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by
Anne Rice
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August 28 - November 9, 2024
when a vampire goes underground as we call it—when he ceases to drink blood and he just lies in the earth—he soon becomes too weak to resurrect himself, and what follows is a dream state.
Pure evil has no real place. And that means, doesn’t it, that I have no place.
My ancestors had fought in countless noble wars since the times of the Crusades with St. Louis.
No one in my family much believed in God or ever had. Of course they said they did, and we went to mass. But this was duty.
“And won’t the world be better if no one is ever again burnt in the name of God?” I asked. “If there is no more faith in God to make men do that to each other? What is the danger in a secular world where horrors like that don’t happen?”
“Actors and musicians—they’re saints to me.”
Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness.
“You are the man in me,” she said. “And so I’ve kept you here, afraid of living without you, and maybe now in sending you away, I am only doing what I have done before.”
“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.”
“All I see is a face. He must be wearing something black, a cloak and even a hood. But it looks like a mask to me, the face, very white and strangely clear. I mean the lines in his face are so deep they seemed to be etched with black greasepaint. I see it for a moment. It veritably glows. Then when I look again, there’s no one there. Yet this is an exaggeration. It’s more subtle than that, the way he looks and yet …”
He was no ghastly thing to me now but merely that which was strange and white, and full of some deeper lesson perhaps than the sighing trees below or the shimmering city calling me over the miles.
“No, fledgling,” he sighed. “Save your kisses for the world. My time has come and you owe me but one obeisance only. Follow me now.”
And my tears were blood, and they left their stain on my hands when I wiped at my face.
Do not leave me alone here. Do not abandon me.
And with a smile, I realized that I was of that dark ilk that makes others cringe.
Well, now I know, whether I believe in hell or not, that vampires can love each other, that in being dedicated to evil, one does not cease to love.
my favorite was the very young scoundrel who’d kill you for the coins in your pocket.
“I cannot overcome this notion that I’ve died,” she said. “That I am utterly cut off from all living creatures. I can taste, I can see, I can feel. I can drink blood. But I am like something that cannot be seen, cannot affect things.”
Come to me. Come to me because only I, and my like, can end the loneliness you feel.
“Since the ancient days there have been our kind haunting the cities of man, preying upon him by night as God and the devil commanded us to do. The chosen of Satan we are, and those admitted to our ranks had first to prove themselves through a hundred crimes before the Dark Gift of immortality was given to them.”
“Before their loved ones they appeared to die,” he said, “and with only a small infusion of our blood did they endure the terror of the coffin as they waited for us to come. Then and only then was the Dark Gift given, and they were sealed again in the grave after, until their thirst should give them the strength to break the narrow box and rise.”
“It is finished and done, for they know now they can disregard all of it. The things that bound us together, gave us the strength to endure as damned things! The mysteries that protected us here.”
That was what he was, a child of olden days when witches had danced beneath the moon and knights had battled dragons.
They never satisfy you, the ones you make. In silence the estrangement and the resentment only grow.
You long for me and I for you, and we alone in all this realm are worthy of each other. Don’t you know this?
Come to me; all things will be forgiven if only you come to me. I am more alone than I have ever been.
How can there be this forgiveness when there was such rancor only a short while ago?
“And for what purpose? What does it mean, the murdering monster who is filled with light!”
All night you’ve been searching for me, he said, and here I am, waiting for you. I have been waiting for you all along.
Yet never had Nicolas, mortal or immortal, been so alluring. Never had Gabrielle held me so in thrall.
“Don’t weep for thy master, Marius. Marius is in hell where he belongs.
“Rise, young one, and join the Children of Darkness.”
He was flying, no longer bound to the earth and the awful pain of his Master’s death, and the death of the paintings, and death of the mortals he loved.
In Rome in the great coven in the catacombs, he bowed before Santino, the leader, who came down the stone steps to receive him with outstretched arms. This great one had been Born to Darkness in the time of the Black Death, and he told Armand of the vision that had come to him in the year 1349 when the plague raged, that we were to be as the Black Death itself, a vexation without explanation, to cause man to doubt the mercy and intervention of God.
One—that each coven must have its leader and only he might order the working of the Dark Trick upon a mortal, seeing that the methods and the rituals were properly observed. Two—that the Dark Gifts must never be given to the crippled, the maimed, or to children, or to those who cannot, even with the Dark Powers, survive on their own. Be it further understood that all mortals who would receive the Dark Gifts should be beautiful in person so that the insult to God might be greater when the Dark Trick is done. Three—that never should an old vampire work this magic lest the blood of the fledgling
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Four—that no vampire may ever destroy another vampire, except that the coven master has the power of life and death over all of his flock. And it is, further, his obligation to lead the old ones and the mad ones into the fire when they can longer serve Satan as they should. It is his obligation to destroy all vampires who are not properly made. It is his obligation to destroy those who are so badly wounded that they cannot survive on their own. And it is his obligation finally to seek the destruction of all outcasts and all who have broken these laws. Five—that no vampire shall ever reveal his
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Satan is our Lord and Master. In Satan, all is understood and all is known.
Now and then a roaming vampire would speak of the fabled Pandora glimpsed in the far-off Russian city of Moscow, or of Mael living on the bleak English coast.
The first was that no matter how great his loneliness, or how long the search for brothers and sisters in whom he might find some comfort, he never worked the Dark Trick himself. He wouldn’t give that to Satan, no Child of Darkness made by him. And the other secret, which he kept from his followers for their sake, was simply the extent of his ever deepening despair. That he craved nothing, cherished nothing, believed nothing finally, and took not one particle of pleasure in his ever increasing and awesome powers, and existed from moment to moment in a void broken once every night of his
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Yet there were times when we saw fleeting apparitions or mayhem that we couldn’t explain—objects flung about, voices roaring from the mouths of possessed children, icy currents that blew out the candles in a locked room.
Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live.”
No matter what my pain, I fixed my mind on a new destination.
Laughter. That insane music. That din, that dissonance, that never ending shrill articulation of the meaninglessness
“A singer can shatter a glass with the proper high note,” he said, “but the simplest way for anyone to break a glass is simply to drop it on the floor.”
It was useless to tell them as the centuries passed that their Christ was but another God of the Wood, dying and rising, as Dionysus or Osiris had done before him, and that the Virgin Mary was in fact the Good Mother again enshrined.
“But the real perversion of us was accomplished when the Children of Darkness came to believe they served the Christian devil, and like the terrible gods of the East, they tried to give value to evil, to believe in its power in the scheme of things, to give it a just place in the world.
“And now we stand again on the cusp of an atheistic age—an age where the Christian faith is losing its hold, as paganism once lost its hold, and the new humanism, the belief in man and his accomplishments and his rights, is more powerful than ever before.
Old truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all.
What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now contain both heaven and hell: our doom again and again and again.
