Pandora (2 page)

But I felt this victim’s soul like ashes, as though her spirit had been cremated and only the body remained, a worn, disease-ridden shell. I put my arm around her, and when I saw the fear in her small black eyes, when I saw the question coming, I wreathed her with images. The soot that covered my skin was not enough to keep me from looking like the Virgin Mary, and she sank into hymns and devotion, she even saw my veils in the colors she had known in churches of childhood, as she yielded to me, and I—knowing that I needn’t drink, but thirsting for her, thirsting for the anguish she could give forth in her final moment, thirsting for the tasty red blood that would fill my mouth and make me feel human for one instant in my very monstrosity—I gave in to her visions, bent her neck, ran my fingers over her sore tender skin, and then it was, when I sank my teeth into her, when I drank from her—it was then that I knew you were there. You watched.

I knew it, and I felt it, and I saw the image of us in
your eye, distractingly, as the pleasure nevertheless flushed through me, making me believe I was alive, somehow connected to fields of clover or trees with roots deeper in the earth than the branches they raise to the welkin above.

At first I hated you. You saw me as I feasted. You saw me as I gave in. You knew nothing of my months of starvation, restraint, wandering. You saw only the sudden release of my unclean desire to suck her very soul from her, to make her heart rise in the flesh inside her, to drag from her veins every precious particle of her that still wanted to survive.

And she did want to survive. Wrapped in saints, and dreaming suddenly of the breasts that nursed her, her young body fought, pumping and pumping against me, she so soft, and my own form hard as a statue, my milkless nipples enshrined in marble, no comfort. Let her see her mother, dead, gone and now waiting. Let me glimpse through her dying eyes the light through which she sped towards this certain salvation.

Then I forgot about you. I would not be robbed. I slowed the drinking, I let her sigh, I let her lungs fill with the cold river air, her mother drawing closer and closer so that death now was as safe for her as the womb. I took every drop from her that she could give.

She hung dead against me, as one I’d rescued, one I would help from the bridge, some weakened, sickened, drunken girl. I slid my hand into her body, breaking the flesh so easily even with these delicate
fingers, and I closed my fingers around her heart and brought it to my lips and sucked it, my head tucked down by her face, sucked the heart like fruit, until no blood was left in any fiber or chamber, and then slowly—perhaps for your benefit—I lifted her and let her fall down into the water she had so desired.

Now there would be no struggle as her lungs filled with the river. Now there would be no last desperate thrashing. I fed from the heart one last time, to take even the color of blood out of it, and then sent it after her—crushed grapes—poor child, child of a hundred men.

Then I faced you, let you know that I knew you watched from the quay. I think I tried to frighten you. In rage I let you know how weak you were, that all the blood given to you by Lestat would make you no match should I choose to dismember you, pitch a fatal heat into you and immolate you, or only punish you with penetrating scar—simply for having spied upon me.

Actually I have never done such a thing to a younger one. I feel sorry for them when they see us, the ancient ones, and quake in terror. But I should, by all the knowledge of myself I possess, have retreated so quickly that you could not follow me in the night.

Something in your demeanor charmed me, the manner in which you approached me on the bridge, your young Anglo-Indian brown-skinned body gifted by your true mortal age with such seductive grace.
Your very posture seemed to ask of me, without humiliation:

“Pandora, may we speak?”

My mind wandered. Perhaps you knew it. I don’t remember whether I shut you out of my thoughts, and I know that your telepathic abilities are not really very strong. My mind wandered suddenly, perhaps of itself, perhaps at your prodding. I thought of all the things I could tell you, which were so different from the tales of Lestat, and those of Marius through Lestat, and I wanted to warn you, warn you of the ancient vampires of the Far East who would kill you if you went into their territory, simply because you were there.

I wanted to make certain you understood what we all had to accept—the Fount of our immortal vampiric hunger did reside in two beings—Mekare and Maharet—so ancient they are now both horrible to look upon, more than beautiful. And if they destroy themselves we will all die with them.

