PART III 3 page

when I looked to her, as if she'd have me let her alone; and then her feet shot off from me with a

rapid tapping on the stone floor that echoed all along the walls, like fingers tapping on my

temples, on my skull. I held my temples, staring dumbly at the floor in search of shelter, as if to

lift my eyes would force me to look on some wretched suffering I would not, could not endure.

Then again I saw the vampire's face floating in his flame, his ageless eyes circled in dark lashes.

His lips were very still, but as I stared at him he seemed to smile without making even the

slightest movement. I watched him all the harder, convinced it was some powerful illusion I

could penetrate with keen attention; and the more I watched, the more he seemed to smile and

finally to be animated with a soundless whispering, musing, singing. I could hear it like

something curling in the dark, as wallpaper curls in the blast of a fire or paint peels from the face of a burning doll. I had the urge to reach for him, to shake him violently so that his still face

would move, admit to this soft singing; and suddenly I found him pressed against me, his arm

around my chest, his lashes so close I could see them matted and gleaming above the

incandescent orb of his eye, his soft, tasteless breath against my skin. It was delirium.

"I moved to get away from him, and yet I was drawn to him and I didn't move at all, his arm

exerting its firm pressure, his candle blazing now against my eye, so that I felt the warmth of it;

all my cold flesh yearned for that warmth, but suddenly I waved to snuff it but couldn't find it,

and all I saw was his radiant face, as I had never seen Lestat's face, white and poreless and

sinewy and male. The other vampire. All other vampires. An infinite procession of my own kind.

"The moment ended.

"I found myself with my hand outstretched, touching his face; but he was a distance away from

me, as if he'd never moved near me, making no attempt to brush my hand away. I drew back,

flushed, stunned.

"Far away in the Paris night a bell chimed, the dull, golden circles of sound seeming to penetrate the walls, the timbers that carried that sound down into the earth like great organ pipes. Again

came that whispering, that inarticulate singing. And through the gloom I saw that mortal boy

watching me, and I smelled the hot aroma of his flesh. The vampire's facile hand beckoned him,

and he came towards me, his eyes fearless and exciting, and he drew up to me in the candlelight

and put his arms around my shoulders.

"Never had I felt this, never had I experienced it, this yielding of a conscious mortal. But before I could push him away for his own sake, I saw the bluish bruise on his tender neck. He was

offering it to me. He was pressing the length of his body against me now, and I felt the hard

strength of his sex beneath his clothes pressing against my leg. A wretched gasp escaped my lips,

but he bent close, his lips on what must have been so cold, so lifeless for him; and I sank my

teeth into his skin, my body rigid, that hard sex driving against me, and I lifted him in passion off the floor. Wave after wave of his beating heart passed into me as, weightless, I rocked with him,

devouring him, his ecstasy, his conscious pleasure.

"Then, weak and gasping, I saw him at a distance from me, my arms empty, my mouth still

flooded with the taste of his blood. He lay against that auburnhaired vampire, his arm about the

vampire's waist, and he gazed at me in that same pacific manner of the vampire, his eyes misted

over and weak from the loss of life. I remember moving mutely forward, drawn to him and

seemingly unable to control it, that gaze taunting me, that conscious life defying me; he should

die and would not die; he would live on, comprehending, surviving that intimacy! I turned. The

host of vampires moved in the shadows, their candles whipped and fleeting on the cool air; and

above them loomed a great broadcast of ink-drawn figures: the sleeping corpse of a woman

ravaged by a vulture with a human face; a naked man bound hand and foot to a tree, beside him

hanging the torso of another, his severed arms tied still to another branch, and on a spike this

dead man's staring head.

"The singing came again, that thin, ethereal singing. Slowly the hunger in me subsided, obeyed,

but my head throbbed and the flames of the candles seemed to merge in burnished circles of

light. Someone touched me suddenly, pushed me roughly, so that I almost lost my balance, and

when I straitened I saw the thin, angular face of the trickster vampire I despised. He reached out

for me with his white hands. But the other one, the distant one, moved forward suddenly and

stood between us. It seemed he struck the other vampire, that I saw him move, and then again I

did not see him move; both stood still like statues, eyes fixed on one another, and time passed

like wave after wave of water rolling back from a still beach. I cannot say how long we stood

there, the three of us in those shadows, and how utterly still they seemed to me, only the

shimmering flames seeming to have life behind them. Then I remember floundering along the

wall and finding a large oak chair into which I all but collapsed. It seemed Claudia was near and

speaking to someone in a hushed but sweet voice. My forehead teemed with blood, with heat.

