Queen of the Damned Read online

  “That’s Louis’s language,” Armand said patiently. “Please don’t quote that book to me. I’d rather die than see you die, Daniel.”

  “Then give it to me! Damn you! Immortality that close, as close as your arms.”

  “No, Daniel, because I’d rather die than do that, too.”

  But even if Armand did not cause this madness that brought Daniel home, surely he always knew where Daniel was. He could hear Daniel’s call. The blood connected them, it had to—the precious tiny drinks of burning preternatural blood. Never enough to do more than awaken dreams in Daniel, and the thirst for eternity, to make the flowers in the wallpaper sing and dance. Whatever, Armand could always find him, of that he had no doubt.

  IN THE early years, even before the blood exchange, Armand had pursued Daniel with the cunning of a harpy. There had been no place on earth that Daniel could hide.

  Horrifying yet tantalizing, their beginning in New Orleans, twelve years ago when Daniel had entered a crumbling old house in the Garden District and known at once that it was the vampire Lestat’s lair.

  Ten days before he’d left San Francisco after his night-long interview with the vampire Louis, suffering from the final confirmation of the frightening tale he had been told. In a sudden embrace, Louis had demonstrated his supernatural power to drain Daniel almost to the point of death. The puncture wounds had disappeared, but the memory had left Daniel near to madness. Feverish, sometimes delirious, he had traveled no more than a few hundred miles a day. In cheap roadside motels, where he forced himself to take nourishment, he had duplicated the tapes of the interview one by one, sending the copies off to a New York publisher, so that a book was in the making before he ever stood before Lestat’s gate.

  But that had been secondary, the publication, an event connected with the values of a dimming and distant world.

  He had to find the vampire Lestat. He had to unearth the immortal who had made Louis, the one who still survived somewhere in this damp, decadent, and beautiful old city, waiting perhaps for Daniel to awaken him, to bring him out into the century that had terrified him and driven him underground.

  It was what Louis wanted, surely. Why else had he given this mortal emissary so many clues as to where Lestat could be found? Yet some of the details were misleading. Was this ambivalence on Louis’s part? It did not matter, finally. In the public records, Daniel had found the title to the property, and the street number, under the unmistakable name: Lestat de Lioncourt.

  The iron gate had not even been locked, and once he’d hacked his way through the overgrown garden, he had managed easily to break the rusted lock on the front door.

  Only a small pocket flash helped him as he entered. But the moon had been high, shining its full white light here and there through the oak branches. He had seen clearly the rows and rows of books stacked to the ceiling, making up the very walls of every room. No human could or would have done such a mad and methodical thing. And then in the upstairs bedroom, he had knelt down in the thick dust that covered the rotting carpet and found the gold pocket watch on which was written the name Lestat.

  Ah, that chilling moment, that moment when the pendulum swung away from ever increasing dementia to a new passion—he would track to the ends of the earth these pale and deadly beings whose existence he had only glimpsed.

  What had he wanted in those early weeks? Did he hope to possess the splendid secrets of life itself? Surely he would gain from this knowledge no purpose for an existence already fraught with disappointment. No, he wanted to be swept away from everything he had once loved. He longed for Louis’s violent and sensuous world.

  Evil. He was no longer afraid.

  Maybe he was like the lost explorer who, pushing through the jungle, suddenly sees the wall of the fabled temple before him, its carvings overhung with spiderwebs and vines; no matter that he may not live to tell his story; he has beheld the truth with his own eyes.

  But if only he could open the door a little further, see the full magnificence. If they would only let him in! Maybe he just wanted to live forever. Could anyone fault him for that?

  He had felt good and safe standing alone in the ruin of Lestat’s old house, with the wild roses crawling at the broken window and the four-poster bed a skeleton, its hangings rotting away.

  Near them, near to their precious darkness, their lovely devouring gloom. How he had loved the hopelessness of it all, the moldering chairs with their bits of carving, shreds of velvet, and the slithering things eating the last of the carpet away.

