Not twenty minutes has passed since you left me here in the cafe, since I said No to your request, that I
would never write out for you the story of my mortal life, how I became a vampire - how I came upon Marius
only years after he had lost his human life.
Now here I am with your notebook open, using one of the sharp pointed eternal ink pens you left me,
delighted at the sensuous press of the black ink into the expensive and flawless white paper.
Naturally, David, you would leave me something elegant, an inviting page. This notebook bound in dark
varnished leather, is it not, tooled with a design of rich roses, thornless, yet leafy, a design that means only
Design in the final analysis but bespeaks an authority. What is written beneath this heavy and handsome
book cover will count, sayeth this cover.
The thick pages are ruled in light blue - you are practical, so thoughtful, and you probably know I almost
never put pen to paper to write anything at all.
Even the sound of the pen has its allure, the sharp
scratch rather like the finest quills in ancient Rome when I would put them to parchment to write my letters to
my Father, when I would write in a diary my own laments... ah, that sound. The only thing missing here is
the smell of ink, but we have the fine plastic pen which will not run out for volumes, making as fine and deep
a black mark as I choose to make.
I am thinking about your request in writing. You see you will get something from me. I find myself yielding to
it, almost as one of our human victims yields to us, discovering perhaps as the rain continues to fall outside,
as the cafe continues with its noisy chatter, to think that this might not be the agony I presumed - reaching
back over the two thousand years - but almost a pleasure, like the act of drinking blood itself.
I reach now for a victim who is not easy for me to overcome: my own past. Perhaps this victim will flee from
me with a speed that equals my own. Whatever, I seek now a victim that I have never faced. And there is
the thrill of the hunt in it, what the modern world calls investigation.
Why else would I see those times so vividly now? You had no magic potion to give me to loosen my
thoughts. There is but one potion for us and it is blood.
You said at one point as we walked towards the cafe, "You will remember everything."
You, who are so young amongst us yet were so old as a mortal, and such a scholar as a mortal. Perhaps it
is natural that you so boldly attempt to collect our stories.
But why seek to explain here such curiosity as yours, such bravery in face of blood-drenched truth?
How could you have kindled in me this longing to go back, two thousand years, almost exactly - to tell of my
mortal days on Earth in Rome, and how I joined Marius, and what little chance he had against Fate.
How could origins so deeply buried and so long denied suddenly beckon to me. A door snaps open. A light
shines. Come in.
I sit back now in the cafe.
I write, but I pause and look around me at the people of this Paris cafe. I see the drab unisex fabrics of this
age, the fresh American girl in her olive green military clothes, all of her possessions slung over her shoulder
in a backpack; I see the old Frenchman who has come here for decades merely to look at the bare legs and
arms of the young, to feed on the gestures as if he were a vampire, to wait for some exotic jewel of a
moment when a woman sits back laughing, cigarette in hand, and the doth of her synthetic blouse becomes
tight over her breasts and there the nipples are visible.
Ah, old man. He is gray-haired and wears an expensive coat. He is no menace to anyone. He lives entirely
in vision. Tonight he will go back to a modest but elegant apartment which he has maintained since the last
Great World War, and he will watch films of the young beauty Brigitte Bardot. He lives in his eyes. He has
not touched a woman in ten years.
I don't drift, David. I drop anchor here. For I will not have my story pour forth as from a drunken oracle.
I see these mortals in a more attentive light. They are so fresh, so exotic and yet so luscious to me, these
mortals; they look like tropical birds must have looked when I was a child; so full of fluttering, rebellious life, I
wanted to clutch them to have it, to make their wings flap in my hands, to capture flight and own it and
partake of it. Ah, that terrible moment in childhood when one accidentally crushes the life from a bright-red
bird.