" 'Come with me,' said the auburn-haired vampire. I was searching his face for the movement of

his lips that must have preceded the sound, yet it was so hopelessly long after the sound. And

then we were walking, the three of us, down a long stone stairway deeper beneath the city,

Claudia ahead of us, her shadow long against the wall. The air grew cool and refreshing with the

fragrance of water, and I could see the droplets bleeding through the stones like beads of gold in

the light of the vampire's candle.

"It was a small chamber we entered, a fire burning in a deep fireplace cut into the stone wall. A bed lay at the other end, fitted into the rock and enclosed with two brass gates. At first I saw

these things clearly, and saw the long wall of books opposite the fireplace and the wooden desk

that was against it, and the coffin to the other side. But then the room began to waver, and the

auburn-haired vampire put his hands on my shoulders and guided me down into a leather chair.

The fire was intensely hot against my legs, but this felt good to me, sharp and clear, something to

draw me out of this confusion. I sat back, my eyes only half open, and tried to see again what

was about me. It was as if that distant bed were a stage and on the linen pillows of the little stage lay that boy, his black hair parted in the middle and curling about his ears, so that he looked now

in his dreamy, fevered state like one of those lithe androgynous creatures of a Botticelli painting;

and beside him, nestled against him, her tiny white hand stark against his ruddy flesh, lay

Claudia, her face buried in his neck. The masterful auburn-haired vampire looked on, his hands

clasped in front of him; and when Claudia rose now, the boy shuddered. The vampire picked her

up, gently, as I might pick her up, her hands finding a hold on his neck, her eyes half shut with

the swoon, her lips rouged with blood. He set her gently on the desk, and she lay back against the

leatherbound books, her hands falling gracefully into the lap of her lavender dress. The gates

closed on the boy and, burying his face in the pillows, he slept.

"There was something disturbing to me in the room, and I didn't know what it was. I didn't in

truth know what was wrong with me, only that I'd been drawn forcefully either by myself or

someone else from two fierce, consuming states: an absorption with those grim paintings, and

the kill to which I'd abandoned myself, obscenely, in the eyes of others.

"I didn't know what it was that threatened me now, what it was that my mind sought escape

from. I kept looking at Claudia, the way she lay against the books, the way she sat amongst the

objects of the desk, the polished white skull, the candle-holder, the open parchment book whose

hand-painted script gleamed in the light; and then above her there emerged into focus the

lacquered and shimmering painting of a medieval devil, horned and hoofed, his bestial figure

looming over a coven of worshipping witches. Her head was just beneath it, the loose curling

strands of her hair just stroking it; and she watched the brown-eyed vampire with wide,

wondering eyes. I wanted to pick her up suddenly, and frightfully, horribly, I saw her in my

kindled imagination flopping like a doll. I was gazing at the devil, that monstrous face preferable

to the sight of her in her eerie stillness.

" 'You won't awaken the boy if you speak,' said the brown-eyed vampire. 'You've come from so

far, you've traveled so long.' And gradually my confusion subsided, as if smoke were rising and

moving away on a current of fresh air. And I lay awake and very calm, looking at him as he sat

in the opposite chair. Claudia, too, looked at him. And he looked from one to the other of us, his

smooth face and pacific eyes very like they'd been all along, as though there had never been any

change in him at all.

" 'My name is Armand,' he said. 'I sent Santiago to give you the invitation. I know your names. I welcome you to my house.'

"I gathered my strength to speak, my voice sounding strange to me when I told him that we had

feared we were alone.

" 'But how did you come into existence?' he asked. Claudia's hand rose ever so slightly from her lap, her eyes moving mechanically from his face to mine. I saw this and knew that he must have

seen it, and yet he gave no sign. I knew at once what she meant to tell me. 'You don't want to

answer,' said Armand, his voice low and even more measured than Claudia's voice, far less

human than my own. I sensed myself slipping away again into contemplation of that voice and

those eyes, from which I had to draw myself up with great effort.

" 'Are you the leader of this group?' I asked him.

" 'Not in the way you mean leader,' he answered. But if there were a leader here, I would be that one.'

" 'I haven't come... you'll forgive me... to talk of how I came into being. Because that's no

mystery to me, it presents no question. So if you have no power to which I might be required to

render respect, I don't wish to talk of those things.'

" 'If I told you I did have such power, would you respect it?' he asked.

"I wish I could describe his manner of speaking, how each time he spoke he seemed to arise out

of a state of cont emplation very like that state into which I felt I was drifting, from which it took so much to wrench myself; and yet he never moved, and seemed at all times alert. This distracted

me while at the same time I was powerfully attracted by it, as I was by this room, its simplicity,

its rich, warm combination of essentials: the books, the desk, the two chairs by the fire, the

coffin, the pictures. The luxury of those rooms in the hotel seemed vulgar, but more than that,

meaningless, beside this room. I understood all of it except for the mortal boy, the sleeping boy,

whom I didn't understand at all.

