The tale of the body thief - By Anne Rice Page 0,136

into the wet and overgrown garden. The night was full of the noise of the rain, thundering against my mortal ears, and I almost wept when I saw the small house, a great gleaming hulk of wet vines, standing there before me.

In a loud whisper I called Louis’s name. I waited. No sound came from within. Indeed the place seemed on the verge of collapse in its decay. Slowly I approached the door. “Louis,” I said again. “Louis, it is I, Lestat!”

Cautiously I stepped inside amid the heaps and stacks of dusty objects. Quite impossible to see! Yet I made out the desk, the whiteness of the paper, and the candle standing there, and a small book of matches beside it.

With trembling wet fingers, I struggled to strike a match, and only after several efforts succeeded. At last I touched it to the wick, and a thin bright light filled all the room, shining upon the red velvet chair which was mine, and the other worn and neglected objects.

A powerful relief coursed through me. I was here! I was almost safe! And I was not mad. This was my world, this awful cluttered unbearable little place! Louis would come. Louis would have to come before long; Louis was almost here. I all but collapsed in the chair in sheer exhaustion. I laid my hands on Mojo, scratching his head, and stroking his ears.

“We’ve made it, boy,” I said. “And soon we’ll be after that devil. We’ll find a way to deal with him.” I realized I was shivering again, indeed, I was feeling the old telltale congestion in my chest. “Good Lord, not again,” I said. “Louis, come for the love of heaven, come! Wherever you are, come back here now. I need you.”

I was just about to reach into my pocket for one of the many paper handkerchiefs Gretchen had forced upon me, when I realized that a figure was standing exactly at my left, only an inch from the arm of the chair, and that a very smooth white hand was reaching for me. In the same instant, Mojo leapt to his feet, giving forth his worst, most menacing growls, and then appeared to charge the figure.

I tried to cry out, to identify myself, but before my lips were even open, I’d been hurled against the floor, deafened by Mojo’s barking, and I felt the sole of a leather boot pressed to my throat, indeed, to the very bones of my neck, crushing them with such force that surely they were about to be broken.

I couldn’t speak, nor could I free myself. A great piercing cry came from the dog, and then he, too, fell silent, and I heard the muffled sounds of his large body sinking to the floor. Indeed I felt the weight of him on my legs, and I struggled frantically and helplessly in pure terror. All reason left me as I clawed at the foot pinning me down, as I pounded the powerful leg, as I gasped for breath, only hoarse inarticulate growls coming from me.

Louis, it’s Lestat. I’m in the body, the human body.

Harder and harder the foot pressed. I was strangling as the bones were about to be crushed, yet I couldn’t utter one syllable to save myself. And above me in the gloom, I saw his face—the subtle gleaming whiteness of the flesh that did not seem at all to be flesh, the exquisitely symmetrical bones, and the delicate half-closed hand, which hovered in the air, in a perfect attitude of indecision, as the deep-set eyes, fired with a subtle and incandescent green, looked down upon me without the slightest palpable emotion.

With all my soul I cried the words again, but when had he ever been able to divine the thoughts of his victims? I could have done that, but not he! Oh, God help me, Gretchen help me, I was screaming in my soul.

As the foot increased its pressure, perhaps for the final time, all indecision cast aside, I wrenched my head to the right, sucked in one desperate tiny breath, and forced from my constricted throat one hoarse word: “Lestat!” all the while desperately pointing to myself with my right hand and first finger.

It was the last gesture of which I was capable. I was suffocating, and the darkness came rolling over me. Indeed it was bringing a total strangling nausea with it, and just at the moment when I ceased to care in the most lovely light-headed fashion,