Before I ever left Greece, I’d been hearing disturbing news from English and French travelers of the troubles at home. And when I reached the European hostelry in Ankara there was a large packet of letters waiting for me.
Roget had moved all of my money out of France, and into foreign banks. “You must not consider returning to Paris,” he wrote. “I have advised your father and your brothers to keep out of all controversy. It is not the climate for monarchists here.”
Eleni’s letters spoke in their own way of the same things:
Audiences want to see the aristocracy made fools of. Our little play featuring a clumsy queen puppet, who is trampled mercilessly by the mindless troop of puppet soldiers whom she seeks to command, draws loud laughter and screams.
The clergy is also ripe for derision: In another little drama we have a bumptious priest come to chastise a group of dancing-girl marionettes for their indecent conduct. But alas, their dancing master, who is in fact a red-horned devil, turns the unfortunate cleric into a werewolf who ends his days kept by the laughing girls in a golden cage.
All this is the genius of Our Divine Violinist, but we must now be with him every waking moment. To force him to write we tie him to the chair. We put ink and paper in front of him. And if this fails, we make him dictate as we write down the plays.
In the streets he would accost the passers-by and tell them passionately there are horrors in this world of which they do not dream. And I assure you, if Paris were not so busy reading pamphlets that denounce Queen Marie Antoinette, he might have undone us all by now. Our Oldest Friend becomes more angry with every passing night.
Of course I wrote to her at once, begging her to be patient with Nicki, to try to help him through these first years. “Surely he can be influenced,” I said. And for the first time I asked: “Would I have the power to alter things if I were to return?” I stared at the words for a long time before signing my name. My hands were trembling. Then I sealed the letter and posted it at once.
How could I go back? Lonely as I was, I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to Paris, of seeing that little theater again. And what would I do for Nicolas when I got there? Armand’s long-ago admonition was a din in my ears.
In fact, it seemed no matter where I was that Armand and Nicki were both with me, Armand full of grim warnings and predictions, and Nicolas taunting me with the little miracle of love turned into hate.
I had never needed Gabrielle as I did now. But she had gone ahead on our journey long ago. Now and then I remembered the way it had been before we ever left Paris. But I didn’t expect anything from her anymore.
At Damascus, Eleni’s answer was waiting for me.
He despises you as much as ever. When we suggest that perhaps he should go to you, he laughs and laughs. I tell you these things not to haunt you but to let you know that we do our utmost to protect this child who should never have been Born to Darkness. He is overwhelmed by his powers, dazzled and maddened by his vision. We have seen it all and its sorry finish before.
Yet he has written his greatest play this last month. The marionette dancers, sans strings for this one, are, in the flower of their youth, struck down by a pestilence and laid beneath tombstones and flower wreaths to rest. The priest weeps over them before he goes away. But a young violinist magician comes to the cemetery. And by means of his music makes them rise. As vampires dressed all in black silk ruffles and black satin ribbons, they come out of the graves, dancing merrily as they follow the violinist towards Paris, a beautifully rendered painting on the scrim. The crowd positively roars. I tell you we could feast on mortal victims on the stage and the Parisians, thinking it all the most novel illusion, would only cheer.
There was also a frightening letter from Roget:
Paris was in the grip of revolutionary madness. King Louis had been forced to recognize the National Assembly. The people of all classes were uniting against him as never before. Roget had sent a messenger south to see my family and try to determine the revolutionary mood in the countryside for himself.
I answered both letters with all the predictable concern and all the predictable feeling of helplessness.
But as I sent my belongings on to Cairo, I had the dread that all those things upon which I depended were in danger. Outwardly, I was unchanged as I continued my masquerade as the traveling gentleman; inwardly the demon hunter of the crooked back streets was silently and secretly lost.
Of course I told myself that it was important to go south to Egypt, that Egypt was a land of ancient grandeur and timeless marvels, that Egypt would enchant me and make me forget the things happening in Paris which I was powerless to change.
But there was a connection in my mind. Egypt, more than any other land the world over, was a place in love with death.
Finally Gabrielle came like a spirit out of the Arabian desert, and together we set sail.
