by Rice, Anne
I lay staring at him as he came into the deserted garden, the illumination of the sky heating my eyes, the tender skin around them starting to burn. Like a ghost in a white sheet he was in his clean headdress and robe.
I knew that I had to run. I had to get far away immediately and hide myself from the coming sun. No chance now to go into the crypt beneath the floor. This mortal was in my lair. There was not time enough even to kill him and get rid of him, poor unlucky mortal.
Yet I didn’t move. And he came nearer, the whole sky flickering behind him, so that his figure narrowed and became dark.
“Monsieur!” The solicitous whisper, like the woman years and years ago in Notre Dame who had tried to help me before I made a victim of her and her innocent child. “Monsieur, what is it? May I be of help?”
Sunburnt face beneath the folds of the white headdress, golden eyebrows glinting, eyes gray like my own.
I knew I was climbing to my feet, but I didn’t will myself to do it. I knew my lips were curling back from my teeth. And then I heard a snarl rise out of me and saw the shock on his face.
“Look!” I hissed, the fangs coming down over my lower lip. “Do you see!”
And rushing towards him, I grabbed his wrist and forced his open hand flat against my face.
“Did you think I was human?” I cried. And then I picked him up, holding him off his feet before me as he kicked and struggled uselessly. “Did you think I was your brother?” I shouted. And his mouth opened with a dry rasping noise, and then he screamed.
I hurled him up into the air and out over the garden, his body spinning round with arms and legs out before it vanished over the shimmering roof.
The sky was blinding fire.
I ran out of the garden gate and into the alleyway. I ran under tiny archways and through strange streets. I battered down gates and doorways, and hurled mortals out of my path. I bore through the very walls in front of me, the dust of the plaster rising to choke me, and shot out again into the packed mud alley and the stinking air. And the light came after me like something chasing me on foot.
And when I found a burnt-out house with its lattices in ruins, I broke into it and went down into the garden soil, digging deeper and deeper and deeper until I could not move my arms or my hands any longer.
I was hanging in coolness and in darkness.
I was safe.
6
I was dying. Or so I thought. I couldn’t count how many nights had passed. I had to rise and go to Alexandria. I had to get across the sea. But this meant moving, turning over in the earth, giving in to the thirst. I wouldn’t give in.
The thirst came. The thirst went. It was the rack and the fire, and my brain thirsted as my heart thirsted, and my heart grew bigger and bigger, and louder and louder, and still I wouldn’t give in.
Maybe mortals above could hear my heart. I saw them now and then, spurts of flame against the darkness, heard their voices, babble of foreign tongue. But more often I saw only the darkness. Heard only the darkness.
I was finally just the thirst lying in the earth, with red sleep and red dreams, and the slow knowledge that I was now too weak to push up through the soft sandy clods, too weak, conceivably, to turn the wheel again.
That’s right. I couldn’t rise if I wanted to. I couldn’t move at all. I breathed. I went on. But not the way that mortals breathe. My heart sounded in my ears.
Yet I didn’t die. I just wasted. Like those tortured beings in the walls under les Innocents, deserted metaphors of the misery that is everywhere unseen, unrecorded, unacknowledged, unused.
My hands were claws, and my flesh was shrunk to the bones, and my eyes bulged from the sockets. Interesting that we can go on like this forever, that even when we don’t drink, don’t surrender to the luscious and fatal pleasure, we go on. Interesting that is, if each beat of the heart wasn’t such agony.
And if I could stop thinking: Nicolas de Lenfent is gone. My brothers are gone. Pale taste of wine, sound of applause. “But don’t you think it’s good what we do when we are there, that we make people happy?”
“Good? What are you talking about? Good?”
“That it’s good, that it does some good, that there is good in it! Dear God, even if there is no meaning in this world, surely there can still be goodness. It’s good to eat, to drink, to laugh … to be together …”
Laughter. That insane music. That din, that dissonance, that never ending shrill articulation of the meaninglessness …
Am I awake? Am I asleep? I am sure of one thing. I am a monster. And because I lie in torment in the earth, certain human beings move on through the narrow pass of life unmolested.
Gabrielle may be in the jungles of Africa now.
Sometime or other mortals came into the burnt-out house above, thieves hiding. Too much babble of foreign tongue. But all I had to do was sink deeper inside myself, withdraw even from the cool sand around me not to hear them.
Am I really trapped?
Stink of blood above.
Maybe they are the last hope, these two camping in the neglected garden, that the blood will draw me upwards, that it will make me turn over and stretch out these hideous—they must be—claws.
I will frighten them to death before I even drink. Shameful. I was always such a beautiful little devil, as the expression goes. Not now.
Now and then, it seems, Nicki and I are engaged in our best conversations. “I am beyond all pain and sin,” he says to me. “But do you feel anything?” I ask. “Is that what it means to be free of this, that you no longer feel?” Not misery, not thirst, not ecstasy? It is interesting to me in these moments that our concept of heaven is one of ecstasy. The joys of heaven. That our concept of hell is pain. The fires of hell. So we don’t think it very good not to feel anything, do we?
