by Anne Rice
“Simply this. You must never tell others the things that I have told you. Never tell of Those Who Must Be Kept. Never tell the legends of the old gods. Never tell others that you have seen me.”
I nodded gravely. I had expected this, but I knew without even thinking that this might prove very hard indeed.
“If you tell even one part,” he said, “another will follow, and with every telling of the secret of Those Who Must Be Kept you increase the danger of their discovery.”
“Yes,” I said. “But the legends, our origins … What about those children that I make? Can’t I tell them—”
“No. As I told you, tell part and you will end up telling all. Besides, if these fledglings are children of the Christian god, if they are poisoned as Nicolas was with the Christian notion of Original Sin and guilt, they will only be maddened and disappointed by these old tales. It will all be a horror to them that they cannot accept. Accidents, pagan gods they don’t believe in, customs they cannot understand. One has to be ready for this knowledge, meager as it may be. Rather listen hard to their questions and tell them what you must to make them contented. And if you find you cannot lie to them, don’t tell them anything at all. Try to make them strong as godless men today are strong. But mark my words, the old legends never. Those are mine and mine alone to tell.”
“What will you do to me if I tell them?” I asked.
This startled him. He lost his composure for almost a full second, and then he laughed.
“You are the damnedest creature, Lestat,” he murmured. “The point is I can do anything I like to you if you tell. Surely you know that. I could crush you underfoot the way Akasha crushed the Elder. I could set you ablaze with the power of my mind. But I don’t want to utter such threats. I want you to come back to me. But I will not have these secrets known. I will not have a band of immortals descend upon me again as they did in Venice. I will not be known to our kind. You must never—deliberately or accidentally—send anyone searching for Those Who Must Be Kept or for Marius. You will never utter my name to others.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Do you?” he asked. “Or must I threaten you after all? Must I warn you that my vengeance can be terrible? That my punishment would include those to whom you’ve told the secrets as well as you? Lestat, I have destroyed others of our kind who came in search of me. I have destroyed them simply because they knew the old legends and they knew the name of Marius, and they would never give up the quest.”
“I can’t bear this,” I murmured. “I won’t tell anyone, ever, I swear. But I’m afraid of what others can read in my thoughts, naturally. I fear that they might take the images out of my head. Armand could do it. What if—”
“You can conceal the images. You know how. You can throw up other images to confuse them. You can lock your mind. It’s a skill you already know. But let’s be done with threats and admonitions. I feel love for you.”
I didn’t respond for a moment. My mind was leaping ahead to all manner of forbidden possibilities. Finally I put it in words:
“Marius, don’t you ever have the desire to tell all of it to all of them! I mean, to make it known to the whole world of our kind, and to draw them together?”
“Good God, no, Lestat. Why would I do that?” He seemed genuinely puzzled.
“So that we might possess our legends, might at least ponder the riddles of our history, as men do. So that we might swap our stories and share our power—”
“And combine to use it as the Children of Darkness have done, against men?”
“No … Not like that.”
“Lestat, in eternity, covens are actually rare. Most vampires are distrustful and solitary beings and they do not love others. They have no more than one or two well-chosen companions from time to time, and they guard their hunting grounds and their privacy as I do mine. They wouldn’t want to come together, and if they did ever overcome the viciousness and suspicions that divide them, their convocation would end in terrible battles and struggles for supremacy like those revealed to me by Akasha, which happened thousands of years ago. We are evil things finally. We are killers. Better that those who unite on this earth be mortal and that they unite for the good.”
I accepted this, ashamed of how it excited me, ashamed of all my weaknesses and all my impulsiveness. Yet another realm of possibilities was already obsessing me.
“And what about to mortals, Marius? Have you never wanted to reveal yourself to them, and tell them the whole story?”
Again, he seemed positively baffled by the notion.
“Have you never wanted the world to know about us, for better or for worse? Has it never seemed preferable to living in secret?”
He lowered his eyes for a moment and rested his chin against his closed hand. For the first time I perceived a communication of images coming from him, and I felt that he allowed me to see them because he was uncertain of his answer. He was remembering with a recall so powerful that it made my powers seem fragile. And what he remembered were the earliest times, when Rome had still ruled the world, and he was still within the range of a normal human lifetime.
“You remember wanting to tell them all,” I said. “To make it known, the monstrous secret.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “in the very beginning, there was some desperate passion to communicate.”
“Yes, communicate,” I said, cherishing the word. And I remembered that long-ago night on the stage when I had so frightened the Paris audience.
“But that was in the dim beginning,” he said slowly, speaking of himself. His eyes were narrow and remote as if he were looking back over all the centuries. “It would be folly, it would be madness. Were humanity ever really convinced, it would destroy us. I don’t want to be destroyed. Such dangers and calamities are not interesting to me.”
I didn’t answer.
“You don’t feel the urge yourself to reveal these things,” he said to me almost soothingly.
But I do, I thought. I felt his fingers on the back of my hand. I was looking beyond him, back over my brief past—the theater, my fairy-tale fantasies. I felt paralyzed in sadness.
