by Rice, Anne
I was mad during those times. Lead the Coven I did, and of its ceremonies, his fanciful dark litanies and bloody baptisms, I became the architect and the master. My physical strength increased with each year, as is the case with all vampires, and drinking greedily from my victims, for it was the only pleasure of which I could dream, I fed my vampiric powers.
Spells I could make around those I killed, and choosing the beautiful, the promising, the most audacious and splendid for my feast, I nevertheless conveyed upon them fantastical visions to blunt their fear or suffering.
I was mad. Denied the places of light, the comfort of entering the smallest church, bent on perfection in the Dark Ways, I wandered as a dusty wraith through the blackest alleyways of Paris, turning her noblest poetry and music into a din by the wax of piety and bigotry by which I stopped my ears, blind to the soaring majesty of her cathedrals or palaces.
The Coven took all my love, with chatter in the dark of how we might best be Satan’s saints, or whether a beautiful and bold poisoner should be offered our demonic pact and made one of us.
But sometimes I went from an acceptable madness to a state of which I alone knew the dangers. In my earthen cell in the secret catacombs beneath the great Paris Cemetery of Les Innocents where we made our lair, I dreamt night after night of one strange and meaningless thing: What had become of that fine little treasure my mortal Mother had given me? What had become of that strange artifact of Podil which she’d taken from the Ikon corner and put in my hands, that painted egg, that crimson painted egg with the star so beautifully painted on it? Now, where could it be? What had become of it? Had I not left it, wrapped thickly in fur in a golden coffin in which I’d once lodged, ah, had all that really ever taken place, that life I thought I recalled from a city of brilliant white-tiled palaces and glittering canals and a great sweet gray sea full of swift and graceful ships, plying their long oars in perfect unison as if they were living things, those ships, those beautifully painted ships, so often decked with flowers, and with the whitest sails, oh, that could not have been real, and to think, a golden chamber with a golden coffin in it, and this special treasure, this fragile and lovely thing, this painted egg, this brittle and perfect egg, whose painted covering locked inside to utter perfection a moist, mysterious concoction of living fluids—oh, what strange imaginings. But what had happened to it! Who had found it!
Somebody had.
Either that or it was still there, hidden far below a palazzo in that floating city, hidden in a waterproof dungeon built deep into the oozing earth beneath the waters of the lagoon. No, never. Not so, not there. Don’t think of it. Don’t think of profane hands getting that thing. And you know, you lying treacherous little soul, you never, never went back to any such place as the low city with the icy water in its streets, where your Father, a thing of myth and nonsense to be sure, drank wine from your hands and forgave you that you had gone to become a dark and strong winged bird, a bird of the night soaring higher even than the domes of Vladimir’s City, as if someone had broken that egg, that meticulously and wondrously painted egg which your Mother so cherished as she gave it you, broken that egg with a vicious thumb, cracked right into it, and out of that rotten fluid, that stinking fluid, you had been born, the night bird, flying high over the smoking chimneys of Podil, over the domes of Vladimir’s Town, higher and farther and farther away over the wild lands and over the world and into this dark wood, this deep and dark and endless forest from which you will never escape, this cold and comfortless wilderness of the hungry wolf and the chomping rat and the crawling worm and the screaming victim.
Allesandra would come. “Wake, Armand. Wake. You dream the sad dreams, the dreams that precede madness, you cannot leave me, my child, you cannot, I fear death more than I fear this and will not be alone, you cannot go into the fire, you cannot go and leave me here.”
No. I couldn’t. I did not have the passion for such a step. I did not have the hope for anything, even though no word of the Roman Coven had come in decades.
But there came an end to my long centuries of Satan’s service.
Clad in red velvet it came, the very covering my old Master had so loved, the dream king, Marius. It came swaggering and camping through the lighted streets of Paris as though God had made it.
But it was a vampire child, the same as I, son of the seventeen hundreds, as they reckoned the time to be then, a blazing, brash, bumbling, laughing and teasing blood drinker in the guise of a young man, come to stomp out whatever sacred fire yet burnt in the cleft scar tissue of my soul and scatter the ashes.
