PART II 3 page

before one of the men, they were all men, finally left the clearing and came just a few paces into

the trees. He unhooked his pants now and attended to an ordinary physical necessity, and as he

turned to go, Lestat shook me and said, 'Take him,' " The vampire smiled at the boy's wide eyes.

"I think I was about as horrorstruck as you would be," he said. "But I didn't know then that I might kill animals instead of humans. I said quickly I could not possibly take him. And the slave

heard me speak. He turned, his back to the distant fire, and peered into the dark. Then quickly

and silently, he drew a long knife out of his belt. He was naked except for the pants and the belt,

a tall, strong-armed, sleek young man. He said something in the French patois, and then he

stepped forward. I realized that, though I saw him clearly in the dark, he could not see us. Lestat

stepped in back of him with a swiftness that baffled me and got a hold around his neck while he

pinned his left arm. The slave cried out and tried to throw Lestat off. He sank his teeth now, and

the slave froze as if from snakebite. He sank to his knees, and Lestat fed fast as the other slaves

came running. 'You sicken me,' he said when he got back to me. It was as if we were black

insects utterly camouflaged in the night, watching the slaves move, oblivious to us, discover the

wounded man, drag him back, fan out in the foliage searching for the attacker. 'Come on, we

have to get another one before they all return to camp,' he said. And quickly we set off after one

man who was separated from the others. I was still terribly agitated, convinced I couldn't bring

myself to attack and feeling no urge to do so. There were many things, as I mention, which

Lestat might have said and done. He might have made the experience rich in so many ways. But

he did not."

"What could he have done?" the boy asked. "What do you mean?"

"Killing is no ordinary act," said the vampire. "One doesn't simply glut oneself on blood." He shook his head. "It is the experience of another's life for certain, and often the experience of the loss of that life through the blood, slowly. It is again and again the experience of that loss of my

own life, which I experienced when I sucked the blood from Lestat's wrist and felt his heart

pound with my heart. It is again and again a celebration of that experience; because for vampires

that is the ultimate experience." He said this most seriously, as if he were arguing with someone who held a different view. "I don't think Lestat ever appreciated that, though how he could not, I don't know. Let me say he appreciated something, but very little, I think, of what there is to

know. In any event, he took no pains to remind me now of what I'd felt when I clamped onto his

wrist for life itself and wouldn't let it go; or to pick and choose a place for me where I might

experience my first kill with some measure of quiet and dignity. He rushed headlong through the

encounter as if it were something to put behind us as quickly as possible, like so many yards of

the road. Once he had caught the slave, he gagged him and held him, baring his neck. 'Do it,' he

said. 'You can't turn back now.' Overcome with revulsion and weak with frustration, I obeyed. I

knelt beside the bent, struggling man and, clamping both my hands on his shoulders, I went into

his neck. My teeth had only just begun to change, and I had to tear his flesh, not puncture it; but

once the wound was made, the blood flowed. And once that happened, once I was locked to it,

drinking... all else vanished.

"Lestat and the swamp and the noise of the distant camp meant nothing. Lestat might have been

an insect, buzzing, lighting, then vanishing in significance. The sucking mesmerized me; the

warm struggling of the man was soothing to the tension of my hands; and there came the beating

of the drum again, which was the drumbeat of his heart---only this time it beat in perfect rhythm

with the drumbeat of my own heart, the two resounding in every fiber o f my being, until the beat

began to grow slower and slower, so that each was a soft rumble that threatened to go on without

end. I was drowsing, falling into weightlessness; and then Lestat pulled me back. 'He's dead, you

idiot!' he said with his characteristic charm and tact. 'You don't drink after they're dead!

Understand that!' I was in a frenzy for a moment, not myself, insisting to him that the man's heart

still beat, and I was in an agony to clamp onto him again. I ran my hands over his chest, then

grabbed at his wrists. I would have cut into his wrist if Lestat hadn't pulled me to my feet and

slapped my face. This slap was astonishing. It was not painful in the ordinary way. It was a

sensational shock of another sort, a rapping of the senses, so that I spun in confusion and found

myself helpless and staring, my back against a cypress, the night pulsing with insects in my ears.

'You'll die if you do that,' Lestat was saying. 'He'll suck you right down into death with him if

you cling to him in death. And now you've drunk too much, besides; you'll be ill.' His voice

grated on me. I had the urge to throw myself on him suddenly, but I was feeling just what he'd

said. There was a grinding pain in my stomach, as if some whirlpool there were sucking my

insides into itself. It was the blood passing too rapidly into my own blood, but I didn't know it.

