Anne Rice - Vampire Chronicles 2 - The Vampire Lestat

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The Vampire Chronicles

Volume 2

The VAMPIRE LESTAT

Anne Rice

Prologue

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 horror -- skin 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.

One came along eventually, walking right by the fence, a young male with a grizzled

beard who had murdered another, in some far-off place on the other side of the world.

True killer, this one. And oh, that first taste of human struggle and human blood!

Stealing clothes from nearby houses, getting some of the gold and jewels I'd hidden in the

Lafayette Cemetery, that was no problem.

Of course I was scared from time to time. The stench of chemicals and gasoline sickened

me. The drone of air conditioners and the whine of the jet planes overhead hurt my ears.

But after the third night up, I was roaring around New Orleans on a big black Harley-

Davidson motorcycle making plenty of noise myself. I was looking for more killers to

feed on. I wore gorgeous black leather clothes that I'd taken from my victims, and I had a

little Sony Walkman stereo in my pocket that fed Bach's Art of the Fugue through tiny

earphones right into my head as I blazed along.

I was the vampire Lestat again. I was back in action. New Orleans was once again my

hunting ground.

As for my strength, well, it was three times what it had once been. I could leap from the

street to the top of a four-story building. I could pull iron gratings off windows. I could

bend a copper penny double. I could hear human voices and thoughts, when I wanted to,

for blocks around.

By the end of the first week I had a pretty female lawyer in a downtown glass and steel

skyscraper who helped me procure a legal birth certificate, Social Security card, and

driver's license. A good portion of my old wealth was on its way to New Orleans from

coded accounts in the immortal Bank of London and the Rothschild Bank.

But more important, I was swimming in realizations. I knew that everything the amplified

voices had told me about the twentieth century was true.

As I roamed the streets of New Orleans in 1984 this is what I beheld:

The dark dreary industrial world that I'd gone to sleep on had burnt itself out finally, and

the old bourgeois prudery and conformity had lost their hold on the American mind.

People were adventurous and erotic again the way they'd been in the old days, before the

great middle-class revolutions of the late 1700s. They even looked the way they had in

those times.

The men didn't wear the Sam Spade uniform of shirt, tie, gray suit, and gray hat any

longer. Once again, they costumed themselves in velvet and silk and brilliant colors if

they felt like it. They did not have to clip their hair like Roman soldiers anymore; they

wore it any length they desired.

And the women -- ah, the women were glorious, naked in the spring warmth as they'd

been under the Egyptian pharaohs, in skimpy short skirts and tunic like dresses, or

wearing men's pants and shirts skintight over their curvaceous bodies if they pleased.

They painted, and decked themselves out in gold and silver, even to walk to the grocery

store. Or they went fresh scrubbed and without ornament -- it didn't matter. They curled

their hair like Marie Antoinette or cut it off or let it blow free.

For the first time in history, perhaps, they were as strong and as interesting as men.

And these were the common people of America. Not just the rich who've always

achieved a certain androgyny, a certain joie de vivre that the middle-class revolutionaries

called decadence in the past.

The old aristocratic sensuality now belonged to everybody. It was wed to the promises of

the middle-class revolution, and all people had a right to love and to luxury and to

graceful things.

Department stores had become palaces of near Oriental loveliness -- merchandise

displayed amid soft tinted carpeting, eerie music, amber light. In the all-night drugstores,

bottles of violet and green shampoo gleamed like gems on the sparkling glass shelves.

Waitresses drove sleek leather-lined automobiles to work. Dock laborers went home at

night to swim in their heated backyard pools. Charwomen and plumbers changed at the

end of the day into exquisitely cut manufactured clothes.

In fact the poverty and filth that had been common in the big cities of the earth since time

immemorial were almost completely washed away.

You just didn't see immigrants dropping dead of starvation in the alleyways. There

weren't slums where people slept eight and ten to a room. Nobody threw the slops in the

gutters. The beggars, the cripples, the orphans, the hopelessly diseased were so

diminished as to constitute no presence in the immaculate streets at all.

Even the drunkards and lunatics who slept on the park benches, and in the bus stations

had meat to eat regularly, and even radios to listen to, and clothes that were washed.

But this was just the surface. I found myself astounded by the more profound changes

that moved this awesome current along.

For example, something altogether magical had happened to time.

The old was not being routinely replaced by the new anymore. On the contrary, the

English spoken around me was the same as it had been in the 1800s. Even the old slang

("the coast is clear" or "bad luck" or "that's the thing") was still "current." Yet fascinating

new phrases like "they brainwashed you" and "it's so Freudian" and "I can't relate to it"

were on everyone's lips.

