by Anne Rice
“ ‘Someone followed me,’ she whispered now. °I could hear him block after block behind me. At first, I thought it was nothing!’ She stopped for breath, her face blanched in the bluish light that came from the windows across the way. ‘Louis, it was the musician,’ she whispered.
“ ‘But what does that matter? He must have seen you with Lestat.’
“ ‘Louis, he’s down there. Look out the window. Try to see him.’ She seemed so shaken, almost afraid.
“As if she would not stand exposed on the threshold. I stepped out on the balcony, though I held her hand as she hovered by the drape; and she held me so tightly that it seemed she feared for me. It was eleven o’clock and the Rue Royale for the moment was quiet: shops shut, the traffic of the theater just gone away. A door slammed somewhere to my right, and I saw a woman and a man emerge and hurry towards the corner, the woman’s face hidden beneath an enormous white hat. Their steps died away. I could see no one, sense no one. I could hear Claudia’s labored breathing. Something stirred in the house; I started, then recognized it as the jingling and rustling of the birds. We’d forgotten the birds. But Claudia had started worse than I, and she pulled near to me. ‘There is no one, Claudia…’ I started to whisper to her.
“Then I saw the musician.
“He had been standing so still in the doorway of the furniture shop that I had been totally unaware of him, and he must have wanted this to be so. For now he turned his face upwards, towards me, and it shone from the dark like a white light. The frustration and care were utterly erased from his stark features; his great dark eyes peered at me from the white flesh. He had become a vampire.
“ ‘I see him,’ I murmured to her, my lips as still as possible, my eyes holding his eyes. I felt her move closer, her hand trembling, a heart beating in the palm of her hand. She let out a gasp when she saw him now. But at that same moment, something chilled me even as I stared at him and he did not move. Because I heard a step in the lower passage. I heard the gate hinge groan. And then that step again, deliberate, loud, echoing under the arched ceiling of the carriage way, deliberate, familiar. That step advancing now up the spiral stairs. A thin scream rose from Claudia, and then she caught it at once with her hand. The vampire in the furniture shop door had not moved. And I knew the step on the stairs. I knew the step on the porch. It was Lestat. Lestat pulling on the door, now pounding on it, now ripping at it, as if to tear it loose from the very wall. Claudia moved back into the corner of the room, her body bent, as if someone had struck her a sharp blow, her eyes moving frantically from the figure in the street to me. The pounding on the door grew louder. And then I heard his voice. ‘Louis!’ he called to me. ‘Louis!’ he roared against the door. And then came the smash of the back parlor window. And I could hear the latch turning from within. Quickly, I grabbed the lamp, struck a match hard and broke it in my frenzy, then got the flame as I wanted it and held the small vessel of kerosene poised in my hand ‘Get away from the window. Shut it,’ I told her. And she obeyed as if the sudden clear, spoken command released her from a paroxysm of fear. ‘And light the other lamps, now, at once.’ I heard her crying as she struck the match. Lestat was coming down the hallway.
“And then he stood at the door. I let out a gasp, and, not meaning to, I must have taken several steps backwards when I saw him. I could hear Claudia’s cry. It was Lestat beyond question, restored and intact as he hung in the doorway, his head thrust forward, his eyes bulging, as if he were drunk and needed the door jamb to keep him from plunging headlong into the room. His skin was a mass of scars, a hideous covering of injured flesh, as though every wrinkle of his ‘death’ had left its mark upon him. He was seared and marked as if by the random strokes of a hot poker, and his once clear gray eyes were shot with hemorrhaged vessels.
“ ‘Stay back… for the love of God…’ I whispered. ‘I’ll throw it at you. I’ll burn you alive,’ I said to him. And at the same moment I could hear a sound to my left, something scraping, scratching against the facade of the town house. It was the other one. I saw his hands now on the wrought-iron balcony. Claudia let out a piercing scream as he threw his weight against the glass doors.
