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”’Then Lestat began to laugh, and I heard his laughter as I had never heard anything before. His heart I still heard like the beating of a drum, and now came this metallic laughter. It was confusing, each sound running into the next sound, like the mingling reverberations of bells, until I learned to separate the sounds, and then they overlapped, each soft but distinct, increasing but discrete, peals of laughter.’ The vampire smiled with delight. ‘Peals of bells.’”
Louis to Daniel, in Interview with the Vampire
“‘Is this an offer, Louis? Have you come back to me, as lovers say?’
His eyes darkened and he looked away from me.
‘I’m not mocking you, Louis,’ I said.
‘You’ve come back to me , Lestat,’ he said evenly, looking at me again.”
Lestat and Louis, in The Vampire Lestat
”I fell silent. I could feel my left eye growing deeper and stronger into my brain. I had that. I had my eye. And to think of his face, his horror-stricken face when he looked at my eye, and the story of Uncle Mickey’s eye. I couldn’t grasp it. I’d start howling again.
Dimly I thought I heard Louis’s gentle voice, protesting, pleading, arguing. I heard locks thrown, I heard nails going through wood. I heard Louis begging.
‘For a while, just a little while…,’ she said. ‘He is too powerful for us to do anything else. It is either that, or we do away with him.’
‘No,’ Louis cried.
I heard David protest, no, that she couldn’t.
‘I will not,’ she said calmly. ‘But he will stay here until I say that he can leave.’
And they were gone.
‘Sing,’ I whispered. I was talking to the ghosts of the children. ‘Sing…’”
Lestat, in Memnoch the Devil
“‘We can read them perhaps… you and I… together.’
‘Yes… all his twelve books,’ he said. He talked softly of many miraculous little images, of tiny humans, and beasts and flowers, and the lion lying down with the lamb.
I closed my eyes. I was grateful. I was content. He knew I didn’t want to talk anymore.
‘I’ll be down there, in our rooms,’ he said, ‘waiting for you. They can’t keep you here much longer.’
What is longer?”
Lestat and Louis, in Memnoch the Devil
“Lestat lay as he had all along, on the marble floor of the chapel in front of the huge crucifix, on his side, his hands slack, the left hand just below the right hand, its fingers touching the marble lightly, as if with a purpose, when there was no purpose at all. The fingers of his right hand curled, making a little hollow in the palm where the light fell, and that too seemed to have a meaning, but there was no meaning.”
Armand, in The Vampire Armand
“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.”
Armand, in The Vampire Armand
“It was music that lulled him back again into unbroken silence as he retreated once more to a convent building to lie upon a dusty marble floor.”
David, in Merrick
“There were lights in our home above, and there came the enchanting sound of harpsichord music, Mozart, if I was not mistaken, no doubt from Lestat’s small disc player beside his four-poster bed. This meant he had graced us with a visit this evening, though all he would do would be to lie on his bed and listen to recordings till shortly before dawn.”
David, in Merrick
“‘I’ll spend the next few evenings with Lestat,’ Louis said quietly. ‘I want to read to him. He doesn’t respond but he doesn’t stop me. You’ll know where to find me when Merrick returns.’
‘Does he never say anything to you?’ I asked, regarding Lestat.
‘Sometimes he speaks, just a little. He’ll ask for Mozart perhaps, or that I read him some old poetry.’”
David and Louis, in Merrick
“Lestat showed not the slightest sign of having heard our discourse. He lay as before, his red velvet coat creased and dusty, his yellow hair a tangled mass.
I knelt down and laid a reverent kiss on Lestat’s cheek. He continued to gaze into the gloom before him. Once again, I had the distinct impression that his soul was not in his body, not in the way that we believed it to be.”
David, in Merrick
“Quickly I realised he was wearing the black velvet jacket with the cameo buttons that had been his costume in the Chronicle called Merrick, each little cameo almost certainly of sardonyx, the coat itself very fancy with its pinched waist and flaring skirt. His linen shirt was open at the throat; his grey pants weren’t important and neither were his black boots.”
Quinn, about Lestat, in Blackwood Farm
“I was thinking how very attractive he was, I couldn’t stop myself, with his yellow hair so thick and long, turning so gracefully at the collar of his coat, and his large probing violet eyes. There are very few creatures on earth who have true violet eyes. The slight difference between his eyes meant nothing.”
Quinn, about Lestat, in Blackwood Farm
“‘But you love books, then,’ Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen.
‘Oh, yes,’ Lestat said. ‘Sometimes they’re the only thing that keeps me alive.’
‘What a thing to say at your age,’ she laughed.
‘No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,’ he said frankly. ‘And books, they offer one hope - that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved.’”
Aunt Queen and Lestat, in Blackwood Farm
“‘This eye was torn from me,’ he said, ‘just as I described it, by those spirits who would have prevented me from fleeing Memnoch’s Hell. And then it was returned to me, here on Earth, and sometimes I believe that this eye can see strange things.’
‘What strange things?’
‘Angels,’ he said, musing, ‘or those who call themselves angels, or would have me conclude that they’re angels; and they have come to me in the long years since I fled Memnoch. They’ve come to me as I lay like one in a coma on the floor of St. Elizabeth’s, the building in New Orleans which was bequeathed to me by Roger’s daughter. It seems my stolen eye, my restored eye, my bloodshot eye, has established some link with these beings, and I could tell you a tale of them, but now is not the time.’
‘They harmed you, didn’t they?’ I asked, sensing it in his manner.
He nodded.
‘They left my body there for my friends to watch over,’ he explained, and for the first time since I’d seen him, he looked troubled, indecisive, even faintly confused.’
Quinn and Lestat, in Blackwood Farm
(—:—)
It seems whatever the century, whatever the decade, Louis always finds himself reading. He is always like this, in his armchair by the fireplace, the moonlight shining in through the lace curtains covering the windows, painting funny shadows on the pages of his books.
David is out tonight, somewhere in England, where he’s been for the past three nights. He’d told Louis he’d be back by the end of the week. If not, he’d call, let him know.
But now, there are familiar steps on the creaky old stairs, accompanied by a familiar old heartbeat.
Louis doesn’t turn, but he does glance, out of the corners of his eyes, at the open doorway to his room, waiting for the shape of his oldest love to pass. Louis’ sister used to sleepwalk when she was little; it was a fact he had forgotten about her, and only remembered the first time he saw Lestat walk into the house last year. How had Armand described it? A ‘stiff, ungainly quality to his limbs’, a ‘victim of a weariness and a loss of practice at the simple act of walking’? Natural that, after almost four years of stillness.
He has grown more practiced at walking now, within the last year. He doesn’t limp anymore. Still, Louis worries whenever he hears he’s stirred. A car might hit him in his wanderings, although it is perhaps more likely that Lestat’s hard body would break the car than that it would break him, but still. Surely the humans would still take him to a hospital, and would Lestat defend himself then? Would he reveal himself to them, or would he lay there, like a comatose patient, a corpse with his open eyes, staring at nothing?
Would the sun be enough to wake him, to make him scream and weep the way he’d done in the desert?
But to call Maharet and ask her to bind him in her red chains again would be unthinkable. Louis had cried, when this all began, when Maharet had told them it was either her chains or she would kill him, when Lestat had thrashed and struggled as they carried him through the rooms of the convent, when he had yelled and yelled and yelled about lies, and lies, and lies.
He doesn’t yell anymore. His voice is barely loud enough to hear. Louis is certain humans wouldn’t be able to.
So, he worries. Perhaps he has always worried, perhaps it is another constant, as much an intrinsic part of his being as this is, this sitting and reading by moonlight and the dull, electric light of the small chandelier Lestat had replaced years ago.
Lestat appears in the doorway, but he doesn’t continue past. It is enough of a shock that Louis startles, minutely. But he doesn’t look up from his book, instead choosing to wait, to see what will happen.
Lestat takes his sluggish steps across the room, and sinks to his knees beside Louis’ chair. His torso leans against Louis’ legs, his head tilted to rest against his knee.
Louis hears the sharp exhale that leaves him, feels the way his breath flutters the fabric of Louis’ trousers.
Years ago, decades ago, during those early 1800s they lived here together, neither one of them would’ve ever done something like this. They would’ve thought they were debasing themselves, they would’ve seen it as emasculating, as too strange, too trusting, too fragile, too vulnerable.
It is a rare thing for Lestat to wake, to wander out of his chapel and into the townhouse on the Rue Royale. It is rarer still that he will seek anyone - Louis, really, because it is only ever Louis - out.
He finishes his page and reaches for his bookmark. It’s a thin silver plate, with small emeralds at the top. It was a gift, from Lestat, some time last decade. He takes another book from his pile, the one he began reading to Lestat the last night he visited him in the chapel. Then he puts his hand on Lestat’s shoulder, and squeezes. The red velvet is dusty under his hand, but still soft.
“Come,” he coaxes. He leans down and takes Lestat’s hand, pulling him with him as he stands. “Let me read to you.”
