Anne Rice - Vampire Chronicles 5 - Memnoch The Devil

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The Vampire Chronicles

Volume 5

MEMNOCH the DEVIL

Anne Rice

Prologue

Lestat here. You know who I am? Then skip the next few paragraphs. For those whom

I have not met before, I want this to be love at first sight.

Behold: your hero for the duration, a perfect imitation of a blond, blue-eyed, six-foot

Anglo-Saxon male. A vampire, and one of the strongest you’ll ever encounter. My

fangs are too small to be noticed unless I want them to be; but they’re very sharp, and

I cannot go for more than a few hours without wanting human blood.

Of course, I don’t need it that often. And just how often I do need it, I don’t know,

because I’ve never put it to the test.

I’m monstrously strong. I can take to the air. I can hear people talking on the other

side of the city or even the globe. I can read minds; I can bind with spells.

I’m immortal. I’ve been virtually ageless since 1789.

Am I unique? By no means. There are some twenty other vampires in the world of

whom I know. Half of these I know intimately; one half of those I love.

Add to this twenty a good two hundred vagabonds and strangers of whom I know

nothing but now and then hear something; and for good measure another thousand

secretive immortals, roaming about in human guise.

Men, women, children—any human being can become a vampire. All it takes is a

vampire willing to bring you into it, to suck out most of your blood, and then let you

take it back, mixed with his or her own. It’s not all that simple; but if you survive,

you’ll live forever. While you’re young, you’ll thirst unbearably, probably have to

kill each night. By the time you’re a thousand years old, you’ll look and sound wise,

even if you were a kid when you started, and you will drink and kill because you

cannot resist it, whether you need it anymore or not.

If you live longer than that, and some do, who knows? You’ll get tougher, whiter,

ever more monstrous. You’ll know so much about suffering that you will go through

rapid cycles of cruelty and kindness, insight and maniacal blindness. You’ll probably

go mad. Then you’ll be sane again. Then you may forget who you are.

I myself combine the best of vampiric youth and old age. Only two hundred years old,

I have been for various reasons granted the strength of the ancients. I have a modern

sensibility but a dead aristocrat’s impeccable taste. I know exactly who I am. I am

rich. I am beautiful. I can see my reflection in mirrors. And in shopwindows. I love to

sing and to dance.

What do I do? Anything that I please.

Think about it. Is it enough to make you want to read my story?

Have you perhaps read my stories of the vampires before?

Here’s the catch: it doesn’t matter here that I’m a vampire. It is not central to the tale.

It’s just a given, like my innocent smile and soft, purring French-accented voice and

graceful way of sauntering down the street. It comes with the package. But what

happened here could have happened to a human being; indeed, it surely has happened

to humans, and it will happen to them again.

We have souls, you and I.

We want to know things; we share the same earth, rich and verdant and fraught with

perils. We don’t either of us know what it means to die, no matter what we might say

to the contrary. It’s a cinch that if we did, I wouldn’t be writing and you wouldn’t be

reading this book.

What does matter very much, as we go into this story together, is that I have set for

myself the task of being a herb in this world. I maintain myself as morally complex,

spiritually tough, and aesthetically relevant a being of blazing insight and impact, a

guy with things to say to you.

So if you read this, read it for that reason that Lestat is talking again, that he is

frightened, that he is searching desperately for the lesson and for the song and for the

raison d’etre, that he wants to understand his own story and he wants you to

understand it, and that it is the very best story he has right now to tell. If that’s not

enough, read something else.

If it is, then read on. In chains, to my friend and my scribe, I dictated these words.

Come with me. Just listen to me. Don’t leave me alone.

Chapter One

I saw him when he came through the front doors. Tall, solidly built, dark brown hair

and eyes, skin still fairly dark because it had been dark when I’d made him a vampire.

Walking a little too fast, but basically passing for a human being. My beloved David.

