The Vampire Chronicles Collection

by Anne Rice

  In the main it is Our Oldest Friend [Armand, obviously] who is relied upon to restrain him. And that he does with the most caustic threats. But I must say that these do not have an enduring effect upon Our Violinist. He talks often of old religious customs, of ritual fires, of the passage into new realms of being.

  I cannot say that we do not love him. For your sake we would care for him even if we did not. But we do love him. And Our Oldest Friend, in particular, bears him great affection. Yet I should remark that in the old times, such persons would not have endured among us for very long.

  As for Our Oldest Friend, I wonder if you would know him now. He has built a great manse at the foot of your tower, and there he lives among books and pictures very like a scholarly gentleman with little care for the real world.

  Each night, however, he arrives at the door of the theater in his black carriage. And he watches from his own curtained box.

  And he comes after to settle all disputes among us, to govern as he always did, to threaten Our Divine Violinist, but he will never, never consent to perform on the stage. It is he who accepts new members among us. As I told you, they come from all over. We do not have to solicit them. They knock upon our door.…

  Come back to us [she wrote in closing]. You will find us more interesting than you did before. There are a thousand dark wonders which I cannot commit to paper. We are a starburst in the history of our kind. And we could not have chosen a more perfect moment in the history of this great city for our little contrivance. And it is your doing, this splendid existence we sustain. Why did you leave us? Come home.

  I saved these letters. I kept them as carefully as I kept the letters from my brothers in the Auvergne. I saw the marionettes perfectly in my imagination. I heard the cry of Nicki’s violin. I saw Armand, too, arriving in his dark carriage, taking his seat in the box. And I even described all of this in veiled and eccentric terms in my long messages to Marius, working in a little frenzy now and then with my chisel in a dark street while mortals slept.

  But for me, there was no going back to Paris, no matter how lonely I might become. The world around me had become my lover and my teacher. I was enraptured with the cathedrals and castles, the museums and palaces that I saw. In every place I visited, I went to the heart of society: I drank up its entertainments and its gossip, its literature and its music, its architecture and its art.

  I could fill volumes with the things I studied, the things I struggled to understand. I was enthralled by gypsy violinists and street puppeteers as I was by great castrati sopranos in gilded opera houses or cathedral choirs. I prowled the brothels and the gambling dens and the places where the sailors drank and quarreled. I read the newspapers everywhere I went and hung about in taverns, often ordering food I never touched, merely to have it in front of me, and I talked to mortals incessantly in public places, buying countless glasses of wine for others, smelling their pipes and cigars as they smoked, and letting all these mortal smells get into my hair and clothes.

  And when I wasn’t out roaming, I was traveling the realm of the books that had belonged to Gabrielle so exclusively all through those dreary mortal years at home.

  Before we even got to Italy, I knew enough Latin to be studying the classics, and I made a library in the old Venetian palazzo I haunted, often reading the whole night long.

  And of course it was the tale of Osiris that enchanted me, bringing back with it the romance of Armand’s story and Marius’s enigmatic words. As I pored over all the old versions, I was quietly thunderstruck by what I read.

  Here we have an ancient king, Osiris, a man of unworldly goodness who turns the Egyptians away from cannibalism and teaches them the art of growing crops and making wine. And how is he murdered by his brother Typhon? Osiris is tricked into lying down in a box made to the exact size of his body, and his brother Typhon then nails shut the lid. He is then thrown into the river, and when his faithful Isis finds his body, he is again attacked by Typhon, who dismembers him. All parts of his body are found save one.

  Now, why would Marius make reference to a myth such as this? And how could I not think on the fact that all vampires sleep in coffins which are boxes made to the size of their bodies—even the miserable rabble of les Innocents slept in their coffins. Magnus said to me, “In that box or its like you must always lie.” As for the missing part of the body, the part that Isis never found, well, there is one part of us which is not enhanced by the Dark Gift, isn’t there? We can speak, see, taste, breathe, move as humans move, but we cannot procreate. And neither could Osiris, so he became Lord of the Dead.

  Was this a vampire god?

  But so much puzzled me and tormented me. This god Osiris was the god of wine to the Egyptians, the one later called Dionysus by the Greeks. And Dionysus was the “dark god” of the theater, the devil god whom Nicki described to me when we were boys at home. And now we had the theater full of vampires in Paris. Oh, it was too rich.

  I couldn’t wait to tell all this to Gabrielle.

  But she dismissed it indifferently, saying there were hundreds of such old stories.

  “Osiris was the god of the corn,” she said. “He was a good god to the Egyptians. What could this have to do with us?” She glanced at the books I was studying. “You have a great deal to learn, my son. Many an ancient god was dismembered and mourned by his goddess. Read of Actaeon and Adonis. The ancients loved those stories.”

  And she was gone. And I was alone in the candlelighted library, leaning on my elbows amid all these books.

