The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (405 page)

“Vain things,” said the black-haired one. “Vain and foolish, but you’ll come to see it. You are stronger than I reckoned. But then he was centuries old, your Maker, nobody even tells of a time when there wasn’t Marius, the lone wolf, who abides no one in his territory, Marius, the destroyer of the young.”

“I never knew him to destroy any but those who were evil,” I said in a whisper.

“We are evil, aren’t we? All of us are evil. So he destroyed us without compunction. He thought he was safe from us. He turned his back on us! He considered us not worthy of his attentions, and look, how he has lavished all his strength on a boy. But I must say you are a most beautiful boy.”

There was a noise, an evil rustling, not unfamiliar. I smelled rats.

“Oh, yes, my children, the rats,” he said. “They come to me. Do you want to see? Turn over and look up at me, if you will? Think no more on St. Francis, with his birds and squirrels and the wolf at his side. Think on Santino, with his rats.”

I did look. I drew in my breath. I sat up in the dirt and stared at him. A great gray rat sat on his shoulder, its tiny whiskered snout just kissing his ear, its tail curling behind his head. Another rat had come to sit sedately, as if spellbound, in his lap. There were others gathered at his feet.

Seeming loath to move lest they startle, he carefully dipped his right hand into a bowl of dried bread crumbs. I caught the scent only now, mingled with that of the rats. He offered a handful of crumbs to the rat on his shoulder, who ate from it gratefully and with strange delicacy, and then he dropped some of the bread in his lap, where three rats came to feast at once.

“Do you think I love such things?” he said. He looked intently at me, his eyes widening with the emphasis on his words. His black hair was a dense tangled veil on his shoulders, his forehead very smooth and shining white in the candlelight.

“Do you think I love to live here in the bowels of the world,” he asked sadly, “under the great city of Rome, where the earth seeps waste from the foul throng above, and have these, the vermin, as my familiars? Do you think I was never flesh and blood, or that, having undergone this change for the sake of Almighty God and His Divine Plan, I
don’t long for the life you lived with your greedy Master? Have I not eyes to see the brilliant colors which your Master spread over his canvases? Do I not like the sounds of ungodly music?” He gave a soft agonizing sigh.

“What has God made or ever suffered to be made that is distasteful in itself?” he continued. “Sin is not repulsive in itself; how absurd to think so. No one comes to love pain. We can only hope to endure it.”

“Why all this?” I asked. I was sick unto vomiting, but I held it back. I breathed as deeply as I could to let all the smells of this horror chamber flood my lungs and cease to torment me.

I sat back, crossing my legs so that I could study him. I wiped the ashes out of my eye. “Why? Your themes are entirely familiar, but what is this realm of vampires in black monkly robes?”

“We are the Defenders of Truth,” he said sincerely.

“Oh, who is not the defender of truth, for the love of Heaven,” I said bitterly. “Look, the blood of your brother in Christ is stuck all over my hands! And you sit, the freakish blood-stuffed replicant of a human being staring on all this as if it were so much chitchat among the candles!”

“Ah, but you have a fiery tongue for one with such a sweet face,” he said in cool wonder. “So pliant you seem with your soft brown eyes and dark autumnal red hair, but you are clever.”

“Clever? You burnt my Master! You destroyed him. You burnt up his children! I am your prisoner here, am I not? What for? And you talk of the Lord Jesus Christ to me? You? You? Answer me, what is this morass of filth and fancy, molded out of clay and blessed candles!”

He laughed. His eyes crinkled at the edges, and his face was cheerful and sweet. His hair, for all its filth and tangles, kept its preternatural luster. How fine he would have been if freed from the dictates of this nightmare.

“Amadeo,” he said. “We are the Children of Darkness,” he explained patiently. “We vampires are made to be the scourge of man, as is pestilence. We are part of the trials and tribulations of this world; we drink blood, and we kill for the glory of God who would test his human creatures.”

“Don’t speak horrors.” I put my hands over my ears. I cringed.

