The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [359]
I jumped backwards before I could stop myself.
In fact I shot backwards, overturning the vases of lilies, and slammed against the wall beside the door.
I was trembling so violently, my legs could hardly hold me.
“They’re alive!” I said. “They aren’t statues! They’re vampires just like us!”
“Yes,” Marius said. “That word, however, they wouldn’t know.” He was just ahead of me and he was still looking at them, his hands at his sides, just as he had been all along.
Slowly, he turned and came up to me and took my right hand.
The blood had rushed to my face. I wanted to say something but I couldn’t. I kept staring at them. And now I was staring at him and staring at the white hand that held mine.
“It’s quite all right,” he said almost sadly. “I don’t think they dislike your touching them.”
For a moment I couldn’t understand him. Then I did understand. “You mean you … You don’t know whether … They just sit there and … Oooh God!”
And his words of hundreds of years ago, embedded in Armand’s tale, came back to me: Those Who Must Be Kept are at peace, or in silence. More than that we may never know.
I was shuddering all over. I couldn’t stop the tremors in my arms and my legs.
“They’re breathing, thinking, living, as we are,” I stammered. “How long have they been like this, how long?”
“Calm yourself,” he said, patting my hand.
“Oh God,” I said again stupidly. I kept saying it. No other words sufficed. “But who are they?” I asked finally. My voice was rising hysterically. “Are they Osiris and Isis? Is that who they are?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want to get away from them. I want to get out of here.”
“Why?” he asked calmly.
“Because they … they are alive inside their bodies and they … they can’t speak or move!”
“How do you know they can’t?” he said. His voice was low, soothing as before.
“But they don’t. That’s the whole point. They don’t—”
“Come,” he said. “I want you to look at them a little more. And then I’ll take you back up and I’ll tell you everything, as I’ve already said I would.”
“I don’t want to look at them anymore, Marius, honestly I don’t,” I said, trying to get my hand free, and shaking my head. But he was holding on to me as firmly as a statue might, it seemed, and I couldn’t stop thinking how much like their skin was his skin, how he was taking on the same impossible luster, how when his face was in repose, it was as smooth as theirs!
He was becoming like them. And sometime in the great yawn of eternity, I would become like him! If I survived that long.
“Please, Marius …” I said. I was beyond shame and vanity. I wanted to get out of the room.
“Wait for me then,” he said patiently. “Stay here.”
And he let my hand go. He turned and looked down at the flowers I had crushed, the spilled water.
And before my eyes these things were corrected, the flowers put back in the vase, the water gone from the floor.
He stood looking at the two before him, and then I heard his thoughts. He was greeting them in some personal way that did not require an address or a title. He was explaining to them why he had been away the last few nights. He had gone into Egypt. And he had brought back gifts for them which he would soon bring. He would take them out to look at the sea very soon.
I started to calm down a little. But my mind was now anatomizing all that had come clear to me at the moment of shock. He cared for them. He had always cared for them. He made this chamber beautiful because they were staring at it, and they just might care about the beauty of the paintings and the flowers he brought.
But he didn’t know. And all I had to do was look squarely at them again to feel horror, that they were alive and locked inside themselves!
“I can’t bear this,” I murmured. I knew, without his ever telling me, the reason that he kept them. He could not bury them deep in the earth somewhere because they were conscious. He would not burn them because they were helpless and could not give their consent. Oh, God, it was getting worse and worse.
But he kept them as the ancient pagans kept