It is not immodesty that makes me say all this, but altruism. I could achieve so much more than I have already done, if only I had the opportunity.
I am no longer recognizable, you see, as poor Dorian Gray— nor, for that matter, as any particular individual. As a result of my evolution, I have become a potential Everyman—and Everywoman too. I could take on a far greater burden than I have so far been required to bear. Given the chance, I could take on the responsibility of moral and physical corruption for every single person in the world. It is foolish of the world to let me languish here, when there is so much to be done.
It would need another miracle, but miracles are much easier to achieve than you may think; all that it would require is the passionate desire, the sincere wish, the fervent hope.
I could be your redeemer, if you would only let me.
I am equipped to accept into myself all the sins of humankind. They would not diminish me in the least, for I AM ART!
You only have to bring me down from my hiding-place and nail me to the wall, where any and all may come to see me. You only have to reproduce my image on posters and postcards, for anyone to see. Only do these little things and the world’s Great Age might begin at last.
If you are hesitant, you have only to pause for consideration. It will not take you long to perceive that there is one thing, and one thing only, that matters. Release me, and you need never age a single day, nor spend a single moment in regret. No line will ever mar your face; no reckless act will ever weigh upon your conscience.
How can you possibly resist a temptation like that?
THE TEMPTATION OF SAINT ANTHONY
There was no moon on the night when Anthony was bitten by a vampire as he slept within the walls of the abandoned fort at Pispir; the star-shadows were so deep that he got no ore than the merest glimpse of the creature. His only abiding memories were tactile, of skeletal thinness and rags so fragmentary and dust-encrusted that they seemed more like the tatters of an ancient shroud than clothing.
The bite was ragged too, being perhaps more tear than bite, having apparently been inflicted by blunt and decaying teeth. It never entirely healed, although it did not become infected. Although little trace of spilled blood remained, Anthony was sure that he had lost a good deal—perhaps enough to kill him. For three full days he expected to die; even when he stopped expecting it, he was not at all sure that his condition could still be reckoned as life, rather than a strange kind of undeath.
When the next travelers stopped at the fort to draw water from the well that had determined its site, they found its resident hermit awake and active, but somewhat delirious. They were reassured, however, when he consented to accept a little food from them, and showed no inclination to savage them like a rabid dog. They even offered to escort him to Alexandria, if he decided that it would be best to leave his refuge, but he declined the offer.
“I have sworn to remain here for twenty years,” he told them. “There will be time for preaching when my own education is complete.”
“There are schools in Alexandria,” the caravan’s leader told him, “and the greatest library in the world, in spite of the accidents it has suffered.”
“That is not the kind of learning I seek,” he replied. “I want to know what is within myself—what the Lord might communicate to me if only I may hear him.”
The travelers were not Christians, but they understood his notion of the Lord better than a Roman would have done. “This is the desert,” the leader of the band told him. “Here, the voices of the djinn are louder than the voice of God. Solitude leads to madness.”
“The Devil will undoubtedly tempt me,” Anthony admitted. “I am ready for that.” He did not tell them that the thirst was already building within him for something richer by far than water or wine, nor what effort it required to resist the urge to cut his visitors’ throats and suck the wounds till he could such no more.
He had always thought that solitude was the best thing for a man of his sort. The fact that the company of living human beings would henceforth be an endless torment of unacknowledgeable desire only served to confirm his judgment.
The travelers went on their way on the thirty-first day after Anthony had endured the vampire’s bite; after that he was alone until the evening of the fortieth day, when he woke from a doze at sunset to find a simulacrum of Christ offering him a cup.
“This is my blood,” said the apparent Christ. “Drink of it, and be saved.”
“I have been expecting you, Satan,” Anthony replied. “I knew that you would seize upon my new weakness. Why else would you have sent the demon to suck the fluid from me?”
“This is my blood,” the false Christ repeated. “It is my gift, and the way to salvation.”
