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all things either good or ungood
And just like that, Louis is gone. Through the cavelike entranceway, about to round the corner and disappear from Daniel's life as suddenly and senselessly as he had appeared. Armand raises his head minutely. It's a painful-looking movement, something in his spine fractured maybe, but he pushes his eyes up to follow Louis away.
And then just at the last moment, suspended in time before some other future for them all, he says quietly, "Enjoy him," and Louis stops walking.
"The fuck did you just say to me?"
The whole interview, Daniel had been riding on a sort of psychotic confidence. He knew he could die, of course, had fed his editor that stupid line about the most dangerous man in the world, which of course Louis isn't, not by a long shot. Louis can kill basically the same number of people at a time as any normal guy, which is one; not very many, compared to plenty of people. The only difference between him and the average human is… something about the method, perhaps. Everyone knows they could be shot in the street almost anywhere in the world, but most people don't expect to be exsanguinated.
And for most of the interview, Daniel didn't, either. For one, he'd already been attacked once by a vampire and survived, which is a bit of an ego boost. But also, Louis had never seemed particularly interested in killing or maiming him. He seemed like a guy who wanted to have his story told, and would inevitably be disappointed that you can't tell a story without losing control of it, just like all the others. It turned him mean sometimes, sure, but his meanness is the human sort.
Now, for the first time, Daniel is very aware of being in the room with a monster. Only it's not aimed at him. All that worry, setting the apartment in order in case it had to be cleaned out if he never returned to New York, and when the mask finally comes off, all that rage right in the room with him, and he's completely irrelevant.
Armand doesn't answer. He lies there, looking at Louis. And then Louis turns around, walks back into the room.
There is no reason for Daniel to be frightened. This has nothing to do with him. But he is, like the feeling they say you have right before you're hit with lightning. Louis stands over Armand again, and without looking back at Daniel, holds out his hand back towards him. "Give me your knife," he says.
"What?"
"The Swiss Army knife in the right pocket of your pants, Daniel. Give it to me."
Well, yes, he has a Swiss Army knife in his pocket. You should always have a Swiss army knife in your pocket, that's the kind of advice he'd always imagined a father would have given him, if he'd had one of those, the kind of advice he gave his girls, well, you never know what's going to happen out there, lots of shitty guys, you know, or maybe you just need to crack open a can of beer, well, doesn't hurt to be prepared.
"Now, Daniel," says Louis. So Daniel pulls out the knife and hands it over. What else is there to do?
Louis takes the knife and pops the dull, slightly dirty blade out of it. He leans down and pulls Armand to his knees by the hair. Armand goes, like a doll, limbs piled on top of each other, an obvious act. "What are you doing," says Daniel nervously to Louis.
"Dealing with a liar," says Louis, and regrips, grabs Armand's jaw instead of his hair. Armand's mouth falls open, no resistance at all. Well, what is it to him? He's a vampire. He'll heal. Anything Louis can do to him will only be temporary, and he can use it for sympathy in the meantime, kneel on the floor so pathetically and—
Louis reaches in his mouth, grabs his tongue with two fingers and starts sawing at the root of it with Daniel's dull pocket knife.
Armand makes a horrible choked gurgling sound. His head is being tossed around by the force of the knife and he just lets it happen, his entire body following limply.
Daniel feels frozen. It's not like he hasn't seen horrible shit before. But this is different. Something uniquely chilling in the way he's just fucking letting it happen, letting out cries choked off by the blood running down his throat but not lifting a finger to stop it. This is the man who bound Daniel's entire body in invisible rope, who threw him around like an insect, who wiped Louis' memory with as much ease as any puny mortal's. He can stop this. He can stop this. He can—
Armand collapses in a heap on the floor. The pink and red length of his tongue glistens in Louis' hand.
Louis raises his hand, holds it up to the light. Daniel wants very, very badly to look away, but the slimy little nub of it won't let him go. Vampires heal, yes, but does that extend to re-growing absent body parts? It must. Armand must, surely, know damn well that he'll be right as rain by the next sunset. He's lying at Louis' feet, weeping, spitting out mouthful after mouthful of blood. Milking it.