I wanted to tell you of others who have never known us as a tribe or known our history, who survived the terrible fire brought down on her children by our Mother Akasha. I wanted to tell you that there were things walking the Earth that look like us but are not of our breed any more than they are human. And I wanted suddenly to take you under my wing.

It must have been your prodding. You stood there, the English gentleman, wearing your decorum more lightly and naturally than any man I’d ever seen. I
marveled at your fine clothes, that you’d indulged yourself in a light black cloak of worsted wool, that you had even given yourself the luxury of a gleaming red silk scarf—so unlike you when you were newly made.

Understand, I was not aware the night that Lestat transformed you into a vampire. I didn’t feel that moment.

All the preternatural world shimmered weeks earlier, however, with the knowledge that a mortal had jumped into the body of another mortal; we know these things, as if the stars tell us. One preternatural mind picks up the ripples of this sharp cut in the fabric of the ordinary, then another mind receives the image, and on and on it goes.

David Talbot, the name we all knew from the venerable order of psychic detectives, the Talamasca, had managed to move his entire soul and etheric body—into that of another man. That body itself was in the possession of a body thief whom you forced from it. And once anchored in the young body, you, with all your scruples and values, all your knowledge of seventy-four years, remained anchored in the young cells.

And so it was David the Reborn, David with the high-gloss India beauty, and raw well-nourished strength of British lineage, that Lestat had made into a vampire, bringing over both body and soul, compounding miracle with the Dark Trick, achieving once more a sin that should stun his contemporaries and his elders.

And this, this was done to you by your best friend!

Welcome to the darkness, David. Welcome to the domain of Shakespeare’s “inconstant moon.”

Bravely you came up the bridge towards me.

“Forgive me, Pandora,” you said so quietly. Flawless British upper-class accent, and the usual beguiling British rhythm that is so seductive it seems to say that “we will all save the world.”

You kept a polite distance between us, as if I were a virgin girl of the last century, and you didn’t want to alarm me and my tender sensibilities. I smiled.

I indulged myself then. I took your full measure, this fledgling that Lestat—against Marius’s injunction—had dared to make. I saw the components of you as a man: an immense human soul, fearless, yet half in love with despair, and a body which Lestat had almost injured himself to render powerful. He had given you more blood than he could easily give in your transformation. He had tried to give you his courage, his cleverness, his cunning; he had tried to transport an armory for you through the blood.

He had done well. Your strength was complex and obvious. Our Queen Mother Akasha’s blood was mixed with that of Lestat. Marius, my ancient lover, had given him blood as well. Lestat, ah, now what do they say, they say that he may even have drunk the blood of the Christ.

It was this first issue I took up with you, my curiosity overwhelming me, for to scan the world for
knowledge is often to rake in such tragedy that I abhor it.

“Tell me the truth of it,” I said. “This story
Memnoch the Devil
. Lestat claimed he went to Heaven and to Hell. He brought back a veil from St. Veronica. The face of Christ was on it! It converted thousands to Christianity, it cured alienation and succored bitterness. It drove other Children of Darkness to throw up their arms to the deadly morning light, as if the sun were in fact the fire of God.”

“Yes, it’s all happened, as I described it,” you said, lowering your head with a polite but unexaggerated modesty. “And you know a few  . . . of
us
perished in this fervor, whilst newspapers and scientists collected our ashes for examination.”

I marveled at your calm attitude. A Twentieth-Century sensibility. A mind dominated by an incalculable wealth of information, and quick of tongue with an intellect devoted to swiftness, synthesis, probabilities, and all this against the backdrop of horrid experiences, wars, massacres, the worst perhaps the world has ever seen.

“It all happened,” you said. “And I did meet with Mekare and Maharet, the ancient ones, and you needn’t fear for me that I don’t know how fragile is the root It was kind of you to think so protectively of me.”

I was quietly charmed.

“What did you think of this Holy Veil yourself?” I asked.

“Our Lady of Fatima,” you said softly. “The Shroud
of Turin, a cripple rising from the Miraculous Waters of Lourdes! What a consolation it must be to accept such a thing so easily.”

“And you did not?”

