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After my unforgettable lesson on the excruciating agony that sunlight is able to inflict upon our kind, I assumed that I would never again feel a longing for the sun. Indeed, I knew Lestat to be many years older than me—though he, with his usual brash vanity and unspoken want for whatever control he could have over me, constantly refused to tell me his exact age—and I had never heard him express, nor seen him betray, any desire to witness the outside world during the daylight hours.
And yet, just a few months after I began my life as a vampire, I found myself wishing, with a fervor that I had rarely felt for anything, that I could once again go outside while the sun shined high overhead.
I began to dream of all the best and brightest days I had spent as a mortal man: I was walking to church with my siblings on a sweltering Sunday morning, our black shoes shining as they clicked along the pavement; I was reading a brand new novel while sprawled out on one of the chairs outside, having to squint to read the small-type text in the sharp winter sun; I was wandering the streets of New Orleans, with nothing to do and with nowhere to go, smiling to myself as I noted how the sunlight made my city’s rooftops gleam.
Every morning, as we slept, I saw scenes from a life that I knew I could never return to; and every evening, when I woke, it was to the gentle press of familiar fingers against my bloody, tear-stained cheeks, and Lestat’s voice, soft and worried, asking me what was wrong.
Despite all of the ways in which Lestat managed to wound me, he always comprehended me in a manner that no one else ever could; he appeared to intimately understand how painful it was for me to feel everything so deeply, and with so little self-control. In truth, I had hoped that receiving his dark gift would alleviate the depths to which my sorrows could sink—but, if anything, my turning only seemed to make my periods of melancholy and despair more potent than they had ever been before. Looking back, I believe Lestat to have been equally sympathetic, relieved, and intrigued by the fact that, even after “drinking the water,” I continued to be such a sensitive bleeding heart.
As I started to have those dreams of my days in the sun—my “sunlit dreams,” as I started to call them to myself—more and more often, I refused to tell Lestat anything about them. I am not sure which I feared more: that he would mock me for having them, in that brutally demoralizing way he had mastered over his long life, or that he would be utterly unable to appreciate why I would have them in the first place. Seeming to sense that pushing me would get him no answers, Lestat tolerated my silence on the subject; and, in another act of good faith, he acquiesced to my request that we sleep in separate coffins—I hate that I keep waking you up, I said, and I’m sure that this will pass soon, my love, you don’t need to worry—without so much as a word of protest.
However, as time went on, the dreams—or, one could argue, the nightmares—only increased in their intensity and frequency; and, in response, Lestat’s rapidly mounting concern for me, coupled with his obvious frustration at my refusal to admit what, exactly, was wrong, became harder to ignore with every passing night we spent in each other’s presence.
As sleep began to elude me entirely—for the constant dread of facing my sunlit dreams soon became greater than my need to rest—I found that I lost both the energy and the ability to engage in conversation altogether; and it was to fill the resulting quiet, which inevitably and uneasily settled over our home, that Lestat began to play the piano in earnest.
One who had only gotten the chance to know Lestat casually could easily make the mistake of assuming that he was not an emotional man; he seemed to have too much confidence, charisma, and cockiness to be someone who let things as fickle as feelings interfere with his day-to-day life. However, if anyone else had gotten the opportunity to listen to how he played during those dark and difficult nights, they would have learned that his capacity for feeling went far beyond what mere words could ever hope to express.
In the beginning, it was his own anxieties—and, on more than one occasion, his anger—that he reflected in the pieces he chose, and the style in which he played them; he let himself slam into the keys as a song rose into fortissimo, but was able to expertly restrain himself as the dynamics faded to pianissimo a few measures later. As he played, I pretended to read whatever book I had decided to pick up that night, lounging on the couch that—as it just so happened—was perfectly positioned to let us see each other, should we choose to look up, through the library’s open door. In truth, I never managed to read more than a few pages before I found myself completely lost in the music, raptly listening for all of the thoughts he sought to express to me through it; and I am quite sure he knew, as he sat down at the piano, that he always had my attention.
After those first few nights—nights which he clearly needed to spend airing his frustrations, for his own sake, after so many hours of sitting in silence—his choice in pieces noticeably changed; he flitted between different styles and composers, seeming to never find exactly what he was looking for... and, during the hushed hours that sometimes interrupted his playing, I would look over to find him writing intently on long sheets of paper, his concentration entirely fixed on whatever he was putting down. At last, one night, he started to play something entirely new: something soothing, and sanguine, and slow...
