The Vampire Lestat (27 page)

“A curse on you, blasphemer!” one of them screamed. Then the fire licked at his hands and he howled, falling backwards.

“A curse on the profaners, the outlaws!” came screams from below. It caught on quickly and became a regular chorus. “A curse on the outlaws who dared to enter the House of God!” But they were scrambling down to the ground. The heavy timbers were catching, and the fire was roaring to the ceiling.

“Go back to the graveyard where you came from, you pack of pranksters!” I said. I would have thrown the fire down on them if I could have gotten near the window.

Gabrielle stood still with her eyes narrow, obviously listening.

Cries and howls continued from below. A new anthem of curses upon those who broke the sacred laws, blasphemed, provoked the wrath of God and Satan. They were pulling on the gates and lower windows. They were doing stupid things like throwing rocks at the wall.

“They can’t get in,” Gabrielle said in a low monotone, her head still cocked attentively. “They can’t break the gate.”

I wasn’t so certain. The gate was rusted, very old. Nothing to do but wait.

I collapsed on the floor, leaning against the side of the sarcophagus, my arms around my chest and my back bent. I wasn’t even laughing anymore.

She too sat down against the wall with her legs sprawled out before her. Her chest heaved a little, and her hair was coming loose from the braid. It was a cobra’s hood around her face, loose strands clinging to her white cheeks. Soot clung to her garments.

The heat of the fire was crushing. The airless room shimmered with vapors and the flames rose to shut out the night. But we could breathe the
little air that was there. We suffered nothing except the heat and the exhaustion.

And gradually I realized she was right about the gate. They hadn’t managed to break it down. I could hear them drawing away.

“May the wrath of God punish the profane!”

There was some faint commotion near the stables. I saw in my mind my poor half-witted mortal stable boy dragged in terror from his hiding place, and my rage was redoubled. They were sending me images of it from their thoughts, the murder of that poor boy. Damn them.

“Be still,” Gabrielle said. “It’s too late.”

Her eyes widened and then grew small again as she listened. He was dead, the poor miserable creature.

I felt the death just as if I had seen a small dark bird suddenly rising from the stables. And she sat forward as though seeing it too, and then settled back as if she had lost consciousness, though she had not. She murmured and it sounded like “red velvet,” but it was under her breath and I didn’t catch the words.

“I’ll punish you for this, you gang of ruffians!” I said aloud. I sent it out towards them. “You trouble my house. I swear you’ll pay for this.”

But my limbs were getting heavier and heavier. The heat of the fire was almost drugging. All the night’s strange happenings were taking their toll.

In my exhaustion and in the glare of the fire I could not guess the hour. I think I fell to dreaming for an instant, and woke myself with a shiver, unsure of how much time had passed.

I looked up and saw the figure of an unearthly young boy, an exquisite young boy, pacing the floor of the chamber.

Of course it was only Gabrielle.

S
HE gave the impression of almost rampant strength as she walked back and forth. Yet all of it was contained in an unbroken grace.

She kicked at the timbers and watched the blackened ruin of the fire flare for a moment before settling into itself again. I could see the sky. An hour perhaps remained.

“But who are they?” she asked. She stood over me, her legs apart, her hands in two liquid summoning gestures. “Why do they call us outlaws and blasphemers?”

“I’ve told you everything I know,” I confessed. “Until tonight I didn’t think they possessed faces or limbs or real voices.”

I climbed to my feet and brushed off my clothes.

“They damned us for entering the churches!” she said. “Did you catch it, those images coming from them? And they don’t know how we managed to do it. They themselves would not dare.”

For the first time I observed that she was trembling. There were other small signs of alarm, the way the flesh quivered around her eyes, the way that she kept pushing the loose strands of her hair out of her eyes again.

“Gabrielle,” I said. I tried to make my tone authoritative, reassuring. “The important thing is to get out of here now. We don’t know how early those creatures rise, or how soon after sunset they’ll return. We have to discover another hiding place.”

“The dungeon crypt,” she said.

“A worse trap than this,” I said, “if they break through the gate.” I glanced at the sky again. I pulled the stone out of the low passage. “Come on,” I said.

“But where are we going?” she asked. For the first time tonight she looked almost fragile.

“To a village east of here,” I said. “It’s perfectly obvious that the safest place is within the village church itself.”

“Would you do that?” she asked. “In the church?”

“Of course I would. As you just said, the little beasts would never dare to enter! And the crypts under the altar will be as deep and dark as any grave.”

“But Lestat, to rest under the very altar!”

“Mother, you astonish me,” I said. “I have taken victims under the very roof of Notre Dame.” But another little idea came to me. I went to Magnus’s chest and started picking at the heap of treasure. I pulled out two rosaries, one of pearls, another of emeralds, both having the usual small crucifix.

She watched me, her face white, pinched.

“Here, you take this one,” I said, giving her the emerald rosary. “Keep it on you. If and when we do meet with them, show them the crucifix. If I am right, they’ll run from it.”

“But what happens if we don’t find a safe place in the church?”

“How the hell should I know? We’ll come back here!”

I could feel a fear collecting in her and radiating from her as she hesitated, looking through the window at the fading stars. She had passed through the veil into the promise of eternity and now she was in danger again.

Quickly, I took the rosary from her and kissed her and slipped the rosary into the pocket of her frock coat.

“Emeralds mean eternal life, Mother,” I said.

She appeared the boy standing there again, the last glow of the fire just tracing the line of her cheek and mouth.

“It’s as I said before,” she whispered. “You aren’t afraid of anything, are you?”

“What does it matter if I am or not?” I shrugged. I took her arm and drew her to the passage. “We are the things that others fear,” I said. “Remember that.”

W
HEN
we reached the stable, I saw the boy had been hideously murdered. His broken body lay twisted on the hay-strewn floor as if it had been flung there by a Titan. The back of his head was shattered. And to mock him, it seemed, or to mock me, they had dressed him in a gentleman’s fancy velvet frock coat. Red velvet. Those were the words she’d murmured when they had done the crime. I’d seen only the death. I looked away now in disgust. All the horses were gone. “They’ll pay for that,” I said.

I took her hand. But she stared at the miserable boy’s body as if it drew her against her will. She glanced at me.

“I feel cold,” she whispered. “I’m losing the strength in my limbs. I must, I must get to where it’s dark. I can feel it.”

I led her fast over the rise of the nearby hill and towards the road.

T
HERE
were no howling little monsters hidden in this village churchyard, of course. I didn’t think there would be. The earth hadn’t been turned up on the old graves in a long time.

Gabrielle was past conferring with me on this.

I half carried her to the side door of the church and quietly broke the latch.

“I’m cold all over. My eyes are burning,” she said again under her breath. “Someplace dark.”

But as I started to take her in, she stopped.

“What if they’re right,” she said. “And we don’t belong in the House of God.”

“Gibberish and nonsense. God isn’t in the House of God.”

“Don’t! . . . ” She moaned.

I pulled her through the sacristy and out before the altar. She covered
her face, and when she looked up it was at the crucifix over the tabernacle. She let out a long low gasp. But it was from the stained-glass windows that she shielded her eyes, turning her head towards me. The rising sun that I could not even feel yet was already burning her!

I picked her up as I had done last night. I had to find an old burial crypt, one that hadn’t been used in years. I hurried towards the Blessed Virgin’s altar, where the inscriptions were almost worn away. And kneeling, I hooked my fingernails around a slab and quickly lifted it to reveal a deep sepulcher with a single rotted coffin.

I pulled her down into the sepulcher with me and moved the slab back into place.

Inky blackness, and the coffin splintering under me so that my right hand closed on a crumbling skull. I felt the sharpness of other bones under my chest. Gabrielle spoke as if in a trance:

“Yes. Away from the light.”

“We’re safe,” I whispered.

I pushed the bones out of the way, making a nest of the rotted wood and the dust that was too old to contain any smell of human decay.

But I did not fall into the sleep for perhaps an hour or more.

