"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; ail 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.
"'I like to do it,' he said.'I enjoy it.' He looked at me.'I don't say that you have to enjoy it. Take your aesthete's tastes to purer things. Kill them swiftly if you will, but do it! Learn that you're a killer! Ah!' He threw up his hands in disgust. The girl had stopped screaming. Now he drew up a little curved-legged chair beside the coffin and, crossing his legs, he looked at the coffin lid. His was a black varnished coffin, not a pure rectangular box as they are now, but tapered at both ends and widest where the corpse might lay his hands upon his chest. It suggested the human form. It
opened, and the girl sat up astonished, wild-eyed, her lips blue and trembling.'Lie down, love,' he said to her, and pushed her back; and she lay, near-hysterical, staring up at him.'You're dead, love,' he said to her; and she screamed and turned desperately in the coffin like a fish, as if her body could escape through the sides, through the bottom.'It's a coffin, a coffin!' she cried.'Let me out.'
"'But we all must lie in cons, eventually,' he said to her.'Lie still, love. This is your coffin. Most of us never get to know what it feels like. You know what it feels like!' he said to her. I couldn't tell whether she was listening or not, or just going wild. But she saw me in the doorway, and then she lay still, looking at Lestat and then at me.'Help me!' she said to me.
"Lestat looked at me. 'I expected you to feel these things instinctually, as I did,' he said. When I gave you that first kill, I thought you would hunger for the next and the next, that you would go to each human life as if to a full cup, the way I had. But you didn't. And all this time I suppose I kept from straightening you out because you were best weaker. I'd watch you playing shadow in the night, staring at the falling rain, and I'd think, He's easy to manage, he's simple. But you're weak, Louis. You're a mark. For vampires and now for humans alike. This thing with Babette has exposed us both. It's as if you want us both to be destroyed.'
"'I can't stand to watch what you're doing,' I said, turning my back. The girl's eyes were burning into my flesh. She lay, all the time he spoke, staring at me.
"You can stand it!' he said.'I saw you last night with that child. You're a vampire, the same as I am!'
"He stood up and came towards me, but the girl rose again and he turned to shove her down. '13o you think we should make her a vampire? Share our lives with her?' he asked. Instantly I said,'No!'
"'Why, because she's nothing but a whore?' he asked.'A damned expensive whore at that,' he said.
"'Can she live now? Or has she lost too much?' I asked him.
"'Touching)" he said.'She can't live.'
"'Then kill her.' She began to scream. He just sat there. I turned around. He was smiling, and the girl had turned her face to the satin and was sobbing. Tier reason had almost entirely left her; she was crying and praying. She was praying to the Virgin to save her, her hands over her face now, now over her head, the wrist smearing blood in her hair and on the satin. I bent over the coffin. She was dying, it was true; her eyes were burning, but the tissue around them was already bluish and now she smiled.'You won't let me die, will you?' she whispered.'You'll save me.' Lestat reached over and took her wrist. 'But it's too late, love,' he said.'Look at your wrist, your breast' And then he touched the wound in her throat. She put her hands to her throat and gasped, her mouth open, the scream strangled. I stared at Lestat. I could not understand why he did this. His face was as smooth as mine is now, more animated for the blood, but cold and without emotion.
"He did not leer like a stage villain, nor hunger for her suffering as if the cruelty fed him. He simply watched her.'I never meant to be bad,' she was crying.'I only did what I had to do. You won't let this happen to me, You'll let me go. I can't die like this, I can't!' She was sobbing, the sobs dry and thin.'You'll let me go. I have to go to the priest. You'll let me go.' "'But my friend is a priest,' said Lestat, smiling. As if he'd just thought of it as a joke.'This is your funeral, dear. You see, you were at a dinner party and you died. But God has given you another chance to be absolved. Don't you see? Tell him your sins'
"She shook her head at first, and then she looked at me again with those pleading eyes.'Is it true?' she whispered.'Well,' said Lestat,'I suppose you're not contrite, dear. I shall have to shut the lid!'
