"Have you never seriously thought of such a thing?" Fareed asked.
After the biopsies and vials of blood were taken, we were sitting in their rooftop garden, great banks of tempered glass separating us from the chill Pacific wind and the lights of downtown Los Angeles dazzling in the pretty mist.
"I don't understand," said Fareed, "a world in which the most outspoken and high-profile blood drinkers are all romantics, poets, who bring into the Blood only those whom they love for emotional reasons. Oh, I do so appreciate your writing, you understand, every word of it. Your books are scripture for the Undead. Seth gave them to me at once, told me to learn them. But have you never thought to bring over those whom you actually need?"
I admitted I was afraid of the very idea, as afraid as a mortal might have been of designing offspring genetically to enter certain branches of the arts or certain professions.
"But we are not human," said Fareed, who was immediately embarrassed by how obvious and foolish it sounded. He actually blushed.
"What if another bloody tyrant arises?" I asked. "Someone to make Akasha look like a schoolgirl with her fantasies of world domination? You do realize everything I wrote about her was true, do you not? She would have transformed the world if we hadn't stopped her, made herself into a goddess."
Fareed was speechless and then glanced at Seth with the most anxious expression on his face. But Seth was only regarding me with intense interest. He reached over with one of his enormous hands and gently laid it on Fareed's right hand.
"This is all well and good," he said to Fareed. "Please, Lestat, continue."
"Well, suppose such a tyrant rose amongst us again," I said, "and suppose that tyrant brought into the Blood the technicians and soldiers he needed to implement some true takeover. With Akasha, it was all primitive, her scheme, with a 'revealed religion' at the core that would have set the world back, but suppose with laboratories like this, a tyrant could create a vampire race of weapons makers, makers of mind-altering drugs, makers of bombs, planes, whatever is needed to wreak havoc on the existing technological world. What then? Yes, you are right, those of us who are known to everyone today are romantics. We are. We are poets. But we are individuals, with an immense faith in the individual and a love of the individual."
I broke off. I sounded far too much like someone who actually believed in something. Lestat, the dreamer. What did I believe? That we were an accursed race, and that we ought to be exterminated.
Seth picked up the thought, and at once responded. His voice was deep, slow, sharpened by that indefinable Eastern accent. "Why do you believe these things of us, you who have rejected the revealed religions of your world so thoroughly? What are we? We are mutations. But all evolution is driven, surely, by mutations. I don't claim to understand it, but was it not true what you wrote, about how Akasha was destroyed, and how the Core, the fount, whatever you call it, the root that animates us was transferred into the body and brain of Mekare?"
"Yes, it was all true," I said. "And they are out there, those two, and they are of the retiring kind, I assure you, and if they think we have any right to exist as a species, they've never made it known to the rest of us. If they find out about this laboratory they will destroy it--perhaps."
I hastened to add that I wasn't certain about that at all.
"Why would they do that when we can offer them so much?" asked Fareed. "For I can fashion immortal eyes for Maharet, the blind one, so that she no longer must use human eyes, ever changing them as they die in her eye sockets? It is a very simple matter to me to make these immortal eyes with the proper blood protocols. And the mute Mekare, I could determine whether there is any brain left to her which will ever fully awaken."
I must have smiled bitterly. "What a vision."
"Lestat, don't you want to know what your cells are made of?" he asked. "Don't you want to know what chemicals are in the blood that's keeping senescence in your body completely at bay?"
"Senescence?" I didn't know quite what the word meant. We are dead things, I was thinking. You are a physician for the dead.
"Ah, but Lestat," Fareed said. "We're not dead things. That's poetry, and it's old poetry, and it will not endure. Only good poetry endures. We're very much alive, all of us. Your body's a complex organism playing host to another predatory organism that is somehow transforming it little by little year by year for some distinct evolutionary purpose. Don't you want to know what that is?"
These words changed everything for me. They were light dawning, because I saw then a whole realm of possibility that I'd never seen before. Of course he might do things like that. Of course.
