"No. But I'm going out into the snow now. I hear him up there.
  
  He's planning to leave her, he's kissing her, chaste and loving kisses.  His car is 
prowling around out front. He'll go way uptown to that secret place of his where the 
relics are kept. He thinks his enemies in crime and government know nothing of it, or 
believe it's just the junk shop of a friend. But I know of it. And what all those 
treasures mean to him. If he goes up there, I'll follow.... No more time, David."
  
  "I've never been so completely confused," he said. "I wanted to say God go with you."
  
  I laughed. I leant to give him a quick kiss on the forehead, so swift others would not 
make anything of it if they saw it, and then swallowing the fear, the instantaneous fear, 
I left him. In the rooms high above, Dora cried. She sat by the window watching the snow 
and crying. She regretted refusing his new present for her. If only.... She pushed her 
forehead against the cold glass and prayed for her father.
  
  I crossed the street. The snow felt rather good, but then I'm a monster.
  
  I stood at the back of St. Patrick's, watching as my handsome Victim came out, 
hurriedly through the snow, shoulders hunched, and plunged into the backseat of his 
expensive black car. I heard him give the address very near to that junk-shop flat where 
he kept his treasures.
  
  All right, he'd be alone up there for a while. Why not do it, Lestat?
  
  Why not let the Devil take you? Go ahead! Refuse to enter Hell in fear. Just go for it.
  
  2
  
  I REACHED his house on the Upper East Side before he did.
  
  I'd tracked him here numerous times. I knew the routine. Hirelings lived on the lower 
and upper floors, though I don't think they knew who he was. It wasn't unlike a vampire's 
usual arrangement. And between those two flats was his long chain of rooms, the second 
story of the town house, barred like a prison, and accessible by him through a rear 
entrance.
  
  He never had a car let him out in front of the place. He'd get out on Madison and cut 
deep into the block to his back door. Or sometimes he got out on Fifth. He had two 
routes, and some of the surrounding property was his. But nobody-none of his 
pursuers-knew of this place.
  
  I wasn't even sure that his daughter, Dora, knew the exact location. He'd never brought 
her there in all the months I'd been watching him, savoring and licking my lips over his 
life. And I'd never caught from Dora's mind any distinct image of it.
  
  But Dora knew of his collection. In the past, she had accepted his relics. She had some 
of them scattered about the empty convent castle in New Orleans. I'd sensed a glimmer or 
two of these fine things the night when I'd pursued her there. And now my Victim was 
still lamenting that she'd refused the latest gift. Something truly sacred, or so he 
thought.
  
  I got into the flat simply enough.
  
  One could hardly call it a flat, though it did include a small lavatory, dirty in the 
way barren, unused places become dirty, and then room after room was crammed with trunks, 
statues, bronze figures, heaps of seeming trash that no doubt concealed priceless 
discoveries.
  
  It felt very strange to be inside, concealed in the small rear room, because I had 
never done more than look through the windows. The place was cold. When he came, he would 
create heat and light simply enough.
  
  I sensed he was only halfway up Madison in a crush of traffic, and I began to explore.
  
  At once, a great marble statue of an angel startled me. I came round out of the door 
and almost ran smack into it. It was one of those angels that used to stand inside church 
doors, offering holy water in half shells. I had seen them in Europe and in New Orleans.
  
  It was gigantic, and its cruel profile stared blindly into the shadows. Far down the 
hall, the light came up from the busy little street that ran into Fifth. The usual New 
York songs of traffic were coming through the walls.
  
  This angel was poised as if he had just landed from the skies to offer his sacred 
basin. I slapped his bent knee gently and went around him. I didn't like him. I could 
smell parchment, papyrus, various kinds of metal. The room opposite appeared to be filled 
with Russian icons. The walls were veritably covered with them and the light was playing 
on the halos of the sad-eyed Virgins or glaring Christs.
  
  I went on to the next room. Crucifixes. I recognized the Spanish style, and what 
appeared to be Italian Baroque, and very early work which surely must have been very 
rare-the Christ grotesque and poorly proportioned yet suffering with appropriate horror 
on the worm-eaten cross.
  
  Only now did I realize the obvious. It was all religious art. There was nothing that 
wasn't religious. But then it's rather easy to say that about all art from the end of the 
last century backwards, if you think about it. I mean, the great majority of art is 
religious.
  
  The place was utterly devoid of life.
  
  Indeed, it stank of insecticide. Of course, he had saturated it to save his old wooden 
statues, he would have had to do that. I could not hear or smell rats, or detect any 
living thing at all. The lower flat was empty of its occupants, though a small radio 
chattered the news in a bathroom.
  
  Easy to blot out that little sound. On the floors above, there were mortals, but they 
were old, and I caught a vision of a sedentary man, with earphones on his head, swaying 
to the rhythm of some esoteric German music, Wagner, doomed lovers deploring the "hated