by Anne Rice
“ ‘But they’re mad now, all of them,’ Rhosh protested.” She looked at me. Her face was bright and she smiled as she went on. “He told Benedict they would be received as mad creatures when they raved about their captivity and they would be put in chains in some place worse than his prison where he gave them meat and wine every day.”
She broke off, drifting back into her memories.
I didn’t dare interrupt her. I wanted desperately for her to go on.
“Then Benedict won out,” she said. She laughed. “I see it as if it were yesterday, Benedict rushing down and down and down those curving stairs. And monks coming up, a procession of gaunt and ragged monks in rotting robes, singing, all of them actually singing some psalm in Latin and running off into the woods. The woods grew right up to the monastery. The woods concealed it from the world. Benedict was jubilant, and after that Rhoshamandes was a god in his eyes, as he was to the rest of us. Of course Rhoshamandes bolted all the doors, and we kept to the underground rooms ourselves for the next few months as the priests came looking for the fabled place where the raving monks had been kept in the bet ha sohar by an Egyptian demon—.”
“But what if that prison remains underground, under all the vines,” I asked. “Under the forest?”
“It’s possible,” she said. “But I’ve searched that land and found nothing. Only several months ago, Sevraine took me there. We found, on a bit of ruin, an old bell tower to an old chapel. The chapel had been a mile from the monastery.”
“I have to go there,” I said. “I have to go now. Will you come with me? I have to search for anything that remains of that prison.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Sevraine. In her shimmering white gown with her loose hair she seemed scarcely prepared for such a journey, but she asked Thorne if he would get her cloak from the library. The library meant Marius’s library and Thorne was off on the errand immediately.
“I will as well,” said Allesandra.
“But, Lestat,” said David. “What do you hope to discover even if you do find this prison? We’ve heard not a single solitary word from those he took. They were silenced almost immediately.”
“I don’t want to think about it,” I said. “I want to go, to see, to find out what he meant when he said those words, why he used those particular words. He had to mean his old refuge in the Loire.”
“You do realize that Kapetria and Amel visited that land themselves,” said David.
“They found some modern buildings,” said Seth. “They went there by day and examined every house to which Rhoshamandes held title. They were occupied by families who managed his vineyards.”
“Not all of them,” said Sevraine. She was on her feet. Thorne came in with her long dark cloak and put it over her white shoulders. “There was an empty building.”
“Yes,” said Allesandra. “The empty old house with the garden. I remember the garden.” When she climbed to her feet, she took on the gesture and demeanor of an old woman again, the old woman she’d been when I’d first encountered her under Les Innocents. David was at her side. He wore modern clothes, a heavy jacket with a sweater underneath that would keep him warm on the journey, but Allesandra wore only a thin robe.
I was about to say something about it when Thorne appeared again with a long black cashmere coat for her, and helped her into it.
“Rhosh was watching us the whole time we were there,” said Sevraine. She turned to me. “And I wanted to take my leave. Finally he came up and asked us what we were doing there on his land. I told him Allesandra wanted to see the place where she’d been Born to Darkness and he said it was all gone. All of it. He asked us to come to Saint Rayne. I didn’t want to go with him.”
Gregory gestured for all of us to wait. He retired to the corner of the room and was talking in a low voice on his iPhone. I could hear Kapetria on the other end.
He rang off. “We’ll go there with you,” he said to me. “But Kapetria has already searched this unoccupied house from top to bottom. She swears no one has been there in decades.”
“Let us go, Lestat,” said Seth. “The prison could still be underground. Very likely it is. We won’t come back till we’ve found it. But you stay here. You need your rest. You need to be here in the ballroom. There’s a larger crowd there now than last night. Word of the battle with Rhoshamandes has traveled the world.”
“Of course I can’t stay behind,” I said. “You know I can’t.”
Chapter 21
It was a house of these times, all right, though not to be called new. I figured it to be at least three hundred years old. It was built of the local stone, and had two stories and a high-pitched roof, with mullioned windows—and it was indeed empty and silent and without any connections for heat or light, and almost no furniture.
There was no one about. Only the bleak winter vines stripped of their grapes, running on for miles, and a distant copse of ancient trees of immense size, and the cold rain, a rain worse to me than snow, falling over all as if it were falling on the entire world, a near-silent rain that felt like needles on the backs of my hands and on my face.
The house was unlocked and had about it the air of a property abandoned, but as soon as we entered the main room, I spied a fireplace with logs in it, and set them alight. There were thick candles on the stone mantel and I lighted these as well. Dust covered the floor, and spiderwebs glittered in the corners. I could smell the dust burning in the fireplace.
Of course we did not need this light; we could see very well in the darkness. But the light did make things easier and I carried a lighted candle with me as I went from room to room. The floor seemed solid everywhere.
Every single flag that I tore up was resting on a layer of concrete. Surely this had been part of a modern restoration, but there was no sign that anyone ever came to this place.
