reason, surely, for granting me a life which will last until the end of the world; but he was not a
very discriminating person. He didn't consider the world's small population of vampires as being
a select club, I should say. He had human problems, a blind father who did not know his son was
a vampire and must not find out. Living in New Orleans had become too difficult for him,
considering his needs and the necessity to care for his father, and he wanted Pointe du Lac.
"We went at once to the plantation the next evening, ensconced the blind father in the master
bedroom, and I proceeded to make the change. I cannot say that it consisted in any one step
really---though one, of course, was the step beyond which I could make no return. But there were
several acts involved, and the first was the death of the overseer. Lestat took him in his sleep. I
was to watch and to approve; that is, to witness the taking of a human life as proof of my
commitment and part of my change. This proved without doubt the most difficult part for me.
I've told you I had no fear regarding my own death, only a squeamishness about taking my life
myself. But I had a most high regard for the life of others, and a horror of death most recently
developed because of my brother. I had to watch the overseer awake with a start, try to throw oft
Lestat with both hands, fail, then lie there struggling under Lestat's grasp, and finally go limp,
drained of blood. And die. He did not die at once. We stood in his narrow bedroom for the better
part of an hour watching him die. Part of my change, as I said. Lestat would never have stayed
otherwise. Then it was necessary to get rid of the overseer's body. I was almost sick from this.
Weak and feverish already, I had little reserve; and handling the dead body with such a purpose
caused me nausea. Lestat was laughing, telling me callously that I would feel so different once I
was a vampire that I would laugh, too. He was wrong about that. I never laugh at death, no
matter how often and regularly I am the cause of it.
"But let me take things in order. We had to drive up the river road until we came to open fields and leave the overseer there. We tore his coat, stole his money, and saw to it his lips were stained
with liquor. I knew his wife, who lived in New Orleans, and knew the state of desperation she
would suffer when the body was discovered. But more than sorrow for her, I felt pain that she
would never know what had happened, that her husband had not been found drunk on the road
by robbers. As we beat the body, bruising the face and the shoulders, I became more and more
aroused. Of course, you must realize that all this time the vampire Lestat was extraordinary. He
was no more human to me than a biblical angel. But under this pressure, my enchantment with
him was strained. I had seen my becoming a vampire in two lights: The first light was simply
enchantment; Lestat had overwhelmed me on my deathbed. But the other light was my wish for
self-destruction. My desire to be thoroughly damned. This was the open door through which
Lestat had come on both the first and second occasion. Now I was not destroying myself but
someone else. The overseer, his wife, his family. I recoiled and might have fled from Lestat, my
sanity thoroughly shattered, had not he sensed with an infallible instinct what was happening.
Infallible instinct..." The vampire mused. "Let me say the powerful instinct of a vampire to whom even the slightest change in a human's facial expression is as apparent as a gesture. Lestat
had preternatural timing. He rushed me into the carriage and whipped the horses home. 'I want to
die,' I began to murmur. 'This is unbearable. I want to die. You have it in your power to kill me.
Let me die.' I refused to look at him, to be spellbound by the sheer beauty of his appearance. He
spoke my name to me softly, laughing. As I said, he was determined to have the plantation."
"But would he have let you go?" asked the boy. "Under any circumstances?"
"I don't know. Knowing Lestat as I do now, I would say he would have killed me rather than let
me go. But this was what I wanted, you see. It didn't matter. No, this was what I thought I
wanted. As soon as we reached the house, I jumped down out of the carriage and walked, a
zombie, to the brick stairs where my brother had fallen. The house had been unoccupied for
months now, the overseer having his own cottage, and the Louisiana heat and damp were already
picking apart the steps. Every crevice was sprouting grass and even small wildflowers. I
remember feeling the moisture which in the night was cool as I sat down on the lower steps and
even rested my head against the brick and felt the little wax-stemmed wildflowers with my
hands. I pulled a clump of them out of the easy dirt in one hand. 'I want to die; kill me. Kill me,' I said to the vampire. 'Now I am guilty of murder. I can't live.' He sneered with the impatience of
people listening to the obvious lies of others. And then in a flash he fastened on me just as he had
on my man. I thrashed against him wildly. I dug my boot into his chest and kicked him as
fiercely as I could, his teeth stinging my throat, the fever pounding in my temples. And with a
movement of his entire body, much too fast for me to see, he was suddenly standing disdainfully
at the foot of the steps. 'I thought you wanted to die, Louis,' he said."
The boy made a soft, abrupt sound when the vampire said his name which the vampire
acknowledged with the quick statement, "Yes, that is my name," and went on.
