if rd killed him. And I felt that I'd killed him. I sat in the parlor beside his coffin 
for two days thinking, I have killed him. I stared at his face until spots appeared 
before my eyes and I nearly fainted. The back of his skull had been shattered on the 
pavement, and his head had the wrong shape on the pillow. I forced myself to stare at it, 
to study it simply because I could hardly endure the pain and the smell (r)f decay, and I 
was tempted over and over to try to open his eyes. All these were mad thoughts, mad 
impulses. The main thought was this: I had laughed at him; I had not believed him; I had 
not been kind to him. He had fallen because of me."
  "This really happened, didn't it?" the boy whispered. "You're telling me something . 
.that's true."
  "Yes," said the vampire, looking at him without surprise. "I want to go on telling 
you." But as his eyes passed over the boy and returned to the window, he showed only 
faint interest in the boy, who seemed engaged in some silent inner struggle.
  "But you said you didn't know about the visions, that you, a vampire . . . didn't know 
for certain whether . .
  "I want to take things in order," said the vampire, "I want to go on telling you things 
as they happened.
  "No, I don't know about the visions. To this day." And again he waited until the boy 
said.
  "Yes, please, please go on."
  "Well, I wanted to sell the plantations. I never wanted to see the house or the oratory 
again. I leased them finally to an agency which would work them for me and manage things 
so I need never go there, and I moved my mother and sister to one of the town houses in 
New Orleans. Of course, I did not escape my brother for a moment. I could think of 
nothing but his body rotting in the ground. He was buried in the St. Louis cemetery in 
New Orleans, and I did everything to avoid passing those gates; but still I thought of 
him constantly. . Drunk or sober, I saw his body rotting in the coin, and I couldn't bear 
it. Over and over I dreamed that he was at the head of the steps and I was holding his 
arm, talking kindly to him, urging him back into the bedroom, telling him gently that I 
did believe him, that he must pray for me to have faith. Meantime, the slaves on Pointe 
du Lac (that was my plantation) had begun to talk of seeing his ghost on the gallery, and 
the overseer couldn't keep order. People in society asked my sister offensive questions 
about the whole incident, and she became an hysteric. She wasn't really an hysteric. She 
simply thought she ought to react that way, so she did. I drank all the time and was at 
home as little as possible. I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage 
to do it himself. I walked black streets and alleys alone; I passed out in cabarets. I 
backed out of two duels more from apathy than cowardice and truly wished to be murdered. 
And then I was attacked. It might have been anyone-and my invitation was open to sailors, 
thieves, maniacs, anyone. But it was a vampire. He caught me lust a few steps from my 
door one night and left me for dead, or so I thought."
  "You mean . . . he sucked your, blood?" the boy asked.
  "Yes," the vampire laughed. "He sucked my blood. That is the way it's done."
  "But you lived," said the young man. "You said he left you for dead."
  "Well, he drained me almost to the point of death, which was for him sufficient. I was 
put to bed as soon as I was found, confused and really unaware of what had happened to 
me. I suppose I thought that drink had finally caused a stroke. I expected to die now and 
had no interest in eating of drinking or talking to the doctor. My mother sent for the 
priest. I was feverish by then and I told the priest everything, all about my brother's 
visions and what I had done. I remember I clung to his arm, making him swear over and 
over he would tell no one. `I know I didn't kill him,' I said to the priest finally. 
`It's that I cannot live now that he's dead. Not after the way I treated him.'
  " 'That's ridiculous,' he answered me. `Of course you can live. There's nothing wrong 
with you but self-indulgence. Your mother needs you, not to mention your sister. And as 
for this brother of yours, he was possessed of the devil.' I was so stunned when he said 
this I couldn't protest. The devil made the visions, he went on to explain. The devil was 
rampant. The entire country of France was under the influence of the devil, and. the 
Revolution had been his greatest triumph. Nothing would have saved my brother but 
exorcism, prayer, and fasting, men to hold him down while the devil raged in his body and 
tried to throw him about. `The devil threw him down the steps; it's perfectly obvious,' 
he declared. `You weren't talking to your brother in that room, you were talking to the 
devil.' Well, this enraged me. I believed before that I had been pushed to my limits, but 
I had not. He went on talking about the devil, about voodoo amongst the slaves and cases 
of possession in other parts of the world. And I went wild. I wrecked the room in the 
process of nearly killing him."
  "But your strength . . . the vampire . . .?" asked the boy.
  "I was out of my mind," the vampire explained. "I did things I could not have done in 
perfect health. The scene is confused, pale, fantastical now. But I do remember that I 
drove him out of the back doors of the house, across the courtyard, and against the brick 
wall of the kitchen, where I pounded his head until I nearly killed him. When I was 
subdued finally, and exhausted then almost to the point of death, they bled me. The 
fools. But I was going to say something else. It was then that I conceived of my own 
egotism. Perhaps I'd seen it reflected in the priest. His contemptuous attitude towards 
my brother reflected my own; his immediate and shallow carping about the devil; his 
refusal to even entertain the idea that sanctity had passed so close."
  "But he did believe in possession by the devil."
  "That is a much more mundane idea," said the vampire immediately. "People who cease to 
believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I 
do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult. But you 
must understand, possession is really another way of saying someone is mad. I felt it 
was, for the priest. I'm sure he'd seen madness. Perhaps he had stood right over raving 
madness and pronounced it possession. You don't have to see Satan when he is exorcised. 
But to stand in the presence of a saint . . . To believe that the saint has seen a 
vision. No, it's egotism, our refusal to believe it could occur in our midst."
  "I never thought of it in that way," said the boy. "But what happened to you? You said 
they bled you to cure you, and that must have nearly killed you."
  The vampire laughed. "Yes. It certainly did. But the vampire came back that night. You 
see, he wanted Pointe du Lac, my plantation.
  "It was very late, after my sister had fallen asleep. I can remember it as if it were 
yesterday. He came in from the courtyard, opening the French doors without a sound, a 
tall fair-skinned man with a mass of blond hair and a graceful, almost feline quality to 
his movements. And gently, he draped a shawl over my sister's eyes and lowered the wick 
of the lamp. She dozed there beside the basin and the cloth with which she'd bathed my 
forehead, and she ,never once stirred under that shawl until morning. But by that time I 
was greatly changed."
  "What was this change?" asked the boy.
  The vampire sighed. He leaned back against the chair and looked at the walls. "At first 
I thought he was another doctor, or someone summoned by the family to try to reason with 
me. But this suspicion was removed at once. He stepped close to my bed and leaned down so 
that his face was in the lamplight, and I saw that he was no ordinary man at all. His 
gray eyes burned with an incandescence, and the long white hands which hung by his sides