by Rice, Anne
“I know what you’re saying.”
“What I’m saying is, it’s highly unlikely this thing has the power to trick you into anything. So go with it. Let it show you what it promises. And if I’m wrong … if you’re tricked into Hell, then I’ve made a horrible mistake.”
“No, you haven’t. You’ve avenged your father’s death, that’s all. But I agree with you. Trickery is too petty to be involved here. I’m going by instincts. And I’ll tell you something else about Memnoch, the Devil, something maybe that will surprise you.”
“That you like him? I know that. I understood that all along.”
“How is that possible? I don’t like myself, you know. I love myself, of course, I’m committed to myself till my dying day. But I don’t like myself.”
“You told me something last night,” she said. “You said that if I needed you I was to call to you with my thoughts, my heart.”
“Yes.”
“You do the same. If you go with this creature, and you need me, call to me. Let me say it this way: If you cannot pull away of your own volition and you need my intercession, then send out your call! I’ll hear you. And I’ll cry out to the heavens for you. Not for justice but for mercy. Will you make me that promise?”
“Of course.”
“What will you do now?” she asked.
“Spend the remaining hours with you, taking care of your affairs. Making sure, through my numerous mortal alliances, that nothing can hurt you in terms of all these possessions.”
“My father’s done it,” she said. “Believe me. He’s covered it very cleverly.”
“Are you sure?”
“He did it with his usual brilliance. He left more money to fall into the hands of his enemies than the fortune he left to me. They have no need to go looking for anyone. Once they realize he is dead, they will begin to snatch his available assets right and left.”
“You are certain of all this.”
“Without question. Put your affairs in order tonight. You don’t need to worry about mine. Take care of yourself, that you are ready to embark on this.”
I watched her for a long time. I was still seated at the table. She stood with her back to the glass. It struck me that she had been drawn against it in black ink except for her white face.
“Is there a God, Dora?” I whispered. I had spoken these same words so many times! I had asked this question of Gretchen when I was flesh and blood in her arms.
“Yes, there is a God, Lestat,” Dora answered. “Be assured of it. Maybe you’ve been praying to Him so loud and so long that finally He has paid attention. Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t the disposition of God, not to hear us when we cry, to deliberately shut His ears!”
“Shall I leave you here or take you home?”
“Leave me. I don’t ever want to make a journey like that again. I will spend a good part of the rest of my life trying to remember it precisely and failing to do so. I want to stay here in New York with my father’s things. With regard to the money? Your mission has been accomplished.”
“And you accept the relics, the fortune.”
“Yes, of course, I accept them. I’ll keep Roger’s precious books until such time as they can be properly offered for others to see—his beloved heretical Wynken de Wilde.”
“Do you require anything further of me?” I asked.
“Do you think … do you think you love God?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why do you say that?”
“How could I?” I asked. “How could anyone love Him? What did you just tell me yourself about the world? Don’t you see, everybody hates God now. It’s not that God is dead in the twentieth century. It’s that everybody hates Him! At least I think so. Maybe that’s what Memnoch is trying to say.”
She was amazed. She frowned with disappointment and yearning. She wanted to say something. She gestured, as though trying to take invisible flowers from the air to show me their beauty, who knows?
“No, I hate Him,” I said.
She made the Sign of the Cross and put her hands together. “Are you praying for me?”
“Yes,” she said. “If I never lay eyes on you again after tonight, if I never come across a single shred of evidence that you really exist or were here with me, or that any of these things were said, I’ll still be transformed by you as I am now. You are my miracle of sorts. You’re greater proof than millions of mortals have ever been given. You’re proof not only of the supernatural and the mysterious and the wondrous, you’re proof of exactly what I believe!”
“I see.” I smiled. It was all so logical and symmetrical. And true. I smiled, truly smiled, and shook my head. “I hate to leave you,” I said.
“Go,” she said, and then she clenched her fists. “Ask God what He wants of us!” she said furiously. “You’re right. We hate Him!” The anger blazed in her eyes, and then subsided, and she stared at me, her eyes looking larger and brighter because they were wet now with salt and tears.
“Good-bye, my darling,” I said. This was so extraordinary and painful.
I went out into the heavy, drifting snow.
The doors of the great cathedral of St. Patrick’s were closed and bolted, and I stood at the foot of the stone steps looking up at the high Olympic Tower, wondering if Dora could see me as I stood here, freezing in the cold, and letting the snow strike my face, softly, persistently, harmfully, and with beauty.
“All right, Memnoch,” I said aloud. “No need to wait any longer. Come now, please, if you will.”
Immediately I heard the footsteps!
It was as though they were echoing in the monstrous hollow of Fifth Avenue, among the hideous Towers of Babel, and I had cast my lot with the whirlwind.
I turned round and round. There was not a mortal in sight!
“Memnoch the Devil!” I shouted. “I’m ready!”
I was perishing with fear.
“Prove your point to me, Memnoch. You have to do that!” I called.
The steps were getting louder. Oh, he was up to his finest tricks.
“Remember, you have to make me see it from your point of view! That’s what you promised!”
