Hmmm. I slipped my arm ever more tightly around his chest. Then drew back, licking at the wounds.

"You choose your friends badly, David," I whispered, licking the blood from my lips, and looking down into his face. He was almost dead.

~

"I don't know"

"Oh, don't give me that. And don't give me those tears! Why did you do it?"

"I tell you the truth. I don't know. I could give you all the many reasons but I don't know. I did it because I wanted to. Because I wanted to see what would happen if I did it, I wanted to... and I couldn't not do it. I knew that when I went back to New Orleans. I... waited and waited, but I couldn't not do it. And now it's done."

David ~ Dany & Dany ©2000

~

"Why Lestat?" he asked, and his voice was torn and sad, and it broke my heart. Overcome with shame, overcome with misery, I pressed my closed eyes again on my right arm, and brought up my left to cover my head. And nothing, not all his pleas or curses or cries against me or his final quiet departure, could make me look up again."

The Tale of the Body Thief ~ Anne Rice

Superior General of the Talamasca, he is a cultured British gentleman with dark grey hair and black eyes who possesses a powerful ability to conceal his mind from others.

David assigns Jesse to investigate the vampires depicted in IV. After Jesse herself becomes a vampire, she tells Lestat about David Talbot and, intrigued, Lestat visits him at Talamasca headquarters in London. He offers David the Dark Gift, but David refuses it. Lestat finds himself powerfully attracted to this mortal who dispels his illusion that no one can refuse the gift of immortality, no matter what it involves. David continues to reject it, yet develops a friendship with Lestat: he even claims that Lestat is his only friend. Lestat loves David for his understanding and acceptance. He has always craved such a bond with a mortal, although he feels that he is a bad influence on David. He worries over David's health at the age of seventy-four and puzzles over the fact that David devoted his life to Talamasca activities. As a young man, David had been an adventurer, travelling the world and going on dangerous safaris. In Rio de Janeiro he apprenticed himself to a Candomble priestess and learned how to manipulate spirits.

Now, however, his quest is to crack the secrets of the universe. He has seen a vision of God and the Devil talking in a Parisian café, and the insights he gained from that vision give him hope that he may discover some important truths. On the other hand, he is disenchanted with his life, worried over his failing strength, and restless for something significant to happen.

He gets his wish when Lestat switches bodies with Raglan James and relies on David to help him get his body back. David devises a plan for knocking the soul of James out of Lestat's vampire body, so that Lestat can get in. In the ensuing struggle, Lestat gets his body back, but David's soul is knocked out of his. James steals his body, leaving him with the body Lestat had occupied as a mortal: that of a twenty-six-year-old physically fit male. David settles into the new body and allows James to meet with Lestat in his old one. Lestat damages David's former body in a rage, but David does not care; he has gained youth and a new chance at life without compromising his soul. He also gains immortality when Lestat forces him to become a vampire.

The character of David Talbot held great significance for Rice. He represented to her the wise teacher; he also brought her face to face with issues of mortality. Rice expresses her concerns through Lestat. Whenever Lestat looks at David, he thinks of David's inevitable death. "I can hear it when I'm near you!" Lestat exclaims. "I can hear the weakness in your heart."

This statement foreshadowed a tragic event in Rice's own life: the death of her father, Howard O'Brien. Like David, he was seventy-four and had a failing heart. Although Rice had written BT before her father was actually ill, she had felt a great sense of darkness as she wrote. "It was an awful time," she said, "a black, black period."

This feeling was similar to the one Rice had just before her daughter had been diagnosed with a fatal case of leukemia, and the parallels between David Talbot and her father were just as uncanny. After BT was finished, Howard grew ill and died from degenerative heart disease. Later, when Rice read over an early draft of BT, she was amazed at how accurately Lestat's words to David predicted what happened with Howard.

"When I reread BT," she says, " I thought that anyone reading this book would think it was written after Howard's death. It was almost as if it had been written in a state of premonition." And just as Rice had resurrected her deceased mother by having Lestat make Gabrielle into a vampire, she saved David, a symbol of her father, in the same way.

Although Lestat made David to be his companion, from time to time David wanders off on his own or joins the other vampires. He has spent time with Armand, Jesse and Maharet, yet he is always available for Lestat. David believes he actually may not survive long as a vampire because he cannot bear the killing, but Lestat insists he will get used to it.

After Lestat kills Roger, David books rooms in Manhattan's Olympic Tower and helps Lestat move Roger's religious treasures there for safekeeping. Later David meets Lestat in New Orleans to hear about his first encounter with Memnoch the Devil. Recalling his own vision of God and the Devil, David thinks it is credible that Memnoch desires Lestat's assistance, but he advises Lestat not to ask Dora for advice on what to do.

Lestat decides to go with Memnoch to Heaven and Hell, and when he returns, David listens to the entire tale, then carefully records it. The possibility that it is all true tempts David to do as Armand has done: to go up in flames and join God. Lestat urges him not to because his entire experience could all be a lie or a false vision. David and Lestat then travel together to New Orleans, where Maharet meets them. She instructs David to assist her in protectively binding Lestat before she delivers to Lestat a note from Memnoch which indicates that Lestat has perfectly served him. While Lestat lies in chains, straining against this new horror, David goes over the story of his journey with him to make certain it is accurate. Since David cannot read Lestat's mind, Maharet helps him get the impressions right.

Talamasca

The organisation introduced in QD that documents paranormal activity. The name derives from a Latin word meaning "animal mask," and was once used to denote witches and shamans.

"I found the word in a book on witchcraft by Jeffrey Burton Russell," Rice explains. "He was givind old words for sorcerer or witch, and one was Talamasca. When I saw the word on the page it inspired the whole idea of the organisation. I thought that word was so beautiful." The organisation itself was influenced by what Rice had read about English psychic research societies from the nineteenth century.

According to David Talbot, its Superior General, the organisation came into existence in A.D. 758 to study vampires. Although its origins are shrouded in mystery, it holds vast wealth in antiquities, art, gold, jewels, manuscripts, and property. The Talamasca's motto is "We watch. And we are always there."

The organisation is introduced into the Chronicles through Jesse, Maharet's mortal descendant, who possesses extraordinary psychic abilities. She enters the order as an apprentice and finds in them a womb and a network that parallels not only the Great Family that she has learned about from Maharet, but also the worldwide network of vampires.

The Talamasca is a secret order. They require of their members confidentiality, honesty, loyalty, and obedience, but do not ask for belief in the supernatural. Their purpose is to document any manifestation of phenomena that seems out of the natural order. They have records of witch families, the witch trials of the Dark Ages, hauntings, sorcery, werewolves, and vampires. They also collect "vampire refuse" - possessions that vampires leave behind - and they have records dating back to the Dark Ages of vampire anatomy and its limitations.

To complete their collection and to resolve many mysteries, they desire a specimen of vampire tissue to study. Their method of acquiring knowledge is one of respectful, nonintrusive observation. Members are trained to memorise the details of an experience or apparition, no matter how great the shock of the moment. Most members possess some degree of psychic ability, and these are especially nurtured and protected by the organisation.

Although members study the writings of other paranormal investigators, the organisation does not embrace of offer any single theory to explain all the phenomena they study.

The Talamasca sets up Motherhouses in many major cities for the comfort and security of its members, and for storing records and artifacts. Most of the vampire collection is kept in the London Motherhouse. Its underground vaults remind Jesse of Maharet's Sonoma compound, for both house things of great mystery.

Many vampires are aware of the existence and activities of the Talamasca. Some are disturbed by it; others ignore it as having no importance. It intrigues Lestat, who has always fantasised about being a scientific speimen. Through the Talamasca's collections he is able to retrieve a locket he once owned containing Claudia's picture.

In BT, David Talbot talks with Lestat about his involvement in the Talamasca, and about some of his concerns about living such a passive, scholarly life. David is also worried that the Talamasca may not be all that it seems. Even though he is Superior General, he believes that the elders who give him his directives possess motives for operating the organisation that remain a mystery. (Rice will explore this mystery in future novels.)

The Talamasca provides a bridge between vampires and mortals. The members are not composed of spiritual substance like the vampires, but are more in touch with the spiritual realm, via their paranormal abilities, than ordinary mortals. As a form of continuous awareness, they parallel the vampires in the way they observe generations of activity.

The Talamasca unwittingly participate in David's plan to help Lestat get his body back in BT. Their man in Mexico, Jake, books passage for Lestat and David on the QE2 and smuggles guns aboard. He is suspicious of Lestat but does not realise that he is a vampire locked in a mortal body. With his involvement in Lestat's cause, David is breaking the Talamasca's rule of noninvolvement, as well as ignoring his own directive not to talk with vampires under any circumstances. As a result of his actions, he is made a vampire - the very danger from which the directive tried to protect him. He then distances himself from the order.

Aaron Lightner, who invites Jesse into the order, describes the Talamasca in much more detail in The Witching Hour. And Rice further develops the origins of the Talamasca and the activities of its elders as a secret order in Lasher and Taltos, her sequels to WH.

The Vampire Companion ~ Katherine Ramsland