by Anne Rice
Indeed the entire theatre paid for his grief and his rage, and justly so perhaps.
I can make no judgment.
I did not love those decadent and cynical French mummers. Those I had loved, and those who I could love, were, save for Louis de Pointe du Lac, utterly beyond my grasp.
I must have Louis, that was my injunction. I knew no other. So I did not interfere when Louis incinerated the Coven and the infamous theatre, striking, at the risk of his own life, with flame and scythe at the very hour of dawn.
Why did he come away with me afterwards?
Why did he not abhor the one whom he blamed for Claudia's death? "You were their leader; you could have stopped them." He did say those words to me.
Why did we wander for so many years together, drifting like elegant phantoms in our lace and velvet cerements into the garish electric lights and electronic noise of the modern age?
He remained with me because he had to do it. It was the only way that he could go on existing, and for death he has never had the courage, and never will.
And so he endured after the loss of Claudia, just as I had endured through the dungeon centuries, and through the years of tawdry boulevard spectacle, but in time he did learn to be alone.
Louis, my companion, dried up of his own free will, rather like a beautiful rose skillfully dehydrated in sand so that it retains its proportions, nay, even its fragrance and even its tint. For all the blood he drank, he himself became dry, heartless, a stranger to himself and tome.
Understanding all too well the limits of my warped spirit, he forgot me long before he dismissed me, but I too had learnt from him.
For a short time, in awe of the world and confused by it, I too went on alone-perhaps for the first time really and truly alone.
But how long can any of us endure without another? For me at my darkest hours there had been the ancient nun of the Old Ways, Alle- sandra, or at least the babble of those who thought I was a little saint.
Why in this final decade of the twentieth century do we seek each other out if only for occasional words and exchanges of concern? Why are we here gathered in this old and dusty convent of so many brick-walled empty rooms to weep for The Vampire Lestat? Why have the very ancient among us come here to witness the evidence of his most recent and terrifying defeat?
We can't stand it, to be alone. We cannot bear it, any more than the monks of old could bear it, men who though they had renounced all else for Christ's sake, nevertheless came together in congregations to be with one another, even as they enforced upon themselves the harsh rules of single solitary cells and unbroken silence. They couldn't bear to be alone.
We are too much men and women; we are yet formed in the image of the Creator, and what can we say of Him with any certainty except that He, whoever He may be-Christ, Yahweh, Allah-He made us, did He not, because even He in His Infinite Perfection could not bear to be alone.
In time I conceived another love naturally, a love for a mortal boy Daniel, to whom Louis had poured out his story, published under the absurd title Interview with the Vampire, whom I later made into a vampire for the same reasons that Marius had made me so long ago: the boy, who had been my faithful mortal companion, and only sometimes an intolerable nuisance, was about to die.
That is no mystery unto itself, the making of Daniel. Loneliness will always inevitably press us to such things. But I was a firm believer that those we make ourselves will always despise us for it. I cannot claim that I have never despised Marius, both for making me and never returning to me to assure me that he had survived the horrible fire created by the Roman Coven. I had sought Louis rather than create others. And having created Daniel I saw at last my fear realized within a short time.
Daniel, though alive and wandering, though civil and gentle, can no more stand my company than I can stand his. Equipped with my powerful blood, he can contend with any who should be foolish enough to interrupt his plans for an evening, a month or a year, but he cannot contend with my continuous company, and I cannot contend with his.
I turned Daniel from a morbid romantic into a true killer; I made real in his natural blood cells the horror that he so fancied he understood in mine. I pushed his face into the flesh of the first young innocent he had to slaughter for his inevitable thirst, and thereby fell off the pedestal on which he'd placed me in his demented, overimaginative, feverishly poetical and ever exuberant mortal mind.
But I had others around me when I lost Daniel, or rather when gaining Daniel as a fledgling, I lost him as a mortal lover and gradually began to let him go.
