Sample Journal Entries - Lestat de Lioncourt (Vampire Chronicles)
Hello, world. It’s your arch-nemesis, Lestat, again, reaching you across the internet, from merry old New York City. Suffice to say: the rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

I’m sure you remember me, I’m sure you know who I am (even if you won’t admit it), and so, I assume I need no introduction. I have things to say, and stories to tell, though few of them are the wild kind you may be expecting. There are stories of a woman, of a flood, of a love and a loss, and perhaps, soon, a strange new beginning. The internet seems the perfect water to float this barge on – funny to me, how easy it is to stumble across these words, and how hard it will be for you to believe them, whoever you are. A book is a real thing, a solid thing, a thing with promises. I’m tired of those. The internet is nothing. I may be a computer. I may be your fourteen-year-old cousin. I may be your brother, or your neighbour. Or I may be you.

I distract myself.

I’m living in New York, as I said. Some may think otherwise, but even regarding the events of the past decade, my apartment here is as familiarly comforting as ever. Or maybe it’s only a trick of the lights. I love the lights going up around the city, this time of year. Everything is constantly illuminated, electricity being what it is, but Christmas illumination is different. It sparkles, it coaxes that stupid blind optimism out of me. About what? About anything. I can’t take seriously the people who say they don’t feel anything at Christmas. You don’t have to be religious to feel something. The magic doesn’t come from religion – it’s manmade. Christmas is contrived magic, but contrived magic is worth appreciating. There is no natural magic anymore. Not that anyone takes notice of.

There are still, of course, better things to do in New York City, than mill around, staring at the sparkly things. I’ve been seeing a woman. In the ordinary sense of it. It’s odd; we go on dates, we have talks. Ordinarily, I never attempt such mundane things, and when I do, it’s loneliness that drives me. There was Louis, but he was not quite the same, and there was the boy after him. I haven’t done it since. And this was, the best I can figure, an accident. By the time I realized what I was doing, I’d already been knee-deep in it for some time.

Her name is Audrey, and she believes she’s a few years my senior. I don’t know what she believes about me. Like so many unfortunate people in this city, Audrey is a musician, and struggling. I won’t lie – she’s no unearthly talent. She plays the piano, and does it well. As a songwriter, she is sweet, innocent, fresh, but none of her poetry is poetry I’ve never heard. But her voice has that bell-like quality I love so much, like crystal, and that, I know, is what drew me to her.

When we met, she was pregnant, and singing in bars. It wouldn’t take much to turn around and call them “dives,” really. Everything about her was misplaced in these spots, her voice, her looks, her subject matter. There was something disturbing about it, like a particularly savage cartoon I once saw in a children’s magazine: a “Spot the Differences” puzzle featuring a fairy trapped in a spider’s web. The art was terrible except for, somehow, the wide-eyed face of the fairy, her mouth a tight, resigned line.

Before her pregnancy, Audrey had been doing well. She had a long booking at the Four Seasons, once. I remembered seeing her there. Singers are rarely, if ever, booked solely for their talents, though. As soon as they could no longer easily objectify her, they wanted her gone. The jobs got worse and worse, until I found her in front of me, a flickering light, singing Billie Holiday to the kind of people who have no idea “Billie” has ever been a woman’s name.

Her employer hassled her after the show. He insisted she would lose her job if she couldn’t work Fridays. She insisted she had no one to watch her daughter. I, for reasons I’m still not entirely sure of, stepped in. That’s a lie. I hate to see anyone bullied. And the expression on her face while he railed at her was all too like the fairy. I slew the spider. Metaphorically, anyway.

And then I took Audrey home. She stammered thanks, stammered apologies. No one had ever been that nice to her, she said. What could she do for me? She wanted to know. I wouldn’t hear it. I gave her a choice: take whatever money she would have made on a Friday night, or let me send a nanny to her. It took her the rest of the night, and the most coffee I’ve ever seen a person drink, before she agreed to the nanny.

I took her phone number, her address, and I arranged this. (I’m still shocked she gave them to me. Audrey has a naiveté that’s dangerous in a city like this. I’m not sure how she’s survived, except by sheer force of will. That isn’t always enough.) Saturday evening, I called her. Audrey was ecstatic. Her daughter loved the woman I sent. She made incredible tips that night. I was, again, the kindest person she’d ever met. It wasn’t true, what people told her about the city being full of terrible people. These are the things she said. And then she asked if I would let her invite me over for dinner.

I let her.

I fell in love twice, that Sunday night. Audrey is Audrey, with her pretty laugh, and her slow smiles, and the way she twists her napkin around her fingers when she’s flattered. There are more stories in one night with her than I’ve heard in many years with women well beyond twenty-eight. Stories in a look, stories in a movement. Stories in the little lapses between her words. The emotion pouring out of her is always uncanny.

And then there is Bridget. Bridget is Bridget, with her seven years, and her wild, green-flecked brown eyes, her curly pigtails. She’s a doll, and almost more interesting than her mother. For every story Audrey tells without a word at all, Bridget spouts out two or three. She told me about the nanny. She told me about her mother, and her brother (soon to come). She told me about the dog who lives down the street.

