The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [2]
Please forgive me if I sound bitter.
I don’t have any right to be. I started the whole thing; and I got out in one piece, as they say. And so many of our kind did not. Then there were the mortals who suffered. That part was inexcusable. And surely I shall always pay for that.
But you see, I still don’t really fully understand what happened. I don’t know whether or not it was a tragedy, or merely a meaningless venture. Or whether or not something absolutely magnificent might have been born of my blundering, something that could have lifted me right out of irrelevance and nightmare and into the burning light of redemption after all.
I may never know, either. The point is, it’s over. And our world—our little private realm—is smaller and darker and safer than ever. It will never again be what it was.
It’s a wonder that I didn’t foresee the cataclysm, but then I never really envision the finish of anything that I start. It’s the risk that fascinates, the moment of infinite possibility. It lures me through eternity when all other charms fail.
After all, I was like that when I was alive two hundred years ago—the restless one, the impatient one, the one who was always spoiling for love and a good brawl. When I set out for Paris in the 1780s to be an actor, all I dreamed of were beginnings—the moment each night when the curtain went up.
Maybe the old ones are right. I refer now to the true immortals—the blood drinkers who’ve survived the millennia—who say that none of us really changes over time; we only become more fully what we are.
To put it another way, you do get wiser when you live for hundreds of years; but you also have more time to turn out as badly as your enemies always said you might.
And I’m the same devil I always was, the young man who would have center stage, where you can best see me, and maybe love me. One’s no good without the other. And I want so much to amuse you, to enthrall you, to make you forgive me everything. . . . Random moments of secret contact and recognition will never be enough, I’m afraid.
But I’m jumping ahead now, aren’t I?
If you’ve read my autobiography then you want to know what I’m talking about. What was this disaster of which I speak?
Well, let’s review, shall we? As I’ve said, I wrote the book and made the album because I wanted to be visible, to be seen for what I am, even if only in symbolic terms.
As to the risk that mortals might really catch on, that they might realize I was exactly what I said I was—I was rather excited by that possibility as well. Let them hunt us down, let them destroy us, that was in a way my fondest wish. We don’t deserve to exist; they ought to kill us. And think of the battles! Ah, fighting those who really know what I am.
But I never really expected such a confrontation; and the rock musician persona, it was too marvelous a cover for a fiend like me.
It was my own kind who took me literally, who decided to punish me for what I had done. And of course I’d counted on that too.
After all, I’d told our history in my autobiography; I’d told our deepest secrets, things I’d been sworn never to reveal. And I was strutting before the hot lights and the camera lenses. And what if some scientist had gotten hold of me, or more likely a zealous police officer on a minor traffic violation five minutes before sunup, and somehow I’d been incarcerated, inspected, identified, and classified—all during the daylight hours while I lay helpless—to the satisfaction of the worst mortal skeptics worldwide?
Granted, that wasn’t very likely. Still isn’t. (Though it could be such fun, it really could!)
Yet it was inevitable that my own kind should be infuriated by the risks I was taking, that they would try to burn me alive, or chop me up in little immortal pieces. Most of the young ones, they were too stupid to realize how safe we were.
And as the night of the concert approached, I’d found