by Anne Rice
I saw something in him quicken. A faint blush came to his cheeks.
“They have been seen here in Paris,” he said softly. “And she is no woman, this creature. She is a vampire child.”
I can’t remember what followed. Maybe I tried to explain the blunder. Maybe I admitted there was no accounting for what I’d done. Maybe I brought us round again to the purpose of my visit, to what I needed, what I must have. I remember being utterly humiliated as he led me out of the house and into the waiting carriage, as he told me that I must go with him to the Theater of the Vampires.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I can’t go there. I will not be seen like this by the others. You must stop this carriage. You must do as I ask.”
“No, you have it backwards,” he said in the tenderest voice. We were already in the crowded Paris streets. I couldn’t see the city I remembered. This was a nightmare, this metropolis of roaring steam trains and giant concrete boulevards. Never had the smoke and filth of the industrial age seemed so hideous as it was here in the City of Light.
I scarcely remember being forced by him out of the carriage and stumbling along the broad pavements as he pushed me towards the theater doors. What was this place, this enormous building? Was this the boulevard du Temple? And then the descent into that hideous cellar full of ugly copies of the bloodiest paintings of Goya and Brueghel and Bosch.
And finally starvation as I lay on the floor of a brick-lined cell, unable even to shout curses at him, the darkness full of the vibrations of the passing omnibuses and tramcars, penetrated again and again by the distant screech of iron wheels.
Sometime in the dark, I discovered a mortal victim there. But the victim was dead. Cold blood, nauseating blood. The worst kind of feeding, lying on that clammy corpse, sucking up what was left.
And then Armand was there, standing motionless in the shadows, immaculate in his white linen and black wool. He spoke in an undertone about Louis and Claudia, that there would be some kind of trial. Down on his knees he came to sit beside me, forgetting for a moment to be human, the boy gentleman sitting in this filthy damp place. “You will declare it before the others, that she did it,” he said. And the others, the new ones, came to the door to look at me one by one.
“Get clothing for him,” Armand said. His hand was resting on my shoulder. “He must look presentable, our lost lord,” he told them. “That was always his way.”
They laughed when I begged to speak to Eleni or Félix or Laurent. They did not know those names. Gabrielle—it meant nothing.
And where was Marius? How many countries, rivers, mountains lay between us? Could he hear and see these things?
High above, in the theater, a mortal audience, herded like sheep into a corral, thundered on the wooden staircases, the wooden floors.
I dreamed of getting away from here, getting back to Louisiana, letting time do its inevitable work. I dreamed of the earth again, its cool depths which I’d known so briefly in Cairo. I dreamed of Louis and Claudia and that we were together. Claudia had grown miraculously into a beautiful woman, and she said, laughing, “You see this is what I came to Europe to discover, how to do this!”
And I feared that I was never to be allowed out of here, that I was to be entombed as those starving ones had been under les Innocents, that I had made a fatal mistake. I was stuttering and crying and trying to talk to Armand. And then I realized Armand was not even there. If he had come, he had gone as quickly. I was having delusions.
And the victim, the warm victim—“Give it to me, I beg you!”—and Armand saying:
“You will say what I have told you to say.”
It was a mob tribunal of monsters, white-faced demons shouting accusations, Louis pleading desperately, Claudia staring at me mute, and my saying, yes, she was the one who did it, yes, and then cursing Armand as he shoved me back into the shadows, his innocent face radiant as ever.
“But you have done well, Lestat. You have done well.”
What had I done? Borne testimony against them that they had broken the old rules? They’d risen against the coven master? What did they know of the old rules? I was screaming for Louis. And then I was drinking blood in the darkness, living blood from another victim, and it wasn’t the healing blood, it was just blood.
WE WERE in the carriage again and it was raining. We were riding through the country. And then we went up and up through the old tower to the roof. I had Claudia’s bloody yellow dress in my hands. I had seen her in a narrow wet place where she had been burnt by the sun. “Scatter the ashes!” I had said. Yet no one moved to do it. The torn bloody yellow dress lay on the cellar floor. Now I held it in my hands. “They will scatter the ashes, won’t they?” I said.
“Didn’t you want justice?” Armand asked, his black wool cape close around him in the wind, his face dark with the power of the recent kill.
What did it have to do with justice? Why did I hold this thing, this little dress?
I looked out from Magnus’s battlements and I saw the city had come to get me. It had reached out its long arms to embrace the tower, and the air stank of factory smoke.
Armand stood still at the stone railing watching me, and he seemed suddenly as young as Claudia had seemed. And make sure they have had some lifetime before you make them; and never never make one as young as Armand. In death she said nothing. She had looked at those around her as if they were giants jabbering in an alien tongue.
Armand’s eyes were red.
“Louis—where is he?” I asked. “They didn’t kill him. I saw him. He went out into the rain …”
“They have gone after him,” he answered. “He is already destroyed.”
Liar, with the face of a choirboy.
“Stop them, you have to! If there’s still time …”
He shook his head.
“Why can’t you stop them? Why did you do it, the trial, all of it, what do you care what they did to me?” “It’s finished.”
