by Rice, Anne
A young man had been told to meet me on the premises, a clever individual with a great reputation for turning dismal houses into palatial mansions, and I led him now up the stairs and into the decayed flat.
“I want it all as it was over a hundred years ago,” I said to him. “But mind you, nothing American, nothing English. Nothing Victorian. It must be entirely French.” Then I led him on a merry march through room after room, as he scribbled hastily in his little book, scarce able to see in the darkness, while I told him what wallpaper I should want here, and which shade of enamel on this door, and what sort of bergère he might round up for this corner, and what manner of Indian or Persian carpet he must acquire for this or that floor.
How keen my memory was.
Again and again, I cautioned him to write down every word I spoke. “You must find a Greek vase, no, a reproduction will not do, and it must be this high and have upon it dancing figures.” Ah, wasn’t it the ode by Keats which had inspired that long-ago purchase? Where had the urn gone? “And that fireplace, that is not the original mantel. You must find one of white marble, with scrollwork like so, and arched over the grate. Oh, and these fireplaces, they must be repaired. They must be able to burn coal.
“I will live here again as soon as you are finished,” I said to him. “So you must hurry. And, another caution. Anything you find in these premises—hidden in the old plaster—you must give to me.”
What a pleasure it was to stand beneath these high ceilings, and what a joy it would be to see them when the soft crumbling moldings were once more restored. How free and quiet I felt. The past was here, but it wasn’t here. No whispering ghosts anymore, if there had ever been.
Slowly I described the chandeliers I wanted; when the proper labels eluded me, I drew pictures in words for him of what had once been there. I would have oil lamps here and there, also, though of course there must be limitless electricity, and we would conceal the various television screens in handsome cabinets, not to mar the effect. And there, a cabinet for my videotapes and laser disks, and again, we should find something suitable—a painted Oriental press would do the trick. Hide the telephones.
“And a facsimile machine! I must have one of those little marvels! Find someplace to conceal it as well. Why, you can use that room as an office, only make it gracious and beautiful. Nothing must be visible which is not made of polished brass, fine wool, or lustrous wood, or silk or cotton lace. I want a mural in that bedroom. Here, I shall show you. But look, see the wallpaper? That’s the very mural. Bring in a photographer and record every inch and then begin your restoration. Work diligently but very fast.”
Finally we were finished with the dark damp interior. It was time to discuss the courtyard in the back with its broken fountain, and how the old kitchen must be restored. I would have bougainvillea and the Queen’s Wreath, how I love the Queen’s Wreath, and the giant hibiscus, yes, I had just seen this lovely flower in the Caribbean, and the moonflower, of course. Banana trees, give me those as well. Ah, the old walls are tumbling. Patch them. Shore them up. And on the back porch above, I want ferns, all manner of delicate ferns. The weather’s warming again, isn’t it? They will do well.
Now, upstairs, once more, through the long brown hollow of the house and to the front porch.
I broke open the French doors and went out on the rotted boards. The fine old iron railings were not so badly rusted. The roof would have to be remade of course. But I would soon be sitting out here as I did now and then in the old days, watching the passersby on the other side of the street.
Of course the faithful and zealous readers of my books would spot me here now and then. The readers of Louis’s memoir, come to find the flat where we had lived, would surely recognize the house.
No matter. They believed in it, but that’s different from believing it. And what was another young blond-faced man, smiling at them from a high balcony, his arms resting on the rail? I should never feed upon those tender, innocent ones—even when they bare their throats at me and say, “Lestat, right here!” (This has happened, reader, in Jackson Square, and more than once.)
“You must hurry,” I told the young man, who was still scribbling, and taking measurements, and murmuring about colors and fabrics to himself, and now and then discovering Mojo beside him, or in front of him, or underfoot, and giving a start. “I want it finished before summer.” He was in quite a dither when I dismissed him. I remained behind in the old building with Mojo, alone.
