I liked this place. It flamed into my mind. Buy a convent, make it your palace, live within its safety and grandeur in some forgotten spot of a modern city! I felt covetous, or rather, my respect for Dora deepened.

Countless Europeans still lived in such buildings, multi-storeyed, wings facing each other over expensive private courts. Paris had its share of such mansions, surely. But in America, it presented a lovely picture, the idea of living here in such luxury.

But that had not been Dora's dream. Dora wanted to train her women here, her female preachers who would declare the Word of God with the fire of St. Francis or Bonaventure.

Well, if her faith were suddenly swept away by Roger's death, she could live here in splendour.

And what power had I to affect Dora's dream? Whose wishes would be fulfilled if I somehow positioned her so that she accepted her enormous wealth and made herself a princess in this palace? One happy human being saved from the misery which religion can so effortlessly generate?

It wasn't an altogether worthless idea. Just typical of me. To think in terms of Heaven on Earth, freshly painted in pastel hues, floored in fine stone, and centrally heated.

Awful, Lestat.

Who was I to think such things? Why, we could live here like Beauty and the Beast, Dora and I. I laughed out loud. A shiver ran down my back, but I didn't hear the footsteps.

I was suddenly quite alone. I listened. I bristled.

"Don't you dare come near me now," I whispered to the Stalker who was not there, for all I knew. "I'm in a chapel. I am safe! Safe as if I were in the cathedral."

I wondered if the Stalker was laughing at me. Lestat, you imagined it all.

Never mind. Walk up the marble aisle towards the Communion Rail. Yes, there was still a Communion Rail. Look at what is before you, and don't think just now.

Roger's urgent voice was at the ear of my memory. But I loved Dora already, didn't I?

I was here. I would do something. I was merely taking my time!

My footsteps echoed throughout the chapel. I let it happen. The Stations of the Cross, small, in deep relief in plaster, were still fixed between the stained-glass windows, making the usual circuit of the church, and the altar was gone from its deep arched niche—and there stood instead a giant Crucified Christ.

Crucifixes always fascinate me. There are numerous ways in which various details can be rendered, and the art of the Crucified Christ alone fills much of the world's museums, and those cathedrals and basilicas that have become museums. But this, even for me, was a rather impressive one. It was huge, old, very realistic in the style of the late nineteenth century, Christ's scant loincloth coiling in the wind, his face hollow-cheeked and profoundly sorrowful.