by Anne Rice
"Come to us anytime that you wish, " the Roman vampires told us. As for this Theater of the Vampires in Paris, this great scandal which was shocking our kind the world over, well, they would believe that when they saw it with their own eyes. Vampires performing on a stage, vampires dazzling mortal audiences with tricks and mimicry- they thought it was too terribly Parisian! They laughed. Of course I was hearing more directly about the theater all the time. Before I'd even reached St. Petersburg, Roget had sent me a long testament to the "cleverness " of the new troupe: They have gotten themselves up like giant wooden marionettes [he wrote]. Gold cords come down from the rafters to their ankles and their wrists and the tops of their heads, and by these they appear to be manipulated in the most charming dances. They wear perfect circles of rouge on their white cheeks, and their eyes are wide as glass buttons. You cannot believe the perfection with which they make themselves appear inanimate. But the orchestra is another marvel. Faces blank and painted in the very same style, the players imitate mechanical musicians-the jointed dolls one can buy that, on the winding of a key, saw away at their little instruments, or blow their little horns, to make real music! It is such an engaging spectacle that ladies and gentlemen of the audience quarrel amongst themselves as to whether or not these players are dolls or real persons. Some aver that they are all made of wood and the voices coming out of the actors' mouths are the work of ventriloquists. As for the plays themselves, they would be extremely unsettling were they not so beautiful and skillfully done. There is one most popular drama they do which features a vampire revenant, risen from the grave through a platform in the stage. Terrifying is the creature with rag mop hair and fangs. But lo, he falls in love at once with a giant wooden puppet woman, never guessing that she is not alive. Unable to drink blood from her throat, however, the poor vampire soon perishes, at which moment the marionette reveals that she does indeed live, though she is made of wood and with an evil smile she performs a triumphant dance upon the body of the defeated fiend. I tell you it makes the blood run cold to see it. Yet the audience screams and applauds. In another little tableau, the puppet dancers make a circle about a human girl and entice her to let herself be bound up with golden cords as if she too were a marionette. The sorry result is that the strings make her dance till the life goes out off her body. She pleads with eloquent gestures to be released, but the real puppets only laugh and cavort as she expires. The music is unearthly. It brings to mind the gypsies of the country fairs. Monsieur de Lenfent is the director. And it is the sound of his violin which often opens the evening fare. I advise you as your attorney to claim some of the profits being made by this remarkable company. The lines for each performance stretch a considerable length down the boulevard. Roget's letters always unsettled me. They left me with my heart tripping, and I couldn't help but wonder: What had I expected the troupe to do? Why did their boldness and inventiveness surprise me? We all had the power to do such things.
By the time I settled in Venice, where I spent a great deal of time looking in vain for Marius's paintings, I was hearing from Eleni directly, her letters inscribed with exquisite vampiric skill. They were the most popular entertainment in nighttime Paris, she wrote to me. "Actors " had come from all over Europe to join them. So their troupe had swelled to twenty in number, which even that metropolis could scarce "support. "
"Only the most clever artists are admitted, those who possess truly astonishing talent, but we prize discretion above all else. We do not like scandal, as you can well guess. " As for their "Dear Violinist, " she wrote of him affectionately, saying he was their greatest inspiration, that he wrote the most ingenious plays, taking them from stories that he read. "But when he is not at work, he can be quite impossible. He must be watched constantly so that he does not enlarge our ranks. His dining habits are extremely sloppy. And on occasion he says most shocking things to strangers, which fortunately they are too sensible to believe. " In other words, he tried to make other vampires. And he didn't hunt in stealth. In the main it is Our Oldest Friend [Armand, obviously] who is relied upon to restrain him. And that he does with the most caustic threats. But I must say that these do not have an enduring effect upon our Violinist. He talks often of old religious customs, of ritual fires, of the passage into new realms of being. I cannot say that we do not love him. For your sake we would care for him even if we did not. But we do love him. And Our Oldest Friend, in particular, bears him great affection. Yet I should remark that in the old times, such persons would not have endured among us for very long. As for Our Oldest Friend, I wonder if you would know him now. He has built a great manse at the foot of your tower, and there he lives among books and pictures very like a scholarly gentleman with little care for the real world. Each night, however, he arrives at the door of the theater in his black carriage. And he watches from his own curtained box. And he comes after to settle all disputes among us, to govern as he always did, to threaten Our Divine Violinist, but he will never, never consent to perform on the stage. It is he who accepts new members among us. As I told you, they come from all over. We do not have to solicit them. They knock upon our door .... Come back to us [she wrote in closing]. You will find us more interesting than you did before. There are a thousand dark wonders which I cannot commit to paper. We are a starburst in the history of our kind. And we could not have chosen a more perfect moment in the history of this great city for our little contrivance. And it is your doing, this splendid existence we sustain. Why did you leave us? Come home.
