Prince Lestat: The Vampire Chronicles

by Anne Rice

  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.”

  Antoine moved with renewed purpose. I am alive again, he thought. I can die a thousand deaths like any coward and come back to life again. He hunted on the margins as before, struggling for clothes, money, lodgings, a new age flaming into color around him. In a small hotel room, he studied his new Apple computer, determined to master it, soon connecting with the website and radio program of Benji Mahmoud.

  “Vampires have been slaughtered in Mumbai,” declared Benji. “The reports have been confirmed. It is the same as in Tokyo and Beijing. Havens and sanctuaries burnt to the ground and all who fled immolated in their tracks, only the swiftest and the most fortunate surviving to give us the word, the pictures.”

  A frantic vampire calling from Hong Kong poured out her fears to Benji.

  “I appeal to the old ones,” said Benji. “To Mekare, Maharet, Khayman, speak to us. Tell us why these immolations have happened. Is a new Time of Burning begun?”

  Caller after caller begged for permission to come to Benji and Louis and Armand for protection.

  “No. This is not possible,” Benji confessed. “Believe me, the safest place for you is where you are. But avoid known coven houses, or vampire bars and taverns. And if you witness this horrific violence, take shelter. Remember those who strike with the Fire Gift must see you in order to destroy you! Don’t flee in the open. If you possibly can, go underground.”

  Finally after many nights, Antoine broke through. In an anxious whisper he told Benji he’d been made by the great Vampire Lestat himself. “I am a musician!” he pleaded. “Allow me to come to you, I beg you. Confirm for me where you are.”

  “I wish I could, brother,” said Benji, “but alas, I cannot. Don’t seek to find me. And be careful. These are dreadful times for our kind.”

  That night late, Antoine went down in the darkened hotel dining room and he played the piano for the small, weary night staff who stopped only now and then to listen to him as he poured his soul out on the keys.

  He would call again, from some other number. He would beg Benji to understand. Antoine wanted to play music like Sybelle played music. Antoine had this gift to offer. Antoine was telling the truth when he spoke of his maker. Benji had to understand.

  For two months, Antoine worked on his music nightly, and during that time he read the later books of vampire scripture, the memoirs of Pandora, Marius, and Armand.

  Now he knew all about the Bedouin, Benji Mahmoud, and his beloved Sybelle—Benji, a boy of twelve when the great vampire Marius had brought him over, and Sybelle, the eternal gamin who had once played only Beethoven’s Appassionata over and over again, but who now went through the repertoire of all the greats Antoine knew and recent composers of whom he had not dreamed.

  Deviled and driven by her playing, Antoine strove for perfection, assailing pianos in bars, restaurants, deserted classrooms and auditoriums, piano stores, and even private homes.

  He was now composing music of his own again, breaking piano keys in his fervor, breaking strings.

  Another terrible Burning took place in Taiwan.

  Benji was plainly angry now as he appealed to the elders to shed light on what was happening to the tribe. “Lestat, where are you? Can you not be our champion against these forces of destruction? Or have you become Cain the slayer of your brothers and sisters yourself!”

  At last Antoine had the money to purchase a violin of good quality. He went into the countryside to play under the stars. He rushed into Stravinsky and Bartók, whose work he’d learned from recordings. His head teemed with the new dissonance and wailing of modern music. He understood this tonal language, this aesthetic. It spoke for the fear and the pain, the fear that had become terror, the pain that had become the very blood in his veins.

  He had to reach Benji and Sybelle.

  More than anything it was critical loneliness that drove Antoine. He knew he’d end up in the earth again if he didn’t find someone of his own kind to love. He dreamed of making music with Sybelle.

  Am I an elder now? Or am I a maverick to be killed on sight?

  One night Benji spoke of the hour, and of the weather, confirming surely that he was indeed broadcasting from the northern East Coast. Filling a leather backpack with his violin and his musical compositions, Antoine started north.

  Just outside Philadelphia, he encountered another vagrant blood drinker. He almost fled. But the other came to him with open arms—a lean big-boned vampire with straggly hair and huge eyes, pleading with Antoine not to be frightened and not to hurt him, and they came together, all but sobbing in each other’s embrace.

  The boy’s name was Killer and he was little more than a hundred years old. He’d been made, he said, in the very early days of the twentieth century in a backwater town in Texas by a wanderer like himself who charged Killer to bury his ashes after he’d burnt himself up.

  “That’s the way a lot of them did it in those days,” said Killer, “like the way Lestat describes Magnus making him. They pick an heir when they’re sick of it all, give us the Dark Blood, and then we have to scatter the ashes when they’re gone. But what did I care? I was nineteen. I wanted to be immortal, and the world was big in 1910. You could go anywhere, do anything at all.”

