unoccupied for months now, the overseer having his own cottage, and the Louisiana heat 
and damp were already picking apart the steps. Every crevice was sprouting grass and even 
small wildflowers. I remember feeling the moisture which in the night was cool as I sat 
down on the lower steps and even rested my head against the brick and felt the little 
wax-stemmed wildflowers with my hands. I pulled a clump of them out of ,the easy dirt in 
one hand. `I want to die; kill me. Kill me,' I said to the vampire. `Now I am guilty of 
murder. I can't live.' He sneered with the impatience of people listening to the obvious 
lies of others. And then in a flash he fastened on me just as he had on my man. I 
thrashed against him wildly. I dug my boot into his chest and kicked him as fiercely as I 
could, his teeth stinging my throat, the fever pounding in my temples. And with a 
movement of his entire body, much too fast for me to see, he was suddenly standing 
disdainfully at the foot of the steps. `I thought you wanted to die, Louis,' he said."
  The boy made a soft, abrupt sound when the vampire said his name which the vampire 
acknowledged with the quick statement, "Yes, that is my name," and went on.
  "Well, I lay there helpless in the face of my own cowardice and fatuousness again," he 
said. "Perhaps so directly confronted with it, I might in time have gained the courage to 
truly take my life, not to whine and beg for others to take it. I saw myself turning on a 
knife then, languishing in a day-to-day suffering which I found as necessary as penance 
from the confessional, truly hoping death would find me unawares and render me ft for 
eternal pardon. And also I saw myself as if in a vision standing at the head of the 
stairs, just where my brother had stood, and then hurtling my body down on the bricks.
  "But there was no time for courage. Or shall I say, there was no time in Lestat's plan 
for anything but his plan. `Now listen to me, Louis,' he said, and he lay down beside me 
now on the steps, his movement so graceful and so personal that at once it made me think
  of a lover. I recoiled. But he put his right arm around me and pulled me close to his 
chest. Never had I been this close to him before, and in the dim light I could see the 
magnificent radiance of his eye and the unnatural mask of his skin. As I tried to move, 
he ,pressed his right fingers against my lips and said, Be still. I am going to drain you 
now to the very threshold of death, and I want you to be quiet, so quiet that you can 
almost hear the flow of blood through your veins, so quiet that you can hear the flow of 
that same blood through mine. It is your consciousness, your will, which must keep you 
alive.' I wanted to struggle, but he pressed so hard with his fingers that he held my 
entire prone body in check; and as soon as I stopped my abortive attempt at rebellion, he 
sank his teeth into my neck."
  The boy's eyes grew huge. He had drawn farther and farther back in his chair as the 
vampire spoke, and now his face was tense, his eyes narrow, as if he were preparing to 
weather a blow.
  "Have you ever lost a great amount of blood?" asked the vampire. "Do you know the 
feeling?"
  The boy's lips shaped the word no, but no sound came out. He cleared his throat. "No," 
he said.
  "Candles burned in the upstairs parlor, where we had planned the death of the overseer. 
An oil lantern swayed in the breeze on the gallery. All of this light coalesced and began 
to shimmer, as though a golden presence hovered above me, suspended in the stairwell, 
softly entangled with the railings, curling and contracting like smoke. `Listen, keep 
your eyes wide,' Lestat whispered to me, his lips moving against my neck. I remember that 
the movement of his lips raised the hair all over my body, sent a shock of sensation 
through my body that was not unlike the pleasure of passion. . . "
  He mused, his right fingers slightly curled beneath his chin, the first finger 
appearing to lightly stroke it. "The result was that within minutes I was weak to 
paralysis. Panic-stricken, I discovered I could not even will myself to speak. Lestat 
still held me, of course, and his arm was like the weight of an iron bar. I felt his 
teeth withdraw with such a keenness that the two puncture wounds seemed enormous, lined 
with pain. And now he bent over my helpless head and, taking his right hand off me, bit 
his own wrist. The blood flowed down upon my shirt and coat, and he watched it with a 
narrow, gleaming eye. It seemed an eternity that he watched it, and that shimmer of light 
now hung behind his head like the backdrop of an apparition. I think that I knew what he 
meant to do even before he did it, and I was waiting in my helplessness as if I'd been 
waiting for years. He pressed his bleeding wrist to my mouth, said firmly, a little 
impatiently, `Louis, drink.' And I did. `Steady, Louis,' and `Hurry,' he whispered to me 
a number of times. I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the 
first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused 
with the mind upon one vital source. Then something happened." The vampire sat back, a 
slight frown on his face.
  "How pathetic it is to describe these things which can't truly be described," he said, 
his voice loci almost to a whisper. The boy sat as if frozen.
  "I saw nothing but that light then as I drew blood. And then this next thing, this next 
thing was . . . sound. A dull roar at first and then a pounding like the pounding of a 
drum, growing louder and louder, as if some enormous creature were coming up on one 
slowly through a dark and alien forest, pounding as he came, a huge drum. And then there 
came the pounding of another drum, as if another giant were coming yards behind him, and 
each giant, intent on his own drum, gave no notice to the rhythm of the other. The sound 
grew louder and louder until it seemed to fill not just my hearing but all my senses, to 
be throbbing in my lips and fingers, in the flesh of my temples, in my veins. Above all, 
in my veins, drum and then the other drum; and then Lestat pulled his wrist free 
suddenly, and I opened my eyes and checked myself in a moment of reaching for his wrist, 
grabbing it, forcing it back to my mouth at all costs; I checked myself because I 
realized that the drum was my heart, and the second drum had been his." The vampire 
sighed. "Do you understand?"
  The boy began to speak, and then he shook his head. "No . . I mean, I do," he said. "I 
mean, I . . .'
  "Of course," said the vampire, looking away.
  "Wait, wait!" said the boy in a welter of excitement. "The tape is almost gone. I have 
to turn it over." The vampire watched patiently as he changed it.
  "What happened then?" the boy asked. His face was moist, and he wiped it hurriedly with 
his handkerchief.
  "I saw as a- vampire," said -the vampire, his voice now slightly detached. It seemed 
almost distracted. Then he drew himself up. "Lestat was standing again at the foot of the 
stairs, and I saw him as I could not possibly have seen him before. He had seemed white 
to me before, starkly white, so that in the night he was almost luminous; and now I saw 
him filled with his own life and own blood: he was radiant, not luminous. And then I saw 
that not only Lestat had changed, but all things had changed.
  "It was as if I had only just been able to see colors and shapes for the first time. I 
was so enthralled with the buttons on Lestat's black coat that I looked at nothing else 
for a long time. Then Lestat began to laugh, and I heard his laughter as I had never 
heard anything before. His heart I still heard like the beating of a drum, and now came 
this metallic laughter. It was confusing, each sound running into the next sound, like 
the mingling reverberations of bells, until I learned to separate the sounds, and then 
they overlapped, each soft but distinct, increasing but discrete, peals of laughter." The 
vampire smiled with delight. "Peals of bells.