Anne Rice: The Vampire Lestat

True killer, this one. And oh, that first taste of human struggle and human blood! Stealing clothes from nearby houses, getting some of the gold and jewels I'd hidden in the Lafayette Cemetery, that was no problem. Of course I was scared from time to time. The stench of chemicals and gasoline sickened me. The drone of air conditioners and the whine of the jet planes overhead hurt my ears. But after the third night up, I was roaring around New Orleans on a big black Harley-Davidson motorcycle making plenty of noise myself. I was looking for more killers to feed on. I wore gorgeous black leather clothes that I'd taken from my victims, and I had a little Sony Walkman stereo in my pocket that fed Bach's Art of the Fugue through tiny earphones right into my head as I blazed along. I was the vampire Lestat again. I was back in action. New Orleans was once again my hunting ground. As for my strength, well, it was three times what it had once been. I could leap from the street to the top of a four-story building. I could pull iron gratings off windows. I could bend a copper penny double. I could hear human voices and thoughts, when I wanted to, for blocks around. By the end of the fast week I had a pretty female lawyer in a downtown glass and steel skyscraper who helped me procure a legal birth certificate, Social Security card, and driver's license. A good portion of my old wealth was on its way to New Orleans from coded accounts in the immortal Bank of London and the Rothschild Bank. But more important, I was swimming in realizations. I knew that everything the amplified voices had told me about the twentieth century was true. As I roamed the streets of New Orleans in 1984 this is what I beheld: The dark dreary industrial world that I'd gone to sleep on had burnt itself out finally, and the old bourgeois prudery and conformity had lost their hold on the American mind. People were adventurous and erotic again the way they'd been in the old days, before the great middle-class revolutions of the late 1700s. They even looked the way they had in those times. The men didn't wear the Sam Spade uniform of shirt, tie, gray suit, and gray hat any longer. Once again, they costumed themselves in velvet and silk and brilliant colors if they felt like it.

