Prince Lestat (35 page)

No change. I detected a low humming coming from her. We don’t need our tongues to hum? It was almost a purr as might come from a cat, and suddenly her eyes were as remote and without consciousness as those of a statue.

“Why are you doing it?” I asked. “Why kill all those young ones, those poor little young ones?”

With no spark of recognition or response, she moved forward and kissed me, kissing the right side of my face with those seashell-pink lips, those cold lips. I brought my hand up slowly and let my fingers move into the soft thickness of her waving red hair. I touched her head ever so gently.

“Mekare, trust in me,” I whispered in that old language.

A riot of sounds exploded behind me, again some force tearing through a forest that was almost impenetrable. The air was filled with a rain of tiny falling green leaves. I saw them falling on the viscid surface of the water.

Maharet stood there to my left helping Mekare to her feet, making soft gentle crooning sounds as she did it, her fingers stroking Mekare’s face.

I climbed to my feet as well.

“You leave here now, Lestat,” said Maharet, “and don’t you come back. And don’t you urge anyone ever again to come here!”

Her pale face was streaked with blood. There was blood on her pale-green silk robe, blood in her hair, all this from weeping. Blood tears. Blood-red lips.

Mekare stood beside her gazing at me impassively, eyes drifting over the palm fronds, the mesh of branches that shut out the sky, as if she were listening to the birds or the insects and not to anything spoken here.

“Very well,” I said. “I came to help. I came to learn what I could.”

“Say no more! I know why you came,” she said. “You must go. I understand. I would have done the same thing if I were you. But you must tell the others never to look for us again. Never. Do you think I
would ever try to hurt you, you or any of the others? My sister would never do this. She would never harm anyone. Go now.”

“What about Pacaya, the volcano?” I asked. “You can’t do this, Maharet. You can’t go into the volcano, you and Mekare. You can’t do this to us.”

“I know!” she said. It was almost a groan. A terrible deep groan of anguish.

A deep groan came out of Mekare as well, a horrid groan. It was as if her only voice were in her chest and she turned to her sister suddenly lifting her hands but only a little, and letting them drop as if she couldn’t manage to really work them at all.

“Let me talk to you,” I pleaded.

Khayman was coming towards us, and Mekare turned sharply away and moved towards him and lay against his chest and he enfolded her with his arms. Maharet stared at me. She was shaking her head, moaning as if her fevered thoughts had a little song to them of moans.

Before I could speak again, there came a heated blast of air against my face and chest. It blinded me. I thought it was the Fire Gift, and she was making an immediate mockery of her own words.

Well, Brat Prince, I thought, you gambled, you lost! And you get to die now. Here’s your personal Pacaya.

But I was merely flying backwards through the bracken again, smashing against tree trunks, and through clattering crackling branches and wet fronds. I twisted and turned with all my might trying to escape this thing, trying to flee to one side or the other, but it was driving me backwards at such speed that I was helpless.

Finally I was flung down in a grassy place, an open grassy circle of sorts, unable for a moment to move, my body aching all over. My hands and face were badly cut. My eyes were stinging. I was covered with dirt and broken leaves. I climbed to my knees and then to my feet.

The sky above was a deep radiant blue with the jungles rising high all around as if to engulf it. I could see the remains of some huts here, that this had been a village once, but it was now in ruins. It took me a moment to catch my breath and then to wipe my face with my handkerchief, and wipe the blood from the cuts on my hands. My head throbbed.

It was half an hour before I reached the lodge on the banks of the river.

I found David and Jesse in a tasteful tropical suite there, all very civilized and pretty with white curtains and veils of bleached mosquito netting over the white iron bed. Candles burned all through the rooms and the manicured gardens and around a small swimming pool. Such luxury on the edge of chaos.

I stripped everything off and bathed in the fresh, clean swimming pool.

David stood by with a heap of white towels.

When I was myself again, as best as I could be, with these soiled and torn clothes, I went into the cozy little parlor with him.

I related what I’d seen.

“Khayman’s in the grip of the Voice, that’s clear,” I said. “Whether Maharet’s heard it or not, I have no idea. But Mekare gave me no hint of menace, no hint of mind or cunning or …”

“Or what?” Jesse asked.

