25

THE ORPHANAGE was cold. Its thick brick walls, bare of all insulation, held the cold, and made it colder within than the winter outside. Seems I remembered that from before. Why had she given it to me? Why? She had given over the deed to me, and all his relics. What did it mean? Only that she was gone like a comet across the sky.

Was there a country on earth where the news networks had not carried her face, her voice, her Veil, her story?

But we were home, this was our city, New Orleans, our little land, and there was no snow falling here, only the soft scent of the sweet olive trees, and the tulip magnolias in the old neglected convent garden throwing off their pink petals. Look at that, pink petals on the ground.

So quiet here. No one knew of this place. So now the Beast could have his palace and remember Beauty and ponder forever whether Memnoch was weeping in Hell, or whether both of them¡ªthe Sons of God¡ªwere laughing in Heaven!

I walked into the chapel.

I had thought to find drapery and heaps and cartons and crates.  Rather, it was a completed sanctuary. Everything was placed properly as it should be, unwrapped, and dusted, and standing there in the gloom. Statues of St. Anthony, St. Lucy with her eyes on a plate, the Infant Jesus of Prague in his Spanish finery, and the icons hanging on the walls, between the windows, look, all neatly hung.  "But who has done this?"

David was gone. Where? He'd be back. It didn't matter. I had the twelve books. I needed a warm place to sit, perhaps on the altar steps, and I needed light. With this one eye, I needed just a little more than the night's light leaking in through the tall stained-glass windows.

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.

Tall, pale, starved a bit. Black hair short. Green eyes very soft.

Graceful walk of one who does not like to make noise, or make a fuss, or be seen. Plain black clothes, clothes like the Jews in New York who had gathered outside the cathedral, watching the whole spectacle, and like the Amish who had come by train, plain and simple, like the expression on his face.

"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¡ªwith 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 laying on hands.  The Veil has made cures. People are pouring into New York from all over the world. I'm glad you're back. I want you here." "Did I serve God? Is that possible? A God I still hate?"

"I haven't heard your tale," he said. "Will you tell me?" Just that direct, without emotion. "Or is it too much of an agony to say it all again?"

"Let David write it down," I said. "From memory." I tapped my temple. "We have such good memories. I think some of the others can remember things that never actually happened."

I looked around. "Where are we? Oh, my God, I forgot. We're in the chapel. There's the angel with the basin in its hands, and that Crucifix, that was there already."

How stiff and lifeless it looked, how unlike the shining Veil.

"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. "Come home. Let's go. There are ... things in this place."

"Are there?"

"Spirits? Ghosts?" He didn't seem afraid. "They're small, but I feel them, and you know, Lestat, I don't have your powers." Again came his smile. "So you must know. Don't you feel them?"

I shut my eyes. Or, rather, my eye. I heard a strange sound like many, many children walking in ranks. "I think they're singing the times tables."

"And what are those?" Louis asked. He squeezed my arm, bending close. "Lestat, what are the times tables?"

"Oh, you know, the way they used to teach them multiplication in those days, they must have sung it in the classrooms, two times two makes four, two times three makes six, two times four makes eight...  isn't that how it goes ...They're singing it."

I stopped. Someone was there, in the vestibule, right outside the chapel, between the doors to the hall and the doors to the chapel, in the very shadows where I had hidden from Dora.

It was one of our kind. It had to be. And it was old, very old. I could feel the power. Someone was there who was so ancient that only Memnoch and God Incarnate would have understood, or....  Louis, maybe, Louis, if he believed his memories, his brief glimpses, his brief shattering experiences with the very ancient, perhaps....

Still, he wasn't afraid. He was watching me, on guard, but basically fearless.

"Come on, I'm not standing in dread of it!" I said. And I walked towards it. I had the two sacks of books slung over my right shoulder, the fabric tight in my left hand. That allowed my right hand to be free. And my right eye. I still had that. Who was this visitor?

"That's David there," said Louis in a simple placating voice, as if to say, See? You have nothing to worry about.

"No, next to him. Look, look more deeply into the blackness. See, the figure of a woman, so white, so hard, she might as well be a statue in this place?

"Maharet!" I said.

"I am here, Lestat," she said.

I laughed.

"And wasn't that the answer of Isaiah when the Lord called? 'I am here, Lord'?"

"Yes," she said. Her voice was barely audible, but clear and cleaned by time, all the thickness of the flesh long gone from it.