The attic. In the olden times, I’d never gone there. But there was an old staircase hidden off the rear porch, just beyond the back parlour, the very room where Claudia had once sliced through my thin fledgling white skin with her great flashing knife. I went there now and climbed up into the low rooms beneath the sloping roof. Ah, it was high enough for a man of six feet to walk here, and the dormer windows on the very front let in the light from the street.
I should make my lair here, I thought, in a hard plain sarcophagus with a lid no mortal could hope to move. Easy enough to build a small chamber beneath the gable, fitted with thick bronze doors which I should design myself. And when I rise, I shall go down into the house and find it as it was in those wondrous decades, save I shall have everywhere about me the technological marvels I require. The past will not be recovered. The past will be perfectly eclipsed.
“Won’t it, Claudia?” I whispered, standing in the back parlour. Nothing answered me. No sounds of a harpsichord or the canary singing in its cage. But I should have songbirds again, yes, many of them, and the house would be full of the rich rampaging music of Haydn or Mozart.
Oh, my darling, wish you were here!
And my dark soul is happy again, because it does not know how to be anything else for very long, and because the pain is a deep dark sea in which I would drown if I did not sail my little craft steadily over the surface, steadily towards a sun which will never rise.
It was past midnight now; the little city was humming softly around me, with a chorus of mingled voices, and the soft clickety-clack of a distant train, with the low throb of a whistle on the river, and the rumble of traffic on the Rue Esplanade.
I went into the old parlour, and stared at the pale luminous patches of light falling through the panes of the doors. I lay down on the bare wood, and Mojo came to lie down beside me, and there we slept.
I dreamed no dreams of her. So why was I weeping softly when it came time finally to seek the safety of my crypt? And where was my Louis, my treacherous and stubborn Louis? Pain. Ah, and it would get worse, wouldn’t it, when I saw him soon enough?
With a start, I realized that Mojo was lapping the blood tears from my cheeks. “No. That you must never do!” I said, closing my hand over his mouth. “Never, never that blood. That evil blood.” I was badly shaken. And he was at once obedient, backing off just a little from me in his unhurried and dignified way.
How perfectly demonic his eyes seemed as he gazed at me. What a deception! I kissed him again, on the tenderest part of his long, furry face, just beneath his eyes.
I thought again of Louis, and the pain hit me as if I’d been dealt a hard blow by one of the ancients, right in the chest.
Indeed, my emotions were so bitter, and so beyond my control, that I felt frightened and for a moment thought of nothing and felt nothing but this pain.
In my mind’s eye, I saw all the others. I brought up their faces as if I were the Witch of Endor standing over the cauldron invoking the images of the dead.
Maharet and Mekare, the red-haired twins, I beheld together—the oldest of us, who might not have even known of my dilemma, so remote were they in their great age and wisdom, and so deeply wrapped in their own inevitable and timeless concerns; Eric and Mael and Khayman I pictured, who held scant interest for me even if they had knowingly refused to come to my aid. They had never been my companions. What did I care for them? Then I saw Gabrielle, my beloved mother, who surely could not have known of my terrible jeopardy, who was no doubt wandering some d
istant continent, a ragged goddess, communing only with the inanimate, as she had always done. I did not know if she fed any longer on humans; some dim memory came to me of her describing the embrace of some dark woodland beast. Was she mad, my mother, wherever she had gone? I did not think so. That she existed still, I was certain. That I could never find her, I had no doubt.
It was Pandora I pictured next. Pandora, the lover of Marius, might have perished long ago. Made by Marius in Roman times, she had been on the verge of despair when last I saw her. Years ago, she had wandered away, without warning, from our last true coven on the Night Island—one of the first to depart.
As for Santino, the Italian, I knew almost nothing of him. I had expected nothing. He was young. Perhaps my cries had never reached him. And why should he listen if they had?
Then I envisioned Armand. My old enemy and friend Armand. My old adversary and companion Armand. Armand, the angelic child who had created the Night Island, our last home.
