by Rice, Anne
“Vile liar!” he said between his teeth. “You are God’s fool, that’s what you are. You who possessed the dark secret that soared above everything, rendered everything meaningless, and what did you do with it, in those months when you ruled alone from Magnus’s tower, but try to live like a good man! A good man!”
He was close enough to kiss me, the blood of his spittle hitting my face.
“Patron of the arts,” he sneered. “Giver of gifts to your family, giver of gifts to us!” He stepped back, looking down on me contemptuously.
“Well, we will take the little theater that you painted in gold, and hung with velvet,” he said, “and it will serve the forces of the devil more splendidly than he was ever served by the old coven.” He turned and glanced at Eleni. He glanced back at the others. “We will make a mockery of all things sacred. We will lead them to ever greater vulgarity and profanity. We will astonish. We will beguile. But above all, we will thrive on their gold as well as their blood and in their midst we will grow strong.”
“Yes,” said the boy behind him. “We will become invincible.” His face had a crazed look, the look of the zealot as he gazed at Nicolas. “We will have names and places in their very world.”
“And power over them,” said the other woman, “and a vantage point from which to study them and know them and perfect our methods of destroying them when we choose.”
“I want the theater,” Nicolas said to me. “I want it from you. The deed, the money to reopen it. My assistants here are ready to listen to me.”
“You may have it, if you wish,” I answered. “It is yours if it will take you and your malice and your fractured reason off my hands.”
I got up off the dressing table and went towards him and I think that he meant to block my path, but something unaccountable happened. When I saw he wouldn’t move, my anger rose up and out of me like an invisible fist. And I saw him moved backwards as if the fist had struck him. And he hit the wall with sudden force.
I could have been free of the place in an instant. I knew Gabrielle was only waiting to follow me. But I didn’t leave. I stopped and I looked back at him, and he was still against the wall as if he couldn’t move. And he was watching me and the hatred was as pure, as undiluted by remembered love, as it had been all along.
But I wanted to understand, I wanted really to know what had happened. And I came towards him again in silence and this time it was I who was menacing, and my hands looked like claws and I could feel his fear. They were all, except for Eleni, full of fear.
I stopped when I was very close to him and he looked directly at me, and it was as if he knew exactly what I was asking him.
“All a misunderstanding, my love,” he said. Acid on the tongue. The blood sweat had broken out again, and his eyes glistened as if they were wet. “It was to hurt others, don’t you see, the violin playing, to anger them, to secure for me an island where they could not rule. They would watch my ruin, unable to do anything about it.”
I didn’t answer. I wanted him to go on.
“And when we decided to go to Paris, I thought we would starve in Paris, that we would go down and down and down. It was what I wanted, rather than what they wanted, that I, the favored son, should rise for them. I thought we would go down! We were supposed to go down.”
“Oh, Nicki …” I whispered.
“But you didn’t go down, Lestat,” he said, his eyebrows rising. “The hunger, the cold—none of it stopped you. You were a triumph!” The rage thickened his voice again. “You didn’t drink yourself to death in the gutter. You turned everything upside down! And for every aspect of our proposed damnation you found exuberance, and there was no end to your enthusiasms and the passion coming out of you—and the light, always the light. And in exact proportion to the light coming out of you, there was the darkness in me! Every exuberance piercing me and creating its exact proportion of darkness and despair! And then, the magic, when you got the magic, irony of ironies, you protected me from it! And what did you do with it but use your Satanic powers to simulate the actions of a good man!”
I turned around. I saw them scattered in the shadows, and farthest away, the figure of Gabrielle. I saw the light on her hand as she raised it, beckoning for me to come away.
Nicki reached up and touched my shoulders. I could feel the hatred coming through his touch. Loathsome to be touched in hate.
“Like a mindless beam of sunlight you routed the bats of the old coven!” he whispered. “And for what purpose? What does it mean, the murdering monster who is filled with light!”
I turned and smacked him and sent him hurtling into the dressing room, his right hand smashing the mirror, his head cracking against the far wall.
For one moment he lay like something broken against the mass of old clothing, and then his eyes gathered their determination again, and his face softened into a slow smile. He righted himself and slowly, as an indignant mortal might, he smoothed his coat and his rumpled hair.
It was like my gestures under les Innocents when my captors had set me down in the dirt.
And he came forward with the same dignity, and the smile was as ugly as any I had ever seen.
“I despise you,” he said. “But I am done with you. I have the power from you and I know how to use it, which you do not. I am in a realm at last where I choose to triumph! In darkness, we’re equal now. And you will give me the theater, that because you owe it to me, and you are a giver of things, aren’t you—a giver of gold coins to hungry children—and then, I won’t ever look upon your light again.”
He stepped around me and stretched out his arms to the others:
“Come, my beauties, come, we have plays to write, business to attend to. You have things to learn from me. I know what mortals really are. We must get down to the serious invention of our dark and splendid art. We will make a coven to rival all covens. We will do what has never been done.”
