Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis Page 18

  Perhaps they'd taken to the air again, spread their invisible wings and flown high towards the stars. If only the hand of God would pluck them out of the sky and rub them to powder between its thumb and forefinger.

  A scratching noise distracted him. A low scratching sound. Something alive and moving in this cell. No, not a rat, that he couldn't bear, not a rat come to gloat and mock him and somehow escape beneath a door that rendered his own escape absolutely impossible, a rat that might seek to bite him as they'd done in the past.

  But if a rat had come, he would chase it from this place, that much he would do for himself.

  He opened his eyes, praying for the strength to do it, and gazed forward.

  In the light of the fire he saw a long black shape hunching and moving on the stone floor, propelled, it seemed, by a collection of curling legs at one end, hunching and lurching and coming right towards him!

  His mind was wiped clean of words. What he was seeing could not be. Yet he knew what he was seeing.

  The arm, his own severed left arm, was crawling away from the fire and straight towards him, by means of the fingers of the left hand, which reached out to gain an inch and pull the arm behind them over and over again. This was impossible. He was hallucinating. Mortals hallucinate. Why couldn't he?

  He'd had little food for days and nights. Unspeakable things had been done to him.

  He rolled over on his back and stared at the ceiling. How the shadows danced from the licking flames of the fire. And the scratching noise continued.

  Sharply, defiantly, he turned his head. The advancing hand was now only a yard from him. The fingers reached out, curled, lifting the hand, the thumb tucked underneath, and dragged the arm forward. Then once more the fingers reached, then curled and lifted, and the arm dropped down again on the stones, and again they reached.

  Losing my mind, losing my soul, mad. Mad before they ever find me or free me. He couldn't take his eyes off it. He couldn't not look at it making its way towards him. Is it going to connect again? It is going to attach to my shoulder!

  His horror slowly turned to hope. But as it drew closer, he caught sight of something on the palm of the hand, something glittering, indeed a pair of small glittering particles and something that resembled a mouth.

  He gasped. He couldn't move. It was a face that had formed on the palm of the hand, and the small gleaming eyes were fixed on him, and the small mouth was making soft sucking noises, gaping, smacking its lips, its tiny thin lips, and the eyes met his eyes.

  His mind sank beneath all that he knew. Yet some prayer was voicing itself, some prayer to the Parents to help and to guide, the Parents who had given him not the slightest word of what such a horror could mean as it came closer and closer.

  The hand was almost touching him. The arm lay on the stones full length behind it and the fingers were raised and spread apart and waving in the air, and then with a lurch the fingers grasped Derek's shirt, grasped it and ripped it, tearing the buttons loose from the long placket.

  Derek struggled to reason, struggled to think, I must help it, if it means to reconnect, I must help it, but he could not bring himself to move.

  The heat had never left his wounded shoulder, and now it spread through all of his left side, even to his pounding heart. It was as if his heart were beating all through the left side of his body.

  The arm was against him. He could feel its weight, its living weight, and with his head lifted, he stared at it, stared as the fingers touched his naked flesh, the flesh of his chest, and slowly moved upwards. It wanted to be on his naked flesh.

  His eyes rolled back into his head once more. He expected to go under. He reached for the blackness, the emptiness.

  He felt the fingers touching the left nipple of his chest, felt them pulling on the nipple, pulling and pulling, and the warmth collected into heat beneath his nipple.

  A soft wet mouth, a tiny mouth, closed over the nipple.

  And then the blackness came. And he was sliding into oblivion.

  It was a dream of Atalantaya, but he was not walking her polished streets or feeling her soft warm breezes. No, he was far away from her and Atalantaya was on fire and all her people cried out to the Heavens. Smoke billowed from the melting dome, and the sea rose up to drown Derek. Kapetria and Welf were locked in each other's arms, crying for Derek as the waves carried him away, Kapetria screaming for Derek, and Garekyn was gone into the deep.

  He opened his eyes.