"'Stop this, Lestat!' I shouted at him. The girl was screaming again, and I could not stand the sight of it any longer. I bent down to her and took her hand.'I can't remember my sins,' she said, just as I was looking at her wrist, resolved to kill her.'You mustn't try. Tell God only that you are sorry,' I said,'and then you'll die and it will be over.' She lay back, and her eyes shut. I sank my teeth into her wrist and began to suck her dry. She stirred once as if dreaming and said a name; and then, when I felt her heartbeat reach that hypnotic slowness, I drew back from her, dizzy, confused for the moment, my hands reaching for the door frame. I saw her as if in a dream. The candles glared in the corner of my eye. I saw her lying utterly still. And Lestat sat composed beside her, like a mourner. Ibis face was still.'Louis,' he said to me.'Don't you understand? Peace will only come to you when you can do this every night of your life. There is nothing else. But this is everything!' Isis voice was almost tender as he spoke, and he rose and put both his hands on my shoulders. I walked into the parlor, shying away from his touch but not resolute enough to push him off.'Come with me, out into the streets. It's late. You haven't drunk enough. Let me show you what you are. Really! Forgive me if I bungled it, left too much to nature. Come!'
"'I can't bear it, Lestat,' I said to him.'You chose your companion badly.'
"'But Luis,' he said,'you haven't tried!.'
The vampire stopped. He was studying the boy. And the boy, astonished, said nothing.
"It was true what he'd said. I had not drunk enough; and shaken by the girl's fear, I let him lead me out of the hotel, down the back stairs. People were coming now from the Conde Street ballroom, and the narrow street was jammed. There were supper parties in the hotels, and the planter families were lodged in town in great numbers and we passed through them like a nightmare. My agony was unbearable. Never since I was a human being had I felt such mental pain. It was because all of Lestat's words had made sense to me. I knew peace only when I killed, only for that minute; and there was no question in my mind that the killing of anything less than a human being brought nothing but a vague longing, the discontent which had brought me close to humans, to watch their lives through glass. I was no vampire. And in my pain, I asked irrationally, like a child, Could I not return? Could I not be human again? Even as the blood of that girl was warm in me and I felt that physical thrill and strength, I asked that question. The faces of humans passed me like candle flames in the night dancing on dark waves. I was sinking into the darkness. I was weary of longing. I was ¡៧ around and around in the street, looking at the stars and thinking, Yes, it's true. I know what he is saying is true, that when I kill there is no longing; and I can't bear this truth, I can't bear it.
"Suddenly there was one of those arresting moments. The street was utterly quiet. We had strayed far from the main part of the old town and were near the ramparts. There were no lights, only the fire in a window and the far-off sound of people laughing. But no one here. No one near us. I could feel the breeze suddenly from the river and the hot air of the night rising and Lestat near me, so still he might have been made of stone. Over the long, low row of pointed roofs were the massive shapes of oak trees in the dark, great swaying forms of myriad sounds under the lowhung stars. The pain for the moment was gone; the confusion was gone. I closed my eyes and heard the wind and the sound of water flowing softly, swiftly in the river. It was enough, for one moment. And I knew that it would not endure, that it would fly away from me like something torn out of my arms, and I would By after it, more desperately lonely than any creature under God, to get it back. And then a voice beside e rumbled deep in the sound of the night, a drumbeat as the moment ended, saying,'Do what it is your nature to do. This is but a taste of it. Do what it is your nature to do.' And the moment was gone. I stood like the girl in the parlor in the hotel, dazed and ready for the slightest suggestion. I was nodding at Lestat as he nodded at me.'Pain is terrible for you,' he said.'You feel it like no other creature because you are a vampire. You don't want it to go on.'
"'No,' I answered him.'I'll feel as I felt with her, wed to her and weightless, caught as if by a dance.'
"'That and more.' His hand tightened on mine.'Don't turn away from it, come with me.'
"He led me quickly through the street, turning every time I hesitated, his hand out for mine, a smile on his lips, his presence as marvelous to me as the night he'd come in my mortal life and told me we would be vampires.'Evil is a point of view,' he whispered now. ' We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms. I want a child tonight. I am like a mother.... I want a child!"
"I should have known what he meant. I did not. He had me mesmerized, enchanted. He was playing to me as he had when I was mortal; he was leading me. He was saying,'Your pain will end.'
"We'd come to a street of lighted windows. It was a place of rooming houses, sailors, flatboat men. We entered a narrow door; and then, in a hollow stone passage in which I could hear my own breath like the wind, he crept along the wall until his shadow leapt out in the light of a doorway beside the shadow of another man, their heads bent together, their whispers like the rustling of dry leaves.'What is it?' I drew near him as he came back, afraid suddenly this exhilaration in me would die. I saw again that nightmare landscape I'd seen when I spoke With Babette; I felt the chill of loneliness, the chill of guilt.'She's there!' he said.'Your wounded one. Your daughter.'
