Memnoch the Devil (The Vampire Chronicles 5)

"Exactly, and it was a private home in those days, and the top floor had a ballroom with bath and kitchenette. This was well before any restoration. Nobody had invented 'bed and breakfast,' and I just rented the ballroom and the musicians played there and we all used the filthy bath and kitchen, and in the day, when they were asleep all over the floor, I'd dream about Wynken and think about Wynken and wonder how I would ever find out more about this man and what these love poems were. I had all sorts of fantasies about him.

"That attic, I wonder about it now. It had windows at three points of the compass, and deep window seats with tattered old velvet cushions. You could see San Francisco in every direction but east as I remember, but I don't have a good sense of direction. We loved to sit in those window alcoves and talk and talk. My friends loved to hear about Wynken. We were going to write some songs based on Wynken's poems. Well, that never happened. "

"Obsessed. "

"Completely. Lestat, you must go back for those books, no matter what you believe of me when we're finished here. All of them are in the flat. Every single one that Wynken ever did. It was my life's work to get those books, I got into dope for those books. Even back in the Haight.

"I was telling you about Father Kevin. He wrote me a letter, said that he had looked up Wynken de Wilde in some manuscripts and found that Wynken had been the executed leader of a heretical cult. Wynken de Wilde had a religion of strictly female followers, and his works were officially condemned by the church. Father Kevin said all that was 'history,' and I ought to sell the books. He'd write more later. He never did. And two months later I committed multi-murder completely on the spur of the moment, and it changed the course of things. "

"The dope you were dealing?"

"Sort of, only I wasn't the one who made the slipup. Blue dealt more than me. Blue carried around grass in suitcases. I was into little sacks of it, you know, it made just about as much as the band made for me. But Blue bought by the kilo and lost two kilos. Nobody knew what happened to them. He actually lost them in a taxi, we figured, but we never knew.

"There were a lot of stupid kids walking around then. They would get into dealing' never realizing that the supply was originating with some vicious individual who thought nothing of shooting people in the head. Blue thought he could talk his way out of it, he'd make some explanation, he'd been ripped off by friends, that sort of thing. His connections trusted him, he said, they'd even given him a gun.

"The gun was in the kitchen drawer, and they'd told him they might need him to use it sometime, but of course he would never do that. I guess when you are that stoned, you think everybody else is stoned. These men, he said, they were just heads like us, nothing to worry about, that had been just talk. We would all be as famous as Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janis Joplin very soon.

"They came for him during the day. I was the only one home, except for him.

"He was in the big room, the ballroom, at the front door, giving these two men the runaround. I was out of sight in the kitchen, hardly listening. I might have been studying Wynken, I'm not sure. Anyway, very gradually I realized what they were talking about out there in the ballroom.

"These two men were going to kill Blue. They kept telling him in very flat voices that everything was okay, and please come with them, and come on, they had to go, and no, he had to come now, and no, he had to come along quickly. And then one of them said in a ver

y low, vicious voice, 'Come on, man!' And for the first time Blue stopped jabbering in hippie platitudes, like it will all come around, man, and I have done no evil, man, and there was this silence, and I knew they were going to take Blue and shoot him and dump him. This had already happened to kids! It had been in the papers. I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I knew Blue didn't have a chance.

"I didn't think about what I was doing. I completely forgot about the gun in the kitchen drawer. This surge of energy overtook me. I walked into the big room. Both these men were older, hard-looking guys, not hippies, nothing hippified about them. They weren't even Hell's Angels. They were just killers. And both sort of visibly sagged when they discovered there was an impediment to dragging my friend out of the room.

"Now, you know me, that I am as vam as you are probably, and then I was truly convinced of my special nature and destiny, and I came glistening and flashing towards these two men, you know, throwing off sparks, making a dance out of the walk. If I had any idea in my head, it was this: If Blue could die, that would mean I could die. And I couldn't let something like that be proven to me then, you know?"

"I can see it. "

"I started talking to these characters very fast, chattering in a kind of intense, pretentious manner, as if I were a psychedelic philosopher, throwing out four-syllable words and walking right towards them all the time, lecturing them on violence, and implying that they had disturbed me and 'all the others' in the kitchen. We were having a class out there, me and the others. '

"And suddenly one of them reached into his coat and pulled out his gun. I think he thought it would be a slam dunk. I can remember this so distinctly. He simply pulled out the gun and pointed it at me. And by the time he had it aimed, I had both hands on it, and I yanked it away from him, kicked him as hard as I could, and shot and killed both men. "

Roger paused.

I didn't say anything. I was tempted to smile. I liked it. I only nodded. Of course it had begun that way with him, why hadn't I realized it? He hadn't instinctively been a killer; he would never have been so interesting if that had been the case.

"That quick, I was a killer," he said. "That quick. And a smashing success at it, no less, imagine. "

He took another drink and looked off, deep into the memory of it. He seemed securely anchored in the ghost body now, revved up like an engine.

"What did you do then?" I asked.

"Well, that's when the course of my life changed. First I was going to go to the police, going to call the priest, going to go to hell, phone my mother, my life was over, call Father Kevin, flush all the grass down the toilet, life finished, scream for the neighbors, all of that.

"Then I just closed the door and Blue and I sat down and for about an hour I talked. Blue said nothing. I talked. I prayed, meanwhile, that nobody had been in a car outside waiting for those two, but if there came a knock I was ready because I had their gun now, and it had lots of bullets, and I was sitting directly opposite the door.

"And as I talked and waited and watched and let the two bodies lie there, and Blue simply stared into space as if it had been a bad LSD trip, I talked myself into getting the hell out of there. Why should I go to jail for the rest of my life for those two? Took about an hour of expressed logic. "

"Right. "

"We cleaned out that pad immediately, took everything that had belonged to us, called the other two musicians, got them to pick up their stuff at the bus station. Said it was a drug bust coming down.

They never knew what happened. The place was so full of fingerprints from all our parties and orgies and late-night jam sessions, nobody would ever find us. None of us had ever been printed. And besides, I kept the gun.

"And I did something else, too, I took the money off the men.