“Often,” said the vampire. “I wish sometimes that I did not. For such dreams, such long and clear dreams I never had as a mortal; and such twisted nightmares I never had either. In my early days, these dreams so absorbed me that often it seemed I fought waking as long as I could and lay sometimes for hours thinking of these dreams until the night was half gone; and dazed by them I often wandered about seeking to understand their meaning. They were in many ways as elusive as the dreams of mortals. I dreamed of my brother, for instance, that he was near me in some state between life and death, calling to me for help. And often I dreamed of Babette; and often — almost always — there was a great wasteland backdrop to my dreams, that wasteland of night I’d seen when cursed by Babette as I’ve told you. It was as if all figures walked and talked on the desolate home of my damned soul. I don’t remember what I dreamed that day, perhaps because I remember too well what Lestat and I discussed the following evening. I see you’re anxious for that, too.
“Well, as I’ve said, Lestat amazed me in his new calm, his thoughtfulness. But that evening I didn’t wake to find him the same way, not at first. There were women in the parlor. The candles were a few, scattered on the small table and the carved buffet, and Lestat had his arm around one woman and was kissing her. She was very drunk and very beautiful, a great drugged doll of a woman with her careful coif falling slowly down on her bare shoulders and over her partially bared breasts. The other woman sat over a ruined supper table drinking a glass of wine. I could see that the three of them had dined (Lestat pretending to dine… you would be surprised how people do not notice that a vampire is only pretending to eat), and the woman at the table was bored. All this put me in a fit of agitation. I did not know what Lestat was up to. If I went into the room, the woman would turn her attentions to me. And what was to happen, I couldn’t imagine, except that Lestat meant for us to kill them both. The woman on the settee with him was already teasing about his kisses, his coldness, his lack of desire for her. And the woman at the table watched with black almond eyes that seemed to be filled with satisfaction; when Lestat rose and came to her, putting his hands on her bare white arms, she brightened. Bending now to kiss her, he saw me through the crack in the door. And his eyes just stared at me for a moment, and then he went on talking with the ladies. He bent down and blew out the candles on the table. ‘It’s too dark in here,’ said the woman on the couch. ‘Leave us alone,’ said the other woman. Lestat sat down and beckoned her to sit in his lap. And she did, putting her left arm around his neck, her right hand smoothing back his yellow hair. ‘Your skin’s icy,’ she said, recoiling slightly. ‘Not always,’ said Lestat; and then he buried his face in the flesh of her neck. I was watching all this with fascination. Lestat was masterfully clever and utterly vicious, but I didn’t know how clever he was until he sank his teeth into her now, his thumb pressing down on her throat, his other arm locking her tight, so that he drank his fill without the other woman even knowing. ‘Your friend has no head for wine,’ he s
aid slipping out of the chair and seating the unconscious woman there, her arms folded under her face on the table. ‘She’s stupid,’ said the other woman, who had gone to the window and had been looking out at the lights. New Orleans was then a city of many low buildings, as you probably know. And on such clear nights as this, the lamplit streets were beautiful from the high windows of this new Spanish hotel; and the stars of those days hung low over such dim light as they do at sea. ‘I can warm that cold skin of yours better than she can.’ She turned to Lestat, and I must confess I was feeling some relief that he would now take care of her as well. But he planned nothing so simple. ‘Do you think so?’ he said to her. He took her hand, and she said, ‘Why, you’re warm.’”
“You mean the blood had warmed him,” said the boy.
“Oh, yes,” said the vampire. “After killing, a vampire is as warm as you are now.” And he started to resume; then, glancing at the boy, he smiled. “As I was saying… Lestat now held the woman’s hand in his and said that the other had warmed him. His face, of course, was flushed; much altered. He drew her close now, and she kissed him, remarking through her laughter that he was a veritable furnace of passion.
“ ‘Ah, but the price is high,’ he said to her, affecting sadness. ‘Your pretty friend…’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I exhausted her.’ And he stood back as if inviting the woman to walk to the table. And she did, a look of superiority on her small features. She bent down to see her friend, but then lost interest — until, she saw something. It was a napkin. It had caught the last drops of blood from the wound in the throat. She picked it up, straining to see it in the darkness. ‘Take down your hair,’ said Lestat softly. And she dropped it, indifferent, and took down the last tresses, so that her hair fell blond and wavy down her back. ‘Soft,’ he said, ‘so soft. I picture you that way, lying on a bed of satin.’
“ ‘Such things you say!’ she scoffed and turned her back on him playfully.