I had others because I had again, for reasons that I cannot explain to myself or anyone, made yet another Coven-another successor to the Paris Coven of Les Innocents, and the Theatre des Vampires, and this was a swank, modern hiding place for the most ancient, the most learned, the most enduring of our kind. It was a honeycomb of luxurious chambers hidden in that most concealing of edifices-a modern resort hotel and shopping palace on an island off the coast of Miami, Florida, an island on which the lights never went out and the music never ceased to play, an island where men and women came by the thousands in small boats from the mainland to browse the expensive boutiques, or to make love in opulent, decadent, magnificent and always fashionable hotel suites and rooms.
"The Night Island," that was my creation, with its own copter pad and marina, its secret illegal gambling casinos, its mirror-lined gymnasiums and overheated swimming pools, its crystal fountains, its silver escalators, its emporium of dazzling consumables, its bars, taverns, lounges and theaters where I myself, decked out in smart velvet jackets, tight denim pants and heavy black glasses, hair clipped each night (for it grows back to its Renaissance length each day), could roam in peace and anonymity, swimming in the soft caressing murmurs of the mortals around me, searching out when thirst prompted it that one individual who truly wanted me, that one individual who for reasons of health or poverty or sanity or insanity wanted to be taken into the tentative and never overpowering arms of death and sucked free of all blood and all life.
I didn't go hungry. I dropped my victims in the deep warm clean waters of the Caribbean. I opened my doors to any of the Undead who would wipe their boots before entering. It was like the old days of Venice, with Bianca's palazzo open to all ladies and gentlemen, indeed, to all artists, poets, dreamers and schemers who dared to present themselves, had come again.
Well, they had not come again.
It took no bunch of black-robed tramps to disperse the Coven of The Night Island. Indeed those who were couched there for a short while simply wandered off on their own. Vampires do not really want the company of other vampires. They want the love of other immortals, yes, always, and they need it, and they need the deep bonds of loyalty which inevitably grow amongst those who refuse to become enemies. But they don't want the company.
And my splendid glass-walled drawing rooms on The Night Island were soon empty, and I myself had long before that started to wander for weeks, even months on my own.
It is there still, The Night Island. It is there, and now and then I do go back, and I find there some lone immortal who has checked in, as we say in the modern age, to see how it goes with the rest of us, or with some other who might be visiting as well. The great enterprise I sold for a mortal fortune-but I maintain my ownership of the four-story villa (a private club: name, Il Villagio), with its deep secret underground crypts to which all of our kind are welcome to come.
All of our kind.
There are not so many. But let me tell you now who they were. Let me tell you now who has survived the centuries, who has resurfaced after hundreds of years of mysterious absence, who has come forward to be counted in the unwritten census of the modern Living Dead.
There is Lestat, first and foremost, the author of four books of his life and his adventures comprising everything you could ever possibly want to know about him and some of us. Lestat, ever the maverick and the laughing trickster. Six feet tall, a young man of twenty
when made, with huge warm blue eyes and thick flashy blond hair, square of jaw, with a generous beautifully shaped mouth and skin darkened by a sojourn in the sun which would have killed a weaker vampire, a ladies' man, an Oscar Wildean fantasy, the glass of fashion, the most bold and disregarding dusty vagabond on occasion, loner, wanderer, heart-breaker and wise guy, dubbed the "Brat Prince" by my old Master- yes, imagine it, my Marius, yes, my Marius, who did indeed survive the torches of the Roman Coven- dubbed by Marius the "Brat Prince," though in whose Court and by whose Divine Right and whose Royal Blood I should like to know. Lestat, stuffed with the blood of the most ancient of our kind, indeed the very blood of the Eve of our species, some five to seven thousand years the survivor of her Eden, a perfect horror who, emerging from the deceptive poetical title of Queen Akasha of Those Who Must Be Kept, almost destroyed the world.
Lestat, not a bad friend to have, and one for whom I would lay down my immortal life, one for whose love and companionship I have ofttimes begged, one whom I find maddening and fascinating and intolerably annoying, one without whom I cannot exist.
So much for him.
Louis de Pointe du Lac, already described above but always fan to envisage: slender, slightly less tall than Lestat, his maker, black of hair, gaunt and white of skin, with amazingly long and delicate fingers, and feet that do not make a sound. Louis, whose green eyes are soulful, the very mirror of patient misery, soft-voiced, very human, weak, having lived only two hundred years, unable to read minds, or to levitate, or to spellbind others except inadvertently, which can be hilarious, an immortal with whom mortals fall in love. Louis, an indiscriminate killer, because he cannot satisfy his thirst without killing, though he is too weak to risk the death of the victim in his arms, and because he has no pride or vanity which would lead him to a hierarchy of intended victims, and therefore takes those who cross his path, regardless of age, physical endowments, or blessings bestowed by nature or fate.
Louis, a deadly and romantic vampire, the kind of night creature who hovers in the deep shadows at the Opera House to listen to Mozart's Queen of the Night give forth her piercing and irresistible song.
Louis, who has never vanished, who has always been known to others, who is easy to track and easy to abandon, Louis who will not make others after his tragic blunders with vampiric children, Louis who is past questing for God, for the Devil, for Truth or even for love.
Sweet, dusty Louis, reading Keats by the light of one candle. Louis standing in the rain on a slick deserted downtown street watching through the store window the brilliant young actor Leonardo DiCap-rio as Shakespeare's Romeo kissing his tender and lovely Juliet (Claire Danes) on a television screen.
Gabrielle. She's around now. She was around on The Night Island. Everyone hates her. She is Lestat's Mother, and abandons him for centuries, and somehow doesn't manage to heed Lestat's periodic and inevitable frantic cries for help, which though she could not receive them, being his fledgling, could certainly learn of them from other vampiric minds which are on fire with the news round the world when Lestat is in trouble. Gabrielle, she looks just like him, except she's a woman, totally a woman, that is, sharper of feature, small-waisted, bigbreasted, sweet-eyed in the most unnerving and dishonest fashion, gorgeous in a black ball gown with her hair free, more often dusty, genderless, sheathed in supple leather or belted khaki, a steady walker, and a vampire so cunning and cold that she has forgotten what it ever meant to be human or in pain. Indeed, I think she forgot overnight, if she ever knew it. She was in mortal life one of those creatures who always wondered what the others were carrying on about. Gabrielle, lowvoiced, unintentionally vicious, glacial, forbidding, ungiving, a wanderer through snowy forests of the far north, a slayer of giant white bears and white tigers, an indifferent legend to untamed tribes, something more akin to a prehistoric reptile than a human. Beautiful, naturally, blond hair in a braid down her back, almost regal in a chocolate-colored leather safari jacket and a small droopy brimmed rain hat, a stalker, a quick killer, a pitiless and seemingly thoughtful but eternally secretive thing. Gabrielle, virtually useless to anyone but herself. Some night she'll say something to someone, I suppose.
Pandora, child of two millennia, consort to my own beloved Marius a thousand years before I was ever born. A goddess, made of bleeding marble, a powerful beauty out of the deepest and most ancient soul of Roman Italy, fierce with the moral fiber of the old Senatorial class of the greatest Empire the Western world has ever known. I don't know her. Her oval face shimmers beneath a mantle of rippling brown hair. She seems too beautiful to hurt anyone. She is tender-voiced, with innocent, imploring eyes, her flawless face instantly vulnerable and warm with empathy, a mystery. I don't know how Marius could ever have left her. In a short shift of filmy silk, with a snake bracelet on her bare arm, she is too ravishing for mortal males and the envy of females. In her longer concealing gowns, she moves as a wraith through the rooms around her as if they are not real to her, and she, the ghost of a dancer, seeks for some perfect setting that she alone can find. Her powers certainly rival those of Marius. She has drunk from the Eden fount, that is, the blood of Queen Akasha. She can kindle crisp dry objects into fire with the power of her mind, levitate and vanish in the dark sky, slay the young blood drinkers if they menace her, and yet she seems harmless, forever feminine though indifferent to gender, a wan and plaintive woman whom I want to close in my arms.
