The vampire turned towards him and studied him, so that the boy flushed and looked away again anxiously. But then he raised his eyes and looked into the vampire's eyes. He swallowed, but he held the vampire's gaze.
"Is this what you want?" the vampire whispered. "Is this what you wanted to hear?"
He moved the chair back soundlessly and walked to the window. The boy sat as if stunned looking at his broad shoulders and the long mass of the cape. The vampire turned his head slightly. "You don't answer me. I'm not giving you what you want, am I? You wanted an interview. Something to broadcast on the radio."
"That doesn't matter. I'll throw the tapes away if you want!" The boy rose. "I can't say I understand all you're telling me. You'd know I was lying if I said I did. So how can I ask you to go on, except to say what I do understand... what I do understand is like nothing I've ever understood before." He took a step towards the vampire. The vampire appeared to be looking down into Divisadero Street. Then he turned his head slowly and looked at the boy and smiled. His face was serene and almost affectionate. And the boy suddenly felt uncomfortable. He shoved his hands into his pockets and turned towards the table. Then he looked at the vampire tentatively and said. "Will you... please go on?"
The vampire turned with folded arms and leaned against the window. "Why?" he asked.
The boy was at a loss. "Because I want to hear it."
He shrugged. "Because I want to know what happened."
"All right," said the vampire, with the same smile playing on his lips. And he went back to the chair and sat opposite the boy and turned the recorder just a little and said, "Marvelous contraption, really... so let me go on.
"You must understand that what I felt for Babette now was a desire for communication, stronger than any other desire I then felt... except for the physical desire for... blood. It was so strong in me, this desire, that it made me feel the depth of my capacity for loneliness. When I'd spoken to her before, there had been a brief but direct communication which was as simple and as satisfying as taking a person's hand. Clasping it. Letting it go gently. All this in a moment of great need and distress. But now we were at odds. To Babette, I was a monster; and I found it horrible to myself and would have done anything to overcome her feeling. I told her the counsel I'd given her was right, that no instrument of the devil could do right even if he chose.
"'I know!' she answered me. But by this she meant that she could no more trust me than the devil himself. I approached her and she moved back. I raised my hand and she shrank, clutching for the railing.'All right, then,' I said, feeling a terrible exasperation.'Why did you protect me last night! Why have you come to me alone!' What I saw in her face was cunning. She had a reason, but she would by no means reveal it to me. It was impossible for her to speak to me freely, openly, to give me the communication I desired. I felt weary looking at her. The night was already late, and I could see and hear that Lestat had stolen into the wine cellar and taken our caskets, and I had a need to get away; and other needs besides... the need to kill and drink. But it wasn't that which made me weary. It was something else, something far worse. It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn't see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars. I think I turned away from her and put my hand to my eyes. I felt oppressed and weak suddenly. I think I was making some sound without my will. And then on this vast and desolate landscape of night, where I was standing alone and where Babette was only an illusion, I saw suddenly a possibility that I'd never considered before, a possibility from which I'd fled, rapt as I was with the world, fallen into the senses of the vampire, in love with color and shape and sound and singing and softness and infinite variation. Babette was moving, but I took no note of it. She was taking something from her pocket; her great ring of household keys jingled there. She was moving up the steps. Let her go away, I was thinking.'Creature of the devil!' I whispered.'Get thee behind me, Satan,' I repeated. I turned to look at her now. She was frozen on the steps, with wide suspicious eyes. She'd reached the lantern which hung on the wall, and she held it in her hands just staring at me, holding it tight, like a valuable purse.'You think I come from the devil?' I asked her.
