In The Arms of Sleep
Artemis
Nov 2000

Disclaimers: The usual - you know the drill
Posted by: Addie
Spoilers: M-r-i-k (fixing it up properly)

Dedicated to Silvia (who shines like a flame in the darkness and helped me find the light), Addie especially (I'm sorry I was such a whiny baby!), MOM, Paula, Mercredi, Azure Flames, Faye-fae, and anyone else who had to put up with my little "overreaction".


"What if in your dream you dreamed, and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you woke you had the flower in you hand?"

                                         --Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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He lay there still, a broken boy like a wilted orchid torn from the shade and left to languish and wane beneath a vernal sun; but his features, nay even to the very outline of his lips had retained their shape, their beauty. It seemed that he might dream of gentle things for his eyes no longer rolled beneath their heavy lids, and the full curve of his mouth turned slightly upward.

There was a smell of burning, of flesh and singed cloth and hair. Beside me David stood at six-foot-four, lean and elegant and burly as a gangland aristocrat, with wavy black hair dramatically tousled by grief, and the woeful dark eyes of a cartoon owl. Even under such compromising circumstances he had somehow managed to retain the illusion of civility, as though he had been broadsided by a semi on his way to the Winter Cotillion.

And the woman, pale in the misty light, the folds of her silk dress billowing around her slender calves and her small head bowed to peer at the charred figure resting inside the coffin. She had been crying, great hiccuping sobs, and the tears gave her porcelain features a sculpted, nearly numinous look, as though she were a marble virgin weeping over her slain child; a Circe of old with her long tangled hair streaming over her back and shoulders; her skin the soft ivory of a newborn fledgling. But who's flegling?

"Do it!" she'd hissed, a girl's plaintive whisper and I struggled to name her in my mind. Jorinda, Gretel, Ashputtel? Or something more exotic--Huitaca or Coyolxauhqui--a moon goddess straight from Middle American legends.

I take a step toward her, tensing my body as I faltered, focusing upon the image of the tree towering over us, new leaves and a softer air than stirred this early vernal dark. My hands clenched as I struggled not to hear the dull chatter in my head warning me--

"No, Lestat! He is so cold! Too strong--" The shadows around me faded, and there was a faint musky smell, like foxgrapes and raw honey. Suddenly a weariness overcame me; not even weariness so much as the terrible sense that something was done, finished. He was still as death, his skin black and smooth as leather. Fragments of leaf and vine and flower petals settling in the hollows of his ribs and throat and softly tangled hair. "No! Too cold, too strong! He should be dead!--"

I ignored them, pushed them back as much for David and his clever witch as for myself to see Louis scorched and mutilated so. Gazing at him I felt neither pity nor remorse nor even horror. It seemed natural to me that he should lie there thus. If he had been cast upon a forest floor rather than this inner courtyard you would not have noticed him at all: he would have been nothing but dead leaves and pallid fungus, acorn mast and a slug coiled in the roots of a tree.

A long, narrow hand slipped from his fragile chest and opened there beside him. In the center of his palm was a single poppy calyx, mohogany colored, the points of its crown standing upright like so many serrated teeth. I reached inside to tap the pod, once; then ran a thumbnail down the small swollen globe as if I were caressing him. A split appeared in its flesh. Tiny droplets oozed forth, milk-white and viscous.

I had heard the arguments Merrick and David put forth to me, I had put them into consideration. But what of me? What of Louis? What would he have had me do? For the first time in the entire span of my existence both mortal and immortal I did not act on impulse. I could not afford to as much for my own peace of mind as for Louis'. What if in using my blood I create nothing but a soulless monster doomed to suffer forever in a casing of mutilated flesh? What if the creature I bring back, as though I were Christ and he Lazarus, is not Louis at all but a clever revenant taking possession of his body? What if it is Louis and he would curse me forever for what I had denied him of--the solace of heaven or oblivion?

"Leave him . . ." Through the air cascades the scent of wild iris and narcissus and I look up. "He is as he should be . . ."

There was a ghost there in the purple darkness, though I had been the only one to see him, his long hair slipping around his shoulders like black rain and his white shirt undone at the throat, silk stockings wrinkled and stained, reduced to only a vague impression of their former eighteenth century splendor.

"He is not yours--"The creature lifted his head and I nearly cried out for the sheer terrifying beauty of it. It was Louis' long, delicate face with its prominent cheekbones and provacative mouth, Louis' arched brows and angular jaw; but that had been as far as the chilling resemblance went. For one thing the spectre had been much taller than Louis, or even David and myself for that matter, and the eyes that fixed upon me though enormous did not slant or darken as Louis' did, and even the color was different, oddly vigilant and twilight blue. "Never of this world--"

"He hungers--" He pushed back at a long strand of jet-black hair and I could see the muscles bunched at his neck, flaring smoothly out onto broad shoulders and sleekly muscled arms covered with fine dark fleece like an otter's, his legs long and exquisitely formed. There was nothing androgynous about him whatsoever, and in this, too, he had been unlike Louis, who could just as easily be mistaken for a slender woman if it had not been for his masculine air and sultry voice.

I looked away, staring at Louis until my vision grew fuzzy and I was only vaguely aware of David speaking to me from a distance somewhere. And I started, almost reeling and blinking back against tears: real tears. Because it was not that awful cadaver that burned upon the white satin but Louis--a boy with green eyes and black hair, heartbreakingly lovely, new leaves brushing his snowy brow, and the steady drone of cicadas piercing the shadowy air around him.

It was like one of those optical illusions that would leave me fuming as I struggled to find the Young Girl in a blot of ink, when all I could see was The Crone. For a fraction of a second both figures would be there on paper, maiden and hag, and then I wold have to try all over again to bring one or the other back in focus.

The same thing was happening now. In front of me Louis' blackened corpse quivered and burned like a flame, while behind him--or within him, or above him--a memory of his former beauty tried to flicker into being. But it never quite appeared. As abruptly as it had begun, the eerie haziness dispersed and Louis lay there like something made of twigs and leaves and earth.

I extended my arm, my gaze never wavering from the sea-colored line that ran the length of it, a vein slightly raised above honey-colored skin. With my other hand I traced the blood vessel as a lover might, let one fingernail hover above the crook of my elbow. The vein throbbed like a seed about to burst. And smoothly, before either David  or the woman knew what I meant to do, I bit into my wrist.

"He is a kingdom," I whispered to the apparition standing before me, eyes huge and luminous as starlight. "And he is mine--"

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He sees me.

I woke, my pulse thundering in my ears like a drum and my arms flailing and tearing at my hair. I breathed deeply, trying to keep the memory from fading, then slowly opened my eyes to a room bathed in the warm ruddy light of yellow tapers. In the darkness above me Louis shimmers into sight, face and body rippling as though seen through waves of heated air, his gaze alone steady and unwavering, hands streaming through the darkness like the purest moonlight ad his eyes two burning stars.

Laughing I reach for him, a beautiful youth framed across the sky. Beneath his feet the darkness churns to sand, the stars to rubble and flecks of dust, and once more I could feel his hot moist skin, the opium musk of his hair seeping into my nostrils and his cool mouth pressed against mine. And all I can see are his eyes, green shading to black and shining halcyon elsewhere; his hair falling onto my cheeks and temples and uncommonly long fingers stroking the hollows of my cheeks, but then he fades from view and a terrible desolation filled me to realize I'd been dreaming again.

I thought of Merrick and David weeping to have almost had that radiant promise of those eyes so swiftly taken away, and the man with the long hair lingering in the garden trees, melancholy eyes gleaming and soft mouth parted in a warning never spoken--

He hungers, he will have you at last . . .