I was on the stairway. The grand stairway, one might say. It was one of those very

opulent old hotels, divinely overdone, full of crimson and gold, and rather pleasant.

My Victim had picked it. I hadn’t. My victim was dining with his daughter. And I’d

picked up from my victim’s mind that this was where he always met his daughter in

New York, for the simple reason that St. Patrick’s Cathedral was across the street.

David saw me at once a slouching, blond, long-haired youth, bronze face and hands,

the usual deep violet sunglasses over my eyes, hair presentably combed for once,

body tricked out in a dark-blue, doubled-breasted Brooks Brothers suit.

I saw him smile before he could stop himself. He knew my vanity, and he probably

knew that in the early nineties of the twentieth century, Italian fashion had flooded the

market with so much shapeless, hangy, bulky, formless attire that one of the most

erotic and flattering garments a man could choose was the well-tailored navy-blue

Brooks Brothers suit.

Besides, a mop of flowing hair and expert tailoring are always a potent combination.

Who knows that better than I?

I didn’t mean to harp on the clothes! To hell with the clothes. It’s just I was so proud

of myself for being spiffed up and full of gorgeous contradictions a picture of long

locks, the impeccable tailoring, and a regal manner of slumping against the railing and

sort of blocking stairs.

He came up to me at once. He smelled like the deep winter out-side where people

were slipping in the frozen streets, and snow had turned to filth in the gutters. His face

had the subtle preternatural gleam which only I could detect, and love, and properly

appreciate, and eventually kiss.

We walked together onto the carpeted mezzanine.

Momentarily, I hated it that he was two inches taller than me. But I was so glad to see

him, so glad to be near him. And it was warm in here, and shadowy and vast, one of

the places where people do not stare at others.

“You’ve come,” I said. “I didn’t think you would.”

“Of course,” he scolded, the gracious British accent breaking softly from the young

dark face, giving me the usual shock. This was an old man in a young man’s body,

recently made a vampire, and by me, one of the most powerful of our remaining kind.

“What did you expect?” he said, tete-a-tete. “Armand told me you were calling me.

Maharet told me."

"Ah, that answers my first question." I wanted to kiss him, and suddenly I did put out

my arms, rather tentatively and politely so that he could get away if he wanted, and

when he let me hug him, when he returned the warmth, I felt a happiness I hadn't

experienced in months.

Perhaps I hadn't experienced it since I had left him, with Louis. We had been in some

nameless jungle place, the three of us, when we agreed to part, and that had been a

year ago.

"Your first question?" he asked, peering at me very closely, sizing me up perhaps,

doing everything a vampire can do to measure the mood and mind of his maker,

because a vampire cannot read his maker's mind, any more than the maker can read

the mind of the fledgling.

And there we stood divided, laden with preternatural gifts, both fit and rather full of

emotion, and unable to communicate except in the simplest and best way, perhaps

with words.

"My first question," I began to explain, to answer, "was simply going to be: Where

have you been, and have you found the others, and did they try to hurt you? All that

rot, you know how I broke the rules when I made you, et cetera."

"All that rot," he mocked me, the French accent I still possessed, now coupled with

something definitely American. "What rot."

"Come on," I said. "Let's go into the bar there and talk. Obviously no one has done

anything to you. I didn't think they could or they would, or that they'd dare. I wouldn't

have let you slip off into the world if I'd thought you were in danger."

He smiled, his brown eyes full of gold light for just an instant.

"Didn't you tell me this twenty-five times, more or less, before we parted company?"

We found a small table, cleaving to the wall. The place was half crowded, the perfect

proportion exactly. What did we look like? A couple of young men on the make for

mortal men or women? I don't care.

"No one has harmed me," he said, "and no one has shown the slightest interest in it."

Someone was playing a piano, very tenderly for a hotel bar, I thought. And it was

something by Erik Satie. What luck.

"The tie," he said, leaning forward, white teeth flashing, fangs completely hidden, of

course. "This, this big mass of silk around your neck! This is not Brooks Brothers!"

