The Vampire Chronicles Collection

by Anne Rice

  “Years beyond counting, until finally the Mother and the Father became silent, and there were none in existence who could even remember a time when they begged or fought or talked. Years came when nobody could remember who had imprisoned the Mother and the Father, or why the Mother and the Father must not ever be let out. Some did not believe that the Mother and the Father were even the originals or that their immolation would harm anyone else. It was just an old tale.

  “And all the while Egypt was Egypt and its religion, uncorrupted by outsiders, finally moved on towards the belief in conscience, the judgment after death of all beings, be they rich or poor, the belief in goodness on earth and life after death.

  “And then the night came when the Mother and the Father were found free of their prison, and those who tended them realized that only they could have moved the stones. In silence, their strength had grown beyond all reckoning. Yet they were as statues, embracing each other in the middle of the dirty and darkened chamber where for centuries they had been kept. Naked and shimmering they were, all their clothing having long ago rotted away.

  “If and when they drank from the victims offered, they moved with the sluggishness of reptiles in winter, as though time had taken on an altogether different meaning for them, and years were as nights to them, and centuries as years.

  “And the ancient religion was strong as ever, not of the East and not really of the West. The Drinkers of the Blood remained good symbols, the luminous image of life in the afterworld which even the lowliest Egyptian soul might come to enjoy.

  “Sacrifice could only be the evildoer in these later times. And by this means the gods drew the evil out of the people, and protected the people, and the silent voice of the god consoled the weak, telling the truths learned by the god in starvation: that the world was full of abiding beauty, that no soul here is really alone.

  “The Mother and the Father were kept in the loveliest of all shrines and all the gods came to them and took from them, with their will, droplets of their precious blood.

  “But then the impossible was happening. Egypt was reaching its finish. Things thought to be unchangeable were about to be utterly changed. Alexander had come, the Ptolemies were the rulers, Caesar and Antony—all rude and strange protagonists of the drama which was simply The End of All This.

  “And finally the dark and cynical Elder, the wicked one, the disappointed one, who put the Mother and Father in the sun.

  “I GOT up off the couch and I stood in this room in Alexandria looking at the motionless and staring figure of Akasha and the soiled linen hanging from her seemed an insult. And my head swam with old poetry. And I was overcome with love.

  “There was no more pain in my body from the battle with the Elder. The bones were restored. And I went down on my knees, and I kissed the fingers of the right hand that hung at Akasha’s side. I looked up and I saw her looking down at me, her head tilted, and the strangest look passed over her; it seemed as pure in its suffering as the happiness I had just known. Then her head, very slowly, inhumanly slowly, returned to its position of facing forward, and I knew in that instant that I had seen and known things that the Elder had never known.

  “As I wrapped her body again in linen, I was in a trance. More than ever I felt the mandate to take care of her and Enkil, and the horror of the Elder’s death was flashing before me every second, and the blood she had given me had increased my exhilaration as well as my physical strength.

  “And as I prepared to leave Alexandria, I suppose I dreamed of waking Enkil and Akasha, that in the years to come they would recover all the vitality stolen from them, and we would know each other in such intimate and astonishing ways that these dreams of knowledge and experience given me in the blood would pale.

  “My slaves had long ago come back with the horses and the wagons for our journey, with the stone sarcophagi and the chains and locks I had told them to procure. They waited outside the walls.

  “I placed the mummy cases with the Mother and the Father in the sarcophagi side by side in the wagon, and I covered them with locks and chains and heavy blankets, and we set out, heading towards the door to the underground temple of the gods on our way to the city gates.

  “When I reached the door, I left my slaves with firm orders to give a loud alarm if anyone approached, and then I took a leather sack and went down into the temple, and into the library of the Elder, and I put all the scrolls I could find into the sack. I stole every bit of portable writing that was in the place. I wished I could have taken the writing off the walls.

  “There were others in the chambers, but they were too terrified to come out. Of course they knew I had stolen the Mother and the Father. And they probably knew of the Elder’s death.

  “It didn’t matter to me. I was getting out of old Egypt, and I had the source of all our power with me. And I was young and foolish and enflamed.

  “WHEN I finally reached Antioch on the Orontes—a great and wonderful city that rivaled Rome in population and wealth—I read these old papyri and they told of all the things Akasha had revealed to me.

  “And she and Enkil had the first of many chapels I would build for them all over Asia and Europe, and they knew that I would always care for them and I knew that they would let no harm come to me.

  “Many centuries after, when I was set afire in Venice by the band of the Children of Darkness, I was too far from Akasha for rescue, or again, she would have come. And when I did reach the sanctuary, knowing full well the agony that the burnt gods had known, I drank of her blood until I was healed.

  “But by the end of the first century of keeping them in Antioch I had despaired that they would ever ‘come to life,’ as it were. Their silence and stillness was almost continuous as it is now. Only the skin changed dramatically with the passing years, losing the damage of the sun until it was like alabaster again.