It was—as I soon found out—a piece that had been perfectly crafted to carry me swiftly into sleep.
When I next awoke, I found that Lestat had carried me from the couch into his own coffin, and had completely wrapped himself around me, in a way that gave me an immediate sense of safety. I briefly considered attempting to extricate myself without waking him, as I wanted to prevent him from witnessing any more of my weeping, should the sunlit dreams come again; but, in truth, I was both far too tired and far too comfortable to ever seriously consider moving… and, as I heard his whispered command to Go back to sleep, Louis, and felt him press a tender kiss to my temple, I found myself obeying him easily.
This new piece he had written subsequently became one he played each and every night. Right as the sun was about to rise, his gaze would always find mine, through the open library door; and, as he started to play the first few notes, I would allow the music to lull me down into peaceful nothingness.
I remember asking him whether the song had a name; he smiled widely at the question, and kissed me, deeply, before saying it was a sweet lullaby for my sweet Louis, and that it did not need to be titled, since it was made for absolutely no one else to hear but you and me.
After I had accumulated a full week of proper sleep, I no longer found myself drifting off while simply listening to the song. Instead, the increasingly familiar melody became a tool to help me relax, in a way I had not been able to ever since the sunlit dreams began. After he started playing it, I would always close my eyes, and do nothing but listen until he was finished; then, I would look up at him, as he moved to stand in front of me, and I would let him lead me to his coffin without a word.
The sunlit dreams still came to me occasionally, whenever they grew strong enough to break the somnolent spell that Lestat’s lullaby had cast upon me; I awoke early on those occasions, crying uncontrollably, clinging to Lestat in an instinctual need for comfort—and he, in response, would simply hold me even closer, shushing and singing me back into sleep in his low, sonorous voice.
Finally, one morning, as the darkness outside was just beginning to thin in anticipation of the approaching sunrise, I sat down next to him, on the piano bench, and told him of everything all at once: my agonizing longing for the sunlight, the sunlit dreams that still continued to haunt me, the reasons behind my initial unwillingness to tell him about any of this. While he stopped what he was doing as soon as I began to speak, he listened with his hands on the keys and his eyes cast downward, as if he might start playing again at any moment.
When I was finished, however, he immediately turned his gaze on me, and reached out to hold my left hand, which was closest to him, in both of his. We simply looked at each other for a moment—what was there for him to say, that we both had not already thought of ourselves?—and then he lifted my hand to his lips, and pressed a quick kiss to my skin. He squeezed my hand once as he whispered his response—Thank you for finally telling me, mon cher—and then let me go, turning once more to face the piano, and placing his capable, graceful hands back on the keys.
As he played the lullaby for me then, I found myself entranced with his beauty—and, in particular, with the way his golden hair shone in the wavering candlelight. I often wondered, during that time, how glorious he must have been to look at under the full light of the sun; for, while he was quite lovely in the silver moonlight, I am sure the sunlight had brought out the true depths of his beauty, back when he had been nothing more than a dashing mortal youth. I often felt both crestfallen and jealous when I came to the realization that there had been those who had seen him in the sun, and that I would never be one of those people.
And yet, as I looked at him then, I felt nothing but quiet awe and wonder; and I could scarcely believe that someone not only so beautiful, but also so able to create such beautiful things, had chosen me, out of all the people in all the world, to love. He truly was, in all senses of the phrase, the light of my life: he brought clarity and warmth into the darkest, coldest corners of my mind, and filled me with a happiness I had never known, before I called him mine.
I think that any reasonable reader of my story must find themself wondering how, in those early years, I could have been so loving and devoted to my maker; for he was, without a doubt, a manipulative, terrifying, and viciously violent vampire. When you next find yourself in one of those moments of wondering—when you find yourself thinking that I must have been willfully ignorant of Lestat’s true nature during our time in New Orleans, to have loved him as I did—I want you to remember this: he did, in his own way—in his own, imperfect, and ultimately harmful way—love me. Indeed, I am certain he loved me more than I ever loved him. And there is no gift that he ever gave me, or any gesture that he ever made, that pronounced his love more eloquently than the nameless lullaby he wrote for me, at the time when I needed him most.