  But the relic; ah, the relic was everything, the gleaming gold watch that bore an immortal’s name!

  After a while, he had opened the armoire; the black frock coats fell to pieces when he touched them. Withered and curling boots lay on the cedar boards.

  But Lestat, you are here. He had taken the tape recorder out, set it down, put in the first tape, and let the voice of Louis rise softly in the shadowy room. Hour by hour, the tapes played.

  Then just before dawn he had seen a figure in the hallway, and known that he was meant to see it. And he had seen the moon strike the boyish face, the auburn hair. The earth tilted, the darkness came down. The last word he uttered had been the name Armand.

  He should have died then. Had a whim kept him alive?

  He’d awakened in a dark, damp cellar. Water oozed from the walls. Groping in the blackness, he’d discovered a bricked-up window, a locked door plated with steel.

  And what was his comfort, that he had found yet another god of the secret pantheon—Armand, the oldest of the immortals whom Louis had described, Armand, the coven master of the nineteenth-century Theater of the Vampires in Paris, who had confided his terrible secret to Louis: of our origins nothing is known.

  For three days and nights, perhaps, Daniel had lain in this prison. Impossible to tell. He had been near to dying certainly, the stench of his own urine sickening him, the insects driving him mad. Yet his was a religious fervor. He had come ever nearer to the dark pulsing truths that Louis had revealed. Slipping in and out of consciousness, he dreamed of Louis, Louis talking to him in that dirty little room in San Francisco, there have always been things such as we are, always, Louis embracing him, his green eyes darkening suddenly as he let Daniel see the fang teeth.

  The fourth night, Daniel had awakened and known at once that someone or something was in the room. The door lay open to a passage. Water was flowing somewhere fast as if in a deep underground sewer. Slowly his eyes grew accustomed to the dirty greenish light from the doorway and then he saw the pale white-skinned figure standing against the wall.

  So immaculate the black suit, the starched white shirt—like the imitation of a twentieth-century man. And the auburn hair clipped short and the fingernails gleaming dully even in this semidarkness. Like a corpse for the coffin—that sterile, that well prepared.

  The voice had been gentle with a trace of an accent. Not European; something sharper yet softer at the same time. Arabic or Greek perhaps, that kind of music. The words were slow and without anger.

  “Get out. Take your tapes with you. They are there beside you. I know of your book. No one will believe it. Now you will go and take these things.”

  Then you won’t kill me. And you won’t make me one of you either. Desperate, stupid thoughts, but he couldn’t stop them. He had seen the power! No lies, no cunning here. And he’d felt himself crying, so weakened by fear and hunger, reduced to a child.

  “Make you one of us?” The accent thickened, giving a fine lilt to the words. “Why would I do that?” Eyes narrowing. “I would not do that to those whom I find to be despicable, whom I would see burning in hell as a matter of course. So why should I do it to an innocent fool—like you?”

  I want it. I want to live forever. Daniel had sat up, climbed to his feet slowly, struggling to see Armand more clearly. A dim bulb burned somewhere far down the hall. I want to be with Louis and with you.

  Laughter, low, gentle. But contemptuous. “I see why he chose yo
u for his confidant. You are naive and beautiful. But the beauty could be the only reason, you know.”

  Silence.

  “Your eyes are an unusual color, almost violet. And you are strangely defiant and beseeching in the same breath.”

  Make me immortal. Give it to me!

  Laughter again. Almost sad. Then silence, the water rushing fast in that distant someplace. The room had become visible, a filthy basement hole. And the figure more nearly mortal. There was even a faint pink tinge to the smooth skin.

  “It was all true, what he told you. But no one will ever believe it. And you will go mad in time from this knowledge. That’s what always happens. But you’re not mad yet.”

  No. This is real, it’s all happening. You’re Armand and we’re talking together. And I’m not mad.

  “Yes. And I find it rather interesting . . . interesting that you know my name and that you’re alive. I have never told my name to anyone who is alive.” Armand hesitated. “I don’t want to kill you. Not just now.”

