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The Vampire Chronicles

Volume 4

The TALE of the BODY THIEF

Anne Rice

Prologue

The Vampire Lestat here. I have a story to tell you, It’s about something that

happened to me.

It begins in Miami, in the year 1990, and I really want to start right there. But it’s

important that I tell you about the dreams I’d been having before that time, for they

are very much part of the tale too. I’m talking now about dreams of a child vampire

with a woman’s mind and an angel’s face, and a dream of my mortal friend David

Talbot.

But there were dreams also of my mortal boyhood in France - of winter snows, my

father’s bleak and ruined castle in the Auvergne, and the time I went out to hunt a

pack of wolves that were preying upon our poor village.

Dreams can be as real as events. Or so it seemed to me afterwards.

And I was in a dark frame of mind when these dreams began, a vagabond vampire

roaming the earth, sometimes so covered with dust that no one took the slightest

notice of me. What good was it to have full and beautiful blond hair, sharp blue eyes,

razzle-dazzle clothes, an irresistible smile, and a well-proportioned body six feet in

height that can, in spite of its two hundred years, pass for that of a twenty-year-old

mortal. I was still a man of reason however, a child of the eighteenth century, in

which I’d actually lived before I was Born to Darkness.

But as the 1980s were drawing to a close I was much changed from the dashing

fledgling vampire I had once been, so attached to his classic black cape and Bruxelles

lace, the gentleman with walking stick and white gloves, dancing beneath the gas

lamp.

I had been transformed into a dark god of sorts, thanks to suffering and triumph, and

too much of the blood of our vampire elders. I had powers which left me baffled and

sometimes even frightened, I had powers which made me sorrowful though I did not

always understand the reason for it.

I could, for example, move high into the air at will, traveling the night winds over

great distances as easily as a spirit. I could effect or destroy matter with the power of

my mind. I could kindle afire by the mere wish to do so. I could also call to other

immortals over countries and continents with my preternatural voice, and I could

effortlessly read the minds of vampires and humans.

Not bad, you might think. I loathed it. Without doubt, I was grieving for my old

selves-the mortal boy, the newborn revenant once determined to be good at being bad

if that was his predicament.

I’m not a pragmatist, understand. I have a keen and merciless conscience. I could have

been a nice guy. Maybe at times I am. But always, I’ve been a man of action. Grief is

a waste, and so is fear. And action is what you will get here, as soon as I get through

this introduction.

Remember, beginnings are always hard and most are artificial. It was the best of times

and the worst of times-really? When! And all happy families are not alike; even

Tolstoy must have realized that. I can’t get away with "In the beginning," or "They

threw me off the hay truck at noon," or I would do it. I always get away with whatever

I can, believe me. And as Nabokov said in the voice of Humbert Humbert, "You can

always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. "Can’t fancy mean experimental?

I already know of course that I am sensuous, florid, lush, humid-enough critics have

told me that.

Alas, I have to do things my own way. And we will get to the beginning-if that isn’t a

contradiction in terms-I promise you.

Right now I must explain that before this adventure commenced, I was also grieving

for the other immortals I had known and loved, because they had long ago scattered

from our last late-twentieth century gathering place. Folly to think we wanted to

create a coven again. They had one by one disappeared into time and the world, which

was inevitable.

Vampires don’t really like others of their kind, though their need for immortal

companions is desperate.

Out of that need I’d made my fledglings-Louis de Pointe du Lac, who became my

patient and often loving nineteenth-century comrade, and with his unwitting aid, the

beautiful and doomed child vampire, Claudia. And during these lonely vagabond

nights of the late twentieth century, Louis was the only immortal whom I saw quite

often. The most human of us all, the most ungodlike.

I never stayed away too long from his shack in the wilderness of uptown New

Orleans. But you’ll see. I’ll get to that. Louis is in this story.

The point is-you find precious little here about the others. Indeed, almost nothing.

Except for Claudia. I was dreaming more and more often of Claudia. Let me explain

about Claudia. She’d been destroyed over a century before, yet I felt her presence all

the time as if she were just around the corner.

It was 1794 when I made this succulent little vampire out of a dying orphan, and sixty

years passed before she rose up against me. "I’ll put you in your coffin forever,

Father."

I did sleep in a coffin then. And it was a period piece, that lurid attempted murder,

involving as it did mortal victims baited with poisons to cloud my mind, knives

tearing my white flesh, and the ultimate abandonment of my seemingly lifeless form

in the rank waters of the swamp beyond the dim lights of New Orleans.

