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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.
I could affect nothing. The silent ebb and flow of life without change seemed deadly to me.
And in some vague way, I hated the fact that only extreme pain in me could ever wring from her the slightest warmth or interest.
You don’t have to take upon yourself the burden of murder or madness to be free of this place. Surely there must be other ways.”
What sin was there, I thought, except to live out my life in this awful place?
I stared at everything, seeing behind every configuration of color and light and shadow the same thing: death. Only it wasn’t just death as I’d thought of it before, it was death the way I saw it now. Real death, total death, inevitable, irreversible, and resolving nothing!
And when twilight came on—the time I hated more than ever—whether I had seen an execution or not, whether the day had been glorious or vexing, the trembling would start in me. And only one thing saved me from it: the warmth and excitement of the brightly lighted theater, and I made sure that before dusk I was safely inside.
“I can live without God. I can even come to live with the idea there is no life after. But I do not think I could go on if I did not believe in the possibility of goodness.
“You have a light in you that’s almost blinding. But in me there’s only darkness. Sometimes I think it’s like the darkness that infected you that night in the inn when you began to cry and to tremble. You were so helpless, so unprepared for it. I try to keep that darkness from you because I need your light. I need it desperately, but you don’t need the darkness.”
“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.”
“Yes, fight, Wolfkiller,” he said. “Don’t go into hell without a battle. Mock God.”
“My heir chosen to take the Dark Gift from me with more fiber and courage than ten mortal men, what a Child of Darkness you are to be.”
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.
There was meaning in the world, yes, and laws, and inevitability, but they had only to do with the aesthetic. And in this Savage Garden, these innocent ones belonged in the vampire’s arms. A thousand other things can be said about the world, but only aesthetic principles can be verified, and these things alone remain the same.
“With the passage of time he comes to know mortals as they may never know each other,” she continued, undaunted, her eyebrows rising, “and finally there comes the moment when he cannot bear to take life, or bear to make suffering, and nothing but madness or his own death will ease his pain. That is the fate of the old ones which Magnus described to me, Magnus who suffered all afflictions in the end.”
And human as Orpheus perhaps, I stopped and glanced back.
