by Anne Rice
“Thank you,” I said, “for giving me time to talk.” I knew suddenly that he was using no telepathic power to hold me where I stood, but I took no conscious note of it. “I want to tell you that Benedict did what he wanted to do, no matter who tried to dissuade him. I hated it. Hated the very sight of it. He wanted to give his blood to the young ones. I loathed all of it, and watched it because he asked me to watch it and he had provided me with a golden throne of sorts. It had been his gift.”
He listened to these things without expression, his pale eyes as still as if they were made of glass. They reflected the light like the hourglass eyes of old French dolls.
“He said his time had—.”
“I heard what he said,” he replied. “Don’t speak to me of Benedict, not another word, if you want your full quarter hour. And I know that you pledged your friends to keep faith with you. And I know that your foul little Replimoid friends have restored my fortune as you told them to do. And I know that not one of your friends has been able to come after you, because I lost them before I passed over the great sea.”
I hooked my thumb in my jeans and, looking down, I shrugged. I swallowed hard several times, and squinted at the fire until my eyes, sore from the wind, watered at the bright light.
“It would do me no good, would it?” I asked, “to tell you that I never broke faith with you, not ever. That I argued again and again for your life against those who would have destroyed you.”
“And how would they ever have done that?” he asked. “You see now my power. You’ve all seen my power. Which of you can stand against me?”
His eyes narrowed and his face became hard. His lips were as white as his face suddenly until a flash of emotion rendered the whole visage human for a moment with a tapestry of old lines. He appeared now to be in a silent fury. But he wasn’t using any of that power to lock a hold on me.
I drew closer to him.
“What can I do to touch your heart?” I asked. “So that you might spare my life?”
Again, he had no telepathic hold on me. He was merely looking at me, his lips working feverishly and his eyes widening as if he couldn’t contain the passion, before he narrowed them again.
Closer I moved and then closer and then I fell down on my knees again just a few feet before him.
“Maybe they couldn’t have succeeded,” I said. “Maybe they had no idea of your power. But it was I who argued for you, Rhoshamandes. It was I who became your advocate time and again.”
I bowed my head. I stared at the hem of his brown robe, at the old threadbare cloth, at the naked flesh beneath it, the toenails shining as they always do, the feet as perfect as those of a saint in church. In the high Heavens with their icy winds he had felt nothing in this thin garment as he had carried me here, nothing of the pain that I felt now in every fiber, every limb.
“I admire how you’ve achieved your purposes,” I said. “How can I not admire the choices you made and the way in which you made them? Speed and surprise.”
I heard him speak, but I didn’t look up at him.
“Are you really trying to persuade me that you have anything but loathing for me?” he asked. “You never knew me. Your cohorts never knew me. You never knew that I did what I did to Maharet only because she contemplated bringing an end to us all.”
“But I did know that,” I said, my head still bowed. “And I told the others,” I said. I inched closer to him, but there was still a good two feet between us. I could smell the wind in the folds of his robes.
“No, you don’t know me, you think me a monster even now.”
“Yea gods!” I cried looking up at him, and for the first time I did allow myself to invoke the image of my mother, my Gabrielle, on the night I’d come into her death chamber in Paris, on the Île Saint-Louis, and I had shown her what had happened to me, that I was no longer human, and I had seen both the fear and the triumph in her eyes. The tears came exactly as I hoped they would. They came in their usual flood as they always did with me when I gave way to tears, and I trembled violently all over.
Putting my fingers loosely over my eyes I looked up at him as I cried and saw the perplexity in his expression.
“How could I not think you a monster now, Rhoshamandes? What am I to think?” I sobbed. “What am I to pray for as I kneel before you? What do I have to defend me? Oh, if only I had speed. And surprise!”
As fast as I could, I rose up and smashed the crown of my head into his face with all the force I had. His nose was shattered, slammed back into his face, but I held him by the hair on both sides.
He let out a deafening roar of pain, the ax falling to the floor as he stumbled backwards, but I clung to him with all my might, and then I rammed my thumbs right into his eye sockets and, clawing out his eyes, I swallowed them both whole.
“Stop it, stop it!” he bellowed.
I dropped to the floor.
It had all taken place in a second of time.
He spun round, reaching out desperately, and sending the fire all over the whole room. The white paint on the walls blistered and bubbled and turned black. He sent his fire at the plaster ceiling and out the open windows to the sky. Then it was I who sent the fire at him.
With all my strength and all my will, I sent the fire at him.
“No, you don’t understand, stop, listen to me!” he howled.
But the fire had him, the fire caught his long loose sleeves, and burned his face a hideous purplish bloodred. I sent it again and again at him, and I sent my strongest telekinetic power at him, slamming him into the fireplace.
His robes were ablaze and so was his hair. Desperately he tried with both hands to put out the flames, but they were overwhelming him. And I sent the fire over and over, until his head and hands were turning black.
“No, this is all wrong,” he roared.
I snatched up the ax where he had let it drop and coming up behind him as he righted himself, as he stumbled in a circle, a great torch burning before me, roaring some mad words I couldn’t understand—“La bait hah so roar, la bait hah so roar”—I dealt him one fine blow through the flames that struck his head from his neck.
