Prince Lestat (2 page)
Authors: Anne Rice
Lestat once again wrote the story. He had been there. He had seen the passing of the power with his own eyes. He gave his testimony to everyone. The mortal world took no notice of his “fictions,” but his tales shocked the Undead.
And so the story of origins and ancient battles, of vampire powers and vampire weaknesses, and wars for control of the Dark Blood became the common knowledge of the Undead tribe the world over. It became the property of old ones who’d been comatose for centuries in caves or graves, of young ones misbegotten in jungles or swamps or urban slums who had never dreamed of their antecedents. It became the property of wise and secretive survivors who had lived in isolation through the ages.
It became the legacy of all blood drinkers the world over to know they shared a common bond, a common history, a common root.
This is the tale of how that knowledge changed the tribe and its destiny forever.
lood
A
rgot
When the Vampire Lestat wrote his books, he used any number of terms taught to him by the vampires he had encountered in his life. And those vampires who added to his work, offering their memoirs and their experiences in written form, added terms of their own, some much more ancient than those ever revealed to Lestat.
This is a list of those terms, which are now common amongst the Undead throughout the world.
The Blood
—When the word is capitalized it refers to vampiric blood, passed on from master to fledgling through a deep and often dangerous exchange. “In the Blood” means that one is a vampire. The Vampire Lestat had over two hundred years “in the Blood” when he wrote his books. The great vampire Marius has over two thousand years in the Blood. And so forth and so on.
Blood Drinker
—The most ancient term for vampire. This was Akasha’s simple term, which she later sought to supplant with the term “blood god” for those who followed her spiritual path and her religion.
Blood Wife or Blood Spouse—
One’s vampire mate.
Children of the Millennia
—Term for immortals who have lived more than a thousand years and most specifically for those who have survived more than two.
Children of the Night
—Common term for all vampires, or all those in the Blood.
Children of Satan
—Term for vampires of late antiquity and after who believed they were literally children of the Devil and serving God through serving Satan as they fed upon humankind. Their approach to life was penitential and puritanical. They denied themselves all pleasure except drinking blood and occasional Sabbats (large gatherings) at which they danced, and they lived underground, often in filthy and dismal catacombs and enclosures. The Children of Satan have not been seen nor heard of since the eighteenth century, and in all likelihood the cult has died out.
The Coven of the Articulate
—A modern slang term popular among the Undead for the vampires whose stories appear in the Vampire Chronicles—particularly Louis, Lestat, Pandora, Marius, and Armand.
The Dark Gift
—A term for the vampiric power. When a master bestows the Blood on a fledgling, that master is offering the Dark Gift.
The Dark Trick
—Refers to the act of actually making the new vampire. To draw out the fledgling’s blood and to replace it with one’s own powerful Blood—is to work the Dark Trick.
The Devil’s Road
—Medieval term among the vampires for the road each vampire takes through this world; a popular term of the Children of Satan who saw themselves as serving God through serving the Devil. To ride the Devil’s Road was to live one’s life as an immortal.
The First Brood
—These are the vampires descended from Khayman who were in rebellion against Queen Akasha.
The Queens Blood
—These are the vampires made by Queen Akasha to follow her path in the Blood and fight the rebels of the First Brood.
The Sacred Core
—This refers to the residing brain or governing life force of the spirit Amel, which is inside the body of the vampire Mekare. Before it was in Mekare it was in the vampire Akasha. It is believed that every vampire on the planet is connected to the Sacred Core by some sort of invisible web or network of tentacles. If the vampire containing the Sacred Core were to be destroyed, all the vampires of the planet would die.
The Fire Gift
—This is the ability of older vampires to use their telekinetic power to burn matter. They can, through the power of their minds, burn wood, paper, or any flammable substance. And they can burn other vampires as well, igniting the Blood in their bodies and reducing them to cinders. Only older vampires possess this power, but no one can say when and how a vampire acquires it. A very young vampire made by an ancient one may immediately possess the power. A vampire must be able to see that which he or she wants to burn. In sum, no vampire can burn another if he cannot see that vampire, if he is not close enough to direct the power.
