“There is nothing. It is I who must convince you. What have you lived in this body? Three? Four days? You speak of discomforts as if they were deathly afflictions; you talk of physical limits as if they were malicious and punitive restraints.

“And yet through all your endless complaining, you yourself have told me that I must refuse you! You yourself have implored me to turn you away! Lestat, why did you tell me the story of David Talbot and his obsessions with God and the Devil? Why tell me all the things that the nun Gretchen said to you? Why describe the little hospital you saw in your fever dream? Oh, I know it wasn’t Claudia who came to you. I don’t say God put this woman Gretchen in your path. But you love this woman. By your own admission, you love her. She’s waiting for you to return. She can be your guide through the pains and annoyances of this mortal life—”

“No, Louis, you’ve misunderstood everything. I don’t want her to guide me. I don’t want this mortal life!”

“Lestat, can’t you see the chance you’ve been given? Can’t you see the path laid out for you and the light ahead?”

“I’m going to go mad if you don’t stop saying these things … ”

“Lestat, what can any of us do to redeem ourselves? And who has been more obsessed with this very question than you?”

“No, no!” I threw my arms up and crossed them, back and forth, repeatedly, as if trying to head off this dump truck of mad philosophy which was driving right down upon me. “No! I tell you, this is false. This is the worst of all lies.”

He turned away from me, and again I rushed at him, unable to stop myself, and would have grabbed him by the shoulders and shaken him, but with a gesture too quick for my eye, he hurled me backwards against the chair.

Stunned, one ankle painfully twisted, I fell down on the cushions, and then made my right hand into a fist and drove it into the palm of my left. “Oh, no, not sermons, not now.” I was almost weeping. “Not platitudes and pious recommendations.”

“Go back to her,” he said.

“You’re mad!”

“Imagine it,” he went on, as if I hadn’t spoken, his back turned to me, his eyes fixed perhaps on the distant window, his voice almost inaudible, his dark form outlined against the running silver of the rain. “All the years of inhuman craving, of sinister and remorseless feeding. And you are reborn. And there—in that little jungle hospital you could conceivably save a human life for every one you’ve ever taken. Oh, what guardian angels look over you. Why are they so merciful? And you come to me and you beg me to bring you back into this horror, yet with every word you affirm the splendour of all you’ve suffered and seen.”

“I bare my soul to you and you use it against me!”