Santino, the old saint of Rome. He has wandered into the disasters of the modern era with all his beauty unblemished, still the bigshouldered, strong-chested one, olive skin paler now with the workings of the fierce magical blood, huge head of black curling hair often clipped each night at sunset for the sake of anonymity perhaps, unvain, perfectly dressed in black. He says nothing to anyone. He looks at me silently as if we never talked together of theology and mysticism, as if he never broke my happiness, burnt my youth to cinders, drove my Maker into century-long convalescence, divided me from all comfort. Perhaps he fancies us as fellow victims of a powerful intellectual morality, an infatuation with the concept of purpose, two lost ones, veterans of the same war.
At times he looks shrewd and even hateful. He knows plenty. He doesn't underestimate the powers of the ancient ones, who, eschewing the social invisibility of centuries past, now walk among us with perfect ease. When he looks at me, his black eyes are unflinching and passive. The shadow of his beard, fixed forever into the tiny cut-off dark hairs embedded in his skin, is beautiful as it always was. He is all in all conventionally virile, crisp white shirt open at the throat to show the portion of the thick curly black hair that covers his chest, a similar enticing black fleece covering the visible flesh of his arms at the wrists. He favors sleek but sturdy black coats lapeled in leather or fur, low-slung black cars that move at two hundred miles an hour, a golden cigarette lighter reeking of combustible fluid, which he lights over and over again just to peer into the flame. Where he actually lives, and when he will surface, nobody knows.
Santino. I know no more about him than that. We keep a gentlemanly distance from one another. I suspect his own suffering has been terrible; I do not seek to break the shiny black fashionable carapace of his demeanor to discover some raw bloody tragedy beneath it. To know Santino, there is always time.
Now let me describe for the most virginal of readers my Master, Marius, as he is now. So much time and experience divide us now that it is like a glacier between us, and we stare at each other across the glowing whiteness of that impassable waste, able only to speak in lulled and polite voices, so mannerly, the young creature I appear to be, too sweet-faced for casual belief, and he, ever the worldly sophisticate, the scholar of the moment, the philosopher of the century, ethicist of the millennium, historian for all time.
He walks tall as he always did, imperial still in his subdued twentieth-century fashion, carving his coats out of old velvet that they may give some faint clue of the magnificence that was once his nightly dress. On occasions now he clips the long flowi
ng yellow hair which he wore so proudly in old Venice. He is ever quick of wit and tongue and eager for reasonable solutions, possessed of infinite patience and unquenchable curiosity and a refusal to give up on the fate of himself, or of us, or of this world. No knowledge can defeat him; tempered by fire and time, he is too strong for the horrors of technology or the spells of science. Neither microscopes nor computers shake his faith in the infinite, though his once solemn charges-Those Who Must Be Kept, who held such promise of redemptive meaning-have long been toppled from their archaic thrones.
I fear him. I don't know why. Perhaps I fear him because I could love him again, and loving him, I would come to need him, and needing him, I would come to learn from him, and learning from him, I would be again his faithful pupil in all things, only to discover that his patience for me is no substitute for the passion which long ago blazed in his eyes.
I need that passion! I need it. But enough of him. Two thousand years he had survived, slipping in and out of the very mainstream of human life without compunction, a great practitioner of the art of being human, carrying with him forever the grace and quiet dignity of the Augustan Age of seemingly invincible Rome, in which he was born.
There are others who are not here now with me, though they have been on The Night Island, and I will see them again. There are the ancient twins, Mekare and Maharet, custodians of the primal blood fount from which our life flows, the roots of the vine, so to speak, upon which we so stubbornly and beautifully bloom. They are our Queens of the Damned.
Then there is Jesse Reeves, a twentieth-century fledgling made by Maharet, the very eldest and therefore a dazzling monster, unknown to me, but greatly admired. Bringing with her into the world of the Undead an incomparable education in history, the paranormal, philosophy and languages, she is the unknown. Will the fire consume her, as it has so many others who, weary of life, cannot accept immortality? Or will her twentieth-century wit give her some radical and indestructible armor for the inconceivable changes that we now know must lie ahead?