David only smiled and made a quick impatient gesture with both hands. "You don't hate 
Armand and you know you don't." "Wanna bet?"
  
  He looked at me sternly and reprimandingly. English schoolboy stuff probably.
  
  "All right," I said. "I'll tell you. Now, first, I have to remind you of something. A 
conversation we had. It was when you were alive still, when we last talked together in 
your place in the Cotswolds, you know, when you were just a charming old gentleman, dying 
in despair-"
  
  "I remember," he said patiently. "Before you went into the desert."
  
  "No, right after, when we knew I couldn't die as easily I thought I could, when I'd 
come back burnt. You cared for me. Then you started talking about yourself, your life. 
You said something about an experience you'd had before the war, you said, in a Paris 
cafe. You remember? You know what I'm talking about?"
  
  "Yes. I do. I told you that when I was a young man I thought I'd seen a vision."
  
  "Yes, something about the fabric of life ripping for a moment so you glimpsed things 
you shouldn't have seen."
  
  He smiled. "You're the one who suggested that, that the fabric had ripped somehow and 
I'd seen through the rip accidentally. I thought then and I still think now that it was a 
vision I was meant to see. But fifty years have passed since then. And my memory, my 
memory is surprisingly dim of the whole affair."
  
  "Well, that's to be expected. As a vampire, you will remember everything that happens 
to you from now on vividly, but the details of mortal life will slip rather fast, 
especially anything that had to do with the senses, you'll find yourself chasing after it 
what did wine taste like?"
  
  He motioned for me to be quiet. I was making him unhappy. I hadn't meant to do this.
  
  I picked up my drink, savored the fragrance. It was some sort of not Christmas punch. I 
think they called it wassail in England. I set down the glass. My hands and face were 
still dark from that excursion o the desert, that little attempt to fly into the face of 
the sun. That helped me pass for human. What an irony. And it made my hand a little more 
sensitive to the warmth.
  
  A ripple of pleasure ran through me. Warmth! Sometimes I think I get my money out of 
everything! There's no way to cheat a sensualist like me, somebody who can die laughing 
for hours over the pattern of the carpet in a hotel lobby.
  
  I became aware again of his watching me.
  
  He seemed to have collected himself somewhat or forgiven me for the one thousandth time 
for having put his soul into a vampire's body without his permission, indeed against his 
will. He looked at me, almost lovingly suddenly, as if I needed that reassurance.
  
  I took it. I did.
  
  "In this Paris cafe, you heard two beings talking to each other," I said, going back to 
his vision of years before. "You were a young man. It all happened gradually. But you 
realized they weren't 'really' there, the two, in a material sense, and the language they 
were speaking was understandable to you even though you didn't know what it was."
  
  He nodded. "That's correct. And it sounded precisely like God and the Devil talking to 
each other."
  
  I nodded. "And when I left you in the jungles last year, you said I wasn't to worry, 
that you weren't going off on any religious quest to find God and the Devil in a Paris 
cafe. You said you'd spent your mortal life looking for such things in the Talamasca. And 
now you would take a different turn."
  
  "Yes, that's what I said," he admitted agreeably. "The vision's dimmer now than it was 
when I told you. But I remember it. I still remember it, and I still believe I saw and 
heard something, and I'm as resigned as ever that I'll never know what it was."
  
  "You're leaving God and the Devil to the Talamasca, then, as you promised."
  
  "I'm leaving the Devil to the Talamasca," he said. "I don't think the Talamasca as a 
psychic order was ever that interested in God."
  
  All this was familiar verbal territory. I acknowledged it. We both kept our eye on the 
Talamasca, so to speak. But only one member of that devout order of scholars had ever 
known the true fate of David Talbot, the former Superior General, and now that human 
being was dead. His name had been Aaron Lightner. This had been a great  sadness to 
David, the loss of the one human who knew what he was now, the human who had been his 
knowing mortal friend, as David had been mine.
  
  He wanted to pick up the thread.
  
  "You've seen a vision?" he asked. "That's what's frightening you?"
  
  I shook my head. "Nothing as clear as that. But the Thing is stalking me, and now and 
then it lets me see something in the blink of an eye. I hear it mostly. I hear it 
sometimes talking in a normal conversational voice to another, or I hear its steps behind 
me on the street, and I spin around. It's true. I'm terrified of it. And then when it 
shows itself, well, I usually end up so disoriented, I'm sprawled in the gutter like a 
common drunk. A week will pass. Nothing. Then I'll catch that fragment of conversation 
again. ..." "And what are the words?"
  
  "Can't give the fragments to you in order. I'd been hearing them before I realized what 
they were. On some level, I knew I was hearing a voice from some other locale, so to 
speak, you knew it wasn't a mere mortal in the next room. But for all I knew, it could 
have had a natural explanation, an electronic explanation."
  
  "I understand."