by Anne Rice
"Because they could in turn expose us," said Marius, answering some form of this question almost every single night.
As for the vial of blood which Kapetria had given to Fareed, he could find nothing in it that was directly helpful to what he had to do, though its makeup puzzled him. He spoke of its having five times the density of folic acid as human blood. He talked of other chemicals, of breaking down the baffling DNA, of mysterious components for which he had to make new names. When, through me, he put the question to Amel as to what distinguished Replimoid blood from human blood, Amel wouldn't answer. I don't think Amel knew how to answer. Or something about the question aroused deep currents of feeling in him that he couldn't bear.
Amel certainly had no idea as to how to solve the problem of the connection, that was clear. Whether he might ever be the great scientist of Atalantaya again, no one could know; but he was not the Great One now.
As for me, I was no more resigned to perish than I'd ever been, my dramatic little suicide attempt in the Gobi Desert notwithstanding. But helpless to do anything about the connection between me and Amel, I became obsessed with our connection to the others, and how they might be severed from Amel inside of me.
I told Fareed: Find a way to snip the tentacles of the nano-particle thermoplastic luracastria that bound all vampires to the Core. Then I'd die when Amel was removed from me, yes, but the tribe would live.
I became convinced that Kapetria was giving us time to focus on this, and when she had described this vast web of connections as a failed attempt at propagation, she'd been giving us the only help that she could.
More than once I went on Benji's radio cast and made vague appeals to her, heavily disguised as general admonitions to blood drinkers everywhere as to how we must always work together, and think of one another, and think of the welfare and destiny of one another. I gave out the number of the cell phone I carried. But no call from Kapetria came.
"If she knew how to sever the connection, she'd tell us," I said to the others; though why I clung to such a view of her I wasn't sure. Maybe it was simply that I had liked her, liked all she'd told us of her birth and her brief life in Atalantaya, and I positively loved what she'd told us about the life and adventures of the spirit inside us who had always been known as Amel. I loved that she had volunteered the vial of her blood. Yes, she'd lied to us. But I knew why she'd lied. I couldn't fault her for lying. I couldn't yield to a cynical view of Kapetria, or to a cynical view of those with her. And I could not bear to think of their annihilation any more than I could think of ours.
That anything so ancient and mysterious should die--this was unthinkable to me. When Maharet had died, the great unique universe of Maharet had perished with her, and I found it unendurable to think about it. And that was why I couldn't wish for the death of Rhoshamandes either. Who was I to put an end to a being who knew what Rhoshamandes knew, a being who had seen all that he had seen? Some night, Rhoshamandes and I would talk about it all, talk about what it had been like when he first came north from the Mediterranean into the wild primal forests of the land we now call France. Some night, we'd talk about so many things...that is, if it wasn't too late.
Whatever the nightly arguments, the heated question-and-answer sessions, vampires clung to the Court. The Chateau could shelter some fifty or more guests in its crypts; another two hundred or more lodged safely and secretly in the nearby cities; and the young ones who had to hunt the millions in Paris came nightly to Armand's house in Saint-Germain-des-Pres. And I went to be with the young ones there for at least an hour every night.
There were tears shed, loud accusations of betrayal, sharp challenges to my integrity or worth as the Prince of the Vampires, and long violent discussions as to what to fear and what to do, and how long we might have.
But we hung together, at Armand's house, or here in this mighty fortress where the lights never went out and the music always played.
As for Amel, he listened to all of my speeches and exhortations in silence, only pouring forth his heart to me when we were alone. It seemed with every passing night, he knew more of his own story, but he knew it threaded through and through with confusion and pain. He wept and railed at the Bravennans, whom he called the authors of all evil, and blamed on them all the bloody religions that had ever become the scourge of humankind. He lapsed into the ancient tongue for hours as if he could not help himself, and other times he fell to weeping without words.
