by Rice, Anne
But she is most certainly from the same family of powerful psychics—they seem to delight in calling themselves witches—and I have sworn never to see her again. With her considerable powers she would realize at once that something catastrophic has happened to me. And I cannot let my evil touch her in any way.
When I read your Chronicles, I was mildly astonished to discover that the Talamasca had turned against the Blood Hunters. My Maker had told me this, but I didn’t believe it until I read it in your books.
It’s still hard for me to imagine that these gentle people have broken one thousand years of neutrality in a warning against all of our kind. They seemed so proud of their benevolent history, so psychologically dependent upon a secular and kindly definition of themselves.
Obviously, I can’t go to the Talamasca now. They might become my sworn enemies if I do that. They are my sworn enemies! And on account of my past contact, they know exactly where I live. But more significantly, I can’t seek their help because you don’t want it.
You and the other members of the Coven of the Articulate do not want one of us to fall into the hands of an order of scholars who are only too eager to study us at close range.
As for my red-haired Mayfair love, let me repeat that I wouldn’t dream of approaching her, though I’ve sometimes wondered if her extraordinary powers couldn’t help me to somehow put an end to Goblin for all time. But this could not be done without my frightening her and confusing her, and I won’t interrupt her human destiny as mine was interrupted for me. I feel even more cut off from her than I did in the past.
And so, except for my mortal connections, I’m alone.
I don’t expect your pity on account of this. But maybe your understanding will prevent you from immediately annihilating me and Goblin without so much as a warning.
That you can find both of us I have no doubt. If even half the Chronicles are true, it’s plain that your Mind Gift is without measure. Nevertheless, let me tell you where I am.
My true home is the wooden Hermitage on Sugar Devil Island, deep in Sugar Devil Swamp, in northeastern Louisiana, not far from the Mississippi border. Sugar Devil Swamp is fed by the West Ruby River, which branches off from the Ruby at Rubyville.
Acres of this deep cypress swamp have belonged to my family for generations, and no mortal ever accidentally finds his way in here to Sugar Devil Island, I’m certain of it, though my great-great-great-grandfather Manfred Blackwood did build the house in which I sit, writing to you now.
Our ancestral home is Blackwood Manor, an august if not overblown house in the grandest Greek Revival style, replete with enormous and dizzying Corinthian columns, an immense structure on high ground.
For all its huffing and puffing beauty, it lacks the grace and dignity of New Orleans homes, being a truly pretentious monument to Manfred Blackwood’s greed and dreams. Constructed in the 1880s, without a plantation to justify it, it had no real purpose but to give delight to those who lived in it. The entire property—swamp, land and monstrous house—is known as Blackwood Farm.
That the house and land around it are haunted is not only legend but fact. Goblin is without a doubt the most potent of the spirits, but there are ghosts here as well.
Do they want the Dark Blood from me? For the most part, they seem far too weak for such a possibility, but who is to say that ghosts don’t see and learn? God knows that I have some accursed capacity to draw their attention and to endow them with some crucial vitality. It’s been happening all my life.
Have I tried your patience? I hope to God that I have not.
But this letter may be my one chance with you, Lestat. And so I’ve said the things that matter to me most.
And when I reach your flat in the Rue Royale, I’ll use every bit of wit and skill at my command to place this letter where no one will find it but you.
Believing in that ability, I sign my name,
Tarquin Blackwood,
known always as
Quinn
Postscript.
Remember I’m only twenty-two and a bit clumsy. But I can’t resist this small request. If you do mean to track me down and eradicate me, could you give me an hour’s notice to say some sort of farewell to the one mortal relative I most love in all the world?
In the Vampire Chronicle called Merrick, you were described as wearing a coat with cameo buttons. Was that the truth or someone’s fanciful embellishment?
