by Rice, Anne
“Angels aren’t perfect. You can see that already. They are Created Beings. They don’t know everything God knows, that’s obvious to you and everyone else. But they know a great deal; they know all that can be known in Time if they wish to know it; and that is where angels differ, you see. Some wish to know everything in Time, and some care only for God and God’s reflection in those of His most devoted souls.”
“I see, then. What you’re saying is everybody’s right about it, and everybody’s sort of wrong.”
“More right than wrong. Angels are individuals, that is the key. We Who Fell are no single species, unless being the brightest, the most clever, and the most comprehending makes us a species, which I don’t think it does.”
“Go on.”
He laughed. “You think I’m going to stop now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Where do I fit in? I don’t mean me, Lestat de Lioncourt, I mean what I am … the vampire I am.”
“You’re an earthbound phenomenon, just like a ghost. We’ll get to that in a moment. When God sent us down to Earth to Watch, specifically to observe all Mankind, we were as curious about the dead as the living—this wreath of souls we could see and hear, gathered about the world, and which we called Sheol immediately because it seemed to us that the realm of these weeping souls was the realm of pure gloom. ‘Sheol’ means gloom.”
“And the spirit that made the vampires—”
“Wait. It’s very simple. Let me present it, however, as it came to me. If I don’t do that, how can you understand my position? What I ask of you—to be my lieutenant—is so personal and so total that you can’t fully grasp it unless you listen.”
“Please go on.”
“All right. A gathering of Angels decided to go with me, to draw as close as possible to Matter in order to pull together for ourselves our entire knowledge, to better comprehend, as God had asked us to do. Michael came with me. And so did a host of other archangels. There were a few Seraphim. There were a few Ophanim. And some of the lower orders which are the least intelligent angels, but nevertheless angels, and much in love with Creation and curious as to what was making me so angry with God.
“I can’t give you the number of how many we were. But when we reached the earth, we went our separate ways to perceive things, and came together often and instantly and agreed upon what we had seen.
“What united us was our interest in the statement of God that Humankind was part of Nature. We just couldn’t see how this was true. We went exploring.
“Very quickly, I learnt that men and women lived now in large groups, very unlike the other primates, that they built shelters for themselves, that they painted their bodies with various colors, that the women often lived separate from the men, and that they believed in something invisible. Now what was that? Was it the souls of the ancestors, the dearly departed who were still locked in the air of Earth, disembodied and confused?
“Yes, it was the souls of ancestors, but the humans worshipped other entities as well. They imagined a God who had made the Wild Beasts and to him they made blood sacrifice on Altars, thinking this aspect of Almighty God to be a personality of very distinct limits and rather easy to please or displease.
“Now, I can’t say all this was a big surprise to me. I’d seen the early signs of it. After all, I telescoped millions of years for you in my Revelations. But when I drew near to these altars, when I heard the specific prayer to the God of the Wild Animals; when I began to see the care and deliberation of the sacrifice—the slaying of a ram or a deer—I was much struck by the fact that not only had these humans come to look like Angels, but they had guessed at the truth.
“They had come upon it instinctively! There was a God. They knew. They didn’t know what He was like but they knew. And this instinctive knowledge seemed to spring from the same essence as did their surviving spiritual souls. Let me be even clearer.
“Self-consciousness, and the awareness of one’s own death—this had created a sense of distinct individuality in humans, and this individuality feared death; feared annihilation! Saw it, knew what it was, saw it happening. And prayed for a God that He would not let such a thing have no meaning in the world.
“And it was this very same tenacity—the tenacity of this individuality—that made the human soul stay alive after it left the body, imitating the shape of the body, holding itself together, so to speak, clinging to life, as it were, perpetuating itself, by shaping itself according to the only world it knew.”
I didn’t speak. I was wound up in the story and only wanted for him to continue. But naturally I thought of Roger. I thought very distinctly of Roger because Roger was the only ghost I’d ever known. And what Memnoch had just described was a highly organized and very willful version of Roger.
“Oh, yes, precisely,” said Memnoch, “which is probably why it is just as well that he came to you, though at the time I regarded it as one of the greatest annoyances in the world.”
“You didn’t want Roger to come to me?”
“I watched. I listened. I was amazed, as you were, but I have been amazed by other ghosts before him. It wasn’t that extraordinary, but no, it certainly wasn’t something orchestrated by me, if that’s what you mean.”
“But it happened so close to your corning! It seems connected.”
“Does it? What’s the connection? Look for it inside yourself. Don’t you think the dead have tried to speak before? Don’t you think the ghosts of your victims have come howling after you? Admittedly, the ghosts of your victims usually pass in total bliss and confusion, unaware of you as the instrument of their death. But that’s not always the case. Maybe what has changed is you! And as we know, you loved this mortal man, Roger, you admired him, you understood his vanity and love of the sacred and the mysterious and the costly, because you have these traits within yourself.”
“Yes, all of that’s true, without doubt,” I said. “I still think you had something to do with his coming.”
