Prince Lestat Page 2

  Fledgling--A new vampire very young in the Blood. Also, one's own offspring in the Blood. For example, Louis is the fledgling of Lestat. Armand is the fledgling of Marius. The ancient twin Maharet is the fledgling of her twin, Mekare. Mekare is the fledgling of the ancient Khayman. Khayman is the fledgling of Akasha.

  The Little Drink--Stealing blood from a mortal victim without the victim knowing it or feeling it, without the victim having to die.

  Maker--Simple term for the vampire who brought one into the Blood. Being slowly replaced by the term "mentor." Sometimes the maker is also referred to as the "master." However, this has gone out of use. In many parts of the world it is considered a great sin to rise up against or seek to destroy one's maker. A maker can never hear the thoughts of a fledgling, and vice versa.

  The Queen of the Damned--Term given to the vampire Mekare by her sister Maharet once Mekare had taken the Sacred Core into herself. It was ironic. Akasha, the fallen Queen who had sought to dominate the world, had called herself the Queen of Heaven.

  The Savage Garden--A term used by Lestat for the world, fitting with his belief that the only true laws of the universe are aesthetic laws, the laws that govern the natural beauty we see all around us on the planet.

  The Undead--Common term for vampires of all ages.

  Part I

  THE

  VAMPIRE

  LESTAT

  I

  The Voice

  YEARS AGO, I heard him. He'd been babbling.

  It was after Queen Akasha had been destroyed and the mute red-haired twin, Mekare, had become "the Queen of the Damned." I'd witnessed all that--the brutal death of Akasha in the moment when we all thought we would die, too, along with her.

  It was after I'd switched bodies with a mortal man and come back into my own powerful vampiric body--having rejected the old dream of being human again.

  It was after I'd been to Heaven and Hell with a spirit called Memnoch, and come back to Earth a wounded explorer with no appetite anymore for knowledge, truth, beauty.

  Defeated, I'd lain for years on the floor of a chapel in New Orleans in an old convent building, oblivious to the ever-shifting crowd of immortals around me--hearing them, wanting to respond, yet somehow never managing to meet a glance, answer a question, acknowledge a kiss or a whisper of affection.

  And that's when I first heard the Voice. Masculine, insistent, inside my brain.

  Babbling, like I said. And I thought, Well, perhaps we blood drinkers can go mad like mortals, you know, and this is some artifact of my warped mind. Or maybe he is some massively crippled ancient one, slumbering somewhere nearby, and somehow I, telepathically, get to share in his misery.

  There are physical limits to telepathy in our world. Of course. But then voices, pleas, messages, thoughts, can be relayed through other minds, and conceivably, this poor slob could be mumbling to himself on the other side of the planet.

  As I said, he had babbled, mixing languages, ancient and modern, sometimes stringing a whole sentence out in Latin or Greek, and then lapsing into repetitions of modern voices ... phrases from films and even songs. Over and over he begged for help, rather like the tiny human-headed fly at the end of the B-movie masterpiece, Help me, help me, as if he too were caught in a spiderweb and a giant spider were closing in on him. Okay, okay, what can I do, I'd ask, and he was quick to respond. Near at hand? Or just the best relay system in the Undead world?

  "Hear me, come to me." And he'd say that over and over again, night after night, until it was noise.

  I have always been able to tune him out. No problem. Either you learn to tune out telepathic voices when you are a vampire or you go straight out of your mind. I can tune out the cries of the living just as easily. Have to. No other way to survive. Even the very ancient ones can tune out the voices. I've been in the Blood for over two hundred years. They've been in the Blood for six millennia.

  Sometimes he simply went away.

  Around the early years of the twenty-first century he began to speak in English.

  "Why?" I asked.

  "Because you like it," he said in that crisp masculine tone of his. Laughter. His laughter. "Everybody likes English. You must come to me when I call you," he said. Then he was babbling again, in a melange of languages, all about blindness, suffocation, paralysis, helplessness. And it devolved into "Help me" again with snatches of poetry in Latin and Greek and French and English.

  This is interesting for maybe three-quarters of an hour. After that, it's repetitious and a nuisance.

  Of course I did not even bother to say no.

