2

Two years passed before I was strong enough to board a ship for Louisiana. And I was still badly crippled, still scarred. But I had to leave Europe, where no whisper had come to me of my lost Gabrielle or of the great and powerful Marius, who had surely rendered his judgment upon me.

I had to go home. And home was New Orleans, where the warmth was, where the flowers never stopped blooming, where I still owned, through my never ending supply of "coin of the realm," a dozen empty old mansions with rotting white columns and sagging porches round which I could roam.

And I spent the last years of the 1800s in complete seclusion in the old Garden District a block from the Lafayette Cemetery, in the finest of my houses, slumbering beneath towering oaks.

I read by candle or oil lamp all the books I could procure. I might as well have been Gabrielle trapped in her castle bedroom, save there was no furniture here. And the stacks of books reached to the ceiling in one room after another as I went on to the next. Now and then I mustered enough stamina to break into a library or an old bookstore for new volumes, but less and less I went out. I wrote off for periodicals. I hoarded candles and bottles and tin cans of oil.

I do not remember when it became the twentieth century, only that everything was uglier and darker, and the beauty I'd known in the old eighteenth-century days seemed more than ever some kind of fanciful idea. The bourgeois ran the world now upon dreary principles and with a distrust of the sensuality and the excess that the ancient regime had so loved.

But my vision and thoughts were getting ever more clouded. I no longer hunted humans. And a vampire cannot thrive without human blood, human death. I survived by luring the garden animals of the old neighborhood, the pampered dogs and cats. And when they couldn't be got easily, well, then there was always the vermin that I could call to me like the Pied Piper, fat long-tailed gray rats.

One night I forced myself to make the long trek through the quiet streets to a shabby little theater called the Happy Hour near the waterfront slums. I wanted to see the new silent moving pictures. I was wrapped in a greatcoat with a muffler hiding my gaunt face. I wore gloves to hide my skeletal hands. The sight of the daytime sky even in this imperfect film terrified me. But it seemed the dreary tones of black and white were perfect for a colorless age.

I did not think about other immortals. Yet now and then a vampire would appear-some orphaned fledgling who had stumbled on my lair, or a wanderer come in search of the legendary Lestat, begging for secrets, power. Horrid, these intrusions.

Even the timbre of the supernatural voice shattered my nerves, drove me into the farthest corner. Yet no matter how great the pain, I scanned each new mind for knowledge of my Gabrielle. I never discovered any. Nothing to do after that but ignore the poor human victims the fiend would bring in the vain hope of restoring me.

But these encounters were over soon enough. Frightened, aggrieved, shouting curses, the intruder would depart, leaving me in blessed silence.

I'd slip a little deeper away from things, just lying there in the dark.

I wasn't even reading much anymore. And when I did read, I read the Black Mask magazine. I read the stories of the ugly nihilistic men of the twentieth century -- the gray-clad crooks and the bank robbers and the detectives -- and I tried to remember things. But I was so weak. I was so tired.

And then early one evening, Armand came.

I thought at first it was a delusion. He was standing so still in the ruined parlor, looking younger than ever with his short auburn cap of twentieth-century hair and narrow little, suit of dark cloth.

It had to be an illusion, this figure coming into the parlor and looking down at me as I lay on my back on the floor by the broken French window reading Sam Spade by the light of the moon. Except for one thing. If I were going to conjure up an imaginary visitor, it certainly wouldn't have been Armand.

I glanced at him and some vague shame passed over me, that I was so ugly, that I was no more than a skeleton with bulging eyes lying there. Then I went back to reading about the Maltese Falcon, my lips moving to speak Sam Spade's lines.

When I looked up again, Armand was still there. It might have been the same night, or the next night, for all I knew.

He was talking about Louis. He had been for some time.

And I realized it was a lie he'd told me in Paris about Louis. Louis had been with Armand all these years. And Louis had been looking for me. Louis had been downtown in the old city looking for me near the town house where we had lived for so long. Louis had come finally to this very place and seen me through the windows.

I tried to imagine it. Louis alive. Louis here, so close, and I had not even known it.

I think I laughed a little. I couldn't keep it clear in my mind that Louis wasn't burnt up. But it was really wonderful that Louis still lived. It was wonderful that there existed still that handsome face, the poignant expression, that tender and faintly imploring voice. My beautiful Louis surviving, instead of dead and gone with Claudia and Nicki.

But then maybe he was dead. Why should I believe Armand? I went back to reading by the moonlight, wishing the garden out there hadn't gotten so high. A good thing for Armand to do, I told him, would be to go out there and pull down some of those vines, since Armand was so strong. The morning-glory vines and the wisteria were dripping off the upstairs porches and they blocked out the moonlight and then there were the old black oaks that had been here when there was nothing but swamp.

I don't think I actually suggested this to Armand.

