Anne Rice - Vampire Chronicles 6 - The Vampire Armand

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The Vampire Chronicles
Volume 6
The VAMPIRE ARMAND
Anne Rice
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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
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PART ONE
BODY and BLOOD
Chapter One
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
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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
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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
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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."
7
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.
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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."
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"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
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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.
摘要：

1TheVampireChroniclesVolume6TheVAMPIREARMANDAnneRice2Jesus,speakingtoMaryMagdalene:Jesussaithuntoher,Touchmenot;forIamnotyetascendedtomyFather:butgotomybrethren,andsayuntothem,IascenduntomyFather,andyourFather;andtomyGod,andyourGod.THEGOSPELACCORDINGTOST.JOHN20:173PARTONEBODYandBLOODChapterOneTheysa...

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