Daniel is shaking. It's all just a stupid performance, from both of them. Knowing that, insisting on it in his own mind, doesn't make the shaking stop. So the shaking is just the Parkinson's, probably. He feels nauseous, which is probably just the levodopa.
It's not just him, though. Louis' hand is shaking, too.
Louis nudges Armand's shoulder with his toe. Kicks him, really, just a bit, just until he looks up, until he looks up again to see Louis and Daniel staring down at him.
"There," says Louis, and his voice sounds scratchy, wavering. "I took something from you you'll never get back. We're even now. Just like you always wanted."
Then he pockets the tongue, and walks out of the penthouse.
When he'd woken up the morning of his final interview session with the vampires Louis and Armand, Daniel had a clean bag of folded laundry at his door, returned to him by Rashid. He packed the clothes neatly in his suitcase, imagining how useful it would be to return home from a long trip with almost all clean clothes. He stored away his CPAP machine, swallowed amantadine, doxazosin, atorvastatin, levothyroxine, and a handful of vitamins that probably just raise the price point on his pee, then updated his backup of all the interview materials. One copy to a cloud storage service, two to USB sticks, one tucked into his wallet, one in his suitcase. Each backup location had saved his ass at least once in his life. He was feeling good. It was working out. For once in his life, something really, really important was actually working out. After the interview, of course, would come the actual hard part, but still. One day at a time, as they say in the program. He'd made it through, well, nearly, and he'd make it through writing the book, too, and die having said something true, something important, whether people believed it or not.
That was how this day was supposed to go. It was supposed to be almost over. It was supposed to be the crowning achievement of his career, getting in and out of here cleanly.
This is not clean. The living room is coated in dust, the floor slicked with blood, the Vampire Armand is lying in a dark pool of it. In the magnolia room, Daniel's laptop is on fire. Had the recording been autosaving to the cloud account? He can no longer remember. In any case, it's only the material from today that he could have lost, hardly ideal but not disastrous, not—
An enormous bang, and the acrid smell of smoke is suddenly everywhere, pouring out from the doorway. Fuck. Shit. Another, smaller explosion, and then, of course, the sprinkler. And the fire alarm. It's a loud, digital-sounding beep, impossible to ignore, the lights flashing on and off in time to it, and Daniel can see out the window, reflected into the fog outside, that it’s a whole-building affair, every floor’s flashing reflected in the particles. A voice message added in, too: Attention. A fire has been reported. Please report to the nearest exit. Do not use the elevator. A repeat of the message in Arabic. More beeping.
The noise, the lights, the body lying on the floor, it all combines to give the impression of being in the middle of a bad acid trip. Rashid is nowhere to be found— good for him— and Daniel thinks he yells "Where's the fire extinguisher?" at Armand, but either he hadn't actually said it out loud, or Armand doesn't hear, or doesn't care. He just lies there. Daniel makes his way past him, reeling, past the column of smoke. In the magnolia room, the shower of paper that had sprinkled down on Daniel at the impact is sparking to life. Kitchen. He knows there’s one here somewhere, and yes, sure enough, a set of swinging doors enter onto a commercial-size kitchen, with a 10-lb fire extinguisher prominently labelled and displayed in the corner. He can lift ten pounds. Under almost every other circumstance, surely he can lift ten fucking pounds, but now, the weight of the thing makes him stumble and nearly fall. He clutches the walls on his way to the magnolia room. Several flaming books are now burning merrily, and the laptop is still emitting black smoke and the occasional threatening little spark. He pulls the pin and aims the foam around the room. It's not that much, really not any sort of unified conflagration. Hasn't spread to the tree. Who knows if Louis had been hoping it would. More likely, he simply had no idea that the batteries in modern electronics fucking explode. Asshole.