The bait hah so rah!
Quiet. One fragile flickering image of Benedict. Benedict. Then nothing.
I flung the head by its long hair at the stone edge of the mantel, hearing the bones crunch, and then again I swung it and again and again, until I held a sack of blood and bones in my hands.
I brought it to my lips, the eyeless face turned away from me, and I sucked the blood from the bleeding neck, sucked it with all my might, and my mind swam with his thick and viscous blood.
It was silent blood. But it was so strong, so sweet and strong, the blood of the brain, so bright and shining. It was electric, igniting every circuit in me, finding my heart and heating it until I thought that I too would catch fire. The power of it was beatific; it was grand beyond imagining, let alone describing. It was the blood of my enemy defeated, the blood of the one who’d slain my mother, and it was all mine.
The only sound as I drank and drank was the sound of the fire and the sea and a horrid thumping and scratching noise that woke me from my swoon. I stood still. I didn’t know suddenly where I was.
But Rhoshamandes’s blood had become a fine scaffolding of steel supporting me and I was warm, warm as if I’d never ever been cold in all my life.
A listless drowsy breeze filled the room. It was filled with the scent of the ocean, salty and clean, washing me and washing the room, and beyond I saw stars without number, stars of such radiance and such distance that the Heavens were no longer the painted vault of Heaven but a great endless ocean of stars.
I stared down to see the headless body fallen and smoldering and smoking, the robe burnt away to reveal the purplish skin of the back, the headless body moving, crawling, clawing at the polished flags with it
s great sprawling fingers and pushing through the robe with its knees.
The sight of this was so ghastly that for a moment I couldn’t move. A giant headless insect would have been no more horrifying.
Then I was on my knees and, rolling the body over, I drank from the fount of the artery—and the blood flashed through my limbs as if it were molten steel. The hands battered senselessly against my head, against my shoulders. But I could see nothing. I was the blood I was drinking. And I drank as much as I could. I drank when I could drink no more. I gorged on the heat and the power and finally fell back on my hands staring at the broken ceiling. Fine dust fell from a web of cracks in the stucco, and the headless chest rose and fell, rose and fell as the hands rose and fell, imploring with splayed fingers.
The headless body leaked blood, but I could take no more. Its purplish black skin was white already. Even the smashed head lying on the floor, gaping at me with empty eye sockets, was turning from black to white as the last of the blood in it restored the burnt flesh.
I grabbed up the ax again and with both hands chopped open the ribs. The blood splattered from the ugly wound, and the heart beat faster and faster while the hands reached up to me and tried to find me and get ahold of me, until I grabbed the heart out of the body and squeezed the blood out of it into my mouth.
Now the body lay still.
I sat back staring at the distant sky beyond the open arches, my tongue licking the heart, and then I let it drop. I kept trying to find the farthest reaches of the stars, the place where the stars dissolved into a silvery light, but I couldn’t find it. With eyes closed finally, I listened to the sea, and it seemed the sea was washing over me; the stars were falling into the sea, and the sky and the sea had become one, and I wanted to sleep forever.
But there was no time for this.
I moved on all fours to the place where the shrunken and battered head had fallen before the fire, picked it up, and lifted the right eye socket to my lips and sucked until the brain itself flowed into my mouth. Ah, such a nasty viscous thing, this brain!
When all the blood had been crushed from it by my tongue against the roof of my mouth, I spat out the nauseating tissues. A convulsion caught me off guard. The eyes came up, mangled and lusterless and sticky with blood, and I spat them out as well. Again, I vomited blood and tissue, tissue my body could not absorb. And the sickness for a few seconds was near unbearable.
Hard to describe such a physical sense of distress. But it passed.
Rhoshamandes was no more.
The surf pounded on the shore beneath the terrace. The fire crackled and ate at the oak logs.
Speed and surprise.
I lay back more exhausted than I had ever been in all my long existence. I could have slept for a year and I imagined, without wanting to, that I was safe at home in my father’s house, and the music was playing as always in the ballroom.
But I had to leave here. I didn’t even know where I was, let alone that I was safe, or who might come at any moment. Mortals who lived in this place perhaps or fledglings he’d forged to help him in his vengeance.
I sat up. And through a great act of will, managed to climb to my feet and move into the other lighted room.
There, across a great bed, I spied a dark red velvet coverlet and I yanked it free, sending a pyramid of velvet pillows in all directions, and I dragged the coverlet back into the first room.
For a moment, I thought that I might lose consciousness. My head was throbbing with pain, but my vision had never been clearer, and I told myself that I could do what I must. The blood of Rhoshamandes once again flashed in my consciousness as a steel scaffolding actually supporting me, an intricate and endless fabric of steel, and how much of this was Gregory’s vintage blood, I wondered.
A sound came from afar, an uneven and unusual sound that denoted something living.
I went still, slowing the beat of my heart to listen. Was there another immortal in this house? But all I heard were the inevitable modern machines, the air conditioner, the water heater, the circulation of water through pipes. The grinding noise of a motor. Possibly a generator. No. Nothing else. I was alone here.
