by Anne Rice
I was relieved.
I sat down in a chair opposite his, a big Renaissance Revival chair of carved wood that Henry VIII might have loved. It was creaky but comfortable. Slowly I saw the whole room was more or less Tudor in style. This room had no windows. But Armand had given it the effect of windows by heavy gold-framed mirrors set in every wall, and the hearth was Tudor, with black carvings, and heavy andirons. The coffered ceiling was scored by dark beams. Armand was a genius at these things.
“Then it is just a matter of when,” I said with a sigh.
“Surely you don’t want to bring them over until some decision has been made about the Voice,” said Marius. “We need to meet again, all of us, don’t we, as soon as you’re willing?”
“Well, you would think in terms of the Roman Senate,” I said. “Why isn’t he in my head or yours?” Marius asked. “Why is he so quiet? I would have thought he’d be punishing Rhoshamandes and Benedict but he isn’t.”
“He’s in my head now, Marius,” I said. “I can feel him. I’ve always known when he was absent or leaving. But now I know when he’s simply there. It’s rather like having a finger pressed against one’s scalp or cheek or the lobe of one’s ear. He’s here.”
Marius looked exasperated, and then plainly furious.
“He’s stopped his relentless meddling out there,” I said, “that’s what matters.” I gestured to the front of the house, towards the street where the young ones were milling, towards the wide world which lay to the east, and the west, and the south and the north.
“I suppose it would be pointless for me to scrawl a message to you on paper here,” said Marius, “because he can read it through your eyes. But why bring over these two until we’re certain that this thing is not yet going to destroy the entire tribe?”
“He’s never wanted to do that,” I said. “And there is no ultimate solution so long as he exists. Even in the most agreeable host, he can still plot and then travel, and then foment. I don’t see any end to that except for one.”
“Which is what?”
“That he might have some larger vision, some infinitely larger challenge, with which to occupy his mind.”
“Does he want that?” Marius asked. “Or is that not something you’ve dreamed up, Lestat? You are such a romantic at heart. Oh, I know you fancy yourself hard-boiled and practical by nature. But you’re a romantic. You always have been. What he wants perhaps is a sacrificial lamb, a perfect blood drinker, old and powerful, whose functioning brain he can take over and control relentlessly as he gradually obliterates its personality. Rhoshamandes was his prototype. Only Rhoshamandes wasn’t vicious enough or foolish enough—.”
“Yes, that does make sense,” I said. “I’m exhausted. I want to go back to that little retreat I’ve found in the other building.”
“What Armand calls the French library.”
“Yes, exactly,” I said. “He couldn’t have designed a more perfect spot for me. I need to rest. To think. But you may do this with Viktor and Rose whenever you wish, and I say the sooner the better—don’t wait, don’t wait for any resolution that may never come. You do it, go on and do it, and you’ll make them strong and telepathic and resourceful, and you’ll give them the best instructions, and so I leave it to you.”
“And if I do it with a bit of ceremony?” he asked.
“Why not?” I remembered the description of the making of Armand, how he’d taken the young Armand into a painted room in his Venetian palace and there amid blazing multicolored murals he had made him, offering the blood as sacrament with the most appropriate words. So different from my own making, that ruthless Magnus who was now a wise ghost, but had been then a warped and vile blood drinker, tormenting me as he brought me over.
I had to stop thinking of all this. I was bone tired, as mortals say. I rose to go. But then I stopped.
“If we are to be one tribe now,” I said. “If we are to be a true sodality, then we can and should perhaps have our own ceremonies, rites, trappings, some way of surrounding with solemn enthusiasm the birth of others into our ranks. So do it as you wish and make a precedent, perhaps, that will endure.”
He smiled.
“Allow me one innovation at the start,” he said, “that I perform the rites with Pandora, who is nearly my same age, and very skilled at making others, obviously. We will share the making of each between us so that my gifts will go into both Rose and Viktor, and her gifts will go into both as well. Because you see, I cannot really bring both of them over perfectly at the same time on my own.”