"Well, I lay there helpless in the face of my own cowardice and fatuousness again," he said.
"Perhaps so directly confronted with it, I might in time have gained the courage to truly take my life, not to whine and beg for others to take it. I saw myself turning on a knife then, languishing
in a day-to-day suffering which I found as necessary as penance from the confessional, truly
hoping death would find me unawares and render me fit for eternal pardon. And also I saw
myself as if in a vision standing at the head of the stairs, just where my brother had stood, and
then hurtling my body down on the bricks.
"But there was no time for courage. Or shall I say, there was no time in Lestat's plan for anything but his plan. 'Now listen to me, Louis,' he said, and he lay down beside me now on the steps, his
movement so graceful and so personal that at once it made me think of a lover. I recoiled. But he
put his right arm around me and pulled me close to his chest. Never had I been this close to him
before, and in the dim light I could see the magnificent radiance of his eye and the unnatural
mask of his skin. As I tried to move, he pressed his right fingers against my lips and said, 'Be
still. I am going to drain you now to the very threshold of death, and I want you to be quiet, so
quiet that you can almost hear the flow of blood through your veins, so quiet that you can hear
the flow of that same blood through mine. It is your consciousness, your will, which must keep
you alive.' I wanted to struggle, but he pressed so hard with his fingers that he held my entire
prone body in check; and as soon as I stopped my abortive attempt at rebellion, he sank his teeth
into my neck."
The boy's eyes grew huge. He had drawn farther and farther back in his chair as the vampire
spoke, and now his face was tense, his eyes narrow, as if he were preparing to weather a blow.
"Have you ever lost a great amount of blood?" asked the vampire. "Do you know the feeling?"
The boy's lips shaped the word no, but no sound came out. He cleared his throat. "No," he said.
"Candles burned in the upstairs parlor, where we had planned the death of the overseer. An oil
lantern swayed in the breeze on the gallery. All of this light coalesced and began to shimmer, as
though a golden presence hovered above me, suspended in the stairwell, softly entangled with
the railings, curling and contracting like smoke. 'Listen, keep your eyes wide,' Lestat whispered
to me, his lips moving against my neck. I remember that the movement of his lips raised the hair
all over my body, sent a shock of sensation through my body that was not unlike the pleasure of
passion..."
He mused, his right fingers slightly curled beneath his chin, the first finger appearing to lightly
stroke it. "The result was that within minutes I was weak to paralysis. Panic-stricken, I
discovered I could not even will myself to speak. Lestat still held me, of course, and his arm was
like the weight of an iron bar. I felt his teeth withdraw with such a keenness that the two
puncture wounds seemed enormous, lined with pain. And now he bent over my helpless head
and, taking his right hand off me, bit his own wrist. The blood flowed down upon my shirt and
coat, and he watched it with a narrow, gleaming eye. It seemed an eternity that he watched it,
and that shimmer of light now hung behind his head like the backdrop of an apparition. I think
that I knew what he meant to do even before he did it, and I was waiting in my helplessness as if
I'd been waiting for years. He pressed his bleeding wrist to my mouth, said firmly, a little
impatiently, 'Louis, drink.' And I did. 'Steady, Louis,' and 'Hurry,' he whispered to me a number
of times. I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy
the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital
source. Then something happened." The vampire sat back, a slight frown on his face.
"How pathetic it is to describe these things which can't truly be described," he said, his voice low almost to a whisper. The boy sat as if frozen.
"I saw nothing but that light then as I drew blood. And then this next thing, this next thing was...
sound. A dull roar at first and then a pounding like the pounding of a drum, growing louder and
louder, as if some enormous creature were coming up on one slowly through a dark and alien
forest, pounding as he came, a huge drum. And then there came the pounding of another drum,
as if another giant were coming yards behind him, and each giant, intent on his own drum, gave
no notice to the rhythm of the other. The sound grew louder and louder until it seemed to fill not
just my hearing but all my senses, to be throbbing in my lips and fingers, in the flesh of my
temples, in my veins. Above all, in my veins, drum and then the other drum; and then Lestat
pulled his wrist free suddenly, and I opened my eyes and checked myself in a moment of
reaching for his wrist, grabbing it, forcing it back to my mouth at all costs; I checked myself
because I realized that the drum was my heart, and the second drum had been his." The vampire
sighed. "Do you understand?"
The boy began to speak, and then he shook his head. "No... I mean, I do," he said. "I mean, I..."
"Of course," said the vampire, looking away.
