I saw Goblin standing to my right, opaque, detailed, my duplicate—and the computer was on and the keyboard was clicking, and a series of nonsense syllables were jabbering across the monitor while a vague rumble came from the small computer speakers.

I tried to shut my eyes again, but I was too seduced by him, his total double of me, even to my leather coat and black pants, and his crazed expression which surely didn’t reflect mine. His eyes were glittering viciously and triumphantly, and his smile was like that of a clown.

“I’m telling you, go, Goblin,” I said, but this only redoubled his power, and then the image began to thin and to expand.

“Let me hurt him!” Lestat said urgently. “Give me the permission.”

In confusion, I couldn’t answer, even though I heard Lestat plead with me again. I felt the tight grip all around me, as though a boa constrictor had me, or so I imagined, and my vision had left me, melting into the violent chills that I couldn’t shake. I felt the tiny pinpricks all over my face and the backs of my hands, and I tried to lift my hands to ward them off but my hands hurt. Every bit of my bare flesh hurt, even to the back of my neck.

A panic took hold of me, as if I’d been caught in a swarm of bees. Even my eyelids were attacked, and I knew that I’d fallen to the floor, but I couldn’t orient myself. I could feel the carpet under my hand and I couldn’t get up.

“Little Brother, let me hurt him,” Lestat said again. And I heard my own voice as if it came from someone else.

“Damn him,” I said, “hurt him.”

But there had come that magnetic sense of union, Goblin and I, indivisible, and I saw the sunny room again in which a child stood in a wooden playpen scattered with toys, a curly headed toddler in little overalls whom I knew to be myself, and beside him his double, the two of us laughing together, without a single care—look at the red flowers in the linoleum, look at the sunshine, see the spoon flying end over end in an arc through the air—and fast after this there tumbled other images and random moments: laughter in the schoolroom and all the boys looking at me and pointing and murmuring, and me saying He’s right here, I tell you, his hand on my left hand and my writing in crayon in that scrawl of his, love you, Goblin and Tarquin; and the pure electric shocks of pleasure left me without a body, without a soul. I was rolling on the floor, wasn’t I?

“Goblin.” I think I whispered. “The one to whom I belong and to whom I’ve always belonged. No one can understand, no one can fathom.” Goblin, Goblin, Goblin.

The pleasure crested with unspeakable sweetness, and subsided into waves of certain bliss.

He was withdrawing, leaving me cold and hurt and lonely all over, fiercely, catastrophically lonely—he was deserting me.