Yet they are sinister in their darker vestments, some of these mortals: the inevitable cocaine dealer - and
they are everywhere, our finest prey - who waits for his contact in the far corner, his long leather coat styled
by a noted Italian designer, his hair shaved dose on the side and left bushy on the top to make him look
distinctive, which it does, though there is no need when one considers his huge black eyes, and the
hardness of what nature intended to be a generous mouth. He makes those quick impatient gestures with
his cigarette lighter on the small marble table, the mark of the addicted; he twists, he turns, he cannot be
comfortable. He doesn't know that he will never be comfortable in life again. He wants to leave to snort the
cocaine for which he burns and yet he must wait for the contact. His shoes are too shiny, and his long thin
hands will never grow old.
I think he will die tonight, this man. I feel a slow gathering desire to kill him myself. He has fed so much
poison to so many. Tracking him, wrapping him in my arms, I would not even have to wreathe him with
visions. I would let him know that death has come in the form of a woman too white to be human, too
smoothed by the centuries to be anything but a statue come to life. But those for whom he waits plot to kill
him. And why should I intervene?
What do I look like to these people? A woman with long wavy dean brown hair that covers me much like a
nun's mantle, a face so white it appears cosmetically created, and eyes, abnormally brilliant, even from
behind golden glasses.
Ah, we have a lot to be grateful for in the many styles of eyeglasses in this age - for if I were to take these
off, I should have to keep my head bowed, not to startle people with the mere play of yellow and brown and
gold in my eyes, that have grown ever more jewel-like over the centuries, so that I seem a blind woman set
with topaz for her pupils, or rather carefully formed orbs of topaz, sapphire, even aquamarine.
Look, I have filled so many pages, and all I am saying is Yes, I will tell you how it began for me.
Yes, I will tell you the story of my mortal life in ancient Rome, how I came to love Marius and how we came
to be together and then to part.
What a transformation in me, this resolution.
How powerful I feel as I hold this pen, and how eager to put us in sharp and dear perspective before I begin
fulfilling your request.
This is Paris, in a time of peace. There is rain. High regal gray buildings with their double windows and iron
balconies line this boulevard. Loud, tiny, dangerous automobiles race in the streets. Cafes, such as this, are
overflowing with international tourists. Ancient churches are crowded here by tenements, palaces turned to
museums, in whose rooms I linger for hours gazing at objects from Egypt or Sumer which are even older
than me. Roman architecture is everywhere, absolute replicas of Temples of my time now serve as banks.
The words of my native Latin suffuse the English language. Ovid, my beloved Ovid, the poet who predicted
his poetry would outlast the Roman Empire, has been proved true.
Walk into any bookstore and you find him in neat, small paperbacks, designed to appeal to students.
Roman influence seeds itself, sprouting mighty oaks right through the modern forest of computers, digital
disks, microviruses and space satellites.
It is easy here - as always - to find an embraceable evil, a despair worth tender fulfillment.
And with me there must always be some love of the victim, some mercy, some self-delusion that the death I
bring does not mar the great shroud of inevitability, woven of trees and earth and stars, and human events,
which hovers forever around us ready to close on all that is created, all that we know.
Last night, when you found me, how did it seem to you? I was alone on the bridge over the Seine, walking in
the last dangerous darkness before dawn.
You saw me before I knew you were there. My hood was down and I let my eyes in the dim light of the
bridge have their little moment of glory. My victim stood at the railing, no more than a child, but bruised and
robbed by a hundred men. She wanted to die in the water. I don't know if the Seine is deep enough for one
to drown there. So near the Ile St.Louis. So near Notre Dame. Perhaps it is, if one can resist a last struggle
for life.
But I felt this victim's soul like ashes, as though her spirit had been cremated and only the body remained, a
worn, disease-ridden shell. I put my arm around her, and when I saw the fear in her small black eyes, when I
saw the question coming, I wreathed her with images. The soot that covered my skin was not enough to
keep me from looking like the Virgin Mary, and she sank into hymns and devotion, she even saw my veils in
the colors she had known in churches of childhood, as she yielded to me, and I - knowing that I needn't
drink, but thirsting for her, thirsting for the anguish she could give forth in her final moment, thirsting for the
tasty red blood that would fill my mouth and make me feel human for one instant in my very monstrosity - I
gave in to her visions, bent her neck, ran my fingers over her sore tender skin, and then it was, when I sank
my teeth into her, when I drank from her - it was then that I knew you were there. You watched.
