by Anne Rice
And it is only in an informal and carefree style that I can tell you how I eventually came to terms with being the monarch.
You will find the tale filled with digressions, and there may be times when you suspect the digressions are the story. And you may be right. But whatever the case, it’s the tale I have to tell about how I came to accept what others had offered to me, and how I came to know just who we creatures of the night really are.
Oh, don’t worry. It’s not all interior reflection, and inner change, so to speak. There is action. There is intrigue. There is danger. And there were certainly surprises for me.
But let’s get into it, shall we?
As the tale begins, I am still struggling very much to meet the demands of Court life, to find some balance between the expectations of the Council of Elders—and my own wild desires to enhance and enrich the Court, which was attracting blood drinkers from all over the world. I haven’t come close to believing in the Court in a profound way, merely riding the passion of the belief of others, and I think I know what it means to be Prince, but I don’t.
Did I expect the Court to last? No, I really didn’t. I didn’t because every effort I’d ever witnessed to forge an enduring refuge for the Undead had eventually failed. And a lot of those coming to Court felt the same way. “This too shall pass,” they did not hesitate to say, even as they wished us the best.
But I wanted the Court to last, I really did.
So let me begin the narrative on a night when Marius, the ancient Roman Child of the Millennia, in a fit of pique became impatient with what he referred to as my “nauseating buoyancy and optimism” about the world in general.
There was a ball that night in the great hall of the Château, as there almost always is on a Friday night, and it was snowing (it is snowing all through this novel), and things had been relatively simple and busy at Court for the last two to three months, and I was in a very happy disposition, believing that all was going extra specially well. Yes, it would all come crashing down eventually, but for now it was going well.
Marius, watching the dancers under the soft golden radiance of the chandeliers, said to me in a hard cold voice,
“Ultimately they will all disappoint you.”
“What the Hell are you talking about?” I asked. His words had struck me with great force and I wanted to get back to listening to the music, and watching the dancers move to the music, and watching the snow fall beyond the open doors to the terrace. Now why did Marius, sitting on the bench beside me, have to say something so ominous?
“Because, Lestat,” he said, “you have forgotten something absolutely essential about our nature. And sooner or later they will remind you of it.”
“Which is what?” I demanded. I’ve never been a courteous pupil. “Why at a time such as this must you invent difficulties?”
He shrugged. He folded his arms and he leaned against the plastered wall behind us, gazing off into the ballroom. His long white-blond hair was swept back from his face and fastened with a gold clip at the nape of his neck, and he had a contented, relaxed look about him in his loose red velvet robes that was entirely at odds with the way he was ruining the moment for me.
“You’ve forgotten,” he said, “that we are by nature killers. No, listen to me. Just listen.” He placed his hand on mine but kept his eyes on the dancers. “You’ve forgotten that what makes us distinct from human beings and always will is that we hunt human beings and we love killing them. You’re trying to make us into darkling angels.”
“Not so. I never forget what we are.”
“Be quiet,” he said. He went on talking, eyes moving over the room slowly. “Soon you’re going to have to accommodate what we are,” he said. “And the fact that we are simpler creatures than human beings, allowed only one supreme creative and erotic act, and that is the act of killing.”
I was resentful. “I haven’t forgotten this for one solitary moment,” I said, glaring at him. “I never forget it. How can I forget it? What I wouldn’t give just now for one ripe sweet innocent victim, one tender—.” I broke off. I was maddened that he was smiling.
It was only a small smile.
“Whyever do you bring this up now?” I asked.
“Don’t you know?” he replied. He looked at me. “Can’t you feel it?” His eyes fixed on me and he seemed effortlessly sincere and almost kind. “They’re all waiting for something.”
“Well, what else under Heaven can I give them!” I declared.
Something interrupted us that night.
Something came between us.
I no longer precisely remember what it was. We were interrupted. But I didn’t forget that little exchange on the shadowy margins of the ballroom as we watched the others dance.
But several nights after, right at sunset, I awoke to the disturbing news that a gang of ugly blood drinker mavericks had terrorized an old immortal in the wilds of Louisiana who was appealing to me for help, and also that our beloved friends, the immortal Children of Atlantis, a tribe of strange beings with whom we shared the shadows, had deserted their new compound in rural England for the shelter of Gregory Collingsworth’s great pharmaceutical towers outside of Paris.
Matters for the Prince, and the Prince went to it. And this is the story of all that followed.
Chapter 2
The slaughter of the band of rebel mavericks in Louisiana was inevitable. They’d been warned to stay away from New Orleans, where they’d been known to bully other blood drinkers and wreak enough havoc to make the local news. And this time, not only had they fractured the peace to attack the estate of an older immortal appealing for help, but they’d broken into my townhouse in the Rue Royale, stolen clothes from my closets and chests there, and stupidly slashed to pieces a minor but beautiful Impressionist painting which was dear to Louis.
Now, you probably know full well who Louis is and what he means to me. But for the newer fledglings, I’ll say a few words here on that subject.
