Downtown Saturday Night In The Twentieth Century 1984
I am The Vampire Lestat. I'm immortal. More or less. The light of
the sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire-these things might
destroy me. But then again, they might not. I'm six feet tall, which
was fairly impressive in the 1780s when I was a young mortal man. It's
not bad now. I have thick blond hair, not quite shoulder length, and
rather curly, which appears white under fluorescent light. My eyes are
gray, but they absorb the colors blue or violet easily from surfaces
around them. And I have a fairly short narrow nose, and a mouth that
is well shaped but just a little too big for my face. It can look very
mean, or extremely generous, my mouth. It always looks sensual. But
emotions and attitudes are always reflected in my entire expression. I
have a continuously animated face. My vampire nature reveals itself in
extremely white and highly reflective skin that has to be powdered
down for cameras of any kind. And if I'm starved for blood I look like
a perfect horrorskin shrunken, veins like ropes over the contours of
my bones. But I don't let that happen now. And the only consistent
indication that I am not human is my fingernails. It's the same with all
vampires. Our fingernails look like glass. And some people notice
that when they don't notice anything else. Right now I am what
America calls a Rock Superstar. My first album has sold 4 million
copies. I'm going to San Francisco for the first spot on a nationwide
concert tour that will take my band from coast to coast. MTV, the
rock music cable channel, has been playing my video clips night and
day for two weeks. They're also being shown in England on "Top of
the Pops " and on the Continent, probably in some parts of Asia, and
in Japan. Video cassettes of the whole series of clips are selling
worldwide. I am also the author of an autobiography which was
published last week. Regarding my English-the language I use in my
autobiography-I first learned it from a flatboatmen who came down
the Mississippi to New Orleans about two hundred years ago. I
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learned more after that from the English language writers-everybody
from Shakespeare through Mark Twain to H. Rider Haggard, whom I
read as the decades passed. The final infusion I received from the
detective stories of the early twentieth century in the Black Mask
magazine. The adventures of Sam Spade by Dashiell Hammett in
Black Mask were the last stories I read before I went literally and
figuratively underground. That was in New Orleans in 1929. When I
write I drift into a vocabulary that would have been natural to me in
the eighteenth century, into phrases shaped by the authors I've read.
But in spite of my French accent, I talk like a cross between a
flatboatman and detective Sam Spade, actually. So I hope you'll bear
with me when my style is inconsistent. When I blow the atmosphere
of an eighteenth century scene to smithereens now and then. I came
out into the twentieth century last year. What brought me up were
two things. First-the information I was receiving from amplified
voices that had begun their cacophony in the air around the time I lay
down to sleep. I'm referring here to the voices of radios, of course,
and phonographs and later television machines. I heard the radios in
the cars that passed in the streets of the old Garden District near the
place where I lay. I heard the phonographs and TVs from the houses
that surrounded mine. 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. In that state, I absorbed the voices sluggishly,
surrounding them with my own responsive images as a mortal does in
sleep. But at some point during the past fifty-five years I began to
"remember " what I was hearing, to follow the entertainment
programs, to listen to the news broadcasts, the lyrics and rhythms of
the popular songs. And very gradually, I began to understand the
caliber of the changes that the world had undergone. I began listening
for specific pieces of information about wars or inventions, certain
new patterns of speech. Then a self-consciousness developed in me. I
realized I was no longer dreaming. I was thinking about what I heard.
I was wide awake. I was lying in the ground and I was starved for
living blood. I started to believe that maybe all the old wounds I'd
sustained had been healed by now. Maybe my strength had come
back. Maybe my strength had actually increased as it would have done
with time if I'd never been hurt. I wanted to find out. I started to
think incessantly of drinking human blood. The second thing that
brought me back-the decisive thing really-was the sudden presence
near me of a band of young rock singers who called themselves Satan's
Night Out. They moved into a house on Sixth Street-less than a block
3
away from where I slumbered under my own house on Prytania near
the Lafayette Cemetery-and they started to rehearse their rock music
in the attic some time in 1984. I could hear their whining electric
guitars, their frantic singing. It was as good as the radio and stereo
songs I heard, and it was more melodic than most. There was a
romance to it in spite of its pounding drums. The electric piano
sounded like a harpsichord. I caught images from the thoughts of the
musicians that told me what they looked like, what they saw when they
looked at each other and into mirrors. They were slender, sinewy, and
altogether lovely young mortals-beguilingly androgynous and even a
little savage in their dress and movements-two male and one female.