Finally, he's pretty sure they're out. It's hard to think, to even see straight, with the noise still going on. And now the smell is worse, the smoke combining with the chemical smell of the greenish foam now coating everything in the room in a nauseating mixture. He drops the extinguisher on the floor and goes back to the living room. A fire has been reported. Please report to the nearest exit. Do not use the elevator, the voice instructs him again. Even if he wanted to, he couldn't. They are on the sixty-eighth floor. There's no fucking way he is making it to ground level under his own power. His head pounds. He wants to fucking leave. He's put out an actual, real-life fire now, isn't that enough, isn't that sufficient symbolism for this to end already? But no, of course not. Because there's still one thing very, very obviously unfinished here.
And so it seems, in this moment, that the only thing preventing it from being over, the only thing causing it to all go wrong instead of right, indeed the entire and complete source of every injustice and misery in Daniel's entire stupid, misspent, pathetically short life, is this snivelling creature lying at his feet. The one who can control fire, but doesn't. The one who could have prevented it, but didn't. He just needs this to fucking stop. He nudges him with his toe, like Louis did, which has less than no effect, like everything Daniel has ever tried on this planet, so he draws back his foot and kicks him as hard as he can, which probably isn't very hard, so he does it again, and again, when Armand just keeps doing nothing, letting Daniel's foot make contact with his belly over and over again, until he is tired, or just tired of—
Knock on the door. And then voices. Arabic, then English. Is there anyone in here?
Right. The fucking firefighters. Because of the fire. The fire alarm. Fuck.
It feels like a very long way to get to the door. Probably because it is. In the hallway, three guys, two of whom have axes. "Sorry," says Daniel. "My laptop battery exploded, and I put it out, but I couldn't make it downstairs. It's all fine now."
"We'll come in and take a look," says the guy in front. It's not a question.
Daniel glances nervously down the hall, towards Armand, though he's out of sight. He's not sure how the mind gift thing works, if he can make something loud on his end, but just in case, he thinks as hard as he can: THIS WOULD BE A REALLY GOOD TIME FOR THAT MIND-WAMMY SHIT OF YOURS.
He doesn't really have any other choice. Armand had better be taking care of this. He'll be gone from the floor by the time the firefighters round the corner, surely.
He isn't. Daniel gestures them into the magnolia room. "In here," he says. "The laptop, and, uh, some books."
Two of them step into the magnolia room. The other one stay in the hallway. Taking in the damage, the blood, the body. He's about to step towards Armand. Is stepping towards him. Why the vampire not doing anything about this? "What happened?" the firefighter asks.
"He had a bit too much to drink," says Daniel. "He's fine."
He keeps walking towards him. Armand stares straight ahead. Still letting it all fucking happen.
"I'm going to take his vitals," says the man, and Daniel glances nervously out the window. It's still dark, but it must be getting close to dawn. That means he'll have them, right? He's pretty sure that's how it works, but he'd been planning on following up with the Talamasca sources by email for a bit of a more objective view of vampire biology than Louis could provide. The guy kneels and feels for a pulse, old-school, in Armand's neck. He waits, counts. Armand has a pulse, apparently. Pity he's not fucking using it for something useful, like getting these guys out of here, Daniel tries again to think very loudly.
"That's enough," Daniel says. "He's fine. He's just a bit—"
"He's breathing and his heartrate is normal, but he's not otherwise responding. I'm going to call an ambulance for both of you, sir," says the firefighter. From the magnolia room, he hears the sound of a radio, and then the alarm, blessedly, turns off. The silence seems to ring.
One more glance at Armand. Nothing. He's on his own. "No," Daniel says, as firmly as he can. And it's entirely too easy to come up with the scenario to paint here, isn't it, so fine, if Armand isn't going to lift a mental finger to get them out of this, he can deal with Daniel’s method. “He hasn't…" a deliberate pause. "I’ll call myself. I'll have to take a look around for his papers, before we go to the hospital. Must be around here somewhere, you know?"
The firefighter nods slowly. Daniel watches the calculations running in his head, the situation taking on a shape that is, if not clear, at least legible enough to allow him to ignore the bits that are still unclear. Like why there's so much blood. Not really his business, is it.
