Interview with the Vampire tvc-1

by Anne Rice

  “I didn’t know what it was that threatened me now, what it was that my mind sought escape from. I kept looking at Claudia, the way she lay against the books, the way she sat amongst the objects of the desk, the polished white skull, the candle-holder, the open parchment book whose hand-painted script gleamed in the light; and then above her there emerged into focus the lacquered and shimmering painting of a medieval devil, horned and hoofed, his bestial figure looming over a coven of worshipping witches. Her head was just beneath it, the loose curling strands of her hair just stroking it; and she watched the brown-eyed vampire with wide, wondering eyes. I wanted to pick her up suddenly, and frightfully, horribly, I saw her in my kindled imagination flopping like a doll. I was gazing at the devil, that monstrous face preferable to the sight of her in her eerie stillness.

  “ ‘You won’t awaken the boy if you speak,’ said the brown-eyed vampire. ‘You’ve come from so far, you’ve traveled so long.’ And gradually my confusion subsided, as if smoke were rising and moving away on a current of fresh air. And I lay awake and very calm, looking at him as he sat in the opposite chair. Claudia, too, looked at him. And he looked from one to the other of us, his smooth face and pacific eyes very like they’d been all along, as though there had never been any change in him at all.

  “ ‘My name is Armand,’ he said. ‘I sent Santiago to give you the invitation. I know your names. I welcome you to my house.’

  “I gathered my strength to speak, my voice sounding strange to me when I told him that we had feared we were alone.

  “ ‘But how did you come into existence?’ he asked. Claudia’s hand rose ever so slightly from her lap, her eyes moving mechanically from his face to mine. I saw this and knew that he must have seen it, and yet he gave no sign. I knew at once what she meant to tell me. ‘You don’t want to answer,’ said Armand, his voice low and even more measured than Claudia’s voice, far less human than my own. I sensed myself slipping away again into contemplation of that voice and those eyes, from which I had to draw myself up with great effort.

  “ ‘Are you the leader of this group?’ I asked him.

  “ ‘Not in the way you mean leader,’ he answered. But if there were a leader here, I would be that one.’

  “ ‘I haven’t come… you’ll forgive me… to talk of how I came into being. Because that’s no mystery to me, it presents no question. So if you have no power to which I might be required to render respect, I don’t wish to talk of those things.’

  “ ‘If I told you I did have such power, would you respect it?’ he asked.

  “I wish I could describe his manner of speaking, how each time he spoke he seemed to arise out of a state of contemplation very like that state into which I felt I was drifting, from which it took so much to wrench myself; and yet he never moved, and seemed at all times alert. This distracted me while at the same time I was powerfully attracted by it, as I was by this room, its simplicity, its rich, warm combination of essentials: the books, the desk, the two chairs by the fire, the coffin, the pictures. The luxury of those rooms in the hotel seemed vulgar, but more than that, meaningless, beside this room. I understood all of it except for the mortal boy, the sleeping boy, whom I didn’t understand at all.

  “ ‘I’m not certain,’ I said, unable to keep my eyes off that awful medieval Satan. ‘I would have to know from what… from whom it comes. Whether it came from other vampires… or elsewhere’

  “ ‘Elsewhere…’ he said. ‘What is elsewhere?

  “ ‘That?’ I pointed to the medieval picture.

  “ ‘That is a picture,’ he said.

  “ ‘Nothing more?’

  “ ‘Nothing more.’

  “ ‘Then Satan… some satanic power doesn’t give you your power here, either as leader or as vampire?’

  “ ‘No,’ he said calmly, so calmly it was impossible for me to know what he thought of my questions, if he thought of them at all in the manner which I knew to be thinking.

  “ ‘And the other vampires?’

  “ ‘No,’ he said.

  “ ‘Then we are not…’ I sat forward. ‘… the children of Satan?’

  “ ‘How could we be the children of Satan?’ he asked. ‘Do you believe that Satan made this world around you?’

  “ ‘No, I believe that God made it, if anyone made it. But He also must have made Satan, and I want to know if we are his children!’

