"What I think is that when you make a book, you tell the tale as you would like to know it!"

"I see no great wisdom in that."

"Well, then think, for most speech is a mere issue of our feelings, a mere explosion.

Listen, note the way that you make these outbursts."

"I don't want to."

"But you do, but they are not the words you want to read. When you write, something different happens. You make a tale, no matter how fragmented or experimental or how disregarding of all conventional and helpful forms. Try this for me. No, no, I have a better idea."

"What?"

"Come down with me into my rooms. I live here now, I told you. Through my windows you can see the trees. I don't live like our friend Louis, wandering from dusty corner to dusty corner, and then back to his flat in the Rue Royale when he's convinced himself once more and for the thousandth time that no one can harm Lestat.

I have warm rooms. I use candles for old light. Come down and let me write it, your story. Talk to me. Pace, and rant if you will, or rail, yes, rail, and let me write it, and even so, the very fact that I write, this in itself will make you make a form out of it.

You'll begin to..."

"What?"

"To tell me what happened. How you died and how you lived."

"Expect no miracles, perplexing scholar. I didn't die in New York that morning. I almost died."

He had me faintly curious, but I could never do what he wanted. Nevertheless he was honest, amazingly so, as far as I could measure, and therefore sincere.

"Ah, so, I didn't mean literally I meant that you should tell me what it was like to climb so high into the sun, and suffer so much, and, as you said, to discover in your pain all these memories, these connecting links. Tell me! Tell me."

"Not if you mean to make it coherent," I said crossly. I gauged his reaction. I wasn't bothering him. He wanted to talk more.

"Make it coherent? Armand, I'll simply write down what you say." He made his words simple yet curiously passionate.

"Promise?"

I flashed on him a playful look. Me! To do that.

He smiled. He wadded up the little dress and then dropped it carefully so it might fall in the middle of the pile of her old clothes.

"I'll not alter one syllable," he said. "Come be with me, and talk to me, and be my love." Again, he smiled.

Suddenly he came towards me, much in the aggressive manner in which I'd thought earlier to approach him. He slipped his hands under my hair, and felt of my face, and then he gathered up the hair and he put his face down into my curls, and he laughed.

He kissed my cheek.

"Your hair's like something spun from amber, as if the amber would melt and could be drawn from candle flames in long fine airy threads and let to dry that way to make all these shining tresses. You're sweet, boylike and pretty as a girl. I wish I had one glimpse of you in antique velvet the way you were for him, for Marius. I wish I could see for one moment how it was when you dressed in stockings and wore a belted doublet sewn with rubies. Look at you, the frosty child. My love doesn't even touch you."