AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I groaned aloud drinking it, feeling the searing heat of it, so unlike to any human blood. With each slow beat of his powerful heart there came another small surge of it, until my mouth was filled and my throat swallowed without my bidding, and the sound of his heart grew louder, ever louder, and a reddish shimmer filled my vision, and I saw through this shimmer a great swirling dust.
A wretched dreary din rose slowly out of nothingness, commingled with an acid sand that stung my eyes. It was a desert place, all right, and old and full of rank and common things, of sweat and filth and death. The din was voices crying out, and echoing up the close and grimy walls. Voices crowded upon voices, taunts and jeers and cries of horror, and gruff riffs of foul indifferent gossip rushing over the most poignant and terrible cries of outrage and alarm.
Against sweating bodies I was pressed, struggling, the slanting sun burning on my outstretched arm. I understood the babble all around me, the ancient tongue hollered and wailed in my ears as I fought to get ever closer to the source of all the wet and ugly commotion that swamped me and tried to hold me back.
It seemed they'd crush the very life out of me, these ragged, rough-skinned men and veiled women in their coarse homespun, thrusting elbows at me and stepping on my feet. I couldn't see what lay before me. I flung my arms out, deafened by the cries and the wicked boiling laughter, and suddenly, as if by decree, the crowd parted, and I beheld the lurid masterpiece itself.
He stood in His torn and bloody white robe, this very Figure whose Face I??d seen imprinted into the fibers of the Veil. Arms bound up with thick uneven iron chains to the heavy and monstrous crossbeam of His crucifix, He hunched beneath it, hair pouring down on either side of His bruised and lacerated face. The blood from the thorns flowed into His open and unflinching eyes.
He looked at me, quite startled, even faintly amazed. He stared with wide and open gaze as if the multitude didn't surround Him, and a whip did not crack over His very back and then His bowed head. He stared past the tangle of his clotted hair and from beneath His raw and bleeding lids.
"Lord!" I cried.
I must have reached out for Him, for those were my hands, my smallish and white hands that I saw! I saw them struggling to reach His Face.
"Lord!" I cried again.
And back He stared at me, unmoving, eyes meeting my eyes, hands dangling from the iron chains and mouth dripping with blood.
Suddenly a fierce and terrible blow struck me. It pitched me forward. His Face filled all my sight. Before my eyes it was the very measure of all that I could possibly see-His soiled and broken skin, the wetted, darkened tangle of His eyelashes, the great bright orbs of His dark-pupiled eyes.
Closer and closer it came, the blood flowing down and into His thick eyebrows, and dripping down His gaunt cheeks. His mouth opened. A sound came out of Him. It was a sigh at first and then a dull rising breath that grew louder and louder as His Face became even larger, losing its very lineaments, and became the sum of all its swimming colors, the sound now a positive and deafening roar.
In terror, I cried out. I was thrust back. Yet even as I saw His familiar Figure and the ancient frame of His Face with its Thorny Crown, the Face grew ever larger and larger and utterly indistinct and seemed again to bear down on me, and then suddenly to suffocate all my face with its immense and total weight.
I screamed. I was helpless, weightless, unable to draw breath.
I screamed as I??ve never in all my miserable years screamed, the scream so loud that it shut out the roar that filled my ears, but the vision pressed on, a great driving inescapable mass that had been His Face.
"Oh, Lord!" I screamed with all the power of my burning lungs. The very wind rushed in my ears.
Something struck the back of my head so hard that it cracked my skull. I heard the crack. I felt the wet splash of blood.
I opened my eyes. I was staring forward. I was far across the chapel, sprawled against the plaster wall, my legs out in front of me, my arms dangling, my head on fire with the pain of the great concussion where I had struck the wall.
Lestat had never moved. I knew he hadn't.
No one had to tell me. It was not he who threw me back.
I tumbled over onto my face, pulling my arm up under my head. I knew there were feet gathered all around me, that Louis was near, and that even Gabrielle had
come, and I knew too that Marius was taking Sybelle and Benjamin away.
I could hear in the ringing silence only Benjamin's small sharp mortal voice. "But what happened to him. What happened? The blond one didn't hit him. I saw it. It didn't happen. He didn't-. "
My face hidden, my face soaked with tears, I covered my head with my trembling hands, my bitter smile unseen, though my sobs were heard.
I cried and cried for a long time, and then gradually, as I knew it would, my scalp began to heal. The evil blood mounted to the surface of my skin and, tingling there, did its evil ministrations, sewing up the flesh like a little laser beam from Hell.
Someone gave me a napkin. It had the faint scent of Louis on it, but I couldn't be sure. It was a long long time, perhaps even so long as an hour before I finally clasped it and wiped all the blood off my face.
It was another hour, an hour of quiet and of people respectfully slipping away, before I turned over and rose and sat back against the wall. My head no longer hurt, the wound was gone, the blood that had dried there would soon flake away.
I stared at him for a long and quiet time.
I was cold and solitary and raw. Nothing anyone murmured penetrated my hearing. I did not note the gestures or the movements around me.
In the sanctum of my mind I went over, mostly slowly, exactly, what I had seen, what I had heard-all that I've told you here.
