The voices of the Undead said it was the Mother, Akasha, who’d been slaughtering her children, that ancient Egyptian Queen. Lestat had been taken prisoner by her. Elders were gathering. Antoine, like so many others, was prey to strange dreams. Frantically he played his violin in the streets to surround himself with a solitude he could manage and sustain.

And then the immortal voices of the world fell silent.

Some catastrophe had emptied the planet of blood drinkers.

It seemed he was the last left alive. From city to city he went playing his violin for coins on street corners, sleeping once again in graveyards and abandoned cellars, emerging hungry, dazed, longing for some refuge that seemed beyond his reach. He slipped into crowded taverns or nightclubs in the evening, just to feel human warmth around him, bodies brushing against him, to swim in the sound of happy human voices, and the aroma of blood.

What had become of Lestat? Where was he, that shining Titian in his red-velvet frock coat and lace, who had roared with such confidence and power from the rock music stage? He did not know, and he wanted to know, but more acutely he wanted to survive, consciously, in this new world, and he set out to accomplish this.

In Chicago, he managed actual lodgings, and realized reasonable sums from his street-corner playing, and soon a band of mortals gathered to greet him when he appeared each evening. It was a simple matter to move to bars and restaurants again, and once more he found himself seated at the piano in a darkened nightclub with the twenty-dollar bills filling the brandy snifter beside the music stand.

In time he leased an old three-story white frame house in a suburb called Oak Park that was made up of such beautiful structures, and he bought an old steamer trunk in which to sleep by day, and his own piano. He liked his mortal neighbors. He gave them money to hire the gardener or the cleaning lady for him that they recommended. Sometimes he even swept the sidewalks himself in the very early hours of the morning with a big yellow broom. He liked that, the scrape scrape of the broom, and the leaves piled up, curling and brown, and the pavement so clean. Must we disdain all mortal things?

The streets of Oak Park with their great trees were soothing to him. Soon he was shopping in brightly lighted emporiums for decent clothes. And in his comfortable parlor from midnight till dawn he watched television, learning all about this modern world in which he’d emerged, how things were done, how things had to be. A steady stream of dramas, soap operas, news broadcasts, and documentaries soon taught him everything.