They drowned out most of-the other amplified voices around me
when they were playing. But that was perfectly all right. I wanted to
rise and join the rock band called Satan's Night Out. I wanted to sing
and to dance. But I can't say that in the very beginning there was great
thought behind my wish. It was rather a ruling impulse, strong
enough to bring me up from the earth. I was enchanted by the world
of rock music-the way the singers could scream of good and evil,
proclaim themselves angels or devils, and mortals would stand up and
cheer. Sometimes they seemed the pure embodiment of madness.
And yet it was technologically dazzling, the intricacy of their
performance. It was barbaric and cerebral in a way that I don't think
the world of ages past had ever seen. Of course it was metaphor, the
raving. None of them believed in angels or devils, no matter how well
they assumed their parts. And the players of the old Italian commedia
had been as shocking, as inventive, as lewd. Yet it was entirely new,
the extremes to which they took it, the brutality and the defiance-and
the way they were embraced by the world from the very rich to the
very poor. Also there was something vampiric about rock music. It
must have sounded supernatural even to those who don't believe in
the supernatural. I mean the way the electricity could stretch a single
note forever; the way harmony could be layered upon harmony until
you felt yourself dissolving in the sound. So eloquent of dread it was,
this music. The world just didn't have it in any form before. Yes, I
wanted to get closer to it. I wanted to do it. Maybe make the little
unknown band of Satan's Night Out famous. I was ready to come up.
It took a week to rise, more or less. I fed on the fresh blood of the little
animals who live under the earth when I could catch them. Then I
started clawing for the surface, where I could summon the rats. From
there it wasn't too difficult to take felines and finally the inevitable
human victim, though I had to wait a long time for the particular kind
I wanted-a man who had killed other mortals and showed no remorse.
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One came along eventually, walking right by the fence, a young male
with a grizzled beard who had murdered another, in some far-off place
on the other side of the world. True killer, this one. And oh, that first
taste of human struggle and human blood! Stealing clothes from
nearby houses, getting some of the gold and jewels I'd hidden in the
Lafayette Cemetery, that was no problem. Of course I was scared from
time to time. The stench of chemicals and gasoline sickened me. The
drone of air conditioners and the whine of the jet planes overhead hurt
my ears. But after the third night up, I was roaring around New
Orleans on a big black Harley-Davidson motorcycle making plenty of
noise myself. I was looking for more killers to feed on. I wore
gorgeous black leather clothes that I'd taken from my victims, and I
had a little Sony Walkman stereo in my pocket that fed Bach's Art of
the Fugue through tiny earphones right into my head as I blazed along.
I was the vampire Lestat again. I was back in action. New Orleans was
once again my hunting ground. As for my strength, well, it was three
times what it had once been. I could leap from the street to the top of
a four-story building. I could pull iron gratings off windows. I could
bend a copper penny double. I could hear human voices and
thoughts, when I wanted to, for blocks around. By the end of the fast
week I had a pretty female lawyer in a downtown glass and steel
skyscraper who helped me procure a legal birth certificate, Social
Security card, and driver's license. A good portion of my old wealth
was on its way to New Orleans from coded accounts in the immortal
Bank of London and the Rothschild Bank. But more important, I was
swimming in realizations. I knew that everything the amplified voices
had told me about the twentieth century was true. As I roamed the
streets of New Orleans in 1984 this is what I beheld: 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. People were adventurous and erotic again the
way they'd been in the old days, before the great middle-class
revolutions of the late 1700s. They even looked the way they had in
those times. The men didn't wear the Sam Spade uniform of shirt, tie,
gray suit, and gray hat any longer. Once again, they costumed
themselves in velvet and silk and brilliant colors if they felt like it.
