Chapter 29 What a dancer wants what a Vampire needs
\`You want to sleep.' \`Yes . . : she moaned softly. And he picked, her up and took her into the bedroom. Our coffins rested on the carpet and against the wall; there was a velvet-draped bed. Lestat did not put her on the bed; he lowered her slowly into his coffin. \`What are you doing?' I asked him, coming to the door sill. The girl was looking around like a terrified child. \`No . . : she was moaning. And then, as he closed the lid, she screamed. She continued to scream within the coffin.
" \`Why do you do this, Lestat?' I asked.
" \`I like to do it,' he said. \`I enjoy it.' He looked at me. \`I don't say that you have to enjoy it. Take your aesthete's tastes to purer things. Kill them swiftly if you will, but do it! Learn that you're a killer! Ah!' He threw up his hands in disgust. The girl had stopped screaming. Now he drew up a little curved-legged chair beside the coffin and, crossing his legs, he looked at the coffin lid. His was a black varnished coffin, not a pure rectangular box as they are now, but tapered at both ends and widest where the corpse might lay his hands upon his chest. It suggested the human form. It
opened, and the girl sat up astonished, wild-eyed, her lips blue and trembling. \`Lie down, love,' he said to her, and pushed her back; and she lay, near-hysterical, staring up at him. \`You're dead, love,' he said to her; and she screamed and turned desperately in the coffin like a fish, as if her body could escape through the sides, through the bottom. \`It's a coffin, a coffin!' she cried. \`Let me out.'
" \`But we all must lie in cons, eventually,' he said to her. \`Lie still, love. This is your coffin. Most of us never get to know what it feels like. You know what it feels like!' he said to her. I couldn't tell whether she was listening or not, or just going wild. But she saw me in the doorway, and then she lay still, looking at Lestat and then at me.
\`Help me!' she said to me.
"Lestat looked at me. 'I expected you to feel these things instinctually, as I did,' he said. When I gave you that first kill, I thought you would hunger for the next and the next, that you would go to each human life as if to a full cup, the way I had. But you didn't. And all this time I suppose I kept from straightening you out because you were best weaker. I'd watch you playing shadow in the night, staring at the falling rain, and
I'd think, He's easy to manage, he's simple. But you're weak, Louis. You're a mark. For vampires and now for humans alike. This thing with Babette has exposed us both. It's as if you want us both to be destroyed.'
"'I can't stand to watch what you're doing,' I said, turning my back. The girl's eyes were burning into my flesh. She lay, all the time he spoke, staring at me.
"You can stand it!' he said. \`I saw you last night with that child. You're a vampire, the same as I am!'
"He stood up and came towards me, but the girl rose again and he turned to shove her down. '13o you think we should make her a vampire? Share our lives with her?' he asked. Instantly I said, \`No!'
" \`Why, because she's nothing but a whore?' he asked. \`A damned expensive whore at that,' he said.
" \`Can she live now? Or has she lost too much?' I asked him. " \`Touching)" he said. \`She can't live.'
"'Then kill her.' She began to scream. He just sat there. I turned around. He was smiling, and the girl had turned her face to the satin and was sobbing. Tier reason had almost entirely left her; she was crying and praying. She was praying to the Virgin to save her, her hands over her face now, now over her head, the wrist smearing blood in her hair and on the satin. I bent over the coffin. She was dying, it was true; her eyes were burning, but the tissue around them was already bluish and now she smiled.
\`You won't let me die, will you?' she whispered. \`You'll save me.' Lestat reached over and took her wrist. 'But it's too late, love,' he said. \`Look at your wrist, your breast' And then he touched the wound in her throat. She put her hands to her throat and gasped, her mouth open, the scream strangled. I stared at Lestat. I could not understand why he did this. His face was as smooth as mine is now, more animated for the blood, but cold and without emotion.
"He did not leer like a stage villain, nor hunger for her suffering as if the cruelty fed him. He simply watched her. \`I never meant to be bad,' she was crying. \`I only did what I had to do. You won't let this happen to me, You'll let me go. I can't die like this, I can't!' She was sobbing, the sobs dry and thin.