by Rice, Anne
He was forcing me down on my knees. He was bent over me, and suddenly I saw his face completely and it was as impassive as ever, only the stress of the muscles in his arms evincing true life.
And even through the obliterating sound of her scream I knew the door behind me quaked with Marius’s pounding, his shouts almost as loud as her cries.
The blood was coming out of my ears from her screams. I was moving my lips.
The vise of stone clamped to my head suddenly let go. I felt myself hit the floor. I was sprawled out flat, and I felt the cold pressure of his foot on my chest. He would crush my heart in a second, and she, her screams growing ever louder, ever more piercing, was on his back with her arm locked around his neck. I saw her knotted eyebrows, her flying black hair.
But it was Marius I heard through the door talking to him, cutting through the white sound of her screams.
Kill him, Enkil, and I will take her away from you forever, and she will help me to do it! I swear!
Sudden silence. Deafness again. The warmth of blood trickling down the sides of my neck.
She stepped aside and she looked straight forward and the doors flew open, smacking the side of the narrow stone passage, and Marius was suddenly standing above me with his hands on Enkil’s shoulders and Enkil seemed unable to move.
The foot slid down, bruising my stomach, and then it was gone. And Marius was speaking words I could hear only as thoughts: Get out, Lestat. Run.
I struggled to sit up, and I saw him driving them both slowly back towards the tabernacle, and I saw them both staring not forward, but at him, Akasha clutching Enkil’s arm, and I saw their faces blank again, but for the first time the blankness seemed listless and not the mask of curiosity but the mask of death.
“Lestat, run!” he said again, without turning. And I obeyed.
16
I was at the farthest corner of the terrace when Marius finally came into the lighted salon. There was a heat in all my veins still that breathed as if it had its own life. And I could see far beyond the dim hulking shapes of the islands. I could hear the progress of a ship along a distant coast. But all I kept thinking was that if Enkil came at me again, I could jump over this railing. I could get into the sea and swim. I kept feeling his hands on the sides of my head, his foot on my chest.
I stood against the stone railing, shivering, and there was blood all over my hands still from the bruises on my face which had already completely healed.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did it,” I said as soon as Marius came out of the salon. “I don’t know why I did it. I shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I swear it, I’m sorry, Marius. I’ll never never do anything you tell me not to do again.”
He stood with his arms folded looking at me. He was glowering.
“Lestat, what did I say last night?” he asked. “You are the damnedest creature!”
“Marius, forgive me. Please forgive me. I didn’t think anything would happen. I was sure nothing would happen …”
He gestured for me to be quiet, for us to go down onto the rocks together, and he slipped over the railing and went first. I came behind him, vaguely delighted with the ease of it, but too dazed still to care about things like that. Her presence was all over me like a fragrance, only she had had no fragrance, except that of the incense and the flowers that must have somehow managed to permeate her hard white skin. How strangely fragile she had seemed in spite of that hardness.
We went down over the slippery boulders until we reached the white beach and we walked together in silence, looking out over the snow-white froth that leapt against the rocks or streaked towards us on the smooth hard-packed white sand. The wind roared in my ears, and I felt the sense of solitude this always creates in me, the roaring wind that blots out all other sensations as well as sound.
And I was getting calmer and calmer, and more and more agitated and miserable at the same time.
Marius had slipped his arm around me the way Gabrielle used to do it, and I paid no attention to where we were going, quite surprised when I saw we’d come to a small inlet of the water where a longboat lay at anchor with only a single pair of oars.
When we stopped I said again, “I’m sorry I did it! I swear I am. I didn’t believe …”
“Don’t tell me you regret it,” Marius said calmly. “You are not at all sorry that it occurred, and that you were the cause of it, now that you are safe, and not crushed like an eggshell on the chapel floor.”
“Oh, but that’s not the point,” I said. I started crying. I took out my handkerchief, grand accoutrement of an eighteenth-century gentleman, and wiped the blood off my face. I could feel her holding me, feel her blood, feel his hands. The whole thing commenced to reenact itself. If Marius hadn’t come in time …
“But what did happen, Marius? What did you see?”
“I wish we could get beyond his hearing,” Marius said wearily. “It’s madness to speak or think anything that could disturb him any further. I have to let him lapse back.”
And now he seemed truly furious and he turned his back on me.
But how could I not think about it? I wished I could open my head and pull the thoughts out of it. They were rocketing through me, like her blood. In her body was locked a mind still, an appetite, a blazing spiritual core whose heat had moved through me like liquid lightning, and without question Enkil had a deathhold upon her! I loathed him. I wanted to destroy him. And my brain seized upon all sorts of mad notions, that somehow he could be destroyed without endangering us as long as she remained!
But that made little sense. Hadn’t the demons entered first into him? But what if that wasn’t so …
“Stop it, young one!” Marius flashed.
I went to crying again. I felt of my neck where she had touched it, and licked my lips and tasted her blood again. I looked at the scattered stars above and even these benign and eternal things seemed menacing and senseless and I felt a scream swelling dangerously in my throat.
