12
Lestat
The Jungles of the Amazon
DAVID HAD DRAWN me out. Clever David. He’d called Benji’s line in New York, chatting away with Benji on the broadcast about the crisis. He never gave his name. Didn’t have to. Benji knew and I knew, and probably a lot of other blood drinkers knew, that cultured British voice.
On and on, David kept warning the young ones to stay out of the cities, to go into the countryside. He warned the old ones who might be hearing some anonymous command to destroy others: Don’t listen. Benji kept agreeing. Over and over again, David said, Stay out of cities like Lyon, or Berlin, or Florence, or Avignon, or Milan, or Avignon or Rome or Avignon … and so on it went as he named city after city, always throwing in Avignon, and saying that he was certain the great hero, Lestat, was not the one guilty of all this. He’d stake his eternal life on Lestat’s honor; Lestat’s loyalty to others; Lestat’s innate sense of goodness. Why, he, David, wished he had the authority of the pope, so that he could stand in the courtyard of the ruined Popes’ Palace at Avignon and declare for all the world that Lestat wasn’t guilty of these Burnings!
I burst out laughing.
I was listening in my drawing room in my father’s chateau not four hundred kilometers from the little city of Avignon. There had never been any vampires in Avignon! And no burnings either.
Every night, I’d been listening to Benji. I was sick with worry for those who were dying. It was not all fledglings and the misbegotten. Many of the three- and four-hundred-year-old Children of Darkness were being slaughtered. Perhaps some of those I had known and loved on my long journey had been slaughtered, lost to me and to everyone else forever. When Akasha had gone on her rampage, her great Burning, she’d spared those connected to me, out of favor, but this new Burning seemed infinitely more terrible, more random. And I could not guess, any more than anyone else, who or what lay behind the devastation.
Where was my beloved Gabrielle? And how long would it be before this thing attacked the house of Armand and Louis in New York? I wondered: whoever and whatever it was, did it like listening to Benji’s broadcasts, did it like hearing of all the misery it was creating?
“What do you think, Voice?” I asked.
No answer.
The Voice had long ago left me, hadn’t it? The Voice was behind this. Everyone knew that now, didn’t they? The Voice was rousing engines of murder from long slumber, urging them to use powers perhaps they’d never known they had.
“These old ones are being roused by this Voice,” David said. “There’s no doubt of this now. Witnesses have seen these old ones at the site of the massacres. So often it’s a ragged figure, sometimes a hideous wraith. Surely it is the Voice waking these people. Are not many of us hearing this Voice?”
“Who is the Voice?” Benji demanded over and over again. “Which of you out there has heard the Voice? Call us, talk to us.”
David rang off. The surviving fledglings were taking over the airwaves.
Benji had twenty phone lines now to receive those who were calling. Who staffed these lines? I didn’t know enough about radio stations, phones, monitors, etcetera to understand how it worked. But no mortal voice had ever been broadcast by Benji, not for any reason, and sometimes one mournful and miserable blood drinker calling in would take an hour to unfold a tale of desperation. Did the other calls pile up?
Whatever the case, I had to get to Avignon. David wanted me to meet him in Avignon, in the old ruined Palace of the Popes, that was plain enough.
Benji was now addressing the Voice. “Call us here, Voice,” he was saying in that chipper, confident manner of his. “Tell us what you want. Why are you trying to destroy us?”
I looked around my glorious digs here on the mountain. How I’d worked to reclaim this land of my father, how I’d worked to restore this chateau completely—and lately with my own hands, I’d dug out secret rooms beneath it. How I loved these old stone-walled chambers where I’d grown up, now transformed with every sweet amenity, and the view from these windows over the mountains and fields where I’d hunted as a boy. Why, why did I have to be drawn away from all this and into a battle I didn’t want?
Well, I wasn’t going to reveal this place to David or anybody else for that matter. If they didn’t have the sense to look for me at Chateau de Lioncourt in the Auvergne, that was their misfortune! After all, the place had been on all the maps.
I put on my favorite red velvet jacket, slipped on my black boots and my usual sunglasses, and went to Avignon immediately.
Lovely little city, Avignon, with winding cobblestone streets and countless cafés and those old broken-down ruins where once the Roman Catholic pontiffs had reigned in splendor.
