The Vampire Lestat - Anne Rice, ebook, ebook.1400, Temp 3
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
//-->1The Vampire LestatByAnne RiceThis book is dedicated with love to Stan Rice, Karen O'Brien, andAllen Daviau"WONDERFUL . . . THE BEST NEWS IS THAT THIS IS THEMIDDLE BOOK OF THE CHRONICLES OF THE VAMPIRES. "Playboy"Where Rice excels is in evoking the elusive nature of vampiricsexuality, the urgency of the quest for self- knowledge, the thin linebetween arrogance and terror, the loneliness of what is necessarily asolitary existence. " Houston Post"Lestat is more than a sequel to Interview; it's also a prequel and asupplement, swallowing the earlier novel whole.... Lestat is fiercelyambitious, nothing less than a complete unnatural history ofvampires.... In Anne Rice's hands, vampires have come of age. Theynow have a history and a vital new tradition; instead of creeping aboutin charnel houses, they stand center stage, with a thousand spotlightson them. And they smile straight at the camera, licking without shametheir voluptuous lips and white, sharp teeth. " The Village Voice2THE VAMPIRE LESTAT 1 Downtown Saturday Night In TheTwentieth Century 4 1984 4 The Early Education And Adventures OfThe Vampire Lestat 16 Part I - Lelio Rising 16 Part II - The Legacy ofMagnus 53 Part III - Viaticum For The Marquise 102 Part IV - TheChildren Of Darkness 140 Part V - The Vampire Armand 184 Part VI -On The Devil's Road From Paris To Cairo 219 Part VII - AncientMagic, Ancient Mysteries 247Downtown Saturday Night In The Twentieth Century 1984I am The Vampire Lestat. I'm immortal. More or less. The light ofthe sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire-these things mightdestroy me. But then again, they might not. I'm six feet tall, whichwas fairly impressive in the 1780s when I was a young mortal man. It'snot bad now. I have thick blond hair, not quite shoulder length, andrather curly, which appears white under fluorescent light. My eyes aregray, but they absorb the colors blue or violet easily from surfacesaround them. And I have a fairly short narrow nose, and a mouth thatis well shaped but just a little too big for my face. It can look verymean, or extremely generous, my mouth. It always looks sensual. Butemotions and attitudes are always reflected in my entire expression. Ihave a continuously animated face. My vampire nature reveals itself inextremely white and highly reflective skin that has to be powdereddown for cameras of any kind. And if I'm starved for blood I look likea perfect horrorskin shrunken, veins like ropes over the contours ofmy bones. But I don't let that happen now. And the only consistentindication that I am not human is my fingernails. It's the same with allvampires. Our fingernails look like glass. And some people noticethat when they don't notice anything else. Right now I am whatAmerica calls a Rock Superstar. My first album has sold 4 millioncopies. I'm going to San Francisco for the first spot on a nationwideconcert tour that will take my band from coast to coast. MTV, therock music cable channel, has been playing my video clips night andday for two weeks. They're also being shown in England on "Top ofthe Pops " and on the Continent, probably in some parts of Asia, andin Japan. Video cassettes of the whole series of clips are sellingworldwide. I am also the author of an autobiography which waspublished last week. Regarding my English-the language I use in myautobiography-I first learned it from a flatboatmen who came downthe Mississippi to New Orleans about two hundred years ago. I1learned more after that from the English language writers-everybodyfrom Shakespeare through Mark Twain to H. Rider Haggard, whom Iread as the decades passed. The final infusion I received from thedetective stories of the early twentieth century in the Black Maskmagazine. The adventures of Sam Spade by Dashiell Hammett inBlack Mask were the last stories I read before I went literally andfiguratively underground. That was in New Orleans in 1929. When Iwrite I drift into a vocabulary that would have been natural to me inthe eighteenth century, into phrases shaped by the authors I've read.But in spite of my French accent, I talk like a cross between aflatboatman and detective Sam Spade, actually. So I hope you'll bearwith me when my style is inconsistent. When I blow the atmosphereof an eighteenth century scene to smithereens now and then. I cameout into the twentieth century last year. What brought me up weretwo things. First-the information I was receiving from amplifiedvoices that had begun their cacophony in the air around