It was The Vampire Lestat. It wasn’t his fault. Had one of us been able to strike him down one night, break him apart with his own fancy sword and set him ablaze, we might have had a few more decades of our wretched delusions.
But nobody could. He was too damned strong for us.
Created by a powerful and ancient renegade, a legendary vampire by the name of Magnus, this Lestat, aged twenty in mortal years, an errant and penniless country aristocrat from the wild lands of Auvergne, who had thrown over custom and respectability and any hope of court ambitions, of which he had none anyway since he couldn’t even read or write, and was too insulting to wait on any King or Queen, who became a wild blond-haired celebrity of the boulevard gutter theatricals, a lover of men and women, a laughing happy-go-lucky blindly ambitious self-loving genius of sorts, this Lestat, this blue-eyed and infinitely confident Lestat, was orphaned on the very night of his creation by the ancient monster who made him, bequeathed to him a fortune in a secret room in a crumbling medieval tower, and then went into the eternal comfort of the ever devouring flames.
This Lestat, knowing nothing of Old Covens and Old Ways, of soot covered gangsters who thrived under cemeteries and believed they had a right to brand him a heretic, a maverick and a bastard of the Dark Blood, went strutting about fashionable Paris, isolated and tormented by his supernatural endowments yet glorying in his new powers, dancing at the Tuileries with the most magnificently clad women, reveling in the joys of the ballet and the high court theater and roaming not only in the Places of Light, as we called them, but meandering mournfully in Notre Dame de Paris itself, right before the High Altar, without the lightning of God striking him where he stood.
He destroyed us. He destroyed me.
Allesandra, mad by then as most of the old ones were in those times, had one merry argument with him after I dutifully arrested him and dragged him to our underground Court to stand trial, and then she too went into the flames, leaving me with the obvious absurdity: that Our Ways were finished, our superstitions obviously laughable, our dusty black robes ludicrous, our penance and self-denial pointless, our beliefs that we served God and the Devil self-serving, naive and stupid, our organization as preposterous in the gay atheistic Parisian world of the Age of Reason as it might have seemed to my beloved Venetian Marius centuries before.
Lestat was the smasher, the laughing one, the pirate who, worshiping nothing and no one, soon left Europe to find his own safe and agreeable territory in the colony of New Orleans in the New World.
He had no comforting philosophy for me, the baby-faced deacon who had come forth out of the darkest prison, shorn of all belief, to put on the fashionable clothes of the age and walk once again on its high streets as I had done over three hundred years ago in Venice.
And my followers, those few whom I could not overpower and bitterly consign to the flames, how helplessly they blundered in their new freedom—free to pick the gold from the pockets of their victims and don their silks and their white-powdered wigs, and sit in marvelous astonishment before the glories of the painted stage, the lustrous harmony of a hundred violins, the antics of versifying actors.
What was to be our fate, as with dazzled eyes we made our way through crowded early evening boulevards, fancy mansions and grandly decorated ballrooms?
In satin-lined boudoirs we fed, and against the damask cushions of gilded carriages. We bought fine coffins for ourselv
es, full of fancy carvings and padded velvet, and were closeted for the night in gilded mahogany-paneled cellars.
What would have become of us, scattered, my children fearful of me, and I uncertain of when the fopperies and frenzy of the French City of Light might drive them to rash or hideously destructive antics?
It was Lestat who gave me the key, Lestat who gave me the place where I could lodge my crazed and pounding heart, where I could bring my followers together for some semblance of newfangled sanity.
Before leaving me stranded in the waste of my old ways, he bequeathed to me the very boulevard theater in which he had once been the young swain of the Commedia dell’Arte. All its human players were gone. Nothing remained but the elegant and inviting husk, with its stage of gaily painted backdrops and gilded proscenium arch, its velvet curtains and empty benches just waiting for a clamoring audience again. In it we found our safest refuge, so eager to hide behind the mask of greasepaint and glamour that flawlessly disguised our polished white skin and fantastical grace and dexterity.