"Wait, wait!" said the boy in a welter of excitement. "The tape is almost gone. I have to turn it over." The vampire watched patiently as he changed it.
"What happened then?" the boy asked. His face was moist, and he wiped it hurriedly with his handkerchief.
"I saw as a vampire," said the vampire, his voice now slightly detached. It seemed almost
distracted. Then he drew himself up. "Lestat was standing again at the foot of the stairs, and I saw him as I could not possibly have seen him before. He had seemed white to me before,
starkly white, so that in the night he was almost luminous; and now I saw him filled with his own
life and own blood: he was radiant, not luminous. And then I saw that not only Lestat had
changed, but all things had changed.
"It was as if I had only just been able to see colors and shapes for the first time. I was so
enthralled with the buttons on Lestat's black coat that I looked at nothing else for a long time.
Then Lestat began to laugh, and I heard his laughter as I had never heard anything before. His
heart I still heard like the beating of a drum, and now came this metallic laughter. It was
confusing, each sound running into the next sound, like the mingling reverberations of bells,
until I learned to separate the sounds, and then they overlapped, each soft but distinct, increasing
but discrete, peals of laughter." The vampire smiled with delight. "Peals of bells.
" 'Stop looking at my buttons,' Lestat said. 'Go out there into the trees. Rid yourself of all the human waste in your body, and don't fall so madly in love with the night that you lose your ways'
"That, of course, was a wise command. When I saw the moon on the flagstones, I became so
enamored with it that I must have spent an hour there. I passed my brother's oratory without so
much as a thought of him, and standing among the cottonwood and oaks, I heard the night as if it
were a chorus of whispering women, all beckoning me to their breasts. As for my body, it was
not yet totally converted, and as soon as I became the least accustomed to the sounds and sights,
it began to ache. All my human fluids were being forced out of me. I was dying as a human, yet
completely alive as a vampire; and with my awakened senses, I had to preside over the death of
my body with a certain discomfort and then, finally, fear. I ran back up the steps to the parlor,
where Lestat was already at work on the plantation papers, going over the expenses and profits
for the last year. 'You're a rich man,' he said to me when I came in. 'Something's happening to
me,' I shouted.
" 'You're dying, that's all; don't be a fool. Don't you have any oil lamps? All this money and you can't afford whale oil except for that lantern. Bring me that lantern.'
" 'Dying!' I shouted. 'Dying!'
" 'It happens to everyone,' he persisted, refusing to help me. As I look back on this, I still despise him for it. Not because I was afraid, but because he might have drawn my attention to these
changes with reverence. He might have calmed me and told me I might watch my death with the
same fascination with which I had watched and felt the night. But he didn't. Lestat was never the
vampire I am. Not at all." The vampire did not say this boastfully. He said it as if he would truly have had it otherwise.
"Alors," he sighed. "I was dying fast, which meant that my capacity for fear was diminishing as rapidly. I simply regret I was not more attentive to the process. Lestat was being a perfect idiot.
'Oh, for the love of hell!' he began shouting. 'Do you realize I've made no provision for you?
What a fool I am.' I was tempted to say, 'Yes, you are,' but I didn't. 'You'll have to bed down with
me this morning. I haven't prepared you a coffin.' "
The vampire laughed. "The coffin struck such a chord of terror in me I think it absorbed all the capacity for terror I had left. Then came only my mild alarm at having to share a coffin with
Lestat. He was in his father's bedroom meantime, telling the old man good-bye, that he would
return in the morning. 'But where do you go, why must you live by such a schedule!' the old man
demanded, and Lestat became impatient. Before this, he'd been gracious to the old man, almost
to the point of sickening one, but now he became a bully. 'I take care of you, don't I? I've put a
better roof over your head than you ever put over mine! If I want to sleep all day and drink all
night, I'll do it, damn you!' The old man started to whine. Only my peculiar state of emotions and
most unusual feeling of exhaustion kept me from disapproving. I was watching the scene through
the open door, enthralled with the colors of the counterpane and the positive riot of color in the
old man's face. His blue veins pulsed beneath his pink and grayish flesh. I found even the yellow
of his teeth appealing to me; and I became almost hypnotized by the quivering of his lip. 'Such a
son, such a son,' he said, never suspecting, of course, the true nature of his son. 'All right, then, go. I know you keep a woman somewhere; you go to see her as soon as her husband leaves in the
morning. Give me my rosary. What's happened to my rosary?' Lestat said something
blasphemous and gave him the rosary...."
"But..." the boy started.
