The Tale of the Body Thief (35 page)

“I hate this body so much; it’s hell to be in it.”

“It’s that bad?” she asked. “To be human?”

“You don’t have to humor me,” I said. “I know you don’t believe the things I’ve told you.”

“Ah, but our fantasies are like our dreams,” she said with a serious little frown. “They have meaning.”

Suddenly, I saw my reflection in the mirror of the medicine cabinet—this tall caramel-skinned man with thick brown hair, and the large-boned soft-skinned woman beside him. The shock was so great, my heart stopped.

“Dear God, help me,” I whispered. “I want my body back.” I felt like weeping.

She urged me to lie down against the pillows of the bed. The warmth of the room felt good. She began to shave my face, thank God! I hated the feeling of the hair on it. I told her I’d been clean-shaven, as all men of fashion were, when I died, and once we were made vampires we remained the same forever. We grew whiter and whiter, that was true, and stronger and stronger; and our faces became smoother. But our hair was forever the same length, and so were our
fingernails and whatever beard we had; and I had not had that much to begin with.

“Was this transformation a painful thing?” she asked.

“It was painful because I fought. I didn’t want it to happen. I didn’t really know what was being done to me. It seemed some monster out of the medieval past had captured me, and dragged me out of the civilized city. You must remember in those years that Paris was a wonderfully civilized place. Oh, you would think it barbaric beyond description if you were spirited there now, but to a country lord from a filthy castle, it was so exciting, what with the theatres, and the opera, and the balls at court. You can’t imagine. And then this tragedy, this demon coming out of the dark and taking me to his tower. But the act itself, the Dark Trick? It isn’t painful, it’s ecstasy. And then your eyes are opened, and all humanity is beautiful to you in a way that you never realized before.”

I put on the clean skivvy shirt which she gave to me, and climbed under the covers, and let her bring the covers up to my chin. I felt as if I were floating. Indeed, this was one of the most pleasant feelings I’d experienced since I’d become mortal—this feeling like drunkenness. She felt my pulse and my forehead. I could see the fear in her, but I didn’t want to believe it.

I told her that the real pain for me as an evil being was that I understood goodness, and I respected it. I had never been without a conscience. But all my life—even as a mortal boy—I had always been required to go against my conscience to obtain anything of intensity or value.

“But how? What do you mean?” she asked.

I told her that I had run off with a band of actors when I was a boy, committing an obvious sin of disobedience. I had committed the sin of fornication with one of the young women of the troupe. Yet those days, acting on the village stage and making love, had seemed of inestimable value! “You see, that’s when I was alive, merely alive. The trivial sins of a boy! After I was dead, every step I took in the world was a commitment to sin, and yet at every turn I saw the sensual and the beautiful.”

How could this be, I asked her. When I’d made Claudia a child vampire, and Gabrielle, my mother, into a vampire beauty, I’d been reaching again for an intensity! I’d found it irresistible. And in those moments no concept of sin made sense.

I said more, speaking again of David and his vision of God and the Devil in the café, and of how David thought that God was not perfect, that God was learning all the time, and that, indeed, the Devil learned so much that he came to despise his job and beg to be let out of it. But I knew I had told her all these things before in the hospital when she’d been holding my hand.

There were moments when she stopped her fussing with the pillows, and with pills and glasses of water, and merely looked at me. How still her face was, how emphatic her expression, the dark thick lashes surrounding her paler eyes, her large soft mouth so eloquent of kindness.

“I know you are good,” I said. “I love you for it. Yet I would give it to you, the Dark Blood, to make you immortal—to have you with me in eternity because you are so mysterious to me and so strong.”

There was a layer of silence around me, a dull roaring in my ears, and a veil over my eyes. I watched motionless as she lifted a syringe, tested it apparently by squirting a tiny bit of silver liquid into the air, and then put the needle into my flesh. The faint burning sensation was very far away, very unimportant.

When she gave me a large glass of orange juice I drank this greedily. Hmmm. Now this was something to taste, thick like blood, but full of sweetness and strangely like devouring light itself.

