Rice, Anne - Vampire Chronicles 6 - Vampire Armand

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THE VAMPIRE ARMAND

THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES

ANNE RICE

Jesus, speaking to Mary Magdalene:

Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my

Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my

Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN 20:17

PART 1

BODY and BLOOD

THEY SAID a child had died in the attic. Her clothes had been discovered

in the wall. I wanted to go up there, and to lie down near the wall, and

be alone.

They'd seen her ghost now and then, the child. But none of these

vampires could see spirits, really, at least not the way that I could

see them. No matter. It wasn't the company of the child I wanted. It was

to be in that place.

Nothing more could be gained from lingering near Lestat. I'd come.

I'd fulfilled my purpose. I couldn't help him.

The sight of his sharply focused and unchanging eyes unnerved me, and

I was quiet inside and full of love for those nearest me-my human

children, my dark-haired little Benji and my tender willowy Sybelle- but

I was not strong enough just yet to take them away.

I left the chapel.

I didn't even take note of who was there. The whole convent was now

the dwelling place of vampires. It was not an unruly place, or a

neglected place, but I didn't notice who remained in the chapel when I

left.

Lestat lay as he had all along, on the marble floor of the chapel in

front of the huge crucifix, on his side, his hands slack, the left hand

just below the right hand, its fingers touching the marble lightly, as

if with a purpose, when there was no purpose at all. The fingers of his

right hand curled, making a little hollow in the palm where the light

fell, and that too seemed to have a meaning, but there was no meaning.

This was simply the preternatural body lying there without will or

animation, no more purposeful than the face, its expression almost

defiantly intelligent, given that months had passed in which Lestat had

not moved.

The high stained-glass windows were dutifully draped for him before

sunrise. At night, they shone with all the wondrous candles scattered

about the fine statues and relics which filled this once sanctified and

holy place. Little mortal children had heard Mass under this high coved

roof; a priest had sung out the Latin words from an altar.

It was ours now. It belonged to him-Lestat, the man who lay

motionless on the marble floor.

Man. Vampire. Immortal. Child of Darkness. Any and all are excellent

words for him.

Looking over my shoulder at him, I never felt so much like a child.

That's what I am. I fill out the definition, as if it were encoded in

me perfectly, and there had never been any other genetic design.

I was perhaps seventeen years old when Marius made me into a vampire.

I had stopped growing by that time. For a year, I'd been five feet six

inches. My hands are as delicate as those of a young woman, and I was

beardless, as we used to say in that time, the years of the sixteenth

century. Not a eunuch, no, not that, most certainly, but a boy.

It was fashionable then for boys to be as beautiful as girls. Only

now does it seem something worthwhile, and that's because I love the

others-my own: Sybelle with her woman's breasts and long girlish limbs,

and Benji with his round intense little Arab face.

I stood at the foot of the stairs. No mirrors here, only the high

brick walls stripped of their plaster, walls that were old only for

America, darkened by the damp even inside the convent, all textures and

elements here softened by the simmering summers of New Orleans and her

clammy crawling winters, green winters I call them because the trees

here are almost never bare.

I was born in a place of eternal winter when one compares it to this

place. No wonder in sunny Italy I forgot the beginnings altogether, and

fashioned my life out of the present of my years with Marius. "I don't

remember." It was a condition of loving so much vice, of being so

addicted to Italian wine and sumptuous meals, and even the feel of the

warm marble under my bare feet when the rooms of the palazzo were

sinfully, wickedly heated by Marius's exorbitant fires.

His mortal friends ... human beings like me at that time ... scolded

constantly about these expenditures: firewood, oil, candles. And for

Marius only the finest candles of beeswax were acceptable. Every

fragrance was significant.

Stop these thoughts. Memories can't hurt you now. You came here for a

reason and now you have finished, and you must find those you love, your

young mortals, Benji and Sybelle, and you must go on.

Life was no longer a theatrical stage where Banquo's ghost came again

and again to seat himself at the grim table.

My soul hurt.

Up the stairs. Lie for a little while in this brick convent where the

child's clothes were found. Lie with the child, murdered here in this

convent, so say the rumormongers, the vampires who haunt these halls

now, who have come to see the great Vampire Lestat in his Endymion-like

sleep.

I felt no murder here, only the tender voices of nuns.

I went up the staircase, letting my body find its human weight and

human tread.

After five hundred years, I know such tricks. I could frighten all

the young ones-the hangers-on and the gawkers-just as surely as the

other ancient ones did it, even the most modest, uttering words to

evince their telepathy, or vanishing when they chose to leave, or now

and then even making the building tremble with their power-an

interesting accomplishment even with these walls eighteen inches thick

with cypress sills that will never rot.

