“Yes, I believe it!” I answered, humiliated by the feeling in my voice. “How could you not believe it?” I stood up and commenced my pacing again. I made a circuit of the little house, and wandered out into the jungle garden, pushing the thick springy vines out of my way. I was in such a state of confusion I couldn’t speak to him anymore.

I was thinking of my mortal life, vainly trying not to mythologize it, but I could not drive away from me those memories—the last wolf hunt, my dogs dying in the snow. Paris. The boulevard theatre. Unfinished! You don’t really want to be human. How could he say such a thing?

It seemed an age I was out in the garden, but finally, for better or worse, I wandered back inside. I found him still at his desk, looking at me in the most forlorn, almost heartbroken way.

“Look,” I said, “there are only two things which I believe—the first is that no mortal can refuse the Dark Gift once he really knows what it is. And don’t speak to me about David Talbot refusing me. David is not an ordinary man. The second thing I believe is that all of us would be human again if we could. Those are my tenets. There’s nothing else.”

He made a little weary accepting gesture and sat back in his chair. The wood creaked softly beneath his weight, and he lifted his right hand languidly, wholly unconscious of the seductive quality of this simple gesture, and ran his fingers back through his loose dark hair.

The memory pierced me suddenly of the night I had given him the blood, of how he had argued with me at the last moment that I must not do it, and then he’d given in. I had explained it all to him beforehand—while he was still the drunken feverish young planter in the sickbed with the rosary wound around the bedpost. But how can such a thing be explained! And he’d been so convinced that he wanted to come with me, so certain that mortal life held nothing for him—so bitter and burnt out and so young!

What had he known then? Had he ever read a poem by Milton, or listened to a sonata by Mozart? Would the name Marcus Aurelius have meant anything to him? In all probability, he would have thought it a fancy name for a black slave. Ah, those savage and swaggering plantation lords with their rapiers and their pearl-handled pistols! They did appreciate excess; I shall, in retrospect, give them that.

But he was far from those days now, wasn’t he? The author of Interview with the Vampire, of all preposterous titles! I tried to quiet myself. I loved him too much not to be patient, not to wait until he spoke again. I’d fashioned him of human flesh and blood to be my preternatural tormentor, had I not?

“It can’t be undone that easily,” he said now, rousing me from memory, dragging me back into this dusty room. His voice was deliberately gentle, almost conciliatory or imploring. “It can’t be that simple. You can’t change bodies with a mortal man. To be candid, I don’t even think it’s possible, but even if it were—”