  At one point, he cried out "Beauty!" and babbled on incessantly, always getting back to "Beauty!" and always with an exclamation point I could feel like the jab of a finger against my temple.

  "Okay, 'beauty,' so what?" I asked. He moaned, wept, went into dizzying incoherent reverie. I tuned him out for a year, I think. But I could feel him rumbling under the surface, and then two years after that--it might have been--he started addressing me by name.

  "Lestat, you, Brat Prince!"

  "Oh, get off it."

  "No, you, Brat Prince, my prince, boy oh boy, Lestat...." Then he ran those words through ten modern languages and six or seven ancient ones. I was impressed.

  "So tell me who you are, or else," I said glumly. I had to confess when I was extremely lonely, I was happy to have him around.

  And that was not a good year for me. I was wandering aimlessly. I was sick of things. I was furious with myself that the "beauty" of life wasn't sustaining me, wasn't making my loneliness bearable. I was wandering at night in jungles and in forests with my hands up to touch the leaves of the low branches, crying to myself, doing a lot of babbling of my own. I wandered through Central America visiting Maya ruins, and went deep down into Egypt to walk in the desert wastes and see the ancient drawings on the rocks on the way to the ports of the Red Sea.

  Young maverick vampires kept invading the cities where I roamed--Cairo, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Honolulu, San Francisco--and I grew weary of disciplining them, punishing them for slaughtering the innocent in their misbegotten hunger. They'd get caught, thrown into human jails where they'd burn up when dawn came. Occasionally they'd fall into the hands of actual forensic scientists. Bloody nuisance.

  Nothing ever came of it. But more on that later.

  The mavericks multiplying everywhere were causing trouble for one another, and their gang fights and brawls have made life ugly for the rest of us. And they think nothing of trying to burn with fire or decapitate any other blood drinker who gets in their way.

  It is chaos.

  But who am I to police these preternatural nincompoops?

  When have I ever been on the side of law and order? I'm supposed to be the rebellious one, l'enfant terrible. So I let them drive me away out of the cities, and even from New Orleans, I let them drive me away. My beloved Louis de Pointe du Lac left soon after, and from that time on lived in New York with Armand.

  Armand keeps the island of Manhattan safe for them--Louis, Armand, and two young blood drinkers, Benjamin and Sybelle, and whoever else joins them in their palatial digs on the Upper East Side.

  No surprises there. Armand has always been skilled at destroying those who offend him. He was after all for hundreds of years the coven master of the old Children of Satan in Paris, and he'd burn to ashes any blood drinker who didn't obey the vicious old rules of those miserable religious fanatics. He's autocratic, ruthless. Well, he can have that mission.

  But let me add here that Armand isn't the moral cipher I once thought he was. So much of what I thought about us, our minds, our souls, our moral evolution or devolution, was just wrong in the books I wrote. Armand's not without compassion, not without a heart. In many respects, he's just coming into himself after five hundred years. And what do I really know about being immortal? I've been in the Blood since when, 1780? That's not very long. Not very long at all.

  I've been to New York, by the way, to spy on my old friend
s.

  I've stood outside their gorgeous Upper East Side dwelling on warm nights, listening to the young vampire Sybelle play the piano and Benjamin and Armand talking by the hour.

  Such impressive dwellings--three townhouses attached to one another and made into one grand palazzo, each with its own Grecian portico and front steps and little decorative iron fencing. Only the central entrance was used, with the bronze name in script above the door: TRINITY GATE.

  Benji's the vampire responsible for the radio talk show beaming out of New York night after night. In the first years, it was broadcast in the regular way, but now it's internet radio and reaches the Undead all over the world. Benji's clever in ways no one could have predicted--a Bedouin by birth, brought into the Blood at age twelve perhaps, so he'll be five feet two inches tall and small forever. But he's one of those immortal children whom mortals always take for a diminutive adult.

  I can't "hear" Louis when I'm spying, of course, since I made him, and makers and fledglings are deaf to each other, but my preternatural ears have never been better. Outside their house, I easily picked up his rich, soft voice and the images of Louis in the minds of the others. I could see the vividly colored baroque murals on their ceilings through the billowing lace curtains. Lots of blue there--blue skies with rich rolling gold-tinged clouds. Why not? And I could smell those crackling fires.

