The Vampire Lestat (67 page)

“Even as the Church erected statues and pictures of her bloody Christ and her bloody martyrs, she held the belief that these deaths, so well used by the faithful, could only have come at the hands of enemies, not God’s own priests.

“It is the belief in the value of human life that has caused the torture chambers and the stake and the more ghastly means of execution to be abandoned all over Europe in this time. And it is the belief in the value of
human life that carries man now out of the monarchy into the republics of America and France.

“And now we stand again on the cusp of an atheistic age—an age where the Christian faith is losing its hold, as paganism once lost its hold, and the new humanism, the belief in man and his accomplishments and his rights, is more powerful than ever before.

“Of course we cannot know what will happen as the old religion thoroughly dies out. Christianity rose on the ashes of paganism, only to carry forth the old worship in new form. Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.

“But maybe something more wonderful will take place: the world will truly move forward, past all gods and goddesses, past all devils and angels. And in such a world, Lestat, we will have less of a place than we have ever had.

“All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to man and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the earth was new to man, and wondrous. But always we come back to the way the earth is now.

“And in this world the vampire is only a Dark God. He is a Child of Darkness. He can’t be anything else. And if he wields any lovely power upon the minds of men, it is only because the human imagination is a secret place of primitive memories and unconfessed desires. The mind of each man is a Savage Garden, to use your phrase, in which all manner of creatures rise and fall, and anthems are sung and things imagined that must finally be condemned and disavowed.

“Yet men love us when they come to know us. They love us even now. The Paris crowds love what they see on the stage of the Theater of the Vampires. And those who have seen your like walking through the ballrooms of the world, the pale and deadly lord in the velvet cloak, have worshiped in their own way at your feet.

“They thrill at the possibility of immortality, at the possibility that a grand and beautiful being could be utterly evil, that he could feel and know all things yet choose willfully to feed his dark appetite. Maybe they wish they could be that lusciously evil creature. How simple it all seems. And it is the simplicity of it that they want.

“But give them the Dark Gift and only one in a multitude will not be as miserable as you are.

“What can I say finally that will not confirm your worst fears? I have lived over eighteen hundred years, and I tell you life does not need us. I have never had a true purpose. We have no place.”

M
ARIUS paused.

He looked away from me for the first time and towards the sky beyond the windows, as if he were listening to island voices I couldn’t hear.

“I have a few more things to tell you,” he said, “things which are important, though they are merely practical things . . . ” But he was distracted. “And there are promises,” he said, finally, “which I must exact . . . ”

And he slipped into quiet, listening, his face too much like that of Akasha and Enkil.

There were a thousand questions I wanted to ask. But more significant perhaps there were a thousand statements of his I wanted to reiterate, as if I had to say them aloud to grasp them. If I talked, I wouldn’t make very good sense.

I sat back against the cool brocade of the winged chair with my hands together in the form of a steeple, and I just looked ahead of me, as if his tale were spread out there for me to read over, and I thought of the truth of his statements about good and evil, and how it might have horrified me and disappointed me had he tried to convince me of the rightness of the philosophy of the terrible gods of the East, that we could somehow glory in what we did.

I too was a child of the West, and all my brief life I had struggled with the Western inability to accept evil or death.

But underneath all these considerations lay the appalling fact that Marius could annihilate all of us by destroying Akasha and Enkil. Marius could kill every single one of us in existence if he were to burn Akasha and Enkil and thereby get rid of an old and decrepit and useless form of evil in the world. Or so it seemed.

And the horror of Akasha and Enkil themselves . . . What could I say to this, except that I too had felt the first glimmer of what he once felt, that I could rouse them, I could make them speak again, I could make them move. Or more truly, I had felt when I saw them that someone should and could do it. Someone could end their open-eyed sleep.

And what would they be if they ever walked and talked again? Ancient Egyptian monsters. What would they do?

