"So you want me to tell you the story of my life." "Like I said, that's what I do." "I interview people." "I'm a collector of lives." "FM radio, KFRC." "You'll need a lot of tape for my story." "No problem." "I got a bag full of tape." "You followed me here, didn't you?" "Yeah, I suppose I did." "You seemed very interesting." "This is where you live?" "No." "It's just a room." "What do you say we get started?" "What do you do?" "I'm a vampire." "I haven't heard that before." "You mean this literally, I take it?" "Absolutely." "I was waiting for you in that alley." "Watching you watching me." "And then you began to speak." "What a lucky break for me." "Perhaps lucky for both of us." "You said you were waiting for me." "What were you going to do?" "Kill me, drink my blood?" "Yes." "But you needn't be concerned now." "You really believe this, don't you, that you're a vampire?" "We can't begin this way." "Let me turn on the light." " I thought vampires didn't like light." " We love it." "I only wanted to prepare you." "Christ!" "Don't be frightened." "I want this opportunity." "How the hell did you do that?" "The same as you do." "A series of simple gestures." "Only I moved too fast for you to see." "I'm flesh and blood but not human." "I haven't been human for 200 years." "Please..." "How can I put you at ease?" "Shall we begin like "David Copperfield"?" ""I am born..." ""..." "I grew up."" "Or shall we begin when I was born to darkness, as I call it." "That's where we should start, don't you think?" "You're not lying, are you?" "Why should I lie?" "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." "She and the infant had been buried less than half a year." "I would've been happy to join them." "I couldn't bear the pain of their loss." "I longed to be released from it." "I wanted to lose it all:" "My wealth  my estate  my sanity." "How many aces are in a deck?" "Are you calling me a cheat?" "No, I'm calling you a piece of stinking offal!" "You lack the courage of your convictions." "Do it!" "Most of all, I longed for death." "I know that now." "I invited it." "A release from the pain of living." "My invitation was open to anyone." "To the whore at my side." "To the pimp that followed." "But it was a vampire that accepted." "Give me your money or you die!" "Do you still want death?" "Or have you tasted it enough?" "Enough." "He left me there, on the banks of the Mississippi  somewhere between life and death." "Who are you?" "What're you doing in my house?" "I've come to answer your prayers." "Life has no meaning anymore... does it?" "The wine has no taste." "The food sickens you." "There seems no reason for any of it..." "does there?" "What if I could give it back to you?" "Pluck out the pain and give you another life?" "One you could never imagine." "And it would be... for all time." "And sickness and death could never touch you again." "Don't be afraid." "I'm going to give you the choice I never had." "That morning, I was not yet a vampire  and I saw my last sunrise." "I remember it completely  and yet I can't recall any sunrise before it." "I watched the whole magnificence of the dawn for the last time  as if it were the first." "And then I said farewell to sunlight  and set out to become  what I became." "Have you said your good-byes to the light?" "I've drained you to the point of death." "If I leave you here you'll die." "Or you can be young always, my friend as we are now." "But you must tell me will you come or no?" "Yes." "Yes." "Your body's dying." "Pay no attention." "It happens to us all." "Now look with your vampire eyes." "What did you see?" "No words can describe it." "Might as well ask Heaven what it sees." "No human can know." "The statue seemed to move, but didn't." "The world had changed, yet stayed the same." "I was a newborn vampire, weeping at the beauty of the night." "Perhaps you'd like another cigarette?" "I would." "It's not bothering you, is it?" "I don't assume it would." "It's not like you'll die from cancer." "I don't think so." " What about crucifixes?" " Crucifixes?" "Can you look at them?" "Actually, I'm quite fond of looking at crucifixes." "And the stake through the heart?" "Nonsense." "And coffins?" "Coffins." "Coffins, unfortunately, are a necessity." "Don't worry." "Soon you'll be sleeping as soundly as you've ever slept." "And when you awake I'll be waiting for you and so will all the world." "Blood, I was to find, was a necessity as well." "I awoke the next evening with a hunger I had never felt." "Once you taste this you'll never go to another tavern again." "You think so?" "But what if I'd rather taste your lips?" "My lips are even sweeter still." "My friend should taste those lips." "Is his kiss as deep as yours?" "Deeper, ma chrie." "I will not take her life." "I've done it for you." "She's dead as a doornail, my friend." "It's so easy, you almost feel sorry for them." "You'll get used to killing." "Just forget about that mortal coil." "You'll become accustomed to it, all too quickly." "Are you not hungry?" "Au contraire, ma chrie." "He could eat the whole colony." "I will finish it." "Now leave us." "Can't you pretend, you fool?" "Don't give the game away." "We're lucky to have such a home." "Pretend