The Vampire Lestat (75 page)

With my soul I listened. I listened so hard I was sweating. Yet no more of the “transmission.” No images.

And then the gradual awareness that there was a creature outside in the darkness, that I was hearing tiny physical sounds.

Someone out there walking in the stillness. No human scent.

One of
them
was out there. One of
them
had penetrated the secrecy and was approaching beyond the distant skeletal silhouette of the helicopter, through the open field of high grass.

Again I listened. No, not a shimmer to reinforce the message of Danger. In fact the mind of the being was locked to me. I was getting only the inevitable signals of a creature passing through space.

The rambling low-roofed house slumbered around me—a giant aquarium, it seemed, with its barren white walls and the blue flickering light of the silent television set. Tough Cookie and Alex in each other’s arms on the rug before the empty fireplace. Larry asleep in the cell-like bedroom with the carnally indefatigable groupie called Salamander whom they had “picked up” in New Orleans before we came west. Sleeping bodyguards in the other low-ceilinged modern chambers, and in the bunkhouse beyond the great blue oyster-shell swimming pool.

And out there under the clear black sky this creature coming, moving towards us from the highway, on foot. This thing that I sensed now was completely alone. Beat of a supernatural heart in the thin darkness. Yes, I can hear it very distinctly. The hills were like ghosts in the distance, the yellow blossoms of the acacias gleaming white under the stars.

Not afraid of anything, it seemed. Just coming. And the thoughts
absolutely impenetrable. That could mean one of the old ones, the very skilled ones, except the skilled ones would never crush the grass underfoot. This thing moved almost like a human. This vampire had been “made” by me.

My heart was skipping. I glanced at the tiny lights of the alarm box half concealed by the gathered drapery in the corner. Promise of sirens if anything, mortal or immortal, tried to penetrate this house.

On the edge of the white concrete he appeared. Tall, slender figure. Short dark hair. And then he paused as if he could see me in the electric blue haze behind the glass veil.

Yes, he saw me. And he moved towards me, towards the light.

Agile, traveling just a little too lightly for a mortal. Black hair, green eyes, and the limbs shifting silkily under the neglected garments: a frayed black sweater that hung shapelessly from his shoulders, legs like long black spokes.

I felt the lump come up in my throat. I was trembling. I tried to remember what was important, even in this moment, that I must scan the night for others, must be careful.
Danger
. But none of that mattered now. I knew. I shut my eyes for a second. It did not help anything, make anything easier.

Then my hand went out to the alarm buttons and I turned them off. I opened the giant glass doors and the cold fresh air moved past me into the room.

He was past the helicopter, turning and stepping away like a dancer to look up at it, his head back, his thumbs hooked very casually in the pockets of his black jeans. When he looked at me again, I saw his face distinctly. And he smiled.

Even our memories can fail us. He was proof of that, delicate and blinding as a laser as he came closer, all the old images blown away like dust.

I flicked on the alarm system again, closed the doors on my mortals, and turned the key in the lock. For a second I thought, I cannot stand this. And this is only the beginning. And if he is here, only a few steps away from me now, then surely the others, too, will come. They will all come.

I turned and went towards him, and for a silent moment I just studied him in the blue light falling through the glass. My voice was tight when I spoke:

“Where’s the black cape and the ‘finely tailored’ black coat and the silk tie and all that foolishness?” I asked. Eyes locked on each other.

Then he broke the stillness and laughed without making a sound. But he went on studying me with a rapt expression that gave me a secret joy.
And with the boldness of a child, he reached out and ran his fingers down the lapel of my gray velvet coat.

“Can’t always be the living legend,” he said. The voice was like a whisper that wasn’t a whisper. And I could hear his French accent so clearly, though I had never been able to hear my own.

I could scarcely bear the sound of the syllables, the complete familiarity of it.

And I forgot all the stiff surly things I had planned to say and I just took him in my arms.

We embraced the way we never had in the past. We held each other the way Gabrielle and I used to do. And then I ran my hands over his hair and his face, just letting myself really see him, as if he belonged to me. And he did the same. Seems we were talking and not talking. True silent voices that didn’t have any words. Nodding a little. And I could feel him brimming with affection and a feverish satisfaction that seemed almost as strong as my own.

