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The great empty room beneath its immense dome, with only the two vampires watching us, seemed all the more ghastly, the one torch giving a feeble and gloomy light.
Silently I considered: Will the others leave the cemetery, or hover at the top of the stairs? Will any of them allow me to take Nicki alive from this place? The boy will remain near, but the boy is weak; the old queen will do nothing. That leaves only the leader, really. But I must not be impulsive now.
He was still staring at me and saying nothing.
"Armand?" I said respectfully. "May I address you in this way?" I drew closer, scanning him for the slightest change of expression. "You are obviously the leader. And you are the one who can explain all this to us."
But these words were a poor cover for my thoughts. I was appealing to him. I was asking him how he had led them in all this, he who appeared as ancient as the old queen, compassing some depth they would not understand. I pictured him standing before the altar of Notre Dame again, that ethereal expression on his face. And I found myself perfectly in him, and the possibility of him, this ancient one who had stood silent all this while.
I think I searched him now for just an instant of human feeling! That's what I thought wisdom would reveal. And the mortal in me, the vulnerable one who had cried in the inn at the vision of the chaos, said:
"Armand, what is the meaning of all this?"
It seemed the brown eyes faltered. But then the face so subtly transformed itself to rage, that I drew back.
I didn't believe my senses. The sudden changes he had undergone in Notre Dame were nothing to this. And such a perfect incarnation of malice I'd never seen. Even Gabrielle moved away. She raised her right hand to shield Nicki, and I stepped back until I was beside her and our arms touched.
But in the same miraculous way, the hatred melted. The face was again that of a sweet and fresh mortal boy.
The old queen vampire smiled almost wanly and ran her white claws through her hair.
"You turn to me for explanations?" the leader asked.
His eyes moved over Gabrielle and the dazed figure of Nicolas against her shoulder. Then returned to me.
"I could speak until the end of the world," he said, "and I could never tell you what you have destroyed here."
I thought the old queen made some derisive sound, but I was too engaged with him, the softness of his speech and the great raging anger within.
"Since the beginning of time," he said, "these mysteries have existed." He seemed small standing in this vast chamber, the voice issuing from him effortlessly, his hands limp at his sides. "Since the ancient days there have been our kind haunting the cities of man, preying upon him by night as God and the devil commanded us to do. The chosen of Satan we are, and those admitted to our ranks had first to prove themselves through a hundred crimes before the Dark Gift of immortality was given to them."
He came just a little nearer to me, the torchlight glimmering in his eyes.
"Before their loved ones they appeared to die," he said, "and with only a small infusion of our blood did they endure the terror of the coffin as they waited for us to come. Then and only then was the Dark Gift given, and they were sealed again in the grave after, until their thirst should give them the strength to break the narrow box and rise."
His voice grew slightly louder, more resonant.
"It was death they knew in those dark chambers," he said. "It was death and the power of evil they understood as they rose, breaking open the coffin, and the iron doors that held them in. And pity the weak, those who couldn't break out.
Those whose wails brought mortals the day after -- for none would answer by night. We gave no mercy to them.
"But those who rose, ah, those were the vampires who walked the earth, tested, purified, Children of Darkness, born of a fledgling's blood, never the full power of an ancient master, so that time would bring the wisdom to use the Dark Gifts before they grew truly strong. And on these were imposed the Rules of Darkness. To live among the dead, for we are dead things, returning always to one's own grave or one very nearly like it. To shun the places of light, luring victims away from the company of others to suffer death in unholy and haunted places. And to honor forever the power of God, the crucifix about the neck, the Sacraments. And never, never to enter the House of God, lest he strike you powerless, casting you into hell, ending your reign on earth in blazing torment."
He paused. He looked at the old queen for the first time, and it seemed, though I could not truly tell, that her face maddened him.
"You scorn these things," he said to her. "Magnus scorned these things!" He commenced to tremble. "It was the nature of his madness, as it is the nature of yours, but I tell you, you do not understand these mysteries! You shatter them like so much glass, but you have no strength, no power save ignorance. You break and that is all."
He turned away, hesitating as if he would not go on, and looking about at the vast crypt.
