“ ‘I want some more,’ she said, turning to the corpse on the floor.
“ ‘No, not tonight; tomorrow night,’ said Lestat. And he went to take the lady out of his coffin. The child slid off my lap, and I followed her. She stood watching as Lestat put the two ladies and the slave boy into the bed. He brought the covers up to their chin. ‘Are they sick?’ asked the child.
“ ‘Yes, Claudia,’ he said. ‘They’re sick and they’re dead. You see, they die when we drink from them.’ He came towards her and swung her up into his arms again. We stood there with her between us. I was mesmerized by her, by her transformed, by her every gesture: She was not a child any longer, she was a vampire child. ‘Now, Louis was going to leave us,’ said Lestat, his eyes moving from my face to hers. ‘He was going to go away. But now he’s not. Because he wants to stay and take care of you and make you happy.’ He looked at me. ‘You’re not going, are you, Louis?’
“ ‘You bastard!’ I whispered to him. ‘You fiend!’
“ ‘Such language in front of your daughter,’ he said.
“ ‘I’m not your daughter,’ she said with the silvery voice. ‘I’m my mamma’s daughter.’
“ ‘No, dear, not anymore,’ he said to her. He glanced at the window, and then he shut the bedroom door behind us and turned the key in the lock. ‘You’re our daughter, Louis’s daughter and my daughter, do you see? Now, whom should you sleep with? Louis or me?’ And then looking at me, he said, ‘Perhaps you should sleep with Louis. After all, when I’m tired… I’m not so kind.’”
The Vampire stopped. The boy said nothing. “A child vampire!” he whispered finally. The vampire glanced up suddenly as though startled, though his body made no movement. He glared at the tape recorder as if it were something monstrous.
The boy saw that the tape was almost out. Quickly, he opened his brief case and drew out a new cassette, clumsily fitting it into place. He looked at the vampire as he pressed the record button. The vampire’s face looked weary, drawn, his cheekbones more prominent and his brilliant green eyes enormous. They had begun at dark, which had come early on this San Francisco winter night, and now it was just before ten p.m. The vampire straightened and smiled and said calmly, “We are ready to go on?”
“He’d done this to the little girl just to keep you with him?” asked the boy.
“That is difficult to say. It was a statement. I’m convinced that Lestat was a person who preferred not to think or talk about his motives or beliefs, even to himself. One of those people who must act. Such a person must be pushed considerably before he will open up and confess that there is method and thought to the way he lives. That is what had happened that night with Lestat. He’d been pushed to where he had to discover even for himself why he lived as he did. Keeping me with him, that was undoubtedly part of what pushed him. But I think, in retrospect, that he himself wanted to know his own reasons for killing, wanted to examine his own life. He was discovering when he spoke what he did believe. But he did indeed want me to remain. He lived with me in a way he could never have lived alone. And, as I’ve told you, I was careful never to sign any property over to him, which maddened him. That, he could not persuade me to do.” The vampire laughed suddenly, “Look at all the other things he persuaded me to do! How strange. He could persuade me to kill a child, but not to part with my money.” He shook his head. “But,” he said, “it wasn’t greed, really, as you can see. It was fear of him that made me tight with him.”
“ You speak of him as if he were dead. You say Lestat was this or was that. Is he dead?” asked the boy.
“I don’t know,” said the vampire. “I think perhaps he is. But I’ll come to that. We were talking of Claudia, weren’t we? There was something else I wanted to say about Lestat’s motives that night. Lestat trusted no one, as you see. He was like a cat, by his own admission, a lone predator. Yet he had communicated with me that night; he had to some extent exposed himself simply by telling the truth. He had dropped his mockery, his condescension. He had forgotten his perpetual anger for just a little while. And this for Lestat was exposure. When we stood, alone in that dark street, I felt in him a communion with another I hadn’t felt since I died. I rather think that he ushered Claudia into vampirism for revenge.”
“Revenge, not only on you but on the world,” suggested the boy.
“Yes. As I said, Lestat’s motives for everything revolved around revenge.”
“Was it all started with the father? With the school?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it,” said the vampire. “But I want to go on.”
“Oh, please go on. You have to go on! I mean, it’s only ten o’clock.” The boy showed his watch.
The vampire looked at it, and then he smiled at the boy. The boy’s face changed. It was blank as if from some sort of shock. “Are you still afraid of me?” asked the vampire.
The boy said nothing, but he shrank slightly from the edge of the table. His body elongated, his feet moved out over the bare boards and then contracted.
“I should think you’d be very foolish if you weren’t,” said the vampire. “But don’t be. Shall we go on?”
“Please,” said the boy. He gestured towards the machine.
’Well,” the vampire began, “our life was much changed with Mademoiselle Claudia, as you can imagine. Her body died, yet her senses awakened much as mine had. And I treasured in her the signs of this. But I was not aware for quite a few days how much I wanted her, wanted to talk with her and be with her. At first, I thought only of protecting her from Lestat. I gathered her into my coffin every morning and would not let her out of my sight with him if possible. This was what Lestat wanted, and he gave little suggestions that he might do her harm. ‘A starving child is a frightful sight,’ he said to me, ‘a starving vampire even worse.’ They’d hear her screams in Paris, he said, were he to lock her away to die. But all this was meant for me, to draw me close and keep me there. Afraid of fleeing alone, I would not conceive of risking it with Claudia. She was a child. She needed care.
“And there was much pleasure in caring for her. She forgot her five years of mortal life at once, or so it seemed, for she was mysteriously quiet. And from time to time I even feared that she had lost all sense, that the illness of her mortal life, combined with the great vampire shock, might have robbed her of reason; but this proved hardly the case. She was simply unlike Lestat and me to such an extent I couldn’t comprehend her; for little child she was, but also fierce killer now capable of the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child’s demanding. And though Lestat still threatened me with danger to her, he did not threaten her at all but was loving to her, proud of her beauty, anxious to teach her that we must kill to live and that we ourselves could never die.