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Epilogue

Interview With The Vampire

1

And so I came to the end of The Early Education and Adventures of the Vampire Lestat, the tale that I set out to tell You have the account of Old World ic and mystery which I have chosen, despite all prohibitions and injunctions, to pass on

But ht be to continue it And I must consider, at least briefly, the painful events that led to o down into the earth in 1929

That was a hundred and forty years after I left Marius’s island And I never set eyes upon Marius again Gabrielle also reht in Cairo never to be heard from by anyone mortal or immortal that I was ever to know

And when I rave in the twentieth century, I was alone and weary and badly wounded in body and soul

I’d lived out my "one lifetime" as Marius advised me to do But I couldn’t blame Marius for the way in which I’d lived it, and the hideous mistakes I’d made

Sheer will had shaped my experience more than any other hu, I courted tragedy and disaster as I have always done Yet I had my rewards, I can’t deny that For al vampires Louis and Claudia, two of the most splendid immortals who ever walked the earth, and I had the the colony, I fell fatally in love with Louis, a young dark-haired bourgeois planter, graceful of speech and fastidious of manner, who seemed in his cynicism and self destructiveness the very twin of Nicolas

He had Nicki’s grim intensity, his rebelliousness, his tortured capacity to believe and not to believe, and finally to despair

Yet Louis gained a hold over me far more powerful than Nicolas had ever had Even in his cruelestdependence, his infatuation with esture and every spoken word

And his naivet�� conquered eois faith that God was still God even if he turned his back on us, that damnation and salvation established the boundaries of a small and hopeless world

Louis was a sufferer, a thing that loved mortals even more than I did And I wonder sometimes if I didn’t look to Louis to punish me for what had happened to Nicki, if I didn’t create Louis to be my conscience and to mete out year in and year out the penance I felt I deserved

But I loved him, plain and simple And it was out of the desperation to keep him, to bind him closer to me at the most precarious of moments, that I committed thethe living dead It was the cri: the creation with Louis and for Louis of Claudia, a stunningly beautiful vampire child

Her body wasn’t six years old when I took her, and though she would have died if I hadn’t done it (just as Louis would have died if I hadn’t taken hiods for which Claudia and I would both pay

But this is the tale that was told by Louis in Intervieith the Vampire, which for all its contradictions and terrible es to capture the atether and stayed together for sixty-five years

During that time, ere nonpareils of our species, a silk and velvet-clad trio of deadly hunters, glorifying in our secret and in the swelling city of New Orleans that harbored us in luxury and supplied us endlessly with fresh victih Louis did not knohen he wrote his chronicle, sixty-five years is a phenomenal time for any bond in our world

As for the lies he told, the ination, his bitterness, and his vanity, which was, after all, never very great I never revealed to hiuilt and self-loathing fro even half of his own

Even his unusual beauty and unfailing char of a secret to him When you read his statement that I made him a vampire because I coveted his plantation house, you can write that off to modesty more easily than stupidity, I suppose

As for his belief that I was a peasant, well that was understandable He was, after all, a discri as all the colonial planters did to be a genuine aristocrat though he had neverline of feudal lords who licked their fingers and threw the bones over their shoulders to the dogs as they dined

When he says I played with innocent strangers, befriending the the the ga more faithful to my unspoken vow to kill the evildoer than even I had hoped I would be? (The young Freniere, for example, a planter whom Louis romanticizes hopelessly in his text, was in fact a wanton killer and a cheater at cards on the verge of signing over his family’s plantation for debt when I struck him down The whores I feasted upon in front of Louis once, to spite hied and robbed ain)

But little things like this don’t really matter He told the tale as he believed it

And in a real way, Louis was always the suly huined such a coentle Claudia the proper use of table silver when she, bless her little black heart, had not the slightest need ever to touch a knife or a fork

His blindness to theof others was as much a part of his charm as his soft unkereen eyes

And why should I bother to tell of the ti ether and talked together, acted Shakespeare together for Claudia’s amusement, or went arm in arm to hunt the riverfront taverns or to waltz with the dark-skinned beauties of the celebrated quadroon balls?