Lestat moved through the night now like a cat and I followed him, my head throbbing, this pain

in my stomach no better when we reached the house of Pointe du Lac.

" As we sat at the table in the parlor, Lestat dealing a game of solitaire on the polished wood, I sat there staring at him with contempt. He was mumbling nonsense. I would get used to killing, he

said; it would be nothing. I must not allow myself to be shaken. I was reacting too much as if the

'mortal coil' had not been shaken off. I would become accustomed to things all too quickly. 'Do

you think so?' I asked him finally. I really had no interest in his answer. I understood now the

difference between us. For me the experience of killing had been cataclysmic. So had that of

sucking Lestat's wrist. These experiences so overwhelmed and so changed my view of

everything around me, from the picture of my brother on the parlor wall to the sight of a single

star in the topmost pane of the French window, that I could not imagine another vampire taking

them for granted. I was altered, permanently; I knew it. And what I felt, most profoundly, for

everything, even the sound of the playing cards being laid down one by one upon the shining

rows of the solitaire, was respect. Lestat felt the opposite. Or he felt nothing. He was the sow's

ear out of which nothing fine could be made. As boring as a mortal, as trivial and unhappy as a

mortal, he chattered over the game, belittling my experience, utterly locked against the

possibility of any experience of his own. By morning, I realized that I was his complete superior

and I had been sadly cheated in having him for a teacher. He must guide me through the

necessary lessons, if there were any more real lessons, and I must tolerate in him a frame of mind

which was blasphemous to life itself. I felt cold towards him. I had no contempt in superiority.

Only a hunger for new experience, for that which was beautiful and as devastating as my kill.

And I saw that if I were to maximize every experience available to me, I must exert my own

powers over my learning. Lestat was of no use.

"It was well past midnight when I finally rose out of the chair and went out on the gallery. The moon was large over the cypresses, and the candlelight poured from the open doors. The thick

plastered pillars and walls of the house had been freshly whitewashed, the floorboards freshly

swept, and a summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned

against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew

there in constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world

and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from

each thing which would take me best to another. What this meant, I wasn't sure myself. Do you

understand me when I say I did not wish to rush headlong into experience, that what I'd felt as a

vampire was far too powerful to be wasted?"

"Yes," said the boy eagerly. "It sounds as if it was like being in love."

The vampire's eyes gleamed. "That's correct. It is like love," he smiled. "And I tell you my frame of mind that night so you can know there are profound differences between vampires, and how I

came to take a different approach from Lestat. You must understand I did not snub him because

he did not appreciate his experience. I simply could not understand how such feelings could be

wasted. But then Lestat did something which was to show me a way to go about my learning.

"He had more than a casual appreciation of the wealth at Pointe du Lac. He'd been much pleased

by the beauty of the china used for his father's supper; and he liked the feel of the velvet drapes,

and he traced the patterns of the carpets with his toe. And now he took from one of the china

closets a crystal glass and said, 'I do miss glasses.' Only he said this with an impish delight that

caused me to study him with a hard eye. I disliked him intensely! 'I want to show you a little

trick,' he said. 'That is, if you like glasses.' And after setting it on the card table he came out on the gallery where I stood and changed his manner again into that of a stalking animal, eyes

piercing the dark beyond the lights of the house, peering down under the arching branches of the

oaks. In an instant, he had vaulted the railing and dropped softly on the dirt below, and then

lunged into the blackness to catch something in both his hands. When he stood before me with it,

I gasped to see it was a rat. 'Don't be such a damned idiot,' he said. 'Haven't you ever seen a rat?'

It was a huge, struggling field rat with a long tail. He held its neck so it couldn't bite. 'Rats can be quite nice,' he said. And he took the rat to the wine glass, slashed its throat, and filled the glass rapidly with blood. The rat then went hurtling over the gallery railing, and Lestat held the wine

glass to the candle triumphantly. 'You may well have to live off rats from time to time, so wip e

that expression off your face,' he said. 'Rats, chickens, cattle. Traveling by ship, you damn well

better live off rats, if you don't wish to cause such a panic on board that they search your coffin.

You damn well better keep the ship clean of rats.' And then he sipped the blood as delicately as if

it were burgundy. He made a slight face. 'It gets cold so fast.'

" 'Do you mean, then, we can live from animals?' I asked.

