The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2)

by Anne Rice

Of course I was scared from time to time. The stench of chemicals and gasoline sickened me. The drone of air conditioners and the whine of the jet planes overhead hurt my ears. 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. I was the vampire Lestat again. I was back in action. New Orleans was once again my hunting ground.

For the first time in history, perhaps, they were as strong and as interesting as men.

The old was not being routinely replaced by the new anymore. On the contrary, the English spoken around me was the same as it had been in the 1800S. Even the old slang (“the coast is clear” or “bad luck” or “that’s the thing”) was still “current.” Yet fascinating new phrases like “they brainwashed you” and “it’s so Freudian” and “I can’t relate to it” were on everyone’s lips.

And no small part of this unpredicted miracle was the curious innocence of these people in the very midst of their freedom and their wealth. The Christian god was as dead as he had been in the 1700s. And no new mythological religion had arisen to take the place of the old.

As for sexuality, it was no longer a matter of superstition and fear. The last religious overtones were being stripped from it. That was why the people went around half naked. That was why they kissed and hugged each other in the streets. They talked ethics now and responsibility and the beauty of the body. Procreation and venereal disease they had under control.

With their permission, I went into the other room, stretched out on their bed, and began to read. When I was halfway finished, I took the book with me and left the house. I stood stock-still beneath a street lamp with the book until I finished it. Then I placed it carefully in my breast pocket. I didn’t return to the band for seven nights.

On the giant television set I played the cassette of the beautiful Visconti film Death in Venice. An actor said at one point that evil was a necessity. It was food for genius. I didn’t believe that. But I wish it were true. Then I could just be Lestat, the monster, couldn’t I? And I was always so good at being a monster! Ah, well …

Now remember this was the eighteenth century, the time when white-wigged Parisians tiptoed around in high-heeled satin slippers, pinched snuff, and dabbed at their noses with embroidered handkerchiefs. And here I was going out to hunt in rawhide boots and buckskin coat, with these ancient weapons tied to the saddle, and my two biggest mastiffs beside me in their spiked collars.

“You’re dying, Wolfkiller,” he said. “The light’s going out of your blue eyes as if all the summer days are gone …” “No, please …” This thirst was unbearable. My mouth was open, gaping, my back arched. And it was here at last, the final horror, death itself, like this. “Ask for it, child,” he said, his face no longer the grinning mask, but utterly transfigured with compassion. He looked almost human, almost naturally old. “Ask and you shall receive,” he said. I saw water rushing down all the mountain streams of my childhood. “Help me. Please.” “I shall give you the water of all waters,” he said in my ear, and it seemed he wasn’t white at all. He was just an old man, sitting there beside me. His face was human, and almost sad. But as I watched his smile and his gray eyebrows rise in wonder, I knew it wasn’t true. He wasn’t human. He was that same ancient monster only he was filled with my blood! “The wine of all wines,” he breathed. “This is my Body, this is my Blood.” And then his arms surrounded me. They drew me to him and I felt a great warmth emanating from him, and he seemed to be filled not with blood but with love for me. “Ask for it, Wolfkiller, and you will live forever,” he said, but his voice sounded weary and spiritless, and there was something distant and tragic in his gaze.

“Now, live forever, beautiful Wolfkiller, with the gifts nature gave you, and discover for yourself all those most unnatural gifts which I have added to the lot.”

But Magnus’s words came back to me, over and over: To find hell, if there is a hell … If there is a Prince of Darkness …

On the contrary, if I was a damned thing, then let the son of a bitch come for me! Let him tell me why I was meant to suffer. I would truly like to know.

But don’t start crying again. I can’t abide all this crying.

I stared at my reflection. I became frantic to discover myself in it. I rubbed my face, even rubbed the mirror and pressed my lips together to keep from crying.

But through the haze of nausea, I stared at the blood. I stared at the gorgeous crimson color of it in the light of the torch.

Oh, too lovely!

Time to leave the village. I’d learned enough here. But just before I left, I performed one final act of daring. I couldn’t help myself. I just had to do it. Pulling up the high collar of my red cloak, I went into the inn, sought a corner away from the fire, and ordered a glass of wine. Everyone in the little place gave me the eye, but not because they knew there was a supernatural being in their midst. They were merely glancing at the richly dressed gentleman! And for twenty minutes I remained, testing it even further. No one, not even the man who served me, detected anything! Of course I didn’t touch the wine. One whiff of it and I knew that my body could not abide it. But the point was, I could fool mortals! I could move among them!

I can’t help but laugh now when I think of that first night, especially of that particular moment.

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.

And I was learning that I could put people in thrall if I stared at them too hard, and my voice required very strict modulation. I might speak too low for mortal hearing, and were I to shout or laugh too loud, I could shatter another’s ears. I could hurt my own ears.