Actors we became, a regular company of immortals bound together to perform cheerfully decadent pantomimes for mortal audiences who never suspected that we white-faced mummers were more monstrous than any monster we ever presented in our little farces or tragedies.
The Théâtre des Vampires was born.
And worthless shell that I was, dressed up like a human with less claim to that title than ever in all my years of failure, I became its mentor.
It was the least I could do for my orphans of the Old Faith, giddy and happy as they were in a gaudy and Godless world on the verge of political revolution.
Why I governed this palladian theater so long, why I remained year after long year with this Coven of sorts, I know not except that I needed it, needed it as surely as I’d ever needed Marius and our household in Venice, or Allesandra and the Coven beneath the Paris Cemetery of Les Innocents. I needed a place to turn my steps before sunrise where I knew others of my kind were safely at rest.
And I can say truthfully that my vampire followers needed me.
They needed to believe in my leadership, and when worst came to worst I did not fail them, exercising some restraint upon those careless immortals who now and then endangered us by public displays of supernatural power or extreme cruelty, and by managing with the arithmetical skill of an idiot savant our business affairs with the world.
Taxes, tickets, handbills, heating fuel, foot lamps, the fostering of ferocious fabulists, I managed it all.
And now and then, I took exquisite pride and pleasure in it.
With the seasons we grew, as did our audiences, crude benches giving way to velvet seats, and penny pantomimes to more poetical productions.
Many a night as I took my place alone in my velvet-curtained box, a gentleman of obvious means in the narrow trousers of the age, with fitted waistcoat of printed silk and close-cut coat of bright wool, my hair combed back beneath a black ribbon or finally trimmed above my high stiff white collar, I thought upon those lost centuries of rancid ritual and demonic dreams as one might think back on a long painful illness in a lightless room amid bitter medicines and pointless incantations. It could not have been real, all that, the ragged plague of predatory paupers that we were, singing of Satan in the rimy gloom.
And all the lives I’d lived, and worlds I’d known, seemed even less substantial.
What lurked beneath my fancy frills, behind my quiet unquestioning eyes? Who was I? Had I no remembrance of a warmer flame than that which gave its silvery glow to my faint smile at those who asked it of me? I remembered no one who had ever lived and breathed within my quietly moving form. A crucifix with painted blood, a saccharine Virgin on a prayer book page or made of pastel-painted bisque, what were these things but vulgar remnants of a coarse, unfathomable time when powers now dismissed had hovered in the chalice of gold, or blazed most fearfully inside a face above a glowing altar.
I knew nothing of such things. The crosses snatched from virgin necks were melted down to make my golden rings. And rosaries cast aside with other paste as thieving fingers, mine, tore off a victim’s diamond buttons.
I developed in those eight decades of the Théâtre des Vampires—we weathered the Revolution with amazing resiliency, the public clamoring to our seemingly frivolous and morbid entertainments—and maintained, long after the theatre was gone, into the late twentieth century a silent, concealed nature, letting my childlike face deceive my adversaries, my would-be enemies (I rarely took them seriously) and my vampire slaves.
I was the worst of leaders, that is, the indifferent cold leader who strikes fear into the hearts of everyone but bothers to love no one, and I maintained the Théâtre des Vampires, as we called it well into the 1870s, when Lestat’s child Louis came wandering into it, seeking the answers which his cocky insolent maker had never given him to the age-old questions: Where do we vampires come from? Who made us and for what?
Ah, but before I discourse on the coming of the famous and irresistible vampire Louis, and his small exquisite paramour, the vampire Claudia, let me relate one tiny incident that happened to me in the earlier years of the nineteenth century. It may mean nothing; or perhaps it is the betrayal of another’s secret existence. I don’t know. I relate it only because it touches fancifully, if not certainly, upon one who has played a dramatic role in my tale.
