by Anne Rice
“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 château 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.
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 i
nto 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.”
