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

but this one she’d rather liked.
    “Tell her I must speak to her!” he said suddenly, as though coming back to himself.
    “All right, Daddy, if you want me to.” She turned off the lamp by the bed. “You go back to sleep.”
    “Don’t give up till you find her. Tell her . . . the twins! I’ve seen the twins.”
    But as she was leaving, he called her back again with one of those sudden moans that always frightened her. In the light from the hall, she could see he was pointing to the books on the far wall.
    “Get it for me,” he said. He was struggling to sit up again.
    “The book, Daddy?”
    “The twins, the pictures . . . ”
    She took down the old volume and brought it to him and put it in his lap. She propped the pillows up higher for him and turned on the lamp again.
    It hurt her to feel how light he was as she lifted him; it hurt her to see him struggle to put on his silver-rimmed glasses. He took the pencil inhand, to read with it, ready to write, as he had always done, but then he let it fall and she caught it and put it back on the table.
    “You go call her!” he said.
    She nodded. But she stayed there, just in case he needed her. The music from her study was louder now, one of the more metallic and raucous songs. But he didn’t seem to notice. Very gently she opened the book for him, and turned to the first pair of color pictures, one filling the left page, the other the right.
    How well she knew these pictures, how well she remembered as a little girl making the long climb with him to the cave on Mount Carmel, where he had led her into the dry dusty darkness, his flashlight lifted to reveal the painted carvings on the wall.
    “There, the two figures, you see them, the red-haired women?”
    It had been difficult at first to make out the crude stick figures in the dim beam of the flashlight. So much easier later to study what the close-up camera so beautifully revealed.
    But she would never forget that first day, when he had shown her each small drawing in sequence: the twins dancing in rain that fell in tiny dashes from a scribble of cloud; the twins kneeling on either side of the altar upon which a body lay as if in sleep or death; the twins taken prisoner and standing before a tribunal of scowling figures; the twins running away. And then the damaged pictures of which nothing could be recovered; and finally the one twin alone weeping, her tears falling in tiny dashes, like the rain, from eyes that were tiny black dashes too.
    They’d been carved in the rock, with pigments added—orange for the hair, white chalk for the garments, green for the plants that grew around them, and even blue for the sky over their heads. Six thousand years had passed since they had been created in the deep darkness of the cave.
    And no less old were the near identical carvings, in a shallow rock chamber high on the slope of Huayna Picchu, on the other side of the world.
    She had made that journey also with her father, a year later, across the Urubamba River and up through the jungles of Peru. She’d seen for herself the same two women in a style remarkably similar though not the same.
    There again on the smooth wall were the same scenes of the rain falling, of the red-haired twins in their joyful dance. And then the somber altar scene in loving detail. It was the body of a woman lying on the altar, and in their hands the twins held two tiny, carefully drawn plates. Soldiers bore down upon the ceremony with swords uplifted. The twins were taken into bondage, weeping. And then came the hostile tribunal and the familiar escape. In another picture, faint but still discernible, the twins held an infantbetween them, a small bundle with dots for eyes and the barest bit of red hair; then to others they entrusted their treasure as once more the menacing soldiers appeared.
    And lastly, the one twin, amid the full leafy trees of the jungle, her arms out as if reaching for her sister, the red pigment of her hair