"The body's all burnt up," said Benji. "Don't get sick now."

  

    "Burnt up!" said the man.

  

    It was Sybelle's long hand that suddenly whipped the coverlet back. The cool air skidded across my skin. I stared up at the man who drew back, a half-strangled growl caught in his throat.

  

    "For the love of God!"

  

    My body sprang up, drawn by the plump fountain of blood like a hideous puppet on a score of whipping strings. I flailed against him, then anchored my burnt fingernails hard into his neck and wrapped the other arm around him in an agonizing embrace, my tongue flashing at the blood that spilled from the claw marks as I drew in and, ignoring the blazing pain in my face, opened my mouth wide and sank my fangs.

  

    Now I had him.

  

    His height, his strength, his powerful shoulders, his huge hands clamping to my hurt flesh, none of this could help him. I had him. I drew up the first thick swallow of blood and thought I would swoon. But my body wasn't about to allow it. My body had locked to him as if I were a thing of voracious tentacles.

  

    At once, his crazed and luminous thoughts drew me down into a glitzy swirl of New York images, of careless cruelty and grotesque horror, of rampant drug-driven energy and sinister hilarity. I let the images flood me. I couldn't go for the quick death. I had to have every drop of blood inside him, and for that the heart must pump and pump; the heart must not give up.

  

    If I had ever tasted blood this strong, this sweet and salty, I had no memory of it; there was no way in which memory could record such deliciousness, the absolute rapture of thirst slaked, of hunger cured, of loneliness dissolved in this hot and intimate embrace, in which the sound of my own seething, straining breath would have horrified me if I had cared about it.

  

    Such a noise I made, such a dreadful feasting noise. My fingers massaged his thick muscles, my nostrils were pressed into his pampered soap-scented skin.

  

    "Hmmm, love you, wouldn't hurt you for the world, you feel it, it's sweet, isn't it?" I whispered to him over the shallows of gorgeous blood. "Hmmm, yes, so sweet, better than the finest brandy, hmmm..."

  

    In his shock and disbelief, he suddenly let go utterly, surrendering to the delirium that I stoked with each word. I ripped at his neck, widening the wound, rupturing the artery more fully. The blood gushed anew.

  

    An exquisite shiver ran down my back; it ran down the backs of my arms, and down my buttocks and legs. It was pain and pleasure commingled as the hot and lively blood forced itself into the microfibers of my shriveled flesh, as it plumped the muscles beneath the roasted skin, as it sank into the very marrow of my bones. More, I had to have more.

  

    "Stay alive, you don't want to die, no, stay alive," I crooned, rubbing my fingers up through his hair, feeling that they were fingers now, not the pterodactyl digits they'd been moments before. Oh, they were hot; it was the fire all over again, it was the fire blazing in my scorched limbs, this time death had to come, I couldn't bear this any longer, but a pinnacle had been reached, and now it was past and a great soothing ache rushed through me.

  

    My face was pumped and teeming, my mouth fall again and again, and my throat now swallowing without effort.

  

    "Ah, yes, alive, you're so strong, so wonderfully strong ..." I whispered. "Hmmm, no, don't go ... not yet, it's not time."

  

    His knees buckled. He sank slowly to the carpet, and I with him, pulling him gently over with me against the side of the bed, and then letting him fall beside me, so that we lay like lovers entangled. There was more, much more, more than ever I could have drunk in my regular state, more than ever I could have wanted.

  

    Even on those rare occasions when I was a fledgling and greedy and new, and had taken two or three victims a night, I had never drunk so deeply from any one of them. I was now into the dark tasty dregs, pulling out the very vessels themselves in sweet clots that dissolved on my tongue.

  

    "Oh, you are so precious, yes, yes."

  

    But his heart could take no more. It was slowing to a lethal irretrievable pace. I closed my teeth on the skin of his face and ripped it open over his forehead, lapping at the rich tangle of bleeding vessels that covered his skull. There was so much blood here, so much blood behind the tissues of the face. I sucked up the fibers, and then spit them out bloodless and white, watching them drop to the floor like so much slop.

  

    I wanted the heart and the brain. I had seen the ancients take it. I knew how. I'd seen the Roman Pandora once reach right into the chest.

  

    I went for it. Astonished to see my hand fully formed though dark brown in color, I made my fingers rigid like a deadly spade and drove it into him, tearing linen and cracking breastbone, and then reaching his soft entrails until I had the heart and held it as I'd seen Pandora hold it. I drank from it. Oh, it had plenty of blood. This was magnificent. I sucked it to pulp and then let it fall.

  

    I lay as still as he, at his side, my right hand on the back of his neck, my head bowed against his chest, my breath coming in heavy sighs. The blood danced in me. I felt my arms and legs jerking. Spasms ran through me, so that the sight of his white dead carcass blinkered in my gaze. The room flashed on and off.

  

    "Oh, what a sweet brother," I whispered. "Sweet, sweet brother." I rolled on my back. I could hear the roar of his blood in my very ears, feel it moving over my scalp, feel it tingling in my cheeks and in the palms of my hands. Oh, good, too good, too lusciously good.

  

    "Bad guy, hmmm?" It was Benji's voice, far away in the world of the living.

  

    Far away in another realm where pianos ought to be played, and little boys should dance, they stood, the two like painted cutout figures against the swimming light of the room, merely gazing at me, he the little desert rogue with his fancy black cigarette, puffing away and smacking his lips and raising his eyebrows, and she merely floating it seemed, resolute and thoughtful as before, unshocked, untouched perhaps.

  

    I sat up and pulled up my knees. I rose to my feet, with only a quick handhold on the side of the bed to steady myself. I stood naked looking at her.

  

    Her eyes were filled with a deep rich gray light, and she smiled as she looked at me.

  

    "Oh, magnificent," she whispered.

  

    "Magnificent?" I said. I lifted my hands and pushed my hair back off my face. "Show me to the glass. Hurry. I'm thirsting. I'm thirsting again already."

  

    It had begun, this was no lie. In a stupor of shock I stared into the mirror. I had seen such ruined specimens as this before, but each of us is ruined in our own way, and I, for alchemical reasons I couldn't proclaim, was a dark brown creature, the very perfect color of chocolate, with remarkably white opal eyes set with reddish-brown pupils. The nipples of my chest were black as raisins. My cheeks were painfully gaunt, my ribs perfectly defined beneath my shiny skin, and the veins, the veins that were so full of sizzling action, stood like ropes along my arms and the calves of my legs. My hair, of course, had never seemed so lustrous, so full, so much a thing of youth and natural beneficence.

  

    I opened my mouth. I ached with thirst. All the awakened flesh sang with thirst or cursed me with it. It was as if a thousand crushed and muted cells were now chanting for blood.

  

    "I have to have more. I have to. Stay away from me." I hurried past Benji, who all but danced at my side.

  

    "What do you want, what can I do? I'll get another one."

  

    "No, I'll get him for myself." I fell on the victim and slipped loose his silk tie. I quickly undid the buttons of his shirt.

  

    Benji fell at once to unbuckling his belt. Sybelle, on her knees, tugged at his boots.

  

    "The gun, beware of the gun," I said in alarm. "Sybelle, back away from him."

  

    "I see the gun," she said reprovingly. She laid it aside carefully, as if it were a freshly caught fish and might flop from her hands. She peeled off his socks. "Armand, these clothes," she said, "they're too big."

  

    "Benji, you have shoes?" I asked. "My feet are small."

  

    I stood up and hastily put on the shirt, fastening the buttons with a speed that dazzled them.

  

    "Don't watch me, get the shoes," I said. I pulled on the trousers, zipped them up, and with Sybelle's quick fingers to help, buckled the flapping leather belt. I pulled it as tight as I could. This would do.

  

    She crouched before me, her dress a huge flowered circle of pretti-ness around her, as she rolled the pant legs over my brown bare feet.

  

    I had slipped my hands through his fancy linked shirt cuffs without ever disturbing them.

  

    Benji threw down the black dress shoes, fine Bally pumps, never even worn by him, divine little wretch. Sybelle held one sock for my foot. Benji gathered up the other.

  

    When I put on the coat it was done. The sweet tingling in my veins had stopped. It was pain again, it was beginning to roar, as if I were threaded with fire, and the witch with the needle pulled on the thread, hard, to make me quiver.

  

    "A towel, my dears, something old, common. No, don't, not in this day and age, don't think of it."

  

    Full of loathing I gazed down at his livid flesh. He lay staring dully at the ceiling, the soft tiny hair in his nostrils very black against his drained and awful skin, his teeth yellow above his colorless lip. The hair on his chest was a matted swarm in the sweat of his death, and against the giant gaping slit lay the pulp that had been his heart, ah, this was the evil evidence which must be shut from the eyes of the world on general principles.

  

    I reached down and slipped the ruins of his heart back into the cavity of his chest. I spit upon the wound and rubbed it with my fingers.

  

    Benji gasped. "Look at it heal, Sybelle," he cried.

  

    "Just barely," I said. "He's too cold, too empty." I looked about. There lay the man's wallet, papers, a bag in leather, lots of green bills in a fancy silver clip. I gathered all this up. I stuffed the folded money in one pocket, and all else in the other. What else did he have? Cigarette, a deadly switchblade knife, and the guns, ah, yes, the guns.

  

    Into my coat pockets I put these items.

  

    Swallowing my nausea, I reached down and scooped him up, horrid flaccid white man in his pitiable silk shorts and fancy gold wristwatch. My old strength was indeed coming back. He was heavy, but I could easily heave him over my shoulder.

  

    "What will you do, where will you go?" Sybelle cried. "Armand, you can't leave us."

  

    "You'll come back!" said Benji. "Here, gimme that watch, don't throw away that man's watch."

  

    "Sshhh, Benji," Sybelle whispered. "You know damned good and well I've bought you the finest watches. Don't touch him. Armand, what can we do now to help you?" She drew close to me. "Look!" she said pointing to the dangling arm of the corpse which hung just below my right elbow. "He has manicured nails. How amazing."

  

    "Oh, yeah, he always took very good care of himself," said Benji. "You know the watch is worth five thousand dollars."

  

    "Hush up about the watch," she said. "We don't want his things." She looked at me again. "Armand, even now you're still changing. Your face, it's getting fuller."

  

    "Yes, and it hurts," I said. "Wait for me. Prepare a dark room for me. I'll come back as soon as I've fed. I have to feed now, feed and feed to heal the scars that are left. Open the door for me."

  

    "Let me see if there's anyone out there," said Benji with a quick dutiful rush to the door.

  

    I went out into the hallway, easily carrying the poor corpse, its white arms hanging down, swinging and banging against me just a little.

  

    What a sight I was in these big clothes. I must have looked like a mad poetical schoolboy who had raided the thrift stores for the finest threads and was off now in fancy new shoes to search out the rock bands.

  

    "There isn't anyone out here, my little friend," I said. "It's three of the clock and the hotel's asleep. And if reason serves me right, that's the door of the fire stairs there, at the very end of the hall, correct? There isn't anyone in the fire stairs either."

  

    "Oh, clever Armand, you delight me!" he said. He narrowed his little black eyes. He jumped up and down soundlessly on the hallway carpet. "Give me the watch!" he whispered.

  

    "No," I said. "She's right. She's rich, and so am I, and so are you. Don't be a beggar."

  

    "Armand, we'll wait for you," said Sybelle in the doorframe. "Benji, come inside immediately."

  

    "Oh, listen to her now, how she wakes up! How she talks! 'Benji, come inside,' she says. Hey, sweetheart, don't you have something to do just now, like perhaps play the piano?"

  

    She gave a tiny burst of laughter in spite of herself. I smiled. What a strange pair they were. They did not believe their own eyes. But that was typical enough in this century. I wondered when they would start to see, and having seen, start screaming.

