I could tell you other things. What you must understand is I want to learn from you. You walked into Notre Dame Cathedral and God didn't strike you dead."
"I'll tell you something that Ifound amusing," I said. "This was two hundred years ago. Paris before the Revolution. There were vampires living in Paris then, in Les Innocents, the big cemetery, it's long gone, but they lived there in the catacombs beneath the tombs, and they were afraid to go into Notre Dame. When they saw me do it, they, too, thought God would strike me dead."
She was looking at me rather placidly.
"I destroyed their faith for them," I said. "Their belief in God and the Devil. And they were vampires. They were earthbound creatures like me, half demon, half human, stupid, blundering, and they believed that God would strike them dead."
"And before you, they had really had a faith?"
"Yes, an entire religion, they really did," I said. "They thought themselves servants of the Devil. They thought it was a distinction.
They lived as vampires, but their existence was miserable and deliberately penitential. I was, you might say, a prince. I came swaggering through Paris in a red cloak lined with wolf fur. But that was my human life, the cloak. Does that impress you, that vampires would be believers? I changed it all for them. I don't think they've ever forgiven me, that is, those few who survive. There are not, by the way, very many of us."
"Stop a minute," she said. "I want to listen to you, but I must ask you something first."
"Yes?"
"My father, how did it happen, was it quick and...”
"Absolutely painless, I assure you," I said, turning to her, looking at her. "He told me himself. No pain."
She was owl-like with such a white face and big dark eyes, and she was actually slightly scary herself. I mean, she might have scared another mortal in this place, the way she looked, the strength of it.
"It was in a swoon that your father died," I said. "Ecstatic perhaps, and filled with various images, and then a loss of consciousness. His spirit had left his body before the heart ceased to beat. Any physical pain I inflicted he never felt; once the blood is being sucked, once I've ... no, he didn't suffer."
I turned and looked at her more directly. She'd curled her legs under her, revealing white knees beneath her hem.
"I talked with Roger for two hours afterwards," I said. "Two hours. He came back for one reason, to make certain I'd look out for you. That his enemies didn't get you, and the government didn't get you, and all these people he's connected with, or was. And that, and that his death didn't... hurt you more than it had to."
"Why would God do this?" she whispered.
"What has God got to do with it? Listen, darling, I don't know anything about God. I told you. I walked into Notre Dame and nothing happened, and nothing ever has...."
Now, that was a lie, wasn't it? What about Him? Coming here in the guise of the Ordinary Man, letting that door slam, arrogant bastard, how dare he?
"How can this be God's plan?" she asked.
"You're perfectly serious, aren't you? Look, I could tell you many stories. I mean, the one about the Paris vampires believing in the Devil is just the beginning! Look, there . . . there. ..." I broke off.
"What is it?"
That sound. Those slow, measured steps! No sooner had I thought of him, insultingly and angrily, than the steps had begun.
"I... was going to say. ..." I struggled to ignore him.
I could hear them approaching. They were faint, but it was the unmistakable walk of the winged being, letting me know, one heavy footfall after another, as though echoing through a giant chamber in which I existed quite apart from my existence in this room.
"Dora, I've got to leave you."
"What is it?"
The footsteps were coming closer and closer. "You dare come to me while I'm with her!" I shouted. I was on my feet.
"What is it?" she cried. She was up on her knees on the bed. I backed across the room. I reached the door. The footsteps were growing fainter.
"Damn you to hell!" I whispered.
"Tell me what it is," she said. "Will you come back? Are you leaving me now forever?"
"No, absolutely not. I'm here to help you. Listen, Dora, if you need me, call to me." I put my finger to my temple. "Call and call and call! Like prayer, you understand. It won't be idolatry, Dora, I'm no evil god. Do it. I have to go."
"What is your name?"
The footsteps came on, distant but loud, without location in the immense building, only pursuing me.
"Lestat." I pronounced my name carefully for her—Le-'stat— primary stress on the second syllable, sounding the final "t" distinctly.
"Listen. Nobody knows about your father. They won't for a while. I did everything he asked of me. I have his relics."
"Wynken's books?"
"All of it, everything he held sacred ... A fortune for you, and all he possessed that he wanted you to have. I've got to go."
Were the steps fading? I wasn't certain. But I couldn't take the risk of remaining.
"I'll come again as soon as I can. You believe in God? Hang on to it, Dora, because you just might be right about God, absolutely right!"
I was out of there like particles of light, up the stairways, through the broken attic window, and up above the rooftop, moving fast enough that I could hear no footfall, and the city below had become a beguiling swirl of lights.
7
IN MOMENTS, I stood in my own courtyard in the French Quarter behind the town house in the Rue Royale, looking up at my own lighted windows, windows that had been mine for so long, hoping and praying that David was there, and afraid he wasn't.
I hated running from this Thing! I had to stand there a moment and let my usual rage cool. Why had I run? Not to be humiliated in front of Dora, who might have seen nothing more than me terrified by the Thing and thrown backwards onto the floor?
Maybe Dora could have seen it!
Every instinct in me told me I'd done the proper thing, gotten away, and kept that thing away from Dora. That thing was after me. I had to protect Dora. I now had a very good reason to fight that thing, for another's sake, not my own.
Only now did the full goodness of Dora take a contained shape in my mind, that is, only now did I get a full impression of her, untangled from the blood smell between her legs and her owl-like face peering at me. Mortals tumble through life, from cradle to grave.
Once in a century or two perhaps, one crosses the path of a being like Dora. An elegant intelligence and concept of goodness, precisely, and the other thing Roger had struggled to describe, the magnetism which had not burst free as yet from the tangle of faith and scripture.
The night was warm and receptive.
My courtyard banana trees had not been touched by a freeze this winter, and grew thick and drowsing as ever against the brick walls. The wild impatiens and lantana were glowing in the overgrown beds, and the fountain, the fountain with its cherub, was making its crystalline music as the water splashed from the cherub's horn into the basin.
New Orleans, scents of the Quarter.
I ran up the back steps from the courtyard to the rear door of my flat.
I went inside, pounding down the hall, a man in a state of visible and ostentatious confusion. I saw a shadow cross the living room. "David!"
"He's not here."
I came to a halt in the doorframe.
It was the Ordinary Man.
He stood with his back to Louis's desk between the two front windows, arms folded loosely, face evincing a patient intellect and a sort of unbreakable poise.
"Don't run again," he said without rancour. "I'll go after you. I asked you to please leave that girl out of it. Didn't I? I was only trying to get you to cut it short."