by Anne Rice
“How the Hell do I know!” I said crossly, but he only smiled as if he was on to my bad behavior and had always been. He waved it away and looked to Jesse.
“Yes, she did bring young ones to the compound,” Jesse said, picking up the thread. “But only a few. Then four years ago something completely unexpected happened.”
She took a deep breath, and sat back again, putting the sole of her boot up against the coffee table. Small delicate brown leather boot.
David was waiting, and from the world beyond I heard the voice of Benji broadcasting out of New York: “If you don’t want disaster, I tell you leave them alone. Play my voice. Let my voice plead with them to come to us, to speak to us, yes, but do not approach them. You know their power. You know what they can do.”
I closed my mind to the voices.
“All right,” said Jesse as if she’d won an exhausting argument with herself. She sat up straight again, crossing her legs rather gracefully, and stretching her left arm along the back of the chair. “This was four years ago, as I said. And she’d been visited by a very strange blood drinker, perhaps the strangest blood drinker I’d ever encountered or heard of, and he took her completely by surprise. His name was Fareed Bhansali, and if you can believe it, he is a physician and a research scientist. This was something that Maharet had in particular always feared—a scientist blood drinker, a blood drinker who might use knowledge that she viewed as magical to take power in the world.”
I was about to protest that I knew Fareed, had known him well, though we’d only met once, when I perceived that she understood this, understood it from my thoughts, and David was signaling that he knew Fareed as well. Very well. The story of Seth and Fareed was out there.
“But Fareed Bhansali would never seek to use power unwisely or wrongly,” David said. “I’ve met him, sat with him, talked to him, talked to Seth, his mentor.” (“Mentor,” it seemed, had become interchangeable with the word “maker,” which was fine with me.)
“Well, that’s what she came to discover soon enough. He told her he could easily restore Thorne’s eyes to Thorne and provide her with eyes from a blood drinker that would last her for eternity. He said he could implant these new eyes for her with surgical delicacy so that they would endure forever. He explained that he knew how to override the Blood in us and stop its relentless war on change long enough to make the alterations in tissue required for a true wedding of nerves and biological threads.” Jesse sighed. “I didn’t understand most of it. I don’t think Maharet did either. But he was brilliant, undeniably brilliant. He explained he was a true physician for our kind. He said he’d recently attached a full-functioning vampiric leg to an ancient vampire named Flavius who had lost the limb before he was ever brought into the Blood.”
“Of course, Flavius,” said David. “Pandora’s Flavius, her Athenian slave. But this is marvelous.”
I knew that story as well. I smiled. Of course, Fareed could do such a thing. But what else might he do?
Jesse continued.
“Well, Maharet took him up on the offer. She did not like the idea that a young fledgling would be blinded for these purposes. But he soon got around this ethically, telling her to choose a victim for herself, one upon whom she thought it entirely proper and just to feed. He would take that victim, render him or her unconscious, and then infuse the body with the vampiric blood. When he’d removed the eyes, he would do away with the victim. She might be present at all stages if she wished. And once again, he emphasized that the placement of the eyes would involve his skills as a surgeon with more infusions of vampiric blood to perfect the result. Her eyes would be her eyes forever. She had only to pick the victim, as he said, from all those within her hearing, all those with the proper-color eyes.”
That sent a chill through me: “the proper-color eyes.” Brought back flashes of something horrible, but I didn’t want to see exactly what it was. I shook myself all over and fastened my attention on Jesse.
“She took him up on it,” said Jesse. “But she took him up on more than that. He wanted to welcome her and Mekare both to his laboratory in America. He had a huge place, apparently a mad scientist’s dream. I believe it was in New York at that time. They’d tried a number of locations. But Maharet wouldn’t risk trying to take Mekare to this place. Instead she spent a king’s ransom bringing all Fareed’s staff and equipment to us. She had everything flown into Jakarta, and brought out by truck to the compound. Electricians were brought in, new generators purchased and installed. When it was finished Fareed had what he needed to do every kind of test known to modern science on Mekare.”
