They said a child had died in the attic. Her clothes had
been discovered in the wall.
I wanted to go up there, and to lie down near the
wall, and be alone.
They'd seen her ghost now and then, the child. But
none of these vampires could see spirits, really, at least
not the way that I could see them. No matter. It wasn't
the company of the child I wanted. It was to be in that
place.
Nothing more could be gained from lingering near
Lestat. I'd come. I'd fulfilled my purpose. I couldn't
help him.
The sight of his sharply focused and unchanging eyes
unnerved me, and I was quiet inside and full of love for
those nearest me — my human children, my dark-haired
little Benji and my tender willowy Sybelle — but I was not
strong enough just yet to take them away.
I left the chapel.
I didn't even take note of who was there. The whole
convent was now the dwelling place of vampires. It was not
an unruly place, or a neglected place, but I didn't notice
who remained in the chapel when I left.
Lestat lay as he had all along, on the marble floor of
the chapel in front of the huge crucifix, on his side, his
hands slack, the left hand just below the right hand, its
fingers touching the marble lightly, as if with a purpose,
when there was no purpose at all. The fingers of his right
hand curled, making a little hollow in the palm where the
light fell, and that too seemed to have a meaning, but
there was no meaning.
This was simply the preternatural body lying there
without will or animation, no more purposeful than the
face, its expression almost defiantly intelligent, given
that months had passed in which Lestat had not moved.
The high stained-glass windows were dutifully draped
for him before sunrise. At night, they shone with all the
wondrous candles scattered about the fine statues and
relics which filled this once sanctified and holy place.
Little mortal children had heard Mass under this high
coved roof; a priest had sung out the Latin words from an
altar.
It was ours now. It belonged to him — Lestat, the man
who lay motionless on the marble floor.
Man. Vampire. Immortal. Child of Darkness. Any and all
are excellent words for him.
Looking over my shoulder at him, I never felt so much
like a child.
That's what I am. I fill out the definition, as if it
were encoded in me perfectly, and there had never been any
other genetic design.
I was perhaps seventeen years old when Marius made me
into a vampire. I had stopped growing by that time. For a
year, I'd been five feet six inches. My hands are as
delicate as those of a young woman, and I was beardless,
as we used to say in that time, the years of the sixteenth
century. Not a eunuch, no, not that, most certainly, but a
boy.
It was fashionable then for boys to be as beautiful as
girls. Only now does it seem something worthwhile, and
that's because I love the others — my own: Sybelle with
her woman's breasts and long girlish limbs, and Benji with
his round intense little Arab face.
I stood at the foot of the stairs. No mirrors here,
only the high brick walls stripped of their plaster, walls
that were old only for America, darkened by the damp even
inside the convent, all textures and elements here
softened by the simmering summers of New Orleans and her
clammy crawling winters, green winters I call them because
the trees here are almost never bare.
I was born in a place of eternal winter when one
compares it to this place. No wonder in sunny Italy I
forgot the beginnings altogether, and fashioned my life
out of the present of my years with Marius. "I don't
remember." It was a condition of loving so much vice, of
being so addicted to Italian wine and sumptuous meals, and
even the feel of the warm marble under my bare feet when
the rooms of the palazzo were sinfully, wickedly heated by
Marius's exorbitant fires.
His mortal friends ... human beings like me at that
time ... scolded constantly about these expenditures:
firewood, oil, candles. And for Marius only the finest
candles of beeswax were acceptable. Every fragrance was
significant.
Stop these thoughts. Memories can't hurt you now. You
came here for a reason and now you have finished, and you
must find those you love, your young mortals, Benji and
Sybelle, and you must go on.
Life was no longer a theatrical stage where Banquo's
ghost came again and again to seat himself at the grim
table.
My soul hurt.
Up the stairs. Lie for a little while in this brick
convent where the child's clothes were found. Lie with the
child, murdered here in this convent, so say the
rumormongers, the vampires who haunt these halls now, who
have come to see the great Vampire Lestat in his
Endymionlike sleep.
I felt no murder here, only the tender voices of nuns.
I went up the staircase, letting my body find its
human weight and human tread.
After five hundred years, I know such tricks. I could
frighten all the young ones — the hangers-on and the
gawkers — just as surely as the other ancient ones did it,
even the most modest, uttering words to evince their
telepathy, or vanishing when they chose to leave, or now
and then even making the building tremble with their
power — an interesting accomplishment even with these
walls eighteen inches thick with cypress sills that will
never rot.
He must like the fragrances here, I thought. Marius,
where is he? Before I had visited Lestat, I had not wanted
to talk very much to Marius, and had spoken only a few
civil words when I left my treasures in his charge.
After all, I had brought my children into a menagerie
of the Undead. Who better to safeguard them than my
beloved Marius, so powerful that none here dared question
his smallest request.
There is no telepathic link between us naturally —
Marius made me, I am forever his fledgling — but as soon
as this occurred to me, I realized without the aid of this
telepathic link that I could not feel the presence of
Marius in the building. I didn't know what had happened in
that brief interval when I knelt down to look at Lestat. I
didn't know where Marius was. I couldn't catch the
familiar human scents of Benji or Sybelle. A little stab
of panic paralyzed me.
I stood on the second story of the building. I leaned
against the wall, my eyes settling with determined calm on
the deeply varnished heart pine floor. The light made
pools of yellow on the boards.
