"You are out of your brilliant preternatural mind."
"No. But I'm going out into the snow now. I hear him up there.
He's planning to leave her, he's kissing her, chaste and loving kisses. His car is prowling around out front. He'll go way uptown to that secret place of his where the relics are kept. He thinks his enemies in crime and government know nothing of it, or believe it's just the junk shop of a friend. But I know of it. And what all those treasures mean to him. If he goes up there, I'll follow.... No more time, David."
"I've never been so completely confused," he said. "I wanted to say God go with you."
I laughed. I leant to give him a quick kiss on the forehead, so swift others would not make anything of it if they saw it, and then swallowing the fear, the instantaneous fear, I left him.
In the rooms high above, Dora cried. She sat by the window watching the snow and crying. She regretted refusing his new present for her. If only. . . . She pushed her forehead against the cold glass and prayed for her father.
I crossed the street. The snow felt rather good, but then I'm a monster.
I stood at the back of St. Patrick's, watching as my handsome Victim came out, hurriedly through the snow, shoulders hunched, and plunged into the backseat of his expensive black car. I heard him give the address very near to that junk-shop flat where he kept his treasures All right, he'd be alone up there for a while. Why not do it, Lestat?
Why not let the Devil take you? Go ahead! Refuse to enter Hell in fear. Just go for it.
2
I REACHED his house on the Upper East Side before he did.
I'd tracked him here numerous times. I knew the routine. Hirelings lived on the lower and upper floors, though I don't think they knew who he was. It wasn't unlike a vampire's usual arrangement. And between those two flats was his long chain of rooms, the second story of the town house, barred like a prison, and accessible by him through a rear entrance.
He never had a car let him out in front of the place. He'd get out on Madison and cut deep into the block to his back door. Or sometimes he got out on Fifth. He had two routes, and some of the surrounding property was his. But nobody—none of his pursuers— knew of this place.
I wasn't even sure that his daughter, Dora, knew the exact location. He'd never brought her there in all the months I'd been watching him, savoring and licking my lips over his life. And I'd never caught from Dora's mind any distinct image of it.
But Dora knew of his collection. In the past, she had accepted his relics. She had some of them scattered about the empty convent castle in New Orleans. I'd sensed a glimmer or two of these fine things the night when I'd pursued her there. And now my Victim was still lamenting that she'd refused the latest gift. Something truly sacred, or so he thought.
I got into the flat simply enough.
One could hardly call it a flat, though it did include a small lavatory, dirty in the way barren, unused places become dirty, and then room after room was crammed with trunks, statues, bronze figures, heaps of seeming trash that no doubt concealed priceless discoveries.
It felt very strange to be inside, concealed in the small rear room, because I had never done more than look through the windows. The place was cold. When he came, he would create heat and light simply enough.
I sensed he was only halfway up Madison in a crush of traffic, and I began to explore.
At once, a great marble statue of an angel startled me. I came round out of the door and almost ran smack into it. It was one of those angels that used to stand inside church doors, offering holy water in half shells. I had seen them in Europe and in New Orleans.
It was gigantic, and its cruel profile stared blindly into the shadows. Far down the hall, the light came up from the busy little street that ran into Fifth. The usual New York songs of traffic were coming through the walls.
This angel was poised as if he had just landed from the skies to offer his sacred basin. I slapped his bent knee gently and went around him. I didn't like him. I could smell parchment, papyrus, various kinds of metal. The room opposite appeared to be filled with Russian icons. The walls were veritably covered with them and the light was playing on the halos of the sad-eyed Virgins or glaring Christs.
I went on to the next room. Crucifixes. I recognized the Spanish style, and what appeared to be Italian Baroque, and very early work which surely must have been very rare—the Christ grotesque and poorly proportioned yet suffering with appropriate horror on the worm-eaten cross.
Only now did I realize the obvious. It was all religious art. There was nothing that wasn't religious. But then it's rather easy to say that about all art from the end of the last century backwards, if you think about it. I mean, the great majority of art is religious.
The place was utterly devoid of life.
Indeed, it stank of insecticide. Of course, he had saturated it to save his old wooden statues, he would have had to do that. I could not hear or smell rats, or detect any living thing at all. The lower flat was empty of its occupants, though a small radio chattered the news in a bathroom.
Easy to blot out that little sound. On the floors above, there were mortals, but they were old, and I caught a vision of a sedentary man, with earphones on his head, swaying to the rhythm of some esoteric German music, Wagner, doomed lovers deploring the "hated dawn" or some heavy, repetitive, and distinctly pagan foolishness. Leitmotiv be damned. There was another person up there, but she was too feeble to be of any concern, and I could catch only one image of her and she appeared to be sewing or knitting.
I didn't care enough about any of this to bring it into loving focus.
I was safe in the flat, and He'd be coming soon, filling all these rooms with the perfume of his blood, and I'd do my damnedest not to break his neck before I'd had every drop. Yes, this was the night.
Dora wouldn't find out until she got home tomorrow anyway.
Who would know that I'd left his corpse here?
I went on into the living room. This was tolerably clean; the room where he relaxed and read and studied and fondled his objects. There were his comfortable bulky couches, fitted with heaps of pillows, and halogen lamps of black iron so delicate and light and modern and easy to maneuver that they looked like insects poised on tables and on the floor itself, and sometimes on top of cardboard boxes.
The crystal ashtray was full of butts, which confirmed he preferred safety to cleanliness, and I saw scattered glasses in which the liquor had long ago dried to a glaze that was now flaked like lacquer.
Thin, rather frowsy drapes hung over the windows, making the light soiled and tantalizing.
Even this room was jammed with statues of saints—a very lurid and emotional St. Anthony holding a chubby Child Jesus in the crook of his arm; a very large and remote Virgin, obviously of Latin American origin. And some monstrous angelic being of black granite, which even with my eyes I could not fully examine in the gloom, something resembling more a Mesopotamian demon than an angel.
For one split second this granite monster sent the shivers through me. It resembled ... no, I should say its wings made me think of the creature I'd glimpsed, this Thing that I thought was following me.
But I didn't hear any footsteps here. There was no rip in the fabric of the world. It was a statue of granite, that's all, a hideous ornament perhaps from some gruesome church full of images of Hell and Heaven.
Lots of books lay on the tables. Ah, he did love books. I mean, there were the fine ones, made of vellum and very old and all that, but current books, too, titles in philosophy and religion, current affairs, memoirs of currently popular war correspondents, even a few volumes of poetry.
Mircea Eliade, history of religions in various volumes, might have been Dora's gift, and there, a brand-new History of God, by a woman named Karen Armstrong. Something else on the meaning of life— Understanding the Present, by Bryan Appleyard. Hefty books. But fun, my kind, anyway. And the books had been handled. Yes, it was his scent on these books, heavily his scent, not Dora's.