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

stuck to the stone wall with dried blood.
    How well she could recall her excitement. She had shared her father’s ecstasy, that he had found the twins a world apart from each other, in these ancient pictures, buried in the mountain caves of Palestine and Peru.
    It seemed the greatest event in history; nothing could have been so important. Then a year later a vase had been discovered in a Berlin museum that bore the very same figures, kneeling, plates in hand before the stone bier. A crude thing it was, without documentation. But what did that matter? It had been dated 4000 B.C . by the most reliable methods, and there unmistakably, in the newly translated language of ancient Sumer, were the words that meant so much to all of them:
    “The Legend of the Twins”
    Yes, so terribly significant, it had all seemed. The foundation of a life’s work, until he presented his research.
    They’d laughed at him. Or ignored him. Not believable, such a link between the Old World and the New. Six thousand years old, indeed! They’d relegated him to the “crazy camp” along with those who talked of ancient astronauts, Atlantis, and the lost kingdom of Mu.
    How he’d argued, lectured, begged them to believe, to journey with him to the caves, to see for themselves! How he’d laid out the specimens of pigment, the lab reports, the detailed studies of the plants in the carvings and even the white robes of the twins.
    Another man might have given it up. Every university and foundation had turned him away. He had no money even to care for his children. He took a teaching position for bread and butter, and, in the evenings, wrote letters to museums all over the world. And a clay tablet, covered with drawings, was found in Manchester, and another in London, both clearly depicting the twins! On borrowed money he journeyed to photograph these artifacts. He wrote papers on them for obscure publications. He continued his search.
    Then she had come, the quiet-spoken and eccentric woman who had listened to him, looked at his materials, and then given him an ancient papyrus, found early in this century in a cave in Upper Egypt, which contained some of the very same pictures, and the words “The Legend of the Twins.”
    “A gift for you,” she’d said. And then she’d bought the vase for him from the museum in Berlin. She obtained the tablets from England as well.
    But it was the Peruvian discovery that fascinated her most of all. She gave him unlimited sums of money to go back to South America and continue his work.
    For years he’d searched cave after cave for more evidence, spoken to villagers about their oldest myths and stories, examined ruined cities, temples, even old Christian churches for stones taken from pagan shrines.
    But decades passed and he found nothing.
    It had been the ruin of him finally. Even she, his patron, had told him to give it up. She did not want to see his life spent on this. He should leave it now to younger men. But he would not listen. This was his discovery! The Legend of the Twins! And so she wrote the checks for him, and he went on until he was too old to climb the mountains and hack his way through the jungle anymore.
    In the last years, he lectured only now and then. He could not interest the new students in this mystery, even when he showed the papyrus, the vase, the tablets. After all, these items did not fit anywhere really, they were of no definable period. And the caves, could anyone have found them now?
    But she had been loyal, his patron. She’d bought him this house in Rio, created a trust for him which would come to his daughter when he died. Her money had paid for his daughter’s education, for so many other things. Strange that they lived in such comfort. It was as if he had been successful after all.
    “Call her,” he said again. He was becoming agitated, empty hands scraping at the photographs. After all, his daughter had not moved. She stood at his shoulder looking down at the pictures, at