"She quickly moved her left fingers around the hook of the lantern and with her right hand made the sign of the Cross, the Latin words barely audible to me; and her face blanched and her eyebrows rose when there was absolutely no change because of it.'Did you expect me to go up in a puff of smoke?' I asked her. I drew closer now, for I had gained detachment from her by virtue of my thoughts.'And where would I go?' I asked her.'And where would I go, to hell, from whence I came? To the devil, from whom I came?' I stood at the foot of the steps.'Suppose I told you I know nothing of the devil. Suppose I told you that I do not even know if he exists!' It was the devil I'd seen upon the landscape of my thoughts; it was the devil about whom I thought now. I turned away from her. She wasn't hearing me as you are now. She wasn't listening. I looked up at the stars. Lestat was ready, I knew it. It was as if he'd been ready there with the carriage for years; and she had stood upon the step for years. I had the sudden sensation my brother was there and had been there for ages also, and that he was talking to me low in an excited voice, and what he was saying was desperately important but it was going away from me as fast as he said it, like the rustle of rats in .the rafters of an immense house. There was a scraping sound and a burst of light.'I don't know whether I come from the devil or not! I don't know what I am!' I shouted at Babette, my voice deafening in my own sensitive ears.'I am to live to the end of the world, and I do not even know what I am!' But the light flared before me; it was the lantern which she had lit with a match and held now so I couldn't see her face. For a moment I could see nothing but the light, and then the great weight of the lantern struck me full force in the chest and the glass shattered on the bricks anti the flames roared on my legs, in my face. Lestat was shouting from the darkness,'Put it out, put it out, idiot. It will consume you!' And I felt something thrashing me wildly in my blindness. It was Lestat's jacket. I'd fallen helpless back against the pillar, helpless as much from the fire and the blow as from the knowledge that Babette meant to destroy me, as from, the knowledge that I did not know what I was.
"All this happened in a matter of seconds. The fire was out and I knelt in the dark with my hands on the bricks. Lestat at the top of the stairs had Babette again, and I flew up after him, grabbing him about the neck and pulling him backwards. He turned on me, enraged, and kicked me; but I clung to him and pulled him down on top of me to the bottom. Babette was petrified. I saw her dark outline against the sky and the glint of light in her eyes.'Come on then!' Lestat said, scrambling to his feet. Babette was putting her hand to her throat. My injured eyes strained to gather the light to see her. Her throat bled.'Remember!' I said to her. I might have killed you! Or let him kill you! I did not. You called me devil. You are wrong.'"
"Then you'd stopped Lestat just in time," said the boy.
"Yes. Lestat could kill and dank like a bolt of lightning. But I had saved only Babette's physical life. I was not to know that until later."
"In an hour and a half Lestat and I were in New Orleans, the horses nearly dead from exhaustion, the carriage parked on a side street a block from a new Spanish hotel. Lestat had an old man by the arm and was putting fifty dollars into his hand.'Get us a suite,' he directed him,'and order some champagne. Say it is for two gentlemen, and pay in advance. And when you come back I'll have another fifty for you. And I'll be watching for you, I wager.' Isis gleaming eyes held the man in thrall. I knew he'd kill him as soon as he returned with the hotel room keys, and he did. I sat in the carriage watching wearily as the man grew weaker and weaker and finally died, his body collapsing like a sack of rocks in a doorway as Lestat let him go.'Good night, sweet prince,' said Lestat'and here's your fifty dollars.' And he shoved the money into his pocket as if it were a capital joke.
"Now we slipped in the courtyard doors of the hotel and went up to the lavish parlor of our suite. Champagne glistened in a frosted bucket. Two glasses stood on the silver tray. I knew Lestat would fill one glass and sit there staring at the pale yellow color. And I, a man in a trance, lay on the settee staring at him as if nothing he could do mattered. I have to leave him or die, I thought. It would be sweet to die, I thought. Yes, die. I wanted to die before. Now I wish to die. I saw it with such sweet clarity, such dead calm.
"'You're being morbid!' Lestat said suddenly.'It's almost dawn.' He pulled the lace curtains back, and I could see the rooftops under the dark blue sky, and above, the great constellation Orion.'Go kill!' said Lestat, sliding up the glass. He stepped out of the sill, and I heard his feet land softly on the rooftop beside the hotel. He was going for the coffins, or at least one. My thirst rose in me like fever, and I followed him. My desire to die was constant, like a pure thought in the mind, devoid of emotion. Yet I needed to feed. I've indicated to you I would not then kill people. I moved along the rooftop in search of rats."
"But why... you've said Lestat shouldn't have made you start with people. Did you mean... do you mean for you it was an aesthetic choice, not a moral one?"
"Had you asked me then, I would have told you it was aesthetic, that I wished to understand death in stages. That the death of an animal yielded such pleasure and experience to me that I had only begun to understand it, and wished to save the experience of human death for my mature understanding. But it was moral. Because all aesthetic decisions are moral, really."
