The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles)

by Rice, Anne

  It was Armand, of course. Yet I was hardly prepared for the sight he presented here.

  Candle wax dripped down the marble bust of Caesar, flowed over the brightly painted countries of the world globe. And the books, they lay in mountains on the carpet, save for those of the very last shelf in the corner where he stood, in his old rags still, hair full of dust, ignoring me as he ran his hand over page after page, his eyes intent on the words before him, his lips half open, his expression like that of an insect in its concentration as it chews through a leaf.

  Perfectly horrible he looked, actually. He was sucking everything out of the books!

  Finally he let this one drop and took down another, and opened it and started devouring it in the same manner, fingers moving down the sentences with preternatural speed.

  And I realized that he had been examining everything in the flat in this fashion, even the bed sheets and curtains, the pictures that had been taken off their hooks, the contents of cupboards and drawers. But from the books, he was taking concentrated knowledge. Everything from Caesar’s Gallic Wars to modern English novels lay on the floor.

  But his manner wasn’t the entire horror. It was the havoc he was leaving behind him, the utter disregard of everything he used.

  And his utter disregard of me.

  He finished his latest book, or broke off from it, and went to the old newspapers stacked on a lower shelf.

  I found myself backing out of the room and away from him, staring numbly at his small dirty figure. His auburn hair shimmered despite the dirt in it; his eyes burned like two lights.

  Grotesque he seemed, among all the candles and the swimming colors of the flat, this filthy waif of the netherworld, and yet his beauty held sway. He hadn’t needed the shadows of Notre Dame or the torchlight of the crypt to flatter him. And there was a fierceness in him in this bright light that I hadn’t seen before.

  I felt an overwhelming confusion. He was both dangerous and compelling. I could have looked on him forever, but an overpowering instinct said: Get away. Leave the place to him if he wants it. What does it matter now?

  The violin. I tried desperately to think about the violin. To stop watching the movement of his hands over the words in front of him, the relentless focus of his eyes.

  But these things were putting me in a trance.

  I turned my back on him and went into the parlor. My hands were trembling. I could hardly endure knowing he was there. I searched everywhere and didn’t find the damned violin. What could Nicki have done with it? I couldn’t think.

  Pages turning, paper crinkling. Soft sound of the newspaper dropping to the floor.

  Go back to the tower at once.

  I went to pass the library quickly, when without warning his soundless voice shot out and stopped me. It was like a hand touching my throat. I turned and saw him staring at me.

  Do you love them, your silent children? Do they love you? That was what he asked, the sense disentangling itself from an endless echo.

  I felt the blood rise to my face. The heat spread out over me like a mask as I looked at him.

  All the books in the room were now on the floor. He was a haunt standing in the ruins, a visitant from the devil he believed in. Yet his face was so tender, so young.

  The Dark Trick never brings love, you see, it brings only the silence. His voice seemed softer in its soundlessness, clearer, the echo dissipated. We used to say it was Satan’s will, that the master and the fledgling not seek comfort in each other. It was Satan who had to be served, after all.

  Every word penetrated me. Every word was received by a secret, humiliating curiosity and vulnerability. But I refused to let him see this. Angrily I said:

  “What do you want of me?”

  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?”

  “You’re taking these things from my mind …” I said. I was appalled. I saw the monastery where I’d been as a boy, the rows and rows of books that I could not read, Gabrielle bent over her books, her back to all of us. “Stop this!” I whispered.

  It seemed the longest time had passed. I was becoming disoriented. He was speaking again, but in silence.

  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 toneless words seemed to be stretched, amplified, like a note on the violin drawn out forever and ever.

  “This is madness,” I whispered. I thought of all the things he had said to me, what he had blamed me for, the horrors the others had described—that he had thrown his followers into the fire.

  “Is it madness?” he asked. “Go then to your silent ones. Even now they say to each other what they cannot say to you.”

  “You’re lying …” I said.

  “And time will only strengthen their independence. But learn for yourself. You will find me easily enough when you want to come to me. After all, where can I go? What can I do? You have made me an orphan again.”

  “I didn’t—” I said.

  “Yes, you did,” he said. “You did it. You brought it down.” Still there was no anger. “But I can wait for you to come, wait for you to ask the questions that only I can answer.”

  I stared at him for a long moment. I don’t know how long. It was as if I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t see anything else but him, and the great sense of peace I’d known in Notre Dame, the spell he cast, was again working. The lights of the room were too bright. There was nothing else but light surrounding him, and it was as if he were coming closer to me and I to him, yet neither of us was moving. He was drawing me, drawing me towards him.

  I turned away, stumbling, losing my balance. But I was out of the room. I was running down the hallway, and then I was climbing out of the back window and up to the roof.

  I rode into the Ile de la Cité as if he were chasing me. And my heart didn’t stop its frantic pace until I had left the city behind.

