4
Trouble in the Talamasca and in the Great Family
BENJI HAD BEEN broadcasting for quite a long while by the time I finally met Jesse Reeves and David Talbot in Paris.
I’d overheard David’s telepathic plea to the vampire Jesse Reeves to come to him. It was something of a coded message. Only someone who knew that both blood drinkers had once been members in the ancient Order of the Talamasca would have understood it—David calling to his red-haired fellow scholar to please meet with her old mentor, if she would be so kind, who’d been searching for her in vain, with news to share of their old compatriots. He’d gone so far as to reference a café on the Left Bank for a meeting, a place they’d known in earlier years, “those sunny times,” and vowed he’d be on the watch for her nightly until he saw her or heard from her.
I was shocked by all this. In my wanderings, I’d assumed always that Jesse and David were fast companions, still studying together in the ancient archives of Maharet’s secret jungle compound, which she shared with her twin sister in Indonesia. It had been years since I’d visited the compound, but I had had it in my mind to go there sometime soon due to the troubles I was suffering in my heart, and my general doubts about my own stamina to survive the misery I was now enduring. Also, I’d been very concerned that Benji’s persistent broadcasts to “the vampire world” might eventually rile Maharet and draw her out of her retreat to punish Benji. Maharet could be provoked. I knew that firsthand. After my encounter with Memnoch, I’d provoked her and drawn her out. I worried about that more than I cared to admit to myself. Benji, the nuisance.
And now this, David searching for Jesse as if he hadn’t seen her in years, as if he no longer knew where Maharet or Mekare could be found.
I had half a mind to go looking for the twins first. And finally I did.
I took to the skies easily enough and went south, discovering the spot and discovering that it had long been abandoned.
It was chilling to walk through the ruins. Maharet had once had many stone rooms here, gated gardens, screened-in areas where she and her sister could roam in solitude. There had been a bevy of native mortal servants, generators, satellite dishes, and even cooling machines, and all the comforts the modern world could provide in such a remote spot. And David had told me of the libraries, of the shelves of ancient scrolls and tablets, of his hours of speaking to Maharet about the worlds she’d witnessed.
Well, it was ruined and overgrown, and some of the rooms had been intentionally knocked down, and there were old tunnels down into the earth which were now half caved in with rocks and dirt, and the jungle had swallowed a wilderness of rusted electrical equipment. All traces of human or vampiric habitation had been obliterated.
So that meant the twins had vanished from here and not even David Talbot knew where they were, David, who had been so fascinated and fearless with the twins, so eager to learn what they had to teach.
And now David was calling to Jesse Reeves and begging for a meeting in Paris.
Red-haired confidante, I must see you, I must discover why it is I cannot find you.
Now understand I made David a vampire, so I can’t hear his telepathic messages directly, no, but I caught them from other minds as so often happens.
As for Jesse, she was a fledgling vampire, yes, made the night of my travesty of a rock concert in San Francisco some decades before. But she’d been made by her beloved aunt Maharet, a true ancestor of hers, and a vampiric guardian, whom as I’ve explained had some of the oldest and most potent Blood in the world. So Jesse was no ordinary fledgling by any means.
David’s call was going out over and over again, with the intelligence that he’d haunt the Left Bank till Jesse showed up there.
Well, I decided I’d haunt it too until I found David or both of them.
I headed for Paris to a suite I’d maintained for years, in the gorgeous H?tel Plaza Athénée in the Avenue Montaigne, the closets stocked with a splendid wardrobe (as if that was going to hide the crumbling ruin which I had become), and I prepared to stay in residence and search until David and Jesse appeared. The safe in that suite held all the usual papers, plastic bank cards, and currency I’d need for a comfortable stay in the capital. And I brought with me a cell phone I’d recently had my attorneys obtain for me. I didn’t want to greet Jesse or David as the ragged, dusty, windblown suicidal vagabond. I really was no longer that in spirit, and though I had scant interest in all things material, I felt more at ease in the capital as a member of human society.
It was good to be back in Paris, better than I expected, with all that dizzying life around me, and the magnificent lights of the Champs-élysées, to be drifting through the galleries of the Louvre again in the early hours of the morning, or haunting the Pompidou or just walking the old streets of the Marais. I spent hours in Sainte-Chappelle, and in the Musée de Cluny loving the old medieval walls of the place, so like the buildings I had known when I was a living boy.