They did not have to clip their hair like Roman soldiers anymore; they
wore it any length they desired. And the women-ah, the women were
glorious, naked in the spring warmth as they'd been under the
Egyptian pharaohs, in skimpy short skirts and tunic like dresses, or
wearing men's pants and shirts skintight over their curvaceous bodies
if they pleased. They painted, and decked themselves out in gold and
5
silver, even to walk to the grocery store. Or they went fresh scrubbed
and without ornament-it didn't matter. They curled their hair like
Marie Antoinette or cut it off or let it blow free. For the first time in
history, perhaps, they were as strong and as interesting as men. And
these were the common people of America. Not just the rich who've
always achieved a certain androgyny, a certain joie de vivre that the
middle-class revolutionaries called decadence in the past. The old
aristocratic sensuality now belonged to everybody. It was wed to the
promises of the middle-class revolution, and all people had a right to
love and to luxury and to graceful things. Department stores had
become palaces of near Oriental loveliness-merchandise displayed
amid soft tinted carpeting, eerie music, amber light. In the all-night
drugstores, bottles of violet and green shampoo gleamed like gems on
the sparkling glass shelves. Waitresses drove sleek leather-lined
automobiles to work. Dock laborers went home at night to swim in
their heated backyard pools. Charwomen and plumbers changed at
the end of the day into exquisitely cut manufactured clothes. In fact
the poverty and filth that had been common in the big cities of the
earth since time immemorial were almost completely washed away.
You just didn't see immigrants dropping dead of starvation in the
alleyways. There weren't slums where people slept eight and ten to a
room. Nobody threw the slops in the gutters. The beggars, the
cripples, the orphans, the hopelessly diseased were so diminished as to
constitute no presence in the immaculate streets at all. Even the
drunkards and lunatics who slept on the park benches, and in the bus
stations had meat to eat regularly, and even radios to listen to, and
clothes that were washed. But this was just the surface. I found myself
astounded by the more profound changes that moved this awesome
current along. For example, something altogether magical had
happened to time. The old was not being routinely replaced by the
new anymore. On the contrary, the English spoken around me was
the same as it had been in the 1800s. Even the old slang ( "the coast is
clear " or "bad luck " or "that's the thing ") was still "current. " Yet
fascinating new phrases like
"they brainwashed you " and "it's so Freudian " and "I can't relate to
it " were on everyone's lips. In the art and entertainment worlds all
prior centuries were being "recycled. " Musicians performed Mozart as
well as jazz and rock music; people went to see Shakespeare one night
and a new French film the next. In giant fluorescent-lighted
emporiums you could buy tapes of medieval madrigals and play them
on your car stereo as you drove ninety miles an hour down the
freeway. In the bookstores Renaissance poetry sold side by side with
6
the novels of Dickens or Ernest Hemingway. Sex manuals lay on the
same tables with the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Sometimes the
wealth and the cleanliness everywhere around me became like an
hallucination. I thought I was going out of my head. Through shop
windows I gazed stupefied at computers and telephones as pure in
form and color as nature's most exotic shells. Gargantuan silver
limousines navigated the narrow French Quarter streets like
indestructible sea beasts. Glittering office towers pierced the night sky
like Egyptian obelisks above the sagging brick buildings of old Canal
Street. Countless television programs poured their ceaseless flow of
images into every air-cooled hotel room. But it was no series of
hallucinations. This century had inherited the earth in every sense.
And no small part of this unpredicted miracle was the curious
innocence of these people in the very midst of their freedom and their
wealth. The Christian god was as dead as he had been in the 1700s.
