by Anne Rice
One of these ghosts rose to greet me and beckoned for me to wait as I stood in the door.
I backed up into the passage as this phantom moved out of the room and towards me, not out of fear so much as overwhelming reluctance. I knew where I stood with any human on the planet; I knew what I faced with any blood drinker. But I did not begin to know what I faced with a self-possessed ghost in a solid body.
He stood before me, smiling, the light from the shadowy conference room illuminating his rather remarkable face. Smooth forehead, Grecian features, and long ashen-blond hair.
He was dressed in a long simple black silk soutane. And it was a real garment, made of raw silk. This skin was not real, no, and the organs within were simulated well but not real, and who knew what soul lay behind these cheerful, friendly eyes?
Once again, I felt keenly that these spirits or ghosts clothed in bodies of their own making were exactly like us. They were incarnated souls as we were incarnated souls.
“I’ve waited a long time to beg your forgiveness for what I did to you,” he said in French. “I have hoped and prayed always that you were glad of it finally, glad to be living and breathing now, hard as it’s been for you on the Devil’s Road.”
I said nothing. I was trying to figure what this could possibly mean. That a ghost could speak so distinctly in a deep human voice amazed me. It truly seemed to be coming from his vocal cords. The illusion was perfect.
He stood eye to eye with me. He smiled. He reached for my hands and took them in his. “If only there were time for a long meeting,” he said, “a time for me to answer your inevitable questions, time for me to let your anger rise.”
Soft dusty fingers. They gave off warmth like human fingers.
“What anger?” I asked.
“I’m Magnus, the one who made you and abandoned you. And I will always bear the guilt for that.”
I heard but I didn’t believe. I didn’t believe in the possibility of it. My human soul refused. And yet I knew this creature wasn’t lying to me. This wasn’t the season for lies. This was the season for revelations. And this creature or being or entity or whatever it was, this thing was telling me the truth.
I don’t know how many minutes passed as we stood there.
“Don’t judge me by what you see here,” he said. “For a ghost can perfect a body himself which nature never gave him, and that’s what I’ve done. The ghosts of this world have learned much over the centuries, especially the last few hundred years. My body resembles yours now, fine and strong and well proportioned, the body for which you died, and I have given myself your eyes, your shining blue eyes. But I do beg your forgiveness, for bringing you into this realm we now share.”
A cool draft moved through the passage.
I felt a tingling on the surface of my skin. I was trembling. I heard my heart in my ears.
“Well, as you said, if only there were time,” I responded. “But there isn’t time now, is there? It’s almost dawn.” I struggled to form each word. “I can’t stay with you now.” I was so grateful for this, so grateful that I had to leave him, and move sluggishly, almost drunkenly, away. Shock and shock and greater shock.
I glanced back at him. How sad he looked standing there, how forlorn and burdened with grief and sorrow.
“You burn bright, Prince Lestat,” he said. And tears rose to his eyes.
I hurried away. I had to. I had to find some graceful and secret place to lie down in solitude. There was no traveling for me tonight. It was too late. There was only the hope of sleep now. And up ahead, Sevraine was waiting for me and gesturing for me to hurry.
Give me this little rock-cut tomb of sorts, this shelf on which to lie. Give me these satin pillows, so cool, and these soft woolen covers. Give me this and let me weep alone here. And let me forget all but darkness as you shut the door.
And to think—on rising we would go into the Kingdom of Greater Shocks.
And all I’d been before this night was gone, absolutely gone. The world I’d only inhabited a short time ago seemed bleak and empty and over now.
All my struggles, my triumphs, my losses, were being eclipsed by what was being revealed now. Had ever ennui and despair been banished by such revelations, such precious gifts of truth?
19
Rhoshamandes
Murder Most Foul
FOR TWO NIGHTS, Rhosh had been holed up in a luxury hotel in Manaus, waking up to look out on the small Amazonian city and the jungles beyond stretching into infinity. He was furious. He had sent for Benedict, and Benedict had come, as always frayed and exhausted from the lonely journey through miles of uncharted sky, and was now equally agitated by sleeping in this multistoried mortal hostel with only a hiding place in a closet to keep him safe from the sun and from prying mortal eyes.