I saved these letters. I kept them as carefully as I kept the letter from my brothers in the Auvergne. I saw the marionettes perfectly in my imagination. I heard the cry of Nicki's violin. I saw Armand, too, arriving in his dark carriage, taking his seat in the box. And I even described all of this in veiled and eccentric terms in my long messages to Marius, working in a little frenzy now and then with my chisel in a dark street while mortals slept. But for me, there was no going back to Paris, no matter how lonely I might become. The world around me had become my lover and my teacher. I was enraptured with the cathedrals and castles, the museums and palaces that I saw. In every place I visited, I went to the heart of society: I drank up its entertainments and its gossip, its literature and its music, its architecture and its art. I could fill volumes with the things I studied, the things I struggled to understand. I was enthralled by gypsy violinists and street puppeteers as I was by great castrati sopranos in gilded opera houses or cathedral choirs. I prowled the brothels and the gambling dens and the places where the sailors drank and quarreled. I read the newspapers everywhere I went and hung about in taverns, often ordering food I never touched, merely to have it in front of me, and I talked to mortals incessantly in public places, buying countless glasses of wine for others, smelling their pipes and cigars as they smoked, and letting all these mortal smells get into my hair and clothes. And when I wasn't out roaming, I was traveling the realm of the books that had belonged to Gabrielle so exclusively all through those dreary mortal years at home. Before we even got to Italy, I knew enough Latin to be studying the classics, and I made a library in the old Venetian palazzo I haunted, often reading the whole night long. And of course it was the tale off Osiris that enchanted me, bringing back with it the romance of Armand's story and Marius's enigmatic words. As I pored over all the old versions, I was quietly thunderstruck by what I read. Here we have an ancient king, Osiris, a man of unworldly goodness who turns the Egyptians away from cannibalism and teaches them the art of growing crops and making wine. And how is he murdered by his brother Typhon? Osiris is tricked into lying down in a box made to the exact size of his body, and his brother Typhon then nails shut the lid. He is then thrown into the river, and when his faithful Isis finds his body, he is again attacked by Typhon, who dismembers him. All parts of his body are found save one. Now, why would Marius make reference to a myth such as this? And how could I not think on the fact that all vampires sleep in coffins which are boxes made to the size off their bodies- even the miserable rabb
le of les Innocents slept in their coffins. Magnus said to me, "In that box or its like you must always lie. " As for the missing part of the body, the part that Isis never found, well, there is one part of us which is not enhanced by the Dark Gift, isn't there? We can speak, see, taste, breathe, move as humans move, but we cannot procreate. And neither could Osiris, so he became Lord of the Dead. Was this a vampire god? But so much puzzled me and tormented me. This god Osiris was the god of wine to the Egyptians, the one later called Dionysus by the Greeks. And Dionysus was the "dark god " of the theater, the devil god whom Nicki described to me when we were boys at home. And now we had the theater full of vampires in Paris. Oh, it was too rich. I couldn't wait to tell all this to Gabrielle. But she dismissed it indifferently, saying there were hundreds of such old stories.
"Osiris was the god of the corn, " she said. "He was a good god to the Egyptians. What could this have to do with us? " She glanced at the books I was studying. "You have a great deal to learn, my son. Many an ancient god was dismembered and mourned by his goddess. Read of Actaeon and Adonis. The ancients loved those stories. " And she was gone. And I was alone in the candlelighted library, leaning on my elbows amid all these books. I brooded on Armand's dream of the sanctuary of Those Who Must Be Kept in the mountains. Was it a magic that went back to the Egyptian times? How had the Children of Darkness forgotten such things? Maybe it had all been poetry to the Venetian master, the mention of Typhon, the slayer of his brother, nothing more than that. I went out into the night with my chisel. I wrote my questions to Marius on stones that were older than us both. Marius had become so real to me that we were talking together, the way that Nicki and I had once done. He was the confidant who received my excitement, my enthusiasm, my sublime bewilderment at all the wonders and puzzles of the world. But as my studies deepened, as my education broadened, I was getting that first awesome inkling of what eternity might be. I was alone among humans, and my writing to Marius couldn't keep me from knowing my own monstrosity as I had in those first Paris nights so long ago. After all, Marius wasn't really there. And neither was Gabrielle. Almost from the beginning, Armand's predictions had proved true.
