Free The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice

to see the charred stakes in their grim circle and the ground in which nothing ever grew even one hundred years after the burnings. The new saplings of the forest kept their distance. And so the wind struck the clearing, and above, clinging to the rocky slope, the village hovered in darkness.
    A faint chill passed over me, but it was the mere shadow of the anguish I’d felt as a child when I’d heard those awful words “roasted alive,” when I had imagined the suffering.
    Nicki’s white lace shone in the pale light, and he struck up a gypsy song at once and danced round in a circle as he played it.
    I sat on a broad burned stump of tree and drank from the bottle. And the heartbreaking feeling came as it always did with the music. What sin was there, I thought, except to live out my life in this awful place? And pretty soon I was silently and unobtrusively crying.
    Though it seemed the music had never stopped, Nicki was comforting me. We sat side by side and he told me that the world was full of inequities and that we were prisoners, he and I, of this awful corner of France, and someday we would break out of it. And I thought of my mother in the castle high up the mountain, and the sadness numbed me until I couldn’t bear it, and Nicki started playing again, telling me to dance and to forget everything.
    Yes, that’s what it could make you do, I wanted to say. Is that sin? How can it be evil? I went after him as he danced in a circle. The notes seemed to be flying up and out of the violin as if they were made of gold. I could almost see them flashing. I danced round and round him now and he sawed away into a deeper and more frenzied music. I spread the wings of the fur-lined cape and threw back my head to look at the moon. The music rose all around me like smoke, and the witches’ place was no more. There was only the sky above arching down to the mountains.
    We were closer for all this in the days that followed.
    B UT a few nights later, something altogether extraordinary happened.
    It was late. We were at the inn again and Nicolas, who was walking about the room and gesturing dramatically, declared what had been on our minds all along.
    That we should run away to Paris, even if we were penniless, that it was better than remaining here. Even if we lived as beggars in Paris! It had to be better.
    Of course we had both been building up to this.
    “Well, beggars in the streets it might be, Nicki,” I said. “Because I’ll be damned in hell before I’ll play the penniless country cousin begging at the big houses.”
    “Do you think I want you to do that?” he demanded. “I mean run away, Lestat,” he said. “Spite them, every one of them.”
    Did I want to go on like this? So our fathers would curse us. After all, our life was
meaningless
here.
    Of course, we both knew this running off together would be a thousand times more serious than what I had done before. We weren’t boys anymore, we were men. Our fathers
would
curse us, and this was something neither of us could laugh off.
    Also we were old enough to know what poverty meant.
    “What am I going to do in Paris when we get hungry?” I asked. “Shoot rats for supper?”
    “I’ll play my violin for coins on the boulevard du Temple if I have to, and you can go to the theaters!” Now he was really challenging me. He was saying, Is it all words with you, Lestat? “With your looks, you know, you’d be on the stage in the boulevard du Temple in no time.”
    I loved this change in “our conversation”! I loved seeing him believe we could do it. All his cynicism had vanished, even though he did throw in the word “spite” every ten words or so. It seemed possible suddenly to do all this.
    And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us.
    I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been