Anne Rice - The Vampire Lestat

"You don't understand, do you? " I asked.

"Lestat, sin always feels good, " he said gravely. "Don't you see that? Why do you think the Church has always condemned the players? It was from Dionysus, the wine god, that the theater came. You can read that in Aristotle. And Dionysus was a god that drove men to debauchery. It felt good to you to lie on that stage because it was abandoned and lewd-the age-old service of the god of the grape-and you were having a high time of it defying your father-'

"No, Nicki. No, a thousand times no. "

"Lestat, we're partners in sin, " he said, smiling finally.

"We've always been. We've both behaved badly, both been utterly disreputable. It's what binds us together. " Now it was my turn to look sad and hurt. And the Golden Moment was gone beyond reprieve- unless something new was to happen.

"Come on, " I said suddenly. "Get your violin, and we'll go off somewhere in the woods where the music won't wake up anybody. We'll see if there isn't some goodness in it. "

"You're a madman! " he said. But he grabbed the unopened bottle by the neck and headed for the door immediately. I was right behind him. When he came out of his house with the violin, he said:

"Let's go to the witches' place! Look, it's a half moon. Plenty of light. We'll do the devil's dance and play for the spirits of the witches. " I laughed. I had to be drunk to go along with that. "We'll reconsecrate the spot, " I insisted,

"with good and pure music. " It had been years and years since I'd walked in the witches' place. The moon was bright enough, as he'd said, to see the charred stakes in their grim circle and the ground in which nothing ever grew even one hundred years after the burnings. The new saplings of the forest kept their distance. And so the wind struck the clearing, and above, clinging to the rocky slope, the village hovered in darkness. A faint chill passed over me, but it was the mere shadow of the anguish I'd felt as a child when I'd heard those awful words "roasted alive, " when I had imagined the suffering. Nicki's white lace shoes shone in the pale light, and he struck up a gypsy song at once and danced round in a circle as he played it. I sat on a broad burned stump of tree and drank from the bottle. And the heartbreaking feeling came as it always did with the music. What sin was there, I thought, except to live out my life in this awful place? And pretty soon I was silently and unobtrusively crying. Though it seemed the music had never stopped, Nicki was comforting me. We sat side by side and he told me that the world was full of inequities and that we were prisoners, he and I, of this awful corner of France, and someday we would break out of it. And I thought of my mother in the castle high up the mountain, and the sadness numbed me until I couldn't bear it, and Nicki started playing again, telling me to dance and to forget everything. Yes, that's what it could make you do, I wanted to say. Is that sin? How can it be evil? I went after him as he danced in a circle. The notes seemed to be flying up and out of the violin as if they were made of gold. I could almost see them flashing. I danced round and round him now and he sawed away into a deeper and more frenzied music. I spread the wings of the fur lined cape and threw back my head to look at the moon. The music rose all around me like smoke, and the witches' place was no more. There was only the sky above arching down to the mountains. We were closer for all this in the days that followed. But a few nights later, something altogether extra-ordinary happened. It was late. We were at the inn again and Nicolas, who was walking about the room and gesturing dramatically, declared what had been on our minds all along. That we should run away to Paris, even if we were penniless, that it was better than remaining here. Even if we lived as beggars in Paris! It had to be better. Of course we had both been building up to this.

"Well, beggars in the streets it might be, Nicki, " I said. "Because I'll be damned in hell before I'll play the penniless country cousin begging at the big houses. "

"Do you think I want you to do that? " he demanded. "I mean run away, Lestat, " he said. "Spite them, every one of them. " Did I want to go on like this? So our fathers would curse us. After all, our life was meaningless here. Of course, we both knew this running off together would be a thousand times more serious than what I had done before. We weren't boys anymore, we were men. Our fathers would curse us, and this was something neither of us could laugh off. Also we were old enough to know what poverty meant.

"What am I going to do in Paris when we get hungry? " I asked. "Shoot rats for supper? "

"I'll play my violin for coins on the boulevard du Temple if I have to, and you can go to the theaters! " Now he was really challenging me.

He was saying, Is it all words with you, Lestat?

"With your looks, you know, you'd be on the stage in the boulevard du Temple in no time. " I loved this change in "our conversation "! I loved seeing him believe we could do it. All his cynicism had vanished, even though he did throw in the word "spite " every ten words or so. It seemed possible suddenly to do all this. And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us. I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness. In fact, it came to me that my mother dying soon was meaningless and I confided in Nicolas what she had said. "I'm perfectly horrified. I'm afraid. " Well, if there had been a Golden Moment in the room it was gone now. And something different started to happen. I should call it the Dark Moment, but it was still high-pitched and full of eerie light. We were talking rapidly, cursing this meaninglessness, and when Nicolas at last sat down and put his head in his hands, I took some glamourous and hearty swigs of wine and went to pacing and gesturing as he had done before. I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don't find out the answer as to why we were ever alive. Even the avowed atheist probably thinks that in death he'll get some answer. I mean God will be there, or there won't be anything at all.

"But that's just it, " I said, "we don't make any discovery at that moment! We merely stop! We pass into nonexistence without ever knowing a thing. " I saw the universe, a vision of the sun, the planets, the stars, black night going on forever. And I began to laugh.

"Do you realize that! We'll never know why the hell any of it happened, not even when it's over! " I shouted at Nicolas, who was sitting back on the bed, nodding and drinking his wine out of a flagon. "We're going to die and not even know. We'll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witnesses to it. We won't have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing! " But I had stopped laughing. I stood still and I understood perfectly what I was saying! There was no judgment day, no final explanation, no luminous moment in which all terrible wrongs would be made right, all horrors redeemed. The witches burnt at the stake would never be avenged. No one was ever going to tell us anything! No, I didn't understand it at this moment. I saw it! And I began to make the single sound: "Oh! " I said it again "Oh! " and then I said it louder and louder and louder, and I dropped the wine bottle on the floor. I put my hands to my head and I kept saying it, and I could see my mouth opened in that perfect circle that I had described to my mother and I kept saying, "Oh, oh, oh! " I said it like a great hiccupping that I couldn't stop. And Nicolas took hold of me and started shaking arse, saying: