by Anne Rice
“But let me take things in order. We had to drive up the river road until we came to open fields and leave the overseer there. We tore his coat, stole his money, and saw to it his lips were stained with liquor. I knew his wife, who lived in New Orleans, and knew the state of desperation she would suffer when the body was discovered. But more than sorrow for her, I felt pain that she would never know what had happened, that her husband had not been found drunk on the road by robbers. As we beat the body, bruising the face and the shoulders, I became more and more aroused. Of course, you must realize that all this time the vampire Lestat was extraordinary. He was no more human to me than a biblical angel. But under this pressure, my enchantment with him was strained. I had seen my becoming a vampire in two lights: The first light was simply enchantment; Lestat had overwhelmed me on my deathbed. But the other light was my wish for self-destruction. My desire to be thoroughly damned. This was the open door through which Lestat had come on both the first and second occasion. Now I was not destroying myself but someone else. The overseer, his wife, his family. I recoiled and might have fled from Lestat, my sanity thoroughly shattered, had not he sensed with an infallible instinct what was happening. Infallible instinct …” The vampire mused. “Let me say the powerful instinct of a vampire to whom even the slightest change in a human’s facial expression is as apparent as a gesture. Lestat had preternatural timing. He rushed me into the carriage and whipped the horses home. ‘I want to die,’ I began to murmur. ‘This is unbearable. I want to die. You have it in your power to kill me. Let me die.’ I refused to look at him, to be spellbound by the sheer beauty of his appearance. He spoke my name to me softly, laughing. As I said, he was determined to have the plantation.”
“But would he have let you go?” asked the boy. “Under any circumstances?”
“I don’t know. Knowing Lestat as I do now, I would say he would have killed me rather than let me go. But this was what I wanted, you see. It didn’t matter. No, this was what I thought I wanted. As soon as we reached the house, I jumped down out of the carriage and walked, a zombie, to the brick stairs where my brother had fallen. The house had been unoccupied for months now, the overseer having his own cottage, and the Louisiana heat and damp were already picking apart the steps. Every crevice was sprouting grass and even small wildflowers. I remember feeling the moisture which in the night was cool as I sat down on the lower steps and even rested my head against the brick and felt the little wax-stemmed wildflowers with my hands. I pulled a clump of them out of the easy dirt in one hand. ‘I want to die; kill me. Kill me,’ I said to the vampire. ‘Now I am guilty of murder. I can’t live.’ He sneered with the impatience of people listening to the obvious lies of others. And then in a flash he fastened on me just as he had on my man. I thrashed against him wildly. I dug my boot into his chest and kicked him as fiercely as I could, his teeth stinging my throat, the fever pounding in my temples. And with a movement of his entire body, much too fast for me to see, he was suddenly standing disdainfully at the foot of the steps. ‘I thought you wanted to die, Louis,’ he said.”
The boy made a soft, abrupt sound when the vampire said his name, which the vampire acknowledged with the quick statement, “Yes, that is my name,” and went on.
“Well, I lay there helpless in the face of my own cowardice and fatuousness again,” he said. “Perhaps so directly confronted with it, I might in time have gained the courage to truly take my life, not to whine and beg for others to take it. I saw myself turning on a knife then, languishing in a day-to-day suffering which I found as necessary as penance from the confessional, truly hoping death would find me unawares and render me fit for eternal pardon. And also I saw myself as if in a vision standing at the head of the stairs, just where my brother had stood, and then hurtling my body down on the bricks.
“But there was no time for courage. Or shall I say, there was no time in Lestat’s plan for anything but his plan. ‘Now listen to me, Louis,’ he said, and he lay down beside me now on the steps, his movement so graceful and so personal that at once it made me think of a lover. I recoiled. But he put his right arm around me and pulled me close to his chest. Never had I been this close to him before, and in the dim light I could see the magnificent radiance of his eye and the unnatural mask of his skin. As I tried to move, he pressed his right fingers against my lips and said, ‘Be still. I am going to drain you now to the very threshold of death, and I want you to be quiet, so quiet that you can almost hear the flow of blood through your veins, so quiet that you can hear the flow of that same blood through mine. It is your consciousness, your will, which must keep you alive.’ I wanted to struggle, but he pressed so hard with his fingers that he held my entire prone body in check; and as soon as I stopped my abortive attempt at rebellion, he sank his teeth into my neck.”
