Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles

Louis:
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.

Louis:
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.

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

Louis:
You lack the courage of your convictions sir, do it.

Claudia:
Locked together in hatred. But I can't hate you Louis. Louis my love, I was mortal to you. You gave me your immortal kiss you became my mother, and my father, and so I'm yours forever. But now it's time to end it, Louis. Now it's time to leave him.

Louis:
Do you think I would let them harm you.

Claudia:
No you would not Louis, danger holds you to me.

Louis:
Love holds you to me.

Claudia:
You... fed on me.

Louis:
I took your life. He gave you a new one.

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

Claudia:
And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never ever grow up.

Lestat:
Your body's dying. Pay no attention.

Lestat:
You are a vampire who never knew what life was until it ran out in a big gush over your lips.

Louis:
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.

Louis:
Where are we?

Lestat:
Where do you think, my idiot friend? We're in a nice, filthy cemetery. Does this make you happy? Is this fitting, proper enough?

Louis:
We belong in hell.

Lestat:
And what if there is no hell, or they don't want us there? Ever think of that?

Louis:
But there was a hell, and no matter where we moved to, I was in it.

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

Armand:
The world changes, we do not, there lies the irony that finally kills us.

Lestat:
God, I swear you grow more like Louis each day. Then you'll be eating rats.

Claudia:
Rats? When did you eat rats Louis?

Louis:
It was a long, long time ago. Before you were born, and I don't recommend them.

Louis:
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?

Claudia:
Madeleine, Louis is shy.

Madeleine:
Drink.

Claudia:
Do it Louis, because I cannot, I haven't the strength. You saw to that when you made me.

Louis:
You haven't the vaguest conception under God what you ask.

Madeleine:
En contraire Monsieur, I have.

Claudia:
You have found your new companion Louis, You will make me mine.

Lestat:
Evil is a point of view. God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are, none so like him as ourselves.

Louis:
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 its whole magnificence for the last time as if it were the first. And then I said farewell to sun light, and set out to become what I became.

Louis:
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.

Lestat:
LOUIS! Put me in my coffin!

Claudia:
I'll put you in your coffin!

Lestat:
Absinthe, absinthe... you've given them absinthe?

Claudia:
No. Laudanum.

Lestat:
Laudanum.

Claudia:
Yes. It killed them, unfortunately, but it keeps the blood warm.

Lestat:
You? You let me drink... dead blood? You... let me drink... dead blood?

Claudia:
One lesson you taught me: never drink from the dead!

Lestat:
Louis... Louis! Put me in my coffin. Put me in my coffin!

Claudia:
I'll put you in your coffin!

Claudia:
One lesson you taught me. Never drink from the dead.

Claudia:
Goodnight sweet prince, may flights of devils wing you to your rest.

Claudia:
Who will take care of me my love, my dark angel, when you are gone?

Louis:
Vampires pretending to be humans, pretending to be vampires.

Claudia:
How avant-garde.

Lestat:
Evildoers are easier, and they taste better.

Armand:
You are beautiful my friend. Lestat must have wept when he made you.

Louis:
You knew Lestat?

Armand:
Knew him well enough not to mourn his passing

Armand:
They had forgotten the first lesson, that we are to be powerful, beautiful, and without regret.

Louis:
And you can teach me this?

Armand:
Yes.

Louis:
To be without regret?

Armand:
Yes.

Louis:
Then what a pair we could make, but what if it's a lesson I don't care to learn.

Armand:
What do you mean?

Louis:
What if all I have is my suffering, my regret?

Armand:
Don't you want to lose it?

Louis:
Why? So you can have that too? The heart that mourns her, her that you burnt to a cinder.

Armand:
Louis, I swear that I...

Louis:
Ah, but I know you did. I know. You who regrets nothing, you who feels nothing, if that's all I have left to learn, I can do that on my own... and as much as your invitation may appeal to me, I *regretfully* decline.

Lestat:
What's wrong, my dear?

Whore:
It's a coffin...

Lestat:
Yes, it is. Well, then you must be dead.

Claudia:
Which one of you did it? Which one of you did it? Which on of you made me the way I am?

Lestat:
The way you are? A vampire gone insane that pollutes it's own bed?

Claudia:
And if I cut my hair again?

Lestat:
It will grow back again.

Claudia:
But it wasn't always so. I had a mother once, and Louis: he had a wife. He was mortal same as she and so was I.

Louis:
Claudia.

Claudia:
You made us what we are, didn't you?

Lestat:
Stop her, Louis.

Claudia:
Did you do it to me?

Claudia:
How did you do it?

Lestat:
Why should I tell you? It's in my power.

Claudia:
Why yours alone? Tell me how it was done.

Lestat:
Be glad I made you what you are. (grabs her throat with one hand) You'd be dead now if I hadn't, just like that damned corpse. Now, get rid of it. (releases her)

Claudia:
You get rid of it.

