I am, as far as I know.. the only childe of the magnifcently guilt-stricken Louis de Pointe du Lac. Madeleine, the French woman that the child-vampire Claudia desired so to be made. I had longed to die just a year before, when my angel, my daughter, had died so suddenly, leaving this tremendous void in my life. We had been all alone, Nathalie and I, for my lovers came and went like the wind.. supporting us enough for the time that each stayed. I was a dollmaker, a craft I had learned from an old lover, someone so unimportant that after all these years I can't even remember his name. But after Nathalie was so suddenly stripped from me, the only way I found solace was through creating and recreating her through the dolls. Porcelain cold white, black spiraling curls, rosebud lips; the dolls were like having her by my side... my daughter for eternity. With the sateen bonnets and crinkled shoes, she was forever my baby. Then one night in the shop, I met sweet death in a little yellow dress, death innocent with liquid blue eyes. The year, I recall, was 1889, the extravagent world of Victorian era France. And I was in Paris, the en vouge bohemian pinnacle of the world at that time. A little girl came into my shop, all alone, asking for a doll with the shape of a woman. 'A lady doll..' she said so simply, so earnestly that I felt obliged to make it. She came in, again and again, so mute and beautiful.. watching the dolls, watching me. Her eyes seemed so innocent, but something behind the multifaceted cristalline gaze hid a pain and a longing.. something I found unexplicable, and therefore paid no attention to. Then, one night I saw her milling about in front of the lead-glass windows of the shop, her golden head bowed as if a terrible burden was pressing on her bird shoulders. I waved her in, watching the expression on her face, the passion in her eyes. She had the face of my Nathalie, the same sculpted lips and long curling lashes, and I knelt to touch her face as if she was simply Nathalie herself restored to me from the gods. Her hands were in my hair, toying with the copper spirals, and then her neck swivled and I felt her teeth at my neck. I realised it all.. she needed me as much I needed her. Vampire child, and her dollmaker. We dodged through the crowds on the packed Parisian streets, and breezed into the most fantastic rooms in the Hotel-St.Gabriel. There, we waited. Me, toying childishly with my rings, with my skirts..watching the green taffeta reflect incandescent light against the silk lined walls; her, sitting as still as a Greacan staue, round feautures like marble. I remember it so clearly, for one has much time muse over these things when one is alone. I remember Louis, how beautiful he was with his midnight hair and emerald eyes, how I tried so hard to seduce him. I remember how he finally gave in. There was screaming, there was pain. It was terrible to watch Claudia cry, for I had grown to love her. The red tears streaked her alabaster face, falling onto her little dress... I wanted to pull her away.. protect her. But Louis made me, made me as a gift for Claudia before he would leave her for Armand. I loved life as a vampire, I loved the beauty of the night, the beauty of Louis and Claudia, the beauty of mortals how I saw them with my new vampire eyes. I loved the thrill of the seduction and the kill, I loved the chill that ran down my spine as I felt lives run out in a red stream under my lips. But it wasn't to last. Louis had been, as I was told my Claudia, 'dancing with the devil'.. seeing a vampire named Armand every night. Viciously jealous.. evil.. these are words she described Armand as. But I enjoyed those months with just Claudia; making her room into a fairy-land, dressing her like the lady doll she wished to be. The night, I would never forget it. All seemed calm, and I sat stitching lace and satin for a little dress for Cladia, I believe. The doors to the room seemed to fly open, and in a cacophony of pale, black-clad forms we were dragged out. I still can hear Claudia's silver-fluted scream, and Louis yelling for us to fight them.. but it was of no use. I remember being dragged away, watching them tear away Claudia's little yellow dress. Then we were seperated. The last glimpse I had of her was her getting lost in the arms of some tall, yellow-haired man. Then she was gone. I was alone in the hall with some fledgling named Cecile, a tall and slender creature as myself. She was cackling witch-like, her lips pulled back from her fanged teeth in a laughing sneer, and it was that laughing that disgusted me. In a moment of sheer madness, I lunged at her, taking her neck.. draining her as if she was a fragile mortal. She burned that dawn in the courtyard, all alone. The 1994 film Interveiw with the Vampire had such a beautiful scene where Claudia and I were burnt to nothing but dust, arms anchored about eachother. Moving and artistic. But completely false. In truth it was just the crumpled form of that fledgling and dusty ashes of an unknown, mingled with a clip of Claudia's curls Raiding a trunk in the back, I stole a black dress and a wide-brimmed poke bonnet to cover my flaming red locks. I escaped into the night, alone and greiving for I thought that I had lost Claudia. A hundred years have passed since then, and I am still searching for the feeling stabbing at my heart to have found my family and my Claudia again. It all seems so black and surreal, like a macabre play, but I know that somehow, someway it will fall into place.