Anne Rice - The Vampire Lestat

"Get clothing for him, " Armand said. His hand was resting on my shoulder. "He must look presentable, our lost lord, " he told them. "That was always his way. " They laughed when I begged to speak to Eleni or Felix or Laurent. They did not know those names. Gabrielle- it meant nothing. And where was Marius? How many countries, rivers, mountains lay between us? Could he hear and see these things? High above, in the theater, a mortal audience, herded like sheep into a corral, thundered on the wooden staircases, the wooden floors. I dreamed of getting away from here, getting back to Louisiana, letting time do its inevitable work. I dreamed of the earth again, its cool depths which I'd known so briefly in Cairo. I dreamed of Louis and Claudia and that we were together. Claudia had grown miraculously into a beautiful woman, and she said, laughing, "You see this is what I came to Europe to discover, how to do this! " And I feared that I was never to be allowed out of here, that I was to be entombed as those starving ones had been under les Innocents, that I had made a fatal mistake. I was stuttering and crying and trying to talk to Armand.

And then I realized Armand was not even there. If he had come, he had gone as quickly. I was having delusions. And the victim, the warm victim- "Give it to me, I beg you! "-and Armand saying:

"You will say what I have told you to say. " It was a mob tribunal of monsters, white-faced demons shouting accusations, Louis pleading desperately, Claudia staring at me mute, and my saying, yes, she was the one who did it, yes, and then cursing Armand as he shoved me back into the shadows, his innocent face radiant as ever.

"But you have done well, Lestat. You have done well. " What had I done? Borne testimony against them that they had broken the old rules? They'd risen against the coven master? What did they know of the old rules? I was screaming for Louis. And then I was drinking blood in the darkness, living blood from another victim, and it wasn't the healing blood, it was just blood. We were in the carriage again and it was raining. We were riding through the country. And then we went up and up through the old tower to the roof. I had Claudia's bloody yellow dress in my hands. I had seen her in a narrow wet place where she had been burnt by the sun.

"Scatter the ashes! " I had said. Yet no one moved to do it. The torn bloody yellow dress lay on the cellar floor. Now I held it in my hands. "They will scatter the ashes, won't they? " I said.

"Didn't you want justice? " Armand asked, his black wool cape close around him in the wind, his face dark with the power of the recent kill. What did it have to do with justice? Why did I hold this thing, this little dress? I looked out from Magnus's battlements and I saw the city had come to get me. It had reached out its long arms to embrace the tower, and the air stank of factory smoke. Armand stood still at the stone railing watching me, and he seemed suddenly as young as Claudia had seemed. And make sure they have had some lifetime before you make them; and never, never make one as young as Armand. In death she said nothing. She had looked at those around her as if they were giants jabbering in an alien tongue. Armand's eyes were red.

"Louis-where is he? " I asked. "They didn't kill him. I saw him. He went out into the rain... "

"They have gone after him, " he answered. "He is already destroyed. " Liar, with the face of a choirboy.

"Stop them, you have to! If there's still time. . . " He shook his head.

"Why can't you stop them? Why did you do it, the trial, all of it, what do you care what they did to me? "

"It's finished. " Under the roar of the winds came the scream of a steam whistle. Losing the train of thought. Losing it . . . Not wanting to go back. Louis, come back.

"And you don't mean to help me, do you? " Despair. He leaned forward, and his face transformed itself as it had done years and years ago, as if his rage were melting it from within.

"You, who destroyed all of us, you who took everything. Whatever made you think that I would help you! " He came closer, the face all but collapsed upon itself. "You who put us on the lurid posters in the boulevard du Temple, you who made us the subject of cheap stories and drawing room talk! "

"But I didn't. You know I . . . I swear . . . It wasn't me! "

"You who carried our secrets into the limelight-the fashionable one, the Marquis in the white gloves, the fiend in the velvet cape! "

"You're mad to blame it all on me. You have no right, " I insisted, but my voice was faltering so badly I couldn't understand my own words. And his voice shot out of him like the tongue of a snake.

"We had our Eden under that ancient cemetery, " he hissed. "We had our faith and our purpose. And it was you who drove us out of it with a flaming sword. What do we have now! Answer me! Nothing but the love of each other and what can that mean to creatures like us!

"No, it's not true, it was all happening already. You don't understand anything. You never did. " But he wasn't listening to me. And it didn't matter whether or not he was listening. He was drawing closer, and in a dark flash his hand went out, and my head went back, and I saw the sky and the city of Paris upside down. I was falling through the air. And I went down and down past the windows of the tower, until the stone walkway rose up to catch me, and every bone in my body broke within its thin case of preternatural skin.

Two years passed before I was strong enough to board a ship for Louisiana. And I was still badly crippled, still scarred. But I had to leave Europe, where no whisper had come to me of my lost Gabrielle or of the great and powerful Marius, who had surely rendered his judgment upon me. I had to go home. And home was New Orleans, where the warmth was, where the flowers never stopped blooming, where I still owned, through my never ending supply of "coin of the realm, " a dozen empty old mansions with rotting white columns and sagging porches round which I could roam. And I spent the last years of the 1800s in complete seclusion in the old Garden District a block from the Lafayette Cemetery, in the finest of my houses, slumbering beneath towering oaks. I read by candle or oil lamp all the books I could procure. I might as well have been Gabrielle trapped in her castle bedroom, save there was no furniture here. And the stacks of books reached to the ceiling in one room after another as I went on to the next. Now and then I mustered enough stamina to break into a library or an old bookstore for new volumes, but less and less I went out. I wrote off for periodicals. I hoarded candles and bottles and tin cans of oil. I do not remember when it became the twentieth century, only that everything was uglier and darker, and the beauty I'd known in the old eighteenth-century days seemed more than ever some kind of fanciful idea. The bourgeois ran the world now upon dreary principles and with a distrust of the sensuality and the excess that the ancient regime had so loved. But my vision and thoughts were getting ever more clouded. I no longer hunted humans. And a vampire cannot thrive without human blood, human death. I survived by luring the garden animals of the old neighborhood, the pampered dogs and cats. And when they couldn't be got easily, well, then there was always the vermin that I could call to me like the Pied Piper, fat long-tailed gray rats. One night I forced myself to make the long trek through the quiet streets to a shabby little theater called the Happy Hour near the waterfront slums. I wanted to see the new silent moving pictures. I was wrapped in a greatcoat with a muffler hiding my gaunt face. I wore gloves to hide my skeletal hands. The sight of the daytime sky even in this imperfect film terrified me. But it seemed the dreary tones of black and white were perfect for a colorless age. I did not think about other immortals. Yet now and then a vampire would appear-some orphaned fledgling who had stumbled on my lair, or a wanderer come in search of the legendary Lestat, begging for secrets, power. Horrid, these intrusions. Even the timbre of the supernatural voice shattered my nerves, drove me into the farthest corner. Yet no matter how great the pain, I scanned each new mind for knowledge of my Gabrielle. I never discovered any. Nothing to do after that but ignore the poor human victims the fiend would bring in the vain hope of restoring me. But these encounters were over soon enough. Frightened, aggrieved, shouting curses, the intruder would depart, leaving me in blessed silence. I'd slip a little deeper away from things, just lying there in the dark. I wasn't even reading much anymore. And when I did read, I read the Black Mask magazine. I read the stories of the ugly nihilistic men of the twentieth century-the gray-clad crooks and the bank robbers and the detectives-and I tried to remember things. But I was so weak. I was so tired.