7
The Story of Antoine
HE HAD DIED at the age of eighteen, Born to Darkness in weakness and confusion, beaten, burned, and left for dead along with his maker. In his fragile short human life, he’d played the piano only, studying at the Conservatoire de Paris when he was but ten years old. A genius he’d been called, and, oh, the Paris of those times. Bizet, Saint-Sa?ns, Berlioz, even Franz Liszt—he’d seen them, heard their music, known them all. He might have become one of them. But his brother had betrayed him, fathering a child out of wedlock, and selecting him—a third son, aged seventeen—to take the blame for the scandal. Off to Louisiana he’d been shipped with a fortune that funded his ruin through drink and his nightly attendance at the gambling tables. Only now and then did he vengefully attack the piano in some fashionable parlor or hotel lobby, delighting and confusing happenstance audiences with a riot of broken and violent riffs and incoherent melodies. Taken up by whores and patronesses of the arts alike, he traded upon his looks: jet-black wavy hair, very white skin, and famously deep blue eyes and a baby Cupid’s bow mouth that others liked to kiss and touch with their fingertips. He was tall but gangly, fragile looking, but notoriously strong, able to land a punch with ease to break the jaw of anyone who might try to harm him. Fortunately he had never broken his precious piano fingers doing such things, but knowing it well might happen, he’d taken to carrying a knife and a pistol, and he was no stranger either to the rapier and attended, a few times, at least, a fashionable New Orleans fencing establishment.
Mostly, he fell apart, disintegrated, lost things, woke up in strange bedrooms, got sick with tropical fever, or from bad food, or from drinking himself into a stupor. He had no respect for this raw, mad, essentially colonial town. It wasn’t Paris, this disgusting American place. It might as well have been Hell for all he cared. If the Devil kept pianos in Hell, what did it matter?
Then Lestat de Lioncourt, that paragon of fashion, who lived in the Rue Royale with his trusted friend Louis de Pointe du Lac and their little ward Claudia, had come into his life with his fabled generosity and swaggering abandon.
Those days. Ah, those days. How beautiful they seemed in retrospect, and how raw and ugly they had been in fact. That crumbling city of New Orleans, the filth of it, the relentless rains, the mosquitoes and the stench of death from the soggy graveyards, the lawless riverfront streets, and that enigmatic gentleman in exile, Lestat, sustaining him, putting gold in his hands, luring him away from the bars and the roulette wheels and urging him to pound the nearest keyboard.
Lestat had purchased for him the finest pianoforte that he could find, a magnificent Broadwood grand, shipped from England, and played at one time by the great Frédéric Chopin.
Lestat had brought servants to clean up his flat. Lestat had hired a cook to see that he ate before he drank, and Lestat had told him that he had a gift and that he must believe in it.
Such a charmer, Lestat in his elegant black frock coats and glossy four-in-hands, marching up and down on the antique Savonnerie carpet, urging him on with a wink and a flashing smile, his blond hair bushy and rebellious down to his crisp white collar. He smelled of clean linen, fresh flowers, the spring rain.
“Antoine, you must compose,” Lestat had told him. Paper, ink, everything he needed for his writing. And then those ardent embraces, shrill and chilling kisses when oblivious to the silent and devoted servants they lay in the big cypress four-poster bed together beneath the flaming red silk tester. So cold Lestat had seemed yet so rampantly affectionate. Hadn’t those kisses now and then hurt with a tiny sting like an insect biting into his throat? What did he care? The man intoxicated him. “Compose for me,” he’d whispered in Antoine’s ear, and the command imprinted itself on Antoine’s heart.
Sometimes he composed for twenty-four hours without stopping—never mind the endless noise from the crowded muddy street outside his windows—then fell down from exhaustion to sleep over the piano itself in a stupor.
Then Lestat in those shining white gloves and with that glistening silver walking stick was there blazing before him, face moist and cheeks ruddy.
“Here, get up now, Antoine. You’ve slept enough. Play for me.”
“Why do you believe in me?” he’d asked.
“Play!” Lestat pointed to the piano keys.
