The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [179]
And it didn’t matter that they didn’t believe it. It didn’t matter that they thought it was art. The fact was that, after two centuries of concealment, I was visible to mortals! I spoke my name aloud. I told my nature. I was there!
But again, I was going farther than Louis. His story, for all its peculiarities, had passed for fiction. In the mortal world, it was as safe as the tableaux of the old Theater of the Vampires in the Paris where the fiends had pretended to be actors pretending to be fiends on a remote and gas-lighted stage.
I’d step into the solar lights before the cameras, I’d reach out and touch with my icy fingers a thousand warm and grasping hands. I’d scare the hell out of them if it was possible, and charm them and lead them into the truth of it if I could.
And suppose—just suppose—that when the corpses began to turn up in ever greater numbers, that when those closest to me began to hearken to their inevitable suspicions—just suppose that the art ceased to be art and became real!
I mean what if they really believed it, really understood that this world still harbored the Old World demon thing, the vampire—oh, what a great and glorious war we might have then!
We would be known, and we would be hunted, and we would be fought in this glittering urban wilderness as no mythic monster has ever been fought by man before.
How could I not love it, the mere idea of it? How could it not be worth the greatest danger, the greatest and most ghastly defeat? Even at the moment of destruction, I would be alive as I have never been.
But to tell the truth, I didn’t think it would ever come to that—I mean, mortals believing in us. Mortals have never made me afraid.
It was the other war that was going to happen, the one in which we’d all come together, or they would all come to fight me.
That was the real reason for The Vampire Lestat. That was the kind of game I was playing.
But that other lovely possibility of real revelation and disaster … Well, that added a hell of a lot of spice!
OUT of the gloomy waste of Canal Street, I went back up the stairs to my rooms in the old-fashioned French Quarter hotel. Quiet it was, and suited to me, with the Vieux Carré spread out beneath its windows, the narrow little streets of Spanish town houses I’d known for so long.
On the giant television set I played the cassette of the beautiful Visconti film Death in Venice. An actor said at one point that evil was a necessity. It was food for genius.
I didn’t believe that. But I wish it were true. Then I could just be Lestat, the monster, couldn’t I? And I was always so good at being a monster! Ah, well …
I put a fresh disk into the portable computer word processor and I started to write the story of my life.
1
N THE winter of my twenty-first year, I went out alone on horseback to kill a pack of wolves.
This was on my father’s land in the Auvergne in France, and these were the last decades before the French Revolution.
It was the worst winter that I could remember, and the wolves were stealing the sheep from our peasants and even running at night through the streets of the village.
These were bitter years for me. My father was the Marquis, and I was the seventh son and the youngest of the three who had lived to manhood. I had no claim to the title or the land, and no prospects. Even in a rich family, it might have been that way for a younger boy, but our wealth had been used up long ago. My eldest brother, Augustin, who was the rightful heir to all we possessed, had spent his wife’s small dowry as soon as he married her.
My father’s castle, his estate, and the village nearby were my entire universe. And I’d been born restless—the dreamer, the angry one, the complainer. I wouldn’t sit by the fire and talk of old wars and the days of the Sun King. History had no meaning for me.
But in this dim and old-fashioned world, I had become the hunter. I brought in the pheasant,