The boy’s eyes grew huge. He had drawn farther and farther back in his chair as the vampire spoke, and now his face was tense, his eyes narrow, as if he were preparing to weather a blow.
“Have you ever lost a great amount of blood?” asked the vampire. “Do you know the feeling?”
The boy’s lips shaped the word no, but no sound came out. He cleared his throat. “No,” he said.
“Candles burned in the upstairs parlor, where we had planned the death of the overseer. An oil lantern swayed in the breeze on the gallery. All of this light coalesced and began to shimmer, as though a golden presence hovered above me, suspended in the stairwell, softly entangled with the railings, curling and contracting like smoke. ‘Listen, keep your eyes wide,’ Lestat whispered to me, his lips moving against my neck. I remember that the movement of his lips raised the hair all over my body, sent a shock of sensation through my body that was not unlike the pleasure of passion.…”
He mused, his right fingers slightly curled beneath his chin, the first finger appearing to lightly stroke it. “The result was that within minutes I was weak to paralysis. Panic-stricken, I discovered I could not even will myself to speak. Lestat still held me, of course, and his arm was like the weight of an iron bar. I felt his teeth withdraw with such a keenness that the two puncture wounds seemed enormous, lined with pain. And now he bent over my helpless head and, taking his right hand off me, bit his own wrist. The blood flowed down upon my shirt and coat, and he watched it with a narrow, gleaming eye. It seemed an eternity that he watched it, and that shimmer of light now hung behind his head like the backdrop of an apparition. I think that I knew what he meant to do even before he did it, and I was waiting in my helplessness as if I’d been waiting for years. He pressed his bleeding wrist to my mouth, said firmly, a little impatiently, ‘Louis, drink.’ And I did. ‘Steady, Louis,’ and ‘Hurry,’ he whispered to me a number of times. I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source. Then something happened.” The vampire sat back, a slight frown on his face.
“How pathetic it is to describe these things which can’t truly be described,” he said, his voice low almost to a whisper. The boy sat as if frozen.
“I saw nothing but that light then as I drew blood. And then this next thing, this next thing was … sound. A dull roar at first and then a pounding like the pounding of a drum, growing louder and louder, as if some enormous creature were coming up on one slowly through a dark and alien forest, pounding as he came, a huge drum. And then there came the pounding of another drum, as if another giant were coming yards behind him, and each giant, intent on his own drum, gave no notice to the rhythm of the other. The sound grew louder and louder until it seemed to fill not just my hearing but all my senses, to be throbbing in my lips and fingers, in the flesh of my temples, in my veins. Above all, in my veins, drum and then the other drum; and then Lestat pulled his wrist free suddenly, and I opened my eyes and checked myself in a moment of reaching for his wrist, grabbing it, forcing it back to my mouth at all costs; I checked myself because I realized that the drum was my
heart, and the second drum had been his.” The vampire sighed. “Do you understand?”
The boy began to speak, and then he shook his head. “No … I mean, I do,” he said. “I mean, I …”
“Of course,” said the vampire, looking away.
“Wait, wait!” said the boy in a welter of excitement. “The tape is almost gone. I have to turn it over.” The vampire watched patiently as he changed it.
“What happened then?” the boy asked. His face was moist, and he wiped it hurriedly with his handkerchief.
“I saw as a vampire,” said the vampire, his voice now slightly detached. It seemed almost distracted. Then he drew himself up. “Lestat was standing again at the foot of the stairs, and I saw him as I could not possibly have seen him before. He had seemed white to me before, starkly white, so that in the night he was almost luminous; and now I saw him filled with his own life and own blood: he was radiant, not luminous. And then I saw that not only Lestat had changed, but all things had changed.
