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Like most things Lestat did, the purchase of the doll’s house was elaborate, not without fanfare, and almost entirely self-serving.
“Let me see!” Claudia had demanded, leaping up from the table in the parlour where Louis had been teaching her to play cards.
“Upstairs, ma petite,” Lestat had told her, brushing snow from the shoulders of his overcoat, and glancing over her head to ensure that Louis was watching him.
Louis sighed, and followed them up the stairs.
The thing was huge. Lestat carried it up into Claudia’s bedroom himself and set it down on the floor. Then he stepped back, folding his arms and smirking that beautiful, infuriating smirk that had haunted Louis’ dreams all those years ago; that he loved to bite and lick and kiss and which tormented him still.
“All for me?” Claudia gasped, throwing herself onto the floor to examine the toy. It was a rhetorical question, Louis knew. She was aware that the doll’s house belonged to her - why else would her Uncle Les have put it in her room? She just wanted the affirmation, the confirmation that the gift was for her and her alone, that she could dig her nails into it and do with the thing as she pleased, that Lestat had seen it and thought of her, or better still, planned the elaborate gifting process out in the manner he thought would best please his vicious little angel.
Louis knew better.
“You spoil her, Les,” he said, leaning against the door frame and watching their daughter examine her gift fondly.
Lestat looked pleased at this. “I am only giving her what she is due, my love,” he said.
Louis wasn’t sure how true this was. Lestat, he knew, did not love Claudia the way Louis did. This had troubled him at first, because it was not as though Lestat wasn’t capable of the emotion - he certainly adored Louis, in the way only Lestat could. But perhaps he did feel for their child, in his own curious manner, Louis thought, watching Claudia run her fingers over the miniaturised wallpaper, the plush velvet carpeting, and watching Lestat’s silvery gaze flicker from her to Louis and back again, watching the watching. Even if Lestat’s love for Claudia was contingent on Louis’ love for her, perhaps that was enough.
It was certainly enough for Claudia, it seemed, who sprang up from the floor and threw herself at Lestat’s midriff, wrapping her arms around his waist and declaring that she loved it, it was perfect Uncle Les, just what she always wanted, could they find some furniture for it, some beds and some chairs and some wardrobes, and some dolls too, and oh! How about curtains, could they make curtains on little poles, d’you think, Uncle Les -
“Ah, ah,” Lestat said, and gently detached her from him, tucking a stray black curl behind one ear. “Attendez, mademoiselle.” He reached inside his coat and from within, withdrew a slim red box, wrapped all about with a dark silky ribbon.
“More presents?” Claudia exclaimed.
Lestat presented her with the box and stepped back, removing his coat, which he threw over the back of a chair, before approaching Louis and winding one arm around his back.
“What did I just say?” Louis said, trying not to smile.
Lestat looked immensely pleased.
Claudia, meanwhile, was tearing the ribbon from the box in a frenzy. She dropped it to the floor, where it curled about her feet, then tossed the lid after it.
She gasped, then raised her gaze back up to Lestat in delight.
Louis craned his neck, curious as to what could have elicited this response from their child.
“Show your father,” Lestat told her.
Carefully, as though she was holding a string of the most fragile and precious jewels, Claudia turned the box towards the pair of them. Inside, nestled on a bed of tissue paper, lay three dolls, of the perfect proportions to fit within the newly acquired house.
Louis realised at once that this was no ready-made set; nothing Lestat could have carelessly snatched from the shelves of whatever store he had purchased the house from. These had to have been commissioned, made to exacting descriptions. For nowhere, he knew, in New Orleans and probably in the entire country, maybe even the world, would it be possible to find a doll family such as this one: where one parent was White and the other Black, along with their child, or where two male dolls might be sold side-by-side, and especially not with a daughter shared between them.
“It’s us!” Claudia said. She took the Claudia doll carefully from the box and examined it, touching its dark yarn hair with the tip of a fingernail, patting and smoothing the pink satin of its skirts.
There was an odd thickness in the back of Louis’ throat. He swallowed, touched by Lestat’s thoughtfulness, his attention to detail.
He looked up. Lestat was not looking at Claudia. He was looking at Louis.
Louis removed the two remaining dolls from their box, and held the white one up in front of him. The toy’s straight yellow hair was slightly mussed from being bumped around inside Lestat’s coat.
“Looks just like you,” he said.
“Surely I am much more handsome?” Lestat said. His grip tightened on Louis’ hip, and Louis knew that he would not be sleeping alone that night.
“He certainly seems more agreeable than you,” Louis said. “Much less inclined to argue with me.”
Claudia giggled, to which Lestat responded with an expression of deepest hurt and betrayal.
“Can we go to the store tomorrow evening, Uncle Les?” she said. “I wanna get a kitchen set, and sofas, and tables and chairs. Oh! Do you think they might make some tiny little coffins? And a bathtub? And -”
“Yes, yes, ma poupette, whatever you want,” Lestat said. He sighed deeply and dramatically, as though greatly put-upon.
Louis placed a hand between his shoulder blades, and scratched his back lightly through his sweater. Lestat practically purred.
