autobiography had cooperated in full. And during the long months of recording and filmmaking, I hadn't seen a single one of them in New Orleans, nor heard them roaming about.
Yet somehow they had obtained the unlisted number and into the electronic answering machine they issued their admonitions and epithets.
"Outcast. We know what you are doing. We are ordering you to stop." "Come out where we can see you. We dare you to come out."
I had the band holed up in a lovely old plantation house north of New Orleans, pouring the Dom Perignon for them as they smoked their hashish cigarettes, all of us weary of anticipation and preparation, eager for the first live audience in San Francisco, the first certain taste of success.
Then my lawyer, Christine, sent on the first phone messages -- uncanny how the equipment captured the timbre of the unearthly voices -- and in the middle of the night, I drove my musicians to the airport and we flew west.
After that, even Christine didn't know where we were hiding. The musicians themselves were not entirely sure. In a luxurious ranch house in Carmel Valley we heard our music for the first time over the radio. We danced as our first video films appeared nationwide on the television cable.
And each evening I went alone to the coastal city of Monterey to pick up Christine's communications. Then I went north to hunt.
I drove my sleek powerful black Porsche all the way to San Francisco, taking the hairpin curves of the coast road at intoxicating speed. And in the immaculate yellow gloom of the big city skid row I stalked my killers a little more cruelly and slowly than before.
The tension was becoming unbearable.
Still I didn't see the others. I didn't hear them. All I had were those phone messages from immortals I'd never known:
"We warn you. Do not continue this madness. You are playing a more dangerous game than you realize." And then the recorded whisper that mortal ears could not hear:
"Traitor!" "Outcast!" "Show yourself, Lestat!"
If they were hunting San Francisco, I didn't see them. But then San Francisco is a dense and crowded city. And I was sly and silent as I had always been.
Finally the telegrams came pouring in to the Monterey postbox. We had done it. Sales of our album were breaking records here and in Europe. We could perform in any city we wanted after San Francisco. My autobiography was in all the bookstores from coast to coast. The Vampire Lestat was at the top of the charts.
And after the nightly hunt in San Francisco, I started riding the long length of Divisadero Street. I let the black carapace of the Porsche crawl past the ruined Victorian houses, wondering in which one of these -- if any -- Louis had told the tale of Interview with the Vampire to the mortal boy. I was thinking constantly about Louis and Gabrielle. I was thinking about Armand. I was thinking about Marius, Marius whom I had betrayed by telling the whole tale.
Was The Vampire Lestat stretching its electronic tentacles far enough to touch them? Had they seen the video films: The Legacy of Magnus, The Children of Darkness, Those Who Must Be Kept? I thought of the other ancient ones whose names I'd revealed: Mael, Pandora, Ramses the Damned.
The fact was, Marius could have found me no matter what the secrecy or the precautions. His powers could have bridged even the vast distances of America. If he was looking, if he had heard . . .
The old dream came back to me of Marius cranking the motion picture camera, of the flickering patterns on the wall of the sanctum of Those Who Must Be Kept. Even in recollection it seemed impossibly lucid, made my heart trip.
And gradually I realized that I possessed a new concept of loneliness, a new method of measuring a silence that stretched to the end of the world. And all I had to interrupt it were those menacing recorded preternatural voices which carried no images as their virulency increased:
"Don't dare to appear on stage in San Francisco. We warn you. Your challenge is too vulgar, too contemptuous. We will risk anything, even a public scandal, to punish you."
I laughed at the incongruous combination of archaic language and the unmistakable American sound. What were they like, those modern vampires? Did they affect breeding and education once they walked with the undead? Did they assume a certain style? Did they live in covens or