  

    "Goodbye, sweet loves," I said. "Be ready for me."

  

    "Armand, you will come back." Her eyes were fall of tears. "You promise me."

  

    I was stunned. "Sybelle," I said. "What is it that women want so often to hear and wait so long to hear it? I love you."

  

    I left them, racing down the stairs, hefting him to the other shoulder when the weight on the one side became too hurtful. The pain passed over me in waves. The shock of the outside cold air was scalding.

  

    "Feed," I whispered. And what was I to do with him? He was far too naked to carry down Fifth Avenue.

  

    I slipped off his watch because it was the only identification on him left, and almost vomiting with revulsion from my closeness to these fetid remains, I dragged him by one hand after me very fast through the back alley, and then across a small street, and down another sidewalk.

  

    I ran into the face of the icy wind, not stopping to observe those few hulking shapes that hobbled by in the wet darkness, or to take stock of the one car that crept along on the shining wet asphalt.

  

    Within seconds I had covered two blocks, and finding a likely alleyway, with a high gate to keep out the beggars of the night, I quickly mounted the bars and flung his carcass to the very far end of it. Down into the melting snow he fell. I was rid of him.

  

    Now I had to have blood. There was no time for the old game, the game of drawing out those who wanted to die, those who truly craved my embrace, those in love already with the far country of death of which they knew nothing.

  

    I had to shuffle and stumble along, the mark, in my floppy silk jacket and rolled pants, long hair veiling my face, poor dazzled kid, perfect for your knife, your gun, your fist.

  

    It didn't take long.

  

    The first was a drunken, sauntering wretch who plied me with questions before he revealed the flashing blade and went to sink it into me. I pushed him up against the side of the building, and fed like a glutton.

  

    The next was a common desperate youth, fall of festering sores, who had killed twice before for the heroin he needed as badly as I needed the doomed blood inside him.

  

    I drank more slowly.

  

    The thickest worst scars of my body yielded with much defense, itching, throbbing and only slowly melting away. But the thirst, the thirst would not stop. My bowels churned as if devouring themselves. My eyes pulsed with pain.

  

    But the cold wet city, so full of rankling hollow noise, grew ever brighter before me. I could hear voices many blocks away, and small electronic speakers in high buildings. I could see beyond the breaking clouds the true and numberless stars.

  

    I was almost myself again.

  

    So who will come to me now, I thought, in this barren desolate hour before dawn, when the snow is melting in the warmer air, and neon lights have all died out, and the wet newspaper blows like leaves through a stripped and frozen forest?

  

    I took all the precious articles which had belonged to my first victim, and dropped them here and there into deep hollow public trash cans.

  

    One last killer, yes, please, fate, do give me this, while there's time, and indeed he came, blasted fool, out of a car as behind him the driver waited, the motor idling.

  

    "What's taking you so damn long?" said the driver at last.

  

    "Nothing," I said, dropping his friend. I leaned in to look at him. He was as vicious and stupid as his companion. He threw up his hand, but helplessly and too late. I pushed him over on the leather seat and drank now for rank pleasure, pure sweet crazed pleasure.

  

    I walked slowly through the night, my arms out, my eyes directed Heavenward.

  

    From the scattered black grates of the gleaming street there gushed the pure white steam of heated places below. Trash in shiny plastic sacks made a fantastical modern and glittering display on the curbs of the slate-gray sidewalks.

  

    Tiny tender trees, with little year-round leaves like short pen strokes of bright green in the night, bent their stemlike trunks with the whining wind. Everywhere the high clean glass doors of granite-faced buildings contained the radiant splendor of rich lobbies. Shop windows displayed their sparkling diamonds, lustrous furs and smartly cut coats and gowns on grandly coiffed and faceless pewter mannequins.

  

    The Cathedral was a lightless, soundless place of frost-rimmed turrets and ancient pointed arches, the pavement clean where I had stood on the morning when the sun caught me.

  

    Lingering there, I closed my eyes, trying perhaps to recall the wonder and the zeal, the courage and the glorious expectation.

  

    There came instead, clear and shining through the dark air, the pristine notes of the Appassionata. Roiling, rumbling, racing on, the crashing music came to call me home. I followed it.

  

    The clock in the hotel foyer was striking six. The winter dark would break up in moments like the very ice that had once imprisoned me. The long polished desk was deserted in the muted lights.

  

    In a wall mirror of dim glass framed in rococo gold, I saw myself, paled and waxen, and unblemished. Oh, what fun the sun and ice had had with me in turns, the fury of the one quick-frozen by the merciless grip of the other. Not a scar remained of where the skin had burnt to muscle. A sealed and solid thing with seamless agony within, I was, all of a piece, restored, with sparkling clear white fingernails, and curling lashes round my clear brown eyes, and clothes a wretched heap of stained, misfitted finery on the old familiar rugged cherub.

  

    Never before had I been thankful to see my own too youthful face, too hairless chin, too soft and delicate hands. But I could have thanked the gods of old for wings at this moment.

  

    Above, the music carried on, so grand, so legible of tragedy and lust and dauntless spirit. I loved it so. Who in the whole wide world could ever play that same Sonata as she did, each phrase as fresh as songs sung all their livelong life by birds who know but one such set of patterns.

  

    I looked about. It was a fine, expensive place, of old wainscoting and a few deep chairs, and door keys ranged up a wall in tiny dark-stained wooden boxes.

  

    A great vase of flowers, the infallible trademark of the vintage New York hotel, stood boldly and magnificently in the middle of the space, atop a round black marble table. I skirted the bouquet, snapping off one big pink lily with a deep red throat and petals curling to yellow at the outside, and then I went silently up the fire stairs to find my children.

  

    She did not stop her playing when Benji let me in.

  

    "You're looking really good, Angel," he said.

   

    On and on she went, her head moving unaffectedly and perfectly with the rhythm of the Sonata.

  

    He led me through a chain of finely decorated plastered chambers. Mine was too sumptuous by far, I whispered, seeing the tapestry spread and pillows of old gracious threadbare gold. I needed only perfect darkness.

  

    "But this is the least we have," he said with a little shrug.

  

    He had changed to a fresh white linen robe lined with a fine blue stripe, a kind I'd often seen in Arab lands. He wore white socks with his brown sandals. He puffed his little Turkish cigarette, and squinted up at me through the smoke.

  

    "You brought me back the watch, didn't you!" He nodded his head, all sarcasm and amusement.

  

    "No," I said. I reached into my pocket. "But you may have the money. Tell me, since your little mind is such a locket and I have no key, did anyone see you bring that badge-carrying, gun-toting villain up here?"

  

    "I see him all the time," he said with a little weary wave of his hand.

  

    "We left the bar separately. I killed two birds with one stone. I'm very smart."

  

    "How so?" I asked. I put the lily in his little hand.

  

    "Sybelle's brother bought from him. That cop was the only guy ever missed him." He gave a little laugh. He tucked the lily in the thick curls above his left ear, then pulled it down and twirled its tiny cibo-rium in his fingers. "Clever, no? Now nobody asks where he is."

  

    "Oh, indeed, two birds with one stone, you're quite right," I said. "Though I'm sure there's a great deal more to it."

  

    "But you'll help us now, won't you?"

  

    "I will indeed. I'm very rich, I told you. I'll patch things up. I have an instinct for it. I owned a great playhouse in a faraway city, and after that an island of fancy shops, and other such things. I am a monster in many realms, it seems. You'll never, ever have to fear again."

  

    "You're truly beauty fall, you know," he said raising one eyebrow and then giving me a quick wink. He drew on his tasty-looking little cigarette and then offered it to me. His left hand kept the lily safe.

  

    "Can't. Only drink blood," I said. "A regular vampire out of the book in the main. Need deep darkness in the light of day, which is coming very soon. You mustn't touch this door."

  

    "Ha!" he laughed with impish delight. "That's what I told her!" He rolled his eyes and glanced in the direction of the living room. "I said we had to steal a coffin for you right away, but she said, no, you'd think of that."

  

    "How right she was. The room will do, but I like coffins well enough. I really do."

  

    "And can you make us vampires too?"

  

    "Oh, never. Absolutely not. You're pure of heart and too alive, and I don't have such a power. It's never done. It can't be."

  

    Again, he shrugged. "Then who made you?" he asked.

  

    "I was born out of a black egg," I said. "We all are."

  

    He gave a scoffing laugh.

  

    "Well, you've seen all the rest," I said. "Why not believe the best part of it?"

  

    He only smiled and puffed his smoke, and looked at me most knavishly.

  

    The piano sang on in crashing cascades, the rapid notes melting as fast as they were born, so like the last thin snowflakes of the winter, vanishing before they strike the pavements.

  

    "May I kiss her before I go to sleep?" I asked.

  

    He cocked his head, and shrugged. "If she doesn't like it, she'll never stop playing long enough to say so."

  

    I went back into the parlor. How clear it all was, the grand design of sumptuous French landscapes with their golden clouds and cobalt skies, the Chinese vases on their stands, the massed velvet tumbling from the high bronze rods of the narrow old windows. I saw it all of a piece, including the bed where I had lain, now heaped with fresh down-filled coverlets and pillowed with embroidered antique faces.

  

    And she, the center diamond of it all, in long white flannel, flounced at wrists and hem with rich old Irish lace, playing her long lacquered grand with agile unerring fingers, her hair a broad smooth yellow glow about her shoulders.

  

    I kissed her scented locks, and then her tender throat, and caught her girlish smile and gleaming glance as she played on, her head tilting back to brush my coat front.

  

    Down around her neck, I slipped my arms. She leant her gentle weight against me. With crossed arms, I clasped her waist. I felt her shoulders moving against my snug embrace with her darting fingers.

  

    I dared in whisper-soft tones with sealed lips to hum the song, and she hummed with me.

  

    "Appassionato,," I whispered in her ear. I was crying. I didn't want to touch her with blood. She was too clean, too pretty. I turned my head.

  

    She pitched forward. Her hands pounded into the stormy finish.

  

    A silence fell, abrupt, and crystalline as the music before it.

  

    She turned and threw her arms around me, and held me tight and said the words I'd never heard a mortal speak in all my long immortal life:

  

    "Armand, I love you."

  

    NEED I SAY they are the perfect companions? Neither of them cared about the murders. I could not for the life of me understand it. They cared about other things, such as world peace, the poor suffering homeless in the waning winter cold of New York, the price of medicines for the sick, and how dreadful it was that Israel and Palestine were forever in battle with each other. But they did not care one whit about the horrors they'd beheld with their own eyes. They did not care that I killed every night for blood, that I lived off it and nothing else, and that I was a creature wed by my very nature to human destruction.

  

    They did not care one whit about the dead brother (his name was Fox, by the way, and the last name of my beautiful child is best left unmentioned).

  

    In fact if this text ever sees the light of the real world, you're bound to change both her first name and that of Benjamin.

  

    However, that's not my concern now. I can't think of the fate of these pages, except that they are very much for her, as I mentioned to you before, and if I'm allowed to title them I think it will be Symphony for Sybelle.

  

    Not, please understand, that I love Benji no less. It's only that I haven't the same overwhelming protective feeling for him. I know that Benji will live out a great and adventurous life, no matter what should befall me or Sybelle, or even the times. It's in his flexible and enduring Bedouin nature. He is a true child of the tents and the blowing sands, though in his case, the house was a dismal cinder block hovel on the outskirts of Jerusalem where he induced tourists to pose for overpriced pictures with him and a filthy snarling camel.

