The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (367 page)

Bleeding in her head, human eyes, lifted from someone dead or alive, I couldn’t know, and put into her sockets to thrive on her vampiric blood as long as they could. But how weary they seemed in her beautiful face. What had Jesse said? She is made of alabaster. And alabaster is a stone through which light can pass.

“I won’t take a human eye,” I said under my breath.

She said nothing. She had not come to judge, to recommend. Why had she come? What did she want?

“You want to hear the tale too?”

“Your gentle English friend says that it happened as you described it. He says the songs they sing on the televisions are true; that you are the Angel of the Night, and you brought her the Veil, and that he was there, and he heard you tell.”

“I am no angel! I never meant to give her the Veil! I took the Veil as proof. I took the Veil because.…”

My voice had broken.

“Because why?” she asked.

“Because Christ gave it to me!” I whispered. “He said, ‘Take it,’ and I did.”

I wept. And she waited. Patient, solemn. Louis waited. David waited.

Finally I stopped.

“Write down every word, David, if you write it, every ambiguous word, you hear me? I won’t write it myself. I won’t. Well, maybe … if I don’t think you’re getting it exactly right, I’ll write it, I’ll write it one time through. What do you want? Why have you come? No, I won’t write it. Why are you here, Maharet, why have you shown yourself to me? Why have you come to the Beast’s new castle, for what? Answer me.”

She said nothing. Her long, pale-red hair went down to her waist. She wore some simple fashion that could pass unnoticed in many lands, a long, loose coat, belted around her tiny waist,
a skirt that covered the tops of her small boots. The blood scent of the human eyes in her head was strong. And blazing in her head, these dead eyes looked ghastly to me, unsupportable.

“I won’t take a human eye!” I said. But I had said that before. Was I being arrogant or insolent? She was so powerful. “I won’t take a human
life,
” I said. That had been what I meant. “I will never, never, never as long as I live and endure and starve and suffer, take a human life, nor raise my hand against a fellow creature, be he human or one of us, I do not care, I won’t … I am … I will … with my last strength, I won’t.…”

“I’m going to keep you here,” she said. “As a prisoner. For a while. Until you’re quieter.”

“You’re mad. You’re not keeping me anywhere.”

“I have chains waiting for you. David, Louis—you will help me.

“What is this? You two, you dare? Chains, we are talking about chains? What am I, Azazel cast into the pit? Memnoch would get a good laugh at this, if he hadn’t turned his back on me forever!”

But none of them had moved. They stood motionless, her immense reservoir of power totally disguised by her slender white form. And they were suffering. Oh, I could smell the suffering.

“I have this for you,” she said. She extended her hand. “And when you read it you will scream and you will weep, and we’ll keep you here, safe and quiet, until such time as you stop. That’s all. Under my protection. In this place. You will be my prisoner.”

“What! What is it?” I demanded.

It was a crumpled piece of parchment.

“What the hell is this!” I said. “Who gave you this?” I didn’t want to touch it.

She took my left hand with her absolutely irresistible strength, forcing me to drop the books in their sacks, and she placed the little crumpled bundle of parchment in my palm.

“It was given to me for you,” she said.

“By whom?” I demanded.

“The person whose writing you will find inside. Read it.”

“What the hell!” I swore. With my right fingers I tore open the crumpled vellum.

My eye. My eye shone there against the writing. This little package contained my eye, my eye wrapped in a letter. My blue eye, whole and alive.

Gasping, I picked it up and pushed it into my face, into the sore aching socket, feeling its tendrils reach back into the brain, tangling with the brain. The world flared into full vision.

She stood staring at me.

“Scream, will I?” I cried. “Scream, why? What do you think I see? I see only what I saw before!” I cried. I looked from right to left, the appalling patch of darkness gone, the world complete, the stained glass, the still trio watching me. “Oh, thank you, God!” I whispered. But what did this mean? Was it a prayer of thanks, or merely an exclamation!

“Read,” she said, “what is written on the vellum.”

An archaic hand, what was this? An illusion! Words in a language that was no language at all, yet clearly articulated so that I could pick them out of the swarming design, written in blood and ink and soot:

I started to roar. “Lies, lies, lies!” I heard the chains. “What metal is it you think can bind me, cast me down! Damn you. Lies! You didn’t see him. He didn’t give you this!”

David, Louis, her strength, her inconceivable strength,
strength, since the time immemorial, before the first tablets had been engraved at Jericho—it surrounded me, enclosed me. It was she more than they; I was her child, thrashing and cursing at her.

They dragged me through the darkness, my howls echoing off the walls, into the room they had chosen for me with its bricked-up windows, lightless, a dungeon, the chains going round and round as I thrashed.

“It’s lies, it’s lies, it’s lies! I don’t believe it! If I was tricked it was by God!” I roared and roared. “He did it to me. It’s not real unless He did it, God Incarnate. Not Memnoch. No, never, never. Lies!”

Finally I lay there, helpless. I didn’t care. There was a comfort in being chained, in being unable to batter the walls with my fists till they were pulp, or smash my head against the bricks, or worse.…

“Lies, lies, it’s all a great big panorama of lies! That’s all I saw! One more circus maximus of lies!”

“It’s not all lies,” she said. “Not all of it. That’s the age-old dilemma.”

I fell silent. I could feel my left eye growing deeper and stronger into my brain. I had that. I had my eye. And to think of his face, his horror-stricken face when he looked at my eye, and the story of Uncle Mickey’s eye. I couldn’t grasp it. I’d start howling again.

Dimly I thought I heard Louis’s gentle voice, protesting, pleading, arguing. I heard locks thrown, I heard nails going through wood. I heard Louis begging.