The other two emerge from the magnolia room, and Daniel ushers them all towards the door. "You did well," says one. "The foam should be vacuumed first, then washed with a solution of water and ethanol. There are cleaning services that will do it."
"Good for me," says Daniel dully, and locks the door behind him. Then he sits down on the floor, right there, panting. What the fuck. What the fuck. It feels unreal. The incursion of the real world, firefighters, some guy kneeling to take Armand’s pulse, has destabilized the carefully curated vision of reality he’s been sucking down with a straw for the last two weeks, and now he feels dizzy with it. Vampires are real. Are vampires real? He hadn’t been sure, when he’d gotten on the plane. He’d been sure the moment he got here, no doubt at all, but why? What proof does he really have? None. The story was supposed to come first, then the proof comes later, that’s just fact-checking. Now the facts feel like they’re crashing in on him, felled by an earthquake before he had time to shore them up.
He's not sure how long he kneels there. Hiding, basically. Long enough that what snaps him out of it is the dawn prayer. He walks shakily back to the living room. Daniel is both starving and nauseous. His feet ache, his back aches, his head aches, it feels like he can taste the fire extinguisher foam in the back of his throat. He needs to sleep. But—
There is a dead body on the floor. He stares down at it. He doesn't need to take the pulse to know there isn't one. Not like he's an expert, but, yeah, he's got enough experience of death to be getting on with. The complete absence of breath, movement, the grey cast of the skin around Armand's eyes. He's dead. This is a corpse.
Daniel takes a deep breath. Get it together. This is real. He isn't a senile old man. Louis isn't a schizophrenic megalomaniac. Well, maybe he is, but he's also a vampire, and Daniel is also an award-winning investigative journalist chasing down the story of his life. So. This is a dead body, yes. But it had been alive, not so long ago. Now it is dead, because it's a vampire, and that is how it works. But it will be back again, when the sun tucks back out of view, and Daniel just needs to check. Just one more time, one more reassurance that all this isn't an elaborate hoax. So, here's his chance.
He reaches down, and pushes Armand's body over onto its back. It plops over, heavy weight. A stream of blood has dried on its chin, staining the collar of its shirt. Daniel feels nauseous. He pulls out his phone.
A piece of mirror would be best for this, something he could hold in front of the thing's month and show the lack of exhalation visually. The idea of going into the bathroom in the guest room and breaking the bathroom mirror is so far beyond him that it's almost laughable. Instead he just aims the camera and presses the video capture. The frame is shaking badly. He needs to prove that the thing is dead. He rolls it again with his foot. Oh. You're supposed to rub the sternum, aren't you? He reaches out and tries it, holding the phone with his left hand and-well, it's not really clear on the video what he's doing, it just looks like— he stops the video. Puts the phone down.
If this body is going to re-animate— and he still thinks it will, though he's feeling crazier for it by the second— then it is a person. That's what's been keeping him here, after all, the reason this story has to be told, completely besides the shock value. At its core, Louis' story is about the stubborn insistence of his humanity. Every time it seemed to have been yanked from him, or that he gave it up, repudiated it, there it was, whole, untouched, both a gift and a cruse. And so if this is real, and this book deserves to be written, then—
He's not really sure what he expects, when he reaches his arms under Armand's's back and tries to pick him up. For it to work like in a movie, maybe, the classic move, the hero carrying the limp body to safety powered by nothing but his own centrality in the narrative. It doesn't work. Daniel can barely pick up his suitcase, for crying out loud, of course he can't pick up Armand.
His throat feels tight. Panic grips him. He needs to get Armand out of here. Now that he's had the thought, he can't escape the weight of it bearing down on him. He's a person, fuck, he's a fucking person, and he has to wake up in his own bed. Or what used to be his own bed. Or coffin. Do they have coffins? Daniel hadn't asked. Whenever he does wake up, which he will, surely, Daniel is not insane, this is real. Daniel grabs Armand's hands and tugs. The body moves not easily, but surely. Daniel repositions, grabs his wrists, and keeps dragging. Down the hallway, towards where he knows Louis and Armand's bedroom is. Well, just Louis' bedroom now. Or just Armand's bedroom? He, after all, is the one being dragged into it to recover from the worst divorce Daniel has ever personally witnessed— which is saying something— while Louis probably books a plane ticket right back to his ex. Maybe there's some sort of squatter's rights situation coming into play.