I heard the old vampire queen very softly singing.
She was chanting something under her breath, and she began to rock back and forth, her head to one side, her eyes dreamy. Once again, she looked beautiful.
"It is finished for my children," the leader whispered. "It is finished and done, for they know now they can disregard all of it. The things that bound us together, gave us the strength to endure as damned things! The mysteries that protected us here."
Again he looked at me.
"And you ask me for explanations as if it were inexplicable!" he said. "You, for whom the working of the Dark Trick is an act of shameless greed. You gave it to the very womb that bore you! Why not to this one, the devil's fiddler, whom you worship from afar every night?"
"Have I not told you?" sang the vampire queen. "Haven't we always known? There is nothing to fear in the sign of the Cross, nor the Holy Water, nor the Sacrament itself..." She repeated the words, varying the melody under her breath, adding as she went on. "And the old rites, the incense, the fire, the vows spoken, when we thought we saw the Evil One in the dark, whispering..."
"Silence!" said the leader, dropping his voice. His hands almost went to his ears in a strangely human gesture. Like a boy he looked, almost lost. God, that our immortal bodies could be such varied prisons for us, that our immortal faces should be such masks for our true souls.
Again he fixed his eyes on me. I thought for a moment there would be another of those ghastly transformations or that some uncontrollable violence would come from him, and I hardened myself.
But he was imploring me silently.
Why did this come about! His voice almost dried in his throat as he repeated it aloud, as he tried to curb his rage. "You explain to me! Why you, you with the strength of ten vampires and the courage of a hell full of devils, crashing through the world in your brocade and your leather boots! Lelio, the actor from the House of Thesbians, making us into grand drama on the boulevard! Tell me! Tell me why!"
"It was Magnus's strength, Magnus's genius," sang the woman vampire with the most wistful smile.
"No!" He shook his head. "I tell you, he is beyond all account. He knows no limit and so he has no limit. But why!"
He moved just a little closer, not seeming to walk but to come more clearly into focus as an apparition might.
"Why you," he demanded, "with the boldness to walk their streets, break their locks, call them by name. They dress your hair, they fit your clothes! You gamble at their tables! Deceiving them, embracing them, drinking their blood only steps from where other mortals laugh and dance. You who shun cemeteries and burst from crypts in churches. Why you! Thoughtless, arrogant, ignorant, and disdainful! You give me the explanation. Answer me!"
My heart was racing. My face was warm and pulsing with blood. I was in no fear of him now, but I was angry beyond all mortal anger, and I didn't fully understand why.
His mind -- I had wanted to pierce his mind -- and this is what I heard, this superstition, this absurdity. He was no sublime spirit who understood what his followers had not. He had not believed it. He had believed in it, a thousand times worse!
And I realized quite clearly what he was not demon or angel at all, but a sensibility forged in a dark time when the small orbs of the sun traveled the dome of the heavens, and the stars were no more than tiny lanterns describing gods and goddesses upon a closed night. A time when man was the center of this great world in which we roam, a time when for every question there had been an answer. That was what he was, a child of olden days when witches had danced beneath the moon and knights had battled dragons.
Ah, sad lost child, roaming the catacombs beneath a great city and an incomprehensible century. Maybe your mortal form is more fitting than I supposed.
But there was no time to mourn for him, beautiful as he was. Those entombed in the walls suffered at his command. Those he had sent out of the chamber could be called back.
I had to think of a reply to his question that he would be able to accept. The truth wasn't enough. It had to be arranged poetically the way that the older thinkers would have arranged it in the world before the age of reason had come to me.
"My answer?" I said softly. I was gathering my thoughts and I could almost feel Gabrielle's warning, Nicki's fear. "I'm no dealer in mysteries," I said. "No lover of philosophy. But it's plain enough what has happened here."
He studied me with a strange earnestness.
"If you fear so much the power of God," I said, "then the teachings of the Church aren't unknown to you. You must know that the forms of goodness change with the ages, that there are saints for all times under heaven."
Visibly he hearkened to this, warmed to the words I used.
