(ebook) Anne Rice - The Vampire Lestat

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The Vampire Lestat

Anne Rice

This book is dedicated with love to Stan Rice, Karen O'Brien, and

Allen Daviau

"WONDERFUL . . . THE BEST NEWS IS THAT THIS IS THE

MIDDLE BOOK OF THE CHRONICLES OF THE VAMPIRES. "

Playboy

"Where Rice excels is in evoking the elusive nature of vampiric

sexuality, the urgency of the quest for self- knowledge, the thin line

between arrogance and terror, the loneliness of what is necessarily a

solitary existence. " Houston Post

"Lestat is more than a sequel to Interview; it's also a prequel and a

supplement, swallowing the earlier novel whole.... Lestat is fiercely

ambitious, nothing less than a complete unnatural history of

vampires.... In Anne Rice's hands, vampires have come of age. They

now have a history and a vital new tradition; instead of creeping about

in charnel houses, they stand center stage, with a thousand spotlights

on them. And they smile straight at the camera, licking without shame

their voluptuous lips and white, sharp teeth. " The Village Voice

THE VAMPIRE LESTAT 1 Downtown Saturday Night In The

Twentieth Century 4 1984 4 The Early Education And Adventures Of

The Vampire Lestat 16 Part I - Lelio Rising 16 Part II - The Legacy of

Magnus 53 Part III - Viaticum For The Marquise 102 Part IV - The

Children Of Darkness 140 Part V - The Vampire Armand 184 Part VI -

On The Devil's Road From Paris To Cairo 219 Part VII - Ancient

Magic, Ancient Mysteries 247

Downtown Saturday Night In The Twentieth Century 1984

I am The Vampire Lestat. I'm immortal. More or less. The light of

the sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire-these things might

destroy me. But then again, they might not. I'm six feet tall, which

was fairly impressive in the 1780s when I was a young mortal man. It's

not bad now. I have thick blond hair, not quite shoulder length, and

rather curly, which appears white under fluorescent light. My eyes are

gray, but they absorb the colors blue or violet easily from surfaces

around them. And I have a fairly short narrow nose, and a mouth that

is well shaped but just a little too big for my face. It can look very

mean, or extremely generous, my mouth. It always looks sensual. But

emotions and attitudes are always reflected in my entire expression. I

have a continuously animated face. My vampire nature reveals itself in

extremely white and highly reflective skin that has to be powdered

down for cameras of any kind. And if I'm starved for blood I look like

a perfect horrorskin shrunken, veins like ropes over the contours of

my bones. But I don't let that happen now. And the only consistent

indication that I am not human is my fingernails. It's the same with all

vampires. Our fingernails look like glass. And some people notice

that when they don't notice anything else. Right now I am what

America calls a Rock Superstar. My first album has sold 4 million

copies. I'm going to San Francisco for the first spot on a nationwide

concert tour that will take my band from coast to coast. MTV, the

rock music cable channel, has been playing my video clips night and

day for two weeks. They're also being shown in England on "Top of

the Pops " and on the Continent, probably in some parts of Asia, and

in Japan. Video cassettes of the whole series of clips are selling

worldwide. I am also the author of an autobiography which was

published last week. Regarding my English-the language I use in my

autobiography-I first learned it from a flatboatmen who came down

the Mississippi to New Orleans about two hundred years ago. I

learned more after that from the English language writers-everybody

from Shakespeare through Mark Twain to H. Rider Haggard, whom I

read as the decades passed. The final infusion I received from the

detective stories of the early twentieth century in the Black Mask

magazine. The adventures of Sam Spade by Dashiell Hammett in

Black Mask were the last stories I read before I went literally and

figuratively underground. That was in New Orleans in 1929. When I

write I drift into a vocabulary that would have been natural to me in

the eighteenth century, into phrases shaped by the authors I've read.