And David was waiting for me, sure enough, along with Jesse, haunting the old ruin. Not a single other blood drinker in the city.
I came right down into the dark grassy high-walled courtyard. No mortal eyes to witness this. Just the dark empty broken archways in the stone cloister gazing on like so many black eyes.
“Brat Prince.” David rose from his seat on the grass and threw his arms around me. “I see you’re in fine form.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I mumbled. But it was so good to see him again, to see both of them. Jesse hovered against the old crumbling stone wall, wrapped in a heavy gray muffler.
“Do we have to stand out here in this desolate place, under the shadow of all this history?” I said testily, but I didn’t mean it. It was fine with me, this chilly September night with deep winter already in the air. I was embarrassingly glad that they’d forced me to this meeting.
“Of course not, Your Royal Highness,” said David. “There’s a fine little hotel in Lyon, the Villa Florentine, not far away at all”—he’s telling me? I was born here!—“and we have comfortable rooms there.” That sounded good enough.
Within fifteen minutes we’d made the little journey, and we entered the red-carpeted suite by the patio doors and were comfortably settled in the parlor. The hotel was above the town, on a hilltop with a pretty view, and I liked it just fine.
Jesse looked worn and miserably unhappy, dressed in a creased and cracked brown leather jacket and pants, her gray wool sweater high under her chin, muffler covering her mouth, hair the usual shimmering veil of copper waves. David was in his gray worsted wool with a nappy suede vest and flashing silk tie—all bespoke most likely. He was a good deal brighter in tone and expression than Jesse, but I knew the gravity of the situation.
“Benji doesn’t guess the half of it,” Jesse said, the words just pouring out of her. “And I don’t know what I can tell him or anyone else.” She sat on the foot of the bed, hands clasped between her knees. “Maharet’s banished me and Thorne forever. Forever.” She began to cry, but didn’t stop talking.
She explained that Thorne had been going and coming since the time Fareed had restored his eyes to him, and he, the great Viking warrior, wanted to stand with Maharet against any force that threatened her.
He’d heard the Voice. He’d heard it in Sweden and Norway, prompting him to clean out the riffraff, speaking of a great purpose. He’d found it easy to shut out.
“And you?” I asked, looking from Jesse to David. “Have either of you heard the Voice?”
Jesse shook her head no, but David nodded. “About a year ago, I started hearing it. About the most interesting words it ever uttered were in fact a question. It asked me whether or not we’d all been weakened by the proliferation of the power.”
“Remarkable,” I said under my breath. “What was your response?”
“I told it no. I said I was as powerful as I’d ever been, perhaps a little more powerful of late.”
“And did it say anything else?”
“It spoke mostly nonsense. Half the time I wasn’t even sure it was speaking to me. I mean it could have been addressing anyone. It spoke of an optimum number of blood drinkers, considering the source of the power. It spoke of the power as the Sacred Core. I could hear the capital letters. It raved that the realm of the Undead was sunk now into depravity and madness. But it would go on and on around these ideas, often making little or no logical or sequential sense at all. It would even lapse into other languages and it would, well, it would make mistakes, mistakes in meaning, syntax. It was bizarre.”
Jesse was staring at him as if all this was a surprise to her.
“To tell the truth,” David explained, “I had no idea it was the Voice as people are saying now,” said David. “I’m giving you the distilled version. It was mostly incoherent. I thought it was some old one. I mean, this happens, of course. Old ones shoot their messages to others. I found it tiresome. I tuned it out.”
“And you, Jesse?” I asked.
“I’ve never heard it,” she whispered. “I think that Thorne is the first to have spoken of it directly to me or Maharet.”
“And what did she say?”
“She banished us both. She gave us infusions of her blood. She insisted on this. And then she told us we were not to come back. She’d already banished David.” She glanced at him and then went on. “She said pretty much the same things to us she’d said to him. The time was past when she could extend hospitality any longer to others, that she and Mekare and Khayman must now be alone—.”
“Khayman wasn’t there at the time,” David interjected. “Isn’t that so?”