He must like the fragrances here, I thought. Marius, where is he?

Before I had visited Lestat, I had not wanted to talk very much to

Marius, and had spoken only a few civil words when I left my treasures

in his charge.

After all, I had brought my children into a menagerie of the Undead.

Who better to safeguard them than my beloved Marius, so powerful that

none here dared question his smallest request.

There is no telepathic link between us naturally-Marius made me, I am

forever his fledgling-but as soon as this occurred to me, I realized

without the aid of this telepathic link that I could not feel the

presence of Marius in the building. I didn't know what had happened in

that brief interval when I knelt down to look at Lestat. I didn't know

where Marius was. I couldn't catch the familiar human scents of Benji or

Sybelle. A little stab of panic paralyzed me.

I stood on the second story of the building. I leaned against the

wall, my eyes settling with determined calm on the deeply varnished

heart pine floor. The light made pools of yellow on the boards.

Where were they, Benji and Sybelle? What had I done in bringing them

here, two ripe and glorious humans? Benji was a spirited boy of twelve,

Sybelle, a womanling of twenty-five. What if Marius, so generous in his

own soul, had carelessly let them out of his sight?

"I'm here, young one." The voice was abrupt, soft, welcome.

My Maker stood on the landing just below me, having come up the steps

behind me, or more truly, with his powers, having placed himself there,

covering the preceding distance with silent and invisible speed.

"Master," I said with a little trace of a smile. "I was afraid for

them for a moment." It was an apology. "This place makes me sad."

He nodded. "I have them, Armand," he said. "The city seethes with

mortals. There's food enough for all the vagabonds wandering here. No

one will hurt them. Even if I weren't here to say so, no one would

dare."

It was I who nodded now. I wasn't so sure, really. Vampires are by

their very nature perverse and do wicked and terrible things simply for

the sport of it. To kill another's mortal pet would be a worthy

entertainment for some grim and alien creature, skirting the fringes

here, drawn by remarkable events.

"You're a wonder, young one," he said to me smiling. Young one! Who

else would call me this but Marius, my Maker, and what is five hundred

years to him? "You went into the sun, child," he continued with the same

legible concern written on his kind face. "And you lived to tell the

tale."

"Into the sun, Master?" I questioned his words. But I myself did not

want to reveal any more. I did not want to talk yet, to tell of what had

happened, the legend of Veronica's Veil and the Face of Our Lord

emblazoned upon it, and the morning when I had given up my soul with

such perfect happiness. What a fable it was.

He came up the steps to be near me, but kept a polite distance. He

has always been the gentleman, even before there was such a word. In

ancient Rome, they must have had a term for such a person, infallibly

good mannered, and considerate as a point of honor, and wholly

successful at common courtesy to rich and poor alike. This was Marius,

and it had always been Marius, insofar as I could know.

He let his snow-white hand rest on the dull satiny banister. He wore

a long shapeless cloak of gray velvet, once perfectly extravagant, now

downplayed with wear and rain, and his yellow hair was long like

Lestat's hair, full of random light and unruly in the damp, and even

studded with drops of dew from outside, the same dew clinging to his

golden eyebrows and darkening his long curling eyelashes around his

large cobalt-blue eyes.

There was something altogether more Nordic and icy about him than

there was about Lestat, whose hair tended more to golden, for all its

luminous highlights, and whose eyes were forever prismatic, drinking up

the colors around him, becoming even a gorgeous violet with the

slightest provocation from the worshipful outside world.

In Marius, I saw the sunny skies of the northern wilderness, eyes of

steady radiance which rejected any outside color, perfect portals to his

own most constant soul.

"Armand," he said. "I want you to come with me."

"Where is that, Master, come where?" I asked. I too wanted to be

civil. He had always, even after a struggle of wits, brought such finer

instincts out of me.

"To my house, Armand, where they are now, Sybelle and Benji. Oh,

don't fear for them for a second. Pandora's with them. They are rather

astonishing mortals, brilliant, remarkably different, yet alike. They

love you, and they know so much and have come with you rather a long

way."

I flushed with blood and color; the warmth was stinging and

unpleasant, and then as the blood danced back away from the surface of

my face, I felt cooler and strangely enervated that I felt any

sensations at all.

It was a shock being here and I wanted it to be over.

"Master, I don't know who I am in this new life," I said gratefully.

"Reborn? Confused?" I hesitated, but there was no use stopping it.

