Prince Lestat

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.