Well, it didn’t work. There are very few sure ways to kill the undead. The sun, fire...

One must aim for total obliteration. And after all, we are talking about the Vampire

Lestat here.

Claudia suffered for this crime, being executed later by an evil coven of blood

drinkers who thrived in the very heart of Paris in the infamous Theatre of the

Vampires. I’d broken the rules when I made a blood drinker of a child so small, and

for that reason alone, the Parisian monsters might have put an end to her. But she too

had broken their rules in trying to destroy her maker, and that you might say was their

logical reason for shutting her out into the bright light of day which burnt her to ashes.

It’s a hell of a way to execute someone, as far as I’m concerned, because those who

lock you out must quickly retire to their coffins and are not even there to witness the

mighty sun carrying out their grim sentence. But that’s what they did to this exquisite

and delicate creature that I had fashioned with my vampiric blood from a ragged, dirty

waif in a ramshackle Spanish colony in the New World-to be my friend, my pupil, my

love, my muse, my fellow hunter. And yes, my daughter.

If you read Interview with the Vampire, then you know all about this. It’s Louis’s

version of our time together. Louis tells of his love for this our child, and of his

vengeance against those who destroyed her.

If you read my autobiographical books, The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the

Damned, you know all about me, also. You know our history, for what it’s worth-and

history is never worth too much-and how we came into being thousands of years ago

and that we propagate by carefully giving the Dark Blood to mortals when we wish to

take them along the Devil’s Road with us.

But you don’t have to read those works to understand this one. And you won’t find

here the cast of thousands that crowded The Queen of the Damned, either. Western

civilization will not for one second teeter on the brink. And there will be no

revelations from ancient times or old ones confiding half-truths and riddles and

promising answers that do not in fact exist and never have existed.

No, I have done all that before.

This is a contemporary story. It’s a volume in the Vampire Chronicles, make no

mistake. But it is the first really modern volume, for it accepts the horrifying absurdity

of existence from the start, and it takes us into the mind and the soul of its hero- guess

who?-for its discoveries.

Read this tale, and I will give you all you need to know about us as you turn the

pages. And by the way, lots of things do happen! I’m a man of action as I said-the

James Bond of the vampires, if you will-called the Brat Prince, and the Damnedest

Creature, and "you monster" by various and sundry other immortals.

The other immortals are still around, of course-Maharet and Mekare, the eldest of us

all, Khayman of the First Brood, Eric, Santino, Pandora, and others whom we call the

Children of the Millennia. Armand is still about, the lovely five-hundred-year-old

boy-faced ancient who once ruled the Theatre des Vampires, and before that a coven

of devil worshiping blood drinkers who lived beneath the Paris Cemetery, Les

Innocents. Armand, I hope, will always be around.

And Gabrielle, my mortal mother and immortal child will no doubt turn up one of

these nights sometime before the end of another thousand years, if I’m lucky.

As for Marius, my old teacher and mentor, the one who kept the historical secrets of

our tribe, he is still with us and always will be. Before this tale began, he would come

to me now and then to scold and plead: Would I not stop my careless kills which

invariably found their way into the pages of mortal newspapers! Would I not stop

deviling my mortal friend David Talbot, and tempting him with the Dark Gift of our

blood? Better we make no more, did I not know this?

Rules, rules, rules. They always wind up talking about rules. And I love to break the

rules the way mortals like to smash their crystal glasses after a toast against the bricks

of the fireplace.

But enough about the others. The point is-this is my book from start to finish.

Let me speak now of the dreams that had come to trouble me in my wanderings.

With Claudia, it was almost a haunting. Just before my eyes would close each dawn,

I’d see her beside me, hear her voice in a low and urgent whisper. And sometimes I’d

slide back over the centuries to the little colonial hospital with its rows of tiny beds

where the orphan child had been dying.

Behold the sorrowful old doctor, potbellied and palsied, as he lifts the child’s body.

And that crying. Who is crying? Claudia was not crying. She slept as the doctor

entrusted her to me, believing me to be her mortal father. And she is so pretty in these

dreams. Was she that pretty then? Of course she was.

"Snatching me from mortal hands like two grim monsters in a nightmare fairy tale,

you idle, blind parents!"

The dream of David Talbot came once only.