"Don't ask me to stay here just now. Maybe some time when Lestat is

himself again, maybe when enough time has passed-. I don't know for

certain, only that I can't accept your kind invitation now."

He gave me a brief accepting nod. With his hand he made a little

acquiescent gesture. His old gray cloak had slipped off one shoulder. He

seemed not to care about it. His thin black wool clothes were neglected,

lapels and pockets trimmed in a careless gray dust. That was not right

for him.

He had a big shock of white silk at his throat that made his pale

face seem more colored and human than it otherwise would. But the silk

was torn as if by brambles. In sum, he haunted the world in these

clothes, rather than was dressed in them. They were for a stumbler, not

my old Master.

I think he knew I was at a loss. I was looking up at the gloom above

me. I wanted to reach the attic of this place, the half-concealed

clothing of the dead child. I wondered at this story of the dead child.

I had the impertinence to let my mind drift, though he was waiting.

He brought me back with his gentle words:

"Sybelle and Benji will be with me when you want them," he said. "You

can find us. We aren't far. You'll hear the Appassionato when you want

to hear it." He smiled.

"You've given her a piano," I said. I spoke of golden Sybelle. I had

shut out the world from my preternatural hearing, and I didn't want just

yet to unstop my ears even for the lovely sound of her playing, which I

already missed overly much.

As soon as we'd entered the convent, Sybelle had seen a piano and

asked in a whisper at my ear if she could play it. It was not in the

chapel where Lestat lay, but off in another long empty room. I had told

her it wasn't quite proper, that it might disturb Lestat as he lay

there, and we couldn't know what he thought, or what he felt, or if he

was anguished and trapped in his own dreams.

"Perhaps when you come, you'll stay for a while," Marius said.

"You'll like the sound of her playing my piano, and maybe then we'll

talk together, and you can rest with us, and we can share the house for

as long as you like."

I didn't answer.

"It's palatial in a New World sort of way," he said with a little

mockery in his smile. "It's not far at all. I have the most spacious

gardens and old oaks, oaks far older than those even out there on the

Avenue, and all the windows are doors. You know how I like it that way.

It's the Roman style. The house is open to the spring rain, and the

spring rain here is like a dream."

"Yes, I know," I whispered. "I think it's falling now, isn't it?" I

smiled.

"Well, I'm rather spattered with it, yes," he said almost gaily. "You

come when you want to. If not tonight, then tomorrow ..."

"Oh, I'll be there tonight," I said. I didn't want to offend him, not

in the slightest, but Benji and Sybelle had seen enough of white-faced

monsters with velvet voices. It was time to be off.

I looked at him rather boldly, enjoying it for a moment, overcoming a

shyness that had been our curse in this modern world. In Venice of old,

he had gloried in his clothes as men did then, always so sharp and

splendidly embellished, the glass of fashion, to use the old graceful

phrase. When he crossed the Piazza San Marco in the soft purple of

evening, all turned to watch him pass. Red had been his badge of pride,

red velvet-a flowing cape, and magnificently embroidered doublet, and

beneath it a tunic of gold silk tissue, so very popular in those times.

He'd had the hair of a young Lorenzo de' Medici, right from the

painted wall.

"Master, I love you, but now I must be alone," I said. "You don't

need me now, do you, Sir? How can you? You never really did." Instantly

I regretted it. The words, not the tone, were impudent. And our minds

being so divided by intimate blood, I was afraid he'd misunderstand.

"Cherub, I want you," he said forgivingly. "But I can wait. Seems not

long ago I spoke these same words when we were together, and so I say

them again."

I couldn't bring myself to tell him it was my season for mortal

company, how I longed just to be talking away the night with little

Benji, who was such a sage, or listening to my beloved Sybelle play her

sonata over and over again. It seemed beside the point to explain any

further. And the sadness came over me again, heavily and undeniably, of

having come to this forlorn and empty convent where Lestat lay, unable

or unwilling to move or speak, none of us knew.

"Nothing will come of my company just now, Master," I said. "But you

will grant me some key to finding you, surely, so that when this time

passes ..." I let my words die.

"I fear for you!" he whispered suddenly, with great warmth.

"Any more than ever before, Sir?" I asked.

He thought for a moment. Then he said, "Yes. You love two mortal

children. They are your moon and stars. Come stay with me if only for a

little while. Tell me what you think of our Lestat and what's happened.

Tell me perhaps, if I promise to remain very quiet and not to press you,

tell me your opinion of all you've so recently seen."

"You touch on it delicately, Sir, I admire you. You mean why did I

believe Lestat when he said he had been to Heaven and Hell, you mean

what did I see when I looked at the relic he brought back with him,

Veronica's Veil."