They did not have to clip their hair like Roman soldiers anymore; they wore it any length they desired. And the women-ah, the women were glorious, naked in the spring warmth as they'd been under the Egyptian pharaohs, in skimpy short skirts and tunic like dresses, or wearing men's pants and shirts skintight over their curvaceous bodies if they pleased. They painted, and decked themselves out in gold and silver, even to walk to the grocery store. Or they went fresh scrubbed and without ornament-it didn't matter. They curled their hair like Marie Antoinette or cut it off or let it blow free. For the first time in history, perhaps, they were as strong and as interesting as men. And these were the common people of America. Not just the rich who've always achieved a certain androgyny, a certain joie de vivre that the middle-class revolutionaries called decadence in the past. The old aristocratic sensuality now belonged to everybody. It was wed to the promises of the middle-class revolution, and all people had a right to love and to luxury and to graceful things. Department stores had become palaces of near Oriental loveliness-merchandise displayed amid soft tinted carpeting, eerie music, amber light. In the all-night drugstores, bottles of violet and green shampoo gleamed like gems on the sparkling glass shelves. Waitresses drove sleek leather-lined automobiles to work. Dock laborers went home at night to swim in their heated backyard pools. Charwomen and plumbers changed at the end of the day into exquisitely cut manufactured clothes. In fact the poverty and filth that had been common in the big cities of the earth since time immemorial were almost completely washed away. You just didn't see immigrants dropping dead of starvation in the alleyways. There weren't slums where people slept eight and ten to a room. Nobody threw the slops in the gutters. The beggars, the cripples, the orphans, the hopelessly diseased were so diminished as to constitute no presence in the immaculate streets at all. Even the drunkards and lunatics who slept on the park benches, and in the bus stations had meat to eat regularly, and even radios to listen to, and clothes that were washed. But this was just the surface. I found myself astounded by the more profound changes that moved this awesome current along. For example, something altogether magical had happened to time. The old was not being routinely replaced by the new anymore. On the contrary, the English spoken around me was the same as it had been in the 1800s. Even the old slang ( "the coast is clear " or "bad luck " or "that's the thing ") was still "current. " Yet fascinating new phrases like "they brainwashed you " and "it's so Freudian " and "I can't relate to it " were on everyone's lips. In the art and entertainment worlds all prior centuries were being "recycled. " Musicians performed Mozart as well as jazz and rock music; people went to see Shakespeare one night and a new French film the next. In giant fluorescent-lighted emporiums you could buy tapes of medieval madrigals and play them on your car stereo as you drove ninety miles an hour down the freeway. In the bookstores Renaissance poetry sold side by side with the novels of Dickens or Ernest Hemingway. Sex manuals lay on the same tables with the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Sometimes the wealth and the cleanliness everywhere around me became like an hallucination. I thought I was going out of my head. Through shop windows I gazed stupefied at computers and telephones as pure in form and color as nature's most exotic shells. Gargantuan silver limousines navigated the narrow French Quarter streets like indestructible sea beasts. Glittering office towers pierced the night sky like Egyptian obelisks above the sagging brick buildings of old Canal Street. Countless television programs poured their ceaseless flow of images into every air-cooled hotel room. But it was no series of hallucinations. This century had inherited the earth in every sense. And no small part of this unpredicted miracle was the curious innocence of these people in the very midst of their freedom and their wealth. The Christian god was as dead as he had been in the 1700s. And no new mythological religion had arisen to take the place of the old. On the contrary, the simplest people of this age were driven by a vigorous secular morality as strong as any religious morality I had ever known. The intellectuals carried the standards. But quite ordinary individuals all over America cared passionately about "peace " and "the poor " and "the planet " as if driven by a mystical zeal. Famine they intended to wipe out in this century. Disease they would destroy no matter what the cost. They argued ferociously about the execution of condemned criminals, the abortion of unborn babies. And the threats of "environmental pollution " and "holocaustal war " they battled as fiercely as men have battled witchcraft and heresy in the ages past. As for sexuality, it was no longer a matter of superstition and fear. The last religious overtones were being stripped from it. That was why the people went around half naked. That was why they kissed and hugged each other in the streets. They talked ethics now and responsibility and the beauty of the body. Procreation and venereal disease they had under control. Ah, the twentieth century. Ah, the turn of the great wheel. It had outdistanced my wildest dreams of it, this future. It had made fools of grim prophets of ages past. I did a lot of thinking about this sinless secular morality, this optimism. This brilliantly lighted world where the value of human life was greater than it had ever been before. In the amber electric twilight of a vast hotel room I watched on the screen before me the stunningly crafted film of war called Apocalypse Now. Such a symphony of sound and color it was, and it sang of the age-old battle of the Western world against evil. "You must make a friend of horror and moral terror, " says the mad commander in the savage garden of Cambodia, to which the Western man answers as he has always answered: No. No. Horror and moral terror can never be exonerated. They have no real value. Pure evil has no real place. And that means, doesn't it, that I have no place. Except, perhaps, the art that repudiates evil-the vampire comics, the horror novels, the old gothic tales-or in the roaring chants of the rock stars who dramatize the battles against evil that each mortal fights within himself. It was enough to make an old world monster go back into the earth, this stunning irrelevance to the mighty scheme of things, enough to make him lie down and weep. Or enough to make him become a rock singer, when you think about it .... But where were the other old world monsters? I wondered. How did other vampires exist in a world in which each death was recorded in giant electronic computers, and bodies were carried away to refrigerated crypts? Probably concealing themselves like loathsome insects in the shadows, as they have always done, no matter how much philosophy they talked or how many covens they formed. Well, when I raised my voice with the diode band called Satan's Night Out, I would bring them all into the light soon enough. I continued my education. I talked to mortals at bus stops and at gas stations and in elegant drinking places. I read books. I decked myself out in the shimmering dream skins of the fashionable shops. I wore white turtleneck shirts and crisp khaki safari jackets, or lush gray velvet blazers with cashmere scarves. I powdered down my face so that I could "pass " beneath the chemical lights of the all-night supermarkets, the hamburger joints, the carnival thoroughfares called nightclub strips. I was learning. I was in love. And the only problem I had was that murderers to feed upon were scarce. In this shiny world of innocence and plenty, of kindness and gaiety and full stomachs, the common cutthroat thieves of the past and their dangerous waterfront hangouts were almost gone. And so I had to work for a living. But I'd always been a hunter. I liked the dim smoky poolrooms with the single light shining on the green felt as the tattooed ex-convicts gathered around it as much as I liked the shiny satin-lined nightclubs of the big concrete hotels. And I was learning more all the time about my killers-the drug dealers, the pimps, the murderers who fell in with the motorcycle gangs. And more than ever, I was resolute that I would not drink innocent blood. Finally it was time to call upon my old neighbors, the rock band called Satan's Night Out. At six thirty on a hot sticky Saturday night, I rang the doorbell of the attic music studio. The beautiful young mortals were all lying about in their rainbow-colored silk shirts and skintight dungarees smoking hashish cigarettes and complaining about their rotten luck getting "gigs " in the South. They looked like biblical angels, with their long clean shaggy hair and feline movements; their jewelry was Egyptian. Even to rehearse they painted their faces and their eyes. I was overcome with excitement and love just looking at them, Alex and Larry and the succulent little Tough Cookie. And in an eerie moment in which the world seemed to stand still beneath me, I told them what I was. Nothing new to them, the word "vampire. " In the galaxy in which they shone, a thousand other singers had worn the theatrical fangs and the black cape. And yet it felt so strange to speak it aloud to mortals, the forbidden truth. Never in two hundred years had I spoken it to anyone who had not been marked to become one of us. Not even to my victims did I confide it before their eyes closed. And now I said it clearly and distinctly to these handsome young creatures.

Читать дальше