Anne Rice - New Tales of the Vampires (1)

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New Tales of the Vampires

By Anne Rice

JULIAN OF NORWICH

Revelations of Divine Love

Not twenty minutes has passed since you left me here in the cafe, since I said

No to your request, that I would never write out for you the story of my mortal

life, how I became a vampire – how I came upon Marius only years after he had

lost his human life.

Now here I am with your notebook open, using one of the sharp pointed eternal

ink pens you left me, delighted at the sensuous press of the black ink into the

expensive and flawless white paper.

Naturally, David, you would leave me something elegant, an inviting page. This

notebook bound in dark varnished leather, is it not, tooled with a design of

rich roses, thornless, yet leafy, a design that means only Design in the final

analysis but bespeaks an authority. What is written beneath this heavy and

handsome book cover will count, sayeth this cover.

The thick pages are ruled in light blue – you are practical, so thoughtful, and

you probably know I almost never put pen to paper to write anything at all.

Even the sound of the pen has its allure, the sharp

scratch rather like the finest quills in ancient Rome when I would put them to

parchment to write my letters to my Father, when I would write in a diary my own

laments... ah, that sound. The only thing missing here is the smell of ink, but

we have the fine plastic pen which will not run out for volumes, making as fine

and deep a black mark as I choose to make.

I am thinking about your request in writing. You see you will get something from

me. I find myself yielding to it, almost as one of our human victims yields to

us, discovering perhaps as the rain continues to fall outside, as the cafe

continues with its noisy chatter, to think that this might not be the agony I

presumed – reaching back over the two thousand years – but almost a pleasure,

like the act of drinking blood itself.

I reach now for a victim who is not easy for me to overcome: my own past.

Perhaps this victim will flee from me with a speed that equals my own. Whatever,

I seek now a victim that I have never faced. And there is the thrill of the hunt

in it, what the modern world calls investigation.

Why else would I see those times so vividly now? You had no magic potion to give

me to loosen my thoughts. There is but one potion for us and it is blood.

You said at one point as we walked towards the cafe, “You will remember

everything."

You, who are so young amongst us yet were so old as a mortal, and such a scholar

as a mortal. Perhaps it

is natural that you so boldly attempt to collect our stories.

But why seek to explain here such curiosity as yours, such bravery in face of

blood-drenched truth?

How could you have kindled in me this longing to go back, two thousand years,

almost exactly – to tell of my mortal days on Earth in Rome, and how I joined

Marius, and what little chance he had against Fate.

How could origins so deeply buried and so long denied suddenly beckon to me. A

door snaps open. A light shines. Come in.

I sit back now in the cafe.

I write, but I pause and look around me at the people of this Paris cafe. I see

the drab unisex fabrics of this age, the fresh American girl in her olive green

military clothes, all of her possessions slung over her shoulder in a backpack;

I see the old Frenchman who has come here for decades merely to look at the bare

legs and arms of the young, to feed on the gestures as if he were a vampire, to

wait for some exotic jewel of a moment when a woman sits back laughing,

cigarette in hand, and the doth of her synthetic blouse becomes tight over her

breasts and there the nipples are visible.

Ah, old man. He is gray-haired and wears an expensive coat. He is no menace to

anyone. He lives entirely in vision. Tonight he will go back to a modest but

elegant apartment which he has maintained since the last Great World War, and he

will watch films of the young beauty Brigitte Bardot. He lives in his eyes. He

has not touched a woman in ten years.

I don’t drift, David. I drop anchor here. For I will not have my story pour

forth as from a drunken oracle.

I see these mortals in a more attentive light. They are so fresh, so exotic and

yet so luscious to me, these mortals; they look like tropical birds must have

looked when I was a child; so full of fluttering, rebellious life, I wanted to

clutch them to have it, to make their wings flap in my hands, to capture flight

and own it and partake of it. Ah, that terrible moment in childhood when one

accidentally crushes the life from a bright-red bird.