A wind was collecting, but from where I couldn’t tell. All of the great metropolis seemed empty, frozen, my tomb. The snow swirled and thickened before the cathedral. The towers faded.
I heard his voice right beside me, bodiless and intimate. “All right, my beloved one,” he said. “We’ll begin now.”
TEN
We were in the whirlwind and the whirlwind was a tunnel, but between us there fell a silence in which I could hear my own breath. Memnoch was so close to me, his arm locked around me, that I could see his dark face in profile, and feel the mane of his hair against the side of my own face.
He was not the Ordinary Man now, but indeed the granite angel, the wings rising out of my focus, and folded around us, against the force of the wind.
As we rose, steadily, without the slightest reference to any sort of gravity, two things became apparent to me at once. The first was that we were surrounded by thousands upon thousands of individual souls. I say souls! What did I see? I saw shapes in the whirlwind, some completely anthropomorphic, others merely faces, but surrounding me, everywhere, were distinct spiritual entities or individuals, and very faintly I heard their voices—whispers, cries, and howls—mingling with the wind.
The sound couldn’t hurt me now, as it had in the prior apparitions, nevertheless I heard this throng as we shot upwards, turning as if on an axis, the tunnel narrowing suddenly so that the souls seemed to touch us, and then widening, only to narrow again.
The second thing which I instantly realized was that the darkness was fading or being drained utterly from Memnoch’s form. His profile was bright and even translucent; so were his shapeless unimportant garments. And the goat legs of the dark Devil were now the legs of a large man. In sum, the entire turbid and smokelike presence had been replaced by something crystalline and reflective, but
which felt pliant and warm and alive.
Words came back to me, snatches of scripture, of visions and prophetic claims and poetry; but there was no time to evaluate, to analyze, to seal into memory.
Memnoch spoke to me in a voice that may not have been technically audible, though I heard the familiar accentless speech of the Ordinary Man.
“Now, it is difficult to go to Heaven without the slightest preparation, and you will be stunned and confused by what you see. But if you don’t see this first, you’ll hunger for it throughout our dialogue, and so I’m taking you to the very gates. Be prepared that the laughter you hear is not laughter. It is joy. It will come through to you as laughter because that is the only way such ecstatic sound can be physically received or perceived.”
No sooner had he finished the last syllable than we found ourselves standing in a garden, on a bridge across a stream! For one moment, the light so flooded my eyes that I shut them, thinking the sun of our solar system had found me and was about to burn me the way I should have been burnt: a vampire turned into a torch and then forever extinguished.
But this sourceless light was utterly penetrating and utterly benign. I opened my eyes, and realized that we were once again amid hundreds of other individuals, and on the banks of the stream and in all directions I saw beings greeting each other, embracing, conversing, weeping, and crying out. As before, the shapes were in all degrees of distinctness. One man was as solid as if I’d run into him in the street of the city; another individual seemed no more than a giant facial expression; while others seemed whirling bits and pieces of material and light. Others were utterly diaphanous. Some seemed invisible, except that I knew they were there! The number was impossible to determine.
The place was limitless. The waters of the stream itself were brilliant with the reflected light; the grass so vividly green that it seemed in the very act of becoming grass, of being born, as if in a painting or an animated film!
I clung to Memnoch and turned to look at him in this new light form. He was the direct opposite now of the accumulating dark angel, yet the face had the very same strong features of the granite statue, and the eyes had the same tender scowl. Behold the angels and devils of William Blake and you’ve seen it. It’s beyond innocence.
“Now we’re going in,” he said.
I realized I was clinging to him with both hands.
“You mean this isn’t Heaven!” I cried, and my voice came out as direct speech, intimate, just between us.
“No,” he said, smiling and guiding me across this bridge. “When we get inside, you must be strong. You must realize you are in your earthbound body, unusual as it is, and your senses will be overwhelmed! You will not be able to endure what you see as you would if you were dead or an angel or my lieutenant, which is what I want you to become.”
There was no time to argue. We had passed swiftly across the bridge; giant gates were opening before us. I couldn’t see the summit of the walls.
The sound swelled and enveloped us, and indeed it was like laughter, waves upon waves of shimmering and lucid laughter, only it was canorous, as though all those who laughed also sang canticles in full voice at the same time.
What I saw, however, overwhelmed me as much as the sound.
This was very simply the densest, the most intense, the busiest, and the most profoundly magnificent place I’d ever beheld. Our language needs endless synonyms for beautiful; the eyes could see what the tongue cannot possibly describe.
Once again, people were everywhere, people filled with light, and of distinct anthropomorphic shape; they had arms, legs, beaming faces, hair, garments of all different kinds, yet no costume of any seemingly great importance, and the people were moving, traveling paths in groups or alone, or coming together in patterns, embracing, clasping, reaching out, and holding hands.
I turned to the right and to the left, and then all around me, and in every direction saw these multitudes of beings, wrapped in conversation or dialogue or some sort of interchange, some of them embracing and kissing, and others dancing, and the clusters and groups of them continuing to shift and grow or shrink and spread out.