  I brooded on Armand’s dream of the sanctuary of Those Who Must Be Kept in the mountains. Was it a magic that went back to the Egyptian times? How had the Children of Darkness forgotten such things? Maybe it had all been poetry to the Venetian master, the mention of Typhon, the slayer of his brother, nothing more than that.

  I went out into the night with my chisel. I wrote my questions to Marius on stones that were older than us both. Marius had become so real to me that we were talking together, the way that Nicki and I had once done. He was the confidant who received my excitement, my enthusiasm, my sublime bewilderment at all the wonders and puzzles of the world.

  BUT as my studies deepened, as my education broadened, I was getting that first awesome inkling of what eternity might be. I was alone among humans, and my writing to Marius couldn’t keep me from knowing my own monstrosity as I had in those first Paris nights so long ago. After all, Marius wasn’t really there.

  And neither was Gabrielle.

  Almost from the beginning, Armand’s predictions had proved true.

  2

  EFORE we were even out of France, Gabrielle was breaking the journey to disappear for several nights at a time. In Vienna, she often stayed away for over a fortnight, and by the time I settled in the palazzo in Venice she was going away for months on end. During my first visit to Rome, she vanished for a half year. And after she left me in Naples, I returned to Venice without her, angrily leaving her to find her way back to the Veneto on her own, which she did.

  Of course it was the countryside that drew her, the forest or the mountains, or islands on which no human beings lived. And she would return in such a tattered state—her shoes worn out, her clothes ripped, her hair in hopeless tangles—that she was every bit as frightening to look at as the ragged members of the old Paris coven had been. Then she’d walk about my rooms in her dirty neglected garments staring at the cracks in the plaster or the light caught in the distortions of the hand-blown window glass.

  Why should immortals pore over newspapers, she would ask, or dwell in palaces? Or carry gold in their pockets? Or write letters to a mortal family left behind?

  In an eerie, rapid undertone she’d speak of cliffs she had climbed, the drifts of snow through which she had tumbled, the caves full of mysterious markings and ancient fossils that she had found.

  Then she would go as silently as she’d come, and I would be left watching for her and waiting for her—and bitter and angry at her, and resenting
her when she finally came back.

  One night during our first visit to Verona, she startled me in a dark street.

  “Is your father still alive?” she asked. Two months she’d been gone that time. I’d missed her bitterly, and there she was asking about them as if they mattered finally. Yet when I answered, “Yes, and very ill,” she seemed not to hear. I tried to tell her then that things in France were bleak indeed. There would surely be a revolution. She shook her head and waved it all away.

  “Don’t think about them anymore,” she said. “Forget them.” And once again, she was gone.

  The truth was, I didn’t want to forget them. I never stopped writing to Roget for news of my family. I wrote to him more often than I wrote to Eleni at the theater. I’d sent for portraits of my nieces and nephews. I sent presents back to France from every place in which I stopped. And I did worry about the revolution, as any mortal Frenchman might.

  And finally, as Gabrielle’s absences grew longer and our times together more strained and uncertain, I started to argue with her about these things.

  “Time will take our family,” I said. “Time will take the France we knew. So why should I give them up now while I can still have them? I need these things, I tell you. This is what life is to me!”

  But this was only the half of it. I didn’t have her any more than I had the others. She must have known what I was really saying. She must have heard the recriminations behind it all.

  Little speeches like this saddened her. They brought out the tenderness in her. She’d let me get clean clothes for her, comb out her hair. And after that we’d hunt together and talk together. Maybe she would even go to the casinos with me, or to the opera. She’d be a great and beautiful lady for a little while.

  And those moments still held us together. They perpetuated our belief that we were still a little coven, a pair of lovers, prevailing against the mortal world.

  Gathered by the fire in some country villa, riding together on the driver’s seat of the coach as I held the reins, walking together through the midnight forest, we still exchanged our various observations now and then.

  We even went in search of haunted houses together—a newfound pastime that excited us both. In fact, Gabrielle would sometimes return from one of her journeys precisely because she had heard of a ghostly visitation and she wanted me to go with her to see what we could.

  Of course, most of the time we found nothing in the empty buildings where spirits were supposed to appear. And those wretched persons supposed to be possessed by the devil were often no more than commonly insane.

  Yet there were times when we saw fleeting apparitions or mayhem that we couldn’t explain—objects flung about, voices roaring from the mouths of possessed children, icy currents that blew out the candles in a locked room.

  But we never learned anything from all this. We saw no more than a hundred mortal scholars had already described.

  It was just a game to us finally. And when I look back on it now, I know we went on with it because it kept us together—gave us convivial moments which otherwise we would not have had.

  But Gabrielle’s absences weren’t the only thing destroying our affection for each other as the years passed. It was her manner when she was with me—the ideas she would put forth.

  She still had that habit of speaking exactly what was on her mind and little more.

  One night in our little house in the Via Ghibellina in Florence, she appeared after a month’s absence and started to expound at once.

