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You’ll know so much about suffering that you will go through rapid cycles of cruelty and kindness, insight and maniacal blindness. You’ll probably go mad. Then you’ll be sane again. Then you may forget who you are.
I know exactly who I am. I am rich. I am beautiful. I can see my reflection in mirrors. And in shopwindows. I love to sing and to dance. What do I do? Anything that I please.
So if you read this, read it for that reason—that Lestat is talking again, that he is frightened, that he is searching desperately for the lesson and for the song and for the raison d’être, that he wants to understand his own story and he wants you to understand it, and that it is the very best story he has right now to tell.
Come with me. Just listen to me. Don’t leave me alone.
“Are those the words Armand used, ‘unabashed plea’? I hate Armand.”
“You don’t hate Armand and you know you don’t.” “Wanna bet?”
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.
There was that noise again out in the lobby, and I turned abruptly in my chair and looked over my shoulder, and then back at David. I listened. I thought I heard it again, like a footstep, an echoing footstep, a deliberately terrifying footstep. I did hear it. I knew I was trembling. But then it was gone, over. There came no voice in my ear.
the magnus of it all :/
What would I have said if Armand, three hundred years older than me, and far more wicked, had said the Devil was coming for him? I would have laughed at him. I would have made some cruel joke about his fully deserving it and how he’d meet so many of our kind down there, subject to a special sort of vampiric torment, far worse than mere damned mortals ever experienced. I shuddered.
“I was merely walking, human style.
I was crestfallen. I am proud, I am an egomaniac of a being; I do love attention; I want glory; I want to be wanted by God and the Devil. I want, I want, I want, I want.
My point is simply that I love you, that we’re linked in some way that none of the others is linked. Louis worships you. You’re some sort of dark god to him, though he pretends to hate you for having made him.
Ummmm you can back up a little bit
“I hear Armand and I see him and I ignore him,” I said.
Why not let the Devil take you? Go ahead! Refuse to enter Hell in fear. Just go for it.
I nudged his dead body on the floor deliberately just to be sure I was still there, and not going mad, and in terror of the disorientation, but it didn’t come, and then I screamed. I screamed like any kid. And I ran out of there. I tore out of there, down the hall, out of the back and into the wide night.
I was past all patience with my fear, simply furious, humiliated and shaken, and at the same time curiously excited—as I always am by the unknown.
I was filled with a sadness so awful that I couldn’t speak. I’d killed this man! Why had I done it? I mean, I knew he’d been interesting and evil, but Christ, how could I have … but then what if he stayed with me the way he was! What if he could become my friend exactly the way he was.
“Look, what are you scared of?” I asked. “Don’t fade on me!” I clung to him, very raw, and small, and almost crying, thinking that I had killed him, taken his life, and now all I wanted to do was hold on to his spirit. He gave no response. He looked afraid. I wasn’t the ossified monster I thought I was. I wasn’t in danger of being inured to human suffering. I was a damned jibbering empath!
“There is no black granite statue in this room.” I gave a sigh. “I’m going to hell,” I whispered.
I sank down in a chair in the front room, panting from sheer boredom and fury that I had had to do anything so utterly menial.
His dark, long face, wolflike and seemingly evil, was full of the usual gentleness and forbearance. God, why didn’t you make us all dogs?
“Absolutely painless, I assure you,” I said, turning to her, looking at her. “He told me himself. No pain.”
What does it mean to be loved by death?
I felt a sudden sagging, a complete exhaustion, and a despair. Typical. I rolled over on my face and tucked my arm under my head and started crying like a child. I was perishing from exhaustion. I was worn and miserable and I loved crying. I couldn’t do anything else. I gave in to it fully. I felt that profound release of the utterly grief-stricken. I didn’t give a damn who saw or heard. I cried and cried. Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there’s nothing quite like it. I feel sorry for those
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My task is hard and I’m tired! Some of the rest of David’s ideas about that little vision, well—” He shook his head. “The point is, you are the one I want now and it’s terribly important you see everything before you make up your mind.” “I’m that bad, am I?” I whispered, lips trembling. I was going to bawl again. “In all the world, with all the things humans have done, all the unspeakable horrors men have visited on other men, the unthinkable suffering of women and children worldwide at the hands of mankind, and I’m that bad! You want me! David was too good, I suppose. He didn’t become as
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“You and Descartes,” he said. “You and Kant.” “Don’t lump me with others,” I said. “I am the Vampire Lestat, the one and only.”
