Read The Vampire Lestat Online
Authors: Anne Rice
The Vampire Lestat (3 page)
You never pass on our “secrets” to humans unless you mean to bequeath the Dark Gift of our powers to them. You never name other immortals. You never tell where their lairs might be.
My beloved Louis, the narrator of
Interview with the Vampire
, had done all this. He had gone far beyond my secret little disclosure to my rock singers. He had told hundreds of thousands of readers. He had all but drawn them a map and placed an X on the very spot in New Orleans where I slumbered, though what he really knew about that, and what his intentions were, was not clear.
Regardless, for what he’d done, others would surely hunt him down. And there are very simple ways to destroy vampires, especially now. If he was still in existence, he was an outcast and lived in a danger from our kind that no mortal could ever pose.
All the more reason for me to bring the book and the band called The Vampire Lestat to fame as quickly as possible. I had to find Louis. I had to talk to him. In fact, after reading his account of things, I ached for him, ached for his romantic illusions, and even his dishonesty. I ached even for
his gentlemanly malice and his physical presence, the deceptively soft sound of his voice.
Of course I hated him for the lies he told about me. But the love was far greater than the hate. He had shared the dark and romantic years of the nineteenth century with me, he was my companion as no other immortal had ever been.
And I ached to write my story for him, not an answer to his malice in
Interview with the Vampire
, but the tale of all the things I’d seen and learned before I came to him, the story I could not tell him before.
Old rules didn’t matter to me now, either.
I wanted to break every one of them. And I wanted my band and my book to draw out not only Louis but all the other demons that I had ever known and loved. I wanted to find my lost ones, awaken those who slept as I had slept.
Fledglings and ancient ones, beautiful and evil and mad and heartless—they’d all come after me when they saw those video clips and heard those records, when they saw the book in the windows of the bookstores, and they’d know exactly where to find me. I’d be Lestat, the rock superstar. Just come to San Francisco for my first live performance. I’ll be there.
But there was another reason for the whole adventure—a reason even more dangerous and delicious and mad.
And I knew Louis would understand. It must have been behind his interview, his confessions. I wanted mortals
to know
about us. I wanted to proclaim it to the world the way I’d told it to Alex and Larry and Tough Cookie, and my sweet lawyer, Christine.
And it didn’t matter that they didn’t believe it. It didn’t matter that they thought it was art. The fact was that, after two centuries of concealment, I was visible to mortals! I spoke my name aloud. I told my nature. I was there!
But again, I was going farther than Louis. His story, for all its peculiarities, had passed for fiction. In the mortal world, it was as safe as the tableaux of the old Theater of the Vampires in the Paris where the fiends had pretended to be actors pretending to be fiends on a remote and gas-lighted stage.
I’d step into the solar lights before the cameras, I’d reach out and touch with my icy fingers a thousand warm and grasping hands. I’d scare the hell out of them if it was possible, and charm them and lead them into the truth of it if I could.
And suppose—just suppose—that when the corpses began to turn up in ever greater numbers, that when those closest to me began to hearken to their inevitable suspicions—just suppose that the art ceased to be art and became real!
I mean what if they really believed it, really understood that this world still harbored the Old World demon thing, the vampire—oh, what a great and glorious war we might have then!
We would be known, and we would be hunted, and we would be fought in this glittering urban wilderness as no mythic monster has ever been fought by man before.
How could I not love it, the mere idea of it? How could it not be worth the greatest danger, the greatest and most ghastly defeat? Even at the moment of destruction, I would be alive as I have never been.
But to tell the truth, I didn’t think it would ever come to that—I mean, mortals believing in us. Mortals have never made me afraid.
It was the other war that was going to happen, the one in which we’d all come together, or they would all come to fight me.
That was the real reason for The Vampire Lestat. That was the kind of game I was playing.
But that other lovely possibility of real revelation and disaster . . . Well, that added a hell of a lot of spice!
O
UT
of the gloomy waste of Canal Street, I went back up the stairs to my rooms in the old-fashioned French Quarter hotel. Quiet it was, and suited to me, with the Vieux Carré spread out beneath its windows, the narrow little streets of Spanish town houses I’d known for so long.
On the giant television set I played the cassette of the beautiful Visconti film
Death in Venice
. An actor said at one point that evil was a necessity. It was food for genius.
I didn’t believe that. But I wish it were true. Then I could just be Lestat, the monster, couldn’t I? And I was always so good at being a monster! Ah, well . . .
I put a fresh disk into the portable computer word processor and I started to write the story of my life.
I
N THE winter of my twenty-first year, I went out alone on horseback to kill a pack of wolves.
This was on my father’s land in the Auvergne in France, and these were the last decades before the French Revolution.
It was the worst winter that I could remember, and the wolves were stealing the sheep from our peasants and even running at night through the streets of the village.
These were bitter years for me. My father was the Marquis, and I was the seventh son and the youngest of the three who had lived to manhood. I had no claim to the title or the land, and no prospects. Even in a rich family, it might have been that way for a younger boy, but our wealth had been used up long ago. My eldest brother, Augustin, who was the rightful heir to all we possessed, had spent his wife’s small dowry as soon as he married her.
