“Lestat, don’t you want to know what your cells are made of?” he asked. “Don’t you want to know what chemicals are in the blood that’s keeping senescence in your body completely at bay?”

“Senescence?” I didn’t know quite what the word meant. We are dead things, I was thinking. You are a physician for the dead.

“Ah, but Lestat,” Fareed said. “We’re not dead things. That’s poetry, and it’s old poetry, and it will not endure. Only good poetry endures. We’re very much alive, all of us. Your body’s a complex organism playing host to another predatory organism that is somehow transforming it little by little year by year for some distinct evolutionary purpose. Don’t you want to know what that is?”

These words changed everything for me. They were light dawning, because I saw then a whole realm of possibility that I’d never seen before. Of course he might do things like that. Of course.

He talked on and on then, scientifically and I suppose brilliantly, but his terminology became thicker and more foreign. Try as I might, I’d never been able to fathom modern science at all. No amount of preternatural intelligence allowed me to really absorb medical texts. I had only the layman’s smattering of the words he was using—DNA, mitochondria, viruses, eukaryotic cell tissue, senescence, genome, atoms, quarks, whatever. I pored over the books of those who wrote for the popular audience, and retained little or nothing but respect and humility and a deepening sense of my own wretchedness at being outside of life when life itself involved such magnificent revelations.

He sensed it was useless.

“Come, let me show you a very small part of what I can do,” said Fareed.

And down we went into the laboratories again. Almost all the blood drinkers were gone, but I caught the faint scent of a human. Maybe more than one human.

He offered me a tantalizing possibility. Did I want to feel erotic passion, the same way I’d known it when I was a young man of twenty in Paris, before I died? Well, he could help me achieve this. And if he did, I would produce semen, and he would like to take a sample of that.

I was stunned. Of course, I wasn’t about to turn this down. “Well, just how are we going to collect this semen?” I asked, laughing, and even blushing in spite of myself. “Even when I was alive, I preferred to carry out all my erotic experiments with others.”

He offered me a choice. Behind a glass wall there sat, on a large soft bed, a young human female, clad only in a white flannel sleeping shirt, reading a thick hardcover book under a dim lamp. She couldn’t see us through the one-way glass. She couldn’t hear us. I figured her to be perhaps thirty-five or -six, which was quite young for these times, though it would not have been two hundred years ago, and I had to confess to myself, she looked familiar to me. Her hair was thick and long and wavy and distinctly blond though rather dark blond, and she had deep-set blue eyes that were a little too pale perhaps to be beautiful, and well-balanced features and a rather innocent-looking but generous mouth.

The room was like a stage set with its blue toile wallpaper and bedding, and frilly shaded lamps, and even a picture on the wall that one might find in a common bedroom, of an old nineteenth-century English village street. Geese and a creek and a bridge. Only the medical texts on the bedside table and the heavy book in the woman’s hands seemed out of place.

She looked luscious in her white flannel shirt, with high firm breasts and long well-shaped legs. She was marking something in her book with a pen.

“You may couple with her, in which case I shall take the sample from her,” Fareed explained. “Or you may take the sample for me yourself as you desire in the old solitary way.” He made a gesture with his right hand opening his five fingers.

I didn’t ponder for long. When I’d slipped into a human body thanks to the machinations of the Body Thief, I’d enjoyed the company of two beautiful women, but that had not been in this body, my body, my vampiric body.

“The woman is well paid, respected, at home here,” said Seth. “She is a doctor herself. You will neither surprise her nor horrify her. She has never been a part of such an experiment before, but she is prepared for it. And she will be well rewarded when it’s over.”

Well, if no harm comes to her, I thought. How clean and pretty she was, with that well-scrubbed American look to her, and those shiny blue eyes, and her hair the color of fields of grain. I could almost smell her hair. In fact, I could smell it, a lovely fragrance of soapsuds or shampoo and sunshine. She looked delectable, and irresistible. I wanted every single drop of her blood. Could erotic feeling override that?

“All right, I’ll do it.”

But just how exactly could these gentlemen make a dead body like mine actually produce seed as if it were living?

The answer came swiftly with a series of injections and indeed an intravenous line that would continue throughout the experiment to deliver a powerful elixir of human hormones into my blood, overriding the vampiric body’s natural tendency to resist senescence long enough for the desire to develop, the sperm to be produced, and then ejaculated.

I thought it was hilariously funny.

Now I could write an essay of five hundred pages on how this experience unfolded, because I did feel biological erotic desire again, and I fell on the young woman about as mercilessly as any greedy aristocrat of my time ever fell on a milkmaid in his village. But it was precisely as my beloved Louis had said a long time ago, “the pale shadow of killing,” that is, the pale shadow of drinking blood, and it was over almost at once, it seemed, and then the passion was gone, back into the depths of memory once more as if it had never been aroused, the pinnacle, the ejaculation forgotten.

I’d felt strangely awkward afterwards. I was sitting on the bed beside this blond-haired fair-skinned human female, my back to a nest of sweet-smelling linen-covered pillows, and I felt I ought to talk to her, ask her how she came to be here, and why she was here.

And then quite suddenly, as I sat there, wondering if this was proper or even wise, she told me.

Her name was Flannery Gilman, she said. In a clear fresh West Coast American voice, she explained that she’d been studying “us” since the night I’d appeared on the stage as a rock star outside San Francisco, and so many of our kind had died as the result of my great scheme to be a mortal performer. She’d seen vampires that night with her own eyes, and had no doubt of their existence. She’d seen them immolated in the parking lot afterwards. Indeed, she’d scraped up samples of their burnt and oozing remains from the asphalt. She’d gathered burnt vampiric bones in plastic sacks, and she’d developed hundreds of photographs later of what she’d witnessed and captured on film. She’d spent five years studying and writing up her various specimens, preparing a thousand-page document to prove our existence and counter every objection she could anticipate from her medical colleagues. She’d gone broke because of her obsession.