I came into a brightly illuminated eighteenth-century salon. The stone walls had been covered in fine rosewood paneling with framed mirrors rising to the ceiling. There were the usual painted chests, upholstered chairs, dark and lush landscapes, porcelain clocks. A small collection of books in the glass-doored bookcases, a newspaper of recent date lying on a small table beside a brocaded winged chair.
High narrow French doors opened onto the stone terrace, where banks of white lilies and red roses gave off their powerful perfume.
And there, with his back to me, at the stone railing stood an eighteenth-century man.
It was Marius when he turned around and gestured for me to come out.
He was dressed as I was dressed. The frock coat was red, not violet, the lace Valenciennes, not Bruxelles. But he wore very much the same costume, his shining hair tied back loosely in a dark ribbon just as mine was, and he looked not at all ethereal as Armand might have, but rather like a superpresence, a creature of impossible whiteness and perfection who was nevertheless connected to everything around him—the clothes he wore, the stone railing on which he laid his hand, even the moment itself in which a small cloud passed over the bright half moon.
I savored the moment: that he and I were about to speak, that I was really here. I was still clearheaded as I had been on the ship. I couldn’t feel thirst. And I sensed that it was his blood in me that was sustaining me. All the old mysteries collected in me, arousing me and sharpening me. Did Those Who Must Be Kept lie somewhere on this island? Would all these things be known?
I went up to the railing and stood beside him, glancing out over the sea. His eyes were now fixed on an island not a half mile off the shore below. He was listening to something that I could not hear. And the side of his face, in the light from the open doors behind us, looked too frighteningly like stone.
But immediately, he turned to me with a cheerful expression, the smooth face vitalized impossibly for an instant, and then he put his arm around me and guided me back into the room.
He walked with the same rhythm as a mortal man, the step light but firm, the body moving through space in the predictable way.
He led me to a pair of winged chairs that faced each other and there we sat down. This was more or less the center of the room. The terrace was to my right, and we had a clear illumination from the chandelier above as well as a dozen or so candelabra and sconces on the paneled walls.
Natural, civilized it all was. And Marius settled in obvious comfort on the brocade cushions and let his fingers curl around the arms of the chair.
As he smiled, he looked entirely human. All the lines, the animation were there until the smile melted again.
I tried not to stare at him, but I couldn’t help it.
And something mischievous crept into his face.
My heart was skipping.
“What would be easier for you?” he asked in French. “That I tell you why I brought you here, or that you tell me why you asked to see me?”
“Oh, the former would be easier,” I said. “You talk.”
He laughed in a soft ingratiating fashion.
“You’re a remarkable creature,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to go down into the earth so soon. Most of us experience the first death much later—after a century, maybe even two.”
“The first death? You mean it’s common—to go into the earth the way I did?”
“Among those who survive, it’s common. We die. We rise again. Those who don’t go into the earth for periods of time usually do not last.”
I was amazed, but it made perfect sense. And the awful thought struck me that if only Nicki had gone down into the earth instead of into the fire—But I couldn’t think of Nicki now. I would start asking inane questions if I did. Is Nicki somewhere? Has Nicki stopped? Are my brothers somewhere? Have they simply stopped?
“But I shouldn’t have been so surprised that it happened when it did in your case,” he resumed as if he hadn’t heard these thoughts, or didn’t want to address them just yet. “You’ve lost too much that was precious to you. You saw and learned a great deal very fast.”
“How do you know what’s been happening to me?” I asked.
Again, he smiled. He almost laughed. It was astonishing the warmth emanating from him, the immediacy. The manner of his speech was lively and absolutely current. That is, he spoke like a well-educated Frenchman.
“I don’t frighten you, do I?” he asked.
“I didn’t think that you were trying to,” I said.