" 'I'm not certain,' I said, unable to keep my eyes off that awful medieval Satan. 'I would have to know from what... from whom it comes. Whether it came from other vampires... or elsewhere'

" 'Elsewhere...' he said. 'What is elsewhere?

" 'That?' I pointed to the medieval picture.

" 'That is a picture,' he said.

" 'Nothing more?'

" 'Nothing more.'

" 'Then Satan... some satanic power doesn't give you your power here, either as leader or as

vampire?'

" 'No,' he said calmly, so calmly it was impossible for me to know what he thought of my

questions, if he thought of them at all in the manner which I knew to be thinking.

" 'And the other vampires?'

" 'No,' he said.

" 'Then we are not...' I sat forward. '... the children of Satan?'

" 'How could we be the children of Satan?' he asked. 'Do you believe that Satan made this world

around you?'

" 'No, I believe that God made it, if anyone made it. But He also must have made Satan, and I

want to know if we are his children!'

" 'Exactly, and consequently if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan's

power comes from God and that Satan is simply God's child, and that we are God's children also.

There are no children of Satan, really.'

"I couldn't disguise my feelings at this. I sat back against the leather, looking at that small

woodcut of the devil, released for the moment from any sense of obligation to Armand's

presence, lost in my thoughts, in the undeniable implications of his simple logic.

" 'But why does this concern you? Surely what I say doesn't surprise you,' he said. 'Why do you

let it affect you?'

"'Let me explain,' I began. 'I know that you're a master vampire. I respect you. But I'm incapable of your detachment. I know what it is, and I do not possess it and I doubt that I ever will. I accept this.'

" 'I understand,' he nodded. 'I saw you in the theater, your suffering, your sympathy with that

girl. I saw your sympathy for Denis when I offered him to you; you die when you kill, as if you

feel that you deserve to die, and you stint on nothing. But why, with this passion and this sense

of justice, do you wish to call yourself the child of Satan!'

" 'I'm evil, evil as any vampire who ever lived! I've killed over and over and will do it again. I took that boy, Denis, when you gave him to me, though I was incapable of knowing whether he

would survive or not.'

" 'Why does that make you as evil as any vampire? Aren't there gradations of evil? Is evil a great perilous gulf into which one falls with the first sin, plummeting to the depth?'

" 'Yes, I think it is,' I said to him. 'It's not logical, as you would make it sound. But it's that dark, that empty. And it is without consolation.'

" 'But you're not being fair,' he said with the first glimmer of expression in his voice. 'Surely you attribute great degrees and variations to goodness. There is the goodness of the child which is

innocence, and then there is the goodness of the monk who has given up everything to others and

lives a life of self-deprivation and service. The goodness of saints, the goodness of good

housewives. Are all these the same?'

" 'No. But equally and infinitely different from evil.' I answered.

"I didn't know I thought these things. I spoke them now as my thoughts. And they were my most

profound feelings taking a shape they could never have taken had I not spoken them, had I not

thought them out this way in conversation with another. I thought myself then possessed of a

passive mind, in a sense. I mean that my mind could only pull itself together, formulate thought

out of the muddle of longing and pain, when it was touched by another mind; fertilized by it;

deeply excited by that other mind and driven to form conclusions. I felt now the rarest, most

acute alleviation of loneliness. I could easily visualize and suffer that moment years before in

another century, when I had stood at the foot of Babette's stairway, and feel the perpetual

metallic frustration of years with Lestat; and then that passionate and doomed affection for

Claudia which made loneliness retreat behind the soft indulgence of the senses, the same senses

that longed for the kill. And I saw the desolate mountaintop in eastern Europe where I had

confronted that mindless vampire and killed him in the monastery ruins. And it was as if the

great feminine longing of my mind were being awakened again to be satisfied. And this I felt

despite my own words: 'But it's that dark, that empty. And it is without consolation.'

"I looked at Armand, at his large brown eyes in that taut, timeless face, watching me again like a painting; and I felt the slow shifting of the physical world I'd felt in the painted ballroom, the pull of my old delirium, the wakening of a need so terrible that the very promise of its fulfillment

contained the unbearable possibility of disappointment. And yet there was the question, the

awful, ancient, hounding question of evil.

"I think I put my hands to my head as mortals do when so deeply troubled that they instinctively cover the face, reach for the brain as if they could reach through the skull and massage the living

organ out of its agony.

