"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 fumed 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, fuming 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 sight 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 fumed 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 chunk 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.