Yet they are sinister in their darker vestments, some of these mortals: the

inevitable cocaine dealer – and they are everywhere, our finest prey – who waits

for his contact in the far corner, his long leather coat styled by a noted

Italian designer, his hair shaved dose on the side and left bushy on the top to

make him look distinctive, which it does, though there is no need when one

considers his huge black eyes, and the hardness of what nature intended to be a

generous mouth. He makes those quick impatient gestures with his cigarette

lighter on the small marble table, the mark of the addicted; he twists, he

turns, he cannot be comfortable. He doesn’t know that he will never be

comfortable in life again. He wants to leave to snort the cocaine for which he

burns and yet he must wait for the contact. His shoes are too shiny, and his

long thin hands will never grow old.

I think he will die tonight, this man. I feel a slow gathering desire to kill

him myself. He has fed so much poison to so many. Tracking him, wrapping him in

my arms, I would not even have to wreathe him with visions. I would let him know

that death has come in the form of a woman too white to be human, too smoothed

by the centuries to be anything but a statue come to life. But those for whom he

waits plot to kill him. And why should I intervene?

What do I look like to these people? A woman with long wavy dean brown hair that

covers me much like a nun’s mantle, a face so white it appears cosmetically

created, and eyes, abnormally brilliant, even from behind golden glasses.

Ah, we have a lot to be grateful for in the many styles of eyeglasses in this

age – for if I were to take these off, I should have to keep my head bowed, not

to startle people with the mere play of yellow and brown and gold in my eyes,

that have grown ever more jewel-like over the centuries, so that I seem a blind

woman set with topaz for her pupils, or rather carefully formed orbs of topaz,

sapphire, even aquamarine.

Look, I have filled so many pages, and all I am saying is Yes, I will tell you

how it began for me.

Yes, I will tell you the story of my mortal life in ancient Rome, how I came to

love Marius and how we came to be together and then to part.

What a transformation in me, this resolution.

How powerful I feel as I hold this pen, and how eager to put us in sharp and

dear perspective before I begin fulfilling your request.

This is Paris, in a time of peace. There is rain. High regal gray buildings with

their double windows and iron balconies line this boulevard. Loud, tiny,

dangerous automobiles race in the streets. Cafes, such as this, are overflowing

with international tourists. Ancient churches are crowded here by tenements,

palaces turned to museums, in whose rooms I linger for hours gazing at objects

from Egypt or Sumer which are even older than me. Roman architecture is

everywhere, absolute replicas of Temples of my time now serve as banks. The

words of my native Latin suffuse the English language. Ovid, my beloved Ovid,

the poet who predicted his poetry would outlast the Roman Empire, has been

proved true.

Walk into any bookstore and you find him in neat, small paperbacks, designed to

appeal to students.

Roman influence seeds itself, sprouting mighty oaks right through the modern

forest of computers, digital disks, microviruses and space satellites.

It is easy here – as always – to find an embraceable evil, a despair worth

tender fulfillment.

And with me there must always be some love of the victim, some mercy, some

self-delusion that the death I bring does not mar the great shroud of

inevitability, woven of trees and earth and stars, and human events, which

hovers forever around us ready to close on all that is created, all that we

know.

Last night, when you found me, how did it seem to you? I was alone on the bridge

over the Seine, walking in the last dangerous darkness before dawn.

You saw me before I knew you were there. My hood was down and I let my eyes in

the dim light of the bridge have their little moment of glory. My victim stood

at the railing, no more than a child, but bruised and robbed by a hundred men.

She wanted to die in the water. I don’t know if the Seine is deep enough for one

to drown there. So near the Ile St.Louis. So near Notre Dame. Perhaps it is, if

one can resist a last struggle for life.