The effects of her blood were waning already. The first clear vision was clouded, and my limbs were once again my limbs. They might be stronger, yes, but the magic was dying. The magic had left only something stronger than memory of the circuit of the blood through us both.
“Marius, what happened!” I said, shouting over the wind. “Don’t be angry with me, don’t turn away from me. I can’t …”
“Shhh, Lestat,” he said. He came back and took me by the arm. “Don’t worry about my anger,” he said. “It’s unimportant, and it is not directed, at you. Give me a little more time to collect myself.”
“But did you see what happened between her and me?”
He was looking out to sea. The water looked perfectly black and the foam perfectly white.
“Yes, I saw,” he said.
“I took the violin and I wanted to play it for them, I was thinking—”
“Yes, I know, of course …”
“—that music would affect them, especially that music, that strange, unnatural-sounding music, you know how a violin …”
“Yes—”
“Marius, she gave me … she … and she took—”
“I know.”
“And he keeps her there! He keeps her prisoner!”
“Lestat, I beg you …” He was smiling wearily, sadly.
Imprison him, Marius, the way that they did, and let her go!
“You dream, my child,” he said. “You dream.”
He turned and he left me, gesturing for me to leave him alone. He went down to the wet beach and let the water lap at him as he walked back and forth.
I tried to get calm again. It seemed unreal to me that I had ever been any place but this island, that the world of mortals was out there, that the strange tragedy and menace of Those Who Must Be Kept was unknown beyond these wet and shining cliffs.
Finally Marius made his way back.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Straight west is an island that is not under my protection and there is an
old Greek city on the northern tip of it where the seamen’s taverns stay open all night. Go there now in the boat. Hunt and forget what has happened here. Assess the new powers you might have from her. But try not to think of her or him. Above all try not to plot against him. Before dawn, come back to the house. It won’t be difficult. You’ll find a dozen open doors and windows. Do as I say, now, for me.”
I bowed my head. It was the one thing under heaven that could distract me, that could wipe out any noble or enervating thoughts. Human blood and human struggle and human death.
And without protest, I made my way out through the shallow water to the boat.
In the early hours I looked at my reflection in a fragment of metallic mirror pinned to the wall of a seaman’s filthy bedroom in a little inn. I saw myself in my brocade coat and white lace, and my face warm from killing, and the dead man sprawled behind me across the table. He still held the knife with which he’d tried to cut my throat. And there was the bottle of wine with the drug in it which I’d kept refusing, with playful protestations, until he’d lost his temper and tried the last resort. His companion lay dead on the bed.
I looked at the young blond-haired rake in the mirror.
“Well, if it isn’t the vampire Lestat,” I said.
But all the blood in the world couldn’t stop the horrors from coming over me when I went to my rest.
I couldn’t stop thinking of her, wondering if it was her laugh I had heard in my sleep the night before. And I wondered that she had told me nothing in the blood, until I closed my eyes and quite suddenly things came back to me, of course, wonderful things, incoherent as they were magical. She and I were walking down a hallway together—not here but in a place I knew. I think it was a palace in Germany where Haydn wrote his music—and she spoke casually as she had a thousand times to me. But tell me about all this, what do the people believe, what turns the wheels inside of them, what are these marvelous inventions … She wore a fashionable black hat with a great white plume on its broad brim and a white veil tied round the top of it and under her chin, and her face was merely beginning, merely young.
* * *
When I opened my eyes, I knew Marius was waiting for me. I came out into the chamber and saw him standing by the empty violin case, with his back to the open window over the sea.
“You have to go now, my young one,” he said sadly. “I had hoped for more time, but that is impossible. The boat is waiting to take you away.”
“Because of what I did …” I said miserably. So I was being cast out.
“He’s destroyed the things in the chapel,” Marius said, but his voice was asking for calm. He put his arm around my shoulder, and he took my valise in his other hand. We went towards the door. “I want you to go now because it is the only thing that will quiet him, and I want you to remember not his anger, but everything that I told you, and to be confident that we will meet again as we said.”
“But are you afraid of him, Marius?”
“Oh, no, Lestat. Don’t carry this worry away with you. He has done little things like this before, now and then. He does not know what he does, really. I am convinced of that. He only knows that someone stepped between him and Akasha. Time is all that is required for him to lapse back.”
There it was, that phrase again, “lapse back.”
“And she sits as if she never moved, doesn’t she?” I asked.
“I want you away now so that you don’t provoke him,” Marius said, leading me out of the house and towards the cliffside stairs. He continued speaking:
“Whatever ability we creatures have to move objects mentally, to ignite them, to do any real harm by the power of the mind does not extend very far from the physical spot where we stand. So I want you gone from here tonight and on your way to America. All the sooner to return to me when he is no longer agitated and no longer remembers, and I will have forgotten nothing and will be waiting for you.”
