Interview with the Vampire

Chapter 9

"I won't tell you again what it was like, except that it caught me up just as it had done before, and as killing always does, only more; so that my knees bent and I half lay on the bed, sucking her dry; that heart pounding again that would not slow, would not give up. And suddenly, as I went on and on, the instinctual part of me waiting, waiting for the slowing of the heart which would mean death, Lestat wrenched me from her.'But she's not dead,' I whispered. But it was over. The furniture of the room emerged from the darkness. I sat stunned, staring at her, too weak to move, my head rolling back against the headboard of the bed, my hands pressing down on the velvet spread. Lestat was snatching her up, talking to her, saying a name. 'Claudia, Claudia, listen to me, come round, Claudia.' He was carrying her now out of the bedroom into the parlor, and his voice was so soft I barely heard him.'You're ill, do you hear me? You must do as I tell you to get well.' And then, in the pause that followed, I came to my senses. I realized what he was doing, that he had cut his wrist and given it to her and she was drinking.'That's it dear; more,' he was saying to her.'You must drink it to get well.'
"'Damn you!' I shouted, and he hissed at me with blazing eyes. He sat on the settee with her locked to his wrist. I saw her white hand clutching at his sleeve, and I could see his chest heaving for breath and his face contorted the way I'd never seen it. He let out a moan and whispered again to her to go on; and when I moved from the threshold, he glared at me again, as if to say,'I'll kill you!'
"'But why, Lestat?' I whispered to him. He was trying now to push her off, and she wouldn't let go. With her fingers locked around his fingers and arm she held the wrist to her mouth, a growl coming out of her.'Stop, stop!' he said to her. He was clearly in pain. He pulled back from her and held her shoulders with both hands. She tried desperately to reach leis wrist with leer teeth, but she couldn't; and then she looked at him with the most innocent astonishment. He stood back, his hand out lest she move. Then he clapped a handkerchief on his wrist and backed away from her, toward the bell rope. He pulled it sharply, his eyes still fixed on her.
"'What have you done, Lestat?' I asked him.'What have you done?' I stared at her. She sat composed, revived, filled with life, no sign of pallor or weakness in her, her legs stretched out straight on the damask, her white gown soft and thin like an angel's gown around her small form. She was looking at Lestat.'Not me,' he said to her,'ever again. Do you understand? But I'll show you what to do!' When I tried to make him look at me and answer a as to what he was doing, he shook me off. a gave me such a blow with his arm that I hit the wall. Someone was knocking now. I knew what he meant to do. Once more I tried to reach out for ' but he spun so fast I didn't even see him hit me. When I did see ' I was sprawled in the chair and he was opening the door.'Yes, come in, please, there's been an accident,' he said to the young slave boy. And then, shutting the door, he took him from behind, so that the boy never knew what happened. And even as he knelt over the body drinking, he beckoned for the child, who slid from the couch and went down on her knees and took the wrist offered her, quickly pushing back the cuff of the shirt. She gnawed as if she meant to devour his flesh, and then Lestat showed her what to do. He sat back and let her have the rest, his eye on the boy's chest, so that when the ' came, he bent forward and said,'No more, he's dying... You must never drink after the heart stops or you'll be sick again, sick to death. Do you understand?' But she'd had enough and she sat next to ' their backs against the legs of the settee, their legs stretched out on the floor. The boy died in seconds. I felt weary and sickened, as if the night had lasted a thousand years. I sat there watching them, the child drawing close to Lestat now, snuggling near him as he slipped his arm around her, though his indifferent eyes remained fixed on the corpse. Then he looked up at me.
