by Anne Rice
“Stay safe,” said Teskhamen. “Be clever. And if this Voice provokes a gathering of the tribe, consider coming. We cannot stay the same in these times, because nothing now can stay the same, and we must needs meet the challenges as humans are meeting them.”
Teskhamen took a small white card out of his pocket and handed it to Everard. A gentleman’s calling card. On it was written the name TESKHAMEN in golden script, and beneath it was an e-mail very simple to memorize, actually, and a phone number.
“We’re going now, friend,” said Teskhamen. “But if you need us, contact us. We wish you luck.”
“I think I’ll survive this, same way I survived world wars and the earlier massacre, but thank you. And thank you for putting up with my … my disagreeable behavior.”
“It’s been a pleasure,” said Teskhamen. “One last bit of advice. Keep listening to Benji. If there is to be a coming together, Benji will give the word.”
“Hmmm.” Everard shook his head. “A coming together? Like last time? A big showdown to stop the wicked Voice the way the wicked Queen was stopped? How do you have a showdown with a Voice that can pop into the head of anyone at any time and can hear anything perhaps that I’m saying … or even thinking?”
“That’s a good question,” said Raymond Gallant. “It all depends, doesn’t it, on what the Voice really wants.”
“And what is that,” said Everard, “other than to turn us against one another?”
The three creatures rose to their feet. Teskhamen extended his hand.
Everard also rose with obvious respect. “You make me think of better times, you really do,” he murmured in spite of himself. Suddenly he was furious at himself for becoming so emotional.
“And what times were those?” asked Teskhamen kindly.
“When Rhoshamandes was still … Oh, I don’t know. Hundreds of years ago before the Children of Satan destroyed his castle. Destroyed everything. That’s what happens when blood drinkers unite, band together, believe things. We’re evil. We’ve always been.”
The three looked at him calmly without making the slightest response. Nothing in their expressions or demeanor suggested agreement. Or evil.
“And you have no idea at all where Rhoshamandes might be, do you?” asked Raymond Gallant.
“None,” said Everard. And then he found himself confessing, “If I did, why, I’d go to him.” Such strange words coming from him, who had such complete disregard for other blood drinkers, who scorned covens, havens, vampire hostels, and gangs. But he knew he had confessed the truth, that he’d travel the Earth to find Rhoshamandes. Actually, he never traveled anywhere much. But it was good to think he’d travel the Earth to find his old master. “He’s long gone, dead, burned up, immolated, whatever!” he said sharply. “Has to be.”
“You think?” asked Raymond Gallant.
A sudden pain tugged at Everard’s heart. He has to be dead or he would have found me by now, gathered me to him, forgiven me.…
Rhoshamandes had abandoned the wild thick forests of France and Germany in the 1300s. Weary of battling the ever-increasing Children of Satan who had cannibalized his own fledglings to his eternal misery, he had simply left the ancient battlefield.
But Everard had never known the true story. The Children of Satan had had Everard by then, dragging him out nightly to scourge the innocent of Paris. They bragged that they’d driven the last great blasphemer from French land. Had they really? Magnus they had not feared as they had Rhoshamandes.
They told tales of Rhoshamandes’s castle and lands burnt in the daylight hours by rabid monks and nuns driven to do it by the nightly whispers of Children of Satan pretending to be angels. Ah, those times. Those superstitious times when vampires could speak to gullible religious minds and play infernal games with them.
“Well, I can tell you this,” Everard said, denying the pain. “If he’s slumbering underground somewhere under some Merovingian ruin, the Voice won’t get anywhere with him, no matter what state he’s in. He’s too wise for that, too powerful. He was … he was magnificent.”
Sharp grinding memory. Everard going out in filthy rags with the Children of Satan to harry the Parisian poor, slinking into filthy hovels to feed on the innocent, and somewhere near the voice of Rhoshamandes calling: “Everard, break free. Come back to me!”
“Goodbye, Everard,” said Teskhamen, and the three moved off together.