Over and over I heard the misbegotten blood drinkers near at hand, warring with one another, playing cat and mouse in the alleyways, harassing and torturing their mortal victims with a viciousness that astonished me.
But they were a cowardly bunch. And they did not detect my presence. Oh, now and then they knew an old one was passing. But they never got close enough to confirm their suspicions. In fact they fled at the sound of my heartbeat.
Over and over, I got those disconcerting flashes of olden times, my times, when there had been bloody executions in the Place de Grève, and even the most popular thoroughfares had run with mud and filth, and the rats had owned the capital as surely as humankind. Gasoline fumes owned it now.
But mostly, I had to admit I felt good. I even went to the grand Palais Garnier, for a performance of Balanchine’s Apollo, and wandered the magnificent foyer and stairway at my leisure, loving the marble, the columns, the gilt, the soaring ceilings as much as the music. Paris, my capital, Paris, where I’d died and been reborn, was buried beneath the great nineteenth-century monuments I beheld around me, but it was still Paris where I’d suffered the worst defeat of my immortal life. Paris where I might live again every night if I could overcome my own tiresome misery.
I didn’t have long to wait for Jesse and David.
The telepathic cacophony of the fledglings let me know that David had been seen in the streets of the Left Bank, and within hours they were singing songs of Jesse as well.
I was tempted to send out a warning blast to the fledglings to leave the pair entirely alone, but I did not want to break the silence I’d maintained for so long.
It was a chilly night in September, and I soon spotted the pair behind glass, in a noisy crowded brasserie called the Café Cassette in the Rue de Rennes. They had just seen each other as Jesse approached David’s table. I stood concealed in a dark doorway across the way, spying on them, confident they knew someone was out there, but not me.
Meanwhile the fledglings were darting up, photographing them apparently with cell phones that looked like the slab of glass given to me by my attorneys, and then tearing away as fast as they could, without David or Jesse giving them the slightest acknowledgment.
This sent a stab through me, as I knew I’d be photographed too the moment I made my approach. This is the way it is with us now. This was what Benji had been talking about. This was what was happening with the Undead. There was no avoiding it.
I continued to listen and watch.
Now David isn’t a vampire in the body into which he was born. The notorious Body Thief I encountered years ago was largely responsible for that, and when I brought David over into Darkness, as we so quaintly put it, he was a seventy-four-year-old man inhabiting a young, robust, dark-haired, and dark-eyed male body. So that is how he looks and how he will always look, but in my heart of hearts he remains David—my old mortal friend, once the gentle gray-haired Superior General of the Talamasca, and my partner in crime, my ally in my battle against the Body Thief—my forgiving fledgling.
As for Jesse Reeves, Maharet’s near-incomparable blood had made her a formidable monster. She was a tall, thin woman, with bones like a bird, and rippling light red hair down to her shoulders, whose fierce eyes always regarded the world from an uncommitted remove and a deep isolation. She had an oval face, and looked far too chaste and ethereal to be what anyone would call beautiful. In fact, she had the neuter-gender quality of an angel.
She had come to the meeting in refined safari wear with pressed khaki jacket and pants, and there sat David beaming when he saw her, the British gentleman in gray Donegal tweed with a brown suede vest and elbow patches. He rose to take her in his arms, and at once they fell to confiding in one another in hushed whispers that I could easily hear from my shadowy hiding place.
Well, I could stand this for maybe three minutes. Then the pain was just too much. I almost fled. After all, I’d given up on all this, had I not?
But then I knew I had to see them, had to hold them each in my arms, had to put my heart close to their hearts. So I plunged across the rainy street and into the café and sat down right beside them.
There was a sudden rush of paparazzi blood drinkers from doorways here and there, and they massed beyond the glass to take the inevitable pictures—It’s Lestat—. And then they vanished.
David and Jesse had seen me before I was halfway there and David rushed to meet me and threw his arms around me. Jesse hugged both of us. I was lost for a moment to the beating of their hearts, to the subtle scents rising from their hair and skin, and the sheer softness of affection emanating from the firmest of touches. Mon Dieu, why had I ever thought this was a good idea!
