Memnoch the Devil (The Vampire Chronicles 5)

One night Louis came, with the quiet ease of a chaplain into a jail, immune to the rules yet presenting no threat to them.

Slowly, he sat down beside me and folded his legs, and looked off as though it was not polite to stare at me, the prisoner, wrapped in chains and rage.

He laid his fingers on my shoulder. His hair had a reasonable and fashionable look to it¡ªthat is, it was clipped and combed and not full of dust. His clothes were clean and new, too, as if he had perhaps dressed for me.

I smiled to myself at that, his dressing for me. But from time to time he did, and when I saw that the shirt had antique buttons of gold and pearl, I knew that he had, and I accepted that the way a sick man accepts a cool cloth on his forehead.

His fingers pressed me just a little harder, and I liked this too. But I didn't have the slightest interest in saying so.

"I've been reading Wynken's books," he said. "You know, I picked them up. I went back for them. We'd left them in the chapel. " And now, he did glance at me very respectfully and simply.

"Oh, thank you for that," I said. "I dropped the books in the dark.

I dropped them when I reached for the eye, or did she take my hand? Whatever, I let the sacks fall with the books. I can't budge these chains. I can't move. "

"I've taken the books home to our place in the Rue Royale. They're there, like so many jewels strewn out for us to gaze at. "

"Yes. Have you looked at the tiny pictures, I mean, really looked?" I asked. "I've never really looked. I just . . . it was all happening so quickly, and I didn't really open the books. But if you could have seen his ghost in the bar and heard the way he described them. "

"They are glorious. They are magnificent. You will love them. You have years of pleasure ahead with them and the light at your side. I've only begun to look at them and to read. With a magnifying glass. But you won't need the glass. Your eyes are stronger than mine. "

"We can read them perhaps. . . you and I. . . together. "

"Yes. . . all his twelve books," he said. He talked softly of many miraculous little images, of tiny humans, and beasts and flowers, and the lion lying down with the lamb.

I closed my eyes. I was grateful. I was content. He knew I didn't want to talk anymore.

"I'll be down there, in our rooms," he said, "waiting for you. They can't keep you here much longer. "

What is longer?

It seemed the weather grew warm.

David might have come.

Sometimes I shut my eyes and my ears and I refused to listen to any sound that was deliberately directed to me. I heard the cicadas singing when the sky was red still from the sun, and other vampires were asleep. I heard the birds swooping down on the limbs or oaks on Napoleon Avenue. I heard the children!

The children did come. Singing. And sometimes some one or two speaking in a rapid whisper, as if exchanging confidences beneath a tent made from a sheet. And feet on the stairs.

And then from beyond the walls, the blaring, amplified noise of the electric night.

One evening I opened my eyes and the chains were gone.

I was alone and the door was open.

My clothes were in tatters, but I didn't care. I stood up, creakily, achingly, and for the first time in a fortnight, perhaps, I put my hand to my eye and felt it secure there, though of course I'd always seen through it. And I'd stopped thinking about it long ago.

I walked out of the orphanage, through the old courtyard. For one moment I thought I saw a set of iron swings, the kind they made for children on old playgrounds. I saw the A-frames at each end, the crossbar, and the swings themselves, and the children swinging, little girls with blowing hair, and I could hear them laughing. I looked up, dazed, at the stained-glass windows of the chapel.

The children were gone. The courtyard was empty. My palace now. She'd cut all ties. She was long gone to her great, great victory.

I walked a long time down St. Charles Avenue.

I walked under oaks I knew, on old pavements and stretches of brick, past houses new and old, and on across Jackson Avenue into the curious mix of taverns and neon signs, of boarded-up buildings and ruined houses and fancy shops, the garish waste that stretches to downtown.

I came to an empty store that had once sold expensive automobiles.

For fifty years, they'd sold those fancy cars in this place, and now it was a big, hollow room with glass walls. I could see my reflection perfectly in the glass. My preternatural vision was mine again, flawless, with both blue eyes.