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I laughed outright this time.

I was already getting used to the shifts in his face between masklike perfection and expression, and the steady vitality of his gaze that united both. The impression remained one of evenness and openness—of a startlingly beautiful and perceptive man.

But what I could not get used to was the sense of presence, that something immensely powerful, dangerously powerful, was so contained and immediately there.

I became a little agitated suddenly, a little overwhelmed. I felt the unaccountable desire to weep.

He leaned forward and touched the back of my hand with his fingers, and a shock coursed through me. We were connected in the touch. And though his skin was silky like the skin of all vampires, it was less pliant. It was like being touched by a stone hand in a silk glove.

“I brought you here because I want to tell you what I know,” he said. “I want to share with you whatever secrets I possess. For several reasons, you have attracted me.”

I was fascinated. And I felt the possibility of an overpowering love.

“But I warn you,” he said, “there’s a danger in this. I don’t possess the ultimate answers. I can’t tell you who made the world or why man exists. I can’t tell you why we exist. I can only tell you more about us than anyone else has told you so far. I can show you Those Who Must Be Kept and tell you what I know of them. I can tell you why I think I have managed to survive for so long. This knowledge may change you somewhat. That’s all knowledge ever really does, I suppose …”

“Yes—”

“But when I’ve given all I have to give, you will be exactly where you were before: an immortal being who must find his own reasons to exist.”

“Yes,” I said, “reasons to exist.” My voice was a little bitter. But it was good to hear it spelled out that way.

But I felt a dark sense of myself as a hungry, vicious creature, who did a very good job of existing without reasons, a powerful vampire who always took exactly what he wanted, no matter who said what. I wondered if he knew how perfectly awful I was.

The reason to kill was the blood.

Acknowledged. The blood and the sheer ecstasy of the blood. And without it we are husks as I was in the Egyptian earth.

“Just remember my warning,” he said, “that the circumstances will be the same afterwards. Only you might be changed. You might be more bereft than before you came here.”

“But why have you chosen to reveal things to me?” I asked. “Surely others have gone looking for you. You must know where Armand is.”

“There are several reasons, as I told you,” he said. “And probably the strongest reason is the manner in which you sought me. Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds—justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner. But you have been truly asking since you left Paris ten years ago.”

I understood this, but only inarticulately.

“You have few preconceptions,” he said. “In fact, you astound me because you admit to such extraordinary simplicity. You want a purpose. You want love.”

“True,” I said with a little shrug. “Rather crude, isn’t it?”

He gave another soft laugh:

“No. Not really. It’s as if eighteen hundred years of Western civilization have produced an innocent.”

“An innocent? You can’t be speaking of me.”

“There is so much talk in this century of the nobility of the savage,” he explained, “of the corrupting force of civilization, of the way we must find our way back to the innocence that has been lost. Well, it’s all nonsense really. Truly primitive people can be monstrous in their assumptions and expectations. They cannot conceive of innocence. Neither can children. But civilization has at last created men who behave innocently. For the first time they look about themselves