Where were they, Benji and Sybelle? What had I done in
bringing them here, two ripe and glorious humans? Benji
was a spirited boy of twelve, Sybelle, a womanling of
twenty-five. What if Marius, so generous in his own soul,
had carelessly let them out of his sight?
"I'm here, young one." The voice was abrupt, soft,
welcome.
My Maker stood on the landing just below me, having
come up the steps behind me, or more truly, with his
powers, having placed himself there, covering the
preceding distance with silent and invisible speed.
"Master," I said with a little trace of a smile. "I
was afraid for them for a moment." It was an
apology. "This place makes me sad."
He nodded. "I have them, Armand," he said. "The city
seethes with mortals. There's food enough for all the
vagabonds wandering here. No one will hurt them. Even if I
weren't here to say so, no one would dare."
It was I who nodded now. I wasn't so sure, really.
Vampires are by their very nature perverse and do wicked
and terrible things simply for the sport of it. To kill
another's mortal pet would be a worthy entertainment for
some grim and alien creature, skirting the fringes here,
drawn by remarkable events.
"You're a wonder, young one," he said to me smiling.
Young one! Who else would call me this but Marius, my
Maker, and what is five hundred years to him? "You went
into the sun, child," he continued with the same legible
concern written on his kind face. "And you lived to tell
the tale."
"Into the sun, Master?" I questioned his words. But I
myself did not want to reveal any more. I did not want to
talk yet, to tell of what had happened, the legend of
Veronica's Veil and the Face of Our Lord emblazoned upon
it, and the morning when I had given up my soul with such
perfect happiness. What a fable it was.
He came up the steps to be near me, but kept a polite
distance. He has always been the gentleman, even before
there was such a word. In ancient Rome, they must have had
a term for such a person, infallibly good mannered, and
considerate as a point of honor, and wholly successful at
common courtesy to rich and poor alike. This was Marius,
and it had always been Marius, insofar as I could know.
He let his snow-white hand rest on the dull satiny
banister. He wore a long shapeless cloak of gray velvet,
once perfectly extravagant, now downplayed with wear and
rain, and his yellow hair was long like Lestat's hair,
full of random light and unruly in the damp, and even
studded with drops of dew from outside, the same dew
clinging to his golden eyebrows and darkening his long
curling eyelashes around his large cobalt-blue eyes.
There was something altogether more Nordic and icy
about him than there was about Lestat, whose hair tended
more to golden, for all its luminous highlights, and whose
eyes were forever prismatic, drinking up the colors around
him, becoming even a gorgeous violet with the slightest
provocation from the worshipful outside world.
In Marius, I saw the sunny skies of the northern
wilderness, eyes of steady radiance which rejected any
outside color, perfect portals to his own most constant
soul.
"Armand," he said. "I want you to come with me."
"Where is that, Master, come where?" I asked. I too
wanted to be civil. He had always, even after a struggle
of wits, brought such finer instincts out of me.
"To my house, Armand, where they are now, Sybelle and
Benji. Oh, don't fear for them for a second. Pandora's
with them. They are rather astonishing mortals, brilliant,
remarkably different, yet alike. They love you, and they
know so much and have come with you rather a long way."
I flushed with blood and color; the warmth was
stinging and unpleasant, and then as the blood danced back
away from the surface of my face, I felt cooler and
strangely enervated that I felt any sensations at all.
It was a shock being here and I wanted it to be over.
"Master, I don't know who I am in this new life," I
said gratefully. "Reborn? Confused?" I hesitated, but
there was no use stopping it. "Don't ask me to stay here
just now. Maybe some time when Lestat is himself again,
maybe when enough time has passed — . I don't know for
certain, only that I can't accept your kind invitation
now."
He gave me a brief accepting nod. With his hand he
made a little acquiescent gesture. His old gray cloak had
slipped off one shoulder. He seemed not to care about it.
His thin black wool clothes were neglected, lapels and
pockets trimmed in a careless gray dust. That was not
right for him.
He had a big shock of white silk at his throat that
made his pale face seem more colored and human than it
otherwise would. But the silk was torn as if by brambles.
In sum, he haunted the world in these clothes, rather than
was dressed in them. They were for a stumbler, not my old
Master.
I think he knew I was at a loss. I was looking up at
the gloom above me. I wanted to reach the attic of this
place, the half-concealed clothing of the dead child. I
wondered at this story of the dead child. I had the
impertinence to let my mind drift, though he was waiting.
He brought me back with his gentle words:
"Sybelle and Benji will be with me when you want
them," he said. "You can find us. We aren't far. You'll
hear the Appassionata when you want to hear it." He
smiled.
"You've given her a piano," I said. I spoke of golden
Sybelle. I had shut out the world from my preternatural
hearing, and I didn't want just yet to unstop my ears even
for the lovely sound of her playing, which I already
missed overly much.
As soon as we'd entered the convent, Sybelle had seen
a piano and asked in a whisper at my ear if she could play
it. It was not in the chapel where Lestat lay, but off in
another long empty room. I had told her it wasn't quite
proper, that it might disturb Lestat as he lay there, and
we couldn't know what he thought, or what he felt, or if
he was anguished and trapped in his own dreams.
"Perhaps when you come, you'll stay for a while,"
Marius said. "You'll like the sound of her playing my
piano, and maybe then we'll talk together, and you can
rest with us, and we can share the house for as long as
you like."
I didn't answer.
"It's palatial in a New World sort of way," he said
with a little mockery in his smile. "It's not far at all.
I have the most spacious gardens and old oaks, oaks far
older than those even out there on the Avenue, and all the
windows are doors. You know how I like it that way. It's
the Roman style. The house is open to the spring rain, and
the spring rain here is like a dream."