"Yes?" said the vampire. "I'm afraid I don't allow you to ask enough questions."
"I was going to ask, rosaries have crosses on them, don't they?"
"Oh, the rumor about crosses!" the vampire laughed "You refer to our being afraid of crosses?"
"Unable to look on them, I thought," said the boy.
"Nonsense, my friend, sheer nonsense. I can look on anything I like. And I rather like looking on crucifixes in particular."
"And what about the rumor about keyholes? That you can... become steam and go through
them."
"I wish I could," laughed the vampire. "How positively delightful. I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shapes. No." He shook his head. "That is, how would you say today... bullshit?"
The boy laughed despite himself. Then his face grew serious.
"You mustn't be so shy with me," the vampire said. "What is it?"
"The story about stakes through the heart," said the boy, his cheeks coloring slightly.
"The same," said the vampire. "Bull---shit," he said, carefully articulating both syllables, so that the boy smiled. "No magical power whatsoever. Why don't you smoke one of your cigarettes? I
see you have them in your shirt pocket."
"Oh, thank you," the boy said, as if it were a marvelous suggestion. But once he had the cigarette to his lips, his hands were trembling so badly that he mangled the first fragile book match.
"Allow me," said the vampire. And, taking the book, he quickly put a lighted match to the boy's cigarette. The boy inhaled, his eyes on the va mpire's fingers. Now the vampire withdrew across
the table with a soft rustling of garments. "There's an ashtray on the basin," he said, and the boy moved nervously to get it. He stared at the few butts in it for a moment, and then, seeing the
small waste basket beneath, he emptied the ashtray and quickly set it on the table. His fingers left
damp marks on the cigarette when he put it down. "Is this your room?" he asked.
"No," answered the vampire. "Just a room."
"What happened then?" the boy asked. The vampire appeared to be watching the smoke gather
beneath the overhead bulb.
"Ah... we went back to New Orleans posthaste," he said. "Lestat had his coffin in a miserable room near the ramparts."
"And you did get into the coffin?"
"I had no choice. I begged Lestat to let me stay in the closet, but he laughed, astonished. 'Don't you know what you are?' he asked. 'But is it magical? Must it have this shape?' I pleaded. Only
to hear him laugh again. I couldn't bear the idea; but as we argued, I realized I had no real fear. It was a strange realization. All my life I'd feared closed places. Born and bred in French houses
with lofty ceilings and floor-length windows, I had a dread of being enclosed. I felt
uncomfortable even in the confessional in church. It was a normal enough fear. And now I
realized as I protested to Lestat, I did not actually feel this anymore. I was simply remembering
it. Hanging on to it from habit, from a deficiency of ability to recognize my present and
exhilarating freedom. 'You're carrying on badly,' Lestat said finally. 'And it's almost dawn. I
should let you die. You will die, you know. The sun will destroy the blood I've given you, in
every tissue, every vein. But you shouldn't be feeling this fear at all. I think you're like a man
who loses an arm or a leg and keeps insisting that he can feel pain where the arm or leg used to
be.' Well, that was positively the most intelligent and useful thing Lestat ever said in my
presence, and it brought me around at once. 'Now, I'm getting into the coffin,' he finally said to
me in his most disdainful tone, 'and you will get in on top of me if you know what's good for
you.' And I did. I lay face-down on him, utterly confused by my absence of dread and filled with
a distaste for being so close to him, handsome and intriguing though he was. And he shut the lid.
Then I asked him if I was completely dead. My body was tingling and itching all over. 'No,
you're not then,' he said. 'When you are, you'll only hear and see it changing and feel nothing.
You should be dead by tonight. Go to sleep."'
"Was he right? Were you... dead when you woke up?"
"Yes, changed, I should say. As obviously I am alive. My body was dead. It was some time
before it became absolutely cleansed of the fluids and matter it no longer needed, but it was
dead. And with the realization of it came another stage in my divorce from human emotions. The
first thing which became apparent to me, even while Lestat and I were loading the coffin into a
hearse and stealing another coffin from a mortuary, was that I did not like Lestat at all. I was far
from being his equal yet, but I was infinitely closer to him than I had been before the death of my
body. I can't really make this clear to you for the obvious reason that you are now as I was before
my body died.
"You cannot understand. But before I died, Lestat was absolutely the most overwhelming
experience I'd ever had. Your cigarette has become one long cylindrical ash."
"Oh!" The boy quickly ground the filter into the glass. "You mean that when the gap was closed between you, he lost his... spell?" he asked, his eyes quickly fixed on the vampire, his hands now producing a cigarette and match much more easily than before.