"In ancient days," I said, "there were martyrs who quenched the flames that sought to burn them, mystics who rose into the air as they heard the voice of God. But as the world changed, so changed the saints. What are they now but obedient nuns and priests? They build hospitals and orphanages, but they do not call down the angels to rout armies or tame the savage beast."
I could see no change in him but I pressed on.
"And so it is with evil, obviously. It changes its form. How many men in this age believe in the crosses that frighten your followers? Do you think mortals above are speaking to each other of heaven and hell? Philosophy is what they talk about, and science! What does it matter to them if white-faced haunts prowl a churchyard after dark? A few more murders in a wilderness of murders? How can this be of interest to God or the devil or to man?"
I heard again the old queen vampire laughing.
But Armand didn't speak or move.
"Even your playground is about to be taken from you," I continued. "This cemetery in which you hide is about to be removed altogether from Paris. Even the bones of our ancestors are no longer sacred in this secular age."
His face softened suddenly. He couldn't conceal his shock.
"Les Innocents destroyed!" he whispered. "You're lying to me..."
"I never lie," I said offhand. "At least not to those I don't love. The people of Paris don't want the stench of graveyards around them anymore. The emblems of the dead don't matter to them as they matter to you. Within a few years, markets, streets, and houses will cover this spot. Commerce. Practicality. That is the eighteenth-century world."
"Stop!" he whispered. "Les Innocents has existed as long as I have existed!" His boyish face was strained. The old queen was undisturbed.
"Don't you see?" I said softly. "It is a new age. It requires a new evil. And I am that new evil." I paused, watching him. "I am the vampire for these times."
He had not foreseen my point. And I saw in him for the first time a glimmer of terrible understanding, the first glimmer of real fear.
I made a small accepting gesture.
"This incident in the village church tonight," I said cautiously, "it was vulgar, I'm inclined to agree. My actions on the stage of theater, worse still. But these were blunders. And you know they aren't the source of your rancor. Forget them for the moment and try to envision my beauty and my power. Try to see the evil that I am. I stalk the world in mortal dressthe worst of fiends, the monster who looks exactly like everyone else."
The woman vampire made a low song of her laughter. I could feel only pain from him, and from her the warm emanation of her love.
"Think of it, Armand," I pressed carefully. "Why should Death lurk in the shadows? Why should Death wait at the gate? There is no bedchamber, no ballroom that I cannot enter. Death in the glow of the hearth, Death on tiptoe in the corridor, that is what I am. Speak to me of the Dark Gifts -- I use them. I'm Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the heart of the rose."
There was a faint moan from Nicolas.
I think I heard Armand sigh.
"There is no place where they can hide from me," I said, "these godless and powerless ones who would destroy les Innocents. There is no lock that can keep me out."
He stared back at me silently. He appeared sad and calm. His eyes were darkened slightly, but they were untroubled by malice or rage. He didn't speak for a long moment, and then:
"A splendid mission, that," he said, "to devil them mercilessly as you live among them. But it's you still who don't understand."
"How so?" I asked.
"You can't endure in the world, living among men, you cannot survive."
"But I do," I said simply. "The old mysteries have given way to a new style. And who knows what will follow? There's no romance in what you are. There is great romance in what I am!"
"You can't be that strong," he said. "You don't know what you're saying, you have only just come into being, you are young."
"He is very strong, however, this child," mused the queen, "and so is his beautiful newborn companion. They are fiends of high-blown ideas and great reason, these two."
"You can't live among men!" Armand insisted again.
His face colored for one second. But he wasn't my enemy now; rather he was some wondering elder struggling to tell me a critical truth. And at the same moment he seemed a child imploring me, and in that struggle lay his essence, parent and child, pleading with me to listen to what he had to say.
"And why not? I tell you I belong among men. It is their blood that makes me immortal."
"Ah, yes, immortal, but you have not begun to understand it," he said. "It's no more than a word. Study the fate of your maker. Why did Magnus go into the flames? It's an age-old truth among us, and you haven't even guessed it. Live among men, and the passing years will drive you to madness. To see others grow old and die, kingdoms rise and fall, to lose all you understand and cherish -- who can endure it? It will drive you to idiot raving and despair. Your own immortal kind is your protection, your salvation. The ancient ways, don't you see, which never changed!"