Indeed, the combination of seeming disorder and order was the mystery. This was not chaos. This was not confusion. This was not a din. It seemed the hilarity of a great and final gathering, and by final I mean it seemed a perpetually unfolding resolution of something, a marvel of sustained revelation, a gathering and growing understanding shared by all who participated in it, as they hurried or moved languidly (or even in some cases sat about doing very little), amongst hills and valleys, and along pathways, and through wooded areas and into buildings which seemed to grow one out of another like no structure on earth I’d ever seen.
Nowhere did I see anything specifically domestic such as a house, or even a palace. On the contrary, the structures were infinitely larger, filled with as bright a light as the garden, with corridors and staircases branching here and there with perfect fluidity. Yet ornament covered everything. Indeed, the surfaces and textures were so varied that any one of them might have absorbed me forever.
I cannot convey the sense of simultaneous observation that I felt. I have to speak now in sequence. I have to take various parts of this limitless and brilliant environment, in order to shed my own fallible light on the whole.
There were archways, towers, halls, galleries, gardens, great fields, forests, streams. One area flowed into another, and through them all I was traveling, with Memnoch beside me, securely holding me in a solid grip. Again and again, my eyes were drawn to some spectacularly beautiful sculpture or cascade of flowers or a giant tree reaching out into the cloudless blue, only to have my body turned back around by him as if I were being kept to a tightrope from which I might fatally fall.
I laughed; I wept; I did both, and my body was convulsing with the emotions. I clung to him and tried to see over his shoulder and around him, and spun in his grip like an infant, turning to lock eyes with this or that person who happened to glance at me, or to look for a steady moment as the groups and the parliaments and congregations shifted and moved.
We were in a vast hall suddenly. “God, if David could see this!” I cried; the books and scrolls were endless, and there seemed nothing illogical or confusing in the manner in which all these documents lay open and ready to be examined.
“Don’t look, because you won’t remember it,” Memnoch said. He snatched at my hand as if I were a toddler. I had tried to catch hold of a scroll that was filled with an absolutely astonishing explanation of something to do with atoms and photons and neutrinos. But he was right. The knowledge was gone immediately, and the unfolding garden surrounded us as I lost my balance and fell against him.
I looked down at the ground and saw flowers of complete perfection; flowers that were the flowers that our flowers of the world might become! I don’t know any other way to describe how well realized were the petals and the centers and the colors. The colors themselves were so distinct and so finely delineated that I was unsure suddenly that our spectrum was even involved.
I mean, I don’t think our spectrum of color was the limit! I think there was some other set of rules. Or it was merely an expansion, a gift of being able to see combinations of color which are not visible chemically on earth.
The waves of laughter, of singing, of conversation, became so loud as to overwhelm my other senses; I felt blinded by sound suddenly; and yet the fight was laying bare every precious detail.
“Sapphirine!” I cried out suddenly, trying to identify the greenish blue of the great leaves surrounding us and gently waving to and fro, and Memnoch smiled and nodded as if in approval, reaching again to stop me from touching Heaven, from trying to grab some of the magnificence I saw.
“But I can’t hurt it if I touch, can I?” It seemed unthinkable suddenly that anyone could bruise anything here, from the walls of quartz and crystal with their ever-rising spires and belfries, to the sweet, soft vines twining upwards in the branches of trees drippin
g with magnificent fruits and flowers. “No, no, I wouldn’t want to hurt it!” I said.
My own voice was distinct to me, though the voices of all those around me seemed to overpower it.
“Look!” said Memnoch. “Look at them. Look!” And he turned my head as if to force me not to cower against his chest but to stare right into the multitudes. And I perceived that these were alliances I was witnessing, clans that were gathering, families, groups of kindred, or true friends, beings whose knowledge of each other was profound, creatures who shared similar physical and material manifestations! And for one brave moment, one brave instant, I saw that all these beings from one end of this limitless place to the other were connected, by hand or fingertip or arm or the touch of a foot. That, indeed, clan slipped within the womb of clan, and tribe spread out to intersperse amongst countless families, and families joined to form nations, and that the entire congregation was in fact a palpable and visible and interconnected configuration! Everyone impinged upon everyone else. Everyone drew, in his or her separateness, upon the separateness of everyone else!
I blinked, dizzy, near to collapsing. Memnoch held me.
“Look again!” he whispered, holding me up.
But I covered my eyes; because I knew that if I saw the interconnections again, I would collapse! I would perish inside my own sense of separateness! Yet each and every being I saw was separate.
“They are all themselves!” I cried. My hands were clapped on my eyes. I could hear the raging and soaring songs more intensely; the long riffs and cascades of voices. And beneath all there came such a sequence of flowing rhythms, lapping one over the other, that I began to sing.
I sang with everyone! I stood still, free of Memnoch for a moment, opened my eyes, and heard my voice come out of me and rise as if into the universe itself.
I sang and I sang; but my song was full of longing and immense curiosity and frustration as well as celebration. And it came home to me, thudded into me, that nowhere around me was there anyone who was unsafe or unsatisfied, was there anything approximating stasis or boredom; yet the word “frenzy” was in no way applicable to the constant movement and shifting of faces and forms that I saw.