“What you feel is loneliness and monstrousness,” he said. “And you’re impulsive and defiant.”
“True.”
“But what would it matter to reveal anything to anyone? No one can forgive. No one can redeem. It’s a childish illusion to think so. Reveal yourself and be destroyed, and what have you done? The Savage Garden would swallow your remains in pure vitality and silence. Where is there justice or understanding?”
I nodded.
I felt his hand close on mine. He rose slowly to his feet, and I stood up, reluctantly but compliantly.
“It’s late,” he said gently. His eyes were soft with compassion. “We’ve talked enough for now. And I must go down to my people. There’s trouble in the nearby village, as I feared there would be. And it will take what time I have until dawn, and then more tomorrow evening. It may well be after midnight tomorrow before we can talk—”
He was distracted again, and he lowered his head and listened.
“Yes, I have to go,” he said. And we embraced lightly and very comfortably.
And though I wanted to go with him and see what happened in the village—how he would conduct his affairs there—I wanted just as much to seek my rooms and look at the sea and finally sleep.
“You’ll be hungry when you rise,” he said. “I’ll have a victim for you. Be patient till I come.”
“Yes, of course …”
“And while you wait for me tomorrow,” he said, “do as you like in the house. The old scrolls are in the cases in the library. You may look at them. Wander all the rooms. Only the sanctuary of Those Who Must Be Kept should not be approached. You must not go down the stairs alone.”
I nodded.
I wanted to ask him one thing more. When would he hunt? When would he drink? His blood had sustained me for two nights, maybe more. But whose blood sustained him?
Had he taken a victim earlier? Would he hunt now? I had a growing suspicion that he no longer needed the blood as much as I did. That, like Those Who Must Be Kept, he had begun to drink less and less. And I wanted desperately to know if this was true.
But he was leaving me. The village was definitely calling him. He went out onto the terrace and then he disappeared. For a moment I thought he had gone to the right or left beyond the doors. Then I came to the doors and saw the terrace was empty. I went to the rail and I looked down and I saw the speck of color that was his frock coat against the rocks far below.
And so we have all this to look forward to, I thought: that we may not need the blood, that our faces will gradually lose all human expression, that we can move objects with the strength of our minds, that we can all but fly. That some night thousands of years hence we may sit in utter silence as Those Who Must Be Kept are sitting now? How often tonight had Marius looked like them? How long did he sit without moving when no one was here?
And what would half a century mean to him, during which time I was to live out that one mortal life far across the sea?
I turned away and went back through the house to the bedchamber I’d been given. And I sat looking at the sea and the sky until the light started to come. When I opened the little hiding place of the sarcophagus, there were fresh flowers there. I put on the golden mask headdress and the gloves and I lay down in the stone coffin, and I could still smell the flowers as I closed my eyes.
The fearful moment was coming. The loss of consciousness. And on the edge of dream, I heard a woman laugh. She laughed lightly and long as though she were very happy and in the midst of conversation, and just before I went into darkness, I saw her white throat as she bent her head back.
15
HEN I opened my eyes I had an idea. It came full blown to me, and it immediately obsessed me so that I was scarcely conscious of the thirst I felt, of the sting in my veins.
“Vanity,” I whispered. But it had an alluring beauty to it, the idea. No, forget about it. Marius said to stay away from the sanctuary, and besides he will be back at midnight and then you can present the idea to him. And he can … what? Sadly shake his head.
I came out in the house and all was as it had been the night before, candles burning, windows open to the soft spectacle of the dying light. It didn’t seem possible that I would leave here soon. And that I would never come back to it, that he himself would vacate this extraordinary place.
I felt sorrowful and miserable. And then there was the idea.
Not to do it in his presence, but silently and secretly so that I did not feel foolish, to go all alone.
No. Don’t do it. After all, it won’t do any good. Nothing will happen when you do it.
But if that’s the case, why not do it? Why not do it now?
I made my rounds again, through the library and the galleries and the room full of birds and monkeys, and on into other chambers where I had not been.
But that idea stayed in my head. And the thirst nagged at me, making me just a little more impulsive, a little more restless, a little less able to reflect on all the things Marius had told me and what they might mean as time went on.
He wasn’t in the house. That was certain. I had been finally through all the rooms. Where he slept was his secret, and I knew there were ways to get in and out of the house that were his secret as well.
But the door to the stairway down to Those Who Must Be Kept, that I discovered again easily enough. And it wasn’t locked.
I stood in the wallpapered salon with its polished furniture looking at the clock. Only seven in the evening, five hours till he came back. Five hours of the thirst burning in me. And the idea … The idea.
I didn’t really decide to do it. I just turned my back on the clock and started walking back to my room. I knew that hundreds of others before me must have had such ideas. And how well he had described the pride he felt when he thought he could rouse them. That he might make them move.
No. I just want to do it, even if nothing happens, which is exactly how it will go. I just want to go down there alone and do it. It has something to do with Nicki maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know!