There was good hunting for a blood drinker in this city and in its surrounding areas, but that was about all that could be said for it in Rhosh’s estimation, and he was desperate to penetrate the compound of Maharet, Khayman, and Mekare, but he could not.
Each night the Voice urged him to be strong, to attack the defenses of the twins, to force his way in. But Rhosh was wary. He could not overcome the combined strength of Khayman and Maharet. He knew this. And he did not trust the Voice when it said they would never attack him, that he would take them by surprise and find them surprisingly vulnerable to his gifts and his will.
“I need you to free me from this creature,” the Voice continued to insist. “I need you to free me from this Unholy Trinity which keeps me captive here, blind and immobile and unable to fulfill my destiny. And I do indeed have a destiny and have always had a destiny. Do you know what I have endured to learn how to express myself as I am talking to you now? You are my hope, Rhoshamandes, you have five thousand years in the Blood, do you not? You are stronger than they are because you know how to use your gifts and they are reluctant.”
Rhosh had given up arguing honestly with the Voice. The Voice was a conniver and a child.
Rhosh feared Maharet. He always had. Who in the Blood was more powerful than Maharet? She had a thousand years on him, but she had something else. She’d been one of the first ever made, and her spiritual resources were a legend.
If the earliest children of First Brood and Queens Blood hadn’t been deaf to each other telepathically, this drama would have come to a close well before now. If Maharet could hear the Voice speaking to Rhoshamandes, it would be finished for Rhosh, he was sure. Even now he wondered if this miserable humid and tropical place was not to be the end of his long journey on this Earth.
But just when his thoughts sank into discouragement, the Voice would come, whispering, cajoling, wheedling. “I will make you the monarch of the tribe. Don’t you see what I am offering you? Don’t you grasp why I need you? Once inside your body, I can walk into the sun of my own free will because your body is strong enough for this, and all over the world young ones will burn. But you and I inside of you will only be kissed by that golden light. Oh, I remember now, yes, I remember, the blessed peace and strength that came to me when Akasha and Enkil were put into the sun. Golden brown they became, and no more than that, but all over the world children burned. My strong blood was restored to me. I was myself in flashes of waking wonder! We will do that, don’t you see, when I am in you and you can brave the sunlight. And you love me! Who else loves me?”
“I love you all right,” said Rhosh grimly. “But not enough to be destroyed trying to take you into me. And if I did have you inside me, would you feel what I feel?”
“Yes, don’t you see? I am entombed in one who feels nothing and desires nothing, and never drinks, never drinks of the life-giving human blood!”
“When I expose myself to the sun, I know pain as I’m falling into unconsciousness and pain for months after I wake. I do it only because I must to pass for human. Are you willing to know that pain?”
“That is nothing to the pain I know now!” he said. “You’ll wake to golden skin as you know, and so many
others will have died, mercifully died, died! And we will be stronger than ever! Don’t you see? Yes, I will feel what you feel. But once you have the Sacred Core in you, you will feel what I feel too.”
The Voice rambled on.
“Did I ever promise the Queen of Egypt that I could support a legion of blood drinkers? Was she mad? Were the First Brood not mad? They knew what I was and who I was and yet they stretched my body and my power beyond all reasonable limits, greedy and wanton, passing the Blood to anyone who would revolt against Akasha, and she made this Queens Blood as if the size of her guard was all that mattered—until I was as a human bleeding from all limbs and all orifices, unable to think, to dream, to know.…”
Rhosh was listening but not much. You will feel what I feel, too.
The possibilities were blazing in his mind as he stood at the window looking out over the nighttime city of Manaus.
“What else would you want of me, other than that I sleep under the sun to burn off the riffraff?” The riffraff? More than the riffraff would burn. All the many younger ones would burn—Lestat, his precious Louis, Armand that vicious and notorious tyrant, and of course the little genius Benjamin Mahmoud.
