has risen? Don'1 you think the Mother has seen and heard her children's dreams?"
"Ah, but prophecies have a way of fulfilling themselves," Khayman said. "That's the magic of it. We all understood it in ancient times. The power of charms is the power of the will; you might say that we were all great geniuses of psychology in those dark days, that we could be slain by the power of another's designs. And the dreams, Marius, the dreams are but part of a great design."
"Don't talk of it as if it were already done," Maharet said. "We have another tool. We can use reason. This creature speaks now, does she not? She understands what is spoken to her. Perhaps she can be diverted-"
"Oh, you are mad, truly mad!" Eric said. "You are going to speak to this monster that roamed the world incinerating her offspring!" He was becoming more frightened by the minute. "What does this thing know of reason, that inflames ignorant women to rise against their men? This thing knows slaughter and death and violence, that is all it has ever known, as your story makes plain. We don't change, Maharet. How many times have you told me. We move ever closer to the perfection of what we were meant to be."
"None of us wants to die, Eric," Maharet said patiently. But something suddenly distracted her.
At the same moment, Khayman too felt it. Jesse studied both of them, attempting to understand what she was seeing. Then she realized that Marius had undergone a subtle change as well. Eric was petrified. Mael, to Jesse's surprise, was staring fixedly at her.
They were hearing some sound. It was the way they moved their eyes that revealed it; people listen with their eyes; their eyes dance as they absorb the sound and try to locate its source.
Suddenly Eric said: "The young ones should go to the cellar immediately."
"That's no use," Gabrielle said. "Besides, I want to be here." She couldn't hear the sound, but she was trying to hear it.
Eric turned on Maharet. "Are you going to let her destroy us, one by one?"
Maharet didn't answer. She turned her head very slowly and looked towards the landing.
Then Jesse finally heard the sound herself. Certainly human ears couldn't hear it; it was like the auditory equivalent of tension without vibration, coursing through her as it did through every particle of substance in the room. It was inundating and disorienting, and though she saw that Maharet was speaking to Khayman and that Khayman was answering, she couldn't hear what they were saying. Foolishly, she'd put her hands to her ears. Dimly, she saw that Daniel had done the same thing, but they both knew it did no good at all.
The sound seemed suddenly to suspend all time; to suspend momentum. Jesse was losing her balance; she backed up against the wall; she stared at the map across from her, as if she wanted it somehow to sustain her. She stared at the soft flow of the lights streaming out of Asia Minor and to the north and to the south.
Some dim, inaudible commotion filled the room. The sound had died away, yet the air rang with a deafening silence.
In a soundless dream, it seemed, she saw the figure of the Vampire Lestat appear in the door; she saw him rush into Ga-brielle's arms; she saw Louis move towards him and then embrace him. And then she saw the Vampire Lestat look at her-and she caught the flashing image of the funeral feast, the twins, the body on the altar. He didn't know what it meant! He didn't know.
It shocked her, the realization. The moment on the stage came back to her, when he had obviously struggled to recognize some fleeting image, as they had drawn apart.
Then as the others drew him away now, with embraces and kisses again-and even Armand had come to him with his arms out-he gave her the faintest little smile. "Jesse," he said.
He stared at the others, at Marius, at the cold and wary faces. And how white his skin was, how utterly white, yet the warmth, the exuberance, the almost childlike excitement-it was exactly as it had been before.
Chapter 37
PART IV
THE The Queen Of The Damned
Wings stir the sunlit dust of the cathedral in which the Past is buried to its chin in marble.
STAN RICE - From "Poem on Crawling into Bed: Bitterness" Body of Work (1983)
In the glazed greenery of hedge,
and ivy,
and inedible strawberries
the lilies are white;