  “ ‘Exactly, and consequently if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan’s power comes from God and that Satan is simply God’s child, and that we are God’s children also. There are no children of Satan, really.’

  “I couldn’t disguise my feelings at this. I sat back against the leather, looking at that small woodcut of the devil, released for the moment from any sense of obligation to Armand’s presence, lost in my thoughts, in the undeniable implications of his simple logic.

  “ ‘But why does this concern you? Surely what I say doesn’t surprise you,’ he said. ‘Why do you let it affect you?’

  “ ‘Let me explain,’ I began. ‘I know that you’re a master vampire. I respect you. But I’m incapable of your detachment. I know what it is, and I do not possess it and I doubt that I ever will. I accept this.’

  “ ‘I understand,’ he nodded. ‘I saw you in the theater, your suffering, your sympathy with that girl. I saw your sympathy for Denis when I offered him to you; you die when you kill, as if you feel that you deserve to die, and you stint on nothing. But why, with this passion and this sense of justice, do you wish to call yourself the child of Satan!’

  “ ‘I’m evil, evil as any vampire who ever lived! I’ve killed over and over and will do it again. I took that boy, Denis, when you gave him to me, though I was incapable of knowing whether he would survive or not.’

  “ ‘Why does that make you as evil as any vampire? Aren’t there gradations of evil? Is evil a great perilous gulf into which one falls with the first sin, plummeting to the depth?’

  “ ‘Yes, I think it is,’ I said to him. ‘It’s not logical, as you would make it sound. But it’s that dark, that empty. And it is without consolation.’

  “ ‘But you’re not being fair,’ he said with the first glimmer of expression in his voice. ‘Surely you attribute great degrees and variations to goodness. There is the goodness of the child which is innocence, and then there is the goodness of the monk who has given up everything to others and lives a life of self-deprivation and service. The goodness of saints, the goodness of good housewives. Are all these the same?’

  “ ‘No. But equally and infinitely different from evil.’ I answered.

  “I didn’t know I thought these things. I spoke them now as my thoughts. And they were my most profound feelings taking a shape they could never have taken had I not spoken them, had I not thought them out this way in conversation with another. I thought myself then possessed of a passive mind, in a sense. I mean that my mind could only pull itself together, formulate thought out of the muddle of longing and pain, when it was touched by another mind; fertilized by it; deeply excited by that other mind and driven to form conclusions. I felt now the rarest, most acute alleviation of loneliness. I could easily visualize and suffer that moment years before in another century, when I had stood at the foot of Babette’s stairway, and feel the perpetual metallic frustration of years with Lestat; and then that passionate and doomed affection for Claudia which made loneliness retreat behind the soft indulgence of the senses, the same senses that longed for the kill. And I saw the desolate mountaintop in eastern Europe where I had confronted that mindless vampire and killed him in the monastery ruins. And it was as if the great feminine longing of my mind were being awakened again to be satisfied. And this I felt despite my own words: ‘But it’s that dark, that empty. And it is without consolation.’

  “I looked at Armand, at his large brown eyes in that taut, timeless face, watching me again like a painting; and I felt the slow shifting of the physical world I’d felt in the painted bal
lroom, the pull of my old delirium, the wakening of a need so terrible that the very promise of its fulfillment contained the unbearable possibility of disappointment. And yet there was the question, the awful, ancient, hounding question of evil.

  “I think I put my hands to my head as mortals do when so deeply troubled that they instinctively cover the face, reach for the brain as if they could reach through the skull and massage the living organ out of its agony.

  “ ‘And how is this evil achieved?’ he asked. ‘How does one fall from grace and become in one instant as evil as the mob tribunal of the Revolution or the most cruel of the Roman emperors? Does one merely have to miss Mass on Sunday, or bite down on the Communion Host? Or steal a loaf of bread… or sleep with a neighbor’s wife?’

  “ ‘No…’ I shook my head. ‘No.’

