It was the music of the Vampire Lestat--his old maker--now a rock-star sensation, with music carried on airwaves, blasted from television screens, music seeping from tiny transmitters no bigger than a pack of playing cards to which people listened through plugs in their ears.
Oh, what sweet glory to see Lestat so splendidly restored! How his heart ached to reach him.
The Undead were everywhere now on the new continent. Maybe they had always been here, spreading, breeding, creating fledglings as he'd been created. He couldn't guess. He only knew his powers were greater now; he could read the minds of mortals, hear their thoughts when he didn't want to hear them, and he could hear that relentless music, and those strange eerie stories that Lestat told in his little video films.
We had come from ancient parents out of darkest Egypt: Akasha and Enkil. Kill the Mother and the Father and we all die, or so the songs said. What did the Vampire Lestat want with this mortal persona: rock star, outcast, monster, gathering mortals to a concert in San Francisco, gathering the Undead?
Antoine would have gone out west to see Lestat on the stage. But he was still struggling with the simplest difficulties of life in the late twentieth century when the massacres began.
All over the world, it seemed, the Undead were being slaughtered, as coven houses and vampire taverns were burnt to cinders. Fledglings and old ones were immolated as they fled.
All this Antoine learned from the telepathic cries of brothers and sisters whom he'd never known in places he'd never been.
"Flee, go to the Vampire Lestat, he will save us!"
Antoine could not fathom it. He played for coins in the subways of New York, and once set upon by a gang of mortal cutthroats for his earnings, he slew them all and fled the city making his way south.
The voices of the Undead said it was the Mother, Akasha, who'd been slaughtering her children, that ancient Egyptian Queen. Lestat had been taken prisoner by her. Elders were gathering. Antoine, like so many others, was prey to strange dreams. Frantically he played his violin in the streets to surround himself with a solitude he could manage and sustain.
And then the immortal voices of the world fell silent.
Some catastrophe had emptied the planet of blood drinkers.
It seemed he was the last left alive. From city to city he went playing his violin for coins on street corners, sleeping once again in graveyards and abandoned cellars, emerging hungry, dazed, longing for some refuge that seemed beyond his reach. He slipped into crowded taverns or nightclubs in the evening, just to feel human warmth around him, bodies brushing against him, to swim in the sound of happy human voices, and the aroma of blood.
What had become of Lestat? Where was he, that shining Titian in his red-velvet frock coat and lace, who had roared with such confidence and power from the rock music stage? He did not know, and he wanted to know, but more acutely he wanted to survive, consciously, in this new world, and he set out to accomplish this.
In Chicago, he managed actual lodgings, and realized reasonable sums from his street-corner playing, and soon a band of mortals gathered to greet him when he appeared each evening. It was a simple matter to move to bars and restaurants again, and once more he found himself seated at the piano in a darkened nightclub with the twenty-dollar bills filling the brandy snifter beside the music stand.
In time he leased an old three-story white f
rame house in a suburb called Oak Park that was made up of such beautiful structures, and he bought an old steamer trunk in which to sleep by day, and his own piano. He liked his mortal neighbors. He gave them money to hire the gardener or the cleaning lady for him that they recommended. Sometimes he even swept the sidewalks himself in the very early hours of the morning with a big yellow broom. He liked that, the scrape scrape of the broom, and the leaves piled up, curling and brown, and the pavement so clean. Must we disdain all mortal things?
The streets of Oak Park with their great trees were soothing to him. Soon he was shopping in brightly lighted emporiums for decent clothes. And in his comfortable parlor from midnight till dawn he watched television, learning all about this modern world in which he'd emerged, how things were done, how things had to be. A steady stream of dramas, soap operas, news broadcasts, and documentaries soon taught him everything.
He lay back in his large overstuffed easy chair marveling at the blue skies and the brilliant sun he saw before him on the large television screen. He watched sleek and powerful American automobiles speeding on mountain roads and over prairies. He watched a somber, bespectacled teacher speak in sonorous tones of "the ascent of man."
And then there were the films of symphony performances, the full-scale operas, the unending virtuoso concerts! He thought he'd go mad with the beauty of it--witnessing in living color and mesmerizing detail the London Philharmonic play Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or the great Itzhak Perlman racing through the Brahms Concerto with an orchestra surrounding him.
Going into Chicago to hunt, he now purchased tickets to see splendid performances in the immense opera house, marveling at its size and luxury. He was awake to the wealth of the world. He was awake to an age that seemed made for his sensibilities.
Where was Lestat in this world? What had happened to him? In the music stores, they still sold his old album. You could buy a video of the single concert to which he'd drawn a capacity crowd. But where was the being himself--and would he remember his once-beloved Antoine? Or had he made a legion of followers since those long-ago southern nights?
Hunting was harder in these great times, yes. One had to seek far and wide to find the detestable human vermin who in ages past had been infinitely more numerous and more at hand. He could find no metropolitan cesspools like the old Barbary Coast. But he didn't mind that. He didn't "love" his victims. He never had. He wanted to feed and be done with it.
Once he'd spotted a victim, he was relentless. There was no way for that man or woman to hide. He slipped easily into darkened houses and caressed his mark with rough and eager hands. Let blood be blood.
He was soon playing the piano for a salary in a fine restaurant and making plenty of money from tips on top of that. And he learned to hunt more skillfully among the innocent--drinking from one victim after another on crowded dance floors until he had had enough--without killing or crippling anyone. This took discipline, but he could do it. He could do what he had to do to survive now, to be part of this age, to feel vital and resilient and, yes, immortal.
Ambition began to grow in him. He needed papers to live in this world; he needed wealth. Lestat had always had papers to live in the world. Lestat had always had great wealth. In the old nights so long ago, Lestat had been a respected and highly visible gentleman, for whom tailors and shopkeepers had kept late hours, a patron of the arts, a common figure nodding to those he passed in Jackson Square or on the steps of the Cathedral. Lestat had had a lawyer who handled his affairs of the world; Lestat came and went as he chose. "These matters are nothing," said Lestat. "My fortune is divided in many banks. I will always have what I need."
Antoine would do this. He would learn. Yet he had no real knack for it. Surely someone could forge papers for him, he must focus on this. He had to have some safety in this world, and he wanted a vehicle, yes, a powerful American car, so that he could travel miles and miles in one night.
The voices came again.
The Undead were returning, and appearing in great numbers in the cities of North America. And the voices were talking, the voices spoke of the population spreading throughout the world.
The old Queen had been destroyed. But Lestat and a council of immortals had survived her, and the new Mother was now a red-haired woman, ancient as the Queen had been, Mekare, a sorceress, who had no tongue.