"Yes, that's correct," said the vampire with obvious pleasure. "The trip back to Pointe du Lac was thrilling. And the constant chatter of Lestat was positively the most boring and disheartening
thing I experienced. Of course as I said, I was far from being his equal. I had my dead limbs to
contend with... to use his comparison. And I learned that on that very night, when I had to make
my first kill."
The vampire reached across the table now and gently brushed an ash from the boy's lapel, and
the boy stared at his withdrawing hand in alarm. "Excuse me," said the vampire. "I didn't mean to frighten you."
"Excuse me," said the boy. "I just got the impression suddenly that your arm was... abnormally long. You reach so far without moving!"
"No," said the vampire, resting his hands again on his crossed knees. "I moved forward much too fast for you to see. It was an illusion."
"You moved forward? But you didn't. You were sitting just as you are now, with your back
against the chair."
"No," repeated the vampire firmly. "I moved forward as I told you. Here, I'll do it again." And he did it again, and the boy stared with the same mixture of confusion and fear. "You still didn't see it," said the vampire. "But, you see, if you look at my outstretched arm now, it's really not remarkably long at all." And he raised his arm, fir st finger pointing heavenward as if he were an angel about to give the Word of the Lord. "You have experienced a fundamental difference
between the way you see and I see. My gesture appeared slow and somewhat languid to me. And
the sound of my finger brushing your coat was quite audible. Well, I didn't mean to frighten you,
I confess. But perhaps you can see from this that my return to Pointe du Lac was a feast of new
experiences, the mere swaying of a tree branch in the wind a delight."
"Yes," said the boy; but he was still visibly shaken. The vampire eyed him for a moment, and then he said, "I was telling you..."
"About your first kill," said the boy.
"Yes. I should say first, however, that the plantation was in a state of pandemonium. The
overseer's body had been found and so had the blind old man in the master bedroom, and no one
could explain the blind old man's presence. And no one had been able to find me in New
Orleans. My sister had contacted the police, and several of them were at Pointe du Lac when I
arrived. It was already quite dark, naturally, and Lestat quickly explained to me that I must not
let the police see me in even minimal light, especially not with my body in its present remarkable
state; so I talked to them in the avenue of oaks before the plantation house, ignoring their
requests that we go inside. I explained I'd been to Pointe du Lac the night before and the blind
old man was my guest. As for the overseer, he had not been here, but had gone to New Orleans
on business.
"After that was settled, during which my new detachment served me admirably, I had the
problem of the plantation itself. My slaves were in a state of complete confusion, and no work
had been done all day. We had a large plant then for the making of the indigo dye, and the
overseer's management had been most important. But I had several extremely intelligent slaves
who might have done his job just as well a long time before, if I had recognized their intelligence
and not feared their African appearance and manner. I studied them clearly now and gave the
management of things over to them. To the best, I gave the overseer's house on a promise. Two
of the young women were brought back into the house from the fields to care for Lestat's father,
and I told them I wanted as much privacy as possible and they would all of them be rewarded not
only for service but for leaving me and Lestat absolutely alone. I did not realize at the time that
these slaves would be the first, and possibly the only ones, to ever suspect that Lestat and I were
not ordinary creatures. I failed to realize that their experience with the supernatural was far
greater than that of white men. In my own inexperience I still thought of them as childlike
savages barely domesticated by slavery. I made a bad mistake. But let me keep to my story. I
was going to tell you about my first kill. Lestat bungled it with his characteristic lack of common
sense."
"Bungled it?" asked the boy.
"I should never have started with human beings. But this was something I had to learn by myself.
Lestat had us plunge headlong into the swamps right after the police and the slaves were settled.
It was very late, and the slave cabins were completely dark. We soon lost sight of the lights of
Pointe du Lac altogether, and I became very agitated. It was the same thing again: remembered
fears, confusion. Lestat, had he any native intelligence, might have explained things to me
patiently and gently---that I had no need to fear the swamps, that the snakes and insects I was
utterly invulnerable, and that I must concentrate on my new ability to see in total darkness.
Instead, he harassed me with condemnations. He was concerned only with our victims, with
finishing my initiation and getting on with it.
"And when we finally came upon our victims, he rushed me into action. They were a small camp
of runaway slaves. Lestat had visited them before and picked off perhaps a fourth of their
number by watching from the dark for one of them to leave the fire, or by taking them in their
sleep. They knew absolutely nothing of Lestat's presence. We had to watch for well over an hour