by Rice, Anne
He shook his head angrily in protest. Was he not the living proof it need not be so?
But she drew near to me and took hold of my arm, turning my face towards her.
“Did Magnus tell you nothing, child?” she asked. I felt an immense power flowing from her.
“While others prowled this sacred place,” she said, “I went alone across the snow-covered fields to find Magnus. My strength is so great now it is as if I have wings. I climbed to his window to find him in his chamber, and together we walked the battlements unseen by all save the distant stars.” She drew even closer, her grip tightening.
“Many things, Magnus knew,” she said. “And it is not madness which is your enemy, not if you are really strong. The vampire who leaves his coven to dwell among human beings faces a dreadful hell long before madness comes. He grows irresistibly to love mortals! He comes to understand all things in love.”
“Let me go,” I whispered softly. Her glance was holding me as surely as her hands.
“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.”
At last she released me. She receded from me as if she were an image in a sailor’s glass.
“I don’t believe what you’re saying,” I whispered. But the whisper was like a hiss. “Magnus? Love mortals?”
“Of course you do not,” she said with her graven jester’s smile.
Armand, too, was looking at her as if he did not understand.
“My words have no meaning now,” she added. “But you have all the time in the world to understand!”
Laughter, howling laughter, scraping the ceiling of the crypt. Cries again from within the walls. She threw back her head with her laughter.
Armand was horror-stricken as he watched her. It was as if he saw the laughter emanating from her like so much glittering light.
“No, but it’s a lie, a hideous simplification!” I said. My head was throbbing suddenly. My eyes were throbbing. “I mean it’s a concept born out of moral idiocy, this idea of love!”
I put my hands to my temples. A deadly pain in me was growing. The pain was dimming my vision, sharpening my memory of Magnus’s dungeon, the mortal prisoners who had died among the rotted bodies of those condemned before them in the stinking crypt.
Armand looked to me now as if I were torturing him as the old queen tortured him with her laughter. And her laughter went right on, rising and falling away. Armand’s hands went out towards me as if he would touch me but did not dare.
All the rapture and pain I’d known in these past months came together inside me. I felt quite suddenly as if I would begin to roar as I had that night on Renaud’s stage. I was aghast at these sensations. I was murmuring nonsense syllables again aloud.
“Lestat!” Gabrielle whispered.
“Love mortals?” I said. I stared at the old queen’s inhuman face, horrified suddenly to see the black eyelashes like spikes about her glistening eyes, her flesh like animated marble. “Love mortals? Does it take you three hundred years!” I glared at Gabrielle. “From the first nights when I held them close to me, I loved them. Drinking up their life, their death, I love them. Dear God, is that not the very essence of the Dark Gift?”
My voice was growing in volume as it had that night in the theater. “Oh, what are you that you do not? What vile things that this is the sum of your wisdom, the simple capacity to feel!”
I backed away from them, looking about me at this giant tomb, the damp earth arching over our heads. The place was passing out of the material into an hallucination.
“God, do you lose your reason with the Dark Trick,” I asked, “with your rituals, your sealing up of the fledglings in the grave? Or were you monsters when you were living? How could we not all of us love mortals with every breath we take!”
No answer. Except the senseless cries of the starving ones. No answer. Just the dim beating of Nicki’s heart.
“Well, hear me, whatever the case,” I said. I pointed my finger at Armand, at the old queen.
“I never promised my soul to the devil for this! And when I made this one it was to save her from the worms that eat the corpses around here. If loving mortals is the hell you speak of, I am already in it. I have met my fate. Leave me to it and all scores are settled now.”
My voice had broken. I was gasping. I ran my hands back through my hair. Armand seemed to shimmer as he came close to me. His face was a miracle of seeming purity and awe.
“Dead things, dead things I said. “Come no closer. Talking of madness and love, in this reeking place! And that old monster, Magnus, locking them up in his dungeon. How did he love them, his captives? The way boys love butterflies when they rip off their wings!”
“No, child, you think you understand but you do not,” sang the woman vampire unperturbed. “You have only just begun your loving.” She gave a soft lilting laugh. “You feel sorry for them, that is all. And for yourself that you cannot be both human and inhuman. Isn’t it so?”
“Lies!” I said. I moved closer to Gabrielle. I put my arm around her.
“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.” And throwing up her arms, again she howled.
“Damn you,” I said. I picked up Gabrielle and Nicki and carried them backwards towards the door. “You’re in hell already,” I said, “and I intend to leave you in hell now.”
I took Nicolas out of Gabrielle’s arms and we ran through the catacomb towards the stairs.
The old queen was in a frenzy of keening laughter behind us.
And human as Orpheus perhaps, I stopped and glanced back.
“Lestat, hurry!” Nicolas whispered in my ear. And Gabrielle gave a desperate gesture for me to come.
