Page 18 (1/2)

18

HE HAD COME from the maelstrom One shoe was left to hied with thorns and dried leaves and bits of errant flowers

In his arms, to his chest he clutched a flat bundle of folded cloth as if it carried the whole fate of the world embroidered on it

But the worst, the very worst horror of all, was that one eye had been torn from his beautiful face, and the socket of va to acknowledge this horrid disfigurement to the body rendered perfect for all time when he’d been made immortal

I wanted to take him in my arone and whatever had taken place, he was now safe again with us, but nothing could quiet him

A deep exhaustion saved us all from the inevitable tale We had to seek our dark corners away froht when he would come out to us and tell us what had happened

Still clutching the bundle, refusing all help, he closeted himself up with his wound I had no choice but to leave hi intoplace, secure in clean modern darkness, I cried and cried like a child on account of the sight of hiht low like this when it had taken so many painful decades to cement my love for hio, he’d co into the Theatre des Vaentle Louis and the doomed child, and I hadn’t pitied him then, his skin scored with scars from Claudia’s foolish and clumsy attempt to kill him

Loved him then, yes, I had, but this had been a bodily disaster which his evil blood would heal, and I knew froreater strength than serene tiiven him

But what I’d seen noas a devastation of the soul in his anguished face, and the vision of the one blue eye, shining so vividly in his streaked and wretched face, had been unbearable

I don’t re hastened us away, and if you cried too, I never heard you, I never thought to listen As for the bundle he had carried in his arms, what could it have possibly been? I do not even think I thought of it

The next night:

He came quietly into the parlor of the apartment as the darkness clambered down, starry for a few precious moments before the dreary descent of snow He ashed and dressed, his torn and bleeding foot no doubt healed He wore new shoes

But nothing could lessen the grotesque picture of his torn face where the cuts of a claw or fingernails surrounded the gaping, puckering lids Quietly he sat down

He looked at htened his face "Don’t fear for me, little devil Ar now I a"

In a low voice I whispered to hio down into the streets, letwho has wasted every physical gift that God ever gave, an eye for you! Let me put it here in the empty socket Your blood will rush into it and make it see You know You saw this miracle once with the ancient one, Maharet, indeed, with a pair ofin her special blood, eyes that could see! I’ll do it It won’t take me but a moment, and then I’ll have the eye in my hand and be the doctor myself and place it here Please"

He only shook his head He kissed me quickly on the cheek

"Why do you love me after all I’ve done to you?" he asked There was no denying the beauty of his smooth poreless sun-darkened skin, and even as the dark slit of the empty socket seemed to peer at me with some secret power to relay its vision to his heart He was handso froh he’d seen some powerful an to cry "I have, and IBelieve ht, the wildflowers clinging still to h-believe me"

You intervened then, David "Tell us, Lestat We would have waited here forever for you Tell us Where did this de and reasonable your voice sounded, just as it does now I think you were iven to us, if I may speculate, to force us to see our catastrophes in the new light of s for hts hereafter

Let athered in the black-lacquered Chinese chairs around the thick glass table, and Dora co in, at once struck by the presence of hiiven her a clue, a pretty picture with her short gleaile nape of her swanlike neck, her long supple body clad in a loose ungirdled gown of purple red tissue that folded itself about her sel of the Lord, this, I thought lord Father’s severed head She teaches doctrines with every step that would lee

About her pale sweet throat she wore a crucifix so tiny it seehtless chain of minuscule links woven by fairies What are such holy objects now, tu on milky bosohts were er of her beauty Her swelling breasts, their shadowy cleft quite visible against the si of her dark low-cut dress, told reatest adorner love for hirace of her white arrateful for the gentle yielding of his body in towards her I was so thankful that she loved him

"So the Prince of Lies had a tale to tell, did he?" she asked She could not kill the quaver in her voice "So he’s taken you to his Hell and sent you back?" She took Lestat’s face in her hands and turned it towards her "Then tell us what it was, this Hell, tell us e must be afraid Tell us why you are afraid, but I think it’s so far worse than fear that I see now in you"