This was no longer the childish spirit baiting me and telling me he loved me one moment while calling me a fool the next. This was Amel who knew things that I would never know, no matter how long I walked the earth, knew possibilities and probabilities of which we blood drinkers simply never conceived--but Amel who could not think how to save us from destruction, and swore again and again that he would never allow such a thing to come about.
"Why don't we go into Paris?" I suggested more than once. "Why don't we just talk with Fareed and Seth and maybe you can figure how to sever the connection so that the others don't have to die?"
Weeping. I heard him weeping. "Don't you think I've tried?"
"I don't know. I wonder. You built Atalantaya," I said. I couldn't get used to calling it Atlantis. "Surely you can bring your extraordinary mind to bear on this problem and come up with something, there has to be something."
This was torture for him. I knew it. But I was desperate.
"I won't let her do it!" Amel protested. "Don't you understand? You think she can do this without my cooperation? You think I can't use the power inside you to incinerate her? She knows I can and I will."
And on he'd go, weeping, and avowing that we are one, and you are me and I am you. "Go look in a mirror. Find a mirror. There are mirrors all over this castle. I want you to look in a mirror. I want to see you in the mirror."
And so I stood in front of a mirror from time to time and let him look at me, remembering Kapetria's description of him with his green eyes and red hair. Could have been your brother or your cousin, is that what she said?
"When I first saw you standing before Akasha," he said, "I saw me."
If I slept, we dreamed, and we were in Atalantaya and the language was all around me. We walked the gleaming streets together, as people came out to greet him, touch his hand. It was balmy and sweet there like it is in New Orleans in springtime and the banana trees were vastly bigger and primal sending their knifelike leaves sky-high over us. The buildings did shine with the luster of pearls. But these dreams faded fast when I opened my eyes.
One night I dreamed a man and a woman were talking together in the ancient language. I couldn't see them, but I was hearing them, hearing her voice and his voice; it seemed they'd been talking forever, and I had the distinct impression that if I did listen with the utmost focus, that I could crack the language. The secret lay in the repetitions. I felt I knew now the word for "behold," the word they said so often--lalakate.
Then it was morning. I woke up, found I wasn't in my coffin, that I had fallen asleep on the marble bench beside it. I'd done that often lately, fallen asleep on the hard cold marble, not bothering with the comfort of the coffin as though I were a monk sentenced for his sins to sleep on a hard pallet. I saw my phone lying on the floor. Out of the charger. No battery. I remembered that I'd put it in the charger, then put my right hand under my head and gone to sleep as the world sang Lauds above.
I stared at the phone.
"It was you talking to her!"
No answer.
I sat up and picked up the phone. I checked back and there were the calls. All day long, calls one after another, until the battery had gone out, seven distinct calls.
"Don't bother," he said. Anguish. "She has no solution for the severing of the ties. She is working on 'what she has to work on now,' she says."
"How did you do it?"
"She'd given me the number when we were together in the blood," he said. "I hadn't realized what it was. I had to think about it. You know how hard it is for m
e to think of any one thing without so many other things. She'd talked of ghosts using phones and radios and radio waves. And the phone was right by your head. More and more often you were sleeping like that on the bench and the phone was right by your head. But it doesn't matter. She doesn't know anything. She's working on 'what she has to work on.' She's like a parent determined to rescue a child against the child's will."
He didn't speak for the rest of the night.
But I was shaken.
I told the ancient ones what he'd done, managing to connect through the phone while I slept. We'd all suspected long ago that he wasn't paralyzed as we were by the sun, but it was, like so much else, just a mystery that Fareed could not explain with all the abstract medical terms in the world. I told him of all the times that Amel had tried to force me to move against my will, of the times he'd made my hand jump or cramp.
I left the phone and the charger upstairs in my bedchamber after that. If they needed me during those hours when I was down there waiting for sleep, they'd have to knock at the door of the vault.
Amel didn't seem to care. And he wasn't trying to make my limbs move anymore anyway. At least not most of the time.