I drew closer, moving out of the chapel proper and into the little vestibule. David stood beside her, like her anointed Second in Command, as if he would have done her will in an instant, and she the eldest, well, almost the eldest, the Eve of Us, the Mother of Us All, or the only Mother who remained, and now as I looked at her, I remembered the awful truth again, about her eyes, that when she was human, they had blinded her, and the eyes through which she looked now were always borrowed, human.

Bleeding in her head, human eyes, lifted from someone dead or alive, I couldn't know, and put into her sockets to thrive on her vampiric blood as long as they could. But how weary they seemed in her beautiful face. What had Jesse said? She is made of alabaster. And alabaster is a stone through which light can pass.

"I won't take a human eye," I said under my breath.

She said nothing. She had not come to judge, to recommend.

Why had she come? What did she want?

"You want to hear the tale too?"

"Your gentle English friend says that it happened as you described it. He says the songs they sing on the televisions are true; that you are the Angel of the Night, and you brought her the Veil, and that he was there, and he heard you tell."

"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 wept. And she waited. Patient, solemn. Louis waited. David waited.

Finally I stopped.

"Write down every word, David, if you write it, every ambiguous word, you hear me? I won't write it myself. I won't. Well, maybe ...  if I don't think you're getting it exactly right, I'll write it, I'll write it one time through. What do you want? Why have you come? No, I won't write it. Why are you here, Maharet, why have you shown yourself to me? Why have you come to the Beast's new castle, for what? Answer me."

She said nothing. Her long, pale-red hair went down to her waist.  She wore some simple fashion that could pass unnoticed in many lands, a long, loose coat, belted around her tiny waist, a skirt that covered the tops of her small boots. The blood scent of the human eyes in her head was strong. And blazing in her head, these dead eyes looked ghastly to me, unsupportable.

"I won't take a human eye!" I said. But I had said that before. Was I being arrogant or insolent? She was so powerful. "I won't take a human life," I said. That had been what I meant. "I will never, never, never as long as I live and endure and starve and suffer, take a human life, nor raise my hand against a fellow creature, be he human or one of us, I do not care, I won't ... I am ... I will ...with my last strength, I won't...."

"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¡ªyou 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!"

But none of them had moved. They stood motionless, her immense reservoir of power totally disguised by her slender white form.

And they were suffering. Oh, I could smell the suffering.

"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."

"What! What is it?" I demanded.

It was a crumpled piece of parchment.

"What the hell is this!" I said. "Who gave you this?" I didn't want to touch it.

She took my left hand with her absolutely irresistible strength, forcing me to drop the books in their sacks, and she placed the little crumpled bundle of parchment in my palm.

"It was given to me for you," she said.

"By whom?" I demanded.

"The person whose writing you will find inside. Read it."

"What the hell!" I swore. With my right fingers I tore open the crumpled vellum.

My eye. My eye shone there against the writing. This little package contained my eye, my eye wrapped in a letter. My blue eye, whole and alive.

Gasping, I picked it up and pushed it into my face, into the sore aching socket, feeling its tendrils reach back into the brain, tangling with the brain. The world flared into full vision.

She stood staring at me.

"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!

"Read," she said, "what is written on the vellum."

An archaic hand, what was this? An illusion! Words in a language that was no language at all, yet clearly articulated so that I could pick them out of the swarming design, written in blood and ink and soot:

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¡ªit 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 going round and round as I thrashed.

"It's lies, it's lies, it's lies! I don't believe it! If I was tricked it was by God!" I roared and roared. "He did it to me. It's not real unless He did it, God Incarnate. Not Memnoch. No, never, never. Lies!"

Finally I lay there, helpless. I didn't care. There was a comfort in being chained, in being unable to batter the walls with my fists till they were pulp, or smash my head against the bricks, or worse....

"Lies, lies, it's all a great big panorama of lies! That's all I saw! One more circus maximus of lies!"

"It's not all lies," she said. "Not all of it. That's the age-old dilemma."

I fell silent. I could feel my left eye growing deeper and stronger into my brain. I had that. I had my eye. And to think of his face, his horror-stricken face when he looked at my eye, and the story of Uncle Mickey's eye. I couldn't grasp it. I'd start howling again.

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."

And they were gone.

"Sing," I whispered. I was talking to the ghosts of the children.

"Sing. ..."

But the convent was empty. All the little ghosts had fled. The con-vent was mine. Memnoch's servant; Memnoch's prince. I was alone in my prison.

P/S: Copyright -->www_novelfreereadonline_Com

***