I knew it, and I felt it, and I saw the image of us in your eye, distractingly, as the pleasure nevertheless
flushed through me, making me believe I was alive, somehow connected to fields of clover or trees with
roots deeper in the earth than the branches they raise to the welkin above.
At first I hated you. You saw me as I feasted. You saw me as I gave in. You knew nothing of my months of
starvation, restraint, wandering. You saw only the sudden release of my unclean desire to suck her very soul
from her, to make her heart rise in the flesh inside her, to drag from her veins every precious particle of her
that still wanted to survive.
And she did want to survive. Wrapped in saints, and dreaming suddenly of the breasts that nursed her, her
young body fought, pumping and pumping against me, she so soft, and my own form hard as a statue, my
milkless nipples enshrined in marble, no comfort. Let her see her mother, dead, gone and now waiting. Let
me glimpse through her dying eyes the light through which she sped towards this certain salvation.
Then I forgot about you. I would not be robbed. I slowed the drinking, I let her sigh, I let her lungs fill with the
cold river air, her mother drawing closer and closer so that death now was as safe for her as the womb. I
took every drop from her that she could give.
She hung dead against me, as one I'd rescued, one I would help from the bridge, some weakened,
sickened, drunken girl. I slid my hand into her body, breaking the flesh so easily even with these delicate
fingers, and I dosed my fingers around her heart and brought it to my lips and sucked it, my head tucked
down by her face, sucked the heart like fruit, until no blood was left in any fiber or chamber, and then slowly
- perhaps for your benefit - I lifted her and let her fall down into the water she had so desired.
Now there would be no struggle as her lungs filled with the river. Now there would be no last desperate
thrashing. I fed from the heart one last time, to take even the color of blood out of it, and then sent it after her
- crushed grapes - poor child, child of a hundred men.
Then I faced you, let you know that I knew you watched from the quay. I think I tried to frighten you. In rage I
let you know how weak you were, that all the blood given to you by Lestat would make you no match should
I choose to dismember you, pitch a fatal heat into you and immolate you, or only punish you with penetrating
scar - simply for having spied upon me.
Actually I have never done such a thing to a younger one. I feel sorry for them when they see us, the ancient
ones, and quake in terror. But I should, by all the knowledge of myself I possess, have retreated so quickly
that you could riot follow me in the night.
Something in your demeanor charmed me, the manner in which you approached me on the bridge, your
young Anglo-Indian brown-skinned body gifted by your true mortal age with such seductive grace. Your very
posture seemed to ask of me, without humiliation:
"Pandora, may we speak?"
My mind wandered. Perhaps you knew it. I don't remember whether I shut you out of my thoughts, and I
know that your telepathic abilities are not really very strong. My mind wandered suddenly, perhaps of itself,
perhaps at your prodding. I thought of all the things I could tell you, which were so different from the tales of
Lestat, and those of Marius through Lestat, and I wanted to warn you, warn you of the ancient vampires of
the Far East who would kill you if you went into their territory, simply because you were there.
I wanted to make certain you understood what we all had to accept - the Fount of our immortal vampiric
hunger did reside in two beings - Mekare and Maharet - so ancient they are now both horrible to look upon,
more than beautiful. And if they destroy themselves we will all die with them.
I wanted to tell you of others who have never known us as a tribe or known our history, who survived the
terrible fire brought down on her children by our Mother Akasha. I wanted to tell you that there were things
walking the Earth that look like us but are not of our breed any more than they are human. And I wanted
suddenly to take you under my wing.
It must have been your prodding. You stood there, the English gentleman, wearing your decorum more
lightly and naturally than any man I'd ever seen. I marveled at your fine clothes that you'd indulged yourself
in a light black cloak of worsted wool,
that you had even given yourself the luxury of a gleaming red silk scarf - so unlike you when you
were newly made.
