THE Vampire Lestat here. I have a story to tell you, It's about something that happened to me.
It begins in Miami, in the year 1990, and I really want to start right there. But it's important that I tell you
about the dreams I'd been having before that time, for they are very much part of the tale too. I'm talking
now about dreams of a child vampire with a woman's mind and an angel's face, and a dream of my mortal
friend David Talbot.
But there were dreams also of my mortal boyhood in France- of winter snows, my father's bleak and ruined
castle in the Auvergne, and the time I went out to hunt a pack of wolves that were preying upon our poor
village.
Dreams can be as real as events. Or so it seemed to me afterwards.
And I was in a dark frame of mind when these dreams began, a vagabond vampire roaming the earth,
sometimes so covered with dust that no one took the slightest notice of me. What good was it to have full
and beautiful blond hair, sharp blue eyes, razzle-dazzle clothes, an irresistible smile, and a well-proportioned
body six feet in height that can, in spite of its two hundred years, pass for that of a twenty-year-old mortal. I
was still a man of reason however, a child of the eighteenth century, in which I'd actually lived before I was
Born to Darkness.
But as the 1980s were drawing to a close I was much changed from the dashing fledgling vampire I had
once been, so attached to his classic black cape and Bruxelles lace, the gentleman with walking stick and
white gloves, dancing beneath the gas lamp.
I had been transformed into a dark god of sorts, thanks to suffering and triumph, and too much of the blood
of our vampire elders. I had powers which left me baffled and sometimes even frightened, I had powers
which made me sorrowful though I did not always understand the reason for it.
I could, for example, move high into the air at will, traveling the night winds over great distances as easily as
a spirit. I could effect or destroy matter with the power of my mind. I could kindle afire by the mere wish to do
so. I could also call to other immortals over countries and continents with my preternatural voice, and I could
effortlessly read the minds of vampires and humans.
Not bad, you might think. I loathed it. Without doubt, I was grieving for my old selves-the mortal boy, the
newborn revenant once determined to be good at being bad if that was his predicament.
I'm not a pragmatist, understand. I have a keen and merciless conscience. I could have been a nice guy.
Maybe at times I am. But always, I've been a man of action. Grief is a waste, and so is fear. And action is
what you will get here, as soon as I get through this introduction.
Remember, beginnings are always hard and most are artificial. It was the best of times and the worst of
times-really? When! And all happy families are not alike; even Tolstoy must have realized that. I can't get
away with "In the beginning," or "They threw me off the hay truck at noon," or I would do it. I always get
away with whatever I can, believe me. And as Nabokov said in the voice of Humbert Humbert, "You can
always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. " Can't fancy mean experimental? I already know of
course that I am sensuous, florid, lush, humid-enough critics have told me that.
Alas, I have to do things my own way. And we will get to the beginning-if that isn't a contradiction in terms-I
promise you.
Right now I must explain that before this adventure commenced, I was also grieving for the other immortals I
had known and loved, because they had long ago scattered from our last late-twentieth century gathering
place. Folly to think we wanted to create a coven again. They had one by one disappeared into time and the
world, which was inevitable.
Vampires don't really like others of their kind, though their need for immortal companions is desperate.
Out of that need I'd made my fledglings-Louis de Pointe du Lac, who became my patient and often loving
nineteenth-century comrade, and with his unwitting aid, the beautiful and doomed child vampire, Claudia.
And during these lonely vagabond nights of the late twentieth century, Louis was the only immortal whom I
saw quite often. The most human of us all, the most ungodlike.
I never stayed away too long from his shack in the wilderness of uptown New Orleans. But you'll see. I'll get
to that. Louis is in this story.
The point is-you find precious little here about the others. Indeed, almost nothing.
Except for Claudia. I was dreaming more and more often of Claudia. Let me explain about Claudia. She'd
been destroyed over a century before, yet I felt her presence all the time as if she were just around the
corner.
It was 1794 when I made this succulent little vampire out of a dying orphan, and sixty years passed before
she rose up against me. "I'll put you in your coffin forever, Father."
I did sleep in a coffin then. And it was a period piece, that lurid attempted murder, involving as it did mortal
victims baited with poisons to cloud my mind, knives tearing my white flesh, and the ultimate abandonment
of my seemingly lifeless form in the rank waters of the swamp beyond the dim lights of New Orleans.
Well, it didn't work. There are very few sure ways to kill the undead. The sun, fire... One must aim for total
obliteration. And after all, we are talking about the Vampire Lestat here.
Claudia suffered for this crime, being executed later by an evil coven of blood drinkers who thrived in the
very heart of Paris in the infamous Theatre of the Vampires. I'd broken the rules when I made a blood
drinker of a child so small, and for that reason alone, the Parisian monsters might have put an end to her.
But she too had broken their rules in trying to destroy her maker, and that you might say was their logical
reason for shutting her out into the bright light of day which burnt her to ashes.
It's a hell of a way to execute someone, as far as I'm concerned, because those who lock you out must
quickly retire to their coffins and are not even there to witness the mighty sun carrying out their grim
sentence. But that's what they did to this exquisite and delicate creature that I had fashioned with my
vampiric blood from a ragged, dirty waif in a ramshackle Spanish colony in the New World-to be my friend,
my pupil, my love, my muse, my fellow hunter. And yes, my daughter.
If you read Interview with the Vampire, then you know all about this. It's Louis's version of our time together.
Louis tells of his love for this our child, and of his vengeance against those who destroyed her.
If you read my autobiographical books, The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned, you know all
about me, also. You know our history, for what it's worth-and history is never worth too much-and how we
came into being thousands of years ago and that we propagate by carefully giving the Dark Blood to mortals
when we wish to take them along the Devil's Road with us.
But you don't have to read those works to understand this one. And you won't find here the cast of
thousands that crowded The Queen of the Damned, either. Western civilization will not for one second teeter
on the brink. And there will be no revelations from ancient times or old ones confiding half-truths and riddles
and promising answers that do not in fact exist and never have existed.
No, I have done all that before.