“Oh, that’s very tempting,” I said. “But that’s what Devils do so well. Tempt. I need to think about this, and consult others for advice.” “Consult others?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “I’m not going off with the Devil without telling anyone,” I said. “You’re the Devil! Goddamn it, why should I trust the Devil? That’s absurd! You’re playing by rules, somebody’s rules. Everybody always is. And I don’t know the rules. Well. You gave me the choice, and this is my choice. Two full nights, and not before then. Leave me alone all that time! Give me your oath.” “Why?” he asked politely, as if
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We eyed each other for a moment. And then he surprised me, rising and coming towards me just as I moved to take him in my arms. His gesture wasn’t tentative, but it was extremely gentle. I could have backed away. I didn’t. We held each other tight for a moment. The cold embracing the cold. The hard embracing the hard. “Cherub child,” I said. I did a bold thing, maybe even a defiant thing. I reached out and mussed his snaggled curls. He is smaller than me physically, but he didn’t seem to mind this gesture. In fact, he smiled, shook his head, and reclaimed his hair with a few casual strokes of
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I didn’t like it that they knew each other at all. David was my David, and Armand was my Armand.
He didn’t look so much like a church ornament anymore. He had his hands in his pockets. Little tough guy.
“I would not believe him,” said Armand. “What does this mean—he wants you to help him? That you would begin to exist simultaneously on this earth and in Hell? No, I would shun him for his imagery, if nothing else, for his vocabulary. For his name. Memnoch. It sounds evil.”
“You are perverse, stubborn, and innately destructive!” said David. It had the tone of a curse. “You will do what you will!” He was furious. I could see it. All his reasons for despising me were being heated from within, and there really was nothing I could say in my defense.
Now from you, Armand, a promise, the obvious thing. Around this Dora, I’ve thrown a protective light. None of us can touch her.” “That goes without saying. I won’t hurt your little friend. You wound me.” He looked genuinely put out.
thers no way armands acting hurt....
“Lestat, if you need me—” Armand said. “If this being tries to take you by force!” “Why do you care about me?” I asked. “After all the bad things I did to you? Why?”
???????????
“Why didn’t you help me last time, when I was in all that trouble, having switched bodies with a human being?” “You won’t forgive me if I tell you,” he said. “Tell me.” “Because I hoped and prayed for you, that you would remain in that mortal body and save your soul. I thought you had been granted the greatest gift, that you were human again, my heart ached for your triumph! I couldn’t interfere. I couldn’t do it.”
And I’ll tell you something else about Memnoch, the Devil, something maybe that will surprise you.” “That you like him? I know that. I understood that all along.” “How is that possible? I don’t like myself, you know. I love myself, of course, I’m committed to myself till my dying day. But I don’t like myself.”
We were in the whirlwind and the whirlwind was a tunnel, but between us there fell a silence in which I could hear my own breath. Memnoch was so close to me, his arm locked around me, that I could see his dark face in profile, and feel the mane of his hair against the side of my own face. He was not the Ordinary Man now, but indeed the granite angel, the wings rising out of my focus, and folded around us, against the force of the wind.
Why is this lowkey givin howl and sophie dhdhdhd
Be prepared that the laughter you hear is not laughter. It is joy. It will come through to you as laughter because that is the only way such ecstatic sound can be physically received or perceived.”
Our language needs endless synonyms for beautiful; the eyes could see what the tongue cannot possibly describe.