Armand had not moved, and the old woman stood beside him laughing still.
“Good-bye, brave children,” she cried. “Ride the Devil’s Road bravely. Ride the Devil’s Road as long as you can.”
The coven scattered like frightened ghosts in the cold rain as we burst out of the sepulcher. And baffled, they watched as we sped out of les Innocents into the crowded Paris streets.
Within moments we had stolen a carriage and were on our way out of the city into the countryside.
I drove the team on relentlessly. Yet I was so mortally tired that preternatural strength seemed purely an idea. At every thicket and turn of the road I expected to see the filthy demons surrounding us again.
But somehow I managed to get from a country inn the food and drink Nicolas would need, and the blankets to keep him warm.
He was unconscious long before we reached the tower, and I carried him up the stairs to that high cell where Magnus had first kept me.
His throat was still swollen and bruised from their feasting on him. And though he slept deeply as I laid him on the straw bed, I could feel the thirst in him, the awful craving that I’d felt after Magnus had drunk from me.
Well, there was plenty of wine for him when he awakened, and plenty of food. And I knew—though how I couldn’t tell—that he wouldn’t die.
What his daylight hours would be like, I could hardly imagine. But he would be safe once I turned the key in the lock. And no matter what he had been to me, or what he stood to be in the future, no mortal could wander free in my lair while I slept.
Beyond that I couldn’t reason. I felt like a mortal walking in his sleep.
I was still staring down at him, hearing his vague jumbled dreams—dreams of the horrors of les Innocents—when Gabrielle came in. She had finished burying the poor unfortunate stable boy, and she looked like a dusty angel again, her hair stiff and t
angled and full of delicate fractured light.
She looked down at Nicki for a long moment and then she drew me out of the room. After I had locked the door, she led me down to the lower crypt. There she put her arms tightly around me and held me, as if she too were worn almost to collapse.
“Listen to me,” she said finally, drawing back and putting her hands up to hold my face. “We’ll get him out of France as soon as we rise. No one will ever believe his mad tales.”
I didn’t answer. I could scarce understand her, her reasoning or her intentions. My head swam.
“You can play the puppeteer with him,” she said, “as you did with Renaud’s actors. You can send him off to the New World.”
“Sleep,” I whispered. I kissed her open mouth. I held her with my eyes closed. I saw the crypt again, heard their strange, inhuman voices. All this would not stop.
“After he’s gone, then we can talk about these others,” she said calmly. “Whether to leave Paris altogether for a while …”
I let her go, and I turned away from her and I went to the sarcophagus and rested for a moment against the stone lid. For the first time in my immortal life I wanted the silence of the tomb, the feeling that all things were out of my hands.
It seemed she said something else then. Do not do this thing!
4
When I awoke I heard his cries. He was beating on the oaken door, cursing me for keeping him prisoner. The sound filled the tower, and the scent of him came through the stone walls: succulent, oh so succulent, smell of living flesh and blood, his flesh and blood. She slept still. Do not do this thing.
Symphony of malice, symphony of madness coming through the walls, philosophy straining to contain the ghastly images, the torture, to surround it with language …
When I stepped into the stairwell, it was like being caught in a whirlwind of his cries, his human smell.
And all the remembered scents mingled with it—the afternoon sunshine on a wooden table, the red wine, the smoke of the little fire.
“Lestat! Do you hear me! Lestat!” Thunder of fists against the door.
Memory of childhood fairy tale: the giant says he smells the blood of a human in his lair. Horror. I knew the giant was going to find the human. I could hear him coming after the human, step by step. I was the human.
Only no more.
Smoke and salt of flesh and pumping blood.
“This is the witches’ place! Lestat, do you hear me! This is the witches’ place!”
Dull tremor of the old secrets between us, the love, the things that only we had known, felt. Dancing in the witches’ place. Can you deny it? Can you deny everything that passed between us?
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?
“Be the puppeteer again,” she had said. Is that what I was? No one will ever believe his mad tales.
But he knows the place where we lie, Mother. He knows our names, the name of our kin—too many things about us. And he will never go quietly to another country. And they may go after him; they will never let him live now.
Where are they?
I went up the stairs in the whirlwind of his echoing cries, looked out the little barred window at the open land. They’ll be coming again. They have to come. First I was alone, then I had her with me, and now I have them!
But what was the crux? That he wanted it? That he had screamed over and over that I had denied him the power?
Or was it that I now had the excuses I needed to bring him to me as I had wanted to do from the first moment? My Nicolas, my love. Eternity waits. All the great and splendid pleasures of being dead.
I went further up the stairs towards him and the thirst sang in me. To hell with his cries. The thirst sang and I was an instrument of its singing.
And his cries had become inarticulate—the pure essence of his curses, a dull punctuation to the misery that I could hear without need of any sound. Something divinely carnal in the broken syllables coming from his lips, like the low gush of the blood through his heart.