She nodded. “He’d been missing for a week at least.” She went on with her story. “I begged her to let me remain. Thorne went down on his knees. But she was adamant. She said to leave then, not to wait on anything as cumbersome as regular transportation, but to take to the air and put as much distance between ourselves and her as we could. I went to England immediately to see David. I think Thorne actually went to New York. I think many are going to New York. I think he went to Benji and Armand and Louis, but I’m not sure. Thorne was in a fury. He so loves Maharet. But she warned him not to try to deceive her. She said she’d know if he lingered. She was agitated. More agitated than I’d ever seen her. She pressed on me some routine information about resources, money, but I reminded her she’d seen to that. I knew how to get along out here.”
“The infusions of blood,” I said, “what did you see in those infusions?”
This was a highly sensitive question to ask a blood drinker, and especially to ask this blood drinker who was the loyal biological descendant of Maharet. But even fledglings see images when they receive the blood of their makers; even they experience a telepathic connection in those moments that is otherwise closed. I stood firm.
Her face softened. She was sad, thoughtful. “Many things,” she said, “as always. But this time, they were images of the mountain and the valley where the twins had been born. At least, I think that’s what I was seeing, seeing them in their old village and seeing them when they were alive.”
“So this is what was on her mind,” I said. “Memories of her human past.”
“I think so,” said Jesse in a small voice. “There were other images, colliding, cascading, you know how it is, but again and again, it was those long-ago times. Sunshine. Sunshine in the valley …”
David was giving me one of his subtle little gestures to be gentle, tread lightly.
But we both knew these visions or memories were like unto what mortals think about at the end of their lives, their earliest happiest memories.
“She’s in the Amazon, isn’t she?” I said. “Deep in the jungles.”
“Yes,” said Jesse. “She forbade me to tell anyone, and I’m breaking her confidence now. She’s in uncharted jungle. The only tribe in the area fled after our arrival there.”
“I’m going there,” I said. “I want to see for myself what’s happening. If we’re all to perish because of this Voice, well, I want to hear from her what’s going on.”
“Lestat, she doesn’t know what’s going on,” said Jesse. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“I know—.”
“I think all this disgusts her. She wants to be left alone. I think this Voice may be driving her to think about destroying herself and Mekare and, well, all of us.”
“I don’t think the Voice wants us destroyed,” I said.
“But she may be thinking of it,” said Jesse sharply. “I’m only speculating,” she confessed. “I know she’s confused, angry, even bitter, and this from Maharet. Maharet of all immortals. Maharet.”
“She’s human still,” David said softly. He stroked Jesse’s arm. He kissed her hair. “We’re all human no matter how long we go on.”
He spoke with the easy authority of an old Talamasca scholar, but I actually agreed with him. “If you ask me,” he said softly to Jesse, “finding her sister, being reunited with her sister, has destroyed Maharet.”
Jesse wasn’t surprised by this or jarred by it.
“She never leaves Mekare alone now,” Jesse said. “And Khayman, well, Khayman is hopeless, roaming off for weeks at a time, and stumbling back in with no memory of where he’s been.”
“Well, surely he’s not the source of the Voice,” said David.
“No, of course not,” I said. “But the Voice is controlling him. Isn’t that obvious? The Voice is manipulating him as it has been all along. I suspect the Voice began these massacres with him; and then moved to enlisting others. The Voice is working on a number of fronts, you might say. But Maharet and Khayman are too close for any telepathic bridge. She can’t know. And he obviously can’t tell her. He hasn’t the wits to tell her or anyone.”
A dark cold feeling came over me that, no matter how this came to an end, Khayman as an immortal on this Earth was finished. Khayman wouldn’t survive. And I dreaded the loss of Khayman. I dreaded the loss of all he’d experienced in his thousands of years of roaming, the loss of the tales he might have told of the early battles of the First Brood, of his later wanderings as Benjamin the Devil. I dreaded the loss of the gentle, sweet-hearted Khayman whom I’d briefly known. This was too painful. Who else wouldn’t survive?
Jesse appeared to be reading my thoughts. She nodded. “I’m afraid you’re right.”
“Well, I think I know what’s happening,” I said. “I’m going there now. After I see her I’ll meet you in Manaus. That’s far enough away from her, isn’t it?”
David nodded. He said he knew of a fashionable little jungle lodge about thirty miles out of Manaus located on the Acajatuba River. Ah, British gentlemen, they always know how to go forth into the wilderness in style. I smiled. We agreed we’d meet there.