“Of course, as you wish,” I said. “I leave this in your hands.”
“And then it can be done with grace and solemnity for both at the same time.”
I nodded. “And if they emerge from this telepathically deaf to one another, and deaf to both of you?”
“So be it. There’s a wisdom in it. Let them have their silence in which to learn. When has telepathy really done us any great measure of good?”
I gave my assent.
I was at the door when he spoke again.
“Lestat, be careful with this Voice!” he said.
I turned around and looked at him.
“Don’t be your usual impulsive self in lending this thing a sympathetic ear.”
He stood and left the table, appealing to me with his arms out.
“Lestat, no one is insensible to what this thing endures in the body of one with dimmed eyes and stopped ears, a thing that can’t move, can’t write, can’t think, can’t speak. We know.”
“Do you?”
“Give Seth and Fareed time, as long as the thing is quiet, to ponder this.”
“What? The making of a ghastly machine?”
“No, but possibly some vehicle can yet be found—some fledgling brought over for the very purpose, with senses and faculties intact, but with little intellect or sanity at stake, and with a physicality—as a fledgling—that can be controlled.”
“And this fledgling would be kept a prisoner, of course.”
“Inevitably,” he said. His arms dropped to his sides.
Inside me the Voice gave a long low agonized sigh.
“Lestat, if it’s in your mind, it’s going to go for your mind. And you must call us, all of us, to your aid if this thing begins to push you to the brink.”
“I know that, Marius,” I said. “I’ve never known myself, but I know when I’m not myself. That is certain.”
He gave a soft despairing smile and shook his head.
I went out.
I went back to the French library.
Someone had been in here, one of those quiet, strange mortal servants of Armand’s who went about the house like obedient somnambulists—and this one had dusted and polished, and laid out a soft green silk cover for me, over the back of the darker green damask couch.
The two small lamps burned on the desk.
I turned on the computer long enough to confirm at clear volume what I already knew. Benji was broadcasting vigorously. No Burnings anywhere on the planet. No word of the Voice from far and wide. No calls coming in from desperate victims.
I shut off the machine.
I knew he was with me. That subtle touch, that embrace of invisible fingers on the back of my neck.
I sat down in the largest of the leather wing chairs, the one in which Viktor and Rose had cuddled together last night, and I looked up at the great mirror over the mantel. I was pondering the hallucinations the Voice had once created for me in mirrors—those reflections of myself which he had so playfully ignited in my brain.
Those were hallucinations, surely, and I wondered just how far he might take such a power. After all, telepathy can do infinitely more than invade a mind with a logical string of words.
A quarter of an hour passed during which I considered all these things in an unguarded way. I looked dreamily at the giant mirror. Was I longing for him to show himself as my double, as he’d done before? Longing to see that clever impish face that wasn’t my face and had to be
some semblance of his intellect or soul?
The mirror reflected only the shelves of books behind me, the polished wood, the many differing volumes of varying thickness and height.
I became drowsy.
Something appeared in the mirror. I blinked, thinking that perhaps I was mistaken, but I saw it more clearly. It was a tiny amorphous reddish cloud.
It was swirling, growing bigger, and then shrinking and then expanding again, indistinct in shape, swelling, fading, growing ever more red, thickening again.
It began to grow larger, giving the illusion that it was coming closer to me, traveling steadily towards me from some point very far away, deep in the world of the mirror, where its diminutive size was an illusion.
Steadily towards me, it moved, and now it appeared to be swimming, propelling itself by the writhing work of myriad red-tinted tentacles, gossamer and transparent tentacles, moving as if through water, as if it were a sea creature of innumerable translucent arms.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It seemed the mirror was just a piece of glass. It was traveling towards me from a vast dark and cloudy world in which it was purely at home.