" 'Yes.' He drank it all down and then casually threw the glass at the fireplace. I stared at the fragments. 'You don't mind, do you?' He gestured to the broken glass with a sarcastic smile. 'I

surely hope you don't, because there's nothing much you can do about it if you do mind.'

" 'I can throw you and your father out of Pointe du Lac, if I mind,' I said. I believe this was my first show of temper.

" 'Why would you do that?' he asked with mock alarm. 'You don't know everything yet... do

you?' He was laughing then and walking slowly about the room. He ran his fingers over the satin

finish of the spinet. 'Do you play?' he asked.

"I said something like, 'Don't touch it!' and he laughed at me. 'I'll touch it if I like!' he said. 'You don't know, for example, all the ways you can die. And dying now would be such a calamity,

wouldn't it?'

" 'There must be someone else in the world to teach me these things,' I said. 'Certainly you're not the only vampire! And your father, he's perhaps seventy. You couldn't have been a vampire long,

so someone must have instructed you...

" 'And do you think you can find other vampires by yourself? They might see you coming, my

friend, but you won't see them. No, I don't think you have much choice about things at this point,

friend. I'm your teacher and you need me, and there isn't much you can do about it either way.

And we both have people to provide for. My father needs a doctor, and then there is the matter of

your mother and sister. Don't get any mortal notions about telling them you are a vampire. Just

provide for them and for my father, which means that tomorrow night you had better kill fast and

then attend to the business of your plantation. Now to bed. We both sleep in the same room; it

makes for far less risk.'

" 'No, you secure the bedroom for yourself,' I said. 'I've no intention of staying in the same room with you.'

"He became furious. 'Don't do anything stupid, Louis. I warn you. There's nothing you can do to

defend yourself once the sun rises, nothing. Separate rooms mean separate security. Double

precautions and double chance of notice.' He then said a score of things to frighten me into

complying, but he might as well have been talking to the walls. I watched him intently, but I

didn't listen to him. He appeared frail and stupid to me, a man made of dried twigs with a thin,

carping voice. 'I sleep alone,' I said, and gently put my hand around the candle flames one by

one. 'It's almost morning!' he insisted.

" 'So lock yourself in,' I said, embracing my coffin, hoisting it and carrying it down the brick stairs. I could hear the locks snapping on the French doors above, the swoosh of the drapes. The

sky was pale but still sprinkled with stars, and another light rain blew now on the breeze from the

river, speckling the flagstones. I opened the door of my brother's oratory, shoving back the roses

and thorns which had almost sealed it, and set the coffin on the stone floor before the priedieu. I

could almost make out the images of the saints on the walls. 'Paul,' I said softly, addressing my

brother, 'for the first time in my life I feel nothing for you, nothing for your death; and for the

first time I feel everything for you, feel the sorrow of your loss as if I never before knew feeling.'

You see..."

The vampire turned to the boy. "For the first time now I was fully and completely a vampire. I

shut the wood blinds flat upon the small barred windows and bolted the door. Then I climbed

into the satin-lined coffin, barely able to see the gleam of cloth in the darkness, and locked

myself in. That is how I became a vampire."

"And there you were," said the boy after a pause, "with another vampire you hated."

"But I had to stay with him," answered the vampire. "As I've told you, he had me at a great disadvantage. He hinted there was much I didn't know and must know and that he alone could

tell me. But in fact, the main part of what he did teach me was practical and not so difficult to

figure out for oneself. How we might travel, for instance, by ship, having our coffins transported

for us as though they contained the remains of loved ones being sent here or there for bu rial; how

no one would dare to open such a coffin, and we might rise from it at night to clean the ship of

rats---things of this nature. And then there were the shops and businessmen he knew who

admitted us well after hours to outfit us in the finest Paris fashions, and those agents willing to

transact financial matters in restaurants and cabarets. And in all of these mundane matters, Lestat

was an adequate teacher. What manner of man he'd been in life, I couldn't tell and didn't care; but

he was for all appearances of the same class now as myself, which meant little to me, except that

it made our lives run a little more smoothly than they might have otherwise. He had impeccable

taste, though my library to him was a 'pile of dust,' and he seemed more than once to be

infuriated by the sight of my reading a book or writing some observations in a journal. 'That

mortal nonsense,' he would say to me, while at the same time spending so much of my money to

splendidly furnish Pointe du Lac, that even I, who cared nothing for the money, was forced to

wince. And in entertaining visitors at Pointe du Lac---those hapless travelers who came up the

river road by horseback or carriage begging accommodations for the night, sporting letters of

introduction from other planters or officials in New Orleans---to these he was so gentle and

polite that it made things far easier for me, who found myself hopelessly locked to him and

jarred over and over by his viciousness."

