Prince Lestat

by Anne Rice

  In St. Louis he'd begun to actually play again. It was the strangest thing. Most of his scars were gone by then. He no longer looked infected and contagious with some disfiguring disease.

  It was as if he'd waked from a dream, and for years the violin was his instrument, and he even played for money at mortal gatherings, and managed to become a gentleman again, with clean linen and a small apartment with paintings, a brass clock, and a wooden closet of fine clothes. But all that had come to nothing. He felt loneliness, despair. The world seemed empty of monsters like himself.

  He'd wandered out west, why he didn't know. By the 1880s, he'd been playing the piano in the Barbary Coast vice dens of San Francisco and hunting the seamen for blood. He worked his way up from the sailors' saloons to the fancy melodeons and the French and Chinese parlor houses, glutting himself on the riffraff in dark streets where murder was rampant.

  Gradually he came to realize the quality parlor houses loved him, even the finest of them, and he was soon surrounded by admiring ladies of the evening, who were a comfort to him, and therefore immune from his murderous thirst.

  In the Chinatown brothels, he fell in love with the sweet tender exotic slave girls who delighted in his music.

  And finally, in the great music halls, he heard applause for the songs he wrote on the spot, and his dizzying improvisations. He was back in the world again. He was loving it. Dressed like a dandy, he put pomade in his dark hair, clenched a small cheroot between his teeth, and lost himself in the ivory keys, intoxicated by the adulation all around him.

  But other vampires crept into his bloody paradise--the first he'd seen since Lestat set sail from the New Orleans docks.

  Powerful males, clad in brocade vests and fancy frock coats, obviously using their skills to cheat at cards and dazzle their victims, cast a cold eye on him and threatened him before fleeing themselves. In the dark streets of Chinatown he ran up against a Chinese blood drinker in a long dark coat and black hat who threatened him with a hatchet.

  Though he longed desperately to know these vampire strangers--though he longed to trust them, talk with them, share the story of his journey with them--he left San Francisco in terror.

  He left behind the pretty waiter girls and courtesans who'd sustained him with their sweet friendship and the easy pickings of the drunken men.

  From city to city he'd moved, playing in the small raucous orchestras of theaters wherever he got work. It never lasted very long. He was a vampire after all; he merely looked human; and a vampire cannot pass indefinitely as human in the same close group of humans. They begin to stare, to ask questions, then to veer away, and finally there is some fatal aversion as if they've discovered a leper in their midst.

  But his many mortal acquaintances continued to warm his soul. No vampire can live on blood and killing; all vampires need human warmth, or so he thought. He made deep friends now and then, those who allowed it and never questioned his eccentricities, his habits, his icy skin.

  The old century died; the new century was born, and he shied away from the electric lights, keeping to the back alleys in blessed darkness. He was completely healed now; there was no sign of his old wounds at all, and indeed, it seemed he'd grown stronger over the years. Yet he felt ugly, loathsome, unfit to live, existing from moment to moment like an addict. He gravitated to the crippled, the diseased, the bohemian, and the downtrodden when he wanted an evening of conversation, just a little cerebral companionship. It kept him from weeping. It kept him from killing too brutally and indiscriminately.

  He slept in graveyards when he could find a large and secret crypt, or in coffins in cellars, and now and then almost trapped by the sun he dug straight down into the moist Mother Earth, uttering a prayer that he would die there.

  Fear and music and blood and pain. That was still his existence.

  The Great War began. The world as he'd known it was coming to an end.

  He couldn't clearly remember coming to Boston, only that it had been a long journey and he'd forgotten why he had ever chosen that city. And there for the first time, he'd gone underground for the long sleep. Surely he would die in the earth, buried as he was, week after week, month after month with only the memory of blood bringing him back now and then to uneasy consciousness. Surely this would be the finish. And the inevitable and total darkness would swallow mercilessly any question or passion that had ever obsessed him.

  Well, he didn't die, obviously.

  Half a century passed before he rose again, hungry, emaciated, desperate, but surprisingly strong. And it was music that brought him forth, but not the music he had so loved.

  It was the music of the Vampire Lestat--his old maker--now a rock-star sensation, with music carried on airwaves, blasted from television screens, music seeping from tiny transmitters no bigger than a pack of playing cards to which people listened through plugs in their ears.

  Oh, what sweet glory to see Lestat so splendidly restored! How his heart ached to reach him.

  The Undead were everywhere now on the new continent. Maybe they had always been here, spreading, breeding, creating fledglings as he'd been created. He couldn't guess. He only knew his powers were greater now; he could read the minds of mortals, hear their thoughts when he didn't want to hear them, and he could hear that relentless music, and those strange eerie stories that Lestat told in his little video films.

  We had come from ancient parents out of darkest Egypt: Akasha and Enkil. Kill the Mother and the Father and we all die, or so the songs said. What did the Vampire Lestat want with this mortal persona: rock star, outcast, monster, gathering mortals to a concert in San Francisco, gathering the Undead?

  Antoine would have gone out west to see Lestat on the stage. But he was still struggling with the simplest difficulties of life in the late twentieth century when the massacres began.

  All over the world, it seemed, the Undead were being slaughtered, as coven houses and vampire taverns were burnt to cinders. Fledglings and old ones were immolated as they fled.

  All this Antoine learned from the telepathic cries of brothers and sisters whom he'd never known in places he'd never been.

  "Flee, go to the Vampire Lestat, he will save us!"

  Antoine could not fathom it. He played for coins in the subways of New York, and once set upon by a gang of mortal cutthroats for his earnings, he slew them all and fled the city making his way south.

  The voices of the Undead said it was the Mother, Akasha, who'd been slaughtering her children, that ancient Egyptian Queen. Lestat had been taken prisoner by her. Elders were gathering. Antoine, like so many others, was prey to strange dreams. Frantically he played his violin in the streets to surround himself with a solitude he could manage and sustain.

  And then the immortal voices of the world fell silent.

  Some catastrophe had emptied the planet of blood drinkers.

  It seemed he was the last left alive. From city to city he went playing his violin for coins on street corners, sleeping once again in graveyards and abandoned cellars, emerging hungry, dazed, longing for some refuge that seemed beyond his reach. He slipped into crowded taverns or nightclubs in the evening, just to feel human warmth around him, bodies brushing against him, to swim in the sound of happy human voices, and the aroma of blood.

  What had become of Lestat? Where was he, that shining Titian in his red-velvet frock coat and lace, who had roared with such confidence and power from the rock music stage? He did not know, and he wanted to know, but more acutely he wanted to survive, consciously, in this new world, and he set out to accomplish this.

  In Chicago, he managed actual lodgings, and realized reasonable sums from his street-corner playing, and soon a band of mortals gathered to greet him when he appeared each evening. It was a simple matter to move to bars and restaurants again, and once more he found himself seated at the piano in a darkened nightclub with the twenty-dollar bills filling the brandy snifter beside the music stand.

  In time he leased an old three-story white f
rame house in a suburb called Oak Park that was made up of such beautiful structures, and he bought an old steamer trunk in which to sleep by day, and his own piano. He liked his mortal neighbors. He gave them money to hire the gardener or the cleaning lady for him that they recommended. Sometimes he even swept the sidewalks himself in the very early hours of the morning with a big yellow broom. He liked that, the scrape scrape of the broom, and the leaves piled up, curling and brown, and the pavement so clean. Must we disdain all mortal things?

  The streets of Oak Park with their great trees were soothing to him. Soon he was shopping in brightly lighted emporiums for decent clothes. And in his comfortable parlor from midnight till dawn he watched television, learning all about this modern world in which he'd emerged, how things were done, how things had to be. A steady stream of dramas, soap operas, news broadcasts, and documentaries soon taught him everything.

  He lay back in his large overstuffed easy chair marveling at the blue skies and the brilliant sun he saw before him on the large television screen. He watched sleek and powerful American automobiles speeding on mountain roads and over prairies. He watched a somber, bespectacled teacher speak in sonorous tones of "the ascent of man."