He talked on and on then, scientifically and I suppose brilliantly, but his terminology became thicker and more foreign. Try as I might, I'd never been able to fathom modern science at all. No amount of preternatural intelligence allowed me to really absorb medical texts. I had only the layman's smattering of the words he was using--DNA, mitochondria, viruses, eukaryotic cell tissue, senescence, genome, atoms, quarks, whatever. I pored over the books of those who wrote for the popular audience, and retained little or nothing but respect and humility and a deepening sense of my own wretchedness at being outside of life when life itself involved such magnificent revelations.
He sensed it was useless.
"Come, let me show you a very small part of what I can do," said Fareed.
And down we went into the laboratories again. Almost all the blood drinkers were gone, but I caught the faint scent of a human. Maybe more than one human.
He offered me a tantalizing possibility. Did I want to feel erotic passion, the same way I'd known it when I was a young man of twenty in Paris, before I died? Well, he could help me achieve this. And if he did, I would produce semen, and he would like to take a sample of that.
I was stunned. Of course, I wasn't about to turn this down. "Well, just how are we going to collect this semen?" I asked, laughing, and even blushing in spite of myself. "Even when I was alive, I preferred to carry out all my erotic experiments with others."
He offered me a choice. Behind a glass wall there sat, on a large soft bed, a young human female, clad only in a white flannel sleeping shirt, reading a thick hardcover book under a dim lamp. She couldn't see us through the one-way glass. She couldn't hear us. I figured her to be perhaps thirty-five or -six, which was quite young for these times, though it would not have been two hundred years ago, and I had to confess to myself, she looked familiar to me. Her hair was thick and long and wavy and distinctly blond though rather dark blond, and she had deep-set blue eyes that were a little too pale perhaps to be beautiful, and well-balanced features and a rather innocent-looking but generous mouth.
The room was like a stage set with its blue toile wallpaper and bedding, and frilly shaded lamps, and even a picture on the wall that one might find in a common bedroom, of an old nineteenth-century English village street. Geese and a creek and a bridge. Only the medical texts on the bedside table and the heavy book in the woman's hands seemed out of place.
She looked luscious in her white flannel shirt, with high firm breasts and long well-shaped legs. She was marking something in her book with a pen.
"You may couple with her, in which case I shall take the sample from her," Fareed explained. "Or you may take the sample for me yourself as you desire in the old solitary way." He made a gesture with his right hand opening his five fingers.
I didn't ponder for long. When I'd slipped into a human body thanks to the machinations of the Body Thief, I'd enjoyed the company of two beautiful women, but that had not been in this body, my body, my vampiric body.
"The woman is well paid, respected, at home here," said Seth. "She is a doctor herself. You will neither surprise her nor horrify her. She has never been a part of such an experiment before, but she is prepared for it. And she will be well rewarded when it's over."
Well, if no harm comes to her, I thought. How clean and pretty she was, with that well-scrubbed American look to her, and those s
hiny blue eyes, and her hair the color of fields of grain. I could almost smell her hair. In fact, I could smell it, a lovely fragrance of soapsuds or shampoo and sunshine. She looked delectable, and irresistible. I wanted every single drop of her blood. Could erotic feeling override that?
"All right, I'll do it."
But just how exactly could these gentlemen make a dead body like mine actually produce seed as if it were living?
The answer came swiftly with a series of injections and indeed an intravenous line that would continue throughout the experiment to deliver a powerful elixir of human hormones into my blood, overriding the vampiric body's natural tendency to resist senescence long enough for the desire to develop, the sperm to be produced, and then ejaculated.
I thought it was hilariously funny.
Now I could write an essay of five hundred pages on how this experience unfolded, because I did feel biological erotic desire again, and I fell on the young woman about as mercilessly as any greedy aristocrat of my time ever fell on a milkmaid in his village. But it was precisely as my beloved Louis had said a long time ago, "the pale shadow of killing," that is, the pale shadow of drinking blood, and it was over almost at once, it seemed, and then the passion was gone, back into the depths of memory once more as if it had never been aroused, the pinnacle, the ejaculation forgotten.