"'Where is Mamma?' asked the child softly. She had a voice equal to her physical beauty; clear like a little silver bell. It was sensual. She was sensual. Her eyes were as wide and clear as Babette's. You understand that I was barely aware of what all this meant. I knew what it might mean, but I was aghast. Now Lestat stood up and scooped her from the floor and came towards me.'She's our daughter,' he said.'You're going to live with us now.' He beamed at her, but his eyes were cold, as if it were all a horrible joke; then he looked at me, and his face had conviction. He pushed her towards me. I found her on my lap, my arms around her, feeling again how soft she was, how plump her skin was, like the skin of warm fruit, plums warmed by sunlight; her huge luminescent eyes were fixed on me with trusting curiosity.'This is Louis, and I am Lestat,' he said to her, dropping down beside her. She looked about and said that it was a pretty room, very pretty, but she wanted her mamma. He had his comb out and was running it through her hair, holding the locks so as not to pull with the comb; her hair was untangling and becoming like satin. She was the most beautiful child I'd ever seen, and now she glowed with the cold fire of a vampire. Her eyes were a woman's eyes, I could see it already. She would become white and spare like us but not lose her shape. I understood now what Lestat had said about death, what he meant. I touched her neck where the two red puncture wounds were bleeding just a little. I took Lestat's handkerchief from the floor and touched it to her neck.'Your mamma's left you with us. She wants you to be happy,' he was saying with that same immeasurable confidence.'She knows we can make you very happy.'
"'I want some more,' she said, turning to the corpse on the floor.
"'No, not tonight; tomorrow night,' said Lestat. And he went to take the lady out of his coffin. The child slid off my lap, and I followed her. She stood watching as Lestat put the two ladies and the slave boy into the bed. He brought the covers up to their chin.'Are they sick?' asked the child.
"'Yes, Claudia,' he said.'They're sick and they're dead. You see, they die when we drink from them.' He came towards her and swung her up into his arms again. We stood there with her between us. I was mesmerized by her, by her transformed, by her every gesture: She was not a child any longer, she was a vampire child.'Now, Louis was going to leave us,' said Lestat, his eyes moving from my face to hers.'He was going to go away. But now he's not. Because he wants to stay and take care of you and make you happy.' He looked at me.'You're not going, are you, Louis?'
"'You bastard!' I whispered to him. 'You fiend!'
"'Such language in front of your daughter,' he said.
"'I'm not your daughter,' she said with the silvery voice.'I'm my mamma's daughter.'
"'No, dear, not anymore,' he said to her. He glanced at the window, and then he shut the bedroom door behind us and turned the key in the lock.'You're our daughter, Louis's daughter and my daughter, do you see? Now, whom should you sleep with? Louis or me?' And then looking at me, he said,'Perhaps you should sleep with Louis. After all, when I'm tired... I'm not so kind."'
The Vampire Stopped. The boy said nothing. "A child vampire!" he whispered finally. The vampire glanced up suddenly as though startled, though his body made no movement. He glared at the tape recorder as if it were something monstrous.
The boy saw that the tape was almost out. Quickly, he opened his brief case and drew out a new cassette, clumsily fitting it into place. He looked at the vampire as he pressed the record button. The vampire's face looked weary, drawn, his cheekbones more prominent and his brilliant green eyes enormous. They had begun at dark, which had come early on this San Francisco winter night, and now it was just before ten P.m. The vampire straightened and smiled and said calmly, "We are ready to go on?"
"He'd done this to the little girl just to keep you with him?" asked the boy.
"That is difficult to say. It was a statement. I'm convinced that Lestat was a person who preferred not to think or talk about his motives or beliefs, even to himself. One of those people who must act. Such a person must be pushed considerably before he will open up and confess that there is method and thought to the way he lives. That is what had happened that night with Lestat. He'd been pushed to where he had to discover even for himself why he lived as he did. Keeping me with him, that was undoubtedly part of what pushed him. But I think, in retrospect, that he himself wanted to know his own reasons for killing, wanted to examine his own life. He was discovering when he spoke what he did believe. But he did indeed want me to remain. He lived with me in a way he could never have lived alone. And, as I've told you, I was careful never to sign any property over to him, which maddened him. That, he could not persuade me to do." The vampire laughed suddenly, "Look at all the other things he persuaded me to do! How strange. He could persuade me to kill a child, but not to part with my money." He shook his head. "But," he said, "it wasn't greed, really, as you can see. It was fear of him that made me tight with him."