Daniel stops n the entranceway of the bedrooom. Has to, he's exhausted, arms shaking. Also, this is… he needs a moment to take it in. It's not like it's unexpected, really. If he'd had to imagine, he probably would have imagined something like it. Enormous, cavernous, an ornate burial chamber. The bed set into the floor, a few steps down, surrounded by grated walls, the headboard itself an oddly foot-like array of abstract shapes. Outside the grates, paintings that his slightly blurry vision canot quite make out. He can, however, make out the outline of the array of whips and paddles hanging on the wall like art. Despite all that— or perhaps, he can admit, because of it— it is actually a nice room. It's peaceful.
Daniel starts pulling again. Armand's body makes a horrible dull thinking sound as he pulls it down the small set of stairs. There's no way to get him on the bed but the same way he's gotten him here, so Daniel just climbs up onto the mattress and keeps pulling. The corpse sort of slides over the edge of the mattress, rumpling the sheets as Daniel pulls him up. Tries to get his head on a pillow, and once he's more or less made it it only makes sense to pull the blankets around him. It's awkward. Armand's limbs are splayed out at odd angles, and Daniel can't quite figure out how to arrange them. With his face turned up, the blood coating his mouth and chin is lurid. It would look like a portrait of a vampire who'd eaten well, if he didn't look so small and grey.
Daniel steps back. He wants to do more, like there's some movement he could make that would make up for kicking the shit out of him just a few hours ago. Why had he done that? He can't remember any longer. Armand had done something bad to Louis. Armand had been slightly more involved in Santiago's lynching play than Louis thought he was. Something like that. Armand had let Louis believe he put him in a box of rocks instead of Lestat. Daniel can't quite remember where the actual crux of the lie was supposed to be. Well, he'll have to reread the documents, won't he, time to get the book together. The trial script must still be on the floor of the living room. He should go get it, scan it. He's so tired.
He doesn't want to go back to the guest room. It feels like there must be some fundamental difference, between the version of him who slept there while Louis and Armand were in here, and whatever they all are today. There are cushions set out on the tiered steps on the way to the door. Beneath one of them is set a basin and washcloth that cannot possibly have any other use but to wash feet. It doesn't even feel salacious, any more, the realization, the remnant of a truly freaky, fucked-up sex life. Just a bit sad. Daniel takes the cushion on the other side of it, and curls up.
Time passes differently here. Daniel had thought it was just the schedule, staying up late to accommodate Louis, or knowing that Louis is doing the same for him. The accumulation of sleeplessness day over day, the lack of routine making everything not slower, exactly, but more noticeable, time sticking to his fingers. But now the interview is over, and the stickiness remains. Maybe it's that the passage of time is marked communally. Daniel hadn't needed an alarm to tell him when he ought to go stand by Armand's bed, to wait for the dead thing to rise again.
He stands there at twilight, on the first day. Armand is just as Daniel had left him. His eyes are open, which Daniel cannot remember if they were before; but somehow it doesn't matter, he doesn't have even a moment's thought that there might be something behind them, they are so clearly unseeing.
He stands there, watching, until the muezzin outside goes silent, and nothing changes. All right then, dusk, that's unambiguous, surely. Daniel kills another few hours wandering around the penthouse, trying to plan what he's going to say. But when the evening prayer is called, just like before, just like every single moment since Louis had removed his tongue, Armand does nothing.
Daniel goes back to the guest bedroom. Takes a pair of clean boxers out of his packed suitcase. One more night. All right.