26
Lestat
I TOLD LOUIS EVERYTHING. Ten nights had passed during which I sought to protect him from the extent of my fear. Of course he knew absolutely everything that had been going on; he was always with me, and we'd managed to get away to hunt in Paris twice.
But this was different. I poured it all out. I confided all my fears that there was nothing I could do to stop the inevitable, and I talked about severing the tentacles and how Fareed and Seth were working on that now, marshaling every bit of research they had on us to try to figure a way.
"And what are the chances of Fareed figuring out this mystery, as to how we're all connected?" I asked. "As Fareed himself put it, how can he disconnect something that he cannot see?"
We were in the Chateau because no one wanted me to leave it, unless I positively had to, which I didn't, except to go to Armand's house for a brief visit, or hunt when I felt I had to, and all that I'd already done.
We were in the south tower, which was wholly new, and contained some of the most splendid rooms, reserved in theory for the most honored guests, and this meant we had a bedchamber parlor to ourselves, and it was a fine comfortable place to talk.
I'd had this apartment done all in shades of gold, magenta, and rose, with nineteenth-century flowered wallpaper and a nineteenth-century walnut bed and armoire and chests of drawers and chairs. It made me think of our flat in New Orleans and I found it comforting after all the brilliantly lighted baroque splendor of so many other rooms.
We sat at the small round table before the arched window, with the two leaded-glass sashes open wide to the night air. No need of a light as the moon was full. There were two decks of cards there, and I'd thought I might deal out a game of solitaire just to do something, anything, but I hadn't touched the cards. I love shiny new cards.
"For two nights now, Amel hasn't been with me," I said. "I don't know whether or not you can tell."
Louis was leaning on his elbows and looking at me.
He had taken off his black wool jacket and was dressed only in a gray cashmere sweater over his white shirt and black pants. He would never have done that on such a freezing night as this before he'd received all the powerful blood. I wonder if he ever thought of Merrick anymore, the unearthly sorceress who'd seduced him and spellbound him and pushed him, unwittingly, to expose his fragile vampiric body to the sun. Merrick had left us early of her own will. She'd been one of those powerful souls utterly convinced of an afterlife more interesting than this world. Maybe she was thriving in that afterlife, or lost in the upper air with the other spirits and ghosts in the confusing realm that Gremt had fled.
I'd been observing many small changes in Louis over the years due to the powerful blood. His eyes were certainly more iridescent and it irritated me that he would never wear sunglasses, even in the brightest rooms or on the brightest streets. But nothing changed the wall of telepathic silence that fell between master and fledgling. Yet I felt closer to him than to any other visible being in the world.
"What happens if you call to Amel and ask him to come back?" Louis asked.
"What would be the point?" I asked.
I was wearing my usual court finery, because I knew it comforted almost everyone. But it wasn't in keeping with my mood to be dressed in steel-blue brocade and linen frills, and for the first time, I envied Louis his simpler clothes.
"Amel could be inside you right now looking at me for all I know," I said. "What does it matter? One minute he swears he'll never let her harm me, and the next he's as grim as I am, speaking of Kapetria as a parent bound to rescue a child against the child's will."
Of course I'd told him all about the phone incident.
"I don't think that's possible," Louis said. His voice was even and soft. "That he's inside me, I mean, but let me get back to that. I've been thinking a lot about the matter of tentacles binding us and what Kapetria said, that this was a failed attempt at procreation or propagation. It makes me think of the silver cord."
"What silver cord?"
"The silver cord was what the old nineteenth-century parapsychologists called it," said Louis. "An invisible connection between body and soul. When a man astral projects, goes up and out of his body and into another body as you did with the Body Thief, the silver cord is what connects him to his biological body, and if the silver cord breaks, the man dies."
"I don't know what the hell you're talking about," I said.
"Oh, yes, you do," he said. "That etheric body that is traveling on the astral plane or hooked inside another body--the way David Talbot's etheric body was hooked into the old body of the Body Thief--the etheric body is free only once the silver cord is cut."