You shook your head. “And neither did Lestat, really. It was the mortal girl, Dora, snatching the Veil from him, who took it out into the world. But it was a most singular and meticulously made thing, I’ll tell you that, more worthy of the word ‘relic’ perhaps than any other I’ve ever seen.”

You sounded dejected suddenly.

“Some immense intent went into its making,” you said.

“And the vampire Armand, the delicate boylike Armand, he believed it?” I asked. “Armand looked at it and saw the face of Christ,” I said, seeking your confirmation.

“Enough to die for it,” you said solemnly. “Enough to open his arms to the morning sun.”

You looked away, and you closed your eyes. This was a simple unadorned plea to me not to make you speak of Armand and how he had gone into the morning fire.

I gave a sigh—surprised and gently fascinated to find you so articulate, skeptical, yet so sharply and frankly connected to the others.

You said in a shaken voice, “Armand.” And still looking away from me. “What a Requiem. And does he know now if Memnoch was real, if God Incarnate who tempted Lestat was in fact the Son of the God Almighty? Does anyone?”

I was taken with your earnestness, your passion. You were not jaded or cynical. There was an immediacy to your feelings for these happenings, these creatures, these questions you posed.

“They locked up the Veil, you know,” you said. “It’s in the Vatican. There were two weeks of frenzy on Fifth Avenue in St Patrick’s Cathedral in which people came to look into the eyes of The Lord, and then they had it, gone, taken to their vaults. I doubt there is a nation on the Earth with the power to gain even a glimpse of it now.”

“And Lestat,” I said. “Where is he now?”

“Paralyzed, silent,” you said. “Lestat lies on the floor of a chapel in New Orleans. He doesn’t move. He says nothing. His Mother has come to him. You knew her, Gabrielle, he made a vampire of her.”

“Yes, I remember her.”

“Even she draws no response from him. Whatever he saw, in his journey to Heaven and Hell, he doesn’t know the truth of it one way or the other—he tried to tell this to Dora! And eventually, after I’d written down the whole story for him, he passed within a few nights into this state.

“His eyes are fixed and his body pliant. They made a curious Pietà, he and Gabrielle, in this abandoned convent and its chapel. His mind is closed, or worse—it’s empty.”

I found I liked very much your manner of speaking. In fact, I was taken off guard.

“I left Lestat because he was beyond my help and my reach,” you said. “And I must know if there are
old ones who want to put an end to me; I must make my pilgrimages and my progresses to know the dangers of this world to which I’ve been admitted.”

“You’re so forthright. You have no cunning.”

“On the contrary. I conceal my keenest assets from you.” You gave me a slow, polite smile. “Your beauty rather confuses me. Are you used to this?”

“Quite,” I said. “And weary of it. Come beyond it. Let me just warn, there are old ones, ones no one knows or can explain. It’s rumored you’ve been with Maharet and Mekare, who are now the Eldest and the Fount from which we all spring. Obviously they’ve drawn back from us, from all the world, into some secret place, and have no taste for authority.”

“You’re so very correct,” you said, “and my audience with them was beautiful but brief. They don’t want to rule over anyone, nor will Maharet, as long as the history of the world and her own physical descendants are in it—her own thousands of human descendants from a time so ancient there is no date for it—Maharet will never destroy herself and her sister, thereby destroying all of us.”

“Yes,” I said, “in that she believes, the Great Family, the generations she has traced for thousands of years. I saw her when we all gathered. She doesn’t see us as evil—you, or me, or Lestat—she thinks that we’re natural, rather like volcanoes or fires that rage through forests, or bolts of lightning that strike a man dead.”

“Precisely,” you said. “There is no Queen of the Damned now. I fear only one other immortal, and
that’s your lover, Marius. Because it was Marius who laid down the strict rule before he left the others that no more blood drinkers could be made. I’m base-born in the mind of Marius. That is, were he an Englishman, those would be his words.”

I shook my head. “I can’t believe he would harm you. Hasn’t he come to Lestat? Did he not come to see the Veil with his own eyes?”

You said No to both questions.

“Heed this advice: whenever you sense his presence, talk to him. Talk to him as you have to me. Begin a conversation which he won’t have the confidence to bring to a close.”