  And then there were the films of symphony performances, the full-scale operas, the unending virtuoso concerts! He thought he'd go mad with the beauty of it--witnessing in living color and mesmerizing detail the London Philharmonic play Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or the great Itzhak Perlman racing through the Brahms Concerto with an orchestra surrounding him.

  Going into Chicago to hunt, he now purchased tickets to see splendid performances in the immense opera house, marveling at its size and luxury. He was awake to the wealth of the world. He was awake to an age that seemed made for his sensibilities.

  Where was Lestat in this world? What had happened to him? In the music stores, they still sold his old album. You could buy a video of the single concert to which he'd drawn a capacity crowd. But where was the being himself--and would he remember his once-beloved Antoine? Or had he made a legion of followers since those long-ago southern nights?

  Hunting was harder in these great times, yes. One had to seek far and wide to find the detestable human vermin who in ages past had been infinitely more numerous and more at hand. He could find no metropolitan cesspools like the old Barbary Coast. But he didn't mind that. He didn't "love" his victims. He never had. He wanted to feed and be done with it.

  Once he'd spotted a victim, he was relentless. There was no way for that man or woman to hide. He slipped easily into darkened houses and caressed his mark with rough and eager hands. Let blood be blood.

  He was soon playing the piano for a salary in a fine restaurant and making plenty of money from tips on top of that. And he learned to hunt more skillfully among the innocent--drinking from one victim after another on crowded dance floors until he had had enough--without killing or crippling anyone. This took discipline, but he could do it. He could do what he had to do to survive now, to be part of this age, to feel vital and resilient and, yes, immortal.

  Ambition began to grow in him. He needed papers to live in this world; he needed wealth. Lestat had always had papers to live in the world. Lestat had always had great wealth. In the old nights so long ago, Lestat had been a respected and highly visible gentleman, for whom tailors and shopkeepers had kept late hours, a patron of the arts, a common figure nodding to those he passed in Jackson Square or on the steps of the Cathedral. Lestat had had a lawyer who handled his affairs of the world; Lestat came and went as he chose. "These matters are nothing," said Lestat. "My fortune is divided in many banks. I will always have what I need."

  Antoine would do this. He would learn. Yet he had no real knack for it. Surely someone could forge papers for him, he must focus on this. He had to have some safety in this world, and he wanted a vehicle, yes, a powerful American car, so that he could travel miles and miles in one night.

  The voices came again.

  The Undead were returning, and appearing in great numbers in the cities of North America. And the voices were talking, the voices spoke of the population spreading throughout the world.

  The old Queen had been destroyed. But Lestat and a council of immortals had survived her, and the new Mother was now a red-haired woman, ancient as the Queen had been, Mekare, a sorceress, who had no tongue.

  Silent this new Queen of the Damned. Silent those immortals who'd survived with her. No one knew what had become of them, where they'd gone.

  What was it to Antoine? He cared but he did not care.

  The voices spoke of vampire scripture, a canon, so to speak. The Vampire Chronicles. There had been two, and now there were three, and this canon told of what had happened to Lestat and the others. They told of the "Queen of the Damned."

  Walking boldly into a brightly lighted bookstore, Antoine bought the volumes, and read them over a week of strange nights.

  In the pages of the first book, published long ago, he found himself, nameless, "the musician," with not so much as a physical description except that he'd been a "boy," a mere footnote to the life and adventures of his maker as told by the vampire Louis, that one whom Lestat had so loved, and feared to anger. "Let him get used to the idea, Antoine, and then I'll bring you over. I can't ... I can't lose them, Louis and Claudia." And they had turned on him, sought to kill him, dumped Lestat's body in the swamp. And after that final battle in flames and smoke when he had fought with Lestat to punish them, Antoine had never been mentioned again.

  What did it matter? Claudia had died for it all, unjustly. Louis had survived. The books were filled with stories of other older and more powerful beings.

  So where were they now, these great survivors of Queen Akasha's massacre? And how many like Antoine were roaming the world, weak, afraid, without comrades or the consolation of love, clinging to existence as he did?

