Memnoch the Devil (The Vampire Chronicles 5)

The black thing wasn't a statue at all. It was alive. And it was studying me. It was living and breathing and watching me under its furious shining black scowl, looking down at me.

"No, not true," I said aloud. I tried to fall into the deep calm that danger often produces in me. Not true.

I nudged his dead body on the floor deliberately just to be sure I was still there, and not going mad, and in terror of the disorientation, but it d

idn't come, and then I screamed.

I screamed like any kid.

And I ran out of there.

I tore out of there, down the hall, out of the back and into the wide night.

I went up over the rooftops, and then in sheer exhaustion slipped down in a narrow alley, and lay against the bricks. No, that couldn't have been true. That was some last image he projected, my Victim; he threw that image out in death, a sweet vengeance. Making that statue look alive, that big dark winged thing, that goat-legged. . . .

"Yeah," I said. I wiped my lips. I was lying in dirty snow. There were other mortals in this alley. Don't bother us. I won't. I wiped my lips again. "Yeah, vengeance; all his love," I whispered aloud, "for all the things in that place, and he threw that at me. He knew. He knew what I was. He knew how. . . . "

And besides, the Thing that stalked me had never been so calm, so still, so reflective. It had always been swelling and rising like so much thick, stinking smoke and those voices . . . That had been a mere statue standing there.

I got up, furious with myself, absolutely furious for having fled, for having passed up the last little trick involved in the whole kill. I was furious enough to go back there, and kick his dead body and kick that statue, which no doubt returned to granite the instant that conscious life went completely out of the dying brain of its owner.

Broken arms, shoulders. As if from the bloody heap I'd made of him, he'd called up that thing.

And Dora will hear about this. Broken arms, shoulders. Neck broken.

I went out onto Fifth Avenue. I walked into the wind.

I stuffed my hands in the pockets of my wool blazer, which was far too light to look appropriate in this quiet blizzard, and I walked and walked. "All right, damn it, you knew what I was, and for a moment, you made that thing look alive. "

I stopped dead still, staring over the traffic at the dark snow-covered woods of Central Park.

"If it "? all connected, come for me. " I was talking not to him now, or the statue, but to the Stalker. I simply refused to be afraid. I was just completely out of my head.

And where was David? Hunting somewhere? Hunting . . . as he had so loved to do as a mortal man in the Indian jungles, hunting, and I'd made him the hunter of his brothers forever.

I made a decision.

I was going back at once to the flat. I'd look at the damned statue, and see for myself that it was utterly inanimate, and then I'd do what I ought to do for Dora¡ªthat is, get rid of her father's corpse.

It took me only moments to get back, to be going up the narrow pitch-dark back stairs again, and into the flat. I was past all patience with my fear, simply furious, humiliated and shaken, and at the same time curiously excited¡ªas I always am by the unknown.

Stench of his freshly dead body. Stench of wasted blood.

I could hear or sense nothing else. I went into a small room which had once been an active kitchen and still contained the remnants of housekeeping from the time of that dead mortal whom the Victim had loved. Yes, just what I wanted under the sink pipes where mortals always shove it, a box of green plastic garbage sacks, just perfect for his remains.

It suddenly hit me that he had chucked his murdered wife, Terry, into such a bag, I'd seen it, smelled it, when I was feasting on him. Oh, hell with it. So he'd given me the idea.

There were a few pieces of cutlery around, though nothing that would allow a surgical or artistic job. I took the largest of the knives, carbon-steel blade, and went into the living room, deliberately with out hesitation, and turned and looked at the mammoth statue.

The halogens were still shining; bright, deliberate beams in the shadowy clutter.

Statue; goat-legged angel.

You idiot, Lestat.

I went up to it and stood before it, looking coldly at the details. Probably not seventeenth-century. Probably contemporary, executed by hand, yes, but it had the utter perfection of something contemporary, and the face did have the William Blake sublime expression¡ªan evil, scowling, goat-legged being with the eyes of Blake's saints and sinners, full of innocence as well as wrath.

I wanted it suddenly, would liked to have kept it, gotten it down some way to my rooms in New Orleans as a keepsake for practically falling down dead in fear at its feet. Cold and solemn it stood before me. And then I realized that all these relics might be lost if I didn't do something with them. As soon as his death was known, all this would be confiscated, that was his whole point with Dora, that this, his true wealth, would pass into indifferent hands.