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Daniel stares at the intertwining hands of the two men in front of him. Then at each of them.
“… bullshit,” he says at long last, “a steaming pile of Bull. Shit. Is what you’re feeding me, Louis. And I’m not gonna stand for it.”
He resolutely ambles back to his seat at the sofa, and – before either one of them could blink – deletes the recording that has been running for the past two and a half hours, and empties the bin, too, just for good measure.
“Now, either you tell me a story that’s a little bit more believable about how you went about this botched murder attempt. Or I ditch the project. What’s it gonna be?”
The vampire Armand gave him a long look, the blood-red of his eyes piercing into Daniel’s every thought. The old man stood his ground, however, his words weren’t empty threats. He isn’t scared of a little mind-reading.
What he is conscious of though, is the fact that with a single nod from Louis, this Armand guy would most certainly not hesitate to deliver a swift and gruesome punishment for his defiance.
Fortunately, Louis has fully composed himself. Any signs of distress he was showing not ten minutes ago have been wiped clean from his demeanor.
“It’s alright, Armand,” Louis says, a polite – almost rehearsed – smile upturning his lips a minuscule amount.
Daniel watches the vampire go to his chair, and sit down as if nothing ever happened, his long fingers laced together over his knee.
“I apologize, Daniel,” says Louis, “let us try again.”
Even so, it takes a moment for him to begin speaking. His gaze wandered far out over the horizon. The pale green reflecting dots of light from the distant cell towers. He was so silent for so long that Daniel, with his old-man patience fraying at the seams and his old-man body protesting at the tense line he’s holding himself in, can’t help but let out a grunt and shift pointedly. Yet, still, no response.
When Louis speaks again, it is with a slight hesitance, unlike the perfectly paced, beautifully crafted monologues he had been serving every day since Daniel’s arrival in Dubai.
“It was his words on that balcony that threw me off of my balance … perhaps that was already obvious in the way I recounted them to you. For all the details that you do not trust in the story, do not doubt when I say that I have committed every word of his to my memory. The only thing describing New Orleans was the words. Beyond that – his gaze, his hands, the pleading timbre in his voice – all spoke of me. Of our love. A love so closely tied to the city it was borne in, that any thought of the city automatically meant a thought of us.
“I was the weak link in the plan. Claudia knew it right from the start. And Lestat certainly did, too. The history between us was such that I could not commit something so … enormously affecting … against him and not blink an eye. He was trying to get a response out of me. I did not realize that until afterwards. And by then it was too late. I had fallen perfectly into his thrall once again.
“After the festivities, once we were back at the Rue Royale, I was but two conflicting forces. One, Claudia’s desire for freedom and thirst for revenge. Two, Lestat’s yearning, his totally frustrating, immature, abject fear of being alone … Sometimes, after the dust has settled and I am without either of them, I curse them both for the pain they had put me through. I curse even my dearest Claudia. For the impossible choice I’d been forced to make between them. And then I curse myself for doing the worst possible thing – not making a choice at all. I hid behind the curtains of false ignorance I drew shut before my eyes. I refused to become an active accomplice in her plan, and simultaneously I refused to step in and save him from impending doom.
“Having lived as many years as I have, one gets the opportunity to reflect and ponder their mistakes over and over. I have looked back at these few weeks countless times since. And I have come to a simple conclusion that I was, plainly, a coward that wanted more than life was willing to give him. To the very end, I think some part of me still believed that, by some miracle, a compromise could suddenly be reached between them … and that we could go back to the way it was, before.”
“To the very end, I entertained this idea in my head. And I did more of that than what I really should’ve done, which was to look at the puzzle that was right in front of me. And tried something – anything – to solve it.”
“Uh-huh. And what do you think you could’ve done, really.”
“Anything!” Louis repeats with a glare, “anything would’ve been better than nothing!”
“Better for soothing your conscience, maybe. But better for the three of you? I sincerely doubt that was possible. And I’m not just saying that to placate you.”
Louis purses his lips, looking out the window in silence once again.
Daniel sighs, “what happened at the house, Louis?”
