by Rice, Anne
Pandora, child of two millennia, consort to my own beloved Marius a thousand years before I was ever born. A goddess, made of bleeding marble, a powerful beauty out of the deepest and most ancient soul of Roman Italy, fierce with the moral fiber of the old Senatorial class of the greatest Empire the Western world has ever known. I don’t know her. Her oval face shimmers beneath a mantle of rippling brown hair. She seems too beautiful to hurt anyone. She is tender-voiced, with innocent, imploring eyes, her flawless face instantly vulnerable and warm with empathy, a mystery. I don’t know how Marius could ever have left her. In a short shift of filmy silk, with a snake bracelet on her bare arm, she is too ravishing for mortal males and the envy of females. In her longer concealing gowns, she moves as a wraith through the rooms around her as if they are not real to her, and she, the ghost of a dancer, seeks for some perfect setting that she alone can find. Her powers certainly rival those of Marius. She has drunk from the Eden fount, that is, the blood of Queen Akasha. She can kindle crisp dry objects into fire with the power of her mind, levitate and vanish in the dark sky, slay the young blood drinkers if they menace her, and yet she seems harmless, forever feminine though indifferent to gender, a wan and plaintive woman whom I want to close in my arms.
Santino, the old saint of Rome. He has wandered into the disasters of the modern era with all his beauty unblemished, still the big-shouldered, strong-chested one, olive skin paler now with the workings of the fierce magical blood, huge head of black curling hair often clipped each night at sunset for the sake of anonymity perhaps, unvain, perfectly dressed in black. He says nothing to anyone. He looks at me silently as if we never talked together of theology and mysticism, as if he never broke my happiness, burnt my youth to cinders, drove my Maker into century-long convalescence, divided me from all comfort. Perhaps he fancies us as fellow victims of a powerful intellectual morality, an infatuation with the concept of purpose, two lost ones, veterans of the same war.
At times he looks shrewd and even hateful. He knows plenty. He doesn’t underestimate the powers of the ancient ones, who, eschewing the social invisibility of centuries past, now walk among us with perfect ease. When he looks at me, his black eyes are unflinching and passive. The shadow of his beard, fixed forever into the tiny cut-off dark hairs embedded in his skin, is beautiful as it always was. He is all in all conventionally virile, crisp white shirt open at the throat to show the portion of the thick curly black hair that covers his chest, a similar enticing black fleece covering the visible flesh of his arms at the wrists. He favors sleek but sturdy black coats lapeled in leather or fur, low-slung black cars that move at two hundred miles an hour, a golden cigarette lighter reeking of combustible fluid, which he lights over and over again just to peer into the flame. Where he actually lives, and when he will surface, nobody knows.
Santino. I know no more about him than that. We keep a gentle-manly distance from one another. I suspect his own suffering has been terrible; I do not seek to break the shiny black fashionable carapace of his demeanor to discover some raw bloody tragedy beneath it. To know Santino, there is always time.
Now let me describe for the most virginal of readers my Master, Marius, as he is now. So much time and experience divide us now that it is like a glacier between us, and we stare at each other across the glowing whiteness of that impassable waste, able only to speak in lulled and polite voices, so mannerly, the young creature I appear to be, too sweet-faced for casual belief, and he, ever the worldly sophisticate, the scholar of the moment, the philosopher of the century, ethicist of the millennium, historian for all time.
He walks tall as he always did, imperial still in his subdued twentieth-century fashion, carving his coats out of old velvet that they may give some faint clue of the magnificence that was once his nightly dress. On occasions now he clips the long flowing yellow hair which he wore so proudly in old Venice. He is ever quick of wit and tongue and eager for reasonable solutions, possessed of infinite patience and unquenchable curiosity and a refusal to give up on the fate of himself, or of us, or of this world. No knowledge can defeat him; tempered by fire and time, he is too strong for the horrors of technology or the spells of science. Neither microscopes nor computers shake his faith in the infinite, though his once solemn charges—Those Who Must Be Kept, who held such promise of redemptive meaning—have long been toppled from their archaic thrones.
I fear him. I don’t know why. Perhaps I fear him because I could love him again, and loving him, I would come to need him, and needing him, I would come to learn from him, and learning from him, I would be again his faithful pupil in all things, only to discover that his patience for me is no substitute for the passion which long ago blazed in his eyes.
I need that passion! I need it. But enough of him. Two thousand years he had survived, slipping in and out of the very mainstream of human life without compunction, a great practitioner of the art of being human, carrying with him forever the grace and quiet dignity of the Augustan Age of seemingly invincible Rome, in which he was born.
There are others who are not here now with me, though they have been on The Night Island, and I will see them again. There are the ancient twins, Mekare and Maharet, custodians of the primal blood fount from which our life flows, the roots of the vine, so to speak, upon which we so stubbornly and beautifully bloom. They are our Queens of the Damned.
