The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (365 page)

“Lestat,” Dora cried, tears gushing, “you have brought me the Face of my God! You have brought it to all of us. Don’t you see? Memnoch lost! Memnoch was defeated. God won! God used Memnoch for his own ends, he led Memnoch into the labyrinth of Memnoch’s own design. God has triumphed!”

“No, Dora, no! You can’t believe that,” I shouted. “What if it isn’t the truth? What if it was all a pack of tricks. Dora!”

She shot past me down the corridor and out the door. We three stood stunned. We could hear the elevator descending. She had the veil!

“David, what is she going to do? David, help me.”

“Who can help us now?” asked David, but it was without conviction or bitterness, only that pondering, that endless pondering. “Armand, take hold of yourself. You cannot surrender to this,” he said. His voice was sad.

But Armand was lost.

“Why?” Armand asked. He was just a child now on his knees. “Why?”

This is how he must have looked centuries ago when Marius had come to free him from his Venetian captors, a boy kept for lust, a boy brought into the palace of the Undead.

“Why can’t I believe it? Oh, my God, I
do
believe it. It is the face of Christ!”

He climbed to his feet, drunkenly, and then he moved slowly, doggedly, step by step, after her.

By the time we reached the street, she stood screaming before the doors of the cathedral.

“Open the doors! Open the church. I have the veil.” She kicked the bronze doors with her right foot. All around her gathered mortals, murmuring.

“The Veil, the Veil!” They stared at it, as she stopped to turn and show it once more. Then all pounded on the doors.

The sky above grew light with the coming sun, far, far off in the maw of the winter, but nevertheless rising in its inevitable path, to bring its fatal white light down on us if we didn’t seek shelter.

“Open the doors!” she screamed.

From all directions, humans came, gasping, falling on their knees when they saw the Veil.

“Go,” said Armand, “seek shelter now, before it’s too late. David, take him, go.”

“And you, what will you do?” I demanded.

“I will bear witness. I will stand here with my arms outstretched,” he cried, “and when the sun rises, my death shall confirm the miracle.”

The mighty doors were being opened at last. The dark-clad figures drew back in astonishment. The first gleam of silver light illuminated the Veil, and then came the warmer, yellow electric lights from within, the lights of candles, the rush of the heated air.

“The Face of Christ!” she screamed.

The priest fell down on his knees. The older man in black, brother, priest, whatever he was, stood openmouthed looking up at it.

“Dear God, dear God,” he said, making the Sign of the Cross. “That in my lifetime, God … it’s the Veronica!”

Humans rushed past us, stumbling and jostling to follow her into the church. I heard their steps echoing up the giant nave.

“We have no time,” David said in my ear. He had lifted me off my feet, strong as Memnoch, only there was no whirlwind, only the risen winter dawn, and the falling snow, and more and more shouts and howls and cries as men and women flooded towards the church, and the bells above in the steeples began to ring.

“Hurry, Lestat, with me!”

We ran together, already blinded by the light, and behind me I heard Armand’s voice ring out over the crowd.

“Bear witness, this sinner dies for Him!” The scent of fire came in a fierce explosion! I saw it blaze against the glass walls of the towers as we fled. I heard the screams.

“Armand!” I cried out. David pulled me along, down metal steps, echoing and chiming like the bells pealing from the cathedral above.

I went dizzy; I surrendered to him. I gave up my will to him. In my grief, crying, “Armand, Armand.”

Slowly I made out David’s figure in the dark. We were in a damp icy place, a cellar beneath a cellar, beneath the high
shrieking hollow of an empty wind-torn building. He was digging through the broken earth.

“Help me,” he cried, “I’m losing all feeling, the light’s coming, the sun is risen, they’ll find us.”

“No, they won’t.”

I kicked and dug out the grave, carrying him with me deeper and deeper, and closing the soft clods of earth behind us. Not even the sounds of the city above could penetrate this darkness. Not even the bells of the church.

Had the Tunnel opened for Armand? Had his soul gone up? Or was he wandering through the Gates of Hell?

“Armand,” I whispered. And as I closed my eyes, I saw Memnoch’s stricken face:
Lestat, help me!

