coaches in the streets.
No, this isn't a dream, I told myself. It is happening. He is there. And if only I try I can see the city beyond the windows, know where he is. If only I try I can hear the language that he speaks to the young players. "Marius!" I said, but the earth around me devoured the sound.
The scene changed.
Marius rode in the great cage of an elevator down into a cellar. Metal doors screeched and clanked. And into the vast sanctum of Those Who Must Be Kept he went, and how different it all was. No more the Egyptian paintings, the perfume of flowers, the glitter of gold.
The high walls were covered with the dappled colors of the impressionists building out of myriad fragments a vibrant twentieth-century world. Airplanes flew over sunlit cities, towers rose beyond the arch of steel bridges, iron ships drove through silver seas. A universe it was, dissolving the walls on which it was rendered, surrounding the motionless and unchanged figures of Akasha and Enkil.
Marius moved about the chapel. He moved past dark tangled sculptures, telephone devices, typewriting machines upon wooden stands. He, set before Those Who Must Be Kept a large and stately gramophone. Delicately he put the tiny needle to its task upon the revolving record. A thin and rasping Vienna waltz poured forth from the metal horn.
I laughed to see it, this sweet invention, set before them like an offering. Was the waltz like incense rising in the air?
But Marius had not completed his tasks. A white screen he had unrolled down the wall. And now from a high platform behind the seated god and goddess, he projected moving pictures of mortals onto the white screen. Those Who Must Be Kept stared mute at the flickering images. Statues in a museum, the electric light glaring on their white skin.
And then the most marvelous thing happened. The jittery little figures in the motion picture began to talk. Above the grind of the gramophone waltz they actually talked.
And as I watched, frozen in excitement, frozen in joy to see it all, a great sadness suddenly engulfed me, a great crushing realization. It was just a dream, this. Because the truth was, the little figures in the moving pictures couldn't possibly talk.
The chamber and all its little wonders lost its substance, went dim.
Ah, horrid imperfection, horrid little giveaway that I'd made it all up. And out of real bits and pieces, too -- the silent movies I'd seen myself at the little theater called the Happy Hour, the gramophones I'd heard around me from a hundred houses in the dark.
And the Vienna waltz, ah, taken from the spell Armand had worked upon me, too heartbreaking to think of that.
Why hadn't I been just a little more clever in fooling myself, kept the film silent as it should have been, and I might have gone on believing it was a true vision after all.
But here was the final proof of my invention, this audacious and self-serving fancy: Akasha, my beloved, was speaking to me!
Akasha stood in the door of the chamber gazing down the length of the underground corridor to the elevator by which Marius had returned to the world above. Her black hair hung thickly and heavily about her white shoulders. She raised her cold white hand to beckon. Her mouth was red.
"Lestat!" she whispered. "Come."
Her thoughts flowed out of her soundlessly in the words of the old queen vampire who had spoken them to me under les Innocents years and years before:
From my stone pillow I have dreamed dreams of the mortal world above. I have heard its voices, its new music, as lullabies as I lie in my grave. I have envisioned its fantastical discoveries, I have known its courage in the timeless sanctum of my thoughts. And though it shuts me out with its dazzling forms, I long for one with the strength to roam it fearlessly, to ride the Devil's Road through its heart.
"Lestat!" she whispered again, her marble face tragically animate. "Come!"
"Oh, my darling," I said, tasting the bitter earth between my lips, "if only I could."
Lestat de Lioncourt
In the year of his Resurrection 1984
Dionysus in San Francisco
1985
Part VII Ancient Magic, Ancient Mysteries Epilogue 3
3
The week before our record album went on sale, they reached out for the first time to threaten us over the telephone wires.
Secrecy regarding the rock band called The Vampire Lestat had been expensive but almost impenetrable. Even the book publishers of my