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“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.
“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 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.
Armand was shattered, broken, on his knees, the blood tears running straight down his cheeks, horrid streaks on the white flesh.
He studied the slumped, broken, sobbing figure of Armand, the lost child in his exquisite velvet and lace now stained with his tears.
“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!”
Ah, so the books had been in this little room, where I had slept. I was consoled, so consoled. I sat there, my legs crossed, rocking back and forth, crying. Oh, this is so weird to cry with one eye! God, are tears coming out of the left eye? I don’t think so. I think he ripped away the ducts, what do you think?
A figure stood in the vestibule. Scentless. Vampire. My fledgling. Has to be. Young. Louis. Inevitable. “Did you do all of this?” I asked. “Arrange things here in the church so beautifully?” “It seemed the right thing to do,” he said. He walked towards me. I saw him clearly, though I had to turn my head to focus the one eye on him, and stop trying to open a left eye which wasn’t there.
“Come home with me,” he said. Such a human voice. So kind. “There’s time to come here and reflect. Wouldn’t you rather be home, in the Quarter, amongst our things?” If anything in the world could have truly comforted me, he would have been the thing—with just the beguiling tilt of his narrow head or the way that he kept looking at me, protecting me obviously with a confidential calm from what he must have feared for me, and for him, and perhaps for all of us.
My old familiar gentleman friend, my tender enduring pupil, educated as truly by Victorian ways of courtesy as ever by me in the ways of being a monster. What if Memnoch had called upon him? Why didn’t Memnoch do that! “What have I done?” I asked. “Was it the will of God?” “I don’t know,” he said. He laid his soft hand on mine. His slow voice was a balm to my nerves. “Come home. I’ve listened for hours, to the radio, to the television, to the story of the angel of the night who brought the Veil. The Angel’s tattered clothes have been given over to the hands of priests and scientists. Dora is
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“Do they show the Veil on the evening news?” “Over and over.” He smiled. No mockery. Only love. “What did you think, Louis, when you saw the Veil?” “That it was the Christ I once believed in. That it was the Son of God I knew when I was a boy and this was swampland.” His voice was patient.
“I am no angel! I never meant to give her the Veil! I took the Veil as proof. I took the Veil because.…” My voice had broken. “Because why?” she asked. “Because Christ gave it to me!” I whispered. “He said, ‘Take it,’ and I did.”
“I’m going to keep you here,” she said. “As a prisoner. For a while. Until you’re quieter.” “You’re mad. You’re not keeping me anywhere.” “I have chains waiting for you. David, Louis—you will help me. “What is this? You two, you dare? Chains, we are talking about chains? What am I, Azazel cast into the pit? Memnoch would get a good laugh at this, if he hadn’t turned his back on me forever!”
“I have this for you,” she said. She extended her hand. “And when you read it you will scream and you will weep, and we’ll keep you here, safe and quiet, until such time as you stop. That’s all. Under my protection. In this place. You will be my prisoner.”
“Scream, will I?” I cried. “Scream, why? What do you think I see? I see only what I saw before!” I cried. I looked from right to left, the appalling patch of darkness gone, the world complete, the stained glass, the still trio watching me. “Oh, thank you, God!” I whispered. But what did this mean? Was it a prayer of thanks, or merely an exclamation!
To My Prince, My Thanks to you for a job perfectly done. with Love, Memnoch the Devil
I started to roar. “Lies, lies, lies!” I heard the chains. “What metal is it you think can bind me, cast me down! Damn you. Lies! You didn’t see him. He didn’t give you this!” David, Louis, her strength, her inconceivable strength, strength, since the time immemorial, before the first tablets had been engraved at Jericho—it surrounded me, enclosed me. It was she more than they; I was her child, thrashing and cursing at her. They dragged me through the darkness, my howls echoing off the walls, into the room they had chosen for me with its bricked-up windows, lightless, a dungeon, the chains
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Dimly I thought I heard Louis’s gentle voice, protesting, pleading, arguing. I heard locks thrown, I heard nails going through wood. I heard Louis begging. “For a while, just a little while.…” she said. “He is too powerful for us to do anything else. It is either that, or we do away with him.” “No,” Louis cried. I heard David protest, no, that she couldn’t. “I will not,” she said calmly. “But he will stay here until I say that he can leave.”
One night Louis came, with the quiet ease of a chaplain into a jail, immune to the rules yet presenting no threat to them. Slowly, he sat down beside me and folded his legs, and looked off as though it was not polite to stare at me, the prisoner, wrapped in chains and rage. He laid his fingers on my shoulder. His hair had a reasonable and fashionable look to it—that is, it was clipped and combed and not full of dust. His clothes were clean and new, too, as if he had perhaps dressed for me. I smiled to myself at that, his dressing for me. But from time to time he did, and when I saw that the
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“They are glorious. They are magnificent. You will love them. You have years of pleasure ahead with them and the light at your side. I’ve only begun to look at them and to read. With a magnifying glass. But you won’t need the glass. Your eyes are stronger than mine.” “We can read them perhaps … you and I … together.” “Yes … all his twelve books,” he said. He talked softly of many miraculous little images, of tiny humans, and beasts and flowers, and the lion lying down with the lamb. I closed my eyes. I was grateful. I was content. He knew I didn’t want to talk anymore. “I’ll be down there, in
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