him intensely! `I want to show you a little trick,' he said. `That is, if you like 
glasses.' And after setting it on the card table he came out on the gallery where I stood 
and changed his manner again into that of a stalking animal, eyes piercing the dark 
beyond the lights of the house, peering down under the arching branches of the oaks. In 
an instant, he had vaulted the railing and dropped softly on the dirt below, and then 
lunged into the blackness to catch something in both his hands. When he stood before me 
with it, I gasped to see it was a rat. `Don't be such a damned idiot,' he said. `Haven't 
you ever seen a rat?' It was a huge, struggling field rat with a long tail. He held its 
neck so it couldn't bite. `Rats can be quite nice,' he said. And he took the rat to the 
wine glass, slashed its throat, and filled the glass rapidly with blood. The rat then 
went hurtling over the gallery railing, and Lestat held the wine glass to the candle 
triumphantly. `You may well have to live off rats from time to time, so wipe that 
expression off your face,' he said. `Rats, chickens, cattle. Traveling by ship, you damn 
well better live off rats, if you don't wish to cause such a panic on board that they 
search your coffin. You damn well better keep the ship clean of rats.' And then he sipped 
the blood as delicately as if it were burgundy. He made a slight face. `It gets cold so 
fast.'
  " `Do you mean, then, we can live from animals?' I asked.
  " `Yes.' He drank it all down and then casually threw the glass at the fireplace. I 
stared at the fragments. `You don't mind, do you?' He gestured to the broken glass with a 
sarcastic smile. `I surely hope you don't, because there's nothing much you can do about 
it if you do mind.'
  " `I can throw you and your father out of Pointe du Lac, if I mind,' I said. I believe 
this was my first show of temper.
  " 'Why would you do that?' he asked with mock alarm. `You don't know everything yet . . 
. do you?' He was laughing then and walking slowly about the room. He ran his fingers 
over the satin finish of the spinet. `Do you play?' he asked.
  "I said something like, `Don't touch it!' and he laughed at me. `I'll touch it if I 
like!' he said. `You don't know, for example, all the ways you can die. And dying now 
would be such a calamity, wouldn't it?'
  " `There must be someone else in the world to teach me these things,' I said. 
`Certainly you're not the only vampire! And your father, he's perhaps seventy. You 
couldn't have been a vampire long, so someone must have instructed you. . .
  " `And do you think you can find other vampires by yourself? They might see you coming, 
my friend, but you won't see them. No, I don't think you have much choice about things at 
this point, friend. I'm your teacher and you need me, and there isn't much you can do 
about it either way. And we both have people to provide for. My father needs a doctor, 
and then there is the matter of your mother and sister. Don't get any mortal notions 
about telling them you are a vampire. Just provide for them and for my father, which 
means that tomorrow night you had better kill fast and then attend to the business of 
your plantation. Now to bed. We both sleep in the same room; it makes for far less risk.'
  " 'No, you secure the bedroom for yourself,' I said. `I've no intention of staying in 
the same room with you.'
  "He became furious. `Don't do anything stupid, Louis. I warn you. There's nothing you 
can do to defend yourself once the sun rises, nothing. Separate rooms mean separate 
security. Double precautions and double chance of notice.' He then said a score of things 
to frighten me into complying, but he might as well have been talking to the walls. I 
watched him intently, but I didn't listen to him. He appeared frail and stupid to me, a 
man made of dried twigs with a thin, carping voice. `I sleep alone,' I said, and gently 
put my hand around the candle flames one by one. `It's almost morning!' he insisted.
  " `So lock yourself in,' I said, embracing my coffin, hoisting it and carrying it down 
the brick stairs. I could hear the locks snapping on the French doors above, the swoosh 
of the drapes. The sky was pale but still sprinkled with stars, and another light rain 
blew now on the breeze from the river, speckling the flagstones. I opened the door of my 
brother's oratory, shoving back the roses and thorns which had almost sealed it, and set 
the coffin on the stone floor before the priedieu. I could almost. make out the images of 
the saints on the walls. `Paul,' I said softly, addressing my brother, `for the first 
time in my life I feel nothing for you, nothing for your death; arid for the first time I 
feel everything for you, feel the sorrow of your loss as if I never before knew feeling.' 
You see . . . "
  The vampire tuned to the boy. "For the first time now I was fully and completely a 
vampire. I shut the wood blinds flat upon the small barred windows and bolted the door. 
Then I climbed into the satin-lined coffin, barely able to see the gleam of cloth in the 
darkness, and locked myself in. That is how I became a vampire."
   And There You Were," said the boy after a pause, "with another vampire you hated."
  "But I had to stay with him," answered the vampire. "As I've told you, he had me at a 
great disadvantage.
  He hinted there was much I didn't know and must know and that he alone could tell me. 
But in fact, the main part of what he did teach me was practical and not so difficult to 
figure out for oneself. How we might travel, for instance, by ship, having our coffins 
transported for us as though they contained the remains of loved ones being sent here or 
there for burial; how no one would dare to epee such a coffin, and we might rise from it 
at night to clean the ship of rats-things of this nature, And then there were the shops 
and businessmen he knew who admitted us well after hours to outfit us in the finest Paris 
fashions, and those agents willing to transact financial matters in restaurants and 
cabarets. And in all of these mundane matters, Lestat was an adequate teacher. What 
manner of man he'd been in life, I couldn't tell and didn't care; but he was for all 
appearances of the same class now as myself, which meant little to me, except that it 
made our lives run a little more smoothly than they might have otherwise. He had 
impeccable taste, though my library to him was a `pile of dust,' and he seemed more than 
once to be infuriated by the sight of my reading a book or writing some observations in a 
journal. `That mortal nonsense,' he would say to me, while at the same time spending so 
much of my money to splendidly furnish Pointe du Lac, that even I, who cared nothing for 
the money, was forced to wince. And in entertaining visitors at Pointe du Lac-those 
hapless travelers who came up the river road by horseback or carriage begging 
accommodations for the night, sporting letters of introduction from other planters or 
officials in New Orleans.-to these he was so gentle and polite that it made things far 
easier for me, who found myself hopelessly locked to him and jarred over and over by his 
viciousness."
  "But he didn't harm these men?" asked the boy.
  "Oh yes' often, he did. But I'll tell you a little secret if I may, which applies not 
only to vampires, but to generals, soldiers, and kings. Most of us would much rather see 
somebody die than be the object of rudeness under our roofs. Strange . . . yes. But very 
true, I assure you. That Lestat hunted for mortals every night, I knew. But had he been 
savage and ugly to my family, my guests, and my slaves, I couldn't have endured it. He 
was not. He seemed particularly to delight in the visitors. But he said we must spare no 
expense where our families were concerned. And he seemed to me to push luxury upon his 
father to an almost ludicrous point. The old blind man must be told constantly how fine 
and expensive were his bed jackets and robes and what imported draperies had just been 
fixed to his bed and what French and Spanish wines we had in the cellar and how much the