The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [210]
I think that he laughed.
I was beyond terror. I could not even scream.
I had dropped the wine. The glass bottle was rolling on the floor. And as I tried to move forward, to gather my senses and make my body more than something drunken and sluggish, his thin, gangly limbs found animation all at once.
He advanced on me.
I didn’t cry out. I gave a low roar of angry terror and scrambled up off the bed, tripping over the small table and running from him as fast as I could.
But he caught me in long white fingers that were as powerful and as cold as they had been the night before.
“Let me go, damn you, damn you, damn you!” I was stammering. My reason told me to plead, and I tried. “I’ll just go away, please. Let me out of here. You have to. Let me go.”
His gaunt face loomed over me, his lips drawn up sharply into his white cheeks, and he laughed a low riotous laugh that seemed endless. I struggled, pushing at him uselessly, pleading with him again, stammering nonsense and apologies, and then I cried, “God help me!” He clapped one of those monstrous hands over my mouth.
“No more of that in my presence, Wolfkiller, or I’ll feed you to the wolves of hell,” he said with a little sneer. “Hmmmm? Answer me. Hmmmm?”
I nodded and he loosened his grip.
His voice had had a momentary calming effect. He sounded capable of reason when he spoke. He sounded almost sophisticated.
He lifted his hands and stroked my head as I cringed.
“Sunlight in the hair,” he whispered, “and the blue sky fixed forever in your eyes.” He seemed almost meditative as he looked at me. His breath had no smell whatsoever, nor did his body, it seemed. The smell of mold was coming from his clothes.
I didn’t dare to move, though he was not holding me. I stared at his garments.
A ruined silk shirt with bag sleeves and smocking at the neck of it. And worsted leggings and short ragged pantaloons.
In sum he was dressed as men had been centuries before. I had seen such clothes in tapestries in my home, in the paintings of Caravaggio and La Tour that hung in my mother’s rooms.
“You’re perfect, my Lelio, my Wolfkiller,” he said to me, his long mouth opening wide so that again I saw the small white fangs. They were the only teeth he possessed.
I shuddered. I felt myself dropping to the floor.
But he picked me up easily with one arm and laid me down gently on the bed.
In my mind I was praying fiercely, God help me, the Virgin Mary help me, help me, help me, as I peered up into his face.
What was it I was seeing? What had I seen the night before? The mask of old age, this grinning thing cut deeply with the marks of time and yet frozen, it seemed, and hard as his hands. He wasn’t a living thing. He was a monster. A vampire was what he was, a blood-sucking corpse from the grave gifted with intellect!
And his limbs, why did they so horrify me? He looked like a human, but he didn’t move like a human. It didn’t seem to matter to him whether he walked or crawled, bent over or knelt. It filled me with loathing. Yet he fascinated me. I had to admit it. He fascinated me. But I was in too much danger to allow such a strange state of mind.
He gave a deep laugh now, his knees wide apart, his fingers resting on my cheek as he made a great arc over me.
“Yeeeees, lovely one, I’m hard to look at!” he said. His voice was still a whisper and he spoke in long gasps. “I was old when I was made. And you’re perfect, my Lelio, my blue-eyed young one, more beautiful even without the lights of the stage.”
The long white hand played with my hair again, lifting up the strands and letting them drop as he sighed.
“Don’t weep, Wolfkiller,” he said. “You’re chosen, and your tawdry little triumphs in the House of Thesbians will be nothing once this night comes to its close.”
Again came that low riot of laughter.
There was no doubt in my mind, at least at this moment, that