The Tale of the Body Thief (14 page)

By the time David had left the city of Rio de Janeiro he was a different being. For though his narrative had been tightened and polished later, and undoubtedly edited, it nevertheless included much of his diary written at the very time. There was no doubt that he had been on the verge of madness in the conventional sense. He no longer saw streets and buildings and people everywhere he looked; he saw spirits,
gods, invisible powers emanating from others, and various levels of spiritual resistance upon the part of humans, both conscious and unconscious, to all such things. Indeed, if he had not gone into the jungles of the Amazon, if he had not forced himself to become the British game hunter again, he might have been lost forever from his old world.

For months, he had been a gaunt, sunburnt creature in shirtsleeves and soiled pants, wandering Rio in search of ever greater spiritual experience, having no contact whatsoever with his countrymen no matter how they badgered him for such contact. And then he’d outfitted himself in his proper khaki, taken up his big guns, laid up a store of the best British provisions for a camping trip, and gone off to recover himself as he brought down the spotted jaguar, and skinned and gutted the carcass of the beast with his own knife.

Body and soul!

It really wasn’t so incredible that in all these years he had never returned to Rio de Janeiro, for if he had ever made the journey back there, perhaps he could not have left.

Yet obviously, the life of the Candomble adept was not enough for him. Heroes seek adventure, but the adventure itself does not swallow them whole.

How it sharpened my love for him to know of these experiences, and how it saddened me to think that he had spent his life in the Talamasca ever since. It did not seem worthy of him, or no, it did not seem the best thing to make him happy, no matter how he insisted that he had wanted it. It seemed the very wrong thing.

And of course, this deepening knowledge of him made me ache for him all the more. I considered again that in my dark preternatural youth, I had made companions for myself who could never really be companions—Gabrielle, who had no need of me; Nicolas, who had gone mad; Louis, who could not forgive me for having seduced him into the realm of the undead, even though he had wanted it himself.

Only Claudia had been the exception—my intrepid little Claudia, companion hunter and slayer of random victims—vampire par excellence. And it had been her alluring strength which caused her ultimately to turn upon her maker. Yes, she had been the only one who had been like me really—as they say in this day and age. And that might have been the reason that she was haunting me now.

Surely there was some connection to my love of David! And I had failed to see it before. How I loved him; and how deep had been the
emptiness when Claudia turned against me, and was my companion no more.

These manuscripts more fully illuminated another point for me as well. David was the very man to refuse the Dark Gift, and to the bitter end. This man feared nothing really. He didn’t like death, but he didn’t fear it. He never had.

But I had not come to Paris merely to read this memoir. I had another purpose in mind. I left the blessed and timeless isolation of the hotel and began to wander—slowly, visibly—about.

In the Rue Madeleine, I purchased fine clothes for myself, including a dark blue double-breasted coat of cashmere wool. Then I spent hours on the Left Bank, visiting its bright and inviting cafés, and thinking of David’s story of God and the Devil, and wondering what on earth he had really seen. Of course, Paris would be a fine place for God and the Devil but … 

I traveled the underground Metro for some time, studying the other passengers, trying to determine what was so different about Parisians. Was it their alertness, their energy? The way they avoided eye contact with others? I could not determine it. But they were very different from Americans—I had seen it everywhere—and I realized I understood them. I liked them.

That Paris was such a rich city, so filled with expensive fur coats and jewels and boutiques beyond counting, left me faintly amazed. It seemed richer even than the cities of America. It had seemed no less rich perhaps in my time with its glass coaches and white-wigged ladies and gentlemen. But the poor had been there too, everywhere, even dying in the very streets. And now I saw only the rich, and at moments, the entire city with its millions of motorcars and countless stone town houses, hotels and mansions seemed almost beyond belief.

Of course I hunted. I fed.

At twilight the next night, I stood on the top floor of the Pompidou under a sky as purely violet as any in my beloved New Orleans, watching all the lights of the great sprawling city come to life. I gazed at the distant Eiffel Tower, rising so sharply in the divine gloom.

Ah, Paris, I knew I would come back here, yes, and soon. Some night in the future I would make a lair for myself on the Île St. Louis, which I had always loved. To hell with the big houses of the Avenue Foch. I would find the building where once Gabrielle and I had worked the Dark Magic together, mother leading her son to make her
his daughter, and mortal life had released her as if it were a mere hand I’d grabbed by the wrist.

I would bring Louis back with me—Louis, who had loved this city so much before he lost Claudia. Yes, he must be invited to love it again.

Meantime I’d walk slowly over to the Café de la Paix in the great hotel where Louis and Claudia had lodged during that tragic year in the reign of Napoleon III, and I would sit there with my glass of wine, untouched, forcing myself to think calmly of all that—and that it was done.

Well, I had been strengthened by my ordeal in the desert, that was plain. And I was ready for something to happen … 

 … And finally in the early hours of the morning, when I had become a bit melancholy and was grieving a little for the old tumbledown buildings of the 1780s, and when the mists were hanging over the half-frozen river, and I was leaning on the high stone ledge of the bank very near the bridge to the Île de la Cité, I saw my man.

First came that sensation, and this time I recognized it right off for what it was. I studied it as it was happening to me—the faint disorientation which I allowed without ever losing control; and soft delicious ripples of vibration; and then the deep constriction which included my entire form—fingers, toes, arms, legs, trunk—as before. Yes, as if my entire body, while retaining its exact proportions, was growing smaller and smaller, and I was being forced out of this dwindling shape! At the very moment when it seemed damned nigh impossible to remain within myself, my head cleared, and the sensations came to a halt.

This was precisely what had happened both times before. I stood at the bridge, considering this, and memorizing the details.

Then I beheld a battered little car jerking to a stop on the far side of the river, and out he climbed—the young brown-haired one—awkwardly as before, and rising to his full height tentatively and fixing me with his ecstatic and glittering eyes.

He’d left the motor of his little machine running. I smelled his fear as I had before. Of course he knew that I had seen him, there could be no mistake of that. I’d been here a full two hours, waiting for him to find me, and I suppose he realized this as well.

Finally he screwed up his courage and came across the bridge through the fog, an immediately impressive figure in a long greatcoat,
with a white scarf about the neck, half walking, half running, and stopping a few feet away from me, as I stood there with my elbow on the rail, staring at him coldly. He thrust at me another little envelope. I grabbed his hand.

“Don’t be hasty, Monsieur de Lioncourt!” he whispered desperately. British accent, upper-class, very like David’s, and he’d got the French syllables very close to perfect. He was near perishing with fear.

“Who the hell are you!” I demanded.

“I have a proposition for you! You’d be a fool if you didn’t listen. It’s something you’ll want very much. And no one else in this world can offer it to you, be assured!”

I let him go and he sprang back, nearly toppling over, hand flung out to catch the stone rail. What was it about this man’s gestures? He was powerfully built, but he moved as if he were a thin, tentative creature. I couldn’t figure it out.

“Explain this proposition now!” I said, and I could hear his heart come to a stop inside his broad chest.

“No,” he said. “But we shall talk very soon.” Such a cultured voice, a polished voice.

Far too refined and careful for the large glazed brown eyes, and the smooth robust young face. Was he some hothouse plant grown to prodigious proportions in the company of elderly people, never having seen a person his own age?

“Don’t be hasty!” he shouted again, and off he ran, stumbling, then catching himself, and then forcing his tall, clumsy body into the small car, and driving off through the frozen snow.

Indeed, he was going so fast as he disappeared into St. Germain, I thought he would have a wreck and kill himself.

I looked down at the envelope. Another damned short story, no doubt. I tore it open angrily, not sure I should have let him go, and yet somehow enjoying this little game, and even enjoying my own indignation at his cleverness and capacity for tracking me.

I saw that, indeed, it was a video tape of a recent film.
Vice Versa
was the title. What on earth … ? I flipped it over, and scanned the advertisement. A comic piece.

I returned to the hotel. There was yet another package waiting for me. Another video tape.
All of Me
was the name of it, and once again, the description on the back of the plastic case gave a fair idea of what it was about.

I went to my rooms. No video player! Not even in the Ritz. I rang David, though it was now very near dawn.

“Would you come to Paris? I’ll have everything arranged for you. See you at dinner, eight o’clock tomorrow in the dining room downstairs.”

Then I did call my mortal agent, rousing him from bed and instructing him to arrange David’s ticket, limousine, suite, and whatever else he should need. There should be cash waiting for David; there should be flowers; and chilled champagne. Then I went out to find a safe place to sleep.

But an hour later—as I stood in the dark dank cellar of an old abandoned house—I wondered if the little mortal bastard couldn’t see me even now, if he didn’t know where I slept by day, and couldn’t come bring in the sun upon me, like some cheap vampire-hunter in a bad movie, with no respect for the mysterious at all.

I dug deep beneath the cellar. No mortal alone could have found me there. And even in my sleep, I might have strangled him if he had, without my ever knowing it.

“S
O WHAT
do you think it all means?” I said to David. The dining room was exquisitely decorated and half empty. I sat there in the candlelight, in black dinner jacket and boiled shirt, with my arms folded before me, enjoying the fact that I needed only the pale-violet tinted glasses now to hide my eyes. How well I could see the tapestried portieres, and the dim garden beyond the windows.

David was eating lustily. He’d been utterly delighted to come to Paris, loved his suite over the Place Vendôme, with its velvet carpets and gilded furnishings, and had spent all afternoon in the Louvre.

“Well, you can see the theme, can’t you?” he replied.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I do see common elements, of course, but these little stories are all different.”

“How so?”

“Well, in the Lovecraft piece, Asenath, this diabolical woman, switches bodies with her husband. She runs about the town using his male body, while he is stuck at home in her body, miserable and confused. I thought it was a hoot, actually. Just wonderfully clever, and of course Asenath isn’t Asenath, as I recall, but her father, who has
switched bodies with her. And then it all becomes very Lovecraftian, with slimy half-human demons and such.”

“That may be the irrelevant part. And the Egyptian story?”

“Completely different. The moldering dead, which still possess life, you know … ”

“Yes, but the plot.”

“Well, the soul of the mummy manages to get possession of the body of the archaeologist, and he, the poor devil, is put in the rotted body of the mummy—”

“Yes?”

“Good Lord, I see what you’re saying. And then the film
Vice Versa
. It’s about the soul of a boy and the soul of a man who switch bodies! All hell breaks loose until they are able to switch back. And the film
All of Me
, it’s about body switching as well. You’re absolutely right. All four stories are about the same thing.”

“Exactly.”

“Christ, David. It’s all coming clear. I don’t know why I didn’t see it. But … ”

“This man is trying to get you to believe that he knows something about this body switching. He’s trying to entice you with the suggestion that such a thing can be done.”

“Good Lord. Of course. That explains it, the way he moves, walks, runs.”

“What?”

I sat there stunned, reenvisioning the little beast before I answered, bringing up to mind every image of him from every conceivable angle which memory would allow. Yes, even in Venice, he’d had that obvious awkwardness about him.

“David, he
can
do it.”

“Lestat, don’t jump to such a mad conclusion! He may think that he can do it. He may want to try it. He may be living entirely in a world of delusions—”

“No. That’s his proposition, David, the proposition he says that I will want to hear! He
can
switch bodies with people!”

“Lestat, you can’t believe—”

“David, that’s what’s wrong with him! I’ve been trying to figure it since I saw him on the beach in Miami. That isn’t his body! That’s why he can’t use its musculature or its … its height. That’s why he
almost falls when he runs. He can’t control those long powerful legs. Good God, that man is in someone else’s body. And the voice, David, I told you about his voice. It’s not the voice of a young man. Oh, that explains it! And you know what I think? I think he chose that particular body because I’d notice it. And I’ll tell you something else. He’s already tried this switching trick with me and it’s failed.”