Pandora - New Vampires 01

by Anne Rice

  I truly could not trust my eyes. Was he really there'? Was I, myself, sitting here, in boned and low-necked bodice, and these huge skirts, one pulled back in artful folds to reveal the other? My skin in this age seemed an artificial contrivance. My hair had been professionally gathered and lifted into an ornate shape.

  I had paid no mind to the mortal hands which had so bound me. During this age I let myself be led through the world by a fierce Asian vampire, about whom I cared nothing. I had fallen into an ever existing trap for a woman: I had become the noncommittal and ostentatious ornament of a male personality who for all his tiresome verbal cruelty possessed sufficient force to carry us both through time.

  The Asian was off' slowly taking his carefully chosen victim in a bedroom above.

  Marius came towards me and kissed me and took me in his arms. I shut my eyes. "This is Marius!" I whispered. "Truly Marius."

  "Pandora!" he said, drawing back to look at me. "My Pandora!"

  His skin had been burned. Faint scars. But it was almost healed.

  He led me out on the dance floor! He was the perfect impersonation of a human being. He guided me in the steps of the dance. I could scarce breathe. Following his lead, shocked at each new artful turn by the rapture of his face, I could not measure centuries or even millennia. I wanted suddenly to know everything - where he had been, what had befallen him. Pride and shame in me held no sway. Could he see that I was no more than a ghost of the woman he'd known? "You are the hope of my soul!" I whispered.

  Quickly he took me away. We went in a carriage to his palace. He deluged me with kisses. I dung to him.

  "You," he said, "my dream, a treasure so foolishly thrown away, you are here, you have persevered."

  "Because you see me, I am here," I said bitterly. "Because you lift the candle, I can almost see my strength in the looking glass."

  Suddenly I heard a sound, an ancient and terrible sound. It was the heartbeat of Akasha, the heartbeat of Enkil.

  The carriage had come to a halt. Iron gates. Servants.

  The palace was spacious, fancy, the ostentatious residence of a rich noble.

  "They are in there, the Mother and the Father" I asked.

  "Oh, yes, unchanged. Utterly reliable in their eternal silence." His voice seemed to defy the horror of it.

  I couldn't bear it. I had to escape the sound of her heart. An image of the petrified King and Queen rose before my eyes.

  "No! Get me away from here. I can't go in. Marius, I cannot look on them!"

  "Pandora, they are hidden below the palace. There is no need to look on them. They won't know. Pandora, they are the same."

  Ah! The same! My mind sped back, over perilous terrain, to my very first nights, alone and mortal, in Antioch, to the later victories and defeats of that time. Ah! Akasha was the same! I feared I would begin to scream and be unable to control it.

  'Very well," said Marius, "we'll go where you want."

  I gave the coachman the location of my hiding place.

  I couldn't look at Marius. Valiantly, he kept the pretense of happy reunion. He talked of science and literature, Shakespeare, Dryden, the New World full of jungles and rivers. But behind his voice I heard the joy drained from him.

  I buried my face against him. When the carriage stopped I leapt out and fled to the door of my little house. I looked back. He stood in the street.

  He was sad and weary, and slowly he nodded and made a gesture of acceptance. "May I wait it out?" he asked. "Is there hope you'll change your mind? I'll wait here forever!"

  "It's not my mind!" I said. "I leave this city tonight. Forget me. Forget you ever saw me!"

  "My love," he said softly. "My only love."

  I ran inside, shutting the door. I heard the carriage pull away. I went wild, as I had not since mortal life, beating the was with my fists, trying to restrain my immense strength and trying not to let loose the howls and cries that wanted to break from me.

  Finally I looked at the dock. Three hours left until dawn.