And no new mythological religion had arisen to take the place of the
old. On the contrary, the simplest people of this age were driven by a
vigorous secular morality as strong as any religious morality I had ever
known. The intellectuals carried the standards. But quite ordinary
individuals all over America cared passionately about "peace " and "the
poor " and "the planet " as if driven by a mystical zeal. Famine they
intended to wipe out in this century. Disease they would destroy no
matter what the cost. They argued ferociously about the execution of
condemned criminals, the abortion of unborn babies. And the threats
of "environmental pollution " and "holocaustal war " they battled as
fiercely as men have battled witchcraft and heresy in the ages past. As
for sexuality, it was no longer a matter of superstition and fear. The
last religious overtones were being stripped from it. That was why the
people went around half naked. That was why they kissed and hugged
each other in the streets. They talked ethics now and responsibility
and the beauty of the body. Procreation and venereal disease they had
under control. Ah, the twentieth century. Ah, the turn of the great
wheel. It had outdistanced my wildest dreams of it, this future. It had
made fools of grim prophets of ages past. I did a lot of thinking about
this sinless secular morality, this optimism. This brilliantly lighted
world where the value of human life was greater than it had ever been
before. In the amber electric twilight of a vast hotel room I watched
on the screen before me the stunningly crafted film of war called
Apocalypse Now. Such a symphony of sound and color it was, and it
sang of the age-old battle of the Western world against evil. "You must
make a friend of horror and moral terror, " says the mad commander
in the savage garden of Cambodia, to which the Western man answers
7
as he has always answered: No. No. Horror and moral terror can
never be exonerated. They have no real value. Pure evil has no real
place. And that means, doesn't it, that I have no place. Except,
perhaps, the art that repudiates evil-the vampire comics, the horror
novels, the old gothic tales-or in the roaring chants of the rock stars
who dramatize the battles against evil that each mortal fights within
himself. It was enough to make an old world monster go back into the
earth, this stunning irrelevance to the mighty scheme of things,
enough to make him lie down and weep. Or enough to make him
become a rock singer, when you think about it .... But where were the
other old world monsters? I wondered. How did other vampires exist
in a world in which each death was recorded in giant electronic
computers, and bodies were carried away to refrigerated crypts?
Probably concealing themselves like loathsome insects in the shadows,
as they have always done, no matter how much philosophy they talked
or how many covens they formed. Well, when I raised my voice with
the diode band called Satan's Night Out, I would bring them all into
the light soon enough. I continued my education. I talked to mortals
at bus stops and at gas stations and in elegant drinking places. I read
books. I decked myself out in the shimmering dream skins of the
fashionable shops. I wore white turtleneck shirts and crisp khaki safari
jackets, or lush gray velvet blazers with cashmere scarves. I powdered
down my face so that I could "pass " beneath the chemical lights of the
all-night supermarkets, the hamburger joints, the carnival
thoroughfares called nightclub strips. I was learning. I was in love.
And the only problem I had was that murderers to feed upon were
scarce. In this shiny world of innocence and plenty, of kindness and
gaiety and full stomachs, the common cutthroat thieves of the past and
their dangerous waterfront hangouts were almost gone. And so I had
to work for a living. But I'd always been a hunter. I liked the dim
smoky poolrooms with the single light shining on the green felt as the
tattooed ex-convicts gathered around it as much as I liked the shiny
satin-lined nightclubs of the big concrete hotels. And I was learning
more all the time about my killers-the drug dealers, the pimps, the
murderers who fell in with the motorcycle gangs. And more than ever,
I was resolute that I would not drink innocent blood. Finally it was
time to call upon my old neighbors, the rock band called Satan's Night
Out. At six thirty on a hot sticky Saturday night, I rang the doorbell of
the attic music studio. The beautiful young mortals were all lying
about in their rainbow-colored silk shirts and skintight dungarees
smoking hashish cigarettes and complaining about their rotten luck
getting "gigs " in the South. They looked like biblical angels, with their
8
long clean shaggy hair and feline movements; their jewelry was
Egyptian. Even to rehearse they painted their faces and their eyes. I
was overcome with excitement and love just looking at them, Alex and
Larry and the succulent little Tough Cookie. And in an eerie moment
in which the world seemed to stand still beneath me, I told them what
I was. Nothing new to them, the word "vampire. " In the galaxy in
which they shone, a thousand other singers had worn the theatrical
fangs and the black cape. And yet it felt so strange to speak it aloud to
mortals, the forbidden truth. Never in two hundred years had I
spoken it to anyone who had not been marked to become one of us.
