The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2)

by Anne Rice

But after the third night up, I was roaring around New Orleans on a big black Harley-Davidson motorcycle making plenty of noise myself. I was looking for more killers to feed on. I wore gorgeous black leather clothes that I’d taken from my victims, and I had a little Sony Walkman stereo in my pocket that fed Bach’s Art of the Fugue through tiny earphones right into my head as I blazed along.

My beloved Louis,

All the more reason for me to bring the book and the band called The Vampire Lestat to fame as quickly as possible. I had to find Louis. I had to talk to him. In fact, after reading his account of things, I ached for him, ached for his romantic illusions, and even his dishonesty. I ached even for his gentlemanly malice and his physical presence, the deceptively soft sound of his voice.

How could I not love it, the mere idea of it? How could it not be worth the greatest danger, the greatest and most ghastly defeat? Even at the moment of destruction, I would be alive as I have never been.

“Monsieur, what’s the matter!” he said, almost helplessly, and I stood up and threw my arms around him and kissed him on both cheeks and kissed the violin. “Stop calling me Monsieur,” I said. “Call me by my name.” I lay back down on the bed and buried my face on my arm and started to cry, and once I’d started I couldn’t stop it. He sat next to me, hugging me and asking me why I was crying, and though I couldn’t tell him, I could see that he was overwhelmed that his music had produced this effect. There was no sarcasm or bitterness in him now. I think he carried me home that night. And the next morning I was standing in the crooked stone street in front of his father’s shop, tossing pebbles up at his window. When he stuck his head out, I said: “Do you want to come down and go on with our conversation?”

“You don’t understand. I’m speaking of the character of human beings, not what they believe in. I’m speaking of those who won’t accept a useless life, just because they were born to it. I mean those who would be some-thing better. They work, they sacrifice, they do things …” He was moved by this, and I was a little surprised that I’d said it. Yet I felt I had hurt him somehow. “There is blessedness in that,” I said. “There’s sanctity. And God or no God, there is goodness in it. I know this the way I know the mountains are out there, that the stars shine.” He looked sad for me. And he looked hurt still. But for the moment I didn’t think of him. I was thinking of the conversation I had had with my mother and my perception that I couldn’t be good and defy my family. But if I believed what I was saying …

“Lestat, sin always feels good,”

And I knew it wasn’t going to pass, and nothing for the moment could make me forget, but what I felt was inexpressible gratitude for the music, that in this horror there could be something as beautiful as that. You couldn’t understand anything; and you couldn’t change anything. But you could make music like that. And I felt the same gratitude when I saw the village children dancing, when I saw their arms raised and their knees bent, and their bodies turning to the rhythm of the songs they sang. I started to cry watching them. I wandered into the church and on my knees I leaned against the wall and I looked at the ancient statues and I felt the same gratitude looking at the finely carved fingers and the noses and the ears and the expressions on their faces and the deep folds in their garments, and I couldn’t stop myself from crying. At least we had these beautiful things, I said. Such goodness. But nothing natural seemed beautiful to me now! The very sight of a great tree standing alone in a field could make me tremble and cry out. Fill the orchard with music. And let me tell you a little secret. It never did pass, really.

“You’re the mad one,” I said. “If you could see yourself, hear your own voice, your music—which of course you play for yourself—you wouldn’t see darkness, Nicki. You’d see an illumination that is all your own. Somber, yes, but light and beauty come together in you in a thousand different patterns.”

My lips moved, but nothing came out of them; yet this didn’t really matter. All the things I had ever wanted to say were clear to me and that is what mattered, not that they be expressed. And there was so much time, so much sweet time in which to say anything and do anything. There was no urgency at all.

Blood and blood and blood. And it was not merely the dry hissing coil of the thirst that was quenched and dissolved, it was all my craving, all the want and misery and hunger that I had ever known. My mouth widened, pressed harder to him. I felt the blood coursing down the length of my throat. I felt his head against me. I felt the tight enclosure of his arms. I was against him and I could feel his sinews, his bones, the very contour of his hands. I knew his body. And yet there was this numbness creeping through me and a rapturous tingling as each sensation penetrated the numbness, and was amplified in the penetration so that it became fuller, keener, and I could almost see what I felt.