If you wore those cameo buttons—indeed, if you chose them carefully and you loved them—then for the sake of those cameos, let me, before being destroyed, say farewell to an elderly woman of incredible charm and benevolence who loves each evening to spread out her hundreds of cameos on her marble table and examine them one by one in the light. She is my great-aunt and my teacher in all things, a woman who has sought to endow me with all I need to live an important life.
I’m not worthy of her love now. I’m not alive now. But she doesn’t know this. My nightly visits to her are cautious but nevertheless crucial to her. And should I be taken from her without warning and without some explanation, it would be a cruelty she doesn’t deserve.
Ah, there is much more that I could tell you about her cameos—about the role which they have played in my fate.
But for now, let me only plead with you. Let me live, and help me destroy Goblin. Or put an end to us both.
Sincerely,
Quinn
2
For a long time after I finished the letter, I didn’t move.
I sat listening to the inevitable sounds of Sugar Devil Swamp, my eyes on the pages before me, noting against my will the boring regularity of the handwriting, the muted lamps around me reflected in the marble flooring, the glass windows open to the night breeze.
All was well in my little palazzo in the swampland.
No sign of Goblin. No sense of Goblin’s thirst or enmity. Nothing but that which was natural, and faraway, keen to my vampiric ears, the faint stirrings from Blackwood Manor, where Aunt Queen was just rising, with the loving help of Jasmine, our housekeeper, for a mildly eventful night. Soon the television would be going with an enchanting old black-and-white movie. Dragonwyck or Laura, Rebecca or Wuthering Heights. In an hour perhaps Aunt Queen would be saying to Jasmine, “Where is my Little Boy?”
But for now there was time for courage. Time to follow through.
I took the cameo out of my pocket and looked at it. A year ago, when I was still mortal—still alive—I would have had to hold it to the lamp, but not now. I could see it clearly.
It was my own head, in semi-profile, carved skillfully from a fine piece of double-strata sardonyx so that the image was entirely white and remarkably detailed. The background was a pure and shining black.
It was a heavy cameo, and excellent as to the craft. I’d had it done to give to my beloved Aunt Queen, more of a little joke than anything else, but the Dark Blood had come before the perfect moment. And now that moment was forever past.
What did it show of me? A long oval face, with features that were too delicate—a nose too narrow, eyes round with round eyebrows and a full cupid’s-bow mouth that made me look as if I were a twelve-year-old girl. No huge eyes, no high cheekbones, no rugged jaw. Just very pretty, yes, too pretty, which is why I’d scowled for most of the photographs taken for the portrait; but the artist hadn’t carved that scowl into the face.
In fact, he’d given me a trace of a smile. My short curly hair he’d rendered in thick swirls as if it were an Apollonian halo. He’d carved my shirt collar, jacket lapel and tie with equal grace.
Of course the cameo said nothing of my height of six foot four inches, that my hair was jet black, my eyes blue, or of the fact that I was slight of build. I had the kind of long thin fingers which were very good for the piano, which I played now and then. And it was my height that told people that in spite of my all too precious face and feminine hands, I really was a young man.
And so there was this enigmatic creature in a good likeness. A crea
ture asking for sympathy. A creature saying crassly:
“Well, think about it, Lestat. I’m young, I’m stupid. And I’m pretty. Look at the cameo. I’m pretty. Give me a chance.”
I’d have engraved the back with those words in tiny script, but the back was an oval photo case, and there was my image again in dull color, verifying the accuracy of the portrait on the other side.
There was one engraved word on the gold frame, right beneath the cameo, however: the name Quinn, in a good imitation of that routine handwriting which I had always hated so much—the left-handed one trying to be normal, I imagine, the seer of ghosts saying, “I’m disciplined and not insane.”
I gathered up the pages of the letter, reread them quickly, bristling again at my unimaginative handwriting, then folded the pages and put the cameo with them inside of a narrow brown envelope, which I then sealed.
I put this envelope in the inside breast pocket of my black blazer. I closed the top button of my white dress shirt and I adjusted my simple red silk tie. Quinn, the snappy dresser. Quinn, worthy to be a subject in the Vampire Chronicles. Quinn, dressed for begging to be allowed in.
