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These pre-interviews were growing tiresome.
Off camera and away from the soundstage, Lestat and the Dark Gift’s latest mistake were stashed away in a squat, poorly-lit backroom. With only a desk and two seats placed among stacks of boxes and filing cabinets and strung up notes on a cork-board, the room was suffocating, windowless, and unbearably intimate.
A fact Lestat’s interviewer used to his advantage and delight. He enjoyed demanding Lestat’s attention. Removed from human eyes and hot mics, the swivel-eyed Daniel Molloy spun constantly in his desk chair, pelting out his endless pre-screened questions.
“Okay, can we talk about the journals?” he gesticulates about, mind racing at a nauseating speed. “I’m telling ya, I’ve been dying to talk about the journals, man. We gotta, we gotta get into it. The viewers need us to get into it. They’re expecting it, for us to really sink our teeth in it, you feel me?”
Lestat does not in fact feel him. Save for the unfortunate occasional knocking of knees from under this assuredly small desk because Molloy could not hold still for anything.
“Her writings are off-limits,” Lestat replies flatly. “You know this already. The agreement was made before we began.”
Daniel sniffs hard, shaking his head as he pulls a cigarette and metal capped lighter from his front pocket. The air soon reeks of smoke. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I read your rider. Read all eighteen paragraphs of the subsection demand there would be absolutely zero Claudia talk, ever. But c’mon . I mean, really. Come the fuck on! Lestat, baby! You came here to do a tell-all. She’s a pretty big part of the all that needs telling. And if you’re worried we don’t have the originals, I’ve got excerpts backed up to the cloud and the blurbs that got reworked into chapter four and eight. We could—”
“We will not,” Lestat demands. “Next question.”
A precarious dollop of ash hangs fretfully close to falling into Molloy’s own lap. He fails to notice. He’s too busy tossing out his quaint little zingers and justifications. He’s a rabid animal, through and through. Overexcited, firing on every possible front, a slave to his own unfocused mind, tending to lose track of thoughts and resume them with warning or clear cause.
Youth and the Dark Gift never melded well. Molloy was mere months into his afterlife and could barely keep up a mundane front for his victims he so often scared away, let alone the staff. Alone with another vampire, he made no effort to shield his change. He ran hotter, looser at the mouth. Dangerously so on the point of the latter.
“Fine, fine. We can table Claudia for now. It’s not like she’s going anywhere,” he shrugs amiably. Lestat grinds his teeth. Feels his fangs sharpen as he says nothing.
Molloy takes his as good as any other sign he should continue.
“So if we don’t wanna talk big picture, let’s get dirty with the small stuff. The nitty-gritty details, yknow? Like the timeline for starters, woo, it’s a real mess.” Molloy shuffles around his endless piles of scribbling, pausing his frenetic search only to look up at Lestat with yet another new question burning in his glassy eyes. “Any chance you picked up a habit of keeping a datebook sometime in the 1800s? No? ‘Kay, no matter, it’s fine. I can work with that. I can work with anything—”
Lestat truly rethinks the threats he walked back about eviscerating their team of producers. The lackwits swore there was nothing to be done in the matter of finding more acceptable arrangements. Every time they moved them in the past they found new stagehands and an endless supply of Team Armand groupies lurking beyond the door, all straining ears and mobile devices set to RECORD.
And every time Lestat had tried to forgo the initial interview stages altogether something horrid came to pass on camera. Molloy had, for all his violent delirium, a shockingly astute ability for recall and a steady arsenal of handpicked quotes from Louis that he never failed to confront Lestat with. It was infuriating, really, how disarming he could be from behind the camera.
Louis said it this way.
Louis said it happened that way.
Louis mentioned. Louis stated. Louis commented. Louis wondered. Louis claimed. On and on, Molloy found new ways of slipping in little pieces of his time with Louis. All their many, many talks. Though Lestat hated it, his quoted evidence was too accurate to Louis’ manners and style to be denied. And it was more than editorializing from that brick of a book the publishers parade around. All of it had the trimmings of their more private conversations together. Of the confidence Louis shared with this unworthy cretin.
It made Lestat twitch to think about too long. Made him want to open Molloy’s skull and shake out every trace of Louis he housed there.
“Hey, pal, I can feel you thinking about killing me.” Molloy taps his brow, finger rapid as a bird’s beak to hollow tree bark. “That’s a non-starter, too, remember? We both know Louis won’t forgive you.”
Molloy smiled. Lestat restrained himself, giving a faux smile of his own. He needed this documentary. He needed to make a splash. He needed all eyes off Louis, diverted back to him. And he needed Molloy to do it.