  He rubbed his face with his hands. Oh, this, the dungeon of Rhoshamandes. And the fire still burned, but it was now little more than tiny flames on one thick black log and piles of glimmering embers. The night had paled behind the high window. And no sound came to him from the castle around him of monsters plotting to torture him.

  He rubbed his eyes hard with both hands again. His face was sticky from his tears.

  His hands!

  He had both his hands. He sat up in one swift motion staring at his hands, and down at his left arm fully restored! It had been true, the arm and the hand, but how he couldn't divine. And what would that monster Rhoshamandes do when he saw him restored? Would this be his warrant to torture Derek with the ax forever? But oh, it was glorious to have his arm restored! He flexed his fingers, opening and closing his fist, scarce believing it, that he was whole once more.

  He sat there still and quiet, so relieved at the restoration of his arm that he could think of nothing else for the moment, and even the terror of Rhoshamandes was nothing to him. This was his arm, all right, strong and normal to him as it had ever been since the Parents had made him, and his left hand carried no tiny face in it.

  "Father."

  He looked up. What he saw so shocked him he let out a loud hoarse cry.

  But the naked dark-skinned figure standing against the wall put out its hands.

  "Father, be quiet!" said the figure.

  It approached on bare feet and stood looking down at him. The very duplicate of Derek himself, to his dark skin and his own hair except that the long black waves that hung down around his shoulders were shot through and through with the golden-blond streaks, so that the massive head of hair was more blond than black. Otherwise it was Derek. And it was Derek's voice that had spoken.

  Slowly the truth dawned on him! He knew it complete and entire without words. This being, this duplicate of himself, had formed from the severed arm, and he was staring at his own offspring! He looked down at his restored left arm and up again at the creature that was his son.

  The son dropped on his knees in front of Derek. He was indeed naked, and perfect all over, dark skin without blemish, sharp eyes fixed on Derek.

  "Father," he said as if he were the parent addressing the child. "You have to lift me up to that window now so that I can climb down and then when the monsters have gone to their rest, I will find my way back into the castle, to this room, and get you out of here."

  Derek reached out and clasped his son's face with both hands. He sat up and kissed his son on the lips and then broke down again as he always did, always, into tears.

  And the new one, the new Derek, Derek's son, cried with him.

  10

  Lestat

  I CLIMBED SWIFTLY UP the mountain until I was in the thick of the old forest that extended to the very end of my ancestral land, moving effortlessly through the snow that had so exhausted me when I was a boy and a young man. Many of the old trees I recalled were gone, and I was in a dense thicket of spruce and other fir trees when I came to the cement bench I had hauled to this high and deserted place when I'd first returned in the twentieth century.

  It was a common kind of garden bench, curved about the bark of an immense tree, and deep enough for me to sit comfortably with my back against the tree to look down on the distant Chateau with her glorious lighted windows.

  Oh, the cold winters I had spent under that roof, I thought, but only in passing. I was almost used to it now, the splendid palace that the old castle had become, and this sense of
ownership, of being the lord of this land, the lord who could walk out to the very boundaries, and gaze on all that he ruled. I shut out the sound of distant music, voices, laughter.

  "We are alone now, you and I," I said, speaking aloud to Amel. "At least it seems so."

  "We are," he said. His usual tone, distinct and clear.

  "You have to tell me all you know of this now."

  "That's just it, I have so little to tell you," he responded. "I know that this Garekyn knows me and speaks to me as if he knows me and spoke to me through Eleni when I was in her, and I saw him up close, and I tell you, he is the positive replica of a human male."

  "And in the blood, what did you see?"

  "I wasn't there when Armand drained him. I was there when he fought with Eleni. I gave her every assistance I could, but it came to nothing. I can't move limbs or stop them from moving. I can't increase or decrease the power of a blood drinker. I gave her courage, but it wasn't enough."

  "That doesn't stop you from trying to move my limbs," I said.

  "I admit that. Wouldn't you want to move limbs if you were me? Wouldn't you want to pilot the ship? Look, I don't know what the city is or what it means. But I do know this. I did once know all about it."