“I’m not.” He made an offhand gesture. “But your self-possession is a little surprising, nevertheless. To answer your question, I know things that happen to our kind all over the world. And frankly I do not always understand how or why I know. The power increases with age as do all our powers, but it remains inconsistent, not easily controlled. There are moments when I can hear what is happening with our kind in Rome or even in Paris. And when another calls to me as you have done, I can hear the call over amazing distances. I can find the source of it, as you have seen for yourself.
“But information comes to me in other ways as well. I know of the messages you left for me on walls throughout Europe because I read them. And I’ve heard of you from others. And sometimes you and I have been near to each other—nearer than you ever supposed—and I have heard your thoughts. I can hear your thoughts now, of course, as I’m sure you realize. But I prefer to communicate with words.”
“Why?” I asked. “I thought the older ones would dispense with speech altogether.”
“Thoughts are imprecise,” he said. “If I open my mind to you I cannot really control what you read there. And when I read your mind it is possible for me to misunderstand what I hear or see. I prefer to use speech and let my mental faculties work with it. I like the alarm of sound to announce my important communications. For my voice to be received. I do not like to penetrate the thoughts of another without warning. And quite frankly, I think speech is the greatest gift mortals and immortals share.”
I didn’t know what to answer to this. Again, it made perfect sense. Yet I found myself shaking my head. “And your manner,” I said. “You don’t move the way Armand or Magnus moved, the way I thought the ancient ones—”
“You mean like a phantom? Why should I?” He laughed again, softly, charming me. He slumped back in the chair a little further and raised his knee, resting his foot on the seat cushion just as a man might in his private study.
“There were times, of course,” he said, “when all of that was very interesting. To glide without seeming to take steps, to assume physical positions that are uncomfortable or impossible for mortals. To fly short distances and land without a sound. To move objects by the mere wish to do so. But it can be crude, finally. Human gestures are elegant. There is wisdom in the flesh, in the way the human body does things. I like the sound of my foot touching the ground, the feel of objects in my fingers. Besides, to fly even short distances and to move things by sheer will alone is exhausting. I can do it when I have to, as you’ve seen, but it’s much easier to use my hands to do things.”
I was delighted by this and didn’t try to hide it.
“A singer can shatter a glass with the proper high note,” he said, “but the simplest way for anyone to break a glass is simply to drop it on the floor.”
I laughed outright this time.
I was already getting used to the shifts in his face between masklike perfection and expression, and the steady vitality of his gaze that united both. The impression remained one of evenness and openness—of a startlingly beautiful and perceptive man.
But what I could not get used to was the sense of presence, that something immensely powerful, dangerously powerful, was so contained and immediately there.
I became a little agitated suddenly, a little overwhelmed. I felt the unaccountable desire to weep.
He leaned forward and touched the back of my hand with his fingers, and a shock coursed through me. We were connected in the touch. And though his skin was silky like the skin of all vampires, it was less pliant. It was like being touched by a stone hand in a silk glove.
“I brought you here because I want to tell you what I know,” he said. “I want to share with you whatever secrets I possess. For several reasons, you have attracted me.”
I was fascinated. And I felt the possibility of an overpowering love.
“But I warn you,” he said, “there’s a danger in this. I don’t possess the ultimate answers. I can’t tell you who made the world or why man exists. I can’t tell you why we exist. I can only tell you more about us than anyone else has told you so far. I can show you Those Who Must Be Kept and tell you what I know of them. I can tell you why I think I have managed to survive for so long. This knowledge may change you somewhat. That’s all knowledge ever really does, I suppose …”
“Yes—”
“But when I’ve given all I have to give, you will be exactly where you were before: an immortal being who must find his own reasons to exist.”
“Yes,” I said, “reasons to exist.” My voice was a little bitter. But it was good to hear it spelled out that way.
But I felt a dark sense of myself as a hungry, vicious creature, who did a very good job of existing without reasons, a powerful vampire who always took exactly what he wanted, no matter who said what. I wondered if he knew how perfectly awful I was.
The reason to kill was the blood.
Acknowledged. The blood and the sheer ecstasy of the blood. And without it we are husks as I was in the Egyptian earth.