This is a contemporary story. It's a volume in the Vampire Chronicles, make no mistake. But it is the first
really modern volume, for it accepts the horrifying absurdity of existence from the start, and it takes us into
the mind and the soul of its hero- guess who?-for its discoveries.
Read this tale, and I will give you all you need to know about us as you turn the pages. And by the way, lots
of things do happen! I'm a man of action as I said-the James Bond of the vampires, if you will-called the Brat
Prince, and the Damnedest Creature, and "you monster" by various and sundry other immortals.
The other immortals are still around, of course-Maharet and Mekare, the eldest of us all, Khayman of the
First Brood, Eric, Santino, Pandora, and others whom we call the Children of the Millennia. Armand is still
about, the lovely five-hundred-year-old boy-faced ancient who once ruled the Theatre des Vampires, and
before that a coven of devil worshiping blood drinkers who lived beneath the Paris Cemetery, Les Innocents.
Armand, I hope, will always be around.
And Gabrielle, my mortal mother and immortal child will no doubt turn up one of these nights sometime
before the end of another thousand years, if I'm lucky.
As for Marius, my old teacher and mentor, the one who kept the historical secrets of our tribe, he is still with
us and always will be. Before this tale began, he would come to me now and then to scold and plead: Would
I not stop my careless kills which invariably found their way into the pages of mortal newspapers! Would I
not stop deviling my mortal friend David Talbot, and tempting him with the Dark Gift of our blood? Better we
make no more, did I not know this?
Rules, rules, rules. They always wind up talking about rules. And I love to break the rules the way mortals
like to smash their crystal glasses after a toast against the bricks of the fireplace.
But enough about the others. The point is-this is my book from start to finish.
Let me speak now of the dreams that had come to trouble me in my wanderings.
With Claudia, it was almost a haunting. Just before my eyes would close each dawn, I'd see her beside me,
hear her voice in a low and urgent whisper. And sometimes I'd slide back over the centuries to the little
colonial hospital with its rows of tiny beds where the orphan child had been dying.
Behold the sorrowful old doctor, potbellied and palsied, as he lifts the child's body. And that crying. Who is
crying? Claudia was not crying. She slept as the doctor entrusted her to me, believing me to be her mortal
father. And she is so pretty in these dreams. Was she that pretty then? Of course she was.
"Snatching me from mortal hands like two grim monsters in a nightmare fairy tale, you idle, blind parents!"
The dream of David Talbot came once only.
David is young in the dream and he is walking in a mangrove forest. He was not the man of seventy-four
who had become my friend, the patient mortal scholar who regularly refused my offer of the Dark Blood, and
laid his warm, fragile hand on my cold flesh unflinchingly to demonstrate the affection and trust between us.
No. This is young David Talbot of years and years ago, when his heart didn't beat so fast within his chest.
Yet he is in danger.
Tyger, tyger burning bright.
Is that his voice, whispering those words or is it mine?
And out of the dappled light it comes, its orange and black stripes like the light and shade itself so that it is
scarcely visible. I see its huge head, and how soft its muzzle, white and bristling with long, delicate whiskers.
But look at its yellow eyes, mere slits, and full of horrid mindless cruelty. David, its fangs! Can't you see
these fangs!
But he is curious as a child, watching its big pink tongue touch his throat, touch the thin gold chain he wears
around his throat. Is it eating the chain? Good God, David! The fangs.
Why is my voice dried up inside me? Am I even there in the mangrove forest? My body vibrates as I struggle
to move, dull moans coming from behind my sealed lips, and each moan taxes every fiber of my being.
David, beware!
And then I see that he is down on one knee, with the long shiny rifle cocked against his shoulder. And the
giant cat is still yards away, bearing down on him. On and on it rushes, until the crack of the gun stops it in
its tracks, and over it goes as the gun roars once again, its yellow eyes full of rage, its paws crossed as they
push in one last final breath at the soft earth.
I wake.
What does this dream mean-that my mortal friend is in danger? Or simply that his genetic clock has ticked to
a stop. For a man of seventy-four years, death can come at any instant.
Do I ever think of David that I do not think of death?
David, where are you?
Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.
"I want you to ask me for the Dark Gift,'' I'd said to him when first we met. "I may not give it to you. But I want
you to ask."
He never had. He never would. And now I loved him. I saw him soon after the dream. I had to. But I could
not forget the dream and perhaps it did come to me more than once in the deep sleep of my daylight hours
when I am stone cold and helpless under literal cover of darkness.
All right, you have the dreams now.
But picture the winter snow in France one more time, if you would, piling about the castle walls, and a young
male mortal asleep on his bed of hay, in the light of the fire, with his hunting dogs beside him. This had
become the image of my lost human life, more truly than any remembrance of the boulevard theatre in Paris,
where before the Revolution I'd been so very happy as a young actor.
Now we are truly ready to begin. Let's turn the page, shall we?
THE TALE OF THE BODY THIEF
ONE
MIAMI-the vampires' city. This is South Beach at sunset, in the luxurious warmth of the winterless winter,
clean and thriving and drenched in electric light, the gentle breeze moving in from the placid sea, across the
dark margin of cream-colored sand, to cool the smooth broad pavements full of happy mortal children.
Sweet the parade of fashionable young men displaying their cultured muscles with touching vulgarity, of
young women so proud of their streamlined and seemingly sexless modern limbs, amid the soft urgent roar
of traffic and human voices.
Old stucco hostelries, once the middling shelters of the aged, were now reborn in smart pastel colors,
sporting their new names in elegant neon script. Candles flickered on the white-draped tables of the openporch
restaurants. Big shiny American cars pushed their way slowly along the avenue, as drivers and
passengers viewed the dazzling human parade, lazy pedestrians here and there blocking the thoroughfare.
On the distant horizon the great white clouds were mountains beneath a roofless and star-filled heaven. Ah,
it never failed to take my breath away-this southern sky filled with azure light and drowsy relentless
movement.
To the north rose the towers of new Miami Beach in all their splendour. To the south and to the west, the
dazzling steel skyscrapers of the downtown city with its high roaring freeways and busy cruise-ship docks.