  

    He'd been flat out kidnapped by Fox under the felonious terms of a long-term lease of bondage for which Fox paid Benji's father five thousand dollars. A fabricated emigration passport was thrown into the bargain. He'd been the genius of the tribe, without doubt, had mixed feelings about going home and had learnt in the New York streets to steal, smoke and curse, in that order. Though he swore up and down he couldn't read, it turned out that he could, and began to do so obsessively just as soon as I started throwing books at him.

  

    In fact, he could read English, Hebrew and Arabic, having read all three in the newspapers of his homeland since before he could remember.

  

    He loved taking care of Sybelle. He saw to it that she ate, drank milk, bathed and changed her clothes when none of these routine tasks interested her. He prided himself on the fact that he could by his wits obtain for her whatever she needed, no matter what happened to her.

  

    He was the front man for her with the hotel, tipping the maids, making normal talk at the front desk, which included remarkably finespun lies about the whereabouts of the dead Fox, who had become in Benji's never ending saga a fabulous world traveler and amateur photographer; he handled the piano tuner, who was called as often as once a week because the piano stood by the window, exposed to sun and cold, and also because Sybelle did indeed pound it with the fury that would indeed have impressed the great Beethoven. He spoke on the phone to the bank, all of whose personnel thought he was his older brother, David, pronounced Dahveed, and then made the requisite calls at the teller's window for cash as little Benjamin.

  

    I was convinced within nights of talking with him that I could give him as fine an education as Marius had ever given me, and that he would end up having his choice of universities, professions or amateur pursuits of mind-engaging substance. I didn't overplay my hand. But before the week was out I was dreaming of boarding schools for him from which he might emerge a gold-buttoned blue blazer-wearing American East Coast social conquistador.

  

    I love him enough to tear limb from limb anyone who so much as lays a finger on him.

  

    But between me and Sybelle there lies a sympathy which sometimes eludes mortals and immortals for the space of their entire lives. I know Sybelle. I know her. I knew her when I first heard her play, and I know her now, and I wouldn't be here with you if she were not under the protection of Marius. I will during the space of Sybelle's life never be parted from her, and there is nothing she can ever ask of me that I shall not give.

  

    I will endure unspeakable anguish when Sybelle inevitably dies. But that has to be borne. I have no choice now in the matter. I am not the creature I was when I laid eyes on Veronica's Veil, when I stepped into the sun.

  

    I am someone else, and that someone else has fallen deeply and completely in love with Sybelle and Benjamin and I cannot go back on it.

  

    Of course I am keenly conscious that I thrive in this love; being happier than I have ever been in my entire immortal existence, I have gained great strength from having these two as my companions. The situation is too nearly perfect to be anything but utterly accidental.

  

    Sybelle is not insane. She is nowhere near it, and I fancy that I understand her perfectly. Sybelle is obsessed with one thing, and that is playing the piano. From the first time she laid her hands on the keys she has wanted nothing else. And her "career," as so generously planned for her by her proud parents and by the burningly ambitious Fox, never meant much of anything to her.

  

    Had she been poor and struggling perhaps recognition would have been indispensable to her love affair with the piano, as it would have given her the requisite escape from life's dreary domestic traps and routines. But she was never poor. And she is truly, in the very root of her soul, indifferent as to whether people hear her play her music or not.

  

    She needs only to hear it herself, and to know that she is not disturbing other people.

  

    In the old hotel, mostly full of rooms rented by the day, with only a handful of tenants rich enough to be lodged there year by year, as was Sybelle's family, she can play forever without disturbing anyone.

  

    And after her parents' tragic death, after she lost the only two witnesses who had been intimate to her development,, she simply could not cooperate with Fox's plans for her career any further.

  

    Well, all this I understood, almost from the beginning. I understood it in her incessant repetition of the Sonata No. 23, and I think if you were to hear it, you would understand it too. I want you to hear it.

  

    Understand, it will not at all faze Sybelle if other people do gather to listen to her. It won't bother her one whit if she's recorded. If other people enjoy her playing and tell her so, she's delighted. But it's a simple thing with her. "Ah, so you too love it," she thinks. "Isn't it beautiful?" This is what she said to me with her eyes and her smiles the very first time I ever approached her.

  

    And I suppose before I go any further-and I do have more to put down about my children-I should address this question: How did I approach her? How did I come to be in her apartment on that fateful morning, when Dora stood in the Cathedral crying to the crowds about the miraculous Veil, and I, the blood in my veins having combusted, was in fact rocketing skyward?

  

    I don't know. I have rather tiresome supernatural explanations that read like tomes by members of the Society for the Study of Psychic Phenomena, or the scripts for Mulder and Scully on the television show called The X-Files. Or like a secret file on the case in the archives of the order of psychic detectives called the Talamasca.

  

    Bluntly, I see it this way. I have most-powerful abilities to cast spells, to dislocate my vision, and to transmit my image over distances, and to affect matter both at close range and matter which is out of sight. I must somehow, in this morning journey towards the clouds, have used this power. It might have been drawn from me in a moment of harrowing pain when I was for all purposes deranged and completely unaware of what was happening to me. It might have been a last desperate hysterical refusal to accept the possibility of death, or of the horrible predicament, so close to death, in which I found myself.

  

    That is, having fallen on the roof, burnt and in unspeakable torment, I might have sought a desperate mental escape, projecting my image and my strength into Sybelle's apartment long enough to kill her brother. It certainly is possible for spirits to exert enough pressure on matter to change it. So perhaps that is exactly what I did-project myself in spirit form and lay hands upon the substance that was Fox, and kill him.

  

    But I don't really believe all this. I'll tell you why.

  

    First off, though Sybelle and Benjamin are no experts, for all their savvy and seeming detachment, on the subject of death and its subsequent forensic analysis, they both insisted that Fox's body was bloodless when they got rid of it. The puncture wounds were apparent on his neck. In sum, they believe to this very hour that I was there, in substantial form, and that I did indeed drink Fox's blood.

  

    Now that a projected image cannot do, at least not insofar as I know it. No, it cannot devour the blood of an entire circulatory system and then dissolve itself, returning to the cicatricula of the mind from which it came. No, that is not possible.

  

    Of course, Sybelle and Benji could be wrong. What do they know about blood and bodies? But the fact is, they let Fox lie there, quite dead for some two days, or so they said, while they waited for the return of the Dybbuk or Angel whom they were sure would help them. Now in that time, the blood of a human body sinks down to the very lowest part of the carcass, and such a change would have been visible to these children. They noted no such thing.

  

    Ah, it makes my brain ache! The fact is, I don't know how I got to their apartment, or why. I don't know how it happened. And I do know, as I have already said, that as regards the entire experience- everything I saw and felt in the great restored Cathedral at Kiev, an impossible place-was as real as what I knew in Sybelle's apartment.

  

    There is one other small point, and though it is small it is crucial. After I had slain Fox, Benji did see my burnt body falling from the sky. He did see me, just as I saw him, from the window.

  

    There is one very terrible possibility. It is this. I was going to die that morning. It was going to happen. My ascent was driven by immense will and an immense love of God of which I have no doubt as I dictate these words now.

  

    But perhaps at the crucial moment, my courage failed me. My body failed me. And seeking some refuge from the sun, some way to thwart my martyrdom, I struck upon the predicament of Sybelle and her brother, and feeling her great need of me, I commenced to fall towards the shelter of the roof on which the snow and ice quickly covered me. My visit to Sybelle could have been, according to this interpretation, only a passing illusion, a powerful projection of self, as I've said, a wish fulfillment of the need of this random and vulnerable girl about to be fatally beaten by her brother.

  

    As for Fox, I killed him, without doubt. But he died from fear, from failure of the heart, perhaps, from the pressure of my illusory hands on his fragile throat, from the power of telekinesis or suggestion.

  

    But as I stated before, I don't believe this.

  

    I was there in the Cathedral in Kiev. I broke the egg with my thumbs. I saw the bird fly free.

  

    I know my Mother stood at my side, and I know that my Father knocked over the chalice. I know because I know there is no part of me that could have imagined such a thing. And I know too because the colors I saw then and the music I heard were not made up of anything I had ever experienced.

  

    Now, there is simply no other dream I have ever had about which I can say this. When I said the Mass in Vladimir's City, I was in a realm made up of ingredients which my imagination simply does not have at its disposal.

  

    I don't want to say any more about it. It's too hurtful and awful to try to analyze it. I didn't will it, not with my conscious heart, and I had no conscious power over it. It simply happened.

  

    I would, if I could, forget it entirely. I am so extraordinarily happy with Sybelle and Benji that surely I want to forget it all for the space of their lifetimes. I want only to be with them, as I have been since the night I described to you.

  

    As you realize, I took my time in coming here. Having returned to the ranks of the dangerous Undead, it was very easy for me to discern from the roaming minds of other vampires that Lestat was safe in his prison here, and indeed was dictating to you the entire story of what had happened to him with God Incarnate and with Memnoch the Devil.

  

    It was very easy for me to discern, without revealing my own presence, that an entire world of vampires mourned for me with greater anguish and tears than I could ever have predicted.

  

    So, being confident of Lestat's safety, being baffled yet relieved by the mysterious fact that his stolen eye had been returned to him, I was at leisure to stay with Sybelle and Benji and I did so.

  

    With Benji and Sybelle I rejoined the world in a way which I had not done since my fledgling, my one and only fledgling, Daniel Mol-loy, had left me. My love for Daniel had never been entirely honest, and always viciously possessive, and quite entangled with my own hatred of the world at large, and my confusion in the face of the baffling modern times which had begun to open up to me when I emerged in the late years of the Eighteenth Century from the catacombs beneath Paris.

  

    Daniel himself had no use for the world, and had come to me hungering for our Dark Blood, his brain swimming with macabre, grotesque tales which Louis de Pointe du Lac had told him. Heaping every luxury upon him, I only sickened him with mortal sweets so that finally he turned away from the riches I offered, becoming a vagabond. Mad, roaming the streets in rags, he shut out the world almost to the point of death, and I, weak, muddled, tormented by his beauty, and lusting for the living man and not the vampire he might become, only brought him over to us through the working of the Dark Trick because he would have died otherwise.

  

    I was no Marius to him afterwards. It was too exactly as I supposed: he loathed me in his heart for having initiated him into Living Death, for having made him in one night both an immortal and a regular killer.

  

    As a mortal man, he had no real idea of the price we pay for what we are, and he did not want to learn the truth; he fled from it, in reckless dreams and spiteful wandering.

  

    And so it was as I feared. Making him to be my mate, I made a minion who saw me all the more clearly as a monster.

  

    There was never any innocence for us, there was never any springtime. There was never any chance, no matter how beautiful the twilight gardens in which we wandered. Our souls were out of tune, our desires crossed and our resentments too common and too well watered for the final flowering.

  

    It's different now.

  

    For two months I remained in New York with Sybelle and Benji, living as I've never lived before, not since those long-ago nights with Marius in Venice.

  

    Sybelle is rich, as I think I've told you, but only in a tedious struggling sort of way, with an income that pays for her exorbitant apartment and daily room service meals, with a margin for fine clothes, tickets to the symphony and an occasional spending spree.

  

    I am fabulously rich. So the first thing I did, with pleasure, was lavish upon Sybelle and Benjamin all the riches I had once lavished upon Daniel Molloy to much greater effect.

  

    They loved it.

  

    Sybelle, when she was not playing the piano, had no objections whatsoever to wandering to the picture shows with Benji and me, or to the symphony and the opera. She loved the ballet, and loved to take Benjamin to the finest restaurants, where he became a regular marvel to the waiters with his crisp enthusiastic little voice and his lilting way of rattling off the names of dishes, French or Italian, and ordering vintage wines which they poured for him, unquestioningly, despite all the good-intentioned laws that prohibit the serving of such strong spirits to children.