Now came all the tears and recriminations, along with more embraces of course, and the tender fragrant kisses, and Jesse’s lovely soft hair against my cheek again and David’s strict disapproving eyes fixing me mercilessly even though there were blood tears on his face and he had to wipe at them with one of his perfect linen handkerchiefs.
“Okay, we’re getting out of here,” I said, and headed for the door with both of them struggling to keep up with me.
The hovering paparazzi vampires shot away in all directions, except for one intrepid young female with an actual camera flashing away as she danced backwards in front of us.
I had a car waiting to take us to the Plaza Athénée, and we were silent for the short trip, though it was the strangest and most sensuous experience to be with them, so close, in the backseat of the car, pressing on through the rain with the dim lights blurred in the downpour and the paparazzi following us. I felt pain, being so close to them, and so glad of it. I didn’t want them to know how I felt; indeed, I didn’t want anyone to know how I felt; I didn’t want to know how I felt. So I grew hard and quiet and stared out the windows as Paris was rolling by, with all the endless undying energy of a great capital around us.
Halfway home, I threatened the paparazzi streaking on both sides with immolation if they didn’t scatter now. And that did it.
The sumptuous wallpapered living room of my suite was a perfect sanctuary.
We were soon settled under the soft electric lights in the bland but comfortable mélange of eighteenth-century and modern-style sofas and chairs. I loved the comfort of these sturdy furnishings and relished the cabriole legs and bits of brass ormolu and the satin gloss of fruitwood tables and chests.
“Look, I’m not making any excuses for being in exile,” I said at once, speaking my usual rough brash brand of English. “I’m here now and that’s enough and if I want to tell you what I’ve been doing all these years, well, I’ll write a damned book about it.” But I was so glad to be with them. Even yelling at them was a sublime pleasure, instead of merely thinking about them and missing them and longing for them and wondering about them.
“Of course,” David said sincerely, his eyes suddenly rimmed in red. “I’m simply glad to see you, that’s all. The whole world’s glad to know you’re alive. You’ll know that soon enough.”
I was about to say something sharp and unkind when I realized that indeed “the whole world” would know soon enough with all those mavericks out there disseminating their iPhone images and videos. The initial telepathic blast must have been like a meteor crashing into the sea.
“Don’t underestimate your own fame,” I said under my breath.
Well, we’d be gone from here soon enough. Or I’d tough it out and go on enjoying Paris in spite of the little pests. But Jesse was talking now in that cool American-British voice of hers, drawing me back into the room.
“Lestat, it’s never been more important,” Jesse said, “that we come together.” She looked like a nun with a ragged red veil of hair.
“And why is that?” I demanded. “How can we change what’s happening out there? Wasn’t it always like this, more or less, I mean what has changed really? It must have been this way before.”
“A great deal has changed, apparently,” she replied, but not argumentatively. “But there are things I must confide in you and in David, because I don’t know where else to go or what to do. I was so glad when I realized David was looking for me. I might never have had the courage to come to you on my own—either of you. David, let me speak first, while I have the courage. Then you can explain what it is you want to tell me. It’s about the Talamasca, I understand. But for now the Talamasca is not our greatest concern.”
“What is it then, dearest?” David asked.
“I’m torn,” she said, “because I have no leave to discuss these things, but if I don’t …”
“Trust in me,” David said reassuringly. He took her hand.
She sat on the edge of her chair, small shoulders hunched, her hair tumbled down around her in that veil of waves.
“As you both know,” she said, “Maharet and Mekare have gone into hiding. This began some four years ago with the destruction of our sanctuary in Java. Well, Khayman is still with us, and I come and go as I please. And nothing’s been said to forbid me from coming to you. But something’s wrong, deeply wrong. I’m afraid. I’m afraid that our world may not continue … unless something is done.”
Our world. It was perfectly plain what she meant. Mekare was the host of the spirit that animated us. If Mekare were destroyed, we would all be destroyed as well. All blood drinkers the world over would be destroyed, including that riffraff out there encircling this hotel.
