The Vampire Chronicles Collection Page 4

  “Was he right? Were you … dead when you woke up?”

  “Yes, changed, I should say. As obviously I am alive. My body was dead. It was some time before it became absolutely cleansed of the fluids and matter it no longer needed, but it was dead. And with the realization of it came another stage in my divorce from human emotions. The first thing which became apparent to me, even while Lestat and I were loading the coffin into a hearse and stealing another coffin from a mortuary, was that I did not like Lestat at all. I was far from being his equal yet, but I was infinitely closer to him than I had been before the death of my body. I can’t really make this clear to you for the obvious reason that you are now as I was before my body died. You cannot understand. But before I died, Lestat was absolutely the most overwhelming experience I’d ever had. Your cigarette has become one long cylindrical ash.”

  “Oh!” The boy quickly ground the filter into the glass. “You mean that when the gap was closed between you, he lost his … spell?” he asked, his eyes quickly fixed on the vampire, his hands now producing a cigarette and match much more easily than before.

  “Yes, that’s correct,” said the vampire with obvious pleasure. “The trip back to Pointe du Lac was thrilling. And the constant chatter of Lestat was positively the most boring and disheartening thing I experienced. Of course as I said, I was far from being his equal. I had my dead limbs to contend with … to use his comparison. And I learned that on that very night, when I had to make my first kill.”

  The vampire reached across the table now and gently brushed an ash from the boy’s lapel, and the boy stared at his withdrawing hand in alarm. “Excuse me,” said the vampire. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  “Excuse me,” said the boy. “I just got the impression suddenly that your arm was … abnormally long. You reached so far without moving!”

  “No,” said the vampire, resting his hands again on his crossed knees. “I moved forward much too fast for you to see. It was an illusion.”

  “You moved forward? But you didn’t. You were sitting just as you are now, with your back against the chair.”

  “No,” repeated the vampire firmly. “I moved forward as I told you. Here, I’ll do it again.” And he did it again, and the boy stared with the same mixture of confusion and fear. “You still didn’t see it,” said the vampire. “But, you see, if you look at my outstretched arm now, it’s really not remarkably long at all.” And he raised his arm, first finger pointing heavenward as if he were an angel about to give the Word of the Lord. “You have experienced a fundamental difference between the way you see and I see. My gesture appeared slow and somewhat languid to me. And the sound of my finger brushing your coat was quite audible. Well, I didn’t mean to frighten you, I confess. But perhaps you can see from this that my return to Pointe du Lac was a feast of new experiences, the mere swaying of a tree branch in the wind a delight.”

  “Yes,” said the boy; but he was still visibly shaken. The vampire eyed him for a moment, and then he said, “I was telling you …”

  “About your first kill,” said the boy.

  “Yes. I should say first, however, that the plantation was in a state of pandemonium. The overseer’s body had been found and so had the blind old man in the master bedroom, and no one could explain the blind old man’s presence. And no one had been able to find me in New Orleans. My sister had contacted the police, and several of them were at Pointe du Lac when I arrived. It was already quite dark, naturally, and Lestat quickly explained to me that I must not let the police see me in even minimal light, especially not with my body in its present remarkable state; so I talked to them in the avenue of oaks before the plantation house, ignoring their requests that we go inside. I explained I’d been to Pointe du Lac the night before and the blind old man was my guest. As for the overseer, he had not been here, but had gone to New Orleans on business.

  “After that was settled, during which my new detachment served me admirably, I had the problem of the plantation itself. My slaves were in a state of complete confusion, and no work had been done all day. We had a large plant then for the making of the indigo dye, and the overseer’s management had been most important. But I had several extremely intelligent slaves who might have done his job just as well a long time before, if I had recognized their intelligence and not feared their African appearance and manner. I studied them clearly now and gave the management of things over to them. To the best, I gave the overseer’s house on a promise. Two of the young women were brought back into the house from the fields to care for Lestat’s father, and I told them I wanted as much privacy as possible and they would all of them be rewarded not only for service but for leaving me and Lestat absolutely alone. I did not realize at the time that these slaves would be the first, and possibly the only ones, to ever suspect that Lestat and I were not ordinary creatures. I failed to realize that their experience with the supernatural was far greater than that of white men. In my own inexperience I still thought of them as childlike savages barely domesticated by slavery. I made a bad mistake. But let me keep to my story. I was going to tell you about my first kill. Lestat bungled it with his characteristic lack of common sense.”

  “Bungled it?” asked the boy.

  “I should never have started with human beings. But this was something I had to learn by myself. Lestat had us plunge headlong into the swamps right after the police and the slaves were settled. It was very late, and the slave cabins were completely dark. We soon lost sight of the lights of Pointe du Lac altogether, and I became very agitated. It was the same thing again: remembered fears, confusion. Lestat, had he any native intelligence, might have explained things to me patiently and gently—that I had no need to fear the swamps, that to snakes and insects I was utterly invulnerable, and that I must concentrate on my new ability to see in total darkness. Instead, he harassed me with condemnations. He was concerned only with our victims, with finishing my initiation and getting on with it.

