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"No, I didn't know," I said quickly. "What I know is that I have you here and you helped me with Goblin, and you see what Goblin can do. You see that Goblin has to be. . . has to be destroyed. And maybe me too. "

"You haven't the smallest idea of what you're saying," he returned quietly. "You don't want to be destroyed. You want to live forever. You just don't want to kill to do it, that's all. "

Now I knew that I was going to cry.

I took out my pocket handkerchief and I wiped at my eyes and my nose. I didn't turn away to do this. That would have been too cowardly. But I did look about me without moving my head, and when I looked back at him I thought, what a staggeringly beautiful creature he was.

His eyes alone would have done the trick, but he'd been gifted with so much more, the thick massive blond hair, the large finely shaped mouth and an expression eloquent of comprehension as well as intelligence, and under the light of the gasolier he was the matinee idol drifting before me, carrying me out of myself into some unmeasured moment in which I relished his appearance as if he couldn't or didn't know.

"And you, my timeless one," he said in a soft sure voice with no hint of accusation in it, "I see you here in your exquisite setting of mirrors and gold, of human love and obvious patrimony, and robbed of it all in essence by some careless demon who's left you orphaned and uneasily, no, torturously, ensconced among the mortals you still so desperately need. "

"No," I said. "I fled my Maker. But now I seek you out, and so I have you, even if just for this night, but I do love you, love you as surely as I love Aunt Queen, and Nash, and Goblin, yes, as much as I have loved Goblin, I love you. Forgive me. I can't keep it back. "

"There is no forgiving," said Lestat. "Your head teems with images, and I catch them blinkering and crowding your brain as they seek a narrative, and so you must tell me, you must tell me all of your life, even what you think is not important, tell me all. Let it pour from you, and then we'll judge what's to be done with Goblin together. "

"And me?" I asked. I was exuberant. I was crazed. "We'll judge what's to be done with me?"

"Don't let me scare you so much, Little Brother," he said in the kindest tone. "The worst thing I'd do to you is leave you -- vanish on you as if we'd never met. And I don't think of that now. I think rather of knowing you, that I'm fond of you and have begun to treasure you, and your conscience shines rather bright for me. But tell me, haven't I failed you already? Surely you don't see me now as the hero you once imagined. "

"How so?" I asked, amazed. "You're here, you're with me. You saved Stirling. You stopped a disaster. "

"I wasn't able to destroy your beastly phantom," he said with an amiable shrug. "I can't even see him, and you've counted on me. And I threw the Fire at him with all I had. "

"Oh, but we've only just started," I responded. "You'll help me with him, won't you? We'll figure it out together. "

"Yes, that's precisely what we'll do," he responded. "The thing is strong enough to menace others, no doubt of it. If it can fight you as it did, it can attack others -- that much I can tell, and that it responds to gravity, which for our purposes is a good sign. "

"How so gravity?" I asked.

"It sucked the very air when it left you," he answered. "It's material. I told you. It has some chemistry in the physical world. All ghosts are material in probability. But there are those who know more of this than me. I only once saw a human ghost, talked to a human ghost, spent an hour with a ghost, and it terrified me quite out of my mind. "

"Yes," I replied, "it was Roger, wasn't it, who came to you in the Chronicle called Memnoch the Devil. I read how you talked with him and how he persuaded you to care for his mortal daughter, Dora. I read every word. I believed it; I believed that you saw Roger and that you went to Heaven and Hell. "

"And well you should," he rejoined. "I never lied in those pages, though it was another that took the dictation of it. I have been with Memnoch the Devil, though what he really was -- devil or playful spirit -- I still don't know. " He paused. "It's more than plain to me," he said, "that you've noticed the difference between my eyes. "

"I'm sorry, I couldn't help it," I said quickly. "It isn't a disfigurement. "

He made a gesture of dismissal along with a kind smile.

"This right eye was torn from me," he said, "just as I described it, by those spirits who would have prevented me from fleeing Memnoch's Hell. And then it was returned to me, here on Earth, and sometimes I believe that this eye can see strange things. "

"What strange things?"

"Angels," he said, musing, "or those who call themselves angels, or would have me conclude that they're angels; and they have come to me in the long years since I fled Memnoch. They've come to me as I lay like one in a coma on the chapel floor of St. Elizabeth's, the building in New Orleans which was bequeathed to me by Roger's daughter. It seems my stolen eye, my restored eye, my bloodshot eye, has established some link with these beings, and I could tell you a tale of them, but now is not the time. "

"They harmed you, didn't they?" I asked, sensing it in his manner.

He nodded.

"They left my body there for my friends to watch over," he explained, and for the first time since I'd seen him, he looked troubled, indecisive, even faintly confused.

"But my spirit they took with them," he went on. "And in a realm as palpable as this very room they set me down to do their bidding, always threatening to snatch back this right eye, to take it forever if I didn't do what they bid me to do. "

He hesitated, shaking his head.

"I think it was the eye," he said, "the eye which gave them the claim on me, the ability to reach down to me, in this realm, and take me -- it was the eye, stolen in another dominion and then returned on Earth to its rightful socket. You might say that as they looked down from their lofty Heaven, if Heaven it is, they could see, through the mists of Earth, this bright and shining eye. "

He sighed as if he were suddenly miserable. He looked at me searchingly.