Queen of the Damned

by Anne Rice

  His knees were weak. Imagine! He had not felt such mortal debilities in so long that he had utterly forgotten them. Slowly he removed a linen handkerchief from his pocket. He wiped at the thin layer of blood sweat that covered his forehead. Then he moved towards the throne, and went round it, until he stood staring directly at the figure of the King.

  Enkil as he had been for two thousand years, the black hair in long tiny plaits, hanging to his shoulders. The broad gold collar lying against his smooth, hairless chest, the linen of his kilt immaculate with its pressed pleats, the rings still on his motionless fingers.

  But the body itself was glass! And it was utterly hollow! Even the huge shining orbs of the eyes were transparent, only shadowy circles defining the irises. No, wait. Observe everything. And there, you can see the bones, turned to the very same substance as the flesh, they are there, and also the fine crazing of veins and arteries, and something like lungs inside, but it is all transparent now, it is all of the same texture. But what had been done to him!

  And the thing was changing still. Before his very eyes, it was losing its milky cast. It was drying up, becoming ever more transparent.

  Tentatively, he touched it. Not glass at all. A husk.

  But his careless gesture had upset the thing. The body teetered, then fell over onto the marble tile, its eyes locked open, its limbs rigid in their former position. It made a sound like the scraping of an insect as it settled.

  Only the hair moved. The soft black hair. But it too was changed. It was breaking into fragments. It was breaking into tiny shimmering splinters. A cool ventilating current was scattering it like straw. And as the hair fell away from the throat, he saw two dark puncture wounds in it. Wounds that had not healed as they might have done because all the healing blood had been drawn out of the thing.

  “Who has done this?” He whispered aloud, tightening the fingers of his right fist as if this would keep him from crying out. Who could have taken every last drop of life from him?

  And the thing was dead. There wasn’t the slightest doubt of it. And what was revealed by this awful spectacle?

  Our King is destroyed, our Father. And I still live; I breathe. And this can only mean that she contains the primal power. She was the first, and it has always resided in her. And someone has taken her!

  Search the cellar. Search the house. But these were frantic, foolish thoughts. No one had entered here, and he knew it. Only one creature could have done this deed! Only one creature would have known that such a thing was finally possible.

  He didn’t move. He stared at the figure lying on the floor, watching it lose the very last trace of opacity. And would that he could weep for the thing, for surely someone should. Gone now with all that it had ever known, all that it had ever witnessed. This too coming to an end. It seemed beyond his ability to accept it.

  But he wasn’t alone. Someone or something had just come out of the alcove, and he could feel it watching him.

  For one moment—one clearly irrational moment—he kept his eyes on the fallen King. He tried to comprehend as calmly as he could everything that was occurring around him. The thing was moving towards him now, without a sound; it was becoming a graceful shadow in the corner of his eye, as it came around the throne and stood beside him.

  He knew who it was, who it had to be, and that it had approached with the natural poise of a living being. Yet, as he looked up, nothing could prepare him for the moment.

  Akasha, standing only three inches away from him. Her skin was white and hard and opaque as it had always been. Her cheek shone like pearl as she smiled, her dark eyes moist and enlivened as the flesh puckered ever so slightly around them. They positively glistered with vitality.

  Speechless, he stared. He watched as she lifted her jeweled fingers to touch his shoulder. He closed his eyes, then opened them. Over thousands of years he had spoken to her in so many tongues—prayers, pleas, complaints, confessions—and now he said not a word. He merely looked at her mobile lips, at the flash of white fang teeth, and the cold glint of recognition in her eyes, and the soft yielding cleft of the bosom moving beneath the gold necklace.

  “You’ve served me well,” she said. “I thank you.” Her voice was low, husky, beautiful. But the intonation, the words; it was what he’d said hours ago to the girl in the darkened store in the city!

  The fingers tightened on his shoulder.

  “Ah, Marius,” she said, imitating his tone perfectly again, “you never despair, do you? You are no better than Lestat, with your foolish dreams.”

  His own words again, spoken to himself on a San Francisco street. She mocked him!

  Was this terror? Or was it hatred that he felt—hatred that had lain waiting in him for centuries, mixed with resentment and weariness, and grief for his human heart, hatred that now boiled to a heat he could never have imagined. He didn’t dare move, dare speak. The hate was fresh and astonishing and it had taken full possession of him and he could do nothing to control it or understand it. All judgment had left him.

  But she knew. Of course. She knew everything, every thought, word, deed, that’s what she was telling him. She had always known, everything and anything that she chose to know! And she’d known that the mindless thing beside her was past defending itself. And this, which should have been a triumphant moment, was somehow a moment of horror!

  She laughed softly as she looked at him. He could not bear the sound of it. He wanted to hurt her. He wanted to destroy her, all her monstrous children be damned! Let us all perish with her! If he could have done it, he would have destroyed her!

  It seemed she nodded, that she was telling him she understood. The monstrous insult of it. Well, he did not understand. And in another moment, he would be weeping like a child. Some ghastly error had been made, some terrible miscarriage of purpose.

  “My dear servant,” she said, her lips lengthening in a faint bitter smile. “You have never had the power to stop me.”

  “What do you want! What do you mean to do!”

  “You must forgive me,” she said, oh, so politely, just as he had said the very words to the young one in the back room of the bar. “I’m going now.”

  He heard the sound before the floor moved, the shriek of tearing metal. He was falling, and the television screen had blown apart, the glass piercing his flesh like so many tiny daggers. He cried out, like a mortal man, and this time it was fear. The ice was cracking, roaring, as it came down upon him.

  “Akasha!”

  He was dropping into a giant crevasse, he was plunging into scalding coldness.

  “Akasha!” he cried again.

  But she was gone, and he was still falling. Then the broken tumbling ice caught him, surrounded him, and buried him, as it crushed the bones of his arms, his legs, his face. He felt his blood pouring out against the searing surface, then freezing. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. And the pain was so intense that he couldn’t bear it. He saw the jungle again, inexplicably for an instant, as he had seen it earlier. The hot fetid jungle, and something moving through it. Then it was gone. And when he cried out this time, it was to Lestat: Danger. Lestat, beware. We are all in danger.

  Then there was only the cold and the pain, and he was losing consciousness. A dream coming, a lovely dream of warm sun shining on a grassy clearing. Yes, the blessed sun. The dream had him now. And the women, how lovely their red hair. But what was it, the thing that was lying there, beneath the wilted leaves, on the altar?

  PART I

  THE ROAD TO THE VAMPIRE LESTAT

  Tempting to place in coherent collage

  the bee, the mountain range, the shadow

  of my hoof—

  tempting to join them, enlaced by logical

  vast & shining molecular thought-thread

  thru all Substance—

   . . . .

  Tempting

  to say I see in all I see

  the place where the needle

  began in the tapestry—but ah, />
  it all looks whole and part—

  long live the eyeball and the lucid heart.

  STAN RICE

  from “Four Days in Another City”

  Some Lamb (1975)

  1

  THE LEGEND OF THE TWINS

  Tell it

  in rhythmic

  continuity.

  Detail by detail

  the living creatures.

  Tell it

  as must, the rhythm

  solid in the shape.

  Woman. Arms lifted. Shadow eater.

  STAN RICE

  from “Elegy”

  Whiteboy (1976)

  CALL her for me,” he said. “Tell her I have had the strangest dreams, that they were about the twins. You must call her!”

  His daughter didn’t want to do it. She watched him fumble with the book. His hands were his enemies now, he often said. At ninety-one, he could scarcely hold a pencil or turn a page.

  “Daddy,” she said, “that woman’s probably dead.”

  Everybody he had known was dead. He’d outlived his colleagues; he’d outlived his brothers and sisters, and even two of his children. In a tragic way, he had outlived the twins, because no one read his book now. No one cared about “the legend of the twins.”

  “No, you call her,” he said. “You must call her. You tell her that I dreamed of the twins. I saw them in the dream.”

  “Why would she want to know that, Daddy?”

  His daughter took the little address book and paged through it slowly. Dead all these people, long dead. The men who had worked with her father on so many expeditions, the editors and photographers who had worked with him on his book. Even his enemies who had said his life was wasted, that his research had come to nothing; even the most scurrilous, who had accused him of doctoring pictures and lying about the caves, which her father had never done.

  Why should she be still alive, the woman who had financed his long-ago expeditions, the rich woman who had sent so much money for so many years?

  “You must ask her to come! Tell her it’s very important. I must describe to her what I’ve seen.”

  To come? All the way to Rio de Janeiro because an old man had had strange dreams? His daughter found the page, and yes, there was the name and the number. And the date beside it, only two years old.

  “She lives in Bangkok, Daddy.” What time was it in Bangkok? She had no idea.

  “She’ll come to me. I know she will.”

  He closed his eyes and settled back onto the pillow. He was small now, shrunken. But when he opened his eyes, there was her father looking at her, in spite of the shriveling yellowed skin, the dark spots on the backs of his wrinkled hands, the bald head.

  He appeared to be listening to the music now, the soft singing of the Vampire Lestat, coming from her room. She would turn it down if it kept him awake. She wasn’t much for American rock singers, but this one she’d rather liked.

  “Tell her I must speak to her!” he said suddenly, as though coming back to himself.

  “All right, Daddy, if you want me to.” She turned off the lamp by the bed. “You go back to sleep.”

  “Don’t give up till you find her. Tell her . . . the twins! I’ve seen the twins.”

  But as she was leaving, he called her back again with one of those sudden moans that always frightened her. In the light from the hall, she could see he was pointing to the books on the far wall.

  “Get it for me,” he said. He was struggling to sit up again.

  “The book, Daddy?”

  “The twins, the pictures . . . ”

  She took down the old volume and brought it to him and put it in his lap. She propped the pillows up higher for him and turned on the lamp again.

  It hurt her to feel how light he was as she lifted him; it hurt her to see him struggle to put on his silver-rimmed glasses. He took the pencil in hand, to read with it, ready to write, as he had always done, but then he let it fall and she caught it and put it back on the table.

