the deep slumber again. But I might have backed off from Satan’s Night Out and roamed about for a few years, stunned and trying to gather my wits.
The men—Alex, the sleek delicate young drummer, and his taller blond-haired brother, Larry—recognized my name when I told them it was Lestat.
Not only did they recognize it, but they connected it with a body of information about me that they had read in a book.
In fact, they thought it was delightful that I wasn’t just pretending to be any vampire. Or Count Dracula. Everybody was sick of Count Dracula. They thought it was marvelous that I was pretending to be the vampire Lestat.
“Pretending to be the vampire Lestat?” I asked.
They laughed at my exaggeration, my French accent.
I looked at all of them for a long moment, trying to scan their thoughts. Of course I hadn’t expected them to believe I was a real vampire. But to have read of a fictional vampire with a name as unusual as mine? How could this be explained?
But I was losing my confidence. And when I lose my confidence, my powers drain. The little room seemed to be getting smaller. And there was something insectile and menacing about the instruments, the antenna, the wires.
“Show me this book,” I said.
From the other room they brought it, a small pulp paper “novel” that was falling to pieces. The binding was gone, the cover ripped, the whole held together by a rubber band.
I got a preternatural chill of sorts at the sight of the cover. Interview with the Vampire. Something to do with a mortal boy getting one of the undead to tell the tale.
With their permission, I went into the other room, stretched out on their bed, and began to read. When I was halfway finished, I took the book with me and left the house. I stood stock-still beneath a street lamp with the book until I finished it. Then I placed it carefully in my breast pocket.
I didn’t return to the band for seven nights.
DURING much of that time, I was roaming again, crashing through the night on my Harley-Davidson motorcycle with the Bach Goldberg Variations turned up to full volume. And I was asking myself, Lestat, what do you want to do now?
And the rest of the time I studied with a renewed purpose. I read the fat paperback histories and lexicons of rock music, the chronicles of its stars. I listened to the albums and pondered in silence the concert video tapes.
And when the night was empty and still, I heard the voices of Interview with the Vampire singing to me, as if they sang from the grave. I read the book over and over. And then in a moment of contemptible anger, I shredded it to bits.
FINALLY, I came to my decision.
I met my young lawyer, Christine, in her darkened skyscraper office with only the downtown city to give us light. Lovely she looked against the glass wall behind her, the dim buildings beyond forming a harsh and primitive terrain in which a thousand torches burned.
“It is not enough any longer that my little rock band be successful,” I told her. “We must create a fame that will carry my name and my voice to the remotest parts of the world.”
Quietly, intelligently, as lawyers are wont to do, she advised me against risking my fortune. Yet as I continued with maniacal confidence, I could feel her seduction, the slow dissolution of her common sense.
“The best French directors for the rock video films,” I said. “You must lure them from New York and Los Angeles. There is ample money for that. And here you can find the studios, surely, in which we will do our work. The young record producers who mix the sound after—again, you must hire the best. It does not matter what we spend on this venture. What is important is that it be orchestrated, that we do our work in secret until the moment of revelation when our albums and our films are released with the book that I propose to write.”
Finally her head was swimming with dreams of wealth and power. Her pen raced as she made her notes.
And what did I dream of as I spoke to her? Of an unprecedented rebellion, a great and horrific challenge to my kind all over the world.
“These rock videos,” I said. “You must find directors who’ll realize my visions. The films are to be sequential. They must tell the story that is