They settle atop the covers of Louis’ canopy bed, Louis with his back against the pillows by the headboard, and then Lestat, curling up, in a way much too similar to how he lies on the marble floor, and laying his head in Louis’ lap.
Louis reaches out for the casette player he keeps on his nightstand. David has bought them all cd-players, and Lestat likes his records. More than once, Louis has seen him staring transfixed at the spinning vinyl. But Louis likes cassettes, likes the practised ease he has with them, likes the mixtapes he has made throughout the years.
This tape has Mozart, mostly. He hears the catch in Lestat’s breath once he’s turned it on, and wonders if, somewhere in that lost mind of his, he is remembering Nicolas.
He picks his book up with one hand and begins reading aloud. His other hand finds itself in Lestat’s hair, smoothing it down in slow strokes so as to not catch in the tangles. His fingers move to his temples when he sees Lestat frowning, the pads of his fingertips pressing gently, then to smooth out the curve of his eyebrows.
Lestat’s skin is ice cold. He hasn’t had any blood in years.
Louis, however, fed earlier, and knows he’s warm. Under his ministrations, he feels Lestat relax, feels him sink into the bed, into Louis.
In the original French, he reads aloud, “ ‘The stars mean different things to different people. For some they are nothing more than twinkling lights in the sky. For travellers they are guides. For scholars they are food for thought. For my businessman they are wealth. But for everyone the stars are silent. Except from now on just for you…’
“ ‘What do you mean?’
“ ‘When you look up at the sky at night, since I shall be living on one of them and laughing on one of them, for you it will be as if all the stars were laughing. You and only you will have stars that can laugh!’
“ And as he said it he laughed .”
David had come to see him the last time Louis visited Lestat at St. Elizabeth’s, when he had first began reading the book to him. He had recognised it, of course, had asked, ‘Is that de Saint-Exupéry?’, and at Louis’ nod had given him something of a strange look.
Louis had been ready to begin arguing the merits of the novella, despite its status as children’s literature, had even been about to defend children’s literature as a whole genre worthy of engaging with.
But David had held up his hand and shaken his head, and instead Louis had talked about how he’d found an old copy of it in a secondhand bookshop, Le Petit Prince embossed on the cover, how he had lost his old copy from the forties, how he had forgotten about it, how he thought Lestat might like it, how Louis did.
“ ‘And when you are comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be happy to have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And from time to time you will open your window, just for the pleasure of it… And your friends will be astonished to see you laughing whilst gazing at the sky. And so you will say to them, ‘Yes, stars always make me laugh.’ And they will think you, ” Louis flips the page, “ are crazy… I shall have played a very naughty trick on you…’
“ And once again he laughed.
“ ‘It will be as if I had given you, instead of stars, a lot of little bells that can laugh…’ ”
It is when Louis’ hand catches on a knot for the fifth time that he stops. His hand stills, palm resting flat against Lestat’s head, and he looks beyond the pages, down at his face.
“Will you let me wash your hair?” he asks.
It’s not every night that Lestat allows it, if anything it is a very rare occurrence, but he is a vain man, after all, and Louis imagines the dust and tangles must eventually get to be too much for him. And tonight has been good, so far, and so Louis lets himself hope.
Some nights Lestat won’t let Louis touch him at all. Others, he might even speak, just a word or so, but it is enough.
It is too little.
Louis has always been good at lying to himself.
Almost imperceptibly, he feels the movement of Lestat’s nod against his thigh.
“Come,” he says, again. He turns off the music. Lestat follows him as he slips off the bed. Louis takes his hand, again, and keeps his hold as they walk into his adjoining en-suite.
It feels like leading a blind man, and briefly, Louis’ memories flash to Lestat’s father, the feeble old Marquis de Lioncourt whom Louis never thought more than a farmer, at best, before he shakes the thought. He doesn’t like to dwell on Lestat’s father, not since he found out the reason Lestat hated him so.
He turns the tub’s faucet on, along with the knob for hot water. As they wait for the clawfoot to fill, Louis turns to Lestat and helps slip off his clothes. If he didn’t, he might’ve gone bathing fully dressed. His consciousness never seems to stay for long, flitting away like flights of fancy, only there to help him get to his destination or to ask for music.
The tub sufficiently filled, Lestat makes to step in, but he pauses, one foot submerged and the other still on the cool tile. He grabs for Louis’ hand, and Louis gives it to him. He tugs, as though hoping to bring him with him into the water, and for a moment Louis can’t help but remember how he had once wished to follow Lestat’s body into the alligator infested swamps.