" You speak of him as if he were dead. You say Lestat was this or was that. Is he dead?" asked the boy.
"I don't know," said the vampire. "I think perhaps he is. But I'll come to that. We were talking of Claudia, weren't we? There was something else I wanted to say about Lestat's motives that night. Lestat trusted no one, as you see. He was like a cat, by his own admission, a lone predator. Yet he had communicated with me that night; he had to some extent exposed himself simply by telling the truth. He had dropped his mockery, his condescension. He had forgotten his perpetual anger for just a little while. And this for Lestat was exposure. When we stood, alone in that dark street, I felt in him a communion with another I hadn't felt since I died. I rather think that he ushered Claudia into vampirism for revenge"
"Revenge, not only on you but on the world," suggested the boy.
"Yes. As I said, Lestat's motives for everything revolved around revenge"
"Was it all started with the father? With the school?"
"I don't know. I doubt it," said the vampire. "But I want to go on."
"Oh, please go on. You have to go on! I mean, it's only ten o'clock." The boy showed his watch.
The vampire looked at it, and then he smiled at the boy. The boy's face changed. It was blank as if from some sort of shock. "Are you still afraid of me?" asked the vampire.
The boy said nothing, but he shrank slightly from the edge of the table. His body elongated, his feet moved out over the bare boards and then contracted.
"I should think you'd be very foolish if you weren't," said the vampire. "But don't be. Shall we go on?"
"Please," said the boy. He gestured towards the machine.
'Well," the vampire began, "our life was much changed with Mademoiselle Claudia, as you can imagine. Her body died, yet her senses awakened much as mine had. And I treasured in her the signs of this. But I was not aware for quite a few days how much I wanted her, wanted to talk with her and be with her. At first, I thought only of protecting her from Lestat. I gathered her into my coffin every morning and would not let her out of my sight with him if possible. This was what Lestat wanted, and he gave little suggestions that he might do her harm. 'A starving child is a frightful sight,' he said to me,'a starving vampire even worse.' They'd hear her screams in Paris, he said, were he to lock her away to die. But all this was meant for me, to draw me close and keep me there. Afraid of fleeing alone, I would not conceive of risking it with Claudia. She was a child. She needed care.
"And there was much pleasure in caring for her. She forgot her five years of mortal life at once, or so it seemed, for she was mysteriously quiet. And from time to time I even feared that she had lost all sense, that the illness of her mortal life, combined with the great vampire shock, might have robbed her of reason; but this proved hardly the case. She was simply unlike Lestat and me to such an extent I couldn't comprehend her; for little child she was, but also fierce killer now capable of the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child's demanding. And though Lestat still threatened me with danger to her, he did not threaten her at all but was loving to her, proud of her beauty, anxious to teach her that we must kill to live and that we ourselves could never die.
"The plague raged in the city then, as I've indicated, and he took her to the stinking cemeteries where the yellow fever and plague victims lay in heaps while the sounds of shovels never ceased all through the day and night.'This is death,' he told her, pointing to the decaying corpse of a woman,'which we cannot suffer. Our bodies will stay always as they are, fresh and alive; but we must never hesitate to bring death, because it is how we live.' And Claudia gazed on this with inscrutable liquid eyes.
"If there was not understanding in the early years, there was no smattering of fear. Mute and beautiful, she played with dolls, dressing, undressing them by the hour. Mute and beautiful, she killed. And I, transformed by Lestat's instruction, was now to seek out humans in much greater numbers. But it was not only the killing of them that soothed some pain in me which bad been constant in the dark, still nights on Pointe du Lac, when I sat with only the company of Lestat and the old man; it was their great, shifting numbers everywhere in streets which never grew quiet, cabarets which never shut their doors, balls which lasted till dawn, the music and laughter streaming out of the open windows; people all around me now, my pulsing victims, not seen with that great love I'd felt for my sister and Babette, but with some new detachment and need. And I did kill them, kills infinitely varied and great distances apart, as I walked with the vampire's sight and light movement through this teeming, burgeoning city, my victims surrounding me, seducing me, inviting me to their supper tables, their carriages, their brothels. I lingered only a short while, long enough to take what I must have, soothed in my great melancholy that the town gave me an endless train of magnificent strangers.