I laughed; I wept; I did both, and my body was convulsing with the emotions. I clung to him and tried to see over his shoulder and around him, and spun in his grip like an infant, turning to lock eyes with this or that person who happened to glance at me, or to look for a steady moment as the groups and the parliaments and congregations shifted and moved.
And then he spoke loudly, pleadingly to me, in a heartbroken voice, a voice strong and masculine and perhaps even young. “You would never be my adversary, would you? You wouldn’t, would you? Not you, Lestat, no, not you!” My God. In utter agony, I was torn out of His grip, out of His midst, and out of His milieu. The whirlwind once again surrounded us. I sobbed and beat on Memnoch’s chest. Heaven was gone! “Memnoch, let go of me! God, it was God!”
“I believe God worked backwards from the blueprint of Himself. He created a physical universe whose laws would result in the evolution of creatures who resembled Him. They would be made of matter. Except for one striking and important difference. Oh, but then there were so many surprises.
“Yes. I think He did it originally to find out what it would have been like had He been Matter. And I think He was looking for a clue as to how He got where He is. And why He is shaped like He is, which is shaped like me or you. In watching man evolve, He hopes to understand His own evolution, if such a thing in fact occurred. And whether this has worked or not to His satisfaction, well, only you can judge that for yourself.”
And again came the image of Him, turning from the balustrade, and the voice asking me with such conviction, You would never be my adversary, would you? Memnoch watched me. I looked away. I felt the strongest loyalty to him already, rising out of the tale he was telling me and the emotions invested in it, and I was confused by the words of God Incarnate. “And well you should be,” said Memnoch. “For the question you must ask yourself is this: Knowing you, Lestat, as surely He must, why He does not already consider you His adversary? Can you guess?” Stunned. Quiet. He waited until I was ready for
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But as I was in a wild, wooded area, as I was in this very valley which is Palestine, if you would know it, before it was ever called Palestine,
“Well, suppose you had a chance to forgive Magnus, the vampire who brought you into this, suppose he stood before you and said, ‘Lestat, forgive me for taking you out of your mortal life and putting you outside Nature, and making you drink blood to live. Do with me what you will so that you can forgive me.’ What would you do?” “You chose a bad example,” I said. “I don’t know that I haven’t forgiven him. I don’t think he knew what he was doing. I don’t care about him. He was mad. He was an Old World monster. He started me on the Devil’s Road on some warped, impersonal impulse. I don’t even
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Lestat not ever being fully wiling to actually be angry at someone who has harmed him. my tummy....
And how angry I had become many a time when others had accused me of my various flamboyant attacks upon mortal men and women. And children. Helpless children.
Girl………
“But you spoke entirely as if these people had been victims of God’s injustice. You didn’t touch upon the souls of the guilty? Those like me—the transgressors, those who were the doers of injustice?” “Don’t you think they have their story?” “Some may have their excuses, engrained in their stupidity and their simplicity and their fear of authority. I don’t know. But many, many evildoers must be just like me. They know how bad they are. They don’t care. They do what they do because … because they love it. I love making vampires. I love drinking blood. I love taking life. I always have.”
What sort of Hell could you believe in and would you—if you were in my place—create?” “A place where people realize what they’ve done to others; where they face every detail of it, and realize every particle of it, so that they would never, never do the same thing again; a place where souls are reformed, literally, by knowledge of what they’d done wrong and how they could have avoided it, and what they should have done. When they understand, as you said of the Elect of Sheol, when they can forgive not only God for this big mess, but themselves for their own failures, their own horrible angry
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“Yes. That would be it. That would terminate my anger, my outrage. I couldn’t shake my fist anymore, if only I could forgive God and others and myself.”
“The earth is my battlefield. Lestat, I fight Him not in Hell but on Earth. I roam the world seeking to tear down every edifice He has erected to sanctify self-sacrifice and suffering, to sanctify aggression and cruelty and destruction. I lead men and women from churches and temples to dance, to sing, to drink, to embrace one another with license and love. I do everything I can to show up the lie at the heart of His religions!
