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