How It All Goes Down
- Louis and Claudia leave New Orleans behind on a ship bound for Europe.
- For Claudia, this trip is almost as bad as one of those cruises where the toilets don't work. She's cooped up in a room with Louis, who's been brooding on the very nature of vampiredom for weeks.
- Louis comes to the conclusion that's he's damned. Damned if he does. Damned if he doesn't. Damned damned damned.
- Once they arrive in Europe, Claudia and Louis begin scouring the countryside for fellow bloodsuckers.
- One night, Claudia and Louis arrive at a village inn decorated with a crucifix and a garland of garlic over the door.
- Everyone inside is totally freaking out, and Louis investigates.
- In a back room, Louis finds a man named Morgan sitting beside the dead body of his wife, Emily. The cause of death: two puncture wounds on her throat.
- Morgan has a story to tell Louis.
- When Morgan arrived in the village, he found the villagers engaging in some weird ceremony.
- They had a wild horse running around a graveyard. When the horse stopped on a certain grave, they dug it up. The body inside was as fresh as it was the day before it died. So the villagers chopped its head off with a shovel.
- Ick. Now they want to do the same to Emily.
- Louis can't do anything to save Emily, but he does think he might be able to find the vampire who did this to her.
- The woman in the inn tells Claudia and Louis that the monster comes from some ruins to the north, so they set off in their carriage to check it out.
- Claudia and Louis arrive at the ruins at the same time that someone… or something… else does: it's a creepy, rotting figure with a human slung over its shoulders like a sack of potatoes.
- Here's how Louis describes this creature: "Two huge eyes bulged from naked sockets and two small, hideous holes make up his nose; only a putrid, leathery flesh enclosed his skull, and the rank, rotting rags that covered his frame were thick with earth and slime and blood" (2.167). It's like he's fighting a destitute Lord Voldemort.
- Louis fights the gruesome beast and kills him. The human that he was dragging around turns out to be Morgan. It's almost sunrise, so Louis and Claudia have no choice but to feed on poor Morgan and return to the village to spend the night—er, spend the day.
- Louis and Claudia tell the villagers that they've killed the vampire, and they retire for the day.
- Louis summarizes the next bit of their journey, saying that they encountered multiple "mindless corpse[s]" (2.183) in every village across Transylvania, Hungary, and Bulgaria.
- He and Claudia begin to worry that Lestat was the only other vampire besides them, and that they've killed him. Whoops.
- Around this time, Claudia starts to wonder about making another vampire of her own, and Louis makes her stop talking about stuff like that.
- Claudia decides it would be best for them to go to Paris.