In the art and entertainment worlds all prior centuries were being "recycled." Musicians

performed Mozart as well as jazz and rock music; people went to see Shakespeare one

night and a new French film the next.

In giant fluorescent-lighted emporiums you could buy tapes of medieval madrigals and

play them on your car stereo as you drove ninety miles an hour down the freeway. In the

bookstores Renaissance poetry sold side by side with the novels of Dickens or Ernest

Hemingway. Sex manuals lay on the same tables with the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Sometimes the wealth and the cleanliness everywhere around me became like an

hallucination. I thought I was going out of my head.

Through shop windows I gazed stupefied at computers and telephones as pure in form

and color as nature's most exotic shells. Gargantuan silver limousines navigated the

narrow French Quarter streets like indestructible sea beasts. Glittering office towers

pierced the night sky like Egyptian obelisks above the sagging brick buildings of old

Canal Street. Countless television programs poured their ceaseless flow of images into

every air-cooled hotel room.

But it was no series of hallucinations. This century had inherited the earth in every sense.

And no small part of this unpredicted miracle was the curious innocence of these people

in the very midst of their freedom and their wealth. The Christian god was as dead as he

had been in the 1700s. And no new mythological religion had arisen to take the place of

the old.

On the contrary, the simplest people of this age were driven by a vigorous secular

morality as strong as any religious morality I had ever known. The intellectuals carried

the standards. But quite ordinary individuals all over America cared passionately about

"peace" and "the poor" and "the planet" as if driven by a mystical zeal.

Famine they intended to wipe out in this century. Disease they would destroy no matter

what the cost. They argued ferociously about the execution of condemned criminals, the

abortion of unborn babies. And the threats of "environmental pollution" and "holocaustal

war" they battled as fiercely as men have battled witchcraft and heresy in the ages past.

As for sexuality, it was no longer a matter of superstition and fear. The last religious

overtones were being stripped from it. That was why the people went around half naked.

That was why they kissed and hugged each other in the streets. They talked ethics now

and responsibility and the beauty of the body. Procreation and venereal disease they had

under control.

Ah, the twentieth century. Ah, the turn of the great wheel.

It had outdistanced my wildest dreams of it, this future. It had made fools of grim

prophets of ages past.

I did a lot of thinking about this sinless secular morality, this optimism. This brilliantly

lighted world where the value of human life was greater than it had ever been before.

In the amber electric twilight of a vast hotel room I watched on the screen before me the

stunningly crafted film of war called Apocalypse Now. Such a symphony of sound and

color it was, and it sang of the age-old battle of the Western world against evil. "You

must make a friend of horror and moral terror," says the mad commander in the savage

garden of Cambodia, to which the Western man answers as he has always answered: No.

No. Horror and moral terror can never be exonerated. They have no real value. Pure evil

has no real place.

And that means, doesn't it, that I have no place.

Except, perhaps, the art that repudiates evil -- the vampire comics, the horror novels, the

old gothic tales -- or in the roaring chants of the rock stars who dramatize the battles

against evil that each mortal fights within himself.

It was enough to make an old world monster go back into the earth, this stunning

irrelevance to the mighty scheme of things, enough to make him lie down and weep. Or

enough to make him become a rock singer, when you think about it ....

But where were the other old world monsters? I wondered. How did other vampires exist

in a world in which each death was recorded in giant electronic computers, and bodies

were carried away to refrigerated crypts? Probably concealing themselves like loathsome

insects in the shadows, as they have always done, no matter how much philosophy they

talked or how many covens they formed.

Well, when I raised my voice with the little band called Satan's Night Out, I would bring

them all into the light soon enough.

I continued my education. I talked to mortals at bus stops and at gas stations and in

elegant drinking places. I read books. I decked myself out in the shimmering dream skins

of the fashionable shops. I wore white turtleneck shirts and crisp khaki safari jackets, or

lush gray velvet blazers with cashmere scarves. I powdered down my face so that I could

"pass" beneath the chemical lights of the all-night supermarkets, the hamburger joints, the

carnival thoroughfares called nightclub strips.

I was learning. I was in love.

And the only problem I had was that murderers to feed upon were scarce. In this shiny

world of innocence and plenty, of kindness and gaiety and full stomachs, the common

cutthroat thieves of the past and their dangerous waterfront hangouts were almost gone.