“I cannot tell you all that happened then. I cannot possibly recount it as it was. I remember heaving the lamp at Lestat; it smashed at his feet and the flames rose at once from the carpet. I had a torch then in my hands, a great tangle of sheet I’d pulled from the couch and ignited in the flames. But I was struggling with him before that, kicking and driving savagely at his great strength. And somewhere in the background were Claudia’s panicked screams. And the other lamp was broken. And the drapes of the windows blazed. I remember that his clothes reeked of kerosene and that he was at one point smacking wildly at the flames. He was clumsy, sick, unable to keep his balance; but when he had me in his grip, I even tore at his fingers with my teeth to get him off. There was noise rising in the street, shouts, the sound of a bell. The room itself had fast become an inferno, and I did see in one clear blast of light Claudia battling the fledgling vampire. He seemed unable to close his hands on her, like a clumsy human after a bird. I remember rolling over and over with Lestat in the flames, feeling the suffocating heat in my face, seeing the flames above his back when I rolled under him. And then Claudia rose up out of the confusion and was striking at him over and over with the poker until his grip broke and I scrambled loose from him. I saw the poker coming down again and again on him and could hear the snarls rising from Claudia in time with the poker, like the stress of an unconscious animal. Lestat was holding his hand, his face a grimace of pain. And there, sprawled on the smoldering carpet, lay the other one, blood flowing from his head.
“What happened then is not clear to me. I think I grabbed the poker from her and gave him one fine blow with it to the side of the head. I remember that he seemed unstoppable, invulnerable to the blows. The heat, by this time, was singeing my clothes, had caught Claudia’s gossamer gown, so that I grabbed her up and ran down the passage trying to stifle the flames with my body. I remember taking off my coat and beating at the flames in the open air, and men rushing up the stairs and past me. A great crowd swelled from the passage into the courtyard, and someone stood on the sloped roof of the brick kitchen. I had Claudia in my arms now and was rushing past them all, oblivious to the questions, thrusting a shoulder through them, making them divide. And then I was free with her, hearing her pant and sob in my ear, running blindly down the Rue Royale, down the first narrow street, running and running until there was no sound but the sound of my running. And her breath. And we stood there, the man and the child, scorched and aching, and breathing deep in the quiet of night.”
PART II
All night long I stood on the deck of the French ship Mariana, watching the gangplanks. The long levee was crowded, and parties lasted late in the lavish staterooms, the decks rumbling with passengers and guests. But finally, as the hours moved toward dawn, the parties were over one by one, and carriages left the narrow riverfront streets. A few late passengers came aboard, a couple lingered for hours at the rail nearby. But Lestat and his apprentice, if they survived the fire (and I was convinced that they had) did not find their way to the ship. Our luggage had left the flat that day; and if anything had remained to let them know our destination, I was sure it had been destroyed. Yet still I watched. Claudia sat securely locked in our stateroom, her eyes fixed on the porthole. But Lestat did not come.
“Finally, as I’d hoped, the commotion of putting out commenced before daylight. A few people waved from the pier and the grassy hump of the levee as the great ship began first to shiver, then to jerk violently to one side, and then to slide out in one great majestic motion into the current of the Mississippi.
“The lights of New Orleans grew small and dim until there appeared behind us only a pale phosphorescence against the lightening clouds. I was fatigued beyond my worst memory, yet I stood on the deck for as long as I could see that fight, knowing that I might never see it again. In moments w
e were carried downstream past the piers of Freniere and Pointe du Lac and then, as I could see the great wall of cottonwood and cypress growing green out of the darkness along the shore, I knew it was almost morning. Too perilously close.