“I’d forgotten all about such things,” I said. “How good it tastes, better than wine, really. I should have drunk it before. And to think I would have gone back without knowing it.” I sank down into the pillow and looked up at the bare rafters of the low sloping ceiling. Nice clean little room, very white. Very simple. Her nun’s cell. Snow was falling gently outside the little window. I counted twelve little panes of glass.

I was slipping in and out of sleep. I vaguely recall her trying to make me drink soup and that I couldn’t do it. I was shaking, and terrified that those dreams would come again. I didn’t want Claudia to come. The light of the little room burnt my eyes. I told her about Claudia haunting me, and the little hospital.

“Full of children,” she said. Hadn’t she remarked on this before. How puzzled she looked. She spoke softly of her work in the missions … with children. In the jungles of Venezuela and in Peru.

“Don’t speak anymore,” she said.

I knew I was frightening her. I was floating again, in and out of
darkness, aware of a cool cloth on my forehead, and laughing again at this weightless feeling. I told her that in my regular body I could fly through the air. I told her how I had gone into the light of the sun above the Gobi Desert.

Now and then, I opened my eyes with a start, shaken to discover myself here. Her small white room.

In the burnished light, I saw a crucifix on the wall, with a bleeding Christ; and a statue of the Virgin Mary atop a small bookcase—the old familiar image of the Mediatrix of All Graces, with her bowed head and outstretched hands. Was that Saint Rita there with the red wound in her forehead? Ah, all the old beliefs, and to think they were alive in this woman’s heart.

I squinted, trying to read the larger titles on the books on her shelves: Aquinas, Maritain, Teilhard de Chardin. The sheer effort of interpreting these various names to mean Catholic philosophers exhausted me. Yet I read other titles, my mind feverish and unable to rest. There were books on tropical diseases, childhood diseases, on child psychology. I could make out a framed picture on the wall near the crucifix, of veiled and uniformed nuns together, perhaps at a ceremony. If she was one of them, I couldn’t tell, not with these mortal eyes, and hurting the way they were. The nuns wore short blue robes, and blue and white veils.

She held my hand. I told her again I had to go to New Orleans. I had to live to reach my friend Louis, who would help me recover my body. I described Louis to her—how he existed beyond the reach of the modern world in a tiny unlighted house behind his ramshackle garden. I explained that he was weak, but he could give me the vampiric blood, and then I’d be a vampire again, and I’d hunt the Body Thief and have my old form restored to me. I told her how very human Louis was, that he would not give me much vampiric strength, but I could not find the Body Thief unless I had a preternatural body.

“So this body will die,” I said, “when he gives the blood to me. You are saving it for death.” I was weeping. I realized I was speaking French, but it seemed that she understood, because she told me in French that I must rest, that I was delirious.

“I am with you,” she said in French, very slowly and carefully. “I will protect you.” Her warm gentle hand was over mine. With such care, she brushed the hair back from my forehead.

Darkness fell around the little house.

There was a fire burning in the little hearth, and Gretchen was lying beside me. She had put on a long flannel gown, very thick and white; and her hair was loose, and she was holding me as I shivered. I liked the feel of her hair against my arm. I held on to her, frightened I’d hurt her. Over and over again, she wiped my face with a cool cloth. She forced me to drink the orange juice or cold water. The hours of the night were deepening and so was my panic.

“I won’t let you die,” she whispered in my ear. But I heard the fear which she couldn’t disguise. Sleep rolled over me, thinly, so that the room retained its shape, its color, its light. I called upon the others again, begging Marius to help me. I began to think of terrible things—that they were all there as so many small white statues with the Virgin and with Saint Rita, watching me, and refusing to help.

Sometime before dawn, I heard voices. A doctor had come—a tired young man with sallow skin and red-rimmed eyes. Once again, a needle was put into my arm. I drank greedily when the ice water was given me. I could not follow the doctor’s low murmuring, nor was I meant to understand it. But the cadences of the voice were calm and obviously reassuring. I caught the words “epidemic” and “blizzard” and “impossible conditions.”

When the door shut, I begged her to come back. “Next to your beating heart,” I whispered in her ear as she lay down at my side. How sweet this was, her tender heavy limbs, her large shapeless breasts against my chest, her smooth leg against mine. Was I too sick to be afraid?