I sat back again, listening. No Goblin. Where was Goblin? I felt an aching loneliness for him. I felt the emptiness of the night air. He was waiting for me to hunt, waiting for the fresh blood. But I had no intention of hunting tonight, even though I was faintly hungry. I was going into New Orleans. I was going, perhaps, to my death.
Goblin couldn’t guess at what was happening. Goblin had never been more than a child. Goblin looked like me, yes, at every stage of my life, but he was forever the infant. Whenever he had grabbed my left hand with his right, the script had been a child’s scrawl.
I leaned over and touched the remote control button on the marble desk. The torchères dimmed and slowly went out. The darkness came into the Hermitage. The sounds seemed to grow louder: the call of the night heron, the subtle movement of the rank dark waters, the scurrying of tiny creatures through the tops of the tangled cypress and gum. I could smell the alligators, who were as wary of the island as men. I could smell the fetid heat itself.
The moon was generous and gradually I made out a bit of the sky, which was a bright metallic blue.
The swamp was at its thickest here around the island—the cypresses, a thousand years old, their knobby roots surrounding the shore, their misshapen branches heavy with trailing Spanish moss. It was as if they meant to hide the Hermitage, and perhaps they did.
Only the lightning now and then attacked these old sentinels. Only the lightning was fearless of the legends that said some evil dwelt on Sugar Devil Island: go there and you might never come back.
I’d been told about those legends when I was fifteen. And at twenty-one I heard it all repeated, but vanity and fascination had drawn me to the Hermitage, to the pure mystery of it—this strong two-story house, and the nearby inexplicable mausolem—and now there was no real later. There was only this immortality, this brimming power which shut me off from actuality or time.
A man in a pirogue would take a good hour to navigate his way out of here, picking through the tree roots, and back to the landing at the foot of the high ground where Blackwood Manor stood so arrogant and aloof.
I didn’t really love this Hermitage, though I needed it. I didn’t love the grim gold-and-granite mausoleum with its strange Roman engravings, though I had to hide inside it from the sun by day.
But I did love Blackwood Manor, with the irrational and possessive love that only great houses can draw from us—houses that say, “I was here before you were born and I’ll be here after you”; houses that seem a responsibility as much as a haven of dreams.
The history of Blackwood Manor had as much of a grip on me as its overweening beauty. I’d lived my whole life on Blackwood Farm and in the Manor, except for my wonderful adventures abroad.
How so many uncles and aunts had managed to leave Blackwood Manor over the years, I couldn’t fathom, but they weren’t important to me, those strangers who had gone North and only came home now and then for funerals. The house had me in thrall.
I was debating now. Do I go back, just to walk through the rooms again? Do I go back to seek out the large rear first-floor bedroom where my beloved Aunt Queen was just settling into her favorite chair? I did have another cameo in my jacket pocket, one expressly bought for her only nights before in New York, and I should give it to her, shouldn’t I? It was a wonderful specimen, one of the finest—.
But no. I couldn’t manage a partial farewell, could I? I couldn’t hint that something might happen to me. I couldn’t gleefully descend into mystery, into which I’d already sunk up to my eyeballs: Quinn, the night visitor, Quinn who likes dimly lighted rooms now and shies from lamps as though he suffers from an exotic disease. What good would a partial farewell do for my beloved and gentle Aunt Queen?
If I failed tonight, I would be another legend: “That incorrigible Quinn. He went deep into Sugar Devil Swamp, though everybody told him not to; he went to that accursed island Hermitage, and one night he just didn’t come back.”
The fact was, I didn’t believe Lestat would blast me into infinity. I didn’t believe he would do it without letting me tell him my story, all or at least in part. Maybe I was just too young to believe it. Maybe because I’d read the Chronicles so avidly, I felt Lestat was as close to me as I was to him.
