The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [220]
I thought and thought about it, half awake, half dreaming again, and the maddest thought came to me, that I would tell Nicki all about this, that as soon as I got home I would lay it all out, the dream, the possible meaning and we would talk—
With an ugly shock, I opened my eyes. The human in me looked helplessly about this chamber. He started to weep again and the newborn fiend was too young yet to rein him in. The sobs came up like hiccups, and I put my hand over my mouth.
Magnus, why did you leave me? Magnus, what I am supposed to do, how do I go on?
I drew up my knees and rested my head on them, and slowly my head began to clear.
Well, it has been great fun pretending you will be this vampire creature, I thought, wearing these splendid clothes, running your fingers through all that glorious lucre. But you can’t live as this! You can’t feed on living beings! Even if you are a monster, you have a conscience in you, natural to you … Good and Evil, good and evil. You cannot live without believing in—You cannot abide the acts that—Tomorrow you will … you will … you will what?
You will drink blood, won’t you?
The gold and the precious stones glowed like embers in the nearby chest, and beyond the bars of the window, there rose against the gray clouds the violet shimmer of the distant city. What is their blood like? Hot living blood, not monster blood. My tongue pushed at the roof of my mouth, at my fangs.
Think on it, Wolfkiller.
I ROSE to my feet slowly. It was as if the will made it happen rather than the body, so easy was it. And I picked up the iron key ring which I’d brought with me from the outer chamber and I went to inspect the rest of my tower.
6
MPTY chambers. Barred windows. The great endless sweep of the night above the battlements. That is all I found aboveground. But on the lower floor of the tower, just outside the door to the dungeon stairs, there was a resin torch in the sconce, and a tinderbox in the niche beside it. Tracks in the dust. The lock well oiled and easy to turn when I finally found the right key for it.
I shone the torch before me on a narrow screw stairway and started down, a little repelled by a stench that rose from somewhere quite far below me.
Of course I knew that stench. It was common enough in every cemetery in Paris. In les Innocents it was thick as noxious gas, and you had to live with it to shop the stalls there, deal with the letter writers. It was the stench of decomposing bodies.
And though it sickened me, made me back up a few steps, it wasn’t all that strong, and the odor of the burning resin helped to subdue it.
I went on down. If there were dead mortals here, well, I couldn’t run away from them.
But on the first level beneath the ground, I found no corpses. Only a vast cool burial chamber with its rusted iron doors open to the stairs, and three giant stone sarcophagi in the center of it. It was very like Magnus’s cell above, only much larger. It had the same low curved ceiling, the same crude and gaping fireplace.
And what could that mean, except that other vampires had once slept here? No one puts fireplaces in burial vaults. At least not that I had ever known. And there were even stone benches here. And the sarcophagi were like the one above, with great figures carved on them.
But years of dust overlay everything. And there were so many spider-webs. Surely no vampires dwelled here now. Quite impossible. Yet it was very strange. Where were those who had lain in these coffins? Had they burnt themselves up like Magnus? Or were they still existing somewhere?
I went in and opened the sarcophagi one by one. Nothing but dust inside. No evidence of other vampires at all, no indication that any other vampires existed.
I went out and continued