Read The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) Online
Authors: Anne Rice
The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (313 page)
I reached down and picked up the locket, and looked very closely at the little picture. And a sad realization came to me.
She was no longer the real memories. She had become those fever dreams. She was the image in the jungle hospital, a figure standing against the sun in Georgetown, a ghost rushing through the shadows of Notre Dame. In life she’d never been my conscience! Not Claudia, my merciless Claudia. What a dream! A pure dream.
A dark secret smile stole over my lips as I looked at her, bitter and on the edge, once more, of tears. For nothing had changed in the realization that I had given her the words of accusation.
The very same thing was true
. There had been the opportunity for salvation—and I had said no.
I wanted to say something to her as I held the locket; I wanted to say something to the being she had been, and to my own weakness, and to the greedy wicked being in me who had once again triumphed. For I had. I had won.
Yes, I wanted to say something so terribly much! And would that it were full of poetry, and deep meaning, and would ransom my greed and my evil, and my lusty little heart. For I was going to Rio, wasn’t I, and with David, and with Louis, and a new era was beginning …
Yes, say something—for the love of heaven and the love of Claudia—to darken it and show it for what it is! Dear God, to lance it and show the horror at the core.
But I could not.
What more
is
there to say, really?
The tale is told.
Lestat de Lioncourt
New Orleans
1991
For my parents,
Howard and Katherine O’Brien.
Your dreams and your courage will be with me
all of my days
.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1995 by Anne O’Brien Rice
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
The poems “What God Did Not Plan On,” “The Offering,” and “Duet on Iberville Street” by Stan Rice are reprinted by permission of Stan Rice.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-93327
eISBN: 978-0-307-57587-6
v3.0_r1
WHAT GOD DID NOT PLAN ON
Sleep well,
Weep well,
Go to the deep well
As often as possible.
Bring back the water,
Jostling and gleaming.
God did not plan on consciousness
Developing so
Well. Well,
Tell Him our
Pail is full
And He can
Go to Hell.
Stan Rice
24 June 93
THE OFFERING
To the somethingness
Which prevents the nothingness
Like Homer’s wild boar
From thrashing this way and that
Its white tusks
Through human beings
Like crackling stalks
And to nothing less
I offer this suffering of my father
Stan Rice
16 Oct 93
DUET ON IBERVILLE STREET
The man in black leather
Buying a rat to feed his python
Does not dwell on particulars.
Any rat will do.
While walking back from the pet store
I see a man in a hotel garage
Carving a swan in a block of ice
With a chain saw.
Stan Rice
30 Jan 94
ROLOGUE
Lestat here. You know who I am? Then skip the next few paragraphs. For those whom I have not met before, I want this to be love at first sight.
Behold: your hero for the duration, a perfect imitation of a blond, blue-eyed, six-foot Anglo-Saxon male. A vampire, and one of the strongest you’ll ever encounter. My fangs are too small to be noticed unless I want them to be; but they’re very sharp, and I cannot go for more than a few hours without wanting human blood.
Of course, I don’t need it that often. And just how often I do need it, I don’t know, because I’ve never put it to the test.
I’m monstrously strong. I can take to the air. I can hear people talking on the other side of the city or even the globe. I can read minds; I can bind with spells.
I’m immortal. I’ve been virtually ageless since 1789.
Am I unique? By no means. There are some twenty other vampires in the world of whom I know. Half of these I know intimately; one half of those I love.
Add to this twenty a good two hundred vagabonds and strangers of whom I know nothing but now and then hear something; and for good measure another thousand secretive immortals, roaming about in human guise.
Men, women, children—any human being can become a vampire. All it takes is a vampire willing to bring you into it, to suck out most of your blood, and then let you take it back, mixed with his or her own. It’s not all that simple; but if you survive, you’ll live forever. While you’re young, you’ll thirst
unbearably, probably have to kill each night. By the time you’re a thousand years old, you’ll look and sound wise, even if you were a kid when you started, and you will drink and kill because you cannot resist it, whether you need it anymore or not.
If you live longer than that, and some do, who knows? You’ll get tougher, whiter, ever more monstrous. You’ll know so much about suffering that you will go through rapid cycles of cruelty and kindness, insight and maniacal blindness. You’ll probably go mad. Then you’ll be sane again. Then you may forget who you are.
I myself combine the best of vampiric youth and old age. Only two hundred years old, I have been for various reasons granted the strength of the ancients. I have a modern sensibility but a dead aristocrat’s impeccable taste. I know exactly who I am. I am rich. I am beautiful. I can see my reflection in mirrors. And in shopwindows. I love to sing and to dance.