“Just remember my warning,” he said, “that the circumstances will be the same afterwards. Only you might be changed. You might be more bereft than before you came here.”
“But why have you chosen to reveal things to me?” I asked. “Surely others have gone looking for you. You must know where Armand is.”
“There are several reasons, as I told you,” he said. “And probably the strongest reason is the manner in which you sought me. Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds—justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner. But you have been truly asking since you left Paris ten years ago.
I understood this, but only inarticulately.
“You have few preconceptions,” he said. “In fact, you astound me because you admit to such extraordinary simplicity. You want a purpose. You want love.”
“True,” I said with a little shrug. “Rather crude, isn’t it?”
He gave another soft laugh:
“No. Not really. It’s as if eighteen hundred years of Western civilization have produced an innocent.”
“An innocent? You can’t be speaking of me.”
“There is so much talk in this century of the nobility of the savage,” he explained, “of the corrupting force of civilization, of the way we must find our way back to the innocence that has been lost. Well, it’s all nonsense really. Truly primitive people can be monstrous in their assumptions and expectations. They cannot conceive of innocence. Neither can children. But civilization has at last created men who behave innocently. For the first time they look about themselves and say, ‘What the hell is all this!’ ”
“True. But I’m not innocent,” I said. “Godless yes. I come from godless people, and I’m glad of it. But I know what good and evil are in a very practical sense, and I am Typhon, the slayer of his brother, not the killer of Typhon, as you must know.”
He nodded with a slight lift of his eyebrows. He did not have to smile anymore to look human. I was seeing an expression of emotion now even when there were no lines whatsoever in his face.
“But you don’t seek any system to justify it either,” he said. “That’s what I mean by innocence. You’re guilty of killing mortals because you’ve been made into something that feeds on blood and death, but you’re not guilty of lying, of creating great dark and evil systems of thought within yourself.”
“True.”
“To be godless is probably the first step to innocence,” he said, “to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost.”
“So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions.”
“An absence of need for illusions,” he said. “A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.”
I sighed. I sat back in the chair for the first time, thinking this over, what it had to do with Nicki and what Nicki said about the light, always the light. Had he meant this?
Marius seemed now to be pondering. He too was sitting back in his chair, as he had been all along, and he was looking off at the night sky beyond the open doors, his eyes narrow, his mouth a little tense.
“But it wasn’t merely your spirit that attracted me,” he said, “your honesty, if you will. It was the way you came into being as one of us.”
“Then you know all that, too.”
“Yes, everything,” he said, dismissing that. “You have come into being at the end of an era, at a time when the world faces changes undreamed of. And it was the same with me. I was born and grew to manhood in a time when the ancient world, as we call it now, was coming to a close. Old faiths were worn out. A new god was about to rise.”
“When was this time?” I asked excitedly.
“In the years of Augustus Caesar, when Rome had just become an empire, when faith in the gods was, for all lofty purposes, dead.”
I let him see the shock and the pleasure spread over my face. I never doubted him for a moment. I put my hand to my head as if I had to steady myself a little.
But he went on:
“The common people of those days,” he said, “still believed in religion just as they do now. And for them it was custom, superstition, elemental magic, the use of ceremonies whose origins were lost in antiquity, just as it is today. But the world of those who originated ideas—those who ruled and advanced the course of history—was a godless and hopelessly sophisticated world like that of Europe in this day and age.”
“When I read Cicero and Ovid and Lucretius, it seemed so to me,” I said.
He nodded and gave a little shrug.
“It has taken eighteen hundred years,” he said, “to come back to the skepticism, the level of practicality that was our daily frame of mind then. But history is by no means repeating itself. That is the amazing thing.”
“How do you mean?”
