It broke my heart to see the pain in his eyes, to see them clouded, and see the sharp lines of distress in this new and unmarred skin. But once again, the mix of a vintage soul and a youthful form was so wondrous and beguiling that I could only stare at him, thinking vaguely of the way he had stared at me in New Orleans and how impatient with it I had become.

“I have to go there, Lestat. To that hospital. I have to see what’s taken place.”

“I’ll go. You can come with me. But I alone will go into the hospital room itself. Now where is the phone? I must call the Park Central and find out where they took Mr. Talbot! And again, they’re probably looking for me. The incident happened in my room. Perhaps I should simply call the hospital.”

“No!” He reached out and touched my hand. “Don’t. We should go there. We should … see … for ourselves. I should see for myself. I have … I have a feeling of foreboding.”

“So do I,” I said. But it was more than foreboding. After all, I had seen that old man with the iron-gray hair passing into silent convulsions on the bloodstained bed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

IT WAS a vast general hospital to which all emergency cases were taken, and even at this late hour of the night, the ambulances were busy at its entrances, and white-jacketed doctors were hard at work as they received the victims of traffic violence, sudden heart attack, the bloody knife or the common gun.

But David Talbot had been taken quite far away from the glaring lights and the relentless noise, to the silent precincts on a higher floor known simply as Intensive Care.

“You wait here,” I said to David firmly, directing him into a sterile little parlour with dismal modern furnishings and a scattering of tattered magazines. “Don’t move from this place.”

The broad corridor was absolutely silent. I walked towards the doors at the far end.

It was only a moment later that I returned. David sat staring into space, long legs crossed before him, arms folded once more across his chest.

As if waking from a dream, he finally looked up.

I began to tremble again all over, almost uncontrollably, and the serene quiet of his face only worsened my dread and the awful agonizing remorse.

“David Talbot’s dead,” I whispered, struggling to made the words plain. “He died half an hour ago.”

He registered no visible response whatever. It was as if I hadn’t spoken at all. And all I could think was, I made this decision for you! I did it. I brought the Body Thief into your world, though you warned me against it. And it was I who struck down that other body! And God knows what you will feel when you realize what’s happened. You don’t really know.

Slowly he climbed to his feet.

“Oh, but I do know,” he said in a small and reasonable voice. He came towards me and placed his hands on my shoulders, his entire demeanor so much that of his old self that it was as if I were looking at two beings who had been fused into one. “It’s Faust, my beloved friend,” he said. “And you weren’t Mephistopheles. You were only Lestat, striking out in anger. And now it’s done!”