Understand, I was not aware the night that Lestat transformed you into a vampire. I didn't feel that moment.
All the preternatural world shimmered weeks earlier, however, with the knowledge that a mortal
had jumped into the body of another mortal; we know these things, as if the stars tell us. One preter
natural mind picks up the ripples of this sharp cut in the fabric of the ordinary, then another mind receives
the image, and on and on it goes.
David Talbot, the name we all knew from the venerable order of psychic detectives, the Talamasca, had
managed to move his entire soul and etheric body - into that of another man. That body itself was in the
possession of a body thief whom you forced from it. And once anchored in the young - body, you, with all
your scruples and values, all your knowledge of seventy-four years, remained an chored in the young cells.
And so it was David the Reborn, David with the high-gloss India beauty, and raw well-nourished strength of
British lineage, that Lestat had made into a vampire, bringing over both body and soul, compounding miracle
with the Dark Trick, achieving once more a sin that should stun his contemporaries and his elders. And this,
this was done to you by your best friend!
Welcome to the darkness, David. Welcome to the domain of Shakespeare's "inconstant moon."
Bravely you came up the bridge towards me.
"Forgive me, Pandora," you said so quietly. Flawless British upper-class accent, and the usual beguiling
British rhythm that is so seductive it seems to say that "we will all save the world."
You kept a polite distance between us, as if I were a virgin girl of the last century, and you didn't want to
alarm me and my tender sensibilities. I smiled.
I indulged myself then. I took your full measure, this fledgling that Lestat - against Marius's injunction - had
dared to make. I saw the components of you as a man: an immense human soul, fearless, yet half in love
with despair, and a body which Lestat had almost injured himself to render powerful. He had given you more
blood than he could easily give in your transformation. He had tried to give you his courage, his cleverness,
his cunning; he had tried to transport an armory for you through the blood.
He had done well. Your strength was complex and obvious. Our Queen Mother Akasha's blood was mixed
with that of Lestat. Marius, my ancient lover, had given him blood as well. Lestat, ah, now what do they say,
they say that he may even have drunk the blood of the Christ.
It was this first issue I took up with you, my curiosity overwhelming me, for to scan the world for knowledge
is often to rake in such tragedy that I abhor it.
"Tell me the truth of it," I said. "This story Memnoch the Devil. Lestat claimed he went to Heaven and to Hell.
He brought back a veil from St. Veronica. The face of Christ was on it! It converted thousands to Christianity,
it cured alienation and succored bitterness. It drove other Children of Darkness to :throw up their arms to the
deadly morning light, as if the sun were in fact the fire of God."
"Yes, it's all happened, as I described it," you said, lowering your head with a polite but unexaggerated
modesty. "And you know a few... of us perished in this fervor, whilst newspapers and scientists collected our
ashes for examination."
I marveled at your calm attitude. A Twentieth-Century sensibility. A mind dominated by an incalculable
wealth of information, and quick of tongue with an intellect devoted to swiftness, synthesis, probabilities, and
all this against the backdrop of horrid experiences, wars, massacres, the worst perhaps the world has ever
seen.
"It all happened," you said. "And I did meet with Mekare and Maharet, the ancient ones, and you needn't fear
for me that I don't know how fragile is the root. It was kind of you to think so protectively of me."
I was quietly charmed.
"What did you think of this Holy Veil yourself?" I asked.
"Our Lady of Fatima," you said softly. "The Shroud of Turin, a cripple rising from the Miraculous Waters of
Lourdes! What a consolation it must be to accept such a thing so easily."
"And you did not?"
You shook your head. "And neither did Lestat, really. It was the mortal girl, Dora, snatching the Veil from
him, who took it out into the world. But it was a most singular and meticulously made thing, I'll tell you that,
more worthy of the word 'relic' perhaps than any other I've ever seen."
You sounded dejected suddenly.
"Some immense intent went into its making," you said.
"And the vampire Armand, the delicate boylike Armand, he believed it?" I asked. "Armand looked at it and
saw the face of Christ," I said, seeking your confirmation.