  In a cheap motel, by the glimmering light of the muted television, as if it were the flicker of a fireplace, they talked for hours.

  Killer had survived the long-ago massacre of Akasha the great Queen. He’d made it all the way to San Francisco in 1985 to hear the Vampire Lestat onstage, only to see hundreds of blood drinkers immolated after the concert. He and his companion Davis had been fatally separated, and Killer, sneaking into the slums of San Francisco, had found himself the next night one of a tiny remnant fleeing the city, thankful to be alive. He never saw Davis again.

  Davis was a beautiful black vampire, and Killer had loved him. They’d been members of the Fang Gang in those times. They even wore those letters on their leather jackets and they drove Harleys and they never spent more than two nights in any one place. All over, those times.

  “The Burning now, it has to happen,” Killer told Antoine. “Things can’t go on the way they are. I tell you, before Lestat came on the scene in those days, it wasn’t like this. There just weren’t so many of us, and me and my friends, we roamed the country towns in peace. There were coven houses then, havens like, and vampire bars where anyone could enter, you know, safe refuge, but the Queen wiped all that away. And with it went the last of vampire law and order. And since those times, the tramps and the mavericks have bred everywhere, and group fights group. There’s no discipline, no rules. I tried to team up with the young ones in Philadelphia. They were like mad dogs.”

  “I know that old story,” Antoine said, shivering, remembering those flames, those unspeakable flames. “But I have to reach Benji and Sybelle. I have to reach Lestat.”

  In all these years, Antoine had never told the story of his own life to anyone. He had not even told it to himself. And now, with the lamp of the Vampire Chronicles illuminating his strange journey, he poured it out to Killer unstintingly. He feared derision, but none came.

  “He was my friend, Lestat,” Antoine confessed. “He told me about his lover, Nicolas, who had been a violinist. He said he couldn’t speak his heart to his little family, to Louis or Claudia, that they would laugh at him. So he spoke his heart only to me.”

  “You go to New York, my friend, and Armand will burn you to cinders,” said Killer. “Oh, not Benji or Sybelle, no, and maybe not even Louis … but Armand will do it and they won’t bat an eye. And they can do it too. They have Marius’s blood in their veins, those two. Even Louis’s powerful now, got the blood of the older ones in him. But Armand is the one who kills. There are eight million people in Manhattan and four members of the Undead. I warn you, Antoine, they won�
��t listen to you. They won’t care that Lestat made you. Least I don’t think they will. Hell, you won’t even have a chance to tell them. Armand will hear you coming. Then he’ll kill you on sight. You do know they have to see you to burn you up, don’t you? They can’t do it unless they can see you. But Armand will hunt you down and you won’t be able to hide.”

  “But I have to go,” Antoine said. He burst into tears. He wrapped his arms tight around himself and rocked back and forth on the edge of the bed. His long black hair fell down over his face. “I have to get back to Lestat. I have to. And if anyone can help me find him, it’s Louis, isn’t it?”

  “Hell, man,” said Killer. “Don’t you get it? Everybody’s looking for Lestat. And these Burnings are happening now. And they’re moving west. No one’s seen hide nor hair of Lestat in the last two years, man. And the last sighting in Paris could have been bogus. There’s lots of swaggering dudes walking around pretending to be Lestat. I was down in New Orleans last year and there were so many fake Lestats swaggering around in pirate shirts and cheap boots, you wouldn’t believe it. The place is overrun. They drove me out of the city after one night.”

  “I can’t go on alone,” said Antoine. “I have to reach them. I have to play my violin for Sybelle. I have to be part of them.”

  “Look, old buddy,” said Killer, softened and sympathetic and putting his arm around Antoine. “Why don’t you just come out west with me? We both rode out the last Burning, didn’t we? We’ll ride this one out too.”

  Antoine couldn’t answer. He was in such pain. He saw the pain in bright explosive colors in his mind as he had when he was so badly burned years and years ago. Red and yellow and orange was this pain. He took up the violin and began to play it, softly, as softly as you can play a violin, and he let it mourn with him for all he’d ever been or might have been and then sing of his hopes and dreams.

  The next night after they’d hunted the country roads, he told Killer of his loneliness over the centuries, of how he’d grown to love mortals the way Lestat had once loved him, and how he’d pulled away from them finally, always afraid that he couldn’t make another, as Lestat had made him. Lestat had been badly wounded when he’d made Antoine. It hadn’t been easy. It was nothing like the majestic procedure of the Dark Trick described in the pages of Marius’s memoir, Blood and Gold. Marius made it sound like the giving of a sacrament when he’d made Armand in the 1500s in those Renaissance rooms in Venice, filled with Marius’s paintings. It had been nothing like that at all.