Where was Armand? Had Armand deliberately left me to my own devices? And why not?
Let me turn now to Marius, the great ancient master who had made Armand in love and tenderness so many centuries ago; Marius, for whom I’d searched so many decades; Marius, the true child of two millennia, who had led me down into the depths of our meaningless history, and bid me worship at the shrine of Those Who Must Be Kept.
Those Who Must Be Kept. Dead and gone as was Claudia. For kings and queens among us can perish as surely as tender childlike fledglings.
Yet I go on. I am here. I am strong.
And Marius, like Louis, had known of my suffering! He’d known and he’d refused to help.
The rage in me grew stronger, ever more dangerous. Was Louis somewhere near in these very streets? I clenched my fists, struggling against this rage, struggling against its helpless and inevitable expression.
Marius, you turned your back on me. That came as no surprise, really. You were always the teacher, the parent, the high priest. I don’t despise you for it. But Louis! My Louis, I could never deny you anything, and you turned me away!
I knew I could not remain here. I did not trust myself to lay eyes on him. Not yet.
An hour before dawn, I took Mojo back to his little garden, kissed him good-bye, and then I walked fast to the outskirts of the old city, and through the Faubourg Marigny, and finally into the swamplands, and then I raised my arms towards the stars, swimming so brilliant beyond the clouds, and I went up, and up, and up until I was lost in the song of the wind and tumbling on the thinnest currents, and the joy I felt in my gifts filled my entire soul.
THIRTY
It must have been a full week that I traveled the world. First I’d gone to snowy Georgetown and found that frail, pathetic young woman whom my mortal self had so unforgivably raped. Like an exotic bird, she looked to me now, struggling to see me well in the smelly dark of the quaint little mortal restaurant, not wanting to admit that this encounter with “my French friend” had ever happened, and then stunned as I placed an antique rosary made of emeralds and diamonds in her hand. “Sell it, if you like, chérie,” I said. “He wanted you to have it for whatever purpose you wish. But tell me one thing. Did you conceive a child?”
She shook her head and whispered the word “no.” I wanted to kiss her, she was beautiful again to me. But I dared not risk it. It wasn’t only that I would have frightened her, it was that the desire to kill her was almost overpowering. Some fierce purely male instinct in me wanted to claim her now simply because I had claimed her in another way before.
I was gone from the New World within hours, and night after night, I wandered, hunting in the seething slums of Asia—in Bangkok and Hong Kong and Singapore—and then in the dreary and frozen city of Moscow, and in the charming old cities of Vienna and Prague. I went to Paris for a short time. I did not go to London. I pushed my speed to the limits; I rose and plunged in the darkness, sometimes alighting in towns of which I did not know the name. I fed ceaselessly among the desperate and the vicious and, now and then, the lost and the mad and the purely innocent who fell under my gaze.
I tried not to kill. I tried not to. Except when the subject was damn near irresistible, an evildoer of the first rank. And then the death was slow and savage, and I was just as hungry when it was over, and off to find another before the sun rose.
I had never been so at ease with my powers. I had never risen so high into the clouds, nor traveled so fast.
I walked for hours among mortals in the narrow old streets of Heidelberg, and of Lisbon, and of Madrid. I, passed through Athens and Cairo and Marrakesh. I walked on the shores of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean and the Adriatic Sea.
What was I doing? What was I thinking? That the old cliché was true—the world was mine.
And everywhere I went I let my presence be known. I let my thoughts emanate from me as if they were notes played on a lyre.
The Vampire Lestat is here. The Vampire Lestat is passing. Best give way.
I didn’t want to see the others. I didn’t really look for them, or open my mind or my ears to them. I had nothing to say to them. I only wanted them to know that I had been there.
I did pick up the sound of nameless ones in various places, vagabonds unknown to us, random creatures of the night who had escaped the late massacre of our kind. Sometimes it was a mere mental glimpse of a powerful being who, at once, veiled his mind. Other times it was the clear sound of a monster plodding through eternity without guile or history or purpose. Maybe such things will always be there!