“There were early signs,” Jesse said hesitatingly, “but I didn’t notice them. Only in retrospect did I come to realize what was going on. You both know what the Great Family meant to Maharet. Lestat, you weren’t with us when she told the story, but you knew and you wrote the entire account of this accurately. David, you know all of this as well. My aunt’s human descendants have kept her alive through the millennia. In every generation she reinvented a human persona for herself so that she might care for the Great Family, care for the genealogical records, distribute the grants and the trusts, keep branches and clans in touch with one another. I grew up in this family. Long before I ever dreamed there was any secret surrounding my aunt Maharet, I knew what it was like to be part of it, the beauty of it, the richness of the heritage. And I knew even then what it meant to her. And I know well enough now that this was the vocation that maintained her sanity when everything else failed.
“Well, sometime before we left the Java compound, she’d succeeded in making the Great Family entirely independent of herself. She confessed to me that the process had taken years. The family’s huge; branches exist in almost every country in the world; she’d spent most of the first decade of the new millennium sitting in law offices and bank offices and building libraries and archives so that the family would survive without her.”
“But all this is quite understandable,” said David. “She’s tired, perhaps. Perhaps she wants a rest. And the world itself has changed so dramatically in the last thirty years, Jesse. What with computers now it is entirely possible to unite and strengthen the Great Family in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.”
“All that’s true, David, but let’s not forget what the Great Family meant to her. I didn’t like to see the weariness. I didn’t like to hear it in her voice. I asked her many times if she would keep watch as she’d always done, even though she no longer had to play an official role.”
“Surely she will,” David offered.
“She said no,” Jesse responded. “She said that her time with the Great Family was over. And she reminded me that it was her interfering in my life, as she called it, her coming to me as my beloved aunt Maharet, that eventually resulted in my being inducted, as she put it, into our world.”
All this was true obviously. It had been Maharet’s custom to visit many of her mortal descendants. And she’d been particularly drawn to the young Jesse. And the young Jesse had been kept too long in the company of blood drinkers not to realize that something profoundly mysterious set these “people” apart from others. So Maharet was right.
“I didn’t like it,” Jesse continued. “I feared it, but when I pressed her, she said this had to be. She said we were living in an internet age when scrutiny made impossible the secrecy of the past.”
“Well, I think she’s right about that too,” David said.
“She said that the information age was creating a crisis of unbelievable dimensions for any race or group or entity that had depended on secrecy. She said that people alive today were not realizing just how grave the crisis was.”
“Once again, she’s right about that too,” said David.
I didn’t want to admit it, but I agreed. The great international Roman Catholic Church was being brought to its knees by the internet or information age. And that was only one such institution.
Benji’s incessant broadcasts, websites, and blogs; maverick blood drinkers with picture-capturing iPhones; satellite mobiles that were better than telepathy at reaching individuals at any time in any part of the world—all were revolutionary beyond imagining.
“She said the time was past when an immortal could shepherd a network of human beings as she’d done with the Great Family. She said the ancient records wouldn’t even have survived modern investigation if she had not done what she did. Understand, she said, no one would ever really catch on as to who she was and what she’d done with the Great Family. That was a story for us to understand; human beings would always believe it was fictive nonsense even if they read it in Lestat’s books. But sooner or later new and enterprising members of the family would begin researching with exhaustive depth. Had she not withdrawn and covered her tracks, the whole endeavor would have become mired in unanswerable questions. The Great Family itself would have been hurt. Well, she said, she’d taken care of it. It had taken six years, but she’d done it and now everything was finished and she could be at peace.”
“At peace,” David repeated respectfully.
“Yes, well, I sensed a deepening sadness in her, a melancholy.”
“And at the same time,” David offered, “she showed little interest in anything else.”
“Precisely,” said Jesse. “You are so exactly right. For hours on end, she’s listened to Benji’s broadcasts out of New York, Benji’s complaining that the tribe was parentless, that blood drinkers were orphans, and she said time and again that Benji was correct.”
“So she wasn’t angry with him,” I said.
“Never,” said Jesse. “But I’ve never known her to be angry with anyone. I’ve known her only to be sad.”
“And what about Mekare in all this?” I asked. “How has it been with Mekare since Akasha was killed? That’s the question tormenting me most of the time though I don’t particularly want to admit it. How goes it with the one who is the true Queen of the Damned?” I knew well enough that Mekare had from the beginning seemed unchangeable, uncommunicative, mute in soul as well as mute in body, a mysterious thing that obviously loved one person and one person only, her twin, Maharet.