"Enough to die for it," you said solemnly. "Enough to open his arms to the morning sun."
You looked away, and you closed your eyes. This was a simple unadorned plea to me not to make you
speak of Armand and how he had gone into the morning fire.
I gave a sigh - surprised and gently fascinated to find you so articulate, skeptical, yet so sharply and frankly
connected to the others.
You said in a shaken voice, "Armand." And still looking away from me. "What a Requiem. And does he know
now if Memnoch was real, if God Incarnate who tempted Lestat was in fact the Son of the God Almighty?
Does anyone'?"
I was taken with your earnestness, your passion. You were not jaded or cynical. There was an immediacy to
your feelings for these happenings, these creatures, these questions you posed,
"They locked up the Veil, you know," you said. "It's in the Vatican. There were two weeks of frenzy on Fifth
Avenue in St. Patrick's Cathedral in which people came to look into the eyes of The Lord, and then they had
it, gone, taken to their vaults. I doubt there is a nation on the Earth with the power to gain even a glimpse of
it now."
"And Lestat," I said. "Where is he now?"
"Paralyzed, silent," you said. "Lestat lies on the floor of a chapel in New Orleans. He doesn't move. He says
nothing. His Mother has come to him. You knew her, Gabrielle, he made a vampire of her."
"Yes, I remember her."
"Even she draws no response from him. Whatever he saw, in his journey to Heaven and Hell, he doesn't
know the truth of it one way or the other - he tried to tell this to Dora! And eventually, after I'd written down
the whole story for him, he passed within a few nights into this state.
"His eyes are fixed and his body pliant. They made a curious Pietá, he and Gabrielle, in this abandoned
convent and its chapel. His mind is dosed, or worse - it's empty."
I found I liked very much your manner of speaking. In fact, I was taken off guard.
"I left Lestat because he was beyond my help and my reach," you said. "And I must know if there are old
ones who want to put an end to me; I must make my pilgrimages and my progresses to know the dangers of
this world to which I've been admitted."
"You're so forthright. You have no cunning."
"On the contrary, I conceal my keenest assets from you." You gave me a slow, polite smile. "Your beauty
rather confuses me. Are you used to this?"
"Quite," I said. "And weary of it. Come beyond it. Let me just warn, there are old ones, ones no one knows or
can explain. It's rumored you've been with Maharet and Mekare, who are now the E1dest and the Fount
from which we all spring. Obviously they've drawn back from us, from all the world, into some secret place,
and have no taste for authority."
"You're so very correct," you said, "and my audience with them was beautiful but brief. They don't want to
rule over anyone, nor will Maharet, as long as the history of the world and her own physical descendants are
in it - her own thousands of human descendants from a time so ancient there is no date for it - Maharet will
never destroy herself and her sister, thereby destroying all of us."
"Yes," I said, "in that she believes, the Great Family, the generations she has traced for thousands of years.
I saw her when we all gathered. She doesn't see us as evil - you, or me, or Lestat - she thinks that we're
natural, rather like volcanoes or fires that rage through forests, or bolts of lightning that strike a man dead."
"Precisely," you said. "There is no Queen of the Damned now. I fear only one other immortal, and that's your
lover, Marius. Because it was Marius who laid down the strict rule before he left the others that no more
blood drinkers could be made. I'm baseborn in the mind of Marius. That is, were he an Englishman, those
would be his words."
I shook my head. "I can't believe he would harm you. Hasn't he come to Lestat'? Did he not come to see the
Veil with his own eyes?"
You said No to both questions.
"Heed this advice: whenever you sense his presence, talk to him. Talk to him as you have to me. Begin a
conversation which he won't have the confidence to bring to a dose."
You smiled again. "That's such a clever way of putting it," you said.
"But I don't think you have to fear him. If he wanted you gone off the Earth, you'd be gone. What we have to
fear is the same things humans fear - that there are others of our same species, of varying power and belief,
and we are never entirely sure where they are or what they do. That's my advice to you."
"You are so kind to take your time with me," you said.
