I was starved for living blood. I started to believe that maybe all the old wounds I’d sustained had been healed by now. Maybe my strength had come back. Maybe my strength had actually increased as it would have done with time if I’d never been hurt. I wanted to find out.
I started to think incessantly of drinking human blood.
The second thing that brought me back—the decisive thing really—was the sudden presence near me of a band of young rock singers who called themselves Satan’s Night Out.
They moved into a house on Sixth Street—less than a block away from where I slumbered under my own house on Prytania near the Lafayette Cemetery—and they started to rehearse their rock music in the attic some time in 1984.
I could hear their whining electric guitars, their frantic singing. It was as good as the radio and stereo songs I heard, and it was more melodic than most. There was a romance to it in spite of its pounding drums. The electric piano sounded like a harpsichord.
I caught images from the thoughts of the musicians that told me what they looked like, what they saw when they looked at each other and into mirrors. They were slender, sinewy, and altogether lovely young mortals—beguilingly androgynous and even a little savage in their dress and movements—two male and one female.
They drowned out most of the other amplified voices around me when they were playing. But that was perfectly all right.
I wanted to rise and join the rock band called Satan’s Night Out. I wanted to sing and to dance.
But I can’t say that in the very beginning there was great thought behind my wish. It was rather a ruling impulse, strong enough to bring me up from the earth.
I was enchanted by the world of rock music—the way the singers could scream of good and evil, proclaim themselves angels or devils, and mortals would stand up and cheer. Sometimes they seemed the pure embodiment of madness. And yet it was technologically dazzling, the intricacy of their performance. It was barbaric and cerebral in a way that I don’t think the world of ages past had ever seen.
Of course it was metaphor, the raving. None of them believed in angels or devils, no matter how well they assumed their parts. And the players of the old Italian commedia had been as shocking, as inventive, as lewd.
Yet it was entirely new, the extremes to which they took it, the brutality and the defiance—and the way that they were embraced by the world from the very rich to the very poor.
Also there was something vampiric about rock music. It must have sounded supernatural even to those who don’t believe in the supernatural. I mean the way the electricity could stretch a single note forever; the way harmony could be layered upon harmony until you felt yourself dissolving in the sound. So eloquent of dread it was, this music. The world just didn’t have it in any form before.
Yes, I wanted to get closer to it. I wanted to do it. Maybe make the little unknown band of Satan’s Night Out famous. I was ready to come up.
It took a week to rise, more or less. I fed on the fresh blood of the little animals who live under the earth when I could catch them. Then I started clawing for the surface, where I could summon the rats. From there it wasn’t too difficult to take felines and finally the inevitable human victim, though I had to wait a long time for the particular kind I wanted—a man who had killed other mortals and showed no remorse.
One came along eventually, walking right by the fence, a young male with a grizzled beard who had murdered another in some far-off place on the other side of the world. True killer, this one. And oh, that first taste of human struggle and human blood!
Stealing clothes from nearby houses, getting some of the gold and jewels I’d hidden in the Lafayette Cemetery, that was no problem.
Of course I was scared from time to time. The stench of chemicals and gasoline sickened me. The drone of air conditioners and the whine of the jet planes overhead hurt my ears.
But after the third night up, I was roaring around New Orleans on a big black Harley-Davidson motorcycle making plenty of noise myself. I was looking for more killers to feed on. I wore gorgeous black leather clothes that I’d taken from my victims, and