Inside me the Voice gave a long low agonized sigh.
“Lestat, if it’s in your mind, it’s going to go for your mind. And you must call us, all of us, to your aid if this thing begins to push you to the brink.”
“I know that, Marius,” I said. “I’ve never known myself, but I know when I’m not myself. That is certain.”
He gave a soft despairing smile and shook his head.
I went out.
I went back to the French library.
Someone had been in here, one of those quiet, strange mortal servants of Armand’s who went about the house like obedient somnambulists—and this one had dusted and polished, and laid out a soft green silk cover for me, over the back of the darker green damask couch.
The two small lamps burned on the desk.
I turned on the computer long enough to confirm at clear volume what I already knew. Benji was broadcasting vigorously. No Burnings anywhere on the planet. No word of the Voice from far and wide. No calls coming in from desperate victims.
I shut off the machine.
I knew he was with me. That subtle touch, that embrace of invisible fingers on the back of my neck.
I sat down in the largest of the leather wing chairs, the one in which Viktor and Rose had cuddled together last night, and I looked up at the great mirror over the mantel. I was pondering the hallucinations the Voice had once created for me in mirrors—those reflections of myself which he had so playfully ignited in my brain.
Those were hallucinations, surely, and I wondered just how far he might take such a power. After all, telepathy can do infinitely more than invade a mind with a logical string of words.
A quarter of an hour passed during which I considered all these things in an unguarded way. I looked dreamily at the giant mirror. Was I longing for him to show himself as my double, as he’d done before? Longing to see that clever impish face that wasn’t my face and had to be some semblance of his intellect or soul?
The mirror reflected only the shelves of books behind me, the polished wood, the many differing volumes of varying thickness and height.
I became drowsy.
Something appeared in the mirror. I blinked, thinking that perhaps I was mistaken, but I saw it more clearly. It was a tiny amorphous reddish cloud.
It was swirling, growing bigger, and then shrinking and then expanding again, indistinct in shape, swelling, fading, growing ever more red, thickening again.
It began to grow larger, giving the illusion that it was coming closer to me, traveling steadily towards me from some point very far away, deep in the world of the mirror, where its diminutive size was an illusion.
Steadily towards me, it moved, and now it appeared to be swimming, propelling itself by the writhing work of myriad red-tinted tentacles, gossamer and transparent tentacles, moving as if through water, as if it were a sea creature of innumerable translucent arms.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It seemed the mirror was just a piece of glass. It was traveling towards me from a vast dark and cloudy world in which it was purely at home.
Suddenly it resembled nothing so much as a reddish Medusa’s head but with a tiny dark visage, tiny, and with writhing red serpentine arms beyond count. They had no serpent heads, these arms. And the entire image retained its ruby-red-tinged transparency. The face—and it was a face—grew larger and larger as I stared at it amazed.
It became the size of an old silver half dollar as I watched, and the countless translucent tentacles seemed to elongate and become ever more delicate, dancing as they did so, dancing, reaching outward beyond the frame of the mirror on either side.
I stood up.
I moved towards the fireplace. I looked directly into the mirror.
The face grew larger and larger and I could now make out tiny glittering eyes in it, and what seemed a mouth, a round mouth of elastic shifting shape, a mouth seeking to be a mouth. The great mass of crimson tinted tentacles now filled the mirror to the very frame.
The face grew bigger, and it seemed the mouth which was only a dark cypher stretched into a smile. The eyes flashed black and filled with life.
Bigger and bigger grew the face as though the being were indeed still moving towards me, moving towards the barrier of this glass that divided us, and the face slowly grew to be the size perhaps of my own.
The dark eyes expanded, took on the human accoutrements of eyelashes and eyebrows; a semblance of a nose appeared, and the mouth had lips. The whole mirror now was filled with the deep pellucid red of this image, a soft elusive red, the color of blood suffusing the tubular tentacles and the face, the slowly darkening face.
“Amel!” I cried out. I gasped for breath.
The dark eyes grew pupils as they looked at me, and lips smiled as the opening had smiled before. An expression bloomed on the surface of the face, an expression of unutterable love.
Pain fused with the love, undeniable pain. The expression of pain and love so fused in the face that I could hardly bear to look at it, aware suddenly of a huge pain inside me, inside my heart, pain blooming in me as if it were unstoppable, out of all control, and would soon be more than I could bear.
“I love you!” I said. “I love you!” And then without words I reached out towards it. I reached out and I told it that I would embrace it, I would know it, I would take into myself its love, its pain. I will take into myself what you are.
