by Anne Rice
I knew it was Gabrielle. I knelt beside her.
“Mother,” I whispered. I could hear the rhythm of her heart, agonizingly slow.
I reached out to part her hair, to uncover her eyes, and then I realized what he’d done to her.
It was the back of her head facing me. He had turned her head completely around on her neck. He had broken her neck. I let out a gasp.
“Be careful,” said Gregory. “No, don’t touch her. This is a matter for our vampire doctor. He’s broken her spinal cord, and only Fareed will know precisely how to repair it.”
“If it can be repaired,” whispered Sevraine.
Of course it can be repaired, I thought. Why is she expressing such a doubt, she, one of the eldest? But what if she knows something that I don’t know? Finally fear took the place of words inside me.
“Fareed will know,” Gregory said impatiently. And he called to Fareed, begging him to come immediately, describing the strange route and the forest above the vineyards and bell tower.
I remained beside Gabrielle and I kissed the hair on the back of her head and told her in a soft voice that I was here. I took her limp hand in mine, and I kissed it, and I laid my hand gently on her heart and I told her that I could hear her heart beating. “Let my words find your mind, Mother,” I said. “I’m here. I’ve come. And I’m taking you home. I’m taking all of you home.”
No sound issued from the body, not even a telepathic sound. But I knew Fareed was on his way, and these next few minutes would be the longest I’d endured in all my life.
In a daze I sat watching as the others removed the remaining two bodies. With immense care Gregory and Santh folded back the steel wrappings.
I recognized Louis’s simple dark wool suit and lace-up shoes, and Marius’s loose red velvet robe. And they too had suffered the same fate.
No sound came from any of them but the beating of their hearts, and that had to mean that they were alive and could be restored. It had to mean that. But who knew? What book contained pictures of such disasters and the directions in bold scientific terms as to what one was supposed to do with the blood drinker subjected to such indecencies? Would Fareed someday add these horrors to the books he was writing, and spell out how such bodies could be reanimated?
“I’ve never seen such a thing done,” said Gregory. “But I understand now how he silenced them so quickly. He broke their necks. And how he managed to bring them here without their being able to utter the smallest cry for us. They are in a deathlike sleep.”
I couldn’t bear the sight of them lying in a row like that, the three of them, their faces turned to the floor. I fell back against the wall. It was as if I’d traveled miles on the wind again, I was so tired, and I began to laugh almost hysterically as I gazed at the three of them with their white hands and their clothes just the same as they’d been the night they’d been taken away.
I had seen so many horrific things in these last few nights I knew that my existence now was completely altered, but we had found them, they were here, they were safe, and I was certain, certain, based on all I knew, that the three of them would be fully restored.
Rhoshamandes’s words came back to me, his claiming that I didn’t understand him at all, his claiming that he was not a monster, but what cruel game had he meant to play?
Suddenly the body of Marius began to move.
We were all astonished.
One knee rose under the dark red velvet robe, and the heel of his boot scraped the stone floor. Then the body slowly sat upright, and the hands moved sluggishly up to the head. None of us dared to move or to say a word.
The hands took their time, feeling the skull through the hair, and then the hands began to turn the head slowly. We heard snapping noises, popping sounds, and even a low grinding, but the face of Marius was now directed towards us, and the eyes quite suddenly snapped open and were fired with life.
Marius stared at me, and then at the others, and then at me again, and a slow smile appeared on his lips.
“I knew you’d come,” he said. I rushed forward and helped him to his knees, though of course he did not need it. And as he rose to his feet, I wept in his arms. The only thought in my mind, the only image, the only idea, was of Armand, and how Armand would feel when he too could hold Marius like this and know that Marius lived, that Marius had been restored, that all of them were safe and secure, and using my strongest power I sent the word to him. I sent the news. And I sent my love to Armand with it.
“And the monster?” Marius asked. His voice was hoarse, and not quite his own. “What’s happened to him?”
“Dead, destroyed, gone from the earth,” I said.
“You’re certain of it.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. I laughed. “I am quite certain of it.” I couldn’t stop laughing. “I destroyed him with my own hands. I saw his remains burned with my own eyes. He’s gone, vanquished. You can place your trust in me.”
I gave him to know how it had come about. I lavished upon him the bits and pieces of my memory in a little torrent, and I saw the relief course through him. He closed his eyes. “Lestat,” he said, “you are the damnedest creature! May the gods protect you always. You are indeed the damnedest creature.”
Fareed had just arrived. He broke in on our laughing and I had to get control of myself, or I would pass into crying like a boy.
But I was so convinced now that all would be well, I couldn’t hold the tears much longer.
Fareed studied the two bodies, and then asked if Rhoshamandes was right-handed. “Yes,” I said. “He held my ax in his right hand.”
“Exactly as I thought,” said Fareed.
Then he knelt beside my mother, and taking her head in his hands, he carefully turned it, listening to every tiny snapping or popping noise as if they were confiding some secret to him. At last she lay as if in a deep sleep, no breath issuing from her lips, and only her heart beating.