"I don't understand," said the boy. "I thought aesthetic decisions could be completely immoral. What about the clich��¦ of the artist who leaves his wife and children so he can paint? Or Nero playing the harp while Rome burned?"
"Both were moral decisions. Both served a higher good, in the mind of the artist. The conflict lies between the morals of the artist and the morals of society, not between aesthetics and morality: But often this isn't understood; and here comes the waste, the tragedy. An artist, stealing paints from a store, for example, imagines himself to have made an inevitable but immoral decision, and then he sees ' self as fallen from grace; what follows is despair and petty irresponsibility, as if morality were a great glass world which can be utterly shattered by one act. But this was not my great concern then. I did not know these things then. I believed I killed animals for aesthetic reasons only, and I hedged against the great moral question of whether or mot by my very nature I was damned.
"Because, you see, though Lestat had never said anything about devils or hell to me, I believed I was damned when I went over to him, just as Judas must have believed it when he put the noose around his neck. You understand?"
The boy said nothing. He started to speak but didn't.
The color burned for a moment in blotches on his cheeks. " Were you?" he whispered.
The vampire only sat there, smiling, a small smile that played on his lips like the light. The boy was staring at him now as if he were just seeing him for the first time.
"Perhaps... " said the vampire drawing himself up and crossing his legs ".... we should take things one at a time. Perhaps I should go on with my story."
"Yes, please... " said the boy.
"I was agitated that night, as I told you. I had hedged against this question as a vampire and now it completely overwhelmed me, and in that state I had no desire to live. Well, this produced in me, as it can in humans, a craving for that which will satisfy at least physical desire. I think I used it as an excuse. I have told you what the kill means to vampires; you can imagine from what I've said the difference between a rat and a man.
"I went down into the street after Lestat and walked for blocks. The streets were muddy then, the actual blocks islands above the gutters, and the entire city so dark compared to the cities of today. The lights were as beacons in a black sea. Even with morning rising slowly, only the dormers and high porches of the houses were emerging from the dark, and to a mortal man the narrow streets I found were like pitch. Am I damned? Am I from the devil? Is my very nature that of a devil? I was asking myself over and over. And if it is, why then do I revolt against it, tremble when Babette hurls a flaming lantern at me, turn away in disgust when Lestat kills? What have I become in becoming a vampire? Where am I to go? And all the while, as the death wish caused me to neglect my thirst, my thirst grew hotter; my veins were veritable threads of pain in my flesh; my temples throbbed; and finally I could stand it no longer. Torn apart by the wish to take no action-to starve, to wither in thought on the one hand; and driven to kill on the other-I stood in an empty, desolate street and heard the sound of a child crying.
"She was within. I drew close to the walls, trying in my habitual detachment only to understand the nature of her cry. She was weary and aching and utterly alone. She had been crying for so long now, that soon she would stop from sheer exhaustion. I slipped my hand up under the heavy wooden shutter and pulled it so the bolt slipped. There she sat in the dark room beside a dead woman, a woman who'd been dead for some days. The room itself was cluttered with trunks and packages as though a number of people had been packing to leave; but the mother lay half clothed, her body already in decay, and no one else was there but the child. It was moments before she saw me, but when she did she began to tell me that I must do something to help her mother. She was only five at- most, and very thin, and her face was stained with dirt and tears. She begged me to help. They had to take a ship, she said, before the plague came; their father was waiting. She began to shake her mother now and to cry in the most pathetic and desperate way; and then she looked at me again and burst into the greatest flow of tears.
"You must understand that by now I was burning with physical need to drink. I could not have made it through another day without feeding. But there were alternatives: rats abounded in the streets, and somewhere very near a dog was howling hopelessly. I might have Pied the room had I chosen and fed and gotten back easily. But the question pounded in me: Am I dammed? If so, why do I feel such pity for her, for her gaunt face? Why do I wish to touch her tiny, soft arms, hold her now on my knee as I am doing, feel her bend her head to my chest as I gently touch the satin hair? Why do I do this? If I am damned I must want to kill her, I must want to make her nothing but food for a cursed existence, because being damned I must hate her.