Not even to my victims did I confide it before their eyes closed. And
now I said it clearly and distinctly to these handsome young creatures.
I told them that I wanted to sing with them, that if they were to trust
to me, we would all be rich and famous. That on a wave of
preternatural and remorseless ambition, I should carry them out of
these rooms and into the great world. Their eyes misted as they
looked at me. And the little twentieth-century chamber of stucco and
pasteboard rang with their laughter and delight. I was patient. Why
shouldn't I be? I knew I was a demon who could mimic almost any
human sound or movement. But how could they be expected to
understand? I went to the electric piano and began to play and to sing.
I imitated the rock songs as I started, and then old melodies and lyrics
came back to me- French songs buried deep in my soul yet never
abandoned-and I wound these into brutal rhythms, seeing before me a
tiny crowded little Paris theater of centuries ago. A dangerous passion
welled in me. It threatened my equilibrium. Dangerous that this
should come so soon. Yet I sang on, pounding the slick white keys of
the electric piano, and something in my soul was broken open. Never
mind that these tender mortal creatures gathered around me should
never know. It was sufficient that they were jubilant, that they loved
the eerie and disjointed music, that they were screaming, that they saw
prosperity in the future, the impetus that they had lacked before. They
turned on the tape machines and we began singing and playing
together, jamming as they called it. The studio swam with the scent of
their blood and our thunderous songs. But then came a shock I had
never in my strangest dreams anticipated-something that was as
extraordinary as my little revelation to these creatures had been. In
fact, it was so overwhelming that it might have driven me out of their
world and back underground. I don't mean I would have gone into
the deep slumber again. But I might have backed off from Satan's
Night Out and roamed about for a few years, stunned and trying to
gather my wits. The men-Alex, the sleek delicate young drummer, and
9
his taller blond-haired brother, Larry- recognized my name when I
told them it was Lestat. Not only did they recognize it, but they
connected it with a body of information about me that they had read
in a book. In fact, they thought it was delightful that I wasn't just
pretending to be any vampire. Or Count Dracula. Everybody was sick
of Count Dracula. They thought it was marvelous that I was
pretending to be the vampire Lestat.
"Pretending to be the vampire Lestat? " I asked. They laughed at my
exaggeration, my French accent. I looked at all of them for a long
moment, trying to scan their thoughts. Of course I hadn't expected
them to believe I was a real vampire. But to have read of a fictional
vampire with a name as unusual as mine? How could this be
explained? But I was losing my confidence. And when I lose my
confidence, my powers drain. The little room seemed to be getting
smaller. And there was something insectile and menacing about the
instruments, the antenna, the wires.
"Show me this book, " I said. From the other room they brought it, a
small pulp paper "novel " that was falling to pieces. The binding was
gone, the cover ripped, the whole held together by a rubber band. I
got a preternatural chill of sorts at the sight of the cover. Interview
with the Vampire. Something to do with a mortal boy getting one of
the undead to tell the tale. With their permission, I went into the
other room, stretched out on their bed, and began to read. When I
was halfway finished, I took the book with me and left the house. I
stood stock- still beneath a street lamp with the book until I finished it.
Then I placed it carefully in my breast pocket. I didn't return to the
band for seven nights. During much of that time, I was roaming
again, crashing through the night on my Harley- Davidson motorcycle
with the Bach Goldberg Variations turned up to full volume. And I
was asking myself, Lestat, what do you want to do now? And the rest
of the time I studied with a renewed purpose. I read the fat paperback
histories and lexicons of rock music, the chronicles of its stars. I
listened to the albums and pondered in silence the concert video tapes.