*
Claudia adored the doll’s house, and all the tiny pieces of furniture her guardians procured for her during late-night shopping trips whilst the toy store proprietor stifled yawns and not-so-surreptitiously checked his wristwatch. (Lestat wanted to drain him for his impertinence. Claudia stamped her foot and said that if they did that, there was no knowing who would take over the shop and whether or not her beloved doll house accessories would remain available. When Christmas rolled around, Louis gifted the man a large bottle of brandy and thanked him profusely for staying open late whilst his poor, sick daughter, whose tender skin had terrible reactions in the sun, browsed the shelves and her uncle sighed and opened up his wallet. The owner of the store remained, for the time being, unharmed.)
The thing Claudia loved most of all, however, was the dolls. Louis regularly discovered them scattered about the house, outside of Claudia’s room, abandoned as though she’d forgotten them mid-game, and let them slip from her fingers as she dashed off to the next amusement.
He picked them up every time, sighing, and calling after her admonishingly, though he always returned them to the doll’s house himself, positioning them carefully, lovingly, in their chairs, their beds, upon their miniature sofas.
And yet the next evening, when he arose from his coffin, he would find them again, halfway across the house, in the parlour, or in his and Lestat’s bedroom, or the bathroom. Once, he found Lestat’s miniature likeness in the garden, bedecked with evening dew.
“Claudia!” he said.
“It wasn’t me!” Claudia insisted.
“Then who was it, little miss?” he asked. “The fairies?”
Claudia shrugged nonchalantly, and Louis sighed, and returned the dolls to their rightful place.
*
As the years slipped by, Claudia elected to play with the doll's house less and less. Instead, she spent her time scribbling away in her diary, or reading, or spying on the people passing by beneath their balcony at night, chin resting upon her folded arms, heaving great sighs, until one of her adoptive parents offered to take her out.
But sometimes she could still be persuaded to return to that once-favoured toy and play pretend once more. Louis privately suspected she did this just to humour him, to keep him happy; with her eternally youthful countenance, it was easy to forget that behind the round face and shining skin her mind grew sharper and more restless with each and every passing day. Still, she seemed to enjoy it, he thought, when they were crouched on her bedroom floor together, dolls in hand, inventing some diabolical storyline, which, when Lestat did not join them, usually involved Claudia becoming Queen of all Vampires, or something of the like. When Lestat was around, their stories tended to remain dramatic and bloody, though they did not involve mention of others of their kind; it was just better for all involved, Louis and Claudia had quickly learnt, not to mention that particular topic around Lestat.
Lestat's personal favourite story to act out was entirely preposterous and relegated Claudia's doll to a supporting role, which at first she hated, but as time went on, she appeared to come to appreciate his flair for the dramatic and need to be the centre of attention as it meant she could sit back and no longer had to engage in such childish pleasures. The story involved the wedding of Louis and Lestat.
Typically, it involved Lestat's doll waxing poetic about the beauty and charm of Louis’ doll, and begging him for his hand in “eternal dark matrimony.”
“You're crazy,” Louis told him, fondly. “Two men getting married? Come on now.”
“Stranger things have happened, my Louis,” Lestat said, and seizing the Louis doll from him, immediately had the Lestat doll press kisses all across its face.
*
When Claudia left, that awful, awful night, she took her doll with her.
Lestat wanted to tear up her room - throw out everything, her clothes, her coffin, her books, each and every little thing she’d left behind. He wanted to smash the doll’s house too.
“No,” Louis said, and locked the door.
Lestat fumed, but protested no further.
After a week, when it became clear that Claudia was not coming back, Louis unlocked her door and went in, and sat cross-legged before the doll’s house, and cried.
Lestat left him to it.
Louis searched through the house, behind each tiny piece of furniture Claudia had lovingly collected with the assistance of her fathers’ wallets, and then behind the doll’s house too, and inside her now vacant coffin. But it quickly became clear that there were only two dolls left.
The miniature Louis and Lestat sat inside the house, motionless, collecting dust, and stared back at him with unseeing painted eyes.
Claudia had taken her doll with her, Louis deduced, wherever it was she’d gone.
It made sense, he supposed.
Who else would take care of Claudia better than Claudia? She had cradled herself, shielded and fed and nursed herself for years now.
The dust thickened and the house grew silent and angry. And every so often, when he could bear to peel himself from his coffin, from his bed, from the sofa, Louis made a solemn pilgrimage to that locked room where the air was thick and silent and still, and sat in front of the doll’s house.
Once, shaking with grief, he picked up the Louis doll, the Lestat doll, and tried to play with them as he’d once played with Claudia, coming up with elaborate, violent and intricate storylines for the three of them.
But it didn’t work. He put the dolls back in their miniature parlour, on opposite sides of the room, face-down on the floor.
It wasn’t the same without Claudia.
*
The dust in the house deepened, and Claudia’s door remained locked.
Sometimes, Louis wondered if he got up and moved around their still, loveless home in his sleep. Would it even be possible, he thought: to unlock and open doors, to navigate up and down the stairway whilst unconscious?