to drink, at least." "Such fine crystal shouldn't go to waste." "I know." "It gets cold so quickly." "We can live like this?" "On animal blood?" "I wouldn't call it living." "Call it surviving." "Useful trick if you're on a ship for a month." "There's nothing in the world now that doesn't hold some..." "Fascination." "Yes." " I'm bored with this prattle." " We can live without killing." "It's possible." "Anything is possible." "But just try it for a week." "Come into New Orleans and let me show you some real sport." "Lestat killed two, sometimes three a night." "A fresh young girl  was his favorite for the first of the evening." "For seconds, he preferred a gilded, beautiful youth." "But the snob in him loved to hunt in society." "The blood of the aristocrat thrilled him best of all." "The trick is not to think about it." "You see that one?" "Widow St. Clair." "She had that gorgeous young fop murder her husband." "How do you know?" "Read her thoughts." "Read her thoughts." "I can't." "The "dark gift" is different for each of us." "But one thing is true of everyone." "We grow stronger as we go along." "Just take my word for it." "She blamed a slave for his murder." "Imagine what they did to him." "Evil-doers are easier, and they taste better." "Where are we going?" "Nowhere." "Now, young man, you really amaze me!" "I'm old enough to be your grandmother." "Oh, yes, that's the melody." "I remember it." "Murderer!" "My little papillons!" "My butterflies, he killed them!" "You... whining coward of a vampire who prowls killing rats and poodles!" "You could've finished us!" "You've condemned me to Hell!" "I don't know any Hell." "That's more like it!" "Anger!" "Fury!" "That's why I chose you!" "But you can't kill me, Louis." "Feed on what you will." "Rats, chickens poodles." "I'll leave you to it and watch you come around." "Remember:" "Life without me would be even more unbearable." "Consider yourself lucky." "In Paris, a vampire must be clever for many reasons." "Paris?" "Here all one needs is a pair of fangs." "You came from Paris?" "As did the one who made me." "Tell me about him." "You must've learned something from him." "I learned absolutely nothing." "I wasn't given a choice, remember?" "You must know something about the meaning of it all." "Why?" "Why should I know these things?" "Do you know them?" "That noise it's driving me mad!" "We've been here for weeks with nothing but that noise!" "They know about us." "They watch us dine on empty plates and drink from empty glasses." "Come to New Orleans then." "The Paris Opera's in town." "We can try some French cuisine." "Forgive me if I have a lingering respect for life." "You'll soon run out of chickens, Louis." "Monsieur Louis?" "You don't want any supper?" "No, ma chrie." "We're worried about you, Master." "When is it that you go riding in the field?" "And how long since you've been to the slave quarter?" "Everywhere there is death." "Are you still our master at all?" "That will be all, Yvette." "I will not go unless you listen to me." "You must send away this friend of yours." "The slaves are all frightened of him and they are frightened of you." "I'm frightened of myself." "Hear me now!" "This place is cursed!" "Damned!" "And, yes, your master is the Devil!" "Get out while you can!" "You're all free!" "Do you hear me?" "Run!" "Run!" "Save yourselves!" "Perfect!" "Perfect!" "Just burn the place!" "Burn everything we own!" "Have us living in a field, like cattle!" "You thought you could have it all." "Shut up, Louis!" "Come on!" "Where are we?" "Where do you think, my idiot friend?" "We're in a nice, filthy cemetery." "Are you happy?" "Is this fitting?" "Proper enough?" "We belong in Hell." "What if there is no Hell?" "Or they don't want us there?" "Ever think of that?" "But there was a Hell." "And no matter where we moved to, I was in it." "We rented rooms on the waterfront of New Orleans." "Your skin is icy." "Your friend has no head for wine." "Don't worry." "I can warm that cold skin of yours better than she can." "Do you think so?" "Why you're warm now!" "But the price is high." "Your pretty friend, I exhausted her." "Soft." "So soft." "I can see you lying on a bed of satin." "Such things you say." "Do you know what manner of bed?" "Should we put out the light?" "And then put out the light." "But once I've put out thy light I cannot give it vital breath again." "Its needs must wither." "For you, Louis." "You can pretend it's wine." "She's not dead!" "You're in love with your mortal nature." "You resist what can bring you peace." "You call this peace?" "We're predators, whose all-seeing eyes give them detachment!" " The girl, Lestat!" " Take her!" "End that hunger!" "No!" "Now, my child." "You're tired, you want to sleep!" "It's a coffin!" "A coffin!" "Let me out!" "I'm not dead!" "It's your coffin, enjoy it." "Most of us never get to know what it feels like." "Why do you do this?" "I like to do it." "I enjoy it." "Take your aesthete's taste to purer things." "Kill them swiftly if you will, but do it!" "For do not doubt you are a killer, Louis!" " What's that?" " It's a coffin." "So it is." "You must be dead." "I'm not dead, am I?" "You're not dead." "Not yet." "Finish this now!" "You