"If you want to tell me. But more truly, I wish you would come and

rest."

I put my hand on top of his, marveling that in spite of all I'd

endured, my skin was almost as white as his.

"You will be patient with my children till I come, won't you?" I

asked. "They imagine themselves so intrepidly wicked, coming here to be

with me, whistling nonchalantly in the crucible of the Undead, so to

speak."

"Undead," he said, smiling reprovingly. "Such language, and in my

presence. You know I hate it."

He planted a kiss quickly on my cheek. It startled me, and then I

realized that he was gone.

"Old tricks!" I said aloud, wondering if he were still near enough to

hear me, or whether he had shut up his ears to me as fiercely as I shut

mine to the outside world.

I looked off, wanting the quiet, dreaming of bowers suddenly, not in

words but in images, the way my old mind would do it, wanting to lie

down in garden beds among growing flowers, wanting to press my face to

earth and sing softly to myself.

The spring outside, the warmth, the hovering mist that would be rain.

All this I wanted. I wanted the swampy forests beyond, but I wanted

Sybelle and Benji, too, and to be gone, and to have some will to carry

on.

Ah, Armand, you always lack this very thing, the will. Don't let the

old story repeat itself now. Arm yourself with all that's happened.

Another was nearby.

It seemed so awful to me suddenly, that some immortal whom I didn't

know should intrude here on my random private thoughts, perhaps to make

a selfish approximation of what I felt.

It was only David Talbot.

He came from the chapel wing, through the bridge rooms of the convent

that connect it to the main building where I stood at the top of the

staircase to the second floor.

I saw him come into the hallway. Behind him was the glass of the door

that led to the gallery, and beyond that the soft mingled gold and white

light of the courtyard below.

"It's quiet now," he said. "And the attic's empty and you know that

you can go there, of course."

"Go away," I said. I felt no anger, only the honest wish to have my

thoughts unread and my emotions left alone.

With remarkable self-possession he ignored me, then said:

"Yes, I am afraid of you, a little, but then terribly curious too."

"Oh, I see, so that excuses it, that you followed me here?"

"I didn't follow you, Armand," he said. "I live here."

"Ah, I'm sorry then," I admitted. "I hadn't known. I suppose I'm glad

of it. You guard him. He's never alone." I meant Lestat of course.

"Everyone's afraid of you," he said calmly. He had taken up a

position only a few feet away, casually folding his arms. "You know^,

it's quite a study, the lore and habits of the vampires."

"Not to me, "I said.

"Yes, I realize that," he said. "I was only musing, and I hope you'll

forgive me. It was about the child in the attic, the child they said was

murdered. It's a tall story, about a very small little person. Maybe if

your luck is better than that of everyone else, you'll see the ghost of

the child whose clothes were shut up in the wall."

"Do you mind if I look at you?" I said. "I mean if you're going to

dip your beak into my mind with such abandon? We met some time ago

before all this happened-Lestat, the Heavenly Journey, this place. I

never really took stock of you. I was indifferent, or too polite, I

don't know which."

I was surprised to hear such heat in my voice. I was volatile, and it

wasn't David Talbot's fault.

"I'm thinking of the conventional knowledge about you," I said. "That

you weren't born in this body, that you were an elderly man when Lestat

knew you, that this body you inhabit now belonged to a clever soul who

could hop from living being to living being, and there set up shop with

his own trespassing soul."

He gave me a rather disarming smile.

"So Lestat said," he answered. "So Lestat wrote. It's true, of

course. You know it is. You've known since you saw me before."

"Three nights we spent together," I said. "And I never really

questioned you. I mean I never really even looked directly into your

eyes."

"We were thinking of Lestat then."

"Aren't we now?"

"I don't know," he said.

"David Talbot," I said, measuring him coldly with my eyes, "David

Talbot, Superior General of the Order of Psychic Detectives known as the

Talamasca, had been catapulted into the body in which he now walks." I

didn't know whether I paraphrased or made it up as I went along. "He'd

been entrenched or chained inside it, made a prisoner by so many ropey

veins, and then tricked into a vampire as a fiery unstanchable blood

invaded his lucky anatomy, sealing his soul up in it as it transformed

him into an immortal-a man of dark bronzed skin and dry, lustrous and

thick black hair."

"I think you have it right," he said with indulgent politeness.

