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.

“Hurt him!” I said the words with all my breath, terrified they weren’t audible, and then my eyes opened, and above me I saw the great sprawling image of myself, face wavering and grotesque, and suddenly it was made up of pinpoints of fire!

Lestat had sent the Fire Gift to burn the blood he’d taken, and I heard Goblin’s silent wail, his soundless raging scream.

Oh, no, it was wrong, not my Goblin, how could I have done it, how could I have betrayed him! His scream was like a siren. A rain of tiny ash descended on me, in fact it seemed flung at me, and his scream rose again, piercing my ears.

The air was full of the smell of the burning, like the smell of human hair burning, and the huge shapeless image hovered, drawing itself together into my solid double for one fateful and frightfully opaque moment, challenging me, cursing me—Evil devil, Quinn, evil! Bad. Bad!—and then it was gone, escaping through the door, leaving the gasolier creaking on its chain and the electric lights blinking, and sending a rippling wind through the lace panels on the windows as silence and stillness closed in.

I was on the floor. The blinking lights were unendurable. Lestat came to me and helped me to my feet, and ran his hands caressingly over my hair.

“I couldn’t do it,” he said, “until it was leaving you, because when it was with you the Fire might have burnt you too.”