And when the night was empty and still, I heard the voices of
Interview with the Vampire singing to me, as if they sang from the
grave. I read the book over and over. And then in a moment of
contemptible anger, I shredded it to bits. Finally, I came to my
decision. I met my young lawyer, Christine, in her darkened
skyscraper office with only the downtown city to give us light. Lovely
she looked against the glass wall behind her, the dim buildings beyond
forming a harsh and primitive terrain in which a thousand torches
burned.
10
"It is not enough any longer that my little rock band be successful, " I
told her. "We must create a fame that will carry my name and my
voice to the remotest parts of the world. " Quietly, intelligently, as
lawyers are wont to do, she advised me against risking my fortune. Yet
as I continued with maniacal confidence, I could feel her seduction,
the, slow dissolution of her common sense.
"The best French directors for the rock video films, " I said. "You
must lure them from New York and Los Angeles. There is ample
money for that. And here you can find the studios, surely, in which we
will do our work. The young record producers who mix the sound
after- again, you must hire the best. It does not matter what we spend
on this venture. What is important is that it be orchestrated, that we
do our work in secret until the moment of revelation when our albums
and our films are released with the book that I propose to write. "
Finally her head was swimming with dreams of wealth and power.
Her pen raced as she made her notes. And what did I dream of as I
spoke to her? Of an unprecedented rebellion, a great and horrific
challenge to my kind all over the world.
"These rock videos, " I said. "You must find directors who'll realize
my visions. The films are to be sequential. They must tell the story
that is in the book I want to create. And the songs, many of them I've
already written. You must obtain superior instruments-synthesizers,
the finest sound systems, electric guitars, violins. Other details we can
attend to later. The designing of vampire costumes, the method of
presentation to the rock television stations, the management of our
first public appearance in San Francisco-all that in good time. What is
important now is that you make the phone calls, get the information
you need to begin. " I didn't go back to Satan's Night Out until the
first agreements were struck and signatures had been obtained. Dates
were fixed, studios rented, letters of agreement exchanged. Then
Christine came with me, and we had a great leviathan of a limousine
for my darling young rock players, Larry and Alex and Tough Cookie.
We had breathtaking sums of money, we had papers to be signed.
Under the drowsy oaks of the quiet Garden District street, I poured
the champagne into the glistening crystal glasses for them:
"To The Vampire Lestat, " we all sang in the moonlight. It was to be
the new name of the band, of the book I'd write. Tough Cookie threw
her succulent little arms around me. We kissed tenderly amid the
laughter and the reek of wine. Ah, the smell of innocent blood! And
when they had gone off in the velvet-lined motor coach, I moved alone
through the balmy night towards St. Charles Avenue, and thought
about the danger facing them, my little mortal friends. It didn't come
11
from me, of course. But when the long period of secrecy was ended,
they would stand innocently and ignorantly in the international
limelight with their sinister and reckless star. Well, I would surround
them with bodyguards and hangers-on for every conceivable purpose.
I would protect them from other immortals as best I could. And if the
immortals were anything like they used to be in the old days, they'd
never risk a vulgar struggle with a human force like that. As I walked
up to the busy avenue, I covered my eyes with mirrored sunglasses. I
rode the rickety old St. Charles streetcar downtown. And through the
early evening crowd I wandered into the elegant double-decker
bookstore called de Ville Books, and there stared at the small
paperback of Interview with the vampire on the shelf. I wondered how
many of our kind had "noticed " the book. Never mind for the
moment the mortals who thought it was fiction. What about other
vampires? Because if there is one law that all vampires hold sacred it is
that you do not tell mortals about us. You never pass on our "secrets "
to humans unless you mean to bequeath the Dark Gift of our powers
to them. You never name other immortals. You never tell where their
lairs might be. My beloved Louis, the narrator of Interview with the
Vampire, had done all this. He had gone far beyond my secret little
disclosure to my rock singers. He had told hundreds of thousands of
readers. He had all but drawn them a map and placed an X on the
very spot in New Orleans where I slumbered, though what he really
knew about that, and what his intentions were, was not clear.
Regardless, for what he'd done, others would surely hunt him down.