  I sat down at the desk and wrote to him:

  Marius,

  At dawn we will be taken to Moscow. The very coffin in which I rest is to carry me many miles the first day. Marius, I am dazed. I can't seek shelter in your house, beneath the same roof as the ancient ones. Please, Marius, come to Moscow. Help me to free myself of this predicament. Later you can judge me and condemn me. I need you. Marius, I shall haunt the vicinity of the Czar's palace and the Great Cathedral until you come. Marius, I know I ask of you that you make a great journey, but please come. I am a slave to this blood drinker's will.

  I love you,

  Pandora

  Running back out in the street, I hurried in the direction of his house, trying to retrace the path which I had so stupidly ignored.

  But what about the heartbeat'? I would hear it, that ghastly sound! I had to run past it, run through it, long enough to give Marius this letter, perhaps to let him grasp me by the wrist and force me to some safe place, and drive away before dawn the Asian vampire who kept me.

  Then the very carriage appeared, carrying in it my fellow blood drinker from the ball.

  He stopped for me at once.

  I took the driver aside. "The man who brought me home," I said. "We went to his house, a huge palace."

  "Yes, Count Marius," said the driver. "I just took him back to his own home."

  "You must take this letter to him. Hurry! You must go to his house and put it in his hands! Tell him I had no money to give you, that he must pay you, I demand that you tell him. He will pay you. Tell him the letter is from Pandora. You must find him!"

  "Who are you speaking of''' demanded my Asian companion.

  I motioned to the driver to leave! "Go!" Of course my consort was outraged. But the carriage was already on its way.

  Two hundred years passed before I learned the very simple truth: Marius never received that letter!

  He had gone back to his house, packed up his belongings and, the following night, left Dresden in sorrow, only finding the letter long after, as he related it to the Vampire Lestat, "a fragile piece of writing," as he called it, "that had fallen to the bottom of a cluttered traveling case."

  When did I see him again'?

  In this modern world. When the ancient Queen rose from her throne and demonstrated the limits of her wisdom, her will and her power.

  Two thousand years after, in our Twentieth Century still full of Roman columns and statues and pediments and peristyles, buzzing with computers and warmth-giving television, with Cicero and Ovid in every public library, our Queen, Akasha, was wakened by the image of Lestat on a television screen, in the most modern and secure of shrines, and sought to reign as a goddess, not only over us, but over humankind.

  In the most dangerous hour, when she threatened to destroy us all if we did not follow her lead - and she had already slaughtered many - it was Marius with his reasoning, his optimism, his philosophy who talked to her, tried to calm her and divert her, who stalled her destructive intent until an ancient enemy came to fulfill an ancient curse, and struck her down with ancient simplicity.

  David, what have you done to me in prodding me to write this narrative?

  You have made me ashamed of the wasted years. You have made me acknowledge that no darkness has been ever deep enough to extinguish my personal knowledge of love, love from mortals who brought me into the world, love for goddesses of stone, love for Marius,

  Above all, I cannot deny the resurgence of this love for Marius.

  And all around me in this world I see evidence of love, Behind the image of the Blessed Virgin and her Infant Jesus, behind the image of the Crucified Christ, behind the remembered basalt image of Isis. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot.

  Above all, however, I see it in the very fashioning of the world which
outshines all art, and cannot by sheer randomness have accumulated such beauty.

  Love. But whence comes this love? Why is it so secretive about its source, this love that makes ram and trees and has scattered the stars over us as the gods and goddesses once claimed to do?

  So Lestat, the brat Prince, woke the Queen; and we survived her destruction. So Lestat, the brat Prince, had gone to Heaven and Hell and brought back disbelief, horror and the Veil of Veronica! Veronica, an invented Christian name which means vera ikon, or true icon. He found himself plunged into Palestine during the very years that I lived, and there saw something that has shattered the faculties in humans which we cherish so much: faith, reason.

  I have to go to Lestat, look into his eyes. I have to see what he saw!

  Let the young sing songs of death. They are stupid.

  The finest thing under the sun and the moon is the human soul. I marvel at the small miracles of kindness that pass between humans, I marvel at the growth of conscience, at the persistence of reason in the face of all superstition or despair. I marvel at human endurance.

