by Anne Rice
But this was just the surface. I found myself astounded by the more profound changes that moved this awesome current along.
For example, something altogether magical had happened to time.
The old was not being routinely replaced by the new anymore. On the contrary, the English spoken around me was the same as it had been in the 1800s. Even the old slang (“the coast is clear” or “bad luck” or “that’s the thing”) was still “current.” Yet fascinating new phrases like “they brainwashed you” and “it’s so Freudian” and “I can’t relate to it” were on everyone’s lips.
In the art and entertainment worlds all prior centuries were being “recycled.” Musicians performed Mozart as well as jazz and rock music; people went to see Shakespeare one night and a new French film the next.
In giant fluorescent-lighted emporiums you could buy tapes of medieval madrigals and play them on your car stereo as you drove ninety miles an hour down the freeway. In the bookstores Renaissance poetry sold side by side with the novels of Dickens or Ernest Hemingway. Sex manuals lay on the same tables with the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Sometimes the wealth and the cleanliness everywhere around me became like an hallucination. I thought I was going out of my head.
Through shop windows I gazed stupefied at computers and telephones as pure in form and color as nature’s most exotic shells. Gargantuan silver limousines navigated the narrow French Quarter streets like indestructible sea beasts. Glittering office towers pierced the night sky like Egyptian obelisks above the sagging brick buildings of old Canal Street. Countless television programs poured their ceaseless flow of images into every air-cooled hotel room.
But it was no series of hallucinations. This century had inherited the earth in every sense.
And no small part of this unpredicted miracle was the curious innocence of these people in the very midst of their freedom and their wealth. The Christian god was as dead as he had been in the 1700s. And no new mythological religion had arisen to take the place of the old.
On the contrary, the simplest people of this age were driven by a vigorous secular morality as strong as any religious morality I had ever known. The intellectuals carried the standards. But quite ordinary individuals all over America cared passionately about “peace” and “the poor” and “the planet” as if driven by a mystical zeal.
Famine they intended to wipe out in this century. Disease they would destroy no matter what the cost. They argued ferociously about the execution of condemned criminals, the abortion of unborn babies. And the threats of “environmental pollution” and “holocaustal war” they battled as fiercely as men have battled witchcraft and heresy in ages past.
As for sexuality, it was no longer a matter of superstition and fear. The last religious overtones were being stripped from it. That was why the people went around half naked. That was why they kissed and hugged each other in the streets. They talked ethics now and responsibility and the beauty of the body. Procreation and venereal disease they had under control.
• • •
AH, THE twentieth century. Ah, the turn of the great wheel.
It had outdistanced my wildest dreams of it, this future. It had made fools of grim prophets of ages past.
I did a lot of thinking about this sinless secular morality, this optimism. This brilliantly lighted world where the value of human life was greater than it had ever been before.
IN THE amber electric twilight of a vast hotel room I watched on the screen before me the stunningly crafted film of war called Apocalypse Now. Such a symphony of sound and color it was, and it sang of the age-old battle of the Western world against evil. “You must make a friend of horror and moral terror,” says the mad commander in the savage garden of Cambodia, to which the Western man answers as he has always answered: No.
No. Horror and moral terror can never be exonerated. They have no real value. Pure evil has no real place.
And that means, doesn’t it, that I have no place.
Except, perhaps, in the art that repudiates evil—the vampire comics, the horror novels, the old gothic tales—or in the roaring chants of the rock stars who dramatize the battles against evil that each mortal fights within himself.
IT WAS enough to make an Old World monster go back into the earth, this stunning irrelevance to the mighty scheme of things, enough to make him lie down and weep. Or enough to make him become a rock singer, when you think about it.…
BUT where were the other Old World monsters? I wondered. How did other vampires exist in a world in which each death was recorded in giant electronic computers, and bodies were carried away to refrigerated crypts? Probably concealing themselves like loathsome insects in the shadows, as they have always done, no matter how much philosophy they talked or how many covens they formed.
Well, when I raised my voice with the little band called Satan’s Night Out, I would bring them all into the light soon enough.
• • •
I CONTINUED my education. I talked to mortals at bus stops and at gas stations and in elegant drinking places. I read books. I decked myself out in the shimmering dream skins of the fashionable shops. I wore white turtleneck shirts and crisp khaki safari jackets, or lush gray velvet blazers with cashmere scarves. I powdered down my face so that I could “pass” beneath the chemical lights of the all-night supermarkets, the hamburger joints, the carnival thoroughfares called nightclub strips.
I was learning. I was in love.
And the only problem I had was that murderers to feed upon were scarce. In this shiny world of innocence and plenty, of kindness and gaiety and full stomachs, the common cutthroat thieves of the past and their dangerous waterfront hangouts were almost gone.
And so I had to work for a living. But I’d always been a hunter. I liked the dim smoky poolrooms with the single light shining on the green felt as the tattooed ex-convicts gathered around it as much as I liked the shiny satin-lined nightclubs of the big concrete hotels. And I was learning more all the time about my killers—the drug dealers, the pimps, the murderers who fell in with the motorcycle gangs.