”Now back to business. Our timeline here and here doesn’t really match up.”
“ Our timeline?” Lestat bends forward, incredulous. Of course he has the audacity to include himself. He feels right at home in this story, doesn’t he? A child’s sense of ownership in matters that did not belong to him. “You may want to think on rephrasing that.”
He doesn’t hear Lestat, continuing on.
“We still need hard dates for your age and turning, but nothing we’ve got so far holds water. First you talked about Armand finding you in 1795 and how his coven revealed themselves after you had been a vampire for four years. Meaning you were turned in 1791, except—” Molloy raises one irritatingly quibbling finger as he thumbs through his piles of notes. “You’ve also said you first drank the blood in 1794. Small margin of error there, either way, but jesus, youve also tossed out the year 1781, which is a completely different and fucks up our whole timeline—”
“You are boring me.” It’s a warning. One a smarter soul would heed.
“Hey, I’m on your side here! I’m the one trying to make sure you don’t get trolled in the feedback loop of some wannabe goths-R-us reddit comment section. You’re lucky you’re doing this with me now, by the way, and not ten years ago. Y’know, back before the fascists made fact checking on twitter a fucking moot point. You would’ve been eaten alive—”
“Not a single one of those words mean anything to me.”
“Don’t try to pull that clueless ancient luddite shit with me. I’ve seen you scrolling through the app store on your phone.”
Louis , Lestat reminded himself. All of this was for Louis. He couldn’t kill him because of Louis. Lestat needed him for Louis.
“But again, whatever! We can hammer out the dates later. We’ve got plenty of material to work through.” He turns over more of his notes, furiously running bullet points. “Now this here is the good stuff. And not to riff too hard off of the DSM-5, but we’ve got to talk about this Nicki character.” Molloy wiggles his brow to punctuate the question, wrists turning in circles as if to lead Lestat on for more. “He’s a player in act one but we have to find the right angle. He needs a hook, something beyond the textbook manic depressive, that is. And oh, I should ask, was Nick the first in codifying your sad and sullen type or was there someone even crazier before him?”
Lestat smiles blankly. “Type?”
“Yeah. Your predilection for fucking the mentally unsound…” He squints at Lestat’s face, shocked for the first time he isn’t following. “Pal, did you read any of the thinkpieces my people sent over to your people? Or skim it, at least? Plenty of armchair psychology in the work ups, but the retrospectives on Louis with his whole schizoaffective disorder are must-reads—”
The armrest beneath Lestat’s hand is liable to snap in half.
“Louis is not insane.”
“Okay. Sure.” Molloy nods, seemingly winking. “But Nicki was. He reads like a bonafide whackjob. And your thread of long lost depressed lovers, I mean, people are going to notice the commonality. It reads like a movie plot, all the parallels between them. You might as well get out in front of it.”
“Louis and Nicolas are nothing alike.”
“Sorry, but I gotta call bullshit. Two sad pretty boys, lost in life, tempted to the darkness and failing to live up to vampirism? No matter how you slice it, the only real difference is one of them outlasted their suicidal streak—”
The wooden desk splits and the wall trembles.
In his mind’s eye, Lestat closes his fist over the insipid little creature’s throat. Molloy bends double, wheezing thinly. He’s frantic as he shakes and his shoes flinging off his feet as they kick like those of a man strung up in the gallows. Begging soundlessly, he tries reaching for Lestat but it’s no use. His nails scrabble at his neck next, digging hopeless trenches into the skin. Those eyes bulge, fit to burst, veins exploding red and staining the sclera. A muzzle of spittle drips from his lips when he manages to get the most meager of words out.
“I’m… telling… Louis…”
Though he had never once touched Molloy, Lestat lets go as if burned.
Molloy drops to the ground properly, sucking in worthless air he doesn’t actually need. When he looks up from the dingy carpet, he’s all grins. A sincere look of triumph on his face as he lets Lestat’s mind run away with his threat.
“You will tell Louis nothing of this!” Lestat hisses. He hates this. The very nature of the threat forever hanging over his head, in the hands of this ingrate. Lestat could crush him. He could paper the walls with Molloy’s skin. He could bury him in so much rubble to make a coffin from which he would never escape. He could, he could—
Deftly, Molloy straightens his glasses when he stands. “Put Claudia’s diaries back on the table and Louis never hears about this.”
“Allez vous faire foutre!” The scream rips from his mouth down the hallways. He’s ripped the door off its hinges upon his exit again, dropping it in his wake. He’s near murderous, arms crossed, stamping, muttering a thousand curses.
At the other end of the corridor, Molloy jubilantly waves him off.
“Great idea! Let’s take thirty!”