slumbered under my own house on Prytania near the Lafayette Cemetery -- and they started 
to rehearse their rock music in the attic some time in 1984.
  
  I could hear their whining electric guitars, their frantic singing. It was as good as 
the radio and stereo songs I heard, and it was more melodic than most. There was a 
romance to it in spite of its pounding drums. The electric piano sounded like a 
harpsichord.
  
  I caught images from the thoughts of the musicians that told me what they looked like, 
what they saw when they looked at each other and into mirrors. They were slender, sinewy, 
and altogether lovely young mortals -- beguilingly androgynous and even a little savage 
in their dress and movements -- two male and one female.
  
  They drowned out most of the other amplified voices around me when they were playing. 
But that was perfectly all right.
  
  I wanted to rise and join the rock band called Satan's Night Out. I wanted to sing and 
to dance.
  
  But I can't say that in the very beginning there was great thought behind my wish. It 
was rather a ruling impulse, strong enough to bring me up from the earth.
  
  I was enchanted by the world of rock music -- the way the singers could scream of good 
and evil, proclaim themselves angels or devils, and mortals would stand up and cheer. 
Sometimes they seemed the pure embodiment of madness. And yet it was technologically 
dazzling, the intricacy of their performance. It was barbaric and cerebral in a way that 
I don't think the world of ages past had ever seen.
  
  Of course it was metaphor, the raving. None of them believed in angels or devils, no 
matter how well they assumed their parts. And the players of the old Italian commedia had 
been as shocking, as inventive, as lewd.
  
  Yet it was entirely new, the extremes to which they took it, the brutality and the 
defiance -- and the way they were embraced by the world from the very rich to the very 
poor.
  
  Also there was something vampiric about rock music. It must have sounded supernatural 
even to those who don't believe in the supernatural. I mean the way the electricity could 
stretch a single note forever; the way harmony could be layered upon harmony until you 
felt yourself dissolving in the sound. So eloquent of dread it was, this music. The world 
just didn't have it in any form before.
  
  Yes, I wanted to get closer to it. I wanted to do it. Maybe make the little unknown 
band of Satan's Night Out famous. I was ready to come up.
  
  It took a week to rise, more or less. I fed on the fresh blood of the little animals 
who live under the earth when I could catch them. Then I started clawing for the surface, 
where I could summon the rats. From there it wasn't too difficult to take felines and 
finally the inevitable human victim, though I had to wait a long time for the particular 
kind I wanted -- a man who had killed other mortals and showed no remorse.
  
  One came along eventually, walking right by the fence, a young male with a grizzled 
beard who had murdered another, in some far-off place on the other side of the world. 
True killer, this one. And oh, that first taste of human struggle and human blood!
  
  Stealing clothes from nearby houses, getting some of the gold and jewels I'd hidden in 
the Lafayette Cemetery, that was no problem.
  
  Of course I was scared from time to time. The stench of chemicals and gasoline sickened 
me. The drone of air conditioners and the whine of the jet planes overhead hurt my ears.
  
  But after the third night up, I was roaring around New Orleans on a big black 
Harley-Davidson motorcycle making plenty of noise myself. I was looking for more killers 
to feed on. I wore gorgeous black leather clothes that I'd taken from my victims, and I 
had a little Sony Walkman stereo in my pocket that fed Bach's Art of the Fugue through 
tiny earphones right into my head as I blazed along.
  
  I was the vampire Lestat again. I was back in action. New Orleans was once again my 
hunting ground.
  
  As for my strength, well, it was three times what it had once been. I could leap from 
the street to the top of a four-story building. I could pull iron gratings off windows. I 
could bend a copper penny double. I could hear human voices and thoughts, when I wanted 
to, for blocks around.
  
  By the end of the first week I had a pretty female lawyer in a downtown glass and steel 
skyscraper who helped me procure a legal birth certificate, Social Security card, and 
driver's license. A good portion of my old wealth was on its way to New Orleans from 
coded accounts in the immortal Bank of London and the Rothschild Bank.
  
  But more important, I was swimming in realizations. I knew that everything the 
amplified voices had told me about the twentieth century was true.
  
  As I roamed the streets of New Orleans in 1984 this is what I beheld:
  
  The dark dreary industrial world that I'd gone to sleep on had burnt itself out 
finally, and the old bourgeois prudery and conformity had lost their hold on the American 
mind.
  
  People were adventurous and erotic again the way they'd been in the old days, before 
the great middle-class revolutions of the late 1700s. They even looked the way they had 
in those times.
  
  The men didn't wear the Sam Spade uniform of shirt, tie, gray suit, and gray hat any 
longer. Once again, they costumed themselves in velvet and silk and brilliant colors if 
they felt like it. They did not have to clip their hair like Roman soldiers anymore; they 
wore it any length they desired.
  
  And the women -- ah, the women were glorious, naked in the spring warmth as they'd been 
under the Egyptian pharaohs, in skimpy short skirts and tunic like dresses, or wearing