by Rice, Anne
I raised my hands slowly to command their attention, and very loudly and steadily I sang the ditty to Flaminia, my lovely Flaminia, a dull little couplet spilling into another couplet, and I let my voice grow louder and louder until suddenly people were rising and screaming before me, but louder still I sang it until it obliterated every other noise and in the intolerable roar I saw them all, hundreds of them, overturning the benches as they stood up, their hands clamped to the sides of their heads.
Their mouths were grimaces, toneless screams.
Pandemonium. Shrieks, curses, all stumbling and struggling towards the doors. Curtains were pulled from their fastenings. Men dropped down from the gallery to rush for the street.
I stopped the horrid song.
I stood watching them in a ringing silence, the weak, sweating bodies straining clumsily in every direction. The wind gusted from the open doorways, and I felt a strange coldness over all my limbs and it seemed my eyes were made of glass.
Without looking, I picked up the sword and put it on again, and hooked my finger into the velvet collar of my crumpled and dusty roquelaure. All these gestures seemed as grotesque as everything else I had done, and it seemed of no import that Nicolas was trying to get loose from two of the actors who held him in fear of his life as he shouted my name.
But something out of the chaos caught my attention. It did seem to matter—to be terribly, terribly important, in fact—that there was a figure standing above in one of the open boxes who did not struggle to escape or even move.
I turned slowly and looked up at him, daring him, it seemed, to remain there. An old man he was, and his dull gray eyes were boring into me with stubborn outrage, and as I glared at him, I heard myself let out a loud open-mouthed roar. Out of my soul it seemed to come, this sound. It grew louder and louder until those few left below cowered again with their ears stopped, and even Nicolas, rushing forward, buckled beneath the sound of it, both hands clasped to his head.
And yet the man stood there in the loge glowering, indignant and old, and stubborn, with furrowed brows under his gray wig.
I stepped back and leapt across the empty house, landing in the box directly before him, and his jaw fell in spite of himself and his eyes grew hideously wide.
He seemed deformed with age, his shoulders rounded, his hands gnarled, but the spirit in his eyes was beyond vanity and beyond compromise. His mouth hardened and his chin jutted. And from under his frock coat he pulled his pistol and he aimed it at me with both hands.
“Lestat!” Nicki shouted.
But the shot exploded and the ball hit me with full force. I didn’t move. I stood as steady as the old man had stood before, and the pain rolled through me and stopped, leaving in its wake a terrible pulling in all my veins.
The blood poured out. It flowed as I have never seen blood flow. It drenched my shirt and I could feel it spilling down my back. But the pulling grew stronger and stronger, and a warm tingling sensation had commenced to spread across the surface of my back and chest.
The man stared, dumbfounded. The pistol dropped out of his hand. His head went back, eyes blind, and his body crumpled as if the air had been let out of it, and he lay on the floor.
Nicki had raced up the stairs and was now rushing into the box. A low hysterical murmuring was issuing from him. He thought he was witnessing my death.
And I stood still hearkening to my body in that terrible solitude that had been mine since Magnus made me the vampire. And I knew the wounds were no longer there.
The blood was drying on the silk vest, drying on the back of my torn coat. My body throbbed where the bullet had passed through me and my veins were alive with that same pulling, but the injury was no more.
And Nicolas, coming to his senses as he looked at me, realized I was unharmed, though his reason told him it couldn’t be true.
I pushed past him and made for the stairs. He flung himself against me and I threw him off. I couldn’t stand the sight of him, the smell of him.
“Get away from me!” I said.
But he came back again and he locked his arm around my neck. His face was bloated and there was an awful sound coming out of him.
“Let go of me, Nicki!” I threatened him. If I shoved him off too roughly, I’d tear his arms out of the sockets, break his back.
Break his back …
He moaned, stuttered. And for one harrowing split second the sounds he made were as terrible as the sound that had come from my dying animal on the mountain, my horse, crushed like an insect into the snow.
I scarcely knew what I was doing when I pried loose his hands.
The crowd broke, screaming, when I walked out onto the boulevard.
Renaud ran forward, in spite of those trying to restrain him.
“Monsieur!” He grabbed my hand to kiss it and stopped, staring at the blood.
“Nothing, my dear Renaud,” I said to him, quite surprised at the steadiness of my voice and its softness. But something distracted me as I started to speak again, something I should hearken to, I thought vaguely, yet I went on.
“Don’t give it a thought, my dear Renaud,” I said. “Stage blood, nothing but an illusion. It was all an illusion. A new kind of theatrical. Drama of the grotesque, yes, the grotesque.”
But again came that distraction, something I was sensing in the melee around me, people shuffling and pushing to get close but not too close, Nicolas stunned and staring.
“Go on with your plays,” I was saying, almost unable to concentrate on my own words, “your acrobats, your tragedies, your more civilized theatricals, if you like.”
I pulled the bank notes out of my pocket and put them in his unsteady hand. I spilled gold coins onto the pavement. The actors darted forward fearfully to gather them up. I scanned the crowd around for the source of this strange distraction, what was it, not Nicolas in the door of the deserted theater, watching me with a broken soul.