He was shocked. He looked at me for a long moment as if he were going to become angry, and then he laughed.
“Why?” he asked. “Why would I bother with such an apparition? You know what I’m asking of you! You know what it means! You’re no stranger to the mystical or the theological revelation. You knew when you were a living man—the boy back in France who realized he might die without knowing the meaning of the universe and ran to the village priest to demand of the poor fellow, ‘Do you believe in God?’ ”
“Yes, but it just all happened at the same time. And when you claim there’s no connection, I just … I don’t believe it,” I said.
“You are the damnedest creature! You really are!” he said. His exasperation was mild and patient but still there. “Lestat, don’t you see that what impelled you towards the complexity of Roger and his daughter, Dora, was the same thing that compelled me to come to you? You had come to a point where you were reaching out for the supernatural. You were crying to Heaven to be laid waste! Your taking David, that was perhaps your first real step towards utter moral peril! You could forgive yourself for having made the child vampire Claudia, because you were young and stupid.
“But to bring David over, against his will! To take the soul of David and make it vampiric? That was a crime of crimes. That was a crime that cries to Heaven, for the love of God. David, whom we had allowed to glimpse us once, so much did we feel an interest in him and whatever path he might take.”
“Ah, so the appearance to David was deliberate.”
“I thought I said so.”
“But Roger and Dora, they were simply in the way.”
“Yes. Of course, you chose the brightest and most alluring victim! You chose a man who was as good at what he did—his criminality, his racketeering, his thieving—as you are good at what you are. It was a bolder step. Your hunger is growing. It becomes ever more dangerous to you and those around you. You don’t take the downfallen and the bereft and the cutthroats any longer. When you reached for Roger
, you reached for the power and the glory, but so what?”
“I’m torn,” I whispered.
“Why?”
“Because I feel love for you,” I said, “and that’s something I always pay attention to, as we both know. I feel drawn into you. I want to know what else you have to tell me! And yet I think you’re lying about Roger. And about Dora. I think it is all connected. And when I think of God Incarnate—” I broke off, unable to continue.
I was flooded by the sensations of Heaven, or what I could still remember, what I could still feel, and the breath did leave me in a sorrow that was far greater than any I ever expressed in tears.
I must have closed my eyes. Because when I opened them, I realized Memnoch was holding both my hands in his. His hands felt warm and very strong and uncommonly smooth. How cold my own must have felt to him. His hands were larger; flawless. My hands were … my strange white, slender, glittering hands. My fingernails flashed like ice in the sun as they always do.
He drew away, and it was excruciating. My hands remained rigid, clasped, and utterly alone.
He was standing yards away from me, his back to me, looking out over the narrow sea. His wings were apparent, huge, and moving uneasily, as if an inner tension caused him to work the invisible muscular apparatus to which they were attached. He looked perfect, irresistible, and desperate.
“Maybe God is right!” he said with rage in his low voice, staring not at me but at the sea.
“Right about what?” I stood up.
He wouldn’t look at me.
“Memnoch,” I said, “please go on. There are moments when I feel I’ll collapse beneath the things being made known to me. But go on. Please, please go on.”
“That’s your way of apologizing, isn’t it?” he asked gently. He turned around, towards me. The wings vanished. He walked slowly up to me, and past me, and sat down again on my right. His robe was hemmed in dust from the ground. I absorbed the detail before I actually thought about it. There was a tiny bit of leaf, green leaf, caught in the long flowing tangles of his hair.
“No, not really,” I said. “It wasn’t an apology. I usually say exactly what I mean.”
I studied his face—the sculpted profile, the utter absence of hair on otherwise magnificently human-looking skin. Indescribable. If you turn and look at a statue in a Renaissance church, and you see it is bigger all over than you are, that it is perfect, you don’t get frightened because it’s stone. But this was alive.
He turned as if he’d just noticed I was looking at him. He stared down into my eyes. Then he bent forwards, his eyes very clear, and filled with myriad colors, and I felt his lips, smooth, evenly and modestly moist, touch my cheek. I felt a burn of life through the hard coldness of my self. I felt a raging flame that caught every particle of me, as only blood can do it, living blood. I felt a pain in my heart. I might have laid my finger on my chest in the very place.
“What do you feel!” I asked, refusing to be ravaged.
“I feel the blood of hundreds,” he whispered. “I feel a soul who has known a thousand souls.”
“Known? Or merely destroyed?”
“Will you send me away out of hatred for yourself?” he asked. “Or shall I continue with my story?”
“Please, please go on.”
“Man had invented or discovered God,” he said. His voice was calm now and back to the same polite and almost humble instructive manner. “And in some instances, tribes worshipped more than one such deity who was perceived to have created this or that part of the world. And yes, humans knew of the souls of the dead surviving; and they did reach out to these souls and make offerings to them. They brought offerings to their graves. They cried out to these dead souls. They begged for their help in the hunt, and in the birthing of a child, in all things.
