magnification of every human soul.
Old truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all.
And weary finally of this complexity, we dream of that long-ago time when we sat upon our mother’s knee and each kiss was the perfect consummation of desire. What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now contain both heaven and hell: our doom again and again and again.
Epilogue
Interview with the Vampire
1
AND SO I came to the end of The Early Education and Adventures of the Vampire Lestat, the tale that I set out to tell. You have the account of Old World magic and mystery which I have chosen, despite all prohibitions and injunctions, to pass on.
But my story isn’t finished, no matter how reluctant I might be to continue it. And I must consider, at least briefly, the painful events that led to my decision to go down into the earth in 1929.
That was a hundred and forty years after I left Marius’s island. And I never set eyes upon Marius again. Gabrielle also remained completely lost to me. She’d vanished that night in Cairo never to be heard from by anyone mortal or immortal that I was ever to know.
And when I made my grave in the twentieth century, I was alone and weary and badly wounded in body and soul.
I’d lived out my “one lifetime” as Marius advised me to do. But I couldn’t blame Marius for the way in which I’d lived it, and the hideous mistakes I’d made.
Sheer will had shaped my experience more than any other human characteristic. And advice and predictions notwithstanding, I courted tragedy and disaster as I have always done. Yet I had my rewards, I can’t deny that. For almost seventy years I had my fledgling vampires Louis and Claudia, two of the most splendid immortals who ever walked the earth, and I had them on my terms.
Shortly after reaching the colony, I fell fatally in love with Louis, a young dark-haired bourgeois planter, graceful of speech and fastidious of manner, who seemed in his cynicism and self-destructiveness the very twin of Nicolas.
He had Nicki’s grim intensity, his rebelliousness, his tortured capacity to believe and not to believe, and finally to despair.
Yet Louis gained a hold over me far more powerful than Nicolas had ever had. Even in his crudest moments, Louis touched the tenderness in me, seducing me with his staggering dependence, his infatuation with my every gesture and every spoken word.
And his naiveté conquered me always, his strange bourgeois faith that God was still God even if he turned his back on us, that damnation and salvation established the boundaries of a small and hopeless world.
Louis was a sufferer, a thing that loved mortals even more than I did. And I wonder sometimes if I didn’t look to Louis to punish me for what had happened to Nicki, if I didn’t create Louis to be my conscience and to mete out year in and year out the penance I felt I deserved.
But I loved him, plain and simple. And it was out of the desperation to keep him, to bind him closer to me at the most precarious of moments, that I committed the most selfish and impulsive act of my entire life among the living dead. It was the crime that was to be my undoing: the creation with Louis and for Louis of Claudia, a stunningly beautiful vampire child.
Her body wasn’t six years old when I took her, and though she would have died if I hadn’t done it (just as Louis would have died if I hadn’t taken him also), this was a challenge to the gods for which Claudia and I would both pay.
But this is the tale that was told by Louis in Interview with the Vampire, which for all its contradictions and terrible misunderstandings manages to capture the atmosphere in which Claudia and Louis and I came together and stayed together for sixty-five years.
During that time, we were nonpareils of our species, a silk- and velvet-clad trio of deadly hunters, glorying in our secret and in the swelling city of New Orleans that harbored us in luxury and supplied us endlessly with fresh victims.
And though Louis did not know it when he wrote his chronicle, sixty-five years is a phenomenal time for any bond in our world.
As for the lies he told, the mistakes he made, well, I forgive him