He shakes his head, but steps closer, close enough he can lift Lestat’s hand to his lips and press a kiss to the space where his fingers meet knuckles.
“No,” he says. “First, you’ll have to come back to us, to me, and then we’ll see.”
He’s not sure how much of that Lestat understands, but it is enough for him to let go of Louis’ hand and step into the tub. He makes no protest as Louis leaves, but then he is only gone for the seconds it takes to grab a chair and cup, and carry them back with him.
He sets them down and sits on the chair, positioned so he is almost behind Lestat and able to scoop water into the cup to wet his blond hair.
Louis has always loved that hair, those curls. It hurts a little, seeing them like this, tangled and dusty and lifeless. It’s wrong, on some fundamental level. It is the shaking of a universe.
Among the bottles for conditioner and shampoo and body wash, Louis keeps a comb for his own hair. He lifts it, now, and lays it on the edge of the tub. Then he takes one of the shampoo bottles and pours some in his hand. The other hand finds its way to the side of Lestat’s head, fingertips against his temple.
“Lean your head back,” Louis says softly, and helps guide the movement. It is still strange, to see Lestat so pliant.
He is gentle, if quick, as he massages the shampoo into Lestat’s hair. He uses the cup to rinse it out. Next is the conditioner, and this he makes sure is throughly applied before he takes the comb.
He is slow as he works, one section at a time, working from ends to root, careful not to pull too hard on any tangles.
Perhaps an hour passes like this, in total silence, he isn’t too sure. By the end of it, Lestat’s hair is tangle free and smooth.
“I’ll be back in a moment,” Louis says as he stands.
Lestat makes no move to show he has heard.
Louis sighs, and exits the bathroom. He crosses his room, steps into the hallway and then into Lestat’s room, leaving all the doors open.
The surface of the furniture is coated in a thin layer of dust. It has been weeks since Lestat set foot in here.
Louis walks up to the large armoire and selects a pair of grey trousers, a linen shirt, and a black velvet coat with cameos, almost identical to the red one left discarded on Louis’ bathroom floor.
Louis is the only one Lestat lets get close for any prolonged amount of time in this state he’s in. Louis is the only one he lets change his clothes, or wash his hair, and these are the only clothes he hasn’t refused.
Tomorrow evening, Louis will take the old getup and have them washed, and in a few weeks or months when next Lestat lets himself be cleaned, they will be here, waiting for him.
Louis takes the fresh clothes and carries them back with him in his arms.
He freezes in the doorway to his bathroom.
All he can see of Lestat are the top of his pale knees. The rest of him lies submerged in the water. The now bloody water.
Louis’ heart shoots up and fills his throat, expanding with every hurried beat, until it becomes hard to breathe.
He drops the clothes on the chair he’d occupied, and falls to his knees beside the tub. Without bothering to pull his sleeves up he lowers his arms into the water. His hands find Lestat’s shoulders, and he pulls.
Lestat emerges, like a creature drowned, with wet hair clinging to his skin. He gasps, coughs once. Water drips from his face like snot and spittle, and the blood trailing from his eyes down his cheeks looks pinkish.
“What are you doing?!” Louis shouts, his heart hammering. “What are you-?!”
“ Non ,” Lestat says, quiet and shaky, and that, hearing his voice, is already enough of a shock that he pauses, when Louis hadn’t expected an answer at all. “ Non, non, non, non… ”
Louis shifts to French and lowers his voice. “What? What is it?”
But Lestat only continues to mumble, words in French that are hard to discern and don’t make any sense even when Louis understands them. Lestat’s pupils are blown wide, and he’s staring through Louis with no apparent awareness at all. Blood keeps leaking from both of them, but the left one, the one that was torn from him, is worse off than the other.
It is barely noticeable, but Louis sees it. It’s the result of spending decades looking at someone’s face, learning it, mapping out their body.
Sometimes, he’s sure he can almost make out the remnants of the scars from the fire.
His hands come up to cup Lestat’s face, thumbs catching the blood and brushing it away the way he cannot remember ever having done with real tears. He presses their foreheads together, wet to dry, blond to black, and stares into those violet-blue eyes he fell in love with so many, many years ago until he grows dizzy.
Lestat lets out some tiny, pitiful noise from the back of his throat and Louis tilts him, pressing his side into his own chest, one arm around Lestat’s shoulders and the other in his hair.
Mon cœur, mon cœur, mon cœur, he thinks, and is somehow glad Lestat cannot hear it. He knows the reaction would either be Lestat laughing or getting that half baffled expression his face always takes on whenever Louis expresses his love. Lestat calls everyone pet names, darling, and ma cherie, and mon amour, and it is somehow both too earnest and not at all.
