The Vampire Chronicles

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Previously on "The Vampire Lestat"...

If you are hearing this now,

you must be a very privileged individual.

Louis, do you know someone called Daniel Molloy?

Uh...

Never happened!

Absurd. We're doing a rewrite.

As absurd as a documentary about a rock band

posing as vampires fronted by an actual vampire.

Is it true you were a stutterer as a child?

The name is Raglan James.

Mr. Molloy would like to stay alive, Rashid.

Got me wondering what it'd be like,

ride with others, hunt in a pack.

Hmm. The Tooth Team.

The Fang Gang.

I assume a privileged individual such as yourself

enjoys a little dirt in their sandwich.

So I serve it to you now...

Are you for real?

How it felt then.

Fledgling.

Lover.

Mother.

You are listening to "The Failures,"

Album 8, Side A.

If you're still listening after the...

Oedipiphany of the last hour, welcome back.

I've been fondling my thoughts since the last album,

and I believe there might be value added in illuminating

the why and how I became me

in the light of said Oedipiphany.

You've weathered the Freudian storms.

And yes, that boat is a penis.

And yes, that ocean is my mother's vagina.

Kiss, grope, aftercare.

Onward.

Picture Auvergne, France, 1772.

Picture the dingy seat of the Lioncourt family

at the fag end of a thousand years

of aristocratic decline.

Picture my five dead siblings, Aristide, Marie, Jules,

unbaptized, and Faustin,

garden gnomes guarding the undulating domestic bliss

of our great hall.

The boy possesses an ability to envision

the unseen, the holy.

He would be well-suited

to the monastic house at Haute-Loire.

And what will you get for this favor, hmm?

A silk-lined cassock?

Nothing, Monseigneur.

I see goodness in your son.

Are you a good boy, Lestat?

Answer your brother, Lestat.

I-I...

D-d-don't--

D-d-don't.

Kn-kn-kn--

Kn-kn-know.

No, he doesn't know.

My son, the hiccup, the next Pope?

We can mend his affliction.

Pope, as befits his rank and station.

Titles won on the blood-soaked fields of France.

Siege of Compiègne. Battle of Coutras.

In time, he would learn

to find consolation in philosophy.

What is the course of studies at Haute-Loire?

Aristotle, Erasmus--

I asked the question.

Aristotle, Erasmus, Aquinas.

Cicero, Alberti, Bruno.

The innkeeper tells me he brought these "actors"

back to the inn,

buys them a sum of wine beyond obligation.

Half the village there, waiting for me to pay.

Tenants asking me this. Tenants!

Escape was not an option for Gabriella Vece.

The Marquis had promised her preservation

and delivered her ruin.

On stage with whores and whoremasters.

He wants a taste of the theatre,

you tell him to bed one of them.

You don't open the wagon and join up!

I was impressed into s-service.

She sacrificed her youth, squandered her intellect,

and paid a midwife to nick her in the womb

so he couldn't humiliate her anymore.

Held his hat in the square like a beggar.

Like an actor.

Better a gong farmer than an actor.

Better an actor than a cabbage.

Look up from your book when you speak to our father.

- Cabbage. - Cabbage.

Cabbage.

It was our little joke, the cabbages--

the cabbage heads with cabbage brains

and cabbage wives all speaking cabbage.

At least there would have been some honor in it!

The Lioncourt name, covered in his shit again.

Love nothing, do nothing, change nothing.

Sit and suffer.

Am I suffering?

Is Gregoire?

A question for the philosophers.

Can a cabbage suffer?

One hour on stage, an hour of not this place,

its dampness and dimness and your pockmarked wife

and Gregoire jamming his cock into servant girls

like he's saucing pork!

Cabbage.

- And Lestat speaks... - Cabbage.

A verse with players in a wagon.

Cabbage.

Say "cabbage"

one more goddamn time.

C-c-cabbage.

Break his legs!

You will hunt the land as we do.

You will marry your worth and have children

who will shame you the way you have shamed me.

She had a cold beauty,

like snow behind a thick, distorting wall of glass.

And I grew hard by example.

But now the wolves, they are taking our sheep,

so bold now they have lost their fear.

Another one stolen today.

A puddle of guts where sheep used to be.

They will snatch our babes soon.

There have been wolves in the hills since I was a boy.

Magnificent animals.

The wolves are causing trouble, father.

It's a famine now, seigneur, from here to Versailles.

What do they want us to do about it, huh?

Nothing.

Sit there on your titles

while you fumble to find your pricks

from under the awning of your stomachs.

Piss off!

Keep coughing, huh?

Seeding the nothings you wed, bearing more nothings

who will inherit nothing!

Not funny, brother.

Put the gun down, Lestat.

- She's with child. - Hey!

Put the gun down, Lestat.

The wolves will move on.

We ask your protection as our seigneur.

We would like you to share

some of your bounty on your table.

Hey, go home!

There's nothing more we can do here.

But be men!

She meant to kill me with the challenge.

Better a quick end

than watch me surrender another decade,

watch me join the cabbages.

And what was this life?

The good in me lost at the monastery.

Wait.

My sense of wonder abandoned in a traveling player's wagon.

Go.

I wanted the wolves to come.

Until I didn't.

He refuses food.

He refuses care.

You killed five wolves

by yourself?

Eight,

not five.

Tore apart my horse.

My dog.

Eight.

Do the wolves look worse?

There's a mob came yesterday, again tonight.

They wish to worship you.

Your father and your brothers bent

with shame.

Come down.

You'll enjoy it.

From room to room,

slaughtering the three of them.

That's what I dreamt

when I killed the wolves, Mother.

You know what I dream?

I'm drinking wine.

So drunk, I strip off my clothes

and bathe in the mountain stream naked.

I go into the village...

Into the inn,

and I take into bed

any man that comes.

Crude men, big men,

old men, boys,

taking them one after another,

and feeling some magnificent release in it,

no thought of your father