  Hell’s Bells ringing.

  The tower was in darkness against the first glimmer of the morning light. My little coven had already gone to rest in their dungeon crypt.

  I didn’t open the tombs to look at them, though I wanted desperately to do it, just to see Gabrielle and touch her hand.

  I climbed alone towards the battlements to look out at the burning miracle of the approaching morning, the thing I should never see to its finish again. Hell’s Bells ringing, my secret music …

  But another sound was coming to me. I knew it as I went up the stairs. And I marveled at its power to reach me. It was like a song arching over an immense distance, low and sweet.

  Once years ago, I had heard a young farm boy singing as he walked along the high road out of the village to the north. He hadn’t known anyone was listening. He had thought himself alone in the open country, and his voice had a private power and purity that gave it unearthly beauty. Never mind the words of his old song.

  This was the voice that was calling to me now. The lone voice, rising over the miles that separated us to gather all sounds into itself.

  I was frightened again. Yet I opened the door at the top of the staircase and went out onto the stone roof. Silken the morning breeze, dreamlike the twinkling of the last stars. The sky was not so much a canopy as it was a mist rising endlessly above me, and
the stars drifted upwards, growing ever smaller, in the mist.

  The faraway voice sharpened, like a note sung in the high mountains, touching my chest where I had laid my hand.

  It pierced me as a beam pierces darkness, singing Come to me; all things will be forgiven if only you come to me. I am more alone than I have ever been.

  And there came in time with the voice a sense of limitless possibility, of wonder and expectation that brought with it the vision of Armand standing alone in the open doors of Notre Dame. Time and space were illusions. He was in a pale wash of light before the main altar, a lissome shape in regal tatters, shimmering as he vanished, and nothing but patience in his eyes. There was no crypt under les Innocents now. There was no grotesquery of the ragged ghost in the glare of Nicki’s library, throwing down the books when he had finished with them as if they were empty shells.

  I think I knelt down and rested my head against the jagged stones. I saw the moon like a phantom dissolving, and the sun must have touched her because she hurt me and I had to close my eyes.

  But I felt an elation, an ecstasy. It was as if my spirit could know the glory of the Dark Trick without the blood flowing, in the intimacy of the voice dividing me and seeking the tenderest, most secret part of my soul.

  What do you want of me, I wanted to say again. How can there be this forgiveness when there was such rancor only a short while ago? Your coven destroyed. Horrors I don’t want to imagine … I wanted to say it all again.

  But I couldn’t shape the words now any more than I could before. And this time, I knew that if I dared to try, the bliss would melt and leave me and the anguish would be worse than the thirst for blood.

  Yet even as I remained still, in the mystery of this feeling, I knew strange images and thoughts that weren’t my own.

  I saw myself retreat again to the dungeon and lift up the inanimate bodies of those kindred monsters I loved. I saw myself carrying them up to the roof of the tower and leaving them there in their helplessness at the mercy of the rising sun. Hell’s Bells rang the alarm in vain for them. And the sun took them up and made them cinders with human hair.

  My mind recoiled from this; it recoiled in the most heartbreaking disappointment.

  “Child, still,” I whispered. Ah, the pain of this disappointment, the possibility diminishing … “How foolish you are to think that such things could be done by me.”

  The voice faded; it withdrew itself from me. And I felt my aloneness in every pore of my skin. It was as if all covering had been taken from me forever and I would always be as naked and miserable as I was now.

  And I felt far off a convulsion of power, as if the spirit that had made the voice was curling upon itself like a great tongue.

  “Treachery!” I said louder. “But oh, the sadness of it, the miscalculation. How can you say that you desire me!”

  Gone it was. Absolutely gone. And desperately, I wanted it back even if it was to fight with me. I wanted that sense of possibility, that lovely flare again.

  And I saw his face in Notre Dame, boyish and almost sweet, like the face of an old da Vinci saint. A horrid sense of fatality passed over me.

  6

  As soon as Gabrielle rose, I drew her away from Nicki, out into the quiet of the forest, and I told her all that had taken place the preceding night. I told her all that Armand had suggested and said. In an embarrassed way, I spoke of the silence that existed between her and me, and of how I knew now that it wasn’t to change.

  “We should leave Paris as soon as possible,” I said finally. “This creature is too dangerous. And the ones to whom I gave the theater—they don’t know anything other than what they’ve been taught by him. I say let them have Paris. And let’s take the Devil’s Road, to use the old queen’s words.”

  I had expected anger from her, and malice towards Armand. But through the whole story she remained calm.

  “Lestat, there are too many unanswered questions,” she said. “I want to know how this old coven started, I want to know all that Armand knows about us.”

  “Mother, I’m tempted to turn my back on it. I don’t care how it started. I wonder if he himself even knows.”

