by Rice, Anne
“He knows about the wolves.” I was very unsure of myself. It was like recounting a dream I had all but forgotten. “He knows I killed the wolves back home. He knows the cloak I wear is lined with their fur.”
“What are you talking about? You mean you’ve spoken to him?”
“No, that’s just it,” I said. This was so confusing to me, so vague. I felt that swimming sensation again. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’ve never spoken to him, never been near him. But he knows.”
“Ah, Lestat,” he said. He sat back on the bench. He was smiling at me in the most endearing way. “Next you’ll be seeing ghosts. You have the strongest imagination of anyone I’ve ever known.”
“There are no ghosts,” I answered softly. I scowled at our little fire. I laid a few more lumps of coal on it.
All the humor went out of Nicolas.
“How in the hell could he know about the wolves? And how could you …”
“I told you already, I don’t know!” I said. I sat thinking and not saying anything, disgusted, maybe, at how ridiculous it all seemed.
And then as we remained silent together, and the fire was the only sound or movement in the room, the name Wolfkiller came to me very distinctly as if someone had spoken it.
But nobody had.
I looked at Nicki, painfully aware that his lips had never moved, and I think all the blood drained from my face. I felt not the dread of death as I had on so many other nights, but an emotion that was really alien to me: fear.
I was still sitting there, too unsure of myself to say anything, when Nicolas kissed me.
“Let’s go to bed,” he said softly.
1
It must have been three o’clock in the morning; I’d heard the church bells in my sleep.
And like all sensible men in Paris, we had our door barred and our window locked. Not good for a room with a coal fire, but the roof was a path to our window. And we were locked in.
I was dreaming of the wolves. I was on the mountain and surrounded and I was swinging the old medieval flail. Then the wolves were dead again, and the dream was better, only I had all those miles to walk in the snow. The horse screamed in the snow. My mare turned into a loathsome insect half smashed on the stone floor.
A voice said “Wolfkiller” long and low, a whisper that was like a summons and a tribute at the same time.
I opened my eyes. Or I thought I did. And there was someone standing in the room. A tall, bent figure with its back to the little hearth. Embers still glowed on the hearth. The light moved upwards, etching the edges of the figure clearly, then dying out before it reached the shoulders, the head. But I realized I was looking right at the white face I’d seen in the audience at the theater, and my mind, opening, sharpening, realized the room was locked, that Nicolas lay beside me, that this figure stood over our bed.
I heard Nicolas’s breathing. I looked into the white face.
“Wolfkiller,” came the voice again. But the lips hadn’t moved, and the figure drew nearer and I saw that the face was no mask. Black eyes, quick and calculating black eyes, and white skin, and some appalling smell coming from it, like the smell of moldering clothes in a damp room.
I think I rose up. Or perhaps I was lifted. Because in an instant I was standing on my feet. The sleep was slipping off me like garments. I was backing up into the wall.
The figure had my red cloak in its hand. Desperately I thought of my sword, my muskets. They were under the bed on the floor. And the thing thrust the red cloak towards me and then, through the fur-lined velvet, I felt its hand close on the lapel of my coat.
I was torn forward. I was drawn off my feet across the room. I shouted for Nicolas. I screamed, “Nicki, Nicki!” as loud as I could. I saw the partially opened window, and then suddenly the glass burst into thousands of fragments and the wooden frame was broken out. I was flying over the alleyway, six stories above the ground.
I screamed. I kicked at this thing that was carrying me. Caught up in the red cloak, I twisted, trying to get loose.
But we were flying over the rooftop, and now going up the straight surface of a brick wall! I was dangling in the arm of the creature, and then very suddenly on the surface of a high place, I was thrown down.
I lay for a moment seeing Paris spread out before me in a great circle—the white snow, and chimney pots and church belfries, and the lowering sky. And then I rose up, stumbling over the fur-lined cloak, and I started to run. I ran to the edge of the roof and looked down. Nothing but a sheer drop of hundreds of feet, and then to another edge and it was exactly the same. I almost fell!
I turned desperate, panting. We were on the top of some square tower, no more than fifty feet across! And I could see nothing higher in any direction. And the figure stood staring at me, and I heard come out of it a low rasping laughter just like the whisper before.
“Wolfkiller,” it said again.
“Damn you!” I shouted. “Who the hell are you!” And in a rage I flew at it with my fists.