  “ ‘But if evil is without gradation, and it does exist, this state of evil, then only one sin is needed. Isn’t that what you are saying? That God exists and…’

  “ ‘I don’t know if God exists,’ I said. ‘And for all I do know… He doesn’t exist.’

  “ ‘Then no sin matters,’ he said. ‘No sin achieves evil.’

  “ ‘That’s not true. Because if God doesn’t exist we are the creatures of highest consciousness in the universe. We alone understand the passage of time and the value of every minute of human life. And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would have died tomorrow or the day after or eventually… it doesn’t matter. Because if God does not exist, this life… every second of it… is all we have.’

  “He sat back, as if for the moment stopped, his large eyes narrowing, then fixing on the depths of the fire. This was the first time since he had come for me that he had looked away from me, and I found myself looking at him unwatched. For a long time he sat in this manner and I could all but feel his thoughts, as if they were palpable in the air like smoke. Not read them, you understand, but feel the power of them. It seemed he possessed an aura and even though his face was very young, which I knew meant nothing, he appeared infinitely old, wise. I could not define it, because I could not explain how the youthful lines of his face, how his eyes expressed innocence and this age and experience at the same time.

  “He rose now and looked at Claudia, his hands loosely clasped behind his back. Her silence all this time had been understandable to me. These were not her questions, yet she was fascinated with him and was waiting for him and no doubt learning from him all the while that he spoke to me. But I understood something else now as they looked at each other. He had moved to his feet with a body totally at his command, devoid of the habit of human gesture, gesture rooted in necessity, ritual, fluctuation of mind; and his stillness now was unearthly. And she, as I’d never seen before, possessed the same stillness. And they were gazing at each other with a preternatural understanding from which I was simply excluded.

  “I was something whirling and vibrating to them, as mortals were to me. And I knew when he turned towards me again that he’d come to understand she did not believe or share my concept of evil.

  “His speech commenced without the slightest warning. ‘This is the only real evil left,’ he said to the flames.

  “ ‘Yes,’ I answered, feeling that all-consuming subject alive again, obliterating all concerns as it always had for me.

  “ ‘It’s true,’ he said, shocking me, deepening my sadness, my despair.

  “ ‘Then God does not exist… you have no knowledge of His existence?’

  “ ‘None,’ he said.

  “ ‘No knowledge!’ I said it again, unafraid of my simplicity, my miserable human pain.

  “ ‘None.’

  “ ‘And no vampire here has discourse with God or with the devil!’

  “ ‘No vampire that I’ve ever known,’ he said, musing, the fire dancing in his eyes. ‘And as far as I know today, after four hundred years, I am the oldest living vampire in the world.’

  “I stared at him, astonished.

  “Then it began to sink in. It was as I’d always feared, and it was as lonely, it was as totally without hope. Things would go on as they had before, on and on. My search was over. I sat back listlessly watching those licking flames.

  “It was futile to leave him to continue it, futile to travel the world only to hear again the same story. ‘Four hundred years’ — I think I repeated the words ‘four hundred years.’ I remember staring at the fire. There was a log falling very slowly in the fire, drifting downwards in a process that would take it the night, and it was pitted with tiny holes where some substance that had larded it through and through had burned away fast, and in each of these tiny holes there danced a flame amid the larger flames; and all of these tiny flames with their black mouths seemed to me faces that made a chorus; and the chorus sang without singing. The chorus had no need of singing; in one breath in the fire, which was continuous, it made its soundless song.

  “All at once Armand moved in a loud rustling of garments, a descent of crackling shadow and light that left him kneeling at my feet, his hands outstretched holding my head, his eyes burning.

  “ ‘This evil, this concept, it comes from disappointment, from bitterness! Don’t you see? Children of Satan! Children of God! Is this the only question you bring to me, is this the only power that obsesses you, so that you must make us gods and devils yourself when the only power that exists is inside ourselves? How could you believe in these old fantastical lies, these myths, these emblems of the supernatural?’ He snatched the devil from above Claudia’s still countenance so swiftly that I couldn’t see the gesture, only the demon leering before me and then crackling in the flames.

