The Vampire Lestat (44 page)

“We go into the fire or we go into legend,” said a teller of the tale.

Then came accounts of chaos in Rome, of dozens of leaders who put on the black hood and the black robes to preside over the coven. And then it seemed there were none.

Since the year 1700 there had been no word anymore from Italy. For half a century Armand had not been able to trust to his passion or that of the others around him to create the frenzy of the true Sabbat. And he had dreamed of his old Master, Marius, in those rich robes of red velvet, and seen the palazzo full of vibrant paintings, and he had been afraid.

Then another had come.

His children rushed down into the cellars beneath les Innocents to describe to him this new vampire, who wore a fur-lined cloak of red velvet and could profane the churches and strike down those who wore crosses and walk in the places of light. Red velvet. It was mere coincidence, and yet it maddened him and seemed an insult to him, a gratuitous pain that his soul couldn’t bear.

And then the woman had been made, the woman with the hair of a lion and the name of an angel, beautiful and powerful as her son.

And he had come up the stairway out of the catacomb, leading the band against us, as the hooded ones had come to destroy him and his Master in Venice centuries before.

And it had failed.

He stood dressed in these strange lace and brocade garments. He carried coins in his pockets. His mind swam with images from the thousands of books he had read. And he felt himself pierced with all he had witnessed in the places of light in the great city called Paris, and it was as if he could hear his old Master whispering in his ear:

But a millennium of nights will be yours to see light as no mortal has ever seen it, to snatch from the distant stars as if you were Prometheus an endless illumination by which to understand all things
.

“All things have eluded my understanding,” he said. “I am as one whom the earth has given back, and you, Lestat and Gabrielle, are like the images painted by my old Master in cerulean and carmine and gold.”

He stood still in the doorway, his hands on the backs of his arms, and he was looking at us, asking silently:

What is there to know? What is there to give? We are the abandoned of God. And there is no Devil’s Road spinning out before me and there are no bells of hell ringing in my ears
.

A
N HOUR passed. Perhaps more. Armand sat by the fire. No marks any longer on his face from the long-forgotten battle. He seemed, in his stillness, to be as fragile as an emptied shell.

Gabrielle sat across from him, and she too stared at the flames in silence, her face weary and seemingly compassionate. It was painful for me not to know her thoughts.

I was thinking of Marius. And Marius and Marius . . . the vampire who had painted pictures in and of the real world. Triptychs, portraits, frescoes on the walls of his palazzo.

And the real world had never suspected him nor hunted him nor cast him out. It was this band of hooded fiends who came to burn the paintings, the ones who shared the Dark Gift with him—had he himself ever called it the Dark Gift?—they were the ones who said he couldn’t live and create among mortals. Not mortals.

I saw the little stage at Renaud’s and I heard myself sing and the singing become a roar. Nicolas said, “It is splendid.” I said, “It is petty.” And it was like striking Nicolas. In my imagination he said what he had not said that night: “Let me have what I can believe in. You would never do that.”

The triptychs of Marius were in churches and convent chapels, maybe on the walls of the great houses in Venice and Padua. The vampires would not have gone into holy places to pull them down. So they were there somewhere, with a signature perhaps worked into the detail, these creations of the vampire who surrounded himself with mortal apprentices, kept a mortal lover from whom he took the little drink, went out alone to kill.

I thought of the night in the inn when I had seen the meaninglessness of life, and the soft fathomless despair of Armand’s story seemed an ocean in which I might drown. This was worse than the blasted shore in Nicki’s mind. This was for three centuries, this darkness, this nothingness.

The radiant auburn-haired child by the fire could open his mouth again and out would come blackness like ink to cover the world.

That is, if there had not been this protagonist, this Venetian master, who had committed the heretical act of making meaning on the panels he painted—it had to be meaning—and our own kind, the elect of Satan, had made him into a living torch.

Had Gabrielle seen these paintings in the story as I had seen them? Did they burn in her mind’s eye as they did in mine?