That is, until I reached the last room, a long broad chamber which contained a refectory table with benches on either side. There suddenly I came upon an old upright Victrola phonograph on little curved legs with an old thick black recording disc on the turntable, labeled with the name of a Verdi opera. So perhaps Rhoshamandes had once come here, long decades ago.
Old recordings in brown-paper jackets were heaped in the corner. Verdi, Verdi, more Verdi. And beneath the table I spied what appeared to be a square mosaic with the figures of Bacchus in a chariot surrounded by worshipping nymphs.
“This table’s been moved recently,” I said. “Look at the marks in the dust.” I shoved the table to the side, the legs screeching on the stone, and the bench falling over on its side.
The mosaic was beautiful, and possibly ancient, dating all the way back to the Roman times. I walked back and forth over it, and tapped it several times with the toe of my boot. I could feel nothing and see nothing that indicated it was not deeply embedded in the stone.
“Except that the stone is all new,” said Gregory. “This floor is nothing as old as the mosaic.”
At once David, Allesandra, and Gregory and I were searching the walls everywhere with our hands for some sort of crank or handle, and finding nothing. I became impatient and wanted to search the rest of the house.
I walked to the double doors that opened into the garden, and there I saw a great pile of what appeared to be sheets of metal glinting in the light of the rainy sky. Sheets of metal!
Now why was that here?
“There could be a thousand reasons,” said David. “To patch the roof, to patch walls.”
I went out into the rain and examined the heap and saw it was all sheets of steel, each sheet maybe one and one-half inches thick.
“What is steel made of?” I asked.
“Iron, mostly iron,” said Gregory.
I was even more excited, and David was even more saddened, wishing for all the world that he could somehow save me from all this.
Now w
hat was this doing here, all this steel, which is mostly made of iron? And it hadn’t been here very long at all, because green shrubbery was crushed beneath the loose pile of sheets—and deep rutted tire tracks led to the garden, and they were filled with gleaming puddles of rain.
It was easy to figure that a heavy vehicle had brought these steel sheets here for some purpose.
Gregory stood at my side, oblivious to the cold in his thin worsted-wool business suit and plain shirt and tie. He seemed utterly immune to the rain slowly drenching his short hair and his face. He looked out over the barren fields. And when he realized that I was shivering, foolishly shivering, he removed his long cashmere scarf and wound it around my neck.
I tried to demur, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
Another figure appeared in the door. It was Santh.
He was dressed in a tweed jacket and sweater with a rolled neck, and jeans and boots very much like my own. His blond hair was groomed for the first time since I’d met him, hanging like a mantle over his shoulders. He too was looking out at the fields, and I realized that he was listening.
For a long moment, I watched him, watched him intently as if something wondrous was going to happen, and then it did.
“I hear something,” he whispered.
Gregory glanced at me and I knew we both were listening. But I heard nothing but the rain on the high roof and on the gables of the roof, and on the leaves in the distance copse. Such immense trees, surely spared from older forest.
“I don’t hear anything,” Gregory said.
“Neither do I,” said Sevraine.
“I do,” said Santh. “I hear a heartbeat. I think I hear more than one, but I know I hear one.”
“Wait a minute…,” Gregory murmured. His hand tightened on my upper right arm. For a moment he hurt me, but I didn’t care.
“It’s a heartbeat,” said Santh. “It’s coming from somewhere under this earth and out there.”
“I think I do hear it,” said Gregory. “It’s irregular, tired.”
At once, we set to work searching the ground around us, kicking at stones, prying up rocks, digging into the loose earth with the toes of our boots.
Then Allesandra gave a cry. “Ah there, in the trees, yes, the same trees…,” she said. She rushed towards the distant copse and disappeared within the dark trunks and wet leaves.
We all came right behind her.
Here were ancient stones turned this way and that by the roots of the trees and relentless vines which sought to bury them. Santh and Gregory pried the stones loose and tossed them out into the open. Then they both began to dig with their hands until they had cleared the remnant of a floor.
“It’s just a piece of flooring,” Gregory said, dusting off his knees.
Allesandra hung her head and Sevraine put her arm about Allesandra to comfort her. “A foolish journey,” Allesandra whispered. “I am to blame for it, and I never wanted to see this place again, never wanted to be under this sky or these stars.”
Santh stood transfixed. Then he turned and fixed his gaze on the distant wooded hill beyond the edge of the vineyard and he disappeared.
Of course he hadn’t dematerialized. He had simply used his preternatural speed to reach the nearby forest.
Gregory went after him and so did I.
The wet forest was thick and young, and the light of the sky was still plenty for us to see more stones, ancient stones, stones ripped up by more roots, and vines hungry to embrace them. It was a steep ascent, and the mud was wet and slippery, and a cold wind sliced through the forest, clattering in the wet leaves, and cutting into my eyes. But I went on searching, as we all did, pitching the stones right and left.
Suddenly Santh appeared high up the hill. He was beckoning for us to come.
“The old chapel!” Allesandra cried.
