Anne Rice - Memnoch the Devil

"Thank God for that," I said. "Did you tell them he was dead?

Will it all end soon, his story, and what part you have to play in it?"

"They found his head," said Armand quietly.

In a muted voice he explained. Dogs had dragged the head from a heap of garbage, and were fighting over it beneath a bridge. For an hour, an old man watched, warming himself by a fire, and then gradually he realized it was a human head that the dogs were fighting over and gnawing at, and they brought the head to the proper authorities, and through the genetic testing of his hair and skin discovered that it was Roger. Dental plates didn't help. Roger's teeth had been perfect.

All that remained was for Dora to identify it.

"He must have wanted it found," I said.

"What makes you say that?" asked David. "Where have you been?"

"I saw your mother," I said to Dora. "I saw her bottle-blond hair and her blue eyes. It won't be long before they're in Heaven."

"What on earth are you saying, my darling?" she asked. "My angel? What are you telling me?"

"Sit down, all of you. I'll tell you the whole tale. Listen to everything I say without interrupting. No, I don't want to sit, not with my back to the sky and the whirlwind and the snow and the church. No, I'll walk back and forth, listen to what I have to tell you.

"Remember this. Every word of this happened to me! I could have been tricked. I could have been deceived. But this is what I saw with my eyes, and heard with my ears!"

I told them everything, from the very, very beginning, some things each of them had already heard, but which all of them together had never heard—from my first fatal glimpse of Roger and my love for his brazen white-toothed smile and guilty, gleaming black eyes— all the way to the moment I had pitched myself through the door of the flat last night.

I told them everything. Every word spoken byMemnoch and God Incarnate. Everything I had seen in Heaven and in Hell and on Earth. I told them about the smell and the colors of Jerusalem. I told them and told them and told them.

The story devoured the night. It ate the hours, as I paced, raving, repeating those parts I wanted to get exactly right, the stages of Evolution which had shocked the angels, and the vast libraries of Heaven, and the peach tree with both bloom and fruit, and God, and the sol­dier lying on his back in Hell, refusing to give in. I described to them the details of the interior of Hagia Sophia. I talked about the naked men on the battlefield. Over and over I described Hell. I described Heaven. I repeated my final speech, that I couldn't help Memnoch, I couldn't teach in this school!

They stared at me in utter silence.

"Do you have the veil?" Dora asked, her lip quivering. "Do you still have it?"

So tender was the tilt of her head, as if she'd forgive me in an instant if I said, No, I lost it in the street, I gave it to a beggar!

"The veil proves nothing," I said. "Whatever is on the veil means nothing! Anyone who can make illusions like that can make a veil! It proves neither truth nor lies, neither trickery nor witchery nor theophany."

"When you were in Hell," she asked, so kindly, so gently, her white face shining in the warmth of the lamp, "did you tell Roger you had the veil?"

"No, Memnoch wouldn't let me. And I only saw him for a minute, you see, one second it was one way, and then it was another. But he's going up, I know he is, he's going because he's clever and he's figured it out, and Terry will go with him! They will be in the arms of God unless God is a cheap magician and all of this was a lie, but a lie for what? For what purpose?"

"You don't believe what Memnoch asked of you?" asked Armand.

Only at this moment did I realize how shaken he was, how like the boy he must have been when made a vampire, how young and full of earthly grace. He wanted it to be true!

"Oh, yes, I do!" I said. "I believed him, but it could all be a lie, don't you see?"

"Didn't you feel it was true," asked Armand, "that he needed you?"

"What?" I demanded. "Are we back to that, arguing whether or not when we serve Satan we serve God? You and Louis arguing about that in the Theater of the Vampires, if we are children of Satan, are we children of God?"

"Yes!" said Armand. "Did you believe him?"

"Yes. No. I don't know," I said. "I don't know!" I shouted it. "I hate God as much as I ever did. I resent them both, damn them!"

"And Christ?" Dora asked, her eyes filled with tears. "Was He sorry for us?"

"Yes, in His own way. Yes. Perhaps. Maybe. Who knows! But He didn't go through the Passion as a man alone, as Memnoch had begged Him to do, He carried His cross as God Incarnate. I tell you their rules are not our rules! We have conceived of better rules! We are in the hands of mad things!"

She broke into soft, sorrowful cries.

"Why are we never, never to know?" she cried.

"I don't know!" I declared. "I know they were there, that they appeared to me, that they let me see them. And still I don't know!"

David was scowling, scowling rather like Memnoch could scowl, deep in thought. Then he asked:

"And if it was all a series of images and tricks, things drawn from your heart and your mind, what was the purpose? If it was not a straight proposition that you become his lieutenant or prince, then what could have been the motive?"

"What do you think?" I asked. "They have my eye! I tell you not a word of it is a lie from me. They've got my bloody eye, damn it. I don't know what it was all about, unless it was true, absolutely true to the last syllable."

"We know you believe it's true," said Armand. "Yes, you believe it completely. You bore witness. I believe it's true. All of my long wandering through the valley of death, I've believed it was true!"

"Don't be a common fool," I said bitterly.

But I could see the flame in Armand's face; I could see the ecstasy and the sorrow in his eyes. I could see the entire galvanization of his form with belief, with conversion.

"The clothes," said David thoughtfully, calmly, "in the other room. You've gathered them all up, and the evidence will tell some scientific tale."

"Stop thinking like a scholar. These are Beings who play at a game only they can understand. What is it to them to make pine needles and dirt cling to my clothes, but yes, I saved those relics, yes, I've saved everything but my goddamned eye, which I left on the steps of Hell so I could get out. I, too, want to analyze the evidence on those clothes. I, too, want to know what forest it was where I walked and listened to him!"

"They let you get out," said David.

"If you could have seen his face when he saw that eye on the step,"

I said.

"What was it in his face?" Dora asked.

"Horror, horror that such a thing had happened. You see, when he reached for me, I think that his two fingers, like this, went into the eye socket, overshooting the mark. He had merely meant to grab me by the hair. But when his fingers plunged into the socket, he tried in horror to draw them out, and out came the eye, spilling down my face, and he was horror-stricken!"

"You love him," said Armand in a hushed voice.

"I love him. Yes, I think he's right about everything. But I don't believe in anything!"

"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.

"They let you escape, and they had a purpose," said David. "It was like the vision I saw in the cafe."

"Yes, and they had a purpose," I said. "But did I defeat their purpose?" I looked to him for the answer, he the wise one, the old one in human years. "David, did I defeat them when I took you out of life?