No, something else both familiar and unfamiliar, having to do with the dark.
“Hire the finest mummers”—I was half babbling—“the best musicians, the great scene painters.” More bank notes. My voice was getting loud again, the vampire voice, I could see the grimaces again and the hands going up, but they were afraid to let me see them cover their ears. “There is no limit, NO LIMIT, to what you can do here!”
I broke away, dragging my roquelaure with me, the sword clanking awkwardly because it was not buckled right. Something of the dark.
And I knew when I hurried into the first alleyway and started to run what it was that I had heard, what had distracted me, it had been the presence, undeniably, in the crowd!
I knew it for one simple reason: I was running now in the back streets faster than a mortal can run. And the presence was keeping time with me and the presence was more than one!
I came to a halt when I knew it for certain.
I was only a mile from the boulevard and the crooked alley around me narrow and black as any in which I had ever been. And I heard them before they seemed, quite purposefully and abruptly, to silence themselves.
I was too anxious and miserable to play with them! I was too dazed. I shouted the old question, “Who are you, speak to me!” The glass panes rattled in the nearby windows. Mortals stirred in their little chambers. There was no cemetery here. “Answer me, you pack of cowards. Speak if you have a voice or once and for all get away from me!”
And then I knew, though how I knew, I can’t tell you, that they could hear me and they could answer me, if they chose. And I knew that what I had always heard was the irrepressible evidence of their proximity and their intensity, which they couldn’t disguise. But their thoughts they could cloak and they had. I mean, they had intellect, and they had words.
I let out a long low breath.
I was stung by their silence, but I was stung a thousand times more by what had just happened, and as I’d done so many times in the past I turned my back on them.
They followed me. This time they followed,
and no matter how swiftly I moved, they came on.
And I did not lose that strange toneless shimmer of them until I reached the place de Gréve and went into the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
I spent the remainder of the night in the cathedral, huddled in a shadowy place by the right wall. I hungered for the blood I’d lost, and each time a mortal drew near I felt a strong pulling and tingling where the wounds had been.
But I waited.
And when a young beggar woman with a little child approached, I knew the moment had come. She saw the dried blood, and became frantic to get me to the nearby hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu. Her face was thin with hunger, but she tried to lift me herself with her little arms.
I looked into her eyes until I saw them glaze over. I felt the heat of her breasts swelling beneath her rags. Her soft, succulent body tumbled against me, giving itself to me, as I nestled her in all the bloodstained brocade and lace. I kissed her, feeding on her heat as I pushed the dirty cloth away from her throat, and I bent for the drink so skillfully that the sleepy child never saw it. Then I opened with careful trembling fingers the child’s ragged shirt. This was mine, too, this little neck.
There weren’t any words for the rapture. Before I’d had all the ecstasy that rape could give. But these victims had been taken in the perfect semblance of love. The very blood seemed warmer with their innocence, richer with their goodness.
I looked at them afterwards, as they slept together in death. They had found no sanctuary in the cathedral on this night.
And I knew my vision of the garden of savage beauty had been a true vision. There was meaning in the world, yes, and laws, and inevitability, but they had only to do with the aesthetic. And in this Savage Garden, these innocent ones belonged in the vampire’s arms. A thousand other things can be said about the world, but only aesthetic principles can be verified, and these things alone remain the same.
I was now ready to go home. And as I went out in the early morning, I knew that the last barrier between my appetite and the world had been dissolved.
No one was safe from me now, no matter how innocent. And that included my dear friends at Renaud’s and it included my beloved Nick.
13
I wanted them gone from Paris. I wanted the playbills down, the doors shut; I wanted silence and darkness in the little rattrap theater where I had known the greatest and most sustained happiness of my mortal life.
Not a dozen innocent victims a night could make me stop thinking about them, could make this ache in me dissolve. Every street in Paris led to their door.
And an ugly shame came over me when I thought of my frightening them. How could I have done that to them? Why did I need to prove to myself with such violence that I could never be part of them again?
No. I’d bought Renaud’s. I’d turned it into the showcase of the boulevard. Now I would close it down.
It was not that they suspected anything, however. They believed the simple stupid excuses Roget gave them, that I was just back from the heat of the tropical colonies, that the good Paris wine had gone right to my head. Plenty of money again to repair the damage.
God only knows what they really thought. The fact was, they went back to regular performances the following evening, and the jaded crowds of the boulevard du Temple undoubtedly put upon the mayhem a dozen sensible explanations. There was a queue under the chestnut trees.
Only Nicki was having none of it. He had taken to heavy drinking and refused to return to the theater or study his music anymore. He insulted Roget when he came to call. To the worst cafés and taverns he went, and wandered alone through the dangerous nighttime streets.
Well, we have that in common, I thought.
All this Roget told me as I paced the floor a good distance from the candle on his table, my face a mask of my true thoughts.
“Money doesn’t mean very much to the young man, Monsieur,” he said. “The young man has had plenty of money in his life, he reminds me. He says things that disturb me, Monsieur. I don’t like the sound of them.”
Roget looked like a nursery rhyme figure in his flannel cap and gown, legs and feet naked because I had roused him again in the middle of the night and given him no time to put on his slippers even or to comb his hair.