"Yes, I know," I whispered. "I think it's falling now,
isn't it?" I smiled.
"Well, I'm rather spattered with it, yes," he said
almost gaily. "You come when you want to. If not tonight,
then tomorrow ..."
"Oh, I'll be there tonight," I said. I didn't want to
offend him, not in the slightest, but Benji and Sybelle
had seen enough of white-faced monsters with velvet
voices. It was time to be off.
I looked at him rather boldly, enjoying it for a
moment, overcoming a shyness that had been our curse in
this modern world. In Venice of old, he had gloried in his
clothes as men did then, always so sharp and splendidly
embellished, the glass of fashion, to use the old graceful
phrase. When he crossed the Piazza San Marco in the soft
purple of evening, all turned to watch him pass. Red had
been his badge of pride, red velvet — a flowing cape, and
magnificently embroidered doublet, and beneath it a tunic
of gold silk tissue, so very popular in those times.
He'd had the hair of a young Lorenzo de' Medici, right
from the painted wall.
"Master, I love you, but now I must be alone," I
said. "You don't need me now, do you, Sir? How can you?
You never really did." Instantly I regretted it. The
words, not the tone, were impudent. And our minds being so
divided by intimate blood, I was afraid he'd
misunderstand.
"Cherub, I want you," he said forgivingly. "But I can
wait. Seems not long ago I spoke these same words when we
were together, and so I say them again."
I couldn't bring myself to tell him it was my season
for mortal company, how I longed just to be talking away
the night with little Benji, who was such a sage, or
listening to my beloved Sybelle play her sonata over and
over again. It seemed beside the point to explain any
further. And the sadness came over me again, heavily and
undeniably, of having come to this forlorn and empty
convent where Lestat lay, unable or unwilling to move or
speak, none of us knew.
"Nothing will come of my company just now, Master," I
said. "But you will grant me some key to finding you,
surely, so that when this time passes ..." I let my words
die.
"I fear for you!" he whispered suddenly, with great
warmth.
"Any more than ever before, Sir?" I asked.
He thought for a moment. Then he said, "Yes. You love
two mortal children. They are your moon and stars. Come
stay with me if only for a little while. Tell me what you
think of our Lestat and what's happened. Tell me perhaps,
if I promise to remain very quiet and not to press you,
tell me your opinion of all you've so recently seen."
"You touch on it delicately, Sir, I admire you. You
mean why did I believe Lestat when he said he had been to
Heaven and Hell, you mean what did I see when I looked at
the relic he brought back with him, Veronica's Veil."
"If you want to tell me. But more truly, I wish you
would come and rest."
I put my hand on top of his, marveling that in spite
of all I'd endured, my skin was almost as white as his.
"You will be patient with my children till I come,
won't you?" I asked. "They imagine themselves so
intrepidly wicked, coming here to be with me, whistling
nonchalantly in the crucible of the Undead, so to speak."
"Undead," he said, smiling reprovingly. "Such
language, and in my presence. You know I hate it."
He planted a kiss quickly on my cheek. It startled me,
and then I realized that he was gone.
"Old tricks!" I said aloud, wondering if he were still
near enough to hear me, or whether he had shut up his ears
to me as fiercely as I shut mine to the outside world.
I looked off, wanting the quiet, dreaming of bowers
suddenly, not in words but in images, the way my old mind
would do it, wanting to lie down in garden beds among
growing flowers, wanting to press my face to earth and
sing softly to myself.
The spring outside, the warmth, the hovering mist that
would be rain. All this I wanted. I wanted the swampy
forests beyond, but I wanted Sybelle and Benji, too, and
to be gone, and to have some will to carry on.
Ah, Armand, you always lack this very thing, the will.
Don't let the old story repeat itself now. Arm yourself
with all that's happened.
Another was nearby.
It seemed so awful to me suddenly, that some immortal
whom I didn't know should intrude here on my random
private thoughts, perhaps to make a selfish approximation
of what I felt.
It was only David Talbot.
He came from the chapel wing, through the bridge rooms
of the convent that connect it to the main building where
I stood at the top of the staircase to the second floor.
I saw him come into the hallway. Behind him was the
glass of the door that led to the gallery, and beyond that
the soft mingled gold and white light of the courtyard
below.
"It's quiet now," he said. "And the attic's empty and
you know that you can go there, of course."
"Go away," I said. I felt no anger, only the honest
wish to have my thoughts unread and my emotions left
alone.
With remarkable self-possession he ignored me, then
said:
"Yes, I am afraid of you, a little, but then terribly
curious too."
"Oh, I see, so that excuses it, that you followed me
here?"
"I didn't follow you, Armand," he said. "I live here."
"Ah, I'm sorry then," I admitted. "I hadn't known. I
suppose I'm glad of it. You guard him. He's never alone."
I meant Lestat of course.
"Everyone's afraid of you," he said calmly. He had
taken up a position only a few feet away, casually folding
his arms. "You know, it's quite a study, the lore and
habits of the vampires."
"Not to me," I said.
"Yes, I realize that," he said. "I was only musing,
and I hope you'll forgive me. It was about the child in
the attic, the child they said was murdered. It's a tall
story, about a very small little person. Maybe if your
luck is better than that of everyone else, you'll see the
ghost of the child whose clothes were shut up in the
wall."
