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PART III

APPASSIONATA

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I DIDN’T WANT to go to hi the theatres to see the plays of Shakespeare, and reading the plays and the sonnets the whole night long I had no other thoughts just now but Shakespeare Lestat had given him to me And when I’d had a bellyful of despair, I’d opened the books and begun to read

But Lestat was calling Lestat was, or so he claio The last time he’d been in trouble, I hadn’t been free to rush to his rescue There is a story to that, but nothing as important as this one which I tell now

Now I knew that ht be shattered by the mere contact with him, but he wanted me to come, so I went

I found hih he didn’t know it and he couldn’t have led me into a worse snowstorht, a victim hom he’d fallen in love, as was his custoh criht of the feast

So what did he want of me, I wondered You were there, David You could help hi you hadn’t heard his call directly, but he’d reached you soether to discuss in low, sophisticated whispers Lestat’s latest fears

When next I caught up with him he was in New Orleans And he put it to me plain and siuise of aat one s and hoofed feet; and then next, the Devil could be an ordinary man Lestat ith these stories The Devil had offered him a dreadful proposition, that he, Lestat, become the Devil’s helper in the service of God

Do you remember how cal for our advice? Oh, I told him firmly it was madness to follow this spirit, to believe that any discarnate thing was bound to tell him the truth

But only now do you know the wounds he opened with this strange and marvelous fable So the Devil would ht have laughed outright, or wept, throwing it in his face that I had once believed s as I stalked lory of God

But he knew all this There was no need to wound hiht of his own tale, which Lestat, being the bright star,oaks we talked in civilized voices You and I begged hinored all we said

It was allthen in this very building, this old brick convent, the daughter of the man Lestat had stalked and slain

When he bound us to look out for her, I was angry, but only mildly so I have fallen in love with mortals I have those tales to tell I am in love noith Sybelle and Benjamin, whom I call my children, and I had been a secret troubadour to other ht, he was in love with Dora, he’d laid his head on a mortal breast, he wanted the womb blood of her that would be no loss to her, he was shost of her Father and courted by the Prince of Evil Himself

And she, what shall I say of her? That she possessed the power of a Rasputin behind the face of a nunnery postulant, when in fact she is a practiced theologian and not aleader, not a visionary, whose ecclesiastical ambitions would have dwarfed those of Saints Peter and Paul put together, and that of course, she is like any flower Lestat ever gathered fro little creature, a glorious specimen of God’s Creation-with raven hair, a poutylimbs of a nymph

Of course I knew the very moment that he left this world I felt it I was in New York already, very near to him and aware that you were there as well Neither of us ht if at all possible Then came the moment when he vanished in the blizzard, when he was sucked out of the earthly at his fledgling you couldn’t hear the perfect silence that descended when he vanished You couldn’t kno cosof his heart

I knew, and I think it was to distract us both that I proposed we go to the wounded mortal who must have been shattered by her Father’s death at the hands of a blond-haired handso monster who’d made her his confidant and a friend

It was not difficult to help her in the short event-filled nights that follohen horror was heaped upon horror, her Father’s ic the madcap conversation of the orld

It seeo, not merely so short a tiacy of crucifixes and statues, of ikons which I handled so coolly as if I’d never loved such treasures at all

It see in some fashionable Fifth Avenue shop a shapely coat of old red velvet, a poet’s shirt, as they call it now, of starched cotton and a trousers of black wool and shiny boots that buckled at the ankle, all this the better to accompany her to identify her Father’s severed head under the leeching fluorescent lights of soood thing about this final decade of the twentieth century is that a th

It seeo that I combed out mine, full and curly and clean for once, just for her