"A handsome gent," I went on, "the color of caramel, moving with such

catlike ease and gilded glances that he makes me think of all things

once delectable, and now a potpourri of scent: cinnamon, clove, mild

peppers and other spices golden, brown or red, whose fragrances can

spike my brain and plunge me into erotic yearnings that live now, more

than ever, to play themselves out. His skin must smell like cashew nuts

and thick almond creams. It does."

He laughed. "I get your point."

I had shocked myself. I was wretched for a moment. "I'm not sure I

get myself," I said apologetically.

"I think it's plain," he said. "You want me to leave you alone."

I saw the preposterous contradictions in all this at once.

"Look," I whispered quickly. "I'm deranged," I whispered. "My senses

cross, like so many threads to make a knot: taste, see, smell, feel. I'm

rampant."

I wondered idly and viciously if I could attack him, take him, bring

him down under my greater craft and cunning and taste his blood without

his consent.

"I'm much too far along the road for that," he said, "and why would

you chance such a thing?"

What self-possession. The older man in him did indeed command the

sturdier younger flesh, the wise mortal with an iron authority over all

things eternal and supernaturally powerful. What a blend of energies!

Nice to drink his blood, to take him against his will. There is no such

fun on Earth like the raping of an equal.

"I don't know," I said, ashamed. Rape is unmanly. "I don't know why I

insult you. You know, I wanted to leave quickly. I mean I wanted to

visit the attic, and then be out of here. I wanted to avoid this sort of

infatuation. You are a wonder, and you think me a wonder, and it's

rich."

I let my eyes pass over him. I'd been blind to him when we met last,

that was most true.

He dressed to kill. With the cleverness of olden times, when men

could preen like peacocks, he'd chosen golden sepia and umber colors for

his clothes. He was smart and clean and fretted all over with careful

bits of pure gold, in a wristband timepiece and buttons and a slender

pin for his modern tie, that tailored spill of color men wear in this

age, as if to let us grab them all the more easily by its noose. Stupid

ornament. Even his shirt of polished cotton was tawny and full of

something of the sun and the warmed earth. Even his shoes were brown,

glossy as beetles' backs.

He came towards me.

"You know what I'm going to ask," he said. "Don't wrestle with these

unarticulated thoughts, these new experiences, all this overwhelming

understanding. Make a book out of it for me."

I couldn't have predicted that this would be his question. I was

surprised, sweetly so, but nevertheless taken off guard.

"Make a book? I? Armand?"

I went towards him, turned sharply and fled up the steps to the

attic, skirting the third floor and then entering the fourth.

The air was thick and warm here. It was a place daily baked by the

sun. All was dry and sweet, the wood like incense and the floors

splintery.

"Little girl, where are you?" I asked.

"Child, you mean," he said.

He had come up behind me, taking a bit of time for courtesy's sake.

He added, "She was never here."

"How do you know?"

"If she were a ghost, I could call her," he said.

I looked over my shoulder. "You have that power? Or is this just what

you want to say to me right now? Before you venture further, let me warn

you that we almost never have the power to see spirits."

"I'm altogether new," David said. "I'm unlike any others. I've come

into the Dark World with different faculties. Dare I say, we, our

species, vampires, have evolved?"

"The conventional word is stupid," I said. I moved further into the

attic. I spied a small chamber with plaster and peeling roses, big

floppy prettily drawn Victorian roses with pale fuzzy green leaves. I

went into the chamber. Light came from a high window out of which a

child could not have seen. Merciless, I thought.

"Who said that a child died here?" I said. All was clean beneath the

soil of years. There was no presence. It seemed perfect and just, no

ghost to comfort me. Why should a ghost come from some savory rest for

my sake?

So I could cuddle up perhaps to the memory of her, her tender legend.

How are children murdered in orphanages where only nuns attend? I never

thought of women as so cruel. Dried up, without imagination perhaps, but

not aggressive as we are, to kill.

I turned round and round. Wooden lockers lined one wall, and one

locker stood open, and there the tumbled shoes were, little brown

Oxfords, as they called them, with black strings, and now I beheld,

where it had been behind me, the broken and frayed hole from which

they'd ripped her clothes. All fallen there, moldy and wrinkled they

lay, her clothes.

A stillness settled on me as if the dust of this place were a fine

ice, coming down from the high peaks of haughty and monstrously selfish

mountains to freeze all living things, this ice, to close up and stop

forever all that breathed or felt or dreamed or lived.

He spoke in poetry:

" Tear no more the heat of the sun,' " he whispered. "Nor the furious

winter's rages. Fear no more ...' "

I winced with pleasure. I knew the verses. I loved them.

I genuflected, as if before the Sacrament, and touched her clothes.

"And she was little, no more than five, and she didn't die here at all.

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