"Do you mind if I look at you?" I said. "I mean if
you're going to dip your beak into my mind with such
abandon? We met some time ago before all this happened —
Lestat, the Heavenly Journey, this place. I never really
took stock of you. I was indifferent, or too polite, I
don't know which."
I was surprised to hear such heat in my voice. I was
volatile, and it wasn't David Talbot's fault.
"I'm thinking of the conventional knowledge about
you," I said. "That you weren't born in this body, that
you were an elderly man when Lestat knew you, that this
body you inhabit now belonged to a clever soul who could
hop from living being to living being, and there set up
shop with his own trespassing soul."
He gave me a rather disarming smile.
"So Lestat said," he answered. "So Lestat wrote. It's
true, of course. You know it is. You've known since you
saw me before."
"Three nights we spent together," I said. "And I never
really questioned you. I mean I never really even looked
directly into your eyes."
"We were thinking of Lestat then."
"Aren't we now?"
"I don't know," he said.
"David Talbot," I said, measuring him coldly with my
eyes, "David Talbot, Superior General of the Order of
Psychic Detectives known as the Talamasca, had been
catapulted into the body in which he now walks." I didn't
know whether I paraphrased or made it up as I went
along. "He'd been entrenched or chained inside it, made a
prisoner by so many ropey veins, and then tricked into a
vampire as a fiery unstanchable blood invaded his lucky
anatomy, sealing his soul up in it as it transformed him
into an immortal — a man of dark bronzed skin and dry,
lustrous and thick black hair."
"I think you have it right," he said with indulgent
politeness.
"A handsome gent," I went on, "the color of caramel,
moving with such catlike ease and gilded glances that he
makes me think of all things once delectable, and now a
potpourri of scent: cinnamon, clove, mild peppers and
other spices golden, brown or red, whose fragrances can
spike my brain and plunge me into erotic yearnings that
live now, more than ever, to play themselves out. His skin
must smell like cashew nuts and thick almond creams. It
does."
He laughed. "I get your point."
I had shocked myself. I was wretched for a
moment. "I'm not sure I get myself," I said
apologetically.
"I think it's plain," he said. "You want me to leave
you alone."
I saw the preposterous contradictions in all this at
once.
"Look," I whispered quickly. "I'm deranged," I
whispered. "My senses cross, like so many threads to make
a knot: taste, see, smell, feel. I'm rampant."
I wondered idly and viciously if I could attack him,
take him, bring him down under my greater craft and
cunning and taste his blood without his consent.
"I'm much too far along the road for that," he
said, "and why would you chance such a thing?"
What self-possession. The older man in him did indeed
command the sturdier younger flesh, the wise mortal with
an iron authority over all things eternal and
supernaturally powerful. What a blend of energies! Nice to
drink his blood, to take him against his will. There is no
such fun on Earth like the raping of an equal.
"I don't know," I said, ashamed. Rape is unmanly. "I
don't know why I insult you. You know, I wanted to leave
quickly. I mean I wanted to visit the attic, and then be
out of here. I wanted to avoid this sort of infatuation.
You are a wonder, and you think me a wonder, and it's
rich."
I let my eyes pass over him. I'd been blind to him
when we met last, that was most true.
He dressed to kill. With the cleverness of olden
times, when men could preen like peacocks, he'd chosen
golden sepia and umber colors for his clothes. He was
smart and clean and fretted all over with careful bits of
pure gold, in a wristband timepiece and buttons and a
slender pin for his modern tie, that tailored spill of
color men wear in this age, as if to let us grab them all
the more easily by its noose. Stupid ornament. Even his
shirt of polished cotton was tawny and full of something
of the sun and the warmed earth. Even his shoes were
brown, glossy as beetles' backs.
He came towards me.
"You know what I'm going to ask," he said. "Don't
wrestle with these unarticulated thoughts, these new
experiences, all this overwhelming understanding. Make a
book out of it for me."
I couldn't have predicted that this would be his
question. I was surprised, sweetly so, but nevertheless
taken off guard.
"Make a book? I? Armand?"
I went towards him, turned sharply and fled up the
steps to the attic, skirting the third floor and then
entering the fourth.
The air was thick and warm here. It was a place daily
baked by the sun. All was dry and sweet, the wood like
incense and the floors splintery.
"Little girl, where are you?" I asked.
"Child, you mean," he said.
He had come up behind me, taking a bit of time for
courtesy's sake.
He added, "She was never here."
"How do you know?"
"If she were a ghost, I could call her," he said.
I looked over my shoulder. "You have that power? Or is
this just what you want to say to me right now? Before you
venture further, let me warn you that we almost never have
the power to see spirits."
"I'm altogether new," David said. "I'm unlike any
others. I've come into the Dark World with different
faculties. Dare I say, we, our species, vampires, have
evolved?"
"The conventional word is stupid," I said. I moved
further into the attic. I spied a small chamber with
plaster and peeling roses, big floppy prettily drawn
Victorian roses with pale fuzzy green leaves. I went into
the chamber. Light came from a high window out of which a
child could not have seen. Merciless, I thought.
"Who said that a child died here?" I said. All was
clean beneath the soil of years. There was no presence. It
seemed perfect and just, no ghost to comfort me. Why
should a ghost come from some savory rest for my sake?
So I could cuddle up perhaps to the memory of her, her
tender legend. How are children murdered in orphanages
where only nuns attend? I never thought of women as so
cruel. Dried up, without imagination perhaps, but not
aggressive as we are, to kill.
