When I didn't answer, he persisted gently: "Just for a little while, until the reporters have stopped, and the horror of it is over; until her faith is restored, and she's whole and Dora after all, and back to her life. She has her life, yet, She can't be hurt because of me, Lestat, not because of me, it's not fair."

"Fair?"

"Call me by my name," he said. "Look at me."

I looked at him. It was exquisitely painful. He was miserable. I didn't know whether human beings could express this same intensity of misery. I actually didn't know.

"My name's Roger," he said. He seemed even younger now, as though he were traveling backwards in time, in his mind, or merely becoming innocent, as if the dead, if they are going to stick around, have a right to remember their innocence.

"I know your name," I said. "I know everything about you, Roger.

Roger, the Ghost. And you never let Old Captain touch you; you just let him adore you, and educate you, and take you places, and buy you beautiful things, and you never even had the decency to go to bed with him."

I said those things, about the images I'd drunk with his blood, but without malice. I was just talking in wonder of how bad we all are, the lies we tell.

He said nothing for the moment.

I was overwhelmed. It was grief veritably blinding me, and bitterness and a deep ugly horror for what I had done to him, and to others, and that I had ever harmed any living creature. Horror.

What was Dora's message? How were we to be saved? Was it the same old canticle of adoration?

He watched me. He was young, committed, a magnificent semblance of life. Roger.

"All right," he said, the voice soft and patient, "I didn't sleep with Old Captain, you're right, but he never really wanted that of me, you see, it wasn't like that, he was far too old. You don't know what it was really like. You might know the guilt I feel. But you don't know later how much I regretted not having done it. Not having known that with Old Captain. And that's not what made me go wrong. It wasn't that. It wasn't the big deception or heist that you imagine it to be. I loved the things he showed me. He loved me. He lived two, three more years, probably because of me. Wynken de Wilde, we loved Wynken de Wilde together. It should have turned out different. I was with Old Captain when he died, you know. I never left the room. I'm faithful that way when I am needed by those I loved."

"Yeah, you were with your wife, Terry, too, weren't you?" It was cruel of me to say this, but I'd spoken without thinking, seeing her face again as he shot her. "Scratch that, if you will," I said. "I'm sorry. Who in the name of God is Wynken de Wilde?"