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I ran every red light just to see
If your grave still had room for me
I love you like I love being hungry.
In the dank and dirty hovel that had once been a splendorous monument to eighteenth century architecture, Lestat slept.
Beneath the dust and decay of the Rue Royale house, there lingered a glimmer of its former opulence, the old bones of wood, plaster, and peeling wallpaper harkening back to a time when the banisters gleamed with polish and Persian rugs covered the floors.
Now it was a mausoleum. A dwelling for rats. The shutters had eroded from their window frames, which were walled off now with mildewing boards. The floor was littered with yellowed newspapers and torn pages of books, and glittering crystal remnants of the chandelier that once hung magnificently from the vaulted ceiling crunched underfoot. Looters had come and gone, taking whatever they appraised to be of value – the rest had been left behind, until what remained was little more than the picked-clean carcass of some great, long-dead beast left to rot.
It was here that Lestat had laid himself to rest, a self-imposed punishment for his part in the child vampire Claudia’s death. He had entombed himself in this dreadful solitude, away from all who loved him and all who despised him.
Armand felt both sentiments in equal measure. For who but Lestat could inspire in him such despairing adoration? Who else could make of love a religion, and of Armand its most pitiful, abstemious disciple?
The truth of the matter was that Armand had only ever known devotion. It was the only way he could love. And he had loved Lestat since he had first crawled up from the catacombs to watch him traipse through the streets of Paris with all the misguided confidence of a young god. And he loved him still, in his silence and in his absence, as the faithful love their distant Holy Father, to whom they devote their lives for the promise of eternal paradise.
Armand would never have that privilege. Heaven would not take him. Neither would Lestat.
The bitterest part was that Lestat would never know who returned to him faithfully as he slept. He would never know that Armand kept vigil in this cold, forsaken place, that he chased away the feckless squatters who dared to trespass, that it was Armand who had boarded up the windows to ensure that – should Lestat ever awaken and stagger, famished and weak into the corridor – the cruel sun would not be there to claim him.
He would never know that Armand shared his company through those endless nights, sometimes perched beside his coffin, reading by the tremulous light of a single candle yet another book that would join the rest in the graveyard of tattered volumes strewn across the floorboards.
Nor would Lestat know that Armand would sometimes lay there, draped across the polished casket lid – the only surface in the entire dilapidated manor routinely swept clean of cobwebs and dust. That in those moments, he would envision Lestat lying in repose beneath him, so close and yet so horribly apart, and he would languish there until the candle guttered and the dark claimed them both, until dusk became dawn became dusk once more.
If any were to behold Armand then, they might mistake him for a marble statue of a weeping angel collapsed upon the tomb of a lost love – an effigy to grief for the loss of a lover they could not follow into death.
Lestat slept alone. In his interminable silence, Armand felt the full weight of eternity pressing upon him, the relentless march of time offering no reprieve. He could not be sure when, or if, Lestat would awaken, or whether would ever look upon him again, even in disdain.
The silence became a torment unto itself. Armand longed for even the subtlest sign that Lestat might stir beneath the coffin lid, that he might one day open his eyes and see Armand there waiting for him. The longing grew and grew and became like a physical wound, Lestat’s indifference like an amputation – and Armand, ever enduring, ever desperate, sought ways to make himself seen.
So he began to bring Lestat flowers.
He would visit on nights that held a special, secret significance to him alone. It was never questioned by Louis, who would often disappear for days on end to lose time among his art, his accrued fortune, and all the numbing routines that now constituted his penance. Neither spoke of where the other went, nor of what sacred ghosts they each tended to in the dark.
The offerings he left on Lestat’s altar changed with every visit. At first, Armand came bearing fragrant wild roses that had been stolen from the gardens of the Quarter, their petals bruised from the plucking, their thorns scratching his palm ineffectually when he wished they would pierce him instead. Then came red camellias, vibrant and lustrous, which became little more than browned remains when he returned again with a bouquet of white clover and baby’s breath. Another night he brought a bundle of violet heliotropes bound by a silk bow, which months later had rotted away with all the rest, lying untouched on Lestat’s coffin, which bore no evidence that he had ever stirred at all.
Tonight, Armand stole into the boarded up house with forget-me-nots tied together with a leather cord. He knew these would wither like all his offerings before, until the dust they made was unrecognizable as the rest had become. Yet he placed them atop Lestat’s coffin all the same, and hoped against all hope that when he returned again another night, he might see that they had toppled onto the grimy floor, or disappeared into the yawning darkness of the casket to be cherished by their intended recipient.
Sometimes he wondered if the old stories were true – if flowers could keep the restless dead in their graves, and what it might mean if it was by his meddling that Lestat would not – could not – rise from his dreamless sleep. He would be Armand's kept thing.