“Mother!” I called out. “Mother, wake up. It’s Lestat. It’s me.”
For a few long torturous seconds she lay there inert with her eyes half-mast, but then the eyelids fluttered and she looked up at the ceiling. She took a long shuddering breath. And her full expression came back to her as she appeared absorbed in what she saw, her breath rising and falling with one deep breath after another.
“Can you see me?” asked Fareed. At once, she looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time.
“Yes, I see you,” she responded in a sleepy roughened voice. Her eyes moved from right to left. When she saw me she said my name.
“I’m here, Mother,” I said to her.
Fareed drew back, studying her intently. I picked her up as a man picks up a bride, and kissed her on the lips. I could hear the blood rushing in her veins. I could feel its heat in her face. I set her down on her feet gingerly and held her as tight to myself as I could, my senses flooded with the scent of her hair and her skin. I was trembling. I raked at her hair with my fingers. It was smooth new hair, grown back after he had cut her hair from her. I swallowed, refusing to show her tears. I said “Mother” because I couldn’t help it, “Mother,” as if it were the only word I knew. “Mother.”
“My champion,” she said, in the same hoarse voice. “And where the Hell is the villain?”
“Gone from the earth,” I said. I tried to get her hair away from her face.
“Lestat, stop fussing with me,” she said. She was obviously eager to stand on her own two feet, but at once she began to fall, and I caught her and held her once more in my arms. When she spoke again, her words were slurred. “Where are we? What is this place?”
“An old cellar belonging to Rhoshamandes,” I explained to her. “He brought you here. We all thought he’d destroyed you. He wanted us to believe that he had. He wrapped you in steel, the way Cyril had wrapped Baudwin in iron. But you are safe, completely safe
now.”
She lay against me for a long moment but then stood on her own and told me that I had helped her quite enough.
I didn’t argue with her. The time for tears had passed, thankfully, and I turned to watch Fareed with Louis.
For Louis, I was most afraid.
I could see that Fareed was taking extreme care. He turned Louis’s head very slowly, listening to the inevitable sounds again as if they were confiding something vital to him, and finally Louis’s face was as it should be, but Fareed still held it waiting for the eyelids to show the first signs of life.
It seemed an eternity before those dazzlingly beautiful green eyes opened, but finally they did, and Louis looked about himself drowsily, and whispered something incoherent which I couldn’t catch. But I knew it was French.
“Talk to me,” said Fareed. “Louis, look at me. Talk to me.”
“What is it you want me to say?” Louis asked. His voice was as hoarse as Gabrielle’s voice had been, and I saw him wince as if from a sharp pain. “My head aches,” he said. “My throat is on fire.”
“But you see us clearly,” said Fareed.
“Yes, I see you,” said Louis, “but I don’t know where we are. What’s become of him? Is he dead?”
When I told him, yes, that Rhoshamandes was dead, he shut his eyes as if he meant to fall asleep, and that was what he did. Gregory picked him up for the journey home, assuring him that we were all safe now.
Chapter 22
It was just past midnight when we returned to the Château. We could hear the shouts and the clapping and the cheering before we ever reached the ballroom, and there we discovered the largest crowd that had ever filled the room. Blood drinkers crowded the terrace and the nearby salons. It seemed the full Blood Communion had come to share the joy and join in the thanksgiving.
Rose and Viktor, with Sybelle and Benji, begged for the three victims to explain everything.
It was Marius who took command, and related the story; but without disclosing the salient details of how the three of them had been rendered powerless. The enclosing of their bodies in steel, that much he did explain, but not how a snapping of the neck had put them into a silent dreamless state in which they could communicate nothing. I saw the wisdom of his not disclosing this and marveled at how he described the rescue as the heroic work of “the Brat Prince” who had held out hope that those whom Rhoshamandes had abducted might still be in existence.
There came cries of my name, cheers, a chorus chanting “the Brat Prince,” and then Marius raised his stentorian voice to remind them all that the Brat Prince was also the Prince, and he turned and took my hand and kissed the golden ring of Medusa’s head and gestured for me to be seated on the throne.
My Prime Minister.
As he looked about the ballroom, at the evidence of Rhoshamandes’s fury on the walls and ceiling, and at the bright and eager faces of the fledglings surrounding him, he declared there would be a grand ball in ten nights’ time—when the ballroom was fully restored—and until then the young ones must go back to their hunting grounds, and the elders who had no need to hunt were welcome to remain quietly under the roof, while he, Marius, meant to give the ceilings of the room the fresh murals they deserved before the ballroom would be reopened.
“The worst foe this Court has ever faced is now vanquished,” he said. “And the word goes forth from this palace that on the tenth night after this, all should come together to celebrate the Court and its purpose. As for now, I bid you all go your separate ways, as I must seek a quiet time with those who are closest to me.”
Armand was not in this gathering. And Marius had taken note of this, and he had exchanged looks with me as he pondered this.
“He needs you,” I whispered to him.
“Ah, I have been waiting for that for a very long time,” he confided. “His heart is finally no longer shut against me.”