“Sleep now,” she said. “Try not to worry.” At last a deep sleep was coming to me, deep as the snow outside, as the darkness.

“D
ON’T
you think it’s time you made your confession?” asked Claudia. “You know you really are hanging by the proverbial thread.” She was sitting in my lap, staring up at me, hands on my shoulders, her little upturned face not an inch from mine.

My heart shrank, exploding in pain, but there was no knife, only these little hands clutching me, and the perfume of crushed roses rising from her shimmering hair.

“No. I can’t make my confession,” I said to her. How my voice trembled. “Oh, Lord God, what do you want of me!”

“You’re not sorry! You’ve never been sorry! Say it. Say the truth! You deserved the knife when I put it through your heart, and you know it, you’ve always known it!”

“No!”

Something in me broke as I stared down at her, at the exquisite face in its frame of fine-spun hair. I lifted her, and rose, placing her in the chair before me and I dropped to my knees at her feet.

“Claudia, listen to me. I didn’t begin it. I didn’t make the world! It was always there, this evil. It was in the shadows, and it caught me, and made me part of it, and I did what I felt I must. Don’t laugh at me, please, don’t turn your head away. I didn’t make evil! I didn’t make myself!”

How perplexed she was, staring at me, watching me, and then her small full mouth spread beautifully in a smile.

“It wasn’t all anguish,” I said, my fingers digging into her little shoulders. “It wasn’t hell. Tell me it wasn’t. Tell me there was happiness. Can devils be happy? Dear God, I don’t understand.”

“You don’t understand, but you always
do
something, don’t you?”

“Yes, and I’m not sorry. I’m not. I would roar it from the rooftops right up into the dome of heaven. Claudia, I would do it again!” A great sigh passed out of me. I repeated the words, my voice growing louder. “
I would do it again!
”

Stillness in the room.

Her calm remained unbroken. Was she enraged? Surprised? Impossible to know as I looked into her expressionless eyes.

“Oh you are evil, my father,” she said in a soft voice. “How can you abide it?”

David turned from the window. He stood over her shoulder, looking down at me as I stayed there on my knees.

“I am the ideal of my kind,” I said. “I am the perfect vampire. You are looking at the Vampire Lestat when you look at me. No one outshines this figure you see before you—no one!” Slowly I rose to my feet. “I am not time’s fool, nor a god hardened by the millennia; I am not the trickster in the black cape, nor the sorrowful wanderer. I have a conscience. I know right from wrong. I know what I do, and yes, I do it. I am the Vampire Lestat. That’s your answer. Do with it what you will.”

D
AWN
. Colorless and bright over the snow. Gretchen slept, cradling me.

S
HE
didn’t wake when I sat up and reached for the glass of water. Tasteless, but cool.

Then her eyes opened, and she sat up with a start, her dark blond hair tumbling down around her face, dry and clean and full of thin light.

I kissed her warm cheek, and felt her fingers on my neck, and then again across my forehead.

“You brought me through it,” I said, my voice hoarse and shaky. Then I lay back down on the pillow, and I felt the tears once more on my cheeks, and closing my eyes, I whispered, “Good-bye, Claudia,” hoping that Gretchen wouldn’t hear.

W
HEN
I opened my eyes again, she had a big bowl of broth for me, which I drank, finding it almost good. There were apples and oranges cut open and glistening upon a plate. I ate these hungrily, amazed at the crispness of the apples, and the chewy fibrous quality of the oranges. Then came a hot brew of strong liquor and honey and sour lemon, which I loved so much that she hurried to make more of it for me.

I thought again how like the Grecian women of Picasso she was, large and fair. Her eyebrows were dark brown and her eyes light—almost a pale green—which gave her face a look of dedication and innocence. She was not young, this woman, and that, too, enhanced her beauty very much for me.

There was something selfless and distracted in her expression, in the way that she nodded and told me I was better when I asked.

She looked perpetually deep in thought. For a long moment, she remained, looking down at me as if I puzzled her, and then very slowly she bent and pressed her lips to mine. A raw vibration of excitement passed through me.

Once more I slept.