To his knowledge, he had never walked in his sleep before. But there was, he was certain, no other way to explain the continued movement of the dolls; or rather, one particular doll.
He could not ask Lestat, who oscillated between brittle, cold acceptance of their rift, of Louis’ vacant disinterest, and, with decreasing frequency, heated scrambling attempts to draw his fledgling back into his orbit.
Louis knew that Lestat suffered in this time, too, just as he did - but he knew it in an academic, theoretical sort of way. On the rare occasions their eyes met across the parlour, he saw the pain there, the fear, the anger, but he did not feel it. He felt as though he was drifting through the world encased in a cocoon of ice, so he could hardly see or hear people and events around him as he stumbled through the fog, unable to reach out and touch the shapes he was surrounded by.
He barely felt a thing when he looked at Lestat, other than vague repressed resentment, barely remembered how passionately they had once loved one another. It was Lestat’s fault, he thought, that Claudia was gone, ultimately.
Lestat was miserable too, though his misery extended, Louis reflected, bitterly, only to the absence of Louis by his side, in his arms, his coffin, his bed. He did not give a damn, he thought, one way or the other, for their poor Claudia. Louis’ love for her was no longer enough to tie the three of them together.
And yet - and yet.
Louis was certain he was the only one who entered Claudia’s room. He never saw Lestat go in there and never heard him enter it, either. But some nights, he would go and sit beside the doll’s house, and stare inside, and see just one doll in there, alone.
The Lestat doll, it seemed, was coming and going as it pleased, whilst the Louis doll lay motionless in a corner.
Louis tried not to think about what that might mean.
*
One day, a new doll appeared.
Amidst the rubble of their family, Louis was unsure how long it had sat there, half-hidden beneath a stack of ageing newspapers.
He spotted the Lestat doll first, laying on the topmost paper, hair and tiny jacket all tousled when he entered the parlour one evening. The real Lestat was, of course, nowhere to be seen. Probably out hunting or - something else. Louis refused to dwell on the notion, even though the stinging scent of women’s perfume that lingered on Lestat’s collar these days told him all he needed to know. Lestat may not be capable of reading his mind anymore, but he would know, Louis thought. Lestat would look at Louis, and know that he knew. It was half the reason Louis kept his eyes averted, focusing on whatever book he was reading these days whenever his once-lover entered the room.
But the dolls were the last lingering thread of attachment he had to Claudia, to their family, to those halcyon nights when they laughed and loved together, when Lestat sat beside Claudia in front of the piano and with greater patience than Louis had ever suspected he possessed directed the tap and splay of her fingertips; when they would pour over clothing catalogues together and Lestat would deride the women’s fashion, and Louis would laugh and together they would pick out coats and skirts and dresses for Claudia, who would roll her eyes and begrudgingly let them dress her up and down and everything in between; when Lestat would put a record on and seize him by the waist and spin him around and around, between the end tables and the sofas and the chairs, and Louis would get lost in his eyes, thinking he’d never seen a man so handsome.
And so, wearily, he bent over and picked up the doll. Perhaps, he thought, this was another of Lestat’s clumsy provocations: leaving the thing out so Louis would know he had been into Claudia’s bedroom, so he would know he was thinking of Claudia, and of those times they’d spent together as a family.
But whatever Lestat thought of Claudia, Louis didn’t care to hear it. Claudia had always been a tool for Lestat, an object, at times a plaything, at others, a chess piece. Lestat resented her, had treated her unkindly, and driven her away.
Louis knew that he ought to leave too, but he couldn’t. Wouldn’t even think of it. Instead he stayed, in the swamp, the bayou he and Lestat had created for themselves, and rotted in it, his punishment. He would bear this provocation from Lestat like he bore all of his other jabs and snipes and indiscretions, and one day, one day, maybe - Claudia might return home.
Except -
There was another doll there, hidden at the bottom of the newspaper stack. It was sandwiched between two of the oldest papers, which were dry and crispy as autumn leaves, and curling up at the corners, steadily turning yellow. Only its tiny white hand was visible.
Louis frowned, and picked it up.
His stomach turned.
Of all the cruel, vindictive things for Lestat to do.
The doll was a woman, a white woman, in a red and silver dress, with neatly curled light brown hair and full painted lips.
There was no mistaking the resemblance.
Louis’ first instinct was to take the toy out back and toss it in the incinerator where it belonged. He could picture it now; the hiss of smoke, the acrid scent of its ugly dress and smooth, shiny hair going up in flames. His grip tightened on the little figure.
If he burnt it, though, Lestat would find out. Lestat would know. Lestat would be watching him and the doll like a hawk. It was possible that Lestat was even watching him now, somehow. Lestat would know that he had gotten to him; that he had won; that, once again, he had asserted his dominance, as though he didn’t rule every other aspect of their fucking lives, as though Louis hadn’t spent every waking moment of his life, both mortal and undead, bowing and scraping to men who looked like Lestat. Like Lestat hadn’t bullied Claudia, the best thing that had ever happened to them, out of their lives.