Small pleasure boats sped along the sparkling waters of the myriad urban canals.
In the quiet immaculate gardens of Coral Gables, countless lamps illuminated the handsome sprawling villas
with their red-tiled roofs, and swimming pools shimmering with turquoise light. Ghosts walked in the grand
and darkened rooms of the Biltmore. The massive mangrove trees threw out their primitive limbs to cover
the broad and carefully tended streets.
In Coconut Grove, the international shoppers thronged the luxurious hotels and fashionable malls. Couples
embraced on the high balconies of their glass-walled condominiums, silhouettes gazing out over the serene
waters of the bay. Cars sped along the busy roads past the ever-dancing palms and delicate rain trees, past
the squat concrete mansions draped with red and purple bougainvillea, behind their fancy iron gates.
All of this is Miami, city of water, city of speed, city of tropical flowers, city of enormous skies. It is for Miami,
more than any other place, that I periodically leave my New Orleans home. The men and women of many
nations and different colors live in the great dense neighborhoods of Miami. One hears Yiddish, Hebrew, the
languages of Spain, of Haiti, the dialects and accents of Latin America, of the deep south of this nation and
of the far north. There is menace beneath the shining surface of Miami, there is desperation and a throbbing
greed; there is the deep steady pulse of a great capital-the tow grinding energy, the endless risk.
It's never really dark in Miami. It's never really quiet.
It is the perfect city for the vampire; and it never fails to yield to me a mortal killer-some twisted, sinister
morsel who will give up to me a dozen of his own murders as I drain his memory banks and his blood.
But tonight it was the Big-Game Hunt, the unseasonal Easter feast after a Lent of starvation-the pursuit of
one of those splendid human trophies whose gruesome modus operandi reads for pages in the computer
files of mortal law enforcement agencies, a being anointed in his anonymity with a flashy name by the
worshipful press: "Back Street Strangler."
I lust after such killers!
What luck for me that such a celebrity had surfaced in my favorite city. What luck that he has struck six
times in these very streets-slayer of the old and the infirm, who have come in such numbers to live out their
remaining days in these warm climes. Ah, I would have crossed a continent to snap him up, but he is here
waiting for me. To his dark history, detailed by no less than twenty criminologists, and easily purloined by me
through the computer in my New Orleans lair, I have secretly added the crucial elements-his name and
mortal habitation.
A simple trick for a dark god who can read minds. Through his blood-soaked dreams I found him. And
tonight the pleasure will be mine of finishing his illustrious career in a dark cruel embrace, without a scintilla
of moral illumination.
Ah, Miami. The perfect place for this little Passion Play.
I always come back to Miami, the way I come back to New Orleans. And I'm the only immortal now who
hunts this glorious corner of the Savage Garden, for as you have seen, the others long ago deserted the
coven house here-unable to endure each other's company any more than I can endure them.
But so much the better to have Miami all to myself.
I stood at the front windows of the rooms I maintained in the swanky little Park Central Hotel on Ocean
Drive, every now and then letting my preternatural hearing sweep the chambers around me in which the rich
tourists enjoyed that premium brand of solitude-complete privacy only steps from the flashy street-my
Champs Elysees of the moment, my Via Veneto.
My strangler was almost ready to move from the realm of his spasmodic and fragmentary visions into the
land of literal death. Ah, time to dress for the man of my dreams.
Picking from the usual wilderness of freshly opened cardboard boxes, suitcases, and trunks, I chose a suit
of gray velvet, an old favorite, especially when the fabric is thick, with only a subtle luster. Not very likely for
these warm nights, I had to admit, but then I don't feel hot and cold the way humans do. And the coat was
slim with narrow lapels, very spare and rather like a hacking jacket with its fitted waist, or, more to the point,
like the graceful old frock coats of earlier times. We immortals forever fancy old-fashioned garments,
garments that remind us of the century in which we were Born to Darkness. Sometimes you can gauge the
true age of an immortal simply by the cut of his clothes.
With me, it's also a matter of texture. The eighteenth century was so shiny! I can't bear to be without a little
luster. And this handsome coat suited me perfectly with the plain tight velvet pants. As for the white silk shirt,
it was a cloth so soft you could ball the garment in the palm of your hand. Why should I wear anything else
so close to my indestructible and curiously sensitive skin? Then the boots. Ah, they look like all my fine
shoes of late. Their soles are immaculate, for they so seldom touch the mother earth.
My hair I shook loose into the usual thick mane of glowing yellow shoulder-length waves. What would I look
like to mortals? I honestly don't know. I covered up my blue eyes, as always, with black glasses, lest their
radiance mesmerize and entrance at random-a real nuisance-and over my delicate white hands, with their
telltale glassy fingernails, I drew the usual pair of soft gray leather gloves.
Ah, a bit of oily brown camouflage for the skin. I smoothed the lotion over my cheekbones, over the bit of
neck and chest that was bare.
I inspected the finished product in the mirror. Still irresistible. No wonder I'd been such a smash in my brief
career as a rock singer. And I've always been a howling success as a vampire. Thank the gods I hadn't
become invisible in my airy wanderings, a vagabond floating far above the clouds, light as a cinder on the
wind. I felt like weeping when I thought of it.
The Big-Game Hunt always brought me back to the actual. Track him, wait for him, catch him just at the
moment that he would bring death to his next victim, and take him slowly, painfully, feasting upon his
wickedness as you do it, glimpsing through the filthy lens of his soul all his earlier victims . . .
Please understand, there is no nobility in this. I don't believe that rescuing one poor mortal from such a fiend
can conceivably save my soul. I have taken life too often-unless one believes that the power of one good
deed is infinite. I don't know whether or not I believe that. What I do believe is this: The evil of one murder is
infinite, and my guilt is like my beauty-eternal. I cannot be forgiven, for there is no one to forgive me for all
I've done.
Nevertheless I like saving those innocents from their fate. And! like taking my killers to me because they are
my brothers, and we belong together, and why shouldn't they die in my arms instead of some poor merciful
mortal who has never done anyone any willful harm? These are the rules of my game. I play by these rules
because I made them. And I promised myself, I wouldn't leave the bodies about this time; I'd strive to do
what the others have always ordered me to do. But still... I liked to leave the carcass for the authorities. I
liked to fire up the computer later, after I'd returned to New Orleans, and read the entire postmortem report.