He spends the next day snooping aimlessly. The diary pages scattered over the floor. Louis and Armand's's walk-in closet. The whips and paddles hanging on the wall. He finds more in a box under the bed. This should, theoretically, be interesting information. He should write it down, photograph it. Figure out how to present it, a unified psychological picture of his subject. Instead he just drifts.
The kitchen has people food. Until recently, there were other people here. Daniel eats oatmeal and sandwiches with slices of American cheese and sliced ham from the fridge. Who the hell's sliced ham is this? There's nobody to ask. It makes him feel a little less insane. Yes, he is waiting around for a dead body to come back to life. But at least he hadn't imagined that there had once been other people here, real people, who have now left, presumably for the same reasons Daniel perceives to exist. If he were simply hallucinating all this, his mind wouldn't have come up with the sliced ham, nor the little jar labelled "blueberry sumac jelly," which he tries out on toast. It's good. He doesn't even know what sumac is. Isn't it like poison ivy? He googles it; apparently it's a common Persian spice. Why would his fevered mind be making up new spices? He's had plenty of bad trips, and they never involved imaginarily expanding his culinary horizons. Though they did, admittedly, frequently involve vampires.
Another night-time, another nothing. This time, Daniel takes Armand's pulse, once the light has unambiguously left the sky. It's beating, but the firefighter's phrase comes back to Daniel's mind: not otherwise responsive.
Daniel steels himself, kneels by the side of the bed, and grips Armand's face. By now he's basically expecting no reaction, which is what he gets. He pulls down on Armand's chin with one hand, his other holding the back of his head still. His mouth opens a little, and Daniel sticks a finger between the front row of his teeth to pry it wide. He peers in at what there is of Armand's tongue, a ragged stump at the back of his month.
Daniel swallows. He can feel his own pulse thumping in his ears. The little stump is healed, in the sense of no longer being an open wound, but it is not anything that could really be called a tongue. Armand's open eyes stare at him, or at least seem to. Is the stump perhaps a little longer than Louis had left it? Daniel had gotten a pretty good look, despite himself, at the thing that was removed. Maybe it is growing, just slowly. And it makes sense, then, if the body in front of him is expending all its energy on growing new tissue, for it to suspend all other functions, doesn't it? Like a medical coma. Where the person is in there, all the while, watching and listening, trapped until their body allows them to re-enter the world. It sounds like the worst thing that could possibly happen to you. Way worse than being dead.
He takes his fingers out of Armand's mouth. Stands up, steps back from the bed. "Hey," he says. Talking to Armand feels simultaneously momentous and a bit ridiculous. Armand, like always, makes no reaction. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have- done that shit to you."
He means kicking him, obviously, but when it comes out of his mouth like that he's suddenly no longer sure. The script had to come out, of course, but was that really the way to do it? If a student had come to his office, explained the situation, the sources, the history, is this really what he would have counselled? No, of course not. He'd just thought that he was different, special, the rules didn't apply to him or to this. But he cocked it all up. And, well, Armand had cocked it all up too, hadn't he. Pretty damn pathetically. But it is just that, pathetic, in the original sense. Pathétique: stirring emotion. Daniel isn't sure what the hell emotion this is, but there's a lot of it.
He goes back to his room and unpacks his suitcase. Rashid's thoughtful clean laundry, back on the shelf in the guest bedroom.
It becomes a kind of routine, after a few days. As the sun sets, crouch down beside the bed with the catatonic vampire. Open his mouth and look inside. Daniel honestly isn't sure if the tongue is growing. If so, it's not doing it particularly quickly.
On the third day, he descends the elevator, nods to the doorman, and takes the metro to the mall to buy a new computer. Louis had, indeed, wired him an actual million fucking dollars, so he takes the gold car on the way back, clutching his new Macbook. Why not. He discovers that the reason why not is that it makes him feel fucking weird. Yes, he'll happily pretend to have his unconscious domestic's passport locked away to get out of a tight spot, but apparently buying an upper-class public transit ticket is a bridge too far for his bohemian sensibilities.