He gritted his teeth. The tips of his fingernails were beginning to pierce through the fabric of the doll’s gaudy dress.
There was no sense in confronting Lestat. That was what he wanted, after all, and Louis couldn’t bear to give him the satisfaction, the lick of attention he evidently so desperately and pathetically craved.
He wondered if he should put the dolls - both Lestat’s and Antoinette’s - back where he had found them; pretend that he hadn’t seen. Pretend that he didn’t care, the way he and Lestat had both been pretending for so long. Louis wondered if either of them knew how to do anything but pretend these days. But if he left the dolls out, feigned ignorance, Lestat would simply become more and more determined to provoke a response. Louis knew him, deeply. Intimately. The way he knew the shape of his own teeth, the taste of his own blood. Lestat would not stop poking and prodding until he got what he wanted.
Louis swallowed, and placed the Lestat doll back down on top of the newspaper stack. If Lestat wanted to go into Claudia’s bedroom, re-opening the wounds of their past, that was his business, so long as no harm came to the things she had left behind.
But Antoinette -
He stared down at the doll, clenched within his fist. It seemed to smirk back up at him.
Louis was not threatened by Antoinette. Not Antoinette as an individual, anyhow. He barely perceived her as such. He knew Lestat felt the same way, which was small comfort.
Still, the gall of Lestat, to bring his lover into their family home - a second time, no less - gnawed away at his insides like a rabid dog.
He breathed in, once, deeply. Then, jaw clenched, he took the doll upstairs, opened a window, and hurled it out onto the street.
Perhaps, he thought, hopefully, it would be run over by a passing car.
Lestat didn’t mention the doll when he arrived home, close to dawn. But the next night, he returned to the house far earlier than usual, and joined Louis in the parlour, watching him closely, some curious expression Louis was unable to place flitting across his face.
Presently, he lit a cigarette, and, leaning against the fireplace, said, “Have you seen Antoinette recently?”
Louis’ fingers tightened on the book he was reading. He focused on the page, refusing to look up and meet Lestat’s iridescent gaze.
“No,” he said, keeping his voice light and distracted. “Why would I?”
Lestat exhaled a lungful of smoke and gazed pensively into the flames. A moment passed, and then he said, “I just wondered. You know, she took an awful fall last night. She broke an arm and two of her ribs are cracked.”
“Oh,” Louis said. “Oh, no.”
“Hmm.” Lestat’s eyes narrowed infinitesimally. A log crackled in the fireplace. Louis re-read the same sentence three times. Behind him, Lestat twisted one of his rings round and around his finger. “Come now, Louis; I won’t tell,” he said, at last.
Louis knew what he was insinuating. God, Lestat would love it if Louis truly had done something to hurt her. He turned the page of his book and tried again to make sense of the blurred ink before him. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Lestat leant back against the fireplace and twisted his ring once more. Louis didn’t see him do it, but he felt it. He knew. He always knew. The air between them was like a web of tugging strings. Whenever one of them moved, the other stumbled. “Ah, mon rêve,” Lestat said, and then he fell silent. He was waiting for Louis to turn, to look up at him, to react.
Louis flipped the page of his book, and continued to read.
At last, apparently unable to bear it, Lestat said, “Antoinette didn't fall, did she?” He took a long, slow, pull of his cigarette; twisted his ring once more.
Louis remained silent.
Lestat said, “She was pushed, non?”
There was no sense in feigning ignorance as to Lestat's line of questioning any longer. Louis closed the book, and turned to look up at the other man. “I haven't left the house in three days,” he said, evenly.
Lestat tapped the ash off the end of his cigarette. His expression was coy, almost playful. It reminded Louis of the way he'd behaved when they'd first met, and were still dancing around one another - or rather, when Louis was dancing around Lestat. Lestat had toyed with him, the cat to Louis’ vacillating mouse. It aggravated him. Lestat said, “You can tell me, Louis. I can keep a secret.” His tone was teasing; almost sweet. For a brief moment, Louis considered it; closing his eyes, giving in. He could pretend none of this had ever happened; the dust in their house, Antoinette, the cold silences, the sharp barbed jabs, even Claudia. Once again it could just be him and Lestat, wrapped up in one another in their shared darkness.
But instead he opened his eyes and let the world in. That was it, he thought; Lestat knew it too. Louis always had too much of the world in him.
He said, quietly, “There's nothing to tell.”
Lestat's expression soured.
There's still time, Louis thought. I could tell him I wish it was me. I could tell him I want to kill her myself. The moment, their bond, this great, bloody, endlessly pulsing that lay between them and encircled them and that was them could be salvaged.
But the betrayal of the Antoinette doll still stung, still gutted him deeply, and as Lestat's mouth twisted as he looked away, Louis could not help but think, once again, of what had been lost. And, fingers tightening on the book in his lap, he said, “And is there anything you wanna admit to me?”
Lestat looked back at him, his attention piqued.
Louis refused to look away.
Lestat's head tilted, just a fraction. He said, “Nothing I'm sure you don't already suspect me of.” There was a gleam in his eyes once more. Like this was all a damned game, thought Louis.