He stopped, shocked that he had used this word, salvation, and it reverberated through the room, his lips shaping it again.
"Armand," the old queen sang softly. "Madness may come to the eldest we know, whether they keep to the old ways or abandon them." She made a gesture as if to attack him with her white claws, screeching with laughter as he stared coldly back. "I have kept to the old ways as long as you have and I am mad, am I not? Perhaps that is why I have kept them so well!"
He shook his head angrily in protest. Was he not the living proof it need not be so?
But she drew near to me and took hold of my arm, turning my face towards hers.
"Did Magnus tell you nothing, child?" she asked.
I felt an immense power flowing from her.
"While others prowled this sacred place," she said, "I went alone across the snow-covered fields to find Magnus. My strength is so great now it is as if I have wings. I climbed to his window to find him in his chamber, and together we walked the battlements unseen by all save the distant stars."
She drew even closer, her grip tightening.
"Many things, Magnus knew," she said. "And it is not madness which is your enemy, not if you are really strong. The vampire who leaves his coven to dwell among human beings faces a dreadful hell long before madness comes. He grows irresistibly to love mortals! He comes to understand all things in love."
"Let me go," I whispered softly. Her glance was holding me as surely as her hands.
"With the passage of time he comes to know mortals as they may never know each other," she continued, undaunted, her eyebrows rising, "and finally there comes the moment when he cannot bear to take life, or bear to make suffering, and nothing but madness or his own death will ease his pain. That is the fate of the old ones which Magnus described to me, Magnus who suffered all afflictions in the end."
At last she released me. She receded from me as if she were an image in a sailor's glass.
"I don't believe what you're saying," I whispered. But the whisper was like a hiss. "Magnus? Love mortals?"
"Of course you do not," she said with her graven jester's smile.
Armand, too, was looking at her as if he did not understand.
"My words have no meaning now," she added. "But you have all the time in the world to understand!"
Laughter, howling laughter, scraping the ceiling of the crypt. Cries again from within the walls. She threw back her head with her laughter.
Armand was horror-stricken as he watched her. It was as if he saw the laughter emanating froth her like so much glittering light.
"No, but it's a lie, a hideous simplification!" I said. My head was throbbing suddenly. My eyes were throbbing. "I mean it's a concept born out of moral idiocy, this idea of love!"
I put my hands to my temples. A deadly pain in me was growing. The pain was dimming my vision, sharpening my memory of Magnus's dungeon, the mortal prisoners who had died among the rotted bodies of those condemned before them in the stinking crypt.
Armand looked to me now as if I were torturing him as the old queen tortured him with her laughter. And her laughter went right on, rising and falling away. Armand's hands went out towards me as if he would touch me but did not dare.
All the rapture and pain I'd known in these past months came together inside me. I felt quite suddenly as if I would begin to roar as I had that night on Renaud's stage. I was aghast at these sensations. I was murmuring nonsense syllables again aloud.
"Lestat!" Gabrielle whispered.
"Love mortals?" I said. I stared at the old queen's inhuman face, horrified suddenly to see the black eyelashes like spikes about her glistening eyes, her flesh like animated marble. "Love mortals? Does it take you three hundred years!" I glared at Gabrielle. "From the first nights when I held them close to me, I loved them. Drinking up their life, their death, I love them. Dear God, is that not the very essence of the Dark Gift?"
My voice was growing in volume as it had that night in the theater. "Oh, what are you that you do not? What vile things that this is the sum of your wisdom, the simple capacity to feel!"
I backed away from them, looking about me at this giant tomb, the damp earth arching over our heads. The place was passing out of the material into a hallucination.
"God, do you lose your reason with the Dark Trick," I asked, "with your rituals, your sealing up of the fledglings in the grave? Or were you monsters when you were living? How could we not all of us love mortals with every breath we take!"
No answer. Except the senseless cries of the starving ones. No answer. Just the dim beating of Nicki's heart.
"Well, hear me, whatever the case," I said.
I pointed my finger first at Armand, at the old queen.
"I never promised my soul to the devil for this! And when I made this one it was to save her from the worms that eat the corpses around here. If loving mortals is the hell you speak of, I am already in it. I have met my fate. Leave me to it and all scores are settled crow."
