by Rice, Anne
“Hurry, both of you!” said a female voice in French suddenly. “What are you waiting for, the Church to pronounce it a miracle?” And I was jerked into the leather bucket seat before I realized what was happening, dragging Louis in on top of me so that he had to scramble over me into the compartment in back.
The Porsche lurched forward, scattering the fleeing mortals in front of its headlights. I stared at the slender figure of the driver beside me, her yellow hair streaming over her shoulders, her soiled felt hat smashed down over her eyes.
I wanted to throw my arms around her, to crush her with kisses, to press my heart against her heart and forget absolutely everything else. The hell with these idiot fledglings. But the Porsche almost went over again as she made the sharp right out of the gate and into the busy street.
“Gabrielle, stop!” I shouted, my hand closing on her arm. “You didn’t do that, burn them like that—!”
“Of course not,” she said, in sharp French still, barely glancing at me. She looked irresistible as with two fingers she twisted the wheel again, swinging us into yet another ninety-degree turn. We were headed for the freeway.
“Then you’re driving us away from Marius!” I said. “Stop.”
“So let him blow up the van that’s following us!” she cried. “Then I’ll stop.” She had the gas pedal floored, her eyes fixed on the road in front of her, her hands locked to the leather-clad wheel.
I turned to see it over Louis’s shoulder, a monster of a vehicle bearing down with surprising speed—an overgrown hearse it seemed, hulking and black, with a mouthful of chromium teeth across the snub-nosed front and four of the undead leering at us from behind the tinted windshield glass.
“We can’t get clear of this traffic to outrun them!” I said. “Turn around. Go back to the auditorium. Gabrielle, turn around!”
But she bore on, weaving in and out of the motor coaches wildly, driving some of them in sheer panic to the side.
The van was gaining.
“It’s a war machine, that’s what it is!” Louis said. “They’ve rigged it with an iron bumper. They’re going to try to ram us, the little monsters!”
Oh, I had played this one wrong. I had underestimated. I had envisioned my own resources in this modern age, but not theirs.
And we were moving farther and farther away from the one immortal who could blow them to Kingdom Come. Well, I would handle them with pleasure. I’d smash their windshield to pieces for starters, then tear off their heads one by one. I opened the window, climbing halfway up and out of it, the wind whipping my hair, as I glared at them, their ugly white faces behind the glass.
As we shot up the freeway ramp, they were almost on top of us. Good. Just a little closer and I would spring. But our car was skidding to a halt. Gabrielle couldn’t clear the path ahead.
“Hold on, it’s coming!” she screamed.
“Like hell it is!” I shouted, and in an instant I would have jumped off the roof and gone into them like a battering ram.
But I didn’t have that instant. They had struck us full force, and my body flew up in the air, diving over the side of the freeway as the Porsche shot out in front of me, sailing into space.
I saw Gabrielle break through the side door before the car hit the ground. And she and I were both rolling over on the grassy slope as the car capsized and exploded with a deafening roar.
“Louis!” I shouted. I scrambled towards the blaze. I would have gone right into it after him. But the glass of the back portal splintered as he came through it. He hit the embankment just as I reached him. And with my cape I beat at his smoking garments, Gabrielle ripping off her jacket to do the same.
The van had stopped at the freeway railing high above. The creatures were dropping over the edge, like big white insects, and landing on their feet on the slope.
And I was ready for them.
But again, as the first one skidded down towards us, scythe raised, there came that ghastly preternatural scream again and the blinding combustion, the creature’s face a black mask in a riot of orange flame. The body convulsed in a horrid dance.
The others turned and ran under the freeway.
I started after them, but Gabrielle had her arms around me and wouldn’t let me go. Her strength maddened me and amazed me.
“Stop, damn it!” she said. “Louis, help me!”
“Let me loose!” I said furiously. “I want one of them, just one of them. I can get the hindmost in the pack!”
But she wouldn’t release me, and I certainly wasn’t going to fight her, and Louis had joined with her in her angry and desperate entreaties.
“Lestat, don’t go after them!” he said, his polite manner strained to the fullest. “We’ve had quite enough. We must leave here now.”
“All right!” I said, giving it up resentfully. Besides, it was too late. The burnt one had expired in smoke and sputtering flames, and the others were gone into silence and darkness without a trace.
The night around us was suddenly empty, except for the thunder of the freeway traffic high above. And there we were, the three of us, standing together in the lurid glare of the blazing car.
Louis wiped the soot from his face wearily, his stiff white shirtfront smudged, his long velvet opera cape burnt and torn.
And there was Gabrielle, the waif just as she’d been so long ago, the dusty, ragged boy in frayed khaki jungle jacket and pants, the squashed brown felt hat askew on her lovely head.
Out of the cacophony of city noises, we heard the thin whine of sirens approaching.
Yet we stood motionless, the three of us, waiting, glancing to one another. And I knew we were all scanning for Marius. Surely it was Marius. It had to be. And he was with us, not against us. And he would answer us now.
I said his name aloud softly. I peered into the dark under the freeway, and out over the endless army of little houses that crowded the surrounding slopes.