  I have one more story to tell you. I don't know why I want to record it here. But I do. Perhaps it's because I feel you - a vampire who sees spirits - will understand this, and understand perhaps why I remained so unmoved by it.

  Once in the Sixth Century - that is, five hundred years after the birth of Christ and three hundred years since I had left Marius - I went wandering in barbarian Italy. The Ostrogoths had long ago overrun the peninsula.

  Then other tribes swept down on them, looting, burning, carrying off stones from old Temples.

  It was like walking on burning coals for me to go there.

  But Rome did struggle with some conception of itself, its principles, trying to blend the pagan with the Christian, and find some respite from the barbarian raids.

  The Roman Senate still existed. Of all institutions it had survived

  And a scholar, sprung from the same stock as myself, Boethius, a very learned man who studied the ancients and the saints, had recently been put to death, but not before he had given us a great book. You can find it in any library today. It is, of course, The Consolation of Philosophy.

  I had to see the ruined Forum for myself, the burnt and barren hills of Rome, the pigs and goats roaming where once Cicero had spoken to the crowds. I had to see the forsaken poor living desperately along the banks of the Tiber.

  I had to see the fallen classical world. I had to see the Christian churches and shrines.

  I had to see one scholar in particular. Like Boethius he had come from old Roman stock, and like Boethius he had read the classics and the saints. He was a man who wrote letters that went all over the world, even as far as to the scholar Bede in England.

  And he had built a monastery there, some great flare of creativity and optimism, in spite of ruin and war.

  This man was of course the scholar Cassiodorus, and his monastery lay at the very tip of the boot of Italy, in the paradisal land of green Calabria.

  I came upon it in early evening, as I planned, when it looked like a great and splendid lighted little city.

  Its monks were copying away ferociously in the Scriptorium.

  And there in his cell, wide open to the night, sat Cassiodorus himself, at his writing, a man past ninety years of age.

  He had survived the barbarian politics that doomed his friend Boethius, having served the Aryan Ostrogoth Emperor Theodoric, having lived to retire from Civil Service - he had survived to build this monastery, his dream, and to write to monks all over the world, to share what he knew with them of the ancients, to conserve the wisdom of the Greeks and the Romans.

  Was he truly the last man of the ancient world, as some have said? The last man who could read both Latin and Greek? The last man who could treasure both Aristotle and the dogma of the Roman Pope'? Plato and Saint Paul?

  I didn't know then that he would be so well remembered, And I didn't know how soon he'd be forgotten!

  Vivarium, on its mountain slopes, was an architectural triumph. It had its sparkling ponds to catch and hold fish - the characteristic which gave it its name. It had its Christian church with the inevitable cross, its dormitories, its rooms for the weary guest traveler. Its library was rich in the classics of my time, as well as gospels which have now been lost. The monastery was rich in all the fruits of the field, all crops needed for food, trees laden with fruit, fields of wheat.

  The monks cared for all of this, and they dedicated themselves to copying books day and night in their long Scriptorium.

  There were beehives there, on this gentle moon-lighted coast, hundreds of beehives from which the monks harvested honey to eat, and wax for sacred candles, and royal jelly for an ointment. The bee-hives covered a hill as big as the orchard or the farmland of Vivarium.

  I spied on Cassiodorus. I walked among the bee-hives, and marveled as I always do at the inexplicable organization of bees, for the mysteries of the bees and their dance and their hunting for pollen and their breeding was all known to my eye long before it was understood by the human world.

  As I left the hives, as I moved array towards the distant beacon of Cassiodorus's lamp, I looked back. I beheld something.

  Something collected itself from the hives, something immense and invisible and forceful that I could both feel and hear. I was not gripped by fear, merely sparked by a temporary hope that some New Thing had come into the world. For I am not a seer of ghosts and never was.

