were not those of a human being. I think I knew everything in that instant, and all that 
he told me was only aftermath. What I mean is, the moment I saw him, saw his 
extraordinary aura and knew him to be no creature I'd ever known, I was reduced to 
nothing. That ego which could not accept the presence of an extraordinary human being in 
its midst was crushed. All my conceptions, even my guilt and wish to die, seemed utterly 
unimportant. I completely forgot myself!" he said, now silently touching his breast with 
his fist. "I forgot myself totally. And in the same instant knew totally the meaning of 
possibility. From then on I experienced only increasing wonder. As he talked to me and 
told me of what I might become, of what his life had been and stood to be, my past shrank 
to embers. I saw my life as if I stood apart from it, the vanity, the self-serving, the 
constant fleeing from one petty annoyance after another, the lip service to God and the 
Virgin and a host of saints whose names filled my prayer books, none of whom made the 
slightest difference in a narrow, materialistic, and selfish existence. I saw my real 
gods . . the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity. Cinders."
  The boy's face was tense with a mixture of confusion and amazement. "And so you decided 
to become a vampire?" he asked. The vampire was silent for a moment.
  "Decided. It doesn't seem the right word. Yet I cannot say it was inevitable from the 
moment that he stepped into that room. No, indeed, it was not inevitable. Yet I can't say 
I decided. Let me say that when he'd finished speaking, no other decision was possible 
for me, and I pursued my course without a backward glance. Except for one."
  "Except for one? What?"
  "My last sunrise," said the vampire. "That morning, I was not yet a vampire. And I saw 
my last sunrise.
  "I remember it completely; yet I do not think I remember any other sunrise before it. I 
remember the light came first to the tops of the French windows, a paling behind the lace 
curtains, and then a gleam growing brighter and brighter in patches among the leaves of 
the trees. Finally the sun came through the windows themselves and the lace lay in 
shadows on the stone floor, and all over the form of my sister, who was still sleeping, 
shadows of lace on the shawl over her shoulders and head. As soon as she was warm, she 
pushed the shawl away without awakening, and then the sun shone full on her eyes and she 
tightened her eyelids. Then it was gleaming on the table where she rested her head on her 
arms, and gleaming, blazing, in the water in the pitcher. And I could feel it on my hands 
on the counterpane and then on my face. I lay in the bed thinking about all the things 
the vampire had told me, and then it was that I said good-bye to the sunrise and went out 
to become a vampire. It was . . . the last sunrise."
  The vampire was looking out the window again. And when he stopped, the silence was so 
sudden the boy seemed to hear it. Then he could hear the noises from the street. The 
sound of a truck was deafening. The light cord stirred with the vibration. Then the truck 
was gone.
  "Do you miss it?" he asked then in a small voice.
  "Not really," said the vampire. "There are so many other things. But where were we? You 
want to know how it happened, how I became a vampire."
  "Yes," said the boy. "How did you change, exactly?"
  "I can't tell you exactly," said the vampire. "I can tell you about it, enclose it with 
words that will make the value of it to me evident to you. But I can't tell you exactly, 
any more than I could tell you exactly what is the experience of sex if you have never 
had it."
  The young man seemed struck suddenly with still another question, but before he could 
speak the vampire went on. "As I told you, this vampire Lestat, wanted the plantation. A 
mundane reason, surely, for granting me a life which will last until the end of the 
world; but he was not a very discriminating person. He didn't consider the world's small 
population of vampires as being a select club, I should say. He had human problems, a 
blind father who did not know his son was a vampire and must not find out. Living in New 
Orleans had become too difficult for him, considering his needs and the necessity to care 
for his father, and he wanted Pointe du Lac.
  "We went at once to the plantation the next evening, ensconced the blind father in the 
master bedroom, and I proceeded to make the change. I cannot say that it consisted in any 
one step really-though one, of course, was the step beyond which I could make no return. 
But there were several acts involved, and the first was the death of the overseer. Lestat 
took him in his sleep. I was to watch and to approve; that is, to witness the taking of a 
human life as proof of my commitment and part of my change. This proved without doubt the 
most difficult part for me. I've told you I had no fear regarding my own death, only a 
squeamishness about taking my life myself. But I had a most high regard for the life of 
others, and a horror of death most recently developed because of my brother. I had to 
watch the overseer awake with a start, try to throw oft Lestat with both hands, fail, 
then lie there struggling under Lestat's grasp, and finally go limp, drained of blood. 
And die. He did not die at once. We stood in his narrow bedroom for the better part of an 
hour watching him die. Part of my change, as I said. Lestat would never have stayed 
otherwise. Then it was necessary to get rid of the overseer's body. I was almost sick 
from this. Weak and feverish already, I had little reserve; and handling the dead body 
with such a purpose caused me nausea,. Lestat was laughing, telling me callously that I 
would feel so different once I was a vampire that I would laugh, too. He was wrong about 
that. I never laugh at death, no matter how often and regularly I am the cause of it.
  "But let me take things in order. We had to drive up the river road until we came to 
open fields and leave the overseer there. We tore his coat, stole his money, and saw to 
it his- lips were stained with liquor. I knew his wife, who lived in New Orleans, and 
knew the state of desperation she would suffer when the body was discovered. But more 
than sorrow for her, I felt pain that she would never know what had happened, that her 
husband had not been found drunk on the road by robbers. As we beat the body, bruising 
the face and the shoulders, I became more and more aroused. Of course, you must realize 
that all this time the vampire Lestat was extraordinary. He was no more human to me than 
a biblical angel. But under this pressure, my enchantment with him was strained. I had 
seen my becoming a vampire in two lights: The first light was simply enchantment; Lestat 
had overwhelmed me on my deathbed. But the other light was my wish for self-destruction. 
My desire to be thoroughly damned. This was the open door through which Lestat had come 
on both the first and second occasion. Now I was not destroying myself but someone else. 
The overseer, his wife, his family. I recoiled and might have fled from Lestat, my sanity 
thoroughly shattered, had not he sensed with an infallible instinct what was happening. 
Infallible instinct. . ." The vampire mused. "Let me say the powerful instinct of a 
vampire to whom even the slightest change in a human's facial expression is as apparent 
as a gesture. Lestat had preternatural timing. He rushed me into the carriage and whipped 
the horses home. `I want to die,' I began to murmur. `This is unbearable. I want to die. 
You have it in your power to kill me. Let me die.' I refused to look at him, to be 
spellbound by the sheer beauty of his appearance. He spoke my name to me softly, 
laughing. As I said, he was determined to have the plantation."
  "But would he have let you go?" asked the boy. "Under any circumstances?"
  "I don't know. Knowing Lestat as I do now, I would say he would have killed me rather 
than let me go. But this was what I wanted, you see. It didn't matter. No, this was what 
I thought I wanted. As soon as we reached the house, I jumped down out of the carriage 
and walked, a zombie, to the brick stairs where my brother had fallen. The house had been