  “But by the time I realized all this I was powerfully engaged in watching the goings-on of the city and the changing of the times. I was madly in love with a beautiful brown-haired Greek courtesan named Pandora, with the loveliest arms I have ever beheld on a human being, who knew what I was from the first moment she set eyes on me and bided her time, enchanting me and dazzling me until I was ready to bring her over into the magic, at which time she was allowed the blood from Akasha and became one of the most powerful supernatural creatures I have ever known. Two hundred years I lived and fought and loved with Pandora. But that is another tale.

  “There are a million tales I could tell of the centuries I have lived since then, of my journeys from Antioch to Constantinople, back to Alexandria and on to India and then to Italy again and from Venice to the bitter cold highlands of Scotland and then to this island in the Aegean, where we are now.

  “I could tell you of the tiny changes in Akasha and Enkil over the years, of the puzzling things they do, and the mysteries they leave unsolved.

  “Perhaps some night in the far distant future, when you’ve returned to me, I’ll talk of the other immortals I’ve known, those who were made as I was made by the last of the gods who survived in various lands—some the servants of the Mother and others of the terrible gods out of the East.

  “I could tell you how Mael, my poor Druid priest, finally drank from a wounded god himself and in one instant lost all his belief in the old religion, going on to become as enduring and dangerous a rogue immortal as any of us. I could tell you how the legends of Those Who Must Be Kept spread through the world. And of the times other immortals have tried to take them from me out of pride or sheer destructiveness, wanting to put an end to us all.

  “I will tell you of my loneliness, of the others I made, and how they met their ends. Of how I have gone down into the earth with Those Who Must Be Kept, and risen again, thanks to their blood, to live several mortal lifetimes before burying myself again. I will tell you of the other truly eternal ones whom I meet only now and then. Of the last time I saw Pandora in the city of Dresden, in the company of a powerful and vicious
vampire from India, and of how we quarreled and separated, and of how I discovered too late her letter begging me to meet her in Moscow, a fragile piece of writing that had fallen to the bottom of a cluttered traveling case. Too many things, too many stories, stories with and without lessons …

  “But I have told you the most important things—how I came into possession of Those Who Must Be Kept, and who we really were.

  “What is crucial now is that you understand this:

  “As the Roman Empire came to its close, all the old gods of the pagan world were seen as demons by the Christians who rose. It was useless to tell them as the centuries passed that their Christ was but another God of the Wood, dying and rising, as Dionysus or Osiris had done before him, and that the Virgin Mary was in fact the Good Mother again enshrined. Theirs was a new age of belief and conviction, and in it we became devils, detached from what they believed, as old knowledge was forgotten or misunderstood.

  “But this had to happen. Human sacrifice had been a horror to the Greeks and Romans. I had thought it ghastly that the Keltoi burned for the god their evildoers in the wicker colossi as I described. And so it was to the Christians. So how could we, gods who fed upon human blood, have been seen as ‘good’?

  “But the real perversion of us was accomplished when the Children of Darkness came to believe they served the Christian devil, and like the terrible gods of the East, they tried to give value to evil, to believe in its power in the scheme of things, to give it a just place in the world.

  “Hearken to me when I say: There has never been a just place for evil in the Western world. There has never been an easy accommodation of death.

  “No matter how violent have been the centuries since the fall of Rome, no matter how terrible the wars, the persecutions, the injustices, the value placed upon human life has only increased.

  “Even as the Church erected statues and pictures of her bloody Christ and her bloody martyrs, she held the belief that these deaths, so well used by the faithful, could only have come at the hands of enemies, not God’s own priests.

  “It is the belief in the value of human life that has caused the torture chambers and the stake and the more ghastly means of execution to be abandoned all over Europe in this time. And it is the belief in the value of human life that carries man now out of the monarchy into the republics of America and France.

  “And now we stand again on the cusp of an atheistic age—an age where the Christian faith is losing its hold, as paganism once lost its hold, and the new humanism, the belief in man and his accomplishments and his rights, is more powerful than ever before.

  “Of course we cannot know what will happen as the old religion thoroughly dies out. Christianity rose on the ashes of paganism, only to carry forth the old worship in new form. Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.

  “But maybe something more wonderful will take place: the world will truly move forward, past all gods and goddesses, past all devils and angels. And in such a world, Lestat, we will have less of a place than we have ever had.

  “All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to man and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the earth was new to man, and wondrous. But always we come back to the way the earth is now.

  “And in this world the vampire is only a Dark God. He is a Child of Darkness. He can’t be anything else. And if he wields any lovely power upon the minds of men, it is only because the human imagination is a secret place of primitive memories and unconfessed desires. The mind of each man is a Savage Garden, to use your phrase, in which all manner of creatures rise and fall, and anthems are sung and things imagined that must finally be condemned and disavowed.

  “Yet men love us when they come to know us. They love us even now. The Paris crowds love what they see on the stage of the Theater of the Vampires. And those who have seen your like walking through the ballrooms of the world, the pale and deadly lord in the velvet cloak, have worshiped in their own way at your feet.