It didn’t move. I struck it as if I were striking the brick wall. I veritably bounced off it, losing my footing in the snow and scrambling up and attacking it again.
Its laughter grew louder and louder, and deliberately mocking, but with a strong undercurrent of pleasure that was even more maddening than the mockery. I ran to the edge of the tower and then turned on the creature again.
“What do you want with me!” I demanded. “Who are you!” And when it gave nothing but this maddening laughing, I went for it again. But this time I went for the face and the neck, and I made my hands like claws to do it, and I pulled off the hood and saw the creature’s black hair and the full shape of its human-looking head. Soft skin. Yet it was as immovable as before.
It backed up a little, raising its arms to play with me, to push me back and forth as a man would push a little child. Too fast for my eyes, it moved its face away from me, turning to one side and then the other, and all of these movements with seeming effortlessness, as I frantically tried to hurt it and could feel nothing but that soft white skin sliding under my fingers and maybe once or twice its fine black hair.
“Brave strong little Wolfkiller,” it said to me now in a rounder, deeper voice.
I stopped, panting and covered with sweat, staring at it and seeing the details of its face. The deep lines I had only glimpsed in the theater, its mouth drawn up in a jester’s smile.
“Oh, God help me, help me …” I said as I backed away. It seemed impossible that such a face should move, show expression, and gaze with such affection on me as it did. “God!”
“What god is that, Wolfkiller?” it asked.
I turned my back on it, and let out a terrible roar. I felt its hands close on my shoulders like things forged of metal, and as I went into a last frenzy of struggling, it whipped me around so that its eyes were right before me, wide and dark, and the lips were closed yet still smiling, and then it bent down and I felt the prick of its teeth on my neck.
Out of all the childhood tales, the old fables, the name came to me, like a drowned thing shooting to the surface of black water and breaking free in the light.
“Vampire!” I gave one last frantic cry, shoving at the creature with all I had.
Then there was silence. Stillness.
I knew that we were still on the roof. I knew that I was being held in the thing’s arms. Yet it seemed we had risen, become weightless, were traveling through the darkness even more easily than we had traveled before.
“Yes, yes,” I wanted to say, “exactly.”
And a great noise was echoing all around me, enveloping me, the sound of a deep gong perhaps, being struck very slowly in perfect rhythm, its sound washing through me so that I felt the most extraordinary pleasure through all my limbs.
My lips moved, but nothing came out of them; yet this didn’t really matter. All the things I had ever wanted to say were clear to me and that is what mattered, not that they be expressed. And there was so much time,
so much sweet time in which to say anything and do anything. There was no urgency at all.
Rapture. I said the word, and it seemed clear to me, that one word, though I couldn’t speak or really move my lips. And I realized I was no longer breathing. Yet something was making me breathe. It was breathing for me and the breaths came with the rhythm of the gong which was nothing to do with my body, and I loved it, the rhythm, the way that it went on and on, and I no longer had to breathe or speak or know anything.
My mother smiled at me. And I said, “I love you …” to her, and she said, “Yes, always loved, always loved …” And I was sitting in the monastery library and I was twelve years old and the monk said to me, “A great scholar,” and I opened all the books and could read everything, Latin, Greek, French. The illuminated letters were indescribably beautiful, and I turned around and faced the audience in Renaud’s theater and saw all of them on their feet, and a woman moved the painted fan from in front of her face, and it was Marie Antoinette. She said “Wolfkiller,” and Nicolas was running towards me, crying for me to come back. His face was full of anguish. His hair was loose and his eyes were rimmed with blood. He tried to catch me. I said, “Nicki, get away from me!” and I realized in agony, positive agony, that the sound of the gong was fading away.
I cried out, I begged. Don’t stop it, please, please. I don’t want to … I don’t … please.
“Lelio, the Wolfkiller,” said the thing, and it was holding me in its arms and I was crying because the spell was breaking.
“Don’t, don’t.”
I was heavy all over, my body had come back to me with its aches and its pains and my own choking cries, and I was being lifted, thrown upwards, until I fell over the creature’s shoulder and I felt its arm around my knees.
I wanted to say God protect me, I wanted to say it with every particle of me but I couldn’t say it, and there was the alleyway below me again, that drop of hundreds of feet, and the whole of Paris tilted at an appalling angle, and there was the snow and the searing wind.
2
I was awake and I was very thirsty.