“What does he say?” I demanded.
“He talks about sorcery, Monsieur. He says that you possess unusual powers. He speaks of La Voisin and the Chambre Ardente, an old case of sorcery under the Sun King, the witch who made charms and poisons for members of the Court.”
“Who would believe that trash now?” I affected absolute bewilderment. The truth was, the hair was standing up on the back of my neck.
“Monsieur, he says bitter things,” he went on. “That your kind, as he puts it, has always had access to great secrets. He keeps speaking of some place in your town, called the witches’ place.”
“My kind!”
“That you are an aristocrat, Monsieur,” Roget said. He was a little embarrassed. “When a man is angry as Monsieur de Lenfent is angry, these things come to be important. But he doesn’t whisper his suspicions to the others. He tells only me. He says that you will understand why he despises you. You have refused to share with him your discoveries! Yes, Monsieur, your discoveries. He goes on about La Voisin, about things between heaven and earth for which there are no rational explanations. He says he knows now why you cried at the witches’ place.”
I couldn’t look at Roget for a moment. It was such a lovely perversion of everything! And yet it hit right at the truth. How gorgeous, and how perfectly irrelevant. In his own way, Nicki was right.
“Monsieur, you are the kindest man—” Roget said.
“Spare me, please …”
“But Monsieur de Lenfent says fantastical things, things he should not say even in this day and age, that he saw a bullet pass through your body that should have killed you.”
“The bullet missed me,” I said. “Roget, don’t go on with it. Get them out of Paris, all of them.”
“Get them out?” he asked. “But you’ve put so much money into this little enterprise …”
“So what? Who gives a damn?” I said. “Send them to London, to Drury Lane. Offer Renaud enough for his own London theater. From there they might go to America—Saint-Domingue, New Orleans, New York. Do it, Monsieur. I don’t care what it takes. Close up my theater and get them gone!”
And then the ache will be gone, won’t it? I’ll stop seeing them gathered around me in the wings, stop thinking about Lelio, the boy from the provinces who emptied their slop buckets and loved it.
Roget looked so profoundly timid. What is it like, working for a well-dressed lunatic who pays you triple what anyone else would pay you to forget your better judgment?
I’ll never know. I’ll never know what it is like to be human in any way, shape, or form again.
“As for Nicolas,” I said. “You’re going to persuade him to go to Italy and I’ll tell you how.”
“Monsieur, even persuading him to change his clothes would take some doing.”
“This will be easier. You know how ill my mother is. Well, get him to take her to Italy. It’s the perfect thing. He can very well study music at the conservatories in Naples, and that is exactly where my mother should go.”
“He does write to her … is very fond of her.”
“Precisely. Convince him she’ll never make the journey without him. Make all the arrangements for him. Monsieur, you must accomplish this. He must leave Paris. I give you till the end of the week, and then I’ll be back for the news that he’s gone.”
It was asking a lot of Roget, of course. But I could think of no other way. Nobody would believe Nicki’s ideas about sorcery, that was no worry. But I knew now that if Nicki didn’t leave Paris, he would be driven slowly out of his mind.
As the nights passed, I fought with myself every waking hour not to seek him out, not to risk one last exchange.
I just waited, knowing full well that I was losing him for
ever and that he would never know the reasons for anything that had come to pass. I, who had once railed against the meaninglessness of our existence, was driving him off without explanation, an injustice that might torment him to the end of his days.
Better that than the truth, Nicki. Maybe I understand all illusions a little better now. And if you can only get my mother to go to Italy, if there is only time for my mother still …
Meantime I could see for myself that Renaud’s House of Thesbians was closed down. In the nearby café, I heard talk of the troupe’s departure for England. So that much of the plan had been accomplished.
It was near dawn on the eighth night when I finally wandered up to Roget’s door and pulled the bell.
He answered sooner than I expected, looking befuddled and anxious in the usual white flannel nightshirt.
“I’m getting to like that garb of yours, Monsieur,” I said wearily. “I don’t think I’d trust you half as much if you wore a shirt and breeches and a coat …”
“Monsieur,” he interrupted me. “Something quite unexpected—”
“Answer me first. Renaud and the others went happily to England?”
“Yes, Monsieur. They’re in London by now, but—”
“And Nicki? Gone to my mother in the Auvergne. Tell me I’m right. It’s done.”
“But Monsieur!” he said. And then he stopped. And quite unexpectedly, I saw the image of my mother in his mind.
Had I been thinking, I would have known what it meant. This man had never to my knowledge laid eyes upon my mother, so how could he picture her in his thoughts? But I wasn’t using my reason. In fact my reason had flown.
“She hasn’t … you’re not telling me that it’s too late,” I said.
“Monsieur, let me get my coat …” he said inexplicably. He reached for the bell.
And there it was, her image again, her face, drawn and white, and all too vivid for me to stand it.
I took Roget by the shoulders.
“You’ve seen her! She’s here.”
“Yes, Monsieur. She’s in Paris. I’ll take you to her now. Young de Lenfent told me she was coming. But I couldn’t reach you, Monsieur! I never know where to reach you. And yesterday she arrived.”