I lifted the key and put it in the lock and he went silent, his thoughts washing backwards and into him as if the ocean could be sucked back into the tiny mysterious coils of a single shell.
I tried to see him in the shadows of the room, and not it—the love for him, the aching, wrenching months of longing for him, the hideous and unshakable human need for him, the lust. I tried to see the mortal who didn’t know what he was saying as he glared at me:
“You, and your talk of goodness”—low seething voice, eyes glittering—“your talk of good and evil, your talk of what was right and what was wrong and death, oh yes, death, the horror, the tragedy …”
Words. Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart:
“… and you shared it with her, the lord’s son giveth to the lord’s wife his great gift, the Dark Gift. Those who live in the castle share the Dark Gift—never were they dragged to the witches’ place where the human grease pools on the ground at the foot of the burnt stake, no, kill the old crone who can no longer see to sew, and the idiot boy who cannot till the field. And what does he give us, the lord’s son, the wolfkiller, the one who screamed in the witches’ place? Coin of the realm! That’s good enough for us!”
Shuddering. Shirt soaked with sweat. Gleam of taut flesh through the torn lace. Tantalizing, the mere sight of it, the narrow tightly muscled torso that sculptors so love to represent, nipples pink against the dark skin.
“This power”—sputtering as if all day long he had been saying the words over with the same intensity, and it does not really matter that now I am present—“this power that made all the lies meaningless, this dark power that soared over everything, this truth that obliterated …”
No. Language. Not truth.
The wine bottles were empty, the food devoured. His lean arms were hardened and tense for the struggle—but what struggle?—his brown hair fallen out of its ribbon, his eyes enormous and glazed. But suddenly he pushed against the wall as if he’d go through it to get away from me—dim remembrance of their drinking from him, the paralysis, the ecstasy—yet he was drawn immediately forward again, staggering, putting his hands out to steady himself by taking hold of things that were not there.
But his voice had stopped.
Something breaking in his face.
“How could you keep it from me!” he whispered. Thoughts of old magic, luminous legend, some great eerie strata in which all the shadowy things thrived, an intoxication with forbidden knowledge in which the natural things become unimportant. No miracle anymore to the leaves falling from the autumn trees, the sun in the orchard.
No.
The scent was rising from him like incense, like the heat and the smoke of church candles rising. Heart thumping under the skin of his naked chest. Tight little belly glistening with sweat, sweat staining the thick leather belt. Blood full of salt. I could scarce breathe.
And we do breathe. We breathe and we taste and we smell and we feel and we thirst.
“You have misunderstood everything.” Is this Lestat speaking? It sounded like some other demon, some loathsome thing for whom the voice was the imitation of a human voice. “You have misunderstood everything that you have seen and heard.”
“I would have shared anything I possessed with you!” Rage building again. He reached out. “It was you who never understood,” he whispered.
“Take your life and leave with it. Run.”
“Don’t you see it’s the confirmation of everything? That it exists is the confirmation—pure evil, sublime evil!” Triumph in his eyes. He reached out suddenly a
nd closed his hand on my face.
“Don’t taunt me!” I said. I struck him so hard he fell backwards, chastened, silent. “When it was offered me I said no. I tell you I said no. With my last breath, I said no.”
“You were always the fool,” he said. “I told you that.” But he was breaking down. He was shuddering and the rage was alchemizing into desperation. He lifted his arms again and then stopped. “You believed things that didn’t matter,” he said almost gently. “There was something you failed to see. Is it possible you don’t know yourself what you possess now?” The glaze over his eyes broke instantly into tears.
His face knotted. Unspoken words coming from him of love.
And an awful self-consciousness came over me. Silent and lethal, I felt myself flooded with the power I had over him and his knowledge of it, and my love for him heated the sense of power, driving it towards a scorching embarrassment which suddenly changed into something else.
We were in the wings of the theater again; we were in the village in Auvergne in that little inn. I smelled not merely the blood in him, but the sudden terror. He had taken a step back. And the very movement stoked the blaze in me, as much as the vision of his stricken face.
He grew smaller, more fragile. Yet he’d never seemed stronger, more alluring than he was now.
All the expression drained from his face as I drew nearer. His eyes were wondrously clear. And his mind was opening as Gabrielle’s mind had opened, and for one tiny second there flared a moment of us together in the garret, talking and talking as the moon glared on the snow-covered roofs, or walking through the Paris streets, passing the wine back and forth, heads bowed against the first gust of winter rain, and there had been the eternity of growing up and growing old before us, and so much joy even in misery, even in the misery—the real eternity, the real forever—the mortal mystery of that. But the moment faded in the shimmering expression of his face.
“Come to me, Nicki,” I whispered. I lifted both hands to beckon. “If you want it, you must come …”