"The ship is sailing without us!" "Though the fire seemed to spread I stood on that deck, fearful, he would come out again from the river like some monster, to destroy us." "And all the while I thought..." ""Lestat..."" ""...we deserve your vengeance."" ""You gave me the 'dark gift'..."" ""...and I delivered you into the hands of Death for the second time."" "Though the ship was blessedly free of rats a strange plague nonetheless struck its passengers." "Claudia and I alone seemed immune." "We kept to ourselves pondering the mystery of each other." "We reached the Mediterranean." "I wanted those waters to be blue..." "but they were black night-time waters." "And how I suffered then straining to recall the color that in my youth I took for granted." "We searched village after village ruin after ruin country after country." "And always we found nothing." "I began to believe we were the only ones." "There was a strange comfort in that thought." "For what could the damned really have to say to the damned?" "You found nothing?" "Peasant rumors superstitions about garlic crosses the old stake in the heart." "But one of our kind?" "Not a whisper." "There are no vampires in Transylvania?" "No Count Dracula?" "Fictions, my friend." "The vulgar fictions of a demented Irishman." "Paris September, 1870." "The city I'd always dreamed of." "I was Creole, after all, and Paris was the mother of New Orleans." "A universe whole and entire unto herself." "We were alive again." "Just the two of us." "And so euphoric was I that I yielded to her every desire." "So it was when I'd given up the search for vampires that a vampire found me." "Buffoon!" "Santiago!" "I've searched the world for an immortal and this is what I find!" "Bring the petite beauty with you." "No one will harm you." "I won't allow it." "And remember my name:" "Armand." "Remember what I told you." "They have different powers." "They'll read your thoughts." "He's the one, that's the vampire." "Two lovers wandering down their violet way whose passionate embraces, each to each permit no meditations on decay until they find themselves within my reach!" "Vampires who pretend to be humans pretending to be vampires." "How avant-garde." "The monk whose soul with Heaven doth commune and spends his days in pious contemplation finds he will meet his Maker all too soon." "For all his prayers gets no remuneration." "The lesson endeth here and it is this:" "Each one of you, my clammy hands must touch." "Each one must bend his forehead to my kiss." "But, hark!" "Methinks a mortal doth approach!" "What have we here?" "What beauty by my side?" "A rose in bloom, a shrinking violet?" "Perhaps she has a mind to be my bride." "Perhaps my lesson has not ended yet!" "I don't want to die!" "But Death we are and have always been." "Someone help me!" "Please!" "What have I done?" "We all die!" "But I'm young!" "Death is no respecter of age!" "It can come any time, any place." "Just as this flesh is pink now so it will turn gray and wrinkle with age." "Let me live!" "I don't care!" "Then why should you care if you die now?" "And suppose Death had a heart to love and to release you?" "To whom would he turn his passion?" "Would you choose a person from the crowd there?" "A person to suffer as you do?" "Monsieur Vampire, take me!" "I adore you!" "You wait your turn!" "Well...." "Do you know what it means to be loved by Death?" "To become our bride?" "No pain." "No pain." "Monstrous." "We live beneath." "Let me show you." "Monstrous." "Yes." "But very beautiful." "Welcome to my home." "Try him." "Two vampires from the New World as all we love slowly rots and fades away." "Are you the leader of this group?" "If there were a leader I would be the one." "So you have the answers?" "So you have questions?" "What are we?" "Nothing if not vampires." "Who made us what we are?" "Surely you know the one who made you?" "Yes, but the one who made him?" "The source of all this evil." "I understand." "I saw you in the theater." "Your suffering your sympathy for that girl." "You die when you kill." "You feel you deserve to die and you stint on nothing." "But does that make you evil?" "Since you comprehend what you call goodness, doesn't that make you good?" "Then there is nothing?" "Perhaps." "But perhaps this is the only real evil left." "Then God does not exist?" "I know nothing of God." "Or the Devil." "I have never seen a vision, nor learned a secret that would damn or save my soul." "As far as I know after 400 years I am the oldest living vampire in the world." "Then it's as I always feared." "You fear too much." "So much you make me fear...." "The one who made you should have told you this." "The one who left the Old World for the New...." "He knew nothing." "Nor did he