“It was as if I had only just been able to see colors and shapes for the first time. I was so enthralled with the buttons on Lestat’s black coat that I looked at nothing else for a long time. Then Lestat began to laugh, and I heard his laughter as I had never heard anything before. His heart I still heard like the beating of a drum, and now came this metallic laughter. It was confusing, each sound running into the next sound, like the mingling reverberations of bells, until I learned to separate the sounds, and then they overlapped, each soft but distinct, increasing but discrete, peals of laughter.” The vampire smiled with delight. “Peals of bells.
“ ‘Stop looking at my buttons,’ Lestat said. ‘Go out there into the trees. Rid yourself of all the human waste in your body, and don’t fall so madly in love with the night that you lose your way!’
“That, of course, was a wise command. When I saw the moon on the flagstones, I became so enamored with it that I must have spent an hour there. I passed my brother’s oratory without so much as a thought of him, and standing among the cottonwood and oaks, I heard the night as if it were a chorus of whispering women, all beckoning me to their breasts. As for my body, it was not yet totally converted, and as soon as I became the least accustomed to the sounds and sights, it began to ache. All my human fluids were being forced out of me. I was dying as a human, yet completely alive as a vampire; and with my awakened senses, I had to preside over the death of my body with a certain discomfort and then, finally, fear. I ran back up the steps to the parlor, where Lestat was already at work on the plantation papers, going over the expenses and profits for the last year. ‘You’re a rich man,’ he said to me when I came in. ‘Something’s happening to me,’ I shouted.
“ ‘You’re dying, that’s all; don’t be a fool. Don’t you have any oil lamps? All this money and you can’t afford whale oil except for that lantern. Bring me that lantern.’
“ ‘Dying!’ I shouted. ‘Dying!’
“ ‘It happens to everyone,’ he persisted, refusing to help me. As I look back on this, I still despise him for it. Not because I was afraid, but because he might have drawn my attention to these changes with reverence. He might have calmed me and told me I might watch my death with the same fascination with which I had watched and felt the night. But he didn’t. Lestat was never the vampire I am. Not at all.” The vampire did not say this boastfully. He said it as if he would truly have had it otherwise.
“Alors,” he sighed. “I was dying fast, which meant that my capacity for fear was diminishing as rapidly. I simply regret I was not more attentive to the process. Lestat was being a perfect idiot. ‘Oh, for the love of hell!’ he began shouting. ‘Do you realize I’ve made no provision for you? What a fool I am.’ I was tempted to say, ‘Yes, you are,’ but I didn’t. ‘You’ll have to bed down with me this morning. I haven’t prepared you a coffin.’ ”
The vampire laughed. “The coffin struck such a chord of terror in me I think it absorbed all the capacity for terror I had left. Then came only my mild alarm at having to share a coffin with Lestat. He was in his father’s bedroom meantime, telling the old man good-bye, that he would return in the morning. ‘But where do you go, why must you live by such a schedule!’ the old man demanded, and Lestat became impatient. Before this, he’d been gracious to the old man, almost to the point of sickening one, but now he became a bully. ‘I take care of you, don’t I? I’ve put a better roof over your head than you ever put over mine! If I want to sleep all day and drink all night, I’ll do it, damn you!’ The old man started to whine. Only my peculiar state of emotions and most unusual feeling of exhaustion kept me from disapproving. I was watching the scene through the open door, enthralled with the colors of the counterpane and the positive riot of color in the old man’s face. His blue veins pulsed beneath his pink and grayish flesh. I found even the yellow of his teeth appealing to me, and I became almost hypnotized by the quivering of his lip. ‘Such a son, such a son,’ he said, never suspecting, of course, the true nature of his son. ‘All right, then, go. I know you keep a woman somewhere; you go to see her as soon as her husband leaves in the morning. Give me my rosary. What’s happened to my rosary?’ Lestat said something blasphemous and gave him the rosary.…”
“But …” the boy started.
