She’d always liked to listen to people, especially when they talked so much that she didn’t have to say anything much herself.
I heard the first raindrops strike the porch roof beneath her. I felt them on my face: I saw the trees begin to move in their fury. And I heard the wind, wailing as if he were wailing, lashing the trees and crying in his grief as he had on the death of my mother, and on the death of her mother. Yes, it was a storm for the death of the witch, and I was the witch. And it was my death and my storm.
I knew all things were symbols of other things! I knew that all rituals were enactments of other happenings! I know out of our practical human minds we devised these things with an immensity of soul that would not allow the world to be devoid of meaning. And this statue represented love. Love above injustice. Love above loneliness and condemnation. That was what mattered, that single thing.
The tale can’t be told without one link being connected to the other and we poor orphans of ticking time know no other means of measure than those of sequence.
She was quite the reader of books, that I can tell you. She knew so much poetry. She was always quoting this or that verse in an off-handed manner. I try to remember the things she quotes, the poets she loved.
Why must I see him brought low like this when it had taken so many decades to cement my love for him forever?
There was never any innocence for us, there was never any springtime. There was never any chance, no matter how beautiful the twilight gardens in which we wandered. Our souls were too out of tune, our desires crossed and our resentments to common and too well watered for the final flowering.
He sat relaxed, one knee up, arms folded, face clear one moment in a flash of flame and pale the next. He was soiled all over, and seemed rather limp and in a strange misery of ease. His expression was neither bitter nor sarcastic, only thoughtful-fixed with an enduring expression just as the faces on the mosaics were fixed as they bore lifeless witness to the same events.
Come to me, and I shall be the sun round which you are locked in orbit, and my rays shall lay bare the secrets you keep from each other, and I, who possess charms and powers of which you have no inkling, shall control and possess and destroy you!
Beauty wasn’t the treachery he imagined it to be, rather it was an uncharted land where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signposts of evil or good.
Think of it, Armand,” I pressed carefully. “Why should Death lurk in the shadows? Why should Death wait at the gate? There is no bedchamber, no ballroom that I cannot enter. Death in the glow of the hearth, Death on tiptoe in the corridor, that is what I am. Speak to me of the Dark Gifts – I use them. I’m Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the heart of the rose.
Treachery it was, the theft of immortality. A dark Prometheus stealing a luminescent fire. Laughter in the darkness. Laughter echoing in the catacomb. Echoing as if down the centuries.
Son tu conciencia y tu voluntad las que deben mantenerte vivo.
No te enamores tanto de la noche como para perder tu camino.
I suppose we could people the world with vampires, the three of us,’ she said.
And you called me mad, time’s martyr, a vagrant Cassandra corrupted by too long a vigil on this earth.
So there it is finally,” I said. “The whole philosophy – and the whole is founded upon a lie. And you cower like peasants, in hell already by your own choosing, enchained more surely than the lowest mortal, and you wish to punish us because we do not? Follow our examples because we do not!
Ah, but it is too sublime,” sang the old queen with her eyes on the domed ceiling. “From my stone pillow I have dreamed dreams of the mortal world above. I have heard its voices, its new music, as lullabies as I lie in my grave. I have envisioned its fantastical discoveries, I have known its courage in the timeless sanctum of my thoughts. And though it shuts me out with its dazzling forms, I long for one with the strength to roam it fearlessly, to ride the Devil’s Road through its heart.
Had you asked me then, I would have told you it was aesthetic, that I wished to understand death in stages. That the death of an animal yielded such pleasure and experience to me that I had only begun to understand it, and wished to save the experience of human death for my mature understanding. But it was moral. Because all aesthetic decisions are moral, really.
Lestat thought the best color at all times for vampires was black, possibly the only aesthetic principle he steadfastly maintained, but he wasn’t opposed to anything which smacked of style and excess.