David is young in the dream and he is walking in a mangrove forest. He was not the

man of seventy-four who had become my friend, the patient mortal scholar who

regularly refused my offer of the Dark Blood, and laid his warm, fragile hand on my

cold flesh unflinchingly to demonstrate the affection and trust between us.

No. This is young David Talbot of years and years ago, when his heart didn’t beat so

fast within his chest. Yet he is in danger.

Tyger, tyger burning bright.

Is that his voice, whispering those words or is it mine?

And out of the dappled light it comes, its orange and black stripes like the light and

shade itself so that it is scarcely visible. I see its huge head, and how soft its muzzle,

white and bristling with long, delicate whiskers. But look at its yellow eyes, mere

slits, and full of horrid mindless cruelty. David, its fangs! Can’t you see these fangs!

But he is curious as a child, watching its big pink tongue touch his throat, touch the

thin gold chain he wears around his throat. Is it eating the chain? Good God, David!

The fangs.

Why is my voice dried up inside me? Am I even there in the mangrove forest? My

body vibrates as I struggle to move, dull moans coming from behind my sealed lips,

and each moan taxes every fiber of my being. David, beware!

And then I see that he is down on one knee, with the long shiny rifle cocked against

his shoulder. And the giant cat is still yards away, bearing down on him. On and on it

rushes, until the crack of the gun stops it in its tracks, and over it goes as the gun roars

once again, its yellow eyes full of rage, its paws crossed as they push in one last final

breath at the soft earth.

I wake.

What does this dream mean-that my mortal friend is in danger? Or simply that his

genetic clock has ticked to a stop. For a man of seventy-four years, death can come at

any instant.

Do I ever think of David that I do not think of death?

David, where are you?

Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.

"I want you to ask me for the Dark Gift," I’d said to him when first we met. "I may

not give it to you. But I want you to ask."

He never had. He never would. And now I loved him. I saw him soon after the dream.

I had to. But I could not forget the dream and perhaps it did come to me more than

once in the deep sleep of my daylight hours when I am stone cold and helpless under

literal cover of darkness.

All right, you have the dreams now.

But picture the winter snow in France one more time, if you would, piling about the

castle walls, and a young male mortal asleep on his bed of hay, in the light of the fire,

with his hunting dogs beside him. This had become the image of my lost human life,

more truly than any remembrance of the boulevard theatre in Paris, where before the

Revolution I’d been so very happy as a young actor.

Now we are truly ready to begin. Let’s turn the page, shall we?

Chapter One

Miami-the vampires’ city. This is South Beach at sunset, in the luxurious warmth of

the winterless winter, clean and thriving and drenched in electric light, the gentle

breeze moving in from the placid sea, across the dark margin of cream-colored sand,

to cool the smooth broad pavements full of happy mortal children.

Sweet the parade of fashionable young men displaying their cultured muscles with

touching vulgarity, of young women so proud of their streamlined and seemingly

sexless modern limbs, amid the soft urgent roar of traffic and human voices.

Old stucco hostelries, once the middling shelters of the aged, were now reborn in

smart pastel colors, sporting their new names in elegant neon script. Candles flickered

on the white-draped tables of the open-porch restaurants. Big shiny American cars

pushed their way slowly along the avenue, as drivers and passengers viewed the

dazzling human parade, lazy pedestrians here and there blocking the thoroughfare.

On the distant horizon the great white clouds were mountains beneath a roofless and

star-filled heaven. Ah, it never failed to take my breath away-this southern sky filled

with azure light and drowsy relentless movement.

To the north rose the towers of new Miami Beach in all their splendour. To the south

and to the west, the dazzling steel skyscrapers of the downtown city with its high

roaring freeways and busy cruise-ship docks. Small pleasure boats sped along the

sparkling waters of the myriad urban canals.

In the quiet immaculate gardens of Coral Gables, countless lamps illuminated the

handsome sprawling villas with their red-tiled roofs, and swimming pools shimmering

with turquoise light. Ghosts walked in the grand and darkened rooms of the Biltmore.

The massive mangrove trees threw out their primitive limbs to cover the broad and

carefully tended streets.

In Coconut Grove, the international shoppers thronged the luxurious hotels and

fashionable malls. Couples embraced on the high balconies of their glass-walled

condominiums, silhouettes gazing out over the serene waters of the bay. Cars sped

along the busy roads past the ever-dancing palms and delicate rain trees, past the squat

concrete mansions draped with red and purple bougainvillea, behind their fancy iron

gates.