“Would that make you mine?” he mused aloud into the impenetrable dark. He sat at the foot of Lestat’s coffin, tearing a page from the book he was reading by the candle’s dim glow and letting it flutter to the ground like a plucked petal. It was a passage from Teasdale, and it joined the other excerpts he had left discarded on the floor, which he knew would only ever exist as debris beneath Lestat’s feet if he ever stirred. Laughable, to imagine the golden-haired fiend would ever stoop to read them.
I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be…
“If I could not sense you slumbering there, and if I did not know you are too insufferably obstinate to die, I would think this an empty coffin.” It was not the first time Armand spoke to Lestat as though he could hear him. It was a fantasy he indulged often, that they shared in this silence together, that they might converse – that, if nothing else, Lestat would listen to him, and think of him, and they would suffer this lonely existence side by side.
He drew a slow breath, eyes fixed on the coffin’s polished surface.
“Everyone I have ever loved has left me," he said quietly. "I speak not of Louis, of course – he remains my enduring companion, even when he wanders.”
Armand knew Lestat must not have heard him, for the mere mention of Louis would have surely stirred him into a fit of desolate rage or irrepressible sorrow.
He continued speaking all the same.
“I do not know if they ever loved me at all, those who left, and if that is why they could not bring themselves to stay. Or if I was the one who did not love them enough, or embrace them tightly enough, and it is because I am deficient in something vital. Perhaps that is why all who claim to love me cannot bear to keep me.”
The old rafters creaked; an animal shuffled somewhere in the stifling dark.
Still Lestat slept. Armand wondered what would happen if he unlatched the lock of his coffin and crawled inside, or pulled Lestat from his grave and held him until his bones cracked and he stirred finally from sleep. Why should he be permitted to sleep while Armand wept? Why should he enjoy the mercy of an easeful death?
“But you never promised me your heart,” he whispered, bitterness rasping at the edges of his voice. “You were the first to show me honesty, when you turned me away and told me you could not give what I begged you for.”
He set the book down. He wanted to throw it at Lestat instead. He wanted to rage, to yell: Say something to me, you revenant cur! Hate me or love me, but do not deny me – do not leave me in this silence alone, for without you I am nothing!
But the words did not come. He rose to his feet, and still they stuck behind his teeth, and caught in his throat, and it was all he could do not to reach out to Lestat’s mind like a lost child reaching for his mother’s hand.
“If only you had said yes to me,” he murmured, “we could have had each other in this terrible loneliness. Who else will ever know me as you have known me? Who else will ever know you as I have, or love you as I do?”
He waited for a voice that would not answer, but it was no less devastating than all the times before when silence prevailed.
And yet he knew would return to this unsatisfying vigil. Again, and again, and again – there was no other path to take that would not lead him here, when the gaping loneliness of his and Louis’ San Francisco apartments threatened to swallow him whole. He could not be alone. It was unbearable to have only himself as company in this infernal eternity. He was a stranger to himself, and it frightened him.
So there came no rage, finally; it dissipated from him as quickly as it had animated him, until he was left only with his heavy heart, which pulled him down atop the coffin lid. He was tired, so very tired. Half a millenia of exhaustion, and there might yet be another half a millenia more, and how the thought made him feel infinitely small and infinitely weary, until Armand could do nothing but surrender to a fitful rest as he lay across Lestat’s coffin.
Sleep came in spite of himself. In that liminal space between the waking and the dreaming, he imagined he could hear the faintest stirring below, the subtlest whisper of a gasp that could have been the wind rattling outside.
“Of course it would be you.”
Of course. Of course. The dismissal! The disdain! And yet so tremulous was the voice, so thin and weak as if spoken from a parched throat, from a body starved of blood and air – a body that would not move from its grave, even when it spoke as if alive again. For a moment, a sliver of impossible happiness pierced the ever-present gloom, and Armand dared to believe his hope had not been for naught.
…Then he awoke.
The candle’s light had snuffed out, the wick burned down to a melted stub of cold wax. Time had passed without his noticing, and the dying glow of the setting sun was beginning to press against the covered windows.
Desperately, he reached out to Lestat’s mind, but was met with that same, sleeping silence of the dreamless slumber in which he had entombed himself.
His heart contracted violently. A dream. What else could it have been? The forget-me-nots lay untouched, the scattered clippings of torn book pages remained exactly where Armand had left them. A dream. Or Lestat had fed him this one paltry scrap of recognition in an effort to drive him mad, to spite him, to infuriate and entice him.
“You are a contemptible fiend,” Armand hissed into the dark, his eyes welling; somehow he was convinced beyond all reason that Lestat had heard him, that within his satin-lined coffin, the golden-haired devil was smiling. A cruel, languid smile that held in his mocking laughter, the kind that had always made Armand simultaneously ache and rage, as though the world had been reduced to that single, maddening sound.
Armand stood. And as he left the room and sealed the hidden door behind him, he imagined Lestat’s voice following him, a sensual purr that curled in his mind like amorphous smoke.
“Send Louis all my love, my grave-defiling little gremlin.”