I heard the sound of weeping only it had no sound. I heard it rising all around me the way the sound of falling rain can rise as it strikes more and more surfaces around one, pattering on streets and roofs and leaves and boughs.
“I know what’s driven you to these things!” I said aloud. I was crying. My eyes were filling with blood.
“I would never have hurt that boy,” whispered the Voice inside me, only it was coming from this face, this tragic face, these lips, this one looking into my eyes.
“I believe you,” I said.
“I will never hurt you.”
“I will give you all that I know,” I said, “if only you’ll do the same with me! If only we can love one another! Always, completely! I will not suffer you to go into any other but me!”
“Yes,” he said. “You have always been my beloved. Always. Dancer, singer, oracle, high priest, prince.”
I reached out for the mirror, slapping my hands on the glass. The eyes were huge, and the mouth was long and serene with curving lips, expressive lips.
“In one body,” said the Voice. “In one brain. In one soul.” A sigh came from it. A long agonizing sigh. “Don’t fear me. Don’t fear my suffering, my cries, my frantic power. Help me. Help me, I beg you. You are my redeemer. Call me forth from the tomb.”
I reached out with every fiber of my being, my hands pressing the glass, shuddering against it, my whole soul wanting to pass into the mirror, into the bloody-red image, into the face, into the Voice.
And then the image was gone.
I found myself on the carpet, sitting there, as if I’d been pushed or fallen backwards, staring up at the bright empty mirror reflecting again the contents of the room.
There was a knocking at the door.
Somewhere a clock was striking the hour. So many chimes. Was it possible?
I rose to my feet and went to the door.
It was midnight. The last chime had just echoed through the hallway.
Gregory and Seth and Sevraine were there. Fareed was with them and David and Jesse and Marius. Others were nearby.
What had drawn them here now, just now? I was dazed. What could I say to them?
“There is so much we want to talk about,” said Gregory. “We’re not hearing the Voice. None of us are. The world’s quiet, or so it tells Benji upstairs. But surely this is only an intermezzo. We must plan.”
I stood there quietly for a long moment, hands clasped just under my chin. I lifted my right hand, one finger raised.
“Am I your leader?” I asked. It was so hard for me to speak, to form the simplest words. “Will you accept my decision as to the disposition of the Voice?”
No one answered for a moment. I couldn’t shake off the languor I felt. I couldn’t rally. I wanted them all to leave me now.
Then Gregory said softly, “But what possible disposition for the Voice can there be? The Voice is in the body of Mekare. Mekare is quiet now. The Voice is quiet. But the Voice will begin to scheme again. The Voice will plot.”
“This creature, Mekare,” said Sevraine, “she is a living thing. She knows, in some brutal and simple way, she knows her tragedies. I tell you she knows.”
Seems Fareed said something about reasoning with the Voice, but I scarcely heard him.
Seth asked me if I was hearing the Voice. “You are communing with it, aren’t you? But you’ve sealed yourself off from us. You’re battling the Voice alone.”
“So this is the decision you want from me?” I asked. “That the Voice remain with Mekare?”
“What other decision can there be for now?” asked Sevraine. “And whoever else takes this Voice into himself risks being driven mad by it. And how can anyone seize Amel from Mekare without ending her life? We have no recourse but to reason with it as it lives inside of her.”
I drew myself up. I had to appear alert, even if I was not, in control of my faculties, even if I was not. I was by no means irrational. It’s simply that I had to return to a state of examining these things on my own which I could not share.
Gregory was trying to read my thoughts. They all were. But I knew too well how to lock them out. And in the dark little sanctum of my heart I saw that blood-red face, that suffering face. I beheld it in pure wonder.
“Put aside your fears,” I said. My tongue was thick, and I didn’t sound like myself to me. I looked directly at Gregory, then at Seth, then at each of the others in so far as I could see them. Even at Marius who reached out to grasp my arm.
“I want to be alone now.” I removed Marius’s hand from me. The Latin words came to me. “Nolite timere,” I said. I gestured for patience as I started to close the door.
Slowly they withdrew.
Marius bent forward to kiss me and he told me that they would all be in the house till morning. No one was leaving. Everyone was here, and that when we were ready to talk with them further, they’d come together at once.
“Tomorrow night,” said Marius, “at the hour of nine, Viktor and Rose will be brought over by Pandora and me.”
“Ah, yes,” I answered. “That’s good.” I smiled.
At last, the door was shut once again, and I moved back into the room. I sat down again, on the leather ottoman of one of the chairs, near to the fire.
Moments passed. Perhaps half an hour. Now and then I drew to myself the random sounds of the house, and the great metropolis beyond, and then banished those sounds as if I were a magnet at the center of a consciousness greater than myself.
