The tale of the body thief - By Anne Rice Page 0,38

who weren’t human beings.

“I turned around again, forcing myself to focus tightly, to be aware of things, keenly aware. And there they were still, and it was painfully clear they were illusory. They simply weren’t of the same fabric as everything else. Do you know what I’m saying? I can break it down into parts. They weren’t being illuminated by the same light, for instance, they existed in some realm where the light was from another source.”

“Like the light in Rembrandt.”

“Yes, rather like that. Their clothes and their faces were smoother than those of human beings. Why, the whole vision was of a different texture, and that texture was uniform in all its details.”

“Did they see you?”

“No. I mean to say, they didn’t look at me, or acknowledge me. They looked at each other, they went on talking, and I picked up the thread again instantly. It was God talking to the Devil and telling the Devil that he must go on doing the job. And the Devil didn’t want to do it. He explained that his term had already been too long. The same thing was happening to him that had happened to all the others. God said that He understood, but the Devil ought to know how important he was, he couldn’t simply shirk his duties, it wasn’t that simple, God needed him, and needed him to be strong. And all this was very amicable.”

“What did they look like?”

“That’s the worst part of it. I don’t know. At the time I saw two vague shapes, large, definitely male, or assuming male form, shall we say, and pleasant-looking—nothing monstrous, nothing out of the ordinary really. I wasn’t aware of any absence of particulars—you know, hair color, facial features, that sort of thing. The two figures seemed quite complete. But when I tried to reconstruct the event afterwards, I couldn’t recall any details! I don’t think the illusion was that nearly complete. I think I was satisfied by it, but the sense of completeness sprang from something else.”

“From what?”

“The content, the meaning, of course.”

“They never saw you, never knew you were there.”

“My dear boy, they had to know I was there. They must have known. They must have been doing it for my benefit! How else could I have been allowed to see it?”

“I don’t know, David. Maybe they didn’t mean for you to see. Maybe it’s that some people can see, and some people can’t. Maybe it was a little rip in the other fabric, the fabric of everything else in the café.”

“That could be true. But I fear it wasn’t. I fear I was meant to see it and it was meant to have some effect on me. And that’s the horror, Lestat. It didn’t have a very great effect.”

“You didn’t change your life on account of it.”

“Oh, no, not at all. Why, two days later I doubted I’d even seen it. And with each telling to another person, with each little verbal confrontation—‘David, you’ve gone crackers’—it became ever more uncertain and vague. No, I never did anything about it.”

“But what was there to do? What can anybody do on account of any revelation but live a good life? David, surely you told your brethren in the Talamasca about the vision.”

“Yes, yes, I told them. But that was much later, after Brazil, when I filed my long memoirs, as a good member should do. I told them the whole story, such as it was, of course.”

“And what did they say?”

“Lestat, the Talamasca never says much of anything, that’s what one has to face. ‘We watch and we are always there.’ To tell the truth, it wasn’t a very popular vision to go talking about with the other members. Speak of spirits in Brazil and you have an audience. But the Christian God and His Devil? No, I fear the Talamasca is subject somewhat to prejudices and even fads, like any other institution. The story raised a few eyebrows. I don’t recall much else. But then when you’re talking to gentlemen who have seen werewolves, and been seduced by vampires, and fought witches, and talked to ghosts, well, what do you expect?”

“But God and the Devil,” I said, laughing. “David, that’s the big time. Maybe the other members envied you more than you realized.”

“No, they didn’t take it seriously,” he said, acknowledging my humor with a little laugh of his own. “I’m surprised that you’ve taken it seriously, to be quite frank.”

He rose suddenly, excitedly, and walked across the