  This force rose out of the very bees themselves, out of their intricate knowledge and their countless sublime patterns, as though they had somehow accidentally evolved it, or empowered it with consciousness through the means of their endless creativity, meticulousness and endurance.

  It was like an old Roman woodland spirit of the forest.

  I saw this force fly loosely over the fields. I saw it enter the body of a straw man who stood in the fields, a scarecrow which the monks had made with a fine round wooden head, painted eyes, crude nose and smiling mouth - a creature whole and entire who could be moved from time to time, intact in his monk's hood and robe.

  I saw this scarecrow, this man of straw and wood hurry whirling and dancing through the fields and the vineyards until he had reached Cassiodorus's cell.

  I followed!

  Then I heard a silent wail rise from the being. I heard it and I saw the scarecrow in a bending, bowing dance of sorrow, its bundled straw hands over ears it didn't have. It writhed with grief.

  Cassiodorus was dead. He had died quietly within his lamp-lighted cell, his door open, at his writing table. He lay, gray-haired, ancient, quiet against his manuscript. He had lived over ninety years. And he was dead.

  This creature, this scarecrow, was wild with suffering and grief, rocking and moaning, though it was a sound no human could have heard.

  I who have never seen spirits stared at it in wonder. Then it perceived that I was there. It turned. He - for so it seemed in this ragged attire and body of straw - reached out to me. He flung out his straw arms. The straw fell from his sleeves. His wooden head wobbled on the pole that was his spine. He - It - implored me: he begged me for the answer to the greatest questions humans and immortal have ever posed. He looked to me for answers!

  Then glancing back again at the dead Cassiodorus, he ran to me, across the sloping grass, and the need came out of him, poured from him, his arms out as it beheld me. Could I not explain? Could I not contain in some Divine Design the mystery of the loss of Cassiodorus! Cassiodorus who had with his Vivarium rivaled the hive of bees in elegance and glory! It was Vivarium which had drawn this consciousness together from the hives! Could I not ease this creature's pain!

  "There are horrors in this world," I whispered. "It is made up of mystery and dependent upon mystery. If you would have peace, go back to the hives; lose your human shape, and descend again, fragmented into the mindless life of the contented bees from which you rose."

  He was fixed, and he listened to me.

>   "If you would have fleshly life, human life, hard life which can move through time and space, then fight for it. If you would have human philosophy then struggle and make yourself wise, so that nothing can hurt you ever. Wisdom is strength. Collect yourself, whatever you are, into something with a purpose.

  "But know this. All is speculation under the sky. All myth, all religion, all philosophy, all history - is lies."

  The thing, whether it be male or female, drew up its bundled straw hands, as if to cover its mouth. I turned my back on it.

  I walked away silently through the vineyards. In a little while the monks would discover that their Father Superior, their genius, their saint, had died at his work.

  I looked back in amazement to discover that the figure of straw remained, organized, assuming the posture of an upright being, watching me.

  "I will not believe in you!" I shouted back to this man of straw. "I will not search with you for any answer! But know this: if you would become an organized being as you see in me, love all mankind and womankind and all their children. Do not take your strength from blood! Do not feed on suffering. Do not rise like a god above crowds chanting in adoration. Do not lie!"

  It listened. It heard. It remained still.

  I ran. I ran and ran up the rocky slopes and through the forests of Calabria until I was far far away from it. Under the moon, I saw the sprawling majesty of Vivarium with its cloisters and sloped roofs as it surrounded the shores of its shimmering inlet from the sea.

  I never saw the straw creature again. I don't know what it was. I don't want you to ask me any question about it.

  You tell me spirits and ghosts walk. We know such beings exist. But that was the last I saw of that being.

  And when next I drifted through Italy, Vivarium had been long destroyed. The earthquakes had shaken loose the last of its walls. Had it been sacked first by the next wave of ignorant tall men of Northern Europe, the Vandals? Was it an earthquake that brought about its ruin?