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By faith and music, the walls of Jericho were permitted to fall.
When Antoine was permitted to enter Trinity Gate, that formidable partition between salvation and the torment of his continued isolation, Armand’s hospitality disarmed him. Yet Louis’ mercy had unmoored him utterly.
All can be pardoned when you are impervious to time, perhaps; for time is not impervious to us. Whether by its destructions or reformations.
When his gracious host, this infernal beauty with hair of fire floss, led the weary musician to his suite, Antoine was offered a bath.
“Decades of touch starvation takes a heavy toll,” Armand had explained impassively, his gaze both appraising and patient. Waiting for consent with apparent ambivalence to either outcome. Steam clamored to the grand mirrors.
Armand’s eyes were saccharine as honey, with their spindle-ended stewards forever scurrying behind the combs. Calculating, yes. But he was not as cravenly as unilaterally described from his own memoir, from Louis’ or Lestat’s. If they could only see him now, perhaps, their old impressions might be rendered obsolete.
Chords from the grand piano downstairs felt like a caress. Inexplicably beguiled, Antoine all too willingly undressed.
When Armand lathered the soap into Antoine’s hair, he hadn’t yet suspected that he was not the true intended recipient of such kindness. That this grace was an offering on the grounds of contrition, for wrongs committed long before Antoine’s time.
But it was more than sufficient for him. Antoine had died as he had lived, after all: in the shadow of someone else.
Antoine had been the second virtuoso of Lestat’s fledglings, and certainly not the most significant (if he could claim to have ever had significance at all).
He had first been inducted into the blood not by his own merit, but for the uncanny resemblance he bore to someone else. Little did Antoine realize he and Louis shared this commonality among the innumerable, also. They were but two vestiges who had sprung from the dark night of someone else’s soul.
Antoine learned of Nicolas de Lenfent from The Vampire Lestat , though he had cast an odious presence in Lestat’s vague recollections from time to time. Perhaps as a consolation, backhanded though it was. You are not my Louis. Louis is my Louis. You just so happen to remind me of someone else.
The nights passed not with strained civility, but with more intimacy than Antoine had ever known. Louis, elegantly reclining in the balmy half-light of the parlor, reading passages from William Faulkner soliciting Antoine’s interpretations, “from one southerner to another”, with rapt intrigue.
And, of course, Benji doling out ‘subtlety’ with a heavy hand and a hatted head. “did you and Lestat ever compose original pieces together? – you did? Great, maybe you can play it, pass it off as your own. Then his righteous indignation will provoke him out of hiding.”
They had been sitting in the courtyard, fragrant with nocturnal flora. Louis was kneeling next to the morning glories, admiring the little white trumpets. Armand was looking at Benji, his eyes resplendent with pride, his lips pursed with the usual wry amusement.
“It was never finished,” Antoine confessed.
To which Armand followed, without a beat missed: “May I offer a recommendation?”
Conversation, apart from composition, was not Sybelle’s modus operandi. Yet Antoine fell in sync with her quite naturally. Oh, she did speak, effusively, and with much to say. But to the classically untrained ear, she confided her heart within the scores scrawled across sheet music.
So long had Antoine ached for companionship, he strained to hear all the inferred whispers, even in the note rests.
Hers was a shock of flaxen rivulets, champagne cascading down her back, piano posture taut as his bowstring. Chopin's Fantaisie Impromptu sent momentum through her fingers like windchimes, if only the breeze were so impossibly exacting.
Sybelle, a true instrumentalist. Serene in the most austere sense, she was a mirror, like the face of the moon on the sea. What of herself lurked fifty fathoms beneath the placid surface? In her eyes, Antoine could find the luster in every jewel buried inside her wrecked ships.
Musicians, who almost practice something like mediumship, have a tendency to merge vessels with their instruments. The best musicians lose themselves in that fusion. Their creative process together was such a labyrinth for Antoine and Sybelle to lose themselves in. To seek out their respective Minotaurs.
It wasn’t until they began to reconstruct some semblance of harmony out of these discordant scraps – a half-hearted piece only partially rendered by long-lost Maker and wayward fledgling – that the musicians deepened the substance of their conversations.
Their rapport was one of telepathy. They made a game of keeping pace with the tempo of a piece, kept in rhythm with the melody of it, layered their music with confessions and intimate disclosures.
‘Before I was made, I loved Armand even in his ruination. It was all I knew of him.’
‘Yes. Lestat, likewise, came to me ruined.’
‘We have loved them unconditionally, haven’t we?’
'Yes. Helpless. Hideous. Monstrous. No less beloved for it. Perhaps even more.’
‘Still, Armand would not have made me. If by his will, I would not be here now.’
‘Precisely because he loves you. Do you believe Lestat turned me out of love?’
There was a truly phantasmagoric synergy between them. Difficult to ignore when one heard them, downright irrefutable when one observed them. The Song Gift , Armand had so anointed this phenomena with facetious fondness.
Once, he walked in on the evocative, romantic trill of Purcell's Three Parts upon a Ground:
‘In my bereavement, I could only play the Appassionata. Grief entraps us in maddening repetition. We can only play one singular piece of music, perhaps. If we are lucky, with variations.’
‘Woe, then, to those variations.’
‘Forgive him for failing to see you as your own composition, rather than the turrets of some greater piece. You came here, didn’t you, playing at the gate, at the risk of certain extermination… to be heard?’
Antoine met her eyes. They had so long been imploring him for his. She’d never reached for his before, yet at obtaining her conquest, she even smiled. Antoine flushed the red of his own blood.
‘You have become your own composition, Antoine. It took you time. So much so, you may have spent one mortal lifetime lost in the anonymity of someone else’s melody. Lestat gave you time, and so here you’ve come, and here you are. Tragically, music was no salvation for Nicolas, was it? Not like you. Nothing like you.’
Armand drew back, as though stricken. When he retreated, Sybelle’s gaze settled on the space Armand left in his vacancy. Sybelle’s note of beckoning reverberated like a haunt through the corridor, however, and drew him back:
“Armand?” she called. “Won’t you come and see? I’ve something to show you. Something you seem to have missed. Antoine, come. Join me on the bench, won’t you?”
Sybelle, who might have asked and henceforth received any request of any vampire, for such purity and beauty was worth its volume in the collective ichor of the first brood, was met with acquiescence.
Gentle Antoine, obliging the accompaniment by bowing low before taking a seat. Armand, only marginally more curious than crestfallen for having now understood the flawed premise of his repentance. For had he not only perpetuated Lestat’s transgressions? Had his grandiloquent hospitality towards Antoine not also been in the service of Nicolas’ memory?
Then Sybelle made a little flourish with her hands.
Yes. Her hands. Hers and Antoine’s hands, wrists overlapping in procession, down the ivories, up once more. Slow, sinuous, demonstrative. Sybelle, holding her beloved Armand’s gaze. From her chest, a resplendent burst, a fervent pulse of adoration, and all for him.
‘Do you not see? You have given our Antoine an additional pair of hands.’
Then she reached beside her, braided Antoine’s fingers through her own, which he received with an adoring squeeze. Armand breathed in a laugh that sounded a little like weeping, too. And so they played on, hand in hand, just like that.