finish it!" "Save me from him!" "Save me!" "You'll let me go?" "I can't die like this!" "I need a priest." "My friend is a priest." "He'll hear your sins before you die." "Unless..." "I make her one of us." "No!" "Then take her, Louis, end her suffering!" "End yours!" "No!" "Now are you happy?" "My God!" "To think you are all I have to learn from." "In the Old World they called it the "dark gift."" "And I gave it to you." "Don't go that way, Monsieur." "It's the plague." " Go back the way you came!" " The way I came..." "Mama." "Please help us." "Papa left us and didn't come back." "Please, wake Mama, Monsieur." "My philosopher." "My martyr." ""Never take a human life."" "This calls for a celebration." "There's still life in the old lady yet." "Come back!" "You are what you are!" "Merciful death." "How you love your precious guilt." "Her blood coursed in my veins  sweeter than life itself." "And, as it did, Lestat's words made sense to me." "I knew peace only when I killed." "When I heard her heart in that terrible rhythm, I knew what peace could be." "All I need to find you, Louis, is follow the corpses of rats." "Pain is terrible for you." "You feel it like no other creature, because you're a vampire." "You don't want it to go on." "No." "Then do what it is in your nature to do and you will feel as you felt with that child in your arms." "Evil is a point of view." "God kills indiscriminately and so shall we." "For no creatures under God are as we are." "None so like Him as ourselves." "I have a gift for you." "Come." "Please." " She's here." " What are you saying?" "You need more congenial than mine." "Remember how you wanted her?" "The taste of her?" "I thought I'd killed her." "Don't worry." "Your conscience is clear." "Claudia." "Listen to me." "You're ill, my precious." "And I'm going to give you what you need to get well." "No." "You want her to die then?" "That's it." "Yes." "Stop!" "Stop!" "Enough!" "I want some more." "Of course you want more." "Gently, chrie." "They're so innocent." "They must not be made to suffer." "Good." "Yes." "All right, now." "Stop." "That's enough, chrie." "You must stop before the heart stops." "I want more." "I know." "But it's best in the beginning lest the Death takes you down with it." "You've done very well." "Look at you." "Not a drop split." "Very good." "Where is Mama?" "Mama's gone to Heaven, chrie, like that sweet lady..." "right there." "They all go to Heaven." "All but us." "Do you want to frighten our daughter?" "I'm not your daughter." "Oh, yes, you are." "You're my and Louis' daughter now." "You see, Louis was going to leave us." "He was going to go away." "But now he's not." "Now he's going to stay and make you happy." "Louis." "You fiend." "One happy family." "He did it to make you stay with him?" "Perhaps." "He knew me." "He knew I would love her more than the waking world." "But there was more to it." "He lavished affection on her, there is no doubt about that." "Perhaps, in the end, he did it because he was lonely too." " I need more light." " She needs more light." " I'll go blind without another lamp." " She'll go blind." "Or let me fit this child during the day." "Well, I am afraid, madame, that my days are sacrosanct." "A little child, she was." "But also a fierce killer  now capable of the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child's demanding." "Let me kiss it better." "Now who will we get to finish your dress?" "Be practical!" "Remember, never in our home!" "She slept in my coffin at first  curling her little fingers around my hair  till the day when she wanted her own coffin." "But still, whenever she awoke  she would crawl into mine." "They died fast in those days, before, she learned to play with them  to delay the moment till she had taken what she wanted." "Why are you crying, child?" "Are you lost, my love?" "Mama!" "Hush, now, don't cry." "We'll find her." "Mind the thumb, girl." "Mind the thumb." "That little digit." "They're expensive, my dear." "Maybe too expensive for a young girl like you." "Claudia!" "What have we told you!" "Never in the house." "Give me some room." "To me, she was a child." "But to Lestat, a pupil  an infant prodigy with a lust for killing like his own." "Together, they finished off whole families." "Wonderful, wonderful." "Now try something on a more somber note." "Time can pass quickly for mortals when they're happy." "With us, it was the same." "The years flew by like minutes." "The city grew." "Sailboats gave way to steamships  disgorging an endless menu of magnificent strangers." "A new world had sprung up around us." "And we were all Americans now." "This filthy modern tide!" "What I wouldn't give for a drop of old-fashioned Creole blood!" "Yankees are not to your taste?" "Their Democratic flavor doesn't suit my palate, Louis." "Now that is pure Creole." "Trust Claudia to have found her." "What?" "Don't you want her?" "I want to be her." "Can I?" "Be like her one day?" "More melancholy nonsense." "You grow more like Louis daily!" "Soon you'll be eating rats." "Rats?" "When did you eat rats, Louis?" "It was a long, long time ago." "Before you were born." "And I don't recommend them." "Thirty years had passed, yet her body remained