All of this is Miami, city of water, city of speed, city of tropical flowers, city of

enormous skies. It is for Miami, more than any other place, that I periodically leave

my New Orleans home. The men and women of many nations and different colors

live in the great dense neighborhoods of Miami. One hears Yiddish, Hebrew, the

languages of Spain, of Haiti, the dialects and accents of Latin America, of the deep

south of this nation and of the far north. There is menace beneath the shining surface

of Miami, there is desperation and a throbbing greed; there is the deep steady pulse of

a great capital-the tow grinding energy, the endless risk.

It’s never really dark in Miami. It’s never really quiet.

It is the perfect city for the vampire; and it never fails to yield to me a mortal killer-

some twisted, sinister morsel who will give up to me a dozen of his own murders as I

drain his memory banks and his blood.

But tonight it was the Big-Game Hunt, the unseasonal Easter feast after a Lent of

starvation-the pursuit of one of those splendid human trophies whose gruesome

modus operandi reads for pages in the computer files of mortal law enforcement

agencies, a being anointed in his anonymity with a flashy name by the worshipful

press: "Back Street Strangler."

I lust after such killers!

What luck for me that such a celebrity had surfaced in my favorite city. What luck

that he has struck six times in these very streets-slayer of the old and the infirm, who

have come in such numbers to live out their remaining days in these warm climes. Ah,

I would have crossed a continent to snap him up, but he is here waiting for me. To his

dark history, detailed by no less than twenty criminologists, and easily purloined by

me through the computer in my New Orleans lair, I have secretly added the crucial

elements-his name and mortal habitation.

A simple trick for a dark god who can read minds. Through his blood-soaked dreams I

found him. And tonight the pleasure will be mine of finishing his illustrious career in

a dark cruel embrace, without a scintilla of moral illumination.

Ah, Miami. The perfect place for this little Passion Play.

I always come back to Miami, the way I come back to New Orleans. And I’m the only

immortal now who hunts this glorious corner of the Savage Garden, for as you have

seen, the others long ago deserted the coven house here-unable to endure each other’s

company any more than I can endure them.

But so much the better to have Miami all to myself.

I stood at the front windows of the rooms I maintained in the swanky little Park

Central Hotel on Ocean Drive, every now and then letting my preternatural hearing

sweep the chambers around me in which the rich tourists enjoyed that premium brand

of solitude-complete privacy only steps from the flashy street-my Champs Elysees of

the moment, my Via Veneto.

My strangler was almost ready to move from the realm of his spasmodic and

fragmentary visions into the land of literal death. Ah, time to dress for the man of my

dreams.

Picking from the usual wilderness of freshly opened cardboard boxes, suitcases, and

trunks, I chose a suit of gray velvet, an old favorite, especially when the fabric is

thick, with only a subtle luster. Not very likely for these warm nights, I had to admit,

but then I don’t feel hot and cold the way humans do. And the coat was slim with

narrow lapels, very spare and rather like a hacking jacket with its fitted waist, or,

more to the point, like the graceful old frock coats of earlier times. We immortals

forever fancy old-fashioned garments, garments that remind us of the century in

which we were Born to Darkness. Sometimes you can gauge the true age of an

immortal simply by the cut of his clothes.

With me, it’s also a matter of texture. The eighteenth century was so shiny! I can’t

bear to be without a little luster. And this handsome coat suited me perfectly with the

plain tight velvet pants. As for the white silk shirt, it was a cloth so soft you could ball

the garment in the palm of your hand. Why should I wear anything else so close to my

indestructible and curiously sensitive skin? Then the boots. Ah, they look like all my

fine shoes of late. Their soles are immaculate, for they so seldom touch the mother

earth.

My hair I shook loose into the usual thick mane of glowing yellow shoulder-length

waves. What would I look like to mortals? I honestly don’t know. I covered up my

blue eyes, as always, with black glasses, lest their radiance mesmerize and entrance at

random-a real nuisance-and over my delicate white hands, with their telltale glassy

fingernails, I drew the usual pair of soft gray leather gloves.

Ah, a bit of oily brown camouflage for the skin. I smoothed the lotion over my

cheekbones, over the bit of neck and chest that was bare.

I inspected the finished product in the mirror. Still irresistible. No wonder I’d been

such a smash in my brief career as a rock singer. And I’ve always been a howling

success as a vampire. Thank the gods I hadn’t become invisible in my airy

wanderings, a vagabond floating far above the clouds, light as a cinder on the wind. I

felt like weeping when I thought of it.