But I felt this victim’s soul like ashes, as though her spirit had been cremated

and only the body remained, a worn, disease-ridden shell. I put my arm around

her, and when I saw the fear in her small black eyes, when I saw the question

coming, I wreathed her with images. The soot that covered my skin was not enough

to keep me from looking like the Virgin Mary, and she sank into hymns and

devotion, she even saw my veils in the colors she had known in churches of

childhood, as she yielded to me, and I – knowing that I needn’t drink, but

thirsting for her, thirsting for the anguish she could give forth in her final

moment, thirsting for the tasty red blood that would fill my mouth and make me

feel human for one instant in my very monstrosity – I gave in to her visions,

bent her neck, ran my fingers over her sore tender skin, and then it was, when I

sank my teeth into her, when I drank from her – it was then that I knew you were

there. You watched.

I knew it, and I felt it, and I saw the image of us in your eye, distractingly,

as the pleasure nevertheless flushed through me, making me believe I was alive,

somehow connected to fields of clover or trees with roots deeper in the earth

than the branches they raise to the welkin above.

At first I hated you. You saw me as I feasted. You saw me as I gave in. You knew

nothing of my months of starvation, restraint, wandering. You saw only the

sudden release of my unclean desire to suck her very soul from her, to make her

heart rise in the flesh inside her, to drag from her veins every precious

particle of her that still wanted to survive.

And she did want to survive. Wrapped in saints, and dreaming suddenly of the

breasts that nursed her, her young body fought, pumping and pumping against me,

she so soft, and my own form hard as a statue, my milkless nipples enshrined in

marble, no comfort. Let her see her mother, dead, gone and now waiting. Let me

glimpse through her dying eyes the light through which she sped towards this

certain salvation.

Then I forgot about you. I would not be robbed. I slowed the drinking, I let her

sigh, I let her lungs fill with the cold river air, her mother drawing closer

and closer so that death now was as safe for her as the womb. I took every drop

from her that she could give.

She hung dead against me, as one I'd rescued, one I would help from the bridge,

some weakened, sickened, drunken girl. I slid my hand into her body, breaking

the flesh so easily even with these delicate fingers, and I dosed my fingers

around her heart and brought it to my lips and sucked it, my head tucked down by

her face, sucked the heart like fruit, until no blood was left in any fiber or

chamber, and then slowly – perhaps for your benefit – I lifted her and let her

fall down into the water she had so desired.

Now there would be no struggle as her lungs filled with the river. Now there

would be no last desperate thrashing. I fed from the heart one last time, to

take even the color of blood out of it, and then sent it after her – crushed

grapes – poor child, child of a hundred men.

Then I faced you, let you know that I knew you watched from the quay. I think I

tried to frighten you. In rage I let you know how weak you were, that all the

blood given to you by Lestat would make you no match should I choose to

dismember you, pitch a fatal heat into you and immolate you, or only punish you

with penetrating scar – simply for having spied upon me.

Actually I have never done such a thing to a younger one. I feel sorry for them

when they see us, the ancient ones, and quake in terror. But I should, by all

the knowledge of myself I possess, have retreated so quickly that you could riot

follow me in the night.

Something in your demeanor charmed me, the manner in which you approached me on

the bridge, your young Anglo-Indian brown-skinned body gifted by your true

mortal age with such seductive grace. Your very posture seemed to ask of me,

without humiliation:

“Pandora, may we speak?”

My mind wandered. Perhaps you knew it. I don’t remember whether I shut you out

of my thoughts, and I know that your telepathic abilities are not really very

strong. My mind wandered suddenly, perhaps of itself, perhaps at your prodding.

I thought of all the things I could tell you, which were so different from the

tales of Lestat, and those of Marius through Lestat, and I wanted to warn you,

warn you of the ancient vampires of the Far East who would kill you if you went

into their territory, simply because you were there.

I wanted to make certain you understood what we all had to accept – the Fount of

our immortal vampiric hunger did reside in two beings – Mekare and Maharet – so

ancient they are now both horrible to look upon, more than beautiful. And if

they destroy themselves we will all die with them.

I wanted to tell you of others who have never known us as a tribe or known our

history, who survived the terrible fire brought down on her children by our

Mother Akasha. I wanted to tell you that there were things walking the Earth

that look like us but are not of our breed any more than they are human. And I

wanted suddenly to take you under my wing.