The anger flared, deep in his stomach. He stood up. “Really, Lestat?” he said. “Our daughter's dolls? That's how you decide you wanna get my attention?”
A moment passed. Something like confusion passed across Lestat's face. “What do you mean?” he said.
Louis’ fists tightened at his sides. “Don't play dumb,” he said. “You brought the thing into our house. Our home. Just like you brought her.”
Lestat was very still. His cigarette was by now completely burnt out, down to the butt. “What did I bring?” he said.
Louis took a step towards him. His face and head and chest were burning with a heat he had not experienced in years. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew you wanted me to mention it. Mention your woman. Well, here we are. I'm mentioning her! You got me!” He was standing right before Lestat now, close enough that they might have felt one another's breath on their faces if they had still lived. But they did not. The space between them still felt cavernous, and yet it was the closest they'd been in years. Quietly, voice shaking with anger, Louis said, “You know, you can fuck with me all you want, and you been doin’ that for a long time. A long time! But you don't fuck with her. Not our girl, not our Claudia.”
Lestat's expression clouded. He was no longer still and intent, but angry and somehow, Louis thought, disappointed. He tossed the cigarette into the fireplace, and turned away from Louis, crossing the room into the hallway. “I will not listen to your nonsense,” he said stiffly, “Not anymore.” He threw his overcoat and hat back on, wrenched open the front door, and disappeared into the night.
Louis stood in the parlour alone for a long time.
The fire creaked and spat.
He sat down - and winced.
The Lestat doll was buried between the sofa cushions, watching him with beady eyes through a curtain of golden hair.
*
When she returned, at last, after those long, painful years had irreparably widened the gulf between Louis and Lestat beyond all hope of repair, she brought her doll back with her.
This was not something Louis realised until over a week into his convalescence; in the hours and days immediately following Claudia’s return and Lestat’s subsequent fury (Claudia called it an “attack,” which Louis supposed made sense but he could not bear to refer to it as such himself, even within his own head; despite everything, he knew Lestat, knew him as deeply and intimately as a wound on his own body, and he could never bring himself to say that he did not love Lestat, even if, at that moment in time, he did not want him anymore), Louis remained in the main confined to his coffin, resting, whilst Claudia brought him caged birds and eyed him with an expression that was even more painful to see on her deceptively youthful face than any of the physical blows he had been dealt.
When he was finally back on his feet and able to move around the house unassisted, he found, to his joy, the Claudia doll restored to her place in the doll's house, nestled in one of the little bedrooms against the side of the Louis doll. The Lestat doll was nowhere to be seen.
“You brought her back,” he said to the real Claudia, through raw, bruising lips.
Claudia looked up at him. There was a tiny line between her eyebrows. “What?” she said.
He gestured. “Your doll. When you left…it hurt me that you took it. I don't know why. I know it's just a doll, but I'm glad you brought it back.”
Claudia stared at him for a long moment. “I didn't take it,” she said.
Louis looked down into the doll's house. The dolls, slumped where they sat, stared blankly up at him.
*
In the years that followed, the Louis and Claudia dolls did not exert themselves to the extent they had when they had first been brought home. From time to time, one of them would be found in another upstairs room, and on one occasion Claudia's made it halfway down the stairs. But these instances were rare, and Louis was mostly able to convince himself that one of them was rising in their sleep and moving the dolls themselves.
The Antoinette doll never made another appearance, and Louis never mentioned it to Claudia. And he certainly never mentioned the intermittent return of the blonde-haired doll to Rue Royale.
It wasn't like the two of them discussed the dolls in their daily conversations. Claudia was practically a grown woman now, in mind if not body, and Louis silently suspected that she only kept the doll's house because she knew that it would upset him if she threw it out. For the most part, she studiously ignored the object as though it did not exist, and it was only when she was out of the house that Louis crept into her room to look at it, painfully recalling happier times when two or three of them had crouched before it, rearranging the tiny pieces of furniture, repositioning the tiny figurines, spinning their tales of madness and blood, passion and violence.
And so Louis was the only one of the two of them to see it: the third doll. The first time he found it, it was on the veranda, slouched against the wall. His blood ran cold at the sight of it; and yet, he found that he could not fight the way his heart stirred and leapt, nor the speed with which he moved to the top of the steps, eyes wide open, searching up and down and up again between cars and pedestrians, searching and searching for that familiar golden head of hair.
Another time - opening up his coffin for the early dawn. Lestat's own coffin was still there, still crouched beside his own like a creature in wait.
(“We should burn it,” Claudia had said.
“No,” Louis said. He remembered the doll's house; the years Claudia had been away; how Lestat had wanted to destroy her things. How he hadn't, when Louis had asked.
“But -”
“I said no, Claudia!”
She stared at him a long moment, wide-eyed and still as the grave. Then, silently, she'd left the room.
His chest hurt. That had been Louis, the father. He had no right to fatherhood anymore. But brotherhood fit him poorly, like a badly-made suit; it always had done. They hadn't talked about it in the morning; just went on pretending.)
The doll lay in the corner of the room, behind Lestat’s untouched coffin, almost out of sight.