  “And when we finally came upon our victims, he rushed me into action. They were a small camp of runaway slaves. Lestat had visited them before and picked off perhaps a fourth of their number by watching from the dark for one of them to leave the fire, or by taking them in their sleep. They knew absolutely nothing of Lestat’s presence. We had to watch for well over an hour before one of the men—they were all men—finally left the clearing and came just a few paces into the trees. He unhooked his pants now and attended to an ordinary physical necessity; and as he turned to go, Lestat shook me and said, ‘Take him.’ ” The vampire smiled at the boy’s wide eyes. “I think I was about as horrorstruck as you would be,” he said. “But I didn’t know then that I might kill animals instead of humans. I said quickly I could not possibly take him. And the slave heard me speak. He turned, his back to the distant fire, and peered into the dark. Then quickly and silently, he drew a long knife out of his belt. He was naked except for the pants and the belt, a tall, strong-armed, sleek young man. He said something in the French patois, and then he stepped forward. I realized that, though I saw him clearly in the dark, he could not see us. Lestat stepped in back of him with a swiftness that baffled me and got a hold around his neck while he pinned his left arm. The slave cried out and tried to throw Lestat off. He sank his teeth now, and the slave froze as if from snakebite. He sank to his knees, and Lestat fed fast as the other slaves came running. ‘You sicken me,’ he said when he got back to me. It was as if we were black insects utterly camouflaged in the night, watching the slaves move, oblivious to us, discover the wounded man, drag him back, fan out in the foliage searching for the attacker. ‘Come on, we have to get another one before they all return to camp,’ he said. And quickly we set off after one man who was separated from the others. I was still terribly agitated, convinced I couldn’t bring myself to attack and feeling no urge to do so. There were many things, as I mention, which Lestat might have said and done. He might have made the experience rich in so many ways. But he did not.”

  “What c
ould he have done?” the boy asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Killing is no ordinary act,” said the vampire. “One doesn’t simply glut oneself on blood.” He shook his head. “It is the experience of another’s life for certain, and often the experience of the loss of that life through the blood, slowly. It is again and again the experience of that loss of my own life, which I experienced when I sucked the blood from Lestat’s wrist and felt his heart pound with my heart. It is again and again a celebration of that experience; because for vampires that is the ultimate experience.” He said this most seriously, as if he were arguing with someone who held a different view. “I don’t think Lestat ever appreciated that, though how he could not, I don’t know. Let me say he appreciated something, but very little, I think, of what there is to know. In any event, he took no pains to remind me now of what I’d felt when I clamped onto his wrist for life itself and wouldn’t let it go; or to pick and choose a place for me where I might experience my first kill with some measure of quiet and dignity. He rushed headlong through the encounter as if it were something to put behind us as quickly as possible, like so many yards of the road. Once he had caught the slave, he gagged him and held him, baring his neck. ‘Do it,’ he said. ‘You can’t turn back now.’ Overcome with revulsion and weak with frustration, I obeyed. I knelt beside the bent, struggling man and, clamping both my hands on his shoulders, I went into his neck. My teeth had only just begun to change, and I had to tear his flesh, not puncture it; but once the wound was made, the blood flowed. And once that happened, once I was locked to it, drinking … all else vanished.

  “Lestat and the swamp and the noise of the distant camp meant nothing. Lestat might have been an insect, buzzing, lighting, then vanishing in significance. The sucking mesmerized me; the warm struggling of the man was soothing to the tension of my hands; and there came the beating of the drum again, which was the drumbeat of his heart—only this time it beat in perfect rhythm with the drumbeat of my own heart, the two resounding in every fiber of my being, until the beat began to grow slower and slower, so that each was a soft rumble that threatened to go on without end. I was drowsing, falling into weightlessness; and then Lestat pulled me back. ‘He’s dead, you idiot!’ he said with his characteristic charm and tact. ‘You don’t drink after they’re dead! Understand that!’ I was in a frenzy for a moment, not myself, insisting to him that the man’s heart still beat, and I was in an agony to clamp onto him again. I ran my hands over his chest, then grabbed at his wrists. I would have cut into his wrist if Lestat hadn’t pulled me to my feet and slapped my face. This slap was astonishing. It was not painful in the ordinary way. It was a sensational shock of another sort, a rapping of the senses, so that I spun in confusion and found myself helpless and staring, my back against a cypress, the night pulsing with insects in my ears. ‘You’ll die if you do that,’ Lestat was saying. ‘He’ll suck you right down into death with him if you cling to him in death. And now you’ve drunk too much, besides; you’ll be ill.’ His voice grated on me. I had the urge to throw myself on him suddenly, but I was feeling just what he’d said. There was a grinding pain in my stomach, as if some whirlpool there were sucking my insides into itself. It was the blood passing too rapidly into my own blood, but I didn’t know it. Lestat moved through the night now like a cat and I followed him, my head throbbing, this pain in my stomach no better when we reached the house of Pointe du Lac.