Can you give it up, Lestat? Or isn’t it true that you’d rather fight the thirst with this hellish torment than die and feel nothing? At least you have the desire for blood, hot and delicious and filling every particle of you—blood.
How long are these mortals going to be here, above in my ruined garden? One night, two nights? I left the violin in the house where I lived. I have to get it, give it to some young mortal musicians, someone who will …
Blessed silence. Except for the playing of the violin. And Nicki’s white fingers stabbing at the strings, and the bow streaking in the light, and the faces of the immortal marionettes, half entranced, half amused. One hundred years ago, the people of Paris would have got him. He wouldn’t have had to burn himself. Got me too maybe. But I doubt it.
No, there never would have been any witches’ place for me.
He lives on in my mind now. Pious mortal phrase. And what kind of life is that? I don’t like living here myself! What does it mean to live on in the mind of another? Nothing, I think. You aren’t really there, are you?
Cats in the garden. Stink of cat blood.
Thank you, but I would rather suffer, rather dry up like a husk with teeth.
7
There was a sound in the night. What was it like?
The giant bass drum beaten slowly in the street of my childhood village as the Italian players announced the little drama to be performed from the back of their painted wagon. The great bass drum that I myself had pounded through the streets of the town during those precious days when I, the runaway boy, had been one of them.
But it was stronger than that. The booming of a cannon echoing through valleys and mountain passes? I felt it in my bones. I opened my eyes in the dark, and I knew it was drawing nearer.
The rhythm of steps, it had, or was it the rhythm of a heart beating? The world was filled with the sound.
It was a great ominous din that drew closer and closer. And yet some part of me knew there was no real sound, nothing a mortal ear could hear, nothing that rattled the china on its shelf or the glass windows. Or made the cats streak to the top of the wall.
Egypt lies in silence. Silence covers the desert on both sides of the
mighty river. There is not even the bleat of sheep or the lowing of cattle. Or a woman crying somewhere.
Yet it was deafening, this sound.
For one second I was afraid. I stretched in the earth. I forced my fingers up towards the surface. Sightless, weightless, I was floating in the soil, and I couldn’t breathe suddenly, I couldn’t scream, and it seemed that if I could have screamed, I would have cried out so loud all the glass for miles about me would have been shattered. Crystal goblets would have been blown to bits, windows exploded.
The sound was louder, nearer. I tried to roll over and to gain the air but I couldn’t.
And it seemed then I saw the thing, the figure approaching. A glimmer of red in the dark.
It was someone coming, this sound, some creature so powerful that even in the silence the trees and the flowers and the air itself did feel it. The dumb creatures of the earth did know. The vermin ran from it, the felines darting out of its path.
Maybe this is death, I thought.
Maybe by some sublime miracle it is alive, Death, and it takes us into its arms, and it is no vampire, this thing, it is the very personification of the heavens.
And we rise up and up into the stars with it. We go past the angels and the saints, past illumination itself and into the divine darkness, into the void, as we pass out of existence. In oblivion we are forgiven all things.
The destruction of Nicki becomes a tiny pinpoint of vanishing light. The death of my brothers disintegrates into the great peace of the inevitable.
I pushed at the soil. I kicked at it, but my hands and legs were too weak. I tasted the sandy mud in my mouth. I knew I had to rise, and the sound was telling me to rise.
I felt it again like the roar of artillery: the cannon boom.
And quite completely I understood that it was looking for me, this sound, it was seeking me out. It was searching like a beam of light. I couldn’t lie here anymore. I had to answer.
I sent it the wildest current of welcome. I told it I was here, and I heard my own miserable breaths as I struggled to move my lips. And the sound grew so loud that it was pulsing through every fiber of me. The earth was moving with it around me.
Whatever it was, it had come into the burnt-out ruined house.
The door had been broken away, as if the hinges had been anchored not in iron but in plaster. I saw all this against the backdrop of my closed eyes. I saw it moving under the olive trees. It was in the garden.
In a frenzy again I clawed towards the air. But the low, common noise I heard now was of a digging through the sand from above.
I felt something soft like velvet brush my face. And I saw overhead the gleam of the dark sky and the drift of the clouds like a veil over the stars, and never had the heavens in all their simplicity looked so blessed.
My lungs filled with air.
I let out a loud moan at the pleasure of it. But all these sensations were beyond pleasure. To breathe, to see light, these were miracles. And the drumming sound, the great deafening boom seemed the perfect accompaniment.
And he, the one who had been looking for me, the one from whom the sound came, was standing over me.
The sound melted; it disintegrated until it was no more than the aftersound of a violin string. And I was rising, just as if I were being lifted, up out of the earth, though this figure stood with its hands at its side.
At last, it lifted its arms to enfold me and the face I saw was beyond the realm of all possibility. What one of us could have such a face? What did we know of patience, of seeming goodness, of compassion? No, it wasn’t one of us. It couldn’t have been. And yet it was. Preternatural flesh and blood like mine. Iridescent eyes, gathering the light from all directions, tiny eyelashes like strokes of gold from the finest pen.
And this creature, this powerful vampire, was holding me upright and looking into my eyes, and I believe that I said some mad thing, voiced some frantic thought, that I knew now the secret of eternity.