"But he didn't harm these men?" asked the boy.

"Oh yes, often, he did. But I'll tell you a little secret if I may, which applies not only to vampires, but to generals, soldiers, and kings. Most of us would much rather see somebody die than be the

object of rudeness under our roofs. Strange... yes. But very true, I assure you. That Lestat hunted

for mortals every night, I knew. But had he been savage and ugly to my family, my guests, and

my slaves, I couldn't have endured it. He was not. He seemed particularly to delight in the

visitors. But he said we must spare no expense where our families were concerned. And he

seemed to me to push luxury upon his father to an almost ludicrous point. The old blind man

must be told constantly how fine and expensive were his bed jackets and robes and what

imported draperies had just been fixed to his bed and what French and Spanish wines we had in

the cellar and how much the plantation yielded even in bad years when the coast talked of

abandoning the indigo production altogether and going into sugar. But then at other times he

would bully the old man, as I mentioned. He would erupt into such rage that the old man

whimpered like a child. 'Don't I take care of you in baronial splendor!' Lestat would shout at him.

'Don't I provide for your every want! Stop whining to me about going to church or old friends!

Such nonsense. Your old friends are dead. Why don't you die and leave me and my bankroll in

peace!' The old man would cry softly that these things meant so little to him in old age. He

would have been content on his little farm forever. I wanted often to ask him later, 'Where was

this farm? From where did you come to Louisiana?' to get some clue to that place where Lestat

might have known another vampire. But I didn't dare to bring these things up, lest the old man

start crying and Lestat become enraged. But these fits were no more frequent than periods of

near obsequious kindness when Lestat would bring his father supper on a tray and feed him

patiently while talking of the weather and the New Orleans news and the activities of my mother

and sister. It was obvious that a great gulf existed between father and son, both in education and

refinement, but how it came about, I could not quite guess. And from this whole matter, I

achieved a somewhat consistent detachment.

"Existence, as I've said, was possible. There was always the promise behind his mocking smile

that he knew great things or terrible things, had commerce with levels of darkness I could not

possibly guess at. And all the time, he belittled me and attacked me for my love of the senses,

my reluctance to kill, and the near swoon which killing could produce in me. He laughed

uproariously when I discovered that I could see myself in a mirror and that crosses had no effect

upon me, and would taunt me with sealed lips when I asked about God or the devil. 'I'd like to

meet the devil some night,' he said once with a malignant smile. 'I'd chase him from here to the

wilds of the Pacific. I am the devil.' And when I was aghast at this, he went into peals of

laughter. But what happened was simply that in my distaste for him I came to ignore and suspect

him, and yet to study him with a detached fascination. Sometimes I'd find myself staring at his

wrist from which I'd drawn my vampire life, and I would fall into such a stillness that my mind

seemed to leave my body or rather my body to become my mind; and then he would see me and

stare at me with a stubborn ignorance of what I felt and longed to know and, reaching over,

shake me roughly out of it. I bore this with an overt detachment unknown to me in mortal life

and came to understand this as a part of vampire nature: that I might sit at home at Pointe du Lac

and think for hours of my brother's mortal life and see it short and rounded in unfathomable

darkness, understanding now the vain and senseless wasting passion with which I'd mourned his

loss and turned on other mortals like a maddened animal. All that confusion was then like

dancers frenzied in a fog; and now, now in this strange vampire nature, I felt a profound sadness.

But I did not brood over this. Let me not give you that impression, for brooding would have been

to me the most terrible waste; but rather I looked around me at all the mortals that I knew and

saw all life as precious, condemning all fruitless guilt and passion that would let it slip through

the fingers like sand. It was only now as a vampire that I did come to know my sister, forbidding

her the plantation for the city life which she so needed in order to know her own time of life and

her own beauty and come to marry, not brood for our lost brother or my going away or become a

nursemaid for our mother. And I provided for them all they might need or want, finding even the

most trivial request worth my immediate attention. My sister laughed at the transformation in me

when we would meet at night and I would take her from our flat out the narrow wooden streets to

walk along the tree-lined levee in the moonlight, savoring the orange blossoms and the caressing

warmth, talking for hours of her most secret thoughts and dreams, those litt le fantasies she dared

to tell no one and would even whisper to me when we sat in the dim lit parlor entirely alone. And

I would see her sweet and palpable before me, a shimmering, precious creature soon to grow old,

soon to die, soon to lose these moments that in their tangibility promised to us, wrongly...

wrongly, an immortality. As if it were our very birthright, which we could not come to grasp the

meaning of until this time of middle life when we looked on only as many years ahead as already

lay behind us. When every moment, every moment must be first known and then savored.