But he was quiet suddenly, and his face became a little drawn.

“I thought you were dead and gone, you know,” he said. It was barely audible.

“How did you find me here?” I asked.

“You wanted me to,” he answered. Flash of innocent confusion. He gave a slow shrug of the shoulders.

Everything he did was magnetizing me just the way it had over a century ago. Fingers so long and delicate, yet hands so strong.

“You let me see you and you let me follow you,” he said. “You drove up and down Divisadero Street looking for me.”

“And you were still there?”

“The safest place in the world for me,” he said. “I never left it. They came looking for me and they didn’t find me and then they went away. And now I move among them whenever I want and they don’t know me. They never knew what I looked like, really.”

“And they’d try to destroy you if they knew,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered. “But they’ve been trying to do that since the Theater of the Vampires and the things that happened there. Of course
Interview with the Vampire
gave them some new reasons. And they do need reasons to play their little games. They need the impetus, the excitement. They feed upon it like blood.” His voice sounded labored for a second.

He took a deep breath. Hard to talk about all this. I wanted to put my arms around him again but I didn’t.

“But at the moment,” he said, “I think you are the one that they want to destroy. And they do know what you look like.” Little smile. “Everybody knows now what you look like. Monsieur Le Rock Star.”

He let his smile broaden. But the voice was polite and low as it had always been. And the face suffused with feeling. There had been not the slightest change there yet. Maybe there never would be.

I slipped my arm around his shoulder and we walked together away from the lights of the house. We walked past the great gray hulk of the copter and into the dry sunbaked field and towards the hills.

I think to be this happy is to be miserable, to feel this much satisfaction is to burn.

“Are you going to go through with it?” he asked. “The concert tomorrow night?”

Danger to us all
. Had it been a warning or a threat? “Yes, of course,” I said. “What in hell could stop me from it?”

“I would like to stop you,” he answered. “I would have come sooner if I could. I spotted you a week ago, then lost you.”

“And why do you want to stop me?”

“You know why,” he said. “I want to talk to you.” So simple, the words, and yet they had such meaning.

“There’ll be time after,” I answered. “ ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.’ Nothing is going to happen. You’ll see.” I kept glancing at him and away from him, as if his green eyes were hurting me. In modern parlance he
was
a laser beam. Deadly and delicate he seemed. His victims had always loved him.

And I had always loved him, hadn’t I, no matter what happened, and how strong could love grow if you had eternity to nourish it, and it took only these few moments in time to renew its momentum, its heat?

“How can you be sure of that, Lestat?” he asked. Intimate his speaking my name. And I had not brought myself to say Louis in that same natural way.

We were walking slowly now, without direction, and his arm was around me loosely as mine was around him.

“I have a battalion of mortals guarding us,” I said. “There’ll be bodyguards on the copter and in the limousine with my mortals. I’ll travel alone from the airport in the Porsche so I can more easily defend myself, but we’ll have a veritable motorcade. And just what can a handful of hateful twentieth-century fledglings do anyway? These idiot creatures use the telephone for their threats.”

“There are more than a handful,” he said. “But what about Marius? Your enemies out there are debating it, whether the story of Marius was true, whether Those Who Must Be Kept exist or not—”

“Naturally, and you, did you believe it?”

“Yes, as soon as I read it,” he said. And there passed between us a moment of silence, in which perhaps we were both remembering the
questing immortal of long ago who had asked me over and over, Where did it begin?

Too much pain to be reinvoked. It was like taking pictures from the attic, cleaning away the dust and finding the colors still vibrant. And the pictures should have been portraits of dead ancestors and they were pictures of us.

I made some little nervous mortal gesture, raked my hair back off my forehead, tried to feel the cool of the breeze.

“What makes you so confident,” he asked, “that Marius won’t end this experiment as soon as you step on the stage tomorrow night?”

“Do you think any of the old ones would do that?” I answered.

