by Anne Rice
All right. I allowed myself to be taken along. White marble tile, carved gold fixtures; an ancient Roman splendor, when you got right down to it, with gleaming bottles of soaps and scents lining marble shelves. And the flood of hot water in the pool, with the jets pumping it full of bubbles, it was all very inviting; or might have been at some other time.
They stripped my garments off me. Absolutely fascinating feeling. No one had ever done such a thing to me. Not since I’d been alive and then only when I was a very small child. I stood in the flood of steam from the bath, watching all these small dark hands, and feeling the hairs rise all over my body; feeling the adoration in the women’s eyes.
Through the steam I looked into the mirror—a wall of mirror actually, and I saw myself for the first time since this sinister odyssey had begun. The shock was more for a moment than I could handle. This can’t be me.
I was much paler than I’d imagined. Gently I pushed the women away and went towards the mirror wall. My skin had a pearlescent gleam to it; and my eyes were even brighter, gathering all the colors of the spectrum and mingling them with an icy light. Yet I didn’t look like Marius. I didn’t look like Akasha. The lines in my face were still there!
In other words I’d been bleached by Akasha’s blood, but I hadn’t become smooth yet. I’d kept my human expression. And the odd thing was, the contrast now made these lines all the more visible. Even the tiny lines all over my fingers were more clearly etched than before.
But what consolation was this when I was more than ever noticeable, astonishing, unlike a human being? In a way, this was worse than that first moment two hundred years ago, when an hour or so after my death I’d seen myself in a mirror, and tried to find my humanity in what I was seeing. I was just as afraid right now.
I studied my reflection—my chest was like a marble torso in a museum, that white. And the organ, the organ we don’t need, poised as if ready for what it would never again know how to do or want to do, marble, a Priapus at a gate.
Dazed, I watched the women draw closer; lovely throats, breasts, dark moist limbs. I watched them touch me all over again. I was beautiful to them, all right.
The scent of their blood was stronger in here, in the rising steam. Yet I wasn’t thirsty, not really. Akasha had filled me, but the blood was tormenting me a little. No, quite a lot.
I wanted their blood—and it had nothing to do with thirst. I wanted it the way a man can want vintage wine, though he’s drunk water. Only magnify that by twenty or thirty or a hundred. In fact, it was so powerful I could imagine taking all of them, tearing at their tender throats one after another and leaving their bodies lying here on the floor.
No, this is not going to take place, I reasoned. And the sharp, dangerous quality of this lust made me want to weep. What’s been done to me! But then I knew, didn’t I? I knew I was so strong now that twenty men couldn’t have subdued me. And think what I could do to them. I could rise up through the ceiling if I wanted to and get free of here. I could do things of which I’d never dreamed. Probably I had the fire gift now; I could burn things the way she could burn them, the way Marius said that he could. Just a matter of strength, that’s all it was. And dizzying levels of awareness, of acceptance. . . .
The women were kissing me. They were kissing my shoulders. Just a lovely little sensation, the soft pressure of the lips on my skin. I couldn’t help smiling, and gently I embraced them and kissed them, nuzzling their heated little necks and feeling their breasts against my chest. I was utterly surrounded by these malleable creatures, I was blanketed in succulent human flesh.
I stepped into the deep tub and allowed them to wash me. The hot water splashed over me deliriously, washing away easily all the dirt that never really clings to us, never penetrates us. I looked up at the ceiling and let them brush the hot water through my hair.
Yes, extraordinarily pleasurable, all of it. Yet never had I been so alone. I was sinking into these mesmerizing sensations; I was drifting. Because really, there was nothing else that I could do.
When they were finished I chose the perfumes that I wanted and told them to get rid of the others. I spoke in French but they seemed to understand. Then they dressed me with the clothes I selected from what they presented to me. The master of this house had liked handmade linen shirts, which were only a little too large for me. And he’d liked handmade shoes as well, and they were a tolerable fit.
I chose a suit of gray silk, very fine weave, and rather jaunty modern cut. And silver jewelry. The man’s silver watch, and his cuff links which had tiny diamonds embedded in them. And even a tiny diamond pin for the narrow lapel of the coat. But all these clothes felt so strange on me; it was as if I could feel the surface of my own skin yet not feel it. And there came that déjà vu. Two hundred years ago. The old mortal questions. Why in the hell is this happening? How can I gain control of it?
I wondered for a moment, was it possible not to care what happened? To stand back from it and view them all as alien creatures, things upon which I fed? Cruelly I’d been ripped out of their world! Where was the old bitterness, the old excuse for endless cruelty? Why had it always focused itself upon such small things? Not that a life is small. Oh, no, never, not any life! That was the whole point actually. Why did I who could kill with such abandon shrink from the prospect of seeing their precious traditions laid waste?
Why did my heart come up in my throat now? Why was I crying inside, like something dying myself?
Maybe some other fiend could have loved it; some twisted and conscienceless immortal could have sneered at her visions, yet slipped into the robes of a god as easily as I had slipped into that perfumed bath.
But nothing could give me that freedom, nothing. Her permissions meant nothing; her power finally was but another degree of what we all possessed. And what we all possessed had never made the struggle simple; it had made it agony, no matter how often we won or lost.
It couldn’t happen, the subjugation of a century to one will; the design had to be foiled somehow, and if I just maintained my calm, I’d find the key.
Yet mortals had inflicted such horrors upon others; barbarian hordes had scarred whole continents, destroying everything in their path. Was she merely human in her delusions of conquest and domination? Didn’t matter. She had inhuman means to see her dreams made real!
I would start weeping again if I didn’t stop reaching now for the solution; and these poor tender creatures around me would be even more damaged and confused than before.
When I lifted my hands to my face, they didn’t move away from me. They were brushing my hair. Chills ran down my back. And the soft thud of the blood in their veins was deafening suddenly.
I told them I wanted to be alone. I couldn’t endure the temptation any longer. And I could have sworn they knew what I wanted. Knew it, and were yielding to it. Dark salty flesh so close to me. Too much temptation. Whatever the case, they obeyed instantly, and a little fearfully. They left the room in silence, backing away as if it weren’t proper to simply walk out.
I looked at the face of the watch. I thought it was pretty funny, me wearing this watch that told the time. And it made me angry suddenly. And then the watch broke! The glass shattered; everything flew out of the ruptured silver case. The strap broke and the thing fell off my wrist onto the floor. Tiny glittering wheels disappeared into the carpet.
“Good God!” I whispered. Yet why not?—if I could rupture an artery or a heart. But the point was to control this thing, to direct it, not let it escape like that.
I looked up and chose at random a small mirror, one standing on the dresser in a silver frame. I thought Break and it exploded into gleaming fragments. In the hollow stillness I could hear the pieces as they struck the walls and the dresser top.
Well, that was useful, a hell of a lot more useful than being able to kill people. I stared at the telephone on the edge of the dresser. I concentrated, let the power collect, then consciously subdued it and directed it to push the
phone slowly across the glass that covered the marble. Yes. All right. The little bottles tumbled and fell as it was pushed into them. Then I stopped them; I couldn’t right them however. I couldn’t pick them up. Oh, but wait, yes I could. I imagined a hand righting them. And certainly the power wasn’t literally obeying this image; but I was using it to organize the power. I righted all the little bottles. I retrieved the one which had fallen and put it back in place.
I was trembling just a little. I sat on the bed to think this over, but I was too curious to think. The important thing to realize was this: it was physical; it was energy. And it was no more than an extension of powers I’d possessed before. For example, even in the beginning, in the first few weeks after Magnus had made me, I’d managed once to move another—my beloved Nicolas with whom I’d been arguing—across a room as if I’d struck him with an invisible fist. I’d been in a rage then; I hadn’t been able to duplicate the little trick later. But it was the same power, the same verifiable and measurable trait.
“You are no god,” I said. But this increase of power, this new dimension, as they say so aptly in this century. . . . Hmmmm. . . .
Looking up at the ceiling, I decided I wanted to rise slowly and touch it, run my hands over the plaster frieze that ran around the cord of the chandelier. I felt a queasiness; and then I realized I was floating just beneath the ceiling. And my hand, why, it looked like my hand was going through the plaster. I lowered myself a little and looked down at the room.
Dear God, I’d done this without taking my body with me! I was still sitting there, on the side of the bed. I was staring at myself, at the top of my own head. I—my body at any rate—sat there motionless, dreamlike, staring. Back. And I was there again, thank God, and my body was all right, and then looking up at the ceiling, I tried to figure what this was all about.
Well, I knew what it was all about, too. Akasha herself had told me how her spirit could travel out of her body. And mortals had always done such things, or so they claimed. Mortals had written of such invisible travel from the most ancient times.
I had almost done it when I tried to see into Azim’s temple, gone there to see, and she had stopped me because when I left my body, my body had started to fall. And long before that, there had been a couple of other times. . . . But in general, I’d never believed all the mortal stories.
Now I knew I could do this as well. But I certainly didn’t want to do it by accident. I made the decision to move to the ceiling again but this time with my body, and it was accomplished at once! We were there together, pushing against the plaster and this time my hand didn’t go through. All right.
I went back down and decided to try the other again. Now only in spirit. The queasy feeling came, I took a glance down at my body, and then I was rising right through the roof of the palazzo. I was traveling out over the sea. Yet things looked unaccountably different; I wasn’t sure this was the literal sky or the literal sea. It was more like a hazy conception of both, and I didn’t like this, not one bit. No, thank you. Going home now! Or should I bring my body to me? I tried, but absolutely nothing happened, and that didn’t surprise me actually. This was some kind of hallucination. I hadn’t really left my body, and ought to just accept that fact.
And Baby Jenks, what about the beautiful things Baby Jenks had seen when she went up? Had they been hallucinations? I would never know, would I?
Back!
Sitting. Side of the bed. Comfortable. The room. I got up and walked around for a few minutes, merely looking at the flowers, and the odd way the white petals caught the lamplight and how dark the reds looked; and how the golden light was caught on the surfaces of the mirrors, all the other lovely things.
It was overwhelming suddenly, the pure detail surrounding me; the extraordinary complexity of a single room.