"'What do you say, what are you talking about!'
"'You've saved her,' he whispered.'I. knew it. You left the window wide on her and her dead mother, and people passing in the street brought her here.'
"`The child. The little girl!' I gasped. But he was already leading me through the door to stand at the end of the long ward of wooden beds, each with a child beneath a narrow white blanket, one candle at the end of the ward, where a nurse bent over a small desk. We walked down the aisle between the rows.'Starving children, orphans,' he said:'Children of plague and fever.' He stopped. I saw the little girl lying in the bed. And then the man was coming, and he was whispering with Lestat; such care for the sleeping little ones. Someone in another room was crying. The nurse rose and hurried away.
"And now the doctor bent and wrapped the child in the blanket. Lestat had taken money from his pocket and set it on the foot of the bed. The doctor was saying how glad he was we'd come for her, how most of them were orphans; they came in on the ships, sometimes orphans too young even to tell which body was that of their mother. He thought Lestat was the father.
"And in moments, Lestat was running through the streets with her, the white of the blanket gleaming against his dark coat and cape; and even to my expert vision, as I ran after him it seemed sometimes as if the blanket dew through the night with no one holding it, a shifting shape traveling on the wind like a leaf stood upright and sent scurrying along a passage, trying to gain the wind all the while and truly take flight. I caught him finally as we approached the lamps near the Place d'Armes. The child lay pale on his shoulder, her cheeks still full like plums, though she was drained and near death. She opened her eyes, or rather the lids slid back; and beneath the long curling lashes I saw a streak of white.'Lestat, what are you doing? Where are you taking her?' I demanded. But I knew too well. He was heading for the hotel and meant to take her into our room.
"The corpses were as we left them, one neatly set in the coffin as if an undertaker had already attended her, the other in her chair at the table. Lestat brushed past them as if he didn't see them, while I watched him in fascination. The candles had all burned down, and the only light was that of the moon and the street. I could see his iced and gleaming profile as he set the child down on the pillow.'Come here, Louis, you haven't fed enough, I know you haven't,' he said with the same calm, convincing voice he had used skillfully all evening. He held my hand in his, his own warm and tight.'See her, Louis, how plump and sweet she looks, as if even death can't take her freshness; the will to live is too strong! He might make a sculpture of her tiny lips and rounded hands, but he cannot her faded You remember, the way you wanted her when you saw her in that room.' I resisted him. I didn't want to kill her. I hadn't wanted to last night. And then suddenly I remembered two conflicting things and was torn in agony: I remembered the powerful beating of her heart against mine and I hungered for it, hungered for it so badly I tamed my back on her in the bed and would have rushed out of the room had not Lestat held me fast; and I remembered her mother's face and that moment of horror when I'd dropped the child and he'd come into the room. But he wasn't mocking me now; he was confusing me.'You want her, Louis. Don't you see, once you've taken her, then you can take whomever you wish. You wanted her last night but you weakened, and that's why she's not dead.' I could feel it was true, what he said. I could feel again that ecstasy of being pressed to her, her little heart going and going.'She's too strong for me... her heart, it wouldn't give up,' I said to him.'Is she so strong?' he smiled. He drew me close to him.'Take her, Louis, I know you want her.' And I did. I drew close to the bed now and just watched her. Her chest barely moved with her breath, and one small hand was tangled in her long, gold hair. I couldn't bear it, looking at her, wanting her not to die and wanting her; and the more I looked at her, the more I could taste her skin, feel my arm sliding under her back and pulling her up to me, feeling her soft neck. Soft, soft, that's what she was, so soft. I tried to tell myself it was best for her to die--what was to become of her? but these were lying thoughts. I wanted her! And so I took her in my arms and held her, her burning cheek on mine, her hair' down over my wrists and brushing my eyelids, the sweet perfume of a child strong and pulsing in spite of sickness and death. She moaned how, stirred in her sleep, and that was more than I could bear. rd kill her before rd let her wake and know it. I went into her throat and heard Lestat saying to me strangely,'Just a little tear. It's just a little throat.' And I obeyed him.