Under the roar of the winds came the scream of a steam whistle. Losing the train of thought. Losing it … Not wanting to go back. Louis, come back.
“And you don’t mean to help me, do you?” Despair.
He leaned forward, and his face transformed itself as it had done years and years ago, as if his rage were melting it from within.
“You, who destroyed all of us, you who took everything. Whatever made you think that I would help you!” He came closer, the face all but collapsed upon itself. “You who put us on the lurid posters in the boulevard du Temple, you who made us the subject of cheap stories and drawing room talk!”
“But I didn’t. You know I … I swear … It wasn’t me!”
“You who carried our secrets into the limelight—the fashionable one, the Marquis in the white gloves, the fiend in the velvet cape!”
“You’re mad to blame it all on me. You have no right,” I insisted, but my voice was faltering so badly I couldn’t understand my own words.
And his voice shot out of him like the tongue of a snake.
“We had our Eden under that ancient cemetery,” he hissed. “We had our faith and our purpose. And it was you who drove us out of it with a flaming sword. What do we have now! Answer me! Nothing but the love of each other and what can that mean to creatures like us!”
“No, it’s not true, it was all happening already. You don’t understand anything. You never did.”
But he wasn’t listening to me. And it didn’t matter whether or not he was listening. He was drawing closer, and in a dark flash his hand went out, and my head went back, and I saw the sky and the city of Paris upside down.
I was falling through the air.
And I went down and down past the windows of the tower, until the stone walkway rose up to catch me, and every bone in my body broke within its thin case of preternatural skin.
2
Two years passed before I was strong enough to board a ship for Louisiana. And I was still badly crippled, still scarred. But I had to leave Eur
ope, where no whisper had come to me of my lost Gabrielle or of the great and powerful Marius, who had surely rendered his judgment upon me.
I had to go home. And home was New Orleans, where the warmth was, where the flowers never stopped blooming, where I still owned, through my never ending supply of “coin of the realm,” a dozen empty old mansions with rotting white columns and sagging porches round which I could roam.
And I spent the last years of the 1800s in complete seclusion in the old Garden District a block from the Lafayette Cemetery, in the finest of my houses, slumbering beneath towering oaks.
I read by candle or oil lamp all the books I could procure. I might as well have been Gabrielle trapped in her castle bedroom, save there was no furniture here. And the stacks of books reached to the ceiling in one room after another as I went on to the next. Now and then I mustered enough stamina to break into a library or an old bookstore for new volumes, but less and less I went out. I wrote off for periodicals. I hoarded candles and bottles and tin cans of oil.
I do not remember when it became the twentieth century, only that everything was uglier and darker, and the beauty I’d known in the old eighteenth-century days seemed more than ever some kind of fanciful idea. The bourgeois ran the world now upon dreary principles and with a distrust of the sensuality and the excess that the ancient regime had so loved.
But my vision and thoughts were getting ever more clouded. I no longer hunted humans. And a vampire cannot thrive without human blood, human death. I survived by luring the garden animals of the old neighborhood, the pampered dogs and cats. And when they couldn’t be got easily, well, then there was always the vermin that I could call to me like the Pied Piper, fat long-tailed gray rats.
One night I forced myself to make the long trek through the quiet streets to a shabby little theater called the Happy Hour near the waterfront slums. I wanted to see the new silent moving pictures. I was wrapped in a greatcoat with a muffler hiding my gaunt face. I wore gloves to hide my skeletal hands. The sight of the daytime sky even in this imperfect film terrified me. But it seemed the dreary tones of black and white were perfect for a colorless age.
I did not think about other immortals. Yet now and then a vampire would appear—some orphaned fledgling who had stumbled on my lair, or a wanderer come in search of the legendary Lestat, begging for secrets, power. Horrid, these intrusions.
Even the timbre of the supernatural voice shattered my nerves, drove me into the farthest corner. Yet no matter how great the pain, I scanned each new mind for knowledge of my Gabrielle. I never discovered any. Nothing to do after that but ignore the poor human victims the fiend would bring in the vain hope of restoring me.
But these encounters were over soon enough. Frightened, aggrieved, shouting curses, the intruder would depart, leaving me in blessed silence.
I’d slip a little deeper away from things, just lying there in the dark.
I wasn’t even reading much anymore. And when I did read, I read the Black Mask magazine. I read the stories of the ugly nihilistic men of the twentieth century—the gray-clad crooks and the bank robbers and the detectives—and I tried to remember things. But I was so weak. I was so tired.
And then early one evening, Armand came.
I thought at first it was a delusion. He was standing so still in the ruined parlor, looking younger than ever with his short auburn cap of twentieth-century hair and narrow little suit of dark cloth.
It had to be an illusion, this figure coming into the parlor and looking down at me as I lay on my back on the floor by the broken French window reading Sam Spade by the light of the moon. Except for one thing. If I were going to conjure up an imaginary visitor, it certainly wouldn’t have been Armand.
I glanced at him and some vague shame passed over me, that I was so ugly, that I was no more than a skeleton with bulging eyes lying there. Then I went back to reading about the Maltese Falcon, my lips moving to speak Sam Spade’s lines.