It must have been your prodding. You stood there, the English gentleman, wearing

your decorum more lightly and naturally than any man I’d ever seen. I marveled

at your fine clothes that you’d indulged yourself in a light black cloak of

worsted wool,

that you had even given yourself the luxury of a gleaming red silk scarf – so

unlike you when you

were newly made.

Understand, I was not aware the night that Lestat transformed you into a

vampire. I didn’t feel that moment.

All the preternatural world shimmered weeks earlier, however, with the knowledge

that a mortal

had jumped into the body of another mortal; we know these things, as if the

stars tell us. One preter

natural mind picks up the ripples of this sharp cut in the fabric of the

ordinary, then another mind re-

ceives the image, and on and on it goes.

David Talbot, the name we all knew from the venerable order of psychic

detectives, the Talamasca, had managed to move his entire soul and etheric body

– into that of another man. That body itself was in the possession of a body

thief whom you forced from it. And once anchored in the young - body, you, with

all your scruples and values, all your knowledge of seventy-four years, remained

an chored in the young cells.

And so it was David the Reborn, David with the high-gloss India beauty, and raw

well-nourished strength of British lineage, that Lestat had made into a vampire,

bringing over both body and soul, compounding miracle with the Dark Trick,

achieving once more a sin that should stun his contemporaries and his elders.

And this, this was done to you by your best friend!

Welcome to the darkness, David. Welcome to the domain of Shakespeare’s

"inconstant moon.”

Bravely you came up the bridge towards me.

"Forgive me, Pandora,” you said so quietly. Flawless British upper-class accent,

and the usual beguiling British rhythm that is so seductive it seems to say that

“we will all save the world."

You kept a polite distance between us, as if I were a virgin girl of the last

century, and you didn’t want to alarm me and my tender sensibilities. I smiled.

I indulged myself then. I took your full measure, this fledgling that Lestat –

against Marius’s injunction – had dared to make. I saw the components of you as

a man: an immense human soul, fearless, yet half in love with despair, and a

body which Lestat had almost injured himself to render powerful. He had given

you more blood than he could easily give in your transformation. He had tried to

give you his courage, his cleverness, his cunning; he had tried to transport an

armory for you through the blood.

He had done well. Your strength was complex and obvious. Our Queen Mother

Akasha’s blood was mixed with that of Lestat. Marius, my ancient lover, had

given him blood as well. Lestat, ah, now what do they say, they say that he may

even have drunk the blood of the Christ.

It was this first issue I took up with you, my curiosity overwhelming me, for to

scan the world for knowledge is often to rake in such tragedy that I abhor it.

"Tell me the truth of it," I said. "This story Memnoch the Devil. Lestat claimed

he went to Heaven and to Hell. He brought back a veil from St. Veronica. The

face of Christ was on it! It converted thousands to Christianity, it cured

alienation and succored bitterness. It drove other Children of Darkness to

:throw up their arms to the deadly morning light, as if the sun were in fact the

fire of God."

"Yes, it's all happened, as I described it," you said, lowering your head with a

polite but unexaggerated modesty. “And you know a few... of us perished in this

fervor, whilst newspapers and scientists collected our ashes for examination.”

I marveled at your calm attitude. A Twentieth-Century sensibility. A mind

dominated by an incalculable wealth of information, and quick of tongue with an

intellect devoted to swiftness, synthesis, probabilities, and all this against

the backdrop of horrid experiences, wars, massacres, the worst perhaps the world

has ever seen.

“It all happened," you said. “And I did meet with Mekare and Maharet, the

ancient ones, and you needn’t fear for me that I don't know how fragile is the

root. It was kind of you to think so protectively of me."

I was quietly charmed.

“What did you think of this Holy Veil yourself?" I asked.

"Our Lady of Fatima," you said softly. “The Shroud of Turin, a cripple rising

from the Miraculous Waters of Lourdes! What a consolation it must be to accept

such a thing so easily."

