"When I came to my senses, I was still there, in the lobby. Everything looked ordinary, and it was as if I'd been in that other place for years and years, and all sorts of fragments of memory were slipping away from me, flying away from me, so fast that I couldn't catch any one thought or finished proposition or suggestion.

"All I could remember with any certainty is what I just told you. I stood there. I looked at the flowers. Nobody in the lobby noticed me. I pretended everything was normal. But I kept trying to remember, kept chasing these fragments, beset by bits and pieces of talk, or threat or description, and I kept seeing very clearly this truly ugly dark Being before me, exactly the sort of demon you'd create if you wanted to drive someone right out of his reason. I kept seeing this face and...."

"Yes?"

"...I've seen him twice again."

, I realized I was mopping my forehead with the little napkin the waiter had given me.

He'd come again. David placed an order. Then he leant close to me.

"You think you've seen the Devil."

"There's not much else that could frighten me, David," I said. "We both know that.

There isn't a vampire in existence who could really frighten me. Not the very oldest, not the wisest, not the cruelist. Not even Maharet. And what do I know of the supernatural other than us? The elementals, the poltergeists, the little addlebrained spirits, we all know and see ... the things you called up with Candomble witchcraft."

"Yes," he said.

"This was The Man Himself, David."

He smiled, but it was by no means unkind or unsympathetic. "For you, Lestat," he teased softly, seductively, "for you, it would have to be the Devil Himself."

We both laughed. Though I think it was what writers call a mirthless laugh. I went on.

"The second time it was in New Orleans. I was near home, our flat in the Rue Royale.

Just walking. And I started to hear those steps behind me, like something deliberately following me and letting me know it. Damn it, I've done this to mortals myself and it's so vicious. God! Why was I ever created! And then the third time, the Thing was even closer. Same scenario. Huge, towering over me. Wings, David. Either it has wings or I in my fear am endowing it with wings. It is a Winged Being, and it is hideous, and this last time, I kept hold of the image long enough to run from it, to flee, David, like a coward. And then I woke up, as I always do, in some familiar place, where I started actually, and everything's just the way it was. Nobody has a hair out of place."

"And it doesn't talk to you when it appears like this?"

"No, not at all. It's trying to drive me crazy. It's trying to ... to make me do something, perhaps. Remember what you said, David, that you didn't know why God and the Devil had let you see them."