“Has there been no change in her over these years?” I pushed.
Jesse didn’t respond. She looked at me in silence and then her face broke. I thought she’d break down completely but she pulled herself up.
She looked at David. David sat back on the sofa, and took a deep breath. “Mekare has never shown any sign of understanding what in fact happened to her,” David said. “Oh, in the beginning, Maharet had hopes.”
“If there’s a true mind there,” said Jesse, “no one can reach it. How long it took for my aunt to resign herself to this I can’t say.”
I wasn’t surprised, but I was horrified. And anytime in my life I’d been in contact with Mekare, I’d been uneasy, as if dealing with something that looked human but was in no way human anymore. Now, all blood drinkers truly are human; they never cease being human. They may talk of being more or less human, but they are human, with human thoughts, desires, human speech. Mekare’s face had never been more expressive than that of an animal, as mysterious and unreachable as the face of an animal, a thing that seems intelligent yet is not intelligent in the way we are at all.
“Oh, she knows she’s with her sister and she shows love to her sister,” said David, “but beyond that, if any thought, any coherent verbal thought, has ever emanated from Mekare, I’ve never heard it, and neither has Jesse. And neither has Maharet as far as I ever knew.”
“But she remains docile, manageable,” I said. “She always seemed that way, utterly compliant. Isn’t that so?”
Neither replied. Jesse was looking uneasily at David and then she turned to me as if just hearing my question. “It certainly did seem that way,” she said. “In the beginning, Maharet would spend nights, weeks even, talking with her, walking with her, taking her about the jungle compound. She sang to her, played music for her, sat her down before the television screens, playing films for her, brilliant colorful films full of sunlight. I don’t know if you remember how large it was, the compound with all those salons, or how much of an enclosed area it provided for solitary walks. They were always together. Maharet was obviously doing everything in her power to draw Mekare out.”
I did remember those massive overarching screened enclosures, with the jungle exploding against the steel mesh. Orchids, the wild screeching South American birds with their long blue and yellow feathers, the vines dripping pink or yellow blossoms. Had there not been tiny Brazilian monkeys chattering in the upper branches? Maharet had imported every small colorful tropical creature or plant imaginable. It had been marvelous to roam the paths discovering secretive and picturesque stone grottoes, streams, and little waterfalls—to be in the wilderness and yet somehow safe from it at the same time.
“But I knew early on,” said Jesse, “that Maharet was disappointed, almost brutally disappointed, only of course she’d never say. All those long centuries searching for Mekare, certain that Mekare could be alive somewhere, and then Mekare appearing to fulfill her curse against Akasha, and then this.”
“I can imagine it,” I said. I remembered Mekare’s masklike face, those eyes as empty as the paperweight eyes of a French doll.
Jesse went on, a frown creasing her smooth forehead, her reddish-blond eyebrows catching the light.
“There was never a mention, never a declaration or a decision. But the long hours of talking stopped. No more reading aloud, or music, or films. And after that there was simple physical affection, the two walking arm in arm, or Maharet at her reading with Mekare sitting motionless on a bench nearby.”
And of course, I thought to myself, the horrifying thought that this thing, this motionless, thoughtless being, contained the Sacred Core. But then was it so bad? Was it so bad for the host of the Sacred Core to be without thought, without dreams, without ambition, without designs?
Akasha, when she had risen from her throne, had been a monster. “I would be the Queen of Heaven,” she’d said to me as she slew mortals, and urged me to do the same. And I, the consort, had done her bidding all too easily, to my everlasting shame. What a price I’d paid for the powerful Blood she’d given me, and the instructions. No wonder I kept to my refuge now. When I looked back over my myriad adventures sometimes all I saw was shame.
Maharet had rightfully described her sister as the Queen of the Damned.
I stood up and went to the window. I had to stop. Too many voices out there in the night. Benji in faraway New York was already broadcasting of the appearance of Lestat in Paris, with David Talbot and Jesse Reeves. His amplified voice poured forth from countless devices out there, warning the fledglings: “Children of the Night, leave them alone. For your own safety, leave them alone. They will hear my voice. They will hear me begging them to speak to us. Give them time. For your own safety, leave them alone.”