Marius was traveling some route into my soul that would let him roam there forever, along with the hooded fiends who turned the paintings into chaos again.

In a dull sort of misery, I thought of the travelers’ tales—that Marius was alive, seen in Egypt or Greece.

I wanted to ask Armand, wasn’t it possible? Marius must have been so very strong . . . But it seemed disrespectful of him to ask.

“Old legend,” he whispered. His voice was as precise as the inner voice. Unhurriedly, he continued without ever looking away from the flames. “Legend from the olden times before they destroyed us both.”

“Perhaps not,” I said. Echo of the visions, paintings on the walls. “Maybe Marius is alive.”

“We are miracles or horrors,” he said quietly, “depending upon how you wish to see us. And when “you first
know
about us, whether it’s through the dark blood or promises or visitations, you think anything is possible. But that isn’t so. The world closes tight around this miracle soon enough; and you don’t hope for other miracles. That is, you become accustomed to the new limits and the limits define everything once again. So they say Marius continues. They all continue somewhere, that’s what you
want
to believe.

“Not a single one remains in the coven in Rome from those nights when I was taught the ritual; and maybe the coven itself is no longer even there. Years and years have passed since there was any communication from the coven. But they all exist somewhere, don’t they? After all, we can’t die.” He sighed. “Doesn’t matter,” he said.

Something greater and more terrible mattered, that this despair might crush Armand beneath it. That in spite of the thirst in him now, the blood lost when we had fought together, and the silent furnace of his body healing the bruises and the broken flesh, he could not will himself into the world above to hunt. Rather suffer the thirst and the heat of the silent furnace. Rather stay here and be with us.

But he already knew the answer, that he could not be with us.

Gabrielle and I didn’t have to speak to let him know. We did not even have to resolve the question in our minds. He knew, the way God might know the future because God is the possessor of all the facts.

Unbearable anguish. And Gabrielle’s expression all the more weary, sad.

“You know that with all my soul I do want to take you with us,” I said. I was surprised at my own emotion. “But it would be disaster for us all.”

No change in him. He knew. No challenge from Gabrielle.

“I cannot
stop
thinking of Marius,” I confessed.

I know. And you do not think of Those Who Must Be Kept, which is most strange
.

“That is merely another mystery,” I said. “And there are a thousand mysteries. I think of Marius! And I’m too much the slave of my own obsessions and fascination. It’s a dreadful thing to linger so on Marius, to extract that one radiant figure from the tale.”

Doesn’t matter. If it pleases you, take it. I do not lose what I give
.

“When a being reveals his pain in such a torrent, you are bound to respect the whole of the tragedy. You have to try to comprehend. And such helplessness, such despair is almost incomprehensible to me. That’s why I think of Marius. Marius I understand. You I don’t understand.”

Why?

Silence.

Didn’t he deserve the truth?

“I’ve been a rebel always,” I said. “You’ve been the slave of everything that ever claimed you.”

“I was the leader of my coven!”

“No. You were the slave of Marius and then of the Children of Darkness. You fell under the spell of one and then the other. What you suffer now is the absence of a spell. I think I shudder that you caused me so to understand it for a little while, to know it as if I were a different being than I am.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, eyes still on the fire. “You think too much in terms of decision and action. This tale is no explanation. And I am not a being who requires a respectful acknowledgment in your thoughts or in words. And we all know the answer you have given is too immense to be voiced and we all three of us know that it is final. What I don’t know is why. So I am a creature very different from you, and so you cannot understand me. Why can’t I go with you? I will do whatever you wish if you take me with you. I will be under your spell.”

I thought of Marius with his brush and the pots of egg tempera.

“How could you have ever believed anything that they told you after they burned those paintings?” I asked. “How could you have given yourself over to them?”

Agitation, rising anger.

Caution in Gabrielle’s face, but not fear.