Suddenly I was distracted by the sound of a police car passing slowly below, the men inside it speaking of
my killer, that he will strike soon again, his stars are in the correct positions, the moon is at the right height. It
will be in the side streets of South Beach most certainly, as it has been before. But who is he? How can he
be stopped?
Seven o'clock. The tiny green numerals of the digital clock told me it was so, though I already knew, of
course. I closed my eyes, letting my head drop just a little to one side, bracing myself perhaps for the full
effects of this power which I so loathed. First came an amplification of the hearing again, as if I had thrown a
modern technological switch. The soft purring sounds of the world became a chorus from hell-full of sharpedged
laughter and lamentation, full of lies and anguish and random pleas. I covered my ears as if that
could stop it, then finally I shut it off.
Gradually I saw the blurred and overlapping images of their thoughts, rising like a million fluttering birds into
the firmament. Give me my killer, give me his vision!
He was there, in a small dingy room, very unlike this one, yet only two blocks from it, just rising from his bed.
His cheap clothes were rumpled, sweat covering his coarse face, a thick nervous hand going for the
cigarettes in his shirt pocket, then letting them go-already forgotten. A heavy man he was, of shapeless
facial features and a look full of vague worry, or dim regret.
It did not occur to him to dress for the evening, for the Feast for which he'd been hungering. And now his
waking mind was almost collapsed beneath the burden of his ugly palpitating dreams. He shook himself all
over, loose greasy hair falling onto his sloping forehead, eyes like bits of black glass.
Standing still in the silent shadows of my room, I continued to track him, to follow down a back stairs, and
out into the garish light of Collins Avenue, past dusty shop windows and sagging commercial signs,
propelled onward, towards the inevitable and yet unchosen object of his desire.
And who might she be, the lucky lady, wandering blindly and inexorably towards this horror, through the
sparse and dismal crowds of the early evening in this same dreary region of town? Does she carry a carton
of milk and a head of lettuce in a brown paper bag? Will she hurry at the sight of the cutthroats on the
corner? Does she grieve for the old beachfront where she lived perhaps so contentedly before the architects
and the decorators drove her to the cracked and peeling hostelries further away?
And what will he think when he finally spots her, this filthy angel of death? Will she be the very one to remind
him of the mythic shrew of childhood, who beat him senseless only to be elevated to the nightmare
pantheon of his subconscious, or are we asking too much?
I mean there are killers of this species who make not the smallest connection between symbol and reality,
and remember nothing for longer than a few days. What is certain is only that their victims don't deserve it,
and that they, the killers, deserve to meet with me.
Ah, well, I will tear out his menacing heart before he has had a chance to "do" her, and he will give me
everything that he has, and is.
I walked slowly down the steps, and through the smart, glittering art deco lobby with its magazine-page
glamour. How good it felt to be moving like a mortal, to open the doors, to wander out into the fresh air. I
headed north along the sidewalk among the evening strollers, eyes drifting naturally over the newly
refurbished hotels and their little cafes.
The crowd thickened as I reached the corner. Before a fancy open-air restaurant, giant television cameras
focused their lenses on a stretch of sidewalk harshly illuminated by enormous white lights. Trucks blocked
the traffic; cars slowed to a stop. A loose crowd had gathered of young and old, only mildly fascinated, for
television and motion picture cameras in the vicinity of South Beach were a familiar sight.
I skirted the lights, fearing their effect upon my highly reflective face. Would I were one of the tan-skinned
ones, smelling of expensive beach oils, and half naked in friable cotton rags. I made my way around the
corner. Again, I scanned for the prey. He was racing, his mind so thick with hallucinations that he could
scarce control his shuffling, sloppy steps.
There was no time left.
With a little spurt of speed, I took to the low roofs. The breeze was stronger, sweeter. Gentle the roar of
excited voices, the dull natural songs of radios, the sound of the wind itself.
In silence I caught his image in the indifferent eyes of those who passed him; in silence I saw his fantasies
once more of withered hands and withered feet, of shrunken cheeks and shrunken breasts. The thin
membrane between fantasy and reality was breaking.
I hit the pavements of Collins Avenue, so swiftly perhaps I simply seemed to appear. But nobody was
looking. I was the proverbial tree falling in the uninhabited forest.
And in minutes, I was ambling along, steps behind him, a menacing young man perhaps, piercing the little
clusters of tough guys who blocked the path, pursuing the prey through the glass doors of a giant ice-cooled
drugstore. Ah, such a circus for the eye-this low-ceilinged cave-chock-full of every imaginable kind of
packageable and preserved foodstuff, toilet article, and hair accoutrement, ninety percent of which existed
not at all in any form whatsoever during the century when I was bora.
We're talking sanitary napkins, medicinal eyedrops, plastic bobby pins, felt-tip markers, creams and
ointments for all nameable parts of the human body, dishwashing liquid in every color of the rainbow, and
cosmetic rinses in some colors never before invented and yet undefined. Imagine Louis XVI opening a noisy
crackling plastic sack of such wonders? What would he think of Styrofoam coffee cups, chocolate cookies
wrapped in cellophane, or pens that never run out of ink?
Well, I'm still not entirely used to these items myself, though I've watched the progress of the Industrial
Revolution for two centuries with my own eyes. Such drugstores can keep me enthralled for hours on end.
Sometimes I become spellbound in the middle of Wal-Mart.
But this time I had a prey hi my sights, didn't I? Later for Time and Vogue, pocket computer language
translators, and wristwatches that continue to tell time even as you swim in the sea.
Why had he come to this place? The young Cuban families with babies in tow were not his style. Yet
aimlessly he wandered the narrow crowded aisles, oblivious to the hundreds of dark faces and the fast riffs
of Spanish around him, unnoticed by anyone but me, as his red-rimmed eyes swept the cluttered shelves.