"For that was it. I fed on strangers. I drew only close enough to see the pulsing beauty, the unique expression, the new and passionate voice, then killed before those feelings of revulsion could be aroused in me, that fear, that sorrow.
"Claudia and Lestat might hunt and seduce, stay long in the company of the doomed victim, enjoying the splendid humor in his unwitting friendship with death. But I still could not bear it. And so to me, the swelling population was a mercy, a forest in which I was lost, unable to stop myself, whirling too fast for thought or pain, accepting again and again the invitation to death rather than extending it.
"We lived meantime in one of my new Spanish town houses in the Rue Royale, a long, lavish upstairs flat above a shop I rented to a tailor, a hidden garden court behind us, a well secure against the street, with fitted wooden shutters and a barred carriage door-a place of far greater luxury and security than Pointe du Lac. Our servants were free people of color who left us to solitude before dawn for their own homes, and Lestat bought the very latest imports from France and Spain: crystal chandeliers and Oriental carpets, silk screens with aimed birds of paradise, canaries singing in great do domed, golden cages, and delicate marble Grecian gods and beautifully painted Chinese vases. I did not need the luxury anymore than I had needed it before, but I found myself enthralled with the new flood of art and craft and design, could stare at the intricate pattern of the carpets for hours, or watch the gleam of the lamplight change the somber colors of a Dutch painting.
"All this Claudia found wondrous, with the quiet awe of an unspoiled child, and marveled when Lestat hired a painter to make the walls of her room a magical forest of unicorns and golden birds and laden fruit trees over sparkling streams.
"An endless train of dressmakers and shoemakers and tailors came to our flat to outfit Claudia in the best of children's fashions, so that she was always a vision, not just of child beauty, with her curling lashes and her glorious yellow hair, but of the taste of finely trimmed bonnets and tiny lace gloves, flaring velvet coats and capes, and sheer white puffed-sleeve gowns with gleaming blue sashes. Lestat played with her as if she were a magnificent doll, and I played with her as if she were a magnificent doll; and it was her pleading that forced me to give up my rusty black for dandy jackets and silk ties and soft gray coats and gloves and black capes. Lestat thought the best color at all times for vampires was black, possibly the only aesthetic principle he steadfastly maintained, but he wasn't opposed to anything which smacked of style and excess. He loved the great figure we cut, the three of us in our box at the new French Opera House or the Theatre d'Orleans, to which we went as often as possible, Lestat having a passion for Shakespeare which surprised me, though he often dozed through the operas and woke just in time to invite some lovely lady to midnight supper, where he would use all his skill to make her love him totally, then dispatch her violently to heaven or hell and come home with her diamond ring to give to Claudia.
"And all this time I was educating Claudia, whispering in her tiny seashell ear that our eternal life was useless to us if we did not see the beauty around us, the creation of mortals everywhere; I was constantly sounding the depth of her still gaze as she took the books I gave her, whispered the poetry I taught her, and played with a light but confident touch her own strange, coherent songs on the piano. She could fall for hours into the pictures in a book and listen to me read until she sat so still the sight of her jarred me, made me put the book down, and just stare back at her across the lighted room; then she'd move, a doll coming to life, and say in the softest voice that I must read some more.
"And then strange things began to happen, for though she said little and was the chubby, round-fingered child still, I'd find her tucked in the arm of my chair reading the work of Aristotle or Boethius or a new novel just come over the Atlantic. Or pecking out the music of Mozart .we'd only heard the night before with an infallible ear and a concentration that made her ghostly as she sat there hour after hour discovering the music the melody, then the bass, and finally bringing it together. Claudia was mystery. It was not possible to know what she knew or did not know. And to watch her kill was chilling. She would sit alone in the dark square waiting for the kindly gentleman or woman to find her, her eyes more mindless than I had ever seen Lestat's. Like a child numbed with fright she would whisper her plea for help to her gentle, admiring patrons, and as they carried her out of the square, her arms would fix about their necks, her tongue between her teeth, her vision glazed with consuming hunger. They found death fast in those first years, before she learned to play with them, to lead them to the doll shop or the cafe where they gave her steaming cups of chocolate or tea to ruddy her pale cheeks, cups she pushed away, waiting, waiting, as if feasting silently on their terrible kindness.
