by Rice, Anne
Lestat had also risen, and he came towards me and gestured for me to sit down again. He took my head in both his hands. There was no dreadful pressure; there was no pain. It was gentle, the manner in which he was holding me.
But I was too afraid to do anything but look up into his eyes quietly, and again I saw that small difference, that one eye was larger than the other by not even a fraction of an inch. I tried to repress the mere thought of it. I tried only to think I will do whatever you want of me, and without meaning for it to happen, I closed my eyes as if someone were about to hit me in the face.
“You think I’m going to kill you, don’t you?” I heard him say.
“I hope not,” I said shakily.
“Come on, Little Brother,” he said, “it’s time to leave this pretty little place to those who know so much about it. And you, my young friend, have to feed.”
And then I felt his arm tight around me. The air was rushing past me. I was clinging to him, though I don’t think I needed to, and we were out in the night, and we were moving towards the clouds.
4
It was like traveling with my Maker—the speed, the altitude and the strong arms holding me. I gave it all of my trust.
And then came the sudden plunge.
I was shaken as he let me go, and I had to stop myself from stumbling until the dizziness passed.
We stood on a terrace. A partially open glass door separated us from a lighted room. It was tastefully furnished in rather routine modern furniture—beige velvet chairs and couches, with the inevitable large television, muted lamps and scattered tables of iron and glass.
Two very pretty young brunette women were inside, one busy with a suitcase on the coffee table, and the other in front of a nearby mirror, brushing her long hair. They wore skimpy silk dresses, both pretty fashionable, revealing a great deal of their dark olive skin.
Lestat put his arm around me again and gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze.
“What does your mind tell you?” he whispered.
I let the Mind Gift loose, casting for the one at the mirror, and caught the whisper of murder at once. The other was even more accustomed to it, and it seemed that both of the women were party to a crime that was actually happening now somewhere at a distance from this place.
It was an elegant hotel, this building. Through a door I saw the bedroom. I caught the scent from a gin drink on one of the tables, I caught the scent of fresh flowers, and of course I caught the overwhelming scent of Fair Game.
The thirst rose in me. The thirst clouded my eyes. I tasted blood as though I were already drinking it, and I felt the abysmal and desperate emptiness that I always feel before I feast. Nothing will ever fill you. Nothing will ever make this abominable hunger go away.
“Fair Game exactly,” said Lestat in a low voice. “But we don’t let them suffer, no matter how rough we want to get.”
“No, Sir,” I answered deferentially. “May I have the one in front of the mirror?”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I can see her face in the mirror, and she’s cruel.”
He nodded.
He slipped the door open and we came into the cool refreshing air of the room. The thirst was too hot for it. The thirst was hopeless.
At once, the women cried out in protest. Where had we come from? Who were we? Vulgar words, threats.
With a remnant of my rational mind, I saw that the suitcase was filled with money, but what did it matter? How much more interesting was a huge vase of flowers near the far window, bursting with color. How much more interesting the blood.
Lestat drifted past me and caught the woman who ran to the right with both his arms. The rush of furious words from her came to an abrupt stop.
The other woman darted to the sofa, and I saw the gun there that she wanted so desperately to reach. I had her before she could lay her hand on it, and I crushed her against me, looking into her black eyes.
She gave me a string of curses in Spanish, and the thirst in me rose even more violently, as if her curses had drawn it out. I brushed her thick black hair back from her neck and ran my thumb over the artery. She was maddened, full of hatred.
Slowly, I bit into the fount of blood.
My Maker’s lessons came back to me. Love her sins, follow the path with her, make her evil your evil and you will do no evil. I struggled to obey as her mind was broken open. I probed for the murders and I found them, rampant, savage and always over the white powder; and the wealth that had drawn her out of the deep filthy slums of her birth to finery and fortune, to those who toasted her beauty and her cunning; and murder after murder of those as covered in blood as herself. Yes, love you, I whispered, love the sheer will and the ever present anger; yes, give it to me, the rage in the warm sweet blood flowing, and suddenly there came, towards me, her unbounded love.
