Excerpt of The Tale of the Body Thief by Anne Rice

MIAMI—the vampires' city. This is South Beach at sunset,
in the luxurious warmth of the winterless winter, clean
and thriving and drenched in electric light, the gentle
breeze moving in from the placid sea, across the dark
margin of cream-colored sand, to cool the smooth broad
pavements full of happy mortal children.

Sweet the parade of fashionable young men displaying their
cultured muscles with touching vulgarity, of young women
so proud of their streamlined and seemingly sexless modern
limbs, amid the soft urgent roar of traffic and human
voices.

Old stucco hostelries, once the middling shelters of the
aged, were now reborn in smart pastel colors, sporting
their new names in elegant neon script. Candles flickered
on the white-draped tables of the open-porch restaurants.
Big shiny American cars pushed their way slowly along the
avenue, as drivers and passengers viewed the dazzling
human parade, lazy pedestrians here and there blocking the
thoroughfare.

On the distant horizon the great white clouds were
mountains beneath a roofless and star-filled heaven. Ah,
it never failed to take my breath away—this southern sky
filled with azure light and drowsy relentless movement.

To the north rose the towers of new Miami Beach in all
their splendor. To the south and to the west, the dazzling
steel skyscrapers of the downtown city with its high
roaring freeways and busy cruise-ship docks. Small
pleasure boats sped along the sparkling waters of the
myriad urban canals.

In the quiet immaculate gardens of Coral Gables, countless
lamps illuminated the handsome sprawling villas with their
red-tiled roofs, and swimming pools shimmering with
turquoise light.Ghost walked in the grand and darkened
rooms of the Biltmore. The massive mangrove trees threw
out their primitive limbs to cover the broad and carefully
tended streets.

In Coconut Grove, the international shoppers thronged the
luxurious hotels and fashionable malls. Couples embraced
on the high balconies of their glass-walled condominiums,
silhouettes gazing out over the serene waters of the bay.
Cars sped along the busy roads past the ever-dancing palms
and delicate rain trees, past the squat concrete mansions
draped with red and purple bougainvillea, behind their
fancy iron gates.

All of this is Miami, city of water, city of speed, city
of tropical flowers, city of enormous skies. It is for
Miami, more than any other place, that I periodically
leave my New Orleans home. The men and women of many
nations and different colors live in the great dense
neighborhoods of Miami. One hears Yiddish, Hebrew, the
languages of Spain, of Haiti, the dialects and accents of
Latin America, of the deep south of this nation and of the
far north. There is menace beneath the shining surface of
Miami, there is desperation and a throbbing greed; there
is the deep steady pulse of a great capital—the low
grinding energy, the endless risk.

It's never really dark in Miami. It's never really quiet.

It is the perfect city for the vampire; and it never fails
to yield to me a mortal killer—some twisted, sinister
morsel who will give up to me a dozen of his own murders
as I drain his memory banks and his blood.

But tonight it was the Big-Game Hunt, the unseasonal
Easter feast after a Lent of starvation—the pursuit of one
of those splendid human trophies whose gruesome modus
operandi reads for pages in the computer files of mortal
law enforcement agencies, a being anointed in his
anonymity with a flashy name by the worshipful
press: "Back Street Strangler."

I lust after such killers!

What luck for me that such a celebrity had surfaced in my
favorite city. What luck that he has struck six times in
these very streets—slayer of the old and the infirm, who
have come in such numbers to live out their remaining days
in these warm climes. Ah, I would have crossed a continent
to snap him up, but he is here waiting for me. To his dark
history, detailed by no less than twenty criminologists,
and easily purloined by me through the computer in my New
Orleans lair, I have secretly added the crucial elements—
his name and mortal habitation.

A simple trick for a dark god who can read minds. Through
his blood-soaked dreams I found him . And tonight the
pleasure will be mind of finishing his illustrious career
in a dark cruel embrace, without a scintilla of moral
illumination.

Ah, Miami. The perfect place for this little Passion Play.

I always come back to Miami, the way I come back to New
Orleans. And I'm the only immortal now who hunts this
glorious corner of the Savage Garden, for as you have
seen, the others long ago deserted the coven house here—
unable to endure each other's company any more than I can
endure them.

But so much the better to have Miami all to myself.

I stood at the front windows of the rooms I maintained in
the swanky little Park Central Hotel on Ocean Drive, every
now and then letting my preternatural hearing sweep the
chambers around me in which the rich tourists enjoyed that
premium brand of solitude—complete privacy only steps from
the flashy street—my Champs Elysees of the moment, my Via
Veneto.

My strangler was almost ready to move from the realm of
him spasmodic and fragmentary visions into the land of
literal death. Ah, time to dress for the man of my dreams.

Picking from the usual wilderness of freshly opened
cardboard boxes, suitcases, and trunks, I chose a suit of
gray velvet, an old favorite, especially when the fabric
is thick, with only a subtle luster. Not very likely for
these warm nights, I had to admit, but then I don't feel
hot and cold the way humans do. And the coat was slim with
narrow lapels, very spare and rather like a hacking jacket
with its fitted waist, or, more to the point, like the
graceful old frock coats of earlier times. We immortals
forever fancy old-fashioned garments, garments that remind
us of the century in which we were Born to Darkness.
Sometimes you can gauge the true age of an immortal simply
by the cut of his clothes.

With me, it's also a matter of texture. The eighteenth
century was so shiny! I can't bear to be without a little
luster. And this handsome coat suited me perfectly with
the plain tight velvet pants. As for the white silk shirt,
it was a cloth so soft you could ball the garment in the
palm of your hand. Why should I wear anything else so
close to my indestructible and curiously sensitive skin?
Then the boots. Ah, they look like all my fine shoes of
late. Their soles are immaculate, for they so seldom touch
the mother earth.

My hair I shook loose into the usual thick mane of glowing
yellow shoulder-length waves. What would I look like to
mortals? I honestly don't know. I covered up my blue eyes,
as always, with black glasses, lest their radiance
mesmerize and entrance at random—a real nuisance—and over
my delicate white hands, with their telltale glassy
fingernails, I drew the usual pair of soft gray leather
gloves.

Ah, a bit of oily brown camouflage for the skin. I
smoothed the lotion over my cheekbones, over the bit of
neck and chest that was bare.

I inspected the finished product in the mirror. Still
irresistible. No wonder I'd been such a smash in my brief
career as a rock singer. And I've always been a howling
success as a vampire. Thank the gods I hadn't become
invisible in my airy wandering, a vagabond floating far
above the clouds, light as a cinder on the wind. I felt
like weeping when I thought of it.

The Big-Game Hunt always brought me back to the actual.

Track him, wait for him, catch him just at the moment that
he would bring death to his next victim, and take him
slowly, painfully, feasting upon his wickedness as you do
it, glimpsing through the filthy lens of his soul all his
earlier victims—

Please understand, there is no nobility in this. I don't
believe that rescuing one poor mortal from such a fiend
can conceivably save my soul. I have taken life too often—
unless one believes that the power of one good deed is
infinite. I don't know whether or not I believe that. What
I do believe is this: The evil of one murder is infinite,
and my guilt is like my beauty—eternal. I cannot be
forgiven, for there is no one to forgive me for all I've
done.