I'd felt strangely awkward afterwards. I was sitting on the bed beside this blond-haired fair-skinned human female, my back to a nest of sweet-smelling linen-covered pillows, and I felt I ought to talk to her, ask her how she came to be here, and why she was here.
And then quite suddenly, as I sat there, wondering if this was proper or even wise, she told me.
Her name was Flannery Gilman, she said. In a clear fresh West Coast American voice, she explained that she'd been studying "us" since the night I'd appeared on the stage as a rock star outside San Francisco, and so many of our kind had died as the result of my great scheme to be a mortal performer. She'd seen vampires that night with her own eyes, and had no doubt of their existence. She'd seen them immolated in the parking lot afterwards. Indeed, she'd scraped up samples of their burnt and oozing remains from the asphalt. She'd gathered burnt vampiric bones in plastic sacks, and she'd developed hundreds of photographs later of what she'd witnessed and captured on film. She'd spent five years studying and writing up her various specimens, preparing a thousand-page document to prove our existence and counter every objection she could anticipate from her medical colleagues. She'd gone broke because of her obsession.
What had it all come to? Utter ruin.
Even though she'd connected with at least two dozen other doctors who claimed to have seen and experimented upon vampires--perusing their samples, reviewing their material, and referencing it--she had found the doors of every reputable medical association in the world slammed in her face.
She was laughed at, ridiculed, denied grant money, and ultimately denied admission to conventions and conferences, and pointed out publicly as a laughingstock by those who ostracized her and advised her to "get psychological help."
"They destroyed me," she said calmly. "They ruined me. They did it to all of us. They cast us out along with the believers in ancient astronauts, pyramid power, ectoplasm, and the lost city of Atlantis. They sent me into the wilderness of crackpot websites and New Age conventions and fringe gatherings where we were welcomed only by enthusiasts who believed in everything from Ouija boards to Bigfoot. My license to practice medicine was revoked in California. My family turned against me. I was for all practical purposes dead."
"I see," I said dismally.
"I wonder if you do," she said. "There's abundant evidence in the hands of science all over the planet that you exist, you know, but nobody's ever going to do a damned thing about it. At least not as things are now."
I was speechless. I should have known.
"I used to think that once a vampire fell into the hands of doctors, it would be over."
She laughed.
"It's happened many times," she said. "And I can tell you exactly what takes place. The vampire, having been taken captive in some sheltered place by day, wakes up at sundown to destroy his captors and lay waste their jail or their laboratory or their morgue. If he or she is too weak to do that, then the captors are generally spellbound and befuddled into releasing the victim, and retribution soon follows with all photographic or medical evidence immolated along with the witnesses. Sometimes other blood drinkers come to help free the captive. Sometimes an entire lab facility goes up in flames and almost everyone on the premises is killed. I documented at least two dozen accounts that fit this pattern. Every single one had a series of official 'rational' explanations of what happened attached to it, with marginalized survivors ridiculed and ultimately ignored. Some survivors have wound up in mental hospitals. You don't have to worry about a thing."
"And so you work now with Fareed."
"I have a place here," she said with a gentle smile. "I'm respected here for what I know. You could say I've been reborn. Oh, you cannot imagine the little fool I was that night when I saw you on the stage, so certain I was going to take the medical world by storm with all those pictures."
"What did you want to happen? I mean what did you want to happen to us?"
"I wanted to be believed, first and foremost, and then I wanted you to be studied! The very thing that Fareed's doing here. There is no rhyme or reason to what is actually studied 'out there.' " She gestured as if the mortal world were on the other side of the wall. "Doesn't matter anymore to me," she added. "I work for Fareed."
I laughed under my breath.
