The Vampire Chronicles Collection

by Anne Rice

  I think that he laughed.

  I was beyond terror. I could not even scream.

  I had dropped the wine. The glass bottle was rolling on the floor. And as I tried to move forward, to gather my senses and make my body more than something drunken and sluggish, his thin, gangly limbs found animation all at once.

  He advanced on me.

  I didn’t cry out. I gave a low roar of angry terror and scrambled up off the bed, tripping over the small table and running from him as fast as I could.

  But he caught me in long white fingers that were as powerful and as cold as they had been the night before.

  “Let me go, damn you, damn you, damn you!” I was stammering. My reason told me to plead, and I tried. “I’ll just go away, please. Let me out of here. You have to. Let me go.”

  His gaunt face loomed over me, his lips drawn up sharply into his white cheeks, and he laughed a low riotous laugh that seemed endless. I struggled, pushing at him uselessly, pleading with him again, stammering nonsense and apologies, and then I cried, “God help me!” He clapped one of those monstrous hands over my mouth.

  “No more of that in my presence, Wolfkiller, or I’ll feed you to the wolves of hell,” he said with a little sneer. “Hmmmm? Answer me. Hmmmm?”

  I nodded and he loosened his grip.

  His voice had had a momentary calming effect. He sounded capable of reason when he spoke. He sounded almost sophisticated.

  He lifted his hands and stroked my head as I cringed.

  “Sunlight in the hair,” he whispered, “and the blue sky fixed forever in your eyes.” He seemed almost meditative as he looked at me. His breath had no smell whatsoever, nor did his body, it seemed. The smell of mold was coming from his clothes.

  I didn’t dare to move, though he was not holding me. I stared at his garments.

  A ruined silk shirt with bag sleeves and smocking at the neck of it. And worsted leggings and short ragged pantaloons.

  In sum he was dressed as men had been centuries before. I had seen such clothes in tapestries in my home, in the paintings of Caravaggio and La Tour that hung in my mother’s rooms.

  “You’re perfect, my Lelio, my Wolfkiller,” he said to me, his long mouth opening wide so that again I saw the small white fangs. They were the only teeth he possessed.

  I shuddered. I felt myself dropping to the floor.

  But he picked me up easily with one arm and laid me down gently on the bed.

  In my mind I was praying fiercely, God help me, the Virgin Mary help me, help me, help me, as I peered up into his face.

  What was it I was seeing? What had I seen the night before? The mask of old age, this grinning thing cut deeply with the marks of time and yet frozen, it seemed, and hard as his hands. He wasn’t a living thing. He was a monster. A vampire was what he was, a blood-sucking corpse from the grave gifted with intellect!

  And his limbs, why did they so horrify me? He looked like a human, but he didn’t move like a human. It didn’t seem to matter to him whether he walked or crawled, bent over or knelt. It filled me with loathing. Yet he fascinated me. I had to admit it. He fascinated me. But I was in too much danger to allow such a strange state of mind.

  He gave a deep laugh now, his knees wide apart, his fingers resting on my cheek as he made a great arc over me.

  “Yeeeees, lovely one, I’m hard to look at!” he said. His voice was still a whisper and he spoke in long gasps. “I was old when I was made. And you’re perfect, my Lelio, my blue-eyed young one, more beautiful even without the lights of the stage.”

  The long white hand played with my hair again, lifting up the strands and letting them drop as he sighed.

  “Don’t weep, Wolfkiller,” he said. “You’re chosen, and your tawdry little triumphs in the House of Thesbians will be nothing once this night comes to its close.”

  Again came that low riot of laughter.

  There was no doubt in my mind, at least at this moment, that he was from the devil, that God and the devil existed, that beyond the isolation I’d known only hours ago lay this vast realm of dark beings and hideous meanings and I had been swallowed into it somehow.