For a long moment, Everard watched them as they walked down the narrow street and disappeared around the corner.
Not a single human being would ever guess what they were. Their human poise was simply superb.
He leaned his elbow on the table and rested his chin in his hand. Was he glad they were gone? Or was he sorry?
Did he want to run after them and say, Don’t leave me here! Take me with you. I want to stay with you.
Yes and no.
He did want to do that, but he simply could not do it. He didn’t know how to do that, how to speak that honestly to them, how to implore them for their help or their companionship. He didn’t know how to be anything but what he was.
Suddenly the Voice was there. He heard it sigh.
“They can’t protect you from me,” said the Voice. “They’re devils.”
“They didn’t seem like devils to me,” said Everard testily.
“They and their laughable Talamasca!” said the Voice. “Be damned!”
“Talamasca,” whispered Everard in amazement. “Of course. Talamasca! That’s where I heard that name Raymond Gallant before. Why, that man was known to Marius. That man …” Died about five hundred years ago.
It was amusing to him suddenly, very amusing. He’d always known about the Talamasca, the old Order of scholars of the supernatural. Rhoshamandes had warned him about them, and their old monastery in southern France. Yet his maker had urged him to respect them and leave them alone. He’d loved them the way he’d loved Magnus.
“For they are gentle scholars,” he’d said in that deep seductive voice of his, “and they mean us no harm. Ah, but it is astonishing. They know as much of us as the Church of Rome, but they do not condemn us and they mean us no harm. They want to learn about us. Imagine it. They study us, and when have we ever studied ourselves? I rather like them for that. I do. You must never hurt them.”
And so their membership included humans and ghosts, did it? And blood drinkers. Raymond Gallant, Teskhamen, and Magnus.
Hmmm. Did all of their human members become ghosts when they died? Well, that would never have worked, surely. There’d be thousands of spectral members floating around by now. That was absurd.
No. It was fairly easy to figure that it was a rare occurrence to recruit a dying member from their ranks to remain with them “in spirit” simply because it was so very rare for any dying person’s spirit to remain behind. Oh, the planet had lots of ghosts, but they were an infinitesimal remnant of all those poor slobs who’d been born and died since the dawn of creation. But how blessed must be the ghosts inducted into the Talamasca with book-educated sorcerers to help them learn to materialize? That’s what Magnus had been driving at. No wonder they’d been so good at it, those two, with their warm ruddy complexions and their shining moist lips.
But the vampire, Teskhamen. How in the world did he become part of them?
Everard ran a quick scan in his mind of what he’d learned about the Talamasca—from Lestat’s writings, and Marius’s memoir. Dedicated, honorable, committed to truth without religious suspicion, censure, or judgment, yes. If their ranks included vampires, the vast majority of the rank and file certainly had never guessed it.
Then there was the great mystery of who had founded the Talamasca. If it turned out to be a vampire, a mere blood drinker, such as Teskhamen, old as he was, well, that would be a crushing disappointment to the others, wouldn’t it?
Hmmm. That was their problem.
He studied the little white card, and put it safely in his jacket.
“Contemptible,” sa
id the Voice. “In the end, I will burn them all as well. I will burn their libraries, their little museums, their retreat houses, their—.”
“I get it!” said Everard angrily.
“You will rue the night you mocked me.”
“Oh, yeah?” Everard said in a low American drawl. “If you’re all that strong, Voice, why don’t you give it a try? They’ve been around since the Dark Ages. And they don’t appear to be afraid of you at all.”
“You infuriating stupid disrespectful and foolish monster!” said the Voice. “Your time will come.”
Everard was suddenly startled. A waiter stood beside him with a mug of coffee, the steam rising in the cool air.
“Talking to yourself again, Signore de Landen?” he said cheerfully.
Everard smiled, shook his head, and took out a couple of bills of big, pretty Italian currency and gave them to the young man.