I went back to the couch. David was patiently waiting, and so was Jesse. Surely their preternatural hearing was as acute as mine.
“And then there was the time when Marius came to her,” said Jesse, looking at me eagerly.
I nodded for her to continue.
“You know these things. Marius came wanting Maharet’s permission to put an end to Santino, the vampire who’d done so much to harm him over the centuries, the vampire who brought the Children of Satan against him in Venice.”
David nodded, and so did I. I shrugged.
“She had hated that she was asked to sit in judgment, that Marius wanted her to convene a court of sorts, to give permission for what he wanted to do. She refused permission to Marius to harm Santino, not because she didn’t believe he should but because she did not want to be the judge. And she did not want a murder beneath her roof.”
“That was clear,” said David.
Marius had recounted this story in his memoir. Or somebody had recounted it. The memoir might have been polished up by David for all I knew. Probably was. Pandora and Armand had been present for this court or tribunal when Marius had come before Maharet with his request, wanting vengeance on Santino but forswearing it if Maharet would not give her blessing. And somebody had brought Santino there, but who precisely had done that? Maharet?
It was Marius who’d said somebody has to rule. It was Marius who had raised the entire issue of authority. What were we to expect from someone who came into the Blood during the age of the great Pax Romana? Marius had forever been the rational Roman, the believer in reason and law and order.
And then it had been another blood drinker, Thorne, an ancient fledgling of Maharet, an old Norseman, red-haired, romantic, newly emerged from the blessed solitude of the earth, who had destroyed Santino for reasons of his own. An ugly violent scene it had been with Santino burnt by Thorne right before Maharet’s eyes. Maharet had wept. Her outrage had not been that of a queen so much as the mistress of a household defiled. And Thorne had followed this act of disobedience and defiance by offering Maharet a precious gift: his preternatural eyes.
Maharet had been blind all her long life as a blood drinker. Blinded by Akasha before she came into the Blood, she’d used the eyes of her mortal victims; but they had never endured very long. Thorne had given her his vampire eyes. He’d asked the mute and impassive Mekare to take his eyes from him and give them to her sister. And that Mekare had done. Thorne had remained in the compound after that for all anyone ever knew, a prisoner of the twins, blind, suffering, maybe content.
When I’d read that account in Marius’s memoir, I’d thought back on Fareed’s promise to achieve permanent preternatural eyes for Maharet. Had he ever had the opportunity?
“That broke something inside of her,” said Jesse, “that awful trial. Not Thorne’s rebellion, you understand. She loved and forgave Thorne. She kept Thorne with us after. But simply the fact of Marius appealing to her, saying that there had to be a law amongst us, that somebody had to have authority. That broke her. That made it all too plain that she was no sovereign for the Undead.”
This had never occurred to me. I had assumed that one so old and so powerful had simply gone on, pursuing a path well beyond our various disputes.
“I think it was after that that she began to obliterate all contact with the Great Family, and I saw her slipping ever deeper into her own silence.”
“But she’d summoned young ones from time to time, didn’t she?” I asked. “And David, you were still coming and going.…”
“Yes, she did continue to invite others to the archives,” said David. “She was especially tolerant of me. But I think I disappointed in those early years too. There were times when I could not bear the archives, and all the secret knowledge there that the outside world would never see. She knew how I felt. She knew that reading of lost cities and empires only made me feel less human, less vital, less purposeful. She saw all that. She knew.”
“But she told me once we go through cycles, all of us,” I protested. “I’m in a bad cycle now. That’s why I so wanted to talk to her for a little while. I thought she was the great expert on cycles of despair and cycles of confidence. I thought she had to be. I thought she was the strongest of us all.”
“She’s a fallible being ultimately,” said David, “just as you or I. Very likely her gift for survival depends on her limitations. Isn’t that always the way it is?”
“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, “that 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 people. 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.”
“What name does he use with us?” I asked.
“She never told me precisely,” said Jesse. “But I do know his vast wealth is associated with pharmaceutical corporations and investments. I remember Seth saying as much. To continue, she went off to Switzerland to find him. She called me often while she was there.”
“By phone?”