  It occurred to me quite clearly I was being punished for my life, and yet that seemed absurd. Millions believed as I believed the world over. Why the hell was this happening to me? And a grim possibility started irresistibly to take shape, that the world was no more meaningful than before, and this was but another horror …

  “In God’s name, get away!” I shouted. I had to believe in God now. I had to. That was absolutely the only hope. I went to make the Sign of the Cross.

  For one moment he stared at me, his eyes wide with rage. And then he remained still.

  He watched me make the Sign of the Cross. He listened to me call upon God again and again.

  He only smiled, making his face a perfect mask of comedy from the proscenium arch.

  And I went into a spasm of crying like a child. “Then the devil reigns in heaven and heaven is hell,” I said to him. “Oh, God, don’t desert me …” I called on all the saints I had ever for a little while loved.

  He struck me hard across the face. I fell to one side and almost slipped from the bed to the floor. The room went round. The sour taste of the wine rose in my mouth.

  And I felt his fingers again on my neck.

  “Yes, fight, Wolfkiller,” he said. “Don’t go into hell without a battle. Mock God.”

  “I don’t mock!” I protested.

  Once again he pulled me to himself.

  And I fought him harder than I had ever fought anyone or anything in my existence, even the wolves. I beat on him, kicked him, tore at his hair. But I might as well have fought the animated gargoyles from a cathedral, he was that powerful.

  He only smiled.

  Then all the expression went out of his face. It seemed to become very long. The cheeks were hollow, the eyes wide and almost wondering, and he opened his mouth. The lower lip contracted. I saw the fangs.

  “Damn you, damn you, damn you!” I was roaring and bellowing. And he drew closer and the teeth went through my flesh.

  Not this time, I was raging, not this time. I will not feel it. I will resist. I will fight for my soul this time.

  But it was happening again.

  The sweetness and the softness and the world far away, and even he in his ugliness was curiously outside of me, like an insect pressed against a glass who causes no loathing in us because he cannot touch us, and the sound of the gong, and the exquisite pleasure, and then I was altogether lost. I was incorporeal and the pleasure was incorporeal. I was nothing but pleasure. And I slipped into a web of radiant dreams.

  A catacomb I saw, a rank place. And a white vampire creature waking in a shallow grave. Bound in heavy chains he was, the vampire; and over him bent this monster who had abducted me, and I knew that his name was Magnus, and that he was mortal still in this dream, a great and powerful alchemist. And he had unearthed and bound this slumbering vampire right before the crucial hour of dusk.

  And now as the light died out of the heavens, Magnus drank from his helpless immortal prisoner the magical and accursed blood that would make him one of the living dead. Treachery it was, the theft of immortality. A dark Prometheus stealing a luminescent fire. Laughter in the darkness. Laughter echoing in the catacomb. Echoing as if down the centuries. And the stench of the grave. And the ecstasy, absolutely fathomless, and irresistible, and then drawing to a finish.

  I was crying. I lay on the straw and I said:

  “Please, don’t stop it …”

  Magnus was no longer holding me and my breathing was once again my own, and the dreams were dissolved. I fell down and down as the nightful of stars slid upwards, jewels affixed to a dark purple veil. “Clever that. I had thought the sky was … real.”

  The cold winter air was moving just a little in this room. I felt the tears on my face. I was consumed with thirst!

  And far, far away from me, Magnus stood looking down at me, his han
ds dangling low beside his thin legs.

  I tried to move. I was craving. My whole body was thirsty.

  “You’re dying, Wolfkiller,” he said. “The light’s going out of your blue eyes as if all the summer days are gone …”

  “No, please …” This thirst was unbearable. My mouth was open, gaping, my back arched. And it was here at last, the final horror, death itself, like this.

  “Ask for it, child,” he said, his face no longer the grinning mask, but utterly transfigured with compassion. He looked almost human, almost naturally old. “Ask and you shall receive,” he said.

  I saw water rushing down all the mountain streams of my childhood. “Help me. Please.”

  “I shall give you the water of all waters,” he said in my ear, and it seemed he wasn’t white at all. He was just an old man, sitting there beside me. His face was human, and almost sad.

