Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis

by Anne Rice

  "Is Amel with us?" asked Gregory looking at me.

  "No," I said. "That doesn't mean he isn't in any one of us at this table," I added. "But he's not inside me now. He left me last night before I crossed the Atlantic. I don't think he's been back since."

  "That's highly unusual, isn't it?" asked Marius.

  "I would say so," I replied. "But there's nothing to be done about it, so why bother to talk about it?"

  "Armand, explain what you mean," said Sevraine. "That this was all about Amel."

  Sevraine was certainly one of the most impressive of the ancients. She and Gregory and Seth were clearly the eldest amongst us. And her soft golden skin, though often darkened by sun, had an unmistakable gleam to it that marked her age and power. I knew very little of her really, though she'd opened her house to me and her heart.

  "The thing was looking for Amel," said Armand. "The name Amel means something to the creature. The non-human thing had been listening to Benji's broadcasts. I don't think the thing meant to harm anyone. It came to find out if we and our Amel were real."

  "And you say that the blood you took from him was completely replenished in a matter of hours?" asked Marius.

  "Absolutely," said Armand. "And when the blood was replenished the thing came back to life. He overpowered Eleni and that took some doing. Eleni was made by Everard de Landen. She has the blood of Rhoshamandes in her. I don't know how this creature managed to spellbind her or overpower her but he did. We had no real way of containing such a powerful creature at Trinity Gate."

  "Well, no one can blame you for what took place," said Gregory. "This ancient city you saw, did it have a name?"

  "I heard it but the syllables didn't make sense to me."

  "The lost city of Atlantis," said Marius. He was making notes on a pad in front of him. "Did you hear a name that sounded like Atlantis?"

  "Perhaps," said Armand. "I thought that was a legend."

  "It is a legend," said Gregory. "Nobody ever believed that legend in my time. But it was repeated now and then." Though he was the eldest at the table, born some thousand years before he'd brought Sevraine over, he never assumed an air of authority or command. He saved that for his vast enterprises in the mortal world. Here he wanted to be an equal among equals. He went on. "A great empire, thriving in the Atlantic Ocean, that perished in the space of a day and night."

  "And where is this being now," asked Pandora, "this being that can destroy vampires? Crack their skulls as if they were eggs?" Pandora was usually quiet during these council meetings, but she spoke up with obvious concern.

  "We've traced it to the West Coast of the United States," said Gregory. "It's a male human for all the world knows, with substantial private holdings, and several residences, the main one of which is in London. And it is most certainly an immortal, having arranged to inherit its own fortune at least twice. The account of how this being was discovered in Siberia in the ice by an amateur Russian anthropologist named Prince Alexi Brovotkin is all available in several obscure sites online. Brovotkin died a hundred years ago. The story goes that Brovotkin's team came upon the starved and frozen body of the individual in a cave in Siberia, and managed to resuscitate it with simple ordinary fresh water and warmth.

  "Of course nobody believed the preposterous paper Brovotkin wrote on the subject. But the 'story' was popular in Saint Petersburg at the end of the nineteenth century, and the Prince and his protege were extremely popular in society until Brovotkin died at sea and Garekyn never returned to Russia."

  It was Gremt who spoke up now.

  "So this being," said Gremt, "we are to presume, has been frozen since the fall of the legendary Atlantis, and only came to light due to the explorations of this adventuresome Russian explorer?"

  "Perhaps," said Marius. "Brovotkin never refers to the legend of Atlantis. He offers no speculation as to the origins of the creature. And the trail we've uncovered--of Garekyn, and his fictitious son Garekyn, and the next fictitious Garekyn--is a simple one of men of means traveling the world."

  "I saw a group of such creatures when I drank from him," said Armand. "I received the impression that this creature had been searching desperately to find anyone connected to the fallen city, anyone who might have also been there."

  "And how did Amel figure in the story of the city?" asked Gremt. He glanced at Marius and then back to Armand.

  Armand thought for a long moment. "Unclear. But it was the name Amel spoken so often by Benji and others on the radio broadcast that brought the creature to our door."