Still he can’t help but wish, not for the first time, that he could hear Lestat’s thoughts. It is pride, perhaps, that has Louis believing he could succeeded where others have failed, that he could somehow find Lestat’s consciousness and bring it back from wherever it’s wandered and gotten lost, that he could save him from whatever it is that plagues him so.
But he cannot, and so he sits here on the tiles and rocks them slowly, holding tight enough a mortal would’ve been in pain, and whispers in French, “It’s alright. It’s alright, you’re home. Wherever you think you are, you’re not there, you’re home, you’re in our home, you’re not alone, you’re home, you’re home, shh, shh…”
It feels as though an eternity has passed when he relaxes. The arm he’d kept around Lestat’s shoulders drops into the tub, and he startles a little, at the coldness of the water.
He straightens and moves so he can look Lestat in the eyes. He’s quiet now, and the blood tears have dried to thin crusts on his face.
Louis reaches for a hand towel and dips one corner in the water. Lestat’s eyes close as he works to wipe off the blood. Once it’s all gone, Louis leans forward, and presses a kiss to his closed lids.
“I love you,” he whispers. “ Je t’aime. ”
But there is no reaction. Not a hint of awareness in those beautiful eyes. Louis has heard David think enough times that he suspects Lestat isn’t always in there, that his mind is somewhere else, somewhere they cannot reach him, and perhaps it is true, perhaps this is one of those times.
Perhaps reality exhausts him. Or perhaps he isn’t strong enough to cling to it.
The thought almost brings tears to Louis own eyes.
But he pushes it away and stands, bringing Lestat up with him. He helps him out of the tub and wraps him in a large, fluffy towel. Helps him get dry, helps him dress. Takes his hand and leads him to an armchair.
From a drawer, Louis gets out a rarely used hair dryer and pushes the cord into the socket. He stops behind Lestat and keeps a hand on his shoulder as he gets to work, until each strand of hair is dry and soft and silky again.
Louis can feel the sun approaching, can feel it in the tiredness weighing down his limbs, the way his eyes want to shut. He goes to close the heavy blackout curtains, then back to the armchair where Lestat is waiting.
He urges him up again. Wraps his arms around him, head to shoulder, and whispers in his ear, “Stay. Spend the day with me. I can feel the dawn approaching.”
Again, he gets that horrific image of Lestat stuck outside when it comes, of Lestat burning.
Lestat doesn’t say yes, not in so many words, but he doesn’t protest, doesn’t pull away, as Louis leads him back to bed.
This time, he pulls the covers back. This time, he has Lestat climb in first.
This time, Louis pauses to first change into a softer jumper, a pair of softer trousers, and peel his socks off. This time, he turns the cassette player on before climbing into bed.
He pulls the draperies closed, and it turns the bed into something reminiscent of the private grottos he imagines Gabrielle safely sleeps the day away in.
The room is dark, the bed darker. But Louis has preternatural eyes, and he easily makes out Lestat’s glittering ones as he lies down.
They lie on their sides, facing each other, and like this, in the soft darkness, Louis can almost imagine everything is as it should be.
He can almost imagine he is human, that Lestat is, too, that they are alive in this time when it isn’t as hard to be as they are, to love as they do, as it used to be. That the darkness isn’t fabricated by a careful arrangement of cloth, but the real dark of nighttime. That Lestat is here, all of him, that his mind isn’t fractured, that he is only exhausted from another late night at the theatre where he works, that Claudia is a normal, human, growing girl, that she is alive and asleep in her own room down the hall, that there will be breakfast in the morning, and laughter, and dancing, and Shakespeare quotes, and raving about reviews in the morning paper.
He reaches out across the bed, strokes the blond hair he’s so carefully cleaned and dried, and then down Lestat’s cool cheek. Lestat blinks, almost sleepily, and Louis can’t help but smile seeing it.
Je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime , he thinks.
One of the few non-classical songs on the current tape begins playing from the cassette player, a gentle lulling piano melody, and then a deep voice, singing,
“I don’t believe in an interventionist God, But I know, darling, that you do.
But if I did, I would kneel down and ask him,
Not to intervene when it came to you.
Not to touch a hair on your head.
Leave you as you are.
If he felt he had to direct you,
Then direct you into my arms.
Into my arms, oh Lord.
Into my arms, oh Lord.
Into my arms, oh Lord.
Into my arms…”
In the space between their bodies, Louis takes Lestat’s hand, and twines their fingers together.
And so they wait for sleep.