Lord God, but he was filthy-all decency lost in his mania, craggy face and neck creased with dirt. Will I love
it? Hell, he's a sack of blood. Why push my luck? I couldn't kill little children anymore, could I? Or feast on
waterfront harlots, telling myself it's all perfectly fine, for they have poisoned their share of flat-boatmen. My
conscience is killing me, isn't it? And when you're immortal that can be a really long and ignominious death.
Yeah, look at him, this dirty, stinking, lumbering killer. Men in prison get better chow than this.
And then it hit me as I scanned his mind once more as if cutting open a cantaloupe. He doesn't know what
he is! He has never read his own headlines! And indeed he does not remember episodes of his life in any
discerning order, and could not in truth confess to the murders he has committed for he does not truly recall
them, and he does not know that he will kill tonight! He does not know what I know!
Ah, sadness and grief, I had drawn the very worst card, no doubt about it. Oh, Lord God! What had I been
thinking of to hunt this one, when the starlit world is full of more vicious and cunning beasts? I wanted to
weep.
But then came the provocative moment. He had seen the old woman, seen her bare wrinkled arms, the
small hump of her back, her thin and shivering thighs beneath her pastel shorts. Through the glare of
fluorescent light, she made her way idly, enjoying the buzz and throb of those around her, face half hidden
beneath the green plastic of a visor, hair twisted with dark pins on the back of her small head.
She carried in her little basket a pint of orange juice in a plastic bottle, and a pair of slippers so soft they
were folded up into a neat little roll. And now to this she added, with obvious glee, a paperback novel from
the rack, which she had read before, but fondled lovingly, dreaming of reading it again, like visiting with old
acquaintances. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Yes, I loved it too.
In a trance, he fell in behind her, so close that surely she felt his breath on her neck. Dull-eyed and stupid,
he watched as she inched her way closer and closer to the register, drawing out a few dirty dollar bills from
the sagging collar of her blouse.
Out the doors they went, he with the listless plodding style of a dog after a bitch in heat, she making her way
slowly with her gray sack drooping from its cut-out handles, veering broadly and awkwardly around the
bands of noisy and brazen youngsters on the prowl. Is she talking to herself? Seems so. I didn't scan her,
this little being walking faster and faster. I scanned the beast behind her, who was wholly unable to see her
as the sum of her parts.
Pallid, feeble faces flashed through his mind as he trailed behind her. He hungered to lie on top of old flesh;
he hungered to put a hand over an old mouth.
When she reached her small forlorn apartment building, made of crumbling chalk, it seemed, like everything
else in this seedy section of town, and guarded by bruised palmettos, he came to a sudden swaying stop,
watching mutely as she walked back the narrow tiled courtyard and up the dusty green cement steps. He
noted the number of her painted door as she unlocked it, or rather he clamped on to the location, and
sinking back against the wall, he began to dream very specifically of killing her, in a featureless and empty
bedroom that seemed no more than a smear of color and light.
Ah, look at him resting against the wall as if he had been stabbed, head lolling to one side. Impossible to be
interested in him. Why don't I kill him now!
But the moments ticked, and the night lost its twilight incandescence. The stars grew ever more brilliant. The
breeze came and went.
We waited.
Through her eyes, I saw her parlour as if I could really see through walls and floors-clean, though filled with
careless old furniture of ugly veneer, round-shouldered, unimportant to her. But all had been polished with a
scented oil she loved. Neon light passed through the Dacron curtains, milky and cheerless as the view of the
yard below. But she had the comforting glow of her small carefully positioned lamps. That was what
mattered to her.
In a maple rocking chair with hideous plaid upholstery, she sat composed, a tiny but dignified figure, open
paperback novel hi hand. What happiness to be once more with Francie Nolan. Her thin knees were barely
hidden now by the flowered cotton robe she had taken from her closet, and she wore the little blue slippers
like socks over her small misshapen feet. She had made of her long gray hair one thick and graceful braid.
On the small black-and-white television screen before her, dead movie stars argued without making a
sound. Joan Fon-taine thinks Gary Grant is trying to kill her. And judging by the expression on his face, it
certainly did seem that way to me. How could anyone ever trust Gary Grant, I wondered-a man who looked
as though he were made entirely of wood?
She didn't need to hear their words; she had seen this movie, by her careful count, some thirteen times. She
had read this novel in her lap only twice, and so it will be with very special pleasure that she revisits these
paragraphs, which she does not know yet by heart.
From the shadowy garden below, I discerned her neat and accepting concept of self, without drama and
detached from the acknowledged bad taste that surrounded her. Her few treasures could be contained in
any cabinet. The book and the lighted screen were more important to her than anything else she owned, and
she was well aware of their spirituality. Even the color of her functional and styleless clothes was not worth
her concern.
My vagabond killer was near paralysis, his mind a riot of moments so personal they defied interpretation.
I slipped around the little stucco building and found the stairs to her kitchen door. The lock gave easily when
I commanded it to do so. And the door opened as if I had touched it, when I had not.
Without a sound I slipped into the small linoleum-tiled room. The stench of gas rising from the small white
stove was sickening to me. So was the smell of the soap in its sticky ceramic dish. But the room touched my
heart instantly. Beautify! the cherished china of Chinese blue and white, so neatly stacked, with plates
displayed. Behold the dog-eared cookbooks. And how spotless her table with its shining oilcloth of pure
yellow, and waxen green ivy growing in a round bowl of clear water, which projected upon the low ceiling a
single quivering circle of light.
But what filled my mind as I stood there, rigid, pushing the door shut with my fingers, was that she was
unafraid of death as she read her Betty Smith novel, as she occasionally glanced at the glittering screen.
She had no inner antenna to pick up the presence of the spook who stood, sunk into madness, in the nearby
street, or the monster who haunted her kitchen now.
The killer was immersed so completely in his hallucinations that he did not see those who passed him by.
He did not see the police car prowling, or the suspicious and deliberately menacing looks of the uniformed
mortals who knew all about him, and that he would strike tonight, but not who he was.
