Of Love and Evil - By Anne Rice Page 0,57
on, “Because before I saw that man take his own life, I didn’t believe in Hell. I didn’t believe in the Devil or demons, and when I came to God, it was not out of fear of Hell.”
He nodded.
“And now there is Ankanoc, and there is Hell.”
He pondered this and then he shrugged.
“You’ve heard the voices of evil in the past,” he said. “You’ve always known what evil is. You never lied to yourself.”
“I have but I thought the voices came from within me. I thought all the evil I’d ever witnessed came from within individuals, that devils and Hell were old constructs. I felt myself become evil when I first took a human life. I felt myself grow ever more evil as I killed others. I can live with an evil that was inside myself, perhaps because I was able to repent. But now there’s Ankanoc, a dybbuk, and I don’t want to believe in such things.”
“Does it really change things so much?”
“Shouldn’t it?”
“How do we measure evil? By what evil does, isn’t that so?” he waited. Then: “Nothing’s changed. You’ve cast off the ways of Lucky the Fox, that’s what matters. You’re a Child of the Angels. A philosophy of evil does not alter those things.”
I nodded. But I didn’t find this perfectly comforting, true as it was. A wave of dizziness came over me. And the thirst was burning.
I went to the refrigerator in the little dining area, found a bottle of icy cold soda and drank it down in several gulps. The sheer sensuous pleasure of this quieted me and made me feel a little ashamed. Abstract thoughts yield so easily to bodily comfort, I thought.
“Don’t you sometimes hate us?” I asked him.
“Never, and again you know that I don’t.”
“Are you trying to persuade me to ask genuine questions, instead of rhetorical questions?”
He laughed. It was a small agreeable laugh.
The caffeine in the soda was going to my head.
I went to the other windows one by one and drew the drapes, turning on the lamps that I passed—on the desk, and by the bed. The room felt a little safer now, for no good reason. Then I turned on the heat.
“You won’t leave me, will you?” I asked.
“I never leave you,” he said. His arms were folded. He was leaning against the wall by the window, looking at me across the room. Though his hair was red, his eyebrows were more golden, yet dark enough to give his expression a definite character. He was wearing shoes like mine, but not a wristwatch.
“I mean you won’t go invisible!” I said with a little gesture of both hands. “You’ll stay here till I’ve had a shower and changed clothes.”
“You have things to do,” he said. “If I’m distracting you, I should go.”
“I can’t call Liona at this hour,” I said. “She’s asleep.”
“But what did you do last time when you came back?”
“Research, writing,” I said. “I wrote down everything that had happened. I looked up more of the history of what I’d glimpsed. But you know The Boss is never going to let me show my writing about all this to anyone. That little dream of writing it down, being an author, putting it in books, it’s gone.”
I thought again of how I’d boasted to my former boss, The Right Man, that I would write about this great “something” that had happened to me, and about how I’d turned my life around. I’d told him to keep his eye on the bookstores, that someday he might find my name on the cover of a book. How foolish and impetuous that now seemed. I also recalled that I’d told him my real name, and I wished I had not done that. Why did I have to tell him that his trusted assassin, Lucky the Fox, was really Toby O’Dare?
Images of Liona and Toby flashed through my mind.
Those awful words of Ankanoc came back to me. Wouldn’t the Holy Spirit have flooded you with consolation and light?
Well, I’d been filled with consolation and light when I’d spoken those words to The Right Man, and now I was confused. I didn’t mind so much never telling anyone what I did for Malchiah. A Child of the Angels should keep confidential what he does if that is what is expected of him, just as secrecy had always been expected when I was assassin for The Right Man. How could I give the angels less than I’d given The Right Man? But there