The Cloud Gift
—This is the ability of older vampires to defy gravity, to rise up and move in the upper atmosphere and to cover long distances easily, traveling the winds unseen by those below. Again, no one can say when a vampire might acquire this power. The will to have it may work wonders. All truly ancient ones possess it whether they know it or not. Some vampires despise the power and never use it unless forced.
The Mind Gift
—This is a loose and imprecise term which refers to the preternatural powers of the vampiric mind on many levels. Through the Mind Gift, a vampire might learn things from the world above even when he is sleeping in the earth below. And consciously using the Mind Gift, he might telepathically listen to the thoughts of mortals and immortals. He might use the Mind Gift to pick up images from others as well as words. He might use the Mind Gift to project images into the minds of others. And finally he might use the Mind Gift to telekinetically open a lock, push open a door, or stop the progress of an engine. Again, vampires develop the Mind Gift slowly over time, and only the most ancient can rape the minds of others for information they do not wish to give, or send a telekinetic blast to rupture the brain and blood cells of a human being or another vampire. A vampire can listen to many the world over, hearing and seeing what others hear. But to destroy telekinetically, he or she must be able to see the intended victim.
The Spell Gift
—This refers to the power of vampires to confuse, beguile, and spellbind mortals and sometimes other vampires. All vampires, even fledglings, have this power to some extent, though many don’t know how to use it. It involves a conscious attempt to “persuade” the victim of the reality the vampire wants the victim to embrace. It doesn’t enslave the victim. But it does confuse and mislead. It depends on eye contact. One can’t spellbind anyone from a distance. In fact, it more often involves words as well as glances, and certainly involves the Mind Gift on some level.
Fledgling
—A new vampire very young in the Blood. Also, one’s own offspring in the Blood. For example, Louis is the fledgling of Lestat. Armand is the fledgling of Marius. The ancient twin Maharet is the fledgling of her twin, Mekare. Mekare is the fledgling of the ancient Khayman. Khayman is the fledgling of Akasha.
The Little Drink
—Stealing blood from a mortal victim without the victim knowing it or feeling it, without the victim having to die.
Maker
—Simple term for the vampire who brought one into the Blood. Being slowly replaced by the term “mentor.” Sometimes the maker is also referred to as the “master.” However, this has gone out of use. In many parts of the world it is considered a great sin to rise up against or seek to destroy one’s maker. A maker can never hear the thoughts of a fledgling, and vice versa.
The Queen of the Damned
—Term given to the vampire Mekare by her sister Maharet once Mekare had taken the Sacred Core into herself. It was ironic. Akasha, the fallen Queen who had sought to dominate the world, had called herself the Queen of Heaven.
The Savage Garden
—A term used by Lestat for the world, fitting with his belief that the only true laws of the universe are aesthetic laws, the laws that govern the natural beauty we see all around us on the planet.
The Undead
—Common term for vampires of all ages.
art
I
THE
VAMPIRE
LESTAT
T
he
V
oice
Y
EARS AGO
, I heard him. He’d been babbling.
It was after Queen Akasha had been destroyed and the mute red-haired twin, Mekare, had become “the Queen of the Damned.” I’d witnessed all that—the brutal death of Akasha in the moment when we all thought we would die, too, along with her.
It was after I’d switched bodies with a mortal man and come back into my own powerful vampiric body—having rejected the old dream of being human again.
It was after I’d been to Heaven and Hell with a spirit called Memnoch, and come back to Earth a wounded explorer with no appetite anymore for knowledge, truth, beauty.
Defeated, I’d lain for years on the floor of a chapel in New Orleans in an old convent building, oblivious to the ever-shifting crowd of immortals around me—hearing them, wanting to respond, yet somehow never managing to meet a glance, answer a question, acknowledge a kiss or a whisper of affection.
