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

by Anne Rice

And then suddenly I realized that not only was his black hair long and full and combed precisely like my own, and not only was he dressed in identical coat and cape to my own, but he stood imitating my stance and facial expression to perfection.

He was the vampire; I seemed the mirror.

he now struck at his chest in quickening time to mock my heartbeat.

Armand.’

‘Then we are not …’ I sat forward, ‘… the children of Satan?’ “ ‘How could we be the children of Satan?’ he asked. ‘Do you believe that Satan made this world around you?’

if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan’s power comes from God and that Satan is simply God’s child, and that we are God’s children also. There are no children of Satan, really’

“I was something whirling and vibrating to them, as mortals were to me. And I knew when he turned towards me again that he’d come to understand she did not believe or share my concept of evil.

‘Then God does not exist … you have no knowledge of His existence?’ “ ‘None,’ he said. “ ‘No knowledge!’ I said it again, unafraid of my simplicity, my miserable human pain. “ ‘None.’ “ ‘And no vampire here has discourse with God or with the devil!’ “ ‘No vampire that

‘And as far as I know today, after four hundred years, I am the oldest living vampire in the world.’

“Then it began to sink in. It was as I’d always feared, and it was as lonely, it was as totally without hope. Things would go on as they had before, on and on. My search was over.

Children of Satan! Children of God! Is this the only question you bring to me, is this the only power that obsesses you, so that you must make us gods and devils yourself when the only power that exists is inside ourselves?

I can now accept the most fantastical truth of all: that there is no meaning to any of this!’

‘It is the crime that means death to any vampire anywhere who commits it. It is to kill your own kind!’

‘You would leave me for Armand if he beckoned to you.…’ “ ‘Never …’ I said to her. “ ‘You would leave me, and he wants you as you want him. He’s been waiting for you.…’

‘He draws life out of me into himself,’ she said,

If you knew how he drinks death you’d hate him more than you ever hated Lestat.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘killing other vampires is very exciting; that is why it is forbidden under penalty of death.’

‘Don’t you understand what is happening to me? That he’s killing me, that master vampire who has you in thrall, that he won’t share your love with me, not a drop of it?

Other vampires must experience this and survive it, the passing of a hundred eras.’ “ ‘But they don’t survive it,’ he said. ‘The world would be choked with vampires if they survived it. How do you think I come to be the eldest here or anywhere?’ he asked.

How many vampires do you think have the stamina for immortality?

For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their life to be fixed as they are and incorruptible:

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A love so strong he couldn’t allow me to grow old and die. A love that waited patiently until I was strong enough to be born to darkness. Do you mean to tell me there was no bond of love between you and the vampire who made you?’ “ ‘None,’ I said quickly. I couldn’t repress a bitter smile.

‘I was gifted with eternal life, with heightened perception, and with the need to kill,’ I quickly explained, ‘because the vampire who made me wanted the house I owned and my money.

It is through you that I can save myself from the despair which I’ve described to you as our death. It is through you that I must make my link with this nineteenth century and come to understand it in a way that will revitalize me, which I so desperately need.

waiting at the Théâtre des Vampires. If I knew a mortal of that sensitivity, that pain, that focus, I would make him a vampire in an instant.

‘But Louis,’ he said softly. ‘This is the very spirit of your age. Don’t you see that? Everyone else feels as you feel. Your fall from grace and faith has been the fall of a century.’

I don’t see our life as powers and gifts. I see it as a curse.

‘No. I mean, directly. I made you do it! I was near you the night you did it. I exerted my strongest power to persuade you to do it. Didn’t you know this? “ ‘No!’

‘What can kill me?’ I asked. “Again he stopped. ‘The destruction of your remains,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know this? Fire, dismemberment … the heat of the sun. Nothing else. You can be scarred, yes; but you are resilient. You are immortal.’

“And then I saw Lestat—the blow that was more crippling than any blow.

I could see a passage of rough bricks stretching out from the doorway he’d broken down. And all along that passage were doors which were sealed, as this door had been. I had a vision at once of coffins behind those bricks, of vampires starved and decayed there.

Armand was saying softly to Lestat that he must get out, leave Paris; he was outcast.

In other words, only the younger vampires had left their bones; the ancient ones had suffered total obliteration.

Armand, in his brief visits with vampires in London and Rome, had learned that the burning of the Théâtre des Vampires was known throughout the world, and that both of us were considered outcasts.

Never leave New Orleans ‘again’? Again seemed a human word.

“ ‘That it was you who killed her? Who forced her out into that yard and locked her there?’ I asked. I smiled. ‘Don’t tell me you have been feeling pain for it all these years, not you.’

“ ‘You care about nothing …’ he was saying. And then he sat up slowly and turned to me so again I could see that dark fire in his eyes. ‘I thought you would at least care about that. I thought you would feel the old passion, the old anger if you were to see him again. I thought something would quicken and come alive in you if you saw him … if you returned to this place.’ “ ‘That I would come back to life?’ I said softly.

It was as if I were cold all over, made of metal, and he were fragile suddenly; fragile, as he had been, actually, for a long time.

‘I used to believe you would get over it—that when the pain of all of it left you, you would grow warm again and filled with love, and filled with that wild and insatiable curiosity with which you first came to me, that inveterate conscience, and that hunger for knowledge that brought you all the way to Paris to my cell. I thought it was a part of you that couldn’t die.

It is as if I’m not here, beside you. And, not being here with you, I have the dreadful feeling that I don’t exist at all. And you are as cold and distant from me as those strange modern paintings of lines and hard forms that I cannot love or comprehend, as alien as those hard mechanical sculptures of this age which have no human form.

‘I wanted love and goodness in this which is living death,’ I said. ‘It was impossible from the beginning, because you cannot have love and goodness when you do what you know to be evil, what you know to be wrong. You can only have the desperate confusion and longing and the chasing of phantom goodness in its human form.

And when I came to Paris I thought you were powerful and beautiful and without regret, and I wanted that desperately.

You showed me the only thing that I could really hope to become, what depth of evil, what degree of coldness I would have to attain to end my pain.

And you see now simply a mirror o...

It was an adventure like I’ll never know in my whole life! You talk about passion, you talk about longing! You talk about things that millions of us won’t ever taste or come to understand. And then you tell me it ends like that.

“You don’t know what human life is like!” he said, on the edge of breaking into tears. “You’ve forgotten. You don’t even understand the meaning of your own story, what it means to a human being like me.”

I went literally and figuratively underground. That was in New Orleans in 1929.

Now, when a vampire goes underground as we call it—when he ceases to drink blood and he just lies in the earth—he soon becomes too weak to resurrect himself, and what follows is a dream state.

The dark dreary industrial world that I’d gone to sleep on had burnt itself out finally, and the old bourgeois prudery and conformity had lost their hold on the American mind.

And more than ever, I was resolute that I would not drink innocent blood.