We were with him in an instant. “It’s close, the heartbeat,” Santh said. “And there is definitely more than one heart. But I can hear one heart distinctly. The beat is slow. The being is in deep sleep, but the being is alive.”
There was no mistaking the ruins of “the old chapel.” We came face-to-face with a long wall of broken-out arches ending perpendicular to the square of a broken bell tower. It rose three stories into the trees, its walls jagged and broken and gaping at the sky.
“I hear it,” Gregory cried. “It’s under the ground here!”
“I hear it too,” said Sevraine. “I hear the heartbeat of two others as well.”
I couldn’t contain my excitement.
Vines covered the whole ruin, thick winter vines, vines thick as ropes with dark green leaves. And we began to tear at them, stripping them off the stone, and ripping them back from the flooring. Suddenly, underneath the veil of vines, I saw the glint of steel.
It was a door plated in steel, a door into the bell tower. A sheet of steel had been cut to size and bolted on to it.
I smashed it in, and Santh and Gregory followed me inside.
We found ourselves in a rectangular room open to the sky high above, with a broad stone stairway running down to the right. All of this was new construction. I smelled concrete and I smelled new wood.
“Rhoshamandes has repaired all this,” said Sevraine. “It’s been done since we were here.”
But I scarcely heard her words because I had heard something else. “I hear it,” I confessed. “I hear the heart—only one heart, but I hear it.” It was slow, impossibly slow, just as Santh had said, the heart of an ancient one sleeping. I began to shake all over. David held on to me and led me forward.
We hurried down the stairs, with the others following us, and we found ourselves in a large modern cellar. There lay a stack of sheets of steel, exactly like those beside the house in the old garden. They were new and had their price stickers on them. But all else was thick with dust and the cellar appeared to have no entrance or exit except for the stairs leading down from above.
Frantically we searched everywhere. Then Santh shoved aside the entire pile of steel sheets, sending them clattering at the far wall, and there was the trapdoor, the broad trapdoor with a huge iron ring.
“Wait,” said David. He was holding me still, and he stood quiet now until the others were looking at us. “We don’t know what we’ll find. We don’t know what he’s done to them.”
“Let’s go!” I said. “Let me open it.”
Santh stepped in front of me to do the honors.
No mortal, indeed no group of mortals, could have pulled open this door. Perhaps I myself could not have pulled it open. But it was nothing to Santh, who opened it and threw it back, revealing its immense thickness.
It was like a rectangular cork in the neck of a bottle, the thing, made of stones bound in iron. The air that rose in our faces was cold and dry, and I smelled blood, not human blood but our blood. And something else, a strong smell that was familiar and unfamiliar.
Santh disappeared into the square of darkness, landing on a floor far below with a loud thud. “Come on down,” he called out, his voice echoing off the walls. “It’s a short drop.”
He was right. The jump was not hard for any of us, but Allesandra was afraid of it, and I took her in my arms and carried her down with me.
“This is part of the old house,” she cried as she was placed on her feet. “Mon Dieu, look at the torches in the corners.” There were four of them, and they had been dipped in fresh pitch. It was the pitch that I was smelling. It had been a very long time since I’d held a torch like those in my hand. Santh lighted all of them with the power of his mind, and then took one in hand to illuminate the high-arched entrance to a catacomb.
“This runs all the way to the old monastery cellars,” said Allesandra. “This was a way we could escape if ever the Children of Darkness surrounded the monastery; we’d come here by this catacomb, and go out through the tower.”
The catacomb was broad and had been swept clean. There were more torches on the walls, and I lighted them as we went along, just wanting the comfort of the illumination, though we could see perfectly by the torch Santh carried in his right hand.
For five full minutes we walked briskly through this passage, following several sharp turns which appeared to send us back in the direction from which we had come. I couldn’t tell. But finally we came to a vast room, a room with its own torches to be lighted, and a table against a far wall, and other random items here and there, and sheets of steel glittering in the flickering torchlight.
And there on the barren floor lay a long row of iron coffins, of the old-time elongated-heptagonal shape, the great part of them empty with their lids open, and only three of them closed, and those three being the coffins nearest us.
Now David and Allesandra could hear the heartbeat. And I could hear three heartbeats in all.
The others looked at me, waiting for me to move first, but I found to my shock that I couldn’t do it. I stared at the coffins, prepared for a horror that I could not yet imagine.
But Santh stepped up and immediately ripped open the lid from the first one. And we found ourselves staring at what appeared to be an adult body wrapped entirely in a steel shroud. For a moment, I didn’t know what to make of it.
“He’s taken the steel and molded it to the form,” said Santh. “He’s wrapped it tight, tight as you wrapped Baudwin.”
“Clever miscreant,” said Cyril. “He knew what I’d done to Baudwin. He knew steel is mostly made of iron.”
Santh peeled back the steel sheathing as though it was nothing, and slowly revealed the body of a woman in a torn white shirt and jeans and boots, her arms and her feet flopping as he lifted her, her head entirely covered by her hair. He set the body down on the stones.