“We took our revenge on the people of New Orleans. We feasted on their bodies. For the sake of easy recollection, I had told you there were a little over ten altogether. But there could just as easily have been more … twenty, thirty, forty … scattered all across the house, running and hiding and begging for their lives. We did not drain a single one of them to the limit for fear of becoming too full. We took only enough to ensure that they would each remain weakened and pliant. For some, we only drew gashes across their veins and watched the blood pour. The fountain of life flowed in our house, that night.”
The vampire pauses.
“Do you think me cruel, Daniel? Two lifetimes of restraint for a night of wickedness. Do you think it forgivable?”
But his expression is one of curiosity, more so than remorse.
“No,” says Daniel, “I’ve seen worse. Plus, how do I know you didn’t kill, like, three of them, and your ‘other two’ finished the rest. They certainly would’ve had the capability and the appetite.”
“Sure. That is not out of the realms of possibility.”
“Although, I must say I am surprised you don’t look so guilty about them.”
“For years we lived an ostracized life, isolated from the wonders the city had to offer. I am not so forgiving when it comes to family, Daniel. Lestat, for starts, had always suffered from having a hole in his chest so large that even I couldn’t fill it up on my own. He thrived on attention and appreciation, and I would’ve taken him no other way. But he was robbed of that, left wilting away in the shadows of the ruin of our house. Soon enough even the opera hall refused to welcome us, spouting some unconvincing excuse about the house being full. Lestat, being Lestat, found his way in anyhow. But he could not stand having to hide from the mingling crowd, sneaking in through the back door and forcefully taking a balcony like pariahs that we were.
“We stopped going after that. I’d never heard him play another note of Don Carlos on the piano again.
“… And Claudia. Oh, Claudia. She was a young girl by appearance, a young woman by heart. Brilliant at everything she put her mind to, and as captivating as Miss Josephine Baker herself. She should have had all the attention and praise lavished onto her every night. She should have been able to dress up, go out, and meet people, and make new experiences the way only youth allows. Instead, she was met with dirty looks and snide remarks spoken just loud enough for her to hear. Old men grunted about having known her two-toned daddies twenty years back when their uncanny nature had not been made known, and their only sin was being two queers in love. Upper-class madams wondered if she was a product of a satanic blood ritual or, worse, the physical consummation between those two aforementioned daddies. What must’ve hit her the hardest, though, was most probably the girls and boys her age, people she should’ve befriended and fallen in love with. In another world, perhaps … young people are sometimes the nastiest of them all. Too young to have learned sympathy, yet old enough to devise hurtful things to say and do to you.
“Some time before Charlie, she met a boy traveling through town, headed somewhere upstate. It was a brief engagement, never meant to last. It was also easy, for he didn’t know of her and her family’s reputation. That was, until his third and last night in town. A group of rowdy teenagers had seen them meeting up the night prior, and – being jealous? Or being plain old cruel – had taken him aside and told him a much-embellished tale. That she was an ancient witch hailing from Salem town, come to curse the townspeople. That she is forever young, and for that anyone who went into contact with her would have their youth unknowingly transferred to her by some nonsensical process. But most importantly, they let him know exactly how to ‘defeat’ her and ‘break her spell’. So when Claudia met up with him mere hours later, hoping to find in him a friend for the night, she was instead met with a faceful of holy water thrown her way. And the boy, huddled in the corner, holding up a string of rosary beads. When she went near, he'd tearfully whimper in fear: ‘Witch, witch, witch’.”
Daniel winces, “Well, I’m sympathetic. But hey, she probably murdered those teenagers once she knew, right?”
“Most certainly she did take her due.” Louis’s face remains impassive.
“You condone her actions, then?”
“She was my daughter. My daughter-sister. All the love I could not give Lestat I gave her in its entirety. You have children yourself. Recall the love you hold for them and multiply it tenfold. For this is what happens when one is utterly disconnected from the world, save for one’s eternal companions. I did not understand this before I became a vampire. But it soon became clear that it was what Lestat had been living with, and the reason why he clung to us to the point of our shared suffocation. I, too, clung to them as one would a lifeline, a life cord. For me, they were the world.
“So, to answer your question, I not only condone her actions … she had my blessings entirely. As a matter of fact, if I had known that pain was inflicted on her, I would have hunted those rascals down myself and served them to her on a silver platter. My moral code is absolutely superseded by my affection for the people I love”
Daniel raises an eyebrow, “you make a grand declaration of love for her. And yet when it came to her and Lestat, you froze.”
