could scream of good and evil, proclaim themselves angels or devils, and mortals would stand up and cheer. Sometimes they seemed the pure embodiment of madness. And yet it was technologically dazzling, the intricacy of their performance. It was barbaric and cerebral in a way that I don «t think the world of ages past had ever seen.course it was metaphor, the raving. None of them believed in angels or devils, no matter how well they assumed their parts. And the players of the old Italian commedia had been as shocking, as inventive, as lewd.it was entirely new, the extremes to which they took it, the brutality and the defiance - and the way they were embraced by the world from the very rich to the very poor.there was something vampiric about rock music. It must have sounded supernatural even to those who don »t believe in the supernatural. I mean the way the electricity could stretch a single note forever; the way harmony could be layered upon harmony until you felt yourself dissolving in the sound. So very eloquent of dread it was, this music. The world just didn «t have it in any form before., I wanted to get closer to it. I wanted to do it. Maybe make the little unknown band of Satan »s Night Out famous. I was ready to come up.took a week to rise, more or less. I fed on the fresh blood of the little animals who live under the earth when I could catch them. Then I started clawing for the surface, where I could summon the rats. From there it wasn «t too difficult to take felines and finally the inevitable human victim, though I had to wait a long time for the particular kind I wanted - a man who had killed other mortals and showed no remorse.came along eventually, walking right by the fence, a young male with a grizzled beard who had murdered another, in some far-off place on the other side of the world. True killer, this one. And oh, that first taste of human struggle and human blood! Clothes from nearby houses, getting some of the gold and jewels I »d hidden in the Lafayette Cemetery, that was no problem.! Of course I was scared from time to time. The stench of chemicals and gasoline sickened me. The drone of air conditioners and the whine of the jet planes overhead hurt my ears.after the third night up, I was roaring around New Orleans on a big black Harley-Davidson motorcycle making plenty of noise myself. I was looking for more killers to feed on. I wore gorgeous black leather clothes that I «d taken from my victims, and I had a little Sony Walkman stereo in my pocket that fed Bach» s Art of the Fugue through tiny earphones right into my head as I blazed along.was just a teeny-weeny bit unimaginative. I was back in action. New Orleans was once again my hunting ground.for my strength, well, it was three times what it had once been. I could leap from the street to the top of a four-story building. I could pull iron gratings off windows. I could bend a copper penny double. I could hear human voices and thoughts, when I wanted to, for blocks around.the end of the first week I had a pretty female lawyer in a downtown glass and steel skyscraper who helped me procure a legal birth certificate, Social Security card, and driver «s license. A good portion of my old wealth was on its way to New Orleans from coded accounts in the immortal Bank of London and the Rothschild Bank.more important, I was swimming in realizations. I knew that everything the amplified voices had told me about the twentieth century was...