  “I understand, Lestat,” she said quietly. “Believe me, I do. When all is said and done, I care less about these creatures than I do about the trees in this forest or the stars overhead. I’d rather study the currents of wind or the patterns in the falling leaves …”

  “Exactly.”

  “But we mustn’t be hasty. The important thing now is for the three of us to remain together. We should go into the city together and prepare slowly for our departure together. And together, we must try your plan to rouse Nicolas with the violin.”

  I wanted to talk about Nicki. I wanted to ask her what lay behind his silence, what could she divine? But the words dried up in my throat. I thought as I had all along of her judgment in those first moments: “Disaster, my son.”

  She put her arm around me and led me back towards the tower.

  “I don’t have to read your mind,” she said, “to know what’s in your heart. Let’s take him into Paris. Let’s try to find the Stradivarius.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss me. “We were on the Devil’s Road together before all this happened,” she said. “We’ll be on it soon again.”

  It was as easy to take Nicolas into Paris as to lead him in everything else. Like a ghost he mounted his horse and rode alongside of us, only his dark hair and cape seemingly animate, whipped about as they were by the wind.

  When we fed in the Ile de la Cité, I found I could not watch him hunt or kill.

  It gave me no hope to see him doing these simple things with the sluggishness of a somnambulist. It proved nothing more than that he could go like this forever, our silent accomplice, little more than a resuscitated corpse.

  Yet an unexpected feeling came over me as we moved through the alleyways together. We were not two, but three, now. A coven. And if only I could bring him around—

  But the visit to Roget had to come first. I alone had to confront the lawyer. So I left them to wait only a few doors from his house, and as I pounded the knocker, I braced myself for the most grueling performance yet of my theatrical career.

  Well, I was very quickly to learn an important lesson about mortals and their willingness to be convinced that the world is a safe place. Roget was overjoyed to see me. He was so relieved that I was “alive and in good health” and still wanted his services, that he was nodding his acceptance before my preposterous explanations had even begun.

  (And this lesson about mortal peace of mind I never forgot. Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing tin pans all over, pouring water on pillows, making clocks chime at all hours, mortals will accept almost any “natural explanation” offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious supernatural one, for what is going on.)

  Also it became clear almost at once that he believed Gabrielle and I had slipped out of the flat by the servants’ door to the bedroom, a nice possibility I hadn’t considered before. So all I did about the twisted-up candelabra was mumble something about having been mad with grief when I saw my mother, which he understood right off.

  As for the reason for our leaving, well, Gabrielle insisted upon being removed from everyone and taken to a convent, and there she was right now.

  “Ah, Monsieur, it’s a miracle, her improvement,” I said. “If you could only see her—but never mind. We’re going on to Italy immediately with Nicolas de Lenfent, and we need currency, letters of credit, whatever, and a traveling coach, a huge traveling coach, and a good team of six. You take care of it. Have it all ready by Friday evening early. And write to my father and tell him we’re taking my mother to Italy. My father is all right, I presume?”

  “Yes, yes, of course, I didn’t tell him anything but the most reassuring—”

  “How clever of you. I knew I could trust you. What would I do without you? And what about these rubies, can you turn them into money for me immediately? And I hav
e here some Spanish coins to sell, quite old, I think.”

  He scribbled like a madman, his doubts and suspicions fading in the heat of my smiles. He was so glad to have something to do!

  “Hold my property in the boulevard du Temple vacant,” I said. “And of course, you’ll manage everything for me. And so forth and so on.”

  My property in the boulevard du Temple, the hiding place of a ragged and desperate band of vampires unless Armand had already found them and burnt them up like old costumes. I should find the answer to that question soon enough.

  I came down the steps whistling to myself in strictly human fashion, overjoyed that this odious task had been accomplished. And then I realized that Nicki and Gabrielle were nowhere in sight.

  I stopped and turned around in the street.

  I saw Gabrielle just at the moment I heard her voice, a young boyish figure emerging full blown from an alleyway as if she had just made herself material on the spot.

  “Lestat, he’s gone—vanished,” she said.

  I couldn’t answer her. I said something foolish, like “What do you mean, vanished!” But my thoughts were more or less drowning out the words in my own head. If I had doubted up until this moment that I loved him, I had been lying to myself.

  “I turned my back, and it was that quick, I tell you,” she said. She was half aggrieved, half angry.

  “Did you hear any other …”

  “No. Nothing. He was simply too quick.”

  “Yes, if he moved on his own, if he wasn’t taken …”

  “I would have heard his fear if Armand had taken him,” she insisted.

  “But does he feel fear? Does he feel anything at all?” I was utterly terrified and utterly exasperated. He’d vanished in a darkness that spread out all around us like a giant wheel from its axis. I think I clenched my fist. I must have made some uncertain little gesture of panic.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “There are only two things that go round and round in his mind …”

  “Tell me!”

  “One is the pyre under les Innocents where he was almost burned. And the other is a small theater—footlights, a stage.”