Again, she broke off.
“You’re talking about magnetic imaging,” I said, “CAT scans, all of it.”
“Yes, exactly,” said Jesse.
“I should have known. And all these years, I’ve been afraid for Fareed, afraid that she’d done away with him, blasted him and his staff off the planet.”
“And how could she have done that with Seth protecting Fareed?” asked David. “When you met Fareed, surely you met Seth.”
“She might have made a considerable dent in operations,” I said. “She could have burned them both out. But you’re saying”—I looked at Jesse—“you’re saying, they’re all friends.”
“Allies,” said Jesse.
“Did Mekare submit to the tests?”
“Completely,” said Jesse. “Meekly. Mekare has never balked at anything that I was ever aware of. Nothing. And so they did the tests. There were these physician fledglings with them, and Seth was always working with Fareed. It was frightening to me to meet Seth. It was frightening to Khayman to meet him. Khayman had known Seth when Seth had been a human child. When Seth had been the Crown Prince of Kemet. Sometime after the Blood came into Akasha, she’d sent Seth away. Khayman had never had any knowledge of Seth being made into a blood drinker. He feared him, feared some old blood tie between mother and son that he said might be more powerful than our Blood. Khayman didn’t care for anything that was happening, for these scientists taking tissue samples and X-rays, and sitting around with Maharet until early morning, discussing all the properties of our bodies, the properties of the force that makes us what we are.”
“I’ve given up on scientific language,” I said. “I never thought I’d need it. And now I wish I had been there, and understood everything they’d said.” But this wasn’t entirely true. I’d left Fareed and Seth of my own accord years ago when I might have asked to remain indefinitely. I’d fled from the intensity of both of them and what they might discover about us.
“So what the Hell was the upshot of all of it?” I said suddenly, unable to contain myself. “What the Hell did they find out?”
“They said Mekare was mindless,” said Jesse. “They said the brain in her head was atrophied. They said there was so little indication of brain activity that she was like a human in a coma, kept alive by the brain stem alone. Apparently she’d been entombed so long, possibly in a cave, no one knew, that even her sight had been affected. The powerful Blood has actually hardened the atrophied tissue over time. I couldn’t fathom it. Of course they took some three nights to say this with incredible disclaimers, qualifiers, and tangents, but that was the gist.”
“And what about the other?” I asked.
“What other?” Jesse said.
I glanced at David and then back at her. They both appeared sublimely puzzled. This surprised me.
“What about the Sacred Core?” I asked.
Jesse didn’t respond.
“So what you’re asking is,” David interjected, “could these various diagnostic instruments detect the Sacred Core?”
“Well, of course that’s what I’m asking. Good grief. Fareed had the Mother in his clutches, didn’t he? You don’t think Fareed would be looking for evidence of a parasite inside her with some sort of cerebral activity of its own?”
They continued to stare at me as if I were mad.
“Fareed told me,” I went on, “tha
t this thing, Amel, was a creature just as we are creatures, that it has cellular life, boundaries, is knowable. Fareed made all this clear to me. I simply couldn’t understand all his deductions, but he made it clear that he was obsessed with the physical properties of the Sacred Core.”
Oh, why hadn’t I listened more? Why had I been so pessimistic about the future of Fareed? Why did I have such a grim apocalyptic mind-set?
“Well, if he detected anything,” said Jesse, “I heard nothing of it.” She reflected for a long moment, and then asked: “What about you?”
“What about me when?”
“When you drank from Akasha,” she pushed gently. “When you held her in your arms. Did you hear anything, detect anything? You were in direct contact with the Sacred Core.”
I shook my head. “No, nothing that I could identify. She showed me things, visions, but they all came from her, always from her. As far as I know, from her.” But I had to admit, that was an interesting question.
“I’m no Fareed,” I muttered. “I had only the vaguest and most religious ideas, I confess, about the Sacred Core.”