I could have wept. "On the contrary. You don't know the silence and solitude in which I wander, and pray
you never know it, and here you've given me heat without death, you've given me nourishment without
blood. I'm glad you've come."
I saw you look up at the sky, the habit of the young ones.
"I know, we have to part now."
You turned to me suddenly. "Meet me tomorrow night," you said imploringly. "Let this exchange continue! I'll
come to you in the cafe where you sit every night musing. I'll find you. Let us talk to each other."
"So you've seen me there."
"Oh, often," you said. "Yes." You looked away again. I saw it was to conceal feeling. Then your dark eyes
turned back to me.
"Pandora, we have the world, don't we'?" you whispered.
"I don't know, David. But I'll meet you tomorrow night. Why haven't you come to me there? Where it was
warm and lighted?"
"It seemed a far more outrageous intrusion, to move in on you in the sanctified privacy of a crowded cafe.
People go to such places to be alone, don't they? This seemed somehow more proper. And I did not mean
to be the voyeur. Like many fledglings, I have to feed every night. It was an accident that we saw each other
at that moment."
"That is charming, David," I said. "It is a long time since anyone has charmed me. I'll meet you there...
tomorrow night."
And then a wickedness possessed me. I came towards you and embraced you, knowing that the hardness
and coldness of my ancient body would strike the deepest chord of terror in you, newborn as you were,
passing so easily for mortal.
But you didn't draw back. And when I kissed your cheek, you kissed mine.
I wonder now, as I sit here in the cafe, writing... trying to give you more with these words perhaps than you
ask for... what I would have done had you not kissed me, had you shrunk back with the fear that is so
common in the young.
David, you are indeed a puzzle.
You see that I have begun to chronicle not my life here, but what has passed these two nights between you
and me.
Allow this, David. Allow that I speak of you and me, and then perhaps I can retrieve my lost life.
When you came into the cafe tonight, I thought nothing much about the notebooks. You had two. They were
thick.
The leather of the notebooks smelled good and old, and when you set them down on the table, only then did
I detect a glimmer from your disciplined and restrained mind that they had to do with me.
I had chosen this table in the crowded center of the room, as though I wanted to be in the middle of the
whirlpool of mortal scent and activity. You seemed pleased, unafraid, utterly at home.
You wore another stunning suit of modern cut with a full cape of worsted wool, very tasteful, yet Old World,
and with your golden skin and radiant eyes, you turned the head of every woman in the place and you
turned the heads of some of the men.
You smiled. I must have seemed a snail to you beneath my cloak and hood, gold glasses covering well over
half my face, and a trace of commercial lipstick on my lips, a soft purple pink that had made me think of
bruises. It had seemed very enticing in the mirror at the store, and I liked that my mouth was something I
didn't have to hide, My lips are now almost colorless. With this lipstick I could smile.
I wore these gloves of mine, black lace, with their sheared-off tips so that my fingers can feel, and I had
sooted my nails so they would not sparkle like crystal in the cafe. And I reached out my hand to you and you
kissed it.
There was your same boldness and decorum. And then the warmest smile from you, a smile in which l think
your former physiology must have dominated because you looked far too wise for one so young and strong
of build. I marveled at the perfect picture you had made of yourself.
"You don't know what a joy it is to me," you said, "that you've come, that you've let me join you here at this
table."
"You have made me want this," I said, raising my hands, and seeing that your eyes were dazzled by my
crystalline fingernails, in spite of the soot.
I reached towards you, expecting you to pull back, but you entrusted to my cold white fingers your warm
dark hand.
"You find in me a living being?" I asked you.
"Oh, yes, most definitely, most radiantly and perfectly a living being."
We ordered our coffee, as mortals expect us to do, deriving more pleasure from the heat and aroma than
they could ever imagine, even stirring our little cups with our spoons. I had before me a red dessert. The
dessert is still here of course. I ordered it simply because it was red - strawberries covered in syrup - with a
strong sweet smell that bees would like.
I smiled at your blandishments. I liked them...