And I only vaguely remember Armand letting me know that Louis was leaving him and he, Armand, did not want to go on. Hollow he sounded. Dry. Yet he gathered the moonlight to him as he stood there. And his voice still had its old resonance, its pure undertone of pain.

Poor Armand. And you told me Louis was dead. Go dig a room for yourself under the Lafayette Cemetery. It's just up the street.

No words spoken. No audible laughter, just the secret enjoyment of laughter in me. I remember one clear image of him stranded in the middle of the dirty empty room, looking at the walls of books on all sides. The rain had bled down from leaks in the roof and melded the books together like papier-mach�� bricks. And I noticed it distinctly when I saw him standing there against the backdrop of it. And I knew all the rooms in the house were walled in books like this. I hadn't thought about it until that moment, when he started to look at it. I hadn't been in the other rooms in years.

It seems he came back several times after that.

I didn't see him, but I would hear him moving through the garden outside, looking for me with his mind, like a beam of light.

Louis had gone away to the west.

One time, when I was lying in the rubble under the foundations, Armand came to the grating and peered in at me, and I did see him, and he hissed at me and called me ratcatcher.

You've gone mad -- you, the one who knew everything, the one who scoffed at us! You're mad and you feed on the rats. You know, in France in the old days what they called your kind, you country lords, they called you harecatchers, because you hunted the hare so you wouldn't starve. And now what are you in this house, a ragged haunt, a ratcatcher. You're mad as the ancient ones who cease to talk sense arid jabber at the wind! And yet you hunt the rats as you were born to do.

Again I laughed. I laughed and laughed. I remembered the wolves and I laughed.

"You always make me laugh," I told him. "I would have laughed at you under that cemetery in Paris, except it didn't seem the kind thing to do. And even when you cursed me and blamed me for all the stories about us, that was funny too. If you hadn't been about to throw me off the tower I would have laughed. You always make me laugh."

Delicious it was, the hatred between us, or so I thought. Such unfamiliar excitement, to have him there to ridicule and despise.

Yet suddenly the scene about me began to change. I wasn't lying in the rubble. I was walking through my house. And I wore not the filthy rags that had covered me for years, but a fine black tailcoat and a satin-lined cape. And the house, why, the house was beautiful, and all the books were in their proper place upon shelves. The parquet floor glistened in the light of the chandelier and there was music coming from everywhere, the sound of a Vienna waltz, the rich harmony of violins. With each step I felt powerful again, and light, marvelously light. I could have easily taken the stairs two by two. I could have flown out and up through the darkness, the cloak like black wings.

And then I was moving up in the darkness, and Armand and I stood together on the high roof. Radiant he was, in the same old-fashioned evening clothes, and we were looking over the jungle of dark singing treetops at the distant silver curve of the river and the low heavens where the stars burned through the pearl gray clouds.

I was weeping at the sheer sight of it, at the feel of the damp wind against my face. And Armand stood beside me, with his arm around me. And he was talking of forgiveness and sadness, of wisdom and things learned through pain. "I love you, my dark brother," he whispered.

And the words moved through me like blood itself.

"It wasn't that I wanted vengeance," he whispered. His face was stricken, his heart broken. He said. "But you came to be healed, and you did not want me! A century I had waited, and you did not want me!"

And I knew, as I had all along really, that my restoration was illusion, that I was the same skeleton in rags, of course. And the house was still a ruin. And in the preternatural being who held me was the power that could give me back the sky and the wind.

"Love me and the blood is yours," he said. "This blood that I have never given to another." I felt his lips against my face.

"I can't deceive you," I answered. "I can't love you. What are you to me that I should love you? A dead thing that hungers for the power and the passion of others? The embodiment of thirst itself?"

And in a moment of incalculable power, it was I who struck him and knocked him backwards and off the roof. Absolutely weightless he was, his figure dissolving into the gray night.

But who was defeated? Who fell down and down again through the soft tree branches to the earth where he belonged? Back to the rags and filth beneath the old house. Who lay finally in the rubble, with hands and face against the cool soil?

Yet memory plays its tricks. Maybe I imagined it, his last invitation, and the anguish after. The weeping. I do know that as the months passed he was out there again. I heard him from time to time just walking those old Garden District streets. And I wanted to call to him, to tell him that it was a lie I'd spoken to him, that I did love him. I did.

But it was my time to be at peace with all things. It was my time to starve and to go down into the earth finally, and maybe at last to dream the god's dreams. And how could I tell Armand about the god's dreams?

There were no more candles, and there was no more oil for the lamps. Somewhere was a strongbox full of money and jewels and letters to my lawyers and bankers who would continue to administer these properties I owned forever, on account of sums I had left with them.

And so why not go now into the ground, knowing that it would never be disturbed, not in this old city with its crumbling replicas of other centuries. Everything would just go on and on and on.