He gave a soft teasing laugh. "Look at you, and the wing-tip shoes! My, my. What's

going on in your mind? And what is this all about?"

The bartender threw a hefty shadow over the small table, and murmured predictable

phrases that were lost to me in my excitement and in the noise.

"Something hot," David said. It didn't surprise me. "You know, rum punch or some

such, whatever you can heat up."

I nodded and made a little gesture to the indifferent fellow that I would take the same

thing.

Vampires always order hot drinks. They aren't going to drink them; but they can feel

the warmth and smell them if they're hot, and that is so good.

David looked at me again. Or rather this familiar body with David inside looked at

me. Because for me, David would always be the elderly human I'd known and

treasured, as well as this magnificent burnished shell of stolen flesh that was slowly

being shaped by his expressions and manner and mood.

Dear Reader, he switched human bodies before I made him a vampire, worry no more.

It has nothing to do with this story.

"Something's following you again?" he asked. "This is what Armand told me. So did

Jesse."

"Where did you see them?"

"Armand?" he asked. "A complete accident. In Paris. He was just walking on the

street. He was the first one I saw."

"He didn't make any move to hurt you?"

"Why would he? Why were you calling to me? Who's stalking you? What is all this?"

"And you've been with Maharet."

He sat back. He shook his head. "Lestat, I have pored over manuscripts such as no

living human has seen in centuries; I have laid my hands on clay tablets that..."

"David, the scholar," I said. "Educated by the Talamasca to be the perfect vampire,

though they never had an inkling that that is what you'd become."

"Oh, but you must understand. Maharet took me to these places where she keeps her

treasures. You have to know what it means to hold in your hands a tablet covered in

symbols that predate cuneiform . And Maharet herself, I might have lived how many

centuries without ever glimpsing her."

Maharet was really the only one he had ever had to fear. I suppose we both knew it.

My memories of Maharet held no menace, only the mystery of a survivor of

Millennia, a living being so ancient that each gesture seemed marble made liquid, and

her soft voice had become the distillation of all human eloquence.

"If she gave you her blessing, nothing else much matters," I said with a little sigh. I

wondered if I myself would ever lay eyes upon her again. I had not hoped for it nor

wanted it.

"I've also seen my beloved Jesse," said David.

"Ah, I should have thought of that, of course."

"I went searching for my beloved Jesse. I went crying out from place to place, just the

way you sent out the wordless cry for me."

Jesse. Pale, bird-boned, red-haired. Twentieth-century born. Highly educated and

psychic as a human. Jesse he had known as a human; Jesse he knew now as an

immortal. Jesse had been his human pupil in the order called the Talamasca. Now he

was the equal of Jesse in beauty and vampiric power, or very near to it. I really did not

know.

Jesse had been brought over by Maharet of the First Brood, born as a human before

humans had begun to write their history at all or barely knew that they had one. The

Elder now, if there was one, the Queen of the Damned was Maharet and her mute

sister, Mekare, of whom no one spoke anymore much at all.

I had never seen a fledgling brought over by one as old as Maharet.

Jesse had seemed a transparent vessel of immense strength when last I saw her. Jesse

must have had her own tales to tell now, her own chronicles and adventures.

I had passed onto David my own vintage blood mixed with a strain even older than

Maharet's. Yes, blood from Akasha, and blood from the ancient Marius, and of course

my own strength was in my blood, and my own strength, as we all knew, was quite

beyond measure.

So he and Jesse must have been grand companions, and what had it meant to her to

see her aged mentor clothed in the fleshly raiment of a young human male?

I was immediately envious and suddenly full of despair. I'd drawn David away from

those willowy white creatures who had drawn him into their sanctuary somewhere far

across the sea, deep in a land where their treasures might be hidden from crisis and

war for generations. Exotic names came to mind, but I could not for the moment think

where they had gone, the two red-haired ones, the one ancient, the one young. And to

their hearth, they had admitted David.

A little sound startled me and I looked over my shoulder. I settled back, embarrassed

to have appeared so anxious, and I focused silently for a moment on my victim.

My Victim was still in the restaurant very near us in this hotel, sitting with his

beautiful daughter. I wouldn't lose him tonight. I was sure enough of that.

I sighed. Enough of him. I'd been following him for months. He was interesting, but

he had nothing to do with all this. Or did he? I might kill him tonight, but I doubted it.

Having spied the daughter, and knowing full well how much the Victim loved her, I

had decided to wait until she returned home. I mean, why be so mean to a young girl

like that? And how he loved her. Right now, he was pleading with her to accept a gift,

something newly discovered by him and very splendid in his eyes. However, I

couldn't quite see the image of the gift in her mind or his.

He was a good victim to follow flashy, greedy, at times good, and always amusing.

Back to David. And how this strapping immortal opposite me must have loved the

vampire Jesse, and become the pupil of Maharet. Why didn't I have any respect for

the old ones anymore? What did I want, for the love of heaven? No, that was not the

question. The question t me right now? Was I running from it?

He was politely waiting for me to look at him again. I did. But I didn't speak. I didn't

begin. And so he did what polite people often do, he talked slowly on as if I were not

staring at him through the violet glasses like one with an ominous secret.

"No one has tried to hurt me," he said again in the lovely calm British manner, "no

one has questioned that you made me, all have treated me with respect and kindness,

though everyone of course wanted to know all the details firsthand of how you

survived the Body Thief. And I don't think you know quite how you alarmed them,

and how much they love you."

This was a kindly reference to the last adventure which had brought us together, and

driven me to make him one of us. At the time, he had not sung my praises to Heaven

for any part of it.

"They love me, do they?" I said of the others, the remnants of our revenant species

around the world. "I know they didn't try to help me." I thought of the defeated Body

Thief.

Without David's help, I might never have won that battle. I could not think of

something that terrible. But I certainly didn't want to think of all my brilliant and

gifted vampiric cohorts and how they'd watched from afar and done nothing.

The Body Thief himself was in Hell. And the body in question was opposite me with

David inside it.

"All right, I'm glad to hear I had them a little worried," I said. "But the point is, I'm

being followed again, and this time it's no scheming mortal who knows the trick of

astral projection and how to take possession of someone else's body. I'm being

stalked."

He studied me, not so much incredulous as striving perhaps to grasp the implications.

"Being stalked," he repeated thoughtfully.

"Absolutely." I nodded. "David, I'm frightened. I'm actually frightened. If I told you

what I think this thing is, this thing that's stalking me, you'd laugh."

"Would I?"

The waiter had set down the hot drinks, and the steam did feel glorious. The piano

played Satie ever so softly. Life was almost worth living, even for a son of a bitch of a

monster like myself. Something crossed my mind.

In this very bar, I'd heard my victim say to his daughter two nights ago, "You know I

sold my soul for places just like this."

I'd been yards away, quite beyond mortal hearing, yet hearing every word that fell

from my Victim's lips, and I was enthralled with the daughter. Dora, that was her

name. Dora. She was the one thing this strange and succulently alluring Victim truly

loved, his only child, his daughter.

I realized David was watching me.

"Just thinking about the victim who brought me here," I said. "And his daughter.

They're not going out tonight. The snow's too deep and the wind too cruel. He'll take

her back up to their suite, and she'll look down on the towers of St. Patrick's. I want to

keep my victim in my sights, you know."

"Good heavens, have you fallen in love with a couple of mortals?"

"No. Not at all. Just a new way of hunting. The man's unique, a blaze of individual

traits. I adore him. I was going to feed on him the first time I saw him, but he

continues to surprise me. I've been following him around for half a year."