“You are the Devil,” Anthony retorted, “and you have no gift to offer but eternal damnation.” He got up and went to the well, setting Satan firmly behind him. He lowered the bucket and brought it up again.
He drank—but he was still thirsty, and he knew that the darker thirst would not be assuaged by water.
Anthony did not doubt that the fluid in the Devil’s cup really was blood, nor that it would answer his terrible need, but he had not come to Pispir in search of satiation—quite the reverse, in fact. He did not drink water to salve his thirst, but only because he would die without it; had he been able to drink and keep his thirst he would have done so. To be able to drink and still have thirst of a sort to test him was a privilege of sorts.
When he turned around again, determined to see things in the light of his faith, the Devil was cloven-hoofed and shaggy-legged, with horns set atop his brow. Satan did not seem comfortable in this form, for his eyes seemed pained and his gaze as roaming restlessly, but Anthony assumed that this was because honesty was a sore trial to a creature of his sort.
“You are foolish to insist on seeing me thus,” the Devil complained, casting aside the cup, from which nothing spilled as it rolled over the sand-dusted flagstones bordering the well. “I am neither the Great God Pan, nor the Father of Lies, nor a prideful angel cast out of Heaven. I will admit to being a temptation personified, but mine is the temptation of knowledge and progress. I am one who can and will reveal secrets, if you will only consent to listen.”
“I will not,” Anthony told his adversary. “I am deaf to all but the word of the Lord, and knowledge of the Lord is the only wisdom I seek.”
“I did not send the vampire to bite you,” the Devil insisted, his agonized eyes looking upwards as if to welcome the deeper blue that was consuming the sky from the east. “That is not my way of working—but if I were of a mind to create such creatures, I would shape them as seductive women, whose bite would be a glorious indulgence and a pleasure unmatchable. The wretched parasite that attacked you was one of nature’s sports. If God were responsible for such monstrosities—and I cannot believe that He is—they would be evidence of His sickness or His sense of humor.”
“Have you come to debate with me, then?” Anthony asked. “I do not mind in the least, for the nights are long at this time of year, and often surprisingly cold. It will be a futile occupation, though, from your own point of view. There are many souls in the world, alas, that might be won with far less trouble than mine.”
“This is not a contest,” the Devil said, seeming a little more at ease now that the evening star was shining brightly and the atmospheric dust in the west had taken on the color of blood. “There was no war in Heaven, and there is no war on Earth for the souls of humankind. You conceive of yourself as a battleground in which a higher self of faith of virtue, aided by a guardian angel, is ceaselessly at war with a lower self of insatiable appetite and uncontrollable passion, provoked by mischievous imps, but all of that is mere illusion. If solitude really allowed you to look into yourself more clearly, you would know that you are less divided than you imagine, and that the world is not as you imagine it to be.”
“Excellent,” said Anthony. “Nothing can warm a man more, in th
e absence of tangible heat, than the labor of cutting through sophistry. Sit down, my enemy, I beg you. Let’s make ourselves as comfortable as we can, given the hardness of the ground and the aching within.”
“Oh no,” the Devil said, seeming to grow larger as the night advanced, and now unfurling wings like those of a gigantic eagle. “I can do better than that, my friend, by way of distracting us from our mutual plight.”
Anthony had observed that the Devil, in what he took to be the dark angel’s natural form, was not well-adapted for sitting. His goatish limbs were not articulated like a humans; even squatting must be awkward for him. Anthony had not expected compliance when he made his teasing offer—but neither had he expected to be carried away.
The Devil did not grow claws to match his wings; indeed, the wings themselves refused to coalesce into avian feathers, but continued to grow and to change, as if they were intent on attaining the pure insubstantiality of shadow. By night, it seemed, the Ape of God and the Adversary of Humankind had more freedom to formulate himself as he wished—and what he wished to be, it seemed, was a vast cloud of negation.