It was almost a month before we reached Cairo, and when I found my belongings waiting for me in the European hostelry there was a strange package there.
I recognized Eleni’s writing immediately, but I could not think why she would send me a package and I stared at the thing for a full quarter of an hour, my mind as blank as it had ever been.
There was not a word from Roget.
Why hasn’t Roget written to me, I thought. What is this package? Why is it here?
At last I realized that for an hour I had been sitting in a room with a lot of trunks and packing cases and staring at a package and that Gabrielle, who had not seen fit to vanish yet, was merely watching me.
“Would you go out?” I whispered.
“If you wish,” she said.
It was important to open this, yes, to open it and find out what it was. Yet it seemed just as important for me to look around the barren little room and imagine that it was a room in a village inn in the Auvergne.
“I had a dream about you,” I said aloud, glancing at the package. “I dreamed that we were moving through the world together, you and I, and we were both serene and strong. I dreamed we fed on the evildoer as Marius had done, and as we looked about ourselves we felt awe and sorrow at the mysteries we beheld. But we were strong. We would go on forever. And we talked. ‘Our conversation’ went on and on.”
I tore back the wrapping and saw the case of the Stradivarius violin.
I went to say something again, just to myself, but my throat closed. And my mind couldn’t carry out the words on its own. I reached for the letter which had slipped to one side over the polished wood.
It has come to the worst, as I feared. Our Oldest Friend, maddened by the excesses of Our Violinist, finally imprisoned him in your old residence. And though his violin was given him in his cell, his hands were taken away.
But understand that with us, such appendages can always be restored. And the appendages in question were kept safe by Our Oldest Friend, who allowed our wounded one no sustenance for five nights.
Finally, after the entire troupe had prevailed upon Our Oldest Friend to release N. and give back to him all that was his, it was done.
But N., maddened by the pain and the starvation—for this can alter the temperament completely—slipped into unbreakable silence and remained so for a considerable length of time.
At last he came to us and spoke only to tell us that in the manner of a mortal he had put in order his business affairs. A stack of freshly written plays was ours to have. And we must call together for him somewhere in the countryside the ancient Sabbat with its customary blaze. If we did not, then he should make the theater his funeral pyre.
Our Oldest Friend solemnly granted his wish and you have never seen such a Sabbat as this, for I think we looked all the more hellish in our wigs and fine clothes, our black ruffled vampire dancing costumes, forming the old circle, singing with an actor’s bravado the old chants.
“We should have done it on the boulevard,” he said. “But here, send this on to my maker,” and he put the violin in my hands. We began to dance, all of us, to induce the customary frenzy, and I think we were never more moved, never more in terror, never more sad. He went into the flames.
I know how this news will affect you. But understand we did all that we could to prevent what occurred. Our Oldest Friend was bitter and grieved. And I think you should know that when we returned to Paris, we discovered that N. had ordered the theater to be named officially the Theater of the Vampires and these words had already been painted on the front. As his best plays have always included vampires and werewolves and other such supernatural creatures, the public thinks the new title very amusing, and no one has moved to change it. It is merely clever in the Paris of these times.
Hours later when I finally went down the stairs into the street, I saw a pale and lovely ghost in the shadows—image of the young French explorer in soiled white linen and brown leather boots, straw hat down over the eyes.
I knew who she was, of course, and that we had once loved each other, she and I, but it seemed for the moment to be something I could scarce remember, or truly believe.
I think I wanted to say something mean to her, to wound her and drive her away. But when she came up beside me and walked with me, I didn’t say anything. I merely gave the letter to her so that we didn’t have to talk. And she read it and put it away, and then she had her arm around me again the way she used to long ago, and we were walking together through the black streets.
Smell of death and cooking fires, of sand and camel dung. Egypt smell. Smell of a place that has been the same for six thousand years.
“What can I do for you, my darling?” she whispered.
“Nothing,” I said.
It was I who did it, I who seduced him, made him what he was, and left him there. It was I who subverted the path his life might have taken. And so in dark obscurity, removed from its human course, it comes to this.