Then I practically fell into the chair by the bed. I lay back against the velvet, and listened to my heart pounding. Being invisible, leaving my body, I hated it! I wasn’t going to do it again!
Then I heard laughter, faint, gentle laughter. I realized Akasha was there, somewhere behind me, near the dresser perhaps.
There was a sudden surge in me of gladness to hear her voice, to feel her presence. In fact I was surprised at how strong these sensations were. I wanted to see her but I didn’t move just yet.
“This traveling without your body—it’s a power you share with mortals,” she said. “They do this little trick of traveling out of their bodies all the time.”
“I know,” I said dismally. “They can have it. If I can fly with my body, that’s what I intend to do.”
She laughed again; soft, caressing laughter that I’d heard in my dreams.
“In olden times,” she said, “men went to the temple to do this; they drank the potions given them by the priests; it was in traveling the heavens that men faced the great mysteries of life and death.”
“I know,” I said again. “I always thought they were drunk or stoned out of their minds as one says today.”
“You’re a lesson in brutality,” she whispered. “Your responses to things are so swift.”
“That’s brutal?” I asked. I caught a whiff again of the fires burning on the island. Sickening. Dear God. And we talk here as if this isn’t happening, as if we hadn’t penetrated their world with these horrors. . . .
“And flying with your body does not frighten you?” she asked.
“It all frightens me, you know that,” I said. “When do I discover the limits? Can I sit here and bring death to mortals who are miles away?”
“No,” she said. “You’ll discover the limits rather sooner than you think. It’s like every other mystery. There really is no mystery.”
I laughed. For a split second I heard the voices again, the tide rising, and then it faded into a truly audible sound—cries on the wind, cries coming from villages on the island. They had burned the little museum with the ancient Greek statues in it; and with the icons and the Byzantine paintings.
All that art going up in smoke. Life going up in smoke.
I had to see her suddenly. I couldn’t find her in the mirrors, the way they were. I got up.
She was standing at the dresser; and she too had changed her garments, and the style of her hair. Even more purely lovely, yet timeless as before. She held a small hand mirror, and she was looking at herself in it; but it seemed she was not really looking at anything; she was listening to the voices; and I could hear them again too.
A shiver went through me; she resembled her old self, the frozen self sitting in the shrine.
Then she appeared to wake; to look into the mirror again, and then at me as she put the mirror aside.
Her hair had been loosened; all those plaits gone. And now the rippling black waves came down free over her shoulders, heavy, glossy, and inviting to kiss. The dress was similar to the old one, as if the women had made it for her out of dark magenta silk that she had found here. It gave a faint rosy blush to her cheeks, and to her breasts which were only half covered by the loose folds that went up over her shoulders, gathered there by tiny gold clasps.
The necklaces she wore were all modern jewelry, but the profusion made them look archaic, pearls and gold chains and opals and even rubies.
Against the luster of her skin, all this ornament appeared somehow unreal! It was caught up in the overall gloss of her person; it was like the light in her eyes, or the luster of her lips.
She was something fit for the most lavish palace of the imagination; something both sensuous and divine. I wanted her blood again, the blood without fragrance and without killing. I wanted to go to her and lift my hand and touch the skin which seemed absolutely impenetrable but which would break suddenly like the most fragile crust.
“All the men on the island are dead, aren’t they?” I asked. I shocked myself.
“All but ten. There were seven hundred people on this island. Seven have been chosen to live.”
“And the other three?�
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“They are for you.”
I stared at her. For me? The desire for blood shifted a little, revised itself, included her and human blood—the hot, bubbling, fragrant kind, the kind that—But there was no physical need. I could still call it thirst, technically, but it was actually worse.
“You don’t want them?” she said, mockingly, smiling at me. “My reluctant god, who shrinks from his duty? You know all those years, when I listened to you, long before you made songs to me, I loved it that you took only the hard ones, the young men. I loved it that you hunted thieves and killers; that you liked to swallow their evil whole. Where’s your courage now? Your impulsiveness? Your willingness to plunge, as it were?”
“Are they evil?” I said. “These victims who are waiting for me?”
She narrowed her eyes for a moment. “Is it cowardice finally?” she asked. “Does the grandeur of the plan frighten? For surely the killing means little.”
“Oh, but you’re wrong,” I said. “The killing always means something. But yes, the grandeur of the plan terrifies me. The chaos, the total loss of all moral equilibrium, it means everything. But that’s not cowardice, is it?” How calm I sounded. How sure of myself. It wasn’t the truth, but she knew it.
“Let me release you from all obligation to resist,” she said. “You cannot stop me. I love you, as I told you. I love to look at you. It fills me with happiness. But you can’t influence me. Such an idea is absurd.”
We stared at each other in silence. I was trying to find words to tell myself how lovely she was, how like the old Egyptian paintings of princesses with shining tresses whose names are now forever lost. I was trying to understand why my heart hurt even looking at her; and yet I didn’t care that she was beautiful; I cared about what we said to each other.
“Why have you chosen this way?” I asked.
“You know why,” she said with a patient smile. “It is the best way. It is the only way; it is the clear vision after centuries of searching for a solution.”