The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (364 page)

It’s strange how we feel cold. You can ignore it. And then very suddenly, you can take it personally.

My radiant Dora sat next, opposite Armand, and David sat facing me between them. This left me the chair with its back to the glass and the sky if I wanted it. I stared at it. Such a simple object, a black lacquered chair, Oriental design, vaguely Chinese, mostly functional, obviously expensive.

Dora rose, her legs seeming to unfold beneath her. She wore a thin, long gown of burgundy silk, just a simple dress, the artificial warmth surrounding her obviously and keeping her safe. Her arms were bare and white. Her face was filled with worry, her cap of shiny black hair making two points on either side of her face, mid-cheek, the fashionable bob of eighty years ago and of today. Her eyes were the owl eyes, and full of love.

“What happened, Lestat?” she said. “Oh, please, please tell us.”

“Where is the other eye?” asked Armand. It was just the sort of question he would ask. He had not risen to his feet. David, the Englishman, had risen, simply because Dora had risen, but Armand sat there looking up at me, asking the direct question. “What happened to it? Do you still have it?”

I looked at Dora. “They could have saved that eye,” I said, quoting her story of Uncle Mickey and the gangsters and the eye, “if only those gangsters hadn’t stepped on it!”

“What are you saying?” she said.

“I don’t know if they stepped on my eye,” I said, irritated by the tremour in my voice. The drama of my voice. “They weren’t gangsters, they were ghosts, and I fled, and I left my eye. It was my only chance. I left it on the step. Maybe they
smashed it flat, or smeared it like a blob of grease, I don’t know. Was Uncle Mickey buried with his glass eye?”

“Yes, I think so,” Dora said in a daze. “No one ever told me.

I could sense the other two scanning her, Armand scanning me, their picking up the images of Uncle Mickey, kicked half to death in Corona’s Bar on Magazine Street, and the gangster with the pointed shoe squashing Uncle Mickey’s eye.

Dora gasped.

“What happened to you?”

“You’ve moved Roger’s things?” I asked. “Almost all of them?”

“Yes, they’re in the chapel at St. Elizabeth’s, safe,” Dora said. “St. Elizabeth’s.” That was the name of the orphanage in its lifetime. I had never heard her say it before. “No one will even think to look for them there. The press doesn’t care about me anymore. His enemies circle his corporate connections like vultures; they zero in on his bank accounts and floating bank drafts, and safe-deposit boxes, murdering for this or that key. Among his intimates, his daughter has been declared incidental, unimportant, ruined. No matter.”

“Thank God for that,” I said. “Did you tell them he was dead? Will it all end soon, his story, and what part you have to play in it?”

“They found his head,” said Armand quietly.

In a muted voice he explained. Dogs had dragged the head from a heap of garbage, and were fighting over it beneath a bridge. For an hour, an old man watched, warming himself by a fire, and then gradually he realized it was a human head that the dogs were fighting over and gnawing at, and they brought the head to the proper authorities, and through the genetic testing of his hair and skin discovered that it was Roger. Dental plates didn’t help. Roger’s teeth had been perfect. All that remained was for Dora to identify it.

“He must have wanted it found,” I said.

“What makes you say that?” asked David. “Where have you been?”

“I saw your mother,” I said to Dora. “I saw her bottle-blond hair and her blue eyes. It won’t be long before they’re in Heaven.”

“What on earth are you saying, my darling?” she asked. “My angel? What are you telling me?”

“Sit down, all of you. I’ll tell you the whole tale. Listen to everything I say without interrupting. No, I don’t want to sit, not with my back to the sky and the whirlwind and the snow and the church. No, I’ll walk back and forth, listen to what I have to tell you.

“Remember this. Every word of this happened to me! I could have been tricked. I could have been deceived. But this is what I saw with my eyes, and heard with my ears!”

I told them everything, from the very, very beginning, some things each of them had already heard, but which all of them together had never heard—from my first fatal glimpse of Roger and my love for his brazen white-toothed smile and guilty, gleaming black eyes—all the way to the moment I had pitched myself through the door of the flat last night.