  The voices told him there was no dream coven of elders. They spoke of indifference, lawlessness, a retreat of the ancient ones, of wars for territory that always ended in death. There were notorious vagabond masters who turned mortals into vampires every night until their stamina ran out, and the Dark Trick no longer worked when they attempted it.

  Not six months passed before a gang of maverick vampires came after Antoine.

  He'd just finished the latest book in the vampire scripture, Lestat's Tale of the Body Thief. It was in the back alleys of downtown Chicago. In the early hours they surrounded him with long knives, pasty-faced gangster vampires with sneering lips, and flaming hair, but he was too strong for them, too quick. He found in himself a reserve of the telekinetic power described in the Chronicles, and though he was not strong enough to burn or kill them, he drove them back, slamming them into walls and pavements, bruising and shocking them senseless. That gave him the time he needed to use their long knives to cut off their heads. He had barely time to conceal their bloody remains in garbage heaps before making for his lair.

  Voices told him such skirmishes and deaths were occurring in American cities everywhere, and indeed in the cities of the Old World and in Asia.

  Things couldn't go on like this with him in such a world. This could mean discovery. This could mean battles of vengeance. Chicago was too rich a plum for the Undead certainly, and Antoine's refuge in Oak Park was too close.

  One night his house, his beautiful old graceful white frame house with its rambling porches and gingerbread eaves, was burnt to the ground while he was hunting.

  They finally got him in St. Louis.

  They called themselves a "coven." They surrounded him and doused him with gasoline and set him on fire. Down into the earth he went to smother the flames and then up again. They came after him. He ran, burnt, in agony, over the miles, outdistancing them easily and burying himself again.

  Many things had happened in the world since then.

  But not very much of it to him.

  In the earth he slept, healing, his mind in a feverish realm of semi-consciousness in which he dreamed
he was in New Orleans again and Lestat was listening to his music, Lestat was whispering to him that he had a great talent, and then there were flames.

  And then he heard distinctly through his dreams a young vampire speaking to him, and not to him alone but to all the Children of the Night everywhere. It was a vampire who called himself Benji Mahmoud broadcasting from New York, and how many nights Antoine listened before he rose, he could not say. A lovely rippling piano flooded his ears as Benji spoke, and Antoine knew, absolutely knew, that this was the music of a vampire like himself, that no mortal could have created such intricate, bizarre, and perfect melodies. The vampire Sybelle was her name, said Benji Mahmoud. And sometimes his voice dropped away for her music to take over the airwaves.

  Benji Mahmoud and Sybelle prompted Antoine to come to the surface once more and face the bright dangerous electric nights of the new century.

  It was the year 2013. This fact alone astonished him. Over twenty years had passed and his burnt flesh was healed. His strength was greater than before. His skin was whiter, his eyes sharper, his ears ever more sensitive.

  It was all true what the vampire scripture had said. One healed in the earth, and one grew strong from pain.

  The world was filled with sound, waves and waves of sound.

  How many other blood drinkers heard Benji Mahmoud and Sybelle's piano? How many other minds transmitted it? He did not know. He only knew that he could hear it, thinly but certainly, and he could hear and feel them everywhere, the Children of the Night, too many, surely, listening to the voice of Benji Mahmoud. And they were frightened, these others.

  Massacres had started again. Massacres like the Burnings done by Akasha--massacres of vampires in the cities on the other side of the world.

  "It is coming for us," said the voices of the frightened ones. "But who is it? Is it the mute Mother, Mekare? Has she turned on us the way Akasha turned? Or is it the Vampire Lestat? Is he the one trying to wipe us out for all our crimes against our own kind, our bickering, our quarreling?"

  "Brothers and Sisters of the Night," declared Benji Mahmoud. "We have no parents. We are a tribe without a leader, a tribe without a credo, a tribe without a name." The piano music of Sybelle was masterly, rippling with preternatural genius. Ah, how he loved this. "Children of the Night, Children of Darkness, the Undead, the Immortals, Blood Drinkers, Revenants, why don't we have an honorable and graceful name?" demanded Benji. "I implore you. Do not fight. Do not seek to hurt one another. Band together now against the forces that would wipe us out. Find strength in one another."