The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [211]
It occurred to me quite clearly I was being punished for my life, and yet that seemed absurd. Millions believed as I believed the world over. Why the hell was this happening to me? And a grim possibility started irresistibly to take shape, that the world was no more meaningful than before, and this was but another horror …
“In God’s name, get away!” I shouted. I had to believe in God now. I had to. That was absolutely the only hope. I went to make the Sign of the Cross.
For one moment he stared at me, his eyes wide with rage. And then he remained still.
He watched me make the Sign of the Cross. He listened to me call upon God again and again.
He only smiled, making his face a perfect mask of comedy from the proscenium arch.
And I went into a spasm of crying like a child. “Then the devil reigns in heaven and heaven is hell,” I said to him. “Oh, God, don’t desert me …” I called on all the saints I had ever for a little while loved.
He struck me hard across the face. I fell to one side and almost slipped from the bed to the floor. The room went round. The sour taste of the wine rose in my mouth.
And I felt his fingers again on my neck.
“Yes, fight, Wolfkiller,” he said. “Don’t go into hell without a battle. Mock God.”
“I don’t mock!” I protested.
Once again he pulled me to himself.
And I fought him harder than I had ever fought anyone or anything in my existence, even the wolves. I beat on him, kicked him, tore at his hair. But I might as well have fought the animated gargoyles from a cathedral, he was that powerful.
He only smiled.
Then all the expression went out of his face. It seemed to become very long. The cheeks were hollow, the eyes wide and almost wondering, and he opened his mouth. The lower lip contracted. I saw the fangs.
“Damn you, damn you, damn you!” I was roaring and bellowing. And he drew closer and the teeth went through my flesh.
Not this time, I was raging, not this time. I will not feel it. I will resist. I will fight for my soul this time.
But it was happening again.
The sweetness and the softness and the world far away, and even he in his ugliness was curiously outside of me, like an insect pressed against a glass who causes no loathing in us because he cannot touch us, and the sound of the gong, and the exquisite pleasure, and then I was altogether lost. I was incorporeal and the pleasure was incorporeal. I was nothing but pleasure. And I slipped into a web of radiant dreams.
A catacomb I saw, a rank place. And a white vampire creature waking in a shallow grave. Bound in heavy chains he was, the vampire; and over him bent this monster who had abducted me, and I knew that his name was Magnus, and that he was mortal still in this dream, a great and powerful alchemist. And he had unearthed and bound this slumbering vampire right before the crucial hour of dusk.
And now as the light died out of the heavens, Magnus drank from his helpless immortal prisoner the magical and accursed blood that would make him one of the living dead. Treachery it was, the theft of immortality. A dark Prometheus stealing a luminescent fire. Laughter in the darkness. Laughter echoing in the catacomb. Echoing as if down the centuries. And the stench of the grave. And the ecstasy, absolutely fathomless, and irresistible, and then drawing to a finish.
I was crying. I lay on the straw and I said:
“Please, don’t stop it …”
Magnus was no longer holding me and my breathing was once again my own, and the dreams were dissolved. I fell down and down as the nightful of stars slid upwards, jewels affixed to a dark purple veil. “Clever that. I had thought the sky was … real.”
The cold winter air was moving just a little in this room. I felt the tears on my face. I was consumed with thirst!
And far, far away from me, Magnus stood looking down at me, his hands dangling low beside his thin legs.
I tried to move. I was