I turned round and round. Wooden lockers lined one
wall, and one locker stood open, and there the tumbled
shoes were, little brown Oxfords, as they called them,
with black strings, and now I beheld, where it had been
behind me, the broken and frayed hole from which they'd
ripped her clothes. All fallen there, moldy and wrinkled
they lay, her clothes.
A stillness settled on me as if the dust of this place
were a fine ice, coming down from the high peaks of
haughty and monstrously selfish mountains to freeze all
living things, this ice, to close up and stop forever all
that breathed or felt or dreamed or lived.
He spoke in poetry:
"`Fear no more the heat of the sun,'" he
whispered. "Nor the furious winter's rages. Fear no
more ...'"
I winced with pleasure. I knew the verses. I loved
them.
I genuflected, as if before the Sacrament, and touched
her clothes. "And she was little, no more than five, and
she didn't die here at all. No one killed her. Nothing so
special for her."
"How your words belie your thoughts," he said.
"Not so, I think of two things simultaneously. There's
a distinction in being murdered. I was murdered. Oh, not
by Marius, as you might think, but by others."
I knew I spoke soft and in an assuming way, because
this wasn't meant for pure drama.
"I'm trimmed in memories as if in old furs. I lift my
arm and the sleeve of memory covers it. I look around and
see other times. But you know what frightens me the most —
it is that this state, like so many others with me, will
prove the verge of nothing but extend itself over
centuries."
"What do you really fear? What did you want from
Lestat when you came here?"
"David, I came to see him. I came to find out how it
was with him, and why he lies there, unmoving. I came — ."
I wasn't going to say any more.
His glossy nails made his hands look ornamental and
special, caressive, comely and lovely with which to be
touched. He picked up a small dress, torn, gray, spotted
with bits of mean lace. Everything dressed in flesh can
yield a dizzying beauty if you concentrate on it long
enough, and his beauty leapt out without apology.
"Just clothes." Flowered cotton, a bit of velvet with
a puffed sleeve no bigger than an apple for the century of
bare arms by day and night. "No violence at all
surrounding her," he said as if it were a pity. "Just a
poor child, don't you think, and sad by nature as well as
circumstance."
"And why were they walled up, tell me that! What sin
did these little dresses commit?" I sighed. "Good God,
David Talbot, why don't we let the little girl have her
romance, her fame? You make me angry. You say you can see
ghosts. You find them pleasant? You like to talk with
them. I could tell you about a ghost — ."
"When will you tell me? Look, don't you see the trick
of a book?" He stood up, and dusted off his knee with his
right hand. In his left was her gathered dress. Something
about the whole configuration bothered me, a tall creature
holding a little girl's crumpled dress.
"You know, when you think of it," I said, turning
away, so I wouldn't see the dress in his hand, "there's no
good reason under God for little girls and little boys.
Think of it, the other tender issue of mammals. Among
puppies or kitten or colts, does one find gender? It's
never an issue. The half-grown fragile thing is sexless.
There is no determination. There is nothing as splendid to
look at as a little boy or girl. My head is so full of
notions. I rather think I'll explode if I don't do
something, and you say make a book for you. You think it's
possible, you think ..."
"What I think is that when you make a book, you tell
the tale as you would like to know it!"
"I see no great wisdom in that."
"Well, then think, for most speech is a mere issue of
our feelings, a mere explosion. Listen, note the way that
you make these outbursts."
"I don't want to."
"But you do, but they are not the words you want to
read. When you write, something different happens. You
make a tale, no matter how fragmented or experimental or
how disregarding of all conventional and helpful forms.
Try this for me. No, no, I have a better idea."
"What?"
"Come down with me into my rooms. I live here now, I
told you. Through my windows you can see the trees. I
don't live like our friend Louis, wandering from dusty
corner to dusty corner, and then back to his flat in the
Rue Royale when he's convinced himself once more and for
the thousandth time that no one can harm Lestat. I have
warm rooms. I use candles for old light. Come down and let
me write it, your story. Talk to me. Pace, and rant if you
will, or rail, yes, rail, and let me write it, and even
so, the very fact that I write, this in itself will make
you make a form out of it. You'll begin to ..."
"What?"
"To tell me what happened. How you died and how you
lived."
"Expect no miracles, perplexing scholar. I didn't die
in New York that morning. I almost died."
He had me faintly curious, but I could never do what
he wanted. Nevertheless he was honest, amazingly so, as
far as I could measure, and therefore sincere.
"Ah, so, I didn't mean literally. I meant that you
should tell me what it was like to climb so high into the
sun, and suffer so much, and, as you said, to discover in
your pain all these memories, these connecting links. Tell
me! Tell me."
"Not if you mean to make it coherent," I said crossly.
I gauged his reaction. I wasn't bothering him. He wanted
to talk more.
"Make it coherent? Armand, I'll simply write down what
you say." He made his words simple yet curiously
passionate.
"Promise?"
I flashed on him a playful look. Me! To do that.
He smiled. He wadded up the little dress and then
dropped it carefully so it might fall in the middle of the
pile of her old clothes.
"I'll not alter one syllable," he said. "Come be with
me, and talk to me, and be my love." Again, he smiled.
Suddenly he came towards me, much in the aggressive
manner in which I'd thought earlier to approach him. He
slipped his hands under my hair, and felt of my face, and
then he gathered up the hair and he put his face down into
my curls, and he laughed. He kissed my cheek.