“And you did not?”

You shook your head. “And neither did Lestat, really. It was the mortal girl,

Dora, snatching the Veil from him, who took it out into the world. But it was a

most singular and meticulously made thing, I’ll tell you that, more worthy of

the word 'relic' perhaps than any other I’ve ever seen.”

You sounded dejected suddenly.

"Some immense intent went into its making," you said.

“And the vampire Armand, the delicate boylike Armand, he believed it?” I asked.

“Armand looked at it and saw the face of Christ,” I said, seeking your

confirmation.

"Enough to die for it," you said solemnly. "Enough to open his arms to the

morning sun.”

You looked away, and you closed your eyes. This was a simple unadorned plea to

me not to make you speak of Armand and how he had gone into the morning fire.

I gave a sigh – surprised and gently fascinated to find you so articulate,

skeptical, yet so sharply and frankly connected to the others.

You said in a shaken voice, "Armand." And still looking away from me. “What a

Requiem. And does he know now if Memnoch was real, if God Incarnate who tempted

Lestat was in fact the Son of the God Almighty? Does anyone'?"

I was taken with your earnestness, your passion. You were not jaded or cynical.

There was an immediacy to your feelings for these happenings, these creatures,

these questions you posed,

"They locked up the Veil, you know,” you said. "It’s in the Vatican. There were

two weeks of frenzy on Fifth Avenue in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in which people

came to look into the eyes of The Lord, and then they had it, gone, taken to

their vaults. I doubt there is a nation on the Earth with the power to gain even

a glimpse of it now.”

“And Lestat,” I said. "Where is he now?"

“Paralyzed, silent,” you said. “Lestat lies on the floor of a chapel in New

Orleans. He doesn't move. He says nothing. His Mother has come to him. You knew

her, Gabrielle, he made a vampire of her.”

"Yes, I remember her.”

"Even she draws no response from him. Whatever he saw, in his journey to Heaven

and Hell, he doesn’t know the truth of it one way or the other – he tried to

tell this to Dora! And eventually, after I’d written down the whole story for

him, he passed within a few nights into this state.

“His eyes are fixed and his body pliant. They made a curious Pietá, he and

Gabrielle, in this abandoned convent and its chapel. His mind is dosed, or worse

– it's empty."

I found I liked very much your manner of speaking. In fact, I was taken off

guard.

“I left Lestat because he was beyond my help and my reach,” you said. "And I

must know if there are old ones who want to put an end to me; I must make my

pilgrimages and my progresses to know the dangers of this world to which I’ve

been admitted."

"You’re so forthright. You have no cunning.”

“On the contrary, I conceal my keenest assets from you.” You gave me a slow,

polite smile. “Your beauty rather confuses me. Are you used to this?”

“Quite,” I said. “And weary of it. Come beyond it. Let me just warn, there are

old ones, ones no one knows or can explain. It’s rumored you’ve been with

Maharet and Mekare, who are now the E1dest and the Fount from which we all

spring. Obviously they've drawn back from us, from all the world, into some

secret place, and have no taste for authority.”

“You're so very correct,” you said, “and my audience with them was beautiful but

brief. They don't want to rule over anyone, nor will Maharet, as long as the

history of the world and her own physical descendants are in it – her own

thousands of human descendants from a time so ancient there is no date for it –

Maharet will never destroy herself and her sister, thereby destroying all of

us.”

“Yes,” I said, “in that she believes, the Great Family, the generations she has

traced for thousands of years. I saw her when we all gathered. She doesn’t see

us as evil – you, or me, or Lestat – she thinks that we’re natural, rather like

volcanoes or fires that rage through forests, or bolts of lightning that strike

a man dead.”

“Precisely," you said. “There is no Queen of the Damned now. I fear only one

other immortal, and that’s your lover, Marius. Because it was Marius who laid

down the strict rule before he left the others that no more blood drinkers could

be made. I’m baseborn in the mind of Marius. That is, were he an Englishman,

those would be his words.”