  Daniel had felt the first touch of fear. If you looked closely enough at these beings you could see what they were. It had been the same with Louis. No, they weren’t living. They were ghastly imitations of the living. And this one, the gleaming manikin of a young boy!

  “I am going to let you leave here,” Armand had said. So politely, softly. “I want to follow you, watch you, see where you go. As long as I find you interesting, I won’t kill you. And of course, I may lose interest altogether and not bother to kill you. That’s always possible. You have hope in that. And maybe with luck I’ll lose track of you. I have my limitations, of course. You have the world to roam, and you can move by day. Go now. Start running. I want to see what you do, I want to know what you are.”

  Go now, start running!

  He’d been on the morning plane to Lisbon, clutching Lestat’s gold watch in his hand. Yet two nights later in Madrid, he’d turned to find Armand seated on a city bus beside him no more than inches away. A week later in Vienna he’d looked out the window of a cafe to see Armand watching him from the street. In Berlin, Armand slipped into a taxi beside him, and sat there staring at him, until finally Daniel had leapt out in the thick of the traffic and run away.

  Within months, however, these shattering silent confrontations had given way to more vigorous assaults.

  He woke in a hotel room in Prague to find Armand standing over him, crazed, violent. “Talk to me now! I demand it. Wake up. I want you to walk with me, show me things in this city. Why did you come to this particular place?”

  Riding on a train through Switzerland, he looked up suddenly to see Armand directly opposite watching him over the upturned cover of his fur-lined coat. Armand snatched the book out of his hand and insisted that he explain what it was, why he read it, what did the picture on the cover mean?

  In Paris Armand pursued him nightly through the boulevards and the back streets, only now and then questioning him on the places he went, the things he did. In Venice, he’d looked out of his room at the Danieli, to see Armand staring from a window across the way.

  Then weeks passed without a visitation. Daniel vacillated between terror and strange expectation, doubting his very sanity again. But there was Armand waiting for him in the New York airport. And the following night in Boston, Armand was in the dining room of the Copley when Daniel came in. Daniel’s dinner was already ordered. Please sit down. Did Daniel know that Interview with the Vampire was in the bookstores?

  “I must confess I enjoy this small measure of notoriety,” Armand had said with exquisite politeness and a vicious smile. “What puzzles me is that you do not want notoriety! You did not list yourself as the ‘author,’ which means that you are either very modest or a coward. Either explanation would be very dull.”

  “I’m not hungry, let’s get out of here,” Daniel had answered weakly. Yet suddenly dish after dish was being placed on the table; everyone was staring.

  “I didn’t know what you wanted,” Armand confided, the smile becoming absolutely ecstatic. “So I ordered everything that they had.”

  “You think you can drive me crazy, don’t you?” Daniel had snarled. “Well, you can’t. Let me tell you. Every time I lay eyes on you, I realize that I didn’t invent you, and that I’m sane!” And he had started eating, lustily, furiously—a little fish, a little beef, a little veal, a little sweetbreads, a little cheese, a little everything, put it all together, what did he care, and Armand had been so delighted, laughing and laughing like a schoolboy as he sat watching, with folded arms. It was the first time Daniel had ever heard that soft, silky laughter. So seductive. He got drunk as fast as he could.

  The meetings grew longer and longer. Conversations, sparring matches, and downright fights became the rule. Once Armand had dragged Daniel out of bed in New Orleans and shouted at him: “That telephone, I want you to dial Paris, I want to see if it can really talk to Paris.”

  “Goddamn it, do it yourself,” Daniel had roared. “You’re five hundred years old and you can’t use a telephone? Read the directions. What are you, an immortal idiot? I will do no such thing!”

  How surprised Armand had looked.

  “All right, I’ll call Paris for you. But you pay the bill.”

  “But of course,” Armand had said innocently. He had drawn dozens of hundred-dollar bills out of his coat, sprinkling them on Daniel’s bed.

  More and more they argued philosophy at these meetings. Pulling Daniel out of a theater in Rome, Armand had asked what did Daniel really think that death was? People who were still living knew things like that! Did Daniel know what Armand truly feared?

