Anne Rice
 The Vampire Lestat
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  DOWNTOWN
  SATURDAY NIGHT
  IN THE
  TWENTIETH CENTURY
  1984
  
  I am The Vampire Lestat. I'm immortal. More or less. The light of the sun, the 
sustained heat of an intense fire -- these things might destroy me. But then again, they 
might not.
  
  I'm six feet tall, which was fairly impressive in the 1780s when I was a young mortal 
man. It's not bad now. I have thick blond hair, not quite shoulder length, and rather 
curly, which appears white under fluorescent light. My eyes are gray, but they absorb the 
colors blue or violet easily from surfaces around them. And I have a fairly short narrow 
nose, and a mouth that is well shaped but just a little too big for my face. It can look 
very mean, or extremely generous, my mouth. It always looks sensual. But emotions and 
attitudes are always reflected in my entire expression. I have a continuously animated 
face.
  
  My vampire nature reveals itself in extremely white and highly reflective skin that has 
to be powdered down for cameras of any kind.
  
  And if I'm starved for blood I look like a perfect horror -- skin shrunken, veins like 
ropes over the contours of my bones. But I don't let that happen now. And the only 
consistent indication that I am not human is my fingernails. It's the same with all 
vampires. Our fingernails look like glass. And some people notice that when they don't 
notice anything else.
  
  Right now I am what America calls a Rock Superstar. My first album has sold 4 million 
copies. I'm going to San Francisco for the first spot on a nationwide concert tour that 
will take my band from coast to coast. MTV, the rock music cable channel, has been 
playing my video clips night and day for two weeks. They're also being shown in England 
on "Top of the Pops" and on the Continent, probably in some parts of Asia, and in Japan. 
Video cassettes of the whole series of clips are selling worldwide.
  
  I am also the author of an autobiography which was published last week.
  
  Regarding my English -- the language I use in my autobiography -- I first learned it 
from a flatboatmen who came down the Mississippi to New Orleans about two hundred years 
ago. I learned more after that from the English language writers -- everybody from 
Shakespeare through Mark Twain to H. Rider Haggard, whom I read as the decades passed. 
The final infusion I received from the detective stories of the early twentieth century 
in the Black Mask magazine. The adventures of Sam Spade by Dashiell Hammett in Black Mask 
were the last stories I read before I went literally and figuratively underground.
  
  That was in New Orleans in 1929.
  
  When I write I drift into a vocabulary that would have been natural to me in the 
eighteenth century, into phrases shaped by the authors I've read. But in spite of my 
French accent, I talk like a cross between a flatboatman and detective Sam Spade, 
actually. So I hope you'll bear with me when my style is inconsistent. When I blow the 
atmosphere of an eighteenth century scene to smithereens now and then.
  
  I came out into the twentieth century last year.
  
  What brought me up were two things.
  
  First -- the information I was receiving from amplified voices that had begun their 
cacophony in the air around the time I lay down to sleep.
  
  I'm referring here to the voices of radios, of course, and phonographs and later 
television machines. I heard the radios in the cars that passed in the streets of the old 
Garden District near the place where I lay. I heard the phonographs and TVs from the 
houses that surrounded mine.
  
  Now, when a vampire goes underground as we call it -- when he ceases to drink blood and 
he just lies in the earth -- he soon becomes too weak to resurrect himself, and what 
follows is a dream state.
  
  In that state, I absorbed the voices sluggishly, surrounding them with my own 
responsive images as a mortal does in sleep. But at some point during the past fifty-five 
years I began to "remember" what I was hearing, to follow the entertainment programs, to 
listen to the news broadcasts, the lyrics and rhythms of the popular songs.
  
  And very gradually, I began to understand the caliber of the changes that the world had 
undergone. I began listening for specific pieces of information about wars or inventions, 
certain new patterns of speech.
  
  Then a self-consciousness developed in me. I realized I was no longer dreaming. I was 
thinking about what I heard. I was wide awake. I was lying in the ground and I was 
starved for living blood. I started to believe that maybe all the old wounds I'd 
sustained had been healed by now. Maybe my strength had come back. Maybe my strength had 
actually increased as it would have done with time if I'd never been hurt. I wanted to 
find out.
  
  I started to think incessantly of drinking human blood.
  
  The second thing that brought me back -- the decisive thing really -- was the sudden 
presence near me of a band of young rock singers who called themselves Satan's Night Out.
  
  They moved into a house on Sixth Street -- less than a block away from where I