My mind traveled back and back to my memories of Maharet describing the genesis of the vampires. Amel had gone into the Mother and then Amel was no more. Or so the spirits had told Maharet. This thing that was Amel, invisible yet huge, was now diffused amongst more blood drinkers than ever before in history. It was a root planted in the earth from which myriad plants have sprung so that the root has lost its shape, its boundaries, its “rootness.”
Even after all these years, I didn’t like to speak of that intimacy with Akasha, being the Queen’s lover, drinking her thick and viscid and magnificent blood. I didn’t like to think of her dark eyes, and shining white skin, her curling smile. What a face, what a picture of innocence in one who would conquer the human world, in one who wanted to be the Queen of Heaven.
“And Mekare,” I said. “Have you never drunk from her?” I asked.
Jesse regarded me again for a long moment as if I’d said something shocking and unpleasant and then she simply shook her head. “I’m not aware that anyone has ever approached her for her blood. I’ve never seen Maharet drink Mekare’s blood or offer her blood to Mekare. I’m not sure they’d ever do such a thing, or ever did—that is, after the very first encounter.”
“I have a deep suspicion that if anyone ever did try to drink her blood,” said David, “she’d regard it as vile and she’d destroy that person, perhaps in some crude way, as with her fist.”
Her fist. The six-thousand-year-old fist. Something to consider. A six-thousand-year-old immortal could destroy this hotel with her fist if she had a mind to do it, and the time.
Mekare had destroyed Akasha in a crude and simple way, that was certain, throwing her back against a plate-glass window with such force that she broke the glass. I saw that again, saw that great jagged sheet descending like the blade of a guillotine to sever her head. But I hadn’t seen everything. Perhaps nobody really had except Maharet. How had the skull of Akasha been broken? Ah, the mystery of it: the combination of vulnerability and overwhelming strength.
“I never knew Mekare to have any sense of her powers,” said David, “any sense of the Cloud Gift or the Mind Gift or the Fire Gift. From all you’ve told me, she came against Akasha with the certainty of an equal, nothing more.”
“Thank the gods for that,” said Jesse.
When she’d risen to kill the Queen, Mekare had come over land, walking night after night through jungle and desert, over mountain and valley, until she’d reached the Sonoma compound where we had all come together, guided by what images, what voices, we never knew. Out of what grave or cave she’d come we were never to know either. And I understood now the full implications of all that Jesse had been telling us: There never would be answers to our questions about Mekare. There never would be a biography of Mekare. There never would be a voice speaking on behalf of Mekare. There would never be a Mekare typing away on a computer to pour out her thoughts to us.
“She doesn’t know she’s the Queen of the Damned, does she?” I asked.
Jesse and David stared at me.
“And did Fareed offer to make for her a new tongue?” I pushed.
Again my question shocked both of them. Obviously it was extremely hard for all of us to deal with the implications of the existence and knowledge of Fareed. And the power and mystery of Mekare. Well, we were here to talk, weren’t we? The question of the tongue seemed obvious to me. Mekare had no tongue. Her tongue had been ripped out before she was brought into the Blood. Akasha was guilty. She’d blinded one and ripped the tongue from the other.
“I think that he did make this offer,” Jesse explained, “but there was no way to communicate this to Mekare or to make her cooperate. I’m only surmising. I’m not sure. They’re all deaf to each other’s thoughts, these ancient ones, as you know. But as usual, I heard nothing emanating from Mekare. I’d accepted the idea that she was mindless. She was willing enough to be the passive victim of tests, that was no problem. But beyond that, whenever he drew near to her or tried to examine her mouth, she stared at him as if she were watching the falling rain.”
I could well imagine how frightening that must have been even for the intrepid Fareed.
“Was he able to narcotize her?” I asked.
David was clearly shocked. “You know you really are past all patience,” he muttered.
“Why, for not putting it poetically?”
“Only for very short intervals,” Jesse said, “and only a few times. She grew tired of the needles and stared at him like a statue come to life. He didn’t try again after the first three times.”
