Anne Rice: Servant of the Bones

He looked at me for a long time. “She was a sweet, kind girl, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, very much so. Very unlike her stepfather.”

He pointed to his own shape in the picture.

“Yes, the ghost, the Servant of the Bones,” he said. “I was visible then in my grief. I will never know who called me. Maybe it was only her death, the dark horrible beauty of it. I’ll never know. But you see now, you feel now, I have the solid shape of that form which was nothing before but vapor. God has wrapped me in my old flesh; he makes it harder and harder for me to vanish and return; to take to the air and to nothingness and to reassemble. What is to become of me, Jonathan? As I grow stronger and stronger in this seeming human form, I fear I can’t die. I will never.”

“Azriel, you must tell me everything.”

“Everything? Oh, I want to, Jonathan. I want to.”

Within an hour, I was able to walk about the house without dizziness. He’d found my thick robe for me, and my leather slippers. Within a few more hours I was hungry.

It must have been morning when I fell asleep. And then waking in the later afternoon, I was myself, clearheaded, sharp, and the house was not only safely warmed by the fire, but he had put a few candles around, the thick kind, so that the corners had a dusty soft nonintrusive light.

“Is it all right?” he asked me gently.

I told him to put out a few more. And to light the kerosene lamp on my desk. He did these things with no trouble. A match was no mystery to him, or a cigarette lighter. He raised the wick of the lamp. He put two more of the candles on the stone-top table by the bed.

The room, with its wooden windows bolted shut as tight as its door, was softly, evenly visible. The wind howled in the chimney. Again came the volley of flakes dissolving in the heat. The storm had slackened but the snow still fell. The winter surrounded us.

And no one will come, no one will disturb us, no one will distract us. I stared at him in keen interest. I was happy. Uncommonly happy.

I taught him how to make cowboy coffee by merely throwing the grinds into the pot, and I drank plenty of it, loving the smell of it.

Though he wanted to do it, I mixed up the grits for a good meal, showing him again how it came in little packets, and all one had to do was boil the water on the fire, and then stir the grits to a thick delicious porridge.

He watched me eat it. He said he wanted nothing.

“Why don’t you taste it?” I said. I begged.

“Because my body won’t take it,” he said. “It’s not human, I told you.”

He stood up and walked slowly to the door. I thought he might open it on the storm and I hunkered my shoulders, ready for the blast. I would not even consider asking him to keep it shut. After all he had done, if he wanted to see the snow, I wouldn’t deny him anything.

But he lifted his arms. And without the door being opened, there came a blast of wind and his figure paled, seemed to swirl for a moment, its colors and textures mingled in a vortex and then vanished.

Spellbound, I rose from my place by the fire. I held the bowl to my chest in a desperate childlike gesture.

The wind died away. He was nowhere to be seen, and then, when the wind came again, it was hot: a blast as if from a furnace.

Azriel stood opposite the fire, looking at me. Same white shirt, same black pants. The same dark black hair of his chest thick beneath his open collar.

“Will I never be nefesh?” he asked. “That is, body and soul together.”

I knew the Hebrew word.

I sat him down. He said he could drink water. He said that all ghosts and spirits could drink water, and they drank up the scents of sacrifice and that was why all the ancient talk of libations and of incense, of burnt offerings and of smoke rising from the altars. He drank the water, and it seemed to relax him again.

He sat back in one of my many cracked and broken leather chairs, oblivious to its worn crevices and rips. He put his feet up on the stone hearth, and I saw his shoes were still wet.

I finished my meal, cleared it away, and came back with the picture of Esther. At this round hearth, six people could have sat in a circle. We were near to one another, near enough, him with his back to the desk and beyond it the door, and I with my back to the warmer, smaller, darker corner of the room in my favorite chair, of broken springs and round fat arms, stained from careless wine and coffee.

I looked at her. She was half a page, in this the recurrent story of her death which had been retold only because of Gregory’s downfall.

“He killed her, didn’t he?” I said. “It was the first assassination.”

“Yes,” Azriel answered. I marveled that his eyebrows could be so thick, beautiful and brooding, and yet his mouth so gentle as he smiled. There was no double to die in her place. He killed his own stepdaughter.

“That’s when I came, you see,” he went on. ‘That’s when I came out of the darkness as if called by the master sorcerer, only there was none. I appeared fully formed and hurrying down the New York street, only to witness her death, her cruel death, and to kill those who killed her.”

“The three men? The men who stabbed Esther Belkin?”

He didn’t answer. I remembered. The men had been stabbed with their own ice picks only a block and a half away from the crime. So thick was the crowd on Fifth Avenue that day that no one even connected the deaths of three street toughs with the slaughter of the beautiful girl inside the fashionable store of Henri Bendel. Only the next day had the ice picks told the story of blood, her blood on three, their blood on the one chosen by someone to do away with them.

“I suppose I thought it was part of his plot, then,” I said. “She was killed by terrorists, he said, and he had disposed of those henchmen so that he might make the he bigger and bigger.”

“No, those henchmen were to get away , so that he could make the lie of the terrorists bigger and bigger. But I came there, and I killed them.” He looked at me. “She saw me through the window before she died, the window of the ambulance that came to take her away, and she said my name: ‘Azriel.’ ”

“Then she called you.”

“No, she was no sorceress; she didn’t know the words. She didn’t have the Bones. I was the Servant of the Bones.” He fell back in the chair. Quiet, looking at the fire, his eyes fierce and thick with dark curling eyelashes, the bones of his forehead strong as the line of his jaw.

After a long time he cast on me the most bright and innocent boyish smile. “You’re well now, Jonathan. You’re cured of your fever.” He laughed.

“Yes,” I said. I lay back enjoying the dry warmth of the room, the smell of burning oak. I drank the coffee until I tasted the grounds in my teeth, then I put the cup on the circular stone hearth. “Will you let me record what you tell me?” I asked.

The light shone bright in his face again. With a boy’s enthusiasm, he leant forward in the chair, his massive hands on his knees. “Would you do it? Would you write down what I tell you?”

“I have a machine,” I said, “that will remember every word for us.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” he said. He smiled contentedly and put his head back. “You mustn’t think me an addlebrained spirit, Jonathan. The Servant of the Bones was never that.

“I was made a strong spirit, I was made what the Chaldeans would have called a genii. When brought forth, I knew all that I should know—of the times, of the language, of the ways of the world near and far—all I need to know to serve my Master.”

I begged him to wait. “Let me turn on our little recorder,” I said.

It felt good to stand up, for my head not to swim, for my chest not to ache, and for most of the blur of the fever to have been banished.