Then he sat back and held the warm cup in both hands. Lestat did get that right in the Vampire Chronicles, he thought. It was nice to hold a hot mug of coffee in your two hands and let the steam rise into your face.
The only sounds around him were the predictable voices of the town. A motor scooter firing up somewhere far off and then belching as it went away into the country, and the low hum of conversations blossoming behind closed doors.
He was thirsting.
Suddenly he was thirsting, really thirsting, but he hadn’t the energy to go far enough away from his home to satisfy his thirst. He left the coffee, and got up and made his way through the streets to the city gates.
Within moments he’d passed out of the illumination of the high-walled town and he was walking uphill fast in cool darkness and he felt like weeping and he didn’t quite know why.
Was it conceivable that we are a tribe? Was it conceivable that we were beings who could love one another, be gentle with one another the way that Teskhamen had been with his spectral companions, the way Rhoshamandes had been with him so very long ago?
What if there had never been any Children of Satan in his existence, starving and torturing him and teaching him that he was a child of the Devil, that he had to be miserable and create misery for others, that he was a damned and loathsome thing?
What if there had only been mad Rhoshamandes in his crumbling old castle speaking of poetry and power and “splendor in the Blood”?
Human beings didn’t buy all that old religious rot nowadays, did they? They didn’t skulk about under the burden of Original Sin and concupiscence anymore, pleading for absolution for having bedded their wives the night before going to Holy Communion, cursing their anatomy for dooming them to Eternal Damnation, denouncing themselves as bags of stinking bones and flesh. No, quite the contrary. In this new century they were filled with hope and a new kind of innocence and strangely confident optimism that they could solve the problems confronting them, and cure all illness and feed the entire world. At least so it seemed in this clean and peaceful part of Europe which in the past had known so much suffering, so much misery, so much bloodshed and meaningless death.
What if such a bright and shining time had come for blood drinkers as well, even the most monstrous, as Everard had become? His thoughts drifted back in spite of himself to the last brother in the Blood he’d loved—such a fine, spirited young male vampire who, remembering little of his life before the Dark Gift, had seen life around him as miraculous, whispering of the Blood being a sacrament and singing long carefree songs of an evening to the moon and the stars.
But that one had been burnt to ashes by the great and terrible Queen Akasha when she passed over. Everard had seen that with his own eyes—all that sweet vitality extinguished in an instant, indifferently as fire engulfed the whole vampire hangout in Venice where so many others had perished as well. Why had Everard survived?
He shuddered. He didn’t want to think of that. Best never to love another. Best to forget instantly those who winked out as if they’d never existed. Best to live for the pleasures of each night as they came.
But what if it were a time now for them all to come together, to be the tribe that Benji believed them to be, to approach others, old and young, without rage or fear?
Rhoshamandes had laughed at the very idea of the Children of Satan, and their sanctimonious ways. He used to say, “I was in the Blood before their god was even born.”
Everard didn’t want to think too much about all that either. Let it go. And never remember the satanic covens and their Sabbats. Forget forever those horrid hymns offered to the Prince of Darkness.
Ah, what if it were possible to come together, and worship not a Prince of Darkness but a prince of us?
He opened his iPhone and tapped the screen for the app that connected him directly to Benji’s broadcast. The broadcast should be in full swing now in America.
Two hours before dawn.
He was dozing in his favorite leather chair, half dreaming.
Benji was still talking very low through the Bose speaker dock in which Everard had deposited his iPhone. But he was not hearing this.
The dream: Back in Rhoshamandes’s castle in that big hollow hall with the fire blazing and Benedict, handsome Benedict with the pretty face, begging to make a vampire of the monk known as Notker the Wise, a creature of immense talent who wrote music night and day as one possessed, songs, motets, chants, and canticles. And Rhoshamandes considering it, nodding and moving his chess pieces about, and saying, “But you blood drinkers brought over from the Christian god, I simply do not know.”
“Oh, but, Master, the only god Notker worships is music. Master, would that he could play his music forever.”
