The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2)

by Anne Rice

Or enough to make him become a rock singer, when you think about it …

“Ah, you are a dreamer!” he said, but he was delighted. He was beyond handsome when he smiled.

“And I’ll know people like you,” I went on, “people who have thoughts in their heads and quick tongues with which to voice them, and we’ll sit in cafés and we’ll drink together and we’ll clash with each other violently in words, and we’ll talk for the rest of our lives in divine excitement.” He reached out and put his arm around my neck and kissed me. We almost upset the table we were so blissfully drunk. “My lord, the wolfkiller,” he whispered.

“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.”

I could imagine nothing in the dark, not even the slithering insects of the grave, that could bring about revulsion in me.

“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.”

“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 quiet I had told myself that I wanted—just to be alone after the grisly struggle in Paris. Quiet, and the realization, which I could not bring myself to confess to her, the realization gnawing at my insides like a starved animal—that I couldn’t stand the sight of him now.

Cinderella revealed at the ball, this vision, Sleeping Beauty opening her eyes under a mesh of cobwebs and wiping them all away with one sweep of her warm hand. The sheer pitch of incarnate beauty made me gasp. Yes, perfect mortal raiment, and yet he seemed all the more supernatural, his face too dazzling, his dark eyes fathomless and just for a split second glinting as if they were windows to the fires of hell. And when his voice came it was low and almost teasing, forcing me to concentrate to hear it: 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. I think I sensed even then, as I stood unable to look away, that never in my years of wandering this earth would I ever have such a rich revelation of the true horror that we are.

“Love mortals then, and live as you have lived, recklessly, with appetite for everything and love for everything, but there will come a time when only the love of your own kind can save you.” He glanced at Gabrielle. “And I don’t mean children such as this!”

My eyes began to tear. I actually began to cry.

“It was the Great Mother he served,

The worship of the Great Mother was certainly not unknown to me. The Mother Earth and the Mother of All Things was worshiped under a dozen names

“I lay down in the dark and I sang to myself the hymns of the Great Mother. She was no goddess to me,

She was all the things that I still had in this rude little wooden room where everything else had been taken from me.

I was dying in the most absurd and foolish way, among people I did not admire and customs I would have abolished.

a library was something I could understand. It was the one human place in which I still felt some measure of my old sanity.

if I was anything, I was an individual, a particular being, with a strong sense of my own rights and prerogatives. I could not realize that I was host to an alien entity. I was still Marius, no matter what had been done to me.

I have lived over eighteen hundred years, and I tell you life does not need us. I have never had a true purpose. We have no place.”

I looked at the young blond-haired rake in the mirror. “Well, if it isn’t the vampire Lestat,” I said.

I prayed that in spite of all my secret power, I was somehow kin to every mortal man. Maybe I was not the exotic outcast that I imagined, but merely the dim magnification of every human soul. 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.

He had a glamour to him, this modern Marius, and a sprightliness that his costume of the old days had apparently concealed. And he was doing the most remarkable things. He had before him a black camera upon three spider legs, and this he cranked with his right hand as he made motion pictures of mortals in a studio full of incandescent light.

Marius is a film director !???

“Oh, my darling,” I said, tasting the bitter earth between my lips, “if only I could.”

I think to be this happy is to be miserable, to feel this much satisfaction is to burn.

“There’ll be time after,” I answered. “ ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.’

She straddled the chair like a cowboy when she sat down, resting her chin on her hands on the high back.

Gabrielle , the lesbian