"And when I thought of this, I saw Babette's face contorted with hatred when she had held the lantern waiting to light it, and I saw Lestat in my mind and hated him, and I felt, yes, damned and this is hell, and in that instant I had bent down and driven hard into her soft, small neck and, hearing her tiny cry, whispered even as I felt the hot blood on my lips,'It's only for a moment and there'll be no more pain.' But she was locked to me, and I was soon incapable of saying anything. For four years I had not savored a human; for four years I hadn't really known; and now I heard her heart in that terrible rhythm, and such a heart not the heart of a man or an animal, but the rapid, tenacious heart of the child, beating harder and harder, refusing to die, beating like a tiny fist beating on a door, crying,'I will not die, I will not die, I cannot die, I cannot die...' I think I rose to my feet still locked to her, the heart pulling my heart faster with no hope of cease, the rich blood rushing too fast for me, the room reeling, and then, despite myself, I was staring over her bent head, her open mouth, down through the gloom at the mother's face; and through the half-mast lids. her eyes gleamed at me as if they were alive! I threw the child down. She lay like a jointless doll. And turning in blind horror of the mother to flee, I saw the window filled with a familiar shape. It was Lestat, who backed away from it now laughing, his body bent as he danced in the mud street.'Louis, Louis,' he taunted me, and pointed a long, bone-thin finger at me, as if to say he'd caught me in the act. And now he bounded over the sill, brushing me aside, and grabbed the mother's stinking body from the bed and made to dance with her."
"Good God!" whispered the boy.
"Yes, I might have said the same," said the vampire. "He stumbled over the child as he pulled the mother along in widening circles, singing as he danced, her matted hair falling in her face, as her head snapped back and a black fluid poured out of her mouth. He threw her down. I was out of the window and running down the street, and he was running after me.'Are you afraid of me, Louis?' he shouted.'Are you afraid? The child's alive, Louis, you left her breathing. Shall I go back and make her a vampire? We could use her, Louis, and think of all the pretty dresses we could buy for her. Louis, wait, Louis! I'll go back for her if you say!' And so he ran after me all the way back to the hotel, all the way across the rooftops, where I hoped to lose him, until I leaped in the window of the parlor and turned in rage and slammed the window shut. He hit it, arms outstretched, like a bird who seeks to By through glass, and shook the frame. I was utterly out of my mind. I went round and round the room looking for some way to kill him. I pictured his body burned to a crisp on the roof below. Reason had altogether left me, so that I was consummate rage, and when he came through the broken glass, we fought as we'd never fought before. It was hell that stopped me, the thought of hell, of us being two souls in hell that grappled in hatred. I lost my confidence, my purpose, my grip. I was down on the floor then, and he was standing over me, his eyes cold, though his chest heaved.'You're a fool, Louis,' he said. His voice was calm. It was so calm it brought me around.'The sun's coming up,' he said, his chest heaving slightly from the struggle, his eyes narrow as he looked at the window. I'd never seen him quite like this. The fight had got the better of him in some way; or something had.'Get in your coffin,' he said to me, without even the slightest anger.'But tomorrow night... we talk.'
"Well, I was more than slightly amazed. Lestat talk! I couldn't imagine this. Never had Lestat and I really talked. I think I have described to you with accuracy our sparring matches, our angry go-rounds."
"He was desperate for the money, for your houses," said the boy. "Or was it that he was as afraid to be alone as you were?"
"These questions occurred to me. It even occurred to me that Lestat meant to kill me, some way that I didn't know. You see, I wasn't sure then why I awoke each evening when I did, whether it was automatic when the deathlike sleep left me, and why it happened sometimes earlier than at other times. It was one of the things Lestat would not explain. And he was often up before me. He was my superior in all the mechanics, as I've indicated. And I shut the coin that morning with a kind of despair.
"I should explain now, though, that the shutting of the coffin is always disturbing. It is rather like going under a modern anesthetic on an operating table. Even a casual mistake on the part of an intruder might mean death."
"But how could he have killed you? He couldn't have exposed you to the light; he couldn't have stood it himself."
"This is true, but rising before me he might have nailed my coffin shut. Or set it afire. The principal thing was, I didn't know what he might do, what he might know that I still did not know.
"But there was nothing to be done about it then, and with thoughts of the dead woman and child still in any brain, and the sun rising, I had no energy left to argue with him, and lay down to miserable dreams."
"You do dream!" said the boy.
"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 ' g 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 rd 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 said 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 bung 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. Isis 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?"