“Then tell it to me,” he whispered, and he smiled. The purest image of human love.
“O God, help me. Damn me to the pit of hell.” This was my voice speaking. I can’t look on this beauty.
I saw my arms like bones, hands like birds’ talons. Nothing can live and be what I am now, this wraith. I looked down at my legs. They were sticks. The clothing was falling off me. I couldn’t stand or move, and the remembered sensation of blood flowing in my mouth suddenly overcame me.
Like a dull blaze before me I saw his red velvet clothes, the cloak that covered him to the ground, the dark red gloved hands with which he held me. His hair was thick, white and gold strands mingled in waves fallen loosely around his face, and over his broad forehead. And the blue eyes might have been brooding under their heavy golden brows had they not been so large, so softened with the feeling expressed in the voice.
A man in the prime of life at the moment of the immortal gift. And the square face, with its slightly hollowed cheeks, its long full mouth, stamped with terrifying gentleness and peace.
“Drink,” he said, eyebrows rising slightly, lips shaping the word carefully, slowly, as if it were a kiss.
As Magnus had done on that lethal night so many eons ago, he raised his hand now and moved the cloth back from his throat. The vein, dark purple beneath the translucent preternatural skin, offered itself. And the sound commenced again, that overpowering sound, and it lifted me right off the earth and drew me into it.
Blood like light itself, liquid fire. Our blood.
And my arms gathering incalculable strength, winding round his shoulders, my face pressed to his cool white flesh, the blood shooting down into my loins and every vessel in my body ignited with it. How many centuries had purified this blood, distilled its power?
It seemed beneath the roar of the flow he spoke. He said again:
“Drink, my young one, my wounded one.”
I felt his heart swell, his body undulate, and we were sealed against each other.
I think I heard myself say:
“Marius.”
And he answered:
“Yes.”
1
When I awoke, I was on board a ship. I could hear the creak of the boards, smell the sea. I could smell the blood of those who manned the ship. And I knew that it was a galley because I could hear the rhythm of the oars under the low rumbling of the giant canvas sails.
I couldn’t open my eyes, couldn’t make my limbs move. Yet I was calm. I didn’t thirst. In fact, I experienced an extraordinary sense of peace. My body was warm as if I had only just fed, and it was pleasant to lie there, to dream waking dreams on the gentle undulation of the sea. Then my mind began to clear.
I knew that we were slipping very fast through rather still waters. And that the sun had just gone down. The early evening sky was darkening, the wind was dying away. And the sound of the oars dipping and rising was as soothing as it was clear.
My eyes were now open.
I was no longer in the coffin. I had just come out of the rear cabin of the long vessel and I was standing on the deck.
I breathed the fresh salt air and I saw the lovely incandescent blue of the twilight sky and the multitude of brilliant stars overhead. Never from land do the stars look like that. Never are they so near.
There were dark mountainous islands on either side of us, cliffs sprinkled with tiny flickering lights. The air was full of the scent of green things, of flowers, of land itself.
And the small sleek vessel was moving fast to a narrow pass through the cliffs ahead.
I felt uncommonly clearheaded and strong. There was a moment’s temptation to try to figure out how I had gotten here, whether I was in the Aegean or the Mediterranean itself, to know when we had left Cairo and if the things I remembered had really taken place.
But this slipped away from me in some quiet acceptance of what was happening.
Marius was up ahead on the bridge before the mainmast. I walked towards the bridge and stood beside it, looking up.
/> He was wearing the long red velvet cloak he had worn in Cairo, and his full white blond hair was blown back by the wind. His eyes were fixed on the pass before us, the dangerous rocks that protruded from the shallow water, his left hand gripping the rail of the little deck.
I felt an overpowering attraction to him, and the sense of peace in me expanded.
There was no forbidding grandeur to his face or his stance, no loftiness that might have humbled me and made me afraid. There was only a quiet nobility about him, his eyes rather wide as they looked forward, the mouth suggesting a disposition of exceptional gentleness as before.
Too smooth the face, yes. It had the sheen of scar tissue, it was so smooth, and it might have startled, even frightened, in a dark street. It gave off a faint light. But the expression was too warm, too human in its goodness to do anything but invite.
Armand might have looked like a god out of Caravaggio, Gabrielle a marble archangel at the threshold of a church.
But this figure above me was that of an immortal man.
And the immortal man, with his right hand outstretched before him, was silently but unmistakably piloting the ship through the rocks before the pass.
The waters around us shimmered like molten metal, flashing azure, then silver, then black. They sent up a great white froth as the shallow waves beat upon the rocks.
I drew closer and as quietly as I could I climbed the small steps to the bridge.
Marius didn’t take his eyes off the waters for an instant, but he reached out with his left hand and took my hand, which was at my side.
Warmth. Unobtrusive pressure. But this wasn’t the moment for speaking and I was surprised that he had acknowledged me at all.
His eyebrows came together and his eyes narrowed slightly, and, as if impelled by his silent command, the oarsmen slowed their stroke.
I was fascinated by what I was watching, and I realized as I deepened my own concentration that I could feel the power emanating from him, a low pulse that came in time with his heart.