Later she stood silent as I wrote my message to Marius on an ancient temple wall. I told about the end of Nicolas, the violinist of the Theater of the Vampires, and I carved my words deep as any ancient Egyptian craftsman might have done. Epitaph for Nicki, a milestone in oblivion, which none might ever read or understand.
It was strange to have her there. Strange to have her staying with me hour by hour.
“You won’t go back to France, will you?” she asked me finally. “You won’t go back on account of what he’s done?”
“The hands?” I asked her. “The cutting off of the hands?”
She looked at me and her face smoothed out as if some shock had robbed it of expression. But she knew. She had read the letter. What shocked her? The way I said it perhaps.
“You thought I would go back to get revenge?”
She nodded uncertainly. She didn’t want to put the idea in my head.
“How could I do that?” I said. “It would be hypocrisy, wouldn’t it, when I left Nicolas there counting on them all to do whatever had to be done?”
The changes in her face were too subtle to describe. I didn’t like to see her feel so much. It wasn’t like her.
“The fact is, the little monster was trying to help when he did it, don’t you think, when he cut off the hands. It must have been a lot of trouble to him, really, when he could have burnt up Nicki so easily without a backward glance.”
She nodded, but she looked miserable, and as luck would have it, beautiful, too. “I rather thought so,” she said. “But I didn’t think you would agree.”
“Oh, I’m monster enough to understand it,” I said. “Do you remember what you told me years ago, before we ever left home? You said it the very day that he came up the mountain with the merchants to give me the red cloak. You said that his father was so angry with him for his violin playing that he was threatening to break his hands. Do you think we find our destiny somehow, no matter what happens? I mean, do you think that even as immortals we follow some path that was already marked for us when we were alive? Imagine it, the coven master cut off his hands.”
It was clear in the nights that followed that she didn’t want to leave me alone. And I sensed that she would have stayed on account of Nicki’s death, no matter where we were. But it made a difference that we were in Egypt. It helped that she loved these ruins and these monuments as she had loved none before.
Maybe people had to be dead six thousand years for her to love them. I thought of saying that to her, teasing her with it a little, but the thought merely came and went. These monuments were as old as the mountains she loved. The Nile had coursed through the imagination of man since the dawn of recorded time.
We scaled the pyramids together, we climbed into the arms of the giant Sphinx. We pored over inscriptions on ancient stone fragments. We studied the mummies one could buy from thieves for a pittance, bits of old jewelry, pottery, glass. We let the water of the river move through our fingers, and we hunted the tiny streets of Cairo together, and we went into the brothels to sit back on the pillows and watch the boys dance and hear the musicians play a heated erotic music that drowned out for a little while the sound of a violin that was always in my head.
I found myself rising and dancing wildly to these exotic sounds, imitating the undulations of those who urged me on, as I lost all sense of time or reason in the wail of the horns, the strumming of the lutes.
Gabrielle sat still, smiling, with the brim of her soiled white straw hat over her eyes. We did not talk to each other anymore. She was just some pale and feline beauty, cheek smudged with dirt, who drifted through the endless night at my side. Her coat cinched by a thick leather belt, her hair in a braid down her back, she walked with a queen’s posture and a vampire’s languor, the curve of her cheek luminous in the darkness, her small mouth a blur of rose red. Lovely and soon to be gone again, no doubt.
Yet she remained with me even when I leased, a lavish little dwelling, once the house of a Mameluke lord, with gorgeously tiled floors and elaborate tentwork hanging from its ceilings. She even helped me fill the courtyard with bougainvillea and palms and every kind of tropical plant until it was a verdant little jungle. She brought in the caged parrots and finches and brilliant canaries herself.
She even nodded now and then sympathetically when I murmured there were no letters from Paris, and I was frantic for news.
Why hadn’t Roget written to me? Had Paris erupted into riots and mayhem? Well, it would never touch my distant provincial family, would it? But had something happened to Roget? Why didn’t he write?
She asked me to go upriver with her. I wanted to wait for letters, to question the English travelers. But I agreed. After all, it was rather remarkable really that she wanted me to come with her. She was caring for me in her own way.
I knew she’d taken to dressing in fresh white linen frock coats and breeches only to please me. For me, she brushed out her long hair.