that of an eternal child." "Her eyes alone told the story of her age, staring from under her curls  with a questioning  that would one day need an answer." "Another doll." "I have dozens, you realize." "I thought you could use one more." "Why always on this night?" "What do you mean?" "You always give me a doll on the same night of the year." "I didn't realize." "Is this my birthday?" "You dress me like a doll." "You make my hair like a doll." "Why?" "Some of these, Claudia, are so old tattered." " You should throw them away." " I will, then!" "What have you done?" "What you told me to do!" " You leave a corpse here to rot?" " I wanted her!" " I wanted to be her!" " She's mad!" "She pollutes the very house we live in!" "Do you want me to be a doll forever?" "Don't!" "Why not?" "Can't I change like everyone else?" "Which one of you did it?" "Which one of you did it?" "Which one of you made me the way I am?" "What you are?" "A vampire gone insane, that pollutes its own bed!" "And if I cut my hair again?" "It will grow back again." "But it wasn't always so!" "I had a mother once." "And Louis, he had a wife." "He was mortal, same as she." "And so was I!" "You made us what we are!" "Stop her." "Did you do it to me?" "How did you do it?" "And why should I tell you?" "It's in my power." "Why yours alone?" "Tell me how it was done!" "Be glad I made you what you are." "You'd be dead now if I hadn't." "Like that damned corpse!" "Now get rid of it!" "You get rid of it." "Louis, why?" "You've got to tell me." "You see the old woman?" "That will never happen to you." "You will never grow old." "And you will never die." "And it means something else too, doesn't it?" "I shall never, ever grow up." "I hate him." "Tell me how it came to be that I am this thing." "For thirty years I'd avoided that place." "Yet I found my way back there  with hardly an upward glance." "You fed on me?" "Yes." "And he found me with you." "Then he cut his wrist and fed you from him and you were a vampire then and have been every night thereafter." "You both did it." "I took your life." "He gave you another one." "And here it is." "I hate you both." "I walked all night." "I walked as I walked years before  when my mind swam with guilt at the thought of killing." "I thought of all the things I'd done and couldn't undo." "And I longed for one second's peace." "Locked together in hatred." "But I can't hate you, Louis." "Louis, my love." "I was mortal till you gave me your immortal kiss." "You became my mother and my father." "And so I'm yours forever." "But now it's time to end it, Louis." "Now it's time to leave him." "He will never let us go." "Really?" "What is it now?" "You irritate me." "Your very presence irritates me!" "Does it?" "I found someone who'll be a vampire better than you both!" "Is that supposed to frighten me?" "You're spoiled, because you're an only child." "You need a brother." "Or I do." "I'm weary of you both." "I suppose we could people the world with vampires the three of us." "Oh, not you my little Claudia." "You're a liar." "But you upset my plans." "What plans?" "I came to make peace with you." "Even though you're the father of lies I want things to be as they were." "Stop pestering me then." "I must do more than that." "I've brought a present for you." "Then I hope it's a beautiful woman with endowments you'll never possess." "Why do you say such things?" "You haven't fed enough." "I can tell by your color." "Come and see." "Don't be angry with me." "When I saw them, I knew they were for you." "Drunk on brandywine." "A thimbleful." "You certainly have outdone yourself." "I promise I'll get rid of the bodies." "We forgive each other then?" "Yes." "Absinthe?" "You've given them absinthe?" "No." "Laudanum." "Laudanum." "Yes." "It killed them, unfortunately." "But it keeps the blood warm." "You let me drink dead blood?" "You let me drink..." "One lesson you taught me never drink from the dead." "Put me in my coffin." "Put me in my coffin." "I'll put you in your coffin!" "My God!" "Lift me up!" "Good night, sweet prince." "May flights of devils wing you to your rest." "Should we burn him?" "Bury him?" "What would he have liked?" "The swamp?" "He belongs with those reptiles." "He deserved to die." "Then perhaps so do we, every night of our lives." "He was my maker." "He gave me this life whatever it is." "It shouldn't have been this way." "I did it for us." "So we could be free." "You missed him?" "He was all I knew." "It's as simple as that." "We were like two orphans learning to live again." "We booked a passage to Europe." "Over the weeks, while waiting for the boat  she studied the myths and legends of the Old World  obsessed with the search of what she called "our kind."" "Look who we forgot." "Let's set them free." " Yes." " Yes." "It's the carriage." "Listen, Louis there's life in these old hands still." "Not quite furioso." "Moderato cantabile, perhaps." "How could it be?" "Ask the alligator." "His blood helped." "Then, on a diet of the blood of snakes toads and all the putrid life of the Mississippi slowly Lestat became something like himself again." "You've been a very very naughty little girl." "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."