I went into my chamber and in the incandescent light rising from the sea, I unlocked the violin case and I looked at the Stradivarius violin.
Of course I didn’t know how to play it, but we are powerful mimics. As Marius said, we have superior concentration and superior skills. And I had seen Nicki do it so often.
I tightened the bow now and rubbed the horsehair with the little piece of resin, as I had seen him do.
Only two nights ago, I couldn’t have borne the idea of touching this thing. Hearing it would have been pure pain.
Now I took it out of its case and I carried it through the house, the way I’d carried it to Nicki through the wings of the Theater of the Vampires, and not even thinking of vanity, I rushed faster and faster towards the door to the secret stairs.
It was as if they were drawing me to them, as if I had no will. Marius didn’t matter now. Nothing much mattered, except to be going down the narrow damp stone steps faster and faster, past the windows full of sea spray and early evening light.
In fact, my infatuation was getting so strong, so total that I stopped suddenly, wondering if it was originating with me. But that was foolishness. Who could have put it in my head? Those Who Must Be Kept? Now that was real vanity, and besides, did these creatures know what this strange, delicate little wooden instrument was?
It made a sound, did it not, that no one had ever heard in the ancient world, a sound so human and so powerfully affecting that men thought the violin the work of the devil and accused its finest players of being possessed. I was slightly dizzy, confused.
How had I gotten so far down the steps, and didn’t I remember that the door was bolted from inside? Give me another five hundred years and I might be able to open that bolt, but not just now.
Yet I went on down, these thoughts breaking up and disintegrating as fast as they’d come. I was on fire again, and the thirst was making it worse, though the thirst had nothing to do with it.
And when I came round the last turn I saw the doors to the chapel were open wide. The light of the lamps poured out into the stairwell. And the scent of the flowers and incense was suddenly overwhelming and made a knot in my throat.
I drew nearer, holding the violin with both hands to my chest, though why I didn’t know. And I saw that the tabernacle doors were open, and there they sat.
Someone had brought them more flowers. Someone had laid out the incense in cakes on golden plates.
And I stopped just inside the chapel, and I looked at their faces and they seemed as before to look directly at me.
White, so white I could not imagine them bronzed, and as hard, it seemed, as the jewels they wore. Snake bracelet around her upper arm. Layered necklace on her breast. Tiniest lip of flesh from his chest covering the top of the clean linen skirt he wore.
Her face was narrower than his face, her nose just a little longer. His eyes were slightly longer, the folds of flesh defining them a little thicker. Their long black hair was very much the same.
I was breathing uneasily. I felt suddenly weak and let the scent of the flowers and the incense fill my lungs.
The light of the lamps danced in a thousand tiny specks of gold in the murals.
I looked down at the violin and tried to remember my idea, and I ran my fingers along the wood and wondered what this thing looked like to them.
In a hushed voice I explained what it was, that I wanted them to hear it, that I didn’t really know how to play it but that I was going to try. I wasn’t speaking loud enough to hear myself, but surely they could hear it if they chose to listen.
And I lifted the violin to my shoulder, braced it under my chin, and lifted the bow. I closed my eyes and I remembered music, Nicki’s music, the way that his body had moved with it and his fingers came down with the pressure of hammers and he let the me
ssage travel to his fingers from his soul.
I plunged into it, the music suddenly wailing upwards and rippling down again as my fingers danced. It was a song, all right, I could make a song. The tones were pure and rich as they echoed off the close walls with a resounding volume, creating the wailing beseeching voice that only the violin can make. I went madly on with it, rocking back and forth, forgetting Nicki, forgetting everything but the feel of my fingers stabbing at the soundboard and the realization that I was making this, this was coming out of me, and it plummeted and climbed and overflowed ever louder and louder as I bore down upon it with the frantic sawing of the bow.
I was singing with it, I was humming and then singing loudly, and all the gold of the little room was a blur. And suddenly it seemed my own voice became louder, inexplicably louder, with a pure high note which I knew that I myself could not possibly sing. Yet it was there, this beautiful note, steady and unchanging and growing even louder until it was hurting my ears. I played harder, more frantically, and I heard my own gasps coming, and I knew suddenly that I was not the one making this strange high note!
The blood was going to come out of my ears if the note did not stop. And I wasn’t making the note! Without stopping the music, without giving in to the pain that was splitting my head, I looked forward and I saw Akasha had risen and her eyes were very wide and her mouth was a perfect O. The sound was coming from her, she was making it, and she was moving off the steps of the tabernacle towards me with her arms outstretched and the note pierced my eardrums as if it were a blade of steel.
I couldn’t see. I heard the violin hit the stone floor. I felt my hands on the sides of my head. I screamed and screamed, but the note absorbed my screaming.
“Stop it! Stop it!” I was roaring. But all the light was there again and she was right in front of me and she was reaching out.
“O God, Marius!” I turned and ran towards the doors. And the doors flew shut against me, knocking my face so hard I fell down on my knees. Under the high shrill continuum of the note I was sobbing,