But it did not matter at all. I was sinking. I could feel it. I was drifting through the world as if it were a dream.
It seemed very natural and reasonable that around me I should see a landscape that looked exactly as it had thousands of years ago when artists painted it on the walls of royal tombs. Natural that the palm trees in the moonlight should look exactly as they looked then. Natural that the peasant should draw his water from the river in the same manner as he had done then. And the cows he watered were the same too.
Visions of the world when the world had been new.
Had Marius ever stood in these sands?
We wandered through the giant temple of Ramses, enchanted by the millions upon millions of tiny pictures cut into the walls. I kept thinking of Osiris, but the little figures were strangers. We prowled the ruins of Luxor. We lay in the riverboat together under the stars.
On our way back to Cairo when we came to the great Colossi of Memnon, she told in a passionate whisper how Roman emperors had journeyed to marvel at these statues just as we did now.
“They were ancient in the times of the Caesars,” she said, as we rode our camels through the cool sands.
The wind was not so bad as it could have been on this night. We could see the immense stone figures clearly against the deep blue sky. Faces blasted away, they seemed nevertheless to stare forward, mute witnesses to the passage of time, whose stillness made me sad and afraid.
I felt the same wonder I had known before the pyramids. Ancient gods, ancient mysteries. It made the chills rise. And yet what were these figures now but faceless sentinels, rulers of an endless waste?
“Marius,” I whispered to myself. “Have you seen these? Will any one of us endure so long?”
But my reverie was broken by Gabrielle. She wanted to dismount and walk the rest of the way to the statues. I was game for it, though I didn’t really know what to do with the big smelly stubborn camels, how to make them kneel down and all that.
She did it. And she left them waiting for us, and we walked through the sand.
“Come with me into Africa, into the jungles,” she said. Her face was grave, her voice unusually soft.
I didn’t answer for a moment. Something in her manner alarmed me. Or at least it seemed I should have been alarmed.
I should have heard a sound as sharp as the morning chime of Hell’s Bells.
I didn’t want to go into the jungles of Africa. And she knew I didn’t. I was anxiously awaiting news of my family from Roget, and I had it in my mind to seek the cities of the Orient, to wander through India into China and on to Japan.
“I understand the existence you’ve chosen,” she said. “And I’ve come to admire the perseverance with which you pursue it, you must know that.”
“I might say the same of you,” I said a little bitterly.
She stopped.
We were as near to the colossal statues as one should get, I suppose. And the only thing that saved them from overwhelming me was that there was nothing near at hand to put them in scale. The sky overhead was as immense as they were, and the sands endless, and the stars countless and brilliant and rising forever overhead.
“Lestat,” she said slowly, measuring her words, “I am asking you to try, only once, to move through the world as I do.”
The moon shone full on her, but the hat shadowed her small angular white face.
“Forget the house in Cairo,” she said suddenly, dropping her voice as if in respect for the importance of what she said. “Abandon all your valuables, your clothes, the things that link you with civilization. Come south with me, up the river into Africa. Travel with me as I travel.”
Still I didn’t answer. My heart was pounding.
She murmured softly under her breath that we would see the secret tribes of Africa unknown to the world. We would fight the crocodile and the lion with our bare hands. We might find the source of the Nile itself.
I began to tremble all over. It was as if the night were full of howling winds. And there was no place to go.
You are saying you will leave me forever if I don’t come. Isn’t that it?
I looked up at these horrific statues. I think I said:
And this was why she had stayed close to me, this was why she had done so many little things to please, this was why we were together now. It had nothing to do with Nicki gone into eternity. It was another parting that concerned her now.
She shook her head as if communing with herself, debating on how to go on. In a hushed voice she described to me the heat of tropical nights, wetter, sweeter than this heat.
“Come with me, Lestat,” she said. “By day I sleep in the sand. By night I am on the wing as if I could truly fly. I need no name. I leave no footprints. I want to go down to the very tip of Africa. I will be a goddess to those I slay.”
She approached and slipped her arm about my shoulder and pressed her lips to my cheek, and I saw the deep glitter of her eyes beneath the brim of her hat. And the moonlight icing her mouth.