Read between the lines

I betrayed hi Just as I betrayed Claudia And I forgive the nonsense he wrote, because he told the truth about the eerie contentht to share in those long nineteenth-century decades when the peacock colors of the ancient regiave way to the bombast of Beethoven, which could sound at tiinary Hell’s Bells

I had what I wanted, what I had alanted I had theet Nicki, and even forget Marius and the blank staring face of Akasha, or the icy touch of her hand or the heat of her blood

But I had alanted s What accounted for the duration of the life he described in Intervieith the Va the nineteenth century, vampires were "discovered" by the literary writers of Europe Lord Ruthven, the creation of Dr Polidori, gave way to Sir Francis Varney in the penny dreadfuls, and later canificent and sensuous Countess Car ape of the vah he can turn himself into a bat or dematerialize at will, nevertheless crawls down the wall of his castle in the manner of a lizard apparently for fun -- all of these creations and othic and fantastical tales"

We were the essence of that nineteenth-century conception, aristocratically aloof, unfailingly elegant, and invariablyto each other in a land ripe for, but untroubled by, others of our kind

Maybe we had found the perfect moment in history, the perfect balance between the monstrous and the huination ai black cape, the black top hat, and the little girl’s lu down from their violet ribbon to the puffed sleeves of her diaphanous silk dress

But what had I done to Claudia? And ould I have to pay for that? How long was she content to be the ether, the muse of our moonlit hours, the one object of devotion common to us both?

Was it inevitable that she ould never have a woman’s form would strike out at the demon father who condemned her to the body of a little china doll?

I should have listened to Marius’s warning I should have stopped for one rand and intoxicating experiment: to make a vampire of "the least of these" I should have taken a deep breath

But you know, it was like playing the violin for Akasha I wanted to do it I wanted to see ould happen, I irl like that!

Oh, Lestat, you deserve everything that ever happened to you You’d better not die You o to hell

But as it that for purely selfish reasons, I didn’t listen to soiven me? Why didn’t I learn from any of them -- Gabrielle, Armand, Marius? But then, I never have listened to anyone, really Somehow or other, I never can

And I cannot say even now that I regret Claudia, that I wish I had never seen her, nor held her, nor whispered secrets to her, nor heard her laughter echoing through the shadowy gaslighted rooms of that all too human town house in which weoil paintings and the brass flowerpots as living beings should Claudia was my dark child, my love, evil of my evil Claudia broke ht in the spring of the year 1860, she rose up to settle the score She enticed ain into ed and poisoned body, until alushed out of me before my wounds had the precious few seconds in which to heal

I don’t blaht have done myself

And those delirious ned to so and her will that laid me low as surely as the blade that slashed my throat and divided ht for as long as I go on, and of the chase into avewith it all power to see or hear or hts traveled back and back, way beyond the creation of the doomed vampire family in their paradise of wallpaper and lace curtains, to the diroves of od of the wood had felt again and again his flesh torn, his blood spilled

If there was not ruence, the stunning repetition of the saod rises But this time no one is redeemed

With the blood of Akasha, Marius had said to me, you will survive disasters that would destroy others of our kind

Later, abandoned in the stench and darkness of the swamp, I felt the thirst define my proportions, I felt the thirst propel s seek the war road back

And three nights later, when again I had been beaten andinferno of our town house, it was the blood of the old ones, Magnus and Marius and Akasha, that sustained me as I crawled away fro blood, without a fresh infusion, I was left at the mercy of time to heal my wounds

And what Louis could not describe in his story is what happened to e of the human herd, a hideous and crippledor infirer from my victiing terror rather than rapture, rese so much as the old revenants of les Innocents in their filth and rags

The wounds I’d suffered affected my very spirit, my capacity to reason And what I saw in the mirror every time I dared to look further shriveled my soul

Yet not once in all this time did I call out to Marius, did I try to reach hi blood Better suffer purgatory for a century than Marius’s condeuish, than discover that he knew everything I’d done and had long ago turned his back on iven h at least to hasten my recovery, I did not know even where to look

When I had recovered sufficiently to e to Europe, I turned to the only one that I could turn to: Ariven hinus, Ar coven of the Theater of the Vaed to me After all, I owed Ar to me?

It was a shock to see him when he came to answer the knock on his door

He looked like a young man out of the novels of Dickens in his somber and sleekly tailored black frock coat, all the Renaissance curls clipped away His eternally youthful face was stamped with the innocence of a David Copperfield and the pride of a Steerforth -- anything but the true nature of the spirit within

For one ht burned in him as he looked at me Then he stared slowly at the scars that covered my face and hands, and he said softly and almost compassionately:

"Come in, Lestat"

He took h the house he had built at the foot of Magnus’s tower, a dark and dreary place fit for all the Byronic horrors of this strange age

"You know, the ruypt, or the Far East," he said quickly in everyday French with an animation I’d never seen in hi being "You ith the old century, and no one has heard of you since"