"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.
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. I went further up the stairs towards him and the thirst sang in me. To hell with his cries. The thirst sang and I was an instrument of its singing. And his cries had become inarticulate-the pure essence of his curses, a dull punctuating to the misery that I could hear without need of any sound. Something divinely carnal in the broken syllables coming from his lips, like the low gush of blood through his heart. I lifted the key and put it in the lock and he went silent, his thoughts washing backwards and into him as if the ocean could be sucked back into the tiny mysterious coils of a single shell. I tried to see him in the shadows of the room, and not it the love for him, the aching, wrenching months of longing for him, the hideous and unshakable human need for him, the lust. I tried to see the mortal who didn't know what he was saying as he glared at me:
"You, and your talk of goodness "-low seething voice, eyes glittering- "your talk of good and evil, your talk of what was right and what was wrong and death, oh yes, death, the horror, the tragedy . . . " Words. Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart:
". . . and you shared it with her, the lord's son giveth to the lord's wife his great gift, the Dark Gift. Those who live in the castle share the Dark Gift-never were they dragged to the witches' place where the human grease pools on the ground at the foot of the burnt stake, no, kill the old crone who can no longer see to sew, and the idiot boy who cannot till the field. And what does he give us, the lord's son, the wolfkiller, the one who screamed in the witches' place? Coin of the realm! That's good enough for us! " Shuddering. Shirt soaked with sweat. Gleam of taut flesh through the torn lace. Tantalizing, the mere sight of it, the narrow tightly muscled torso that sculptors so love to represent, nipples pink against the dark skin.