“Yes?” said the vampire. “I’m afraid I don’t allow you to ask enough questions.”
“I was going to ask, rosaries have crosses on them, don’t they?”
“Oh, the rumor about crosses!” the vampire laughed. “You refer to our being afraid of crosses?”
“Unable to look on them, I thought,” said the boy.
“Nonsense, my friend, sheer nonsense. I can look on anything I like. And I rather like looking on crucifixes in particular.”
“And what about the rumor about keyholes? That you can … become steam and go through them.”
“I wish I could,” laughed the vampire. “How positively delightful. I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shapes. No.” He shook his head. “That is, how would you say today … bullshit?”
The boy laughed despite himself. Then his face grew serious.
“You mustn’t be so shy with me,” the vampire said. “What is it?”
“The story about stakes through the heart,” said the boy, his cheeks coloring slightly.
“The same,” said the vampire. “Bull-shit,” he said, carefully articulating both syllables, so that the boy smiled. “No magical power whatsoever. Why don’t you smoke one of your cigarettes? I see you have them in your shirt pocket.”
“Oh, thank you,” the boy said, as if it were a marvellous suggestion. But once he had the cigarette to his lips, his hands were trembling so badly that he mangled the first fragile book match.
“Allow me,” said the vampire. And, taking the book, he quickly put a lighted match to the boy’s cigarette. The boy inhaled, his eyes on the vampire’s fingers. Now the vampire withdrew across the table with a soft rustling of garments. “There’s an ashtray on the basin,” he said, and the boy moved nervously to get it. He stared at the few butts in it for a moment, and then, seeing the small waste basket beneath, he emptied the ashtray and quickly set it on the table. His fingers left damp marks on the cigarette when he put it down. “Is this your room?” he asked.
“No,” answered the vampire. “Just a room.”
“What happened then?” the boy asked. The vampire appeared to be watching the smoke gather beneath the overhead bulb.
“Ah … we went back to New Orleans posthaste,” he said. “Lestat had his coffin in a miserable room near the ramparts.”
“And you did get into the coffin?”
“I had no choice. I begged Lestat to let me stay in the closet, but he laughed, astonished. ‘Don’t you know what you are?’ he asked. ‘But is it magical? Must it have this shape?’ I pleaded. Only to hear him laugh again. I couldn’t bear the idea; but as we argued, I realized I had no real fear. It was a strange realization.
All my life I’d feared closed places. Born and bred in French houses with lofty ceilings and floor-length windows, I had a dread of being enclosed. I felt uncomfortable even in the confessional in church. It was a normal enough fear. And now I realized as I protested to Lestat, I did not actually feel this anymore. I was simply remembering it. Hanging on to it from habit, from a deficiency of ability to recognize my present and exhilarating freedom. ‘You’re carrying on badly,’ Lestat said finally. ‘And it’s almost dawn. I should let you die. You will die, you know. The sun will destroy the blood I’ve given you, in every tissue, every vein. But you shouldn’t be feeling this fear at all. I think you’re like a man who loses an arm or a leg and keeps insisting that he can feel pain where the arm or leg used to be.’ Well, that was positively the most intelligent and useful thing Lestat ever said in my presence, and it brought me around at once. ‘Now, I’m getting into the coffin,’ he finally said to me in his most disdainful tone, ‘and you will get in on top of me if you know what’s good for you.’ And I did. I lay face-down on him, utterly confused by my absence of dread and filled with a distaste for being so close to him, handsome and intriguing though he was. And he shut the lid. Then I asked him if I was completely dead. My body was tingling and itching all over. ‘No, you’re not then,’ he said. ‘When you are, you’ll only hear and see it changing and feel nothing. You should be dead by tonight. Go to sleep.’ ”