And all of their generations would burn. Vampires would burn who had a thousand years in the Blood, or even two thousand. It had happened before. And Rhoshamandes knew this. It wasn’t legend. He had been burned a shining mahogany brown and suffered agony for months after the King and Queen had been dragged into the Egyptian desert by the wicked elder. Had the elder had the strength to leave the Divine Parents in the sun for three days, Rhoshamandes might have died. And the elder would have died. And who would have come to the rescue of Akasha or Enkil? It would have been the finish there and then. Somewhere in the world Sevraine and Nebamun and countless others must have suffered a similar fate. For those who survived and grew stronger, many perished driven to further immolation by the pain of their existence. He remembered all that. Yes, he remembered.
But no one knew how many years in the Blood were needed to survive such a holocaust. Oh, well, maybe the great doctors Fareed and Seth knew. Maybe they had made studies, calculations, based on interviews with blood drinkers, analysis of accounts in the Vampire Chronicles. Maybe they had made projections. Maybe they could transfuse blood from the ancients to the young ones with glistening plastic sacks and shining plastic tubes. Maybe they had a store of ancient blood in their vaults, drawn out of the veins of the great Seth.
“Oh, yes, they are very clever,” said the Voice, ignoring Rhosh’s earlier question and addressing his rambling thoughts. “But they have no love for me. They are treacherous. They speak of ‘the tribe’ as does Benji Mahmoud as if I were not the tribe!” He roared in anguish. “As if I, I, Amel, were not the tribe!”
“So you don’t want to fall into their hands,” said Rhosh.
“No, never! Never!” The Voice sounded frantic. “Think what they might do to me! Can you imagine?”
“And what could they possibly do?” asked Rhosh.
“Put me in a tank of the Blood, my Blood, Blood I made, put me in a tank of it where I would be blind and deaf and mute and trapped in even deeper darkness than I am in now.”
“Nonsense. Somebody would have to feed and sustain such a tank. They’d never do such a dangerous thing. And you are not a separate element now. Even I know that. You are wed to the brain of Mekare, wed to her heart to pump blood to her brain. If they were to simulate such an arrangement, as I said, someone and indeed more than one would have to maintain it and sustain it. That will never happen to you.”
The Voice was clearly mollified.
He dropped his voice to a whisper. “I must be quiet now but you must come to me. She comes. She’s hunted and she is full of despair. She dreams of plunging herself and Mekare and me into a lake of fire! She mourns her lost fledglings. She has driven away those who love her.”
Rhoshamandes shook his head. Under his breath he murmured a desperate negation.
“Listen to me!” pleaded the Voice. “She needs but one word of encouragement from some despairing soul like herself, I tell you, and she will take Mekare in her arms and go at once to this volcano called Pacaya. Do you know where that is?”
“Pacaya,” whispered Rhosh. “Yes, I know where it is.”
“Well, it is where our story will end in fire if you do not come! It could happen this very night, I tell you!”
“You can’t read her mind, can you? You’re entombed in her maker. You can’t …”
“I do not read her mind from Mekare’s mind, you fool,” said the Voice. “I go stealthily into her mind as I go into yours! She cannot lock me out! But oh, if I were to seek to speak to her how I would terrify her, how I would drive her over the edge!”
Pacaya, an active volcano in Guatemala. Rhosh was gasping for breath. He was trembling.
“You must come now,” said the Voice. “Khayman is lost somewhere in the north where I sent him to destroy. He is a ruin of himself, I tell you. He was never crafted for eternity as you were. The mere sight of him goads her to despair. He is a broken instrument. Come to me now. Do you know what a machete is? There are machetes all over in this place. Machetes. You know how to use a machete? Free me from this body! And if you do not, I will sing my songs to someone else!”
It was gone. He could feel that it was gone.
Where had it gone? Off to turn some desperate fearful blood drinker somewhere against another? Or to tempt Nebamun wherever he might be, or even Sevraine?