Suddenly it resembled nothing so much as a reddish Medusa’s head but with a tiny dark visage, tiny, and with writhing red serpentine arms beyond count. They had no serpent heads, these arms. And the entire image retained its ruby-red-tinged transparency. The face—and it was a face—grew larger and larger as I stared at it amazed.
It became the size of an old silver half dollar as I watched, and the countless translucent tentacles seemed to elongate and become ever more delicate, dancing as they did so, dancing, reaching outward beyond the frame of the mirror on either side.
I stood up.
I moved towards the fireplace. I looked directly into the mirror.
The face grew larger and larger and I could now make out tiny glittering eyes in it, and what seemed a mouth, a round mouth of elastic shifting shape, a mouth seeking to be a mouth. The great mass of crimson tinted tentacles now filled the mirror to the very frame.
The face grew bigger, and it seemed the mouth which was only a dark cypher stretched into a smile. The eyes flashed black and filled with life.
Bigger and bigger grew the face as though the being were indeed still moving towards me, moving towards the barrier of this glass that divided us, and the face slowly grew to be the size perhaps of my own.
The dark eyes expanded, took on the human accoutrements of eyelashes and eyebrows; a semblance of a nose appeared, and the mouth had lips. The whole mirror now was filled with the deep pellucid red of this image, a soft elusive red, the color of blood suffusing the tubular tentacles and the face, the slowly darkening face.
“Amel!” I cried out. I gasped for breath.
The dark eyes grew pupils as they looked at me, and lips smiled as the opening had smiled before. An expression bloomed on the surface of the face, an expression of unutterable love.
Pain fused with the love, undeniable pain. The expression of pain and love so fused in the face that I could hardly bear to look at it, aware suddenly of a huge pain inside me, inside my heart, pain blooming in me as if it were unstoppable, out of all control, and would soon be more than I could bear.
“I love you!” I said. “I love you!” And then without words I reached out towards it. I reached out and I told it that I would embrace it, I would know it, I would take into myself its love, its pain. I will take into myself what you are.
I heard the sound of weeping only it had no sound. I heard it rising all around me the way the sound of falling rain can rise as it strikes more and more surfaces around one, pattering on streets and roofs and leaves and boughs.
“I know what’s driven you to these things!” I said aloud. I was crying. My eyes were filling with blood.
“I would never have hurt that boy,” whispered the Voice inside me, only it was coming from this face, this tragic face, these lips, this one looking into my eyes.
“I believe you,” I said.
“I will never hurt you.”
“I will give you all that I know,” I said, “if only you’ll do the same with me! If only we can love one another! Always, completely! I will not suffer you to go into any other but me!”
“Yes,” he said. “You have always been my beloved. Always. Dancer, singer, oracle, high priest, prince.”
I reached out for the mirror, slapping my hands on the glass. The eyes were huge, and the mouth was long and serene with curving lips, expressive lips.
“In one body,” said the Voice. “In one brain. In one soul.” A sigh came from it. A long agonizing sigh. “Don’t fear me. Don’t fear my suffering, my cries, my frantic power. Help me. Help me, I beg you. You are my redeemer. Call me forth from the tomb.”
I reached out with every fiber of my being, my hands pressing the glass, shuddering against it, my whole soul wanting to pass into the mirror, into the bloody-red image, into the face, into the Voice.
And then the image was gone.
I found myself on the carpet, sitting there, as if I’d been pushed or fallen backwards, staring up at the bright empty mirror reflecting again the contents of the room.
There was a knocking at the door.
Somewhere a clock was striking the hour. So many chimes. Was it possible?
I rose to my feet and went to the door.
It was midnight. The last chime had just echoed through the hallway.
Gregory and Seth and Sevraine were there. Fareed was with them and David and Jesse and Marius. Others were nearby.
What had drawn them here now, just now? I was dazed. What could I say to them?
“There is so much we want to talk about,” said Gregory. “We’re not hearing the Voice. None of us are. The world’s quiet, or so it tells Benji upstairs. But surely this is only an intermezzo. We must plan.”