I saw the galley in the harbor below when we reached the edge of the cliff. The stairs looked impossible, but they weren’t impossible. What was impossible was that I was leaving Marius and this island right now.
“You needn’t come down with me,” I said, taking the valise from him. I was trying not to sound bitter and crestfallen. After all, I had caused this. “I would rather not weep in front of others. Leave me here.”
“I wish we had had a few more nights together,” he said, “for us to consider in quiet what took place. But my love goes with you. And try to remember the things I’ve told you. When we meet again we’ll have much to say to each other—” He paused.
“What is it, Marius?”
“Tell me truthfully,” he asked. “Are you sorry that I came for you in Cairo, sorry that I brought you here?”
“How could I be?” I asked. “I’m only sorry that I’m going. What if I can’t find you again or you can’t find me?”
“When the time is right, I’ll find you,” he said. “And always remember: you have the power to call to me, as you did before. When I hear that call, I can bridge distances to answer that I could never bridge on my own. If the time is right, I will answer. Of that you can be sure.”
I nodded. There was too much to say and I didn’t speak a word.
We embraced for a long moment, and then I turned and slowly started my descent, knowing he would understand why I didn’t look back.
17
I did not know how much I wanted “the world” until my ship finally made its way up the murky Bayou St. Jean towards the city of New Orleans, and I saw the black ragged line of the swamp against the luminous sky.
The fact that none of our kind had ever penetrated this wilderness excited me and humbled me at the same time.
Before the sun rose on that first morning, I’d fallen in love with the low and damp country, as I had with the dry heat of Egypt, and as time passed I came to love it more than any spot on the globe.
Here the scents were so strong you smelled the raw green of the leaves as well as the pink and yellow blossoms. And the great brown river, surging past the miserable little Place d’Armes and its tiny cathedral, threw into eclipse every other fabled river I’d ever seen.
Unnoticed and unchallenged, I explored the ramshackle little colony with its muddy streets and gunwale sidewalks and dirty Spanish soldiers lounging about the calaboose. I lost myself in the dangerous waterfront shacks full of gambling and brawling flatboatmen and lovely dark-skinned Caribbean women, wandering out again to glimpse the silent flash of lightning, hear the dim roar of the thunder, feel the silky warmth of the summer rain.
The low-slung roofs of the little cottages gleamed under the moon. Light skittered on the iron gates of the fine Spanish town houses. It flickered behind real lace curtains hung inside freshly washed glass doors. I walked among the crude little bungalows that spread out to the ramparts, peeping through windows at gilded furniture and enameled bits of wealth and civilization that in this barbaric place seemed priceless and fastidious and even sad.
Now and then through the mire there came a vision: a real French gentleman done up in snow-white wig and fancy frock coat, his wife in panniers, and a black slave carrying clean slippers for the two high above the flowing mud.
I knew that I had come to the most forsaken outpost of the Savage Garden, and that this was my country and I would remain in New Orleans, if New Orleans could only manage to remain. Whatever I suffered should be lessened in this lawless place, whatever I craved should give me more pleasure once I had it in my grasp.
And there were moments on that first night in this fetid little paradise when I prayed that in spite of all my secret power, I was somehow kin to every mortal man. Maybe I was not the exotic outcast that I imagined, but merely the dim magnification of every human soul.
Old truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all.
And weary finally of this complexity, we dream of that long-ago time whe
n we sat upon our mother’s knee and each kiss was the perfect consummation of desire. What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now contain both heaven and hell: our doom again and again and again.
Epilogue
Interview with the Vampire
1
And so I came to the end of The Early Education and Adventures of the Vampire Lestat, the tale that I set out to tell. You have the account of Old World magic and mystery which I have chosen, despite all prohibitions and injunctions, to pass on.
But my story isn’t finished, no matter how reluctant I might be to continue it. And I must consider, at least briefly, the painful events that led to my decision to go down into the earth in 1929.
That was a hundred and forty years after I left Marius’s island. And I never set eyes upon Marius again. Gabrielle also remained completely lost to me. She’d vanished that night in Cairo never to be heard from by anyone mortal or immortal that I was ever to know.
And when I made my grave in the twentieth century, I was alone and weary and badly wounded in body and soul.
I’d lived out my “one lifetime” as Marius advised me to do. But I couldn’t blame Marius for the way in which I’d lived it, and the hideous mistakes I’d made.
Sheer will had shaped my experience more than any other human characteristic. And advice and predictions notwithstanding, I courted tragedy and disaster as I have always done. Yet I had my rewards, I can’t deny that. For almost seventy years I had my fledgling vampires Louis and Claudia, two of the most splendid immortals who ever walked the earth, and I had them on my terms.
Shortly after reaching the colony, I fell fatally in love with Louis, a young dark-haired bourgeois planter, graceful of speech and fastidious of manner, who seemed in his cynicism and self-destructiveness the very twin of Nicolas.
He had Nicki’s grim intensity, his rebelliousness, his tortured capacity to believe and not to believe, and finally to despair.