And what precisely would happen if the Sacred Core was transferred to such a being? What if the very worst happened and somehow that impulsive Lestat de Lioncourt got control of it in his young body? Perish the thought.
And Pacaya, what if she took her twin with her, rose into the air, and sought out that inferno? Oh, what agony would descend on each and every member of the tribe throughout the world as unquenchable heat and flame sought to burn the host of the Sacred Core?
Benedict had fallen asleep on the bed. Barefoot in freshly laundered jeans and a white dress shirt open at collar and cuffs, he lay there dreaming.
There was something about the sight of him sleeping so trustingly that touched Rhoshamandes. Of all the blood drinkers Rhosh had ever made or known, this one’s body and face were a true reflection of his soul no matter how much time passed. This one knew how to love.
No wonder it had been Benedict who brought the memoirs of the Vampire Chronicles to Rhosh and insisted he read them. No wonder Benedict had so cherished Louis de Pointe du Lac’s suffering and Lestat’s wild rebellion. “They understand,” he’d told Rhosh. “We cannot live without love. Doesn’t matter how old, how strong, we are, what we possess. We cannot exist without love. It’s absolutely impossible. And they know it, young as they are, they know.”
Rhosh sat down gently beside him, and touched his back. The cotton shirt was soft, clean against his smooth skin. His neck and his soft curly brown hair were silky. Rhosh bent to kiss his cheek.
“Wake up now, Ganymede,” he said. “Your maker needs you.” He ran his hand over the boy’s hips, and his slender powerful thighs, feeling the iron muscles under the starched denim. Had there ever been a more nearly perfect body in the Blood? Well, perhaps, in Allesandra, before she’d become a crone of her own making, twisted, leering, mad, a ragged monster of the Children of Satan. But this was surely the next-best body, wasn’t it?
Benedict woke with a start staring blindly forward.
“The Voice,” he murmured against the pillow. “The Voice is saying come, isn’t it?”
“And we will, but you are to stay some twenty feet behind me. You come when I call to you.”
“Twenty feet against monsters like this.”
Rhosh stood and pulled Benedict to his feet.
“Well, fifty feet then. Stay out of sight, but near enough to hear my slightest command and come instantly.”
How many times had Rhosh instructed Benedict in how to use the Fire Gift, how to muster
it and send it against any blood drinker who ever tried to use it against him, how to fight off the power of another older killer, how to slam back with full force against gifts that seemed on the surface to be overwhelming? How many times had he demonstrated how he might do things with his mind which he’d thought impossible, opening doors, shattering them, blowing them off their hinges?
“No one knows the full measure of anyone else’s powers,” he’d said countless times over the centuries. “You survive the attacks of others when you fight! Fight and flee. Do you hear me?”
But Benedict was no natural warrior. In that short span of his mortal life on Earth, he’d been a prayerful scholar, only tempted by the sensuality of the natural world all around him to abandon his Christian god. He’d been a being made for monastery libraries and royal courts, a lover of gorgeously illustrated manuscripts and books, of flutes and drums and lutes playing, of blended voices in song, of the love of men and women in silken beds, and in perfumed gardens.
Not a warrior, no, never. He’d only sinned against his Christian god because he couldn’t see the harm in loving passion. And the satisfaction of his rampant desires had always been easy, harmonious, pleasant.
A deep chill passed through Rhosh. Perhaps he had done the very wrong thing bringing Benedict here, but was he not infinitely more vulnerable miles away, even in the crypt, to some trickery on the part of the Voice?
Well, there was no time to go over a plan now, not when Maharet was returning to her fortress and when she might, with those preternatural ears, hear what she could not hear telepathically.
“Put on your shoes, we’re going now.”
Finally, they stood like dark shadows in the open window. Not a single mortal eye saw them ascend.
And only moments passed before they came down silently into the jungles surrounding Maharet’s compound.
“Ah, you are here and not a moment too soon,” said the Voice, fearlessly inside Rhosh’s head. “And she is here. She comes and she leaves the gates open behind her. Hurry before she presses all her magical electric buttons and closes me off in this prison!”