garden of Cambodia, to which the Western man answers as he has always answered: No.
  
  No. Horror and moral terror can never be exonerated. They have no real value. Pure evil 
has no real place.
  
  And that means, doesn't it, that I have no place.
  
  Except, perhaps, the art that repudiates evil -- the vampire comics, the horror novels, 
the old gothic tales -- or in the roaring chants of the rock stars who dramatize the 
battles against evil that each mortal fights within himself.
  
  IT WAS ENOUGH TO MAKE AN OLD WORLD MONSTER GO BACK into the earth, this stunning 
irrelevance to the mighty scheme of things, enough to make him lie down and weep. Or 
enough to make him become a rock singer, when you think about it ....
  
  BUT WHERE WERE THE OTHER OLD WORLD MONSTERS? I wondered. How did other vampires exist 
in a world in which each death was recorded in giant electronic computers, and bodies 
were carried away to refrigerated crypts? Probably concealing themselves like loathsome 
insects in the shadows, as they have always done, no matter how much philosophy they 
talked or how many covens they formed.
  
  Well, when I raised my voice with the little band called Satan's Night Out, I would 
bring them all into the light soon enough.
  
  I CONTINUED MY EDUCATION. I TALKED TO MORTALS AT BUS stops and at gas stations and in 
elegant drinking places. I read books. I decked myself out in the shimmering dream skins 
of the fashionable shops. I wore white turtleneck shirts and crisp khaki safari jackets, 
or lush gray velvet blazers with cashmere scarves. I powdered down my face so that I 
could "pass" beneath the chemical lights of the all-night supermarkets, the hamburger 
joints, the carnival thoroughfares called nightclub strips.
  
  I was learning. I was in love.
  
  And the only problem I had was that murderers to feed upon were scarce. In this shiny 
world of innocence and plenty, of kindness and gaiety and full stomachs, the common 
cutthroat thieves of the past and their dangerous waterfront hangouts were almost gone.
  
  And so I had to work for a living. But I'd always been a hunter. I liked the dim smoky 
poolrooms with the single light shining on the green felt as the tattooed ex-convicts 
gathered around it as much as I liked the shiny satin-lined nightclubs of the big 
concrete hotels. And I was learning more all the time about my killers -- the drug 
dealers, the pimps, the murderers who fell in with the motorcycle gangs.
  
  And more than ever, I was resolute that I would not drink innocent blood.
  
  FINALLY IT WAS TIME TO CALL UPON MY OLD NEIGHBORS, THE rock band called Satan's Night 
Out.
  
  AT SIX THIRTY ON A HOT STICKY SATURDAY NIGHT, I RANG THE doorbell of the attic music 
studio. The beautiful young mortals were all lying about in their rainbow-colored silk 
shirts and skintight dungarees smoking hashish cigarettes and complaining about their 
rotten luck getting "gigs" in the South.
  
  They looked like biblical angels, with their long clean shaggy hair and feline 
movements; their jewelry was Egyptian. Even to rehearse they painted their faces and 
their eyes.
  
  I was overcome with excitement and love just looking at them, Alex and Larry and the 
succulent little Tough Cookie.
  
  And in an eerie moment in which the world seemed to stand still beneath me, I told them 
what I was. Nothing new to them, the word "vampire." In the galaxy in which they shone, a 
thousand other singers had worn the theatrical fangs and the black cape.
  
  And yet it felt so strange to speak it aloud to mortals, the forbidden truth. Never in 
two hundred years had I spoken it to anyone who had not been marked to become one of us. 
Not even to my victims did I confide it before their eyes closed.
  
  And now I said it clearly and distinctly to these handsome young creatures. I told them 
that I wanted to sing with them, that if they were to trust to me, we would all be rich 
and famous. That on a wave of preternatural and remorseless ambition, I should carry them 
out of these rooms and into the great world.
  
  Their eyes misted as they looked at me. And the little twentieth-century chamber of 
stucco and pasteboard rang with their laughter and delight.
  
  I was patient. Why shouldn't I be? I knew I was a demon who could mimic almost any 
human sound or movement. But how could they be expected to understand? I went to the 
electric piano and began to play and to sing.
  
  I imitated the rock songs as I started, and then old melodies and lyrics came back to 
me -- French songs buried deep in my soul yet never abandoned -- and I wound these into 
brutal rhythms, seeing before me a tiny crowded little Paris theater of centuries ago. A 
dangerous passion welled in me. It threatened my equilibrium. Dangerous that this should 
come so soon. Yet I sang on, pounding the slick white keys of the electric piano, and 
something in my soul was broken open. Never mind that these tender mortal creatures 
gathered around me should never know.
  
  It was sufficient that they were jubilant, that they loved the eerie and disjointed 
music, that they were screaming, that they saw prosperity in the future, the impetus that 
they had lacked before. They turned on the tape machines and we began singing and playing 
together, jamming as they called it. The studio swam with the scent of their blood and 
our thunderous songs.
  
  But then came a shock I had never in my strangest dreams anticipated -- something that 
was as extraordinary as my little revelation to these creatures had been. In fact, it was 
so overwhelming that it might have driven me out of their world and back underground.
  
  I don't mean I would have gone into the deep slumber again.