And beyond, the city with its wilderness of little lights sunk not in darkness but in a soft violet mist. The snow everywhere was luminescent, melting. Rooftops, towers, walls, all were myriad facets of lavender, mauve, rose. This was the sprawling metropolis. And as I narrowed my eyes, I saw a million windows like so many projections of beams of light, and then as if this were not enough, in the very depths I saw the unmistakable movement of the people. Tiny mortals on tiny streets, heads and hands touching in the shadows, a lone man, no more than a speck ascending a windblown belfry. A million souls on the tessellated surface of the night, and coming soft on the air a dim mingling of countless human voices. Cries, songs, the faintest wisps of music, the muted throb of bells.

If there was a God, he did not matter now. He was part of some dull and dreary realm whose secrets had long ago been plundered, whose lights had long ago gone out. This was the pulsing center of life itself round which all true complexity revolved. Ah, the allure of that complexity, the sense of being there …

His eyes weren’t the portals of his soul anymore. They were gelatinous orbs whose colors tantalized me. And his body was nothing but a writhing morsel of hot flesh and blood, that I must have or die without. It horrified me that this food should be alive, that delicious blood should flow through these struggling arms and fingers, and then it seemed perfect that it should. He was what he was, and I was what I was, and I was going to feast upon him. I pulled him to my lips. I tore the bulging artery in his neck. The blood hit the roof of my mouth. I gave a little cry as I crushed him against me. It wasn’t the burning fluid the master’s blood had been, not that lovely elixir I had drunk from the stones of the dungeon. No, that had been light itself made liquid. Rather this was a thousand times more luscious, tasting of the thick human heart that pumped it, the very essence of that hot, almost smoky scent. I could feel my shoulders rising, my fingers biting deeper into his flesh, and almost a humming sound rising out of me. No vision but that of his tiny gasping soul, but a swoon so powerful that he himself, what he was, had no part in it. It was with all my will that, before the final moment, I forced him away. How I wanted to feel his heart stop. How I wanted to feel the beats slow and cease and know I possessed him.

And I found myself unable to turn away from his death, mutely fascinated by it. Not the smallest detail must escape me.

And then I made my way down one side of the church and up the other, the lurid paintings and statues captivating me. I realized I was seeing the process of the sculptor and the painter, not merely the creative miracle. I was seeing the way the lacquer caught the light. I was seeing little mistakes in perspective, flashes of unexpected expressiveness. What will the great masters be to my eyes, I was thinking. I found myself staring at the simplest designs painted in the plaster walls. Then I knelt down to look at the patterns in the marble, until I realized I was stretched out, staring wide-eyed at the floor under my nose. This is getting out of hand, surely. I got up, shivering a little and crying a little, and looking at the candles as if they were alive, and getting very sick of this.

But the most beguiling aspect of my explorations was that I heard the thoughts of these people, just as I had heard the evil servant whom I killed. Unhappiness, misery, expectation. These were currents in the air, some weak, some frighteningly strong, some no more than a glimmer gone before I knew the source. But I could not, strictly speaking, read minds. Most trivial thought was veiled from me, and when I lapsed into my own considerations, even the strongest passions did not intrude. In sum, it was intense feeling that carried thought to me and only when I wished to receive it, and there were some minds that even in the heat of anger gave me nothing.

I dashed across the churchyard after it, and I could feel it receding. Yet I saw nothing in the barren forest. And I realized I was stronger than it, and that it had been afraid of me! Well, fancy that. Afraid of me. And I had no idea whether or not it was corporeal, vampire the same as I was, or something without a body. “Well, one thing is sure,” I said. “You’re a coward!” Tingling in the air. The forest seemed to breathe for an instant. A sense of my own might came over me that had been brewing all along. I was in fear of nothing. Not the church, not the dark, not the worms swarming over the corpses in my dungeon. Not even this strange eerie force that had retreated into the forest, and seemed to be near at hand again. Not even of men. I was an extraordinary fiend! If I’d been sitting on the steps of hell with my elbows on my knees and the devil had said, “Lestat, come, choose the form of the fiend you wish to be to roam the earth,” how could I have chosen a better fiend than what I was? And it seemed suddenly that suffering was an idea I’d known in another existence and would never know again.

