The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [282]
She drew even closer, her grip tightening.
“Many things, Magnus knew,” she said. “And it is not madness which is your enemy, not if you are really strong. The vampire who leaves his coven to dwell among human beings faces a dreadful hell long before madness comes. He grows irresistibly to love mortals! He comes to understand all things in love.”
“Let me go,” I whispered softly. Her glance was holding me as surely as her hands.
“With the passage of time he comes to know mortals as they may never know each other,” she continued, undaunted, her eyebrows rising, “and finally there comes the moment when he cannot bear to take life, or bear to make suffering, and nothing but madness or his own death will ease his pain. That is the fate of the old ones which Magnus described to me, Magnus who suffered all afflictions in the end.”
At last she released me. She receded from me as if she were an image in a sailor’s glass.
“I don’t believe what you’re saying,” I whispered. But the whisper was like a hiss. “Magnus? Love mortals?”
“Of course you do not,” she said with her graven jester’s smile.
Armand, too, was looking at her as if he did not understand.
“My words have no meaning now,” she added. “But you have all the time in the world to understand!”
Laughter, howling laughter, scraping the ceiling of the crypt. Cries again from within the walls. She threw back her head with her laughter.
Armand was horror-stricken as he watched her. It was as if he saw the laughter emanating from her like so much glittering light.
“No, but it’s a lie, a hideous simplification!” I said. My head was throbbing suddenly. My eyes were throbbing. “I mean it’s a concept born out of moral idiocy, this idea of love!”
I put my hands to my temples. A deadly pain in me was growing. The pain was dimming my vision, sharpening my memory of Magnus’s dungeon, the mortal prisoners who had died among the rotted bodies of those condemned before them in the stinking crypt.
Armand looked to me now as if I were torturing him as the old queen tortured him with her laughter. And her laughter went right on, rising and falling away. Armand’s hands went out towards me as if he would touch me but did not dare.
All the rapture and pain I’d known in these past months came together inside me. I felt quite suddenly as if I would begin to roar as I had that night on Renaud’s stage. I was aghast at these sensations. I was murmuring nonsense syllables again aloud.
“Lestat!” Gabrielle whispered.
“Love mortals?” I said. I stared at the old queen’s inhuman face, horrified suddenly to see the black eyelashes like spikes about her glistening eyes, her flesh like animated marble. “Love mortals? Does it take you three hundred years!” I glared at Gabrielle. “From the first nights when I held them close to me, I loved them. Drinking up their life, their death, I love them. Dear God, is that not the very essence of the Dark Gift?”
My voice was growing in volume as it had that night in the theater. “Oh, what are you that you do not? What vile things that this is the sum of your wisdom, the simple capacity to feel!”
I backed away from them, looking about me at this giant tomb, the damp earth arching over our heads. The place was passing out of the material into an hallucination.
“God, do you lose your reason with the Dark Trick,” I asked, “with your rituals, your sealing up of the fledglings in the grave? Or were you monsters when you were living? How could we not all of us love mortals with every breath we take!”
No answer. Except the senseless cries of the starving ones. No answer. Just the dim beating of Nicki’s heart.
“Well, hear me, whatever the case,” I said.
I pointed my finger at Armand, at the old queen.
“I never promised my soul to the devil for this! And when I made this one it was to save her from the worms that eat the corpses around here. If loving mortals is the hell you speak of, I am already in it. I have met my