Armand thought for a long moment. “Unclear. But it was the name Amel spoken so often by Benji and others on the radio broadcast that brought the creature to our door.”

With a small subtle gesture of his right hand, Teskhamen spoke up. “The Talamasca has accumulated materials on the legend of Atlantis for centuries,” he said. “There are two lines of research.”

I nodded for him to go on. “There are the legends beginning really with Plato’s account written in four hundred B.C. And then there are the recent speculations of modern New Age scholars that some sort of catastrophe did affect this planet around eleven to twelve thousand years ago, at which time a great civilization was destroyed, leaving underwater ruins all over the world.”

The comely ghost of Raymond Gallant was studying him, hanging on his every word. When Teskhamen didn’t say anything more, Raymond spoke up. “There’s a lot of evidence apparently that there was indeed an ancient civilization before this cataclysm, and possibly more than one civilization. Yet scientists are resistant. The climatologists argue constantly. The sea levels did change drastically, but why precisely we don’t know. Biblical scholars claim it was Noah’s flood. Others go about examining underwater ruins, attempting to relate them to the catastrophe. The British writer Graham Hancock writes elegantly and persuasively on the topic. But again, there is no consensus.”

“Fareed says it’s all bunk,” I volunteered. “But beautiful bunk.”

“I’m no longer inclined to agree,” said Marius. “Certainly I thought so centuries ago, yes, that Plato gave birth to a splendid idea with the story of Atlantis, but he was writing a moral tale.”

“And where are Fareed and Seth?” asked my mother.

“Off on a mission to investigate what just may be another of these creatures,” I explained. “The minute word reached Fareed as to this creature, Garekyn, he went off to have a look at a mysterious female employee of Gregory’s whom he’d come to suspect wasn’t a human being.”

I could see that some at the table knew this and some didn’t. It was always the way with the blood drinkers. Some knew all that was happening everywhere as if they received every telepathic emission generated anywhere by anyone, and others were startled, like my mother, who looked up and at me with narrow scornful gray eyes.

My mother’s hair was in her usual long solitary ashen-blond braid, but she was dressed like Sevraine for this meeting, or because it was the way she dressed now in Sevraine’s underground Cappadocian compound—in a long simple gown of gray wool trimmed in thick silver embroidery obviously made by vampiric hands. She looked no softer or more feminine than usual, and in fact slightly disdainful of the entire meeting and even annoyed.