A thin line of spit moved down his unshaven chin. Nothing was real to him-not his life by day, not fear of
discovery- only the electric shiver which these hallucinations sent through his hulking torso and clumsy arms
and legs. His left hand twitched suddenly. There was a catch at the left side of his mouth.
I hated this guy! I didn't want to drink his blood. He was no classy killer. It was her blood I craved.
How thoughtful she was in her solitude and silence, how small, how contented, her concentration as fine as
a light beam as she read the paragraphs of this story she knew so well. Traveling, traveling back to those
days when she first read this book, at a crowded soda fountain on Lexington Avenue in New York City, when
she was a smartly dressed young secretary in a red wool skirt and a white ruffled blouse with pearl buttons
on the cuffs. She worked in a stone office tower, infinitely glamorous, with ornate brass doors on its
elevators, and dark yellow marble tile in its halls.
I wanted to press my lips to her memories, to the remembered sounds of her high heels clicking on the
marble, to the image of her smooth calf beneath the pure silk stocking as she put it on so carefully, not to
snag it with her long enameled nails. I saw her red hair for an instant. I saw her extravagant and potentially
hideous yet charming yellow brimmed hat.
That's blood worth having. And I was starving, starving as I have seldom been in all these decades. The
unseasonal Lenten fast had been almost more than I could endure. Oh, Lord God, I wanted so to kill her!
Below in the street, a faint gurgling sound came from the lips of the stupid, clumsy killer. It cleared its way
through the raging torrent of other sounds that poured into my vampiric ears.
At last, the beast lurched away from the wall, listing for a moment as if he would go sprawling, then
sauntered towards us, into the little courtyard and up the steps.
Will I let him frighten her? It seemed pointless. I have him in my sights, do I not? Yet I allowed him to put his
small metal tool into the round hole in her doorknob, I gave him time to force the lock. The chain tore loose
from the rotten wood.
He stepped into the room, fixing upon her without expression. She was terrified, shrinking back in her chair,
the book slipping from her lap.
Ah, but then he saw me in the kitchen doorway-a shadowy young man in gray velvet, glasses pushed up
over his forehead. I was gazing at him in his own expressionless fashion. Did he see these iridescent eyes,
this skin like polished ivory, hair like a soundless explosion of white light? Or was I merely an obstacle
between him and his sinister goal, all beauty wasted?
In a second, he bolted. He was down the steps as the old woman screamed and rushed forward to slam the
wooden door.
I was after him, not bothering to touch terra firma, letting him see me poised for an instant under the street
lamp as he turned the corner. We went for half a block before I drifted towards him, a blur to the mortals,
who didn't bother to notice. Then I froze beside him, and heard his groan as he broke into a run.
For blocks we played this game. He ran, he stopped, he saw me behind him. The sweat poured down his
body. Indeed the thin synthetic fabric of the shirt was soon translucent with it, and clinging to the smooth
hairless flesh of his chest.
At last he came to his seedy flophouse hotel and pounded up the stairs. I was in the small top-floor room
when he reached it. Before he could cry out, I had him in my arms. The stench of his dirty hair rose in my
nostrils, mingled with a thin acidic smell from the chemical fibers of the shirt. But it didn't matter now. He was
powerful and warm in my arms, a juicy capon, chest heaving against me, the smell of his blood flooding my
brain. I heard it pulsing through ventricles and valves and painfully constricted vessels. I licked at it in the
tender red flesh beneath his eyes.
His heart was laboring and nearly bursting-careful, careful, don't crush him, I let my teeth clamp down on the
wet leathery skin of his neck. Hmmm. My brother, my poor befuddled brother. But this was rich, this was
good.
The fountain opened; his life was a sewer. All those old women, those old men. They were cadavers floating
in the current; they tumbled against each other without meaning, as he went limp in my arms. No sport. Too
easy. No cunning. No malice. Crude as a lizard he had been, swallowing fly after fly. Lord God, to know this
is to know the time when the giant reptiles ruled the earth, and for a million years, only their yellow eyes
beheld the falling rain, or the rising sun.
Never mind. I let him go, tumbling soundlessly out of my grip. I was swimming with his mammalian blood.
Good enough. I closed my eyes, letting this hot coil penetrate my intestines, or whatever was down there
now in this hard powerful white body. In a daze, I saw him stumbling on his knees across the floor. So
exquisitely clumsy. So easy to pick him up from the mess of twisted and tearing newspapers, the overturned
cup pouring its cold coffee into the dust-colored rug.
I jerked him back by his collar. His big empty eyes rolled up into his head. Then he kicked at me, blindly, this
bully, this killer of the old and weak, shoe scuffing my shin. I lifted him to my hungry mouth again, fingers
sliding through his hair, and felt him stiffen as if my fangs were dipped in poison.
Again the blood flooded my brain. I felt it electrify the tiny veins of my face. I felt it pulse even into my fingers,
and a hot prickling warmth slide down my spine. Draught after draught filled me. Succulent, heavy creature.
Then I let him go once more, and when he stumbled away this time, I went after him, dragging him across
the floor, turning his face to me, then tossing him forward and letting him struggle again.
He was speaking to me now in something that ought to have been language, but it wasn't. He pushed at me
but he could no longer see clearly. And for the first time a tragic dignity infused him, a vague look of outrage,
blind as he was. It seemed I was embellished and enfolded now in old tales, in memories of plaster statues
and nameless saints. His fingers clawed at the instep of my shoe. I lifted him up, and when I tore his throat
this time, the wound was too big. It was done.
The death came like a fist in the gut. For a moment I felt nausea, and then simply the heat, the fullness, the
sheer radiance of the living blood, with that last vibration of consciousness pulsing through all my limbs.
I sank down on his soiled bed. I don't know how long I lay there.
I stared at his low ceiling. And then when the sour musty smells of the room surrounded me, and the stench
of his body, I rose and stumbled out, an ungainly figure as surely as he had been, letting myself go soft in
these mortal gestures, in rage and hatred, in silence, because I didn't want to be the weightless one, the
winged one, the night traveler. I wanted to be human, and feel human, and his blood was threaded all
through me, and it wasn't enough. Not nearly enough!
