The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles 2)

I saw Louis shake his head.

"I don't have your powers," he said unobtrusively, "nevertheless I felt this thing. And I tell you it was alien, utterly uncivilized, for want of a better word. "

"Ah, you've hit it again," Gabrielle interjected. "It was completely foreign as if coming from a being so removed. . . "

"And your Marius is too civilized," Louis insisted, "too burdened with philosophy. That's why you know he doesn't want revenge. "

"Alien? Uncivilized?" I glanced at both of them. "Why didn't I feel this menace!" I asked.

"Mon Dieu, it could have been anything," Gabrielle had said finally. "That music of yours could wake the dead. "

I had thought of last night's enigmatic message, "Lestat! Danger!" but it had been too close to dawn for me to worry them with it. And besides, it explained nothing. It was merely another fragment of the puzzle, and one perhaps that did not belong at all.

And now they were gone together, and I was standing alone before the glass doors watching the gleam of light grow brighter and brighter over the Santa Lucia Mountains, thinking:

"Where are you, Marius? Why the hell don't you reveal yourself?" It could damn well be true, everything that Gabrielle said. "Is it a game to you?"

And was it a game to me that I didn't really call out to him? I mean raise my secret voice with its full power, as he had told me two centuries ago that I might do?

Through all my struggles, it had become such a matter of pride not to call to him, but what did that pride matter now?

Maybe it was the call he required of me. Maybe he was demanding that call. All the old bitterness and stubbornness were gone from me now. Why not make that effort, at least?

And closing my eyes, I did what I had not done since those old eighteenth-century nights when I'd talked to him aloud in the streets of Cairo or Rome. Silently, I called. And I felt the voiceless cry rising out of me and traveling into oblivion. I could almost feel it traverse the world of visible proportions, feel it grow fainter and fainter, feel it burn out.

And there it was again for a split second, the distant unrecognizable place I had glimpsed last night. Snow, endless snow, and some sort of stone dwelling, windows encrusted with ice. And on a high promontory a curious modern apparatus, a great gray metal dish turning on an axis to draw to itself the invisible waves that crisscross the earth skies.

Television antenna! Reaching from this snowy waste to the satellite -- that is what it was! And the broken glass on the floor was the glass of a television screen. I saw it. Stone bench . . . a broken television screen. Noise.

Fading.

MARIUS!

Danger, Lestat. All of us in danger. She has . . . I cannot . . . Ice. Buried in ice. Flash of shattered glass on a stone floor, the bench empty, the clang and vibration of The Vampire Lestat throbbing from the speakers -- "She has . . . Lestat, help me! All of us . . . danger. She has. . . "

Silence. The connection broken.

MARIUS!

Something, but too faint. For all its intensity simply too faint!

MARIUS!

I was leaning against the window, staring right into the morning light as it grew brighter, my eyes watering, the tips of my fingers almost burning on the hot glass.

Answer me, is it Akasha? Are you telling me that it is Akasha, that she is the one, that it was she?

But the sun was rising over the mountains. The lethal rays were spilling down into the valley, ranging across the valley floor.

I ran out of the house, across the field and towards the hills, my arm up to shield my eyes.

And within moments I had reached my hidden underground crypt, pulled back the stone, and I went down the crudely dug little stairs. One more turn and then another and I was in cold and safe blackness, earth smell, and I lay on the mud floor of the tiny chamber, my heart thudding, my limbs trembling. Akasha! That music of yours could wake the dead.

Television set in the chamber, of course, Marius had given them that, and the broadc

asts right off the satellite. They had seen the video films! I knew it, I knew it as certainly as if he had spelled it out to the last detail. He had brought the television down into their sanctum, just as he had brought the movies to them years and years ago.

And she had been awakened, she had risen. That music of yours could wake the dead. I'd done it again.