He downloads all his recordings from cloud storage. He picks up the scattered pages from the floor, piles them on the table and tries to sort through them, shifting scraps from one pile to another. He creates a file named "outline," and stares at it. He starts ordering food once he's gone through what Louis' former staff had left behind. He hasn't seen a single one of them, since the incident— Rashid was expected, but surely at least some weren't in the penthouse at the time? How did they know to steer clear? Perhaps Rashid had instructed them. Or perhaps they were all Talamasca, an entire household bristling with eyes and ears. The doorman for the building is still here. He brings Daniel's deliveries up, rings the doorbell and is gone before he opens it, every time. Weird. He should probably find the guy and talk to him about the owners of this penthouse. He doesn't. He should scan the enormous trove of valuable materials scattered around the table, tottering dangerously close to open takeout cartons. He doesn't do that, either.
Check the tongue. Order food. Wander around, castigate himself for not getting anything done. He's fucking dying, he's on a bit of a schedule here, and this book is supposed to be his legacy, the truest thing he's ever said, and he can't get himself to write it.
He hadn't thought about it too much yet, his death. It hadn't seemed pressing. The diagnosis was just another misfortune, the kind that happens to everyone as they age. Something annoying, which will become serious eventually. Technically, everyone on earth is living under a death sentence.
He thinks about it now. Armand is lying unresponsive in the bedroom, always on the edge of his consciousness. It's too easy to imagine it's him, at the end. The very end always looks the same, doesn't it? A waiting room. A room in which you wait. Everyone else waits, too. He thinks of his grandmother, who had made them wait for nearly six months, the sick fuck, his mother shuttling the two of them to the hospital in Fresno every weekend, giving thanks to God that they were able to see her one last time. Daniel, thirteen, sitting in the passenger seat and wanting to say But you're hoping she'll die soon too, aren't you? But then she would cry, again, some more, and he didn't want that, not really. Daniel had never enjoyed cruelty for its own sake. It only pours out of him, sometimes, by accident, always too honest to be worth regretting, but leaving a sick feeling lingering, a rotten emptiness.
His sweet long-suffering mother hadn't made him wait like that, not like her own tough nut of a mom had done; a phone call, an article written on the plane, Kate with him but Lenora too busy with college applications, and she didn't really care anyway. He hadn't insisted. Kate mostly wanted the free trip to California. An easy three days on her way out, but still, everything familiar about it. The lights, the smells, the waiting. It's how it feels now, with Armand. It's how it will be with Daniel. Maybe Kate will even come for him, too. Though he's not holding his breath.
Armand is coming back. Daniel is not waiting for him to die, he is waiting for him to live. He tells himself, over and over.
He is waiting for Armand to live, not die, and yet. Yet he still ends up back in his room, opening his suitcase, pawing through the remaining clothes, the cables and toiletries and pill bottles. Down to the bottom, where he'd stashed the stuff he was sure he wouldn't need. The copy of his will. The fall jacket. And the—
There are somethings you simply have to bring with you, aren't there, if you're setting out to tell a vampire story, or to be part of one.
It's not the one he should have. If this vampire story had any sense of narrative elegance, the Bible that Daniel Molloy brought with him to meet his demons should have been the one on his grandmother's nightstand as she died. The one she clutched from Bayburt to Constantinople to San Francisco, the one she pressed clumsily into his hand and said read to me, not knowing in her confusion that he couldn't.
(I prayed holding this book and was saved, she'd told him once, earlier, when he was small, and one day it will save you, too. Small enough to say what he was thinking and not even know it was cruel, but didn't everyone else pray, too? Why weren't they saved? He remembers the shock on his mother's face as she slapped him, more than the slap itself. She'd never done anything like that before. But then, he'd never said anything like that before. He was only just getting a taste for it.)
It's not that Bible. That one, his mother had taken from her own mother gently, and then pressed her purse into his hand and said go buy an English Bible from the gift shop, sweetheart. It's that cheap hospital gift shop Bible, which he had read faithfully to the old woman every weekend until she no longer required the service, and later to his mother, which he had thrown into his luggage without thinking about it too hard. It's simply what you do if you're in a vampire story. It might save you.