I flashed back on them. Yes, they were going upstairs, just as I thought. They had just

left their table in the restaurant. The night was too wretched even for Dora, though she

wanted to go to the church and to pray for her father, and beg him to stay there and

pray too. Some memory played between them, in their thoughts and fragmentary

words. Dora had been a little girl when my Victim had first brought her to that

cathedral.

He didn't believe in anything. She was some sort of religious leader. Theodora. She

preached to television audiences on the seriousness of values and nourishment of the

soul. And her father? Ah, well, I'd kill him before I learnt too much more, or end up

losing this big trophy buck just for Dora's sake.

I looked back at David, who was watching me eagerly, shoulder resting against the

dark satin-covered wall. In this light, no one could have known he wasn't human.

Even one of us might have missed it. As for me, I probably looked like a mad rock

star who wanted all the world's attention to crush him slowly to death.

"The victim's got nothing to do with it," I said. "I'll tell you all that another time. It's

just we're in this hotel because I followed him here. You know my games, my hunts. I

don't need blood any more than Maharet does, but I can't stand the thought of not

having it!"

"And so what is this new sort of game?" he said politely in British.

"I don't look so much for simple, evil people, murderers, you know so much as a more

sophisticated kind of criminal, someone with the mentality of an Iago. This one's a

drag dealer. Highly eccentric. Brilliant. An art collector. He loves to have people shot,

loves to make billions in a week off cocaine through one gateway and heroin through

another. And then he loves his daughter. And she, she has a televangelist church."

"You're really enthralled with these mortals."

"Look right now, past me, over my shoulder. See the two people in the lobby moving

towards the elevators?" I asked.

"Yes." He stared at them fixedly. Perhaps they'd paused in just the right spot. I could

feel, hear, and smell both of them, but I couldn't know precisely where they were

unless I turned around. But they were there, the dark smiling man with his pale-faced

eager and innocent little girl, who was a woman-child of twenty-five if I had reckoned

correctly.

"I know that man's face," said David. "He's big time. International. They keep trying

to bring him up on some charges. He pulled off an extraordinary assassination, where

was it?" "The Bahamas."

"My God, how did you happen on him? Did you really see him in person somewhere,

you know, like a shell you found on the beach, or did you see him in the papers and

the magazines?"

"Do you recognize the girl? Nobody knows they're connected." "No, I don't recognize

her, but should I? She's so pretty, and so sweet. You're not going to feed on her, are

you?"

I laughed at his gentlemanly outrage at such a suggestion. I wondered if David asked

permission before sucking the blood of his victims, or at least insisted that both parties

be properly introduced. I had no idea what his killing habits were, or how often he

fed. I'd made him plenty strong. That meant it didn't have to be every night. He was

blessed in that.

"The girl sings for Jesus on a television station," I said. "Her church will someday

have its headquarters in an old, old convent building in New Orleans. Right now she

lives there alone, and tapes her programs out of a studio in the French Quarter. I think

her show goes through some ecumenical cable channel out of Alabama." "You're in

love with her."

"Not at all, just very eager to kill her father. Her television appeal is peculiar. She

talks theology with gripping common sense, you know, the kind of televangelist that

just might make it all work. Don't we all fear that someone like that will come along?

She dances like a nymph or a temple virgin, I suppose I should say, sings like a

seraph, invites the entire studio audience to join with her. Theology and ecstasy,

perfectly blended. And all the requisite good works are recommended."

"I see," he said. "And this makes it more exciting for you, to feast on the father? By

the way, the father is hardly an unobtrusive man. Neither seem disguised. Are you

sure no one knows they're connected?"

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1TheVampireChroniclesVolume5MEMNOCHtheDEVILAnneRice2PrologueLestathere.YouknowwhoIam?Thenskipthenextfewparagraphs.ForthosewhomIhavenotmetbefore,Iwantthistobeloveatfirstsight.Behold:yourherofortheduration,aperfectimitationofablond,blue-eyed,six-footAnglo-Saxonmale.Avampire,andoneofthestrongestyou’lle...

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