vampire chronicles | Page 6

the room in the
process of nearly killing him."
"But your strength . . . the va mpire . . .?" asked the boy.
"I was out of my mind," the vampire explained. "I did thi ngs I could not have done in
perfect health. The scene is confused, pale , fantastical now. But I do remember that I
drove him out of the back doors of the house, across the courtyard, and against the brick
wall of the kitchen, where I pounded his head until I nearly killed him. When I was
subdued finally, and exhausted then almost to th e point of death, they bled me. The fools.
But I was going to say something else. It was then that I conceived of my own egotism.
Perhaps I'd seen it reflected in the priest. His contemptuous attitude towards my brother
reflected my own; his immediate and shallow ca rping about the devil; his refusal to even
entertain the idea that sanctity had passed so close."
"But he did believe in possession by the devil."
"That is a much more mundane idea," said the vampire immediately. "People who cease
to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I
do indeed know why. Evil is always possibl e. And goodness is eternally difficult. But
you must understand, possession is really anothe r way of saying someone is mad. I felt it
was, for the priest. I'm sure he'd seen ma dness. Perhaps he had stood right over raving
madness and pronounced it possession. You don't have to see Satan when he is exorcised.
But to stand in the presence of a saint . . . To believe that the saint has seen a vision. No,
it's egotism, our refusal to believe it could occur in our midst."
"I never thought of it in that way," said the boy. "But what happened to you? You said
they bled you to cure you, and that must have nearly killed you."
The vampire laughed. "Yes. It certainly did. But the vampire came back that night. You
see, he wanted Pointe du Lac, my plantation.
"It was very late, after my sister had falle n asleep. I can remember it as if it were
yesterday. He came in from the courtyard, opening the French doors without a sound, a
tall fair-skinned man with a mass of blond hair and a graceful, almost feline quality to his
movements. And gently, he draped a shawl over my sister's eyes and lowered the wick of
the lamp. She dozed there beside the basin and the cloth with which she'd bathed my
forehead, and she ,never once stirred under th at shawl until morning. But by that time I
was greatly changed."
"What was this change?" asked the boy.
The vampire sighed. He leaned back against th e chair and looked at the walls. "At first I
thought he was another doctor, or someone summoned by the fam ily to try to reason with
me. But this suspicion was removed at once. He stepped close to my bed and leaned
down so that his face was in th e lamplight, and I saw that he was no ordinary man at all.
His gray eyes burned with an incandescen ce, and the long white hands which hung by his
sides were not those of a human being. I think I knew everything in that instant, and all
that he told me was only aftermath. What I mean is, the moment I saw him, saw his
extraordinary aura and knew him to be no creature I'd ever known, I was reduced to
nothing. That ego which could not accept the presence of an extraordinary human being
in its midst was crushed. All my conceptions , even my guilt and wish to die, seemed

utterly unimportant. I completely forgot myself!" he said, now silently touching his breast
with his fist. "I forgot myself totally. And in the same instant knew totally the meaning of
possibility. From then on I experienced only increasing wonder. As he talked to me and
told me of what I might become, of what his life had been and stood to be, my past
shrank to embers. I saw my life as if I stood ap art from it, the vanity, the self-serving, the
constant fleeing from one petty annoyance after another, the lip service to God and the
Virgin and a host of saints whose names fille d my prayer books, none of whom made the
slightest difference in a narrow, materialistic, and selfish existence. I saw my real gods .