He nodded his head to say that it was He pushed back the Chinese chair, and wringing his hands he began to pace, the inevitable prelude to his tale telling

"Listen to all I say, before you judge," he declared, fixing us now, the three who crowded about the table, an anxious little audience willing to do whatever he asked of us His eyes lingered on you, David, you, the English scholar in your manly tweed, who in spite of love abundantly clear beheld him with a critical eye, ready to evaluate his words with a wisdoan to talk Hour by hour he talked Hour by hour the words strea over one another so that he had to stop and catch his breath, but he never really paused, as he poured it out over the long night, this tale of his adventure

Yes, Memnoch the Devil had taken hiatorial place in which the souls of all who had ever lived elcome to come of their own accord from the ind of death which had inherited theatorial Hell, confronted with all the deeds they’d ever done, they learnt the most hideous lesson of all, the endless consequences of every action ever corant children slaughtered in see innocence and soldiers bathed in blood from battlefields, all were admitted to this awful place of s wounds in othershands, to plumb the depths of other souls and hearts which they had injured!

All horror was an illusion in this place, but the worst horror of all was the person of God Incarnate, who had allowed this Final School for those ould be worthy to enter His Paradise And, this too Lestat had seen, the Heaven glimpsed atrees and flowers eternally sweet and endless crystal towers of happy, happy beings, shorn of all flesh and one at last with countless choirs of singing angels

It was an old tale It was too old It had been told too ates, and God Our Maker sending forth His endless light to those who climbed the mythic stairs to join the celestial court forever

How led to describe these same wonders!

How limpsed this indescribable and eternal Eden?

And how cleverly this Devil Memnoch had laid out his case to plead for mortal compassion for his sin, that he and he alone had opposed athat Deity to look doith cos who had by ender souls worthy of His interest?

This, then, was the fall of Lucifer like the Star of Morning frohters of Men that they had now the countenances and hearts of angels

"Give theive it to them when they have learnt in my school how to love all that you have created"

Oh, a book has been filled with this adventure Memnoch the Devil cannot be condensed here in these few unjust paragraphs

But this was the sum of what fell onnow and then past Lestat’s frantic, pacing figure at the white sky of ever falling snow, shutting out beneath his roaring narrative the ru with the awful fear in myself that I must at the climax of his tale disappoint him That I must remind him that he had done no more than shape the mystic journey of a thousand saints in a new and palatable fashion

So it is a school that replaces those rings of eternal fire which the poet Dante described in such degree as to sicken the reader, and even the tender Fra Angelico felt compelled to paint, where naked mortals bathed in flame were meant to suffer for eternity

A school, a place of hope, a proh perhaps to welcoht, who countedtheir sins as nuols

Oh, this was very sweet, this picture of the life hereafter, the horrors of the natural world laid off upon a wise but distant God, and the Devil’s folly rendered with such keen intelligence

Would that it were true, would that all the poes of the world were but a ht have saddenedle incident fro encounter, looe for hts, so that as he went on and on, I couldn’t banish this from my mind: that he, Lestat, had drunk the very blood of Christ on the road to Calvary That he, Lestat, had spoken to this God Incarnate, who by His oill had walked towards this horrible Death on Golgotha That he, Lestat, a fearful and tre witness had been made to stand in the narrow dusty streets of ancient Jerusale Lord, had, with the crossbeam of the crucifix strapped to His shoulders, offered His throat to Lestat, the chosen pupil

Ah, such fancy, this madness, such fancy I had not expected to be so hurt by anything in this tale I had not expected this to htness in my throat from which no words could escape I had not wanted this The only salvation of my wounded heart was to think how quaint and foolish it was that such a tableau- Jerusale God, now scourged and liend old and sweet of a woman with a Veil outstretched to wipe the bloody Face of Christ in coe