It seemed the hallway clock struck the hour. Chimes and chimes and chimes. And then after the longest time, the clock chimed yet again. The house was quiet. Only Benji’s voice went on way up there in his studio, talking gently and patiently to the young ones, those isolated on far continents and in far cities, still desperate for the comfort of his words.
Easy to close myself off from that. And the clock chiming again as if it were an instrument being played by my hand. I did like clocks. I had to admit it.
There came that vision of sunshine and green fields. The soft musical sound of the insects humming and the soft rustle of trees. The twins sat together and Maharet said something to me in the soft ancient tongue that I thought very amusing and very comforting, but the words were gone as fast as they’d come, if there had ever been words before.
There was a slow trudging step in the hall beyond the door, a heavy step that made the old boards creak and the deep sound of a powerful beating heart.
The door opened slowly, and Mekare appeared.
She’d been lovingly restored since last night, and wore a black wool robe trimmed in silver. Her long hair was brushed and clean and lustrous. And someone had also fastened a fine collar of diamonds and silver around her neck. The sleeves of the gown were long and full, and the robe draped exquisitely on her, on the girlish body that was now a thing of stone.
Her face was fiercely white in the light of the fire.
Her pale-blue eyes were fixed on me but the flesh around them was softened as it had always been. The fire glinted on her golden eyelashes, on her golden eyebrows, and on her white hands and face.
She came towards me with those slow steps as if the effort cost her body pain, pain that she did not acknowledge, but pain which slowed her every movement. She took her place in front of me, the fire just to her right.
“You want to go to your sister, don’t you?” I asked.
Very slowly, her pink lips, so very like the pink insides of a seashell, spread into a smile. The masklike face fired with subtle perception.
I rose to my feet. My heart was pounding.
She lifted her two hands, palms turned inwards, and gradually brought her fingers to her eyes.
With her left hand poised, she reached with her right hand for her right eye.
I gasped, but it was done before I could stop her, and the blood was pouring down her cheek, the eye gone, plucked out and fallen to the floor, and only the empty bleeding socket was there and then her fingers—the first two fingers—once more jabbed, jabbed into the blood and broke the tender bones, the tender occipital bones, at the back of the eye socket. I heard the little cone of bones snap and shatter.
I understood.
She reached out to me, imploring me, and out of her there came a low desperate sigh.
I took her head in my hands and closed my lips on the bleeding eye socket. I felt her powerful hands caressing my head. I sucked with all my strength, drawing as strongly as ever I’d drawn blood in my life, and I felt the brain coming into my mouth, flowing viscous and sweet as the blood, flowing out of her and coming into me. I felt it fill my mouth, a great gusher of tissue against all the tender flesh inside my mouth, and then filling my throat as it passed down into me.
The world went dark. Black.
And then it exploded with light. All I could see was this light. Galaxies exploded in this light, whole sweeping pathways of innumerable stars pulsed and disintegrated as the light grew brighter and brighter. I heard my own distant cry.
Her body had gone limp in my arms, but I wouldn’t let it go. I held fast, drawing on the blood, drawing on the gusher of tissue, drawing and drawing and hearing the beat of her heart swell to deafening volume and then stop. I swallowed again and again until nothing but blood was in my mouth. My own heart exploded.
I felt her body fall to the floor but I saw nothing. Blackness again. Blackness. Disaster. And then the light, the blinding light.
I lay on the floor my arms and legs outstretched, and a great searing current was moving through my limbs, through my organs, through the chambers of my heart. It pervaded every cell of my skin, all over my body, my arms, my legs, my face, my head. Like electricity it burned through every circuit of my being. The light flashed and brightened. My arms and legs were flopping and I couldn’t control them but the sensations were orgasmic and they had become my body, all heavy tissue and bone suddenly gathered up into this weightless yet glorious thing that I was.
My body had become this light, this throbbing, pulsing, shivering light, this simmering light. And I felt as if it were pouring out of me through my fingers and my toes, through my cock, through my skull. I could feel it generated and regenerated inside me, inside my pounding heart and pouring out so that I seemed immense, immense beyond all imagining, expanding in a void of light, light that was blinding, light that was beautiful, light that was perfect.
I cried out again. I heard it but never meant to do it. I heard it.
Then the light flashed as if to blind me forever, and I saw the ceiling above me, and I saw the circle of the chandelier—the flashing prismatic colors of that chandelier. The room came down around me as if descending from Heaven and I was not on the floor at all. I was standing on my feet.
Never in all my existence had I felt so powerful. Not even ascending with the Cloud Gift had I ever known such fearlessness, such buoyancy, such limitless and utterly sublime strength. I was climbing to the stars yet I had not left the room.