“And as I put the key into the lock of the cabin I felt the greatest exhaustion perhaps that I’d ever known. Never in all the years I’d lived in our select family had I known the fear I’d experienced tonight, the vulnerability, the sheer terror. And there was to be no sudden relief from it. No sudden sense of safety. Only that relief which weariness at last imposes, when neither mind nor body can endure the terror any longer. For though Lestat was now miles away from us, he had in his resurrection awakened in me a tangle of complex fears which I could not escape. Even as Claudia said to me, ‘We’re safe, Louis, safe,’ and I whispered the word yes to her, I could see Lestat hanging in the doorway, see those bulbous eyes, that scarred flesh. How had he come back, how had he triumphed over death? How could any creature have survived that shriveled ruin he’d become? Whatever the answer, what did it mean — not only for him, but for Claudia, for me? Safe from him we were, but safe from ourselves?
“The ship was struck by a strange ‘fever.’ It was amazingly clean of vermin, however, though occasionally their bodies might be found, weightless and dry, as if the creatures had been dead for days. Yet there was this fever. It struck a passenger first in the form of weakness and a soreness about the throat; occasionally there were marks there, and occasionally the marks were someplace else; or sometimes there were no recognizable marks at all, though an old wound was reopened and painful again. And sometimes the passenger who fell to sleeping more and more as the voyage progressed and the fever progressed died in his sleep. So there were burials at sea on several occasions as we crossed the Atlantic. Naturally afraid of fever, I shunned the passengers, did not wish to join them in the smoking room, get to know their stories, hear their dreams and expectations. I took my ‘meals’ alone. But Claudia liked to watch the passengers, to stand on deck and see them come and go in the early evening, to say softly to me later as I sat at the porthole, ‘I think she’ll fall prey…’
“I would put the book down and look out the porthole, feeling the gentle rocking of the sea, seeing the stars, more clear and brilliant than they had ever been on land, dipping down to touch the waves. It seemed at moments, when I sat alone in the dark stateroom, that the sky had come down to meet the sea and that some great secret was to be revealed in that meeting, some great gulf miraculously closed forever. But who was to make this revelation when the sky and sea became indistinguishable and neither any longer was chaos? God? Or Satan? It struck me suddenly what consolation it would be to know Satan, to look upon his face, no matter how terrible that countenance was, to know that I belonged to him totally, and thus put to rest forever the torment of this ignorance. To step through some veil that would forever separate me from all that I called human nature.
“I felt the ship moving closer and closer to this secret. There was no visible end to the firmament; it closed about us with breathtaking beauty and silence. But then the words put to rest became horrible. Because there would be no rest in damnation, could be no rest; and what was this torment compared to the restless fires of hell? The sea rocking beneath those constant stars — those stars themselves — what had this to do with Satan? And those images which sound so static to us in childhood when we are all so taken up with mortal frenzy that we can scarce imagine them desirable: seraphim gazing forever upon the face of God — and the face of God itself — this was rest eternal, of which this gentle, cradling sea was only the faintest promise.
“But even in these moments, when the ship slept and all the world slept, neither heaven nor hell seemed more than a tormenting fancy. To know, to believe, in one or the other… that was perhaps the only salvation for which I could dream.
“Claudia, with Lestat’s liking for light, lit the lamps when she rose. She had a marvelous pack of playing cards, acquired from a lady on board; the picture cards were in the fashion of Marie Antoinette, and the backs of the cards bore gold fleurs-de-lis on gleaming violet. She played a game of solitaire in which the cards made the numbers of a clock. And she asked me until I finally began to answer her, how Lestat had accomplished it. She was no longer shaken. If she remembered her screams in the fire she did not care to dwell on them. If she remembered that, before the fire, she had wept real tears in my arms, it made no change in her; she was, as always in the past, a person of little indecision, a person for whom habitual quiet did not mean anxiety or regret.
“ ‘We should have burned him,’ she said. ‘We were fools to think from his appearance that he was dead.’
“ ‘But how could he have survived?’ I asked her. ‘You saw him, you know what became of him.’ I had no taste for it, really. I would have gladly pushed it to the back of my mind, but my mind would not allow me to. And it was she who gave me the answers now, for the dialogue was really with herself. ‘Suppose, though, he had ceased to fight us,’ she explained, ‘that he was still living, locked in that helpless dried corpse, conscious and calculating…’
“ ‘Conscious in that state!’ I whispered.
