"I know how it is," she said to me. "You hate them. Because of what you've endured and 
what they don't know. They haven't the imagination to know what happened to you out there 
on the mountain."
  
  I felt a cold delight in these words. I gave her the silent acknowledgment that she 
understood it perfectly.
  
  "It was the same the first time I bore a child," she said. "I was in agony for twelve 
hours, and I felt trapped in the pain, knowing the only release was the birth or my own 
death. When it was over, I had your brother Augustin in my arms, but I didn't want anyone 
else near me. And it wasn't because I blamed them. It was only that I'd suffered like 
that, hour after hour, that I'd gone into the circle of hell and come back out. They 
hadn't been in the circle of hell. And I felt quiet all over. In this common occurrence, 
this vulgar act of giving birth, I understood the meaning of utter loneliness."
  
  "Yes, that's it," I answered. I was a little shaken.
  
  She didn't respond. I would have been surprised if she had. Having said what she'd come 
to say, she wasn't going to converse, actually. But she did lay her hand on my forehead 
-- very unusual for her to do that -- and when she observed that I was wearing the same 
bloody hunting clothes after all this time, I noticed it too, and realized the sickness 
of it.
  
  She was silent for a while.
  
  And as I sat there, looking past her at the fire, I wanted to tell her a lot of things, 
how much I loved her particularly.
  
  But I was cautious. She had a way of cutting me off when I spoke to her, and mingled 
with my love was a powerful resentment of her.
  
  All my life I'd watched her read her Italian books and scribble letters to people in 
Naples, where she had grown up, yet she had no patience even to teach me or my brothers 
the alphabet. And nothing had changed after I came back from the monastery. I was twenty 
and I couldn't read or write more than a few prayers and my name. I hated the sight of 
her books; I hated her absorption in them.
  
  And in some vague way, I hated the fact that only extreme pain in me could ever wring 
from her the slightest warmth or interest.
  
  Yet she'd been my savior. And there was no one but her. And I was as tired of being 
alone, perhaps, as a young person can be.
  
  She was here now, out of the confines of her library, and she was attentive to me.
  
  Finally I was convinced that she wouldn't get up and go away, and I found myself 
speaking to her.
  
  "Mother," I said in a low voice, "there is more to it. Before it happened, there were 
times when I felt terrible things." There was no change in her expression. "I mean I 
dream sometimes that I might kill all of them," I said. "I kill my brothers and my father 
in the dream. I go from room to room slaughtering them as I did the wolves. I feel in 
myself the desire to murder..."
  
  "So do I, my son," she said. "So do I" And her face was lighted with the strangest 
smile as she looked at me.
  
  I bent forward and looked at her more closely. I lowered my voice.
  
  "I see myself screaming when it happens," I went on. "I see my face twisted into 
grimaces and I hear bellowing coming out of me. My mouth is a perfect O, and shrieks, 
cries, come out of me."
  
  She nodded with that same understanding look, as if a light were flaring behind her 
eyes.
  
  "And on the mountain, Mother, when I was fighting the wolves ... it was a little like 
that."
  
  "Only a little?" she asked.
  
  I nodded.
  
  "I felt like someone different from myself when I killed the wolves. And now I don't 
know who is here with you -- your son Lestat, or that other man, the killer."
  
  She was quiet for a long time.
  
  "No," she said finally. "It was you who killed the wolves. You're the hunter, the 
warrior. You're stronger than anyone else here, that's your tragedy."
  
  I shook my head. That was true, but it didn't matter. It couldn't account for 
unhappiness such as this. But what was the use of saying it?
  
  She looked away for a moment, then back to me.
  
  "But you're many things," she said. "Not only one thing. You're the killer and the man. 
And don't give in to the killer in you just because you hate them. You don't have to take 
upon yourself the burden of murder or madness to be free of this place. Surely there must 
be other ways."
  
  Those last two sentences struck me hard. She had gone to the core. And the implications 
dazzled me.
  
  Always I'd felt that I couldn't be a good human being and fight them. To be good meant 
to be defeated by them. Unless of course I found a more interesting idea of goodness.
  
  We sat still for a few moments. And there seemed an uncommon intimacy even for us. She 
was looking at the fire, scratching at her thick hair which was wound into a circle on