" 'And how is this evil achieved?' he asked. 'How does one fall from grace and become in one

instant as evil as the mob tribunal of the Revolution or the most cruel of the Roman emperors?

Does one merely have to miss Mass on Sunday, or bite down on the Communion Host? Or steal

a loaf of bread... or sleep with a neighbor's wife?'

" 'No...' I shook my head. 'No.'

" 'But if evil is without gradation, and it does exist, this state of evil, then only one sin is needed.

Isn't that what you are saying? That God exists and...'

" 'I don't know if God exists,' I said. 'And for all I do know... He doesn't exist.'

" 'Then no sin matters,' he said. 'No sin achieves evil.'

" 'That's not true. Because if God doesn't exist we are the creatures of highest consciousness in the universe. We alone understand the passage of time and the value of every minute of human

life. And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man

would have died tomorrow or the day after or eventually... it doesn't matter. Because if God does

not exist, this life... every second of it... is all we have.'

"He sat back, as if for the moment stopped, his large eyes narrowing, then fixing on the depths of the fire. This was the first time since he had come for me that he had looked away from me, and I

found myself looking at him unwatched. For a long time he sat in this manner and I could all but

feel his thoughts, as if they were palpable in the air like smoke. Not read them, you understand,

but feel the power of them. It seemed he possessed an aura and even though his face was very

young, which I knew meant nothing, he appeared infinitely old, wise. I could not define it,

because I could not explain how the youthful lines of his face, how his eyes expressed innocence

and this age and experience at the same time.

"He rose now and looked at Claudia, his hands loosely clasped behind his back. Her silence all

this time had been understandable to me. These were not her questions, yet she was fascinated

with him and was waiting for him and no doubt learning from him all the while that he spoke to

me. But I understood something else now as they looked at each other. He had moved to his feet

with a body totally at his command, devoid of the habit of human gesture, gesture rooted in

necessity, ritual, fluctuation of mind; and his stillness now was unearthly. And she, as I'd never

seen before, possessed the same stillness. And they were gazing at each other with a

preternatural understanding from which I was simply excluded.

"I was something whirling and vibrating to them, as mortals were to me. And I knew when he

turned towards me again that he'd come to understand she did not believe or share my concept of

evil.

"His speech commenced without the slightest warning. 'This is the only real evil left,' he said to the flames.

" 'Yes,' I answered, feeling that all-consuming subject alive again, obliterating all concerns as it always had for me.

" 'It's true,' he said, shocking me, deepening my sadness, my despair.

" 'Then God does not exist... you have no knowledge of His existence?'

" 'None,' he said.

" 'No knowledge!' I said it again, unafraid of my simplicity, my miserable human pain.

" 'None.'

" 'And no vampire here has discourse with God or with the devil!'

" 'No vampire that I've ever known,' he said, musing, the fire dancing in his eyes. 'And as far as I know today, after four hundred years, I am the oldest living vampire in the world.'

"I stared at him, astonished.

"Then it began to sink in. It was as I'd always feared, and it was as lonely, it was as totally

without hope. Things would go on as they had before, on and on. My search was over. I sat back

listlessly watching those licking flames.

"It was futile to leave him to continue it, futile to travel the world only to hear again the same story. 'Four hundred years'---I think I repeated the words 'four hundred years.' I remember staring

at the fire. There was a log falling very slowly in the fire, drifting downwards in a process that

would take it the night, and it was pitted with tiny holes where some substance that had larded it

through and through had burned away fast, and in each of these tiny holes there danced a flame

amid the larger flames; and all of these tiny flames with their black mouths seemed to me faces

that made a chorus; and the chorus sang without singing. The chorus had no need of singing; in

one breath in the fire, which was continuous, it made its soundless song.

"All at once Armand moved in a loud rustling of garments, a descent of crackling shadow and

light that left him kneeling at my feet, his hands outstretched holding my head, his eyes burning.

" 'This evil, this concept, it comes from disappointment, from bitterness! Don't you see? Children of Satan! Children of God! Is this the only question you bring to me, is this the only power that

obsesses you, so that you must make us god s and devils yourself when the only power that exists

is inside ourselves? How could you believe in these old fantastical lies, these myths, these

emblems of the supernatural?' He snatched the devil from above Claudia's still countenance so

swiftly that I couldn't see the gesture, only the demon leering before me and then crackling in the

flames.

"Something was broken inside me when he said this; something ripped aside, so that a torrent of

feeling became one with my muscles in every limb. I was on my feet now, backing away from

him.

