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When I awoke, I heard his cries He was beating on the oaken door, cursinghim prisoner The sound filled the tower, and the scent of hih the stone walls: succulent, oh so succulent, s flesh and blood, his flesh and blood

She slept still

Do not do this thing

Syh the walls, straining to contain the ghastly ie

When I stepped into the stairwell, it was like being caught in a ind of his cries, his huled with it -- the afternoon sunshine on a wooden table, the red wine, the smoke of the little fire

"Lestat! Do you hear ainst the door

Meiant says he siant was going to find the hu after the human, step by step I was the human

Only noblood

"This is the witches’ place! Lestat, do you hear me! This is the witches’ place!"

Dull tres that only we had known, felt Dancing in the witches’ place Can you deny it? Can you deny everything that passed between us?

Get him out of France Send him to the New World And then what? All his life he is one of those slightly interesting but generally tiresome mortals who have seen spirits, talk of the madness Will he be a comical lunatic finally, the kind that even the ruffians and bullies look after, playing his fiddle in a dirty coat for the crowds on the streets of Port-au-Prince?

"Be the puppeteer again," she had said Is that what I was?

No one will ever believe his mad tales

But he knows the place where we lie, Mother He knows our nas about us And he will never go quietly to another country And they o after him; they will never let him live now

Where are they?

I went up the stairs in the ind of his echoing cries, looked out the little barredat the open land They’ll be coain They have to come First I was alone, then I had her with me, and now I have them!

But as the crux? That he wanted it? That he had screamed over and over that I had denied him the power?

Or was it that I now had the excuses I needed to bring him to me as I had wanted to do from the first reat and splendid pleasures of being dead

I went further up the stairs towards hi inand I was an instru

And his cries had become inarticulate -- the pure essence of his curses, a dull punctuating to thedivinely carnal in the broken syllables coh his heart

I lifted the key and put it in the lock and he went silent, his thoughts washing backwards and into him as if the ocean could be sucked back into the tiny le shell

I tried to see him in the shadows of the roofor him, the hideous and unshakable human need for him, the lust I tried to see the lared at oodness" -- low seething voice, eyes glittering -- "your talk of good and evil, your talk of as right and rong and death, oh yes, death, the horror, the tragedy"

Words Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart:

"and you shared it with her, the lord’s son giveth to the lord’s wife his great gift, the Dark Gift Those who live in the castle share the Dark Gift -- never were they dragged to the witches’ place where the huround at the foot of the burnt stake, no, kill the old crone who can no longer see to sew, and the idiot boy who cannot till the field And what does he give us, the lord’s son, the wolfkiller, the one who screaood enough for us!"

Shuddering Shirt soaked with sweat Glea, the htly muscled torso that sculptors so love to represent, nipples pink against the dark skin

"This power" -- sputtering as if all day long he had been saying the words over with the same intensity, and it does not really matter that now I aless, this dark power that soared over everything, this truth that obliterated"

No Language No truth

The wine bottles were empty, the food devoured His lean arle? -- his brown hair fallen out of its ribbon, his eyes enorainst the wall as if he’d go through it to get away fro from him, the paralysis, the ecstasy -- yet he was drawn i his hands out to steady his that were not there

But his voice had stopped

So in his face