  With a small subtle gesture of his right hand, Teskhamen spoke up. "The Talamasca has accumulated materials on the legend of Atlantis for centuries," he said. "There are two lines of research."

  I nodded for him to go on. "There are the legends beginning really with Plato's account written in four hundred B.C. And then there are the recent speculations of modern New Age scholars that some sort of catastrophe did affect this planet around eleven to twelve thousand years ago, at which time a great civilization was destroyed, leaving underwater ruins all over the world."

  The comely ghost of Raymond Gallant was studying him, hanging on his every word. When Teskhamen didn't say anything more, Raymond spoke up. "There's a lot of evidence apparently that there was indeed an ancient civilization before this cataclysm, and possibly more than one civilization. Yet scientists are resistant. The climatologists argue constantly. The sea levels did change drastically, but why precisely we don't know. Biblical scholars claim it was Noah's flood. Others go about examining underwater ruins, attempting to relate them to the catastrophe. The British writer Graham Hancock writes elegantly and persuasively on the topic. But again, there is no consensus."

  "Fareed says it's all bunk," I volunteered. "But beautiful bunk."

  "I'm no longer inclined to agree," said Marius. "Certainly I thought so centuries ago, yes, that Plato gave birth to a splendid idea with the story of Atlantis, but he was writing a moral tale."

  "And where are Fareed and Seth?" asked my mother.

  "Off on a mission to investigate what just may be another of these creatures," I explained. "The minute word reached Fareed as to this creature, Garekyn, he went off to have a look at a mysterious female employee of Gregory's whom he'd come to suspect wasn't a human being."

  I could see that some at the table knew this and some didn't. It was always the way with the blood drinkers. Some knew all that was happening everywhere as if they received every telepathic emission generated anywhere by anyone, and others were startled, like my mother, who looked up and at me with narrow scornful gray eyes.

  My mother's hair was in her usual long solitary ashen-blond braid, but she was dressed like Sevraine for this meeting, or because it was the way she dressed now in Sevraine's underground Cappadocian compound--in a long simple gown of gray wool trimmed in thick silver embroidery obviously made by vampiric hands. She looked no softer or more feminine than usual, and in fact slightly disdainful of the entire meeting and even annoyed.

  Gregory explained about the mysterious woman, how she'd been working for him for ten years. Brilliant, imaginative, a scientist engaged in longevity and life enhancement research and possibly human cloning. It was Fareed who had insisted she wasn't a human being.

  "I suspect Fareed will come up with nothing," Gregory offered now in his usual low-key polite manner. "Except perhaps a good candidate to come over into the Blood. I could see nothing in the photographs or tapes of the woman to indicate she wasn't a simple flesh-and-blood mortal like all the rest."

  Only the scientists among us boldly brought creatures into the ranks of the Undead to do important work. Well, one couldn't discount Notker of Prum, who had brought over many a fine singer or musician during the last millennium. But in general the rest of us had not caught up with the idea of "turning" a mortal simply because we had a job for him here or there. I found myself pondering all this again. The matter had huge implications, implications we'd have to deal with at some point. Who qualif
ies for the Blood? And how do we give it? Or does it simply go unregulated and ungoverned as it has for centuries, with every vampire determining for himself when it was time to select a companion or an heir?

  "I don't know what's taking them so long," said Gregory. "They must be in Geneva by now. In fact, they should be back here."

  "Now, let's get to the matter of where other blood drinkers are just now," said Marius, "and whether or not all know about this Garekyn, and how important it is not to harm him but to bring him back here alive, to speak to us, and tell us what he is and what he wants."

  "Well, Avicus and Zenobia are in the California desert at Fareed's old compound," said Marius. "Rose and Viktor of course are in San Francisco. Rose is revisiting the places that meant so much to her when she was alive. And they did receive the general alert and called in last night."

  "I want them back here now," I said. "I told them. And I don't like that this creature Garekyn has gone to Los Angeles. That's too close to where they are."