But all I could hear were the sirens growing louder and the murmur of human voices as mortals began the long climb from the boulevard below.
I saw fear in Gabrielle’s face. I reached out for her, went towards her, in spite of all the hideous confusion, the mortals coming nearer and nearer, the vehicles stopped on the freeway above.
Her embrace was sudden, warm. But she gestured for me to hurry.
“We’re in danger! All of us,” she whispered. “Terrible danger. Come!”
3
It was five o’clock in the morning and I stood alone at the glass doors of the Carmel Valley ranch house. Gabrielle and Louis had gone into the hills together to find their rest.
A phone call north had told me that my mortal musicians were safe in the new Sonoma hideaway, partying madly behind electric fences and gates. As for the police and the press and all their inevitable questions, well, that would have to wait.
And now I waited alone for the morning light as I’d always done, wondering why Marius hadn’t shown himself, why he had saved us only to vanish without a word.
“And suppose it wasn’t Marius,” Gabrielle had said anxiously as she paced the floor afterwards. “I tell you I felt an overwhelming sense of menace. I felt danger to us as well as to them. I felt it outside the auditorium when I drove away. I felt it when we stood by the burning car. Something about it. It wasn’t Marius, I’m convinced—”
“Something almost barbaric about it,” Louis had said. “Almost but not quite—”
“Yes, almost savage,” she had answered, glancing to him in acknowledgment. “And even if it was Marius, what makes you think he didn’t save you so that he could take his private vengeance in his own way?”
“No,” I had said, laughing softly. “Marius doesn’t want revenge, or he would already have it, that much I know.”
But I had been too excited just watching her, the old walk, the old gestures. And ah, the frayed safari clothing. After two hundred years, she was still the intrepid explorer. She straddled the chair like a cowboy when she sat down, resting her c
hin on her hands on the high back.
We had so much to talk about, to tell each other, and I was simply too happy to be afraid.
And besides, being afraid was too awful, because I knew now I had made another serious miscalculation. I’d realized it for the first time when the Porsche exploded with Louis still inside it. This little war of mine would put all those I loved in danger. What a fool I’d been to think I could draw the venom to myself.
We had to talk all right. We had to be cunning. We had to take great care.
But for now we were safe. I’d told her that soothingly. She and Louis didn’t feel the menace here; it had not followed us to the valley. And I had never felt it. And our young and foolish immortal enemies had scattered, believing that we possessed the power to incinerate them at will.
“You know a thousand times, a thousand times, I pictured our reunion,” Gabrielle said. “And never once was it anything like this.”
“I rather think it went splendidly!” I said. “And don’t suppose for a moment that I couldn’t have gotten us out of it! I was about to throttle that one with the scythe, toss him over the auditorium. And I saw the other one coming. I could have broken him in half. I tell you one of the frustrating things about all this is I didn’t get the chance—”
“You, Monsieur, are an absolute imp!” she said. “You are impossible! You are—what did Marius himself call you—the damnedest creature! I am in full accord.”
I laughed delightedly. Such sweet flattery. And how lovely the old-fashioned French.
And Louis had been so taken with her, sitting back in the shadows as he watched her, reticent, musing as he’d always been. Immaculate he was again, as if his garments were entirely at his command, and we’d just come from the last act of La Traviata to watch the mortals drink their champagne at the marble-top café tables as the fashionable carriages clattered past.
Feeling of the new coven formed, magnificent energy, the denial of the human reality, the three of us together against all tribes, all worlds. And a profound feeling of safety, of unstoppable momentum—how to explain that to them.
“Mother, stop worrying,” I had said finally, hoping to settle it all, to create a moment of pure equanimity. “It’s pointless. A creature powerful enough to burn his enemies can find us anytime that he chooses, do exactly what he likes.”
“And this should stop me from worrying?” she said.
I saw Louis shake his head.
“I don’t have your powers,” he said unobtrusively, “nevertheless I felt this thing. And I tell you it was alien, utterly uncivilized, for want of a better word.”
“Ah, you’ve hit it again,” Gabrielle interjected. “It was completely foreign as if coming from a being so removed …”
“And your Marius is too civilized,” Louis insisted, “too burdened with philosophy. That’s why you know he doesn’t want revenge.”
“Alien? Uncivilized?” I glanced at both of them. “Why didn’t I feel this menace!” I asked.
“Mon Dieu, it could have been anything,” Gabrielle had said finally. “That music of yours could wake the dead.”
I had thought of last night’s enigmatic message—Lestat! Danger—but it had been too close to dawn for me to worry them with it. And besides, it explained nothing. It was merely another fragment of the puzzle, and one perhaps that did not belong at all.
And now they were gone together, and I was standing alone before the glass doors watching the gleam of light grow brighter and brighter over the Santa Lucia Mountains, thinking:
“Where are you, Marius? Why the hell don’t you reveal yourself?” It could damn well be true, everything that Gabrielle said. “Is it a game to you?”
And was it a game to me that I didn’t really call out to him? I mean raise my secret voice with its full power, as he had told me two centuries ago that I might do?
Through all my struggles, it had become such a matter of pride not to call to him, but what did that pride matter now?
Maybe it was the call he required of me. Maybe he was demanding that call. All the old bitterness and stubbornness were gone from me now. Why not make that effort, at least?
And closing my eyes, I did what I had not done since those old eighteenth-century nights when I’d talked to him aloud in the streets of Cairo or Rome. Silently, I called. And I felt the voiceless cry rising out of me and traveling into oblivion. I could almost feel it traverse the world of visible proportions, feel it grow fainter and fainter, feel it burn out.
And there it was again for a split second, the distant unrecognizable place I had glimpsed last night. Snow, endless snow, and some sort of stone dwelling, windows encrusted with ice. And on a high promontory a curious modern apparatus, a great gray metal dish turning on an axis to draw to itself the invisible waves that crisscross the earth skies.
Television antenna! Reaching from this snowy waste to the satellite—that is what it was! And the broken glass on the floor was the glass of a television screen. I saw it. Stone bench … a broken television screen. Noise.
Fading.
MARIUS!
Danger, Lestat. All of us in danger. She has … I cannot … Ice. Buried in ice. Flash of shattered glass on a stone floor, the bench empty, the clang and vibration of The Vampire Lestat throbbing from the speakers—“She has … Lestat, help me! All of us … danger. She has …”
Silence. The connection broken.
MARIUS!
Something, but too faint. For all its intensity simply too faint!
MARIUS!
I was leaning against the window, staring right into the morning light as it grew brighter, my eyes watering, the tips of my fingers almost burning on the hot glass.
Answer me, is it Akasha? Are you telling me that it is Akasha, that she is the one, that it was she?
But the sun was rising over the mountains. The lethal rays were spilling down into the valley, ranging across the valley floor.
I ran out of the house, across the field and towards the hills, my arm up to shield my eyes.
And within moments I had reached my hidden underground crypt, pulled back the stone, and I went down the crudely dug little stairs. One more turn and then another and I was in cold and safe blackness, earth smell, and I lay on the mud floor of the tiny chamber, my heart thudding, my limbs trembling. Akasha! That music of yours could wake the dead.
Television set in the chamber, of course, Marius had given them that, and the broadcasts right off the satellite. They had seen the video films! I knew it, I knew it as certainly as if he had spelled it out to the last detail. He had brought the television down into their sanctum, just as he had brought the movies to them years and years ago.
And she had been awakened, she had risen. That music of yours could wake the dead. I’d done it again.
Oh, if only I could keep my eyes open, could only think, if the sun wasn’t rising.
She had been there in San Francisco, she had been that close to us, burning our enemies. Alien, utterly foreign, yes.
But not uncivilized, no, not savage. She was not that. She was only just reawakened, my goddess, risen like a magnificent butterfly from its cocoon. And what was the world to her? How had she come to us? What was the state of her mind? Danger to all of us. No. I don’t believe it! She had slain our enemies. She had come to us.
But I couldn’t fight the drowsiness and heaviness any longer. Pure sensation was driving out all wonder and excitement. My body grew limp and helplessly still against the earth.
And then I felt a hand suddenly close on mine.
Cold as marble it was, and just about that strong.
My eyes snapped open in the darkness. The hand tightened its grip. A great mass of silken hair brushed my face. A cold arm moved across my chest.
Oh, please, my darling, my beautiful one, please! I wanted to say. But my eyes were closing! My lips wouldn’t move. I was losing consciousness. The sun had risen above.
THE END
This book is dedicated with
love to Stan Rice, Karen O’Brien, and Allen Daviau
A BALLANTINE BOOKS TRADE PAPERBACK Copyright © 1988 by Anne O’Brien Rice
Untitled poem copyright © 1988 by Stan Rice
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Poems by Stan Rice quoted in this book were originally published in:
Some Lamb by Stan Rice. Copyright © 1975 by Stan Rice. Published by The Figures. Reprinted by permission of Stan Rice.
Whiteboy by Stan Rice. Copyright © 1976 by Stan Rice. Published by Mudra. Reprinted by permission of Stan Rice.
Body of Work by Stan Rice. Copyright © 1983 by Stan Rice. Reprinted by permission of Lost Roads Publishers.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-93891
eISBN: 978-0-307-57589-0
v3.0_r2
TRAGIC RABBIT
Tragic rabbit, a painting.
The caked, ears green like rolled corn.
The black forehead pointing at the stars.
A painting on my wall, alone
as rabbits are
and aren’t. Fat red cheek,
all Art, trembling nose,
a habit hard to break as not.
You too can be a tragic rabbit; green and red
your back, blue your manly little chest.
But if you’re ever goaded into being one
beware the True Flesh, it
will knock you off your tragic horse
and break your tragic colors like a ghost
breaks marble; your wounds will heal
so quickly water
will be jealous.
Rabbits on white paper painted
outgrow all charms against their breeding wild;
and their rolled corn ears become horns.
So watch out if the tragic life feels fine—