"Your hair's like something spun from amber, as if the
amber would melt and could be drawn from candle flames in
long fine airy threads and let to dry that way to make all
these shining tresses. You're sweet, boylike and pretty as
a girl. I wish I had one glimpse of you in antique velvet
the way you were for him, for Marius. I wish I could see
for one moment how it was when you dressed in stockings
and wore a belted doublet sewn with rubies. Look at you,
the frosty child. My love doesn't even touch you."
This wasn't true.
His lips were hot, and I could feel the fangs under
them, feel the urgency suddenly in his fingers pressing
against my scalp. It sent the shivers through me, and my
body tensed and then shuddered, and it was sweet beyond
prediction. I resented this lonely intimacy, resented it
enough to transform it, or rid myself of it utterly. I'd
rather die or be away, in the dark, simple and lonely with
common tears.
From the look in his eyes, I thought he could love
without giving anything. Not a connoisseur, just a blood
drinker.
"You make me hungry," I whispered. "Not for you but
for one who is doomed and yet alive. I want to hunt. Stop
it. Why do you touch me? Why be so gentle?"
"Everyone wants you," he said.
"Oh, I know. Everyone would ravage a guilty cunning
child! Everyone would have a laughing boy who knows his
way around the block. Kids make better food than women,
and girls are all too much like women, but young boys?
They're not like men, are they?"
"Don't mock me. I meant I wanted only to touch you, to
feel how soft you are, how eternally young."
"Oh, that's me, eternally young," I said. "You speak
nonsense words for one so pretty yourself. I'm going out.
I have to feed. And when I've finished with that, when I'm
full and hot, then I'll come and I'll talk to you and tell
you anything you want." I stepped back just a little from
him, feeling the quivers through me as his fingers
released my hair. I looked at the empty white window,
peering too high for the trees.
"They could see nothing green here, and it's spring
outside, southern spring. I can smell it through the
walls. I want to look just for a moment on flowers. To
kill, to drink blood and to have flowers."
"Not good enough. Want to make the book," he
said. "Want to make it now and want you to come with me. I
won't hang around forever."
"Oh, nonsense, of course you will. You think I'm a
doll, don't you? You think I'm cute and made of poured
wax, and you'll stay as long as I stay."
"You're a bit mean, Armand. You look like an angel,
and talk like a common thug."
"Such arrogance! I thought you wanted me."
"Only on certain terms."
"You lie, David Talbot," I said.
I headed past him for the stairs. Cicadas sang in the
night as they often do, to no clock, in New Orleans.
Through the nine-pane windows of the stairwell, I
glimpsed the flowering trees of spring, a bit of vine
curling on a porch top.
He followed. Down and down we went, walking like
regular men, down to the first floor, and out the
sparkling glass doors and into the broad lighted space of
Napoleon Avenue with its damp, sweet park of green down
the middle, a park thick with carefully planted flowers
and old gnarled and humble, bending trees.
The whole picture moved with the subtle river winds,
and wet mist swirled but would not fall into rain itself,
and tiny green leaves drifted down like wilting ashes to
the ground. Soft soft southern spring. Even the sky seemed
pregnant with the season, lowering yet blushing with
reflected light, giving birth to the mist from all its
pores.
Strident perfume rose from the gardens right and left,
from purple Four O'Clocks, as mortals call them here, a
rampant flower like unto weed, but infinitely sweet, and
the wild irises stabbing upwards like blades out of the
black mud, throaty petals monstrously big, battering
themselves on old walls and concrete steps, and then as
always there were roses, roses of old women and roses of
the young, roses too whole for the tropical night, roses
coated with poison.
There had been streetcars here once on this center
strip of grass. I knew it, that the tracks had run along
this wide deep green space where I walked ahead of him,
slumward, riverward, deathward, bloodward. He came after
me. I could close my eyes as I walked, never losing a
step, and see the streetcars.
"Come on, follow me," I said, describing what he did,
not inviting him.
Blocks and blocks within seconds. He kept up. Very
strong. The blood of an entire Royal Vampire court was
inside him, no doubt of it. Count on Lestat to make the
most lethal of monsters, that is, after his initial
seductive blunders — Nicolas, Louis, Claudia — not a
single one of the three able to take care of themselves
alone, and two perished, and one lingering and perhaps the
weakest vampire yet walking in the great world.
I looked back. His tight, polished brown face startled
me. He looked lacquered all over, waxed, buffed, and once
again I thought of spicy things, of the meat of candied
nuts, and delicious aromas, of chocolates sweet with sugar
and dark rich butterscotch, and it seemed a good thing
suddenly to maybe grab ahold of him.
But this was no substitute for one rotten, cheap, ripe
and odoriferous mortal. And guess what? I pointed. "Over
there."
He looked as I directed him. He saw the sagging line
of old buildings. Mortals everywhere lurked, slept, sat,
dined, wandered, amid tiny narrow stairs, behind peeling
walls and under cracked ceilings.
I had found one, most perfect in his wickedness, a
great flurry of hateful embers, of malice and greed and
contempt smoldering as he waited for me.
We'd come to Magazine Street and passed it, but we
were not at the river, only almost, and this was a street
I had no recollection of, or knowledge of, in my
wanderings of this city — their city, Louis's and
Lestat's — just a narrow street with these houses the
color of driftwood under the moon and windows hung with
makeshift coverings, and inside there was this one
slouching, arrogant, vicious mortal fixed to a television
set and guzzling malt from a brown bottle, ignoring the
roaches and the pulsing heat that pressed in from the open
window, this ugly, sweating, filthy and irresistible
thing, this flesh and blood for me.