When I looked up again, Armand was still there. It might have been the same night, or the next night, for all I knew.
He was talking about Louis. He had been for some time.
And I realized it was a lie he’d told me in Paris about Louis. Louis had been with Armand all these years. And Louis had been looking for me. Louis had been downtown in the old city looking for me near the town house where we had lived for so long. Louis had come finally to this very place and seen me through the windows.
I tried to imagine it. Louis alive. Louis here, so close, and I had not even known it.
I think I laughed a little. I couldn’t keep it clear in my mind that Louis wasn’t burnt up. But it was really wonderful that Louis still lived. It was wonderful that there existed still that handsome face, that poignant expression, that tender and faintly imploring voice. My beautiful Louis surviving, instead of dead and gone with Claudia and Nick.
But then maybe he was dead. Why should I believe Armand? I went back to reading by the moonlight, wishing the garden out there hadn’t gotten so high. A good thing for Armand to do, I told him, would be to go out there and pull down some of those vines, since Armand was so strong. The morning-glory vines and the wisteria were dripping off the upstairs porches and they blocked out the moonlight and then there were the old black oaks that had been here when there was nothing but swamp.
I don’t think I actually suggested this to Armand.
And I only vaguely remember Armand letting me know that Louis was leaving him and he, Armand, did not want to go on. Hollow he sounded. Dry. Yet he gathered the moonlight to him as he stood there. And his voice still had its old resonance, its pure undertone of pain.
Poor Armand. And you told me Louis was dead. Go dig a room for yourself under the Lafayette Cemetery. It’s just up the street.
No words spoken. No audible laughter, just the secret enjoyment of laughter in me. I remember one clear image of him stranded in the middle of the dirty empty room, looking at the walls of books on all sides. The rain had bled down from leaks in the roof and melded the books together like papier-mâché bricks. And I noticed it distinctly when I saw him standing there against the backdrop of it. And I knew all the rooms in the house were walled in books like this. I hadn’t thought about it until that moment, when he started to look at it. I hadn’t been in the other rooms in years.
It seems he came back several times after that.
I didn’t see him, but I would hear him moving through the garden outside, looking for me with his mind, like a beam of light.
Louis had gone away to the west.
One time, when I was lying in the rubble under the foundations, Armand came to the grating and peered in at me, and I did see him, and he hissed at me and called me ratcatcher.
You’ve gone mad—you, the one who knew everything, the one who scoffed at us! You’re mad and you feed on the rats. You know, in France in the old days what they called your kind, you country lords, they called you harecatchers, because you hunted the hare so you wouldn’t starve. And now what are you in this house, a ragged haunt, a ratcatcher. You’re mad as the ancient ones who cease to talk sense and jabber at the wind! And yet you hunt the rats as you were born to do.
Again I laughed. I laughed and laughed. I remembered the wolves and I laughed.
“You always make me laugh,” I told him. “I would have laughed at you under that cemetery in Paris, except it didn’t seem the kind thing to do. And even when you cursed me and blamed me for all the stories about us, that was funny too. If you hadn’t been about to throw me off the tower I would have laughed. You always make me laugh.”
Delicious it was, the hatred between us, or so I thought. Such unfamiliar excitement, to have him there to ridicule and despise.
Yet suddenly the scene about me began to change. I wasn’t lying in the rubble. I was walking through my house. And I wore not the filthy rags that had covered me for years, but a fine black tailcoat and a satin-lined cape. And the house, why, the house was beautiful, and all the books were i
n their proper place upon shelves. The parquet floor glistened in the light of the chandelier and there was music coming from everywhere, the sound of a Vienna waltz, the rich harmony of violins. With each step I felt powerful again, and light, marvelously light. I could have easily taken the stairs two by two. I could have flown out and up through the darkness, the cloak like black wings.
And then I was moving up in the darkness, and Armand and I stood together on the high roof. Radiant he was, in the same old-fashioned evening clothes, and we were looking over the jungle of dark singing treetops at the distant silver curve of the river and the low heavens where the stars burned through the pearl gray clouds.
I was weeping at the sheer sight of it, at the feel of the damp wind against my face. And Armand stood beside me, with his arm around me. And he was talking of forgiveness and sadness, of wisdom and things learned through pain. “I love you, my dark brother,” he whispered.
And the words moved through me like blood itself.
“It wasn’t that I wanted vengeance,” he whispered. His face was stricken, his heart broken. He said, “But you came to be healed, and you did not want me! A century I had waited, and you did not want me!”
And I knew, as I had all along really, that my restoration was illusion, that I was the same skeleton in rags, of course. And the house was still a ruin. And in the preternatural being who held me was the power that could give me back the sky and the wind.
“Love me and the blood is yours,” he said. “This blood that I have never given to another.” I felt his lips against my face.
“I can’t deceive you,” I answered. “I can’t love you. What are you to me that I should love you? A dead thing that hungers for the power and the passion of others? The embodiment of thirst itself?”
And in a moment of incalculable power, it was I who struck him and knocked him backwards and off the roof. Absolutely weightless he was, his figure dissolving into the gray night.