Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [1]
I can no longer fight him off.
It won’t surprise you, I don’t think, that these assaults are vaguely pleasurable, not as pleasurable to me as feeding on a human victim, but they involve a vague orgasmic shimmer that I can’t deny.
But it is not my vulnerability to Goblin that worries me now. It is the question of what Goblin may become.
Now, I have read your Vampire Chronicles through and through. They were bequeathed to me by my Maker, an ancient Blood Hunter who gave me, according to his own version of things, an enormous amount of strength as well.
In your stories you talk of the origins of the vampires, quoting an ancient Egyptian Elder Blood Drinker who told the tale to the wise one, Marius, who centuries ago passed it on to you.
Whether you and Marius made up some of what was written in your books I don’t know. You and your comrades, the Coven of the Articulate, as you are now called, may well have a penchant for telling lies.
But I don’t think so. I’m living proof that Blood Drinkers exist—whether they are called Blood Drinkers, vampires, Children of the Night or Children of the Millennia—and the manner in which I was made conforms to what you describe.
Indeed, though my Maker called us Blood Hunters rather than vampires, he used words which have appeared in your tales. The Cloud Gift he gave to me so that I can travel effortlessly by air; and also the Mind Gift to seek out telepathically the sins of my victims; as well as the Fire Gift to ignite the fire in the iron stove here that keeps me warm.
So I believe your stories. I believe in you.
I believe you when you say that Akasha, the first of the vampires, was created when an evil spirit invaded every fiber of her being, a spirit which had, before attacking her, acquired a taste for human blood.
I believe you when you say that this spirit, named Amel by the two witches who could see him and hear him—Maharet and Mekare—exists now in all of us, his mysterious body, if we may call it that, having grown like a rampant vine to blossom in every Blood Hunter who is made by another, right on up to the present time.
I know as well from your stories that when the witches Mekare and Maharet were made Blood Hunters, they lost the ability to see and talk to spirits. And indeed my Maker told me that I would lose mine.
But I assure you, I have not lost my powers as a seer of spirits. I am still their magnet. And it is perhaps this ability in me, this receptiveness, and my early refusal to spurn Goblin, that have given him the strength to be plaguing me for vampiric blood now.
Lestat, if this creature grows ever more strong, and it seems there is nothing I can do to stop him, is it possible that he can enter a human being, as Amel did in ancient times? Is it possible that yet another species of the vampiric root may be created, and from that root yet another vine?
I cannot imagine your being indifferent to this question, or to the possibility that Goblin will become a killer of humans, though he is far from that strength right now.
I think you will understand when I say that I’m frightened for those whom I love and cherish—my mortal family—as well as for any stranger whom Goblin might eventually attack.
It’s hard to write these words. For all my life I have loved Goblin and scorned anyone who denigrated him as an “imaginary playmate” or a “foolish obsession.” But he and I, for so long mysterious bedfellows, are now enemies, and I dread his attacks because I feel his increasing strength.
Goblin withdraws from me utterly when I am not hunting, only to reappear when the fresh blood is in my veins. We have no spiritual intercourse now, Goblin and I. He seems afire with jealousy that I’ve become a Blood Hunter. It’s as though his childish mind has been wiped clean of all it once learned.
It is an agony for me, all of this.
But let me repeat: it is not on my account that I write to you. It is in fear of what Goblin may become.
Of course