Madness, most likely. But I was bound and determined to get as near to Lestat as I could. From where and how he kept watch over New Orleans I didn’t know. When and how often he visited his French Quarter flat I didn’t know either. But this letter and the gift of the onyx cameo of myself was to go to that flat tonight.
Finally I got up from the leather-and-gold chair.
I went out of the splendid marble-floored house, and with no more than thought to direct me I let myself rise from the warm earth slowly, experiencing a delicious lightness, until I could see from the cool heights far above the huge long meandering black mass of the swamp, and the lights of the big house shining as if it were a lantern on the smooth grass.
Towards New Orleans I willed myself, using this strangest of powers, the Cloud Gift, traversing the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and moving towards the infamous town house in the Rue Royale, which all Blood Hunters knew was the house of the invincible Lestat.
“One hell of a devil,” my Maker had called him, “keeping his properties in his own name though the Talamasca is hounding him. He means to outlast them. He’s more merciful than I.”
Merciful; that was what I was counting on now. Lestat, wherever you are, be merciful. I don’t come with disrespect. I need you, as my letter will show.
Slowly I descended, down, down, into the balmy air again, a fleeting shadow to prying eyes if there were any, until I stood in the rear courtyard of the town house, near to the murmuring fountain, looking up at the curving iron stairs that led to Lestat’s rear door.
All right. I am here. So the rules have been broken. So I’m in the courtyard of the Brat Prince himself. Descriptions came to mind from the pages of the Chronicles, complex as the bougainvillea vine running rampant up the iron columns to the upstairs cast-iron railing. It was like being in a very shrine.
All around me I could hear the brash noises of the French Quarter: the clatter of restaurant kitchens, the happy voices of the inevitable tourists on the pavements. I heard the thinnest sound of the jazz blaring out of doors on Bourbon Street. I heard the creeping rumble of cars passing sluggishly in front.
The little courtyard itself was tight and beautiful; the sheer height of its brick walls caught me off guard. The glistening green banana trees were the biggest I’d ever seen, their waxy stalks buckling the purple flagstones here and there. But this was no abandoned place.
Someone had been here to clip the dead leaves from the banana groves. Someone had taken away the shriveled bananas that always wither in New Orleans before they ripen. Someone had cut back the abundant roses so that the patio itself was clear.
Even the water gurgling from the conch in the stone cherub’s hand down into the basin of the fountain was fresh and clean.
All these sweet little details made me feel all the more like a trespasser, but I was too damned foolishly passionate to be afraid.
Then I saw a light shining through the rear windows above, a very dim light, as if from a lamp deep in the flat.
That did frighten me, but again the all-possessing madness in me mounted. Would I get to speak to Lestat himself? And what if, catching sight of me, he sent out the Fire Gift without hesitating? The letter, the onyx cameo, my own bitter pleas wouldn’t have a chance.
I should have given Aunt Queen the new cameo. I should have grabbed her up and kissed her. I should have made a speech to her. I was about to die.
Only a perfect idiot could have been as exhilarated as I was. Lestat, I love you. Here comes Quinn to be your student and slave!
I hurried up the curving iron stairs, careful not to make a sound. And once I reached the rear balcony, I caught the distinct scent of a human being inside. A human being. What did this mean? I stopped and sent the Mind Gift before me to search out the rooms.
At once a confusing message reached me. There was a human there, no doubt of it, and he was furtive, this one, moving in haste, painfully conscious of the fact that he had no right to be where he was. And this someone, this human, knew that I was here as well.
For a moment, I didn’t know what to do. Trespassing, I had caught an intruder in the act. A strange protective feeling flooded me. This person had invaded Lestat’s property. How dare he? What sort of a bumbler was he? And how did he know that I was here, and that my mind had searched his?
In fact, this strange unwelcome being had a Mind Gift that was almost as strong as mine. I sounded for his name and he yielded it up to me: Stirling Oliver, my old friend, from the Talamasca. And at the same moment, as I detected his identity, I heard his mind recognize me.