Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [35]
A calm came over me along with a quiet happy expectation, as though he had enforced it.
He led the way and I came quietly behind.
We went into my sitting room, which was on the front of the house, and we had a good view of my bedroom through the open sliding double doors, and there was my enormous and regal bed, the baldachin padded in red satin, and the matching red chairs, thick and inviting, scattered from bedroom to sitting room, and between the front windows of the sitting room, my computer and desk. The giant television, to which I was as addicted as anybody, was catercorner, near the inside wall.
Beneath the gasolier stood the center table with its two chairs facing each other, and this was where I often sat, upright and very comfortable, to read. I wrote here in my diary while I was watching television with one eye. This was where I wanted to be with Lestat. Not in the two chairs by the fireplace, which was dead this time of year.
I saw at once that my computer had been turned on.
Lestat sensed that I was alarmed and then he too saw the message floating in green block type on the black monitor:
NO LESTAT.
The very sight of it sent a jolt through me, and I went at once to the machine and turned it off.
“From Goblin,” said Lestat, and I nodded, as I stood sentinel waiting for the machine to be switched on again, but it was not.
A violent series of chills passed over me. I turned around. I was vaguely aware that Lestat stood on the opposite side of the center table and that he was watching me, but I could scarcely pay any attention. The heavy draperies of the front windows were swaying, and the gasolier above me had started to move. There was that faint tinkling music from the glass cups and their baubles. My vision was clouded.
“Get away from me,” I whispered. “I won’t see you, I’ll shut my eyes, I swear it.” And I did it, screwing my eyes tight as any little child pretending to sleep, but I lost my balance and I had to open my eyes before I fell.
I saw Goblin standing to my right, opaque, detailed, my duplicate—and the computer was on and the keyboard was clicking, and a series of nonsense syllables were jabbering across the monitor while a vague rumble came from the small computer speakers.
I tried to shut my eyes again, but I was too seduced by him, his total double of me, even to my leather coat and black pants, and his crazed expression which surely didn’t reflect mine. His eyes were glittering viciously and triumphantly, and his smile was like that of a clown.
“I’m telling you, go, Goblin,” I said, but this only redoubled his power, and then the image began to thin and to expand.
“Let me hurt him!” Lestat said urgently. “Give me the permission.”
In confusion, I couldn’t answer, even though I heard Lestat plead with me again. I felt the tight grip all around me, as though a boa constrictor had me, or so I imagined, and my vision had left me, melting into the violent chills that I couldn’t shake. I felt the tiny pinpricks all over my face and the backs of my hands, and I tried to lift my hands to ward them off but my hands hurt. Every bit of my bare flesh hurt, even to the back of my neck.
A panic took hold of me, as if I’d been caught in a swarm of bees. Even my eyelids were attacked, and I knew that I’d fallen to the floor, but I couldn’t orient myself. I could feel the carpet under my hand and I couldn’t get up.
“Little Brother, let me hurt him,” Lestat said again. And I heard my own voice as if it came from someone else.
“Damn him,” I said, “hurt him.”
But there had come that magnetic sense of union, Goblin and I, indivisible, and I saw the sunny room again in which a child stood in a wooden playpen scattered with toys, a curly headed toddler in little overalls whom I knew to be myself, and beside him his double, the two of us laughing together, without a single care—look at the red flowers in the linoleum, look at the sunshine, see the spoon flying end over end in an arc through the air—and fast after this there tumbled other images and random moments: