The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [70]
6
THE STORY OF JESSE, THE GREAT FAMILY, AND THE TALAMASCA
i.
The dead don’t share.
Though they reach towards us
from the grave (I swear
they do) they do
not hand their hearts to you.
They hand their heads,
the part that stares.
STAN RICE
from “Their Share”
Body of Work (1983)
ii.
Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.
JOHN WEBSTER
iii.
THE TALAMASCA
Investigators of the Paranormal
We watch
And we are always here.
London Amsterdam Rome
JESSE was moaning in her sleep. She was a delicate woman of thirty-five with long curly red hair. She lay deep in a shapeless feather mattress, cradled in a wooden bed which hung from the ceiling on four rusted chains.
Somewhere in the big rambling house a clock chimed. She must wake up. Two hours until the Vampire Lestat’s concert. But she could not leave the twins now.
This was new to her, this part unfolding so rapidly, and the dream was maddeningly dim as all the dreams of the twins had been. Yet she knew the twins were in the desert kingdom again. The mob surrounding the twins was dangerous. And the twins, how different they looked, how pale. Maybe it was an illusion, this phosphorescent luster, but they appeared to glow in the semidarkness, and their movements were languid, almost as if they were caught in the rhythm of a dance. Torches were thrust at them as they embraced one another; but look, something was wrong, very wrong. One of them was now blind.
Her eyelids were shut tight, the tender flesh wrinkled and sunken. Yes, they have plucked out her eyes. And the other one, why does she make those terrible sounds? “Be still, don’t fight anymore,” said the blind one, in the ancient language which was always understandable in the dreams. And out of the other twin came a horrid, guttural moaning. She couldn’t speak. They’d cut out her tongue!
I don’t want to see any more, I want to wake up. But the soldiers were pushing their way through the crowd, something dreadful was to happen, and the twins became suddenly very still. The soldiers took hold of them, dragged them apart.
Don’t separate them! Don’t you know what this means to them? Get the torches away. Don’t set them on fire! Don’t burn their red hair.
The blind twin reached out for her sister, screaming her name: “Mekare!” And Mekare, the mute one, who could not answer, roared like a wounded beast.
The crowd was parting, making way for two immense stone coffins, each carried on a great heavy bier. Crude these sarcophagi, yet the lids had the roughened shape of human faces, limbs. What have the twins done to be put in these coffins? I can’t stand it, the biers being set down, the twins dragged towards the coffins, the crude stone lids being lifted. Don’t do it! The blind one is fighting as if she can see it, yet they are overpowering her, lifting her and putting her inside the stone box. In mute terror, Mekare is watching, though she herself is being dragged to the other bier. Don’t lower the lid, or I will scream for Mekare! For both of them—
Jesse sat up, her eyes open. She had screamed.
Alone in this house, with no one to hear her, she’d screamed, and she could feel the echo still. Then nothing but the quiet settling around her, and the faint creaking of the bed as it moved on its chains. The song of the birds outside in the forest, the deep forest; and her own curious awareness that the clock had struck six.
The dream was fading rapidly. Desperately she tried to hold on to it, to see the details that always slipped away—the clothing of these strange people, the weapons the soldiers carried, the faces of the twins! But it was already gone. Only the spell remained and an acute awareness of what had happened—and the certainty that the Vampire Lestat was linked to these dreams.
Sleepily, she checked her watch. No time left. She wanted to be in the auditorium when the Vampire Lestat entered; she wanted to be at the very foot of the stage.
Yet she hesitated, staring at the white roses