“Start thinking, Lestat,” I said.
I threw the headless body onto the coverlet, tossed the smashed and empty head on top of the body, then gathered up even the heart and what I’d vomited of the brain and the eyes, and flung them all together, and then made of the coverlet a sack and threw that sack over my shoulder and staggered out into the cold darkness of the terrace over the sea.
What hour of the clock it was I didn’t know, but as I peered up at the stars, as I sought through the shifting mists to see their naked patterns, I realized I was indeed in the islands of the Pacific—and if I had the strength for it, I could rise now and take to the winds and ride them gently west around the globe, hour by hour following the night, over the Orient and over India and over the Middle East until I came upon Europe and France and my father’s house in the mountains—without ever stopping for the rising sun. I had to do this.
Once again I thought I caught an unusual noise. Was it the heartbeat of one of the old ones?
A thin telepathic voice spoke.
How on earth did you do it?
Was that really what I’d heard? Was I hearing laughter? It was tantalizingly faint, like someone toying with me, someone watching all this and being mightily entertained by it.
All the more reason to go now. I’d never attempted such a feat before as this great long western journey, but I was bound and determined to do it now. “You slaughtered the great Rhoshamandes, didn’t you?” I whispered aloud to myself. “Well, Lestat, you little Devil, rise now, call on all the power in your blood and go home!”
With the ends of the coverlet firmly in my grip, I found myself rising upwards before I had even meant to do it, and I headed west slowly letting the wind carry me higher and higher until I was passing through the cold wet mist of the clouds.
Now the Heavens spread out in all their indescribable beauty before me, the stars like diamonds everywhere that I looked, diamonds of inexpressible brilliance, shining like gifts in the great black vault of Heaven, gifts from whom or what we may never know. “Home,” I said. “Guide me home.”
Chapter 18
Whenever I did drop off to sleep, I began to fall, and the clouds would catch me unawares and I would rise again and go on. When the mists broke I saw continents that I had known from maps and globes, but they appeared unreal far below, as did the lights of cities whose names I couldn’t guess.
At some point over the sands of the Middle East I woke with a start, my body descending fast through hot dry air, and before I could grasp the danger, I felt two hands take hold of me. They gripped me by the waist and propelled me back up towards the blackness of Heaven. I’m imagining this, I thought. And all of a piece I remembered the tale that mortals on desperate expeditions through ice and snow often imagined “another” with them, a helpful figure whose presence they took for granted, a figure of whom they never spoke, but a figure who was known to each of those on the journey. And you’re imagining now such a being, I thought, and now he presses you forward and you gain speed and you rise and you travel faster than before, ever more impatient for the finish.
The stars were true. The stars guided me. The night went on and on and there were times when I almost dropped my sack into the dark uncharted lands below. But my hands would tighten on the twisted cloth and I would breathe deep of the wind and see that scaffolding of blood within me.
Somehow I continued. Somehow I moved on.
And gradually thought came back to me. Not just knowing. I had gotten the better of Rhoshamandes. I had done it just as Jesse had said that he and Benedict had gotten the better of the great Maharet, with speed and surprise, and now Benedict was dead and Rhoshamandes had been defeated.
I had slain the grea
test enemy that had ever set himself against me, the enemy who had robbed me of all I loved, the enemy who would destroy the Court—and just for a little while, a little while, I felt the kind of happiness I had known very seldom in my life, happiness—as if they were not all dead, not all finished, not all gone.
Keep going. Keep moving. Be a child of the moon and the stars and the wind. Keep going. Think of those times when as a mortal boy you leapt from high cliffs into mountain streams or from the back of your horse, flying out over the fields, as if you were an eagle. Keep going.
Finally I saw the unmistakable lights of Paris shining upwards through the mist and I knew I was almost there.
“My friends,” I cried out. “I’ve come back. Gregory, Armand, David, I’ve come back.” I sent the telepathic message with all my remaining power, and it seemed stronger than me, stronger than the phantom descending slowly from the track of the winds towards the snow-covered mountains.
When the Château appeared before me I felt myself plummeting so fast that I hit the stone floor of the northwest tower with bruising force. A century ago, that would have broken every bone in my body. But not now. Ignoring the shock, I hoisted the filthy sack over my shoulder and pulled open the door to the stairwell.
“Come to the ballroom, all of you!” I started down the stone stairs, aware of feet pounding throughout the house, of voices crying, “He’s back. Lestat’s alive. He’s back.” And hearts beating all about me. It was as if the entire Château were alive with movement, the very stones vibrating, a chorus of cries and shouts rising to greet me.
Finally I reached the main floor.
I bowed my head, not looking up at those suddenly crowding about me, staggering on towards the door of the ballroom, and once I’d gained the middle, once I stood firmly on the parquet floor beneath the great embossed coat of arms on the ceiling that marked the very center, I let loose the coverlet and down fell the headless body of my enemy, lifeless white limbs tangled in the burnt brown remnants of the torn robe. Horrors, the remnants of the head and heart, such horrors, and the preternatural flesh as white as it had been before he perished.