My voice had broken. I was gasping. I ran my hands back through my hair. Armand seemed to shimmer as he came close to me. His face was a miracle of seeming purity and awe.
"Dead. things, dead things. . ." I said. "Come no closer. Talking of madness and love, in this reeking place! And that old monster, Magnus, locking them up in his dungeon. How did he love them, his captives? The way boys love butterflies when they rip off their wings!"
"No, child, you think you understand but you do not," sang the woman vampire unperturbed. "You have only just begun your loving." She gave a soft lilting laugh. "You feel sorry for them, that is all. And for yourself that you cannot be both human and inhuman. Isn't it so?"
"Lies!" I said. I moved closer to Gabrielle. I put my arm around her.
"You will come to understand all things in love," the old queen went on, "when you are a vicious and hateful thing. This is your immortality, child. Ever deeper understanding of it." And throwing up her arms, again she howled.
"Damn you," I said. I picked up Gabrielle and Nicki and carried them backwards towards the doors. "You're in hell already," I said, "and I intend to leave you in hell now."
I took Nicolas out of Gabrielle's arms and we ran through the catacomb towards the stairs.
The old queen was in a frenzy of keening laughter behind us.
And human as Orpheus perhaps, I stopped and glanced back.
"Lestat, hurry!" Nicolas whispered in my ear. And Gabrielle gave a desperate gesture for me to come.
Armand had not moved, and the old woman stood beside him laughing still.
"Good-bye, brave child," she cried. "Ride the Devil's Road bravely. Ride the Devil's Road as long as you can."
The coven scattered like frightened ghosts in the cold rain as we burst out of the sepulcher. And baffled, they watched as we sped out of les Innocents into the crowded Paris streets.
Within moments we had stolen a carriage and were on our way out of the city into the countryside.
I drove the team on relentlessly. Yet I was so mortally tired that preternatural strength seemed purely an idea. At every thicket and turn of the road I expected to see the filthy demons surrounding us again.
But somehow I managed to get from a country inn the food and drink Nicolas would need, and the blankets to keep him warm.
He was unconscious long before we reached the tower, and I carried him up the stairs to that high cell where Magnus had first kept me.
His throat was still swollen and bruised from their feasting on him. And though he slept deeply as I laid him on the straw bed, I could feel the thirst in him, the awful craving that I'd felt after Magnus had drunk from me.
Well, there was plenty of wine for him when he awakened, and plenty of food. And I knew -- though how I couldn't tell that he wouldn't die.
What his daylight hours would be like, I could hardly imagine. But he would be safe once I turned the key in the lock. And no matter what he had been to me, or what he stood to be in the future, no mortal could wander free in my lair while I slept.
Beyond that I couldn't reason. I felt like a mortal walking in his sleep.
I was still staring down at him, hearing his vague jumbled dreams -- dreams of the horrors of les Innocents -- when Gabrielle came in. She had finished burying the poor unfortunate stable boy, and she looked like a dusty angel again, her hair stiff and tangled and full of delicate fractured light.
She looked down at Nicki for a long moment and then she drew me out of the room. After I had locked the door, she led me down to the lower crypt. There she put her arms tightly around me and held me, as if she too were worn almost to collapse.
"Listen to me," she said finally, drawing back and putting her hands up to hold my face. "We'll get him out of France as soon as we rise. No one will ever believe his mad tales."
I didn't answer. I could scarce understand her, her reasoning or her intentions. My head swam.
"You can play the puppeteer with him," she said, "as you did with Renaud's actors. You can send him off to the New World."
"Sleep," I whispered. I kissed her open mouth. I held her with my eyes closed. I saw the crypt again, heard their strange, inhuman voices. All this would not stop.
"After he's gone, then we can talk about these others," she said calmly. "Whether to leave Paris altogether for a while.. ."
I let her go, and I turned away from her and I went to the sarcophagus and rested for a moment against the stone lid. For the first time in my immortal life I wanted the silence of the tomb, the feeling that all things were out of my hands.
It seemed she said something else then.
Do not do this thing.