“No hint that the Voice was coming from her,” I said.

“How could it possibly be coming from her?”

“You’re joking, surely,” I said.

“No, I’m not,” said Jesse.

In a low confidential tone I told them all I knew of the Voice.

I told them how it had been speaking to me for years, how it talked of beauty and love, and how it had nudged me once to burn and destroy the mavericks in Paris. I told them all about the Voice—its games with my reflection in the mirror.

“So you’re saying it’s some demonic ancient one,” said Jesse. “Trying to take possession of blood drinkers, and that it’s taken possession of Khayman, and Maharet knows it?” Her eyes were glassy with tears that were slowly thickening into pure blood. She brushed her curling copper hair back from her face. She looked unutterably sad.

“Well, that’s one way of putting it,” I said. “You really have no clue who the Voice is?”

I lost all taste for this conversation. I had too much thinking to do and I needed to do it quickly. I didn’t tell them about the image of Pacaya in Guatemala. Why should I? What could they do about it? She had said she wouldn’t harm us.

I went out of the room, motioning for them to let me go, and I stood in this dreamy little tropical garden. I could hear a waterfall somewhere, perhaps more than one, and that throbbing engine of the jungle, that engine of so many voices.

“Who are you, Voice?” I asked aloud. “Why don’t you tell me? I think it’s time, don’t you?”

Laughter
.

Low laughter and that same distinctly male timbre. Right inside my head.

“What’s the name of the game, Voice?” I asked. “How many are going to have to die before you finish? And what is it you really want?”

No answer. But I felt certain someone was watching me. Someone was off in the jungles beyond the border of this garden, beyond this horseshoe of little thatched-roof luxurious guest suites, staring at me.

“Can you even guess what I suffer?” said the Voice.

“No,” I said. “Tell me about it.”

Silence. It was gone. I could feel its distinct absence.

I waited a long time. Then I walked back into the little suite. They were sitting together now on the foot of the bed which looked a bit like a shrine with all its draped white mosquito netting. David was holding Jesse. Jesse was drooping like a broken flower.

“Let’s do as Maharet asks,” I said. “Perhaps she has some plan, some plan she doesn’t dare confide in anyone, and we owe it to her and to ourselves to allow her time to work it. I need a plan myself. This isn’t the moment for me to act on my suspicions.”

“But what are your suspicions?” demanded Jesse. “You can’t think Mekare has the cunning to do all this.…”

“No, not Mekare. I suspect Mekare is holding the Voice back.”

“But how could she do that?” Jesse pressed. “She’s only the host of the Core.”

I didn’t answer. I marveled that she hadn’t guessed it. I wondered how many others really hadn’t guessed it. Or was everyone out there—Benji and all those calling him—afraid to say the obvious?

“I want you to come with us to New York,” said David. “I hope many others are already there.”

“What if that is exactly what the Voice wants?” I sighed. “What if it’s becoming ever more clever at controlling others like Khayman and enlisting them in its pogroms? We all gather in New York, and the Voice brings a cabal of monsters against us? Seems foolish to make it so easy for the Voice.”

But I didn’t say this with much conviction.

“Then what is your plan?” asked David.

“I told you. I need time to think on it.”

“But who is this Voice?” Jesse pleaded.

“Darling,” said David in a low and reverent voice as he embraced her. “The Voice is Amel, the spirit inside Mekare, and he can hear all that we’re saying to one another right now.”

A look of unspeakable horror swept over her face, and then a sudden collapse into deep quiet. She sat staring in front of her, eyes narrowing and then widening very slowly with her thoughts.

“But the spirit is unconscious,” she whispered, pondering it, her soft golden eyebrows knitting. “For millennia it’s been unconscious. The spirits said, ‘Amel is no more.’ ”

“And what is six thousand years to a spirit?” I asked. “It’s come to consciousness and it’s talking and it’s lonely and it’s vindictive and it’s confused and damned incapable, it seems, of really getting whatever it wants. Maybe it doesn’t even know what it wants.”

I could see David flinching, see his right hand rising just a little, and pleading with me to take the edge off, not to push it.

I stood stock-still looking out into the night, waiting, waiting for the Voice to speak, but the Voice didn’t speak.