  “You go call her!” he said.

  She nodded. But she stayed there, just in case he needed her. The music from her study was louder now, one of the more metallic and raucous songs. But he didn’t seem to notice. Very gently she opened the book for him, and turned to the first pair of color pictures, one filling the left page, the other the right.

  How well she knew these pictures, how well she remembered as a little girl making the long climb with him to the cave on Mount Carmel, where he had led her into the dry dusty darkness, his flashlight lifted to reveal the painted carvings on the wall.

  “There, the two figures, you see them, the red-haired women?”

  It had been difficult at first to make out the crude stick figures in the dim beam of the flashlight. So much easier later to study what the close-up camera so beautifully revealed.

  But she would never forget that first day, when he had shown her each small drawing in sequence: the twins dancing in rain that fell in tiny dashes from a scribble of cloud; the twins kneeling on either side of the altar upon which a body lay as if in sleep or death; the twins taken prisoner and standing before a tribunal of scowling figures; the twins running away. And then the damaged pictures of which nothing could be recovered; and finally the one twin alone weeping, her tears falling in tiny dashes, like the rain, from eyes that were tiny black dashes too.

  They’d been carved in the rock, with pigments added—orange for the hair, white chalk for the garments, green for the plants that grew around them, and even blue for the sky over their heads. Six thousand years had passed since they had been created in the deep darkness of the cave.

  And no less old were the near identical carvings, in a shallow rock chamber high on the slope of Huayna Picchu, on the other side of the world.

  She had made that journey also with her father, a year later, across the Urubamba River and up through the jungles of Peru. She’d seen for herself the same two women in a style remarkably similar though not the same.

  There again on the smooth wall were the same scenes of the rain falling, of the red-haired twins in their joyful dance. And then the somber altar scene in loving detail. It was the body of a woman lying on the altar, and in their hands the twins held two tiny, carefully drawn plates. Soldiers bore down upon the ceremony with swords uplifted. The twins were taken into bondage, weeping. And then came the hostile tribunal and the familiar escape. In another picture, faint but still discernible, the twins held an infant between them, a small bundle with dots for eyes and the barest bit of red hair; then to others they entrusted their treasure as once more the menacing soldiers appeared.

  And lastly, the one twin, amid the full leafy trees of the jungle, her arms out as if reaching for her sister, the red pigment of her hair stuck to the stone wall with dried blood.

  How well she could recall her excitement. She had shared her father’s ecstasy, that he had found the twins a world apart from each other, in these ancient pictures, buried in the mountain caves of Palestine and Peru.

  It seemed the greatest event in history; nothing could have been so important. Then a year later a vase had been discovered in a Berlin museum that bore the very same figures, kneeling, plates in hand before the stone bier. A crude thing it was, without documentation. But what did that matter? It had been dated 4000 B.C. by the most reliable methods, and there unmistakably, in the newly translated language of ancient Sumer, were the words that meant so much to all of them:

  “The Legend of the Twins”

  Yes, so terribly significant, it had all seemed. The foundation of a life’s work, until he presented his research.

  They’d laughed at him. Or ignored him. Not believable, such a link between the Old World and the New. Six thousand years old, indeed! They’d relegated him to the “crazy camp” along with those who talked of ancient astronauts, Atlantis, and the lost kingdom of Mu.

  How he’d argued, lectured, begged them to believe, to journey with him to the caves, to see f
or themselves! How he’d laid out the specimens of pigment, the lab reports, the detailed studies of the plants in the carvings and even the white robes of the twins.

  Another man might have given it up. Every university and foundation had turned him away. He had no money even to care for his children. He took a teaching position for bread and butter, and, in the evenings, wrote letters to museums all over the world. And a clay tablet, covered with drawings, was found in Manchester, and another in London, both clearly depicting the twins! On borrowed money he journeyed to photograph these artifacts. He wrote papers on them for obscure publications. He continued his search.

  Then she had come, the quiet-spoken and eccentric woman who had listened to him, looked at his materials, and then given him an ancient papyrus, found early in this century in a cave in Upper Egypt, which contained some of the very same pictures, and the words “The Legend of the Twins.”

  “A gift for you,” she’d said. And then she’d bought the vase for him from the museum in Berlin. She obtained the tablets from England as well.

  But it was the Peruvian discovery that fascinated her most of all. She gave him unlimited sums of money to go back to South America and continue his work.

  For years he’d searched cave after cave for more evidence, spoken to villagers about their oldest myths and stories, examined ruined cities, temples, even old Christian churches for stones taken from pagan shrines.

  But decades passed and he found nothing.

  It had been the ruin of him finally. Even she, his patron, had told him to give it up. She did not want to see his life spent on this. He should leave it now to younger men. But he would not listen. This was his discovery! The Legend of the Twins! And so she wrote the checks for him, and he went on until he was too old to climb the mountains and hack his way through the jungle anymore.

  In the last years, he lectured only now and then. He could not interest the new students in this mystery, even when he showed the papyrus, the vase, the tablets. After all, these items did not fit anywhere really, they were of no definable period. And the caves, could anyone have found them now?