The tale of the body thief - By Anne Rice Page 0,1
quite often. The most human of us all, the most ungodlike.
I never stayed away too long from his shack in the wilderness of uptown New Orleans. But you’ll see. I’ll get to that. Louis is in this story.
The point is—you’ll find precious little here about the others. Indeed, almost nothing.
Except for Claudia. I was dreaming more and more often of Claudia. Let me explain about Claudia. She’d been destroyed over a century before, yet I felt her presence all the time as if she were just around the corner.
It was 1794 when I made this succulent little vampire out of a dying orphan, and sixty years passed before she rose up against me. “I’ll put you in your coffin forever, Father.”
I did sleep in a coffin then. And it was a period piece, that lurid attempted murder, involving as it did mortal victims baited with poisons to cloud my mind, knives tearing my white flesh, and the ultimate abandonment of my seemingly lifeless form in the rank waters of the swamp beyond the dim lights of New Orleans.
Well, it didn’t work. There are very few sure ways to kill the undead. The sun, fire … One must aim for total obliteration. And after all, we are talking about the Vampire Lestat here.
Claudia suffered for this crime, being executed later by an evil coven of blood drinkers who thrived in the very heart of Paris in the infamous Theatre of the Vampires. I’d broken the rules when I made a blood drinker of a child so small, and for that reason alone, the Parisian monsters might have put an end to her. But she too had broken their rules in trying to destroy her maker, and that you might say was their logical reason for shutting her out into the bright light of day which burnt her to ashes.
It’s a hell of a way to execute someone, as far as I’m concerned, because those who lock you out must quickly retire to their coffins and are not even there to witness the mighty sun carrying out their grim sentence. But that’s what they did to this exquisite and delicate creature that I had fashioned with my vampiric blood from a ragged, dirty waif in a ramshackle Spanish colony in the New World—to be my friend, my pupil, my love, my muse, my fellow hunter. And yes, my daughter.
If you read Interview with the Vampire, then you know all about this. It’s Louis’s version of our time together. Louis tells of his love for this our child, and of his vengeance against those who destroyed her.
If you read my autobiographical books, The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned, you know all about me, also. You know our history, for what it’s worth—and history is never worth too much—and how we came into being thousands of years ago and that we propagate by carefully giving the Dark Blood to mortals when we wish to take them along the Devil’s Road with us.
But you don’t have to read those works to understand this one. And you won’t find here the cast of thousands that crowded The Queen of the Damned, either. Western civilization will not for one second teeter on the brink. And there will be no revelations from ancient times or old ones confiding half-truths and riddles and promising answers that do not in fact exist and never have existed.
No, I have done all that before.
This is a contemporary story. It’s a volume in the Vampire Chronicles, make no mistake. But it is the first really modern volume, for it accepts the horrifying absurdity of existence from the start, and it takes us into the mind and the soul of its hero—guess who?—for its discoveries.
Read this tale, and I will give you all you need to know about us as you turn the pages. And by the way, lots of things do happen! I’m a man of action as I said—the James Bond of the vampires, if you will—called the Brat Prince, and the Damnedest Creature, and “you monster” by various and sundry other immortals.
The other immortals are still around, of course—Maharet and Mekare, the eldest of us all, Khayman of the First Brood, Eric, Santino, Pandora, and others whom we call the Children of the Millennia. Armand is still about, the lovely five-hundred-year-old boy-faced ancient who once ruled the Théâtre des Vampires, and before that a coven of devil worshiping blood drinkers who lived beneath the Paris Cemetery, Les Innocents.