My father’s castle, his estate, and the village nearby were my entire universe. And I’d been born restless—the dreamer, the angry one, the complainer. I wouldn’t sit by the fire and talk of old wars and the days of the Sun King. History had no meaning for me.
But in this dim and old-fashioned world, I had become the hunter. I brought in the pheasant, the venison, and the trout from the mountain streams—whatever was needed and could be got—to feed the family. It had become my life by this time—and one I shared with no one else—and it was a very good thing that I’d taken it up, because there were years when we might have actually starved to death.
Of course this was a noble occupation, hunting one’s ancestral lands, and we alone had the right to do it. The richest of the bourgeois couldn’t lift his gun in my forests. But then again he didn’t have to lift his gun. He had money.
Two times in my life I’d tried to escape this life, only to be brought back with my wings broken. But I’ll tell more on that later.
Right now I’m thinking about the snow all over those mountains and the wolves that were frightening the villagers and stealing my sheep. And
I’m thinking of the old saying in France in those days, that if you lived in the province of Auvergne you could get no farther from Paris.
Understand that since I was the lord and the only lord anymore who could sit a horse and fire a gun, it was natural that the villagers should come to me, complaining about the wolves and expecting me to hunt them. It was my duty.
I wasn’t the least afraid of the wolves either. Never in my life had I seen or heard of a wolf attacking a man. And I would have poisoned them if I could, but meat was simply too scarce to lace with poison.
So early on a very cold morning in January, I armed myself to kill the wolves one by one. I had three flintlock guns and an excellent flintlock rifle, and these I took with me as well as my muskets and my father’s sword. But just before leaving the castle, I added to this little arsenal one or two ancient weapons that I’d never bothered with before.
Our castle was full of old armor. My ancestors had fought in countless noble wars since the times of the Crusades with St. Louis. And hung on the walls above all this clattering junk were a good many lances, battleaxes, flails, and maces.
It was a very large mace—that is, a spiked club—that I took with me that morning, and also a good-sized flail: an iron ball attached to a chain that could be swung with immense force at an attacker.
Now remember this was the eighteenth century, the time when white-wigged Parisians tiptoed around in high-heeled satin slippers, pinched snuff, and dabbed at their noses with embroidered handkerchiefs.
And here I was going out to hunt in rawhide boots and buckskin coat, with these ancient weapons tied to the saddle, and my two biggest mastiffs beside me in their spiked collars.
That was my life. And it might as well have been lived in the Middle Ages. And I knew enough of the fancy-dressed travelers on the post road to feel it rather keenly. The nobles in the capital called us country lords “harecatchers.” Of course we could sneer at them and call them lackeys to the king and queen. Our castle had stood for a thousand years, and not even the great Cardinal Richelieu in his war on our kind had managed to pull down our ancient towers. But as I said before, I didn’t pay much attention to history.
I was unhappy and ferocious as I rode up the mountain.
I wanted a good battle with the wolves. There were five in the pack according to the villagers, and I had my guns and two dogs with jaws so strong they could snap a wolf’s spine in an instant.
Well, I rode for an hour up the slopes. Then I came into a small valley I knew well enough that no snowfall could disguise it. And as I started
across the broad empty field towards the barren wood, I heard the first howling.
Within seconds there had come another howling and then another, and now the chorus was in such harmony that I couldn’t tell the number of the pack, only that they had seen me and were signaling to each other to come together, which was just what I had hoped they would do.
I don’t think I felt the slightest fear then. But I felt something, and it caused the hair to rise on the backs of my arms. The countryside for all its vastness seemed empty. I readied my guns. I ordered my dogs to stop their growling and follow me, and some vague thought came to me that I had better get out of the open field and into the woods and hurry.
My dogs gave their deep baying alarm. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the wolves hundreds of yards behind me and streaking straight towards me over the snow. Three giant gray wolves they were, coming on in a line.
I broke into a run for the forest.
It seemed I would make it easily before the three reached me, but wolves are extremely clever animals, and as I rode hard for the trees I saw the rest of the pack, some five full-grown animals, coming out ahead of me to my left. It was an ambush, and I could never make the forest in time. And the pack was eight wolves, not five as the villagers had told me.
Even then I didn’t have sense enough to be afraid. I didn’t ponder the obvious fact that these animals were starving or they’d never come near the village. Their natural reticence with men was completely gone.
I got ready for battle. I stuck the flail in my belt, and with the rifle I took aim. I brought down a big male yards away from me and had time to reload as my dogs and the pack attacked each other.
They couldn’t get my dogs by the neck on account of the spiked collars. And in this first skirmish my dogs brought down one of the wolves in their powerful jaws immediately. I fired and brought down a second.
But the pack had surrounded the dogs. As I fired again and again, reloading as quickly as I could and trying to aim clear of the dogs, I saw the smaller dog go down with its hind legs broken. Blood streamed over the snow; the second dog stood off the pack as it tried to devour the dying animal, but within two minutes, the pack had torn open the second dog’s belly and killed it.
