If you do not, the land is lost and the family is lost. You will be five women on a 
small pension doomed to live but half or less of what life could give you. Learn what you 
must know. Stop at nothing until you have the answers. And take my visitation to you to 
be your courage whenever you waver. You must take the reins of your own life. Your 
brother is dead.'
  "I could see by her face that she had heard every word. She would have questioned me 
had there been time, but she believed me when I said there was not. Then I used all my 
skill to leave her so swiftly I appeared to vanish. From the garden I saw her face above 
in the glow of her candles. I saw her search the dark for me, turning around and around. 
And then I saw her make the Sign of the Crass and walk back to her sisters within."
  The vampire smiled. "There was absolutely no talk on the river coast of any strange 
apparition to Babette Freniere, but after the first mourning and sad talk of the women 
left all alone, she became the scandal of the neighborhood because she chose to run the 
plantation on her own. She managed an immense dowry for her younger sister, and was 
married herself in another year. And Lestat and I almost never exchanged words."
  "Did he go on living at Pointe du Lac?"
  "Yes. I could not be certain he'd told me all I needed to know. And great pretense was 
necessary. My sister was married in my absence, for example, while I had a `malarial 
chill,' and something similar overcame me the morning of my mother's funeral. Meantime, 
Lestat and I sat down to dinner each night with the old man and made nice noises with our 
knives and forks, while he told us to eat everything on our plates and not to drink our 
wine too fast. With dozens of miserable headaches I would receive my sister in a darkened 
bedroom, the covers up to my chin, bid her and her husband bear with the dim light on 
account of the pain in my eyes, as I entrusted to them large amounts of money to invest 
for us all. Fortunately her husband was an idiot; a harmless one, but an idiot, the 
product of four generations of marriages between first cousins.
  "But though these things went well, we began to have our problems with the slaves. They 
were the suspicious ones; and, as I've indicated, Lestat killed anyone and everyone he 
chose. So there was always some talk of mysterious death on the part of the coast. But it 
was what they saw of us which began the talk, and I heard it one evening when I was 
playing a shadow about the slave cabins.
  "Now, let me explain first the character of these slaves. It was only about seventeen 
ninety-five, Lestat and I having lived there for four years in relative quiet, I 
investing the money which he acquired, increasing our lands, purchasing apartments and 
town houses in New Orleans which I rented, the work of the plantation itself producing 
little . . . more a cover for us than an investment. I say `our.' This is wrong. I never 
signed anything over to Lestat, and, as you realize, I was still legally alive. But in 
seventeen ninety-five these slaves did not have the character which you've seen in films 
and novels of the South. They were not soft-spoken, brown-skinned people in drab rags who 
spoke an English dialect. They were Africans. And they were islanders; that is, some of 
them had come from Santo Domingo. They were very black and totally foreign; they spoke in 
their African tongues, and they spoke the French patois; and when they sang, they sang 
African songs which made the fields exotic and strange, always frightening to me in my 
mortal life. They were superstitious and had their own secrets and traditions. In short, 
they had not yet been destroyed as Africans completely. Slavery was the curse of their 
existence; but they had not been robbed yet of that which had been characteristically 
theirs. They tolerated the baptism and modest garments imposed on there by the French 
Catholic laws; but in the evenings, they made their cheap fabrics into alluring costumes, 
made jewelry of animal bones and bits of discarded metal which they polished to look like 
gold; and the slave cabins of Pointe du Lac were a foreign country, an African coast 
after dark, in which not even the coldest overseer would want to wander. No fear for the 
vampire.
  "Not until one summer evening when, passing for a shadow, I heard through the open 
doors of the black foreman's cottage a conversation which convinced me that Lestat and I 
slept is real danger. The slaves knew now we were not ordinary mortals. In hushed tones, 
the maids told of how, through a crack in the door, they had seen us dine on empty plates 
with empty silver, lifting empty glasses to our lips, laughing, our faces bleached and 
ghostly in the candlelight, the blind man a helpless fool in our power. Through keyholes 
they had seen Lestat's coffin, and once he had beaten one of them mercilessly for 
dawdling by the gallery windows of his room. `There is no bed in there,' they confided 
one to the other with nodding heads. `He sleeps in the coffin, I know it.' They were 
convinced, on the best of grounds, of what we were. And as for me, they'd seen me evening 
after evening emerge from the oratory, which was now little more than a shapeless mass of 
brick and vine, layered with flowering wisteria in the spring, wild roses in summer, moss 
gleaming on the old unpainted shutters which had never been opened, spiders spinning in 
the stone arches. Of course, I'd pretended to visit it in memory of Paul, but it was 
clear by their speech they no longer believed such lies. And now they attributed to us 
not only the deaths of slaves found in the fields and swamps and also the dead cattle and 
occasional horses, but all other strange events; even floods and thunder were the weapons 
of God in a personal battle waged with Louis and Lestat. But worse still, they were not 
planning to run away. Vice were devils. Our power inescapable. No, we must be destroyed. 
And at this gathering, where I became an unseen member, were a number of the Freniere 
slaves.
  "This meant word would get to the entire coast. And though I firmly believed the entire 
coast to be impervious to a wave of hysteria, I did not intend to risk notice of any 
kind. I hurried back to the plantation house to tell Lestat our game of playing planter 
was over. He'd have to give up his slave whip and golden napkin ring and move into town.
  "He resisted, naturally. His father was gravely ill and might not live. Ire had no 
intention of running away from stupid slaves. `I'll kill them all,' he said calmly, `in 
threes and fours. Some will run away and that will be fine.'
  " `You're talking madness. The fact is I want you gone from here.'
  " `You want me gone! You,' he sneered. He was building a card palace on the dining room 
table with a pack of very fine French cards. `You whining coward of a vampire who prowls 
the night killing alley cats and rats and staring for hours at candles as if they were 
people and standing in the rain like a zombie until your clothes are drenched and you 
smell like old wardrobe trunks in attics and have the look of a baffled idiot at the zoo.'
  " `You've nothing more to tell me, and your insistence on recklessness has endangered 
us both. I might live in that oratory alone while this house fell to ruin. I don't care 
about it!' I told him. Because this was quite true. `But you must have all the things you 
never had of life and make of immortality a junk shop in which both of us become 
grotesque. Now, go look at your father and tell me how long he has to live, for that's 
how long you stay, and only if the slaves don't rise up against us!'
  "He told me then to go look at his father myself, since I was the one who was always 
`looking,' and I did. The old man was truly dying. I had been spared my mother's death, 
more or less, because she had died very suddenly on an afternoon. She'd been found with 
her sewing basket, seated quietly in the courtyard; she had died as one goes to sleep. 
But now I was seeing a natural death that was too slow with agony and with consciousness. 
And I'd always liked the old man; he was kindly and simple and made few demands. By day, 
he sat in the sun of the gallery dozing and listening to the birds; by night, any chatter 
on our part kept him company. He could play chess, carefully feeling each piece and