And so I had to work for a living. But I'd always been a hunter. I liked the dim smoky

poolrooms with the single light shining on the green felt as the tattooed ex-convicts

gathered around it as much as I liked the shiny satin-lined nightclubs of the big concrete

hotels. And I was learning more all the time about my killers -- the drug dealers, the

pimps, the murderers who fell in with the motorcycle gangs.

And more than ever, I was resolute that I would not drink innocent blood.

Finally it was time to call upon my old neighbors, the rock band called Satan's Night Out.

At six thirty on a hot sticky Saturday night, I rang the doorbell of the attic music studio.

The beautiful young mortals were all lying about in their rainbow-colored silk shirts and

skintight dungarees smoking hashish cigarettes and complaining about their rotten luck

getting "gigs" in the South.

They looked like biblical angels, with their long clean shaggy hair and feline movements;

their jewelry was Egyptian. Even to rehearse they painted their faces and their eyes.

I was overcome with excitement and love just looking at them, Alex and Larry and the

succulent little Tough Cookie.

And in an eerie moment in which the world seemed to stand still beneath me, I told them

what I was. Nothing new to them, the word "vampire." In the galaxy in which they shone,

a thousand other singers had worn the theatrical fangs and the black cape.

And yet it felt so strange to speak it aloud to mortals, the forbidden truth. Never in two

hundred years had I spoken it to anyone who had not been marked to become one of us.

Not even to my victims did I confide it before their eyes closed.

And now I said it clearly and distinctly to these handsome young creatures. I told them

that I wanted to sing with them, that if they were to trust to me, we would all be rich and

famous. That on a wave of preternatural and remorseless ambition, I should carry them

out of these rooms and into the great world.

Their eyes misted as they looked at me. And the little twentieth-century chamber of

stucco and pasteboard rang with their laughter and delight.

I was patient. Why shouldn't I be? I knew I was a demon who could mimic almost any

human sound or movement. But how could they be expected to understand? I went to the

electric piano and began to play and to sing.

I imitated the rock songs as I started, and then old melodies and lyrics came back to me --

French songs buried deep in my soul yet never abandoned -- and I wound these into

brutal rhythms, seeing before me a tiny crowded little Paris theater of centuries ago. A

dangerous passion welled in me. It threatened my equilibrium. Dangerous that this should

come so soon. Yet I sang on, pounding the slick white keys of the electric piano, and

something in my soul was broken open. Never mind that these tender mortal creatures

gathered around me should never know.

It was sufficient that they were jubilant, that they loved the eerie and disjointed music,

that they were screaming, that they saw prosperity in the future, the impetus that they had

lacked before. They turned on the tape machines and we began singing and playing

together, jamming as they called it. The studio swam with the scent of their blood and our

thunderous songs.

But then came a shock I had never in my strangest dreams anticipated -- something that

was as extraordinary as my little revelation to these creatures had been. In fact, it was so

overwhelming that it might have driven me out of their world and back underground.

I don't mean I would have gone into the deep slumber again.

But I might have backed off from Satan's Night Out and roamed about for a few years,

stunned and trying to gather my wits.

The men -- Alex, the sleek delicate young drummer, and his taller blond-haired brother,

Larry -- recognized my name when I told them it was Lestat.

Not only did they recognize it, but they connected it with a body of information about me

that they had read in a book.

In fact, they thought it was delightful that I wasn't just pretending to be any vampire. Or

Count Dracula. Everybody was sick of Count Dracula. They thought it was marvelous

that I was pretending to be the vampire Lestat.

"Pretending to be the vampire Lestat?" I asked.

They laughed at my exaggeration, my French accent.

I looked at all of them for a long moment, trying to scan their thoughts. Of course I hadn't

expected them to believe I was a real vampire. But to have read of a fictional vampire

with a name as unusual as mine? How could this be explained?

But I was losing my confidence. And when I lose my confidence, my powers drain. The

little room seemed to be getting smaller. And there was something insectile and menacing

about the instruments, the antenna, the wires.

"Show me this book," I said.

From the other room they brought it, a small pulp paper "novel" that was falling to

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TheVampireChroniclesVolume2TheVAMPIRELESTATAnneRicePrologueDOWNTOWNSATURDAYNIGHTINTHETWENTIETHCENTURY1984IamTheVampireLestat.I'mimmortal.Moreorless.Thelightofthesun,thesustainedheatofanintensefire--thesethingsmightdestroyme.Butthenagain,theymightnot.I'msixfeettall,whichwasfairlyimpressiveinthe1780sw...

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