I shook my head. "I can’t believe he would harm you. Hasn't he come to Lestat'?

Did he not come to see the Veil with his own eyes?”

You said No to both questions.

“Heed this advice: whenever you sense his presence, talk to him. Talk to him as

you have to me. Begin a conversation which he won't have the confidence to bring

to a dose."

You smiled again. “That’s such a clever way of putting it,” you said.

“But I don’t think you have to fear him. If he wanted you gone off the Earth,

you’d be gone. What we have to fear is the same things humans fear – that there

are others of our same species, of varying power and belief, and we are never

entirely sure where they are or what they do. That's my advice to you.”

"You are so kind to take your time with me,” you said.

I could have wept. “On the contrary. You don’t know the silence and solitude in

which I wander, and pray you never know it, and here you’ve given me heat

without death, you’ve given me nourishment without blood. I’m glad you’ve come.”

I saw you look up at the sky, the habit of the young ones.

“I know, we have to part now."

You turned to me suddenly. “Meet me tomorrow night," you said imploringly. "Let

this exchange continue! I’ll come to you in the cafe where you sit every night

musing. I'll find you. Let us talk to each other.”

“So you’ve seen me there.”

“Oh, often,” you said. “Yes." You looked away again. I saw it was to conceal

feeling. Then your dark eyes turned back to me.

"Pandora, we have the world, don’t we'?" you whispered.

"I don’t know, David. But I’ll meet you tomorrow night. Why haven’t you come to

me there? Where it was warm and lighted?"

"It seemed a far more outrageous intrusion, to move in on you in the sanctified

privacy of a crowded cafe. People go to such places to be alone, don’t they?

This seemed somehow more proper. And I did not mean to be the voyeur. Like many

fledglings, I have to feed every night. It was an accident that we saw each

other at that moment.”

“That is charming, David,” I said. “It is a long time since anyone has charmed

me. I’ll meet you there... tomorrow night.”

And then a wickedness possessed me. I came towards you and embraced you, knowing

that the hardness and coldness of my ancient body would strike the deepest chord

of terror in you, newborn as you were, passing so easily for mortal.

But you didn’t draw back. And when I kissed your cheek, you kissed mine.

I wonder now, as I sit here in the cafe, writing... trying to give you more with

these words perhaps than you ask for... what I would have done had you not

kissed me, had you shrunk back with the fear that is so common in the young.

David, you are indeed a puzzle.

You see that I have begun to chronicle not my life here, but what has passed

these two nights between you and me.

Allow this, David. Allow that I speak of you and me, and then perhaps I can

retrieve my lost life.

When you came into the cafe tonight, I thought nothing much about the notebooks.

You had two. They were thick.

The leather of the notebooks smelled good and old, and when you set them down on

the table, only then did I detect a glimmer from your disciplined and restrained

mind that they had to do with me.

I had chosen this table in the crowded center of the room, as though I wanted to

be in the middle of the whirlpool of mortal scent and activity. You seemed

pleased, unafraid, utterly at home.

You wore another stunning suit of modern cut with a full cape of worsted wool,

very tasteful, yet Old World, and with your golden skin and radiant eyes, you

turned the head of every woman in the place and you turned the heads of some of

the men.

You smiled. I must have seemed a snail to you beneath my cloak and hood, gold

glasses covering well over half my face, and a trace of commercial lipstick on

my lips, a soft purple pink that had made me think of bruises. It had seemed

very enticing in the mirror at the store, and I liked that my mouth was

something I didn’t have to hide, My lips are now almost colorless. With this

lipstick I could smile.

I wore these gloves of mine, black lace, with their sheared-off tips so that my

fingers can feel, and I had sooted my nails so they would not sparkle like

crystal in the cafe. And I reached out my hand to you and you kissed it.

There was your same boldness and decorum. And then the warmest smile from you, a

smile in which l think your former physiology must have dominated because you

looked far too wise for one so young and strong of build. I marveled at the

perfect picture you had made of yourself.