  “You know the creatures of the night are ripe for a great leader,” she said. “Not some superstitious mumbler of old rites, but a great dark monarch who will galvanize us according to new principles.”

  “What principles?” I asked. Ignoring the question, she went on.

  “Imagine,” she said, “not merely this stealthy and loathsome feeding on mortals, but something grand as the Tower of Babel was grand before it was brought down by the wrath of God. I mean a leader set up in a Satanic palace who sends out his followers to turn brother against brother, to cause mothers to kill their children, to put all the fine accomplishments of mankind to the torch, to scorch the land itself so that all would die of hunger, innocent and guilty! Make suffering and chaos wherever you turn, and strike down the forces of good so that men despair. Now that is something worthy of being called evil. That is what the work of a devil really is. We are nothing, you and I, except exotica in the Savage Garden, as you told me. And the world of men is no more or less now than what I saw in my books in the Auvergne years ago.”

  I hated this conversation. And yet I was glad she was in the room with me, that I was speaking to somebody other than a poor deceived mortal. That I wasn’t alone with my letters from home.

  “But what about your aesthetic questions?” I asked. “What you explained to Armand before, that you wanted to know why beauty existed and why it continues to affect us?”

  She shrugged.

  “When the world of man collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains.”

  “And why call all this Satanic?” I asked. “Why not call it chaos? That is all it would be.”

  “Because,” she said, “that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn’t they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Well, use your preternatural brain, my blue-eyed one,” she answered, “my golden-haired son, my handsome wolfkiller. It is very possible that God made the world as Armand said.”

  “This is what you discovered in the forest? You were told this by the leaves?”

  She laughed at me.

  “Of course, God is not necessarily anthropomorphic,” she said. “Or what we would call, in our, colossal egotism and sentimentality, ‘a decent person.’ But there is probably God. Satan, however, was man’s invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws—be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris—that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws. And we are truly Satanic in that we follow no law for man’s protection. So why not truly disrupt? Why not make a blaze of evil to consume all the civilizations of the earth?”

  I was too appalled to answer.

  “Don’t worry.” She laughed. “I won’t do it. But I wonder what will happen in the decades to come. Will not somebody do it?”

  “I hope not!” I said. “Or let me put it this way. If one of us tries, then there shall be war.”

  “Why? Everyone will follow him.”

  “I will not. I will make the war.”

  “Oh, you are too amusing, Lestat,” she said.

  “It’s petty,” I said.

  “Petty!” She had looked away, out into the courtyard, but she looked back and the color rose in her face. “To topple all the cities of the earth? I understood when you called the Theater of the Vampires petty, but now you are contradicting yourself.”

  “It is petty to destroy anything merely for the sake of the destroying, don’t you think?”

  “You’re impossible,” she said. “Sometime in the far future there may be such a leader. He will reduce man to the nakedness and fear from which he came. And we shall feed upon him effortlessly as we have always done, and the Savage Garden, as you call it, will cover the world.”

  “I almost hope someone does attempt it,” I said. “Because I would rise up against him and do everything to defeat him. And possibly I could be saved, I could be good again in my own eyes, as I set out to save man from this.”

  I was very angry. I’d left my chair and walked out into the courtyard. She came right behind me.<
br />
  “You have just given the oldest argument in Christendom for the existence of evil,” she said. “It exists so that we may fight it and do good.”

  “How dreary and stupid,” I said.

  “What I don’t understand about you is this,” she said. “You hold to your old belief in goodness with a tenacity that is virtually unshakable. Yet you are so good at being what you are! You hunt your victims like a dark angel. You kill ruthlessly. You feast all the night long on victims when you choose.”

  “So?” I looked at her coldly. “I don’t know how to be bad at being bad.”

  She laughed.

  “I was a good marksman when I was a young man,” I said, “a good actor on the stage. And now I am a good vampire. So much for our understanding of the word ‘good.’ ”

  AFTER she had gone, I lay on my back on the flagstones in the courtyard and looked up at the stars, thinking of all the paintings and the sculptures that I had seen merely in the single city of Florence. I knew that I hated places where there are only towering trees, and the softest and sweetest music to me was the sound of human voices. But what did it matter really what I thought or felt?

  But she didn’t always bludgeon me with strange philosophy. Now and then when she appeared, she spoke of the practical things she’d learned. She was actually braver and more adventurous than I was. She taught me things.

  We could sleep in the earth, she had ascertained that before we ever left France. Coffins and graves did not matter. And she would find herself rising naturally out of the earth at sunset even before she was awake.

  And those mortals who did find us during the daylight hours, unless they exposed us to the sun at once, were doomed. For example, outside Palermo she had slept in a cellar far below an abandoned house, and when she had awakened, her eyes and face were burning as if they had been scalded, and she had in her right hand a mortal, quite dead, who had apparently attempted to disturb her rest.