The Vampire Chronicles Collection: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned

by Anne Rice

“You weren’t always a vampire, were you?” he began.

“No,” answered the vampire. “I was a twenty-five-year-old man when I became a vampire, and the year was seventeen ninety-one.”

I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage to do it himself.

“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don’t know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

But to stand in the presence of a saint … To believe that the saint has seen a vision. No, it’s egotism, our refusal to believe it could occur in our midst.”

What I mean is, the moment I saw him, saw his extraordinary aura and knew him to be no creature I’d ever known, I was reduced to nothing. That ego which could not accept the presence of an extraordinary human being in its midst was crushed.

No, indeed, it was not inevitable. Yet I can’t say I decided. Let me say that when he’d finished speaking, no other decision was possible for me, and I pursued my course without a backward glance. Except for one.”

But the other light was my wish for self-destruction. My desire to be thoroughly damned.

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.”

You will die, you know. The sun will destroy the blood I’ve given you, in every tissue, every vein.

I did not like Lestat at all. I was far from being his equal yet, but I was infinitely closer to him than I had been before the death of my body.

“Killing is no ordinary act,” said the vampire. “One doesn’t simply glut oneself on blood.” He shook his head. “It is the experience of another’s life for certain, and often the experience of the loss of that life through the blood, slowly. It is again and again the experience of that loss of my own life, which I experienced when I sucked the blood from Lestat’s wrist and felt his heart pound with my heart. It is again and again a celebration of that experience; because for vampires that is the ultimate experience.”

‘You don’t drink after they’re dead! Understand that!’

‘You’ll die if you do that,’ Lestat was saying. ‘He’ll suck you right down into death with him if you cling to him in death. And now you’ve drunk too much, besides; you’ll be ill.’

I did not wish to rush headlong into experience, that what I’d felt as a vampire was far too powerful to be wasted?”

Lestat killed humans all the time, sometimes two or three a night, sometimes more. He would drink from one just enough to satisfy a momentary thirst, and then go on to another.

“No. Being a vampire for him meant revenge. Revenge against life itself. Every time he took a life it was revenge.

The nuances of vampire existence weren’t even available to him because he was focused with a maniacal vengeance upon the mortal life he’d left.

“You must understand that what I felt for Babette now was a desire for communication, stronger than any other desire I then felt … except for the physical desire for … blood.

and heard the sound of a child crying.

And what truly lies before you is vampire nature, which is killing.

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!’

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.’

the killing of anything less than a human being brought nothing but a vague longing, the discontent which had brought me close to humans, to watch their lives through glass.

‘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!’

It was fear of him that made me tight with him.”

for little child she was, but also fierce killer now capable of the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child’s demanding.

And I, transformed by Lestat’s instruction, was now to seek out humans in much greater numbers.

just stare back at her across the lighted room; then she’d move, a doll coming to life,

And to watch her kill was chilling. She would sit alone in the dark square waiting

off to share what they shared: the hunt, the seduction, the kill.

she became an eerie and powerful seductress,

‘I’ll stay with you always. But I must see it, don’t you understand? A coffin for a child.’

Creole

???

Now I knew her to be less human than either of us, less human than either of us might have dreamed. Not the faintest conception bound her to the sympathies of human existence.

‘Because perhaps he was incapable of dying … perhaps he is, and we are … truly immortal?’ “For

I was battling a mindless, animated corpse. But no more.

I lay against the wall, staring at the thing, the blood rushing in my ears. Gradually I realized that Claudia knelt on his chest, that she was probing the mass of hair and bone that had been his head. She was scattering the fragments of his skull. We had met the European vampire, the creature of the Old World. He was dead.”

In every village where we did encounter the vampire, it was the same.” “A mindless corpse?” the boy asked. “Always,” said the vampire.

And her eyes … they were mindless, empty, two pools that reflected the moon. No secrets, no truths, only despair.”

And in despair the recurring fear that we had killed the only other vampire like us, Lestat.

I wanted to forget him, and yet it seemed I thought of him always.

What if, after Lestat’s infusion of blood, she’d been put in a grave, closed up in it until the preternatural drive for blood caused her to break the stone door of the vault that held her, what then would her mind have been, starved, as it were, to the breaking point? Her body might have saved itself when no mind remained.

‘But tell me, Louis, what makes you so certain that you’ve never done this without your knowing it?’

I tell you it’s never happened! Lestat drained me to the point of death to make me a vampire. And gave back all that blood mingled with his own. That is how it was done!’

all was alive with a shocking profusion of gas light that rendered even the ornate lofty ceilings devoid of shadows. The light raced on the gilt curlicues, flickered in the baubles of the chandeliers. Darkness did not exist. Vampires did not exist.

There was a brooding there, a smoldering dissatisfaction. And though it would vanish from her eyes when I would call to her or answer her, anger seemed to settle very near the surface.

She’d always been the ‘lost child’ to her victims, the ‘Orphan,’ and now it seemed she would be something else, something wicked and shocking to the passers-by who succumbed to her.

her inevitable disillusionment with our quest, which left us in this limbo where I felt her drawing away from me, dwarfing me with her enormous need.

the unmistakable figure of another vampire.