“ ‘And suppose, when he reached the swamp waters and heard the sounds of our carriage going away, that he had strength enough to propel those limbs to move. There were creatures all around him in the dark. I saw him once rip the head of a small garden lizard and watch the blood run down into a glass. Can you imagine the tenacity of the will to live in him, his hands groping in that water for anything that moved?’
“ ‘The will to live? Tenacity?’ I murmured. ‘Suppose it was something else…’
“ ‘And then, when he’d felt the resuscitation of his strength, just enough perhaps to have sustained him to the road, somewhere along that road he found someone. Perhaps he crouched, waiting for a passing carriage; perhaps he crept, gathering still what blood he could until he came to the shacks of those immigrants or those scattered country houses. And what a spectacle he must have been!’ She gazed at the hanging lamp, her eyes narrow, her voice muted, without emotion. ‘And then what did he do? It’s clear to me. If he could not have gotten back to New Orleans in time, he could most definitely have reached the Old Bayou cemetery. The charity hospital feeds it fresh coffins every day. And I can see him clawing his way through the moist earth for such a coffin, dumping the fresh contents out in the swamps, and securing himself until the next nightfall in that shallow grave where no manner of man would be wont to disturb him. Yes… that is what he did, I’m certain.’
“I thought of this for a long time, picturing it, seeing that it must have happened. And then I heard her add thoughtfully, as she laid down her card and looked at the oval face of a white-coiffed king, ‘I could have done it.
“ ‘And why do you look that way at me?’ she asked, gathering up her cards, her small fingers struggling to make a neat pack of them and then to shuffle them.
“ ‘But you do believe… that had we burned his remains he would have died?’ I asked.
“ ‘Of course I believe it. If there is nothing to rise, there is nothing to rise. What are you driving at?’ She was dealing out the cards now, dealing a hand for me on the small oak table. I looked at the cards, but I did not touch them.
“ ‘I don’t know…’ I whispered to her. ‘Only that perhaps there was no will to live, no tenacity… because very simply there was no need of either.’
“Her eyes gazed at me steadily, giving no hint of her thoughts or that she understood mine.
“ ‘Because perhaps he was incapable of dying… perhaps he is, and we are… truly immortal?’
“For a longtime she sat there looking at me.
“ ‘Consciousness in that state…’ I finally added, as I looked away from her. ‘If it were so, then mightn’t there be consciousness in any other? Fire, sunlight… what does it matter?’
“ ‘Louis,’ she said, her voice soft. ‘You’re afraid. You don’t stand en
garde against fear. You don’t understand the danger of fear itself. We’ll know these answers when we find those who can tell us, those who’ve possessed knowledge for centuries, for however long creatures such as ourselves have walked the earth. That knowledge was our birthright, and he deprived us. He earned his death.’
“ ‘But he didn’t die…’ I said.
“ ‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘No one could have escaped that house unless they’d run with us, at our very side. No. He’s dead, and so is that trembling aesthete, his friend. Consciousness, what does it matter?’
“She gathered up the cards and put them aside, gesturing for me to hand her the books from the table beside the bunk, those books which she’d unpacked immediately on board, the few select records of vampire lore which she’d taken to be her guides. They included no wild romances from England, no stories of Edgar Allan Poe, no fancy. Only those few accounts of the vampires of eastern Europe, which had become for her a sort of Bible. In those countries indeed they did burn the remains of the vampire when they found him, and the heart was staked and the head severed. She would read these now for hours, these ancient books which had been read and reread before they ever found their way across the Atlantic; they were travelers’ tales, the accounts of priests and scholars. And she would plan our trip, not with the need of any pen or paper, only in her mind. A trip that would take us at once away from the glittering capitals of Europe towards the Black Sea, where we would dock at Varna and begin that search in the rural countryside of the Carpathians.