He reflected for a long moment, slipping deep into his thoughts the way he used to do, so deep it was as if he forgot I was there. And it seemed that old rooms took shape around him, gaslight gave off its unsteady illumination, there came the sounds and scents of a former time from outside streets. We two in that New Orleans parlor, coal fire in the grate beneath the marble mantel, everything growing older except us.

And he stood now a modern child in sagging sweater and worn denim gazing off towards the deserted hills. Disheveled, eyes sparked with an inner fire, hair mussed. He roused himself slowly as if coming back to life.

“No. I think if the old ones trouble themselves with it at all, they will be too interested to do that.”

“Are you interested?”

“Yes, you know I am,” he said.

And his face colored slightly. It became even more human. In fact, he looked more like a mortal man than any of our kind I’ve ever known. “I’m here, aren’t I?” he said. And I sensed a pain in him, running like a vein of ore through his whole being, a vein that could carry feeling to the coldest depths.

I nodded. I took a deep breath and looked away from him, wishing I could say what I really wanted to say. That I loved him. But I couldn’t do that. The feeling was too strong.

“Whatever happens, it will be worth it,” I said. “That is, if you and I, and Gabrielle, and Armand . . . and Marius are together even for a short while, it will be worth it. Suppose Pandora chooses to show herself. And Mael. And God only knows how many others. What if all the old ones come. It will be worth it, Louis. As for the rest, I don’t care.”

“No, you care,” he said, smiling. He was deeply fascinated. “You’re just confident that it’s going to be exciting, and that whatever the battle, you’ll win.”

I bowed my head. I laughed. I slipped my hands into the pockets of my pants the way mortal men did in this day and age, and I walked on
through the grass. The field still smelled of sun even in the cool California night. I didn’t tell him about the mortal part, the vanity of wanting to perform, the eerie madness that had come over me when I saw myself on the television screen, saw my face on the album covers plastered to the windows of the North Beach record store. He followed at my side.

“If the old ones really wanted to destroy me,” I said, “don’t you think it would already be done?”

“No,” he said. “I saw you and I followed you. But before that, I couldn’t find you. As soon as I heard that you’d come out, I tried.”

“How did you hear?” I asked.

“There are places in all the big cities where the vampires meet,” he said. “Surely you know this by now.”

“No, I don’t. Tell me,” I said.

“They are the bars we call the Vampire Connection,” he said, smiling a little ironically as he said it. “They are frequented by mortals, of course, and known to us by their names. There is Dr. Polidori in London, and Lamia in Paris. There is Bela Lugosi in the city of Los Angeles, and Carmilla and Lord Ruthven in New York. Here in San Francisco we have the most beautiful of them all, possibly, the cabaret called Dracula’s Daughter, on Castro Street.”

I started laughing. I couldn’t help it and I could see that he was about to laugh, too.

“And where are the names from
Interview with the Vampire?”
I asked with mock indignation.

“Verboten
,“ he said with a little lift of the eyebrows. “They are not fictional. They are real. But I will tell you they are playing your video clips on Castro Street now. The mortal customers demand it. They toast you with their vodka Bloody Marys.
The Dance of les Innocents
is pounding through the walls.”

A real laughing fit was definitely coming. I tried to stop it. I shook my head.

“But you’ve effected something of a revolution in speech in the back room as well,” he continued in the same mock sober fashion, unable to keep his face entirely straight.

“What do you mean?”

“Dark Trick, Dark Gift, Devil’s Road—they’re all bantering those words about, the crudest fledglings who never even styled themselves vampires. They’re imitating the book even though they condemn it utterly. They are loading themselves down with Egyptian jewelry. Black velvet is once again de rigueur.”

“Too perfect,” I said. “But these places, what are they like?”

“They’re saturated with the vampire trappings,” he said. “Posters from the vampire films adorn the walls, and the films themselves are projected continuously on high screens. The mortals who come are a regular freak show of theatrical types—punk youngsters, artists, those done up in black capes and white plastic fangs. They scarcely notice
us
. We are often drab by comparison. And in the dim lights we might as well be invisible, velvet and Egyptian jewelry and all. Of course, no one preys upon these mortal customers. We come to the vampire bars for information. The vampire bar is the safest place for a mortal in all Christendom. You cannot kill in the vampire bar.”