I haven’t been around children in a long time. You have to understand that this overwhelmed and frightened me beyond belief, on that first night, and has continued to do so, since I met this family. In every word this child said, I felt her becoming more important to me than her mother could ever be. I felt her becoming more threatening. Children know things. Unspoiled as they are by the realities of the world, they believe things that would make a grown-up roll her eyes. I can’t count the number of times a child has looked at me, and then stared, and the terrible sense of knowing that comes from them. Bridget, unfortunately, did none of this. If she had, I might have left that night, and never come back.

I came back the next night, and nearly every night after. I became the boyfriend. I was there with Audrey’s mother, when the baby was born. Kennedy. Not a name I would have chosen, but it sounds right in Audrey’s mouth, and the infant never seems too appalled. That was October, just before Halloween. I thought it might have upset some balance, my intrusion in the beginning of a life. It surprised me, when it didn’t. I was there when he was born, I was one of the first to hold him, and yet it hasn’t affected him in any way. There’s no strange quality in him. He sleeps, he cries a little, he watches and half smiles. Kennedy is yet another piece of evidence in the case against our affecting anything that goes on in the world. I can witness creation, but create nothing, and upset nothing, ultimately.

The life I have with these people is both average and strange. Strange to me, average to the onlookers. That, in itself, makes it strange. When have I ever led a life that didn’t make people stop and turn? Often, really, but I never believe that’s true, until I try to think of it. Didn’t I live, the same as this, with my little family at the dawn of the 19th century? And here I am, two hundred years later, feigning sleep on a couch, breathing in all the smells of the apartment, a baby dozing on my chest, Bridget reading the Chronicles of Narnia to the plastic horses that graze on the floor.

I’ve bought her a wardrobe for Christmas. It’s an antique, with all the scuffs and marks and intricate carving she could want. At her last birthday, Audrey bought her a lamp in the shape of the forest lamppost. Bridget plays that she is Queen Lucy, and I am King Edmund. I’ve fallen again, and she must save me. Some nights, I die for my mistakes, and she rides her wild horses to the mountains, in search of magic cures. She always triumphs. I always rise. She’d never imagine how it makes me laugh and cry, when she’s gone.

But the game, I’m afraid, is up. Six months is a long time, and if you asked, I’d have to say I’m not sure how I’ve avoided all of Audrey’s predictable questions, up until now. What do I do? I’m independently wealthy, a trust-fund kid. But what do I do? I haunt libraries, slip behind the scenes of charitable organizations. All true, and yet all pretty, pacifying lies. I catch glimpses of disbelief from her, sometimes, and it makes me laugh to know she thinks of organized crime. Me, in the mob. And yet it would shock my Audrey to her foundations, if she knew the hits I make, the men who fall.

She is willing to believe in my innocence, however. She believes because I say I love her, and her children say they love me, and I rescue her like the tower damsel she was. She believes because I’ve improved her life in ways she never could have – it’s true! It may be my money she notices, but my efforts have found her better bookings, more tolerant and helpful managers. If I left her high and dry, she wouldn’t fall. Her feet have found her.

It’s gorgeous, to see her in the clubs now. Her voice is clearer, I even think. There’s happiness flowing through her that was never there before. To think I have anything to do with it is stupid, at best. I’m a financier. I’m a talker. I flatter her, and she believes me, and it’s the belief that makes her better. It’s always been in her, this power she has now. How cliché, that she didn’t notice it before. Believe me when I say I would claim more responsibility, if I could, but I’m only a vessel, and a messenger. Audrey is an angel.

But the questions aren’t only questions of money, you see. There’s the question of intimacy, a thousand questions of it, and of love. If I love her, won’t I move in to stay? It’s not appropriate. But the children want me there, she says! It’s tempting, really, but impossible. I tell her it’s tempting, anyway. It’s not, in the conventional sense. I don’t feel compelled to find a way to give in. There’s no real desire in me, just a feeling that there should be one. The feeling of, “in another place, or another time.”

The sex question is a funny one. I’ve made up some revoltingly moral story about waiting for my wife. Do men do that? She asks. I told her the kind of story a woman would like, that I was a nihilist for a few years, the kind of nihilism that comes with a rich family and a driver’s license. One thing led to another, namely a drug-induced brush with death, and I decided to change. It’s a laughable story, because no one really does change, do they? I never have. But she believed it, and I think she loved me more, after.

She once asked me why I didn’t cut out the charade and just marry her. She laughed when she said it, and she was a little drunk, so I’ve tried to hope she didn’t understand what she was saying. I told her as much. She never said it again, but every so often, in the same way I would catch the little drifts of suspicion, I would get the sense she was angry I hadn’t taken her seriously.

I wonder what new suspicions will crop up after me. When I write the inevitable letter, I wonder how strong the urge to tell the truth will be. Do you remember the gothic rock band in the 80s? I was that monster. I disappeared then, and I must disappear now, but if you go and find the old press photos…you’ll know it’s true. If you spent the whole of your new fortune looking for me, you would never find me. Do you see how silly your fears were? Do you think I’m wicked now? It was more of a charade than you imagined.

Goodbye, Audrey. Perhaps, years from now, I will come like a phantom out of the night, and frighten you. Perhaps you will remember me, and hate me, and perhaps you will not. I don’t know. But I will remember you, and love you, and hope that my efforts to protect your children from my own ghastly dreams will not have been fruitless ones. Rest assured, I’ll see you again, in that place between the dreams and waking, where they don’t quite seem ghastly, so much as they seem real.