Lestat danced in circles as Antoine played, looking up into the smoky light of the crystal chandelier. “That’s it, more, that’s it …”
And then Lestat himself would flop down into the gold fauteuil behind the desk and begin writing with superb speed and accuracy the notes that Antoine was playing. What had happened to all those songs, all those sheets of parchment, all those leather folders of music?
How lovely it had been, those candlelight hours, curtains blowing in the wind and sometimes people gathered on the banquette below to listen to his playing.
Until that awful night when Lestat had come to demand his allegiance.
Scarred, filthy, dressed in rags that reeked of the swamp, Lestat had become a monster. “They tried to kill me,” he’d said in a harsh whisper. “Antoine, you must help me!”
Not the precious child, Claudia, not the precious friend, Louis de Pointe du Lac! You cannot mean this. Murderers, those two, the picture-perfect pair who glided through the early evenings as if in some shared dream as they walked the new flagstone pavements?
Then as this ragged and crippled creature had fastened itself to Antoine’s throat, Antoine had seen it all in visions, seen the crime itself, seen his lover savaged again and again by the monster child’s knife, seen Lestat’s body dumped into the swamp, seen him rise. Antoine now knew everything. The Dark Blood had rushed into his body like a burning fluid exterminating every human particle in its path. The music, his own music, rose in his ears in dizzying volume. Only music could describe this ineffable power, this raging euphoria.
They had been defeated, both of them, when they went against Claudia and Louis—and Antoine had been hideously burned. That is how Antoine learned what it meant to be Born to Darkness. You could suffer burns like that and endure. You could suffer what should have meant death for a human being, and you could go on. Music and pain, they were the twin mysteries of his existence. Even the Dark Blood itself did not obsess him as did music and pain. As he lay on the four-poster beside Lestat, Antoine saw his pain in bright flashing colors, his mouth open in a perpetual moan. I cannot live like this. And yet he didn’t want to die, no, never to die, not even now, not even with the craving for human blood driving him out into the night though his body was nothing but pain, pain scraped by the fabric of his shirt, his trousers, even his boots. Pain and blood and music.
For thirty mortal years, he’d lived like a monster, hideous, scarred, preying on the weakest of mortals, hunting in the crowded Irish immigrant slums for his meals. He could make his music without ever touching the keys of a piano. He heard the music in his head, heard it surge and climb as he moved his fingers in the air. The mingled noises of the rat-infested slums, the roaring laughter from a stevedore’s tavern, became a new music to him, caught in the low rumble of voices to the right and to the left, or the cries of his victims. Blood. Give me blood. Music I will possess forever.
Lestat had gone to Europe, chasing after them, those two, Claudia and Louis, who had been his family, his friends, his lovers.
But he had been terrified to attempt such a journey. And he had left Lestat at the docks. “Goodbye to you, Antoine.” Lestat had kissed him. “Maybe you will have a life here in the New World, the life I wanted.” Gold and gold and gold. “Keep the rooms, keep the things I’ve given you.”
But he hadn’t been clever like Lestat. He’d had no skill for living like a mortal among mortals. Not with these songs in his head, these symphonies, and the blood ever beckoning. His own legacy he’d squandered, and Lestat’s gold was gone too at last, though where or how he could never remember. He had left New Orleans, journeying north, sleeping in the cemeteries as he made his way.
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 frame 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.”
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.
“Well, I can tell you as a fact,” said Killer, “that lately it’s not been working at all. Right before these massacres started, they were all talking about it, how hard it was to bring somebody over. It was like the Blood was played out. Too many in the Blood. Think about it. The power comes from the Mother, from that demon, Amel, who entered into Akasha and then passed into Mekare, the Queen of the Damned. Well, maybe Amel really is an invisible creature with tentacles just like Mekare once said, and those tentacles have stretched just as far as they can. They just can’t stretch forever.”
Killer sighed. Antoine looked away. He was obsessed.
“I’m going to tell you something horrible I hate to tell anybody,” said Killer. “Last two times I tried to bring somebody over, it flat-out failed. Now it was never like that before, I can tell you.” Killer shook his head. “I tried to bring over the most beautiful little girl I ever saw in one of those towns back there, and it just did not work. It just didn’t work. Come dawn, I did the only thing I could do—chop off her head and bury her, and I’d promised her eternal life and I had to do that. She was a zombie thing, and she couldn’t even talk and her heart wasn’t beating, but she wasn’t dead.”