The warm natural erotic feeling was long gone. What I wanted to do now again, of course, was drain every drop of blood out of her precious, adorable, curvaceous, hot little body. But I settled for kissing her, snuggling up to her, and pressing my lips against her warm throat, listening to that thunder of blood in the artery.
"They've promised to bring you over, haven't they?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. "They're honorable. That's more than I can say for my colleagues in American medicine." She turned to me, drawing close enough to kiss me quickly one more time on the cheek. I didn't stop her. Her fingers went up to my face and she touched my eyelids.
"Thank you," she said. "Thank you for these priceless moments. Oh, I know you didn't do this for me. You did it for them. But thank you."
I nodded and I smiled. I held her face in my hands as I kissed her now with a fervor that came from the Blood. I could feel her body warming, opening like a flower, but the moment was gone, and I took my leave.
Later, Fareed and Seth told me they meant to keep that promise. She wasn't the only crazy vampire-obsessed doctor or scientist they'd invited in. As a matter of fact, they went out of their way to recruit these poor "loonies" whom the world had ostracized. It was easier after all to invite into our miracle those whose human lives were already ruined.
Well before dawn, the three of us hunted together. Sunset Boulevard was a mob scene, as they say, and the Little Drink was everywhere to be had, and so were a couple of despicable rogues whom I fed on with cruel abandon in the backstreets.
I think the medical experiments had left me desperately thirsting. I was letting the blood fill my mouth and holding it like that for a long time before swallowing, before feeling that great wash of warmth through my limbs.
Seth was a ruthless killer. The ancient ones almost always are. I watched him drain a young male victim, watched the body shrivel as Seth drew quart after quart of the vital fluid. He held the dead boy's head against his chest. I knew he wanted to crush the skull, and then he did, tearing open the hairy wrapping around it and sucking the blood from the brain. Then he'd composed the corpse almost lovingly on piles of refuse in the alley, folding the arms across the chest, closing the eyes. He'd even reshaped the skull and smoothed the torn scalp over it, and stepped back from it as if he were a priest inspecting a sacrifice, murmuring something under his breath.
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sp; Seth and I sat in the roof garden as the morning was coming. The birds had begun to sing, and I could feel the sun, smell the trees welcoming the sun, smell the jacaranda blossoms opening far below.
"But what will you do, my friend," I said, "if the twins come? If the twins don't want this grand experiment to continue?"
"I am as old as they are," Seth answered quietly. He raised his eyebrows. He looked elegant in the long white thawb with its neat collar, rather priestly in it in fact. "And I can protect Fareed from them."
He seemed completely sure of it.
"Long centuries ago," he said, "there were two warring camps, as the Queen told you. The twins and their friend Khayman, they were known as the First Brood, and they fought the cult of the Mother. But I was made by her to fight the First Brood, and I have more of her blood in me than they ever had. Queens Blood, that is what we were aptly called, and she brought me for one very important reason: I was her son, born to her when she was human."
A dark chill ran through me. For a long time I couldn't speak, couldn't think.
"Her son?" I finally whispered.
"I do not hate them," he said. "I never wanted even in those times to fight them, really. I was a healer. I did not ask for the Blood. Indeed I begged my mother to spare me, but you know what she was. You know how she would be obeyed. You know as well as anyone from those times knows those things. And she brought me into the Blood. And as I said, I do not fear those who fought against her. I am as strong as they are."
I remained in awe. I could see in him now a resemblance to her, see it in the symmetry of his features, the special curve of his lips. But I couldn't sense her in him at all.
"As a healer, I traveled the world in my human life," he said, responding to me, to my thoughts. His eyes were gentle. "I sought to learn all I could in the cities of the two rivers; I went far into the northern forests. I wanted to learn, to understand, to know, to bring back with me great healers to Egypt. My mother had no use for such things. She was convinced of her own divinity and blind to the miracles of the natural world."
How well I understood.
It was time for me to be taking my leave. How long he could withstand the coming dawn, I didn't know. But I was about spent, and it was time to seek shelter.