  

    I loved all this too, of course, and was delighted to discover that Sybelle also took a sporadic and playful interest in dressing me, in choosing jackets, shirts and such from racks with a quick point of her finger, and in picking out for me from velvet trays all kinds of jeweled rings, cufflinks, neck chains and tiny crucifixes of rubies and gold, solid-gold clips for money and that sort of thing.

  

    It was I who had played this masterly game with Daniel Molloy. Sybelle plays it with me in her own dreamy way, as I take care of the tiresome cash register details.

  

    I in turn have the supreme pleasure of carrying Benji about like a doll and getting him to wear all the Western finery I purchase, at least now and then, for an hour or two.

  

    We make a striking trio, the three of us dining at Lutece or Sparks (of course I don't dine)-Benji in his immaculate little desert robe, or got up in a finely fitted little suit with narrow lapels, white button-down shirt and flash of tie; me in my highly acceptable antique velvet and chokers of old crumbling lace; and Sybelle in the lovely dresses that spill endlessly out of her closet, confections her Mother and Fox once bought for her, close cut around her large breasts and small waist and always flaring magically about her long legs, hem high enough to reveal the splendid curve of her calf and its tautness when she slips her dark-stockinged feet into dagger-heeled slippers. Benji's close-cropped cap of curls is always the Byzantine halo for his dark enigmatic little face, her flowing waves are free, and my hair is the Renaissance mop again of long unruly curls that used to be my secret vanity.

  

    My deepest pleasure with Benji is education. Right off, we started having powerful conversations about history and the world, and found ourselves stretched out on the carpet of the apartment, poring over maps, as we discussed the entire progress of East and West and the inevitable influences upon human history of climate, culture and geography. Benji gabbles away all during television broadcasts of the news, calling each anchorperson intimately by his or her first name, slamming his fist in anger at the actions of world leaders and wailing loudly over the deaths of great princesses and humanitarians. Benji can watch the news, talk steadily, eat popcorn, smoke a cigarette and sing intermittently with Sybelle's playing, always on key-all more or less simultaneously.

  

    If I fall to staring at the rain as if I've seen a ghost, it's Benji who beats on my arm and cries, "What shall we do, Armand? We have three splendid movies to see tonight. I'm vexed, I tell you, vexed, because if we go to any of these, we'll miss Pavarotti at the Met and I'll go pasty-white with sickness."

  

    Many times the two of us dress Sybelle, who looks at us as if she doesn't know what we're doing. We always sit talking with her when she bathes, because if we don't she's likely to go to sleep in the bathtub, or simply stay in there for hours, sponging the water over her beautiful breasts.

  

    Sometimes the only words she says all night are things like, "Benji, tie your shoes," or "Armand, he's stolen the silverware. Make him put it back," or with sudden astonishment, "It's warm, isn't it?"

  

    I have never told anyone my life story as I've told it to you here and now, but in conversation with Benji I have caught myself telling him many things which Marius told me-about human nature, and the history of the law, about painting and even about music.

  

    It was in these conversations, more than in anything else, that I came to realize in the last two months that I was a changed being.

  

    Some stifling dark terror is gone from me. I do not see history as a panorama of disasters, as once I think I did; and often I find myself remembering Marius's generous and beautifully optimistic predictions- that the world is ever improving; that war, for all the strife we see around us, has nevertheless gone out of fashion with those in power, and will soon pass from the arenas of the Third World as it has passed from the arenas of the West; and we will truly feed the hungry and shelter the homeless and take care of those who need love.

  

    With Sybelle, education and discussion are not the substance of our love. With Sybelle it is intimacy. I don't care if she never says anything. I don't go inside her mind. She doesn't want anybody to do that.

  

    As completely as she accepts me and my nature, I accept her and her obsession with the Appassionata. Hour after hour, night after night, I listen to Sybelle play, and with each fresh start I hear the minute changes of intensity and expression which pour forth in her playing. Gradually, on account of this, I have become the only listener of whom Sybelle has ever been conscious.

  

    Gradually, I have become part of Sybelle's music. I am there with her and the phrases and movements of the Appassionata. I am there and I am one who has never asked anything of Sybelle except that she do what she wants to do, and what she can do so perfectly.

  

    That's all Sybelle ever has to do for me-is what she will.

  

    If or when she wants to rise in "fortune and men's eyes," I'll clear the way for her. If or when she wants to be alone, she will not see or hear me. If or when she wants anything, I will get it for her.

  

    And if or when she loves a mortal man or mortal woman, I'll do what she wants me to do. I can live in the shadows. Doting on her, I can live forever in gloom because there is no gloom when I am near her.

  

    Sybelle often goes with me when I hunt. Sybelle likes to see me feed and kill. I don't think I have ever allowed a mortal to do that. She tries to help me dispose of the remains or confuse the evidence of the cause of death, but I'm very strong and swift and capable at this, so she is mostly the witness.

  

    I try to avoid taking Benji on these escapades because he becomes wildly and childishly excited, and it does him no good. To Sybelle it simply does nothing.

  

    There are other things I could tell you-how we handled the details of her brother's disappearance, how I transferred immense sums of money into her name and set up the appropriate and unbreakable trust funds for Benji, how I bought for her a substantial interest in the hotel in which she lives, and have put into her apartment, which is very huge for a hotel apartment, several other fine pianos which she enjoys, and how I have set aside for myself a safe distance from the apartment a lair with a coffin which is unfindable, unbreachable and indestructible, and to which I go on occasion, though I am more accustomed to sleeping in the little chamber they first gave to me, in which velvet curtains have been fitted tightly over the one window to the airwell.

  

    But the hell with all that.

  

    You know what I want you to know.

  

    What remains for us but to bring it to the moment, to sunset on this night when I came here, entering the very den of the vampires with my brother and with my sister, one on either side to see Lestat at last.

  

    THIS is ALL a little too simple, isn't it? I mean by that, my transformation from the zealous child who stood on the porch of the Cathedral to the happy monster making up his mind one spring night in New York City that it was time to journey south and look in on his old friend.

  

    You know why I came here.

  

    Let me begin at the start of this evening. You were there in the chapel when I arrived.

  

    You greeted me with undisguised good will, so pleased to see I was alive and unharmed. Louis almost wept.

  

    Those others, those raggedy young ones who were clustered about, two boys, I believe, and a girl, I don't know who they were, and still don't, only that later they drifted off.

   

    I was horrified to see him undefended, lying on the floor, and his mother, Gabrielle, far off in the corner merely staring at him, coldly, the way she stares at everything and everyone as though she never knew a human feeling for what it was.

  

    I was horrified that the young tramps were about, and felt instantly protective of Sybelle and Benji. I had no fear of their seeing the classics among us, the legends, the warriors-you, beloved Louis, even Gabrielle, and certainly not Pandora or Marius, who were all there.

  

    But I hadn't wanted my children to look on common trash infused with our blood, and I wondered, arrogantly and vainly perhaps, as I always do at such moments, how these roguish sophomoric slob vampires ever came to be. Who made them and why and when?

  

    At such times, the fierce old Child of Darkness wakes in me, the Coven Master beneath the Paris Cemetery who decreed when and how the Dark Blood should be given and, above all, to whom. But that old habit of authority is fraudulent and just a nuisance at best.

  

    I hated these hangers-on because they were there looking at Lestat as though he were a Carnival Curiosity, and I wouldn't have it. I felt a sudden temper, an urge to destroy.

  

    But there are no rules among us now that authorize such rash actions. And who was I to make a mutiny here under your roof? I didn't know you lived here then, no, but you certainly had custody of the Master of the Place, and you allowed it, the ruffians, and the three or four more of them that came shortly after and dared to circle him, none of them, I noticed, getting any too close.

  

    Of course everyone was most curious about Sybelle and Benjamin. I told them quietly to stay directly beside me and not to stray. Sybelle couldn't get it out of her mind that the piano was so near at hand, and it would have a whole new sound for her Sonata. As for Benji, he was striding along like a little Samurai, checking out monsters all around, with his eyes like saucers though his mouth was very puckered up and stern and proud.

  

    The chapel struck me as beautiful. How could it not? The plaster walls are white and pure, and the ceiling is gently coved, as in the oldest churches, and there is a deep coved shell where once the altar stood, which makes a well for sound, so that one footfall there echoes softly throughout the entire place.

  

    The stained glass I'd seen brilliantly lighted from the street. Unfig-ured, it was nevertheless lovely with its vivid colors of blue and red and yellow, and its simple serpentine designs. I liked the old black lettering of the mortals long gone in whose memory each window had been erected. I liked the old plaster statues scattered about, which I had helped you to clear from the New York apartment and send south.

  

    I had not looked at them much; I had shielded myself from their glass eyes as if they were basilisks. But I certainly looked at them now.

  

    There was sweet suffering St. Rita in her black habit and white wimple, with the fearful awful sore in her forehead like a third eye. There was lovely, smiling Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower of Jesus with His Crucifix and the bouquet of pink roses in her arms.

  

    There was St. Teresa of Avila, carved out of wood and finely painted, with her eyes turned upwards, the mystic, and the feather quill in her hand that marked her as a Doctor of the Church.

  

    There was St. Louis of France with his royal crown; St. Francis, of course, in humble brown monk's robes, with his gathering of tamed animals; and some others whose names I'm ashamed to say I didn't know.

  

    What struck me more perhaps even than these scattered statues, standing like so many guardians of an old and sacred history, were the pictures on the wall that marked Christ's road to Calvary: the Stations of the Cross. Someone had put them all in the proper order, maybe even before our coming into the world of this place.

  

    I divined that they were painted in oil on copper, and they had a Renaissance style to them, imitative certainly, but one which I find normal and which I love.

  

    Immediately, the fear that had been hovering inside me during all my happy weeks in New York came to the fore. No, it was not fear so much as it was dread.

  

    My Lord, I whispered. I turned and looked up at the Face of Christ on the high Crucifix above Lestat's head.

  

    This was an excruciating moment. I think the image on Veronica's Veil overlaid what I saw there in the carved wood. I know it did. I was back in New York, and Dora was holding up the cloth for us to see.

  

    I saw His dark beautifully shadowed eyes perfectly fixed on the cloth, as though part of it but not in any way absorbed by it, and the dark streaks of His eyebrows and, above His steady unchallenging gaze, the tricklets of blood from His thorns. I saw His lips partway open as if He had volumes to speak.

  

    With a shock, I realized that from far off by the altar steps Gabrielle had fixed her glacial gray eyes on me, and I locked up my mind and digested the key. I wouldn't have her touch me or my thoughts. And I felt a bristling hostility for all those gathered in the room.

  

    Louis came then. He was so happy that I had not perished. Louis had something to say. He knew I was concerned and he was anxious about the presence of the others. He looked his usual ascetic self, got up in tired black clothes of beautiful cut but impossible dustiness and a shirt so thin and worn that it seemed an elfin web of threads rather than true lace and cloth.

  

    "We let them in because if we don't, they circle like jackals, and wolves, and won't go away. As it is, they come, they see and they leave here. You know what they want."

  

    I nodded. I didn't have the courage to admit to him that I wanted exactly the same thing. I had never stopped thinking about it, not really, not for one moment, beneath the grand rhythm of all that had befallen me since I'd spoken to him on that last night of my old life.

  

    I wanted his blood. I wanted to drink it. Calmly, I let Louis know.

  

    "He'll destroy you," Louis whispered. He was flushed suddenly with terror. He looked questioningly at gentle silent Sybelle, who held fast to my hand, and Benjamin, who was studying him with enthusiastic bright eyes. "Armand, you can't chance it. One of them got too close. He smashed the creature. The motion was quick, automatic. But it has an arm like living stone and he blasted the creature to fragments there on the floor. Don't go near him, don't try it."

