Anne Rice - Memnoch the Devil

Armour, breastplate, and then of course I saw the most telling details. That it had the legs and feet of a goat. Devil.

Again there came a shiver. Like the thing I'd seen. But that was stupid! And I had no sense of the Stalker being near me now. No disori­entation. I wasn't even really afraid. It was just a frisson, nothing more.

I held very still. Now take your time, I thought. Figure this out.

You've got your Victim and this statue is just a coincidental detail that further enriches the entire scenario. He turned another halogen beam on the thing. It was almost erotic the way he studied it. I smiled. Erotic the way I was studying him—this forty-seven-year-old man with a youth's health and a criminal's poise. Fearlessly he stood back, having forgotten any threat of any kind, and looked at this new acquisition. Where had it come from? Whom? He didn't give a damn about the price. If only Dora. No, Dora wouldn't like this thing.

Dora. Dora, who had cut him to the heart tonight refusing his gift.

His entire posture changed; he didn't want to think about Dora again, and all the things Dora had said—that he had to renounce what he did, that she'd never take another cent for the church, that she couldn't help but love him and suffer if he did go to court, that she didn't want the veil.

What veil? Just a fake, he'd said, but one of the best he'd found so far. Veil? I suddenly connected his hot little memory with something hanging on the far wall, a framed bit of fabric, a painted Christface. Veil. Veronica's veil.

And just an hour ago he'd said to Dora, "Thirteenth century, and so beautiful, Dora, for the love of heaven. Take it. If I can't leave these things to you, Dora "

So this Christface had been his precious gift?

"I won't take them anymore, Daddy, I told you. I won't."

He had pressed her with the vague scheme that this new gift could be exhibited for the public. So could all his relics. They could raise money for the church.

She had started to cry, and all this had been going on back at the hotel, whilst David and I had been in the bar only yards from them.

"And say these bastards do manage to pick me up, some warrant, something I haven't covered, you're telling me you won't take these things? You'll let strangers take them?"

"Stolen, Daddy," she had cried. "They are not clean. They are tainted."

He really could not understand his daughter. It seemed he'd been a thief ever since he was a child. New Orleans. The boardinghouse, the curious mixture of poverty and elegance and his mother drunk most of the time. The old captain who ran the antique shop. All this was going through his mind. Old Captain had had the front rooms of the house, and he, my Victim, had brought the breakfast tray each morning to Old Captain, before going on to school. Boardinghouse, service, elegant oldsters, St. Charles Avenue. The time when the men sat on the galleries in the evening and the old ladies did, too, with their hats. Daylight times I'd never know again.

Such reverie. No, Dora wouldn't like this. And he wasn't so sure he did either, suddenly. He had standards which were often difficult to explain to people. He began some defense as though talking to the dealer who'd brought this. "It's beautiful, yes, but it's too Baroque! It lacks that element of distortion that I treasure."

I smiled. I loved this guy's mind. And the smell of the blood, well.

I took a deliberate breath of it, and let it turn me into a total predator.

Go slowly, Lestat. You've waited for months. Don't rush it. And he's such a monster himself. He'd shot people in the head, killed them with knives. Once in a small grocery he had shot both his enemy and the proprietor's wife with utter indifference. Woman in the way. And he had coolly walked out. Those were early New York days, before Miami, before South America. But he remembered that murder, and that's why I knew about it.

He thought a lot about those various deaths. That's why I thought about them.

He was studying the hoofed feet of this thing, this angel, devil, demon. I realized its wings reached the ceiling. I could feel that shiver again if I let myself. But again, I was on firm ground, and there was nothing from any other realm in this place.

He slipped off his coat now, and stood in shirtsleeves. That was too much. I could see the flesh of his neck, of course, as he opened his collar. I could see that particularly beautiful place right below his ear, that special measure between the back of the neck of a human and the lobe of his ear, which has so much to do with male beauty.

Hell, I had not invented the significance of necks. Everyone knew what those proportions meant. He was all over pleasing to me, but it was the mind, really. To hell with his Asian beauty and all that, even his vanity which made him glow for fifty feet in all directions. It was the mind, the mind that was locked onto the statue, and had for one merciful moment let thoughts of Dora go.

He reached for another one of the little halogen spots and clamped his hand over the hot metal and directed it hill on the demon's wing, the wing I could best see, and I too saw the perfection he was thinking about, the Baroque love of detail; no. He did not collect this sort of thing. His taste was for the grotesque, and this thing was only grotesque by accident. God, it was hideous. It had a ferocious mane of hair, and a scowl on its face that could have been designed by William Blake, and huge rounded eyes that fixed on him in seeming hatred.

"Blake, yes!" he said suddenly. He turned around. "Blake. The damned thing looks like one of those drawings by Blake."

I realized he was staring at me. I had projected the thought, carelessly, yes, obviously with purpose. I felt a shock of connection. He saw me. He saw the glasses perhaps, and the light, or maybe my hair.

Very slowly I stepped out, with my arms at my sides. I wanted nothing so vulgar as his reaching for his gun. But he hadn't reached for it. He merely looked at me, blinded perhaps by the bright little lights so near to him. The halogen beam threw the shadow of the angel's wing on the ceiling. I came closer.

He said absolutely nothing. He was afraid. Or rather, let me say, he was alarmed. He was more than alarmed. He felt this might very well be his last confrontation. Someone had gotten by him totally!

And it was too late to be reaching for guns, or doing anything so literal, and yet he wasn't actually in fear of me.

Damned if he didn't know I wasn't human.

I came swiftly towards him, and took his face in both my hands.

He went into a sweat and tremble, naturally, yet he reached up and pulled the glasses off my eyes and they fell on the floor.

"Oh, it's gorgeous, finally," I whispered, "to be so very close to you!"

He couldn't form words. No mortal in my grip like this could have been expected to utter anything but prayers, and he had no prayers! He stared right into my eyes, and then very slowly took my measure, not daring to move, his face still fixed in both my cold, cold hands, and he knew. Not human.

It was the strangest reaction! Of course I'd confronted recognition before, in lands the world over; but prayer, madness, some desperate atavistic response, something always accompanied it. Even in old Europe where they believed in the nosferatu, they'd scream out a prayer before I sank my teeth.

But this, what was this, his staring at me, this comical criminal courage!

"Going to die like you lived?" I whispered.

One thought galvanized him. Dora. He went into a violent struggle, grabbing at my hands, realizing they felt like stone, and then convulsing, as he tried to pull himself loose, held mercilessly by the face. He hissed at me.

Some inexplicable mercy came over me. Don't torture him like this. He knows too much. Understands too much. God, you've had months of watching him, you don't have to stretch this out. On the other hand, when will you find another kill like this one!