  “As we sat at the table in the parlor, Lestat dealing a game of solitaire on the polished wood, I sat there staring at him with contempt. He was mumbling nonsense. I would get used to killing, he said; it would be nothing. I must not allow myself to be shaken. I was reacting too much as if the ‘mortal coil’ had not been shaken off. I would become accustomed to things all too quickly. ‘Do you think so?’ I asked him finally. I really had no interest in his answer. I understood now the difference between us. For me the experience of killing had been cataclysmic. So had that of sucking Lestat’s wrist. These experiences so overwhelmed and so changed my view of everything around me, from the picture of my brother on the parlor wall to the sight of a single star in the topmost pane of the French window, that I could not imagine another vampire taking them for granted. I was altered, permanently; I knew it. And what I felt, most profoundly, for everything, even the sound of the playing cards being laid down one by one upon the shining rows of the solitaire, was respect. Lestat felt the opposite. Or he felt nothing. He was the sow’s ear out of which nothing fine could be made. As boring as a mortal, as trivial and unhappy as a mortal, he chattered over the game, belittling my experience, utterly locked against the possibility of any experience of his own. By morning, I realized that I was his complete superior and I had been sadly cheated in having him for a teacher. He must guide me through the necessary lessons, if there were any more real lessons, and I must tolerate in him a frame of mind which was blasphemous to life itself. I felt cold towards him. I had no contempt in superiority. Only a hunger for new experience, for that which was beautiful and as devastating as my kill. And I saw that if I were to maximize every experience available to me, I must exert my own powers over my learning. Lestat was of no use.

  “It was well past midnight when I finally rose out of the chair and went out on the gallery. The moon was large over the cypresses, and the candlelight poured from the open doors. The thick plastered pillars and walls of the house had been freshly whitewashed, the floorboards freshly swept, and a summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another. What this meant, I wasn’t sure myself. Do you understand me when I say I did not wish to rush headlong into experience, that what I’d felt as a vampire was far too powerful to be wasted?”

  “Yes,” said the boy eagerly. “It sounds as if it was like being in love.”

  The vampire’s eyes gleamed. “That’s correct. It is like love.” He smiled. “And I tell you my frame of mind that night so you can know there are profound differences between vampires, and how I came to take a different approach from Lestat. You must understand I did not snub him because he did not appreciate his experience. I simply could not understand how such feelings could be wasted. But then Lestat did something which was to show me a way to go about my learning.

  “He had more than a casual appreciation of the wealth at Pointe du Lac. He’d been much pleased by the beauty of the china used for his father’s supper; and he liked the feel of the velvet drapes, and he traced the patterns of the carpets with his toe. And now he took from one of the china closets a crystal glass and said, ‘I do miss glasses.’ Only he said this with an impish delight that caused me to study him with a hard eye. I disliked him intensely! ‘I want to show you a little trick,’ he said. ‘That is, if you like glasses.’ And after setting it on the card table he came out on the gallery where I stood and changed his manner again into that of a stalking animal, eyes piercing the dark beyond the lights of the house, peering down under the arching branches of the oaks. In an instant, he had vaulted the railing and dropped softly on the dirt below, and then lunged into the blackness to catch something in both his hands. When he stood before me with it, I gasped to see it was a rat. ‘Don’t be such a damned idiot,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you ever seen a rat?’ It was a huge, struggling field rat with a long tail. He held its neck so it couldn’t bite. ‘Rats can be quite nice,’ he said. And he took the rat to the wine glass, slashed its throat, and filled the glass rapidly with blood. The rat then went hurtling over the gallery railing, and Lestat held the wine glass to the candle triumphantly. ‘You may well have to live off rats from time to time, so wipe that expression off your face,’ he said. ‘Rats, chickens, cattle. Travelling by ship, you damn well better live off
rats, if you don’t wish to cause such a panic on board that they search your coffin. You damn well better keep the ship clean of rats.’ And then he sipped the blood as delicately as if it were burgundy. He made a slight face. ‘It gets cold so fast.’

  “ ‘Do you mean, then, we can live from animals?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Yes.’ He drank it all down and then casually threw the glass at the fireplace. I stared at the fragments. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ He gestured to the broken glass with a sarcastic smile. ‘I surely hope you don’t, because there’s nothing much you can do about it if you do mind.’

  “ ‘I can throw you and your father out of Pointe du Lac, if I mind,’ I said. I believe this was my first show of temper.

  “ ‘Why would you do that?’ he asked with mock alarm. ‘You don’t know everything yet … do you?’ He was laughing then and walking slowly about the room. He ran his fingers over the satin finish of the spinet. ‘Do you play?’ he asked.

  “I said something like, ‘Don’t touch it!’ and he laughed at me. ‘I’ll touch it if I like!’ he said. ‘You don’t know, for example, all the ways you can die. And dying now would be such a calamity, wouldn’t it?’

  “ ‘There must be someone else in the world to teach me these things,’ I said. ‘Certainly you’re not the only vampire! And your father, he’s perhaps seventy. You couldn’t have been a vampire long, so someone must have instructed you.…’