The house was so alive with vermin and tiny despicable
things that it seemed no more than a shell surrounding
him, crackling and friable and the same color in all its
shadows as a forest. No antiseptic modern standards here.
Even the furniture rotted in the trashy clutter and damp.
Mildew covered the grinding white refrigerator.
Only the reeky personal bed and rags gave off the clue
to reigning domesticity.
It was a proper nest in which to find this fowl, this
ugly bird, thick rich pluckable, devourable sack of bones
and blood and shabby plumage.
I pushed the door to one side, the human stench rising
like a swirl of gnats, and thereby put it off its hinges,
but not with much sound.
I walked on newspapers strewn on painted wood. Orange
peels turned to brownish leather. Roaches running. He
didn't even look up. His swollen drunken face was blue and
eerie, black eyebrows thick and unkempt, and yet he looked
quite possibly a bit angelic, due to the light from the
tube.
He flicked the magic plastic twanger in his hand to
make the channels change, and the light flared and
flickered soundlessly, and then he let the song rise, a
band playing, a travesty, people clapping.
Trashy noises, trashy images, like the trash all
around him. All right, I want you. No one else does.
He looked up at me, a boy invader, David too far off
for him to see, waiting.
I pushed the television set to the side. It teetered,
then fell onto the floor, its parts breaking, like so many
jars of energy were inside, and now splinters of glass.
A momentary fury overcame him, charging his face with
sluggish recognition.
He rose up, arms out, and came at me.
Before I sank my teeth, I noticed that he had long
tangled black hair. Dirty but rich. He wore it back by
means of a knotted bit of rag at the base of his neck and
then straggling down his checkered shirt in a thick tail.
Meantime, he had enough syrupy and beer-besotted blood
in him for two vampires, delicious, ugly, and a raging
fighting heart, and so much bulk it was like riding a bull
to be on him.
In the midst of the feed, all odors rise to sweetness,
even the most rancid. I thought I would quietly die of
joy, as always.
I sucked hard enough to fill my mouth, letting the
blood roll over my tongue, and then to fill my stomach, if
I have one, but above all just to stanch this greedy dirty
thirst, but not hard enough to slow him down.
He swooned and fought, and did the stupid thing of
tearing at my fingers, and then the most dangerous and
clumsy thing of trying to find my eyes. I shut them tight
and let him press with his greasy thumbs. It did him no
good. I am an impregnable little boy. You can not blind
the blind. I was too full of blood to care. Besides it
felt good. Those weak things that would scratch you do
only stroke you.
His life went by as if everyone he ever loved were
riding a roller coaster under snazzy stars. Worse than a
Van Gogh painting. You never know the palette of the one
you kill until the mind disgorges its finest colors.
Soon enough he sank down. I went with him. I had my
left arm all the way around him now, and I lay childlike
against his big muscular belly, and I drew the blood out
now in the blindest gushes, pressing everything he thought
and saw and felt down into only color, just give me color,
pure orange, and just for a second, as he died — as the
death passed me by, like a big rolling ball of black
strength which turns out to be nothing actually, nothing
but smoke or something even less than that — as this death
came into me and went out again like the wind, I thought,
Do I by crushing everything that he is deprive him of a
final knowing?
Nonsense, Armand. You know what the spirits know, what
the angels know. The bastard is going home! To Heaven. To
Heaven that would not have you, and might never.
In death, he looked most excellent.
I sat beside him. I wiped my mouth, not that there was
a drop to wipe. Vampires slobber blood only in motion
pictures. Even the most mundane immortal is far too
skilled to spill a drop. I wiped my mouth because his
sweat was on my lips and on my face, and I wanted it to go
away.
I admired him, however, that he was big and wondrously
hard for all his seeming roundness. I admired the black
hair clinging to his wet chest where the shirt had been so
inevitably torn away.
His black hair was something to behold. I ripped the
knotted cloth that tied it. It was as full and thick as a
woman's hair.
Making sure he was dead, I wrapped its length around
my left hand and purposed to pull the whole mass from his
scalp.
David gasped. "Must you do this?" he asked me.
"No," I said. Even then a few thousand strands had
ripped loose from the scalp, each with only its tiny
blooded root winking in the air like a tiny firefly. I
held the mop for a moment and then let it slip out of my
fingers and fall down behind his turned head.
Those unanchored hairs fell sloppily over his coarse
cheek. His eyes were wet and wakeful-seeming, dying jelly.
David turned and went out into the little street. Cars
roared and clattered by. A ship on the river sang with a
steam calliope.
I came up behind him. I wiped the dust off me. One
blow and I could have set the whole house to falling down,
just caving in on the putrid filth within, dying softly
amid other houses so no one indoors here would even know,
all this moist wood merely caving.
I could not get the taste and smell of this sweat
gone.
"Why did you so object to my pulling out his hair?" I
asked. "I only wanted to have it, and he's dead and beyond
caring and no one else will miss his black hair."
He turned with a sly smile and took my measure.
"You frighten me, the way you look," I said. "Have I
so carelessly revealed myself to be a monster? You know,
my blessed mortal Sybelle, when she is not playing the
Sonata by Beethoven called the Appassionata, watches me
feed all the time. Do you want me to tell my story now?"
I glanced back at the dead man on his side, his
shoulder sagging. On the windowsill beyond and above him
stood a blue glass bottle and in it was an orange flower.
Isn't that the damnedest thing?
"Yes, I do want your story," David said. "Come, let's
go back together. I only asked you not to take his hair
for one reason."