  "How do you mean?"

  "It has to do with me. I knew that the first night we dreamed of it. I thought the dream was coming from someone in the Blood, of course. But now I'm not so sure. I think the images came from deep inside me, and the images are from my past, and the images want me to remember that past."

  "Then what Gremt said was true. You have lived before. You weren't always a spirit."

  "I know that I lived before. I've always known! I told all those addlebrained spirits that I'd lived before, on Earth. Oh, you can't know how stupid and bumbling and hopeless spirits are! They are made of nothing and they are nothing!"

  "That isn't entirely true," I said, "but you have a way of immediately revising your past to support whatever you've come to know in the present. Try to think when you first dreamed of the city."

  "It was when you dreamed of it. What? A month ago? I think maybe I do know why I started to dream of it."

  "Well, then?"

  "It was when Fareed first happened on the face of that doctor in Gregory's company, the black woman who has vanished."

  And indeed, Dr. Karen Rhinehart had vanished.

  Gregory and Fareed had returned from Geneva to report that she'd hastily taken her exit not only from the company laboratories, but from her apartment on Lake Geneva as well--at about 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon, or scarcely an hour after a crack-of-dawn radio alert had gone out from New York as to the escaped Garekyn. Indeed, Benji had been frantically broadcasting in his low secret voice until sunup that the creature was escaping, issuing pictures of the creature to the website along with all the details he knew of the creature, including his London address.

  Rental records and surveillance tape from Geneva had revealed Dr. Karen Rhinehart had been with a companion, another of the mysterious dark-skinned black-haired tribe with the telltale golden streak in his thick curly or wavy black hair.

  Felix Welf was the official name of the male. Six feet or slightly less in height, strong heavy build, decidedly square face, and full beautifully shaped African mouth, a small somewhat delicate nose, and large dark curious eyes with prominent supraorbital ridges and thick well-defined eyebrows.

  "That's the only moment I can pinpoint," said Amel. "I pass in and out of Fareed when I choose, of course. I've never trusted him, any more than I trust any of the others. You're the only one I love and trust. And at one point he was looking at pictures of that woman. He was trying to make up his mind to tell Seth and Gregory about her, or whether he was just being foolish. And perhaps something in that woman's face triggered for me the dream of the city falling into the sea, and I felt it the way you might feel a kick to your gut, and I hated it."

  This was an amazingly coherent and straightforward confession for Amel, and I knew that he was leveling with me. I held back, hoping he would go on, which he did.

  "I dreamed about it more. I homed to Fareed and did my best to get him to focus on that woman again, but Fareed is good at ignoring me, or turning on me, seizing on my presence and demanding to know all manner of things so that I leave because his questions are deafening. That's when I think it started. I saw her, and I remembered something. I think I remembered her voice--the actual sound of her voice. And yes, I know damned good and well that I was once living, walking around this earth just like you, and those spirit friends of yours don't know anything. Anyone who believes a spirit is an idiot."

  "And that goes for a ghost too?" I asked.

  My right hand jerked suddenly and then fell back down on my thigh.

  "You didn't like that, did you?" he asked.

  "Try to do it again," I said. But in truth it alarmed me. It had been no more than a spasm, but I didn't like it. He who can cause a spasm can cause a fall, or perhaps...Didn't want to be thinking about it.

  "Why don't you trust me!" he demanded. "I love you!"

  "I know," I said. "I love you too. And I want to trust you."

  "You're all so emotional!" he said.

  "And you're not? Okay. So that might be the reason you saw the city--that he had stumbled on that woman, and was considering bringing her over."

  "He thinks he can make other blood drinkers without asking anyone. He is a god unto himself, that doctor. He thinks his maker, Seth, protects him against your authority."

  "Likely that's true," I said. "Who is he supposed to ask for permission to make others anyway? Me? Or the Council?"

  "Well, whom do you think, genius!" he replied. "Who is it that animates the entire Corpus Amel, may I ask? Your Frankensteinian friend would have put me in a jar if he could have done it."