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

Daniel Molloy:
What did you see?

Louis:
Words can't describe it, you might as well ask Heaven what it sees; no human can know.

Lestat:
Perfect! Just perfect! Just burn the place! Burn everything we own! Have us sleeping in the field like cattle!

Louis:
You thought you could have it all...

Lestat:
Oh, shut up,Louis! Mon Dieu! Come here.

Lestat:
I'm going to give you the choice I never had.

Lestat:
Do we forgive each other then?

Claudia:
It's time we were on our way. I'm hungry, and the city awaits.

Lestat:
Don't be afraid. I'm going to give you the choice I never had.

Daniel Molloy:
So, what do you do?

Louis:
I'm a vampire.

Daniel Molloy:
Hmm. That's something I've never heard before. You mean this literally, I take it?

Louis:
Absolutely. I was waiting for you in that alleyway: watching you watching me. And then you began to speak.

Daniel Molloy:
What a lucky break for me.

Louis:
Perhaps lucky for the both of us.

Daniel Molloy:
You said you were waiting for me. What were you going to do? Kill me, drink my blood, all that stuff?

Louis:
Yes, but you needn't be concerned with that now.

Daniel Molloy:
You really believe this, don't you, that you're a vampire?

Louis:
We can't begin this way. Let me turn on the light.

Daniel Molloy:
I thought vampires didn't like the light.

Louis:
We love it. I only wanted to prepare you.

Lestat:
We are predators, Whose all seeing eyes were meant to give them detachment.

Lestat:
Merciful death. How you love your precious guilt.

Claudia:
I came to make peace with you, even though you are the father of lies.

Lestat:
It's your coffin, my love. Enjoy it. Most of us never get to know what it feels like.

Louis:
Why do you do this?

Lestat:
I like to do it. I enjoy it. Take your aesthete's; taste purer things; kill them swiftly, if you will, but do it. For do not doubt: you are a killer, Louis.

Lestat:
Oh Louis, Louis. Still whining Louis. Have you heard enough? I've had to listen to that for centuries.

Lestat:
I am afraid, madam, my days are sacrosanct.

Lestat:
Lord, what I wouldn't give for a drop of good old-fashioned Creole blood.

Louis:
Yankees are not to your taste?

Lestat:
Their democratic flavor doesn't suit my palate, Louis.

Lestat:
I assume I need no introduction.

Daniel Molloy:
So there are no vampires in Transylvania? No Dracula?

Louis:
Fictions, my friend. The vulgar fictions of a demented Irishman.

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

Claudia:
What do you mean?

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

Claudia:
Yes, Father. At last we are even.

Claudia:
Louis what's happening to her?

Louis:
She is dying. It happened to you too, but you were to young to remember.

Louis:
Forgive me if I have a lingering respect for life.

Louis:
Whatever happened to Lestat I do not know. I go on, night ever 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.

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

Louis:
I walked all night, I walked as I had walked years before when my mind swarmed 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 moments peace.

Lestat:
Claudia, you have been a very, very naughty little girl.

Daniel Molloy:
So a vampire can cry.

Louis:
Once, maybe twice in his own eternity. Maybe it was to quench those tears forever that I took such revenge on them.

Lestat:
Whining coward of a vampire that prowls the night killing rats and poodles; you could have finished us both.

Louis:
You've condemned me to Hell.

Lestat:
I don't know any Hell.

Louis:
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.

Louis:
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. 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.

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

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

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

Louis:
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.

Louis:
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.'

Louis:
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.

Louis:
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.

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

Lestat:
Should we put out the light? And then put out the light. But once put out thy light, I cannot give it vital breath again. It needs must wither.

Lestat:
Have you said your good-byes to the light?

Lestat:
I've drained you to the point of death. If I leave you here, you die. Or you can be young always, my friend, as we are now, but you must tell me: will you come or no?

Claudia:
Where's mama?

Lestat:
Mama... mama has gone to Heaven, Chèrie, like that sweet lady right there. They all go to Heaven.

Louis:
All but us.

Lestat:
Shh. Do you want to frighten our little daughter?

Claudia:
I'm not your daughter.

Lestat:
Oh, yes, you are. You're mine and Louis' daughter now. You see, Louis was going to leave us, he was going to go away, but now he's not. Now, he's going to stay and make you happy.

Claudia:
Louis.

Louis:
You fiend.

Lestat:
One happy family.

Armand:
I know nothing of God, or the Devil. I have never seen a vision nor learned a secret that will damn or save my soul. And as far as I know, after four hundred years, I am the oldest living vampire in the world.

Lestat:
Read her thoughts.

Louis:
I can't.

Lestat:
The dark gift is different for each of us.

Lestat:
You-you let me drink *dead blood*?

Lestat:
It's so easy you almost feel sorry for them. You'll get used to killing. Just forget about that mortal coil. You'll become accustomed to it, all too quickly.

Louis:
My God, I've failed again.