The others looked at me, frightened, hesitant. And in this still and tense moment I heard myself take a deep breath. My vision broadened. I saw the wings around us again, the high rafters, the walls of scenery transecting the darkness, and beyond, the little blaze along the foot of the dusty stage. I saw the house veiled in shadow and knew in one limitless recollection all that had happened here. And I saw a nightmare hatch another nightmare, and I saw a story come to an end.
“The Theater of the Vampires,” I whispered. “We have worked the Dark Trick on this little place.” No one of the others dared to answer. Nicolas only smiled.
And as I turned to leave the theater I raised my hand in a gesture that urged them all towards him. I said my farewell.
* * *
We were not far from the lights of the boulevard when I stopped in my tracks. Without words a thousand horrors came to me—that Armand would come to destroy him, that his newfound brothers and sisters would tire of his frenzy and desert him, that morning would find him stumbling through the streets unable to find a hiding place from the sun. I looked up at the sky. I couldn’t speak or breathe.
Gabrielle put her arms around me and I held her, burying my face in her hair. Like cool velvet was her skin, her face, her lips. And her love surrounded me with a monstrous purity that had nothing to do with human hearts and human flesh.
I lifted her off her feet embracing her. And in the dark, we were like lovers carved out of the same stone who had no memory of a separate life at all.
“He’s made his choice, my son,” she said. “What’s done is done, and you’re free of him now.”
“Mother, how can you say it?” I whispered. “He didn’t know. He doesn’t know still …”
“Let him go, Lestat,” she said. “They will care for him.”
“But now I have to find that devil, Armand, don’t I?” I said wearily. “I have to make him leave them alone.”
The following evening when I came into Paris, I learned that Nicki had already been to Roget.
He had come an hour earlier pounding on the doors
like a madman. And shouting from the shadows, he had demanded the deed to the theater, and money that he said I had promised to him. He had threatened Roget and his family. He had also told Roget to write to Renaud and his troupe in London and to tell them to come home, that they had a new theater awaiting them, and he expected them back at once. When Roget refused, he demanded the address of the players in London, and began to ransack Roget’s desk.
I went into a silent fury when I heard this. So he would make them all vampires, would he, this demon fledgling, this reckless and frenzied monster?
This would not come to pass.
I told Roget to send a courier to London, with word that Nicolas de Lenfent had lost his reason. The players must not come home.
And then I went to the boulevard du Temple and I found him at his rehearsals, excited and mad as he had been before. He wore his fancy clothes again and his old jewels from the time when he had been his father’s favorite son, but his tie was askew, his stockings crooked, and his hair was as wild and unkempt as the hair of a prisoner in the Bastille who hadn’t seen himself in a mirror in twenty years.
Before Eleni and the others I told him he would get nothing from me unless I had the promise that no actor or actress of Paris would ever be slain or seduced by the new coven, that Renaud and his troupe would never be brought into the Theater of the Vampires now or in the years to come, that Roget, who would hold the purse strings of the theater, must never come to the slightest harm.
He laughed at me, he ridiculed me as he had before. But Eleni silenced him. She was horrified to learn of his impulsive designs. It was she who gave the promises, and exacted them from the others. It was she who intimidated him and confused him with jumbled language of the old ways, and made him back down.
And it was to Eleni finally that I gave control of the Theater of the Vampires, and the income, to pass through Roget, which would allow her to do with it what she pleased.
Before I left her that night, I asked her what she knew of Armand. Gabrielle was with us. We were in the alleyway again, near the stage door.
“He watches,” Eleni answered. “Sometimes he lets himself be seen.” Her face was very confusing to me. Sorrowful. “But God only knows what he will do,” she added fearfully, “when he discovers what is really going on here.”
1
Spring rain. Rain of light that saturated every new leaf of the trees in the street, every square of paving, drift of rain threading light through the empty darkness itself. And the ball in the Palais Royal.
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.
Lost in a sea of mortals again; fresh complexions and ruddy cheeks, mounds of powdered hair atop feminine heads with all manner of millinery nonsense in them, even minute ships with three masts, tiny trees, little birds. Landscapes of pearl and ribbon. Broad-chested men like cocks in satin coats like feathered wings. The diamonds hurt my eyes.
The voices touched the surface of my skin at times, the laughter the echo of unholy laughter, wreaths of candles blinding, the froth of music positively lapping the walls.
Gust of rain from the open doors.
Scent of humans gently stoking my hunger. White shoulders, white necks, powerful hearts running at that eternal rhythm, so many gradations among these naked children hidden in riches, savages laboring beneath a swaddling of chenille, encrustations of embroidery, feet aching over high heels, masks like scabs about their eyes.
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.
Now and then eyes settled on me with some vague air of expectation. My white skin made them pause, but what was that when they let blood out of their veins themselves to keep their delicate pallor? (Let me hold the basin for you and drink it afterwards.) And my eyes, what were those, in this sea of paste jewels?