“Are you ready for this journey tonight?” he asked.
“Absolutely. It’s westward. We’ll gain six hours of darkness. Let’s go.”
“You do realize there’s danger here, don’t you?” asked David. “You’re going against Maharet’s express wish.”
“Of course,” I said. “But why did you two come to me? Didn’t you expect me to do something? Why are you both staring at me?”
“We came to urge you to go with us to New York,” Jesse explained timidly, “to urge you to call a meeting of all the powerful ones of the tribe.”
“You don’t need me to do that,” I said. “Go yourselves. Call the meeting.”
“But everyone will come if you call the meeting,” David said.
“And who is everyone? I want to see Maharet.”
They were edgy, uncertain.
“Look, you go on ahead of me to the Amazon now, and I’ll meet you later this very night. And if I don’t—if I don’t meet you in two nights at the jungle lodge on the river, well, have a Requiem Mass said for me in Notre Dame de Paris.”
I left them then, knowing I’d be traveling much faster and higher than either of them, and also, I went back to my chateau for my ax.
It was rather silly, my wanting my little ax.
I also stripped off the fancy velvet and lace, and put on a decent heavy leather jacket for the journey. I should have cut my hair for those jungles, but I was too damned vain to do that. Samson never loved his hair as much as I love mine. And then I set out for the Amazon.
Five hours before dawn in that great southerly region, I was descending towards the endless channel of deep darkness that was the Amazon rain forest with the silver streak of river winding through it. I was scanning for pinpoints of light, infinitesimal flickers that no mortal eye could ever see.
And then taking my best shot at it, I went down, crashing through the wet humid canopy, descending through crackling and breaking branches and vines until I landed rather awkwardly in the dense darkness of a grove of ancient trees.
At once I was imprisoned by vines and clattering branches in the understory, but I stood quiet, very quiet, listening, making like a stealthy beast on the silent prowl.
The air was wet and fragrant and filled with the simmering voices of the slithering, twittering, and voracious creatures around me everywhere.
But I could hear their voices too. Maharet and Khayman quarreling in the ancient tongue.
If there was a path in the vicinity leading towards those voices, well, I never found it.
I didn’t dare try to cut my way through with the ax. That would have made too much noise and dulled the blade. I just made my way slowly, painstakingly, over bulbous roots and through stinging brush, suppressing my respiration, my pulse, as best I could along with my thoughts.
I could hear Maharet’s low sobbing voice and hear Khayman weeping.
“Did you do these things!” she was demanding. She was speaking their ancient language. I caught the images. Was he the one who’d burnt the house in Bolivia? Had he done this? What about the carnage in Peru? Was he responsible for the other burnings? Was this his work? All of it? The time had come for him to tell her. The time had come for him to be honorable with her.
I caught flashes from his mind, opened up like a ripe fruit in distress: flames, anguished faces, people screaming. He was in a paroxysm of guilt.
And there came into my mind the badly concealed image of a boiling and smoking volcano. An errant shimmering flash.
No.
He was pleading with her to understand that he didn’t know what he’d done. “I never killed Eric,” he said. “I couldn’t have been the one. I can’t remember. He was dead, finished when I found his body.”
She didn’t believe him.
“Kill me!” he wailed suddenly.
I drew closer and closer.
“You did kill Eric, didn’t you? You were the one who did it!”
Eric. Eric had been with Maharet over twenty years ago when Akasha rose. Eric had been at the council table with us when we’d confronted Akasha and opposed her. I had never known Eric, and had never heard of Eric since. Mael, I knew, had perished in New York, though precisely how I wasn’t certain. He’d gone into the sun on the steps of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, but surely that had not been enough to destroy him. But Eric? I didn’t know.
“It’s finished,” Khayman cried. “I will not continue. You do what you have to do with me. You do it!” He was wailing like one in mourning. “My journey in this world is finished.”
I saw the volcano again.
Pacaya. That was the name of the volcano. The image was coming from her, not from him. He couldn’t even know what she was thinking.
I continued moving through the jungles as slowly and silently as I could. But they were so deep into this agonizing discussion, they took no notice.