"It was detachment that made this possible, a sublime loneliness with which Lestat and I moved

through the world of mortal men. And all material troubles passed from us. I should tell you the

practical nature of it.

"Lestat had always known how to steal from victims chosen for sumptuous dress and other

promising signs of extravagance. But the great problems of shelter and secrecy had been for him

a terrible struggle. I suspected that beneath his gentleman's veneer he was painfully ignorant of

the most simple financial matters. But I was not. And so he could acquire cash at any moment

and I could invest it. If he were not picking the pocket of a dead man in an alley, he was at the

greatest gambling tables in the richest salons of the city, using his vampire keenness to suck gold

and dollars and deeds of property from young planters' sons who found him deceptive in his

friendship and alluring in his charm. But this had never given him the life he wanted, and so for

that he had ushered me into the preternatural world that he might acquire an investor and

manager for whom these skills of mortal life became most valuable in this life after.

"But, let me describe New Orleans, as it was then, and as it was to become, so you can

understand how simple our lives were. There was no city in America like New Orleans. It was

filled not only with the French and Spanish of all classes who had formed in part its peculiar

aristocracy, but later with immigrants of all kinds, the Irish and the German in particular. Then

there were not only the black slaves, yet unhomogenized and fantastical in their different tribal

garb and manners, but the great growing class of the free people of color, those marvelous

people of our mixed blood and that of the islands, who produced a magnificent and unique caste

of craftsmen, artists, poets, and renowned feminine beauty. And then there were the Indians, who

covered the levee on summer days selling herbs and crafted wares. And drifting through all,

through this medley of languages and colors, were the people of the port, the sailors of ships,

who came in great waves to spend their money in the cabarets, to buy for the night the beautiful

women both dark and light, to dine on the best of Spanish and French cooking and drink the

imported wines of the world. Then add to these, within years after my transformation, the

Americans, who built the city up river from the old French Quarter with magnificent Grecian

houses which gleamed in the moonlight like temples. And, of course, the planters, always the

planters, coming to town with their families in shining landaus to buy evening gowns and silver

and gems, to crowd the narrow streets on the way to the old French Opera House and the Theatre

d'Orleans and the St. Louis Cathedral, from whose open doors came the chants of High Mass

over the crowds of the Place d'Armes on Sundays, over the noise and bickering of the French

Market, over the silent, ghostly drift of the ships along the rai sed waters of the Mississippi,

which flowed against the levee above the ground of New Orleans itself, so that the ships

appeared to float against the sky.

"This was New Orleans, a magical and magnificent place to live. In which a vampire, richly

dressed and gracefully walking through the pools of light of one gas lamp after another might

attract no more notice in the evening than hundreds of other exotic creatures---if he attracted any

at all, if anyone stopped to whisper behind a fan, 'That man... how pale, how he gleams... how he

moves. It's not natural!' A city in which a vampire might be gone before the words had even

passed the lips, seeking out the alleys in which he could see like a cat, the darkened bars in

which sailors slept with their heads on the table, great high-ceilinged hotel rooms where a lone

figure might sit, her feet upon an embroidered cushion, her legs covered with a lace counterpane,

her head bent under the tarnished light of a single candle, never seeing the great shadow move

across the plaster flowers of the ceiling, never seeing the long white finger reached to press the

fragile flame.

"Remarkable, if for nothing else, because of this, that all of those men and women who stayed

for any reason left behind them some monument, some struc ture of marble and brick and stone

that still stands; so that even when the gas lamps went out and the planes came in and the office

buildings crowded the blocks of Canal Street, something irreducible of beauty and romance

remained; not in every street perhaps, but in so many that the landscape is for me the landscape

of those times always, and walking now in the starlit streets of the Quarter or the Garden District

I am in those times again. I suppose that is the nature of the monument. Be it a small house or a

mansion of Corinthian columns and wrought -iron lace. The monument does not say that this or

that man walked here. No, that what he felt in one time in one spot continues. The moon that

rose over New Orleans then still rises. As long as the monuments stand, it still rises. The feeling,

at least here... and there... it remains the same."

The vampire appeared sad. He sighed, as if he doubted what he had just said. "What was it?" he asked suddenly as if he were slightly tired. "Yes, money. Lestat and I had to make money. And I

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 570