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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.

Chapter 4

4

When I awoke, I heard his cries. He was beating on the oaken door, cursing me for keeping him prisoner. The sound filled the tower, and the scent of him came through the stone walls: succulent, oh so succulent, smell of living flesh and blood, his flesh and blood.

She slept still.

Do not do this thing.

Symphony of malice, symphony of madness coming through the walls, straining to contain the ghastly images, the torture, to surround it with language . . .

When I stepped into the stairwell, it was like being caught in a whirlwind of his cries, his human smell.

And all the remembered scents mingled with it -- the afternoon sunshine on a wooden table, the red wine, the smoke of the little fire.

"Lestat! Do you hear me! Lestat!" Thunder of fists against the door.

Memory of childhood fairy tale: the giant says he smells the blood of a human in his lair. Horror. I knew the giant was going to find the human. I could hear him coming after the human, step by step. I was the human.

Only no more.

Smoke and salt and flesh and pumping blood.

"This is the witches' place! Lestat, do you hear me! This is the witches' place!"

Dull tremor of the old secrets between us, the love, the things that only we had known, felt. Dancing in the witches' place. Can you deny it? Can you deny everything that passed between us?

Get him out of France. Send him to the New World. And then what? All his life he is one of those slightly interesting but generally tiresome mortals who have seen spirits, talk of them incessantly, and no one believes him. Deepening madness. Will he be a comical lunatic finally, the kind that even the ruffians and bullies look after, playing his fiddle in a dirty coat for the crowds on the streets of Port-au-Prince?

"Be the puppeteer again," she had said. Is that what I was?

No one will ever believe his mad tales.

But he knows the place where we lie, Mother. He knows our names, the name of our kin -- too many things about us. And he will never go quietly to another country. And they may go after him; they will never let him live now.

Where are they?

I went up the stairs in the whirlwind of his echoing cries, looked out the little barred window at the open land. They'll be coming again. They have to come. First I was alone, then I had her with me, and now I have them!

But what was the crux? That he wanted it? That he had screamed over and over that I had denied him the power?

Or was it that I now had the excuses I needed to bring him to me as I had wanted to do from the first moment? My Nicolas, my love. Eternity awaits. All the great and splendid pleasures of being dead.