"Ask for it, Wolfkiller, and you will live forever."

~

"My heir chosen to take the Dark Gift from me with more fiber and courage than ten mortal men, what a Child of Darkness you are to be."

The Vampire Lestat ~ Anne Rice

The maker of Lestat, he has survived for over three centuries. He symbolises the darkness that exists beneath the Parisian facades of frivolity. Rice's inspiration for this character came from the short story "Count Magnus" by M. R. James.

"What I liked," says Rice, "was the name and the general mood of the story." According to the tale, Count Magnus is a sixteenth century Swedish aristocrat. "Phenomenally ugly," he is both powerful and cruel and the general populace fears him. Interested in alchemy and the secret of eternal life, he makes a "black pilgrimage" to the city of Chorazin - where, reputedly, the Antichrist was born - and returns home with a mysterious stranger. After the count's death there are sightings of two figures: a tall man in a dark cloak and a short figure wearing a black hood. A gruesome murder on the count's land suggests that Magnus has risen from the dead, possibly with his companion's assistance. The tall figure (Magnus) appears to possess the power to hypnotise people and to move objects at will. He also pursues people relentlessly, appearing wherever they are and making it clear that he is slowly closing in on them, as if he intends to kill them.

In VL, Rice's Magnus is first described as a deeply lined, smiling white face in the audience at Renaud's House of Thesbians where Lestat is performing. Lestat feels a sense of foreboding, a feeling of being watched - of something closing in - and he connects this feeling with the strange, white face. He also believes that the man behind the face knows that he has killed eight wolves. One night he awakens to see the man from the audience standing in his room. The man says, "Wolf-killer," as he abducts Lestat and carries him through the air to a distant tower. Lestat struggles when he realises his abductor is a vampire, but loses consciousness in a sweep of rapture when he is bitten.

Lestat later awakens in a stone house outside Paris, where he sees his abductor uncloaked for the first time. Magnus is old with silver and black hair, spidery limbs and surprisingly soft skin. He wears ragged clothing from another century and his only teeth are fangs. He repeatedly bites Lestat and during these attacks, Lestat experiences a vision of Magnus as a mortal.

When human, magnus had been an alchemist who had trapped a vampire and stolen from him his blood and with it the immortal gift. Whether the vampire was near the point of death (as Marius later indicates is necessary for this theft to occur) is not clear from Lestat's vision. Lestat sees Magnus as a dark Prometheus, the Greek titan of legend who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humankind.

The fact that Magnus is an alchemist is also significant. Representative of spiritual illumination, the process of alchemy strives to make gold from ordinary materials. It combines substances that represent latent inner forces, passion, innocence and transmutation. The stages of alchemy involve dissolving that which is inferior and purifying it, joining forces of opposition and suffering through the tension of these conjoined opposites. As these opposites are bound together, they invert weakness into strength, which is the very image of the vampire joining life and death to turn mortal weakness into immortal power. Rice takes this blending of opposites a step further for she develops androgynous qualities in her vampires, thus transcending gender and she shows how good and evil are both present in that which had been depicted in literature and folklore as an unambiguously evil creature.

Magnus tempts Lestat to ask for the gift of immortality - similar to the way Satan tempted Christ - offering it up as the Blood of Christ, an inverted metaphor of divine immortality. At first, Lestat resists, but eventually he succumbs. As Lestat is Magnus's only "child," it means he receives the full power of three centuries of vampiric strength. Magnus reveals that he chose Lestat because of the courage and stamina he displayed while fighting the pack of wolves on his father's land and that he will now inherit Magnus's tower and all the treasures collected and stored within it. Magnus then lights a fire, dances around it, extracts a promise from the reluctant and terrified Lestat to scatter his ashes, and jumps in to destroy himself. As promised, Lestat tosses Magnus's ashes into the wind.

It is not ever clear why Magnus chose to destroy himself. The old queen of Armand's coven later suggests that Magnus suffered from an affliction common to the old ones: he could no longer bear to take human life of cause suffering and only death would ease his pain. Whatever the reason, Lestat at the time is horrified, for he realises that he is alone with his new experience.

He eventually recovers his wits and explores Magnus's tower. There he discovers four empty stone sarcophagi, fine clothing and a chest of treasures. He also comes upon a shocking scene: a prison cell filled with corpses of blond men, all of whom look like him. He realises that he barely escaped their fate.

In his discussion with Lestat about Hell, Memnoch mentions Magnus. Since the issue of getting through Hell into Heaven centres on forgiveness between victims and perpetrators, he asks Lestat what it would take for him to forgive Magnus. Lestat believes that he has already forgiven him.

The Vampire Companion ~ Katherine Ramsland