The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2)

by Anne Rice

People were adventurous and erotic again the way they’d been in the old days, before the great middle-class revolutions of the late 1700s. They even looked the way they had in those times. The men didn’t wear the Sam Spade uniform of shirt, tie, gray suit, and gray hat any longer. Once again, they costumed themselves in velvet and silk and brilliant colors if they felt like it. They did not have to clip their hair like Roman soldiers anymore; they wore it any length they desired.

For the first time in history, perhaps, they were as strong and as interesting as men. And these were the common people of America. Not just the rich who’ve always achieved a certain androgyny, a certain joie de vivre that the middle-class revolutionaries called decadence in the past.

“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?”

“Our conversation” could have turned into a full-scale fight here if I had said all that was on my mind about bourgeois pomposity. For I fully believed that our work at Renaud’s was in many ways finer than what I saw at the grand theaters. Only the framework was less impressive. Why couldn’t a bourgeois gentleman forget about the frame? How could he be made to look at something other than the surface?

“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.”

A catacomb I saw, a rank place. And a white vampire creature waking in a shallow grave. Bound in heavy chains he was, the vampire; and over him bent this monster who had abducted me, and I knew that his name was Magnus, and that he was mortal still in this dream, a great and powerful alchemist. And he had unearthed and bound this slumbering vampire right before the crucial hour of dusk. And now as the light died out of the heavens, Magnus drank from his helpless immortal prisoner the magical and accursed blood that would make him one of the living dead. Treachery it was, the theft of immortality. A dark Prometheus stealing a luminescent fire. Laughter in the darkness. Laughter echoing in the catacomb. Echoing as if down the centuries. And the stench of the grave. And the ecstasy, absolutely fathomless, and irresistible, and then drawing to a finish.

Do devils love each other? Do they walk arm in arm in hell saying, “Ah, you are my friend, how I love you,” things like that to each other? It was a rather detached intellectual question I was asking, as I did not believe in hell. But it was a matter of a concept of evil, wasn’t it? All creatures in hell are supposed to hate one another, as all the saved hate the damned, without reservation.

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.

“Show it to me, child,” she said, “the strength he gave you. Do you know what it means to be made a vampire by one that powerful, who has never given the Gift before? It’s forbidden here, child, no one of such age conveys his power! For if he should, the fledgling born of him should easily overcome this gracious leader and his coven here.”

“I tell you, you walk this earth as all evil things do, by the will of God, to make mortals suffer for his Divine Glory. And by the will of God you can be destroyed if you blaspheme, and thrown in the vats of hell now, for you are damned souls, and your immortality is given you only at the price of suffering and torment.”

“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.” His voice grew slightly louder, more resonant. “It was death they knew in those dark chambers,” he said. “It was death and the power of evil they understood as they rose, breaking open the coffin, and the iron doors that held them in. And pity the weak, those who couldn’t break out. Those whose wails brought mortals the day after—for none would answer by night. We gave no mercy to them.

“But those who rose, ah, those were the vampires who walked the earth, tested, purified, Children of Darkness, born of a fledgling’s blood, never, the full power of an ancient master, so that time would bring the wisdom to use the Dark Gifts before they grew truly strong. And on these were imposed the Rules of Darkness. To live among the dead, for we are dead things, returning always to one’s own grave or one very nearly like it. To shun the places of light, luring victims away from the company of others to suffer death in unholy and haunted places. And to honor forever the power of God, the crucifix about the neck, the Sacraments. And never never to enter the House of God; lest he strike you powerless, casting you into hell, ending your reign on earth in blazing torment.”

“In ancient days,” I said, “there were martyrs who quenched the flames that sought to burn them, mystics who rose into the air as they heard the voice of God. But as the world changed, so changed the saints. What are they now but obedient nuns and priests? They build hospitals and orphanages, but they do not call down the angels to rout armies or tame the savage beast.” I could see no change in him but I pressed on. “And so it is with evil, obviously. It changes its form. How many men in this age believe in the crosses that frighten your followers? Do you think mortals above are speaking to each other of heaven and hell? Philosophy is what they talk about, and science! What does it matter to them if white-faced haunts prowl a churchyard after dark? A few more murders in a wilderness of murders? How can this be of interest to God or the devil or to man?”

“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.”

We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.

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 be too strong. For all our gifts increase naturally with age, and the old ones have too much strength to pass on. Injury, burning—these catastrophes, if they do not destroy the Child of Satan will only increase his powers when he is healed. Yet Satan guards the flock from the power of old ones, for almost all, without exception, go mad. In this particular, let Armand observe that there was no vampire then living who was more than three hundred years old. No one alive then could remember the first Roman coven. The devil frequently calls his vampires home. But let Armand understand here also that the effect of the Dark Trick is unpredictable, even when passed on by the very young vampire and with all due care. For reasons no one knows, some mortals when Born to Darkness become as powerful as Titans, others may be no more than corpses that move. That is why mortals must be chosen with sk...

But a millennium of nights will be yours to see light as no mortal has ever seen it, to snatch from the distant stars as if you were Prometheus an endless illumination by which to understand all things.

What is there to know? What is there to give? We are the abandoned of God. And there is no Devil’s Road spinning out before me and there are no bells of hell ringing in my ears.

“When the world of man collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains.”

“Of course, God is not necessarily anthropomorphic,” she said. “Or what we would call, in our colossal egotism and sentimentality, ‘a decent person.’ But there is probably God. Satan, however, was man’s invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws—be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris—that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws. And we are truly Satanic in that we follow no law for man’s protection. So why not truly disrupt? Why not make a blaze of evil to consume all the civilizations of the earth?”

“You’re impossible,” she said. “Sometime in the far future there may be such a leader. He will reduce man to the nakedness and fear from which he came. And we shall feed upon him effortlessly as we have always done, and the Savage Garden, as you call it, will cover the world.”

“There were times, of course,” he said, “when all of that was very interesting. To glide without seeming to take steps, to assume physical positions that are uncomfortable or impossible for mortals. To fly short distances and land without a sound. To move objects by the mere wish to do so. But it can be crude, finally. Human gestures are elegant. There is wisdom in the flesh, in the way the human body does things. I like the sound of my foot touching the ground, the feel of objects in my fingers. Besides, to fly even short distances and to move things by sheer will alone is exhausting. I can do it when I have to, as you’ve seen, but it’s much easier to use my hands to do things.” I was delighted by this and didn’t try to hide it. “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.”

“But when I’ve given all I have to give, you will be exactly where you were before: an immortal being who must find his own reasons to exist.”

Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds—justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.

“To be godless is probably the first step to innocence,” he said, “to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost.” “So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions.” “An absence of need for illusions,” he said. “A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.”

“What can I say finally that will not confirm your worst fears? 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.”

“Listen to me,” he said gently. “Before I was taken by the Gauls, I had lived a good lifetime, as long as many a man in those days. And after I took Those Who Must Be Kept out of Egypt, I lived again for years in Antioch as a rich Roman scholar might live. I had a house, slaves, and the love of Pandora. We had life in Antioch, we were watchers of all that passed. And having had that lifetime, I had the strength for others later on. I had the strength to become part of the world in Venice, as you know. I had the strength to rule on this island as I do. You, like many who go early into the fire or the sun, have had no real life at all. “As a young man, you tasted real life for no more than six months in Paris. As a vampire, you have been a roamer, an outsider, haunting houses and other lives as you drifted from place to place. “If you mean to survive, you must live out one complete lifetime as soon as you can. To forestall it may be to lose everything, to despair and to go into the earth again, never to rise. Or worse …”