see these powers as a gift!' I repeated it.'But tell me... do you now feel love for this vampire who gave you eternal life? Do you feel this now?'
"He appeared to be thinking, and then he sand slowly,'Why does this matter?' But went on:'I don't think I've been fortunate in feeling love for many people or many things. But yes, I love him. Perhaps I do not love him as you mean. It seems you confuse me, rather effortlessly. You are a mystery. I do not need him, this vampire, anymore.'
"'I was gifted with eternal life, with heightened perception, and with the need to kill,' I quickly explained,'because the vampire who made me wanted the house I owned and my money. Do you understand such a thing?' I asked.'Ah, but there is so much else behind what I say. It makes itself known to me so slowly, so incompletely! You see, it's as if you've cracked a door for me, and light is streaming from that door and I'm yearning to get to it, to push it back, to enter the region you say exists beyond it! When, in fact, I don't believe it! The vampire who made me was everything that I truly believed evil to be: he was as dismal, as literal, as barren, as inevitably eternally disappointing as I believed evil had to be! I know that now. But you, you are something totally beyond that conception! Open the door for me, push it back all the way. Tell me about this palace in Venice, this love affair with damnation. I want to understand it'
"'You trick yourself. The palace means nothing to you,' he said.'The doorway you see leads to me, now. To your coming to live with me as I am. I am evil with infinite gradations and without guilt.'
"'Yes, exactly,' I murmured.
"'Arid this makes you unhappy,' he said.'You, who came to me in my cell and said there was only one sin left, the willful taking of an innocent human life.'
"'Yes... ' I said.'How you must have been laughing at me.... '
"'I never laughed at you,' he said.'I cannot afford to laugh at you. It is through you that I can save myself from the despair which I've described to you as our death. It is through you that I must make my link with this nineteenth century and come to understand it in a way that will revitalize me, which I so desperately need It is for you that I've been waiting at the Theatre des Vampires. If I knew a mortal of that sensitivity, that pain, that focus, I would make him a vampire in an instant. But such can rarely be done. No, I've had to wait and watch for you. And now I'll fight for you. Do you see how ruthless I am in love? Is this what you meant by love?'
"'Oh, but you'd be making a terrible mistake,' I said, looking him in the eyes. His words were only slowly sinking in. Never had I felt my all-consuming frustration to be so clear. I could not conceivably satisfy him. I could not satisfy Claudia. I'd never been able to satisfy Lestat. And my own mortal brother, Paul: how dismally, mortally I had disappointed him!
"'No. I must make contact with the age,' he said to me calmly.'And I can do this through you... not to learn things from you which I can see in a moment in an art gallery or read in an hour in the thickest books... you are the spirit, you are the heart,' he persisted.
"'No, no.' I threw up my hands. I was on the point of a bitter, hysterical laughter.'Don't you see? I'm not the spirit of any age. I'm at odds with everything and always have been! I have never belonged anywhere with anyone at any time!' It was too painful, too perfectly true.
"But his face only brightened with an irresistible smile. He seemed on the verge of laughing at .me, and then his shoulders began to move with this laughter.'lout Louis,' he said softly.'This is the very spirit of your age. Don't you see that? 'Everyone else feels as you feel. Your fall from grace and faith has been the fall of a century.'
"I was so stunned by this, that for a long time I sat there staring into the fire. It had all but consumed the wood and was a wasteland of smoldering ash, a gray and red landscape that would have collapsed