Anthony felt himself caught up by that cloud, but he was not grabbed or clutched, merely elevated towards the sky. The cloud was beneath him and all around him, but it was perfectly transparent—more perfectly transparent, in fact, than a pool of pure water or the unstirred desert air.
Anthony tried to resist the sensation that he could see more clearly through the cloud of absence than he had ever been able to see before, but his eyes were unusually reluctant to take aboard his conviction and he had to fight to secure the dictatorship of his faith.
He saw the walls of the fort shrink beneath him, until the ruin was a mere blur on the desert’s face. Then he saw the coastline of North Africa, where the ocean was separated from the arid wilderness by a mere ribbon of fertile ground. Then he watched the curve of the horizon extend into the arc of a circle, and he saw the sun that had set a little while before rise again in the west, as the edge of the world could no longer hide it.
“You cannot trouble me with that,” he told the Devil. “I know that the world is round.”
The Devil no longer had eyes to reflect his anguish, nor a leathery tongue with which to form his lies, but he was not voiceless. He spoke within Anthony’s head, like an echo of a thought.
“Fear not, my friend,” the voice said, softer now than before. “I have brought air enough to sustain us for the whole night long—and if, by chance, you would like to slake your thirsts, I have water and blood enough to bring you to the very brink of satisfaction.”
“I have drunk my fill of the Lord’s good water,” Anthony told him, “and human blood I will never drink, no matter how my Devilled thirst might increase. I can suffer any affliction, knowing that my Lord loves me and that my immortal soul is safe for all eternity.” While he spoke, Anthony observed that the world as spinning on its axis, and moving through space as if to describe a circle of its own around the sun. The moon and the world were engaged in a curious dance, but the sun—whose disk seemed no bigger than the moon’s, when seen from the land of Egypt—seemed to have become far more massive as the cloud moved towards it.
“Were you expecting a sequence of crystal spheres?” the Devil whispered from his hidden corner of Anthony’s consciousness. “Were you unmoved by my promise of air because you never believed in the possibility of a void? Did you think that you could breathe the quintessential ether as you moved through the hierarchy of the planets towards the ultimate realm of the fixed stars?”
“There is but one Lord,” Anthony replied, “and I am content to breathe in accordance with His providence.”
“Alas, you’ll have to breathe in accordance with my providence, for a little while,” said the Adversary of Humankind. “There is neither air nor ether outside this nimbus. Can you see that the world is but one of the planetary family, toiling around the central sun? Do you see how small a world it is, by comparison with mighty Jupiter? Can you see that Jupiter and Saturn have major satellites as big as worlds themselves, and hosts of minor ones? Do you see how the space between Mars and Jupiter is strewn with planetoids? Can you see the halo from which comets come, beyond the orbits of worlds unseen from Earth, unnamed as yet by curious astronomers?” Anthony, who was familiar with the story of Er, as told in Plato’s Republic, looked for the Spindle of Necessity and listened for the siren song of the music of the spheres, but he was not disappointed by their absence.
“I am riding in a cloud formed by the Master of Illusion,” he said, not speaking aloud but confident that the Devil, cornered within him, could hear him perfectly well. “You cannot frighten me with empty space and lonely worlds. If the Earth is indeed a solitary wanderer in an infinite void, I shall feel my kinship with its rocks and deserts more keenly than before.”
“The Master of Illusion is sight constrained by faith,” the Devil told him. “I am an Iconoclast, committed to breaking the idols that filter the evidence of your Earthbound eyes. I do not seek to frighten you but to awaken you. Do you see the stars, now that we are moving through their realm? Can you see that they are not fixed at all, but moving in their own paces about the chaos at the heart of the Milky Way? Do you see the nebulae that lie without the sidereal system? Can you discern the stars that comprise them—systems like the Milky Way, more numerous by far than the stars they each contain?”
