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There is Lestat, first and foremost, the author of four books of his life and his adventures co you could ever possibly want to know about hi trickster Six feet tall, a young e warm blue eyes and thick flashy blond hair, square of jaith a generous beautifully shaped mouth and skin darkened by a sojourn in the sun which would have killed a weaker valass of fashion, the abond on occasion, loner, wanderer, heart-breaker and wise guy, dubbed the "Brat Prince" by ine it, my Marius, yes, my Marius, who did indeed survive the torches of the Roh in whose Court and by whose Divine Right and whose Royal Blood I should like to know Lestat, stuffed with the blood of the most ancient of our kind, indeed the very blood of the Eve of our species, some five to seven thousand years the survivor of her Eden, a perfect horror who, e from the deceptive poetical title of Queen Akasha of Those Who Must Be Kept, almost destroyed the world

Lestat, not a bad friend to have, and one for whom I would lay down my immortal life, one for whose love and co and fascinating and intolerably annoying, one without whom I cannot exist

So much for him

Louis de Pointe du Lac, already described above but always fan to envisage: slender, slightly less tall than Lestat, his ly long and delicate fingers, and feet that do not reen eyes are soulful, the very mirror of patientlived only two hundred years, unable to read minds, or to levitate, or to spellbind others except inadvertently, which can be hilarious, an immortal hom mortals fall in love Louis, an indiscriminate killer, because he cannot satisfy his thirst without killing, though he is too weak to risk the death of the victim in his arms, and because he has no pride or vanity which would lead him to a hierarchy of intended victiardless of age, physical endows bestowed by nature or fate Louis, a deadly and roht creature who hovers in the deep shadows at the Opera House to listen to Mozart's Queen of the Night give forth her piercing and irresistible song

Louis, who has never vanished, who has always been known to others, who is easy to track and easy to abandon, Louis ill not ic blunders with va for God, for the Devil, for Truth or even for love

Sweet, dusty Louis, reading Keats by the light of one candle Louis standing in the rain on a slick deserted don street watching through the storethe brilliant young actor Leonardo DiCaprio as Shakespeare's Ro his tender and lovely Juliet (Claire Danes) on a television screen

Gabrielle She's around now She was around on The Night Island Everyone hates her She is Lestat's Mother, and abandons hie to heed Lestat's periodic and inevitable frantic cries for help, which though she could not receive the, could certainly learn of them from other vampiric minds which are on fire with the news round the world when Lestat is in trouble Gabrielle, she looks just like him, except she's a woman, totally a wo-breasted, sweet-eyed in the eous in a black ball goith her hair free, enderless, sheathed in supple leather or belted khaki, a steady walker, and a vaotten what it ever ot overnight, if she ever knew it She was in mortal life one of those creatures who alondered what the others were carrying on about Gabrielle, low-voiced, unintentionally vicious, glacial, forbidding, ungiving, a wanderer through snowy forests of the far north, a slayer of giant white bears and white tigers, an indifferent legend to unta more akin to a prehistoric reptile than a human Beautiful, naturally, blond hair in a braid down her back, alal in a chocolate-colored leather safari jacket and a small droopy brimmed rain hat, a stalker, a quick killer, a pitiless and see Gabrielle, virtually useless to anyone but herself So to someone, I suppose

Pandora, child of two millennia, consort to my own beloved Marius a thousand years before I was ever born A goddess,marble, a powerful beauty out of the deepest and most ancient soul of Roman Italy, fierce with the reatest Empire the Western world has ever known I don't know her Her oval face shi brown hair She seems too beautiful to hurt anyone She is tender-voiced, with innocent, i eyes, her flawless face instantly vulnerable and ith empathy, a mystery I don't kno Marius could ever have left her In a short shift of filmy silk, with a snake bracelet on her bare ar forgowns, she h the roohost of a dancer, seeks for so that she alone can find Her powers certainly rival those of Marius She has drunk from the Eden fount, that is, the blood of Queen Akasha She can kindle crisp dry objects into fire with the power of herblood drinkers if they h indifferent to gender, a wan and plaintive woman whom I want to close in my arms

Santino, the old saint of Rome He has wandered into the disasters of the -shouldered, strong-chested one, olive skin paler noith the workings of the fiercehair often clipped each night at sunset for the sake of anonymity perhaps, unvain, perfectly dressed in black He says nothing to anyone He looks at me

silently as if we never talked together of theology and mysticism, as if he never broke my happiness, burntconvalescence, divided me from all comfort Perhaps he fancies us as fellow victims of a powerful intellectual morality, an infatuation with the concept of purpose, two lost ones, veterans of the same war

At times he looks shrewd and even hateful He knows plenty He doesn't underesti the social invisibility of centuries past, noalk a us with perfect ease When he looks atand passive The shadow of his beard, fixed forever into the tiny cut-off dark hairs embedded in his skin, is beautiful as it alas He is all in all conventionally virile, crisp white shirt open at the throat to show the portion of the thick curly black hair that covers his chest, a si the visible flesh of his arms at the wrists He favors sleek but sturdy black coats lapeled in leather or fur, low-slung black cars that hter reeking of coain just to peer into the flame Where he actually lives, and when he will surface, nobody knows

Santino I know no entle has been terrible; I do not seek to break the shiny black fashionable carapace of his deedy beneath it To know Santino, there is always time

Now let inal of readers my Master, Marius, as he is now So lacier between us, and we stare at each other across the glohiteness of that impassable waste, able only to speak in lulled and polite voices, socreature I appear to be, too sweet-faced for casual belief, and he, ever the worldly sophisticate, the scholar of the moment, the philosopher of the century, ethicist of the millennium, historian for all time

He walks tall as he always did, imperial still in his subdued twentieth-century fashion, carving his coats out of old velvet that they nificence that was once his nightly dress On occasions now he clips the long flowing yellow hair which he wore so proudly in old Venice He is ever quick of wit and tongue and eager for reasonable solutions, possessed of infinite patience and unquenchable curiosity and a refusal to give up on the fate of hie can defeat hi for the horrors of technology or the spells of science Neither microscopes nor coh his once solees-Those Who Must Be Kept, who held such pro been toppled from their archaic thrones

I fear him I don't knohy Perhaps I fear hi hi hi fros, only to discover that his patience for o blazed in his eyes