"Well, that's sweet and poetic and charming," I said. "But likely there is no real silver cord. Just old poetry, poetry of the British spiritualists and psychics. I don't remember seeing any silver cord when I switched bodies with the Body Thief. Likely it's something imaginary that helped astral travelers to visualize what is going on."
"Is it?" Louis asked. "I'm not so sure."
"Are you serious with all this?" I asked.
"What if it is the very same silver cord which in our case remains connected--connecting each new etheric body developed by Amel in a host--to his etheric body, when it should, as Kapetria suggested, snap so that the new vampire can be free?"
"Louis, honestly. The silver cord connects a biological body to an etheric body. Amel is an etheric body, isn't he? And his etheric body is connected to the etheric bodies in each of us."
"Well, we know now, don't we, that they are likely both biological, right? They are two kinds of biological body--the gross biological body and the etheric biological body made of cells we can't see. And in his case those etheric cells are expressions of what he was when he was alive."
I sighed. "It hurts my head to keep talking about cells we can't see."
"Lestat," he said. "I want you please to bear with me. Look at me. Pay attention. Listen to me for a change." He smiled to soften this and laid his hand on mine. "Come on, Lestat, listen."
I growled deep in my throat. "All right, I'm listening," I said. "I read all that foolishness when it was published. I read every word of Madame Blavatsky. I've read the later books. Remember, I am the one who has switched bodies, after all."
"What happens to make the silver cord snap and let loose the etheric body from the biological body?" he asked.
"You just said it; the biological body dies."
"Yes, if the biological body dies the cord snaps, freeing the etheric body," he said.
"And?"
"But that's just it. We never actually die when we're made into vampires. Oh, we all speak of dying, and I had to go out into the swamps and rid my body of all the waste and excess fluids, and I did that. But I never actually died."
&n
bsp; "So how can this lead to a solution?"
He sat there for a long moment, looking out over the snowy fields that lay between us and the road. Then he stood up and walked back and forth before turning to me again.
"I want to go to Paris," he said. "I want to talk to Fareed and the doctors."
"Louis, they've likely read all those British books by the Golden Dawn people. That is what you're talking about, right, the Theosophists and Swedenborg and Sylvan Muldoon and Oliver Fox, and even Robert Monroe in the twentieth century. Seriously? The silver cord?"
"I want to go to Paris now and I want you to come with me," Louis said.
"What you mean is you want me to take you," I said.
"That's right," he responded, "and we should bring Viktor with us."
"Unlike you, Viktor has the skill and the nerve to take to the air on his own."
I removed my iPhone from my pocket. I had come to hate it more than ever since Amel had figured how to use it, but I hit the number for my son.
Turns out he was in Paris already, hunting the back streets with Rose.
"I want you to go to Fareed at his laboratory," I said, "and tell him I'm coming, and I want you to meet me there."
One very endearing thing about my son: I never had to explain an order to him. He simply did whatever I asked.
"David, too," said Louis. "Please call David. I think David will understand this better than I do."
I did as I was told. David was in the Chateau library, going through our own pages again as he'd been doing since Kapetria left, searching for some clue as to how the great connecting web might work. He said he would go to Paris now, if we wanted him to. He would do anything we wanted. I rang off.
"Don't you think you might call Fareed personally and tell him we're coming?" Louis asked. "That's my last request, I promise."
I didn't really need the phone for that. Fareed's telepathic antennae were as powerful as mine. I sent out the message that Louis and I would be joining him within minutes. Louis felt it was important. But then I heard the voice of Thorne in the shadows nearby.
"I've texted him," he said. "We are ready to go."
And so it was done. Louis was putting on his jacket and scarf. I was unhappy. I watched him pulling on his gloves. I couldn't imagine how this could end productively or happily. I didn't want Louis to be humiliated, but what could Fareed and Seth say to talk of the silver cord? If they became impatient and short with him, I'd be furious.