I stood there quietly for a long moment, hands clasped just under my chin. I lifted my right hand, one finger raised.
“Am I your leader?” I asked. It was so hard for me to speak, to form the simplest words. “Will you accept my decision as to the disposition of the Voice?”
No one answered for a moment. I couldn’t shake off the languor I felt. I couldn’t rally. I wanted them all to leave me now.
Then Gregory said softly, “But what possible disposition for the Voice can there be? The Voice is in the body of Mekare. Mekare is quiet now. The Voice is quiet. But the Voice will begin to scheme again. The Voice will plot.”
“This creature, Mekare,” said Sevraine, “she is a living thing. She knows, in some brutal and simple way, she knows her tragedies. I tell you she knows.”
Seems Fareed said something about reasoning with the Voice, but I scarcely heard him.
Seth asked me if I was hearing the Voice. “You are communing with it, aren’t you? But you’ve sealed yourself off from us. You’re battling the Voice alone.”
“So this is the decision you want from me?” I asked. “That the Voice remain with Mekare?”
“What other decision can there be for now?” asked Sevraine. “And whoever else takes this Voice into himself risks being driven mad by it. And how can anyone seize Amel from Mekare without ending her life? We have no recourse but to reason with it as it lives inside of her.”
I drew myself up. I had to appear alert, even if I was not, in control of my faculties, even if I was not. I was by no means irrational. It’s simply that I had to return to a state of examining these things on my own which I could not share.
Gregory was trying to read my thoughts. They all were. But I knew too well how to lock them out. And in the dark little sanctum of my heart I saw that blood-red face, that suffering face. I beheld it in pure wonder.
“Put aside your fears,” I said. My tongue was thick, and I didn’t sound like myself to me. I looked directly at Gregory, then at Seth, then at each of the others in so far as I could see them. Even at Marius who reached out to grasp my arm.
“I want to be alone now.
” I removed Marius’s hand from me. The Latin words came to me. “Nolite timere,” I said. I gestured for patience as I started to close the door.
Slowly they withdrew.
Marius bent forward to kiss me and he told me that they would all be in the house till morning. No one was leaving. Everyone was here, and that when we were ready to talk with them further, they’d come together at once.
“Tomorrow night,” said Marius, “at the hour of nine, Viktor and Rose will be brought over by Pandora and me.”
“Ah, yes,” I answered. “That’s good.” I smiled.
At last, the door was shut once again, and I moved back into the room. I sat down again, on the leather ottoman of one of the chairs, near to the fire.
Moments passed. Perhaps half an hour. Now and then I drew to myself the random sounds of the house, and the great metropolis beyond, and then banished those sounds as if I were a magnet at the center of a consciousness greater than myself.
It seemed the hallway clock struck the hour. Chimes and chimes and chimes. And then after the longest time, the clock chimed yet again. The house was quiet. Only Benji’s voice went on way up there in his studio, talking gently and patiently to the young ones, those isolated on far continents and in far cities, still desperate for the comfort of his words.
Easy to close myself off from that. And the clock chiming again as if it were an instrument being played by my hand. I did like clocks. I had to admit it.
There came that vision of sunshine and green fields. The soft musical sound of the insects humming and the soft rustle of trees. The twins sat together and Maharet said something to me in the soft ancient tongue that I thought very amusing and very comforting, but the words were gone as fast as they’d come, if there had ever been words before.
There was a slow trudging step in the hall beyond the door, a heavy step that made the old boards creak and the deep sound of a powerful beating heart.
The door opened slowly, and Mekare appeared.
She’d been lovingly restored since last night, and wore a black wool robe trimmed in silver. Her long hair was brushed and clean and lustrous. And someone had also fastened a fine collar of diamonds and silver around her neck. The sleeves of the gown were long and full, and the robe draped exquisitely on her, on the girlish body that was now a thing of stone.