With my last bit of feeling, I reached to make sure the Veil was there. But no, the Veil was gone. I’d given Dora the Veil. Dora had the Veil and Dora had taken it into the church.

You would never be my adversary!

We sat together on the low wall, Fifth Avenue, edge of Central Park. Three nights had passed like this. We had watched.

For as far as we could see uptown the line formed, five and six deep, men and women and children, singing, stamping their feet to keep warm, nuns and priests hurrying back and forth offering hot chocolate and tea to those who were freezing. Fires burned in large drums at intervals of so many feet. As far as the eye could see.

And downtown, on and on it went, past the glittering displays of Bergdorf Goodman and Henri Bendel, the furriers, the jewelers, the bookstores of midtown, until it wound its way into the cathedral.

David stood with folded arms, barely leaning on the wall, his ankles crossed. I was the one who sat like a kid, with my knee up, my ravaged one-eyed face upturned, my chin on my knuckled fist, resting my elbow on my knee, just listening to them.

Far ahead one could hear screams and shouts. Someone else had no doubt touched a clean napkin to the Veil, and once again the image had been transferred! And so it would be again sometime tomorrow night, and maybe once the night after and how many times nobody knew, except that the icon made the vera-icon out of the cloth touched to it, and the face blazed from cloth to cloth, like flame touched from wick to wick.

“Come on,” David said. “We’re getting cold here. Come, let’s walk.”

We walked.

“Why?” I asked. “Up there, to see the same thing we saw last night, and the night before? So that I can struggle to get to her again, knowing that any show of force, any preternatural gift only confirms the entire miracle! She won’t listen to me ever again. You know she won’t. And who is gathered on the steps now, who will immolate himself at dawn to confirm the miracle?”

“Mael is there.”

“Ah, yes, the Druid priest, once a priest, always a priest. And so this will be his morning to fall like Lucifer in a blaze.”

Last night it had been some ragged vagabond blood drinker, come from God knows where, unknown to us, but becoming a preternatural torch at dawn for the banks of video cameras and newspaper photographers. The papers were filled with the pictures of the blaze. Filled with the pictures of the Veil itself.

“Here, wait,” I said. We had come to Central Park South. The crowd here was all singing in concert that old solemn, militant hymn:

I stood staring at them, dazed. The pain in my left eye socket seemed worse but what could be changing there, except that with each passing hour I felt the depth.

“You’re fools, all of you!” I shouted. “Christianity is the bloodiest religion that ever existed in the world. I can bear witness!”

“Hush now, and do as I tell you,” David said, pulling me along, so that we vanished amongst the ever-shifting people on the icy sidewalks before anyone could have turned to look. Over and over he had restrained me this way. He was weary of it. I didn’t blame him.

Once, policemen had laid hands on me.

They had caught me and tried to pull me out of the cathedral
as I was trying to talk to her, and then when they had me outside, slowly they had all backed away. They had sensed I wasn’t alive, the way mortals do. They had sensed, and they had muttered about the Veil and the miraculous, and there it had been, my impotence.

Policemen were all over. Policemen everywhere stood on guard to help, to give out the warm tea, to put their pale shivering hands out over the flames in the drums.

Nobody noticed us. Why should they? We were just two men, drab, part of the crowd, our gleaming skin was nothing much in this blinding whiteness of snow amid these ecstatic pilgrims, wandering from valley to valley of song.

The bookstore windows were piled with Bibles, books on Christology. There was a huge pyramid of a lavender-covered book called
Veronica and Her Cloth
by Ewa Kuryluk, and another stack of
Holy Faces, Secret Places
by Ian Wilson.

People sold pamphlets on the street, or even gave them away. I could hear accents from all parts of the country—from Texas, and Florida and Georgia and California.

Bibles, Bibles, Bibles, being sold and given away.

A group of nuns gave out holy pictures of St. Veronica. But the hottest items were the color photographs of the Veil itself, snapped in the church by photographers and then reprinted by the thousands.

“Amazing grace, amazing grace.…” sang one group in unison, rocking back and forth as they held their places in line.

“Gloria, in excelsus deum!” burst from a long-bearded man with his arms outstretched.