Then there is Jesse Reeves, a twentieth-century fledgling made by Maharet, the very eldest and therefore a dazzling monster, unknown to me, but greatly admired. Bringing with her into the world of the Undead an incomparable education in history, the paranormal, philosophy and languages, she is the unknown. Will the fire consume her, as it has so many others who, weary of life, cannot accept immortality? Or will her twentieth-century wit give her some radical and indestructible armor for the inconceivable changes that we now know must lie ahead?
Ah, there are others. There are wanderers. I can hear their voices from time to time in the night. There are those far away who know nothing of our traditions and have styled us, in hostility to our writings and in amusement at our antics, “The Coven of the Articulate,” strange “unregistered” beings of various ages, strengths, attitudes, who sometimes seeing on a paperback rack a copy of The Vampire Lestat tear it loose and grind the small book to powder within their powerful and scornful hands.
They may lend their wisdom or their wit to our unfolding chronicle in some unpredictable future. Who knows?
For now, there is but one more player who must be described before my tale can be advanced.
That one is you, David Talbot, whom I scarcely know, you, who write with furious speed all the words that come slowly tumbling from me as I watch you, mesmerized on some level by the mere fact that these sentiments so long allowed to burn inside of me are now recorded on the seemingly eternal page.
What are you, David Talbot—over seven decades old in mortal education, a scholar, a deep and loving soul? How can one tell? That which you were in life, wise in years, strengthened by routine calamity and deepened by the full four seasons of a man’s span upon the Earth, was transported with all memory and learning intact into the splendid body of a younger man. And then that body, a precious chalice for the Grail of your very self, who knew so well the value of both elements, was then assaulted by your closest of friends, the loving monster, the vampire who would have you as his fellow traveler in eternity whether or not you gave him leave, our beloved Lestat.
I cannot imagine such a rape. I stand too far from all humanity, never having been a full man. In your face I see the vigor and beauty of the dark golden-skinned Anglo-Hindi whose body you enjoy, and in your eyes the calm and dangerously well-tempered soul of the old man.
Your hair is black and soft and handily trimmed below your ears. You dress with high vanity submitted to a staunch British sense of style. You look at me as though your curiosity will put me off guard, when nothing of the sort is true.
Hurt me and I’ll destroy you. I don’t care how strong
you are, or what blood Lestat gave you. I know more than you do. Because I show you my pain, I do not of necessity love you. I do this for myself and for others, for the very idea of others, for any who would know, and for my mortals, those two I’ve gathered to me so recently, those two precious ones who have become the ticking clock of my capacity to go on.
Symphony for Sybelle. That might as well be the name of this confession. And having done my best for Sybelle, I do my best for you as well.
Is this not enough of the past? Is this not enough prologue to the moment in New York when I saw Christ’s Face in the Veil? There begins the final chapter of my life of late. There is nothing more to it. You have all the rest, and what must needs come now is but the brief harrowing account of what has brought me here.
Be my friend, David. I didn’t mean to say such terrible things to you. My heart aches. I need you just to tell me that I may rush on. Help me with your experience. Isn’t this enough? May I go on? I want to hear Sybelle’s music. I want to talk of beloved rescuers. I can’t measure the proportions of this story. I only know I am ready … I have reached the far side of The Bridge of Sighs.
Ah, but it’s my decision, yes, and you wait to write what I will say.
Well, let me go now to the Veil.
Let me go now to the Face of Christ, as if I were walking uphill in the long-ago snowy winter in Podil, beneath the broken towers of Vladimir’s City, to seek within the Monastery of the Caves the paint and the wood on which to see it take form before me: His Face. Christ, yes, the Redeemer, the Living Lord once more.
PART III
APPASSIONATA
17
I didn’t want to go to him. It was winter, and I was contented in London, haunting the theatres to see the plays of Shakespeare, and reading the plays and the sonnets the whole night long. I had no other thoughts just now but Shakespeare. Lestat had given him to me. And when I’d had a bellyful of despair, I’d opened the books and begun to read.
But Lestat was calling. Lestat was, or so he claimed, afraid.
I had to go. The last time he’d been in trouble, I hadn’t been free to rush to his rescue. There is a story to that, but nothing as important as this one which I tell now.
Now I knew that my hard-won peace of mind might be shattered by the mere contact with him, but he wanted me to come, so I went.
I found him first in New York, though he didn’t know it and he couldn’t have led me into a worse snowstorm if he’d tried. He slew a mortal that night, a victim with whom he’d fallen in love, as was his custom of late—to pick these celebrities of high crimes and horrid murders—and to stalk them before the night of the feast.
So what did he want of me, I wondered. You were there, David. You could help him. Or so it seemed. Being his fledgling you hadn’t heard his call directly, but he’d reached you somehow, and the two of you, such proper gentlemen, came together to discuss in low, sophisticated whispers Lestat’s latest fears.