And a woman singing in an upstairs room over the low rumble of a stove seemed to be saying something in a low and vibrant secret language, such as Come to me.

I savored different types of kills: big lumbering creatures, small wiry ones, the hirsute and the dark-skinned, but my favorite was the very young scoundrel who’d kill you for the coins in your pocket. I loved their grunting and cursing. Sometimes I held them with one hand and laughed at them till they were in a positive fury, and I threw their knives over the rooftops and smashed their pistols to pieces against the walls. But in all this my full strength was like a cat never allowed to spring. And the one thing I loathed in them was fear. If a victim was really afraid I usually lost interest.

After that, I bore right into the early evening crowds in the boulevards. Rushing past Renaud’s, I squeezed into the other houses to see the puppet shows, the mimes, and the acrobats. I didn’t flee from street lamps anymore. I went into cafés and bought coffee just to feel the warmth of it against my fingers, and I spoke to men when I chose.

And another time, while deep in contemplation of the changing of the light on surfaces,

But now and then I answered questions before mortals had asked them of me. I fell into stuporous states just looking at candles or tree branches, and didn’t move for so long that people asked if I was ill.

Yet I wanted so to touch him—his hands, his arms, his face. I wanted to feel his flesh with these new immortal fingers. And I found myself whispering the word “Alive.” Yes, you are alive and that means you can die. And everything I see when I look at you is utterly insubstantial. It is a commingling of tiny movements and indefinable colors as if you haven’t a body at all, but are a collection of heat and light. You are light itself, and what am I now?

Beauty wasn’t the treachery he imagined it to be, rather it was an uncharted land where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signposts of evil or good. In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art—the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases—beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.

I didn’t open my eyes but I felt his hand on my face, then holding tight to the back of my neck. They must have made way for him and when he came into my arms, I felt a little convulsion of terror, but the light was dim here, and I had fed furiously to be warm and human-looking, and I thought desperately I don’t know to whom I pray to make the deception work. And then there was only Nicolas and I didn’t care. I looked up and into his face. How to describe what humans look like to us! I’ve tried to describe it a little, when I spoke of Nicki’s beauty the night before as a mixture of movement and color. But you can’t imagine what it’s like for us to look on living flesh. There are those billions of colors and tiny configurations of movement, yes, that make up a living creature on whom we concentrate. But the radiance mingles totally with the carnal scent. Beautiful, that’s what any human being is to us, if we stop to consider it, even the old and the diseased, the downtrodden that one doesn’t really “see” in the street. They are all like that, like flowers ever in the process of opening, butterflies ever unfolding out of the cocoon. Well, I saw all this when I saw Nicki, and I smelled the blood pumping in him, and for one heady moment I felt love and only love obliterating every recollection of the horrors that had deformed me. Every evil rapture, every new power with its gratification, seemed unreal. Maybe I felt a profound joy, too, that I could still love, if I’d ever dou...

This was what I’d been made for. This was the path I had been meant to walk. What were those others to me now—the thieves and killers I’d cut down in the wilderness of Paris? This was what I wanted. And the great awesome possibility of Nicki’s death exploded in my brain. The darkness against my closed eyelids had become blood red. Nicki’s mind emptying in that last moment, giving up its complexity with its life.

Its giving i wanted him dead i wanted him al to myself

All the memories of my life with her surrounded us; they wove their shroud around us and closed us off from the world, the soft poems and songs of childhood, and the sense of her before words when there had only been the flicker of the light on the ceiling above her pillows and the smell of her all around me and her voice silencing my crying, and then the hatred of her and the need of her, and the losing of her behind a thousand closed doors, and cruel answers, and the terror of her and her complexity and her indifference and her indefinable strength.

