Free The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice Page A

nothing but meaninglessness. In fact, it came to me that my mother dying soon was meaningless and I confided in Nicolas what she had said. “I’m perfectly
horrified
. I’m afraid.”
    Well, if there had been a Golden Moment in the room it was gone now. And something different started to happen.
    I should call it the Dark Moment, but it was still high-pitched and full of eerie light. We were talking rapidly, cursing this meaninglessness, and when Nicolas at last sat down and put his head in his hands, I took some glamorous and hearty swigs of wine and went to pacing and gesturing as he had done before.
    I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don’t find out the answer as to why we were ever alive. Even the avowed atheist probably thinks that in death he’ll get some answer. I mean God will be there, or there won’t be anything at all.
    “But that’s just it,” I said, “we don’t make any discovery at that moment! We merely stop! We pass into nonexistence without ever knowing a thing.” I saw the universe, a vision of the sun, the planets, the stars, black night going on forever. And I began to laugh.
    “Do you realize that! We’ll never know why the hell any of it happened, not even when it’s over!” I shouted at Nicolas, who was sitting back on the bed, nodding and drinking his wine out of a flagon. “We’re going to die and not even know. We’ll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won’t any longer be witnesses to it. We won’t have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We’ll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!”
    But I had stopped laughing. I stood still and I understood perfectly what I was saying!
    There was no judgment day, no final explanation, no luminous moment in which all terrible wrongs would be made right, all horrors redeemed.
    The witches burnt at the stake would never be avenged. No one was ever going to tell us anything!
    No, I didn’t understand it at this moment. I
saw
it! And I began to make the single sound: “Oh!” I said it again “Oh!” and then I said it louder and louder and louder, and I dropped the wine bottle on the floor. I put my hands to my head and I kept saying it, and I could see my mouth openedin that perfect circle that I had described to my mother and I kept saying, “Oh, oh, oh!”
    I said it like a great hiccuping that I couldn’t stop. And Nicolas took hold of me and started shaking me, saying:
    “Lestat, stop!”
    I couldn’t stop. I ran to the window, unlatched it and swung out the heavy little glass, and stared at the stars. I couldn’t stand seeing them. I couldn’t stand seeing the pure emptiness, the silence, the absolute absence of any answer, and I started roaring as Nicolas pulled me back from the windowsill and pulled shut the glass.
    “You’ll be all right,” he said over and over. Someone was beating on the door. It was the innkeeper, demanding why we had to carry on like this.
    “You’ll feel all right in the morning,” Nicolas kept insisting. “You just have to sleep.”
    We had awakened everyone. I couldn’t be quiet. I kept making the same sound over again. And I ran out of the inn with Nicolas behind me, and down the street of the village and up towards the castle with Nicolas trying to catch up with me, and through the gates and up into my room.
    “Sleep, that’s what you need,” he kept saying to me desperately. I was lying against the wall with my hands over my ears, and that sound kept coming. “Oh, oh, oh.”
    “In the morning,” he said, “it will be better.”
    W ELL , it was not better in the morning.
    And it was no better by nightfall, and in fact it got worse with the coming of the darkness.
    I walked and talked and gestured like a contented human being, but I was flayed. I was shuddering. My teeth were chattering. I couldn’t stop it. I was staring at everything around me in horror.