risen, straightened, but only to bend over and slink into the chair. ‘You won’t stay with me,’ he sighed. But then he looked away and seemed suddenly absorbed.

“ ‘I wanted to talk to you so much,’ he said. ‘That night I came home to the Rue Royale I only wanted to talk to you!’ He shuddered violently, eyes closed, his throat seeming to contract. It was as if the blows I’d struck him then were falling now. He stared blindly ahead, his tongue moistening his lip, his voice low, almost natural. ‘I went to Paris after you…’

“ ‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’ I asked. ‘What was it you wanted to talk about?’

“I could well remember his mad insistence in the Théâtre des Vampires. I hadn’t thought of it in years. No, I had never thought of it. And I was aware that I spoke of it now with great reluctance.

“But he only smiled at me, an insipid, near apologetic smile. And shook his head. I watched his eyes fill with a soft, bleary despair.

“I felt a profound, undeniable relief.

“ ‘But you will stay!’ he insisted.

“ ‘No,’ I answered.

“ ‘And neither will I!’ said that young vampire from the darkness outside. And he stood for a second in the open window looking at us. Lestat looked up at him and then sheepishly away, and his lower lip seemed to thicken and tremble. ‘Close it, close it,’ he said, waving his finger at the window. Then a sob burst from him and, covering his mouth with his hand, he put his head down and cried.

“The young vampire was gone. I heard his steps moving fast on the walk, heard the heavy chink of the iron gate. And I was alone with Lestat, and he was crying. It seemed a long time before he stopped, and during all that time I merely watched him. I was thinking of all the things that had passed between us. I was remembering things which I supposed I had completely forgotten. And I was conscious then of that same overwhelming sadness which I’d felt when I saw the place in the Rue Royale where we had lived. Only, it didn’t seem to me to be a sadness for Lestat, for that smart, gay vampire who used to live there then. It seemed a sadness for something else, something beyond Lestat that only included him and was part of the great awful sadness of all the things I’d ever lost or loved or known. It seemed then I was in a different place, a different time. And this different place and time was very real, and it was a room where the insects had hummed as they were humming here and the air had been close and thick with death and with the spring perfume. And I was on the verge of knowing that place and knowing with it a terrible pain, a pain so terrible that my mind veered away from it, said, No, don’t take me back to that place—and suddenly it was receding, and I was with Lestat here now. Astonished, I saw my own tear fall onto the face of the child. I saw it glisten on the child’s cheek, and I saw the cheek become very plump with the child’s smile. It must have been seeing the light in the tears. I put my hand to my face and wiped at the tears that were in fact there and looked at them in amazement.

“ ‘But Louis…’ Lestat was saying softly. ‘How can you be as you are, how can you stand it?’ He was looking up at me, his mouth in that same grimace, his face wet with tears. ‘Tell me, Louis, help me to understand! How can you understand it all, how can you endure?’ And I could see by the desperation in his eyes and the deeper tone which his voice had taken that he, too, was pushing himself towards something that for him was very painful, towards a place where he hadn’t ventured in a long time. But then, even as I looked at him, his eyes appeared to become misty, confused. And he pulled the robe up tight, and shaking his head, he looked at the fire. A shudder passed through him and he moaned.

“ ‘I have to go now, Lestat,’ I said to him. I felt weary, weary of him and weary of this sadness. And I longed again for the stillness outside, that perfect quiet to which I’d become so completely