  "I'll never let him do anything like that to you ever," I said.

  "And I'll never let anyone hurt you. Remember that!"

  "Is somebody trying?"

  Silence.

  "These creatures, these non-humans. They would hurt you, wouldn't they? This Garekyn thing ate the brain of Killer and ruptured the skull of Eleni."

  "Blunders," I said. "Why are they looking for you?"

  "I don't know!" he said.

  "So why did you feel a blow to the gut when you saw the vision of that city?"

  "Because I loved it and all those people perished and they were crying. It was a horrible thing what happened to them. Aren't you cold out here? The snow is getting thicker. We are covered in snow."

  "I'm not cold," I said. "Are you cold?"

  "Of course not, I don't feel hot and cold," he said.

  "Yes, you do," I said.

  "No, I don't!"

  "Yes, you do. You feel cold when I feel cold and it takes more than this."

  "You just don't understand how or what I feel," he said dejectedly. "You don't understand how the world looks to me through your eyes, or feels to me through your hands. Or why I want innocent blood."

  "So you're the one who wants innocent blood," I replied. "And that's why I'm thinking of it all the time, night and day, the boss man who's telling the Children of the Night all over the world that they can't drink innocent blood."

  "I loathe and detest you."

  "How big was the city?"

  "How should I know? You saw it. It was big like the city of Manhattan and packed with towers, overgrown with towers, towers of pale azure and pink and gold, the most intricate and delicate of towers. You couldn't see all of it in those flashes. You couldn't see the flowers and the trees that lined the streets--."

  Silence.

  I didn't dare to say a word. But he was not continuing....

  "Yes?" I asked. "What kinds of flowers?"

  I felt a small convulsion in my neck.

  Did that mean he was feeling pain?

  "Yes, that's what it means, you imbecile," he said.

  I remained quiet, waiting. Far down the hill, more and more of the tribe
were arriving. I would not rest until Viktor and Rose had returned. And they could not possibly reach the Chateau before sunrise. It was night in San Francisco, but five in the morning here. I prayed they had gone to New York as they'd promised. I couldn't bear to think of Rose and Viktor most of the time, out there, newly Born to Darkness, determined to roam the planet free of all guardians, Rose gone back to explore her old home and her school and find that devoted mortal bodyguard who'd once saved her life, and bring him over into the Blood if she and Viktor could manage it.

  That had been Rose's only request: to offer the Dark Gift to her beloved Murray. And I had acquiesced though I gave all the predictable stodgy warnings of my generation in the Blood that it could spell disaster. Rose had vanished into our world leaving the mortal Murray bewildered and hurt that his precious charge, the college girl he'd guarded with such love, had simply abandoned him.

  Of course I'd investigated Murray. He was a complex man, of deep feeling, a lover of things of the mind to which he'd made his way only through comic books, fantasy novels, and television, but a lover of the spiritual, and moral to the core of his being. He had been in awe of Rose's education and refinement; in awe of her ambition. Maybe it would work, this invitation to Murray.

  How curious and human to be thinking of all of this at the same time.

  "What is it you see right now, Amel?" I asked.

  "That city," he answered. "Would you think me a boastful fool if I told you I--?" Silence again.

  "If you only knew," I said, "how much I cherish every single word that comes from you, you wouldn't ask. Boast to me. You're allowed for all eternity to do that."

  "I know that city," he said in a small wounded voice. "That city was--."

  "Your home?"

  Silence. Then:

  "It's time," he said. "The Egyptian idiot and the Viking thug are making their way up the mountain."

  "I know," I said. An idea was forming in my mind, of how I might draw him out further on the city, but the sun waits for no vampire. I wondered if Louis had gone into his crypt, the special crypt I'd prepared for him, a monkly chamber of essential things with an antique black coffin that I'd chosen specially, with its lining of thick white silk padding. Pretty much like mine.

  "He sleeps," said Amel.

  I smiled. "And did you look at me through his eyes when I was with him?"