Anne Rice
 The Tale of the Body Thief
  
  
  
  
  
  THE Vampire Lestat here. I have a story to tell you, It's about something that happened 
to me.
  
  It begins in Miami, in the year 1990, and I really want to start right there. But it's 
important that I tell you about the dreams I'd been having before that time, for they are 
very much part of the tale too. I'm talking now about dreams of a child vampire with a 
woman's mind and an angel's face, and a dream of my mortal friend David Talbot.
  
  But there were dreams also of my mortal boyhood in France - of winter snows, my 
father's bleak and ruined castle in the Auvergne, and the time I went out to hunt a pack 
of wolves that were preying upon our poor village.
  
  Dreams can be as real as events. Or so it seemed to me afterwards.
  
  And I was in a dark frame of mind when these dreams began, a vagabond vampire roaming 
the earth, sometimes so covered with dust that no one took the slightest notice of me. 
What good was it to have full and beautiful blond hair, sharp blue eyes, razzle-dazzle 
clothes, an irresistible smile, and a well-proportioned body six feet in height that can, 
in spite of its two hundred years, pass for that of a twenty-year-old mortal. I was still 
a man of reason however, a child of the eighteenth century, in which I'd actually lived 
before I was Born to Darkness.
  
  But as the 1980s were drawing to a close I was much changed from the dashing fledgling 
vampire I had once been, so attached to his classic black cape and Bruxelles lace, the 
gentleman with walking stick and white gloves, dancing beneath the gas lamp.
  
  I had been transformed into a dark god of sorts, thanks to suffering and triumph, and 
too much of the blood of our vampire elders. I had powers which left me baffled and 
sometimes even frightened, I had powers which made me sorrowful though I did not always 
understand the reason for it.
  
  I could, for example, move high into the air at will, traveling the night winds over 
great distances as easily as a spirit. I could effect or destroy matter with the power of 
my mind. I could kindle afire by the mere wish to do so. I could also call to other 
immortals over countries and continents with my preternatural voice, and I could 
effortlessly read the minds of vampires and humans.
  
  Not bad, you might think. I loathed it. Without doubt, I was grieving for my old 
selves-the mortal boy, the newborn revenant once determined to be good at being bad if 
that was his predicament.
  
  I'm not a pragmatist, understand. I have a keen and merciless conscience. I could have 
been a nice guy. Maybe at times I am. But always, I've been a man of action. Grief is a 
waste, and so is fear. And action is what you will get here, as soon as I get through 
this introduction.
  
  Remember, beginnings are always hard and most are artificial. It was the best of times 
and the worst of times-really? When! And all happy families are not alike; even Tolstoy 
must have realized that. I can't get away with "In the beginning," or "They threw me off 
the hay truck at noon," or I would do it. I always get away with whatever I can, believe 
me. And as Nabokov said in the voice of Humbert Humbert, "You can always count on a 
murderer for a fancy prose style. "Can't fancy mean experimental? I already know of 
course that I am sensuous, florid, lush, humid-enough critics have told me that.
  
  Alas, I have to do things my own way. And we will get to the beginning-if that isn't a 
contradiction in terms-I promise you.
  
  Right now I must explain that before this adventure commenced, I was also grieving for 
the other immortals I had known and loved, because they had long ago scattered from our 
last late-twentieth century gathering place. Folly to think we wanted to create a coven 
again. They had one by one disappeared into time and the world, which was inevitable.
  
  Vampires don't really like others of their kind, though their need for immortal 
companions is desperate.
  
  Out of that need I'd made my fledglings-Louis de Pointe du Lac, who became my patient 
and often loving nineteenth-century comrade, and with his unwitting aid, the beautiful 
and doomed child vampire, Claudia. And during these lonely vagabond nights of the late 
twentieth century, Louis was the only immortal whom I saw quite often. The most human of 
us all, the most ungodlike.
  
  I never stayed away too long from his shack in the wilderness of uptown New Orleans. 
But you'll see. I'll get to that. Louis is in this story.
  
  The point is-you find precious little here about the others. Indeed, almost nothing.
  
  Except for Claudia. I was dreaming more and more often of Claudia. Let me explain about 
Claudia. She'd been destroyed over a century before, yet I felt her presence all the time 
as if she were just around the corner.
  
  It was 1794 when I made this succulent little vampire out of a dying orphan, and sixty 
years passed before she rose up against me. "I'll put you in your coffin forever, Father."
  
  I did sleep in a coffin then. And it was a period piece, that lurid attempted murder, 
involving as it did mortal victims baited with poisons to cloud my mind, knives tearing 
my white flesh, and the ultimate abandonment of my seemingly lifeless form in the rank 
waters of the swamp beyond the dim lights of New Orleans.
  
  Well, it didn't work. There are very few sure ways to kill the undead. The sun, fire... 
One must aim for total obliteration. And after all, we are talking about the Vampire 
Lestat here.
  
  Claudia suffered for this crime, being executed later by an evil coven of blood