vampire chronicles | Page 9

of his
entire body, much too fast for me to see, he was suddenly standing disdainfully at the foot
of the steps. `I thought you wanted to die, Louis,' he said."
The boy made a soft, abrupt sound when the vampire said his name which the vampire
acknowledged with the quick statement, "Yes, that is my name," and went on.
"Well, I lay there helpless in the face of my own cowardice and fatuousness again," he
said. "Perhaps so directly confronted with it, I might in time have gained the courage to
truly take my life, not to whine and beg for others to take it. I saw myself turning on a
knife then, languishing in a day-to-day suffe ring which I found as necessary as penance
from the confessional, truly hoping death w ould find me unawares and render me ft for
eternal pardon. And also I saw myself as if in a vision standing at the head of the stairs,
just where my brother had stood, and then hurtling my body down on the bricks.
"But there was no time for courage. Or shall I say, there was no time in Lestat's plan for
anything but his plan. `Now listen to me, Louis,' he said, a nd he lay down beside me now
on the steps, his movement so graceful and so personal that at once it made me think
of a lover. I recoiled. But he put his right arm around me and pulled me close to his chest.
Never had I been this close to him before, a nd in the dim light I could see the magnificent
radiance of his eye and the unnatural mask of hi s skin. As I tried to move, he ,pressed his
right fingers against my lips a nd said, Be still. I am going to drain you now to the very
threshold of death, and I want you to be quiet, so quiet that you can almost hear the flow
of blood through your veins, so quiet that you can hear the flow of that same blood
through mine. It is your consci ousness, your will, which must keep you alive.' I wanted to
struggle, but he pressed so hard with his fingers that he held my entire prone body in
check; and as soon as I stopped my abortive at tempt at rebellion, he sank his teeth into
my neck."
The boy's eyes grew huge. He had drawn fart her and farther back in his chair as the
vampire spoke, and now his face was tense, his eyes narrow, as if he were preparing to
weather a blow.

"Have you ever lost a great amount of blood?" asked the vampire. "Do you know the
feeling?"
The boy's lips shaped the word no, but no sound came out. He cleared his throat. "No," he
said.
"Candles burned in the upstairs parlor, wh ere we had planned the death of the overseer.
An oil lantern swayed in the breeze on the ga llery. All of this light coalesced and began
to shimmer, as though a golden presence hovere d above me, suspended in the stairwell,
softly entangled with the rai lings, curling and contracting like smoke. `Listen, keep your
eyes wide,' Lestat whispered to me, his lips moving against my neck. I remember that the
movement of his lips raised the hair all ove r my body, sent a shock of sensation through
my body that was not unlike the pleasure of passion. . . "
He mused, his right fingers sli ghtly curled beneath his chin, the first finger appearing to
lightly stroke it. "The result was that with in minutes I was weak to paralysis. Panic-
stricken, I discovered I could not even will myself to speak. Lestat still held me, of
course, and his arm was like the weight of an ir on bar. I felt his teeth withdraw with such
a keenness that the two puncture wounds seemed enormous, lined with pain. And now he
bent over my helpless head and, taking his right hand off me, bit hi s own wrist. The blood
flowed down upon my shirt and coat, and he wa tched it with a narrow, gleaming eye. It
seemed an eternity that he watched it, and that shimmer of light now hung behind his
head like the backdrop of an apparition. I think that I knew what he meant to do even
before he did it, and I was waiting in my help lessness as if I'd been waiting for years. He
pressed his bleeding wrist to my mouth, said firmly, a little impatiently, `Louis, drink.'
And I did. `Steady,