The Big-Game Hunt always brought me back to the actual. Track him, wait for him,

catch him just at the moment that he would bring death to his next victim, and take

him slowly, painfully, feasting upon his wickedness as you do it, glimpsing through

the filthy lens of his soul all his earlier victims . . .

Please understand, there is no nobility in this. I don’t believe that rescuing one poor

mortal from such a fiend can conceivably save my soul. I have taken life too often-

unless one believes that the power of one good deed is infinite. I don’t know whether

or not I believe that. What I do believe is this: The evil of one murder is infinite, and

my guilt is like my beauty-eternal. I cannot be forgiven, for there is no one to forgive

me for all I’ve done.

Nevertheless I like saving those innocents from their fate. And! like taking my killers

to me because they are my brothers, and we belong together, and why shouldn’t they

die in my arms instead of some poor merciful mortal who has never done anyone any

willful harm? These are the rules of my game. I play by these rules because I made

them. And I promised myself, I wouldn’t leave the bodies about this time; I’d strive to

do what the others have always ordered me to do. But still... I liked to leave the

carcass for the authorities. I liked to fire up the computer later, after I’d returned to

New Orleans, and read the entire postmortem report.

Suddenly I was distracted by the sound of a police car passing slowly below, the men

inside it speaking of my killer, that he will strike soon again, his stars are in the

correct positions, the moon is at the right height. It will be in the side streets of South

Beach most certainly, as it has been before. But who is he? How can he be stopped?

Seven o’clock. The tiny green numerals of the digital clock told me it was so, though I

already knew, of course. I closed my eyes, letting my head drop just a little to one

side, bracing myself perhaps for the full effects of this power which I so loathed. First

came an amplification of the hearing again, as if I had thrown a modern technological

switch. The soft purring sounds of the world became a chorus from hell-full of sharp-

edged laughter and lamentation, full of lies and anguish and random pleas. I covered

my ears as if that could stop it, then finally I shut it off.

Gradually I saw the blurred and overlapping images of their thoughts, rising like a

million fluttering birds into the firmament. Give me my killer, give me his vision!

He was there, in a small dingy room, very unlike this one, yet only two blocks from it,

just rising from his bed. His cheap clothes were rumpled, sweat covering his coarse

face, a thick nervous hand going for the cigarettes in his shirt pocket, then letting them

go-already forgotten. A heavy man he was, of shapeless facial features and a look full

of vague worry, or dim regret.

It did not occur to him to dress for the evening, for the Feast for which he’d been

hungering. And now his waking mind was almost collapsed beneath the burden of his

ugly palpitating dreams. He shook himself all over, loose greasy hair falling onto his

sloping forehead, eyes like bits of black glass.

Standing still in the silent shadows of my room, I continued to track him, to follow

down a back stairs, and out into the garish light of Collins Avenue, past dusty shop

windows and sagging commercial signs, propelled onward, towards the inevitable and

yet unchosen object of his desire.

And who might she be, the lucky lady, wandering blindly and inexorably towards this

horror, through the sparse and dismal crowds of the early evening in this same dreary

region of town? Does she carry a carton of milk and a head of lettuce in a brown

paper bag? Will she hurry at the sight of the cutthroats on the corner? Does she grieve

for the old beachfront where she lived perhaps so contentedly before the architects

and the decorators drove her to the cracked and peeling hostelries further away?

And what will he think when he finally spots her, this filthy angel of death? Will she

be the very one to remind him of the mythic shrew of childhood, who beat him

senseless only to be elevated to the nightmare pantheon of his subconscious, or are we

asking too much?

I mean there are killers of this species who make not the smallest connection between

symbol and reality, and remember nothing for longer than a few days. What is certain

is only that their victims don’t deserve it, and that they, the killers, deserve to meet

with me.

Ah, well, I will tear out his menacing heart before he has had a chance to "do" her,

and he will give me everything that he has, and is.

I walked slowly down the steps, and through the smart, glittering art deco lobby with

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1TheVampireChroniclesVolume4TheTALEoftheBODYTHIEFAnneRice2PrologueTheVampireLestathere.Ihaveastorytotellyou,It’saboutsomethingthathappenedtome.ItbeginsinMiami,intheyear1990,andIreallywanttostartrightthere.Butit’simportantthatItellyouaboutthedreamsI’dbeenhavingbeforethattime,fortheyareverymuchpartoft...

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