" 'Are you mad?' I asked, astonished at my own anger, my own despair. 'We stand here, the two

of us, immortal, ageless, rising nightly to feed that immortality on human blood; and there on

your desk against the knowledge of the ages sits a flawless child as demonic as ourselves; and

you ask me how I could believe I would find a meaning in the supernatural! I tell you, after

seeing what I have become, I could damn well believe anything! Couldn't you? And believing

thus, being thus confounded, I can now accept the most fantastical truth of all: that there is no

meaning to any of this!'

"I backed towards the door, away from his astonished face, his hand hovering before his lips, the finger curling to dig into his palm. 'Don't! Come back...' he whispered.

" 'No, not now. Let me go. Just a while... let me go.... Nothing's changed; it's all the same. Let that sink into me... just let me go.'

"I looked back before I shut the door. Claudia's face was turned towards me, though she sat as

before, her hands clasped on her knee. She made a gesture then, subtle as her smile, which was

tinged with the faintest sadness, that I was to go on.

"It was my desire to escape the theater then entirely, to find the streets of Paris and wander,

letting the vast accumulation of shocks gradually wear away. But, as I groped along the stone

passage of the lower cellar, I became confused. I was perhaps incapable of exerting my own will.

It seemed more than ever absurd to me that Lestat should have died, if in fact he had; and

looking back on him, as it seemed I was always doing, I saw him more kindly than before. Lost

like the rest of us. Not the jealous protector of any knowledge he was afraid to share. He knew

nothing. There was nothing to know.

"Only, that was not quite the thought that was gradually coming clear to me. I had hated him for all the wrong reasons; yes, that was true. But I did not fully understand it yet. Confounded, I

found myself sitting finally on those dark steps, the light from the ballroom t hrowing my own

shadow on the rough floor, my hands holding my head, a weariness overcoming me. My mind

said, Sleep. But more profoundly, my mind said, Dream. And yet I made no move to return to

the Hotel Saint-Gabriel, which seemed a very secure and airy place to me now, a place of subtle

and luxurious mortal consolation where I might lie in a chair of puce velvet, put one foot on an

ottoman and watch the fire lick the marble tile, looking for all the world to myself in the long

mirrors like a thoughtful human. Flee to that, I thought, flee all that is pulling you. And again

came that thought: I have wronged Lestat, I have hated him for all the wrong reasons. I

whispered it now, trying to withdraw it from the dark, inarticulate pool of my mind, and the

whispering made a scratching sound in the stone vault of the stairs.

"But then a voice came softly to me on the air, too faint for mortals: 'How is this so? How did

you wrong him?'

"I turned round so sharp that my breath left me. A vampire sat near me, so near as to almost

brush my shoulder with the tip of his boot, his legs drawn up close to him, his hands clasped

around them. For a moment I thought my eyes deceived me. It was the trickster vampire, whom

Armand had called Santiago.

"Yet nothing in his manner indicated his former self, that devilish, hateful self that I had seen, even only a few hours ago when he had reached out for me and Armand had struck him. He was

staring at me over his drawn-up knees, his hair disheveled, his mouth slack and without cunning.

" 'It makes no difference to anyone else,' I said to him, the fear in me subsiding.

" 'But you said a name; I heard you say a name,' he said.

" 'A name I don't want to say again,' I answered, looking away from him. I could see now how

he'd fooled me, why his shadow had not fallen over mine; he crouched in my shadow. The vision

of him slithering down those stone stairs to sit behind me was slightly disturbing. Everything

about him was disturbing, and I reminded myself that he could in no way be trusted. It seemed to

me then that Armand, with his hypnotic power, aimed in some way for the maximum truth in

presentation of himself: he had drawn out of me without words my state of mind. But this

vampire was a liar. And I could feel his power, a crude, pounding power that was almost as

strong as Armand.

" 'You come to Paris in search of us, and then you sit alone on the stairs...' he said, in a

conciliatory tone. 'Why don't you come up with us? Why don't you speak to us and talk to us of

this person whose name you spoke; I know who it was, I know the name.'

" 'You don't know, you couldn't know. It was a mortal,' I said now, more from instinct than

conviction. The thought of Lestat disturbed me, the thought that this creature should know of

Lestat's death.

" 'You came here to ponder mortals, justice done to mortals?' he asked; but there was no reproach or mockery in his tone.

" 'I came to be alone, let me not offend you. It's a fact,' I murmured.

" 'But alone in this frame of mind, when you don't even hear my steps... I like you. I want you to come upstairs' And as he said this, he slowly pulled me to my feet beside him.

"At that moment the door of Armand's cell threw a long light into the passage. I heard him

coming, and Santiago let me go. I was standing there baffled. Armand appeared at the foot of the

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 568