“ ‘Do you mean, then, we can live from animals?’ I asked.
“ ‘Yes.’ He drank it all down and then casually threw the glass at the fireplace. I stared at the fragments. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ He gestured to the broken glass with a sarcastic smile. ‘I surely hope you don’t, because there’s nothing much you can do about it if you do mind.’
“ ‘I can throw you and your father out of Pointe du Lac, if I mind,’ I said. I believe this was my first show of temper.
“ ‘Why would you do that?’ he asked with mock alarm. ‘You don’t know everything yet… do you?’ He was laughing then and walking slowly about the room. He ran his fingers over the satin finish of the spinet. ‘Do you play?’ he asked.
“I said something like, ‘Don’t touch it!’ and he laughed at me. ‘I’ll touch it if I like!’ he said. ‘You don’t know, for example, all the ways you can die. And dying now would be such a calamity, wouldn’t it?’
“ ‘There must be someone else in the world to teach me these things,’ I said. ‘Certainly you’re not the only vampire! And your father, he’s perhaps seventy. You couldn’t have been a vampire long, so someone must have instructed you…
“ ‘And do you think you can find other vampires by yourself? They might see you coming, my friend, but you won’t see them. No, I don’t think you have much choice about things at this point, friend. I’m your teacher and you need me, and there isn’t much you can do about it either way. And we both have people to provide for. My father needs a doctor, and then there is the matter of your mother and sister. Don’t get any mortal notions about telling them you are a vampire. Just provide for them and for my father, which means that tomorrow night you had better kill fast and then attend to the business of your plantation. Now to bed. We both sleep in the same room; it makes for far less risk.’
“ ‘No, you secure the bedroom for yourself,’ I said. ‘I’ve no intention of staying in the same room with you.’
“He became furious. ‘Don’t do anything stupid, Louis. I warn you. There’s nothing you can do to defend yourself once the sun rises, nothing. Separate rooms mean separate security. Double precautions and double chance of notice.’ He then said a score of things to frighten me into complying, but he might as well have been talking to the walls. I watched him intently, but I didn’t listen to him. He appeared frail and stupid to me, a man made of dried twigs with a thin, carping voice. ‘I sleep alone,’ I said, and gently put my hand around the candle flames one by one. ‘It’s almost morning!’ he insisted.
“ ‘So lock yourself in,’ I said, embracing my coffin, hoisting it and carrying it down the brick stairs. I could hear the locks snapping on the French doors above, the swoosh of the drapes. The sky was pale but still sprinkled with stars, and another light rain blew now on the breeze from the river, speckling the flagstones. I opened the door of my brother’s oratory, shoving back the roses and thorns which had almost sealed it, and set the coffin on the stone floor before the priedieu. I could almost make out the images of the saints on the walls. ‘Paul,’ I said softly, addressing my brother, ‘for the first time in my life I feel nothing for you, nothing for your death; and for the first time I feel everything for you, feel the sorrow of your loss as if I never before knew feeling.’ You see…”
The vampire turned to the boy. “For the first time now I was fully and completely a vampire. I shut the wood blinds flat upon the small barred windows and bolted the door. Then I climbed into the satin-lined coffin, barely able to see the gleam of cloth in the darkness, and locked myself in. That is how I became a vampire.”
“And there you were,” said the boy after a pause, “with another vampire you hated.”
“But I had to stay with him,” answered the vampire. “As I’ve told you, he had me at a great disadvantage. He hinted there was much I didn’t know and must know and that he alone could tell me. But in fact, the main part of what he did teach me was practical and not so difficult to figure out for oneself. How we might travel, for instance, by ship, having our coffins transported for us as though they contained the remains of loved ones being sent here or there for burial; how no one would dare to open such a coffin, and we might rise from it at night to clean the ship of rats — things of this nature. And then there were the shops and businessmen he knew who admitted us well after hours to outfit us in the finest Paris fashions, and those agents willing to transact financial matters in restaurants and cabarets. And in all of these mundane matters, Lestat was an adequate teacher. What manner of man he’d been in life, I couldn’t tell and didn’t care; but he was for all appearances of the same class now as myself, which meant little to me, except that it made our lives run a little more smoothly than they might have otherwise. He had impeccable taste, though my library to him was a ‘pile of dust,’ and he seemed more than once to be infuriated by the sight of my reading a book or writing some observations in a journal. ‘That mortal nonsense,’ he would say to me, while at the same time spending so much of my money to splendidly furnish Pointe du Lac, that even I, who cared nothing for the money, was forced to wince. And in entertaining visitors at Pointe du Lac — those hapless travelers who came up the river road by horseback or carriage begging accommodations for the night, sporting letters of introduction from other planters or officials in New Orleans — to these he was so gentle and polite that it made things far easier for me, who found myself hopelessly locked to him and jarred over and over by his viciousness.”
“But he didn’t harm these men?” asked the boy.
“Oh yes, often, he did. But I’ll tell you a little secret if I may, which applies not only to vampires, but to generals, soldiers, and kings. Most of us would much rather see somebody die than be the object of rudeness under our roofs. Strange… yes. But very true, I assure you. That Lestat hunted for mortals every night, I knew. But had he been savage and ugly to my family, my guests, and my slaves, I couldn’t have endured it. He was not. He seemed particularly to delight in the visitors. But he said we must spare no expense where our families were concerned. And he seemed to me to push luxury upon his father to an almost ludicrous point. The old blind man must be told constantly how fine and expensive were his bed jackets and robes and what imported draperies had just been fixed to his bed and what French and Spanish wines we had in the cellar and how much the plantation yielded even in bad years when the coast talked of abandoning the indigo production altogether and going into sugar. But then at other times he would bully the old man, as I mentioned. He would erupt into such rage that the old man whimpered like a child. ‘Don’t I take care of you in baronial splendor!’ Lestat would shout at him. ‘Don’t I provide for your every want! Stop whining to me about going to church or old friends! Such nonsense. Your old friends are dead. Why don’t you die and leave me and my bankroll in peace!’ The old man would cry softly that these things meant so little to him in old age. He would have been content on his little farm forever. I wanted often to ask him later, ‘Where was this farm? From where did you come to Louisiana?’ to get some clue to that place where Lestat might have known another vampire. But I didn’t dare to bring these things up, lest the old man start crying and Lestat become enraged. But these fits were no more frequent than periods of near obsequious kindness when Lestat would bring his father supper on a tray and feed him patiently while talking of the weather and the New Orleans news and the activities of my mother and sister. It was obvious that a great gulf existed between father and son, both in education and refinement, but how it came about, I could not quite guess. And from this whole matter, I achieved a somewhat consistent detachment.