“It is a pretty conceit,” Anthony admitted. “Evidence, I trust, of your sense of humor rather than your sickness of mind.”
“It is the truth,” said the voice within him.
“If it were real,” Anthony retorted, “it would not be equal to the millionth part of the greater truth, which is faith in the Lord and His covenant with humankind.” He knew, however, that while the Devil was lurking inside him, borrowing the voice of his own thoughts, he had no means of concealing the force of his realization that perhaps this was the truth, and that the world really might be no more than a mediocre rock dutifully circling a mediocre star in a mediocre galaxy in a universe so vast that no power of sight could plumb its depths nor any power of mind calculate its destiny.
Curiously enough, however, the Devil did not appear to be privy to that unvoiced thought, formulated more by dread than doubt. “It was not always thus,” the Devil said. “In the beginning, it was very tiny—but that was fourteen thousand million years ago; it is expanding still, and has a far greater span before it, until the last fugitive stars expend the last of their waning light, and darkness falls upon lifelessness forever.”
“The Lord said ‘Let there be light’,” Anthony reminded the Adversary. “He did not say ‘Let there be light forever’—but what does it matter, since our souls are safe in his care?”
“Our souls?” countered the Devil.
“Human souls,” Anthony corrected himself. “Those human souls, at least, which contrive to stay out of your dark clutches.”
The cloud seemed to come to a halt then, in an abyss of space that suddenly seem vertiginous in every direction, where whole systems of stars were reduced to mere points of tentative light. “This is not so awesome,” whispered the Devil, “compared with the emptiness inside an atom, where matter dissolves into animate mathematical entity and uncertainty refuses the definition of solidity. I wish I could show you that, but a human mind’s eye is incapable of such imagination. Trust me when I tell you that there is void within as well as without, and that substance is rarer than you could ever comprehend.”
“There is no void where the Lord is,” Anthony replied, “and the Lord is everywhere—except, I must suppose, in the depths of your rebellious heart, from which He has been rudely cast out.”
As he spoke, though, the hermit became more sharply aware of his thirst for blood: the curse that the Devil had inflicted upon him in order to increase his vulnerability to unreason.
Anthony struggled to keep his next thought unvoiced, but in the end he decided that he had no need to hide from the Devil, while he
was still committed to the Lord. “I am a vampire now,” he said, without waiting for any reply to his previous observation, “but I am no more a sinner than I was before. I thirst, but I trust in the Lord to deliver me from evil. I will not drink of human blood, no matter how intense my thirst becomes. If my life is to be a trial by ordeal, then I shall be vindicated.”
“And if you should live forever, unable to die?” the Devil murmured. “What then, my friend? What if your thirst should become as infinite as the abysm of space, never ceasing to increase?”
“Eventually,” Anthony reminded him, “the last star will expend the last of its light, and darkness will fall forever. I shall be safe in the bosom of the Lord.”
The cloud condensed around him then, and moved through him, as if it were turning him inside out or drawing him into a fourth dimension undiscernible by human eyes—but then the dark abyss of intergalactic space was replaced by the familiar gloom of night on Earth. Anthony found himself on the edge of a cliff not far from his fort, kneeling on the bare rock and looking out over the desert dunes.
Anthony bowed his head, and was about to thank the Lord for his deliverance, when he caught sight of a moon-shadow from the corner of his eye. It appeared to be the shadow of a human being, but Anthony knew better than to trust the appearance.
He turned to look at the Devil, who now wore the appearance of an Alexandrian philosopher—an Epicurean, Anthony supposed, rather than a neo-Platonist.
“What now?” the hermit said, glad to be able to speak the words aloud, although his tongue felt thick and the inside of his mouth was parched. “Have you no one else to tempt and torment? I have seen your emptiness, and yet am full. I will no more drink of horror and despair than of human blood. I must suppose that I am a vampire now, but I still have my faith. I shall never be a minion of the Prince of Demons.”
The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels Page 4