Lestat el vampiro

I am the Vampire Lestat. And I have a story to tell. For two centuries I have been a wanderer, a fiend who has lived in the shadows. But now, in this glittering, clamorous twentieth century, I have risen from the earth to the shriek of electric guitars and the beat of pounding drums. I have become a rock superstar. I have written my life, this very story, that the whole world might read it. I do this to set the record straight, to refute the mournful lies told by my beloved Louis in his famous *Interview with the Vampire*. But more, I do it to call them out - all of them, the Children of Darkness, from the oldest to the youngest. I am singing our secrets to the mortals. I am waiting to see who will come.

My tale begins not in splendor, but in the gray hills of the Auvergne in the last years before the French Revolution. I was the youngest son of a dying line, a restless boy in a crumbling castle, my only purpose to hunt the forests for the family table. It was in the winter of my twenty-first year that I went out to kill a pack of eight wolves alone. The battle was a horror of snow and blood; I saw my faithful dogs torn to pieces and my mare shrieking as she was eaten alive, and I fought until I was the only thing left standing in that valley. But when I returned, my brother sneered, “You little bastard, you didn't kill eight wolves!” In that moment, I knew a loneliness so profound it was a kind of death. Only my mother, my beautiful and brilliant Gabrielle, understood. It was she who had always been my secret ally, the only soul who grasped the ferocity of my ambition and the depth of my despair.

My life truly began when I met Nicolas de Lenfent, the draper's son, returned from Paris with a violin and a cynical heart. In the smoky warmth of the village inn, we began “our conversation” - an endless torrent of ideas about God, art, Paris, and the meaninglessness of it all. It was with Nicki that I first stared into the void, the terrifying realization that we would die without ever knowing why we had lived. He played his violin, and in its raw, glittering notes I heard both a confirmation of that horror and the only possible answer to it. Together, we dreamed of escaping our provincial prison, and it was my dying mother who finally gave me the means, pressing her last jewels into my hand. “I want to die knowing you are in Paris,” she told me. And so, with Nicki at my side, I fled.

Paris was a paradise. In a shabby little playhouse on the boulevard du Temple, I found my true calling. I was Lelio, the lover, on the stage of Renaud's House of Thesbians. I sold tickets, swept floors, and lived for the moment I could step before the footlights and feel the embrace of the crowd. For the first time, I was deliriously happy. Nicki played his violin in the orchestra, and we lived in a squalid garret that felt like a palace, our nights filled with cheap wine and endless talk. We were shameless and we were free. But a strange face began to appear in the audience, a face as white as bone, with deep-etched lines and eyes that seemed to know my secret soul. He knew me as the Wolfkiller. And one night, he came for me, tearing me from my bed and from a screaming Nicolas, and carrying me over the rooftops of Paris.

My captor was Magnus, an ancient alchemist who had become a vampire through theft and sorcery. In his high tower, he gave me the Dark Gift. It was a rapturous and agonizing transformation, a symphony of pleasure and terror in which I felt my mortal life drain away to the sound of a great, slow gong. When I awoke, the world was a Savage Garden of incandescent beauty and unbearable stimuli. My new eyes saw every shimmering thread in a tapestry, my new ears heard every whisper from a block away. Before I could even comprehend my new state, Magnus, my mad creator, threw himself upon a great funeral pyre, commanding me to scatter his ashes and take his immense treasure for my own. I was left a fledgling monster, utterly alone, with no knowledge of what I was save for a crushing loneliness and a terrible thirst for human blood.

I returned to Paris a different creature. With Magnus's fortune, I became a gentleman of wealth, sending vast sums to my family and to Nicolas. I bought the little theater, showering its players with gifts, but I could never go back to them. I was an outcast. My reunion with Nicki was a disaster. The thirst for him, my beloved friend, rose in me like a beast, and in my madness to control it, I leapt upon the stage and gave a terrifying performance of my new powers, shattering his sanity and his love for me in a single night. “What are you?” he cried, his face a mask of horror and betrayal. It was a question I could not answer.

It was then that they found me - the Children of Darkness, a coven of vampires living in filth and superstition beneath the cemetery of les Innocents. They put me on trial for my heresies: that I lived among mortals, that I did not serve Satan, that I had profaned a church. Their leader was Armand, a creature of terrifying beauty and ancient sadness, a boy with the eyes of a centuries-old man. But I would not bow to their Dark Ways. I defied their beliefs, shattering their coven with the simple truths of a secular age. In the chaos, it was Nicolas who embraced their creed of sublime evil. He took the survivors and remade our little playhouse into his grotesque masterpiece: the Theater of the Vampires. Our final parting was brutal. “I despise you,” he told me, “you who possessed the dark secret… and what did you do with it but try to live like a good man!”

For the next two hundred years, Gabrielle and I wandered the globe. She had come to me in Paris on the brink of death, and I had given her the Dark Gift, making my immortal mother my immortal companion. Together we explored the world, but while I was drawn to the grand cities and the works of man, she heard the call of the wilderness. She sought the highest mountains and the deepest jungles, and our paths diverged. All the while, I searched for the one being who might hold the true answers: Marius, Armand's ancient master. On walls from St. Petersburg to Istanbul, I carved my plea: *Marius, make yourself known to me*.

It was in Cairo, after I had lost Gabrielle to the African jungles and received the devastating news that Nicolas had thrown himself into the fire, that I finally gave up. I went down into the earth to die. But Marius came. He was a Roman, an immortal of impossible grace and wisdom, and he took me to his secret island in the Aegean. There, he showed me the source of our race: Akasha and Enkil, the Mother and the Father, the first vampires, who sat silent and unmoving on a throne in an underground shrine. He told me the story of our origins - not in myth, but in a terrible accident in ancient Egypt six thousand years ago. In his sanctuary, I began to understand. But my impetuous nature brought disaster. I dared to awaken the Queen, and in Enkil's wrath, I was nearly destroyed. Marius, fearing for their safety and for mine, cast me out, promising we would meet again in a century's time.

I journeyed to the New World, to New Orleans, where I made my fledgling Louis, and later, the vampire child Claudia - a story of love and betrayal that ended in fire and ruin. Wounded and alone, I fell into a long decline, finally going to sleep in the earth in 1929, not caring if I ever rose again. For fifty-five years I dreamed, absorbing the changing world through the voices that filtered down to me - the roar of motorcars, the melodies of the radio, the flickering dramas of television. And then I heard the music. It was the raw, screaming, electric sound of a rock and roll band rehearsing nearby. It called to me as nothing had in centuries. It woke me up. And now, I have made that music my own. The concert is tonight. I have told my story, and I have sent my call across the world. Louis and Gabrielle have already come. But who else is listening? Who else is out there in the darkness, waiting?