Yet their whispers slithered around me. And those scents, ah, not a one was like another. And as clearly as if spoken aloud it came, the summons from mortals here and there, sensing what I was, and the lust.
In some ancient language they welcomed death; they ached for death as death was passing through the room. But did they really know? Of course they didn’t know. And I did not know! That was the perfect horror! And who am I to bear this secret, to hunger so to impart it, to want to take that slender woman there and suck the blood right out of the plump flesh of her round little breast.
The music rushed on, human music. The colors of the room flamed for an instant as if the whole would melt. The hunger sharpened. It was no longer an idea. My veins were throbbing with it. Someone would die. Sucked dry in less than a moment. I cannot stand it, thinking of it, knowing it’s about to happen, fingers on the throat feeling the blood in the vein, feeling the flesh give, give it to me! Where? This is my body, this is my blood.
Send out your power, Lestat, like a reptile tongue to gather in a flick the appropriate heart.
Plump little arms ripe for the squeezing, men’s faces on which the close-shaven blond beard all but glitters, muscle struggling in my fingers, you haven’t got a chance!
And beneath this divine chemistry suddenly, this panorama of the denial of decay, I saw the bones!
Skulls under these preposterous wigs, two gaping holes peering from behind the uplifted fan. A room of wobbling skeletons waiting only for the tolling of the bell. Just as I had seen the audience that night in the pit of Renaud’s when I had done the tricks that terrified them. The horror should be visited upon every other being in this room.
I had to get out. I’d made a terrible miscalculation. This was death and I could get away from it, if I could just get out! But I was tangled in mortal beings as if this monstrous place were a snare for a vampire. If I bolted, I’d send the entire ballroom into panic. As gently as I could I pushed to the open doors.
And against the far wall, a backdrop of satin and filigree, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, like something imagined, Armand. Armand.
If there had been a summons, I never heard it. If there was a greeting, I didn’t sense it now. He was merely looking at me, a radiant creature in jewels and scalloped lace. And it was Cinderella revealed at the ball, this vision, Sleeping Beauty opening her eyes under a mesh of cobwebs and wiping them all away with one sweep of her warm hand. The sheer pitch of incarnate beauty made me gasp.
Yes, perfect mortal raiment, and yet he seemed all the more supernatural, his face too dazzling, his dark eyes fathomless and just for a split second glinting as if they were windows to the fires of hell. And when his voice came it was low and almost teasing, forcing me to concentrate to hear it: All night you’ve been searching for me, he said, and here I am, waiting for you. I have been waiting for you all along.
I think I sensed even then, as I stood unable to look away, that never in my years of wandering this earth would I ever have such a rich revelation of the true horror that we are.
Heartbreakingly innocent he seemed in the midst of the crowd.
Yet I saw crypts when I looked at him, and I heard the beat of the kettledrums. I saw torchlit fields where I had never been, heard vague incantations, felt the heat of raging fires on my face. And they didn’t come out of him, these visions. Rather I drew them out on my own.
Yet never had Nicolas, mortal or immortal, been so alluring. Never had Gabrielle held me so in thrall.
Dear God, this is love. This is desire. And all my past amours have been but the shadow of this.
And it seemed in a murmuring pulse of thought he gave me to know that I had been very foolish to think it would not be so.
Who can love us, you and I, as we can love each other, he whispered and it seemed his lips actually moved.
Others looked at him. I saw them drifting with a ludicrous slowness; I saw t
heir eyes pass over him, I saw the light fall on him at a rich new angle as he lowered his head.
I was moving towards him. It seemed he raised his right hand and beckoned and then he didn’t, and he had turned and I saw the figure of a young boy ahead of me, with narrow waist and straight shoulders and high firm calves under silk stockings, a boy who turned as he opened a door and beckoned again.
A mad thought came to me.
I was moving after him, and it seemed that none of the other things had happened. There was no crypt under les Innocents, and he had not been that ancient fearful fiend. We were somehow safe.
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.
A dark room surrounded us, private, cold. The noise of the ball was far away. He was heated with the blood he’d drunk and I could hear the strong force of his heart. He drew me closer to him, and beyond the high windows there flashed the passing lights of the carriages, with dim incessant sounds that spoke of safety and comfort, and all the things that Paris was.
I had never died. The world was beginning again. I put out my arms and felt his heart against me, and calling out to my Nicolas, I tried to warn him, to tell him we were all of us doomed. Our life was slipping inch by inch from us, and seeing the apple trees in the orchard, drenched in green sunlight, I felt I would go mad.
“No, no, my dearest one,” he was whispering, “nothing but peace and sweetness and your arms in mine.”
“You know it was the damnedest luck!” I whispered suddenly. “I am an unwilling devil. I cry like some vagrant child. I want to go home.”