“Oh, but you know it’s true,” he insisted without raising his voice. “You know it as you see me in my robes and you look about my chamber. I am restrained for The Living Lord as were the monks of old before they learned to paint their walls with erotic paintings.”

“You talk madness, and I don’t know why you do it.” I would not remember the Monastery of the Caves!

“I do it because I have found my purpose here and the purpose of God, and there is nothing Higher. Would you be damned and alone, and selfish and without purpose? Would you turn your back on a design so magnificent that not one tiny child is forgotten! Did you think you could live forever without the splendor of that great scheme, struggling to deny the handiwork of God in every beautiful thing which you coveted and made your own?”

I fell silent. Don’t think on the old Russian saints. Wisely, he did not press. On the contrary, very softly, without the devilish lilt, he began to sing the Latin hymn …

“And on that Day, that Final Day, we shall have duties for Him, we His Dark Angels shall take the Evil souls down into the inferno as is His Divine Will.”

I looked up at him again. “And then the final plea of this hymn, that He have mercy on us, was His Passion not for us?”

I sang it softly in Latin:

I pressed on, scarcely having the spirit for it, to fully acknowledge the horror. “What monk was there in the Monastery of my childhood who didn’t hope one day to be with God? What do you say to me now, that we, the Children of Darkness, serve Him with
no hope of ever being with Him
?”

He looked broken suddenly.

“Pray there is some secret that we don’t know,” he whispered. He looked off as if he were in fact praying. “How can He not love Satan when Satan has done so well? How can He not love us? I don’t understand, but I am what I am, which is this, and you are the same.” He looked at me, eyebrows rising gently again to underscore his wonder. “And we must serve Him. Otherwise we are lost.”

He slipped from the stool and came down towards me, settling on the floor opposite me, cross-legged, and putting his long arm out to place his hand on my shoulder.

“Splendid being,” I said, “and to think God made you as he made the boys you destroyed tonight, the perfect bodies you rendered to the fire.”

He was in deep distress. “Amadeo, take another name and come with us, be with us. We need you. And what will you do alone?”

“Tell me why you killed my Master.”

He let go of me and let his hand fall in the lap made by his black robe stretched across his knees.

“It’s forbidden to us to use our talents to dazzle mortals. It is forbidden us to trick them with our skills. It is forbidden us to seek the solace of their company. It is forbidden us to walk in the places of light.”

Nothing in this surprised me.

“We are monks as pure at heart as those of Cluny,” he said. “We make our Monasteries strict and holy, and we hunt and we kill to perfect the Garden of Our Lord as a Vale of Tears.” He paused, and then making his voice all the more soft and wondering, he continued. “We are as the bees that sting, and the rats that steal the grain; we are as the Black Death come to take young or old, beautiful or ugly, that men and women shall tremble at the power of God.”

He looked at me, imploring me for understanding.

“Cathedrals rise from dust,” he said, “to show man wonder. And in the stones men carve the Danse Macabre to show that life is brief. We carry scythes in the army of the robed skeleton who is carved on a thousand doorways, a thousand walls. We are the followers of Death, whose cruel visage is drawn in a million tiny prayer books which the rich and the poor alike hold in their hands.” His eyes were huge and dreamy. He looked about us at the grim domed cell in which we sat. I could see the candles in the black pupils of his eyes. His eyes closed for a moment, and then opened, clearer, more bright.

“Your Master knew these things,” he said regretfully. “He knew. But he was of a pagan time, obdurate and angry, and refusing ever the grace of God. In you, he saw God’s grace, because your soul is pure. You are young and tender and open like the moonflower to take the light of the night. You hate us now, but you will come to see.”

“I don’t know that I will ever see anything again,” I said. “I’m cold and small and have no understanding now of feeling, of longing, even of hate. I don’t hate you, when I should. I’m empty. I want to die.”

“But it’s God’s will when you die, Amadeo,” he said. “Not your own.” He stared hard at me, and I knew I couldn’t hide from him any longer my recollection—the monks of Kiev, starving slowly in their earthen cells, saying they must take sustenance for it was God’s will when they should die.

I tried to hide these things, I drew these tiny pictures to myself and locked them up. I thought of nothing. One word came to my tongue: horror. And then the thought that before this time I had been a fool.

Another came into the room. It was a female vampire. She entered through a wooden door, letting it close carefully behind her as a good nun might do, in order that no unnecessary noise be made. She came up to him and stood behind him.

Her full gray hair was tangled and filthy, as was his, and it too had formed a shapely veil of beauteous weight and density behind her shoulders. Her clothes were antique rags. She wore the low hip belt of women of olden times adorning a shapely dress that revealed her small waist and gently flaring hips, the courtly costume one sees graven on the stone figures of rich sarcophagi. Her eyes, like his, were huge as if to summon every precious particle of light in gloom. Her mouth was strong and full, and the fine bones of her cheeks and jaw shone well for the thin layer of silvery dust that covered her. Her neck and bosom were almost bare.

“Will he be one of us?” she asked. Her voice was so lovely, so comforting, that I felt I’d been touched by it. “I have prayed for him. I have heard him weeping inside though he makes no sound.”

I looked away from her, bound to be disgusted by her, my enemy, who had slain those I loved.

“Yes,” said Santino, the dark-haired one. “He’ll be one of us, and he can be a leader. He has such strength. He slew Alfredo there, you see? Oh, it was wonderful to behold how he did it, with such rage and with such a baby’s scowl on his face.”

She looked beyond me, at the ruin of what that vampire had been, and I didn’t know myself what was left. I didn’t turn to look at it.

A deep bitter sorrow softened her expression. How beautiful she must have been in life; how beautiful still if the dust were taken away from her.

Her eyes shot to me suddenly, accusingly, and then became mild.

“Vain thoughts, my child,” she said. “I don’t live for looking glasses, as your Master did. I need no velvet or silks to serve my Lord. Ah, Santino, such a newborn thing he is, look at him.” She spoke of me. “In centuries gone by I might have penned verses in honor of such beauty, that it should come to us to grace God’s sooted fold, a lily in the dark he is, a fairy’s child planted by moonlight in a milkmaid’s cradle to thrall the world with his girlish gaze and manly whisper.”

Her flattery enraged me, but I could not bear in this Hell to lose the sheer beauty of her voice, its deep sweetness. I didn’t care what she said. And as I looked at her white face in which many a vein had become a ridge in stone, I knew she was far too old for my impetuous violence. Yet kill, yes, yank head from body, yes, and stab with candles, yes. I thought of these things with clenched teeth, and him, how I would dispatch him for he was not so old, not nearly by half with his olive skin, but these compulsions died like weeds sprung from my mind stung by a northern wind, the deep frozen wind of my will dying inside of me.

Ah, but they were beautiful.

“You will not renounce all beauty,” she said kindly, having drunk up my thoughts perhaps, despite all my devices for concealing them. “You will see another variant of beauty—a harsh and variegated beauty—when you take life and see that marvelous corporeal design become a blazing web as you do suck it dry, and dying thoughts do fall on you like wailing veils to dim your eyes and make you but the school of those poor souls you hasten to glory or perdition—yes, beauty. You will see beauty in the stars that can forever be your comfort. And in the earth, yes, the earth itself, you will find a thousand shades of darkness. This will be your beauty. You do but forswear the brash colors of mankind and the defiant light of the rich and the vain.”

“I forswear nothing,” I said.

She smiled, her face filling with a warm and irresistible warmth, her huge long mat of white hair curling here and there in the ardent flicker of the candles.

She looked to Santino. “How well he understands the things we say,” she said. “And yet he seems the naughty boy who mocks all things in ignorance.”

“He knows, he knows,” the other answered with surprising bitterness. He fed his rats. He looked at her and me. He seemed to muse and even to hum the old Gregorian chant again.

I heard others in the dark. And far away the drums still beat, but that was unendurable. I looked to the ceiling of this place, the blinded mouthless skulls that looked on all with limitless patience.

I looked at them, the seated figure of Santino brooding or lost in thought, and behind him and above him, her statuesque form in its ragged raiment, her gray hair parted in the middle, her face ornamented by the dust.