  "I think we may be disturbing ourselves over nothing," said Gregory. And then he repeated what he had said several times earlier that evening, that in all his life in this world, he'd never seen a creature that looked human but was not human. He had seen some strange beings all right, and certainly ghosts and spirits, but never anything biologically human that wasn't human. "I think we'll find some puerile and disappointing explanation for all this," he said.

  "You didn't see it," said Armand sharply. His tone was low but hostile. "You didn't drink its blood. You didn't see that city falling into the ocean, those towers melting."

  A chill passed over me.

  "I've seen the city," I said turning to him. "I've seen it in my dreams."

  Silence all around.

  "I've seen it too," said Sevraine.

  I waited, looking from one to the other of them around the table.

  "Well, this is clearly like the old telepathic images of the red-haired twins that were fired round the world when the Queen rose," said Marius. "Some have seen this, some haven't. That's the way it was then."

  "Seems so," said Teskhamen. "But I too have seen it. I didn't think it important. I saw it perhaps twice." When no one spoke up he went on. "A great beautiful capital, replete with glassy towers sparkling in the sun; it was like a great forest of glass towers, yet they were all translucent or reflective and then quite suddenly it is night and then comes the fire; it's as if the city exploded from within."

  "I too have seen it," said Louis in a small voice. He looked at me. "But I saw it only once, the night before I met you in New Orleans. I was still in New York. I thought I picked it up from others at Trinity Gate. A dreadful horror accompanied it, the cries of countless people perishing."

  "Yes," I said. "You can hear people crying out to Heaven for help."

  "And a wailing sound," said Armand. "As if of horrific grief."

  Quite suddenly, I felt the telltale warmth at the base of my skull. I said nothing about it. I wasn't about to raise my hand and volunteer that Amel was back and breathing down my neck. It seemed too clumsy to do that, too mundane. I simply let it be known telepathically and the information was absorbed around the table within seconds.

  Teskhamen whispered to Gremt that the spirit had returned, and I looked up to see Gremt staring intently at me.

  "He doesn't know what the images of the falling city mean," I said defensively, as though I were defending Amel's honor. "I've asked him. He knows nothing of it. He sees the same images when I see them. He feels them. But he knows nothing."

  Then without moving my lips I spoke to Amel. I knew when I did this that the others could hear me, except for Louis whom I'd made.

  "You have to tell me if you understand all this," I said.

  In a strong clear masculine tone, audible telepathically to the others, Amel answered: "I do not know." Then he went on.

  "Fareed and Seth found nothing in Geneva. The woman's laboratories were empty, and her apartment vacated. The non-human female has fled."

  "He's probably lying to you," said Teskhamen in a gentle voice. "He knows what it means." Gremt nodded to this. And so did Raymond Gallant. But Marius said nothing. Gregory said nothing.

  "We can't jump to that conclusion," I replied. I tried not to become angry. "Why would Amel lie?"

  I felt a great dejected gloom in Amel, a dark oppressive feeling radiating through my limbs.

  "If only I did know," Amel whispered. "If I had a heart that wasn't your heart or some other blood drinker's heart, if I had a heart that was my very own heart, I think it would tell me never never to find out."

  9

  Derek

  DEMONS, THERE WAS no other name for them. Demons, all of them, his captors, wrapping him in suffocating wool blankets and carrying him out of that dismal horrid room in Budapest, only to take him riding into the clouds on the freezing wind and down now into this, yet another dungeon, deeper, more spacious, more remote from all the world.

  "There's no one on this island to hear you scream," said Rhoshamandes standing over him, a monk from Hell in his long gray habit. "You are in the Outer Hebrides in the North Sea, and in a castle built for me a thousand years ago so that I might be forever safe! And you are in my power." He pounded his chest as he said those words, "my power."

  How proud and haughty the being looked, striding back and forth, his leather sandals slapping the stone floor, his white face grimacing with feeling like that of a nightmare haunt one minute and curiously blank and cold the next, as if it were made of alabaster.