As we drew nearer the church, we could see little clusters and crowds engaged in seminars everywhere. In the midst of one, a young man spoke, rapid, sincere:

“In the fourteenth century, she was officially recognized as a saint, Veronica, and it was believed that the Veil was lost during the Fourth Crusade when the Venetians stormed Hagia Sophia.” He stopped to push his glasses back on his nose. “Of course the Vatican will take its time to rule on this, as it always
does, but seventy-three icons have already been derived from the original icon, and this before the eyes of countless witnesses who are prepared to testify before the Holy See.”

In another place, there were several dark-clad men, priests perhaps, I couldn’t tell, and around them rings of those listening, eyes squinting against the snow.

“I’m not saying the Jesuits cannot come,” said one of the men. “I just said that they aren’t coming in here and taking over. Dora has asked that the Franciscans be the custodians of the Veil, if and when it leaves the cathedral.”

And behind us, two women rapidly concurred that tests had already been done, the age of the cloth was beyond dispute.

“They don’t even grow that kind of flax anymore in the world; you couldn’t find a new piece of such fabric, the fabric itself in its newness and cleanness is a miracle.”

“… all bodily fluids, every part of the image, derived from fluids of a human body. They have not had to hurt the Veil to discover this! This is … this.…”

“… enzyme action. But you know how these things get distorted.”

“No, not
The New York Times. The New York Times
isn’t going to say that three archaeologists have ruled it authentic.”

“Not authentic, my friend, just beyond present scientific explanation.”

“God and the Devil are idiots!” I said.

A group of women turned to stare at me. “Accept Jesus as your Savior, son,” said one of the women. “Go look for yourself at the Veil. He died for our sins.”

David pulled me away. No one paid us any mind. The little schools continued far and wide, the clumps of philosophers and witnesses, and those waiting for the spellbound to stumble down the steps from the church, with tears running down their faces.

“I saw it, I saw it, it was the Face of Christ.”

And back against the arch, cleaved to it, like a tall spidery shadow, the figure of the vampire Mael, almost invisible to
them perhaps, waiting to step into the light of dawn with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross.

Once again, he looked at us with sly eyes.

“You too!” he said, under his breath to us, sending his preternatural voice secretly to our ears. “Come, face the sun, with your arms outstretched! Lestat, God chose you as his Messenger.”

“Come,” David said. “We’ve seen enough for this night and many nights hereafter.”

“And where do we go?” I asked. “Stop, stop pulling my arm. David? Did you hear me?”

“I’ve stopped,” he said politely, lowering his voice as if to instruct me to lower mine. The snow fell so softly now. Fire crackled in the nearby black iron drum.

“The books, what happened to them?” How in God’s name could I have forgotten.

“What books?” he asked. And he pulled me out of the way of the passersby, against a shopwindow, behind which a little crowd stood, enjoying the private warmth inside, looking towards the church.

“The books of Wynken de Wilde. Roger’s twelve books! What happened to them?”

“They’re there,” he said. “Up there in the tower. She left them for you. Lestat, I’ve explained this to you. Last night, she spoke to you.”

“In the presence of all those others, it was impossible to speak the truth.”

“She told you the relics were yours now.”

“We have to get the books!” I said. Oh, what a fool I was to forget those beautiful books.

“Be calm, Lestat, be quiet. Stop making them stare at you. The flat is the same, I told you. She hasn’t told anyone about it. She has surrendered it to us. She will not tell them that we were ever there. She has promised me. She has given the deed to the Orphanage to you, Lestat, don’t you see? She has cut all ties
with her former life. Her old religion is dead, abolished. She is reborn, the custodian of the Veil.”

“But we don’t know!” I roared. “We’ll never know. How can she accept it when we don’t know and we can’t know!” (He pushed me against the wall.) “I want to go back and get the books,” I said.

“Of course, we will do this if you wish.” How tired I was.

On the pavements the people sang: “ ‘And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and lets me call Him by name.’ ”

The apartment was undisturbed.

As far as I could tell, she had never returned. None of us had. David had come to check, and David had been telling the truth. All was as it had been.