“Go on to New York,” I said. “As long as it can rouse and control others, no place is safe. Maybe Seth and Fareed are headed there. Surely they know what’s happening. Get on the radio with Benji and call to Seth. Figure some way to disguise your meaning. You’re good at that. Call to any old ones who might help us. If there are old ones out there who can be roused to burn, there are others who can be roused to fight. And we do have some time after all.”

“Time? What makes you say that?” asked David.

“I just explained it,” I said. “It hasn’t figured out yet how to get what it wants. It may not even know yet how to articulate its own ambitions, plans, desires.”

I left them there.

It was day now on the European continent, but I didn’t want to stay in that wild, primitive, and devouring place. It made me bloody furious that I couldn’t get back home.

I went north towards Florida and made it to a fine Miami hotel before dawn. I rented a suite on a high floor with a balcony looking out over warm, sweet Biscayne Bay, and I sat out there, my foot on the ledge, loving the moist tender breeze, and looking at the huge ghostly clouds of the deep Miami sky and thinking about it.

What if I was wrong? What if it wasn’t Amel? But then I thought
back, back to those first murmurings, “beauty … love.” It had been trying to tell me something momentous about itself and I had dismissed it. I had had no patience with its ravings, its desperate efforts.
You don’t know what I suffer
.

“I was wrong,” I said now, watching these huge tumbling clouds shift and drift past me. “I should have paid more attention to what you were trying to say. I should have talked to you. I wish I had. Is it too late?”

Silence.

“You too have your story,” I said. “I was cruel not to realize it. I was cruel not to think of your capacity for suffering.”

Silence.

I got up and paced the dark thick carpet, then I went back out on the balcony and looked at the lightening sky. Sunrise coming. Relentless implacable sunrise. So comforting to the world of mortal beings and animal things, and the plants breaking through the soil everywhere, and the trees sighing through a billion leaves. And so deadly to us.

“Voice, I am sorry,” I said.

I saw Pacaya volcano again, that image that had flashed repeatedly through Maharet’s mind, that fiery image. I saw in terror her carrying her sister upwards, like an angel with a child in its arms, until she was above that horrid gaping mouth of fire.

Suddenly I felt the presence of the other.

“No,” said the Voice. “It’s not too late. We’ll talk, you and I. When the time comes.”

“Then you do have a plan?” I asked. “You aren’t just slaughtering all your own progeny.”

“Progeny?” He laughed. “Imagine your every limb hung with chains, your fingers bound with weights, your feet connected by a thousand roots to others. Progeny, be damned.”

The sun was indeed rising. It was rising for the Voice too in that jungle. If he was in that jungle.

I closed up the room, pulled the draperies shut, went into the spacious walk-in closet, and lay down to sleep, furious that I wouldn’t be able to head for home until the inevitable sunset.

Two nights later, it hit Paris.

The Voice hadn’t spoken a word to me in the interim. And then it hit Paris.

By the time I got there it was over.

The little hotel in the Rue Saint-Jacques was burnt to the ground and the firefighters were dousing the blackened ruins with water, the smoke and steam rising between the narrow intact buildings on either side of it.

There were no voices here in the heart of Paris now. Those who had escaped had fled to the countryside and they were still pleading with others to follow their example.

I passed slowly, unnoticed, through the sidewalk spectators—just a flashy young man in violet sunglasses and a worn leather coat with unruly long blond hair, secretly carrying a deadly ax with him.

But I was sure I’d heard one plea, stronger than many of the others, when the Burning had started, when those first howls had drifted over the wind, a woman pleading in Italian for me to come. I was certain I’d heard a sobbing entreaty, “I am Bianca Solderini.”

Well, if I’d heard it, it was silent now. It was gone.

I walked along, noting the stains of black grease on the pavements. In one doorway, unmarked as yet, lay a black slimy hulk of burnt bones and shapeless globs of tissue. Could there have been life in that still? How old was that? Was that the beautiful legendary Bianca Solderini?

My soul shriveled. I sauntered closer to it. No one passing me noticed. I touched this mass of steaming blood and guts with my boot. It was melting, the bones losing their shape, the whole little heap melting on the stones. There could be nothing alive there.