“ ‘Do you know what manner of bed?’ he asked. And she laughed and said his bed, she could imagine. She looked back at him as he advanced; and, never once looking away from her, he gently tipped the body of her friend, so that it fell backwards from the chair and lay with staring eyes upon the floor. The woman gasped. She scrambled away from the corpse, nearly upsetting a small end table. The candle went over and went out. ’ “Put out the light… and then put out the light,” ’ Lestat said softly. And then he took her into his arms like a struggling moth and sank his teeth into her.”
“But what were you thinking as you watched?” asked the boy. “Did you want to stop him the way you wanted to stop him from killing Freniere?”
“No,” said the vampire. “I could not have stopped him. And you must understand I knew that he killed humans every night. Animals gave him no satisfaction whatsoever. Animals were to be banked on when all else failed, but never to be chosen. If I felt any sympathy for the women, it was buried deep in my own turmoil. I still felt in my chest the little hammer heart of that starving child; I still burned with the questions of my own divided nature. I was angry that Lestat had staged this show for me, waiting till I woke to kill the women; and I wondered again if I might somehow break loose from him and felt both hatred and my own weakness more than ever.
“Meantime, he propped their lovely corpses at the table and went about the room lighting all the candles until it blazed as if for a wedding. ‘Come in, Louis,’ he said. ‘I would have arranged an escort for you, but I know what a man you are about choosing your own. Pity Mademoiselle Freniere likes to hurl flaming lanterns. It makes a party unwieldy, don’t you think? Especially for a hotel?’ He seated the blond-haired girl so that her head lay to one side against the damask back of the chair, and the darker woman lay with her chin resting just above her breasts; this one had blanched, and her features had a rigid look to them already, as though she was one of those women in whom the fire of personality makes beauty. But the other looked only as if she slept; and I was not sure that she was even dead. Lestat had made two gashes, one in her throat and one above her left breast, and both still bled freely. He lifted her wrist now, and slitting it with a knife, filled two wine glasses and bade me to sit down.
“ ‘I’m leaving you,’ I said to him at once. ‘I wish to tell you that now.’
“ ‘I thought as much,’ he answered, sitting back in the chair, ‘and I thought as well that you would make a flowery announcement. Tell me what a monster I am; what a vulgar fiend’
“ ‘I make no judgments upon you. I’m not interested in you. I am interested in my own nature now, and I’ve come to believe I can’t trust you to tell me the truth about it. You use knowledge for personal power,’ I told him. And I suppose, in the manner of many people making such an announcement, I was not looking to him at all. I was mainly listening to my own words. But now I saw that his face was once again the way it had been when he’d said we would talk. He was listening to me. I was suddenly at a loss. I felt that gulf between us as painfully as ever.
“ ‘Why did you become a vampire?’ I blurted out. ‘And why such a vampire as you are! Vengeful and delighting in taking human life even when you have no need. This girl… why did you kill her when one would have done? And way did you frighten her so before you killed her? And why have you propped her here in some grotesque manner, as if tempting the gods to strike you down for your blasphemy?’
“All this he listened to without speaking, and in the pause that followed I again felt at a loss. Lestat’s eyes were large and thoughtful; I’d seen them that way before, but I couldn’t remember when, certainly not when talking to me.
“ ‘What do you think a vampire is?’ he asked me sincerely.
“ ‘I don’t pretend to know. You pretend to know. What is it?’ I asked. And to this he answered nothing. It was as if he sensed the insincerity of it, the spite. He just sat there looking at me with the same still expression. Then I said, ‘I know that after leaving you, I shall try to find out. I’ll travel the world, if I have to, to find other vampires. I know they must exist; I don’t know of any reasons why they shouldn’t exist in great numbers. And I’m confident I shall find vampires who have more in common with me than I with you. Vampires who understand knowledge as I do and have used their superior vampire nature to learn secrets of which you don’t even dream. If you haven’t told me everything, I shall find things out for myself or from them, when I find them.’
“He shook his head. ‘Louis!’ he said. ‘You are in love with your mortal nature! You chase after the phantoms of your former self. Freniere, his sister… these are images for you of what you were and what you still long to be. And in your romance with mortal life, you’re dead to your vampire nature!’
“I objected to this at once. ‘My vampire nature has been for me the greatest adventure of my life; all that went before it was confused, clouded; I went through mortal life like a blind man groping from solid object to solid object. It was only when I became a vampire that I respected for the first time all of life. I never saw a living, pulsing human being until I was a vampire; I never knew what life was until it ran out in a red gush over my lips, my hands!’ I found myself staring at the two women, the darker one now turning a terrible shade of blue. The blonde was breathing. ‘She’s not dead!’ I said to him suddenly.