Where are all my promises? The stiff and bruised palmettos rattle against the stucco walls.
"Oh, you're back," she said to me.
Such a low, strong voice she had, no tremor in it. She was standing in front of the ugly plaid rocker, with its
worn maple arms, peering at me through her silver-rimmed glasses, the paperback novel clasped in her
hand. Her mouth was small and shapeless and showing a bit of yellow teeth, a hideous contrast to the dark
personality of the voice, which knew no infirmity at all.
What in God's name was she thinking as she smiled at me? Why doesn't she pray?
"I knew you'd come," she said. Then she took off the glasses, and I saw that her eyes were glazed. What
was she seeing? What was I making her see? I who can control all these elements flawlessly was so baffled
I could have wept. "Yes, I knew."
"Oh? And how did you know?" I whispered as I approached her, loving the embracing closeness of the
common little room.
I reached out with these monstrous fingers too white to be human, strong enough to tear her head off, and I
felt her little throat. Smell of Chantilly-or some other drugstore scent.
"Yes," she said airily but definitely. "I always knew."
"Kiss me, then. Love me."
How hot she was, and how tiny were her shoulders, how gorgeous in this the final withering, the flower
tinged with yellow, yet full of fragrance still, pale blue veins dancing beneath her flaccid skin, eyelids
perfectly molded to her eyes when she closed them, the skin flowing over the bones of her skull.
"Take me to heaven," she said. Out of the heart came the voice.
"I can't. I wish I could," I was purring into her ear.
I closed my arms around her. I nuzzled her soft nest of gray hair. I felt her fingers on my face like dried
leaves, and it sent a soft chill through me. She, too, was shivering. Ah, tender and worn little thing, ah,
creature reduced to thought and will with a body insubstantial like a fragile flame! Just the "little drink,"
Lestat, no more.
But it was too late and I knew it when the first spurt of blood hit my tongue. I was draining her. Surely the
sounds of my moans must have alarmed her, but then she was past hearing... They never hear the real
sounds once it's begun.
Forgive me.
Oh, darling!
We were sinking down together on the carpet, lovers in a patch of nubby faded flowers. I saw the book fallen
there, and the drawing on the cover, but this seemed unreal. I hugged her so carefully, lest she break. But I
was the hollow shell. Her death was coming swiftly, as if she herself were walking towards
me in a broad corridor, in some extremely particular and very important place. Ah, yes, the yellow marble
tile. New York City, and even up here you can hear the traffic, and that low boom when a door slams on a
stairway, down the hall.
"Good night, my darling," she whispered.
Am I hearing things? How can she still make words?
I love you. Yes, darling. I love you too."
She stood in the hallway. Her hair was red and stiff and curling prettily at her shoulders; she was smiling,
and her heels had been making that sharp, enticing sound on the marble, but there was only silence around
her as the folds of her woolen skirt still moved; she was looking at me with such a strange clever expression;
she lifted a small black snub-nosed gun and pointed it at me.
What the hell are you doing?
She is dead. The shot was so loud that for a moment I could hear nothing. Only ringing in my ears. I lay on
the floor staring blankly at the ceiling overhead, smelling cordite in a corridor in New York.
But this was Miami. Her clock was ticking on the table. From the overheated heart of the television came the
pinched and tiny voice of Gary Grant telling Joan Fontaine that he loved her. And Joan Fontaine was so
happy. She'd thought for sure Gary Grant meant to kill her.
And so had I.
South Beach. Give me the Neon Strip once more. Only this time I walked away from the busy pavements,
out over the sand and towards the sea.
On and on I went until there was no one near-not even the beach wanderers, or the night swimmers. Only
the sand, blown clean already of ail the day's footprints, and the great gray nighttime ocean, throwing up its
endless surf upon the patient shore. How high the visible heavens, how full of swiftly moving clouds and
distant unobtrusive stars.
What had I done? I'd killed her, his victim, pinched out the light of the one I'd been bound to save. I'd gone
back to her and I'd lain with her, and I'd taken her, and she'd fired the invisible shot too late.
And the thirst was there again.
I'd laid her down on her small neat bed afterwards, on the dull quilted nylon, folding her arms and closing her
eyes.
Dear God, help me. Where are my nameless saints? Where are the angels with their feathered wings to
carry me down into hell? When they do come, are they the last beautiful thing that you see? As you go down
into the lake of fire, can you still follow their progress heavenward? Can you hope for one last glimpse of
their golden trumpets, and their upturned faces reflecting the radiance of the face of God? What do I know of
heaven?
For long moments I stood there, staring at the distant night-scape of pure clouds, and then back at the
twinkling lights of the new hotels, flash of headlamps.
A lone mortal stood on the far sidewalk, staring in my direction, but perhaps he did not note my presence at
all-a tiny figure on the lip of the great sea. Perhaps he was only looking towards the ocean as I had been
looking, as if the shore were miraculous, as if the water could wash our souls clean.
Once the world was nothing but the sea; rain fell for a hundred million years! But now the cosmos crawls
with monsters. He was still there, that lone and staring mortal. And gradually I realized that over the empty
sweep of beach and its thin darkness, his eyes were fixed intently on mine. Yes, looking at me.
I scarce thought about it, looking at him only because I did not bother to turn away. Then a curious sensation
passed over me-and one which I had never felt before.
I was faintly dizzy as it began, and a soft tingling vibration followed, coursing through my trunk and then my
arms and legs. It felt as if my limbs were growing tighter, narrower, and steadily compressing the substance
within. Indeed, so distinct was this feeling that it seemed I might be squeezed right out of myself. I marveled
at it. There was something faintly delicious about it, especially to a being as hard and cold and impervious to
all sensations as I am. It was overwhelming, very like the way the drinking of blood is overwhelming, though
it was nothing as visceral as that. Also no sooner had I analyzed it than I realized it was gone.
I shuddered. Had I imagined the entire thing? I was still staring at that distant mortal-poor soul who gazed
back at me without the slightest knowledge of who or what I was. There was a smile on his young face,
brittle and full of crazed wonder. And gradually I realized I had seen this face before. I was further startled to
make out in his expression now a certain definite recognition, and the odd attitude of expectation. Suddenly
he raised his right hand and waved.
