The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice Read Free Book Online

somehow a moment of horror!
     
    She laughed softly as she looked at him. He could not bear the sound of it. He wanted to hurt her. He wanted to destroy her, all her monstrous children be damned! Let us all perish with her! If he could have done it, he would have destroyed her!
     
    It seemed she nodded, that she was telling him she understood. The monstrous insult of it. Well, he did not understand. And in another moment, he would be weeping like a child. Some ghastly error had been made, some terrible miscarriage of purpose.
     
    "My dear servant," she said, her lips lengthening in a faint bitter smile. "You have never had the power to stop me."
     
    "What do you want! What do you mean to do!"
     
    "You must forgive me," she said, oh, so politely, just as he had said the very words to the young one in the back room of the bar. "I'm going now."
     
    He heard the sound before the floor moved, the shriek of tearing metal. He was falling, and the television screen had blown apart, the glass piercing his flesh like so many tiny daggers. He cried out, like a mortal man, and this time it was fear. The ice was cracking, roaring, as it came down upon him.
     
    "Akasha!"
     
    He was dropping into a giant crevasse, he was plunging into scalding coldness.
     
    "Akasha!" he cried again.
     
    But she was gone, and he was still falling. Then the broken tumbling ice caught him, surrounded him, and buried him, as it crushed the bones of his arms, his legs, his face. He felt his blood pouring out against the searing surface, then freezing. He couldn't move. He couldn't breathe. And the pain was so intense that he couldn't bear it. He saw the jungle again, inexplicably for an instant, as he had seen it earlier. The hot fetid jungle, and something moving through it. Then it was gone. And when he cried out this time, it was to Lestat: Danger, Lestat, beware. We are all in danger.
     
    Then there was only the cold and the pain, and he was losing consciousness. A dream coming, a lovely dream of warm sun shining on a grassy clearing. Yes, the blessed sun. The dream had him now. And the women, how lovely their red hair. But what was it, the thing that was lying there, beneath the wilted leaves, on the altar?
     
    PART I
     
    THE ROAD TO THE VAMPIRE LESTAT
     
    Tempting to place in coherent collage the bee, the mountain range, the shadow of my hoof-tempting to join them, enlaced by logical vast & shining molecular thought-thread thru all Substance-Tempting to say I see in all I see the place where the needle began in the tapestry-but ah, it all looks whole and part- long live the eyeball and the lucid heart.
    -STAN RICE from "Four Days in Another City" Some Lamb (1975)
     
    THE LEGEND OF THE TWINS
     
    Tell it in rhythmic continuity.
    Detail by detail the living creatures.
    Tell it as must, the rhythm solid in the shape.
    Woman. Arms lifted. Shadow eater.
    -STAN RICE from "Elegy" Whiteboy (1976)
     
    "CALL HER FOR ME," HE SAID. "TELL HER I HAVE had the strangest dreams, that they were about the twins. You must call her!" His daughter didn't want to do it. She watched him fumble with the book. His hands were his enemies now, he often said. At ninety-one, he. could scarcely hold a pencil or turn a page. "Daddy," she said, "that woman's probably dead." Everybody he had known was dead. He'd outlived his colleagues; he'd outlived his brothers and sisters, and even two of his children. In a tragic way, he had outlived the twins, because no one read his book now. No one cared about "the legend of the twins."
     
    "No, you call her," he said. "You must call her. You tell her that I dreamed of the twins. I saw them in the dream."
     
    "Why would she want to know that, Daddy?"
     
    His daughter took the little address book and paged through it slowly. Dead all these people, long dead. The men who had worked with her father on so many expeditions, the editors and photographers who had worked with him on his book. Even his enemies who had said his life was