  The townhouse complex was five stories, Belle Epoque, and grand. Basements underneath and, high up there, an immense attic ballroom with a glass ceiling open to the stars. They'd made it into a palace, all right. Armand has always been good at that, drawing on unimaginable reserves to pave his stunning headquarters in marble and antique plank and to furnish the rooms with the finest designs ever produced. And he always made them secure.

  The sad little icon painter from Russia, kidnapped and plunged into the West, had long ago embraced its humanist vision utterly. Marius, his maker, surely must have seen this with some satisfaction a long time ago.

  I wanted to join them. Always do want to join them and never do. In fact, I marveled at the way they lived--slipping out in Rolls-Royce limousines to attend the opera, the symphony, the ballet, wandering the museum openings together, so well integrated into the human world around them, even inviting mortals to those gilded salons for wine and refreshments. Having mortal musicians in to play. How splendidly they passed for human. I marveled that I had ever lived that way, ever been able to do it with such finesse a century or more ago. I watched them with the eyes of a hungry ghost.

  The Voice rumbled and bellowed and whispered whenever I was there, rolling their names around in a stew of invective and rumination and demand. One evening, the Voice said, "Beauty is what drove it, don't you see? It was the mystery of Beauty."

  A year later, I was walking along the sands of South Beach in Miami when he broke that one on me again. For the moment, the mavericks and rogues had been leaving me alone. They were afraid of me, afraid of all the old ones. But not enough.

  "Drove what, dear Voice?" I asked. I felt it was only fair to give him a few minutes before shutting him down.

  "You cannot conceive of the magnitude of this mystery." He spoke in a confidential whisper. "You cannot conceive of this complexity." He was saying these words as if he'd just discovered them. He wept. I swear it. He wept.

  It was an awful sound. I don't glory in any being's pain, not even the pain of my most sadistic enemies, and here was the Voice weeping.

  I was hunting, thirsting though I didn't need to drink, at the mercy of the craving, the deep agonizing lust for heated pumping human blood. I found a young victim, female, irresistible in her combination of filthy soul and gorgeous body, white throat so tender. I had her in the fragrant darkened bedroom of her own lodgings, lights of the city beyond the windows, having come over the roofs to find her, this pale woman with glorious brown eyes and walnut-shaded skin, black hair like the snakes of Medusa, naked between the white linen sheets, struggling against me as I sank my fangs right into the carotid artery. Too hungry for anything else. Give me the heartbeat. Give me the salt. Give me the Viaticum. Fill my mouth.

  And then the blood erupted, roared. Don't rush this! I was the victim suddenly laid waste as if by a phallic god, slammed by the rushing blood against the floor of the universe, the heart pounding, emptying the frail form it sought to protect. And lo, she was dead. Oh, too soon. Crushed lily on the pillow, except she'd been no lily and I'd seen her grimy petty purple crimes as that blood made a fool of me, wasted me, left me warm, indeed hot, all over, licking my lips.

  Can't bear to linger near a dead human. Out over the roofs again.

  "Did you enjoy that, Voice?" I asked. I stretched like a cat under the moon.

  "Hmmm," he replied. "Have always loved it, of course."

  "Then stop all the weeping."

  He drifted off then. That was a first. He left me. I hit him with one question after another. No answer. No one there.

  Three years ago, this happened.

  I was in a wretched state, down and out, disgusted and discouraged. Things were bad all over the vampire world, no doubt about it. Benji in his endless broadcasts was calling for me to come out of exile. And others were joining him in that appeal. "Lestat, we need you." Tales of woe abounded. And I couldn't find many of my friends anymore--not Marius, or David Talbot, or even the ancient twins. Time was when I could find any and all of them fairly easily, but no more.

  "We are a parentless tribe!" Benji cried over the internet vampire radio station. "Young ones, be wise. Flee the old ones when you see them. They are not our elders, no matter how many years they have in the Blood. They have refused all responsibility for their brothers and sisters. Be wise!"