  “They thrill at the possibility of immortality, at the possibility that a grand and beautiful being could be utterly evil, that he could feel and know all things yet choose willfully to feed his dark appetite. Maybe they wish they could be that lusciously evil creature. How simple it all seems. And it is the simplicity of it that they want.

  “But give them the Dark Gift and only one in a multitude will not be as miserable as you are.

  “What can I say finally that will not confirm your worst fears? I have lived over eighteen hundred years, and I tell you life does not need us. I have never had a true purpose. We have no place.”

  14

  ARIUS paused.

  He looked away from me for the first time and towards the sky beyond the windows, as if he were listening to island voices I couldn’t hear.

  “I have a few more things to tell you,” he said, “things which are important, though they are merely practical things …” But he was distracted. “And there are promises,” he said, finally, “which I must exact …”

  And he slipped into quiet, listening, his face too much like that of Akasha and Enkil.

  There were a thousand questions I wanted to ask. But more significant perhaps there were a thousand statements of his I wanted to reiterate, as if I had to say them aloud to grasp them. If I talked, I wouldn’t make very good sense.

  I sat back against the cool brocade of the winged chair with my hands together in the form of a steeple, and I just looked ahead of me, as if his tale were spread out there for me to read over, and I thought of the truth of his statements about good and evil, and how it might have horrified me and disappointed me had he tried to convince me of the rightness of the philosophy of the terrible gods of the East, that we could somehow glory in what we did.

  I too was a child of the West, and all my brief life I had struggled with the Western inability to accept evil or death.

  But underneath all these considerations lay the appalling fact that Marius could annihilate all of us by destroying Akasha and Enkil. Marius could kill every single one of us in existence if he were to burn Akasha and Enkil and thereby get rid of an old and decrepit and useless form of evil in the world. Or so it seemed.

  And the horror of Akasha and Enkil themselves … What could I say to this, except that I too had felt the first glimmer of what he once felt, that I could rouse them, I could make them speak again, I could make them move. Or more truly, I had felt when I saw them that someone should and could do it. Someone could end their open-eyed sleep.

  And what would they be if they ever walked and talked again? Ancient Egyptian monsters. What would they do?

  I saw the two possibilities as seductive suddenly—rousing them or destroying them. Both tempted the mind. I wanted to pierce them and commune with them, and yet I understood the irresistible madness of trying to destroy them. Of going out in a blaze of light with them that would take all our doomed species with it.

  Both attitudes had to do with power. And some triumph over the passage of time.

  “Aren’t you ever tempted to do it?” I asked, and my voice had pain in it. I wondered if down in their chapel they heard.

  He awakened from his listening and turned to me and he shook his head. No.

  “Even though you know better than anyone that we have no place?”

  Again he shook his head. No.

  “I am immortal,” he said, “truly immortal. To be perfectly honest, I do not know what can kill me now, if anything. But that isn’t the point. I want to go on. I do not even think of it. I am a continual awareness unto myself, the intelligence I longed for years and years ago when I was alive, and I’m in love as I’ve always been with the great progress of mankind. I want to see what will happen now that the world has come round again to questioning its gods. W
hy, I couldn’t be persuaded now to close my eyes for any reason.”

  I nodded in understanding.

  “But I don’t suffer what you suffer,” he said. “Even in the grove in northern France, when I was made into this, I was not young. I have been lonely since, I have known near madness, indescribable anguish, but I was never immortal and young. I have done over and over what you have yet to do—the thing that must take you away from me very very soon.”

  “Take me away? But I don’t want—”

  “You have to go, Lestat,” he said. “And very soon, as I said. You’re not ready to remain here with me. This is one of the most important things I have left to tell you and you must listen with the same attention with which you listened to the rest.”

  “Marius, I can’t imagine leaving now. I can’t even …” I felt anger suddenly. Why had he brought me here to cast me out? And I remembered all Armand’s admonitions to me. It is only with the old ones that we find communion, not with those we create. And I had found Marius. But these were mere words. They didn’t touch the core of what I felt, the sudden misery and fear of separation.

  “Listen to me,” he said gently. “Before I was taken by the Gauls, I had lived a good lifetime, as long as many a man in those days. And after I took Those Who Must Be Kept out of Egypt, I lived again for years in Antioch as a rich Roman scholar might live. I had a house, slaves, and the love of Pandora. We had life in Antioch, we were watchers of all that passed. And having had that lifetime, I had the strength for others later on. I had the strength to become part of the world in Venice, as you know. I had the strength to rule on this island as I do. You, like many who go early into the fire or the sun, have had no real life at all.

  “As a young man, you tasted real life for no more than six months in Paris. As a vampire, you have been a roamer, an outsider, haunting houses and other lives as you drifted from place to place.

  “If you mean to survive, you must live out one complete lifetime as soon as you can. To forestall it may be to lose everything, to despair and to go into the earth again, never to rise. Or worse …”