I stared down at Mekare. She was dead. She had sunk to her knees and then fallen on her right side, her blighted eye socket hidden, her left profile perfect as she lay there staring forward with one half-lidded blue eye as if she were asleep. How beautiful she looked, how complete, how like a flower fallen there on the gravel path of a garden, how destined for this fragile moment.
The sound of wind filled my ears, wind and singing as if I’d passed into realms of angels, and then voices assailed me, voices from everywhere, rising and falling in waves, relentless voices, voices in splashes, as if someone were splashing the very walls of my entire universe with great splashes of molten gold paint.
“Are you with me?” I whispered.
“I am with you,” he said clearly, distinctly in my brain.
“Do you see what I see?”
“It’s magnificent.”
“Do you hear what I hear?”
“It’s magnificent.”
“I see as never before,” I said.
“As do I.”
We were wrapped in a cloud of sound together, immense, unending, and symphonic sound.
I looked down at my hands. They were throbbing as was all my body, as was the whole brilliant world. Never had they seemed such a miracle of texture and perfection.
“Are these your hands?” I asked.
“They are mine,” he said calmly.
I turned to the mirror.
“Are these your eyes?” I asked, staring into my own.
“They are mine.”
I gave a long low sigh.
“We are beautiful, you and I,” he said.
Behind me in the glass, behind my still awestruck face, I saw them all. They had all come into the room.
I turned to face them. Every single one of them was gathered here now from right to left. They were astonished. They looked at me, not a single one speaking, not a single one looking with surprise or horror at the body of Mekare on the floor.
They had seen it! They had seen it in their minds. They’d seen it, and they knew. I had not shed her precious blood. I had not done her violence. I had accepted her invitation. All of them knew what had happened. They’d felt it, inescapably, just as I’d felt it on that long-ago day when Mekare took the Core from Akasha.
Never had they or any gathering of persons looked so very distinct to me, each individual there radiant with a subtle power, each stamped with a signature of distinct and defining energy, each marked with a unique gift.
I couldn’t stop looking at them, marveling at the details of their faces, at their delicate flashing expressions playing over eyes and lips.
“Well, Prince Lestat,” cried Benji. “It is done.”
“You are our prince,” said Seth.
“You are anointed now,” said Sevraine.
“You were chosen,” said Gregory, “by him and by her, by him who animates all of us, and by the one who was our Queen of the Damned.”
Amel laughed softly inside me. “You are my beloved,” he whispered.
I stood silent, feeling a slow subtle movement inside of my body, as if some fine tangle of tendrils were moving purposefully out of my brain and down the length of my spine and then out again through my limbs. I could see this as I felt it, see its subtle golden electric pulse.
Out of the depths of my soul, my soul that was the sad and struggling sum of all I’d ever known, I felt my own voice yearning to say, And I will never be alone again.
“No, you will never,” said the Voice, “you will never be alone again.”
I looked at the others once more, all gathered there so expectantly and in awe. I could see the muted wonder in Marius, and the quiet sad trust in Louis, and the childlike amazement in Armand. I saw their doubts, their suspicions, their questions all so uneasily subsumed in the moment by wonder. I knew.
And how could I ever explain how I had reached this moment, I who had been Born to Darkness of rape, and sought for redemption in a borrowed mortal body, and followed spirits yet unexplained to realms of inexplicable Heaven and nightmarish Hell, only to fall back again to the brutal Earth, broken, and battered, and defeated? How to explain why this, this alone, was the bold and terrifying alliance that would give me the passion to travel the road of the centuries, of the millennia, of the aeons of uncharted and unimagined time?
“I will not be the Prince of the Damned,” I said. “I give no power to that old poetry! No. Never. We claim now the Devil’s Road as our road, and we will rename it for ourselves and our tribe and our journey. We are reborn!”
“Prince Lestat,” said Benji again, and then Sybelle echoed it, and then Antoine and Louis and Armand and Marius and Gregory, Seth, Fareed, Rhoshamandes, Everard, Benedict, Sevraine, Bianca, Notker, all of them echoed it, and on the words kept coming from those for whom as yet I had no names.
Viktor stood in the shadows with Rose, and Viktor said it and so did Rose, and Benji shouted it again, throwing up his hands and balling his fists.
“They are beautiful,” said Amel. “These children of me, these parts of me, this tribe of me.”
“Yes, beloved, they have always been that,” I answered. “That has always been true.”
“So beautiful,” he said again. “How can we not love them?”
“Oh, but we do,” I said. “We certainly do.”