  

    "And the elders, the strong ones, have they never tried?"

  

    Pandora spoke then. She had been watching us all the while, playing in the shadows. I'd forgotten how very beautiful she was in a downplayed and very basic way.

  

    Her long rich brown hair was combed back, a shadow behind her slender neck, and she looked glossy and pretty because she had smoothed into her face a fine dark oil to make herself more passably human. Her eyes were bold and flaming. She put her hand on me with a woman's liberty. She too was happy to see me alive.

  

    "You know what Lestat is," she said pleadingly. "Armand, he's a furnace of power and no one knows what he might do."

  

    "But have you never thought of it, Pandora? Has it never even entered your mind, to drink the blood from his throat and search for the vision of Christ when you drank it? What if inside him there is the infallible proof that he drank the blood of God?"

  

    "But Armand," she said. "Christ was never my god."

  

    It was so simple, so shocking, so final.

  

    She sighed, but only out of concern for me. She smiled. "I wouldn't know your Christ if He were inside Lestat," she said gently.

  

    "You don't understand," I said. "Something happened, something happened to him when we went with this spirit called Memnoch, and he came back with that Veil. I saw it. I saw the ... power in it."

  

    "You saw the illusion," said Louis kindly.

  

    "No, I saw the power," I answered. Then in a moment I totally doubted myself. The long corridors of history wound back and away from me, and I saw myself plunged into darkness, carrying a single candle, searching for the ikons I had painted. And the pity of it, the triviality, the sheer hopelessness of it crushed my soul.

  

    I realized I had frightened Sybelle and Benji. They had their eyes fastened on me. They had never seen me as I was now.

  

    I closed my arms around them both and pulled them towards me. I had hunted before I'd come to them tonight, to be at my strongest, and I knew my skin was pleasingly warm. I kissed Sybelle on her pale pink lips, and then kissed Benji's head.

  

    "Armand, you vex me, truly you do," said Benji. "You never told me that you believed in this Veil."

  

    "And you, little man," I said in a hushed voice, not wishing to make a spectacle of us to the others. "Did you ever go into the Cathedral and look at it when it was on display there?"

  

    "Yes, and I say to you what this great lady said." He shrugged, of course. "He was never my god."

  

    "Look at them, prowling," said Louis softly. He was emaciated and shivering a little. He had neglected his own hunger to be here on guard. "I should throw them out now, Pandora," he said in a voice that couldn't have threatened the most timid soul.

  

    "Let them see what they came for," she said coolly under her breath. "They may not have so long to enjoy their satisfaction. They make the world harder for us, and disgrace us, and do nothing for anything living or dead."

  

    I thought it a lovely threat. I hoped she would clean out the lot of them, but I knew of course that many a Child of the Millennia thought the very same thing about those such as me. And what an impertinent creature I was to bring, without anyone's permission, my children to see my friend who lay on the floor.

  

    "These two are safe with us," Pandora said, obviously reading my fretting mind. "You realize they are glad to see you, young and old," she said making a small gesture to include the entire room. "There are some who don't want to step out from the shadows, but they know of you. They didn't want for you to be gone."

  

    "No, no one wanted it," said Louis rather emotionally. "And like a dream, you've come back. We all had inklings of it, wild whispers that you'd been seen in New York, as handsome and vigorous as you ever were. But I had to lay eyes on you to believe it."

  

    I nodded in thanks for these kind words. But I was thinking of the Veil. I looked up at the wooden Christ on the tree again, and then down at the slumbering figure of Lestat.

  

    It was then that Marius came. He was trembling. "Unburnt, whole," he whispered. "My son."

  

    He had that wretched neglected old gray cloak over his shoulders, but I didn't notice then. He embraced me at once, which forced my girl and my boy to step away. They didn't go far, however. I think they were reassured when they saw me put my arms around him and kiss him several times on the face and mouth, as we had always done so many years ago. He was so splendid, so softly full of love.

  

    "I'll keep these mortals safe if you're determined to try," he said. He had read the whole script from my heart. He knew I was bound to do it. "What can I say to prevent you?" he asked.

  

    I only shook my head. Haste and anticipation wouldn't let me do anything else. I gave Benji and Sybelle to his care.

  

    I went over to Lestat and I walked up in front of him, that is, on the left side of him as he lay there to my right. I knelt down quickly, surprised at how cold the marble was, forgetting, I suppose, how very damp it is here in New Orleans and how stealthy the chills can be.

  

    I knelt with my hands before me on the floor and I looked at him. He was placid, still, both blue eyes equally clear as if one had never been torn from his face. He stared through me, as we say, and on and on, and out of a mind that seemed as empty as a dead chrysalis.

  

    His hair was mussed and fall of dust. Not even his cold, hateful Mother had combed it, I supposed, and it infuriated me, but then in a frosty flash of emotion, she said hissingly:

  

    "He will not let anyone touch him, Armand." Her distant voice echoed deeply in the hollow of the chapel. "If you try it, you will soon find out for yourself."

  

    I looked up at her. She had her knees drawn up in a careless clasp of her arms, and her back against the wall. She wore her usual thick and frayed khaki, the narrow pants and the British safari coat for which she was more or less famous, stained from the wild outdoors, her blond hair as yellow and bright as his, braided and lying down her back.

  

    She got up suddenly, angrily, and she came towards me letting her plain leather boots echo sharply and disrespectfully on the floor.

  

    "What makes you think the spirits he saw were gods?" she demanded. "What makes you think the pranks of any of those lofty beings who play with us are any more than capers, and we no more than beasts, from the lowest to the very highest that walk the Earth?" She stood a few feet from him. She folded her arms. "He tempted something or something. That entity could not resist him. And what was the sum of it? Tell me. You ought to know."

  

    "I don't," I said in a soft voice. "I wish you would leave me alone."

  

    "Oh, do you, well, let me tell you what was the sum of it. A young woman, Dora by name, a leader of souls as they call it, who preached for the good that comes of tending to the weak who need it, was thrown off course! That was the sum of it-her preachings, grounded in charity and sung to a new tune so that people could hear them, were obliterated by the bloody face of a bloody god."

  

    My eyes filled with tears. I hated that she saw it so clearly, but I couldn't answer her and I couldn't shut her up. I rose to my feet.

  

    "Back to the cathedrals they flocked," she said scornfully, "the lot of them, and back to an archaic and ludicrous and utterly useless theology which it seems that you have plainly forgot."

  

    "I know it well enough," I said softly. "You make me miserable. What do I do to you? I kneel beside him, that's all."

  

    "Oh, but you mean to do more, and your tears offend me," she said.

  

    I heard someone behind me speak out to her. I thought perhaps it was Pandora, but I was unsure. In a sudden evanescent flash I was aware of all those who made a recreation of my misery, but then I didn't care.

  

    "What do you expect, Armand?" she asked me cunningly and mercilessly. Her narrow oval face was so like his and yet so not. He had never been so divorced from feeling, never so abstract in his anger as she was now. "You think you'll see what he saw, or that the Blood of Christ will still be there for you to savor on your tongue? Shall I quote the catechism for you?"

  

    "No need, Gabrielle," I said again in a meek voice. My tears were blinding me.

  

    "The bread and wine are the Body and Blood as long as they remain that species, Armand; but when it's bread and wine no more then no more is it Body and Blood. So what do you think of the Blood of Christ in him, that it has somehow retained its magical power, despite the engine of his heart that devours the blood of mortals as if it were mere air that he breathed ?"

  

    I didn't answer. I thought quietly in my soul. It was not the bread and the wine; it was His Blood, His Sacred Blood and He gave it on the road to Calvary, and to this being who lies here.

  

    I swallowed hard on my grief and my fury that she had made me commit myself in these terms. I wanted to look back for my poor Sybelle and Benji, for I knew by their scent they were still in the room.

  

    Why didn't Marius take them away! Oh, but it was plain enough. Marius wanted to see what I meant to do.

  

    "Don't tell me," Gabrielle said slurringly, "that it's a matter of faith." She sneered and shook her head. "You come like doubting Thomas to thrust your bloody fangs in the very wound."

  

    "Oh, stop, please, I beg you," I whispered. I put up my hands. "Let me try, and let him hurt me, and then be satisfied, and turn away."

  

    I only meant it as I said it, and I felt no power in it, only meekness and unutterable sadness.

  

    But it struck her hard, and for the first time her face became absolutely and totally sorrowful, and she too had moist and reddening eyes, and her lips even pressed together as she looked at me.

  

    "Poor lost child, Armand," she said. "I am so sorry for you. I was so glad that you had survived the sun."

  

    "Then that means I can forgive you, Gabrielle," I said, "for all the cruel things you've said to me."

  

    She raised her eyebrows thoughtfully, and then slowly nodded in silent assent. Then putting up her hands, she backed away without a sound and took up her old station, sitting on the altar step, her head leaning back against the Communion rail. She brought up her knees as before, and she merely looked at me, her face in shadow.

  

    I waited. She was still and quiet, and not a sound came from the occupants scattered about the chapel. I could hear the steady beat of Sybelle's heart and the anxious breath of Benji, but they were many yards away.

  

    I looked down on Lestat, who was unchanged, his hair fallen as before, a little over his left eye. His right arm was out, and his fingers curling upwards, and there came from him not the slightest movement, not even a breath from his lungs or a sigh from his pores.

  

    I knelt down beside him again. I reached out, and without flinching or hesitating, I brushed his hair back from his face.

  

    I could feel the shock in the room. I heard the sighs, the gasps from the others. But Lestat himself didn't stir.

  

    Slowly, I brushed his hair more tenderly, and I saw to my own mute shock one of my tears fall right onto his face.

  

    It was red yet watery and transparent and it appeared to vanish as it moved down the curve of his cheekbone and into the natural hollow below.

  

    I slipped down closer, turning on my side, facing him, my hand still on his hair. I stretched my legs out behind me, and alongside of him, and I lay there, letting my face rest right on his outstretched arm.

  

    Again there came the shocked gasps and sighs, and I tried to keep my heart absolutely pure of pride and pure of anything but love.

  

    It was not differentiated or defined, this love, but only love, the love I could feel perhaps for one I killed or one I succored, or one whom I passed in the street, or for one whom I knew and valued as much as him.

  

    All the burden of his sorrows seemed unimaginable to me, and in my mind a notion of it expanded to include the tragedy of all of us, those who kill to live, and thrive on death even as the very Earth decrees it, and are cursed with consciousness to know it, and know by what inches all things that feed us slowly anguish and at last are no more. Sorrow. Sorrow so much greater than guilt, and so much more ready for accounting, sorrow too great for the wide world.

  

    I climbed up. I rested my weight on my elbow, and I sent my right fingers slipping gently across his neck. Slowly I pressed my lips to his whitened silky skin and breathed in the old unmistakable taste and scent of him, something sweet and undefinable and utterly personal, something made up of all his physical gifts and those given him afterwards, and I pressed my sharp eyeteeth through his skin to taste his blood.

  

    There was no chapel then for me, or outraged sighs or reverential cries. I heard nothing, and yet knew what was all around. I knew it as if the substantial place was but a phantasm, for what was real was his blood.

  

    It was as thick as honey, deep and strong of taste, a syrup for the very angels.

  

    I groaned aloud drinking it, feeling the searing heat of it, so unlike to any human blood. With each slow beat of his powerful heart there came another small surge of it, until my mouth was filled and my throat swallowed without my bidding, and the sound of his heart grew louder, ever louder, and a reddish shimmer filled my vision, and I saw through this shimmer a great swirling dust.