By the light of the heavens I read more of the story of Sam Spade and the Maltese Falcon. I looked at the date on the magazine and I knew it was 1929, and I thought, oh, that's not possible, is it? And I drank enough from the rats to have the strength to dig really deep.

The earth was holding me. Living things slithered through its thick and moist clods against my dried flesh. And I thought if I ever do rise again, if I ever see even one small patch of the night sky full of stars, I will never, never do terrible things. I will never slay innocents. Even when I hunted the weak, it was the hopeless and the dying I took, I swear it was. I will never never work the Dark Trick again. I will just ... you know, be the "continual awareness" for no purpose, no purpose at all.

Thirst. Pain as clear as light.

I saw Marius. I saw him so vividly that I thought, this can't be a dream! And my heart expanded painfully. How splendid Marius looked. He wore a narrow plain modern suit of clothes, but it was made of red velvet, and his white hair was cut short and brushed back from his face. He had a glamour to him, this modern Marius, and a sprightliness that his costume of the old days had apparently concealed.

And he was doing the most remarkable things. He had before him a black camera upon three spider legs, and this he cranked with his right hand as he made motion pictures of mortals in a studio full of incandescent light. How my heart was swelling to see this, the way that he spoke to these mortal beings, told them how they must hold one another, dance, move about. Painted scenery behind them, yes. And outside the windows of his studio were high brick buildings, and the noise of motor coaches in the streets.

No, this isn't a dream, I told myself. It is happening. He is there. And if only I try I can see the city beyond the windows, know where he is. If only I try I can hear the language that he speaks to the young players. "Marius!" I said, but the earth around me devoured the sound.

The scene changed.

Marius rode in the great cage of an elevator down into a cellar. Metal doors screeched and clanked. And into the vast sanctum of Those Who Must Be Kept he went, and how different it all was. No more the Egyptian paintings, the perfume of flowers, the glitter of gold.

The high walls were covered with the dappled colors of the impressionists building out of myriad fragments a vibrant twentieth-century world. Airplanes flew over sunlit cities, towers rose beyond the arch of steel bridges, iron ships drove through silver seas. A universe it was, dissolving the walls on which it was rendered, surrounding the motionless and unchanged figures of Akasha and Enkil.

Marius moved about the chapel. He moved past dark tangled sculptures, telephone devices, typewriting machines upon wooden stands. He, set before Those Who Must Be Kept a large and stately gramophone. Delicately he put the tiny needle to its task upon the revolving record. A thin and rasping Vienna waltz poured forth from the metal horn.

I laughed to see it, this sweet invention, set before them like an offering. Was the waltz like incense rising in the air?

But Marius had not completed his tasks. A white screen he had unrolled down the wall. And now from a high platform behind the seated god and goddess, he projected moving pictures of mortals onto the white screen. Those Who Must Be Kept stared mute at the flickering images. Statues in a museum, the electric light glaring on their white skin.

And then the most marvelous thing happened. The jittery little figures in the motion picture began to talk. Above the grind of the gramophone waltz they actually talked.

And as I watched, frozen in excitement, frozen in joy to see it all, a great sadness suddenly engulfed me, a great crushing realization. It was just a dream, this. Because the truth was, the little figures in the moving pictures couldn't possibly talk.

The chamber and all its little wonders lost its substance, went dim.

Ah, horrid imperfection, horrid little giveaway that I'd made it all up. And out of real bits and pieces, too -- the silent movies I'd seen myself at the little theater called the Happy Hour, the gramophones I'd heard around me from a hundred houses in the dark.

And the Vienna waltz, ah, taken from the spell Armand had worked upon me, too heartbreaking to think of that.

Why hadn't I been just a little more clever in fooling myself, kept the film silent as it should have been, and I might have gone on believing it was a true vision after all.

But here was the final proof of my invention, this audacious and self-serving fancy: Akasha, my beloved, was speaking to me!

Akasha stood in the door of the chamber gazing down the length of the underground corridor to the elevator by which Marius had returned to the world above. Her black hair hung thickly and heavily about her white shoulders. She raised her cold white hand to beckon. Her mouth was red.

"Lestat!" she whispered. "Come."

Her thoughts flowed out of her soundlessly in the words of the old queen vampire who had spoken them to me under les Innocents years and years before:

From my stone pillow I have dreamed dreams of the mortal world above. I have heard its voices, its new music, as lullabies as I lie in my grave. I have envisioned its fantastical discoveries, I have known its courage in the timeless sanctum of my thoughts. And though it shuts me out with its dazzling forms, I long for one with the strength to roam it fearlessly, to ride the Devil's Road through its heart.

"Lestat!" she whispered again, her marble face tragically animate. "Come!"

"Oh, my darling," I said, tasting the bitter earth between my lips, "if only I could."


Lestat de Lioncourt
In the year of his Resurrection 1984

Dionysus in San Francisco
1985