Anne Rice - Interview with the Vampire

“I thought of this for a long time, picturing it, seeing that it must have happened. And then I heard her add thoughtfully, as she laid down her card and looked at the oval face of a white-coiffed king, ‘I could have done it.

“ ‘And why do you look that way at me?’ she asked, gathering up her cards, her small fingers struggling to make a neat pack of them and then to shuffle them.

“ ‘But you do believe… that had we burned his remains he would have died?’ I asked.

“ ‘Of course I believe it. If there is nothing to rise, there is nothing to rise. What are you driving at?’ She was dealing out the cards now, dealing a hand for me on the small oak table. I looked at the cards, but I did not touch them.

“ ‘I don’t know…’ I whispered to her. ‘Only that perhaps there was no will to live, no tenacity… because very simply there was no need of either.’

“Her eyes gazed at me steadily, giving no hint of her thoughts or that she understood mine.

“ ‘Because perhaps he was incapable of dying… perhaps he is, and we are… truly immortal?’

“For a longtime she sat there looking at me.

“ ‘Consciousness in that state…’ I finally added, as I looked away from her. ‘If it were so, then mightn’t there be consciousness in any other? Fire, sunlight… what does it matter?’

“ ‘Louis,’ she said, her voice soft. ‘You’re afraid. You don’t stand en garde against fear. You don’t understand the danger of fear itself. We’ll know these answers when we find those who can tell us, those who’ve possessed knowledge for centuries, for however long creatures such as ourselves have walked the earth. That knowledge was our birthright, and he deprived us. He earned his death.’

“ ‘But he didn’t die…’ I said.

“ ‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘No one could have escaped that house unless they’d run with us, at our very side. No. He’s dead, and so is that trembling aesthete, his friend. Consciousness, what does it matter?’

“She gathered up the cards and put them aside, gesturing for me to hand her the books from the table beside the bunk, those books which she’d unpacked immediately on board, the few select records of vampire lore which she’d taken to be her guides. They included no wild romances from England, no stories of Edgar Allan Poe, no fancy. Only those few accounts of the vampires of eastern Europe, which had become for her a sort of Bible. In those countries indeed they did burn the remains of the vampire when they found him, and the heart was staked and the head severed. She would read these now for hours, these ancient books which had been read and reread before they ever found their way across the Atlantic; they were travelers’ tales, the accounts of priests and scholars. And she would plan our trip, not with the need of any pen or paper, only in her mind. A trip that would take us at once away from the glittering capitals of Europe towards the Black Sea, where we would dock at Varna and begin that search in the rural countryside of the Carpathians.

“For me it was a grim prospect, bound as I was to it, for there were longings in me for other places and other knowledge which Claudia did not begin to comprehend. Seeds of these longings had been planted in me years ago, seeds which came to bitter flower as our ship passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

“I wanted those waters to be blue. And they were not. They were the nighttime waters, and how I suffered then, straining to remember the seas that a young man’s untutored senses had taken for granted, that an undisciplined memory had let slip away for eternity. The Mediterranean was black, black off the coast of Italy, black off the coast of Greece, black always, black when in the small cold hours before dawn, as even Claudia slept, weary of her books and the meager fare that caution allowed her vampire hunger, I lowered a lantern down, down through the rising vapor until the fire blazed right over the lapping waters; and nothing came to light on that heaving surface but the light itself, the reflection of that beam traveling constant with me, a steady eye which seemed to fix on me from the depths and say, ‘Louis, your quest is for darkness only. This sea is not your sea. The myths of men are not your myths. Men’s treasures are not yours.’

“But oh, how the quest for the Old World vampires filled me with bitterness in those moments, a bitterness I could all but taste, as if the very air had lost its freshness. For what secrets, what truths had those monstrous creatures of night to give us? What, of necessity, must be their terrible limits, if indeed we were to find them at all? What can the damned really say to the damned?

“I never stepped ashore at Piraeus. Yet in my mind I roamed the Acropolis at Athens, watching the moon rise through the open roof of the Parthenon, measuring my height by the grandeur of those columns, walking the streets of those Greeks who died at Marathon, listening to the sound of wind in the ancient olives. These were the monuments of men who could not die, not the stones of the living dead; here the secrets that had endured the passage of time, which I had only dimly begun to understand. And yet nothing turned me from our quest and nothing could turn me, but over and over, committed as I was, I pondered the great risk of our questions, the risk of any question that is truthfully asked; for the answer must carry an incalculable price, a tragic danger. Who knew that better than I, who had presided over the death of my own body, seeing all I called human wither and die only to form an unbreakable chain which held me fast to this world yet made me forever its exile, a specter with a beating heart?

“The sea lulled me to bad dreams, to sharp remembrances. A winter night in New Orleans when I wandered through the St. Louis cemetery and saw my sister, old and bent, a bouquet of white roses in her arms, the thorns carefully bound in an old parchment, her gray head bowed, her steps carrying her steadily along through the perilous dark to the grave where the stone of her brother Louis was set, side by side with that of his younger brother. Louis, who had died in the fire of Pointe du Lac leaving a generous legacy to a godchild and namesake she never knew. Those flowers were for Louis, as if it had not been half a century since his death, as if her memory, like Louis’s memory, left her no peace. Sorrow sharpened her ashen beauty, sorrow bent her narrow back. And what I would not have given, as I watched her, to touch her silver hair, to whisper love to her, if love would not have loosed on her remaining years a horror worse than grief. I left her with grief. Over and over and over.

“And I dreamed now too much. I dreamed too long, in the prison of this ship, in the prison of my body, attuned as it was to the rise of every sun as no mortal body had ever been. And my heart beat faster for the mountains of eastern Europe, finally, beat faster for the one hope that somewhere we might find in that primitive countryside the answer to why under God this suffering was allowed to exist why under God it was allowed to begin, and how under God it might be ended. I had not the courage to end it, I knew, without that answer. And in time the waters of the Mediterranean became, in fact, the waters of the Black Sea”

The vampire sighed. The boy was resting on his elbow, his face cradled in his right palm; and his avid expression was incongruous with the redness of his eyes.

“Do you think I’m playing with you?” the vampire asked, his fine dark eyebrows knitted for an instant.

“No,” the boy said quickly. “I know better than to ask you any more questions. You’ll tell me everything in your own time.” And his mouth settled, and he looked at the vampire as though he were ready for him to begin again.