“And you, when you stood on the stage and you saw the audience screaming to get out of the theater—how my followers described this to me, the vampire terrifying the crowd and the crowd streaming into the boulevard du Temple—what did you believe? That you did not belong among mortals, that’s what you believed. You knew you did not. And there was
no band of fiends in hooded robes to tell you. You knew. So Marius did not belong among mortals. So I did not.”

“Ah, but it’s different.”

“No, it is not. That’s why you scorn the Theater of the Vampires which is now at this very moment working out its little dramas to bring in the gold from the boulevard crowds. You do not wish to deceive as Marius deceived. It divides you ever more from mankind. You want to pretend to be mortal, but to deceive makes you angry and it makes you kill.”

“In that moment on the stage,” I said, “I revealed
myself
. I did the very opposite of deceiving. I wanted somehow in making manifest the monstrosity of myself to be joined with my fellow humans again. Better they should run from me than not see me. Better they should know I was something monstrous than for me to glide through the world unrecognized by those upon whom I preyed.”

“But it was not better.”

“No. What Marius did was better. He did not deceive.”

“Of course he did. He fooled everyone!”

“No. He found a way to imitate mortal life. To be one with mortals. He slew only the evildoer, and he painted as mortals paint. Angels and blue skies, clouds, those are the things you made me see when you were telling. He created good things. And I see wisdom in him and a lack of vanity. He did not need to reveal himself. He had lived a thousand years and he believed more in the vistas of heaven that he painted than in himself.”

Confusion.

Doesn’t
matter now, devils who paint angels
.

“Those are only metaphors,” I said. “And it does matter! If you are to rebuild, if you are to find the Devil’s Road again, it does matter! There are ways for us to exist. If I could only imitate life, just find a way . . . ”

“You say things that mean nothing to me. We are the abandoned of God.”

Gabrielle glanced at him suddenly. “Do you
believe
in God?” she asked.

“Yes, always in God,” he answered. “It is Satan—our master—who is the fiction and that is the fiction which has betrayed me.”

“Oh, then you are truly damned,” I said. “And you know full well that your retreat into the fraternity of the Children of Darkness was a retreat from a sin that was not a sin.”

Anger.

“Your heart breaks for something you’ll never have,” he countered, his voice rising suddenly. “You brought Gabrielle and Nicolas over the barrier to you, but you could not go back.”

“Why is it you don’t hearken to your own story?” I asked. “Is it that you have never forgiven Marius for not warning you about them, letting you fall into their hands? You will never take anything, not example or inspiration, from Marius again? I am not Marius, but I tell you since I set my feet on the Devil’s Road, I have heard of only one elder who could teach me anything, and that is Marius, your Venetian master. He is talking to me now. He is saying something to me of a way to be immortal.”

“Mockery.”

“No. It wasn’t mockery! And you are the one whose heart breaks for what he will never have: another body of belief, another spell.”

No answer.

“We cannot be Marius for you,” I said, “or the dark lord, Santino. We are not artists with a great vision that will carry you forward. And we are not evil coven masters with the conviction to condemn a legion to perdition. And this domination—this glorious mandate—is what you must have.”

I had risen to my feet without meaning to. I had come close to the fireplace and I was looking down at him.

And I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Gabrielle’s subtle nod of approval, and the way that she closed her eyes for a moment as if she were allowing herself a sigh of relief.

He was perfectly still.

“You have to suffer through this emptiness,” I said, “and find what impels you to continue. If you come with us we will fail you and you will destroy us.”

“How suffer through it?” He looked up at me and his eyebrows came together in the most poignant frown. “How do I begin? You move like the right hand of God! But for me the world, the real world in which Marius lived, is beyond reach. I never lived in it. I push against the glass. But how do I get in?”

“I can’t tell you that,” I said.

“You have to study this age,” Gabrielle interrupted. Her voice was calm but commanding.

He looked towards her as she spoke.

“You have to understand the age,” she continued, “through its literature and its music and its art. You have come up out of the earth, as you yourself put it. Now live in the world.”