Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [36]
“Goblin.” I think I whispered. “The one to whom I belong and to whom I’ve always belonged. No one can understand, no one can fathom.” Goblin, Goblin, Goblin.
The pleasure crested with unspeakable sweetness, and subsided into waves of certain bliss.
He was withdrawing, leaving me cold and hurt and lonely all over, fiercely, catastrophically lonely—he was deserting me.
“Hurt him!” I said the words with all my breath, terrified they weren’t audible, and then my eyes opened, and above me I saw the great sprawling image of myself, face wavering and grotesque, and suddenly it was made up of pinpoints of fire!
Lestat had sent the Fire Gift to burn the blood he’d taken, and I heard Goblin’s silent wail, his soundless raging scream.
Oh, no, it was wrong, not my Goblin, how could I have done it, how could I have betrayed him! His scream was like a siren. A rain of tiny ash descended on me, in fact it seemed flung at me, and his scream rose again, piercing my ears.
The air was full of the smell of the burning, like the smell of human hair burning, and the huge shapeless image hovered, drawing itself together into my solid double for one fateful and frightfully opaque moment, challenging me, cursing me—Evil devil, Quinn, evil! Bad. Bad!—and then it was gone, escaping through the door, leaving the gasolier creaking on its chain and the electric lights blinking, and sending a rippling wind through the lace panels on the windows as silence and stillness closed in.
I was on the floor. The blinking lights were unendurable. Lestat came to me and helped me to my feet, and ran his hands caressingly over my hair.
“I couldn’t do it,” he said, “until it was leaving you, because when it was with you the Fire might have burnt you too.”
“I understand,” I said. I was in a fever. “And I never thought to do it, to punish him with it, but think how he learns now. He’s quick. He knows already what’s obvious to me and to you, no doubt, that if I try to burn him, if either of us does again, he’ll fuse with me again and make the fire burn me.”
“Maybe he’ll do that,” said Lestat, guiding me to the straight-back chair at the table. “But do you think he wants for you to die?”
“No, he can’t want that,” I answered. I was out of breath, as though I’d been running. “He takes his life from me. Whatever he was before I came along, I can’t imagine. But it’s my focus, my love, that makes him strong now. And goddamn it, I can’t stop loving him, feeling I’m betraying him, and he feeds off that!”
The blinking of the lights had stopped. The lace curtains were still. Chills ran up and down my spine. With a noise of static in the speakers, the computer suddenly went off.
Stammering, I told Lestat about the image I’d seen, of myself in the playpen, of the old linoleum that must have been in the kitchen, and of Goblin with me, and that it wasn’t something I remembered but something I knew to be true.
“He’s shown me those images before when he’s attacked me, images of myself as an infant.”
“And all this over the years?”
“No, only now after the Dark Gift—with these attacks, when I fuse with him as I would with a mortal victim. It’s the Dark Blood. It’s become the currency of memory, the vampiric blood. He wants me to know he has these memories of a time when I saw him and strengthened him with that vision even before I knew how to talk.”
Lestat had settled in the chair on the other side of the table, and in a split second I developed a positive superstition about him having his back to the hallway door.
I went to the door and closed it, and then, coming back, I unplugged the computer entirely, and I asked if we could rearrange the chairs. Lestat caught me as I reached out to do this.
“Be patient, Little Brother,