“You don’t know what a joy it is to me," you said, "that you've come, that

you’ve let me join you here at this table."

"You have made me want this,” I said, raising my hands, and seeing that your

eyes were dazzled by my crystalline fingernails, in spite of the soot.

I reached towards you, expecting you to pull back, but you entrusted to my cold

white fingers your warm dark hand.

"You find in me a living being?" I asked you.

"Oh, yes, most definitely, most radiantly and perfectly a living being.”

We ordered our coffee, as mortals expect us to do, deriving more pleasure from

the heat and aroma than they could ever imagine, even stirring our little cups

with our spoons. I had before me a red dessert. The dessert is still here of

course. I ordered it simply because it was red – strawberries covered in syrup –

with a strong sweet smell that bees would like.

I smiled at your blandishments. I liked them.

Playfully, I mocked them. I let my hood slip down and I shook out my hair so

that its fullness and dark brown color could shimmer in the light.

Of course it's no signal to mortals, as is Marius’s blond hair or that of

Lestat. But I love my own hair, I love the veil of it when it is down over my

shoulders, and I loved what I saw in your eyes.

"Somewhere deep inside me there is a woman,” I said.

To write it now – in this notebook as I sit here alone – it gives architecture

to a trivial moment, and seems so dire a confession.

David, the more I write, the more the concept of narrative excites me, the more

I believe in the weight of a coherence which is possible on the page though not

in life.

But again, I didn’t know I meant to pick up this pen of yours at all. We were

talking:

“Pandora, if anyone does not know you’re a woman, then he is a fool,” you said.

“How angry Marius would be with me for being pleased by that," I said. “Oh, no.

Rather he would seize it as a strong point in favor of his position. I left him,

left him without a word, the last time we were together – that was before Lestat

went on his little escapade of running around in a human body, and long before

he encountered Memnoch the Devil – I left Marius, and suddenly I wish I could

reach him! I wish I could talk with him as you and I are talking now.”

You looked so troubled for me, and with reason. On some level, you must have

known that I had not evinced this much enthusiasm over anything in many a dreary

year.

“Would you write your story for me, Pandora'?” you asked suddenly.

I was totally surprised.

“Write it in these notebooks?” you pressed. "Write about the time when you were

alive, the time when you and Marius came together, write what you will of

Marius. But it’s your story that I most want.”

I was stunned.

“Why in the world would you want this of me?”

You didn’t answer.

“David, surely you've not returned to that order of human beings, the Talamasca,

they know too much –”

You put up your hand.

“No, and I will never; and if there was ever any doubt of it, I learnt it once

and for all in the archives kept by Maharet.”

“She allowed you to see her archives, the books she’s saved over the course of

time”

“Yes, it was remarkable, you know... a storehouse of tablets, scrolls,

parchments – books and poems from cultures of which the world knows nothing, I

think, Books lost from time. Of course she forbade me to reveal anything I found

or speak in detail of our meeting. She said it was too rash tampering with

things, and she confirmed your fear that I might go to the Talamasca – my old

mortal psychic friends. I have not. I will not. But it is a very easy vow to

keep."

“Why so?”

"Pandora, when I saw all those old writings – I knew I was no longer human. I

knew that the history lying there to be collected was no longer mine! I am not

one of these!” Your eyes swept the room. "Of course you must have heard this a

thousand times from fledgling vampires! But you see, I had a fervent faith that

philosophy and reason would make a bridge for me by which I could go and come in

both worlds. Well, there is no bridge. It’s gone.”

Your sadness shimmered about you, flashing in your young eyes and in the

softness of your new flesh.

"So you know that," I said. I didn’t plan the words. But out they came. “You

know.” I gave a soft bitter laugh.

“Indeed I do. I knew when I held documents from your time, so many from your

time, Imperial Rome, and other crumbling bits of inscribed rock I couldn’t even

hope to place. I knew. I didn’t care about them, Pandora! I care about what we

are, what we are now.”

“How remarkable,” I said. “You don’t know how much I admire you, or how

attractive is your disposition to me.”

“I am happy to hear this,” you said. Then you leaned forward towards me: “I

don’t say we do not carry our human souls with us, our history; of course we do.

“I remember once a long time ago, Armand told me that he asked Lestat, ‘How will

I ever understand the human race?' Lestat said, ‘Read or see all the plays of

Shakespeare and you will know all you ever need to know about the human race.'

Armand did it. He devoured the poems, he sat through the plays, he watched the

brilliant new films with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh and Leonardo

DiCaprio. And when Armand and I last spoke together, this is what he said of his

education:

" 'Lestat was right. He gave me not books but a passage into understanding. This

man Shakespeare writes,' – and I quote both Armand and Shakespeare now as Armand

spoke it, as I will to you – as if it came from my heart:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle.

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more; it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

“ ‘This man writes this,’ said Armand to me, ‘and we all know that it is

absolutely the truth and every revelation has sooner or later fallen before it,

and yet we want to love the way he has said it, we want to hear it again! We

want to remember it! We want to never forget a single word.’ ”

We were both silent for a moment. You looked down, you rested your chin on your

knuckles. I knew the whole weight of Armand’s going into the sun was on you, and

I had so loved your recitation of the words, and the words themselves.

Finally, I said, “And this gives me pleasure. Think of it, pleasure. That you

recite these words to me now.”

You smiled.

"I want to know now what we can learn," you said. “I want to know what we can

see! So I come to you, a Child of the Millennia, a vampire who drank from the

Queen Akasha herself, one who has survived two thousand years. And I ask you,

Pandora, please will you write for me, write your story, write what you will.”

For a long moment I gave you no answer.

Then I said sharply that I could not. But something had stirred in me. I saw and

heard arguments and tirades of centuries ago, I saw the poet's lifted light

shine on eras I had known intimately out of love. Other eras I had never known,

wandering, ignorant, a wraith.

Yes, there was a tale to be written. There was. But at the moment I could not

admit it.

You were in misery, having thought of Armand, having remembered his walking into

the morning sun. You mourned for Armand.

"Was there any bond between you?” you asked. "Forgive me my boldness, but I mean

was there any bond between you and Armand when you met, because Marius had given

you both the Dark Gift? I know no jealousy exists, that I can feel, I wouldn’t

bring up the very name Armand if I detected a hurt in you, but all else is an

absence, a silence. Was there no bond'?”

“The bond is only grief. He went into the sun. And grief is absolutely the

easiest and safest of bonds.”

You laughed under your breath.

“What can I do to make you consider my request? Have pity on me, Gracious Lady,

entrust to me your song.”

I smiled indulgently, but it was impossible, I thought.

“It’s far too dissonant, my dear,” I said. “It’s far too –

I shut my eyes.

I had wanted to say that my song was far too painful to sing.

Suddenly your eyes moved upwards. Your expression changed. It was almost as if

you were deliberately trying to appear to enter a trance. Slowly you turned your

head. You pointed, with your hand close to the table, then let your hand go lax

“What is it, David?” I said. “What are you seeing?"

“Spirits, Pandora, ghosts.”

You shuddered as if to dear your head.

“But that’s unheard of,” I said. Yet I knew that he was telling the truth. "The

Dark Gift takes away that power. Even the ancient witches, Maharet and Mekare,

told us this, that once Akasha’s blood entered them, and they became vampires,

they never heard or saw the spirits again. You’ve recently been with them. Did

you tell them of this power?”

He nodded. Obviously some loyalty bound him

not to say that they did not have it. But I knew they

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NewTalesoftheVampiresByAnneRiceJULIANOFNORWICHRevelationsofDivineLoveINottwentyminuteshaspassedsinceyouleftmehereinthecafe,sinceIsaidNotoyourrequest,thatIwouldneverwriteoutforyouthestoryofmymortallife,howIbecameavampire–howIcameuponMariusonlyyearsafterhehadlosthishumanlife.NowhereIamwithyournotebook...

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