But in spite of my French accent, I talk like a cross between a

flatboatman and detective Sam Spade, actually. So I hope you'll bear

with me when my style is inconsistent. When I blow the atmosphere

of an eighteenth century scene to smithereens now and then. I came

out into the twentieth century last year. What brought me up were

two things. First-the information I was receiving from amplified

voices that had begun their cacophony in the air around the time I lay

down to sleep. I'm referring here to the voices of radios, of course,

and phonographs and later television machines. I heard the radios in

the cars that passed in the streets of the old Garden District near the

place where I lay. I heard the phonographs and TVs from the houses

that surrounded mine. Now, when a vampire goes underground as we

call it when he ceases to drink blood and he just lies in the earth he

soon becomes too weak to resurrect himself, and what follows is a

dream state. In that state, I absorbed the voices sluggishly,

surrounding them with my own responsive images as a mortal does in

sleep. But at some point during the past fifty-five years I began to

"remember " what I was hearing, to follow the entertainment

programs, to listen to the news broadcasts, the lyrics and rhythms of

the popular songs. And very gradually, I began to understand the

caliber of the changes that the world had undergone. I began listening

for specific pieces of information about wars or inventions, certain

new patterns of speech. Then a self-consciousness developed in me. I

realized I was no longer dreaming. I was thinking about what I heard.

I was wide awake. I was lying in the ground and I was starved for

living blood. I started to believe that maybe all the old wounds I'd

sustained had been healed by now. Maybe my strength had come

back. Maybe my strength had actually increased as it would have done

with time if I'd never been hurt. I wanted to find out. I started to

think incessantly of drinking human blood. The second thing that

brought me back-the decisive thing really-was the sudden presence

near me of a band of young rock singers who called themselves Satan's

Night Out. They moved into a house on Sixth Street-less than a block

away from where I slumbered under my own house on Prytania near

the Lafayette Cemetery-and they started to rehearse their rock music

in the attic some time in 1984. I could hear their whining electric

guitars, their frantic singing. It was as good as the radio and stereo

songs I heard, and it was more melodic than most. There was a

romance to it in spite of its pounding drums. The electric piano

sounded like a harpsichord. I caught images from the thoughts of the

musicians that told me what they looked like, what they saw when they

looked at each other and into mirrors. They were slender, sinewy, and

altogether lovely young mortals-beguilingly androgynous and even a

little savage in their dress and movements-two male and one female.

They drowned out most of-the other amplified voices around me

when they were playing. But that was perfectly all right. I wanted to

rise and join the rock band called Satan's Night Out. I wanted to sing

and to dance. But I can't say that in the very beginning there was great

thought behind my wish. It was rather a ruling impulse, strong

enough to bring me up from the earth. I was enchanted by the world

of rock music-the way the singers could scream of good and evil,

proclaim themselves angels or devils, and mortals would stand up and

cheer. Sometimes they seemed the pure embodiment of madness.

And yet it was technologically dazzling, the intricacy of their

performance. It was barbaric and cerebral in a way that I don't think

the world of ages past had ever seen. Of course it was metaphor, the

raving. None of them believed in angels or devils, no matter how well

they assumed their parts. And the players of the old Italian commedia

had been as shocking, as inventive, as lewd. Yet it was entirely new,

the extremes to which they took it, the brutality and the defiance-and

the way they were embraced by the world from the very rich to the

very poor. Also there was something vampiric about rock music. It

must have sounded supernatural even to those who don't believe in

the supernatural. I mean the way the electricity could stretch a single

note forever; the way harmony could be layered upon harmony until

you felt yourself dissolving in the sound. So eloquent of dread it was,

this music. The world just didn't have it in any form before. Yes, I

wanted to get closer to it. I wanted to do it. Maybe make the little

unknown band of Satan's Night Out famous. I was ready to come up.

It took a week to rise, more or less. I fed on the fresh blood of the little

animals who live under the earth when I could catch them. Then I

started clawing for the surface, where I could summon the rats. From

there it wasn't too difficult to take felines and finally the inevitable

human victim, though I had to wait a long time for the particular kind

I wanted-a man who had killed other mortals and showed no remorse.

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12TheVampireLestatByAnneRiceThisbookisdedicatedwithlovetoStanRice,KarenO'Brien,andAllenDaviau"WONDERFUL...THEBESTNEWSISTHATTHISISTHEMIDDLEBOOKOFTHECHRONICLESOFTHEVAMPIRES."Playboy"WhereRiceexcelsisinevokingtheelusivenatureofvampiricsexuality,theurgencyofthequestforself-knowledge,thethinlinebetweenar...

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