  Even Arion and Roland, in their pedestrian street garments, standing well behind him, gazed on Rhoshamandes with something akin to fear. And the deep-voiced female, Allesandra, in the long red gown, a figure as otherworldly as Rhoshamandes, sought again and again to quiet his fury.

  Derek sat in the farthest corner of the vast room, his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms holding tight to his legs. He struggled to keep his bitter joy locked in his heart. Garekyn lives! Garekyn has survived! Garekyn is alive and he will come for me! Garekyn will find me.

  The demons had revealed this to him as soon as they'd come to bring him to this new prison. Garekyn was alive.

  He was shivering violently, oh, so cold from the icy wind whipping through the high naked window. The fire blazing in the blackened hollow cavern of a fireplace was too far away from him to provide anything but light. Uneven light. Lurid light. Light that played on the long dark gray robes of this striding giant as he issued his threats.

  A solitary candle burned on the crude mantelshelf that was no more than a long horizontal slot in the plastered wall. Sooner or later the wet wind from the high small open window would extinguish it.

  "You can rot in this cell forever, if you refuse to talk," said Rhoshamandes. "I have no compunction about starving you till you dry up like a husk, like this being was dried up, this Garekyn Zweck Brovotkin when they found him in the Siberian ice."

  Derek shut his eyes tight. And if Garekyn had survived in the ice, then Welf and Kapetria had surely survived in the ice. But bury the thought deep inside you, in that chamber they cannot reach with their conniving, larcenous powers.

  Rhoshamandes slapped the computer-printed picture with the back of his hand and then let the paper float to the floor.

  "You know what this is, you stubborn little miscreant! You've discovered Benji Mahmoud's broadcasts! This is a printout from his website. You know what that is, too."

  Derek tried not to look at it, tried not to look at the bold and handsome face of his beloved brother Garekyn, staring out from the computer-generated portrait with the very same expression Derek had seen on his face countless times. Patience, curiosity, love. A smiling man with skin as dark as Derek's and as Rhoshamandes had thundered: "The very same black hair with the same telltale gold streak! Do you deny it? Look at it. This is another one of you! How many of you are there out there, and what are you!"

  Earlier that evening, when they had first come for him,
Roland had discovered the iPod on its charger behind the refrigerator and ground it to fragments and dust in his hand. But not before tapping its screen for all sorts of intelligence as to what Derek had been listening to, and berating the humiliated Arion as a traitor under his roof.

  "Old programs," Arion had pleaded in his defense. "Just old archived programs. I gave it to him as a diversion, that's all."

  And all had been forgiven, it seemed, before they'd spirited Derek away and to this horrid place on the edge of the European world.

  "Rhosh, please, be gentle with the boy," said the woman Allesandra. What a commanding manner she had for one so obsequious to this monster. She was as tall as Rhoshamandes was, and her face a portrait of compassion carved in stone. Her long thick hair seemed the perfect color of dust, and her skin was the color of waxen lilies. Demons, all of you.

  Garekyn, Kapetria, help me. Give me the strength to hold out for your coming. Give me the strength to betray nothing.

  "He is no boy!" roared Rhoshamandes. "And he's going to tell me what he knows, and he's going to give me something to take to them so that they will have to recognize me and what they've done to me! He's going to talk or I will chop him to pieces!"

  The creature stopped in his tracks. It was as if his own words had given him an idea. Oh, brilliant! Derek held his breath. Had the monster taken those words from Derek's own thoughts? Chop him to pieces, it had been the very thing Derek dreamed of doing to these monsters. Rhoshamandes turned and marched out of the dungeon chamber leaving the others puzzled.

  Allesandra took this moment to plead with Derek. "Derek, poor Derek, give him the intelligence he demands," she said earnestly. Her demeanor was almost regal. "Why do you hold out? To what purpose? All he asks is for your knowledge so that he might take it to the Prince, bargain with the Prince for a place at the table!" She stood over Derek reproving him as if he were a child. "This Garekyn. You know him. We all saw your reaction to this news. You know the man in the picture. Now he is loose and a threat to our kind. And you can explain to us what he is, and what you are. What do you have to gain by keeping this back?"