  “Something was broken inside me when he said this; something ripped aside, so that a torrent of feeling became one with my muscles in every limb. I was on my feet now, backing away from him.

  “ ‘Are you mad?’ I asked, astonished at my own anger, my own despair. ‘We stand here, the two of us, immortal, ageless, rising nightly to feed that immortality on human blood; and there on your desk against the knowledge of the ages sits a flawless child as demonic as ourselves; and you ask me how I could believe I would find a meaning in the supernatural! I tell you, after seeing what I have become, I could damn well believe anything! Couldn’t you? And believing thus, being thus confounded, I can now accept the most fantastical truth of all: that there is no meaning to any of this!’

  “I backed towards the door, away from his astonished face, his hand hovering before his lips, the finger curling to dig into his palm. ‘Don’t! Come back…’ he whispered.

  “ ‘No, not now. Let me go. Just a while… let me go… Nothing’s changed; it’s all the same. Let that sink into me… just let me go.’

  “I looked back before I shut the door. Claudia’s face was turned towards me, though she sat as before, her hands clasped on her knee. She made a gesture then, subtle as her smile, which was tinged with the faintest sadness, that I was to go on.

  “It was my desire to escape the theater then entirely, to find the streets of Paris and wander, letting the vast accumulation of shocks gradually wear away. But, as I groped along the stone passage of the lower cellar, I became confused. I was perhaps incapable of exerting my own will. It seemed more than ever absurd to me that Lestat should have died, if in fact he had; and looking back on him, as it seemed I was always doing, I saw him more kindly than before. Lost like the rest of us. Not the jealous protector of any knowledge he was afraid to share. He knew nothing. There was nothing to know.

  “Only, that was not quite the thought that was gradually coming clear to me. I had hated him for all the wrong reasons; yes, that was true. But I did not fully understand it yet. Confounded, I found myself sitting finally on those dark steps, the light from the ballroom throwing my own shadow on the rough floor, my hands holding my head, a weariness overcoming me. My mind said, Sleep. But more profoundly, my mind said, Dream. And yet I made no move to return to the Hotel Saint-Gabriel, which seemed a ve
ry secure and airy place to me now, a place of subtle and luxurious mortal consolation where I might lie in a chair of puce velvet, put one foot on an ottoman and watch the fire lick the marble tile, looking for all the world to myself in the long mirrors like a thoughtful human. Flee to that, I thought, flee all that is pulling you. And again came that thought: I have wronged Lestat, I have hated him for all the wrong reasons. I whispered it now, trying to withdraw it from the dark, inarticulate pool of my mind, and the whispering made a scratching sound in the stone vault of the stairs.

  “But then a voice came softly to me on the air, too faint for mortals: ‘How is this so? How did you wrong him?’

  “I turned round so sharp that my breath left me. A vampire sat near me, so near as to almost brush my shoulder with the tip of his boot, his legs drawn up close to him, his hands clasped around them. For a moment I thought my eyes deceived me. It was the trickster vampire, whom Armand had called Santiago.

  “Yet nothing in his manner indicated his former self, that devilish, hateful self that I had seen, even only a few hours ago when he had reached out for me and Armand had struck him. He was staring at me over his drawn-up knees, his hair disheveled, his mouth slack and without cunning.

  “ ‘It makes no difference to anyone else,’ I said to him, the fear in me subsiding.

  “ ‘But you said a name; I heard you say a name,’ he said.

  “ ‘A name I don’t want to say again,’ I answered, looking away from him. I could see now how he’d fooled me, why his shadow had not fallen over mine; he crouched in my shadow. The vision of him slithering down those stone stairs to sit behind me was slightly disturbing. Everything about him was disturbing, and I reminded myself that he could in no way be trusted. It seemed to me then that Armand, with his hypnotic power, aimed in some way for the maximum truth in presentation of himself: he had drawn out of me without words my state of mind. But this vampire was a liar. And I could feel his power, a crude, pounding power that was almost as strong as Armand.