I heard myself sigh. I shook my head.
“I can’t and you know it,” I said. “I can’t do it any more than you can stay with me.”
All the way back to Cairo, I thought on it, what had come to me in those painful moments. What I had known but not said as we stood before the Colossi of Memnon in the sand.
She was already lost to me! She had been for years. I had known it when I came down the stairs from the room in which I grieved for Nicki and I had seen her waiting for me.
It had all been said in one form or another in the crypt beneath the tower years ago. She could not give me what I wanted of her. There was nothing I could do to make her what she would not be. And the truly terrible part was this: she really didn’t want anything of me!
She was asking me to come because she felt the obligation to do so. Pity, sadness—maybe those were also reasons. But what she really wanted was to be free.
She stayed with me as we returned to the city. She did and said nothing.
And I was sinking even lower, silent, stunned, knowing that another dreadful blow would soon fall. There was the clarity and the horror. She will say her farewell, and I can’t prevent it. When do I start to lose my senses? When do I begin to cry uncontrollably?
Not now.
As we lighted the lamps of the little house, the colors assaulted me—Persian carpets covered with delicate flowers, the tentwork woven with a million tiny mirrors, the brilliant plumage of the fluttering birds.
I looked for a packet from Roget but there was none, and I became angry suddenly. Surely he would have written by now. I had to know what was going on in Paris! Then I became afraid.
“What the hell is happening in France?” I murmured. “I’ll have to go and find other Europeans. The British, they always have information. They drag their damned Indian tea and their London Times with them wherever they go.”
I was infuriated to see her standing there so still. It was as if something were happening in the room—that awful sense of tension and anticipation that I’d known in the crypt before Armand told us his long tale.
But nothing was happening, only that she was about to leave me forever. She was about to slip into time forever. And how would we ever find each other again!
“Damn it,” I said. “I expected a letter.” No servants. They hadn’t known when we would be back. I wanted to send someone to hire musicians. I had just fed, and I was warm and I told myself that I wanted to dance.
She broke her stillness suddenly. She started to move in a rather deliberate way. With uncommon directness she went into the courtyard.
I watched her kneel down by the pond. There she lifted two blocks of paving, and she took out a packet and brushed the sandy earth off it, and she brought it to me.
Even before she brought it into the light I saw it was from Roget. This had come before we had ever gone up the Nile, and she had hidden it!
“But why did you do this!” I said. I was in a fury. I snatched the package from her and put it down on the desk.
I was staring at her and hating her, hating her as never before. Not even in the egotism of childhood had I hated her as I did now!
“Why did you hide this from me!” I said.
“Because I wanted one chance!” she whispered. Her chin was trembling. Her lower lip quivered and I saw the blood tears. “But without this even,” she said, “you have made your choice.”
I reached down and tore the packet apart. The letter slipped out of it, along with folded clippings from an English paper. I unraveled the letter, my hands shaking, and I started to read:
Monsieur, As you must know by now, on July 14, the mobs of Paris attacked the Bastille. The city is in chaos. There have been riots all over France. For months I have sought in vain to reach your people, to get them out of the country safely if I could.
But on Monday last I received the word that the peasants and tenant farmers had risen against your father’s house. Your brothers, their wives and children, and all who tried to defend the castle were slain before it was looted. Only your father escaped.
Loyal servants managed to conceal him during the siege and later to get him to the coast. He is, on this very day, in the city of New Orleans in the former French colony of Louisiana. And he begs you to come to his aid. He is grief-stricken and among strangers. He begs for you to come.
There was more. Apologies, assurances, particulars … it ceased to make sense.
I put the letter down on the desk. I stared at the wood and the pool of light made by the lamp.
“Don’t go to him,” she said.
Her voice was small and insignificant in the silence. But the silence was like an immense scream.
“Don’t go to him,” she said again. The tears streaked her face like clown paint, two long streams of red coming down from her eyes.
“Get out,” I whispered. The word trailed off and suddenly my voice swelled again. “Get out,” I said. And again my voice didn’t stop. It merely went on until I said the words again with shattering violence: “GET OUT!”