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by
Anne Rice
I remember feeling the moisture which in the night was cool as I sat down on the lower steps and even rested my head against the brick and felt the little wax-stemmed wildflowers with my hands.
and now his face was tense, his eyes narrow, as if he were preparing to weather a blow.
hovered above me, suspended in the stairwell, softly entangled
I remember that the movement of his lips raised the hair all over my body, sent a shock of sensation through my body that was not unlike the pleasure of passion.…”
and his arm was like the weight of an iron bar.
said the boy in a welter of excitement.
standing among the cottonwood and oaks, I heard the night as if it were a chorus of whispering women, all beckoning me to their breasts.
positive riot of color
the smoke gather beneath the overhead bulb.
Your cigarette has become one long cylindrical ash.”
ground the filter into the glass.
as if he were an angel about to give the Word of the Lord.
Overcome with revulsion and weak with frustration,
the two resounding in every fiber of my being, until the beat began to grow slower and slower, so that each was a soft rumble that threatened to go on without end. I was drowsing, falling into weightlessness;
It was a sensational shock of another sort, a rapping of the senses, so that I spun in confusion and found myself helpless and staring, my back against a cypress, the night pulsing with insects in my ears.
I was altered, permanently; I knew it.
He was the sow’s ear out of which nothing fine could be made.
Only a hunger for new experience, for that which was beautiful and as devastating as my kill.
a man made of dried twigs with a thin, carping voice.
The sky was pale but still sprinkled with stars, and another light rain blew now on the breeze from the river, speckling the flagstones.
‘Don’t I take care of you in baronial splendor!’
near obsequious kindness
malignant smile.
like dancers frenzied in a fog;
Louis Cathedral, from whose open doors came the chants of High Mass over the crowds of the Place d’Armes on Sundays,
It was midwinter, bitter-cold and damp in the swamps, one volley of icy rain after another sweeping the clearing where the duel was to be fought.
I feel that anger for him like a white-hot liquid filling my veins.
“No. Being a vampire for him meant revenge. Revenge against life itself. Every time he took a life it was revenge. It was no wonder, then, that he appreciated nothing. The nuances of vampire existence weren’t even available to him because he was focused with a maniacal vengeance upon the mortal life he’d left. Consumed with hatred, he looked back. Consumed with envy, nothing pleased him unless he could take it from others; and once having it, he grew cold and dissatisfied, not loving the thing for itself; and so he went after something else. Vengeance, blind and sterile and contemptible.
Always before, his ferocity was mysterious, but now I bared my fangs on the humans who fled from me, my steady advance overcoming their clumsy, pathetic speed as the veil of death descended, or the veil of madness.
Now and then feet moved and the boards creaked and the light in the cracks of the boards gave a faint, uneven illumination.
a twisted mask of human frustration.
Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.
The vampire was frozen, staring off, lost in his thoughts, his memory.
His face was serene and almost affectionate. And the boy suddenly felt uncomfortable.
in love with color and shape and sound and singing and softness and infinite variation.
The color burned for a moment in blotches on his cheeks.
The vampire only sat there, smiling, a small smile that played on his lips like the light.
staring at him now as if he were just seeing him fo...
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I had hedged against this question as a vampire and now it completely overwhelmed me,
and in that state I had no desire to live.
The lights were as beacons in a black sea. Even with morning rising slowly, only the dormers and high porches of the houses were emerging from the dark, and to a mortal man the narrow streets I found were like pitch.
And on such clear nights as this, the lamplit streets were beautiful from the high windows of this new Spanish hotel; and the stars of those days hung low over such dim light as they do at sea.
“Oh, yes,” said the vampire. “After killing, a vampire is as warm as you are now.”
a veritable furnace of passion.
helpless as the goddess who came by night to watch Endymion sleep and could not have him.
He did not leer like a stage villain, nor hunger for her suffering as if the cruelty fed him. He simply watched her.
composed beside her, like a mourner.
Over the long, low row of pointed roofs were the massive shapes of oak trees in the dark, great swaying forms of myriad sounds under the low-hung stars.
God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms.
“I won’t tell you again what it was like, except that it caught me up just as it had done before, and as killing always does, only more;