"But when that was done, she was my companion, my pupil, her long hours spent with me consuming faster and faster the knowledge I gave her, sharing with me some quiet understanding which could not include Lestat. At dawn she lay with me, her heart beating against my heart, and many times when I looked at her-when she was at her music or painting and didn't know I stood in the room-I thought of that singular experience rd had with her and no other, that I had killed her, taken her life from her, had drunk all of her life's blood in that fatal embrace I'd lavished on so many others, others who lay now moldering in the damp earth. But she lived, she lived to put her arms around my neck and press her tiny cupid's bow to my lips and put her gleaming eye to nay eye until our lashes touched and, laughing, we reeled about the room as if to the wildest waltz. Father and Daughter. Lover and Lover. You can imagine how well it was Lestat did not envy us this, but only smiled on it from afar, waiting until she came to him. Then he would take her out into the street and they would wave to me beneath the window, off to share what they shared: the hunt, the seduction, the kill.
"Years passed in this way. Years and years and years. Yet it wasn't until some time had passed that an obvious fact occurred to me about Claudia. I suppose from the expression on your face you've already guessed, and you wonder why I didn't guess. I can only tell you, time is not the same for me, nor was it for us then. Day did not link to day making a taut and jerking chain; rather, the moon rose over lapping waves."
"Her body!" the boy said. "She was never to grow up."
The vampire nodded. "She was to be the demon child forever," he said, his voice soft as if he wondered at it. "Just as I am the young man I was when I died. And Lestat? The same. But her mind It was a vampire's mind. And I strained to know how she moved towards womanhood. She came to talk more, though she was never other than a reflective person and could listen to me patiently by the hour without interruption. Yet more and more her doll-like face seemed to possess two totally aware adult eyes, and innocence seemed lost somewhere with neglected-toys and the loss of a certain patience. There was something dreadfully sensual about her lounging on the settee in a tiny nightgown of lace and stitched pearls; she became an eerie and powerful seductress, her voice as clear and sweet as ever, though it had a resonance which was womanish, a sharpness sometimes that proved shocking; After days of her usual quiet, she would scoff suddenly at Lestat's predictions about the war; or drinking blood from a crystal glass say that there were no books in the house, we must get more even if we had to steal them, and then coldly tell me of a library she'd heard of, in a palatial mansion in the Faubourg St.-Marie, a woman who collected books as if they were rocks or pressed butterflies. She asked if I might get her into the woman's bedroom.
"I was aghast at such moments; her mind was unpredictable, unknowable. But then she would sit on my lap and put her fingers in my hair and doze there against my heart, whispering to me softly I should never be as grown up as she until I knew that killing was the more serious thing, not the books, the music.'Always the music... ' she whispered.'Doll, doll,' I called her. That's what she was. A magic doll. Laughter and infinite intellect and then the round-checked face, the bud mouth.'Let me dress you, let me brush your hair,' I would say to her out of old habit, aware of her smiling and watching me with the thin veil of boredom over her expression.'Do as you like,' she breathed into my ear as I bent down to fasten her pearl buttons.'Only kill with me tonight. You never let me see you kill, Louis!'
"She wanted a coffin of her own now, which left me more wounded than I would let her see. I walked out after giving my gentlemanly consent; for how many years had I slept with her as if she were part of me I couldn't know. But then I found her near the Ursuline Convent, an orphan lost in the darkness, and she ran suddenly towards me and clutched at me with a human desperation.'I don't want it if it hurts you,' she confided so softly that a human embracing us both could not have heard her or felt her breath.'I'll stay with you always. But I must see it, don't you understand? A coin for a child.'