2
Before we were even out of France, Gabrielle was breaking the journey to disappear for several nights at a time. In Vienna, she often stayed away for over a fortnight, and by the time I settled in the palazzo in Venice she was going away for months on end. During my first visit to Rome, she vanished for a half year. And after she left me in Naples, I returned to Venice without her, angrily leaving her to find her way back to Veneto on her own, which she did. Of course it was the countryside that drew her, the forest or the mountains, or islands on which no human beings lived. And she would return in such a tattered state-her shoes worn out, her clothes ripped, her hair in hopeless tangles-that she was every bit as frightening to look at as the ragged members of the old Paris coven had been. Then she'd walk about my rooms in her dirty neglected garments staring at the cracks in the plaster or the light caught in the distortions of the handblown window glass. Why should immortals pore over newspapers, she would ask, or dwell in palaces? Or carry gold in their pockets? Or write letters to a mortal family left behind? In this eerie, rapid undertone she'd speak of cliffs she had climbed, the drifts of snow through which she had tumbled, the caves full of mysterious markings and ancient fossils that she had found. Then she would go as silently as she'd come, and I would be left watching for her and waiting for her-and bitter and angry at her, and resenting her when she finally came back. One night during our first visit to Verona, she startled me in a dark street.
"Is your father still alive? " she asked. Two months she'd been gone that time. I'd missed her bitterly, and there she was asking about them as if they mattered finally. Yet when I answered,
"yes, and very ill," she seemed not to hear. I tried to tell her then that things in France were bleak indeed. There would surely be a revolution. She shook her head and waved it all away.
"Don't think about them anymore, " she said. "Forget them. " And once again, she was gone. The truth was, I didn't want to forget them.
I never stopped writing to Roger for news of my family. I wrote to him more often than I wrote to Eleni at the theater. I'd sent for portraits of my nieces and nephews. I sent presents back to France from every place in which I stopped. And I did worry about the revolution, as any mortal Frenchman might. And finally, as Gabrielle's absences grew longer and our times together more strained and uncertain, I started to argue with her about these things.
"Time will take our family, " I said. "Time will take the France we knew. So why should I give them up now while I can still have them?
I need these things, I tell you. This is what life is to me! " But this was only the half of it. I didn't have her any more than I had the others.
She must have known what I was really saying. She must have heard the recrimination behind it all. Little speeches like this saddened her. They brought out the tenderness in her. She'd let me get clean clothes for her, comb out her hair. And after that we'd hunt together and talk together. Maybe she would even go to the casinos with me, or to the opera. She'd be a great and beautiful lady for a little while. And those moments still held us together. They perpetuated our belief that we were still a little coven, a pair of lovers, prevailing against the mortal world. Gathered by the fire in some country villa, riding together on the driver's seat of the coach as I held the reins, walking together through the midnight forest, we still exchanged our various observations now and then. We even went in search of haunted houses together-a newfound pastime that excited us both. In fact, Gabrielle would sometimes return from one of her journeys precisely because she had heard of a ghostly visitation and she wanted me to go with her to see what we could. Of course, most of the time we found nothing in the empty buildings where spirits were supposed to appear. And those wretched persons supposed to be possessed by the devil were often no more than commonly insane. Yet there were times when we saw fleeting apparitions or mayhem that we couldn't explain- objects flung about, voices roaring from the mouths of possessed children, icy currents that blew out the candles in a locked room. But we never learned anything from all this. We saw no more than a hundred mortal scholars had already described. It was just a game to us finally. And when I look back on it now, I know we went on with it because it kept us together gave us convivial moments which otherwise we would not have had. But Gabrielle's absences weren't the only thing destroying our affection for each other as the years passed. It was her manner when she was with me-the ideas she would put forth. She still had that habit of speaking exactly what was on her mind and little more. One night in our little house in the Via Ghibellina in Florence, she appeared after a month's absence and started to expound at once.