  

    A wretched dreary din rose slowly out of nothingness, commingled with an acid sand that stung my eyes. It was a desert place, all right, and old and full of rank and common things, of sweat and filth and death. The din was voices crying out, and echoing up the close and grimy walls. Voices crowded upon voices, taunts and jeers and cries of horror, and gruff riffs of foul indifferent gossip rushing over the most poignant and terrible cries of outrage and alarm.

  

    Against sweating bodies I was pressed, struggling, the slanting sun burning on my outstretched arm. I understood the babble all around me, the ancient tongue hollered and wailed in my ears as I fought to get ever closer to the source of all the wet and ugly commotion that swamped me and tried to hold me back.

  

    It seemed they'd crush the very life out of me, these ragged, rough-skinned men and veiled women in their coarse homespun, thrusting elbows at me and stepping on my feet. I couldn't see what lay before me. I flung my arms out, deafened by the cries and the wicked boiling laughter, and suddenly, as if by decree, the crowd parted, and I beheld the lurid masterpiece itself.

  

    He stood in His torn and bloody white robe, this very Figure whose Face Fd seen imprinted into the fibers of the Veil. Arms bound up with thick uneven iron chains to the heavy and monstrous crossbeam of His crucifix, He hunched beneath it, hair pouring down on either side of His bruised and lacerated face. The blood from the thorns flowed into His open and unflinching eyes.

  

    He looked at me, quite startled, even faintly amazed. He stared with wide and open gaze as if the multitude didn't surround Him, and a whip did not crack over His very back and then His bowed head. He stared past the tangle of his clotted hair and from beneath His raw and bleeding lids.

  

    "Lord!" I cried.

  

    I must have reached out for Him, for those were my hands, my smallish and white hands that I saw! I saw them struggling to reach His Face.

  

    "Lord!" I cried again.

  

    And back He stared at me, unmoving, eyes meeting my eyes, hands dangling from the iron chains and mouth dripping with blood.

  

    Suddenly a fierce and terrible blow struck me. It pitched me forward. His Face filled all my sight. Before my eyes it was the very measure of all that I could possibly see-His soiled and broken skin, the wetted, darkened tangle of His eyelashes, the great bright orbs of His dark-pupiled eyes.

  

    Closer and closer it came, the blood flowing down and into His thick eyebrows, and dripping down His gaunt cheeks. His mouth opened. A sound came out of Him. It was a sigh at first and then a dull rising breath that grew louder and louder as His Face became even larger, losing its very lineaments, and became the sum of all its swimming colors, the sound now a positive and deafening roar.

  

    In terror, I cried out. I was thrust back. Yet even as I saw His familiar Figure and the ancient frame of His Face with its Thorny Crown, the Face grew ever larger and larger and utterly indistinct and seemed again to bear down on me, and then suddenly to suffocate all my face with its immense and total weight.

  

    I screamed. I was helpless, weightless, unable to draw breath.

  

    I screamed as IVe never in all my miserable years screamed, the scream so loud that it shut out the roar that filled my ears, but the vision pressed on, a great driving inescapable mass that had been His Face.

  

    "Oh, Lord!" I screamed with all the power of my burning lungs. The very wind rushed in my ears.

  

    Something struck the back of my head so hard that it cracked my skull. I heard the crack. I felt the wet splash of blood.

  

    I opened my eyes. I was staring forward. I was far across the chapel, sprawled against the plaster wall, my legs out in front of me, my arms dangling, my head on fire with the pain of the great concussion where I had struck the wall.

  

    Lestat had never moved. I knew he hadn't.

  

    No one had to tell me. It was not he who threw me back.

  

    I tumbled over onto my face, pulling my arm up under my head. I knew there were feet gathered all around me, that Louis was near, and that even Gabrielle had come, and I knew too that Marius was taking Sybelle and Benjamin away.

  

    I could hear in the ringing silence only Benjamin's small sharp mortal voice. "But what happened to him. What happened? The blond one didn't hit him. I saw it. It didn't happen. He didn't-."

  

    My face hidden, my face soaked with tears, I covered my head with my trembling hands, my bitter smile unseen, though my sobs were heard.

  

    I cried and cried for a long time, and then gradually, as I knew it would, my scalp began to heal. The evil blood mounted to the surface of my skin and, tingling there, did its evil ministrations, sewing up the flesh like a little laser beam from Hell.

  

    Someone gave me a napkin. It had the faint scent of Louis on it, but I couldn't be sure. It was a long long time, perhaps even so long as an hour before I finally clasped it and wiped all the blood off my face.

  

    It was another hour, an hour of quiet and of people respectfully slipping away, before I turned over and rose and sat back against the wall. My head no longer hurt, the wound was gone, the blood that had dried there would soon flake away.

  

    I stared at him for a long and quiet time.

  

    I was cold and solitary and raw. Nothing anyone murmured penetrated my hearing. I did not note the gestures or the movements around me.

  

    In the sanctum of my mind I went over, mostly slowly, exactly, what I had seen, what I had heard-all that I've told you here.

  

    I rose finally. I went back to him and I looked down at him.

  

    Gabrielle said something to me. It was harsh and mean. I didn't actually hear it. I heard only the sound of it, the cadence, that is, as if her old French, so familiar to me, was a language I didn't know.

  

    I knelt down and I kissed his hair.

  

    He didn't move. He didn't change. I wasn't the slightest bit afraid that he would, or hopeful that he would either. I kissed him one more time on the side of his face, and then I got up, and I wiped my hands on the napkin which I still had, and I went out.

  

    I think I stood in a torpor for a long while, and then something came back to me, something Dora had said a long long time ago, about a child having died in the attic, about a little ghost and about old clothes.

  

    Grasping that, clutching it tight, I managed to propel myself towards the stairs.

  

    It was there that I met you a short time afterwards. Now you know, for better or worse, what I did or didn't see.

  

    And so my symphony is finished. Let me write my name to it. When you're finished with your copying, I will give my transcript to Sybelle. And Benji too perhaps. And you may do with the rest what you will.

  

    THIS is NO EPILOGUE. It is the last chapter to a tale I thought was finished. I write it in my own hand. It will be brief, for I have no drama left me and must manipulate with the utmost care the bare bones of the tale.

  

    Perhaps in some later time the proper words will come to me to deepen my depiction of what happened, but for now to record is all that I can do.

  

    I did not leave the convent after I inscribed my name to the copy which David had so faithfully written out. It was too late.

  

    The night had spent itself in language, and I had to retire to one of the secret brick chambers of the place which David showed me, a place where Lestat had once been imprisoned, and there sprawled on the floor in perfect darkness, overexcited by all that I'd told David, and, more completely exhausted than I'd ever been, I went into immediate sleep with the rise of the sun.

  

    At twilight, I rose, straightened out my clothes and returned to the chapel. I knelt down and gave Lestat a kiss of unreserved affection, just as I had the night before. I took no notice of anyone and did not even know who was there.

  

    Taking Marius at his word, I walked away from the convent, in a wash of early evening violet light, my eyes drifting trustingly over the flowers, and I listened for the chords of Sybelle's Sonata to lead me to the proper house.

  

    Within seconds I heard the music, the distant but rapid phrases of the Allegro assai, or the First Movement, of Sybelle's familiar song.

  

    It was played with an unusual ringing preciseness, indeed, a new languid cadence which gave it a powerful and ruby-red authority which I immediately loved.

  

    So I hadn't scared my little girl out of her mind. She was well and prospering and perhaps falling in love with the drowsy humid loveliness of New Orleans as so many of us have.

  

    I sped at once to the location, and found myself standing, only a little mussed by the wind, in front of a huge three-story redbrick house in Metairie, a countrified suburb of New Orleans which is actually very close to the city, with a feel that can be miraculously remote.

  

    The giant oaks which Marius described were all around this new American mansion, and, as he had promised, all his French doors of shining clean panes were open to the early breeze.

  

    The grass was long and soft beneath my shoes, and a splendid light, so very precious to Marius, poured forth from every window as did the music of the Appassionata now, which was just moving with exceptional grace into the Second Movement, Andante con motto, which promises to be a tame segment of the work but quickly works itself into the same madness as all the rest.

  

    I stopped in my tracks to listen to it. I had never heard the notes quite as limpid and translucent, quite as flashing and exquisitely distinct. I tried for sheer pleasure to divine the differences between this performance and so many I'd heard in the past. They were all different, magical and profoundly affecting, but this was passing spectacular, helped in slight measure by the immense body of what I knew to be a concert grand.

  

    For a moment, a misery swept over me, a terrible, gripping memory of what I'd seen when I drank Lestat's blood the night before. I let myself relive it, as we say so innocently, and then with a positive blush of pleasant shock, I realized that I didn't have to tell anyone about it, that it was all dictated to David and that when he gave me my copies, I could entrust them to whomever I loved, who would ever want to know what I'd seen.

  

    As for myself, I wouldn't try to figure it out. I couldn't. The feeling was too strong that whom I had seen on the road to Calvary, whether He was real or a figment of my own guilty heart, had not wanted me to see Him and had monstrously turned me away. Indeed the feeling of rejection was so total that I could scarce believe that I had managed to describe it to David.

  

    I had to get the thoughts out of my mind. I banished all reverberations of this experience and let myself fall into Sybelle's music again, merely standing under the oaks, with the eternal river breeze, which can reach you anywhere in this place, cooling me and soothing me and making me feel that the Earth itself was filled with irrepressible beauty, even for someone such as I.

  

    The music of the Third Movement built to its most brilliant climax, and I thought my heart would break.

  

    It was only then, as the final bars were played out, that I realized something which should have been obvious to me from the start.

  

    It wasn't Sybelle playing this music. It couldn't be. I knew every nuance of Sybelle's interpretations. I knew her modes of expression; I knew the tonal qualities that her particular touch invariably produced. Though her interpretations were infinitely spontaneous, nevertheless I knew her music, as one knows the writing of another or the style of a painter's work. This wasn't Sybelle.

  

    And then the real truth dawned on me. It was Sybelle, but Sybelle was no longer Sybelle.

  

    For a second I couldn't believe it. My heart stopped in my chest.

  

    Then I walked into the house, a steady furious walk that would have stopped for nothing but to find the truth of what I believed.

  

    In an instant I saw it with my own eyes. In a splendid room, they were gathered together, the beautiful lithe figure of Pandora in a gown of brown silk, girdled at the waist in the old Grecian style, Marius in a light velvet smoking jacket over silk trousers, and my children, my beautiful children, radiant Benji in his white gown, dancing barefoot and wildly around the room with his fingers flung out as if to grasp the air in them, and Sybelle, my gorgeous Sybelle, with her arms bare too in a dress of deep rose silk, at the piano, her long hair swept back over her shoulders, just striding into the First Movement again.

  

    All of them vampires, every one.

  

    I clenched my teeth hard, and covered my mouth lest my roars wake the world. I roared and roared into my collapsed hands.

  

    I cried out the single defiant syllable No, No, No, over and over again. I could say nothing else, scream nothing else, do nothing else.

  

    I cried and cried.

  

    I bit down so hard with my teeth that my jaw ached, and my hands shuddered like wings of a bird that wouldn't let me shut up my mouth tight enough, and once again the tears streamed out of my eyes as thickly as they had when I kissed Lestat.

  

    No, No, No, No!

  

    Then suddenly I flung out my hands, coiling them into fists, and the roar would have got loose, it would have burst from me like a raging stream, but Marius took hold of me with great force and flung me against his chest and buried my face against himself.

  

    I struggled to get free. I kicked at him with all of my strength, and I beat at him with my fists.

  

    "How could you do it!" I roared.

  

    His hands enclosed my head in a hopeless trap, and his lips kept covering me with kisses I hated and detested and fought off with desperate flinging gestures.