"We were to go to the coffinmaker's. A play, a tragedy in one act: I to leave her in his little parlor and confide to him in the anteroom that she was to die. Talk of love, she must have the best, but she must not know; and the coffinmaker, shaken with the tragedy of it, must make it for her, picturing her laid there on the white satin, dabbing a tear from his eye despite all the years...
"'But, why, Claudia...' I pleaded with her. I loathed to do it, loathed cat and mouse with the help less human. But hopelessly her lover, I took her there and set her on the sofa, where she sat with folded hands in her lap, her tiny bonnet bent down, as if she didn't know what we whispered about her in the foyer. The undertaker was an old and greatly refined man of color who drew me swiftly aside lest'the baby' should hear.'But why must she die?' he begged me, as if I were God who ordained it.'Her heart, she cannot live,' I said, the words taking on for me a peculiar power, a disturbing resonance. The emotion in his narrow, heavily lined face disturbed me; something came to my mind, a quality of light, a gesture, the sound of something . a child crying in a stenchfilled room. Now he unlocked one after another of his long rooms and showed me the coffins, black lacquer and silver, she wanted that. And suddenly I found myself backing away from him out of the coffin-house, hurriedly taking her hand.'The order's been taken,' I said to her.'It's driving me mad!' I breathed the fresh air of the street as though I'd been suffocated and then I saw her compassionless face studying mine. She slipped her small gloved hand back into my own.'I want it, Louis,' she explained patiently.
"And then one night she climbed the undertaker's stairs, Lestat beside her, for the con, and left the coffinmaker, unawares, dead across the dusty piles of papers on his desk. And there the coffin lay in our bedroom, where she watched it often by the hour when it was new, as if the thing were moving or alive or unfolded some mystery to her little by little, as things do which change. But she did not sleep in it. She slept with me.
"There were other changes in her. I cannot date them or put them in order. She did not kill indiscriminately. She fell into demanding patterns. Poverty began to fascinate her; she begged Lestat or me to take a carriage out through the Faubourg St.-Marie to the riverfront places where the immigrants lived. She seemed obsessed with the women and children. These things Lestat told me with great amusement, for I was loath to go and would sometimes not be persuaded under any circumstance. But Claudia had a family there which she took one by one. And she had asked to enter the cemetery of the suburb city of Lafayette and there roam the high marble tombs in search of those desperate men who, having no place else to sleep, spend what little they have on a bottle of wine, and crawl into a rotting vault. Lestat was impressed, overcome. What a picture he made of her, the infant death, he called her. Sister death, and sweet death; and for me, mockingly, he had the term with a sweeping bow, Merciful Death! which he said like a woman clapping her hands and shouting out a word of exciting gossip: oh, merciful heavens! so that I wanted to strangle him.
"But there was no quarrelling. We kept to ourselves. We had our adjustments. Books filled our long fiat from floor to ceiling in row after row of gleaming leather volumes, as Claudia and I pursued our natural tastes and Lestat went about his lavish acquisitions. Until she began to ask questions."
The vampire stopped. And the boy looked as anxious as before, as if patience took the greatest effort. But the vampire had brought his long, white fingers together as if to make a church steeple and then folded them and pressed his palms tight. It was as if he'd forgotten the boy altogether. "I should have known," he said, "that it was inevitable, and I should have seen the signs of it coming. For I was so attuned to her; I loved her so completely; she was so much the companion of my every waking hour, the only companion that I had, other than death. I should have known. But something in me was conscious of an enormous gulf of darkness very close to us, as though we walked always near a sheer cliff and might see it suddenly but too late if we made the wrong turn or became too lost in our thoughts. Sometimes the physical world about me seemed insubstantial except for that darkness. As if a fault in the earth were about to open and I could see the great crack breaking down the Rue Royale, and all the buildings were falling to dust in the rumble. But worst of all, they were transparent, gossamer, like stage drops made of silk. Ah... I'm distracted. What do I say? That I ignored the signs in her, that I clung desperately to the happiness she'd given me. And still gave me; and ignored all else.