“My love for Lestat hindered me also!” There is a sharp edge to Louis’s voice. His eyes a tinge darker. “While Claudia held half of my heart, Lestat held the other half, along with my body, my soul, and my mind!”
A pause, and then: “I couldn’t quit him. As much as it pained me to remain, it pained me even more to leave. It pained me the most, to hurt him.”
“Were you really the one who did it? Were you the one who cut his throat?”
“… yes. By that point the situation had been forced to reach a crescendo. I was in a state of delirium from the fasting followed by such sudden intake of blood. And … I was driven terribly jealous, when I saw that he had turned Antoinette and meant to include her in our lives. In place of Claudia, no less.”
“How did it happen?”
“With Claudia in the corner of the room, stomping the living daylights out of Antoinette’s face. She did it with such ferocity, I could hear the nose bridge and the jaw crack into pieces. Even her skin – her near indestructible vampire skin – broke open, blood staining the carpet. Soon she stopped struggling. She had been neutralized, yes, but I knew she wasn’t dead. It would take more than that to kill us, even when we were still fledglings. And I knew that a bigger threat to Claudia still remained, struggling limply in my arms.
“‘Louis’, he’d gasped, ‘Louis, the bond between us, it cannot be severed. Not in life, not in death. Killing me will take a part of you … your life is bound to me. Do you not understand? Louis, I beg of you …’
“On and on he kept repeating my name. Pleading, whimpering. I don’t remember how long it went on for, or how he had the will to push those words out in such never-ending stream. They slithered into my ears against my will, forced me to listen. I was embracing his neck, my face in the crook of it. His skin white like cream. Unblemished. Unmarred. Stained only by blood of his victims. The pulse under it so weak, so faint, unlike I’ve ever heard it before … but pulsing on and on, resilient as its master.
“Finally I unsheathed the blade from my cane. I took a deep breath, and slit the marble there open –”
“After all that begging from the guy?” Daniel interrupted suddenly, “pretty cold, Louis. I didn’t realize you were so determined to go through with it.”
“… as I said, it wasn’t difficult … just …”
“You really didn’t think this through, Louis. This odyssey of yours. You spend days telling me all about your obsessive, unbreakable devotion to this Lestat guy. Your decades-long romance together. And then you cut his throat open just like that? How do you expect me to buy it? Heck, how do you expect my readers to buy it? Tell me something consistent with the Louis you’ve painted in my head. And if you can’t, just fucking make something up!”
Louis eyes are cold, but he remains silent as he listens to Daniel’s outburst.
“Are you ever gonna stop doing this? Lying to my face again and again, whether by omission or by commission, on record or off record. Was San Francisco a lie, or is this? Is the truth somewhere in between, or nowhere at all? Am I supposed to listen for clues and find it myself? In between ritualistic meals blatantly designed to intimidate me, the help who’s been hiding his identity all along, and even more lies you tell about him being the love of your life? Are you trying to convince me, or yourself, Louis?”
“You’re being disrespectful again,” it’s Armand who speaks first.
“And you’re being controlling!” Daniel snipes back, “give us room to breathe. Do you get off on hearing your boyfriend reminisce about his ex? Sitting through hours of Lestat’s magical flying dick and Lestat’s chiseled jawline just for a quick ‘then I slit his throat but not to kill him really because I loved him too much’? Talk about a shitty payoff.”
“Enough,” says Louis.
“Then make him leave,” says Daniel, gesturing to Armand who glowers at him with blood-red eyes, “let’s see if you can start talking sense that way.”
“Your demands are getting out of line, boy.”
“What are you gonna do about it, grandpa? Kill me? Go on then. Good luck finding another biographer who won’t either laugh or run at the first mention of fucking vampires.”
In the ensuing silence, Louis’s eyes bear into Daniel with intensity. And Armand, in the corner of the room, stands still as a sculpture. An eternity passes before Louis averts his gaze, and the older vampire whips out of the room in a flurry of robes.
Daniel can’t help the bite in his voice when he says, “thank you.”
“I hope you’re not fooling yourself. He can still hear us perfectly fine.”
