Prince Lestat: The Vampire Chronicles - Softcover

Rice, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345803655 ISBN 13: 9780345803658

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Rice allows [her vampires] to do what they do best: wreak havoc and evoke terror. All while impeccably dressed.” —The Washington Post

The vampire world is in crisis ... Old vampires, roused from deep slumber in the earth, are doing the bidding of a Voice commanding that they indiscriminately burn their kin in cities across the globe, from Paris to Mumbai, Hong Kong to San Francisco. Left with little time to spare, a host of familiar characters including Louis de Pointe du Lac, Armand, and even the vampire Lestat, must embark on a journey to discover who—or what—is driving this mysterious being.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ANNE RICE is the author of thirty-seven books. She died in 2021.

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The Voice

Years ago, I heard him. He’d been babbling.

It was after Queen Akasha had been destroyed and the mute red-­haired twin, Mekare, had become “the Queen of the Damned.” I’d witnessed all that—­the brutal death of Akasha in the moment when we all thought we would die, too, along with her.

It was after I’d switched bodies with a mortal man and come back into my own powerful vampiric body—­having rejected the old dream of being human again.

It was after I’d been to Heaven and Hell with a spirit called Memnoch, and come back to Earth a wounded explorer with no appetite anymore for knowledge, truth, beauty.

Defeated, I’d lain for years on the floor of a chapel in New Orleans in an old convent building, oblivious to the ever-­shifting crowd of immortals around me—­hearing them, wanting to respond, yet somehow never managing to meet a glance, answer a question, acknowledge a kiss or a whisper of affection.

And that’s when I first heard the Voice. Masculine, insistent, inside my brain.....

“Hear me, come to me.” And he’d say that over and over again, night after night, until it was noise. . . .
 
The Voice rumbled and bellowed and whispered whenever I was there, rolling their names around in a stew of invective and rumination and demand. One evening, the Voice said, “Beauty is what drove it, don’t you see? It was the mystery of Beauty.”
 
A year later, I was walking along the sands of South Beach in Miami when he broke that one on me again. For the moment, the mavericks and rogues had been leaving me alone. They were afraid of me, afraid of all the old ones. But not enough.
 
“Drove what, dear Voice?” I asked. I felt it was only fair to give him a few minutes before shutting him down.
 
“You cannot conceive of the magnitude of this mystery.” He spoke in a confidential whisper. “You cannot conceive of this complexity.” He was saying these words as if he’d just discovered them. He wept. I swear it. He wept.
 
It was an awful sound. I don’t glory in any being’s pain, not even the pain of my most sadistic enemies, and here was the Voice weeping.
 
I was hunting, thirsting though I didn’t need to drink, at the mercy of the craving, the deep agonizing lust for heated, pumping human blood. I found a young victim, female, irresistible in her combination of filthy soul and gorgeous body, white throat so tender. I had her in the fragrant darkened bedroom of her own lodgings, lights of the city beyond the windows, having come over the roofs to find her, this pale woman with glorious brown eyes and walnut-shaded skin, black hair like the snakes of Medusa, naked between the white linen sheets, struggling against me as I sank my fangs right into the carotid artery. Too hungry for anything else. Give me the heartbeat. Give me the salt. Give me the Viaticum. Fill my mouth. . . .
 
On this dreary cold night, I’d been thirsty, more thirsty than I could bear. Oh, I don’t technically need the blood anymore. I have so much blood from Akasha in my veins—the primal blood from the old Mother— that I can exist forever without feeding. But I was thirsting, and I had to have it to stanch the misery, or so I told myself, on a little late night rampage in the city of Amsterdam, feeding off every reprobate and killer I could find. I’d hidden the bodies. I’d been careful. But it had been grim—that hot, delicious blood pumping into me and all those visions with it of filthy and degenerate minds, all that intimacy with the emotions I deplore. Oh, same old, same old. I was sick at heart. In moods like this, I’m a menace to the innocent and I know it only too well.
 
Around four in the morning, it had me so bad, I was in a little public park, sitting on an iron bench in the damp, doubled over, in a bad seedy part of the city, the late night lights looking garish and sooty through the mist. And I was cold all over and fearing now that I simply wasn’t going to endure. I wasn’t going to “make it” in the Blood. I wasn’t going to be a true immortal like the great Marius, or Mekare or Maharet or Khay- man, or even Armand. This wasn’t living, what I was doing. And at one point the pain was so acute, it was like a blade turning in my heart and in my brain. I doubled over on the bench. I had my hands clasped on the back of my neck, and I wanted nothing so much as to die, simply to close my eyes on all of life and die.
 
And the Voice came, and the Voice said:
 
“But I love you!”
 
I was startled. I hadn’t heard the Voice in such a longtime, and there it was, that intimate tone, so soft, so utterly tender, like fingers touching me, caressing my head.
 
“Why?” I asked.
 
“Of all of them, I love you the most,” said the Voice. “I am with you, loving you now.”
 
“What are you? Another make-believe angel?” I said. “Another spirit pretending to be a god, something like that?”
 
“No,” he said.
 
But the moment he’d started to speak, I had felt this warmth in me, this sudden warmth such as addicts de- scribe when they are infused with the substance they crave, this lovely reassuring warmth that I’d found so fleetingly in the blood, and I’d begun to hear the rain around me, hear it not as this dismal drizzle but as a lovely soft symphony of sounds on the surfaces around me.
 
“I love you,” said the Voice. “Now, get up. Leave this place. You must. Get up. Start walking. This rain is not too cold for you. You are too strong for this rain and too strong for this sorrow. Come on, do as I tell you. . . .”
 
And I had.
 
I had gotten up and started walking and made my way back to the elegant old Hotel De L’Europe where I was lodged, and I’d gone into the large, exquisitely wall- papered bedroom and closed the long velvet draperies properly over the coming sun. Glare of white sky over the Amstel River. Morning sounds.

Then, I’d stopped. I’d pressed my fingers to my eyelids and buckled, buckled under the weight of a loneliness so terrible I would have chosen death then if only I’d had such a choice.
“Come now, I love you,” said the Voice. “You’re not alone in this! You never were.” I could feel the Voice inside me, around me, embracing me.
 
Finally, I lay down to sleep. He was singing to me now, singing in French, singing some lyrics put to the beautiful Chopin etude, Tristesse. . . .
 
“Lestat, go home to France, to the Auvergne where you were born,” he whispered, just as if he were beside me. “Your father’s old chateau there. You need to go there. All of you human beings need a home.”
 
So tender it sounded, so sincere.
 
So strange that he would say this. I did own the old ruined chateau. Years ago, I had set architects and stonemasons to rebuild it, though why I did not know. I saw an image of it now, those ancient round towers rising from that cliff above fields and valleys where in the old days so many had starved, where life had been so bitter, where I had been bitter, a boy bound and deter- mined to run away to Paris, to see the world.
 
“Go home,” he whispered.
 
“Why are you not winking out the way I am, Voice?” I asked. “The sun’s rising.”
 
“Because it is not morning where I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0345803655
• ISBN 13: 9780345803658
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 609
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland