2

Before we were even out of France, Gabrielle was breaking the journey to disappear for several nights at a time. In Vienna, she often stayed away for over a fortnight, and by the time I settled in the palazzo in Venice she was going away for months on end. During my first visit to Rome, she vanished for a half year. And after she left me in Naples, I returned to Venice without her, angrily leaving her to find her way back to Veneto on her own, which she did.

Of course it was the countryside that drew her, the forest or the mountains, or islands on which no human beings lived.

And she would return in such a tattered state -- her shoes worn out, her clothes ripped, her hair in hopeless tangles -- that she was every bit as frightening to look at as the ragged members of the old Paris coven had been. Then she'd walk about my rooms in her dirty neglected garments staring at the cracks in the plaster or the light caught in the distortions of the handblown window glass.

Why should immortals pore over newspapers, she would ask, or dwell in palaces? Or carry gold in their pockets? Or write letters to a mortal family left behind?

In this eerie, rapid undertone she'd speak of cliffs she had climbed, the drifts of snow through which she had tumbled, the caves full of mysterious markings and ancient fossils that she had found.

Then she would go as silently as she'd come, and I would be left watching for her and waiting for her -- and bitter and angry at her, and resenting her when she finally came back.

One night during our first visit to Verona, she startled me in a dark street.

"Is your father still alive?" she asked. Two months she'd been gone that time. I'd missed her bitterly, and there she was asking about them as if they mattered finally. Yet when I answered, "yes, and very ill," she seemed not to hear. I tried to tell her then that things in France were bleak indeed. There would surely be a revolution. She shook her head and waved it all away.

"Don't think about them anymore," she said. "Forget them." And once again, she was gone.

The truth was, I didn't want to forget them. I never stopped writing to Roger for news of my family. I wrote to him more often than I wrote to Eleni at the theater. I'd sent for portraits of my nieces and nephews. I sent presents back to France from every place in which I stopped. And I did worry about the revolution, as any mortal Frenchman might.

And finally, as Gabrielle's absences grew longer and our times together more strained and uncertain, I started to argue with her about these things.

"Time will take our family," I said. "Time will take the France we knew. So why should I give them up now while I can still have them? I need these things, I tell you. This is what life is to me!"

But this was only the half of it. I didn't have her any more than I had the others. She must have known what I was really saying. She must have heard the recrimination behind it all.

Little speeches like this saddened her. They brought out the tenderness in her. She'd let me get clean clothes for her, comb out her hair. And after that we'd hunt together and talk together. Maybe she would even go to the casinos with me, or to the opera. She'd be a great and beautiful lady for a little while.

And those moments still held us together. They perpetuated our belief that we were still a little coven, a pair of lovers, prevailing against the mortal world.

Gathered by the fire in some country villa, riding together on the driver's seat of the coach as I held the reins, walking together through the midnight forest, we still exchanged our various observations now and then.

We even went in search of haunted houses together -- a newfound pastime that excited us both. In fact, Gabrielle would sometimes return from one of her journeys precisely because she had heard of a ghostly visitation and she wanted me to go with her to see what we could.

Of course, most of the time we found nothing in the empty buildings where spirits were supposed to appear. And those wretched persons supposed to be possessed by the devil were often no more than commonly insane.

Yet there were times when we saw fleeting apparitions or mayhem that we couldn't explain -- objects flung about, voices roaring from the mouths of possessed children, icy currents that blew out the candles in a locked room.

But we never learned anything from all this. We saw no more than a hundred mortal scholars had already described.

It was just a game to us finally. And when I look back on it now, I know we went on with it because it kept us together gave us convivial moments which otherwise we would not have had.

But Gabrielle's absences weren't the only thing destroying our affection for each other as the years passed. It was her manner when she was with me -- the ideas she would put forth.

She still had that habit of speaking exactly what was on her mind and little more.

One night in our little house in the Via Ghibellina in Florence, she appeared after a month's absence and started to expound at once.

