Interview with the Vampire · Season 1
Can you fly, Louis?
So for twenty years, you lived with the vampire Lestat and you didn't know he had the flying gift?
The Cloud Gift. And yes, it was a remarkable bit of restraint he managed.
Why would he do that?
I suppose he thought if he exposed all his power to me, I would never feel his equal and the relationship would suffer.
'He only beat me the one time, Officer. It's not his fault.' Classic Stockholm, eh, Doc?
I am not here.
She's coming up on 33.
It's a lick and a promise in vampire years.
Maybe, but I'm not your child anymore. That's rule number five. I'll be your companion, your sister.
It's not as simple as choosing a new family configuration. 'Now I'm your cousin.' 'Now I'm your aunt.' I am your maker!
But not my uncle or my daddy. I'm your sister or that's the door.
[Louis bursts into Antoinette's house to find her and Lestat naked in bed]
[Shouting] Six years of begging. You think a song's gon' get a rise out of me?
Did you like it?
This her singing?
It's a clear voice. I wanted to obstacle to the lyric. [Louis smashes the record]
Write me a song and put your lover's voice on it? What the fuck is wrong with your head?
Louis, you're soaking wet.
I swim faster than I drive. [To Antoinette] Put some clothes on. Get the fuck out.
This is my house.
Do I look like I care?
Lestat.
Leave. [To Louis] You swam the Mississippi to find me?
I hate you.
As you should.
He could fly?
Like Superman?
Not like Superman. Superman is a fictional character.
But in the air with a 'fuck you to Newtonian physics' flying?
He said it was more like floating, arising at will, propelling in a direction by the decision. He called it 'the Cloud Gift.'
Claudia, hello. I've been calling quite often. I don't know if the operator is patching me through correctly. [Claudia stares without answering]
I brought something from Louis's favorite bookshop. 'The Book of Hours.' Extremely rare, 15th century. Silver and gold on the vellum, palettes of blue and old rose.
No one here wishes to speak with you.
Well, I know he's upstairs. I can see his silhouette. Perhaps we should let him decide if he wants to see me or not. [Louis throws Lestat's coffin off the balcony and it shatters on the street behind Lestat]
How's that for an answer?
Who made you?
His name was Magnus. He took me from my room in Paris as I kicked and screamed. He kept me for a week, locked in a room full of corpses. Some freshly killed, some bloated and black. But they all looked like me -- my coloring, my physique, my own eyes staring back at me from rotting faces. He fed on me every night and then he put me back in the tower with the lookalike corpses. I thought for sure I'd be one of them, but instead he turned me into this. No grand history of vampiric origins or physiology, no rules, no counsel. Just a sweeping hand to a pile of money and the sight of him throwing himself into a fire. And then I was alone. I thought, 'I can't drink hot blood. I can't feed on others.' I cried. I called to God. I didn't want this. But I have a capacity for enduring. That's why I don't particularly like being abandoned.
[Finds out that Lestat didn't kill Antoinette] It wasn't shocking. It was perfectly consistent with his nature. He'd been told to do something, and, brat that he was, didn't like being told what to do. The effect, however, was numbing.
You're ugly when you act like that.
Better ugly than blind.
'I Felt a Funeral in My Brain.' She also wrote one called 'A Coffin Is a Small Domain.' I mean, come on!
Emily Dickinson is not a vampire.
How do you know?
Cause she's dead.
How do you know?
She got a grave. She got a tombstone.
So do you.
Years accumulated in the small city were catching up to us. Our home was often vandalized. Cowardly warnings suggesting we were no longer welcome. 'Please return from the dark place you came from.' It was an awkward time. I loved Claudia with all my heart and I loved Lestat with a wounded one. The work would be convincing the two to find room again for each other. Concessions would be needed. I would have to lead by example.
For six years in all, these raw and desperate mea culpas came like the tide. And for six years, they were greeted with silence or fire. We burned more gifts than bodies in that decade, but they would not stop coming. And Lestat's relentless determination began to crack my considerable armor. Perhaps it was the modesty of the gesture... but in the spring of 1937, one broke through. He had written it himself in the music of the hour. His first composition in 100 years... Rashid, please play the song in question for Mr. Molloy and the doctor.
I'm not here.
[Come to Me plays in the background] He had engaged a local record company. And when the musicians they hired proved unsatisfactory, he played all the instruments himself.
Daniel Molloy: That's his voice?
Yeah. He pressed only one album. Had the master recordings destroyed. You're listening to an inferior re-recording now. The audacity of it all was matched only by its sincerity. He had made the near-perfect valentine... with one flaw. One perfectly premeditated flaw.
Pleasure never meeting you, Mr. Molloy.
He said to no one.
Quick and clever despite two bags of fluid.
Legal dope makes me constipated, but the wit flows like a river.
Dark woods and bridged rivers. Then the lights of a city depot. Birmingham. Atlanta. Greensboro. Washington, D.C. She, of all things on the Earth, deserved a nice seat and a wide window to watch the countryside blur before the glass. But it was 1939, and the only Negro allowed in first class was the porter, and the Negro passenger rode the rear. The Negro vampire made do with what was left, which was fine with her.
I teased the sun that night in Jackson Square. Thought about the walking cane and pile of ash they'd find in the morning. But Paul had forever ruined Grace's wedding night, and I would not do the same to Claudia on the anniversary of her escape. If I was to join Dante's Wood of the Self-Murdered, it would be another night. And so I endured my way home, back to the crypt, back to the undeserving Lestat.
This is the part of my story, back in San Francisco, where you said, and I paraphrase, 'Give it to me. Make me a vampire now.'
In the eyes of a 20-year-old, you were wasting the gift.
You're in your twenties, Rashid. What do you think?
Well, Mr. du Lac presides in the most desired real estate in the country. I do not see the waste Mr. Molloy sees.
Yeah, well, he lived in a dump the last time we did this.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's Interview with the Vampire pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