“I’m well aware,” Daniel says. He hopes it will help, anyway. “Now, here’s how we’ll proceed. I’ll ask the questions. And you’ll address them as appropriate. It’s how normal interviews work, you know? You’ve been so great at these long, descriptive spiels that I didn’t want to interrupt. But now it becomes clear that you’re a little lacking in the plot department. So, I’ll be lending a hand.”
“Yourself back in San Francisco was naïve and incompetent. But I think I’d prefer him over this.”
Daniel ignores him, “first, when Antoinette was subdued, how did Lestat react?”
“… he was in disbelief, I think. But the poison had already started taking effect, and he was a self-preserving man first and foremost. He soon moved on from the loss.”
“What did he do after that?”
“He … pleaded with me. His words are as I’ve recited to you.”
“How did you feel, hearing him do that? I suppose it’s not every day you hear Lestat beg for anything.”
“No. Never, actually. Never before that night. I was quite surprised to hear it.”
“Did you sympathize?”
“… Yes, of course.”
The speed of Louis’s answers has slowed by a great margin. It gives Daniel ample openings to insert his questions, shot at a rapid-fire pace.
“Did you say anything in response at all?”
“No.” This answer comes a little too quickly and Daniel raises an eyebrow at it. “I simply held him. And tried to keep him still, for he was prone to wandering, even in his half-blind state.”
“Not a single word?” Daniel presses.
“I tried to shush him,” Louis says, “I didn’t have the words as readily available as him. And I didn’t want to hear him say those things anymore. Those poisonous sweet words.”
Could’ve gagged him, tied him up. Ended his suffering quickly. Daniel thinks, but he doesn’t say it. Instead, he says, “how long did it go on for?”
“Minutes. Hours. I don’t know.”
So, hours.
“Where were Claudia and Antoinette? What were they doing?”
“Antoinette had gone still on the floor, but she was still alive … and Claudia was … she was speaking over Lestat.”
“What did she say?”
“She told me to kill him. Told me to do it quickly. She wanted to get it over with.”
“As to be expected. And what did you say to her?”
“I didn’t say anything to her either. I was overwhelmed by the two voices speaking at once. I couldn’t hear her properly.”
But you could hear the dying guy perfectly well.
“Did she try to kill him herself?”
“… Yes. She had my cane in her hand. When she took the blade from it and came towards us Lestat flinched hard, and then slumped back into my arms. I could feel that it took up all of his remaining energy.”
“So he wasn’t able to fight back. Did you stop her?”
“He didn’t want her to do it,” Louis says. That’s a yes, then. “He whispered to me, ‘don’t let her do it, Louis. I’d rather it be you, Louis. I’d go happy if it were you, Louis.’ … but the words from his lips began to lose the weight of his usually excellent elocution. His accent slurred them badly. I remember his whispers of my name evoking an image of a feather landing softly on the ground: ‘Louis.’”
Louis whispers his own name with a careful lightness on the vowel, clearly imitating Lestat’s pronunciation.
“How did you stop her?”
“… I took the blade from her. I told her I’d do it myself, and that she needn’t intervene.”
“I don’t suppose she took that very well.”
“No. She bared her fangs at me. She wouldn’t let go of it. She didn’t believe I could go through with it. I had to let go of Lestat to wrestle it from her.”
Interesting. “Did he try to get involved, too?”
“He did. He grabbed us both, tried to pull our legs, trip us. But he was too weak to really do anything. Claudia was the strongest, most clear-headed of the three of us. I suspect she didn’t really fast. She was too smart to weaken herself like that.”
“You know what I suspect?” Daniel says. He doesn’t want to take Louis out of the story, but he feels compelled to say this one thing, “I suspect Lestat didn’t, either.”
Louis seems startled by the thought of it. Then he says, “I wouldn’t rule out the possibility … perhaps I really was the only one foolish enough to commit to the plan.”
Daniel can see it. Lestat and Claudia making a bet over who can hold their breath under water the longest, each never having the intention to submerge themselves in the first place. And Louis, caught in the crossfire, blinded by his love for both of them, taking everything at face value – drowns alone.
“Anyway, I managed to disarm her swiftly. And I took Lestat back in my arms.”
