Vessey’s Reviews > Interview with the Vampire > Status Update

You’re dead inside, you’re cold and beyond my reach! It is as if I’m not here, beside you. And, not being here with you, I have the dreadful feeling that I don’t exist at all. And you are as cold and distant as those hard forms I cannot love or comprehend, as alien as those hard mechanical sculptures of this age which have no human form. I shudder when I’m near you. I look into your eyes and my reflection isn’t there

I had a vision of him from long ago, that tall, stately gentleman in the swirling black cape, his rich, flawless voice singing, his large, sparkling eye catching the young woman who stood by, enrapt, so that a smile spread over his face as the song died on his lips; and for that one moment when his eye met hers, all evil seemed obliterated in that flush of pleasure, that passion for merely being alive.

She. It seemed then that she had never existed. That she had been some illogical, fantastical dream that was too precious and too personal for me ever to confide in anyone. And too long gone.

I sought for nothing in the one great source of change which is humanity. And even in my love and absorption with the beauty of the world, I sought to learn nothing that could be given back to humanity. I drank of the beauty of the world as a vampire drinks. I was satisfied. I was filled to the brim. But I was dead. And I was changeless.

Before, all art had held for me the promise of a deeper understanding of the human heart. Now the human heart meant nothing. I did not denigrate it. I simply forgot it. The magnificent paintings were cut loose from the hands that had made them and dead like children turned to stone. Like Claudia, severed from her mother, preserved for decades in pearl and hammered gold. And like us, they could all be reduced to ashes

‘that is the crowning evil, that we can even go so far as to love each other, you and I. And who else would show us a particle of love, a particle of compassion or mercy? Who else, knowing us as we know each other, could do anything but destroy us?

If I could make those times come alive for either you or me…for only an instant! What would that be worth? And what a sadness it is to me that time doesn’t dim the memory of that period, that it becomes all the richer and more magical in light of the world I see today.

How beautiful she was, a cold, flaxen-haired woman with a doll’s face and liquid eyes gazing at me so serenely and so long that, surely, I must have been forgotten. The universe was now marked off and nullified by someone who had suffered in it, always, but was now listening to the tinkling of a toy music box, putting a hand on the toy clock. Shortened hours and little golden minutes. I felt I was mad.

To destroy me utterly she needed only show me that pain. The child I made a vampire suffered. Her agony was as my own.

She hated me, she loathed me, and my heart shrivelled inside me, as if, in depriving me of that love which had sustained me a lifetime, she had dealt me a mortal blow. The knife was there. I was dying for her, dying for that love as I was that very first night when he gave her to me, turned her eyes to me, and told her my name; that love which had warmed me in my self-hatred, allowed me to exist.