And more than ever, I was resolute that I would not drink innocent blood.
FINALLY it was time to call upon my old neighbors, the rock band called Satan’s Night Out.
AT SIX thirty on a hot sticky Saturday night I rang the doorbell of the attic music studio. The beautiful young mortals were all lying about in their rainbow-colored silk shirts and skintight dungarees smoking hashish cigarettes and complaining about their rotten luck getting “gigs” in the South.
They looked like biblical angels, with their long clean shaggy hair and feline movements; their jewelry was Egyptian. Even to rehearse they painted their faces and their eyes.
I was overcome with excitement and love just looking at them, Alex and Larry and the succulent little Tough Cookie.
And in an eerie moment in which the world seemed to stand still beneath me, I told them what I was. Nothing new to them, the word “vampire.” In the galaxy in which they shone, a thousand other singers had worn the theatrical fangs and the black cape.
And yet it felt so strange to speak it aloud to mortals, the forbidden truth. Never in two hundred years had I spoken it to anyone who had not been marked to become one of us. Not even to my victims did I confide it before their eyes closed.
And now I said it clearly and distinctly to these handsome young creatures. I told them that I wanted to sing with them, that if they were to trust to me, we would all be rich and famous. That on a wave of preternatural and remorseless ambition, I should carry them out of these rooms and into the great world.
Their eyes misted as they looked at me. And the little twentieth-century chamber of stucco and pasteboard rang with their laughter and delight.
I was patient. Why shouldn’t I be? I knew I was a demon who could mimic almost any human sound or movement. But how could they be expected to understand? I went to the electric piano and began to play and to sing.
I
imitated the rock songs as I started, and then old melodies and lyrics came back to me—French songs buried deep in my soul yet never abandoned—and I wound these into brutal rhythms, seeing before me a tiny crowded little Paris theater of centuries ago. A dangerous passion welled in me. It threatened my equilibrium. Dangerous that this should come so soon. Yet I sang on, pounding the slick white keys of the electric piano, and something in my soul was broken open. Never mind that these tender mortal creatures gathered around me should never know.
It was sufficient that they were jubilant, that they loved the eerie and disjointed music, that they were screaming, that they saw prosperity in the future, the impetus that they had lacked before. They turned on the tape machines and we began singing and playing together, jamming as they called it. The studio swam with the scent of their blood and our thunderous songs.
But then came a shock I had never in my strangest dreams anticipated—something that was as extraordinary as my little revelation to these creatures had been. In fact, it was so overwhelming that it might have driven me out of their world and back underground.
I don’t mean I would have gone into the deep slumber again. But I might have backed off from Satan’s Night Out and roamed about for a few years, stunned and trying to gather my wits.
The men—Alex, the sleek delicate young drummer, and his taller blond-haired brother, Larry—recognized my name when I told them it was Lestat.
Not only did they recognize it, but they connected it with a body of information about me that they had read in a book.
In fact, they thought it was delightful that I wasn’t just pretending to be any vampire. Or Count Dracula. Everybody was sick of Count Dracula. They thought it was marvelous that I was pretending to be the vampire Lestat.
“Pretending to be the vampire Lestat?” I asked.
They laughed at my exaggeration, my French accent.
I looked at all of them for a long moment, trying to scan their thoughts. Of course I hadn’t expected them to believe I was a real vampire. But to have read of a fictional vampire with a name as unusual as mine? How could this be explained?
But I was losing my confidence. And when I lose my confidence, my powers drain. The little room seemed to be getting smaller. And there was something insectile and menacing about the instruments, the antenna, the wires.
“Show me this book,” I said.
From the other room they brought it, a small pulp paper “novel” that was falling to pieces. The binding was gone, the cover ripped, the whole held together by a rubber band.
I got a preternatural chill of sorts at the sight of the cover. Interview with the Vampire. Something to do with a mortal boy getting one of the undead to tell the tale.
With their permission, I went into the other room, stretched out on their bed, and began to read. When I was halfway finished, I took the book with me and left the house. I stood stock-still beneath a street lamp with the book until I finished it. Then I placed it carefully in my breast pocket.
I didn’t return to the band for seven nights.
DURING much of that time, I was roaming again, crashing through the night on my Harley-Davidson motorcycle with the Bach Goldberg Variations turned up to full volume. And I was asking myself, Lestat, what do you want to do now?
And the rest of the time I studied with a renewed purpose. I read the fat paperback histories and lexicons of rock music, the chronicles of its stars. I listened to the albums and pondered in silence the concert video tapes.
And when the night was empty and still, I heard the voices of Interview with the Vampire singing to me, as if they sang from the grave. I read the book over and over. And then in a moment of contemptible anger, I shredded it to bits.
FINALLY, I came to my decision.
I met my young lawyer, Christine, in her darkened skyscraper office with only the downtown city to give us light. Lovely she looked against the glass wall behind her, the dim buildings beyond forming a harsh and primitive terrain in which a thousand torches burned.