Louis’s words shake Daniel out of his thoughts. He questions, “you were holding the blade? What about Claudia?”
“I held the blade. In our scuffle I had inadvertently shoved her too hard, and she was on the ground. All three of us were … she looked at me like I had already betrayed her.”
Daniel doesn’t miss the fact that Louis neglects to mention how, exactly, he was holding the blade. Not to Lestat’s throat, yet, then. Pointed at Claudia, perhaps? No wonder she’d feel betrayed.
“I tried to tell her that I had to be the one to do it. That it was important to both Lestat and me that I be the one to do it. The vampire bond forbade us to have it any other way. I asked that she allowed me this courtesy.”
“Did she have anything to say in response to that?”
When he’s met with silence, Daniel probes gently, “Louis?”
“… she did.”
“What did she say to you, Louis?”
Louis’s eyes were pained, “… she did not believe in the vampire bond. Or, to put it more precisely, she did not believe Lestat.”
“What did she believe?”
“She said … she said, half the things out of his mouth are lies. She asked why I hadn’t learned my lesson yet. She said … ‘What vampire bond? He is my maker too, and I would slit his throat without hesitation if you would let me. There is no vampire bond, Louis. You’re just a fool in love. That’s the only bond between you. Don’t you see, Louis?’”
All of a sudden, Daniel feels a surging sense of respect for the child vampire. “Do you agree with her?”
“What?” Louis appears confused by the question for a moment. Then he blinks, and the haze clears from his eyes, “no. I believe that there truly was something between Lestat and I that was special in an intangible way. Perhaps it was heightened by our love, particularly at the moment of my Making, and so it was different in Claudia’s case. But there was something there.”
“Is that also what you said to her?”
“I didn’t have the time to mull the thought over yet … I said something else to her. Things I regret saying. I didn’t mean any of those things, and so I won’t repeat them here.”
“You picked him over her,” Daniel makes a guess. It’s pretty obvious, really. And from the glance that Louis instantly shoots at him, he’s headed in the right direction. “Did you outright refuse to kill him, Louis?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
Louis looks sharply at him. His next words force their ways through grinded teeth. Daniel catches a glimmering white fang. “You’re a smart man, aren’t you? Figure it out.”
“Would she not allow it?”
“Of course not,” Louis says with a hard edge to his voice. The lines of his body are tenser than Daniel’s ever seen. He’s digging into the armrest of his chair with his pointer finger again. Daniel subconsciously clenches his right hand into a fist, remembering how Louis had almost broken it by triggering his Parkinson’s.
“It was her or him. That’s what she said to me. She wouldn’t let him live. And if he lived, he wouldn’t let her live, either! He didn’t have to say this for me to know it to be true.
“We were locked in a stalemate. There was no way out of it. The only thing I could do was buy time, for Claudia and I to get away. The poison could’ve easily been cleansed from Lestat’s system by the next nightfall, but a draining to the brink of death … and a great gash in the neck that will start bleeding anew every time he drinks again … those factors combined won’t allow him to fully heal for months … enough time for us to make the journey to Europe and figure out what to do next.
“And so that’s what I did. I slit his neck through. The wound was so deep that the insides of the tube of his throat were visible to us, red and wildly pulsing, but only for a moment, before the curtain of blood shrouded it completely. I could never understand how a single body could contain so much blood. It spread out all around him as he laid there on the floor, like a demonic halo. It was that fresh blood from the massacre, and it flowed never-ending. The fountain of life and death.”
“It must’ve been hard for you.”
“Not as much as I thought it would,” Louis says, although Daniel can see that he’s still wound up tight, “it was necessary, and it was our only way out. I pushed any worries for the future that lies ahead to the back of my mind and allowed myself to be comforted by the freedom I had bought Claudia and I, however brief it might’ve been, in the grand scheme of things. And I was comforted, also, by the knowledge that he will survive, and that he will find us again. Isn’t it a sick and twisted thing? Love. An eternity with Lestat won’t be heaven. But an eternity without him will most certainly be hell.”
Daniel has seen and heard many things throughout his long life, but he still finds himself deeply rattled by Louis’s words. The emotions behind them. Deeply complex, deeply human, yet inhuman, and perhaps never to be understood by a mortal such as him. For the life of him, he cannot find the words to respond.