Louis de Pointe du Lac was a landowner in French colonial Louisiana when I gave him the Dark Blood sometime before the close of the eighteenth century. A little while after that, largely to bind him to me, as I loved him very much, I brought a child vampire into our family, and the three of us lived together in relative peace for sixty years in the old French part of New Orleans.
All of this was described in full by Louis in the very first of the Vampire Chronicles, published over forty years ago. Louis told the story of his life in that book, and also the story of his quest to find something that would give his painful existence as a vampire some meaning. It was a tragic story with a tragic ending. And it was Louis’s outrageous lies about me, intentional and unintentional (some people should not be granted a poetic license), that prompted me to write my own autobiography and tell the secrets of Marius to the whole world.
Well, Louis and I have been reunited a number of times, and this time around, at the Court in France, our reunion is enduring. He left that Impressionist painting behind at my request in our old flat in the Rue Royale, and now these miserable miscreants had senselessly destroyed it.
But it was the appeal of the older vampire which compelled me to make the trip across the Atlantic to settle the score. An immortal totally unknown to me, by the name of Dmitri Fontayne, had written to me on parchment with India ink in a gorgeous old hand to recount how this band of rebels had tried to burn down his house in the bayou country, stolen his horses, and ruthlessly murdered his two mortal servants.
This could not go unpunished.
So off to Louisiana I went, along with my two bodyguards, Thorne and Cyril, of whom I have become increasingly fond, and it’s a good thing, because they go with me everywhere.
Now, there used to be a vital reason for this, as there was a time when I carried the Sacred Core within me, the intelligence named Amel, to whom every vampire on the pl
anet was connected. Had I been destroyed during the time, all the blood drinkers of the world would have perished with me.
But I no longer carry within me the Sacred Core. Indeed, no one does. Amel has been liberated, and his intellect now resides in a new flesh-and-blood body, provided for him by our fellow immortals, the Children of Atlantis.
Once this was accomplished, I had expected to lose Thorne and Cyril. I fully expected them to announce that there was no reason anymore for them to protect me. But quite to my surprise they both demanded to remain with me. And the Council of Elders formally asked them to remain, explaining that I was still the Prince, and the continuing vitality of the Court depended on me.
This was a little bit of a shock, and not an unpleasant one. It marked a deepening of my awareness of how very much my presence was required at the Château, and I couldn’t bring myself to complain about being needed, respected, and wanted.
So off we went, the three of us, to find the miscreants on the prowl in New Orleans.
I will not recount how we annihilated them. I took no pleasure in it. I ascertained in each case that the rebel had indeed been warned, was determined to make mischief, believed we old ones to be bragging about powers we didn’t possess, and then I destroyed them. I used the Fire Gift—or the telepathic ability to set them ablaze—and coupled with it a strong telekinetic blast that smashed their heads to pieces before they went up in smoke. I did not want to make them suffer. I wanted them gone. They’d had their chance to travel the Devil’s Road and they’d gratuitously hurt another blood drinker for no good reason and murdered humans dear to him.
But it bothered me, all this. The leader of the pack, the last to die, had asked me by what authority I was to take his life, and I didn’t really have a good answer for him. After all, I’d been the Brat Prince for decades, had I not? The question burned. Of course I could have rattled off a litany of reasons, but I didn’t.
And when it was done, and nothing remained of these unwise fledglings except pools of dark grease on the rooftops on which they’d fallen, I felt faintly disgusted, and desperately thirsty.
Thorne, Cyril, and I spent an hour hunting. My craving for innocent blood was as usual damn near unbearable, so I settled for the infernal torment of the Little Drink from any number of tender, fetching young victims in a darkened nightclub, packed before the stage on which a folk singer sang tender laments with a southern drawl that made her sound faintly British.
After that I walked. Just walked. Walked on New Orleans pavements which are like no other pavements in the world, some of flagstone, some of herringbone brick, some of fractured and fragmented cement, many dangerously ruptured by the roots of trees, and some overgrown with tall grass, and others slimy with velvet-green moss, and some even set with old street names in blue letters.
New Orleans, my New Orleans.
I finally went back to my flat, and inspected the ruined painting. I left a note for my local attorney to have it restored, commended him on doing what he could to clean up the flat, and then sat in my favorite gilded armchair in the front parlor, in the dark, watching the headlamps on Royale float across the wallpapered ceiling. I love the sounds of the French Quarter on mild nights…laughter, chatter, gaiety, Dixieland jazz drifting out of open doors, rock music pounding somewhere—an eternal carouse.
The following night, we went into the bayou country to find the residence of Dmitri Fontayne, the blood drinker with the elegant handwriting.
Chapter 3
I was in love with the being the moment I glimpsed the house and the great black iron picket fence surrounding it. Such high fences these days are often made of aluminum, and they just don’t look the same as iron. But this fence was indeed crafted from true iron and very high, with gilded pickets like the great fences and gates of Paris, and I loved that mark of care, including the heaviness of the arched gate as I opened it.