“For a while, just a little while.…” she said. “He is too powerful for us to do anything else. It is either that, or we do away with him.”

“No,” Louis cried.

I heard David protest, no, that she couldn’t. “I will not,” she said calmly. “But he will stay here until I say that he can leave.”

And they were gone.

“Sing,” I whispered. I was talking to the ghosts of the children. “Sing.…”

But the convent was empty. All the little ghosts had fled. The convent was mine. Memnoch’s servant; Memnoch’s prince. I was alone in my prison.

Two nights, three nights. Outside in the city of the modern world the traffic ran along the broad avenue. Couples passed, whispering in the evening shadows. A dog howled.

Four nights, five nights?

David sat by me reading me the manuscript of my story word for word, all I had said, as he remembered this, stopping over and over again, to ask if this was correct, if these were the very words I’d used, if this was the image. And she would answer.

From her place in the corner, she would say, “Yes, that is what he saw, that is what he told you. That is what I see in his mind. Those are his words. That is what he felt.”

Finally, it must have been after a week, she stood over me and asked if I thirsted for blood. I said, “I will never drink it again. I will dry up like something hard made of limestone. They will throw me into a kiln.”

One night Louis came, with the quiet ease of a chaplain into a jail, immune to the rules yet presenting no threat to them.

Slowly, he sat down beside me and folded his legs, and looked off as though it was not polite to stare at me, the prisoner, wrapped in chains and rage.

He laid his fingers on my shoulder. His hair had a reasonable and fashionable look to it—that is, it was clipped and combed and not full of dust. His clothes were clean and new, too, as if he had perhaps dressed for me.

I smiled to myself at that, his dressing for me. But from time to time he did, and when I saw that the shirt had antique buttons
of gold and pearl, I knew that he had, and I accepted that the way a sick man accepts a cool cloth on his forehead.

His fingers pressed me just a little harder, and I liked this too. But I didn’t have the slightest interest in saying so.

“I’ve been reading Wynken’s books,” he said. “You know, I picked them up. I went back for them. We’d left them in the chapel.” And now, he did glance at me very respectfully and simply.

“Oh, thank you for that,” I said. “I dropped the books in the dark. I dropped them when I reached for the eye, or did she take my hand? Whatever, I let the sacks fall with the books. I can’t budge these chains. I can’t move.”

“I’ve taken the books home to our place in the Rue Royale. They’re there, like so many jewels strewn out for us to gaze at.”

“Yes. Have you looked at the tiny pictures, I mean, really looked?” I asked. “I’ve never really looked. I just … it was all happening so quickly, and I didn’t really open the books. But if you could have seen his ghost in the bar and heard the way he described them.”

“They are glorious. They are magnificent. You will love them. You have years of pleasure ahead with them and the light at your side. I’ve only begun to look at them and to read. With a magnifying glass. But you won’t need the glass. Your eyes are stronger than mine.”

“We can read them perhaps … you and I … together.”

“Yes … all his twelve books,” he said. He talked softly of many miraculous little images, of tiny humans, and beasts and flowers, and the lion lying down with the lamb.

I closed my eyes. I was grateful. I was content. He knew I didn’t want to talk anymore.

“I’ll be down there, in our rooms,” he said, “waiting for you. They can’t keep you here much longer.”

What is longer?

It seemed the weather grew warm.

David might have come.

Sometimes I shut my eyes and my ears and I refused to listen to any sound that was deliberately directed to me. I heard the cicadas singing when the sky was red still from the sun, and other vampires were asleep. I heard the birds swooping down on the limbs of the oaks on Napoleon Avenue. I heard the children!

The children did come. Singing. And sometimes some one or two speaking in a rapid whisper, as if exchanging confidences beneath a tent made from a sheet. And feet on the stairs.

And then from beyond the walls, the blaring, amplified noise of the electric night.

One evening I opened my eyes and the chains were gone.

I was alone and the door was open.

My clothes were in tatters, but I didn’t care. I stood up, creakily, achingly, and for the first time in a fortnight, perhaps, I put my hand to my eye and felt it secure there, though of course I’d always seen through it. And I’d stopped thinking about it long ago.

I walked out of the orphanage, through the old courtyard. For one moment I thought I saw a set of iron swings, the kind they made for children on old playgrounds. I saw the A-frames at each end, the crossbar, and the swings themselves, and the children swinging, little girls with blowing hair, and I could hear them laughing. I looked up, dazed, at the stained-glass windows of the chapel.

The children were gone. The courtyard was empty. My palace now. She’d cut all ties. She was long gone to her great, great victory.

I walked a long time down St. Charles Avenue.

I walked under oaks I knew, on old pavements and stretches of brick, past houses new and old, and on across Jackson Avenue into the curious mix of taverns and neon signs, of boarded-up buildings and ruined houses and fancy shops, the garish waste that stretches to downtown.

I came to an empty store that had once sold expensive automobiles. For fifty years, they’d sold those fancy cars in this
place, and now it was a big, hollow room with glass walls. I could see my reflection perfectly in the glass. My preternatural vision was mine again, flawless, with both blue eyes.

And I saw myself.

I want you to see me now. I want you to look at me, as I present myself, and as I swear to this tale, as I swear on every word of it, from my heart.

I am the Vampire Lestat. This is what I saw. This is what I heard. This is what I know! This is
all
I know.

Believe in me, in my words, in what I have said and what has been written down.

I am here, still, the hero of my own dreams, and let me please keep my place in yours.

I
am the Vampire Lestat.

Let me pass now from fiction into legend.

THE END

9:43 February 28, 1994
Adieu, mon amour