“Look around you! Completely new things are happening in Europe. The value placed upon human life is higher than ever before. Wisdom and philosophy are coupled with new discoveries in science, new inventions which will completely alter the manner in which humans live. But that is a story unto itself. That is the future. The point is that you were born on the cusp of the old way of seeing things. And so was I. You came of age without faith, and yet you aren’t cynical. And so it was with me. We sprang up from a crack between faith and despair, as it were.”
And Nicki fell into that crack and perished, I thought.
“That’s why your questions are different,” he said, “from those who were born to immortality under the Christian god.”
I thought of my conversation with Gabrielle in Cairo—my last conversation. I myself had told her this was my strength.
“Precisely,” he said. “So you and I have that in common. We did not grow to manhood expecting very much of others. And the burden of conscience was private, terrible though it might be.”
“But was it under the Christian god … in the very first days of the Christian god that you were—born to immortality—as you said?”
“No,” he said with a hint of disgust. “We never served the Christian God. That you can put out of your mind right now.”
“But the forces of good and evil behind the names of Christ and Satan?”
“Again, they have very little if anything to do with us.”
“But the concept of evil in some form surely …”
“No. We are older than that, Lestat. The men that made me were worshipers of gods, true. And they believed in things that I did not believe. But their faith hearkened back to a time long before the temples of the Roman Empire, when the shedding of innocent human blood could be done on a massive scale in the name of good. And evil was the drought and the plague of the locust and the death of the crops. I was made what I am by these men in the name of good.”
This was too enticing, too enthralling.
All the old myths came to my mind, in a chorus of dazzling poetry. Osiris was a good god to the Egyptians, a god of the corn. What has this to do with us? My thoughts were spinning. In a flash of mute pictures, I recalled the night I left my father’s house in the Auvergne when the villagers had been dancing round the Lenten fire, and making their chants for the increase of the crops. Pagan, my mother had said. Pagan, had declared the angry priest they had long ago sent away.
And it all seemed more than ever the story of the Savage Garden, dancers in the Savage Garden, where no law prevailed except the law of the garden, which was the aesthetic law. That the crops shall grow high, that the wheat shall be green and then yellow, that the sun shall shine. Look at the perfectly shaped apple that the tree has made, fancy that! The villagers would run through the orchards with their burning brands from the Lenten bonfire, to make the apples grow.
“Yes, the Savage Garden,” Marius said with a spark of light in his eyes. “And I had to go out of the civilized cities of the Empire to find it. I had to go into the deep woods of the northern provinces, where the garden still grew at its lushest, the very land of Southern Gaul in which you were born. I had to fall into the hands of the barbarians who gave us both our stature, our blue eyes, our fair hair. I had it through the blood of my mother, who had come from those people, the daughter of a Keltic chieftain married to a Roman patrician. And you have it through the blood of your fathers directly from those days. And by a strange coincidence, we were both chosen for immortality for the very same reason—you by Magnus and I by my captors—that we were the nonpareils of our blond and blue-eyed race, that we were taller and more finely made than other men.”
“Ooooh, you have to tell me all of it! You have to explain everything!” I said.
“I am explaining everything,” he said. “But first, I think it is time for you to see something that will be very important as we go on.”
He waited a moment for the words to sink in.
Then he rose slowly in human fashion, assisting himself easily with his hands on the arms of the chair. He stood looking down at me and waiting.
“Those Who Must Be Kept?” I asked. My voice had gotten terribly small, terribly unsure of itself.
And I could see a little mischief again in his face, or rather a touch of the amusement that was never far away.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said soberly, trying to conceal the amusement. “It’s very unlike you, you know.”
I was burning to see them, to know what they were, and yet I didn’t move. I’d never really thought that I would see them. I’d never really thought what it would mean …
“Is it … is it something terrible to see?” I asked. He smiled slowly and affectionately and placed his hand on my shoulder.
“Would it stop you if I said yes?”
“No,” I said. But I was afraid.
“It’s only terrible as time goes on,” he said. “In the beginning, it’s beautiful.”
He waited, watching me, trying to be patient. Then he said softly:
“Come, let’s go.”