  As it was past midnight and Daniel was drunk and exhausted and had been sound asleep in the theater before Armand found him, he did not care.

  “I’ll tell you what I fear,” Armand had said, intense as any young student. “That it’s chaos after you die, that it’s a dream from which you can’t wake. Imagine drifting half in and out of consciousness, trying vainly to remember who you are or what you were. Imagine straining forever for the lost clarity of the living. . . . ”

  It had frightened Daniel. Something about it rang true. Weren’t there tales of mediums conversing with incoherent yet powerful presences? He didn’t know. How in hell could he know? Maybe when you died there was flat out nothing. That terrified Armand, no effort expended to conceal the misery.

  “You don’t think it terrifies me?” Daniel had asked, staring at the white-faced figure beside him. “How many years do I have? Can you tell just by looking at me? Tell me.”

  When Armand woke him up in Port-au-Prince, it was war he wanted to talk about. What did men in this century actually think of war? Did Daniel know that Armand had been a boy when this had begun for him? Seventeen years old, and in those times that was young, very young. Seventeen-year-old boys in the twentieth century were virtual monsters; they had beards, hair on their chests, and yet they were children. Not then. Yet children worked as if they were men.

  But let us not get sidetracked. The point was, Armand didn’t know what men felt. He never had. Oh, of course he’d known the pleasures of the flesh, that was par for the course. Nobody then thought children were innocent of sensuous pleasures. But of true aggression he knew little. He killed because it was his nature as a vampire; and the blood was irresistible. But why did men find war irresistible? What was the desire to clash violently against the will of another with weapons? What was the physical need to destroy?

  At such times, Daniel did his best to answer: for some men it was the need to affirm one’s own existence through the annihilation of another. Surely Armand knew these things.

  “Know? Know? What does that matter if you don’t understand,” Armand had asked, his accent unusually sharp in his agitation, “if you cannot proceed from one perception to another? Don’t you see, this is what I cannot do.”

  When he found Daniel in Frankfurt, it was the nature of history, the impossibility of writing any coherent explanati
on of events that was not in itself a lie. The impossibility of truth being served by generalities, and the impossibility of learning proceeding without them.

  Now and then these meetings had not been entirely selfish. In a country inn in England Daniel woke to the sound of Armand’s voice warning him to leave the building at once. A fire destroyed the inn in less than an hour.

  Another time he had been in jail in New York, picked up for drunkenness and vagrancy when Armand appeared to bail him out, looking all too human as he always did after he had fed, a young lawyer in a tweed coat and flannel pants, escorting Daniel to a room in the Carlyle, where he left him to sleep it off with a suitcase full of new clothes waiting, and a wallet full of money hidden in a pocket.

  Finally, after a year and a half of this madness, Daniel began to question Armand. What had it really been like in those days in Venice? Look at this film, set in the eighteenth century, tell me what is wrong.

  But Armand was remarkably unresponsive. “I cannot tell you those things because I have no experience of them. You see, I have so little ability to synthesize knowledge; I deal in the immediate with a cool intensity. What was it like in Paris? Ask me if it rained on the night of Saturday, June 5, 1793. Perhaps I could tell you that.”

  Yet at other moments, he spoke in rapid bursts of the things around him, of the eerie garish cleanliness of this era, of the horrid acceleration of change.

  “Behold, earthshaking inventions which are useless or obsolete within the same century—the steamboat, the railroads; yet do you know what these meant after six thousand years of galley slaves and men on horseback? And now the dance hall girl buys a chemical to kill the seed of her lovers, and lives to be seventy-five in a room full of gadgets which cool the air and veritably eat the dust. And yet for all the costume movies and the paperback history thrown at you in every drugstore, the public has no accurate memory of anything; every social problem is observed in relation to ‘norms’ which in fact never existed, people fancy themselves ‘deprived’ of luxuries and peace and quiet which in fact were never common to any people anywhere at all.”