“ ‘I know. Let her alone,’ he said. He lifted her wrist and made a new gash by the scab of the other and filled his glass. ‘All that you say makes sense,’ he said to me, taking a drink. ‘You are an intellect. I’ve never been. What I’ve learned I’ve learned from listening to men talk, not from books. I never went to school long enough. But I’m not stupid, and you must listen to me because you are in danger. You do not know your vampire nature. You are like an adult who, looking back on his childhood, realizes that he never appreciated it. You cannot, as a man, go back to the nursery and play with your toys, asking for the love and care to be showered on you again simply because now you know their worth. So it is with you and mortal nature. You?
?ve given it up. You no longer look “through a glass darkly.” But you cannot pass back to the world of human warmth with your new eyes’
“ ‘I know that well enough!’ I said. ‘But what is it that is our nature! If I can live from the blood of animals, why should I not live from the blood of animals rather than go through the world bringing misery and death to human creatures!’
“ ‘Does it bring you happiness?’ he asked. ‘You wander through the night, feeding on rats like a pauper and then moon at Babette’s window, filled with care, yet helpless as the goddess who came by night to watch Endymion sleep and could not have him. And suppose you could hold her in your arms and she would look on you without horror or disgust, what then? A few short years to watch her suffer every prick of mortality and then die before your eyes? Does this give happiness? This is insanity, Louis. This is vain. And what truly lies before you is vampire nature, which is killing. For I guarantee you that if you walk the streets tonight and strike down a woman as rich and beautiful as Babbette and suck her blood until she drops at your feet you will have no hunger left for Babette’s profile in the candlelight or for listening by the window for the sound of her voice. You will be filled, Louis, as you were meant to be, with all the life that you can hold; and you will have hunger when that’s gone for the same, and the same, and the same. The red in this glass will be just as red; the roses on the wallpaper just as delicately drawn. And you’ll see the moon the same way, and the same the flicker of a candle. And with that same sensibility that you cherish you will see death in all its beauty, life as it is only known on the very point of death. Don’t you understand that, Louis? You alone of all creatures can see death that way with impunity. You… alone… under the rising moon… can strike like the hand of God!’
“He sat back now and drained the glass, and his eyes moved over the unconscious woman. Her breasts heaved and her eyebrows knit as if she were coming around. A moan escaped her lips. He’d never spoken such words to me before, and I had not thought him capable of it. ‘Vampires are killers,’ he said now. ‘Predators. Whose all-seeing eyes were meant to give them detachment. The ability to see a human life in its entirety, not with any mawkish sorrow but with a thrilling satisfaction in being the end of that life, in having a hand in the divine plan.’
“ ‘That is how you see it!’ I protested. The girl moaned again; her face was very white. Her head rolled against the back of the chair.
“ ‘That is the way it is,’ he answered. ‘You talk of finding other vampires! Vampires are killers! They don’t want you or your sensibility! They’ll see you coming long before you see them, and they’ll see your flaw; and, distrusting you, they’ll seek to kill you. They’d seek to kill you even if you were like me. Because they are lone predators and seek for companionship no more than cats in the jungle. They’re jealous of their secret and of their territory; and if you find one or more of them together it will be for safety only, and one will be the slave of the other, the way you are of me.’
“ ‘I’m not your slave,’ I said to him. But even as he spoke I realized I’d been his slave all along.
“ ‘That’s how vampires increase… through slavery. How else?” he asked. He took the girl’s wrist again, and she cried out as the knife cut. She opened her eyes slowly as he held her wrist over the glass. She blinked and strained to keep them open. It was as if a veil covered her eyes. ‘You’re tired, aren’t you?’ he asked her. She gazed at him as if she couldn’t really see him. ‘Tired!’ he said, now leaning close and staring into her eyes. ‘You want to sleep.’ ‘Yes…’ she moaned softly. And he picked her up and took her into the bedroom. Our coffins rested on the carpet and against the wall; there was a velvet-draped bed. Lestat did not put her on the bed; he lowered her slowly into his coffin. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him, coming to the door sill. The girl was looking around like a terrified child. ‘No…’ she was moaning. And then, as he closed the lid, she screamed. She continued to scream within the coffin.
“ ‘Why do you do this, Lestat?’ I asked.