“ ‘Does it bring you happiness?’ he asked. ‘You wander through the night, feeding on rats like a pauper and then moon at Babette’s window, filled with care, yet helpless as the goddess who came by night to watch Endymion sleep and could not have him. And suppose you could hold her in your arms and she would look on you without horror or disgust, what then? A few short years to watch her suffer every prick of mortality and then die before your eyes? Does this give happiness? This is insanity, Louis. This is vain. And what truly lies before you is vampire nature, which is killing. For I guarantee you that if you walk the streets tonight and strike down a woman as rich and beautiful as Babbette and suck her blood until she drops at your feet you will have no hunger left for Babette’s profile in the candlelight or for listening by the window for the sound of her voice. You will be filled, Louis, as you were meant to be, with all the life that you can hold; and you will have hunger when that’s gone for the same, and the same, and the same. The red in this glass will be just as red; the roses on the wallpaper just as delicately drawn. And you’ll see the moon the same way, and the same the flicker of a candle. And with that same sensibility that you cherish you will see death in all its beauty, life as it is only known on the very point of death. Don’t you understand that, Louis? You alone of all creatures can see death that way with impunity. You… alone… under the rising moon… can strike like the hand of God!’

“He sat back now and drained the glass, and his eyes moved over the unconscious woman. Her breasts heaved and her eyebrows knit as if she were coming around. A moan escaped her lips. He’d never spoken such words to me before, and I had not thought him capable of it. ‘Vampires are killers,’ he said now. ‘Predators. Whose all-seeing eyes were meant to give them detachment. The ability to see a human life in its entirety, not with any mawkish sorrow but with a thrilling satisfaction in being the end of that life, in having a hand in the divine plan.’

“ ‘That is how you see it!’ I protested. The girl moaned again; her face was very white. Her head rolled against the back of the chair.

“ ‘That is the way it is,’ he answered. ‘You talk of finding other vampires! Vampires are killers! They don’t want you or your sensibility! They’ll see you coming long before you see them, and they’ll see your flaw; and, distrusting you, they’ll seek to kill you. They’d seek to kill you even if you were like me. Because they are lone predators and seek for companionship no more than cats in the jungle. They’re jealous of their secret and of their territory; and if you find one or more of them together it will be for safety only, and one will be the slave of the other, the way you are of me.’

“ ‘I’m not your slave,’ I said to him. But even as he spoke I realized I’d been his slave all along.

“ ‘That’s how vampires increase… through slavery. How else?” he asked. He took the girl’s wrist again, and she cried out as the knife cut. She opened her eyes slowly as he held her wrist over the glass. She blinked and strained to keep them open. It was as if a veil covered her eyes. ‘You’re tired, aren’t you?’ he asked her. She gazed at him as if she couldn’t really see him. ‘Tired!’ he said, now leaning close and staring into her eyes. ‘You want to sleep.’ ‘Yes…’ she moaned softly. And he picked her up and took her into the bedroom. Our coffins rested on the carpet and against the wall; there was a velvet-draped bed. Lestat did not put her on the bed; he lowered her slowly into his coffin. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him, coming to the door sill. The girl was looking around like a terrified child. ‘No…’ she was moaning. And then, as he closed the lid, she screamed. She continued to scream within the coffin.

“ ‘Why do you do this, Lestat?’ I asked.

“ ‘I like to do it,’ he said. ‘I enjoy it.’ He looked at me. ‘I don’t say that you have to enjoy it. Take your aesthete’s tastes to purer things. Kill them swiftly if you will, but do it! Learn that you’re a killer! Ah!’ He threw up his hands in disgust. The girl had stopped screaming. Now he drew up a little curved-legged chair beside the coffin and, crossing his legs, he looked at the coffin lid. His was a black varnished coffin, not a pure rectangular box as they are now, but tapered at both ends and widest where the corpse might lay his hands upon his chest. It suggested the human form. It opened, and the girl sat up astonished, wild-eyed, her lips blue and trembling. ‘Lie down, love,’ he said to her, and pushed her back; and she lay, near-hysterical, staring up at him. ‘You’re dead, love,’ he said to her; and she screamed and turned desperately in the coffin like a fish, as if her body could escape through the sides, through the bottom. ‘It’s a coffin, a coffin!’ she cried. ‘Let me out.’

“ ‘But we all must lie in coffins, eventually,’ he said to her. ‘Lie still, love. This is your coffin. Most of us never get to know what it feels like. You know what it feels like!’ he said to her. I couldn’t tell whether she was listening or not, or just going wild. But she saw me in the doorway, and then she lay still, looking at Lestat and then at me. ‘Help me!’ she said to me.

“Lestat looked at me. ‘I expected you to feel these things instinctually, as I did,’ he said. When I gave you that first kill, I thought you would hunger for the next and the next, that you would go to each human life as if to a full cup, the way I had. But you didn’t. And all this time I suppose I kept from straightening you out because you were best weaker. I’d watch you playing shadow in the night, staring at the falling rain, and I’d think, He’s easy to manage, he’s simple. But you’re weak, Louis. You’re a mark. For vampires and now for humans alike. This thing with Babette has exposed us both. It’s as if you want us both to be destroyed.’

“ ‘I can’t stand to watch what you’re doing,’ I said, turning my back. The girl’s eyes were burning into my flesh. She lay, all the time he spoke, staring at me.

“ ‘You can stand it!’ he said. ‘I saw you last night with that child. You’re a vampire, the same as I am!’

“He stood up and came towards me, but the girl rose again and he turned to shove her down. ‘Do you think we should make her a vampire? Share our lives with her?’ he asked. Instantly I said, ‘No!’

“ ‘Why, because she’s nothing but a whore?’ he asked. ‘A damned expensive whore at that,’ he said.

“ ‘Can she live now? Or has she lost too much?’ I asked him.

“ ‘Touching!” he said. ‘She can’t live.’

“ ‘Then kill her.’ She began to scream. He just sat there. I turned around. He was smiling, and the girl had turned her face to the satin and was sobbing. Her reason had almost entirely left her; she was crying and praying. She was praying to the Virgin to save her, her hands over her face now, now over her head, the wrist smearing blood in her hair and on the satin. I bent over the coffin. She was dying, it was true; her eyes were burning, but the tissue around them was already bluish and now she smiled. ‘You won’t let me die, will you?’ she whispered. ‘You’ll save me.’ Lestat reached over and took her wrist. ‘But it’s too late, love,’ he said. ‘Look at your wrist, your breast’ And then he touched the wound in her throat. She put her hands to her throat and gasped, her mouth open, the scream strangled. I stared at Lestat. I could not understand why he did this. His face was as smooth as mine is now, more animated for the blood, but cold and without emotion.

“He did not leer like a stage villain, nor hunger for her suffering as if the cruelty fed him. He simply watched her. ‘I never meant to be bad,’ she was crying. ‘I only did what I had to do. You won’t let this happen to me, You’ll let me go. I can’t die like this, I can’t!’ She was sobbing, the sobs dry and thin. ‘You’ll let me go. I have to go to the priest. You’ll let me go.’ ‘But my friend is a priest,’ said Lestat, smiling. As if he’d just thought of it as a joke. ‘This is your funeral, dear. You see, you were at a dinner party and you died. But God has given you another chance to be absolved. Don’t you see? Tell him your sins’