  

    "How could you? How dare you? How could you?"

  

    At last I gained enough leverage to smash his face with blow after blow.

  

    But what good did it do me? How weak and meaningless were my fists against his strength. How helpless and foolish and small were my gestures, and he stood there, bearing it all, his face unspeakably sad, and his own eyes dry yet full of caring.

  

    "How could you do it, how could you do it!" I demanded. I would not cease.

  

    But suddenly Sybelle rose from the piano, and with her arms out ran to me. And Benji, who had been watching all the while, rushed to me also, and they imprisoned me gently in their tender arms.

  

    "Oh, Armand, don't be angry, don't be, don't be sad," Sybelle cried softly against my ear. "Oh, my magnificent Armand, don't be sad, don't be. Don't be cross. We're with you forever."

  

    "Armand, we are with you! He did the magic," cried Benji. "We didn't have to be born from black eggs, you Dybbuk, to tell us such a tale! Armand, we will never die now, we will never be sick, and never hurt and never afraid again." He jumped up and down with glee and spun in another mirthful circle, astonished and laughing at his new vigor, that he could leap so high and with such grace. "Armand, we are so happy."

  

    "Oh, yes, please," cried Sybelle softly in her deeper gentler voice. "I love you so much, Armand, I love you so very very much. We had to do it. We had to. We had to do it, to always and forever be with you."

  

    My fingers hovered about her, wanting to comfort her, and then, as she ground her forehead desperately into my neck, hugging me tight around the chest, I couldn't not touch her, couldn't not embrace her, couldn't not assure her.

  

    "Armand, I love you, I adore you, Armand, I live only for you, and now with you always," she said.

  

    I nodded, I tried to speak. She kissed my tears. She began to kiss them rapidly and desperately. "Stop it, stop crying, don't cry," she kept saying in her urgent low whisper. "Armand, we love you."

  

    "Armand, we are so happy!" cried Benji. "Look, Armand, look! We can dance together now to her music. We can do everything together. Armand, we have hunted already." He dashed up to me and bent his knees, poised to spring with excitement as if to emphasize his point. Then he sighed and flung out his arms to me again, "Ah, poor Armand, you are all wrong, all filled with wrong dreams. Armand, don't you see?"

  

    "I love you," I whispered in a tiny voice into Sybelle's ear. I whispered it again, and then my resistance broke completely, and I crushed her gently to me and with rampant fingers felt her silky white skin and the zinging fineness of her shining hair.

  

    Still holding her to me, I whispered, "Don't tremble, I love you, I love you."

  

    I clasped Benji to me with my left hand. "And you, scamp, you can tell me all of it in time. Just let me hold you now. Let me hold you."

  

    I was shivering. I was the one shivering. They enclosed me again with all their tenderness, seeking to keep me warm.

  

    Finally, patting them both, taking my leave of them with kisses, I shrank away and fell down exhausted into a large old velvet chair.

  

    My head throbbed and I felt my tears coming again, but with all my force I swallowed my tears for their sake. I had no choice.

  

    Sybelle had gone back to the piano, and striking the keys she began the Sonata again. This time she sang out the notes in a beautiful low monosyllabic soprano, and Benji began dancing again, whirling, and prancing, and stomping with his bare feet, in lovely keeping with Sybelle's time.

  

    I sat forward with my head in my hands. I wanted my hair to come down and hide me from all eyes, but for all its thickness it was only a head of hair.

  

    I felt a hand on my shoulder and I stiffened, but I could not say a word, lest I'd start crying again and cursing with all my might. I was silent.

  

    "I don't expect you to understand," he said under his breath.

  

    I sat up. He was beside me, seated on the arm of the chair. He looked down at me.

  

    I made my face pleasant, all smiles even, and my voice so velvet and placid that no one could have thought I was talking to him of anything but love.

  

    "How could you do it? Why did you do it? Do you hate me so much? Don't lie to me. Don't tell me stupid things that you know I will never, never believe. Don't lie to me for Pandora's sake or their sake. I'll care for them and love them forever. But don't lie. You did it for vengeance, didn't you, Master, you did it for hate?"

  

    "How could I?" he asked in the same voice, expressive of pure love, and it seemed the very genuine voice of love talking to me from his sincere and pleading face. "If ever I did anything for love, I have done this for it. I did it for love and for you. I did it for all the wrongs done you, and the loneliness you've suffered, and the horrors that the world put upon you when you were too young and too untried to know how to fight them and then too vanquished to wage a battle with a full heart. I did it for you."

  

    "Oh, you lie, you lie in your heart," I said, "if not with your tongue. You did it for spite, and you have just revealed it all too plainly to me. You did it for spite because I wasn't the fledgling you wanted to make of me. I wasn't the clever rebel who could stand up to Santino and his band of monsters, and I was the one, after all those centuries, that disappointed you yet again and horribly because I went into the sun after I saw the Veil. That's why you did it. You did it for vengeance and you did it for bitterness and you did it for disappointment, and the crowning horror is you don't know it yourself. You couldn't bear it that my heart swelled to burst when I saw His Face on the Veil. You couldn't bear it that this child you plucked from the Venetian brothel, and nursed with your own blood, this child you taught from your own books and with your hands, cried out to Him when he saw His Face on the Veil."

  

    "No, that is so very very far from the truth it breaks my heart." He shook his head. And tearless and white as he was, his face was a perfect picture of sorrow as though it was a painting he had done with his own hands. "I did it because they love you as no one has ever loved you, and they are free and have within their generous hearts a deep cunning which doesn't shrink from you and all that you are. I did it because they were forged in the same furnace as myself, the two of them, keen to reason and strong to endure. I did it because madness had not defeated her, and poverty and ignorance had not defeated him. I did it because they were your chosen ones, utterly perfect, and I knew that you would not do it, and they would come to hate you for this, hate you, as you once hated me for withholding it, and you would lose them to alienation and death before you would give in.

  

    "They are yours now. Nothing separates you. And it's my blood, ancient and powerful, that's filled them to the brim with power so that they can be your worthy companions and not the pale shadow of your soul which Louis always was.

  

    "There is no barrier of Master and Fledgling between you, and you can learn the secrets of their hearts as they learn the secrets of yours."

  

    I wanted to believe it.

  

    I wanted to believe it so badly that I got up and left him, and making the gentlest smile at my Benjamin and kissing her silkily in passing, I withdrew to the garden and stood alone beneath and between a pair of massive oaks.

  

    Their thunderous roots rose up out of the ground, forming hillocks of hard dark blistering wood. I rested my feet in this rocky place and my head against the nearer of the two trees.

  

    The branches came down and made a veil for me, as I had wanted the hair of my own head to do. I felt shielded and safe in the shadows. I was quiet in my heart, but my heart was broken and my mind was shattered, and I had only to look through the open doorway into the brilliant glory of the light at my two white vampire angels for me to start crying again.

  

    Marius stood for a long time in a distant door. He didn't look at me. And when I looked to Pandora, I saw her coiled up as if to defend herself from some terrible pain-possibly only our quarrel-in another large old velvet chair.

  

    Finally Marius drew himself up and came towards me, and I think it took a force of will for him to do it. He seemed suddenly just a little angry and even proud.

  

    I didn't give a damn.

  

    He stood before me but he said nothing, and it seemed he was there to face whatever I had yet to say.

  

    "Why didn't you let them have their lives!" I said. "You, of all people, whatever you felt for me and my follies, why didn't you let them have what nature gave them? Why did you interfere?"

  

    He didn't answer, but I didn't allow for it. Softening my tone so as not to alarm them, I went on.

  

    "In my darkest times," I said, "it was always your words that upheld me. Oh, I don't mean during those centuries when I was in bondage to a warped creed and morbid delusion. I mean long afterwards, after I had come out of the cellar, at Lestat's challenge, and I read what Lestat wrote of you, and then heard you for myself. It was you, Master, who let me see what little I could of the marvelous bright world unfolding around me in ways I couldn't have imagined in the land or time in which I was born."

  

    I couldn't contain myself. I stopped for breath and to listen to her music, and realizing how lovely it was, how plaintive and expressive and newly mysterious, I almost cried again. But I couldn't allow such to happen. I had a great deal more to say, or so I thought.

  

    "Master, it was you who said we were moving in a world where the old religions of superstition and violence were dying away. It was you who said we lived in a time when evil no longer aspired to any necessary place. Remember it, Master, you told Lestat that there was no creed or code that could justify our existence, for men knew now what was real evil, and real evil was hunger, and want, and ignorance and war, and cold. You said those things, Master, far more elegantly and fully than I could ever say them, but it was on this great rational basis that you argued, you, with the worst of us, for the sanctity and the precious glory of this natural and human world. It was you who championed the human soul, saying it had grown in depth and feeling, that men no longer lived for the glamour of war but knew the finer things which had once been the forte only of the richest, and could now be had by all. It was you who said that a new illumination, one of reason and ethics and genuine compassion, had come again, after dark centuries of bloody religion, to give forth not only its light but its warmth."

  

    "Stop, Armand, don't say any more," he said. He was gentle but very stern. "I remember those words. I remember all of them. But I don't believe those things anymore."

  

    I was stunned. I was stunned by the awesome simplicity of this disavowal. It was sweeping beyond my imagination, and yet I knew him well enough to know that he meant every word. He looked at me steadily.

  

    "I believed it once, yes. But you see, it was not a belief based on reason and on observation of mankind as I told myself it was. It was never that, and I came to realize it and when I did, when I saw it for what it was-a blind desperate irrational prejudice-I felt it suddenly and completely collapse.

  

    "Armand, I said those things because I had to hold them to be true. They were their own creed, the creed of the rational, the creed of the atheistic, the creed of the logical, the creed of the sophisticated Roman Senator who must turn a blind eye to the nauseating realities of the world around him, because if he were to admit what he saw in the wretchedness of his brothers and sisters, he would go mad."

  

    He drew in his breath and continued, turning his back to the bright room as if to shield the fledglings from the heat of his words, as surely as I wanted him to do it.

  

    "I know history, I read it as others read their Bibles, and I will not be satisfied until I have unearthed all stories that are written and know-able, and cracked the codes of all cultures that have left me any tantalizing evidence that I might pry loose from earth or stone or papyrus or clay.

  

    "But I was wrong in my optimism, I was ignorant, as ignorant as I accused others of being, and refusing to see the very horrors that surrounded me, all the worse in this century, this reasonable century, than ever before in the world.

  

    "Look back, child, if you care to, if you would argue the point. Look back to golden Kiev, which you knew only in songs after the raging Mongols had burnt its Cathedrals and slaughtered its population like so much cattle, as they did all through the Kiev Rus for two hundred years. Look back to the chronicles of all Europe and see the wars waged everywhere, in the Holy Land, in the forests of France or Germany, up and down the fertile soil of England, yes, blessed England, and in every Asian corner of the globe.

  

    Oh, why did I deceive myself for so long? Did I not see those Russian grasslands, those burnt cities. Why, all of Europe might have fallen to Ghenghis Khan. Think of the great English Cathedrals torn down to rubble by the arrogant King Henry.

  

    Think of the books of the Mayas heaved into the flames by Spanish priests. Incas, Aztecs, Olmec-peoples of all nations ground to oblivion-.

  

    "It's horrors, horrors upon horrors, and it always was, and I can pretend no longer. When I see millions gassed to death for the whims of an Austrian madman, when I see whole African tribes massacred till the rivers are stuffed with their bloated bodies, when I see rank starvation claim whole countries in an age of gluttonous plenty, I can believe all these platitudes no more.

  

    "I don't know what single event it was that destroyed my self-deception. I don't know what horror it was that ripped the mask from my lies. Was it the millions who starved in the Ukraine, imprisoned in it by their own dictator, or the thousands after who died from the nuclear poisoning spewing into the skies over the grasslands, unprotected by the same governing powers who had starved them before? Was it the monasteries of noble Nepal, citadels of meditation and grace that had stood for thousands of years, older even than myself and all my philosophy, destroyed by an army of greedy grasping militarists who waged war without quarter upon monks in their saffron robes, and priceless books which they heaved into the fire, and ancient bells which they melted down no more to call the gentle to prayer? And this, this within two decades of this very hour, while the nations of the West danced in their discos and swilled their liquor, lamenting in casual tones for the poor sad fate of the distant Dalai Lama, and turning the television dial.

  

    "I don't know what it was. Perhaps it was all the millions-Chinese, Japanese, Cambodian, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Kurdish, oh, God, the litany goes on without end. I have no faith, I have no optimism, I have no firm conviction in the ways of reason or ethics. I have no reproof for you as you stand on the Cathedral steps with your arms out to your all-knowing and all-perfect God.

  

    "I know nothing, because I know too much, and understand not nearly enough and never will. But this you taught me as much as any other I've ever known, that love is necessary, as much as rain to the flowers and the trees, and food to the hungry child, and blood to the starving thirsting predators and scavengers that we are. Love we need, and love can make us forget and forgive all savagery, as perhaps nothing else can.

  

    "And so I took them out of their fabulous promising modern world with its diseased and desperate masses. I took them out and gave them the only might I possess, and I did it for you. I gave them time, time perhaps to find an answer which those mortals living now may never know.

  

    "That was it, all of it. And I knew you would cry, and I knew you would suffer, but I knew you would have them and love them when it was finished, and I knew that you needed them desperately. So there you are ... joined now with the serpent and the lion and the wolf, and far superior to the worst of men who have proved themselves in this time to be colossal monsters, and free to feed with care upon a world of evil that can swallow every bit of pruning they care to do."

  

    A silence fell between us.

  

    I thought for a long while, rather than plunge into my words.

  

    Sybelle had stopped her playing, and I knew that she was concerned for me and needed me, I could feel it, feel the strong thrust of her vampire soul. I would have to go to her and soon.

  

    But I took my time to say a few more words:

  

    "You should have trusted them, Master, you should have let them have their chance. Whatever you thought of the world, you should have let them have their time with it. It was their world and their time."

  

    He shook his head as though he was disappointed in me, and a little weary, and as he had resolved all these matters long ago in his mind, perhaps before I had even appeared last night, he seemed willing to let it all go.

  

    "Armand, you are my child forever," he said with great dignity. "All that is magical and divine in me is bounded by the human and always was."

  

    "You should have let them have their hour. No love of me should have written their death warrant, or their admission to our strange and inexplicable world. We may be no worse than humans in your estimation, but you could have kept your counsel. You could have let them alone."

  

    It was enough.

  

    Besides, David had appeared. He had a copy already of the transcript we'd labored on, but this was not his concern. He approached us slowly, announcing his presence obviously to give us the chance to become silent, which we did.

  

    I turned to him, unable to restrain myself. "Did you know this was to happen? Did you know when it did?"

  

    "No, I did not," he said solemnly.

  

    "Thank you," I said.

  

    "They need you, your young ones," David said. "Marius may be the Maker but they are utterly yours."

  

    "I know," I said. "I'm going. I'll do what I'm bound to do."

  

    Marius put his hand out and touched my shoulder. I realized suddenly that he was truly on the verge of losing his self-control.

  

    When he spoke his voice was tremulous and lustrous with feeling.

  

    He hated the storm inside himself and he was overcome by my sorrow. I knew this plainly enough. It gave me no satisfaction at all.

  

    "You despise me now, and perhaps you're right. I knew you would weep, but in a very profound way, I misjudged you. I didn't realize something about you. Perhaps I never have."

  

    "What's that, Master," I said with acidic drama.

  

    "You loved them selflessly," he whispered. "For all their strange faults, and wild evil, they were not compromised for you. You loved them perhaps more respectfully than I... than I ever loved you."

  

    He seemed so amazed.

  

    I could only nod. I wasn't so sure he was right. My need for them had never been tested, but I didn't want to tell him so.

  

    "Armand," he said. "You know you can stay here as long as you like."

  

    "Good, because I just might," I said. "They love it, and I'm weary. So thank you very much for that."

  

    "But one thing more," he went on, "and I mean this with all my heart."

  

    "What is it, Master?" I said.

  

    David stood by, and I was happy for that, for it seemed to act as a certain curb upon my tears.

  

    "I honestly don't know the answer to this, and I ask you in humility," Marius said. "When you saw the Veil, what was it you really saw? Oh, I don't mean was it Christ, or was it God, or was it a miracle. What I mean is this. There was the face of a being, drenched in blood, who had given birth to a religion guilty of more wars and more cruelty than any creed the world has ever known. Don't be angry with me, please, just explain to me. What was it you saw? Was it only a magnificent reminder of the ikons you once painted? Or was it truly something drenched in love and not in blood? Tell me. If it was love and not blood, I would honestly like to know."

  

    "You ask an old and simple question," I said, "and from where I stand you don't really know a thing. You wonder how He could have been my Lord, given this world as you describe it, and knowing what you know of the Gospels and the Testaments printed in His name. You wonder how I could have believed all that because you don't believe it, isn't that so?"

  

    He nodded. "Yes, I do wonder. Because I know you. And I know that faith is something which you simply do not have."

  

    I was startled. But instantly I knew he was right.

  

    I smiled. I felt a sort of tragic thrilling happiness suddenly.

  

    "Well, I see what you mean," I said. "And I'll tell you my answer. I saw Christ. A kind of bloody light. A personality, a human, a presence that I felt I knew. And He wasn't the Lord God Father Almighty and He wasn't the maker of the universe and the whole world. And He wasn't the Savior or the Redeemer for sins inscribed on my soul before I was born. He wasn't the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, and He wasn't the Theologian expounding from the Holy Mount. He wasn't those things for me. Maybe for others, but not forme."

  

    "But who was He, then, Armand?" David asked. "I have your story, full of marvels and suffering, yet I don't know. What was the concept of the Lord when you spoke the word?"

  

    "Lord," I repeated it. "It doesn't mean what you think. It's spoken with too much intimacy and too much warmth. It's like a secret and sacred name. Lord." I paused, and then continued:

  

    "He is the Lord, yes, but only because He is the symbol of something infinitely more accessible, something infinitely more meaningful than a ruler or king or lord can ever be."

  

    Again, I hesitated, wanting to find the right words since they were so sincere.

  

    "He was . . . my brother" I said. "Yes. That is what He was, my brother, and the symbol of all brothers, and that is why He was the Lord, and that is why His core is simply love. You scorn it. You look askance at what I say. But you don't grasp the complexity of what He was. It's easy to feel, perhaps, but not so easy to really see. He was another man like me. And maybe for many of us, millions upon millions, that's all He's ever been! We're all somebody's sons and daughters and He was somebody's son. He was human, whether He was God or not, and He was suffering and He was doing it for things He thought were purely and universally good. And that meant that His blood might as well have been my blood too. Why, it had to be. And maybe that is the very source of His magnificance for thinkers such as me. You said I had no faith. I don't. Not in titles or in legends or in hierarchies made by other beings like ourselves. He didn't make a hierarchy, not really. He was the very thing. I saw in Him magnificence for simple reasons. There was flesh and blood to what He was! And it could be bread and wine to feed the whole Earth. You don't get it. You can't. Too many lies about Him swim in your ken. I saw Him before I heard so much about Him. I saw Him when I looked at the ikons in my house, and when I painted Him long before I even knew all His names. I can't get Him out of my head. I never have. I never will."

  

    I had no more to say.

  

    They were very amazed but not particularly respecting, pondering the words in all the wrong ways, perhaps, I couldn't absolutely know. It didn't matter what they felt anyway. It wasn't really so good that they had asked me or that I had tried so hard to tell them my truth. I saw the old ikon in my mind, the one my Mother had brought to me in the snow. Incarnation. Impossible to explain in their philosophy. I wondered. Perhaps the horror of my own life was that, no matter what I did or where I went, I always understood. Incarnation. A kind of bloody light.

  

    I wanted to be left alone by them now.

  

    Sybelle was waiting, which was of far greater importance, and I went to take her in my arms.

  

    For many hours we talked together, Sybelle and Benji and me, and finally Pandora, who was very distraught but would say nothing of it, came to talk casually and gaily with us too. Marius joined us and also David.

  

    We were gathered in a circle on the grass under the stars. For the young ones, I put on the bravest of faces and we spoke of beautiful things, and places we would wander, and wonders which Marius and Pandora had seen, and we argued now and then amiably about trivial things.

  

    About two hours before dawn, we had broken up, with Sybelle sitting by herself deep in the garden, looking at one flower after another with great care. Benji had discovered that he could read at preternatural speed and was tearing through the library, which was very impressive indeed.

  

    David, seated at Marius's desk, corrected his misspellings and abbreviations in the typescript, painstakingly correcting the copy he had made for me in haste.

  

    Marius and I sat very close together against the same oak tree, my shoulder against his. We didn't talk. We were watching things, and listening perhaps to the same songs of the night.

  

    I wanted Sybelle to play again. I had never known her to go so long without playing, and I wanted badly to hear her play the Sonata again.

  

    It was Marius who first heard an unusual sound, and stiffened with alarm, only to give it up and rest back beside me again.

  

    "What was it?" I asked.

  

    "Only a little noise. I couldn't ... I couldn't read it," he said. He rested his shoulder against me as he had before.

  

    Almost immediately I saw David look up from his work. And then Pandora appeared, walking slowly but warily towards one of the lighted doors.

  

    Now I heard the sound. And so did Sybelle, for she too looked in the direction of the garden gate. Even Benji had finally deigned to notice it, and he dropped his book in mid-sentence and came marching with a very stern little scowl to the door to take stock of this new situation and get it firmly under control.

  

    At first I thought my eyes had deceived me, but very quickly I realized the identity of the figure who appeared as the gate opened and closed quietly behind his stiff and ungainly arm.

  

    He limped as he approached, or seemed rather the victim of a weariness and a loss of practice at the simple act of walking as he came into the light that fell on the grass before our feet.

  

    I was astonished. No one knew his intentions. No one moved.

  

    It was Lestat, and he was tattered and dusty as he had been on the chapel floor. No thoughts emanated from his mind as far as I could figure, and his eyes looked vague and full of exhausting wonder. He stood before us, merely staring, and then as I rose to my feet, scrambled in fact, to embrace him; he came near to me, and whispered in my ear.

  

    His voice was faltering and weak from lack of use, and he spoke very softly, his breath just touching my flesh.

  

    "Sybelle," he said.

  

    "Yes, Lestat, what is it, what about her, tell me," I said. I held his hands as firmly and lovingly as I could.

  

    "Sybelle," he said again. "Do you think she would play the Sonata for me if you asked her? The Appassionato?"

  

    I drew back and looked into his vague drifting blue eyes.

  

    "Oh, yes," I said, near breathless with excitement, with overflowing feeling. "Lestat, I'm sure she would. Sybelle!"

  

    She had already turned. She watched him in amazement as he made his way slowly across the lawn and into the house. Pandora stepped back for him, and we all watched in respectful silence as he sat down near the piano, his back to the front right leg of it, and his knees brought up and his head resting wearily on his folded arms. He closed his eyes.

  

    "Sybelle," I asked, "would you play it for him? The Appassionata, again, if you would."

  

    And of course, she did.

  

    THE END

  

    8:12 a.m. January 6, 1998 Little Christmas