"I don't want to stay in Paris, " I said. "I don't want to trouble you or the coven at the theater. I am asking this small thing. I am asking... "
It seemed my courage and the words had run out. A long moment passed:
"Tell me again about this Louis, " he said. The tears rose to my eyes disgracefully. I repeated some foolish phrases about Louis's indestructible humanity, his understanding of things that other immortals couldn't grasp. Carelessly I whispered things from the heart. It wasn't Louis who had attacked me. It was the woman, Claudia... I saw something in him quicken. A faint blush came to his cheeks.
"They have been seen here in Paris, " he said softly. "And she is no woman, this creature. She is a vampire child. " I can't remember what followed. Maybe I tried to explain the blunder. Maybe I admitted there was no accounting for what I'd done. Maybe I brought us round again to the purpose of my visit, to what I needed, what I must have. I remember being utterly humiliated as he led me out of the house and into the waiting carriage, as he told me that I must go with him to the Theater of the Vampires.
"You don't understand, " I said. "I can't go there. I will not be seen like this by the others. You must stop this carriage. You must do as I ask. "
"No, you have it backwards, " he said in the tenderest voice. We were already in the crowded Paris streets. I couldn't see the city I remembered. This was a nightmare, this metropolis of roaring steam trains and giant concrete boulevards. Never had the smoke and filth of the industrial age seemed so hideous as it was here in the City of Light. I scarcely remember being forced by him out of the carriage and stumbling along the broad pavements as he pushed me towards the theater doors. What was this place, this enormous building? Was this the boulevard du Temple? And then the descent into that hideous cellar full of ugly copies of the bloodiest paintings of Goya and Brueghel and Bosch. And finally starvation as I lay on the floor of a brick-lined cell, unable even to shout curses at him, the darkness full of the vibrations of the passing omnibuses and tramcars, penetrated again and again by the distant screech of iron wheels. Sometime in the dark, I discovered a mortal victim there. But the victim was dead.
Cold blood, nauseating blood. The worst kind of feeding, lying on that clammy corpse, sucking up what was left. And then Armand was there, standing motionless in the shadows, immaculate in his white linen and black wool. He spoke in an undertone about Louis and Claudia, that there would be some kind of trial. Down on his knees he came to sit beside me, forgetting for a moment to be human, the boy gentleman sitting in this filthy damp place. "You will declare it before the others, that she did it, " he said. And the others, the new ones, came to the door to look at me one by one.
"Get clothing for him, " Armand said. His hand was resting on my shoulder. "He must look presentable, our lost lord, " he told them. "That was always his way. " They laughed when I begged to speak to Eleni or Felix or Laurent. They did not know those names. Gabrielle- it meant nothing. And where was Marius? How many countries, rivers, mountains lay between us? Could he hear and see these things? High above, in the theater, a mortal audience, herded like sheep into a corral, thundered on the wooden staircases, the wooden floors. I dreamed of getting away from here, getting back to Louisiana, letting time do its inevitable work. I dreamed of the earth again, its cool depths which I'd known so briefly in Cairo. I dreamed of Louis and Claudia and that we were together. Claudia had grown miraculously into a beautiful woman, and she said, laughing, "You see this is what I came to Europe to discover, how to do this! " And I feared that I was never to be allowed out of here, that I was to be entombed as those starving ones had been under les Innocents, that I had made a fatal mistake. I was stuttering and crying and trying to talk to Armand.
And then I realized Armand was not even there. If he had come, he had gone as quickly. I was having delusions. And the victim, the warm victim- "Give it to me, I beg you! "-and Armand saying:
"You will say what I have told you to say. " It was a mob tribunal of monsters, white-faced demons shouting accusations, Louis pleading desperately, Claudia staring at me mute, and my saying, yes, she was the one who did it, yes, and then cursing Armand as he shoved me back into the shadows, his innocent face radiant as ever.
"But you have done well, Lestat. You have done well. " What had I done? Borne testimony against them that they had broken the old rules? They'd risen against the coven master? What did they know of the old rules? I was screaming for Louis. And then I was drinking blood in the darkness, living blood from another victim, and it wasn't the healing blood, it was just blood. We were in the carriage again and it was raining. We were riding through the country. And then we went up and up through the old tower to the roof. I had Claudia's bloody yellow dress in my hands. I had seen her in a narrow wet place where she had been burnt by the sun.
"Scatter the ashes! " I had said. Yet no one moved to do it. The torn bloody yellow dress lay on the cellar floor. Now I held it in my hands. "They will scatter the ashes, won't they? " I said.
"Didn't you want justice? " Armand asked, his black wool cape close around him in the wind, his face dark with the power of the recent kill. What did it have to do with justice? Why did I hold this thing, this little dress? I looked out from Magnus's battlements and I saw the city had come to get me. It had reached out its long arms to embrace the tower, and the air stank of factory smoke. Armand stood still at the stone railing watching me, and he seemed suddenly as young as Claudia had seemed. And make sure they have had some lifetime before you make them; and never, never make one as young as Armand. In death she said nothing. She had looked at those around her as if they were giants jabbering in an alien tongue. Armand's eyes were red.
"Louis-where is he? " I asked. "They didn't kill him. I saw him. He went out into the rain... "
"They have gone after him, " he answered. "He is already destroyed. " Liar, with the face of a choirboy.
"Stop them, you have to! If there's still time. . . " He shook his head.
"Why can't you stop them? Why did you do it, the trial, all of it, what do you care what they did to me? "
"It's finished. " Under the roar of the winds came the scream of a steam whistle. Losing the train of thought. Losing it . . . Not wanting to go back. Louis, come back.
"And you don't mean to help me, do you? " Despair. He leaned forward, and his face transformed itself as it had done years and years ago, as if his rage were melting it from within.
"You, who destroyed all of us, you who took everything. Whatever made you think that I would help you! " He came closer, the face all but collapsed upon itself. "You who put us on the lurid posters in the boulevard du Temple, you who made us the subject of cheap stories and drawing room talk! "
"But I didn't. You know I . . . I swear . . . It wasn't me! "
"You who carried our secrets into the limelight-the fashionable one, the Marquis in the white gloves, the fiend in the velvet cape! "
"You're mad to blame it all on me. You have no right, " I insisted, but my voice was faltering so badly I couldn't understand my own words. And his voice shot out of him like the tongue of a snake.
"We had our Eden under that ancient cemetery, " he hissed. "We had our faith and our purpose. And it was you who drove us out of it with a flaming sword. What do we have now! Answer me! Nothing but the love of each other and what can that mean to creatures like us!
"No, it's not true, it was all happening already. You don't understand anything. You never did. " But he wasn't listening to me. And it didn't matter whether or not he was listening. He was drawing closer, and in a dark flash his hand went out, and my head went back, and I saw the sky and the city of Paris upside down. I was falling through the air. And I went down and down past the windows of the tower, until the stone walkway rose up to catch me, and every bone in my body broke within its thin case of preternatural skin.