Page 89

It was a beautiful sunset, or it had been. And the mountains of my homeland were visible out there with the stars sweeping down to touch them, a clear and perfect night so far from the noise and pollution of the world, with only a few voices coming from that little string of shops and dwellings that made up the village on the mountain road beneath us, and we two here in this room which had once been a bedchamber but which was now a spacious paneled and decorated salon.

My mirrors, my traceries of gold on rosewood, my Flemish tapestries, Kirman carpets, Empire chandeliers.

The chateau had indeed undergone a magnificent restoration. Its four towers were now complete and a multitude of rooms completely reconstructed and supplied with electric light and heat. As for the village, it was very small, and existed only to sustain the little workforce of carpenters and craftsmen engaged with the restoration. We were too far off the beaten path in this part of the Auvergne even for the tourists, let alone the rest of the world.

What we had here was solitude and quiet--blessed quiet. Quiet such as only the rural world can provide--far from the voices of Clermont-Ferrand or Riom. And blessed beauty all around us in green fields and undisturbed forests in this old part of France where once so many poor and struggling families had suffered so much for every loaf of bread or morsel of meat. Not so now. New highways had opened the mountainous and isolated peaks and valleys of the Auvergne to the rest of the country several decades ago and with them had come the inevitable technological embrace of modern Europe. But it remained the least populated part of France, perhaps of Europe--and this chateau, surrounded and accessible only through private gated roads, was not even on the current maps.

"It disgusts me to see you going backwards," she declared. She turned her back to me, making a small slender figure against the incandescent light of the window. "Ah, but you have always done what you want to do."

"As opposed to what?" I asked. "Mother, there is no forwards or backwards in this world. My coming here was moving forwards. I was homeless and asked myself, with all the time in the world to ponder it, where I should like to be at home. And voila! I am here in the castle in which I was born of which a considerable amount remains, though it's buried now beneath plaster and ornament, and I am looking out on those mountains where I used to hunt when I was a boy, and I like this. This is the Auvergne, the Massif Central in which I was born. It is my choice. Now stop the harangue."

Of course she had not been born here. She'd lived perhaps the most miserable decades of her existence here, giving birth to seven sons of which I was the last, and dying slowly in these rooms before she'd come to me in Paris, and been launched onto the Devil's Road as we embraced beside her deathbed.

Of course she did

n't love all this. Perhaps there was some special place in this world she loved, loved with the feelings I had for all this, but she was likely never going to tell me.

She laughed. She turned and came towards me in the same marching stride she'd been using all along and took a turn before my desk and walked about staring at the twin marble mantels, the antique clocks, all the things she hated with specific contempt.

I sat back, hands clasped behind my neck, and looked at the murals on the ceiling. My architect had sent to Italy for a painter to do these in the old French style--Dionysus with his band of garlanded worshippers frolicking against a blue sky full of rolling gold-tinged clouds.

Armand and Louis had been right to paint the ceilings of their digs in New York. I hated to admit it, but glimpsing that baroque splendor through their windows had inspired me to give the order for these ceilings here. I resolved never to tell them that. Ah, pang of missing Louis, of wanting so to talk to Louis, pang of gratitude that Louis was with Armand.

"You're yourself again at long last," she said. "I am glad. I am truly glad."

"Why? Our world may shortly end. What does it matter?" But this was dishonest. I didn't think our world was going to end. I wouldn't let it end. I'd fight it ending with every breath in my unwholesome immortal frame.

"Oh, it won't end," she said with a shrug. "Not if we all act together again as we did last time, if we put away our differences as the world is always saying and unite. We can defeat this thing, this raging spirit who thinks his every emotion is unique and momentous as if consciousness itself had just been discovered for his benefit and for his personal use!"

Ah, so she knew all about it. She hadn't been holed up in some North American forest watching the snow fall. She'd been with us all along. And what she'd just said had meaning.

"He does behave that way, doesn't he?" I said. "You put that exactly right."

She leaned against the mantel nearest me, her elbow just able to manage it, and succeeded in looking like a thin graceful boy in that posture, her eyes positively glowing as she smiled at me.

"I love you, you know."

"You could have fooled me on that one," I said. "Hmmm. Well." I shrugged. "Seems lots of people love me, mortal and immortal. Can't help it. I'm just the most dazzling vampire on the planet, though why I'll never know. Weren't you lucky to have me for a son, the wolf killer who stumbled onto the stage in Paris and caught the fancy of a monster." This was dishonest too. Why did I feel I had to keep her at a remove?

"Seriously, you look splendid," she said. "Your hair's whiter. Why is that?"

"Apparently it comes from having been burned. Repeatedly burned. But it's yellow enough still to keep me happy. You look rather splendid yourself. What do you know about all this, what's happening?"

She was silent for a moment. Then she spoke. "Never think they really love you, or love you for yourself," she said.

"Thanks, Mother."

"Seriously. I mean it. Don't ever think ... Love doesn't really ever function like that. You're the only name and face they all know."

I regarded this thoughtfully, then replied, "I know."

"Let's talk of the Voice," she said, leaping right into the subject without preamble. "It can't manipulate the physical. Apparently it can only incite the minds of those it visits. He can't possess the bodies at all. And I suspect it cannot do anything with the host body, but then I have seen the host body less often than you have, and for much less time."

The host body was Mekare. I did not think of Mekare in those terms, but that is what she was.

I was impressed. All this should have been obvious to me before now. I'd regarded every visit from the Voice as some sort of attempt at possession, but the visits had never been that. It could make hallucinations, yes, but it had been working on my brain when it did that. But it had never been able to manipulate me physically into anything. I was mulling over the many things the Voice had said.

"I don't think it can control the host body at all," I said. "The host body has atrophied. Too many centuries with no fresh human blood, no human or vampiric contact, too much darkness for too long."