"Yes?" I asked. I looked at him. Rather genuine
curiosity. "What was the reason then? I was only going to
pull out all his hair and throw it away."
"Like pulling off the wings of a fly," he offered
seemingly without judgment.
"A dead fly," I said. I deliberately smiled. "Come
now, why the fuss?"
"I wanted to see if you'd listen to me," he
said. "That's all. Because if you did then it might be all
right between us. And you stopped. And it is." He turned
around and took my arm.
"I don't like you!" I said.
"Oh, yes, you do, Armand," he answered. "Let me write
it. Pace and rail and rant. You're very high and mighty
right now because you have those two splendid little
mortals hanging on your every gesture, and they're like
acolytes to a god. But you want to tell me the story, you
know you do. Come on!"
I couldn't stop myself from laughing. "Have these
tactics worked for you in the past?"
Now it was his turn to laugh and he did, good-
naturedly. "No, I suppose not," he said. "But let me put
it to you this way, write it for them."
"For whom?"
"For Benji and Sybelle." He shrugged. "No?"
I didn't answer.
Write the story for Benji and Sybelle. My mind raced
forwards, to some cheerful and wholesome room, where we
three would be gathered years hence — I, Armand,
unchanged, boy teacher — and Benji and Sybelle in their
mortal prime, Benji grown into a sleek tall gentleman with
an Arab's ink-eyed allure and his favorite cheroot in his
hand, a man of great expectation and opportunity, and my
Sybelle, a curvaceous and full regal-bodied woman by then,
and an even greater concert pianist than she could be now,
her golden hair framing a woman's oval face and fuller
womanish lips and eyes full of entsagang and secret
radiance.
Could I dictate the story in this room and give them
the book? This book dictated to David Talbot? Could I, as
I set them free from my alchemical world, give them this
book? Go forth my children, with all the wealth and
guidance I could bestow, and now this book I wrote so long
ago for you with David.
Yes, said my soul. Yet I turned, and ripped the black
scalp of hair from my victim and stomped on it with a
Rumpelstiltskin foot.
David didn't flinch. Englishmen are so polite.
"Very well," I said. "I'll tell you my story."
His rooms were on the second floor, not far from where
I'd paused at the top of the staircase. What a change from
the barren and unheated hallways! He'd made a library for
himself and with tables and chairs. A brass bed was there,
dry and clean.
"These are her rooms," he said. "Don't you remember?"
"Dora," I said. I breathed her scent suddenly. Why, it
was all around me. But all her personal things were gone.
These were his books, they had to be. They were new
spiritual explorers — Dannion Brinkley, Hilarion, Melvin
Morse, Brian Weiss, Matthew Fox, the Urantia book. Add to
this old texts — Cassiodorus, St. Teresa of Avila, Gregory
of Tours, the Veda, Talmud, Torah, Kama Sutra — all in
original tongues. He had a few obscure novels, plays,
poetry.
"Yes." He sat down at the table. "I don't need the
light. Do you want it?"
"I don't know what to tell you."
"Ah," he said. He took out his mechanical pen. He
opened a notebook with startlingly white paper scored with
fine green lines. "You will know what to tell me." He
looked up at me.
I stood hugging myself, as it were, letting my head
fall as if it could drop right off me and I would die. My
hair fell long about me.
I thought of Sybelle and Benjamin, my quiet girl and
exuberant boy.
"Did you like them, David, my children?" I asked.
"Yes, the first moment I saw them, when you brought
them in. Everyone did. Everyone looked lovingly and
respectfully at them. Such poise, such charm. I think we
all dream of such confidants, faithful mortal companions
of compelling grace, who aren't screaming mad. They love
you, yet they are neither terrified nor entranced."
I didn't move. I didn't speak. I shut my eyes. I heard
in my heart the swift, bold march of the Appassionata,
those rumbling, incandescent waves of music, full of
throbbing and brittle metal, Appassionata. Only it was in
my head. No golden long-limbed Sybelle.
"Light the candles that you have," I said
timidly. "Will you do that for me? It would be sweet to
have many candles, and look, Dora's lace is hanging still
on the windows, fresh and clean. I am a lover of lace,
that is Brussels point de gaze, or very like it, yes, I'm
rather mad for it."
"Of course, I'll light the candles," he said.
I had my back to him. I heard the sharp delicious
crack of a small wooden match. I smelt it burn, and then
came the liquid fragrance of the nodding wick, the curling
wick, and the light rose upwards, finding the cypress
boards of the stripped wooden ceiling above us. Another
crack, another series of tiny sweet soft crackling sounds,
and the light swelled and came down over me and fell just
short of brightness along the shadowy wall.
"Why did you do it, Armand?" he said. "Oh, the Veil
has Christ on it, in some form, no doubt of it, it did
seem to be the Holy Veil of Veronica, and God knows,
thousands of others believed it, yes, but why in your
case, why? It was blazingly beautiful, yes, I grant you
that, Christ with His thorns and His blood, and His eyes
gazing right at us, both of us, but why did you believe it
so completely, Armand, after so long? Why did you go to
Him? That's what you tried to do, didn't you?"
I shook my head. I made my words soft and pleading.
"Back up, scholar," I said, turning around
slowly. "Mind your page. This is for you, and for Sybelle.
Oh, it's for my little Benji too. But in a way, it's my
symphony for Sybelle. The story begins a long time ago.
Maybe I've never truly realized how long ago, until this
very moment. You listen and write. Let me be the one to
cry and to rant and to rail."