“I found cruel satisfaction in it, too, you know? In delivering his punishment. For that was what it was to me: retribution. I had not pushed back over the wrongs committed to me over all those years. Either I was too weak to do so, or Claudia had acted in my stead and left me playing the mediator. This was the very first time I had truly hurt him so. And it felt … good. I imagine it felt how he felt when he hunted. A sadistic enjoyment of sorts.”
Louis casts a glance at Daniel.
“It’s a miracle. You’re silent, for once.”
“… you are so fucked up. You and him both.”
Louis doesn’t take offense, but, “you will never understand the bond between us.”
“And I don’t think I want to,” Daniel scrubs his eye wearily, “what did you do with him afterwards?”
“As I told you, we put him in a trunk, took it out with the trash. He’d stopped bleeding by then, left with a deathly pallor all over his body. And a tautness from the drying of his skin. Truly like a corpse. We folded him up and found in the storage room a trunk that was as big as a coffin. I suppose it was one of his old coffins, perhaps he had used it when he crossed the ocean to us. As we placed him in the trunk, I heard his voice again, calling my name. Nothing but my name, no pleas, no taunts, no sweet words. Just my name, whispered softly and uncertainly, with a semblance of unconsciousness, as he was sometimes wont to do in the darkness of our coffin. Over and over, with pauses in between each calling just long enough to fool me into thinking each one was the last. I thought I was imagining it, but then I realized that it really was him, calling out from his sleep of death. Even as we locked him up and put him out in front of our doorstep. It didn’t stop until we’d driven away, hurrying to the ship in the hour just before dawn. And even then, it followed me as we sailed across the ocean. The only difference was that I’d stopped being able to tell which was his calling, and which was my mind playing tricks on myself.
A sad smile plays on Louis’s lips, “I was haunted by it, day and night. And each time I jerked awake to a whisper of my name a scoff would come from Claudia’s coffin, and then a rustle as she turned away.”
“I’m guessing your relationship with her didn’t benefit much from the whole thing.”
“She refused to see me for the entire journey. By this I mean, she would look at me, but not really take stock of me. And she would not speak to me, no matter how much I pleaded. Her coldness was torture to me. I’d lost the two people I loved most in this world within a single night. I was a shell of myself, ridden with guilt and jumping at the snap of a twig. And I deserved every moment of it.”
“Did she come to forgive you in time?”
“In time, yes. But time as it was to us, Daniel, not time as you may know it. Time spoken of in years, in decades, in centuries. She began to speak to me again, to see me again, but it was never really the same, after that. And neither was I. Not until I’d met him.”
Louis looks to a wall. Daniel surmises that Armand is on the other side of it.
“How did you meet him?”
“… the sun is coming up. We’ll continue tomorrow.”
“The sun hasn’t stopped you before. Aren’t we in your coffin anyway?” Daniel says. Throughout the many days he’s spent in this penthouse, this is the first time he’s fully ready to accept the story Louis tells him. They’re making good progress, but he suspects they’ll promptly return to square one once the other vampire is back in the picture.
His reluctance to let Louis out of his sight and back in Armand’s must show plainly on his expression.
“We’ll continue tomorrow,” Louis’s tone offers no argument.
“Are you talking to him right now?” Daniel asks as Louis makes for the door, “Louis, I cannot work under these conditions, if he’s an obstacle to the interview.”
Armand’s lean silhouette appears in the doorway that is suddenly opened. He takes Louis’s hand in his own.
“I’m not the obstacle; I am the enabler of this interview. You’d do well to understand that,” Armand says coolly, “you’ve heard quite enough for the day, and Louis is exhausted. It’s time you retire.”
“I don’t know how you’re doing it, but you’re not letting him speak his truth. How can he tell me his story if he remembers only fragments of it? If those fragments are even true, in the first place. Louis, Louis, look at me. What is this spell he has on you, Louis?”
“It’s not a spell, Daniel,” Louis says, “we’re in love –”
“Do not feed me that crap again, Louis,” even as his frustration builds, Daniel couldn’t help but feel a slight sympathy for the vampire, “have you not learned your lesson from Lestat? Because the way I see it, this is the same old playbook all over again. You go and devote your love to an older, stronger vampire with a penchant for controlling your life. And you end up barely yourself because of it. Only this time, there is no Claudia to save you from him.”