I was shaken. The innocence of her victims didn’t trouble her. She didn’t fight my moral battles. But then I didn’t fight them anymore either, so why should I judge her? Yet the ease with which she slew the young man—gracefully breaking his neck when the little drink she took was not enough to kill him—angered me though it had been extremely exciting to watch. She was colder than I. She was better at all of it, I thought. Magnus had said, “Show no mercy.” But had he meant us to kill when we did not have to kill?

“Wait. I’m going to try to get her to come to me. To break the tether.”

I wanted to say Nicki sat by your bed when you were dying, does that mean nothing? But how sentimental, how mortal that sounded, how positively foolish. Yet it wasn’t foolish. “I don’t mean to judge you,” she said. She folded her arms and leaned against the window. “I simply don’t understand. Why did you write to us? Why did you send us all the gifts? Why didn’t you take this white fire from the moon and go where you wanted with it?” “But where should I want to go?” I said. “Away from all those I’d known and loved? I did not want to stop thinking of you, of Nicki, even of my father and my brothers. I did what I wanted,” I said. “Then conscience played no role in it?” “If you follow your conscience, you do what you want,” I said. “But it was simpler than that. I wanted you to have the wealth I gave you. I wanted you … to be happy.” She reflected for a long time. “Would you have had me forget you?” I demanded. It sounded spiteful, angry. She didn’t answer immediately. “No, of course not,” she said. “And had it been the other way around, I would never have forgotten you either. I’m sure of it. But the rest of them? I don’t give a damn about them. I shall never exchange words with them again. I shall never lay eyes on them.” I nodded. But I hated what she was saying. She frightened me.

“It’s not so,” I said. “And how long do you think it will sustain you, feeling and seeing and touching and tasting, if there is no love? No one with you?”

“Mother, you astonish me,” I said. “I have taken victims under the very roof of Notre Dame.” But another little idea came to me. I went to Magnus’s chest and started picking at the heap of treasure. I pulled out two rosaries, one of pearls, another of emeralds, both having the usual small crucifix.

“Emeralds mean eternal life, Mother,” I said. She appeared the boy standing there again, the last glow of the fire just tracing the line of her cheek and mouth. “It’s as I said before,” she whispered. “You aren’t afraid of anything, are you?” “What does it matter if I am or not?” I shrugged. I took her arm and drew her to the passage. “We are the things that others fear,” I said. “Remember that.”

I looked at her for a long moment. But I don’t think I saw her at all. The rage building in me was absolutely silent. It will be rage until I have proof that it must be grief, I thought. Then I wasn’t thinking.

But as I stared at the rain, there came over me the strongest sense of peace. It was almost sensuous. It seemed to me we should yield to them, that it was foolish to resist them further. All things would be resolved were we merely to go out to them and give ourselves over. They would not torture Nicolas, whom they had in their power; they would not tear him limb from limb.

I blinked my eyes. I felt weary suddenly; it was almost a feeling of despair. And I thought confusedly, This is ridiculous, I never despair! Others do that, not me. I go on fighting no matter what happens. Always. And in my exhaustion and anger, I saw Magnus leaping and jumping in the fire, I saw the grimace on his face before the flames consumed him and he disappeared. Was that despair? The thought paralyzed me. Horrified me as the reality of it had done then.

I held Gabrielle closer as I looked at him, and nothing so startled me about him, this inhuman creature, as the manner in which he was staring at us.

I held fast against him. Instinctively. I felt my eyes becoming opaque as if a wall had gone up to seal off the windows of my thoughts. And yet I felt such a longing for him, such a longing to fall into him and follow him and be led by him, that all my longings of the past seemed nothing at all. He was all mystery to me as Magnus had been. Only he was beautiful, indescribably beautiful, and there seemed in him an infinite complexity and depth which Magnus had not possessed. The anguish of my immortal life pressed in on me. He said, Come to me. Come to me because only I, and my like, can end the loneliness you feel. It touched a well of inexpressible sadness. It sounded the depth of the sadness, and my throat went dry with a powerful little knot where my voice might have been, yet I held fast.