care." "Knew?" "Come, beloved." "It's time we were on our way." "I'm hungry and the city awaits." "The place was empty as we left." "Silent as the grave." "And as we blundered through it, again came the thought:" ""I have wronged Lestat."" ""I have hated him for the wrong reasons."" "How did you wrong him?" "You said a name." "Yes, a name I don't care to say again." "There is but one crime among us vampires here." "It is the crime that means death to any vampire:" "To kill your own kind." "Do you think I'd let them harm you?" "No, you would not." "Danger holds you to me." "Love holds you to me." "Love?" "Love." "You would leave me for Armand if he beckoned you." "Never." "He wants you as you want him." "He's been waiting for you." "He wants you as a companion." "He bides his time there." "He finds it as dull and lifeless as we do." "Perhaps." "Do you know what his soul said to me without saying a word?" ""Let him go," he said." ""Let him go."" "Is that what I should do?" "Let you go?" "My father my Louis who made me?" "It will be all right." "You really believe that?" "The soldier on returning from the war thinks victory has enured him against sorrow till Death comes by and chops him from his horse." "I was waiting for you." "Listen to me." "Claudia is very dear to me." "She's my daughter." "Your lover." "No, my beloved." "My child." "You say so." "You're innocent." "She's in danger, isn't she?" "She is." "Why?" "I could give you reasons." "Her silence." "Her youth." "It's forbidden to make one so young so helpless that cannot survive on its own." "Then blame the one who made her." "Did you kill this vampire who made you both?" "Is that why you won't say his name?" "Santiago thinks you did." "We want no quarrel with him." "It's already begun." "If you want to save her..." "...send her away!" "Then I leave too." "So soon?" "Without any of those answers you so longed for?" "You said there are none." "But you asked the wrong questions." "Do you know how few vampires have the stamina for immortality?" "How quickly they perish of their own will." "The world changes." "We do not." "Therein lies the irony that finally kills us." "I need you to make contact with this age." "Me?" "Don't you see?" "I'm not the spirit of any age." "I'm at odds with everything." "I always have been." "That is the very spirit of your age." "The heart of it." "Your fall from grace has been the fall of a century." "But the vampires in the theater?" "Decadent useless." "They can't reflect anything." "But you do." "You reflect its broken heart." "A vampire with a human soul." "An immortal with a mortal's passion." "You are beautiful, my friend." "Lestat must have wept when he made you." "You knew Lestat?" "Yes." "I knew him." "Knew him well enough not to mourn his passing." "I felt a kind of peace at last." "I had found the teacher which Lestat could never, I knew now, have been." "I knew knowledge would never be withheld by Armand." "It would pass through him as through a pane of glass." "Madeleine Louis is shy." "Drink." "Do it." "Because I cannot do it." "I haven't the strength." "You saw to that when you made me." "You don't know what you ask!" "I have." "You have found your new companion!" "You will make me mine!" "How do we seem to you?" "Do you find us beautiful?" "Magical?" "Our white skin, our fierce eyes?" "Do you know the thing you will become?" "Your evil is that you cannot be evil!" "And I shall suffer for it no longer!" "Don't make me do this!" "I cannot!" "Yet, you could do it to me." "Snatching me from my mother's hands, like two monsters in a fairy tale." "And now you weep!" "I haven't tears enough for what you've done to me!" "You give her to me, Louis!" "Do this before you leave me!" "Oh, God!" "I love you still!" "That's the torment of it!" "Who'll care for me, my love my dark angel, when you are gone?" "What do you think she is, Madeleine?" "A doll?" "A child who cannot die." "And the child who did die?" "My daughter." "What's happening to her?" "She's dying." "It happened to you too only you were too young to remember." "But if she dies?" "It's only mortal death." "Bear me no ill will, my love." "We are now even." "What do you mean?" "What died in that room was not that woman." "What has died is the last breath in me that was human." "Yes, Father." "At last we are even." "It's time for justice, little one." "Get me Armand." "He wouldn't stand for this." "Death for the others." "For you eternity in a box." "Walled in a dungeon." "Your only company will be your screams." "Perhaps it will take centuries." "Take them!" "Pleasant dreams." "No!" "No!" "Help!" "Wake up!" "Where's Claudia?" "Claudia." "I cannot help her." "Where's Claudia?" "I can't save her!" "I will only risk losing you!" "Don't!" "Come, Louis." "Not here." "So a vampire can cry?" "Once maybe twice, in eternity." "And maybe it was to quench those tears forever that I took such revenge." "Stop him!" "It's burning!" "Get him!" "Stop him!" "You didn't even warn them, did you?" "No." "And you knew what I would do." "I knew." "I rescued you, didn't I?" "From the terrible dawn." "You were their leader." "They trusted you." "No." "You made me see their failings, Louis." "They were doomed, stuck in their decadent time." "They had forgotten the first lesson that we must be powerful beautiful and without regret." "You can teach me this?" "Yes." "To be without regret?" "Then, what a pair we could make." "But what if it's a lesson I don't care to learn?" "What?" "What if all I have is my suffering?" "My regret?" "Don't you want to lose it?" "So you can have that too?" "The heart that mourns her whom you burnt to a cinder?" "I swear I didn't" "But I know you did." "I know you regret nothing." "You feel nothing." "If that's all I have left to learn I can do that on my own." "I will die." "No." "You are dead." "And you want me to quicken you once more." "And as much as your invitation might appeal to me I must regretfully decline." "For years I wandered:" "Italy, Greece all the ancient lands." "But the world was a tomb to me a graveyard full of broken statues." "And each of those statues resembled her face." "Then, out of curiosity boredom, who knows what I left the Old World and came back to my America." "And there a mechanical wonder allowed me to see the sunrise for the first time in 200 years." "And what sunrises!" "Seen as the human eye could never see them." "Silver at first then, as the years progressed, in tones of purple red and my long-lost blue." "In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans." "And as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home." "It was rich almost sweet like the fragrance of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard." "I walked the streets savoring that long-lost perfume." "And then on Prytania Street only blocks from the Lafayette cemetery I caught the scent of death." "And it wasn't coming from the graves." "The scent grew stronger as I walked." "Old death." "A scent too faint for mortals to detect." "I'm so glad you are here!" "I've dreamed of this moment." "She never should have been one of us." "That's all past, Lestat." "Past." "Still beautiful, Louis." "You always were the strong one." "Don't be frightened." "I mean you no harm." "You've come home to me then?" "You remember how I was?" "The vampire that I was?" "Yes, I remember." "No one could refuse me not even you." "I tried." "Yes, you tried." "And the more you tried the more I wanted you." "I can't bear it." "Such lights and that noise!" "They make the night brighter than the day." "It's false light." "It can't harm you." "If you stay with me, Louis I could venture out again." "Become the old Lestat." "I must leave now." "Whatever happened to Lestat, I do not know." "I go on night after night." "I feed on those who cross my path." "But all my passion went with her golden hair." "I'm a spirit of preternatural flesh." "Detached." "Unchangeable." "Empty." "Empty?" "That's it?" "No, it can't end like that." "But it has." "There's no more to tell." "There must be more to tell." "You don't understand yourself." "You're not empty." "What I wouldn't give to be like you, to have your power to have seen the things you have seen." "You haven't been listening." "I have been listening." "Your story is incredible." "It's amazing." "Do what you want with it." "Give it to others." "Learn what you can." "There's only one way I'll truly learn and you know it." "You brought me here for a reason." "Didn't you?" "What reason would that be?" "You want a companion." "You want a link to the outside world." "That's me." "Take me." "That's what I want." "I refuse to let it end like this." "God, I've failed again." "You haven't failed." "God has nothing to do with it." "Do you like this?" "Do you like being food for the immortals?" "Do you like dying?" "Stop!" "1791 was the year it happened." "I was 24." "Younger than you are now." "But times were different then." "I was a man at that age." "The master of a large plantation, just south of New Orleans." "I had lost my wife in childbirth." "Someone change my shorts." "She and the infant had been buried less than half a year." "It's good stuff." "I would've been happy to join them." "Good stuff." "I assume I need no introduction." "I feel better already." "Most of all, I longed for death." "I invited it." "A release from the pain of living." "Still whining." "Heard enough?" "I've had to listen to that for centuries." "Don't be afraid." "I'm going to give you the choice I never had."