I cannot mark the year of this little event. Let me say only that Chopin’s lovely, dreamy piano music was well revered in Paris, that the novels of George Sand were the rage, and that women had already given up the slender lascivious gowns of the Empire to wear the huge heavy-skirted, small-waisted taffeta dresses in which they appear so often in old shining daguerrotypes.
The theatre was booming as one would say in modern parlance, and I, the manager, having grown tired of its performances, was wandering alone one night in the wooded land just beyond the glow of Paris, not far from a country house full of merry voices and blazing chandeliers.
It was there that I came upon another vampire.
I knew her immediately by her silence, lack of scent and the near divine grace with which she made her way through the wild brush, managing a full flowing cape and abundant skirt with small pale hands, her goal the nearby brilliantly lighted and beckoning windows.
She realized my presence almost as quickly as I sensed hers; quite alarming to me at my age and with my powers. She froze without turning her head.
Though the vicious vampire players of the theatre maintained their right to do away with mavericks or intruders among the Undead, I, the leader, after my years as deluded saint, did not give a damn for such things.
I meant the creature no harm, and, carelessly, I tossed out in a soft casual voice, speaking in French, a warning.
“Ravaged territory, my dear. No game unbespoken here. Make for a safer city before sunup.”
No human ear could have heard this.
The creature made no reply, her taffeta hood drooping as she had obviously bowed her head. Then, turning, she revealed herself to me in the long shafts of golden light falling from the multipaned glass windows beyond her.
I knew this creature. I knew her face. I knew it.
And in a dreadful second—a fateful second—I perceived that she might not know me, not with my hair nightly clipped short for these times, not in these sombre trousers and dull coat, not in this tragic moment when I posed as a man, so utterly transformed from the lushly adorned child she’d known, she couldn’t.
Why didn’t I cry out? Bianca!
But I couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t believe in it, couldn’t rouse my dulled heart to triumph in what my eyes told me to be true, that the exquisite oval face surrounded by its golden hair and taffeta hood was hers, most definitely, framed exactly as it might have been in those days, and it was she, she whose face had been etched into my fevered soul before and after any Dark Gift had ever been given me.
Bianca.
She was gone! For less than a second I saw he
r wide wary eyes, full of vampiric alarm, more urgent and menacing than any human could ever evince, and then the figure was vanished, disappeared from the wood, gone from the environs, gone from all the large rambling gardens that I searched, sluggishly, shaking my head, mumbling to myself, saying, No, couldn’t be, no, of course, not. No.
I never saw her again.
I do not know at this very moment whether or not this creature was Bianca. But I believe in my soul now, now as I dictate this tale, I believe in a soul that is healed and no stranger to hope, that it was Bianca! I can picture her too perfectly as she turned on me in the wooded garden, and in that picture lies one last detail which confirms it for me—because on that night outside of Paris, she had in her blond hair pearls interwoven.
Oh, how Bianca had loved pearls, and how she had loved to weave them in her hair. And I had seen them in the light of the country house, beneath the shadow of her hood, ropes of tiny pearls wound in her blond hair, and within that frame was the Florentine beauty I could never forget—as delicate in vampiric whiteness as it had been when filled with Fra Filippo Lippi’s colors.
It did not hurt me then. It did not shake me. I was too pale of soul, too numbed, too used to seeing all things as figments in a series of unconnected dreams. Very likely, I could not allow myself to believe such a thing.
Only now do I pray it was she, my Bianca, and that someone, and you can guess very well who that might be, someone might tell me whether or not it was my darling courtesan.
Did some member of the hateful murderous Roman Coven, chasing her out into the Venetian night, fall under her spell so that he deserted his Dark Ways, and made her his lover forever? Or did my Master, surviving the horrid fire, as we know he did, seek her out for sustaining blood and bring her over into immortality to assist him in his recovery?
I cannot bring myself to ask Marius this question. Perhaps you will. And perhaps I prefer to hope that it was she, and not to hear denials that render it less likely.