"You know the creatures of the night are ripe for a great leader," she said. "Not some superstitious mumbler of old rites, but a great dark monarch who will galvanize us according to new principles."

"What principles?" I asked. Ignoring the question, she went on.

"Imagine," she said, "not merely this stealthy and loathsome feeding on mortals, but something grand as the Tower of Babel was grand before it was brought down by the wrath off God. I mean a leader set up in a Satanic palace who sends out his followers to turn brother against brother, to cause mothers to kill their children, to put all the fine accomplishments of mankind to the torch, to scorch the land itself so that all would die of hunger, innocent and guilty! Make suffering and chaos wherever you turn, and strike down the forces of good so that men despair. Now that is something worthy of being called evil. That is what the work of a devil really is. We are nothing, you and I, except exotica in the Savage Garden, as you told me. And the world of men is no more or less now than what I saw in my books in the Auvergne years ago."

I hated this conversation. And yet I was glad she was in the room with me, that I was speaking to somebody other than a poor deceived mortal. That I wasn't alone with my letters from home.

"But what about your aesthetic questions?" I asked. "What you explained to Armand before, that you wanted to know why beauty existed and why it continues to affect us?"

She shrugged.

"When the world of man collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains."

"And why call all this Satanic?" I asked. "Why not call it chaos? That is all it would be."

"Because," she said, "that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn't they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live."

"I don't see it."

"Well, use your preternatural brain, my blue-eyed one," she answered, "my golden-haired son, my handsome wolfkiller. It is very possible that God made the world as Armand said."

"This is what you discovered in the forest? You were told this by the leaves?"

She laughed at me.

"Of course, God is not necessarily anthropomorphic," she said. "Or what we would call, in our colossal egotism and sentimentality, `a decent person.' But there is probably God. Satan, however, was man's invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws -- be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris -- that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws. And we are truly Satanic in that we follow no law for man's protection. So why not truly disrupt? Why not make a blaze of evil to consume all the civilizations of the earth?"

I was too appalled to answer.

"Don't worry." She laughed. "I won't do it. But I wonder what will happen in the decades to come. Will not somebody do it?"

"I hope not!" I said. "Or let me put it this way. If one of us tries, then there shall be war."

"Why? Everyone will follow him."

"I will not. I will make the war."

"Oh, you are too amusing, Lestat," she said.

"It's petty," I said.

"Petty!" She had looked away, out into the courtyard, but she looked back and the color rose in her face. "To topple all the cities of the earth? I understood when you called the Theater of the Vampires petty, but now you are contradicting yourself."

"It is petty to destroy anything merely for the sake of the destroying, don't you think?"

"You're impossible," she said. "Sometime in the far future there may be such a leader. He will reduce man to the nakedness and fear from which he came. And we shall feed upon him effortlessly as we have always done, and the Savage Garden, as you call it, will cover the world."

"I almost hope someone does attempt it," I said. "Because I would rise up against him and do everything to defeat him. And possibly I could be saved, I could be good again in my own eyes, as I set out to save man from this."

I was very angry. I'd left my chair and walked out into the courtyard.

She came right behind me.

"You have just given the oldest argument in Christendom for the existence of evil," she said. "It exists so that we may fight it and do good."

"How dreary and stupid," I said.

"What I don't understand about you is this," she said. "You hold to your old belief in goodness with a tenacity that is virtually unshakable. Yet you are so good at being what you are! You hunt your victims like a dark angel. You kill ruthlessly. You feast all the night long on victims when you choose."

"So?" I looked at her coldly. "I don't know how to be bad at being bad."

She laughed.

"I was a good marksman when I was a young man," I said, "a good actor on the stage. And now I am a good vampire. So much for our understanding of the word `good."'

After she had gone, I lay on my back on the flagstones in the courtyard and looked up at the stars, thinking of all the paintings and the sculptures that I had seen merely in the single city of Florence. I knew that I hated places where there are only towering trees, and the softest and sweetest music to me was the sound of human voices. But what did it matter really what I thought or felt?

But she didn't always bludgeon me with strange philosophy. Now and then when she appeared, she spoke of the practical things she'd learned. She was actually braver and more adventurous than I was. She taught me things.

We could sleep in the earth, she had ascertained that before we ever left France. Coffins and graves did not matter. And she would find herself rising naturally out of the earth at sunset even before she was awake.

And those mortals who did find us during the daylight hours, unless they exposed us to the sun at once, were doomed. For example, outside Palermo she had slept in a cellar far below an abandoned house, and when she had awakened, her eyes and face were burning as if they had been scalded, and she had in her right hand a mortal, quite dead, who had apparently attempted to disturb her rest.

"He was strangled," she said, "and my hand was still locked on his throat. And my face had been burned by the little light that leaked down from the opened door."

"What if there had been several mortals?" I asked, vaguely enchanted with her.

She shook her head and shrugged. She always slept in the earth now, not in cellars or coffins. No one would ever disturb her rest again. It did not matter to her.

I did not say so, but I believed there was a grace in sleeping in the crypt. There was a romance to rising from the grave. I was in fact going to the very opposite extreme in that I had coffins made for myself in places where we lingered, and I slept not in the graveyard or the church, as was our most common custom, but in hiding places within the house.

I can't say that she didn't sometimes patiently listen to me when I told her these things. She listened when I described to her the great works of art I had seen in the Vatican museum, or the chorus I had heard in the cathedral, or the dreams I had in the last hour before rising, dreams that seemed to be sparked by the thoughts of mortals passing my lair. But maybe she was watching my lips move. Who could possibly tell? And then she was gone again without explanation, and I walked the streets alone, whispering aloud to Marius and writing to him the long, long messages that took the whole night sometimes to complete.

What did I want of her, that she be more human, that she be like me? Armand's predictions obsessed me. And how could she not think of them? She must have known what was happening, that we were growing ever farther apart, that my heart was breaking and I had too much pride to say it to her.

"Please, Gabrielle, I cannot endure the loneliness! Stay with me."

By the time we left Italy I was playing dangerous little games with mortals. I'd see a man, or a woman -- a human being who looked perfect to me spiritually --  and I would follow the human about. Maybe for a week I'd do this, then a month, sometimes even longer than that. I'd fall in love with the being. I'd imagine friendship, conversation, intimacy that we could never have. In some magical and imaginary moment I would say: "But you see what I am," and this human being, in supreme spiritual understanding, would say: "Yes, I see. I understand."

Nonsense, really. Very like the fairy tale where the princess gives her selfless love to the prince who is enchanted and he is himself again and the monster no more. Only in this dark fairy tale I would pass right into my mortal lover. We would become one being, and I would be flesh and blood again.

Lovely idea, that. Only I began to think more and more of Armand's warnings, that I'd work the Dark Trick again for the same reasons I'd done it before. And I stopped playing the game altogether. I merely went hunting with all the old vengeance and cruelty, and it wasn't merely the evildoer I brought down.

In the city of Athens I wrote the following message to Marius:

"I do not know why I go on. I do not search for truth. I do not believe in it. I hope for no ancient secrets from you, whatever they may be. But I believe in something. Maybe simply in the beauty of the world through which I wander or in the will to live itself. This gift was given to me too early. It was given for no good reason. And already at the age of thirty mortal years, I have some understanding as to why so many of our kind have wasted it, given it up. Yet I continue. And I search for you."

How long I could have wandered through Europe and Asia in this fashion I do not know. For all my complaints about loneliness, I was used to it all. And there were new cities as there were new victims, new languages, and new music to hear. No matter what my pain, I fixed my mind on a new destination. I wanted to know all the cities of the earth, finally, even the far-off capitals of India and China, where the simplest objects would seem alien and the minds I pierced as strange as those of creatures from another world. .

But as we went south from Istanbul into Asia Minor, Gabrielle felt the allure of the new and strange land even more strongly, so that she was scarcely ever at my side.

And things were reaching a horrid climax in France, not merely with the mortal world I still grieved for, but with the vampires of the theater as well.