He carries it under his arm as he shuffles into Armand's room that night. He stops at the top of the stairs, partly to look at him and partly because he needs to be careful going down even the few steps. Tonight, he doesn't bother checking his pulse and tongue. Armand is metronomic: the first one is there, and the second isn't.
"I was wondering," he says, "If you'd like me to read to you. I'm pretty good at reading out loud. The girls swore my Queen Jadis voice gave them nightmares." He swallows, holds the book out in front of him like Armand can see it. "I brought— I thought maybe Psalms. Since it's one, uh, our people have in common." He means for that last part to come out ironic, like it's a joke. It doesn't.
Armand, of course, neither rejects nor welcomes this idea.
The sitting options in here are limited and somewhat ludicrous. There's the orange recliner on the top level, which looks like it belongs in a movie about Sigmund Freud. There's the cushion on the step in front of the foot-washing bowl, which looks comfortable enough, but is still at Armand's feet. He could sit on the steps by the side of the bed, but they're too narrow to move the cushion over. Instead, Daniel descends all the way and settles himself gingerly beside Armand's body on the bed.
The high crinkle of scritta as he finds his place. It feels a bit like newsprint under his fingers. That's what they call it, anyway, isn't it, euangelion, all the good news fit to print delivered to your door with an inky rubber band wrapped around it. His throat clicks. He should have brought water. "Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked," he begins, "or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night." A little late for that now, probably.
But then, if he's going to give the annotated edition, this will be a very different kind of recitation. The image of Kate comes back to him, her head lolling over the side of the bed, pyjamas rucked up over her stomach, Daddyyy, just read the book! while his stupid ass was trying to ask reading comprehension questions: Do you think Bilbo's riddle was fair? Why were the spiders dangerous? Why were the dwarves so careful with the plates? You can ruin a book with that shit, it turns out. You could almost feel a bit sorry for the poor old Bible, being subjected to that kind of scrutiny for millennia. Not like Daniel's ever written anything that could stand up to it. So, he just reads the book.
After forty-five minutes, his throat is noticeably scratchy. He sets the book aside, spine up, pages down on the bedspread beside Armand. It is still there when he gets back with a glass of water, everything under control, as far as it goes, just the way he left it. So he keeps reading. He is good at this, likes doing it. Reading out loud is like getting to own words you didn't even have to go to the trouble of writing down yourself.
It takes about eight hours, all told, with plenty of breaks for water and stretching and takeout biryani. And after, for the first time since Louis left, Daniel actually feels properly tired as the sun is coming up, like he's finally adjusted to the strange double jet lag of both an actual time change and a near reversal of the mortal sleep schedule, which somehow don't cancel each other out so much as compound. Armand passes through whatever transition he goes through as the night fades into day, a nominally dead body into an actually dead one, and Daniel goes to sleep.
The next evening, he checks Armand's pulse, his tongue, then opens his suitcase and spreads the remaining books over the floor. There are books here, of course, but most of the ones in the bedroom are very clearly Louis', and ploughing through someone's ex's TBR while they're in a helpless vampire coma seems a bit tactless even for him. He could look up anything he liked on his new laptop, he supposes, but he doesn't want to spend all day staring at a screen if he's not even getting anything written. If he's honest with himself, he'd packed for this trip like a stereotypical what books would you bring to a desert island situation. Nothing he'd wanted to actively read so much as objects it felt right to carry with him on, very possibly, this final journey, either of his career or his life. The Journalist and the Murderer, almost too on the nose. The copy of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy he'd bought after accidentally catching it on radio rerun in 1981. Le Carré's A Perfect Spy, Nabokov's Pale Fire. Strunk & White. What on earth for? Had he been planning on sleeping with it under his pillow, to ward off insanity? Well, it hadn't worked. He takes the first four into the bedroom, sits back down.
"If you want me to stop," he says, "Or want something else, well, you know what to do." Anything. Do literally anything, Armand.