I was quietly stunned by those words. Did Armand not fear that Marius had renounced him? Had they been at cross-purposes with one another? Perhaps not. Perhaps it was the truth that Armand had only now come to the point when he could open his heart to Marius as he had opened it centuries ago in Venice. I couldn’t know what these two immortals had to say to each other.
I couldn’t know the stories of immortals all through the Château, immortals in couples, or groups, or loose gatherings, or wandering solitary and unmolested through the different libraries and studies and salons, immortals with so many tales to tell that they would fill volume after volume on endless shelves yet, tales that other immortals might inherit and read as part of the promise of this strange place which was defining itself before my eyes.
The assembly was over. Gregory came forward to ask me to authorize more funds for the rapid restoration of the village, and Barbara was at my elbow asking for more equipment in the old kitchens I’d installed when first I renovated the building. Somehow I found myself at my desk signing one document after another, scarcely noticing that I’d agreed to the installation of bathrooms throughout the dungeon “complex” and to the purchase of giant refrigerators. I glimpsed a map of the underground prison floors for less than a second, and then came more papers to sign for the restoration of the stables, the repair of the roads, and an extension of the hothouses in which our flowers were grown so they might provide fresh fruit and vegetables for the mortal carpenters. The walls needed plastering on the outsides where Rhoshamandes had broken them out, and there had to be scaffolding for Marius to do the painting he wished, and Alain Abelard, my humble architect, was asking for another team of roofers. On and on it went.
Meanwhile Marius had gone off to find Armand, and Pandora and Bianca had gone with him. And I heard voices coming from countless rooms, and the sound of a film playing in one of the libraries.
I experienced a great sigh of relief when I thought of Marius and Armand, but I found myself staring numbly at an order for the installation of a great furnace adjacent to the dungeons. Why in the world did we need a furnace of that size, I wondered, but I didn’t care really, and so I signed where I was told to sign, and I was glad when I could escape to go down into the village street and see how the rebuilding had been progressing. It was deliciously cold, and the night was clear and crisp and filled with a bounty of stars and the scent of oak fires, and fresh wood, and paint, and the soft murmur of a few mortal voices behind closed curtains in the townhouses.
It was just before dawn when Gregory and Seth found me and put the question to me that I should have foreseen. Gregory foreswore the seductive power of his lordly robes and Babylonian hair for the encounter. He was businesslike and honest. If we did not keep mortal prisoners in the dungeons, the young vampires might sooner or later do mischief in the cities close to us, which was strictly forbidden. Or they would give up on the Court altogether. They could not endure the thirst of being away from their hunting grounds.
“It’s too easy for us to forget that thirst,” he said. “And true, they could endure for far longer than they do, but it’s painful to them, and that is not how we wish it to be for them, not at all, when they come to us.”
We were standing on the paved road leading up to the drawbridge, and I found myself looking up at the great castle with its scattered lighted windows and the paling sky beyond with its remnants of starlight.
The morning birds sang in the forest. And a last automobile left the grounds, speeding over the drawbridge and past us bound at great speed for the highway.
“So this is what I must do?” I asked. “Preside over a dungeon of condemned men beneath my father’s house?”
“It was always just a matter of time,” said Gregory. “The young ones have to feed. And more than ever they want to be here. They want to see you, talk to you, dance at the balls. Stories of your victory over Rhoshamandes are being written by them in poetry and song.” He smiled as if he couldn’t repress it. “And some of
the ballads are rather good, and they want to perform them for you.”
Shock of memory. Shock of knowing—how once I’d stood on the stage in a jam-packed auditorium outside of San Francisco singing my own ballads to the raucous and deafening accompaniment of guitar and drums, the Vampire Lestat, the rock singer, the creator of a string of luminous little “rock videos” that had told the world about our tribe, that had baited the world to believe in us, to come find us, to wipe us out. I was back in the moment, on that stage again under the burning solar lights—so proud, so arrogant, so visible.
You know what I am.
And the agony of irrelevance had been banished, the dull despairing awareness of utter insignificance in the mortal scheme of things. I could hear those roaring voices, those pounding feet, those delirious shrieks and howls. Visible.
How quickly the mortal world had closed over that night, and all its reckless abandon—over slick black remains on the asphalt of vampires burned in a flash by the will of the great Mother of us all; over witnesses claiming they had seen my preternatural skin, they had touched it! Time had rolled over the entire experience, flattening it to the pages of a book. Where were those little films I’d made? What the world remembered was just another rock singer with long hair and a French name. The few true believers who would not deny the evidence of their own eyes had ended up on the margins of life, ridiculed, ruined, and slightly mad, and eventually questioning themselves and why they had risked so much to insist upon the truth of something so obviously fictive and predictable. Rock singers, vampires, Goths, romantics.
“Lestat,” Gregory called me back to myself. “Let us keep mortal victims for them. They are desperate to stay with us, and think what we can teach these young ones.”
“No one has ever given a damn for the young,” said Seth, though he was marveling at it.