“But he took her blood,” I said.
“That he did before she quite realized what was happening,” said Jesse, “and of course Maharet was assisting and coaxing her and stroking her hair and kissing her and begging her permission in the ancient tongue. But Mekare didn’t like this. She stared at the vials with a kind of revulsion as if she were looking at a loathsome insect feeding on her. He managed to take scrapings of her skin, samples of her hair. I don’t know what else. He wanted everything. He asked us for everything. Saliva, biopsies of organs—biopsies he could take with needles, you understand—bone marrow, liver, pancreas, whatever he could get. I gave all that to him and so did Maharet.”
“She liked him, respected him,” I said.
“Yes, loves him,” she hastened to say, emphasizing the present tense, “respects him. He did provide the eyes of a blood drinker for her, and restore to Thorne his eyes, the eyes he’d given Maharet. He did all that, and took Thorne under his wing when he left, took Thorne with him. Thorne had been languishing in the compound for years, but Thorne had been slowly restored over that time. Thorne wanted to find Marius again and Daniel Malloy, and Fareed took Thorne away with him. But Maharet loved Fareed, and she loved Seth also. We all loved Seth.” She was rambling now, repeating herself, reliving it.
“Seth had been there the night long ago in ancient Kemet when Akasha had condemned Mekare and Maharet to death,” Jesse said. She was picturing it. I was picturing it. “As a boy, he’d seen Mekare’s tongue torn out and seen Maharet blinded. But Seth and Maharet spoke together as if this old history had no claim on them. None whatsoever. They agreed on many things.”
“Such as what?” I prodded.
“Would you try to be polite, just try!” David whispered.
But Jesse answered me without stopping.
“They agreed that whatever they discovered on our behalf, they must never seek to interfere with human life in this world. That no matter what they achieved for us, they must never offer it to the human world. There might come a time, Maharet said, when a science of the vampires would be their greatest defense against persecution, but that time was in the remote future, and likely might never come at all. The human world must be respected. They agreed on all that. Fareed said he had no ambitions anymore in the realm of human beings, that we were his peopl
e. He called us that, his people.”
“Benji would love him,” I remarked. But I was hugely relieved to hear all this. More relieved than I could say.
“Yes,” Jesse said sadly. “Surely Benji would. Fareed had a way of referring to us as ‘the people’ and the ‘Blood People’ and ‘the People in the Blood.’ ”
“Our people, our tribe,” I said, echoing Benji.
“So what did happen, dearest,” asked David, “to make you all abandon the old compound?”
“Well, it was like this. Seth told Maharet of other ancient ones. He told her what I’m sure won’t surprise anyone here, that there were ancient ones everywhere who’d survived Akasha’s Time of Burning, who’d observed it but never feared it. And then he told her of ancient ones roused by it as he’d been. Seth had been in the earth for a thousand years when he heard your music, Lestat, and when he heard his mother’s voice answering yours. Seth said that Maharet was not aware of how much Lestat’s rock music and the Mother’s rise had changed the vampiric world. She had no inkling of how these events had not only awakened old ones, but brought others to a global consciousness.”
“Mon Dieu, a global consciousness,” I said. “So I’m going to be blamed one way or another for everything?”
“Well, that may be the least important aspect of all this,” David said, reaching out and taking my hand. “Whether you’re blamed or not isn’t the point, is it? Please, stop being the Brat Prince for five minutes, and let’s listen to Jesse.”
“Yes, Professor,” I said. “Don’t I always end up listening?”
“Not enough, I would say.” He sighed and looked back to Jesse.
“Well, Maharet wanted to find one of these ancient ones—not one newly risen but one especially wise in Seth’s estimation, and that was a blood drinker living now in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Geneva, a being with a powerful footprint in the human world. He’d maintained something of a vampire family since late antiquity. In fact, the vampire Flavius was the trusted friend and follower of this ancient one.”