riends immediately. One night, when Nicholas and Lestat were in one of Nicholas's private rooms, drunk as usual, when Lestat says something that scares him terribly. He was telling Nicholas about his mother, as he tells Nicholas everything, and he says, " We're going to die and not even know. We'll never know, and all this meaningless will go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witnesses to it. We won't have even that little bit of power to give in meaning in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead without ever knowing!" What he means is that when we die, there'll be nothing. He's saying that even after life is over we'll never know what we were here for. Lestat then fully understood what he was saying. "There was no judgment day, no final explanation, no luminous moment in which all terrible moments would be made right, all horrors redeemed. The witches burnt at the stake would never be avenged. No one was ever going to tell us anything!" This thought of the sudden end of everything about him with no answers at all terrified him. He said "Oh!" and he just kept saying it over and over, all night. He was so horrified with this thought. Nicholas assured Lestat that this feeling would pass, but it never did. It always lurked in the back of his mind somewhere. News that Lestat had "lost his religion" reached Lestat's mother. His mother spoke to him, and asked him what was the matter. Lestat told her as much of the truth as he could without scaring her more than she already was about dying. She was already so afraid of dying, and Lestat did not want to cause her more pain. Lestat's mother gave Lestat a few gold coins, the last of her savings, and told Lestat to go away to Paris, which had always been Lestat's dream. When Lestat refused to take her money; refused to leave her, she told him that she wanted t...