The Vampire Armand (The Vampire Chronicles 6)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the hell with all that.

You know what I want you to know.

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

Chapter 24

24

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

You know why I came here.

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

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

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

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

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

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