The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [333]
But Gabrielle’s absences weren’t the only thing destroying our affection for each other as the years passed. It was her manner when she was with me—the ideas she would put forth.
She still had that habit of speaking exactly what was on her mind and little more.
One night in our little house in the Via Ghibellina in Florence, she appeared after a month’s absence and started to expound at once.
“You know the creatures of the night are ripe for a great leader,” she said. “Not some superstitious mumbler of old rites, but a great dark monarch who will galvanize us according to new principles.”
“What principles?” I asked. Ignoring the question, she went on.
“Imagine,” she said, “not merely this stealthy and loathsome feeding on mortals, but something grand as the Tower of Babel was grand before it was brought down by the wrath of God. I mean a leader set up in a Satanic palace who sends out his followers to turn brother against brother, to cause mothers to kill their children, to put all the fine accomplishments of mankind to the torch, to scorch the land itself so that all would die of hunger, innocent and guilty! Make suffering and chaos wherever you turn, and strike down the forces of good so that men despair. Now that is something worthy of being called evil. That is what the work of a devil really is. We are nothing, you and I, except exotica in the Savage Garden, as you told me. And the world of men is no more or less now than what I saw in my books in the Auvergne years ago.”
I hated this conversation. And yet I was glad she was in the room with me, that I was speaking to somebody other than a poor deceived mortal. That I wasn’t alone with my letters from home.
“But what about your aesthetic questions?” I asked. “What you explained to Armand before, that you wanted to know why beauty existed and why it continues to affect us?”
She shrugged.
“When the world of man collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains.”
“And why call all this Satanic?” I asked. “Why not call it chaos? That is all it would be.”
“Because,” she said, “that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn’t they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Well, use your preternatural brain, my blue-eyed one,” she answered, “my golden-haired son, my handsome wolfkiller. It is very possible that God made the world as Armand said.”
“This is what you discovered in the forest? You were told this by the leaves?”
She laughed at me.
“Of course, God is not necessarily anthropomorphic,” she said. “Or what we would call, in our, colossal egotism and sentimentality, ‘a decent person.’ But there is probably God. Satan, however, was man’s invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws—be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris—that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws. And we are truly Satanic in that we follow no law for man’s protection. So why not truly disrupt? Why not make a blaze of evil to consume all the civilizations of the earth?”
I was too appalled to answer.
“Don’t worry.” She laughed. “I won’t do it. But I wonder what will happen in the decades to come. Will not somebody do it?”
“I hope not!” I said. “Or let me put it this way. If one of us tries, then there shall be war.”
“Why? Everyone will follow him.”
“I will not. I will make the war.”
“Oh, you are too amusing, Lestat,” she said.
“It’s petty,” I said.
“Petty!” She had looked away, out into the courtyard, but she looked back and the color rose in her face. “To topple all the