Balfling.
But I knew this mortal. No, more nearly accurate to say I had glimpsed him more than once, and then the
only certain recollections returned to me with full force.
In Venice, hovering on the edge of the Piazza San Marco, and months after in Hong Kong, near the Night
Market, and both times I had taken particular notice of him because he had taken particular notice of me.
Yes, there stood the same tall, powerfully built body, and the hair was the same thick, wavy brown hair.
Not possible. Or do I mean probable, for there he stood!
Again he made the little gesture of greeting, and then hurriedly, indeed very awkwardly, he ran towards me,
coming closer and closer with his strange ungainly steps as I watched in cold unyielding amazement.
I scanned his mind. Nothing. Locked up tight. Only his grinning face coming clearer and clearer as he
entered the brighter luminous glare of the sea. The scent of his fear filled my nostrils along with the smell of
his blood. Yes, he was terrified, and yet powerfully excited. Very inviting he looked suddenly- another victim
all but thrown into my arms.
How his large brown eyes glittered. And what shining teeth he had.
Coming to a halt some three feet from me, his heart pounding, he held out a fat crumpled envelope in his
damp and trembling hand.
I continued to stare at him, revealing nothing-not injured pride nor respect for this astonishing
accomplishment that he could find me here, that he would dare. I was just hungry enough to scoop him up
now and feed again without giving it another thought. I wasn't reasoning anymore as I looked at him. I saw
only blood.
And as if he knew it, indeed sensed it in full, he stiffened, glared at me fiercely for one moment, and then
tossed the thick envelope at my feet and danced back frantically over the loose sand. It seemed his legs
might go out from under him. He almost fell as he turned and fled.
The thirst subsided a little. Maybe I wasn't reasoning, but I was hesitating, and that did seem to involve
some thought. Who was this nervy young son of a bitch?
Again, I tried to scan him. Nothing. Most strange. But there are mortals who cloak themselves naturally,
even when they have not the slightest awareness that another might pry into their minds.
On and on he sped, desperately and in ungainly fashion, disappearing in the darkness of a side street as he
continued his progress away from me.
Moments passed.
Now I couldn't pick up his scent anymore at all, save from the envelope, which lay where he had thrown it
down.
What on earth could all this mean? He'd known exactly what I was, no doubt of it. Venice and Hong Kong
had not been coincidence. His sudden fear, if nothing else, had made it plain. But I had to smile at his
overall courage. Imagine, following such a creature as me.
Was he some crazed worshiper, come to pound on the temple door in the hopes I'd give him the Dark Blood
simply out of pity or reward for his temerity? It made me angry suddenly, and bitter, and then again I simply
didn't care.
I picked up the envelope, and saw that it was blank and unsealed. Inside, I found, of all things, a printed
short story clipped apparently from a paperback book.
It made a small thick wad of pulp pages, stapled together in the upper-left-hand corner. No personal note at
all. The author of the story was a lovable creature I knew well, H. P. Lovecraft by name, a writer of the
supernatural and the macabre. In fact, I knew the story, too, and could never forget its title: "The Thing on
the Doorstep." It had made me laugh.
"The Thing on the Doorstep." I was smiling now. Yes, I remembered the story, that it was clever, that it had
been fun.
But why would this strange mortal give such a story to me? It was ludicrous. And suddenly I was angry
again, or as angry as my sadness allowed me to be.
I shoved the packet in my coat pocket absently. I pondered. Yes, the fellow was definitely gone. Couldn't
even pick up an image of him from anyone else.
Oh, if only he had come to tempt me on some other night, when my soul wasn't sick and weary, when I
might have cared just a little-enough at least to have found out what it was all about.
But it seemed already that eons had passed since he had come and gone. The night was empty save for the
grinding roar of the big city, and the dim crash of the sea. Even the clouds had thinned and disappeared.
The sky seemed endless and harrowingly still.
I looked to the hard bright stars overhead, and let the low sound of the surf wrap me in silence. I gave one
last grief-stricken look to the lights of Miami, this city I so loved.
Then I went up, simple as a thought to rise, so swift no mortal could have seen it, this figure ascending
higher and higher through the deafening wind, until the great sprawling city was nothing but a distant galaxy
fading slowly from view.
So cold it was, this high wind that knows no seasons. The blood inside me was swallowed up as if its sweet
warmth had never existed, and soon my face and hands wore a sheathing of cold as if I'd frozen solid, and
that sheathing moved underneath my fragile garments, covering all my skin.
But it caused no pain. Or let us say it did not cause enough pain.
Rather it simply dried up comfort. It was only dismal, dreary, the absence of what makes existence worth itthe
blazing warmth of fires and caresses, of kisses and arguments, of love and longing and blood.
Ah, the Aztec gods must have been greedy vampires to convince those poor human souls that the universe
would cease to exist if the blood didn't flow. Imagine presiding over such an altar, snapping your fingers for
another and another and another, squeezing those fresh blood-soaked hearts to your lips like bunches of
grapes.
I twisted and turned with the wind, dropped a few feet, then rose again, arms outstretched playfully, then
falling at my sides. I lay on my back like a sure swimmer, staring again into the blind and indifferent stars.
By thought alone, I propelled myself eastward. The night still stretched over the city of London, though its
clocks ticked out the small hours. London.
There was time to say farewell to David Talbot-my mortal friend.
It had been months since our last meeting in Amsterdam, and I had left him rudely, ashamed for that and for
bothering him at all. I'd spied upon him since, but not troubled him. And I knew that I had to go to him now,
whatever my state of mind.
There wasn't any doubt he would want me to come. It was the proper, decent thing to do.
For one moment I thought of my beloved Louis. No doubt he was in his crumbling little house in its deep
swampy garden in New Orleans, reading by the light of the moon as he always did, or giving in to one
shuddering candle should the night be cloudy and dark. But it was too late to say farewell to Louis ... If there
was any being among us who would understand, it was Louis. Or so I told myself. The opposite is probably
closer to the truth . . .
On to London I went.