I told them everything. Every word spoken by Memnoch and God Incarnate. Everything I had seen in Heaven and in Hell and on Earth. I told them about the smell and the colors of Jerusalem. I told them and told them and told them.…

The story devoured the night. It ate the hours, as I paced, raving, repeating those parts I wanted to get exactly right, the stages of Evolution which had shocked the angels, and the vast libraries of Heaven, and the peach tree with both bloom and fruit, and God, and the soldier lying on his back in Hell, refusing to give in. I described to them the details of the interior of Hagia Sophia. I talked about the naked men on the battlefield. Over and over I described Hell. I described Heaven. I repeated my final speech, that I couldn’t help Memnoch, I couldn’t teach in this school!

They stared at me in utter silence.

“Do you have the veil?” Dora asked, her lip quivering. “Do you still have it?”

So tender was the tilt of her head, as if she’d forgive me in an instant if I said, No, I lost it in the street, I gave it to a beggar!

“The veil proves nothing,” I said. “Whatever is on the veil means nothing! Anyone who can make illusions like that can make a veil! It proves neither truth nor lies, neither trickery nor witchery nor theophany.”

“When you were in Hell,” she asked, so kindly, so gently, her white face shining in the warmth of the lamp, “did you tell Roger you had the veil?”

“No, Memnoch wouldn’t let me. And I only saw him for a minute, you see, one second it was one way, and then it was another. But he’s going up, I know he is, he’s going because he’s clever and he’s figured it out, and Terry will go with him! They will be in the arms of God unless God is a cheap magician and all of this was a lie, but a lie for what? For what purpose?”

“You don’t believe what Memnoch asked of you?” asked Armand.

Only at this moment did I realize how shaken he was, how like the boy he must have been when made a vampire, how young and full of earthly grace. He wanted it to be true!

“Oh, yes, I do!” I said. “I believed him, but it
could all be a lie
, don’t you see?”

“Didn’t you feel it was true,” asked Armand, “that he needed you?”

“What?” I demanded. “Are we back to that, arguing whether or not when we serve Satan we serve God? You and Louis arguing about that in the Theater of the Vampires, if we are children of Satan, are we children of God?”

“Yes!” said Armand. “Did you believe him?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know!” I shouted it. “I hate God as much as I ever did. I resent them both, damn them!”

“And Christ?” Dora asked, her eyes filled with tears. “Was He sorry for us?”

“Yes, in His own way. Yes. Perhaps. Maybe. Who knows! But He didn’t go through the Passion as a man alone, as Memnoch had begged Him to do, He carried His cross as God Incarnate. I tell you their rules are not our rules! We have conceived of better rules! We are in the hands of mad things!”

She broke into soft, sorrowful cries.

“Why are we never, never to know?” she cried.

“I don’t know!” I declared. “I know they were there, that they appeared to me, that they let me see them. And still I don’t know!”

David was scowling, scowling rather like Memnoch could scowl, deep in thought. Then he asked:

“And if it was all a series of images and tricks, things drawn from your heart and your mind, what was the purpose? If it was not a straight proposition that you become his lieutenant or prince, then what could have been the motive?”

“What do you think?” I asked. “They have my eye! I tell you not a word of it is a lie from me. They’ve got my bloody eye, damn it. I don’t know what it was all about, unless it was true, absolutely true to the last syllable.”

“We know you believe it’s true,” said Armand. “Yes, you believe it completely. You bore witness. I believe it’s true. All of my long wandering through the valley of death, I’ve believed it was true!”

“Don’t be a common fool,” I said bitterly.

But I could see the flame in Armand’s face; I could see the ecstasy and the sorrow in his eyes. I could see the entire galvanization of his form with belief, with conversion.

“The clothes,” said David thoughtfully, calmly, “in the other room. You’ve gathered them all up, and the evidence will tell some scientific tale.”

“Stop thinking like a scholar. These are Beings who play at a game only they can understand. What is it to them to make pine needles and dirt cling to my clothes, but yes, I saved those
relics, yes, I’ve saved everything but my goddamned eye, which I left on the steps of Hell so I could get out. I, too, want to analyze the evidence on those clothes. I, too, want to know what forest it was where I walked and listened to him!”

“They let you get out,” said David.

“If you could have seen his face when he saw that eye on the step,” I said.

“What was it in his face?” Dora asked.

“Horror, horror that such a thing had happened. You see, when he reached for me, I think that his two fingers, like this, went into the eye socket, overshooting the mark. He had merely meant to grab me by the hair. But when his fingers plunged into the socket, he tried in horror to draw them out, and out came the eye, spilling down my face, and he was horror-stricken!”

“You love him,” said Armand in a hushed voice.

“I love him. Yes, I think he’s right about everything. But I don’t believe in anything!”

“Why didn’t you accept?” asked Armand. “Why didn’t you give him your soul?”

Oh, how innocent he sounded, how it came from his heart, ancient and childlike, a heart so preternaturally strong that it had taken hundreds of years to render it safe to beat in the company of mortal hearts.

Little Devil, Armand!

“Why didn’t you accept!” he implored.

“They let you escape, and they had a purpose,” said David. “It was like the vision I saw in the café.”

“Yes, and they had a purpose,” I said. “But did I defeat their purpose?” I looked to him for the answer, he the wise one, the old one in human years. “David, did I defeat them when I took you out of life? Did I defeat them somehow some other way? Oh, if only I could remember, their voices in the beginning. Vengeance. Someone said that it wasn’t simple vengeance. But it was those fragments. I can’t remember now What’s happened! Will they come back for me?”

I fell to crying again. Stupid. I fell to describing Memnoch again, in all his forms, even the Ordinary Man, who had been so extraordinary in his proportions, the haunting footsteps, the wings, the smoke, the glory of Heaven, the singing of angels … “Sapphiric …” I whispered. “Those surfaces, all the things the prophets saw and sprinkled throughout their books with words like topaz and beryl and fire and gold and ice and snow, and it was all there … and He said, ‘Drink my Blood!’ I did it!”

They drew close to me. I’d scared them. I’d been too loud, too crazed, too possessed. They stood around me, their arms against me, her fiery white human arms, the warmest, the sweetest of all, and David’s dark brow pushed against my face.

“If you let me,” said Armand, his fingers slipping up to my collar, “if you let me drink, then I’ll know.…”

“No, all you’ll know is that I believe what I saw, that’s all!” I said.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ll know the blood of Christ if I taste it.”

I shook my head. “Back away from me. I don’t even know what the veil will look like. Will it look like something with which I wiped my blood sweat in my sleep as I dreamt? Back away.”

They obeyed. They were a loose triangle. I had my back to the inner wall so that I could see the snow on my left side, though I had to turn my head to the left now to do it. I looked at them. My right hand fumbled inside my vest, it drew out the thick wad, and I felt something, something tiny and strange which I could not explain to them, or put into words even for myself, I felt the weave, that weave of cloth, that ancient weave!

I drew out the veil, not looking myself, and held it up as if I were Veronica showing it to the crowd.

A silence gripped the room. A motionlessness.

Then I saw Armand go down on his knees. And Dora let out her long, keening cry.

“Dear God,” said David.

Shivering, I lowered the veil, still held wide open with both hands, and turned it so I could see the reflection of the veil in the dark glass against the snow, as if it was the Gorgon and was going to kill me.

His Face! His Face blasted into the veil. I looked down. God Incarnate staring at me from the most minute detail, burnt into the cloth, not painted or stained, or sewn or drawn, but blasted into the very fibers, His Face, the Face of God in that instant, dripping with blood from His Crown of Thorns.

“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, yes.” I fell on my knees. “Oh, yes, so very complete, down to the last detail.”

I felt her take the veil. I would have snatched it back if either of them had tried. But into her small hand, I entrusted it, and she held it up now turning round and round, so that all of us could see His dark eyes shining from the cloth!

“It’s God!” she screamed. “It’s Veronica’s Veil!” Her cry grew triumphant and then filled with joy. “Father, you’ve done it! You have given me the Veil!”

And she began to laugh, as one who had seen all the visions one can endure to see, dancing round and round, with the veil held high, singing one syllable over and over again.

Armand was shattered, broken, on his knees, the blood tears running straight down his cheeks, horrid streaks on the white flesh.

Humbled and confounded, David merely watched. Keenly, he studied the veil as it moved through the air, her hands still stretching it wide. Keenly, he studied my face. He studied the slumped, broken, sobbing figure of Armand, the lost child in his exquisite velvet and lace now stained with his tears.