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"But give them the Dark Gift and only one in a multitude will not be as miserable as you are.

"What can I say finally that will not confirm your worst fears? I have lived over eighteen hundred years, and I tell you life does not need us. I have never had a true purpose. We have no place. "

Chapter 13

13

Marius paused.

He looked away from me for the first time and towards the sky beyond the windows, as if he were listening to island voices I couldn't hear.

"I have a few more things to tell you," he said, "things which are important, though they are merely practical things. . . " But he was distracted. "And there are promises," he said, finally, "which I must exact. . . "

And he slipped into quiet, listening, his face too much like that of Akasha and Enkil.

There were a thousand questions I wanted to ask. But more significant perhaps there were a thousand statements of his I wanted to reiterate, as if I had to say them aloud to grasp them. If I talked, I wouldn't make very good sense.

I sat back against the cool brocade of the winged chair with my hands together in the form of a steeple, and I just looked ahead of me, as if his tale were spread out there for me to read over, and I thought of the truth of his statements about good and evil, and how it might have horrified me and disappointed me had he tried to convince me of the rightness of the philosophy of the terrible gods of the East, that we could somehow glory in what we did.

I too was a child of the West, and all my brief life I had struggled with the Western inability to accept evil or death.

But underneath all these considerations lay the appalling fact that Marius could annihilate all of us by destroying Akasha and Enkil. Marius could kill every single one of us in existence if he were to burn Akasha and Enkil and thereby get rid of an old and decrepit and useless form of evil in the world. Or so it seemed.

And the horror of Akasha and Enkil themselves. . . What could I say to this, except that I too had felt the first glimmer of what he once felt, that I could rouse them, I could make them speak again, I could make them move. Or more truly, I had felt when I saw them that someone should and could do it. Someone could end their open-eyed sleep.

And what would they be if they ever walked and talked again? Ancient Egyptian monsters. What would they do?

I saw the two possibilities as seductive suddenly -- rousing them or destroying them. Both tempted the mind. I wanted to pierce them and commune with them, and yet I understood the irresistible madness of trying to destroy them. Of going out in a blaze of light with them that would take all our doomed species with it.

Both attitudes had to do with power. And some triumph over the passage of time.

"Aren't you ever tempted to do it?" I asked, and my voice had pain in it. I wondered if down in their chapel they heard.

He awakened from his listening and turned to me and he shook his head. No.

"Even though you know better than anyone that we have no place?"

Again he shook his head. No.

"I am immortal," he said, "truly immortal. To be perfectly honest, I do not know what can kill me now, if anything. But that isn't the point. I want to go on. I do not even think of it. I am a continual awareness unto myself, the intelligence I longed for years and years ago when I was alive, and I'm in love as I've always been with the great progress of mankind. I want to see what will happen now that the world has come round again to questioning its gods. Why, I couldn't be persuaded now to close my eyes for any reason. "

I nodded in understanding.

"But I don't suffer what you suffer," he said. "Even in the grove in northern France, when I was made into this, I was not young. I have been lonely since, I have known near madness, indescribable anguish, but I was never immortal and young. I have done over and over what you have yet to do the thing that must take you away from me very very soon. "

"Take me away? But I don't want -- "

"You have to go, Lestat," he said. "And very soon, as I said. You're not ready to remain here with me. This is one of the most important things I have left to tell you and you must listen with the same attention with which you listened to the rest. "

"Marius, I can't imagine leaving now. I can't even. . . " I felt anger suddenly. Why had he brought me here to cast me out? And I remembered all Armand's admonitions to me. It is only with the old ones that we find communion, not with those we create. And I had found Marius. But these were mere words. They didn't touch the core of what I felt, the sudden misery and fear of separation.

"Listen to me," he said gently. "Before I was taken by the Gauls, I had lived a good lifetime, as long as many a man in those days. And after I took Those Who Must Be Kept out of Egypt, I lived again for years in Antioch as a rich Roman scholar might live. I had a house, slaves, and the love of Pandora. We had life in Antioch, we were watchers of all that passed. And having had that lifetime, I had the strength for others later on. I had the strength to become part of the world in Venice, as you know. I had the strength to rule on this island as I do. You, like many who go early into the fire or the sun, have had no real life at all.

"As a young man, you tasted real life for no more than six months in Paris. As a vampire, you have been a roamer, an outsider, haunting houses and other lives as you drifted from place to place.

"If you mean to survive, you must live out one complete lifetime as soon as you can. To forestall it may be to lose everything, to despair and to go into the earth again, never to rise. Or worse. . . "

"I want it. I understand," I said. "And yet when they offered it to me in Paris, to remain with the Theater, I couldn't do it. "