“Shave off that monkly crown of hair from him first,” Rhoshamandes had said, “and then you bring him over. Your blood, not my blood. But I will not have a tonsured blood drinker.”
Benedict laughed. It was no secret that Rhoshamandes had locked Benedict up for months to allow his “monkly” hair to grow back all over his pretty head before he’d given him the Dark Blood, and Benedict had prepared for the Dark Gift as if it were a sacrament. Rhoshamandes demanded beauty in his fledglings.
Notker the Wise of Prüm was famously beautiful.
A noise awakened Everard.
It drew him abruptly back from that familiar old hall with its soaring beams and stone pavers.
He heard the sharp strike of a match. Flare of flames against his eyelids. There were no matches in this house! He used the Fire Gift to light his fires.
He shot out of the leather easy chair and found himself facing two wild-eyed and disheveled young blood drinkers—a male and a female in the typical vagabond dress of denim and leather. They were setting fire to the draperies in this room.
“Burn, you devil, burn!” shouted the male in Italian.
With a roar, Everard hurled the female through the window, shattering the glass, and yanked down the burning drapery and threw it over the male as he dragged him roughly through the opening and out into the dark garden.
Both were cursing and snarling at him. The male rolled out from under the heap of smoldering velvet with a knife in his hand and ran at Everard.
Burn.
Everard collected the Fire Gift with all his strength in the center of his forehead, then sent the blast against the fool. Flames shot up out of the boy’s body, enveloping his arms and head, and his gasping screams were silenced by the roar of the blaze, the Blood burning as if it were petrol. The female had fled.
But Everard caught her as she mounted the wall, dragging her backwards as he sank his fangs into her throat. She screamed as he tore open the artery, the blood squirting into his mouth, against the back of his mouth, inundating his tongue.
At once the flood of images drugged him, her pounding heart driving them as it drove the blood: the Voice, yes, the Voice telling her to kill, telling them both to kill, lovers made in a filthy back alley in Milan by a scrawny bearded blood drinker who pushed them out to kill and steal, twenty years in the Blood maybe, dying, and then it b
roke down into bits and pieces of childhood, her white First Communion dress, incense, the crowded Cathedral, “Ave Maria,” a mother’s smiling face, a dress of checkered cloth, apples on a plate, taste of apples, the inevitable peace. He drank deeper, drawing every last drop he could from her, on and on, till there was nothing and the heart had stopped gasping like an open-mouth fish.
From the garden shed, he took a spade and chopped her head from her body. Then he slurped what blood now oozed from the torn neck tissues, the emptying vessels. Shimmer of consciousness. Ghastly! He dropped her head and brushed his hands clean.
With a gentle blast of the Fire Gift he incinerated her remains, the sightless staring head with the long straggly locks of black hair caught in her white teeth, the limp body.
The smoke died away.
The soft breeze of early fall caressed him and comforted him.
The silent garden glittered with fragments of broken glass on the tender grass. The blood had cleared his head, sharpened his vision, warmed him, and made the dark morning miraculous. Like jewels, this broken glass. Like stars.
He breathed in the scent of the lemon trees. All the night was empty around him. No dirges to be sung for this anonymous pair, these beings who might have survived for a thousand years if only they had not pitted themselves against one they could not hope to vanquish.
“Ah, so Voice,” Everard said with contempt. “You won’t leave me alone, will you? You haven’t hurt me, you contemptible monster. You sent these two to their deaths.”
But there was no answer.
With the spade he buried the pair, carefully smoothing down the earth, scraping the clods off the stepping-stones, off the path.
He was shaken. He was disgusted.
But one thing was certain. His gift for making fire was now stronger than ever. He had never actually ever used it against another blood drinker. But this had taught him what he could do if he had to do it.
Small consolation.
Then the Voice sighed. Ah, such a sigh. “That was my intention, Everard,” said the Voice. “I told you I wanted you to kill them, the riffraff. And now you have made a start.”