the time I laydown to sleep. I'm referring here to the voices of radios, of course,and phonographs and later television machines. I heard the radios inthe cars that passed in the streets of the old Garden District near theplace where I lay. I heard the phonographs and TVs from the housesthat surrounded mine. Now, when a vampire goes underground as wecall it when he ceases to drink blood and he just lies in the earth hesoon becomes too weak to resurrect himself, and what follows is adream state. In that state, I absorbed the voices sluggishly,surrounding them with my own responsive images as a mortal does insleep. But at some point during the past fifty-five years I began to"remember " what I was hearing, to follow the entertainmentprograms, to listen to the news broadcasts, the lyrics and rhythms ofthe popular songs. And very gradually, I began to understand thecaliber of the changes that the world had undergone. I began listeningfor specific pieces of information about wars or inventions, certainnew patterns of speech. Then a self-consciousness developed in me. Irealized I was no longer dreaming. I was thinking about what I heard.I was wide awake. I was lying in the ground and I was starved forliving blood. I started to believe that maybe all the old wounds I'dsustained had been healed by now. Maybe my strength had comeback. Maybe my strength had actually increased as it would have donewith time if I'd never been hurt. I wanted to find out. I started tothink incessantly of drinking human blood. The second thing thatbrought me back-the decisive thing really-was the sudden presencenear me of a band of young rock singers who called themselves Satan'sNight Out. They moved into a house on Sixth Street-less than a block2away from where I slumbered under my own house on Prytania nearthe Lafayette Cemetery-and they started to rehearse their rock musicin the attic some time in 1984. I could hear their whining electricguitars, their frantic singing. It was as good as the radio and stereosongs I heard, and it was more melodic than most. There was aromance to it in spite of its pounding drums. The electric pianosounded like a harpsichord. I caught images from the thoughts of themusicians that told me what they looked like, what they saw when theylooked at each other and into mirrors. They were slender, sinewy, andaltogether lovely young mortals-beguilingly androgynous and even alittle savage in their dress and movements-two male and one female.They drowned out most of-the other amplified voices around mewhen they were playing. But that was perfectly all right. I wanted torise and join the rock band called Satan's Night Out. I wanted to singand to dance. But I can't say that in the very beginning there was greatthought behind my wish. It was rather a ruling impulse, strongenough to bring me up from the earth. I was enchanted by the worldof rock music-the way the singers could scream of good and evil,proclaim themselves angels or devils, and mortals would stand up andcheer. Sometimes they seemed the pure embodiment of madness.And yet it was technologically dazzling, the intricacy of theirperformance. It was barbaric and cerebral in a way that I don't thinkthe world of ages past had ever seen. Of course it was metaphor, theraving. None of them believed in angels or devils, no matter how wellthey assumed their parts. And the players of the old Italian commediahad been as shocking, as inventive, as lewd. Yet it was entirely new,the extremes to which they took it, the brutality and the defiance-andthe way they were embraced by the world from the very rich to thevery poor. Also there was something vampiric about rock music. Itmust have sounded supernatural even to those who don't believe inthe supernatural. I mean the way the electricity could stretch a singlenote forever; the way harmony could be layered upon harmony untilyou felt yourself dissolving in the sound. So eloquent of dread it was,this music. The world just didn't have it in any form before. Yes, Iwanted to get closer to it. I wanted to do it. Maybe make the littleunknown band of Satan's Night Out famous. I was ready to come up.It took a week to rise, more or less. I fed on the fresh blood of the littleanimals who live under the earth when I could catch them. Then Istarted clawing for the surface, where I could summon the rats. Fromthere it wasn't too difficult to take felines and finally the inevitablehuman victim, though I had to wait a long time for the particular kindI wanted-a man who had killed other mortals and showed no remorse.3
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]