Without language, she said, Surrender. Without language, she said, I see it!, and it was all of her life, without pagination, and her ripened soul expanded, and there was a terrifying recognition of circumstance and inevitability, her crimes pulled up by the roots from her heart as though by the hand of Heaven.
But the hunger in me was sated, I was filled by her, I had had her, and I drew back, kissing the puncture wounds, lapping the tiny trickles of blood that I’d spilled, healing the evidence, even as the drowsiness overcame me and then gently, gently I set her down on one of the indifferent chairs. I kissed her lips.
I knelt down before her. I forced my tongue between her lips and, opening her mouth, I sucked on her tongue and sank my teeth into it delicately, and there came again a small rush of blood.
Finally there was no more.
I closed her large empty eyes with my left fingers. I felt her eyes through their lids as her blood washed through me. I bent and kissed her breasts. The blood sent shock after shock through me. I let her go.
In the usual daze, I turned and saw Lestat waiting, the royal figure, studying me, musing it seemed, his yellow hair looking almost white in the lamplight, his violet eyes wide.
“You did it right that time, Little Brother,” he said. “You spilled not a single drop.”
There was so much I wanted to say. I wanted to talk of her life, the great overreaching scope of it that I had so deeply tasted, the score she kept with fate; and how hard I’d tried to do what my Maker had told me to do, not merely to devour the blood but devour the evil, dip my tongue deep down into the evil, but she was beside the point.
She was a victim. She who had never been a Subject was now Past Tense.
The blood had me. The warmth had me. The room was a phantasm. Lestat’s woman lay dead on the floor. And there was the suitcase of money, and it meant nothing, could buy nothing, could change nothing, could save no one. The flowers were bold and brilliant, pink lilies dripping with pollen, and dark red roses. The room was complete and final and still.
“No one will mourn them,” said Lestat softly. His voice seemed distant, beyond my reach. “No need to find a hasty grave.”
I thought of my Maker. I thought of the dark waters of Sugar Devil Swamp, the thick duckweed, the voice of the owls.
Something changed in the room, but Lestat didn’t know it.
“Come back to me,” said Lestat. “It’s important, Little Brother, not to let the blood weaken you afterwards, no matter how sweet it is.”
I nodded. But something was happening. We weren’t alone.
I could see the dim figure of my double forming behind Lestat. I could see Goblin, designed as I was designed. I could see the crazed smile on his face.
Lestat pivoted. “Where is he?” he whispered.
“No, Goblin, I forbid it,” I said. But there was no stopping him. The figure moved towards me with lightning speed, yet held itself together in human form. Right before my eyes he was seemingly as solid as I was; and then I felt the tingling all through my limbs as he merged with me, and the tiny stabs on my hands and my neck and my face. I struggled as if I were caught in a perfect n
et.
From deep inside me there came that orgasmic palpitation, that walloping sensation that I was one with him and nothing could part us, that I wanted it suddenly, yes, wanted him and me to be together always, yet I was saying something different.
“Get away from me, Goblin. Goblin, you must listen. I was the one, the one who brought you into being. Listen to me.”
But it was useless. The electric shivers wouldn’t stop, and I saw only images of the two of us as children, as boys, as men, all of it moving too fast for me to focus, to repudiate or confirm. Sunlight poured through an open doorway; I saw the flowered pattern of linoleum. I heard the laughter of toddlers, and I tasted milk.
I knew I was falling or about to fall, that Lestat’s firm hands were holding me, because I wasn’t in the room with the sunlight, but it was all that I could see, and there was Goblin, little Goblin frolicking and laughing, and I too was laughing. Love you, all right, need you, of course, yours, us together. I looked down and saw my chubby childish left hand, and I held a spoon in it and was banging with the spoon. And there was Goblin’s hand on top of mine. And over and over came that bang of the spoon against wood, and the sunlight, how beautifully it came in the door, but the flowers on the linoleum were worn.