Antoine shuddered. He’d never had the courage to try. But if this was true, if he did not have the slightest hope of ever ending this loneliness by making another, well, then, that was all the more reason to press on.
Killer laughed under his breath. “It used to seem so easy,” he said, “back when I was making members of the old Fang Gang, but now the filth and the rabble and the trash are everywhere, and even if you make them, they’ll turn on you, rob you, betray you, and take off with someone else. I tell you these massacres have to come. They have to. There’s bad dudes selling the Blood. Can you believe? Selling the Blood. Least they were. I expect they’re played out too and running for their lives now like everybody else.”
Again Killer begged Antoine to stay with him.
“For all we know, Armand and Louis and Lestat are all in this together,” Killer said. “Maybe they’re all doing it, the big heroes of the Vampire Chronicles. But these things have to happen, like I said. I know this is what Benji thinks, but he won’t say it. He can’t. But this is worse than before. Can you hear them, the voices? There was a Burning last night in Kathmandu. Think about it, man. It’s going to move across India, whoever’s doing it, and then into the Middle East. It’s worse than the last time. It’s being more thorough. I can sense it. I remember. I know.”
Tearfully, they parted a short way southeast of New York. Killer wouldn’t go any farther. Benji’s broadcast the night before had confirmed Killer’s worst fears. There had been no direct witnesses to the Burning when it hit Kolkata. Vampires for hundreds of miles caught images of the immolation. They were fleeing west.
“All right, if you’re determined to go through with this,” said Killer. “I’ll tell you what I know. Armand and the others live in a mansion on the Upper East Side half a block from Central Park. It’s three townhouses linked together, and each one’s got a door to the street. There are little Greek columns on each little porch and big limbed trees growing out front surrounded by little skirts of iron.
“These townhouses are maybe five stories high and they’ve got these fancy little iron balconies up high on the windows that aren’t balconies at all.”
“I know what you mean,” said Antoine gratefully. He was picking up the images from Killer’s mind, but it seemed rude to say so.
“It’s gorgeous inside,” said Killer, “like a palace, and they leave all those windows open on nights like this, you know, and they’ll see you long before you ever see them. They could be anywhere up in those high windows looking out long before you even get close. The mansion’s got a name, Trinity Gate. And a lot of blood drinkers can tell you, it’s the gate of death to us if we go there. And remember, my friend, it’s Armand who’s the killer. Back years ago, when Lestat was down and out in New Orleans—after he’d met Memnoch the Devil—it was Armand who kept the trash away from him. Lestat was sleeping kind of in this chapel in this old convent.…”
“I remember from the books,” said Antoine.
“Yeah, well, it was Armand who cleared the town. Antoine, please don’t go there. He’ll blast you right off the face of the Earth.”
“I have to go,” said Antoine. How could he ever explain to this simple survivor that existence was unbearable to him as it was? Even this blood drinker’s company had not been enough to fill the gnawing emptiness inside him.
They embraced before parting. Killer repeated that he was headed out to California. If the massacres were moving west, well, he’d move west too. He’d heard tell of a great vampire physician who lived in Southern California, an immortal named Fareed, who actually studied the Dark Blood under microscopes and sometimes sheltered roamers like Killer, if they would donate some tissue and some blood for experiments.
Fareed had been made with ancient blood by a vampire named Seth, who was almost as old as the Mother. And nobody could hurt Seth or Fareed. Well, Killer was going to look for that doctor in California because he figured that was his only hope. He begged Antoine to change his mind and come with him. But Antoine could not.
Antoine wept afterwards. Alone again. And as he lay down to sleep that morning, he heard the voices wailing, powerful ones crying out, conveying the word. The Burning was annihilating the vampires of India. A great sense of doom filled Antoine. When he thought of all the years he’d roamed and slept in the earth he felt he had wasted the gift Lestat gave him. Waste. He had never thought of it as precious. It had been only a new kind of suffering.
But that’s not what it was for Benji Mahmoud. “We are a tribe and we should think like one,” Benji said often. “Why should Hell have dominion over us?”