I had eternity now to meet such creatures, if ever the urge came over me. The only name on my lips was Louis.
Louis.
I could not for a moment forget Louis. It was as if someone else were chanting his name in my ear. What would I do if ever again I laid eyes on him? How could I curb my temper? Would I even try?
At last I was tired. My clothes were rags. I could stay away no longer. I wanted to be home.
THIRTY-ONE
I was sitting in the darkened cathedral. Hours ago it had been locked, and I had entered surreptitiously through one of the front doors, quieting the protective alarms. And left it open for him.
Five nights had passed since my return. Work was progressing wonderfully well on the flat in the Rue Royale, and of course he had not failed to notice it. I’d seen him standing under the porch opposite, staring up at the windows, and I’d appeared on the balcony above for only an instant—not even enough for a mortal eye to see.
I’d been playing cat and mouse with him since.
Tonight, I’d let him see me near the old French Market. And what a start it gave him, to actually lay eyes upon me, and to see Mojo with me, to realize as I gave him a little wink that it was truly Lestat whom he saw.
What had he thought in that first instant? That it was Raglan James in my body come to destroy him? That James was making a home for himself in the Rue Royale? No, he’d known it was Lestat all along.
Then I had walked slowly towards the church, Mojo coming along smartly at my side. Mojo, who kept me anchored to the good earth.
I wanted him to follow me. But I wouldn’t so much as turn my head to see whether or not he was coming.
It was warm this night, and it had rained earlier enough to darken the rich, rose-colored walls of the old French Quarter buildings, to deepen the brown of the bricks, and to leave the flags and the cobblestones with a fine and lovely sheen. A perfect night for walking in New Orleans. Wet and fragrant, the flowers blooming over the garden walls.
But to meet with him again, I needed the quiet and silence of the darkened church.
My hands were shaking a little, as they had been off and on since I had come back into my old form. There was no physical cause for it, only my anger coming and going, and long spells of contentment, and then a terrifying emptiness which would open around me, and then the happiness coming again, quite complete, yet fragile, as though it were but a thin fine veneer. Was it fair to say I didn’t
know the full state of my soul? I thought of the unbridled rage with which I’d smashed the head of David Talbot’s body, and I shuddered. Was I still afraid?
Hmmm. Look at these dark sunburnt fingers with their gleaming nails. I felt the tremour as I pressed the tips of my right fingers to my lips.
I sat in the dark pew, several rows back from the railing before the altar, looking at the dark statues, and the paintings, and all the gilded ornament of this cold and empty place.
It was past midnight. The noise from the Rue Bourbon was as loud as ever. So much simmering mortal flesh there. I’d fed earlier. I would feed again.
But the sounds of the night were soothing. Throughout the narrow streets of the Quarter, in her small apartments, and atmospheric little taverns, in her fancy cocktail lounges, and in her restaurants, happy mortals laughed and talked, and kissed and embraced.
I slumped back comfortably in the pew, and stretched out my arms on the back of it as if it were a park bench. Mojo had already gone to sleep in the aisle near me, long nose resting on his paws.
Would that I were you, my friend. Looking like the very devil, and full of big lumbering goodness. Ah, yes, goodness. It was goodness that I felt when I locked my arms around him, and buried my face in his fur.
But now he had come into the church.
I sensed his presence though I could pick up no glimmer of thought or feeling from him, or even hear his step. I had not heard the outer door open or close. Somehow I knew he was there. Then I saw the shadow moving in the corner of my left eye. He came into the pew and sat beside me, a little distance away.
We sat there in silence for many long moments, and then he spoke.
“You burnt my little house, didn’t you?” he asked in a small, vibrant voice.
“Can you blame me?” I asked with a smile, eyes still on the altar. “Besides, I was a human when I did that. It was human weakness. Want to come and live with me?”