  But as I watched his smile and his gray eyebrows rise in wonder, I knew it wasn’t true. He wasn’t human. He was that same ancient monster only he was filled with my blood!

  “The wine of all wines,” he breathed. “This is my Body, this is my Blood.” And then his arms surrounded me. They drew me to him and I felt a great warmth emanating from him, and he seemed to be filled not with blood but with love for me.

  “Ask for it, Wolfkiller, and you will live forever,” he said, but his voice sounded weary and spiritless, and there was something distant and tragic in his gaze.

  I felt my head turn to the side, my body a heavy and damp thing that I couldn’t control. I will not ask, I will die without asking, and then the great despair I feared so much lay before me, the emptiness that was death, and still I said No. In pure horror I said No. I will not bow down to it, the chaos and the horror. I said No.

  “Life everlasting,” he whispered.

  My head fell on his shoulder.

  “Stubborn Wolfkiller.” His lips touched me, warm, odorless breath on my neck.

  “Not stubborn,” I whispered. My voice was so weak I wondered if he could hear me. “Brave. Not stubborn.” It seemed pointless not to say it. What was vanity now? What was anything at all? And such a trivial word was stubborn, so cruel …

  He lifted my face, and holding me with his right hand, he lifted his left hand and gashed his own throat with his nails.

  My body bent double in a convulsion of terror, but he pressed my face to the wound, as he said: “Drink.”

  I heard my scream, deafening in my own ears. And the blood that was flowing out of the wound touched my parched and cracking lips.

  The thirst seemed to hiss aloud. My tongue licked at the blood. And a great whiplash of sensation caught me. And my mouth opened and locked itself to the wound. I drew with all my power upon the great fount that I knew would satisfy my thirst as it had never been satisfied before.

  Blood and blood and blood. And it was not merely the dry hissing coil of the thirst that was quenched and dissolved, it was all my craving, all the want and misery and hunger that I had ever known.

  My mouth widened, pressed harder to him. I felt the blood coursing down the length of my throat. I felt his head against me. I felt the tight enclosure of his arms.

  I was against him and I could feel his sinews, his bones, the very contour of his hands. I knew his body. And yet there was this numbness creeping through me and a rapturous tingling as each sensation penetrated the numbness, and was amplified in the penetration so that it became fuller, keener, and I could almost see what I felt.

  But the supreme part of it remained the sweet, luscious blood filling me, as I drank and drank.

  More of it, more, this was all I could think, if I thought at all, and for all its thick substance, it was like light passing into me, so brilliant did it seem to the mind, so blinding, that red stream, and all the desperate desires of my life were a thousandfold fed.

  But his body, the scaffolding to which I clung, was weakening beneath me. I could hear his breath in feeble gasps. Yet he didn’t make me stop.

  Love you, I wanted to say, Magnus, my unearthly master, ghastly thing that you are, love you, love you, this was what I had always so wanted, wanted, and could never have, this, and you’ve given it to me!

  I felt I would die if it went on, and on it did go, and I did not die.

  But quite suddenly I felt his gentle loving hands caressing my shoulders and with his incalculable strength, he forced me backwards.

  I let out a long mournful cry. Its misery alarmed me. But he was pulling me to my feet. He still held me in his arms.

  He brought me to the window, and I stood looking out, with my hands out to the stone on either side. I was shaking and the blood in me pulsed in all my veins. I leaned my forehead against the iron bars.

  Far far below lay the dark cusp of a hill, overgrown with trees that appeared to shimmer in the faint light of the stars.

  And beyond, the city with its wilderness of little lights sunk not in darkness but in a soft violet mist. The snow everywhere was luminescent, melting. Rooftops, towers, walls, all were myriad facets of lavender, mauve, rose.

  This was the sprawling metropolis.

  And as I narrowed my eyes, I saw a million windows like so many projections of beams of light, and then as if this were not enough, in the very depths I saw the unmistakable movement of the people. Tiny mortals on tiny streets, heads and hands touching in the shadows, a lone man, no more than a speck ascending a windblown belfry. A million souls on the tessellated surface of the night, and coming soft on the air a dim mingling of countless human voices. Cries, songs, the faintest wisps of music, the muted throb of bells.