Antoine was bound and determined to continue. He had a plan. He wouldn’t try to speak to these powerful Manhattan vampires. He would let his music speak for him. Hadn’t he done that all his long life?
Outside the city—before he stole a car to drive into Manhattan—he had his black hair cut and trimmed modern style by a precious little girl in a salon full of perfume and lighted candles, and then outfitted himself in a fine Armani suit of black wool with a Hugo Boss shirt and a gleaming Versace silk tie. Even his shoes were fancy, made of Italian leather, and he carefully rubbed his white skin with oil and clean paper ash to make himself look less luminescent in the bright city lights. If all these blandishments gave them a moment’s pause he would use that pause to make the violin sing.
At last he was on foot on Fifth Avenue, having ditched the stolen car on a side street, when he heard the wild unmistakable music of Sybelle. And there, yes, was the great townhouse complex described by Killer, Trinity Gate, facing downtown with its many warmly lighted windows, and he could all but hear the powerful heart of Armand.
As he dropped the violin case at his feet, and tuned his instrument rapidly, Sybelle broke off the long turbulent piece she’d been playing and suddenly moved into the soft beautiful Chopin étude “Tristesse.”
Crossing Fifth Avenue, he moved towards the doors of the mansion, already playing with her, following her as he glided into the soft sweet unmistakably sad melody of the étude and racing with her into the more violent phrasing. He heard her hesitate and then her playing moved on, slowly again, and his violin sang with it, weaving high above her. The tears rolled down Antoine’s cheeks; he couldn’t stop them, though he knew they would be tinged with blood.
On and on he went with her, moving beneath her into the deepest and darkest notes he could make on the G string.
She stopped.
Silence. He thought he would collapse. In a blur he saw mortals gathered around him, watching him, and suddenly he brought down his bow, ripping away from the gentle caressing music of Chopin into the strong full melodies of Bartók’s Concerto for Violin, playing both orchestra lines and the violin lines in a torrent of wild, dissonant agonized notes.
He saw nothing suddenly, though he knew the crowd had thickened and no music answered him from the keyboard of Sybelle. But this was his heart, his song now, as he plunged deeper and deeper into the Bartók, his tempo speeding up, becoming almost inhuman, as on and on he went.
His soul sang with the music. It became his own melodies and glissandi as his thoughts sang with it.
Let me in, I beg you, let me in. Louis, let me in. Made by Lestat, never having had a chance to know you, never meant to harm you or Claudia, those long-ago times, forgive me, let me in. Benji, my guiding light, let me in. Benji, my consolation in unending darkness, let me in. Armand, I beg you, find a place in your heart for me, let me in.
But soon his words were lost, he was no longer thinking in words or syllables but only in the music, only in the throbbing notes. He was swaying wildly as he played. He no longer cared whether or not he looked or sounded human, and deep in his heart he was aware that if he were to die now, he would not revolt against it, not with any molecule of his being, because the death sentence would come upon him by his own hand and for what he truly was. This music was what he truly was.
Silence.
He had to wipe the blood from his eyes. He had to, and slowly, he reached for his handkerchief and then held it trembling, unable to see.
They were close. The mortal crowd meant nothing to him. He could hear that powerful heart, that ancient heart that had to be Armand’s heart. Cold preternatural flesh touched his flesh. Someone had taken the handkerchief from him, and this one was blotting his eyes for him, and wiping the thin streaks of blood from his face.
He opened his eyes.
It was Armand. Auburn hair, face of a boy, and the dark burning eyes of an immortal who’d roamed for half a millennium. Oh, this truly was the face of a seraph right off the ceiling of a church.
My life is in your hands.
On all sides of him, people were applauding, men and women clapping for his performance—just innocent people, people who didn’t know what he was. People who didn’t even notice these blood tears, this fatal giveaway. The night was bright with streetlamps, and rows and rows of yellow windows, and the daytime warmth was coming up from the pavements, and the tall tender saplings shed their very tiny leaves in a warm breeze.
“Come inside,” said Armand softly. He felt Armand’s arm around him. Such strength. “Don’t be afraid,” said Armand.
There stood the incandescent Sybelle smiling at him, and beside her the unmistakable Benji Mahmoud in a black fedora with his small hand extended.
“We’ll take care of you,” said Armand. “Come inside with us.”