Then, as violently as Goblin had come, he withdrew. I glimpsed the humanoid shape for no more than a second, the eyes huge, the mouth open; then his image expanded, lost its conformity and vanished.
The draperies of the room swayed, and the vase of flowers suddenly toppled, and I heard dimly the dripping of the water, and then the vase itself hit the soft rug.
In a fog, I stared at the wounded bouquet of flowers. Pink-throated lilies. I wanted to pick them up. The tiny wounds all over me stung me and hurt me. I hated him that he had made the vase fall over, that the lilies were spilt now on the floor.
I looked at the women, first one and then the other. They appeared to be sleeping. There was no death.
My Goblin, my very own Goblin. That verbless thought stayed with me. My familiar spirit, my partner in all of life; you belong to me and I belong to you.
Lestat was holding me by the shoulders. I could barely stand. In fact, if he had let me go I would have fallen. I couldn’t take my eyes off the pink-throated lilies.
“He didn’t have to make the flowers fall,” I said. “I taught him not to hurt things that were pretty. I taught him that when we were small.”
“Quinn,” said Lestat, “come back to me! I’m talking to you. Quinn!”
“You didn’t see him,” I said. I was shaking all over. I stared at the tiny wounds on my hands, but they were already healing. It was the same way with the pinpricks on my face. I wiped at my face. Faint traces of blood on my fingers.
“I saw the blood,” said Lestat.
“How did you see it?” I asked. I was growing stronger. I struggled to clear my mind.
“In the shape of a man,” Lestat said, “a man faintly sketched in blood, sketched in the air, just for an instant, and then there was a swirling cloud of tiny drops, and I saw it pass through the open door as rapidly as if it were being sucked out.”
“Then you know why I came looking for you,” I said. But I realized he couldn’t really see the spirit that Goblin was. He’d seen the blood, yes, because the blood was visible, but the spirit who had always appeared to me was invisible to him.
“It can’t really hurt you,” he said, his voice tender and kind. “It can’t take any real volume of blood from you. It took just a tiny taste of what you took from the woman.”
“But he’ll come again whenever he wants, and I can’t fight him, and each time, I could swear, it’s a little more.”
I steadied myself, and he released me, stroking my hair with his right hand. That casual gesture of affection coupled with his dazzling appearance—the vibrant eyes, the exquisitely proportioned features—entranced me even as the trance induced by Goblin slowly wore away.
“He found me here,” I said, “and I don’t even know where I am. He found me here, and he can find me anywhere, and each time, as I told you, he takes a little more blood.”
“Surely you can fight him,” Lestat said, encouragingly.
His expression was concerned and protective, and I felt such an overwhelming need of him and love for him that I was about to cry. I held it back.
“Maybe I can learn to fight him,” I said, “but is that enough?”
“Come, let’s leave this graveyard,” he answered. “You have to tell me about him. You have to tell me how this came about.”
“I don’t know that I have all the answers,” I said. “But I have a story to tell.”
I followed him out onto the terrace into the fresh air.
“Let’s go to Blackwood Manor,” I said. “I don’t know of another place where we can talk in such peace. Only my aunt is there tonight and her lovable entourage, and maybe my mother, and they’ll all leave us completely alone. They’re utterly used to me.”
“And Goblin?” he asked. “Will he be stronger there if he does come back?”
“He was as strong as ever only moments ago,” I responded. “I think that I’ll be stronger.”
“Then Blackwood Manor it is,” he said.
Again there came his firm arm around me and we were traveling upwards. The sky spread out, full of clouds, and then we broke through to the very stars.
5
Within moments we found ourselves in front of the big house, and I experienced a flashing sense of embarrassment as I looked at its huge two-story columned portico.
Of course the garden lights were on, brilliantly illuminating the fluted columns to their full height, and all of the many rooms were aglow. In fact, I had a rule on this and had had since boyhood, that at four o’clock all chandeliers in the main house had to be lighted, and though I was no longer that boy in the grip of twilight depression, the chandeliers were illuminated by the same clock.