“It is not enough any longer that my little rock band be successful,” I told her. “We must create a fame that will carry my name and my voice to the remotest parts of the world.”
Quietly, intelligently, as lawyers are wont to do, she advised me against risking my fortune. Yet as I continued with maniacal confidence, I could feel her seduction, the slow dissolution of her common sense.
“The best French directors for the rock video films,” I said. “You must lure them from New York and Los Angeles. There is ample money for that. And here you can find the studios, surely, in which we will do our work. The young record producers who mix the sound after—again, you must hire the best. It does not matter what we spend on this venture. What is important is that it be orchestrated, that we do our work in secret until the moment of revelation when our albums and our films are released with the book that I propose to write.”
Finally her head was swimming with dreams of wealth and power. Her pen raced as she made her notes.
And what did I dream of as I spoke to her? Of an unprecedented rebellion, a great and horrific challenge to my kind all over the world.
“These rock videos,” I said. “You must find directors who’ll realize my visions. The films are to be sequential. They must tell the story that is in the book I want to create. And the songs, many of them I’ve already written. You must obtain superior instruments—synthesizers, the finest sound systems, electric guitars, violins. Other details we can attend to later. The designing of vampire costumes, the method of presentation to the rock television stations, the management of our first public appearance in San Francisco—all that in good time. What is important now is that you make the phone calls, get the information you need to begin.”
I DIDN’T go back to Satan’s Night Out until the first agreements were struck and signatures had been obtained. Dates were fixed, studios rented, letters of agreement exchanged.
Then Christine came with me, and we had a great leviathan of a limousine for my darling young rock players, Larry and Alex and Tough Cookie. We had breathtaking sums of money, we had papers to be signed.
Under the drowsy oaks of the quiet Garden District street, I poured the champagne into the glistening crystal glasses for them:
“To The Vampire Lestat,” we all sang in the moonlight. It was to be the new name of the band, of the book I’d write. Tough Cookie threw her succulent little arms around me. We kissed tenderly amid the laughter and the reek of wine. Ah, the smell of innocent blood!
AND when they had gone off in the velvet-lined motor coach, I moved alone through the balmy night towards St. Charles Avenue, and thought about the danger facing them, my little mortal friends.
It didn’t come from me, of course. But when the long period of secrecy was ended, they would stand innocently and ignorantly in the international limelight with their sinister and reckless star. Well, I would surround them with bodyguards and hangers-on for every conceivable purpose. I would protect them from other immortals as best I could. And if the immortals were anything like they used to be in the old days, they’d never risk a vulgar struggle with a human force like that.
As I walked up to the busy avenue, I covered my eyes with mirrored sunglasses. I rode the rickety old St. Charles streetcar downtown.
And through the early evening crowd I wandered into the elegant double-decker bookstore called de Ville Books, and there stared at the small paperback of Interview with the Vampire on the shelf.
I wondered how many of our kind had “noticed” the book. Never mind for the moment the mortals who thought it was fiction. What about other vampires? Because if there is one law that all vampires hold sacred it is that you do not tell mortals about us.
You never pass on our “secrets” to humans unless you mean to bequeath the Dark Gift of our powers to them. You never name other immortals. You never tell where their lairs might be.
My beloved Louis, the narrator of Interview with the Vampire, had done all
this. He had gone far beyond my secret little disclosure to my rock singers. He had told hundreds of thousands of readers. He had all but drawn them a map and placed an X on the very spot in New Orleans where I slumbered, though what he really knew about that, and what his intentions were, was not clear.
Regardless, for what he’d done, others would surely hunt him down. And there are very simple ways to destroy vampires, especially now. If he was still in existence, he was an outcast and lived in a danger from our kind that no mortal could ever pose.
All the more reason for me to bring the book and the band called The Vampire Lestat to fame as quickly as possible. I had to find Louis. I had to talk to him. In fact, after reading his account of things, I ached for him, ached for his romantic illusions, and even his dishonesty. I ached even for his gentlemanly malice and his physical presence, the deceptively soft sound of his voice.
Of course I hated him for the lies he told about me. But the love was far greater than the hate. He had shared the dark and romantic years of the nineteenth century with me, he was my companion as no other immortal had ever been.
And I ached to write my story for him, not an answer to his malice in Interview with the Vampire, but the tale of all the things I’d seen and learned before I came to him, the story I could not tell him before.
Old rules didn’t matter to me now, either.
I wanted to break every one of them. And I wanted my band and my book to draw out not only Louis but all the other demons that I had ever known and loved. I wanted to find my lost ones, awaken those who slept as I had slept.
Fledglings and ancient ones, beautiful and evil and mad and heartless—they’d all come after me when they saw those video clips and heard those records, when they saw the book in the windows of the bookstores, and they’d know exactly where to find me. I’d be Lestat, the rock superstar. Just come to San Francisco for my first live performance. I’ll be there.
But there was another reason for the whole adventure—a reason even more dangerous and delicious and mad.