  I moaned. The breeze seemed to lift my hair and I heard my own voice as I had never heard it before crying.

  The city dimmed. I let it go, its swarming millions lost again in the vast and wondrous play of lilac shadow and fading light.

  “Oh, what have you done, what is this that you’ve given to me!” I whispered.

  And it seemed my words did not stop one after another, rather they ran together until all of my crying was one immense and coherent sound that perfectly amplified my horror and my joy.

  If there was a God, he did not matter now. He was part of some dull and dreary realm whose secrets had long ago been plundered, whose lights had long ago gone out. This was the pulsing center of life itself round which all true complexity revolved. Ah, the allure of that complexity, the sense of being there …

  Behind me the scratch of the monster’s feet came on the stones.

  And when I turned I saw him white and bled dry and like a great husk of himself. His eyes were stained with blood-red tears and he reached out to me as if in pain.

  I gathered him to my chest. I felt such love for him as I had never known before.

  “Ah, don’t you see?” came the ghastly voice with its long words, whispers without end, “My heir chosen to take the Dark Gift from me with more fiber and courage than ten mortal men, what a Child of Darkness you are to be.”

  I kissed his eyelids. I gathered his soft black hair in my hands. He was no ghastly thing to me now but merely that which was strange and white, and full of some deeper lesson perhaps than the sighing trees below or the shimmering city calling me over the miles.

  His sunken cheeks, his long throat, the thin legs … these were but the natural parts of him.

  “No, fledgling,” he sighed. “Save your kisses for the world. My time has come and you owe me but one obeisance only. Follow me now.”

  3

  OWN a winding stairs he drew me. And everything I beheld absorbed me. The rough-cut stones seemed to give forth their own light, and even the rats shooting past in the dark had a curious beauty.

  Then he unlocked a thick iron-studded wooden door and, giving over his heavy key ring to me, led me into a large and barren room.

  “You are now my heir, as I told you,” he said. “You’ll take possession of this house and all my treasure. But you’ll do as I say first.”

  The barred windows gave a limitles
s view of the moonlit clouds, and I saw the soft shimmering city again as if it were spreading its arms.

  “Ah, later you may drink your fill of all you see,” he said. He turned me towards him as he stood before a huge heap of wood that lay in the center of the floor.

  “Listen carefully,” he said. “For I’m about to leave you.” He gestured to the wood offhandedly. “And there are things you must know. You’re immortal now. And your nature shall lead you soon enough to your first human victim. Be swift and show no mercy. But stop your feasting, no matter how delicious, before the victim’s heart ceases to beat.

  “In years to come, you’ll be strong enough to feel that great moment, but for the present pass the cup to time just before it’s empty. Or you may pay heavily for your pride.”

  “But why are you leaving me!” I asked desperately. I clung to him. Victims, mercy, feasting … I felt myself bombarded by these words as if I were being physically beaten.

  He pulled away so easily that my hands were hurt by his movement, and I wound up staring at them, marveling at the strange quality of the pain. It wasn’t like mortal pain.

  He stopped, however, and pointed to the stones of the wall opposite. I could see that one very large stone had been dislodged and lay a foot from the unbroken surface around it.

  “Grasp that stone,” he said, “and pull it out of the wall.”

  “But I can’t,” I said. “It must weigh—”

  “Pull it out!” He pointed with one of his long bony fingers and grimaced so that I tried to do it as he said.

  To my pure astonishment I was able to move the stone easily, and I saw beyond it a dark opening just large enough for a man to enter if he crawled on his face.

  He gave a dry cackling laugh and nodded his head.

  “There, my son, is the passageway that leads to my treasure,” he said. “Do with my treasure as you like, and with all my earthly property. But for now, I must have my vows.”

  And again astonishing me, he snatched up two twigs from the wood and rubbed them together so fiercely they were soon burning with bright small flames.