  On this dreary cold night, I'd been thirsty, more thirsty than I could bear. Oh, I don't technically need the blood anymore. I have so much blood from Akasha in my veins--the primal blood from the old Mother--that I can exist forever without feeding. But I was thirsting, and I had to have it to stanch the misery, or so I told myself, on a little late-night rampage in the city of Amsterdam, feeding off every reprobate and killer I could find. I'd hidden the bodies. I'd been careful. But it had been grim--that hot, delicious blood pumping into me and all those visions with it of filthy and degenerate minds, all that intimacy with the emotions I deplore. Oh, same old, same old. I was sick at heart. In moods like this, I'm a menace to the innocent, and I know it only too well.

  Around four in the morning, it had me so bad, I was in a little public park, sitting on an iron bench in the damp, doubled over, in a bad seedy part of the city, the late-night lights looking garish and sooty through the mist. And I was cold all over and fearing now that I simply wasn't going to endure. I wasn't going to "make it" in the Blood. I wasn't going to be a true immortal like the great Marius or Mekare or Maharet or Khayman, or even Armand. This wasn't living, what I was doing. And at one point the pain was so acute, it was like a blade turning in my heart and in my brain. I doubled over on the bench. I had my hands clasped on the back of my neck, and I wanted nothing so much as to die, simply to close my eyes on all of life and die.

  And the Voice came, and the Voice said:

  "But I love you!"

  I was startled. I hadn't heard the Voice in such a long time, and there it was, that intimate tone, so soft, so utterly tender, like fingers touching me, caressing my head.

  "Why?" I asked.

  "Of all of them, I love you the most," said the Voice. "I am with you, loving you now."

  "What are you? Another make-believe angel?" I said. "Another spirit pretending to be a god, something like that?"

  "No," he said.

  But the moment he'd started to speak, I had felt this warmth in me, this sudden warmth such as addicts describe when they are infused with the substance they crave, this lovely reassuring warmth that I'd found so fleetingly in the Blood, and I'd begun to hear the rain, hear it not as this dismal drizzle but as a lovely soft symphony of sounds on the surfaces that surrounded me.

/>   "I love you," said the Voice. "Now, get up. Leave this place. You must. Get up. Start walking. This rain is not too cold for you. You are too strong for this rain and too strong for this sorrow. Come on, do as I tell you...."

  And I had.

  I had gotten up and started walking and made my way back to the elegant old Hotel de l'Europe where I was lodged, and I'd gone into the large exquisitely wallpapered bedroom and closed the long velvet draperies properly over the coming sun. Glare of white sky over the Amstel River. Morning sounds.

  Then, I'd stopped. I'd pressed my fingers to my eyelids and buckled, buckled under the weight of a loneliness so terrible I would have chosen death then if only I'd had such a choice.

  "Come now, I love you," said the Voice. "You're not alone in this! You never were." I could feel the Voice inside me, around me, embracing me.

  Finally, I lay down to sleep. He was singing to me now, singing in French, singing some lyrics put to the beautiful Chopin etude "Tristesse"...

  "Lestat, go home to France, to the Auvergne where you were born," he whispered, just as if he were beside me. "Your father's old chateau there. You need to go there. All of you human beings need a home."

  So tender it sounded, so sincere.

  So strange that he would say this. I did own the old ruined chateau. Years ago, I had set architects and stone masons to rebuild it, though why I did not know. I saw an image of it now, those ancient round towers rising from that cliff above fields and valleys, where in the old days so many had starved, where life had been so bitter, where I had been bitter, a boy bound and determined to run away to Paris, to see the world.

  "Go home," he whispered.

  "Why are you not winking out the way I am, Voice?" I asked. "The sun's rising."

  "Because it is not morning where I am, beloved Lestat."

  "Ah, then you are a blood drinker, aren't you?" I asked. I felt I'd caught him. I began to laugh, to cackle. "Of course you are."

  He was furious. "You miserable, ungrateful, degenerate Brat Prince," he was muttering ... and then he'd left me again. Ah, well. Why not? But I hadn't really solved the mystery of the Voice, not by a long shot. Was he just a powerful old immortal communicating from another part of the globe by bouncing his telepathic message off vampiric minds in between, like light bouncing from mirror to mirror? No, that wasn't possible. His voice was too intimate and precise for all that. You can send out a telepathic call to another immortal by that method, of course. But you can't communicate directly as he had been doing all along with me.