And there are very simple ways to destroy vampires, especially now. If
he was still in existence, he was an outcast and lived in a danger from
our kind that no mortal could ever pose. All the more reason far me
to bring the book and the band called The Vampire Lestat to fame as
quickly as possible. I had to find Louis. I had to talk to him. In fact,
after reading his account of things, I ached for him, ached for his
romantic illusions, and even his dishonesty. I ached even for his
gentlemanly malice and his physical presence, the deceptively soft
sound of his voice. Of course I hated him for the lies he told about
me. But the love was far greater than the hate. He had shared the dark
and romantic years of the nineteenth century with me, he was my
companion as no other immortal had ever been. And I ached to write
my story for him, not an answer to his malice in Interview with the
Vampire, but the tale of all the things I'd seen and learned before I
came to him, the story I could not tell him before. Old rules didn't
matter to me now, either. I wanted to break every one of them. And I
wanted my band and my book to draw out not only Louis but all the
12
other demons that I had ever known and loved. I wanted to find my
lost ones, awaken those who slept as I had slept. Fledglings and
ancient ones, beautiful and evil and mad and heartless-they'd all come
after me when they saw those video clips and heard those records,
when they saw the book in the windows of the bookstores, and they'd
know exactly where to find me. I'd be Lestat, the rock superstar. Just
come to San Francisco for my first live performance. I'll be there. But
there was another reason for the whole adventure-a reason even more
dangerous and delicious and mad. And I knew Louis would
understand. It must have been behind his interview, his confessions. I
wanted mortals to know about us. I wanted to proclaim it to the
world the way I'd told it to Alex and Larry and Tough Cookie, and my
sweet lawyer, Christine. And it didn't matter that they didn't believe it.
It didn't matter that they thought it was art. The fact was that, after
two centuries of concealment, I was visible to mortals! I spoke my
name aloud. I told my nature. I was there! But again, I was going
farther than Louis. His story, for all its peculiarities, had passed for
fiction. In the mortal world, it was as safe as the tableaux of the old
Theater of the Vampires in the Paris where the fiends had pretended to
be actors pretending to be fiends on a remote and gas lighted stage. I'd
step into the solar lights before the cameras, I'd reach out and touch
with my icy fingers a thousand warm and grasping hands. I'd scare the
hell out of them if it was possible, and charm them and lead them into
the truth of it if I could. And suppose-just suppose-that when the
corpses began to turn up in ever greater numbers, that when those
closest to me began to hearken to their inevitable suspicions-just
suppose that the art ceased to be art and became real! I mean what if
they really believed it, really understood that this world still harbored
the Old World demon thing, the vampire-oh, what a great and
glorious war we might have then! We would be known, and we would
be hunted, and we would be fought in this glittering urban wilderness
as no mythic monster has ever been fought by man before. How could
I not love it, the mere idea of it? How could it not be worth the
greatest danger, the greatest and most ghastly defeat? Even at the
moment of destruction, I would be alive as I have never been. But to
tell the truth, I didn't think it would ever come to that-I mean, mortals
believing in us. Mortals have never made me afraid. It was the other
war that was going to happen, the one in which we'd all come together,
or they would all come to fight me. That was the real reason for The
Vampire Lestat. That was the kind of game I was playing. But that
other lovely possibility of real revelation and disaster . . . Well, that
added a hell of a lot of spice! Out of the gloomy waste of canal street, I
13
went back up the stairs to my rooms in the old- fashioned French
Quarter hotel. Quiet it was, and suited to me, with the Vieux Carrel
spread out beneath its windows, the narrow little streets of Spanish
town houses I'd known for so long. On the giant television set I played
the cassette of the beautiful Visconti film Death in Venice. An actor
said at one point that evil was a necessity. It was food for genius. I
didn't believe that. But I wish it were true. Then I could just be Lestat,
the monster, couldn't I? And I was always so good at being a monster!
Ah, well... I put a fresh disk into the portable computer word
processor and I started to write the story of my life.