A quick chuckle from Lestat caught me off guard.
“And why are you so embarrassed?” he asked genially, having easily read my mind. “America destroys her big houses. Some of them don’t even last a hundred years.” His accent lessened. He sounded more intimate. “This place is magnificent,” he said casually. “I like the big columns. The portico, the pediment, it’s all rather glorious. Perfect Greek Revival style. How can you be ashamed of such things? You’re a strange creature, very gentle I think, and out of kilter with your own time.”
“Well, how can I belong to it now?” I asked. “Given the Dark Blood and all its wondrous attributes. What do you think?”
I was at once ashamed of having answered so directly, but he merely took it in stride.
“No, but I mean,” he said, “you didn’t belong to this time before the Dark Gift, did you? The threads of your life, they weren’t woven into any certain fabric.” His manner seemed simple and friendly.
“I suppose you’re right,” I responded. “In fact, you’re very right.”
“You’re going to tell me all about it, aren’t you?” he asked. His golden eyebrows were very clear against his tanned skin, and he frowned slightly while smiling at the same time. It made him look very clever and loving, though I wasn’t sure why.
“You want me to?” I asked.
“Of course I do,” he answered. “It’s what you want to do and must do, besides.” There came that mischievous smile and frown again. “Now, shall we go inside?”
“Of course, yes,” I said, greatly relieved as much by his friendly manner as by what he said. I couldn’t quite grasp that I had him with me, that not only had I found him but that he was wanting to hear my story; he was at my side.
We went up the six front steps to the marble porch and I opened the door, which, on account of our being out here in the country, was never locked.
The broad central hallway stretched out before us, with its diamond-shaped white-and-black marble tiles running to the rear door, which was identical to the door by which we had just entered.
Partially blocking our view was one of the greatest attributes of Blackwood Manor, the spiral stairway, and this drew from Lestat a look of pure delight.
The frigid air-conditioning felt good.
“How gorgeous this is,” he said, gazing at the stairway with its graceful railing and delicate balusters. He stood in the well of it. “Why, it runs all the way to a third floor, doubling back on itself beautifully.”
“The third floor’s the attic,” I said. “It’s a treasure trove of trunks and old furniture. It’s yielded some of its little secrets to me.”
His eyes moved to the running mural on the hallway walls, a sunshine Italian pastoral giving way to a deep blue sky whose bright color dominated the entire long space and the hall above.
“Ah, now this is lovely,” he said, looking up at the high ceiling. “And look at the plaster moldings. Done by hand, weren’t they?”
I nodded. “New Orleans craftsmen,” I said. “It was the 1880s, and my great-great-great-grandfather was fiercely romantic and partially insane.”
“And this drawing room,” he said, peering through the arched doorway to his right. “It’s full of old furniture, fine furniture. What do you call it, Quinn? Rococo? It fills me with a dreamy sense of the past.”
Again, I nodded. I had gone rapidly from embarrassment to an embarrassing sense of pride. All my life people had capitulated to Blackwood Manor. They had positively raved about it, and I wondered now that I had been so mortified. But this being, this strangely compelling and handsome individual into whose hands I’d put my very life, had grown up in a castle, and I had feared he would laugh at what he saw.
On the contrary, he seemed thrilled by the golden harp and the old Pleyel piano. He glanced at the huge somber portrait of Manfred Blackwood, my venerable ancestor. And then slowly he turned enthusiastically to the dining room on the other side of the hall.
I made a motion for him to enter.
The antique crystal chandelier was showering a wealth of light on the long table, a table which could seat some thirty people, made especially for the room. The gilded chairs had only recently been re-covered in green satin damask, and the green and gold was repeated in the wall-to-wall carpet, with a gold swirl on a green ground. Gilded sideboards, inset with green malachite, were ranged between the long windows on the far wall.
