Anne Rice

So you want me to tell you the story of my life?

1791 was the year it happened. I was 24, younger than you are now. But times were different then, I was a man at that age: the master of a large plantation just south of New Orleans. I had lost my wife in childbirth, and she and the infant had been buried less than half a year. I would have been happy to join them. I couldn't bear the pain of their loss. I longed to be released from it. I wanted to lose it all... my wealth, my estate, my sanity. Most of all, I longed for death. I know that now. I invited it. A release from the pain of living. My invitation was open to anyone. To the whore at my side. To the pimp that followed. But it was a vampire that accepted it.

That morning I was not yet a vampire, and I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely, and yet I can't recall any sunrise before it. I watched the whole magnificence of the dawn for the last time as if it were the first. And then I said farewell to sunlight, and set out to become what I became.

Bear me no ill will, my love, we are now even.

What died in that room was not that woman. What has died is the last breath in me that was human.

Her blood coursed through my veins, sweeter than life itself. And as it did, Lestat's words made sense to me. I knew peace only when I killed and when I heard her heart in that terrible rhythm, I knew again what peace could be.

How do we seem to you? Do you find us beautiful, magical? Our white skin, our fierce eyes? "Drink", you ask me, do you have any idea of the thing you will become?

In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home. It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard. I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume.

You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never die.

I'm flesh and blood, but not human. I haven't been human for two hundred years.

The statue seemed to move, but didn't. The world had changed, yet stayed the same. I was a newborn vampire weeping at the beauty of the night.

A little child she was, but also a fierce killer, now capable of the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child's demanding.

So it was, when I'd given up the search for vampires, that a vampire found me.

But the world was a tomb to me, a graveyard of broken statues, and each of those statues resembled her face.

We searched village after village, country after country. And always we found nothing. I began to believe we were the only ones. There was a strange comfort in that thought. For what could the damned really have to say to the damned?

Thirty years had passed, yet her body remained that of an eternal child. Her eyes alone told the story of her age, staring out from under her doll-like curls, with a questioning that will one day need an answer.

We reached the Mediterranean. I wanted those waters to be blue, but they were black, nighttime waters, and how I suffered then, straining to recall the color that in my youth I had taken for granted.

Then out of curiosity, boredom, who knows what, I left the old world and came back to my America. And there, a mechanical wonder allowed me to see the sun rise for the first time in two hundred years. And what sunrises, seen as the human eye could never see them: silver at first, then, as the years progressed, in tones of purple, red, and my long lost blue.

For 30 years I had avoided that place. Yet I found my way back there with hardly an upward glance.

Though the fire seemed to spread through the quarter, I stood on that deck, fearful he would come out again from the very river, like some monster, to destroy us both. And all the while, I thought, 'Lestat, you deserve your vengeance. You gave me the dark gift, and I delivered you into the hands of death for the second time.'

I walked all night, I walked as I had walked years before when my mind swam with guilt at the thought of killing. I had thought of all the things I had done, and couldn't undo. And I longed for a moment's peace.

Blood, I was to find, was a necessity as well. I woke the next evening with a hunger I had never felt.

Lestat killed two, sometimes three a night. A fresh young girl, that was his favorite for the first of the evening. For seconds, he preferred a gilded beautiful youth. But the snob in him loved to hunt in society, and the blood of the aristocrat thrilled him best of all.

Whatever happened to Lestat I do not know. I go on, night after night. I feed on those who cross my path. But all my passion went with her golden hair. I'm a spirit of preternatural flesh. Detached. Unchangeable. Empty.

They know about us. They watch us dine on empty plates and drink from empty glasses.