He stood motionless in his pyjamas, lid of his own coffin halfway ajar, and watched it. The doll did not move.
He swallowed. Closed the lid. Went to the window.
Outside, the street was quiet, and empty, the last of the drunkards trickling away as the first rays of sun nipped at the horizon.
He looked for Lestat, the doll in hand. Looked and looked until his eyes hurt.
When at last he gave up, he put the doll back into the doll’s house. He didn't know what Claudia would say, when she eventually discovered it. But she never did. When he awoke the next night, the doll was gone.
*
Lestat came back.
His doll came back too, again; stayed, this time.
Claudia ignored the dolls; watched Lestat and Louis with the eyes of a hawk.
Watched, and watched, and whispered to Louis all the while of her plan.
Beneath Lestat’s body, in his arms, between his teeth, Louis closed his eyes; pictured the doll’s house; pictured the doll version of the man who had burrowed his way so deeply, so painfully and wonderfully inside of him.
Pictured and wished and dreamed.
*
“She irks me,” Lestat said one evening through gritted teeth. Claudia had just left the house to hunt, slamming the door behind her and kicking the rug askew as she went because she knew it irritated him. “Everything she does is a transparent attempt to provoke me.” He slammed down the lid of his piano.
“She's trying,” Louis said, for what felt like the hundredth time. Sometimes he thought that was what their eternal lives might be like from now on; one long uncomfortable attempt. “You know she is.”
She wasn't.
“Trying my patience,” Lestat snapped. He looked at Louis for a long moment. Then he said, “How long must we endure this charade?”
A brief, cold flicker of fear tickled at the back of Louis’ neck.
Surely Lestat couldn't know, he thought. How would he?
He wasn't sure what to say.
But it didn't seem to matter; rather than waiting for a response, Lestat heaved a great, dramatic sigh, and flung himself down on the sofa beside him.
“It'll take time,” Louis said, feeling like a broken record. Time, time, time: out it stretched, a dark, daunting eternity at his feet, and still he felt like everything was moving at the speed of a bullet to an inevitable, messy conclusion. Time. He was hoping and praying that time would delay Claudia too, slow her murderous machinations, give them just a little more. A little more. Just a few more weeks, days even - that might be all it took. Just enough time to remind Lestat and Claudia that once they'd been happy, once they'd loved one another; just enough time for Louis to keep smoothing and soothing and cajoling, to right the wrongs of the past and derail the awful, inevitable conclusion they were hurtling towards.
Half telling himself that this was all a ruse, play-acting at the behest of Claudia, and half sick with want for the beautiful, terrible, beloved creature at his side, he reached out, lightly tapping his fingers against the back of Lestat's left hand. “Time, cher,” he said, softly. “And ain't time all we got, the three of us?”
“Ah, yes,” Lestat said. “An eternity with a girl who would skin me alive and wear me as a pair of Oxfords, if given half the chance.” But he let Louis touch him, and settled back into the cushions behind him, gaze flickering over Louis’ face, and Louis knew he'd chipped away, just a little more, at Lestat's icy exterior, and - regrettably - at the splintering shield he'd knocked haphazardly together around his own heart.
He swallowed, and offered a smile, wondering if it would be worse for the smile to be real or pretend.
Lestat slumped back into the sofa a little more. Then he frowned. “Ow,” he said, and thrust a hand into the cushions behind him. When he turned back to Louis, he was holding the Claudia doll in his palm.
“I swear they can walk,” Louis said.
Lestat glowered at the doll. “Even in this form, she injures me,” he said, and tossed it onto one of the side tables.
When they went upstairs to sleep later that night, the Claudia doll remained downstairs. Louis glanced into Claudia's room, looking at the doll’s house.
Through the darkness, he could just about make out the Louis and Lestat dolls, leant up against one another in one of the little bedrooms, heads pressed together.
“Louis,” Lestat called, hand beckoning from the plush dark of his coffin.
Louis backed out of Claudia's room; went to join him.
*
Louis took the dolls with him when they left. Claudia had already packed - had her clothes and her diary neatly folded in a suitcase, along with several of Louis’ own suits and shirts and sweaters, as well as a brown paper envelope of cash she had somehow managed to steal from their maker. Louis stood in her bedroom as she tucked the last of their things away, feeling as if he was in a dream. The coppery scent of blood permeated every inch of their surroundings, but he didn’t feel hungry. He just felt dizzy, like he’d had a blow to the head. Maybe he had, in the confusion. He wasn’t sure.
He had bathed, once they’d placed Lestat’s limp body into the coffin and carried it onto the porch. The water had turned scarlet and he’d scrubbed and scrubbed at the dark brown crust gathered beneath his fingernails, wondering if any of the blood inside of his own body was still Lestat’s, or if this - the filthy water that swirled around him and would soon disappear down the plughole, down the drain pipes, into the sewers, was all that he had left of the man he’d once loved.
Afterwards, he went into Claudia’s room, moving as though in a daze, head feeling oddly light.
“Ready?” she said, picking up her suitcase.