What do I do? Anything that I please.
Think about it. Is it enough to make you want to read my story? Have you perhaps read my stories of the vampires before?
Here’s the catch: it doesn’t matter here that I’m a vampire. It is not central to the tale. It’s just a given, like my innocent smile and soft, purring French-accented voice and graceful way of sauntering down the street. It comes with the package. But what
happened
here could have happened to a human being; indeed, it surely has happened to humans, and it will happen to them again.
We have souls, you and I. We want to know things; we share the same earth, rich and verdant and fraught with perils. We don’t—either of us—know what it means to die, no matter what we might say to the contrary. It’s a cinch that if we did, I wouldn’t be writing and you wouldn’t be reading this book.
What does matter very much, as we go into this story together, is that I have set for myself the task of being a hero in this world. I maintain myself as morally complex, spiritually
tough, and aesthetically relevant—a being of blazing insight and impact, a guy with things to say to you.
So if you read this, read it for that reason—that Lestat is talking again, that he is frightened, that he is searching desperately for the lesson and for the song and for the raison d’être, that he wants to understand his own story and he wants you to understand it, and that it is the very best story he has right now to tell.
If that’s not enough, read something else.
If it is, then read on. In chains, to my friend and my scribe, I dictated these words. Come with me. Just listen to me. Don’t leave me alone.
NE
I saw him when he came through the front doors. Tall, solidly built, dark brown hair and eyes, skin still fairly dark because it had been dark when I’d made him a vampire. Walking a little too fast, but basically passing for a human being. My beloved David.
I was on the stairway. The grand stairway, one might say. It was one of those very opulent old hotels, divinely overdone, full of crimson and gold, and rather pleasant. My victim had picked it. I hadn’t. My victim was dining with his daughter. And I’d picked up from my victim’s mind that this was where he always met his daughter in New York, for the simple reason that St. Patrick’s Cathedral was across the street.
David saw me at once—a slouching, blond, long-haired youth, bronze face and hands, the usual deep violet sunglasses over my eyes, hair presentably combed for once, body tricked out in a dark-blue, double-breasted Brooks Brothers suit.
I saw him smile before he could stop himself. He knew my vanity, and he probably knew that in the early nineties of the twentieth century, Italian fashion had flooded the market with so much shapeless, hangy, bulky, formless attire that one of the most erotic and flattering garments a man could choose was the well-tailored navy-blue Brooks Brothers suit.
Besides, a mop of flowing hair and expert tailoring are always a potent combination. Who knows that better than I?
I didn’t mean to harp on the clothes! To hell with the clothes. It’s just I was so proud of myself for being spiffed up and full of gorgeous contradictions—a picture of long locks, the impeccable
tailoring, and a regal manner of slumping against the railing and sort of blocking the stairs.
He came up to me at once. He smelled like the deep winter outside, where people were slipping in the frozen streets, and snow had turned to filth in the gutters. His face had the subtle preternatural gleam which only I could detect, and love, and properly appreciate, and eventually kiss.
We walked together onto the carpeted mezzanine.
Momentarily, I hated it that he was two inches taller than me. But I was so glad to see him, so glad to be near him. And it was warm in here, and shadowy and vast, one of the places where people do not stare at others.
“You’ve come,” I said. “I didn’t think you would.”
“Of course,” he scolded, the gracious British accent breaking softly from the young dark face, giving me the usual shock. This was an old man in a young man’s body, recently made a vampire, and by me, one of the most powerful of our remaining kind.
“What did you expect?” he said, tête-à-tête. “Armand told me you were calling me. Maharet told me.”
“Ah, that answers my first question.” I wanted to kiss him, and suddenly I did put out my arms, rather tentatively and politely so that he could get away if he wanted, and when he let me hug him, when he returned the warmth, I felt a happiness I hadn’t experienced in months.
Perhaps I hadn’t experienced it since I had left him, with Louis. We had been in some nameless jungle place, the three of us, when we agreed to part, and that had been a year ago.
“Your first question?” he asked, peering at me very closely, sizing me up perhaps, doing everything a vampire can do to measure the mood and mind of his maker, because a vampire cannot read his maker’s mind, any more than the maker can read the mind of the fledgling.
And there we stood divided, laden with preternatural gifts, both fit and rather full of emotion, and unable to communicate except in the simplest and best way, perhaps—with words.
“My first question,” I began to explain, to answer, “was simply going to be: Where have you been, and have you found the others, and did they try to hurt you? All that rot, you know—how I broke the rules when I made you, et cetera.”