I saw the two possibilities as seductive suddenly—rousing them or destroying them. Both tempted the mind. I wanted to pierce them and commune with them, and yet I understood the irresistible madness of
trying to destroy them. Of going out in a blaze of light with them that would take all our doomed species with it.

Both attitudes had to do with power. And some triumph over the passage of time.

“Aren’t you ever tempted to do it?” I asked, and my voice had pain in it. I wondered if down in their chapel they heard.

He awakened from his listening and turned to me and he shook his head. No.

“Even though you know better than anyone that we have no place?” Again he shook his head. No.

“I am immortal,” he said,
“truly
immortal. To be perfectly honest, I do not know what can kill me now, if anything. But that isn’t the point. I want to go on. I do not even think of it. I am a continual awareness unto myself, the intelligence I longed for years and years ago when I was alive, and I’m in love as I’ve always been with the great progress of mankind. I want to see what will happen now that the world has come round again to questioning its gods. Why, I couldn’t be persuaded now to close my eyes for any reason.”

I nodded in understanding.

“But I don’t suffer what you suffer,” he said. “Even in the grove in northern France, when I was made into this, I was not young. I have been lonely since, I have known near madness, indescribable anguish, but I was never immortal and young. I have done over and over what you have yet to do—the thing that must take you away from me very very soon.”

“ Take me away? But I don’t want—”

“You have to go, Lestat,” he said. “And very soon, as I said. You’re not ready to remain here with me. This is one of the most important things I have left to tell you and you must listen with the same attention with which you listened to the rest.”

“Marius, I can’t imagine leaving now. I can’t even . . . ” I felt anger suddenly. Why had he brought me here to cast me out? And I remembered all Armand’s admonitions to me. It is only with the old ones that we find communion, not with those we create. And I had found Marius. But these were mere words. They didn’t touch the core of what I felt, the sudden misery and fear of separation.

“Listen to me,” he said gently. “Before I was taken by the Gauls, I had lived a good lifetime, as long as many a man in those days. And after I took Those Who Must Be Kept out of Egypt, I lived again for years in Antioch as a rich Roman scholar might live. I had a house, slaves, and the love of Pandora. We had life in Antioch, we were watchers of all that passed. And having had that lifetime, I had the strength for others later on. I had the strength to become part of the world in Venice, as you know. I had the
strength to rule on this island as I do. You, like many who go early into the fire or the sun, have had no real life at all.

“As a young man, you tasted real life for no more than six months in Paris. As a vampire, you have been a roamer, an outsider, haunting houses and other lives as you drifted from place to place.

“If you mean to survive, you must live out one complete lifetime as soon as you can. To forestall it may be to lose everything, to despair and to go into the earth again, never to rise. Or worse . . . ”

“I want it. I understand,” I said. “And yet when they offered it to me in Paris, to remain with the Theater, I couldn’t do it.”

“That was not the right place for you. Besides, the Theater of the Vampires is a coven. It isn’t the world any more than this island refuge of mine is the world. And too many horrors happened to you there.

“But in this New World wilderness to which you’re headed, this barbaric little city called New Orleans, you may enter into the world as never before. You may take up residence there as a mortal, just as you tried to do so many times in your wanderings with Gabrielle. There will be no old covens to bother you, no rogues to try to strike you down out of fear. And when you make others—and you will, out of loneliness, make others—make and keep them as human as you can. Keep them close to you as members of a family, not as members of a coven, and understand the age you live in, the decades you pass through. Understand the style of garment that adorns your body, the styles of dwellings in which you spend your leisure hours, the place in which you hunt. Understand what it means to feel the passage of time!”

“Yes, and feel all the pain of seeing things die . . . ” All the things Armand advised against.

“Of course. You are made to triumph over time, not to run from it. And you will suffer that you harbor the secret of your monstrosity and that you must kill. And maybe you will try to feast only on the evildoer to assuage your conscience, and you may succeed, or you may fail. But you can come very close to life, if you will only lock the secret within you. You are fashioned to be close to it, as you yourself once told the members of the old Paris coven. You are the imitation of a man.”