I kept thinking over and over of the stable boy, mangled and thrown there in that fancy red velvet frock coat. I had seen that coat before and I couldn’t remember where I had seen it. Had it been one of my own? Had they gotten into the tower? No, that was not possible, they couldn’t have gotten in. Had they had a coat made up identical to one of my own? Gone to such lengths to mock me? No. How could such creatures do a thing like that? But still . . . that particular coat. Something about it . . . 

I
HEARD the softest, loveliest singing when I opened my eyes. And as sound can often do, even in the most precious fragments, it took me back to childhood, to some night in winter when all my family had gone down to the church in our village and stood for hours among the blazing candles, breathing the heavy, sensual smell of the incense as the priest walked in procession with the monstrance lifted high.

I remembered the sight of the round white Host behind the thick glass, the starburst of gold and jewels surrounding it, and overhead the embroidered canopy, swaying dangerously as the altar boys in their lace surplices tried to steady it as they moved on.

A thousand Benedictions after that one had engraved into my mind the words of the old hymn.

And as I lay in the remains of this broken coffin under the white marble slab at the side altar in this large country church, Gabrielle clinging to me still in the paralysis of sleep, I realized very slowly that above me were hundreds upon hundreds of humans who were singing this very hymn right now.

The church was full of people! And we could not get out of this damned nest of bones until all of them went away.

Around me in the dark, I could feel creatures moving. I could smell the shattered, crumbling skeleton on which I lay. I could smell the earth, too, and feel dampness and the harshness of the cold.

Gabrielle’s hands were dead hands holding to me. Her face was as inflexible as bone.

I tried not to brood on this, but to lie perfectly still.

Hundreds of humans breathed and sighed above. Perhaps a thousand of them. And now they moved on into the second hymn.

What comes now, I thought dismally. The litany, the blessings? On this of all nights, I had no time to lie here musing. I must get out. The image of that red velvet coat came to me again with an irrational sense of urgency, and a flash of equally inexplicable pain.

And quite suddenly, it seemed, Gabrielle opened her eyes. Of course I didn’t see it. It was utterly black here. I felt it. I felt her limbs come to life.

And no sooner had she moved than she grew positively rigid with alarm. I slipped my hand over her mouth.

“Be still,” I whispered, but I could feel her panic.

All the horrors of the preceding night must be coming back to her, that she was now in a sepulcher with a broken skeleton, that she lay beneath a stone she could hardly lift.

“We’re in the church!” I whispered. “And we’re safe.”

The singing surged on.
“Tantum ergo Sacramentum, Veneremur cernui.”

“No, it’s a Benediction,” Gabrielle gasped. She was trying to lie still, but abruptly she lost the struggle, and I had to grip her firmly in both arms.

“We
must
get out,” she whispered. “Lestat, the Blessed Sacrament is on the altar, for the love of God!”

The remains of the wooden coffin clattered and creaked against the stone beneath it, causing me to roll over on top of her and force her flat with my weight.

“Now lie still, do you hear me!” I said. “We have no choice but to wait.”

But her panic was infecting me. I felt the fragments of bone crunching beneath my knees and smelled the rotting cloth. It seemed the death stench was penetrating the walls of the sepulcher, and I knew I could not bear to be shut up with that stench.

“We can’t,” she gasped. “We can’t remain here. I have to get out!” She was almost whimpering. “Lestat, I can’t.” She was feeling the walls with both hands, and then the stone above us. I heard a pure toneless sound of terror issue from her lips.

Above the hymn had stopped. The priest would go up the altar steps, lift the monstrance in both hands. He would turn to the congregation and raise the Sacred Host in blessing. Gabrielle knew that of course, and Gabrielle suddenly went mad, writhing under me, almost heaving me to the side.

“All right, listen to me!” I hissed. I could control this no longer. “We are going out. But we shall do it like proper vampires, do you hear! There are one thousand people in the church and we are going to scare them to death. I will lift the stone and we will rise up together, and when we do, raise your arms and make the most horrible face you can muster and cry out if you can. That will make them fall back, instead of pouncing upon us and dragging us off to prison, and then we’ll rush to the door.”