The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [222]
I was lost in the sound as it bounced off the stones and came back at me. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t close my mouth or cover it.
But through the barred entranceway and through a dozen narrow windows above I saw the unmistakable light of morning coming. My screams died. The stones had begun to glow. The light seeped around me like scalding steam, burning my eyelids.
I made no decision to run. I was simply doing it, running up and up to the inner chamber.
As I came out of the passage, the room was full of a dim purple fire. The jewels overflowing the chest appeared to be moving. I was almost blind as I lifted the lid of the sarcophagus.
Quickly, it fell into place above me. The pain in my face and hands died away, and I was still and I was safe, and fear and sorrow melted into a cool and fathomless darkness.
7
T WAS thirst that awakened me.
And I knew at once where I was, and what I was, too. There were no sweet mortal dreams of chilled white wine or the fresh green grass beneath the apple trees in my father’s orchard.
In the narrow darkness of the stone coffin, I felt of my fangs with my fingers and found them dangerously long and keen as little knife blades.
And a mortal was in the tower, and though he hadn’t reached the door of the outer chamber I could hear his thoughts.
I heard his consternation when he discovered the door to the stairs unlocked. That had never happened before. I heard his fear as he discovered the burnt timbers on the floor and called out “Master.” A servant was what he was, and a somewhat treacherous one at that.
It fascinated me, this soundless hearing of his mind, but something else was disturbing me. It was his scent!
I lifted the stone lid of the sarcophagus and climbed out. The scent was faint, but it was almost irresistible. It was the musky smell of the first whore in whose bed I had spent my passion. It was the roasted venison after days and days of starvation in winter. It was new wine, or fresh apples, or water roaring over a cliff’s edge on a hot day when I reached out to gulp it in handfuls.
Only it was immeasurably richer than that, this scent, and the appetite that wanted it was infinitely keener and more simple.
I moved through the secret tunnel like a creature swimming through the darkness and, pushing out the stone in the outer chamber, rose to my feet.
There stood the mortal, staring at me, his face pale with shock.
An old, withered man he was, and by some indefinable tangle of considerations in his mind, I knew he was a stable master and a coachman. But the hearing of this was maddeningly imprecise.
Then the immediate malice he felt towards me came like the heat of a stove. And there was no misunderstanding that. His eyes raced over my face and form. The hatred boiled, crested. It was he who had procured the fine clothes I wore. He who had tended the unfortunates in the dungeon while they had lived. And why, he demanded in silent outrage, was I not there?
This made me love him very much, as you can imagine. I could have crushed him to death in my bare hands for this.
“The master!” he said desperately. “Where is he? Master!”
But what did he think the master was? A sorcerer of some kind, that was what he thought. And now I had the power. In sum, he didn’t know anything that would be of use to me.
But as I comprehended all this, as I drank it up from his mind, quite against his will, I was becoming entranced with the veins in his face and in his hands. And that smell was intoxicating me.
I could feel the dim throbbing of his heart, and then I could taste his blood, just what it would be like, and there came to me some full-blown sense of it, rich and hot as it filled me.
“The master’s gone, burned in the fire,” I murmured, hearing a strange monotone coming from myself. I moved slowly towards him.
He glanced at the blackened floor.