Armand’s eyes harden as they pierce Daniel’s thoughts, “do not say it –”
“Speaking of Claudia, where is the girl when you need her? Did the new stepdaddy not take a liking to her?”
Daniel has had an idea of the answer to that question since Louis’s begun talking about her, and he regrets his untimely provocation as soon as it leaves his lips. Louis charges towards him, and he suddenly finds himself halfway across the balcony railings. The strong winds at such a height whip wildly against his open jacket. He struggles to find his footing, only to discover that the force on his spine is absolutely immovable.
“Do not speak of her,” Louis’s voice reverberates through Daniel’s entire body, shaking him to his bones, “you are not worthy of her.”
It may have been seconds, or minutes, but the pressure is soon removed from him. A third hand comes to steady him. And Daniel could breathe again.
“That’s not what I intended, I –”
“This interview is over,” Armand says with finality, “it seems our boy is still not equipped to write your story, Louis. I will have him gone come nightfall.”
“You can’t just do that.”
“I can, and I will. You leave for the United States within the day. You will still receive full payment for your time. But you will not publish a word of Louis’s story, or we consider the contract broken. And legal troubles will be the least of your worries, if and when that happens.”
Louis is escorted out of the room, and Daniel sees Armand come towards him.
“What are you doing –”
In a blink of an eye, he finds himself in a taxi, speeding ahead into the mainland of Dubai. His bags are beside him. And he is not missing any limbs. But …
His memories are strange. There is a foggy gap of the past however-many hours just before dawn till now, with the sun high overhead. As a younger man, he has blacked out many times before, sometimes for several hours, sometimes for an entire day. This is not unlike that.
Daniel grabs his laptop, and of course – the recordings of the interview are gone. He groans and slams it shut.
Did he erase my memories?
It would seem so, with the fogginess in his head … but if he did, he didn’t do a very good job. Because Daniel can still remember so much of it. He can’t, for the life of him, recall the details of the meals he’s had atop that tower, or the shape of the curl in Lestat’s fringe, or the lace pattern on Claudia’s dress the night she tried to escape. But he remembers the story, from beginning to end. The bare bones of it, anyway.
It seems … his elusive old-man memories have done something right, for once. They have eluded Armand, just as they sometimes elude him. Perhaps they hid in the crevices, and tricked Armand into believing he doesn’t have them anymore. Or perhaps they duplicated themselves, made themselves hazy and unreliable, so that the vampire would not know which to erase.
Daniel doesn’t waste his time pondering the mechanisms of this unexpected miracle any longer. He opens his laptop again and begins to type furiously. About everything he remembers of Louis’s story. They’re unstructured, a mess, and littered with question marks in multiple places. But they form a coherent story, nonetheless.
They pull into Dubai International Airport as Daniel begins to run out of things to write down. He wraps up with Lestat’s murder, both versions of it. With the occasional direct quotes from Louis – because the man could rival Maya Angelou at moments, and Daniel does not want all that potential to go to waste.
When he’s done, he looks up to find the taxi has long driven away, and an envelope containing his flight ticket sitting beside him on the bench.
Daniel considers the flight details: a direct red-eye flight straight to JFK. The timing is perfect. He’ll catch it with ease if he checks in right about now.
But … maybe he won’t …
An idea pops into his head. A tentatively interesting idea.
Daniel considers it. He doesn’t doubt that Armand will make good on the promise to pay him. And … now that his trip’s been cut short a few days …
He guesses he could spend those few days chasing a few more fragments of the story. Maybe he’ll even find eyewitnesses.
And that Lestat … the other main character of Louis’s entire story. He wonders if Lestat will agree with the picture his ex-lover has painted of him.
Most of all, he wonders if Lestat’s still roaming that side of the Atlantic, leaving little trails leading out of New Orleans.
Perhaps … perhaps … Daniel finds himself heady with excitement, with the rush that comes with the prospect of a good story. Perhaps he remains, still, on those banks of the great Mississippi river …
Daniel grabs his bag and tosses the envelope into the bin nearby. He looks to the nearest departure board, searching for the letters MSY.
Well, he guesses he’ll find out.