Why must she understand so much, yet so little?

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.

Forgive me, Nicki. Good and evil exist still, as they always will. But “our conversation” is over forever.

Before I even meant to do it, I had gone out on the stage.

“ ‘Handsome enough’ is this Grim Reaper,” I half uttered, “who can snuff all these ‘brief candles,’ every fluttering soul sucking the air, from this hall.”

In vampire parlance, I am an early riser. I rise when the sun has just sunk below the horizon and there is still red light in the sky. Many vampires don’t rise until there is full darkness, and so I have a tremendous advantage in this, and in that they must return to the grave a full hour or more before I do. I haven’t mentioned it before because I didn’t know it then, and it didn’t come to matter until much later.

And to describe it more truly, as she put on his garments, she became the boy. She put on his cream silk stockings and scarlet breeches, the lace shirt and the yellow waistcoat and then the scarlet frock coat, and even took the scarlet ribbon from the boy’s hair.

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?

But his face was shining white, and perfect, the countenance of a god it seemed, a Cupid out of Caravaggio, seductive yet ethereal, with auburn hair and dark brown eyes.

What was it I’d seen for an instant? I didn’t even know. Hell and heaven, or both made one, vampires in a paradise drinking blood from the very flowers that hung, pendulous and throbbing, from the trees.

“Don’t be a fool for the devil, darling!” I sneered.

What a gay and interesting little get-together this was going to be!

Ah, sad lost child, roaming the catacombs beneath a great city and an incomprehensible century. Maybe your mortal form is more fitting than I supposed.

“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.”

“Ah, yes, immortal, but you have not begun to understand it,” he said. “It’s no more than a word. Study the fate of your maker. Why did Magnus go into the flames? It’s an age-old truth among us, and you haven’t even guessed it. Live among men, and the passing years will drive you to madness. To see others grow old and die, to see kingdoms rise and fall, to lose all you understand and cherish—who can endure it? It will drive you to idiot raving and despair. Your own immortal kind is your protection, your salvation. The ancient ways, don’t you see, which never changed!”

“My words have no meaning now,” she added. “But you have all the time in the world to understand!”

“You will come to understand all things in love,” the old queen went on, “when you are a vicious and hateful thing. This is your immortality, child. Ever deeper understanding of it.”

Get him out of France. Send him to the New World. And then what? All his life he is one of those slightly interesting but generally tiresome mortals who have seen spirits, talk of them incessantly, and no one believes him. Deepening madness. Will he be a comical lunatic finally, the kind that even the ruffians and bullies look after, playing his fiddle in a dirty coat for the crowds on the streets of Port-au-Prince?

My Nicolas, my love. Eternity waits. All the great and splendid pleasures of being dead.

It was shattering something to speak. I was feeling more fear of him at this moment than ever during the earlier battles and arguments, and I hate those who make me feel fear, those who know things that I need to know, who have that power over me. “It is like not knowing how to read, isn’t it?” he said aloud. “And your maker, the outcast Magnus, what did he care for your ignorance? He did not tell you the simplest things, did he?” Nothing in his expression moved as he spoke. “Hasn’t it always been this way? Has anyone ever cared to teach you anything?”

They never satisfy you, the ones you make. In silence the estrangement and the resentment only grow. I willed myself to move but I wasn’t moving. I was merely looking at him as he went on. 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?

The king and queen were there, dancing with the people. Talk in the shadows of intrigue. Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don’t burn the paintings in the Louvre, that’s all.

The air comes out of one body and is breathed into another. The music, does it pass out of one ear and into another, as the old expression goes? We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.

We were the sum of our desires and this was saving us, and the vast untasted horror of my own immortality did not lie before me, and we were navigating calm seas with familiar beacons, and it was time to be in each other’s arms.

Old, old evil, eyes that had seen dark ages of which I only dream.

“I curse you,” he said again and came closer. “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!”

“Oh, but it’s always a travesty, don’t you see?” he said with that same gentleness. “Each time the death and the awakening will ravage the mortal spirit, so that one will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out.” And here he shot his glance to Gabrielle again and half smiled. “And the veil will always come down between you. Make a legion. You will be, always and forever, alone!”

“If you had ever felt real longing for any other one, you would know that what you feel for your son is nothing at all.”

“I want to know, for example, why beauty exists,” she said, “why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a tree and its beauty, and what connects the mere existence of the sea or a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, then why do they retain for us such symbolic power? Lestat calls it the Savage Garden, but for me that is not enough. And I must confess that this, this maniacal curiosity or call it what you will, leads me away from my human victims. It leads me into the open countryside, away from human creation. And maybe it will lead me away from my son, who is under the spell of all things human.”