Louis nodded.
They would leave the house as it was. There was so much blood, there was no sense trying to clean all of it up. Their victims would be reported missing, and the house would begin to smell. They would have a head start of a couple of days, if they were lucky. Once they were on the ship, it wouldn’t matter.
He looked around the room, at the wallpaper he’d once helped Lestat pick out, as a newcomer to the city; the furniture they’d collected, the rugs, the cushions, the art, the curtains. It was strange to think he would never see any of it again. He moved dreamily around the room, pausing to finger the drapes. He wondered if any flecks of Lestat lingered upon the fabric: old eyelashes or stray golden hairs.
Claudia’s eyes remained on his back the whole time.
He turned to face her, but paused when his gaze fell upon the doll’s house, still standing against the wall where Lestat had placed it all those years ago.
“You gonna leave that?” he said.
Claudia looked at it and frowned. “It’s huge,” she said.
Louis moved towards the house, and crouched down before it.
The Lestat doll was nowhere to be seen.
Louis felt sick.
He reached in, and carefully picked up the two remaining figures.
“We could take ‘em,” he said, not looking up at Claudia. “They’re only small.”
Claudia said, slowly, “Why would we want to?”
Louis supposed he understood. Claudia, despite her outward appearance, was a child no longer, and hadn’t been, not for a long, long time. Still, he cupped the dolls in his palms, unable to put them back down.
“Louis,” Claudia said insistently, “We’ll miss the boat.”
Louis stood. He tucked the dolls into his jacket pockets.
Claudia watched him do it, and said nothing, but he felt the doubt rolling off her in thick waves.
“Alright,” he lied, “I’m ready.”
Claudia headed downstairs first. Louis followed after. He tried not to look, but as he passed the door to his and Lestat’s old room, he couldn’t help himself. It was wide open, and the fire within was still glowing as it faded into embers.
Lestat’s blood gleamed in the dimming light.
Louis paused.
There was something else in there, he realised.
Saying nothing to Claudia, he held his breath, and took a slow, measured step towards the doors.
In the middle of the room, soaked in its likeness’ blood, the Lestat doll lay splayed out, alone and abandoned in that big, empty house.
“What’re you doing?” Claudia called from the front door.
“Nothing,” Louis said, and followed her downstairs.
*
The two dolls accompanied them across the Atlantic and through Europe.
One doll went with him to Dubai.
He never stopped looking for the Claudia doll, in his trunks, his suitcases, his bags, his pockets - in hotel rooms and cells and villas and mansions; all the beautiful places Armand took him to, after Paris.
He knew he would never find it.
But he never stopped looking anyway.
*
Louis stood at the window, looking out over the Dubai skyline. Soon, the sun would be rising. Soon, he thought, he must sleep. As if in a dream, he blinked, slow and heavy, and pressed the button for the blinds. A hundred skyscrapers and ten thousand tiny pinpricks of light from thousands of human homes were blacked out with a soft electric buzz. At length, he turned away from the glass, and moved across the room to the walk-in wardrobe.
The little room contained mainly clothes - suits and shirts and pants and shoes, dark and tailored, all lined up neatly along the walls like soldiers on parade. But at the back, behind the rows and rows of jackets and t-shirts and sweaters, the final doll was hidden.
His doll.
Armand knew every square inch of the penthouse; knew every piece of furniture, every door, every window, every blind. He had catalogued within his mind each item they owned; each rug, each electronic, each scarf and shirt and hat. Louis could request a book, and Armand would retrieve it for him at once, knowing immediately on which exact shelf it could be found. He could misplace a belt, and Armand would admonish him for it, then take it and tuck it away in whichever closet or drawer he had deemed the correct one for the item to sit in. Louis wasn’t sure how he stored it all in his head. Sometimes, he wondered if Armand moved their things around whilst Louis was asleep, little by little, just one or two pieces at a time, so Louis would always feel a little off-kilter, a little sea-legged, and Armand would always be able to swoop in to the rescue. He’d thought, once or twice, about bringing it up. But he wasn’t sure what that would achieve.
Did it matter, truly, if that was what Armand was doing? In what way, materially, did it affect Louis’ life?
Did any of it matter?
Their lives went on and on and on, endlessly, one interminable agonising stasis that he could still, even after all these years, never quite settle into.
Still - it seemed that Armand had never found the doll.
Louis was not certain why.
Once or twice, Louis had watched him dig into the very drawer that the doll was concealed within - go through it, take things out - and yet, he had never, as far as Louis was aware, picked it up. He’d never mentioned it to Louis either. Louis had stood behind him, watched as the drawer he knew the doll was in - that he’d put it in himself - was opened. Had seen Armand turning over vests and socks and underpants. And yet the doll was never uncovered.
Other than on these rare occasions where Armand came close to its hiding spot, the doll did not seem to move. Long gone were the nights in Rue Royale when Louis had entered a room, and found the doll - or, more frequently, Lestat or Claudia’s dolls - laying out on the middle of the floor.