Down a relatively short drive lined with majestic oaks stood the house itself, with high front steps of marble and galleries upstairs and down running across its broad façade. Graceful two-story Corinthian columns punctuated these galleries, giving the place a Graeco-Roman grandeur that suggested a temple.
I figured the place had been built in the flush years right before the Civil War when rich Americans threw up such immense houses in desperate competition with one another, using the native cypress wood and stucco to produce an edifice that appeared to be all of marble when it was not.
I caught the scent of the oil lamps before I marked their soft mellow light behind the heavily figured lace curtains, and I stood for a moment on the bottom step looking up at the fanlight above the broad front door. All the scents of Louisiana, so familiar, so enticing, descended on me: the raw fragrance of the magnolias blooming in abundance on the nearby trees, and the deep perfume of the roses in the garden patches along the galleries, and jasmine, night jasmine of such a sweetness that one could drift off into endless dreaming just breathing it in, and remembering long-ago nights, and life moving confidently at a slower pace.
Steps in the hall beyond, and then a figure in the doorway, imperially slim, as the poet says, and with hair like my own, long, so blond it was almost white, gathered back in the fashion Marius and I had popularized at Court. And a hand raised with the flash of a ruby ring beckoning for me to enter.
I hurried to accept the welcome while Thorne and Cyril drifted off to make an inspection of the property, as they so often did.
As soon as I clasped his hand, I liked this blood drinker. His eyes were not large, but they were radiantly blue and his smile animated his entire face.
“Come in, Prince, do come in,” he said in very precise English, sharpened by an accent I couldn’t place.
He was my height and indeed quite thin, wearing a narrow-waisted modern coat and an old-fashioned lace-trimmed shirt over flannel trousers, and wingtipped shoes polished to a mirror luster, with string ties.
He drew me into a broad central hallway, paved in black-and-white marble, and then into a great spacious double parlor, so common in old plantation houses, which had become a library lined with books of all ages. A center table stood in the second parlor, and there we sat down to talk.
By then I’d glimpsed a dining room across the hallway, with a long oval table and English Chippendale chairs. That room too was lined with bookshelves.
Quaint glass oil lamps scattered here and there on the periphery of these rooms provided warm light. The highly polished heart-pine floors were lustrous. Those old floors had never meant to be bare, but rather an under flooring for carpets or parquet. But the polymer lacquer had rendered them hard and beautiful and they gave an amber glow to the room.
“Please call me Mitka,” he said, “and your bodyguards are most welcome to come in. My name is Dmitri Fontayne. I’m part Russian, part French. I was made a blood drinker in the time of Great Catherine in Russia.”
This delighted me. Vampires in the main don’t volunteer their age or their history this readily, and he seemed entirely trusting when he came so easily to the point.
His mind was entirely in accord with his words, and these words particularly fascinated me. I don’t think I’d ever encountered a blood drinker with quite this background. And there was a great deal I wanted to tell him about Louis suddenly, Louis who was immersed in the novels of Tolstoy, and had myriad questions about them which no one cared to answer, and how much Louis would love him right off.
But I came back to the moment.
“Mitka, my pleasure,” I said. “And you know who I am. Lestat will do, though it seems the world likes to address me as ‘the Prince.’ Don’t worry about Thorne or Cyril. They know I want to talk to you alone.”
“As you wish,” he said. “But they mustn’t go far. You have enemies.”
“If you’re speaking of Rhoshamandes, I know all about him and his latest activities….”
&nbs
p; “Ah, but there are others, Prince,” he said. “Please tell them to remain near at hand.”
I did as he wished, sending a silent message to the others, who were prowling around the stables now, having a good time with the horses, which were apparently splendid, and which they wanted to ride.
“Which enemy is this? You do know the band of mavericks in New Orleans has been annihilated?”
“Yes, I do,” he said. A shadow passed over his face, and he looked down for a moment as if he were murmuring a prayer for the dead, but I caught nothing, and then he surprised me by quickly making the Russian Sign of the Cross. Like the Greeks, the Russians touch the right shoulder before the left.
As he looked up, his face brightened beautifully and I felt a kind of elation that was all too common of late, simply being here with him in this ornate parlor surrounded by hundreds of enticing volumes, and feeling the night air through the long open windows to the south. Roses again, the scent of roses in Louisiana is perhaps stronger than anywhere else, and then there came on the breeze a great drift of green fragrances from the nearby swamp, all so redolent of life.
I had to get myself in hand. Fits of laughter, I’d always struggled with at odd moments, and fits of rage occasionally, but now it was spells of elation, as if the common comforts of the world were miracles.
A passage came to me suddenly from Tolstoy, something that Louis had read to me, something that Prince Andrei Bolkonsky was thinking as he lay close to death. Something about love, love making everything possible, and then Louis’s strange comment that Tolstoy’s first two great novels were studies of happiness.
“Ah yes,” said the blood drinker opposite me with irresistible enthusiasm. “ ‘Happy families are all alike,’ ” he said quoting the famous first line from Anna Karenina. Then he caught himself. “Forgive me. I make it a matter of courtesy not to ransack the minds of those I’ve only just met. But I couldn’t help it.”