Page 37

How lovely it had been, those candlelight hours, curtains blowing in the wind and sometimes people gathered on the banquette below to listen to his playing.

Until that awful night when Lestat had come to demand his allegiance.

Scarred, filthy, dressed in rags that reeked of the swamp, Lestat had become a monster. "They tried to kill me," he'd said in a harsh whisper. "Antoine, you must help me!"

Not the precious child, Claudia, not the precious friend, Louis de Pointe du Lac! You cannot mean this. Murderers, those two, the picture-perfect pair who glided through the early evenings as if in some shared dream as they walked the new flagstone pavements?

Then as this ragged and crippled creature had fastened itself to Antoine's throat, Antoine had seen it all in visions, seen the crime itself, seen his lover savaged again and again by the monster child's knife, seen Lestat's body dumped into the swamp, seen him rise. Antoine now knew everything. The Dark Blood had rushed into his body like a burning fluid exterminating every human particle in its path. The music, his own music, rose in his ears in dizzying volume. Only music could describe this ineffable power, this ragi

ng euphoria.

They had been defeated, both of them, when they went against Claudia and Louis--and Antoine had been hideously burned. That is how Antoine learned what it meant to be Born to Darkness. You could suffer burns like that and endure. You could suffer what should have meant death for a human being, and you could go on. Music and pain, they were the twin mysteries of his existence. Even the Dark Blood itself did not obsess him as did music and pain. As he lay on the four-poster beside Lestat, Antoine saw his pain in bright flashing colors, his mouth open in a perpetual moan. I cannot live like this. And yet he didn't want to die, no, never to die, not even now, not even with the craving for human blood driving him out into the night though his body was nothing but pain, pain scraped by the fabric of his shirt, his trousers, even his boots. Pain and blood and music.

For thirty mortal years, he'd lived like a monster, hideous, scarred, preying on the weakest of mortals, hunting in the crowded Irish immigrant slums for his meals. He could make his music without ever touching the keys of a piano. He heard the music in his head, heard it surge and climb as he moved his fingers in the air. The mingled noises of the rat-infested slums, the roaring laughter from a stevedore's tavern, became a new music to him, caught in the low rumble of voices to the right and to the left, or the cries of his victims. Blood. Give me blood. Music I will possess forever.

Lestat had gone to Europe, chasing after them, those two, Claudia and Louis, who had been his family, his friends, his lovers.

But he had been terrified to attempt such a journey. And he had left Lestat at the docks. "Goodbye to you, Antoine." Lestat had kissed him. "Maybe you will have a life here in the New World, the life I wanted." Gold and gold and gold. "Keep the rooms, keep the things I've given you."

But he hadn't been clever like Lestat. He'd had no skill for living like a mortal among mortals. Not with these songs in his head, these symphonies, and the blood ever beckoning. His own legacy he'd squandered, and Lestat's gold was gone too at last, though where or how he could never remember. He had left New Orleans, journeying north, sleeping in the cemeteries as he made his way.

In St. Louis he'd begun to actually play again. It was the strangest thing. Most of his scars were gone by then. He no longer looked infected and contagious with some disfiguring disease.

It was as if he'd waked from a dream, and for years the violin was his instrument, and he even played for money at mortal gatherings, and managed to become a gentleman again, with clean linen and a small apartment with paintings, a brass clock, and a wooden closet of fine clothes. But all that had come to nothing. He felt loneliness, despair. The world seemed empty of monsters like himself.

He'd wandered out west, why he didn't know. By the 1880s, he'd been playing the piano in the Barbary Coast vice dens of San Francisco and hunting the seamen for blood. He worked his way up from the sailors' saloons to the fancy melodeons and the French and Chinese parlor houses, glutting himself on the riffraff in dark streets where murder was rampant.

Gradually he came to realize the quality parlor houses loved him, even the finest of them, and he was soon surrounded by admiring ladies of the evening, who were a comfort to him, and therefore immune from his murderous thirst.

In the Chinatown brothels, he fell in love with the sweet tender exotic slave girls who delighted in his music.

And finally, in the great music halls, he heard applause for the songs he wrote on the spot, and his dizzying improvisations. He was back in the world again. He was loving it. Dressed like a dandy, he put pomade in his dark hair, clenched a small cheroot between his teeth, and lost himself in the ivory keys, intoxicated by the adulation all around him.

But other vampires crept into his bloody paradise--the first he'd seen since Lestat set sail from the New Orleans docks.

Powerful males, clad in brocade vests and fancy frock coats, obviously using their skills to cheat at cards and dazzle their victims, cast a cold eye on him and threatened him before fleeing themselves. In the dark streets of Chinatown he ran up against a Chinese blood drinker in a long dark coat and black hat who threatened him with a hatchet.

Though he longed desperately to know these vampire strangers--though he longed to trust them, talk with them, share the story of his journey with them--he left San Francisco in terror.

He left behind the pretty waiter girls and courtesans who'd sustained him with their sweet friendship and the easy pickings of the drunken men.

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.