His doll, as far as he was aware, never even left the drawer, these days: when Louis went to investigate, after Armand had failed to discover it, he’d always found it in the very place he’d just watched the other vampire searching through, tucked in amongst the socks and handkerchiefs, as though it had always been there.
Most of the time, Louis did not think about the doll. In the vast expanse of his life, it was a tiny thing, a silly token of a life he’d once led; a place he’d once loved. And yet he had kept it with him throughout everything; from New Orleans to Eastern Europe, from Paris throughout Asia and finally to Dubai, in the bottom of some suitcase, or inside the lining of a coat, the toy had remained with him.
He hesitated a moment, arm outstretched through the thick swamp of clothing inside the wardrobe, listening for the sound of Armand’s shoes tapping on the hard, concrete floor of the penthouse as he made his way towards Louis.
But no sound echoed from the sliver of space between the door and the floor, and so Louis turned back to the drawers, and to the doll.
It was old now and tattered, a little worse for wear. But it was still intact, still wearing its tiny suit and with its short dark hair still attached to its head.
He sat down, cross-legged on the floor and cupped it in his hands. Perhaps, he thought, if he held it close to his face, and closed his eyes, and breathed in, he might still smelt it - the woody, smoky scent of that old house, 1132 Rue Royale; the faint metallic smell of blood and the comforting curl of his and Lestat’s tobacco; of leather shoes and motor oil, of the perfume Claudia had pestered him to buy for her, charcoal and wood and smoke in the fireplace and the incinerator, and the faint, crisp scent of wine and brandy and whiskey in the cellar. If he sat still enough, pulled his body inward, focused on the pull of gravity beneath him and all the places his body touched the floor, he fancied he could almost hear it, too: Claudia’s shoes tapping on the hardwood as she skipped across the upstairs hallway, her sharp, childish knuckles rapping against the bannister. The soft, melancholic singing of the piano, the click of Lestat’s nails against the keys; the dull thunk of chess pieces moving across the wooden board as he and Claudia played; the scratch of Claudia’s pen and the whisper of the pages of her diary filling and turning beneath her fingertips at night. He felt it too; Claudia’s head resting against his shoulder, Lestat’s lips against his jaw, the cool of the doorknob in his palm as they headed out in the evenings, the satin pyjamas against his skin.
He opened his eyes, slowly, and ran the tip of one finger over the face of the doll.
Did it ever get lonely, he wondered? Did it miss its old companions? Did it miss that old house? Did it resent being locked up in a wardrobe, a pocket, a succession of dark drawers?
Did it miss the doll’s house?
Did it remember the night Lestat had brought it home, and Claudia had squealed and clutched it to her chest, and loved it with that violent fervour of childhood he and Lestat had strangled her with?
His fingers closed tightly around it for a moment. Then he put it back in the drawer, and closed it. He stood, feeling foolish.
He turned around, and re-entered the bedroom, closing the door to the walk-in wardrobe behind him, then headed for the door to the hallway. Opened it.
He froze.
There, on the floor, in the middle of the corridor outside, lay his doll.
Louis stared at it. Blinked. Looked back at the wardrobe. The door was still closed. For a moment, he considered going back in there - searching the drawers, checking to see if what he saw before him wasn’t some strange duplicate.
But there was no need: when he turned back to the corridor, the doll had moved again. This time, it was halfway down the hallway, legs splayed out, face turned upwards towards the ceiling.
Cautiously, Louis stepped after it.
The doll did not move.
Louis kept his eyes fixed upon the thing.
Still, it remained motionless.
He blinked - and then it was at the end of the corridor, at the base of the door.
Louis paused, before taking a few slow, careful steps after it.
He couldn’t hear Armand, wherever he was, deep inside the penthouse. He paused for a moment to listen - but no, there were no sounds of his companion. He blinked again, slowly.
When he opened his eyes, the door leading into the foyer was open, and the doll was lying in the middle of the marble floor.
He stayed still for a long moment, then moved cautiously towards the doll again.
Another blink, and the front door of the penthouse was open.
Louis hadn’t left the penthouse in several years. Hadn’t left the building in even longer. He blinked.
The corridor outside.
Blink.
The elevator.
Blink.
The vestibule.
Blink.
There was nobody else down there. There was a doorman, he thought, who stood positioned at the gleaming glass entrance to the building at all hours of day and night, but when he looked out through the huge double doors leading out onto the dark street, there was nobody there.
He looked back over his shoulder, towards the shining bank of elevators, but they were still, and silent. It felt, for a moment, like he was the only person in the world, and he could not help but wonder if someday that might be his fate.
He turned back to look for the doll.
The glass doors were now wide open, and he couldn’t see the doll anymore. Just a short flight of black and white steps leading down to the clean, empty street outside, lined with sentry-like palm trees, and the distant glimmer of fountains on the concourse, and above that, the sky, polluted with light.
It was never really dark in Dubai.
Dawn was approaching.
He stood at the building entrance, in the doorway, and stared and stared.
On the ground, at the foot of the steps, lay his doll. And, at its side, a second, tousle-haired and bloodstained.
Louis lifted his face to the waning night. Scented the air. Tasted it. And he stepped outside.