At last, I came to the black steel mesh of a great enclosure. Dimly through the dense green foliage I could see both of them now in a cavernous lighted room—Maharet with her arms around Khayman, Khayman with his face in his hands. Maharet was crying with a deep wrenching feminine sound to it, like a young girl crying.
She stood back and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand like a child might do it. Then she looked up.
She’d seen me.
“Leave here, Lestat,” she said in a clear voice that carried over the vast enclosure. “Go. It’s not safe for you here.”
“I wouldn’t harm him,” Khayman said with a groan. “I would never harm him or anyone of my own will.” He was peering through the foliage trying to make me out. I think he was actually addressing me.
“Maharet, I must speak to you,” I said. “I don’t want to leave here without talking to you.”
Silence.
“You know how things are, Maharet. I have to speak to you for myself and for others. Please, let me in.”
“I don’t want any of you here!” she cried out. “Do you understand? Why do you challenge me?”
Suddenly an invisible forced ripped through the enclosure, uprooting palms, shearing off leaves, and then buckling the steel mesh before it, it drove me backwards, bits and pieces of the mesh flying everywhere in silver needles.
It was the Mind Gift.
I fought it with all my strength but was powerless against it. It hurled me hundreds of yards, slamming me into one crackling tangle of foliage after another until finally I fell against the broad red trunk of an immense tree. I was sprawled on its monstrous roots.
I must have been a mile from where I’d been standing. I couldn’t even see the light of the enclosure from here. I could hear nothing.
I tried to stand up but the understory here was too thick for anything but crawling or climbing towards a break in the jungle that surrounded a dim winding pond. A great scummy growth covered much of the surface, but here and there the water reflected the light of the sky like brilliant silvery glass.
It seemed to me that human hands or immortal hands had been at work here, arranging a rim of damp and pitted stones along the banks.
The insects were twittering and whistling in my ears yet staying clear of me. I had a gash in my face but it was of course already healing. They were dive-bombing at the blood and then veering off in natural revulsion.
I sat down on the largest boulder and tried to think what to do. She wasn’t going to permit me to come in, no doubt of that. But what had I just seen? What did it mean?
I closed my eyes and listened, but all I heard were the voices of this rapacious and devouring jungle.
There came a soft living pressure on my back. I went alert instantly. There was a hand on my shoulder. A cloud of the sweetest perfume enveloped me, something of green herbs, flowers, and citrus, very strong. A vague sense of happiness came over me, but this was not originating with me. I knew it was absolutely pointless to struggle against this hand.
Slowly I turned and looked down at the long white fingers, and then up into Mekare’s face.
The pale-blue eyes were innocent and wondering, the flesh like alabaster all but glowing in the dark. No expression actually, but a suggestion of drowsiness, of languor and of sweetness. No harm.
Just the faintest telepathic shimmer: my image, my image in one of those rock videos I’d made years ago—dancing and singing, and singing about us. Gone.
I searched for a spark of intellect, but this was like the agreeable face of some poor mad mortal in whom most of the brain had long ago been destroyed. It seemed the innocence and curiosity were artifacts of flesh and reflex more than anything else. Her mouth was the perfect pink of a seashell. She wore a long pink gown trimmed in gold. Here and there twinkled diamonds and amethysts sewn exquisitely into the border.
“Beautiful,” I whispered. “Such loving work.”
I was as near to panic as I’d been in a long time, but then as always happens, always when I’m afraid, when anything is making me afraid, I got angry. I remained very still. She appeared to be studying me in an almost dreamy way, but she wasn’t. She might have been blind for all I could tell.
“It is you?” I said. I struggled to say it in the ancient tongue, searching in memory for the smattering of it I knew. “Mekare, is it you?”
There must have been a swelling of great pride in me, ridiculous arrogance to think suddenly with fierce elation that I could reach this creature when all others had failed, that I could touch the surface of her mind and quicken it.
Desperately, I wanted to see that image of me again, from the rock videos. That image or any image, but there was nothing. I sent forth the image. I remembered those songs and canticles of our origins, hoping against hope that this had some meaning for her.
But one wrong word, and think what she might do. She could crush my skull with both hands. She could blast me with obliterating fire. But I couldn’t think of this, or imagine it.
“Beautiful,” I said again.
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.”