he had come across, that he had survived long enough in this ephemeral form to demand a promise of me.
"You do love me," he whispered. He looked serene and intrigued.
Way beyond flattery, way beyond me.
"Passion," I whispered. "It was your passion."
"Yes, I know. I'm flattered. I wasn't run down by a truck in the street, or shot by a hit man. You killed me! You, and you must be one of the best of them."
"Best of what?"
"Whatever you call yourself. You're not human. Yet you are. You sucked my blood out of my body, took it into your own. You're thriving on it now. Surely you're not the only one." He looked away. "Vampires," he said. "I saw ghosts when I was a boy in our house in New Orleans."
"Everybody in New Orleans sees ghosts."
He laughed in spite of himself, a very short, quiet laugh. "I know," he said, "but really I did and I have, and I've seen them in other places. But I never believed in God or the Devil or Angels or Vampires or Werewolves, or things like that, things that could affect fate, or change the course of some chaotic-seeming rhythm that governed the universe."
"You believe in God now?"
"No. I have the sneaking suspicion that I'll hold firm as long as I can in this form—like all the ghosts I've ever glimpsed—then I'll start to fade. I'll die out. Rather like a light. That's what's waiting for me. Oblivion, And it isn't personal. It just feels that way because my mind, what's left of it, what's clinging to the earth here, can't comprehend anything else. What do you think?"
"It terrifies me either way or any way." I was not going to tell him about the Stalker. I was not going to ask him about the statue. I knew now he had had nothing to do with the statue seeming animate. He had been dead, going up.
"Terrifies you?" he asked respectfully. "Well, it's not happening to you. You make it happen to others. Let me explain about Dora."
"She's beautiful. I'll... I'll try to look out for her."
"No, she needs something more from you. She needs a miracle."
"A miracle?"
"Look, you're alive, whatever you are, but you're not human. You can make a miracle, can't you? You could do this for Dora, it would be no problem for a creature of your abilities at all!"
"You mean some sort of fake religious miracle?"
"What else? She's never going to save the world without a miracle and she knows it. You could do it!"
"You're remaining earthbound and haunting me in this place to make a sleazy proposition like this!" I said. "You're unsalvageable.
You are dead. But you're still a racketeer and a criminal. Listen to yourself. You want me to fake some spectacle for Dora? You think Dora would want that?"
He was flabbergasted, clearly. Much too much so to be insulted.
He put the glass down and sat there, composed and calm, appearing to scan the bar. Looking dignified and about ten years younger than he had been when I killed him. I don't guess anyone wants to come back as a ghost except in beautiful form. It was only natural. And I felt a deepening of my inevitable and fatal fascination, this, my Victim. Monsieur, your blood is inside me!
He turned.
"You're right," he said in the most torn whisper. "You're absolutely right. I can't make some deal with you to fake miracles for her.
It's monstrous. She'd hate it."
"Now you're talking like the Grateful Dead," I said.
He gave another litde contemptuous laugh. Then with a low sombre emotion, he said, "Lestat, you have to take care of her ... for a while,"
When I didn't answer, he persisted gently:
"Just for a little while, until the reporters have stopped, and the horror of it is over; until her faith is restored, and she's whole and Dora after all, and back to her life. She has her life, yet, She can't be hurt because of me, Lestat, not because of me, it's not fair."
"Fair?"
"Call me by my name," he said. "Look at me."
I looked at him. It was exquisitely painful. He was miserable. I didn't know whether human beings could express this same intensity of misery. I actually didn't know.
"My name's Roger," he said. He seemed even younger now, as though he were traveling backwards in time, in his mind, or merely becoming innocent, as if the dead, if they are going to stick around, have a right to remember their innocence.
"I know your name," I said. "I know everything about you, Roger. Roger, the Ghost. And you never let Old Captain touch you; you just let him adore you, and educate you, and take you places, and buy you beautiful things, and you never even had the decency to go to bed with him."
I said those things, about the images I'd drunk with his blood, but without malice. I was just talking in wonder of how bad we all are, the lies we tell.
He said nothing for the moment.
I was overwhelmed. It was grief veritably blinding me, and bitterness and a deep ugly horror for what I had done to him, and to others, and that I had ever harmed any living creature. Horror.
What was Dora's message? How were we to be saved? Was it the same old canticle of adoration?
He watched me. He was young, committed, a magnificent semblance of life. Roger.
"All right," he said, the voice soft and patient, "I didn't sleep with Old Captain, you're right, but he never really wanted that of me, you see, it wasn't like that, he was far too old. You don't know what it was really like. You might know the guilt I feel. But you don't know later how much I regretted not having done it. Not having known that with Old Captain. And that's not what made me go wrong. It wasn't that. It wasn't the big deception or heist that you imagine it to be. I loved the things he showed me. He loved me. He lived two, three more years, probably because of me. Wynken de Wilde, we loved Wynken de Wilde together. It should have turned out different. I was with Old Captain when he died, you know. I never left the room. I'm faithful that way when I am needed by those I loved."
"Yeah, you were with your wife, Terry, too, weren't you?" It was cruel of me to say this, but I'd spoken without thinking, seeing her face again as he shot her. "Scratch that, if you will," I said. "I'm sorry. Who in the name of God is Wynken de Wilde?"
I felt so utterly miserable. "Dear God, you're haunting me," I said. "And I'm a coward in my soul! A coward. Why did you say that strange name? I don't want to know. No, don't tell me—This is enough for me. I'm leaving. You can haunt this bar till doomsday if you want. Get some righteous individual to talk to you."
"Listen to me," he said. "You love me. You picked me. All I want to do is fill in the details."
"I'll take care of Dora, somehow or other, I'll figure some way to help her, I'll do something. And I'll take care of all the relics, I'll get them out of there and into a safe place and hold on to them for Dora, until she feels she can accept them."
"Yes!"
"Okay, let me go."
"I'm not holding you," he said.