When next I caught up with him he was in New Orleans. And he put it to me plain and simple. You were there. The Devil had come to him in the guise of a man. The Devil could change shapes, being at one moment horrific and ghastly with webbed wings and hoofed feet; and then next, the Devil could be an ordinary man. Lestat was wild with these stories. The Devil had offered him a dreadful proposition, that he, Lestat, become the Devil’s helper in the service of God.
Do you remember how calmly I responded to his story, his questions, his pleading for our advice? Oh, I told him firmly it was madness to follow this spirit, to believe that any discarnate thing was bound to tell him the truth.
But only now do you know the wounds he opened with this strange and marvelous fable. So the Devil would make him a hellish helper and thereby a servant of God? I might have laughed outright, or wept, throwing it in his face that I had once believed myself a saint of evil, shivering in rags as I stalked my victims in the Parisian winter, all for the honor and glory of God.
But he knew all this. There was no need to wound him further, to shift from him the limelight of his own tale, which Lestat, being the bright star, must always have.
Under moss-hung oaks we talked in civilized voices. You and I begged him to be cautious. Naturally, he ignored all we said.
It was all mixed up with the entrancing mortal Dora, who was living then in this very building, this old brick convent, the daughter of the man Lestat had stalked and slain.
When he bound us to look out for her, I was angry, but only mildly so. I have fallen in love with mortals. I have those tales to tell. I am in love now with Sybelle and Benjamin, whom I call my children, and I had been a secret troubadour to other mortals in the dim past.
All right, he was in love with Dora, he’d laid his head on a mortal breast, he wanted the womb blood of her that would be no loss to her, he was smitten, crazed, goaded by the ghost of her Father and courted by the Prince of Evil Himself.
And she, what shall I say of her? That she possessed the power of a Rasputin behind the face of a nunnery postulant, when in fact she is a practiced theologian and not a mystic, a ranting raving leader, not a visionary, whose ecclesiastical ambitions would have dwarfed those of Saints Peter and Paul put together, and that of course, she is like any flower Lestat ever gathered from the Savage Garden of this world: a most fine and fetching little creature, a glorious specimen of God’s Creation—with raven hair, a pouty mouth, cheeks of porcelain and the dashing limbs of a nymph.
Of course I knew the very moment that he left this world. I felt it. I was in New York already, very near to him and aware that you were there as well. Neither of us meant to let him out of our sight if at all possible. Then came the moment when he vanished in the blizzard, when he was sucked out of the earthly atmosphere as if he’d never been there.
Being his fledgling you couldn’t hear the perfect silence that descended when he vanished. You couldn’t know how completely he’d been withdrawn from all things minuscule yet material which had once echoed with the beating of his heart.
I knew, and I think it was to distract us both that I proposed we go to the wounded mortal who must have been shattered by her Father’s death at the hands of a blond-haired handsome blood-swilling monster who’d made her his confidant and a friend.
It was not difficult to help her in the short event-filled nights that followed, when horror was heaped upon horror, her Father’s murder discovered, his sordid life at once made by media magic the madcap conversation of the wide world.
It seems a century ago, not merely so short a time, that we moved south to these rooms, her father’s legacy of crucifixes and statues, of ikons which I handled so coolly as if I’d never loved such treasures at all.
It seems a century ago that I dressed decently for her, finding in some fashionable Fifth Avenue shop a shapely coat of old red velvet, a poet’s shirt, as they call it now, of starched cotton and ample flopping lace, and to set this off, pegged-leg trousers of black wool and shiny boots that buckled at the ankle, all this the better to accompany her to identify her Father’s severed head under the leeching fluorescent lights of some immense and overcrowded morgue.
One good thing about this final decade of the twentieth century is that a man of any age can wear his hair at any length.
It seems a century ago that I combed out mine, full and curly and clean for once, just for her.
It seems a century ago we stood so staunchly beside her, indeed even held her, this long-necked, short-haired, spellbinding witchlet, in our very arms as she wept over the death of her Father and pelted us with feverish and maniacally intelligent and dispassionate questions about our sinister nature, as if a great crash course in the anatomy of the vampire could somehow close the cycle of horror threatening her wholesomeness and her sanity and somehow bring her wicked conscienceless Father back.
No, it wasn’t the return of Roger, actually, that she prayed for; she believed too totally in the omniscience and mercy of God. Besides, seeing a man’s severed head is a bi
t of a shock, even if the head is frozen, and a dog had chomped on Roger a bit before he’d been discovered, and what with the strict “no touch” rules of modern forensics, he was—for me even—quite a sight. (I remember the coroner’s assistant saying soulfully to me that I was awfully young to have to see such a thing. She thought I was Dora’s little brother. What a sweet woman she was. Perhaps it’s worth it to make a foray into the official mortal world once in a while in order to be called “a real trouper” instead of a Botticelli angel, which has become my tag line among the Undead.)