I wanted a great deal of very cold white wine, the way it is when you bring it up out of the cellar in autumn. I wanted something fresh and sweet to eat, like a ripe apple.
It did occur to me that I had lost my reason, though I couldn’t have said why.
I opened my eyes and knew it was early evening. The light might have been morning light, but too much time had passed for that. It was evening.
And through a wide, heavily barred stone window I saw hills and woods, blanketed with snow, and the vast tiny collection of rooftops and towers that made up the city far away. I hadn’t seen it like this since the day I came in the post carriage. I closed my eyes and the vision of it remained as if I’d never opened my eyes at all.
But it was no vision. It was there. And the room was warm in spite of the window. There had been a fire in the room, I could smell it, but the fire had gone out.
I tried to reason. But I couldn’t stop thinking about cold white wine, and apples in the basket. I could see the apples. I felt myself drop down out of the branches of the tree, and I smelled all around me the freshly cut grass.
The sunlight was blinding on the green fields. It shone on Nicolas’s brown hair, and on the deep lacquer of the violin. The music climbed up to the soft, rolling clouds. And against the sky I saw the battlements of my father’s house.
Battlements.
I opened my eyes again.
And I knew I was lying in a high tower room several miles from Paris.
And just in front of me, on a crude little wooden table, was a bottle of cold white wine, precisely as I had dreamed it.
For a long time I looked at it, looked at the frost of droplets covering it, and I could not believe it possible to reach for it and drink.
Never had I known the thirst I was suffering now. My whole body thirsted. And I was so weak. And I was getting a little cold.
The room moved when I moved. The sky gleamed in the window.
And when at last I did reach for the bottle and pull the cork from it and smell the tart, delicious aroma, I drank and drank without stopping, not caring what would happen to me, or where I was, or why the bottle had been set here.
My head swung forward. The bottle was almost empty and the faraway city was vanishing in the black sky, leaving a little sea of lights behind it.
I put my hands to my head.
The bed on which I’d been sleeping was no more than stone with straw strewn upon it, and it was coming to me slowly that I might be in some sort of jail.
But the wine. It had been too good for a jail. Who would give a prisoner wine like that, unless of course the prisoner was to be executed.
And another aroma came to me, rich and overpowering and so delicious that it made me moan. I looked about, or I should say, I tried to look about because I was almost too weak to move. But the source of this aroma was near to me, and it was a large bowl of beef broth. The broth was thick with bits of meat, and I could see the steam rising from it. It was still hot.
I grabbed it in both hands immediately and I drank it as thoughtlessly and greedily as I’d drunk the wine.
It was so satisfying it was as if I’d never known any food like it, that rich boiled-down essence of the meat, and when the bowl was empty I fell back, full, almost sick, on the straw.
It seemed something moved in the darkness near me. But I was not sure. I heard the chink of glass.
“More wine,” said a voice to me, and I knew the voice.
Gradually, I began remembering everything. Scaling the walls, the small square rooftop, that smiling white face.
For one moment, I thought, No, quite impossible, it must have been a nightmare. But this just wasn’t so. It had happened, and I remembered the rapture suddenly, the sound of the gong, and I felt myself grow dizzy as though I were losing consciousness again.
I stopped it. I wouldn’t let it happen. And fear crept over me so that I didn’t dare to move.
“More wine,” said the voice again.
Turning my head slightly I saw a new bottle, corked, but ready for me, outlined against the window’s luminous glow.
I felt the thirst again, and this time it was heightened by the salt of the broth. I wiped my lips and then I reached for the bottle and again I drank.
I fell back against the stone wall, and I struggled to look clearly through the darkness, half afraid of what I knew I would see.
Of course I was very drunk now.
I saw the window, the city. I saw the little table. And as my eyes moved slowly over the dusky corners of the room, I saw him there.
He no longer wore his black hooded cape, and he didn’t sit or stand as a man might.
Rather he leaned to rest, it seemed, upon the thick stone frame of the window, one knee bent a little towards it, the other long spindly leg sprawled out to the other side. His arms appeared to hang at his sides.
And the whole impression was of something limp and lifeless, and yet his face was as animated as it had been the night before. Huge black eyes seeming to stretch the white flesh in deep folds, the nose long and thin, and the mouth the jester’s smile. There were the fang teeth, just touching the colorless lip, and the hair, a gleaming mass of black and silver growing up high from the white forehead, and flowing down over his shoulders and his arms.
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!