“I want it, I do want it—”

“Then do as I advise. And understand this also. In a real way, eternity is merely the living of one human lifetime after another. Of course, there may be long periods of retreat; times of slumber or of merely watching. But again and again we plunge into the stream, and we swim as long as we can, until time or tragedy brings us down as they will do mortals.”

“Will you do it again? Leave this retreat and plunge into the stream?”

“Yes, definitely. When the right moment presents itself. When the
world is so interesting again that I can’t resist it. Then I’ll walk city streets. I’ll take a name. I’ll do things.”

“Then come now, with me!” Ah, painful echo of Armand. And of the vain plea from Gabrielle ten years after.

“It’s a more tempting invitation than you know,” he answered, “but I’d do you a great disservice if I came with you. I’d stand between you and the world. I couldn’t help it.”

I shook my head and looked away, full of bitterness.

“Do you want to continue?” he asked. “Or do you want Gabrielle’s predictions to come true?”

“I want to continue,” I said.

“Then you must go,” he said. “A century from now, maybe less, we’ll meet again. I won’t be on this island. I will have taken Those Who Must Be Kept to another place. But wherever I am and wherever you are, I’ll find you. And then I’ll be the one who will not want you to leave me. I’ll be the one who begs you to remain. I’ll fall in love with your company, your conversation, the mere sight of you, your stamina and your recklessness, and your lack of belief in anything—all the things about you I already love rather too strongly.”

I could scarcely listen to this without breaking down. I wanted to beg him to let me remain.

“Is it absolutely impossible now?” I asked. “Marius, can’t you spare me this lifetime?”

“Quite impossible,” he said. “I can tell you stories forever, but they are no substitute for life. Believe me, I’ve tried to spare others. I’ve never succeeded. I can’t teach what one lifetime can teach. I never should have taken Armand in his youth, and his centuries of folly and suffering are a penance to me even now. You did him a mercy driving him into the Paris of this century, but I fear for him it is too late. Believe me, Lestat, when I say this has to happen. You must have that lifetime, for those who are robbed of it spin in dissatisfaction until they finally live it somewhere or they are destroyed.”

“And what about Gabrielle?”

“Gabrielle had her life; she had her death almost. She has the strength to reenter the world when she chooses, or to live on its fringes indefinitely.”

“And do you think she will ever reenter?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Gabrielle defies my understanding. Not my experience—she’s too like Pandora. But I never understood Pandora. The truth is most women are weak, be they mortal or immortal. But when they are strong, they are absolutely unpredictable.”

I shook my head. I closed my eyes for a moment. I didn’t want to think of Gabrielle. Gabrielle was gone, no matter what we said here.

And I still could not accept that I had to go. This seemed an Eden to me. But I didn’t argue anymore. I knew he was resolute, and I also knew that he wouldn’t force me. He’d let me start worrying about my mortal father, and he’d let me come to him and say I had to go. I had a few nights left.

“Yes,” he answered softly. “And there are other things I can tell you.”

I opened my eyes again. He was looking at me patiently, affectionately. I felt the ache of love as strongly as I’d ever felt it for Gabrielle. I felt the inevitable tears and did my best to suppress them.

“You’ve learned a great deal from Armand,” he said, his voice steady as if to help me with this little silent struggle. “And you learned much more on your own. But there are still some things I might teach you.”

“Yes, please,” I said.

“Well, for one thing,” he said, “your powers are extraordinary, but you can’t expect those you make in the next fifty years to equal you or Gabrielle. Your second child didn’t have half Gabrielle’s strength and later children will have even less. The blood I gave you will make some difference. If you drink . . . if you drink from Akasha and Enkil, which you may choose not to do . . . that will make some difference too. But no matter, only so many children can be made by one in a century. And new offspring will be weak. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The rule of the old covens had wisdom in it that strength should come with time. And then again, there is the old truth: you might make titans or imbeciles, no one knows why or how.