And that’s when I first heard the Voice. Masculine, insistent, inside my brain.
Babbling, like I said. And I thought, Well, perhaps we blood drinkers can go mad like mortals, you know, and this is some artifact of my warped mind. Or maybe he is some massively crippled ancient one, slumbering somewhere nearby, and somehow I, telepathically, get to share in his misery.
There are physical limits to telepathy in our world. Of course. But then voices, pleas, messages, thoughts, can be relayed through other
minds, and conceivably, this poor slob could be mumbling to himself on the other side of the planet.
As I said, he had babbled, mixing languages, ancient and modern, sometimes stringing a whole sentence out in Latin or Greek, and then lapsing into repetitions of modern voices … phrases from films and even songs. Over and over he begged for help, rather like the tiny human-headed fly at the end of the B-movie masterpiece, Help me, help me, as if he too were caught in a spiderweb and a giant spider were closing in on him. Okay, okay, what can I do, I’d ask, and he was quick to respond. Near at hand? Or just the best relay system in the Undead world?
“Hear me, come to me.” And he’d say that over and over again, night after night, until it was noise.
I have always been able to tune him out. No problem. Either you learn to tune out telepathic voices when you are a vampire or you go straight out of your mind. I can tune out the cries of the living just as easily. Have to. No other way to survive. Even the very ancient ones can tune out the voices. I’ve been in the Blood for over two hundred years. They’ve been in the Blood for six millennia.
Sometimes he simply went away.
Around the early years of the twenty-first century he began to speak in English.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you like it,” he said in that crisp masculine tone of his. Laughter. His laughter. “Everybody likes English. You must come to me when I call you,” he said. Then he was babbling again, in a mélange of languages, all about blindness, suffocation, paralysis, helplessness. And it devolved into “Help me” again with snatches of poetry in Latin and Greek and French and English.
This is interesting for maybe three-quarters of an hour. After that, it’s repetitious and a nuisance.
Of course I did not even bother to say no.
At one point, he cried out “Beauty!” and babbled on incessantly, always getting back to “Beauty!” and always with an exclamation point I could feel like the jab of a finger against my temple.
“Okay, ‘beauty,’ so what?” I asked. He moaned, wept, went into dizzying incoherent reverie. I tuned him out for a year, I think. But I could feel him rumbling under the surface, and then two years after that—it might have been—he started addressing me by name.
“Lestat, you, Brat Prince!”
“Oh, get off it.”
“No, you, Brat Prince, my prince, boy oh boy, Lestat.…” Then he ran those words through ten modern languages and six or seven ancient ones. I was impressed.
“So tell me who you are, or else,” I said glumly. I had to confess when I was extremely lonely, I was happy to have him around.
And that was not a good year for me. I was wandering aimlessly. I was sick of things. I was furious with myself that the “beauty” of life wasn’t sustaining me, wasn’t making my loneliness bearable. I was wandering at night in jungles and in forests with my hands up to touch the leaves of the low branches, crying to myself, doing a lot of babbling of my own. I wandered through Central America visiting Maya ruins, and went deep down into Egypt to walk in the desert wastes and see the ancient drawings on the rocks on the way to the ports of the Red Sea.
Young maverick vampires kept invading the cities where I roamed—Cairo, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Honolulu, San Francisco—and I grew weary of disciplining them, punishing them for slaughtering the innocent in their misbegotten hunger. They’d get caught, thrown into human jails where they’d burn up when dawn came. Occasionally they’d fall into the hands of actual forensic scientists. Bloody nuisance.
Nothing ever came of it. But more on that later.
The mavericks multiplying everywhere were causing trouble for one another, and their gang fights and brawls have made life ugly for the rest of us. And they think nothing of trying to burn with fire or decapitate any other blood drinker who gets in their way.
It is chaos.
But who am I to police these preternatural nincompoops?