murdered in orphanages where only nuns attend? I never thought of women as so cruel. 
Dried up, without imagination perhaps, but not aggressive as we are, to kill.
  
  I turned round and round. Wooden lockers lined one wall, and one locker stood open, and 
there the tumbled shoes were, little brown Oxfords, as they called them, with black 
strings, and now I beheld, where it had been behind me, the broken and frayed hole from 
which they'd ripped her clothes. All fallen there, moldy and wrinkled they lay, her 
clothes.
  
  A stillness settled on me as if the dust of this place were a fine ice, coming down 
from the high peaks of haughty and monstrously selfish mountains to freeze all living 
things, this ice, to close up and stop forever all that breathed or felt or dreamed or 
lived.
  
  He spoke in poetry:
  
  "Tear no more the heat of the sun,'" he whispered. "Nor the furious winter's rages. 
Fear no more...'"
  
  I winced with pleasure. I knew the verses. I loved them.
  
  I genuflected, as if before the Sacrament, and touched her clothes. "And she was 
little, no more than five, and she didn't die here at all. No one killed her. Nothing so 
special for her."
  
  "How your words belie your thoughts," he said.
  
  "Not so, I think of two things simultaneously. There's a distinction in being murdered. 
I was murdered. Oh, not by Marius, as you might think, but by others."
  
  I knew I spoke soft and in an assuming way, because this wasn't meant for pure drama.
  
  "I'm trimmed in memories as if in old furs. I lift my arm and the sleeve of memory 
covers it. I look around and see other times. But you know what frightens me the most-it 
is that this state, like so many others with me, will prove the verge of nothing but 
extend itself over centuries."
  
  "What do you really fear? What did you want from Lestat when you came here?"
  
  "David, I came to see him. I came to find out how it was with him, and why he lies 
there, unmoving. I came-." I wasn't going to say any more.
  
  His glossy nails made his hands look ornamental and special, caressive, comely and 
lovely with which to be touched. He picked up a small dress, torn, gray, spotted with 
bits of mean lace. Everything dressed in flesh can yield a dizzying beauty if you 
concentrate on it long enough, and his beauty leapt out without apology.
  
  "Just clothes." Flowered cotton, a bit of velvet with a puffed sleeve no bigger than an 
apple for the century of bare arms by day and night. "No violence at all surrounding 
her," he said as if it were a pity. "Just a poor child, don't you think, and sad by 
nature as well as circumstance."
  
  "And why were they walled up, tell me that! What sin did these little dresses commit?" 
I sighed. "Good God, David Talbot, why don't we let the little girl have her romance, her 
fame? You make me angry. You say you can see ghosts. You find them pleasant? You like to 
talk with them. I could tell you about a ghost-."
  
  "When will you tell me? Look, don't you see the trick of a book?" He stood up, and 
dusted off his knee with his right hand. In his left was her gathered dress. Something 
about the whole configuration bothered me, a tall creature holding a little girl's 
crumpled dress.
  
  "You know, when you think of it," I said, turning away, so I wouldn't see the dress in 
his hand, "there's no good reason under God for little girls and little boys. Think of 
it, the other tender issue of mammals. Among puppies or kitten or colts, does one find 
gender? It's never an issue. The half-grown fragile thing is sexless. There is no 
determination. There is nothing as splendid to look at as a little boy or girl. My head 
is so full of notions. I rather think I'll explode if I don't do something, and you say 
make a book for you. You think it's possible, you think..."
  
  "What I think is that when you make a book, you tell the tale as you would like to know 
it!"
  
  "I see no great wisdom in that."
  
  "Well, then think, for most speech is a mere issue of our feelings, a mere explosion. 
Listen, note the way that you make these outbursts."
  
  "I don't want to."
  
  "But you do, but they are not the words you want to read. When you write, something 
different happens. You make a tale, no matter how fragmented or experimental or how 
disregarding of all conventional and helpful forms. Try this for me. No, no, I have a 
better idea."
  
  "What?"
  
  "Come down with me into my rooms. I live here now, I told you. Through my windows you 
can see the trees. I don't live like our friend Louis, wandering from dusty corner to 
dusty corner, and then back to his flat in the Rue Royale when he's convinced himself 
once more and for the thousandth time that no one can harm Lestat. I have warm rooms. I 
use candles for old light. Come down and let me write it, your story. Talk to me. Pace, 
and rant if you will, or rail, yes, rail, and let me write it, and even so, the very fact 
that I write, this in itself will make you make a form out of it. You'll begin to..."
  
  "What?"
  
  "To tell me what happened. How you died and how you lived."
  
  "Expect no miracles, perplexing scholar. I didn't die in New York that morning. I