I looked from one to the other of them. And quite slowly, I commenced to brush the filth from my frock coat and breeches. I smoothed my cloak as I straightened my shoulders. Then I ran a hand through my hair, and stood with my arms folded, the picture of righteous dignity, gazing about. Gabrielle gave a faint smile. She stood composed, her hand on the hilt of her sword. The effect of this on the others was universal amazement. The dark-eyed female was enthralled. I winked at her. She would have been gorgeous if someone had thrown her into a waterfall and held her there for half an hour and I told her so silently. She took two steps backwards and pulled closed her robe over her breasts. Interesting. Very interesting indeed.

“Bastard!” he said. “You were made by the outcast, Magnus, in defiance of the coven, and in defiance of the Dark Ways. And so you gave the Dark Gift to this woman in rashness and vanity as it was given to you.”

The fear silently exploded in my heart, but I knew this was what they wanted to see. And I sealed it within.

It wasn’t merely his beauty; it was the astonishing innocence of his boyish face. He moved so lightly and swiftly I could not see his feet actually take steps. His huge eyes regarded us without anger, his hair, for all the dust in it, giving off faint reddish glints. I tried to feel his mind, what it was, why such a sublime being should command these sad ghosts when it had the world to roam. I tried to discover again what I had almost discovered when we stood before the altar of the cathedral, this creature and I. If I knew that, maybe I could defeat him and defeat him I would. I thought I saw him respond to me, some silent answer, some flash of heaven in the very pit of hell in his innocent expression, as if the devil still retained the face and form of the angel after the fall.

She hissed, drew in her breath, and stood erect. And for one moment in perfect stillness she passed into beauty. I longed to comb her hair, to wash it with my own hands, and to clothe her in modern dress, to see her in the mirror of my time. In fact, my mind went suddenly wild with the idea of it, the reclaiming of her and the washing away of her evil disguise. I think for one second the concept of eternity burned in me. I knew then what immortality was. All things were possible with her, or so for that one moment it seemed.

“Why in the name of hell,” I outshouted him, “did the devil give you beauty, agility, eyes to see visions, minds to cast spells?”

God, that our immortal bodies could be such varied prisons for us, that our immortal faces should be such masks for our true souls.

But he was imploring me silently. Why did this come about! His voice almost dried in his throat as he repeated it aloud, as he tried to curb his rage. “You explain to me! Why you, you with the strength of ten vampires and the courage of a hell full of devils, crashing through the world in your brocade and your leather boots! Lelio, the actor from the House of Thesbians, making us into grand drama on the boulevard! Tell me! Tell me why!” “It was Magnus’s strength, Magnus’s genius,” sang the woman vampire with the most wistful smile. “No!” He shook his head. “I tell you, he is beyond all account. He knows no limit and so he has no limit. But why!”

I had to think of a reply to his question that he would be able to accept. The truth wasn’t enough. It had to be arranged poetically the way that the old thinkers would have arranged it in the world before the age of reason had come to be.

“Don’t you see?” I said softly. “It is a new age. It requires a new evil. And I am that new evil.” I paused, watching him. “I am the vampire for these times.” He had not foreseen my point. And I saw in him for the first time a glimmer of terrible understanding, the first glimmer of real fear. I made a small accepting gesture. “This incident in the village church tonight,” I said cautiously, “it was vulgar, I’m inclined to agree. My actions on the stage of theater, worse still. But these were blunders. And you know they aren’t the source of your rancor. Forget them for the moment and try to envision my beauty and my power. Try to see the evil that I am. I stalk the world in mortal dress—the worst of fiends, the monster who looks exactly like everyone else.” The woman vampire made a low song of her laughter. I could feel only pain from him, and from her the warm emanation of her love. “Think of it, Armand,” I pressed carefully. “Why should Death lurk in the shadows? Why should Death wait at the gate? There is no bedchamber, no ballroom that I cannot enter. Death in the glow of the hearth, Death on tiptoe in the corridor, that is what I am. Speak to me of the Dark Gifts—I use them. I’m Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the heart of the rose.” There was a faint moan from Nicolas. I think I heard Armand sigh.

His face colored for one second. But he wasn’t my enemy now; rather he was some wondering elder struggling to tell me a critical truth. And at the same moment he seemed a child imploring me, and in that struggle lay his essence, parent and child, pleading with me to listen to what he had to say.