“And as we angels peered into Sheol, as we passed into it, invisible, our essence causing no disturbance in a realm that was purely souls at that point … souls and nothing but souls … we realized these souls were strengthened in their survival by the attentions of those living on earth, by the love being sent to them by humans, by the thoughts of them in human minds. It was a process.
“And just as with angels, these souls were individuals with varying degrees of intellect, interest, or curiosity. They were hosts as well to all human emotions, though in many, mercifully, all emotion was on the wane.
“Some souls, for example, knew they were dead, and sought to respond to the prayers of their children, and actively attempted to advise, speaking with all the power they could muster in a spiritual voice. They struggled to appear to their children. Sometimes they broke through for fleeting seconds, gathering to themselves swirling particles of matter by the sheer force of their invisible essence. Other times they made themselves visible in dreams, when the soul of the sleeping human was opened to other souls. They told their children of the bitterness and darkness of death, and that they must be brave and strong in life. They gave their children advice.
“And they seemed, in some instances at least, to know that the belief and attention of their sons and daughters strengthened them. They requested offerings and prayers, they reminded the children of their duty. These souls were to some extent the least confused, except for one thing. They thought they had seen all there was to be seen,”
“No hint of Heaven?” I asked.
“No, and no light from Heaven penetrated Sheol, nor any music. From Sheol one saw the darkness and the stars, and the people of Earth.”
“Unbearable.”
“Not if you think you are a god to your children and can still derive strength from the mere sight of the libations they pour on your grave. Not if you feel pleasure in those who hearken to your advice and anger at those who don’t, and not if you can communicate occasionally, sometimes with spectacular results.”
“I see, of course. And gods they seemed to their children.”
“Ancestral gods of a certain kind. Not the Creator of All. Human beings had distinct ideas on both questions, as I’ve said.
“I became greatly absorbed with this whole question of Sheol. I traveled the length and breadth of Sheol. Some of these souls didn’t know they were dead. They knew only they were lost and blind and miserable and they cried all the time like infant humans. They were so weak I don’t even think they felt the presence of other souls.
“Other souls were clearly deluded. They thought they were still alive! They chased after their kindred, trying vainly to get the oblivious son or daughter to listen, when of course the kindred could not hear or see them; and these, these who thought they were still living, well, these had no presence of mind to gather matter to make themselves appear or to come to the living in a dream, because they didn’t know they were dead.”
“Yes.”
“To continue, some souls knew they were ghosts when they came to mortals. Others thought they were alive and the whole world had turned against them. Others simply drifted, seeing and hearing the sounds of other living beings but remote from this as if in a stupor or dream. And some souls died.
“Before my very eyes, some died. And soon I realized many were dying. The dying soul would last a week, perhaps a month in human time, after its separation from the human body, retaining its shape, and then begin to fade. The essence would gradually disperse, just as did the essence inside an animal upon its death. Gone into the air, returned perhaps to the energy and essence of God.”
“That’s what happened?” I asked desperately. “Their energy went back into the Creator; the light of a candle returned to the eternal fire?”
“I don’t know. And that I didn’t see, little flames wafted to Heaven, drawn aloft by a mighty and loving blaze. No, I saw nothing of the kind.
“From Sheol the Light of God was not visible. For Sheol, the consolation of God did not exist. Yet these were spiritual beings, made in our image and His image, and clinging to that image and hungering for a life beyond death. That was the agony. The hunger for the life beyon
d death.”
“If that was absent at the time of the death, would the soul simply be extinguished?” I asked.
“No, not at all. The hunger seemed innate. The hunger had to die out in Sheol before the soul would disintegrate. Indeed, souls went through many, many experiences in Sheol, and those who had become the strongest were those who perceived themselves as gods, or humans passed into the realm of the good God, and attentive to humans; and these souls gained power even to sway the others and strengthen them sometimes and keep them from fading away.”
He paused as if not sure how to proceed. Then, he went on:
“There were some souls who understood things in a different way. They knew they weren’t gods. They knew they were dead humans. They knew they didn’t really have the right to change the destiny of those who prayed to them; they knew that the libations essentially were symbolic. These souls understood the meaning of the concept symbolic. They knew. And they knew they were dead and they perceived themselves to be lost. They would have reentered the flesh if they could have. For there in the flesh was all the light and warmth and comfort that they had ever known and could still see. And sometimes these souls managed to do exactly that!
“I witnessed it in various different fashions. I saw these souls deliberately descend and take possession of a stupefied mortal, take over his limbs and brain and live in him until the man gained the strength to throw the soul off. You know these things. All men do—what is involved in possession. You have possessed a body that wasn’t yours, and your body has been possessed by another soul.”
“Yes.”
“But this was the dawn of such invention. And to watch these clever souls learn the rules of it, to see them grow ever more powerful, was something to behold.
“And what I could not fail to be frightened by, being the Accuser as I am, and horrified by Nature, as God calls it, what I could not ignore was that these souls did have an effect on living women and men! There were those living humans already who had become oracles. They would smoke or drink some potion to render their own minds passive, so that a dead soul might speak with their voice!