Anne Rice - Memnoch the Devil

Once again, he looked at us with sly eyes.

"You too!" he said, under his breath to us, sending his preternatu­ral voice secretly to our ears. "Come, face the sun, with your arms outstretched! Lestat, God chose you as his Messenger."

"Come," David said. "We've seen enough for this night and many nights hereafter."

"And where do we go?" I asked. "Stop, stop pulling my arm.

David? Did you hear me?"

"I've stopped," he said politely, lowering his voice as if to instruct me to lower mine. The snow fell so softly now. Fire crackled in the nearby black iron drum.

"The books, what happened to them?" How in God's name could I have forgotten.

"What books?" he asked. And he pulled me out of the way of the passersby, against a shopwindow, behind which a little crowd stood, enjoying the private warmth inside, looking towards the church.

"The books of Wynken de Wilde. Roger's twelve books! What happened to them?"

"They're there," he said. "Up there in the tower. She left them for you. Lestat, I've explained this to you. Last night, she spoke to you."

"In the presence of all those others, it was impossible to speak the truth."

"She told you the relics were yours now."

"We have to get the books!" I said. Oh, what a fool I was to forget those beautiful books.

"Be calm, Lestat, be quiet. Stop making them stare at you. The flat is the same, I told you. She hasn't told anyone about it. She has surrendered it to us. She will not tell them that we were ever there. She has promised me. She has given the deed to the Orphanage to you, Lestat, don't you see? She has cut all ties with her former life. Her old religion is dead, abolished. She is reborn, the custodian of the Veil."

"But we don't know!" I roared. "We'll never know. How can she accept it when we don't know and we can't know!" (He pushed me against the wall.) "I want to go back and get the books," I said.

"Of course, we will do this if you wish." How tired I was.

On the pavements the people sang: " 'And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and lets me call Him by name.' "

The apartment was undisturbed.

As far as I could tell, she had never returned. None of us had.

David had come to check, and David had been telling the truth. All was as it had been.

Except, in the tiny room where I had slept there stood only the chest. My clothes and the blanket on which they'd lain, covered with the same dirt and pine needles from an ancient forest floor, were all gone.

"Did you take them?"

"No," he said. "I believe she did. They are the tattered relics of the angelic messenger. The Vatican officials have them, as far as I know."

I laughed. "And they'll analyze all that material, the bits of organic matter from the forest floor."

"The clothes of the Messenger of God, it was already in the papers," he said. "Lestat, you must come to your senses. You cannot blunder through the mortal world like this. You are a risk to yourself, to others. You are a risk to everything out there. You must contain your power."

"Risk? After this, what I've done, creating a miracle, like this, a new infusion of blood into the very religion that Memnoch loathed. Oh God!"

"Ssssshhhh. Quiet," he said. "The chest, there. The books are in the chest."

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?

David stood in the hallway. The light from the distant glass wall made his profile icy and calm.

I reached over and opened the lid of the chest. It was made of wood, a Chinese chest, carved deep with many figures. And there were the twelve books, each wrapped as we had wrapped them so carefully, and all padded and safe and dry. I didn't have to open them to know.

"I want us to leave now," David said. "If you begin crying out again, if you begin trying to tell people again. . . ."

"Oh, I know how tired you are, my friend," I said. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." From riot after riot, he'd torn me and dragged me out of the sight of mortal eyes.

I thought about those policemen again. I hadn't even been resisting them. I thought about the way they backed off one by one, as if from something so inherently unwholesome that their molecules told them to do it. Back off.

And she spoke of a Messenger from God. She was so certain.

"We have to leave it now," he said. "It's done. Others are coming.

I don't want to see the others. Do you? Do you want to answer the questions of Santino or Pandora or Jesse or whoever might come! What more can we do? I want to leave now."

"You believe I was his fool, don't you?" I asked, looking up at him.

"Whose fool? God's or the Devil's?"

"That's just it," I said. "I don't know. You tell me what you believe."

"I want to go," he said, "because if I do not go now, I will join them this morning on the church steps—Mael and whoever else is there. And there are others coming. I know them. I see them."

"No, you can't do that! What if every particle of it was a lie! What if Memnoch wasn't the Devil, and God wasn't God, and the whole thing was some hideous hoax worked on us by monsters who are no better than we are! You can't ever think of joining them on the church steps! The earth is what we have! Cling to it! You don't know. You don't know about the whirlwind and Hell. You don't know.

Only He knows the rules. Only He is supposed to speak the truth! And Memnoch over and over described Him as if He were Mad, a Moral Idiot."

He turned slowly, the light playing with the shadows of his face. Softly he asked, "His blood, Lestat, could it truly be inside you?"

"Don't start believing it!" I said. "Not you! No. Don't believe. I refuse to play. I refuse to take either side! I brought the Veil back so you and she would believe what I said, that's all I did, and this, this madness has happened!"

I swooned.

I saw the Light of Heaven for an instant, or it seemed I did. I saw Him standing at the balustrade. I smelled that fierce horrid smell that had arisen so often from the earth, from battlefields, from the floors of Hell.

David knelt beside me, holding me by my arms.

"Look at me, don't fade out on me now!" he said. "I want us to leave here, we're to go away. You understand? We'll go back home. And then I want you to tell me the whole story again, dictate it to me, word for word."

"For what?"

"In the words we'll find the truth, in the details and in the plot we'll discover who did what for whom. Whether God used you, or Memnoch did! Whether Memnoch was lying the whole time!

Whether God...."

"Ah, it makes your head ache, doesn't it? I don't want you to write it down. There will only be a version if you write it down, a version, and there are already so many versions, what has she told them of her night visitors who brought her the Veil, her benign demons who brought her the Veil? And they took my clothes! What if there is tissue from my skin on those clothes?"

"Come now, take the books, here, I'll help you, here, there are three sacks here but we need only two, you put this bundle in yours, and I'll take the other."

robeyed his orders. We had the books in the two sacks. We could go now.

"Why did you leave them here when you sent all the other things back?"

"She wanted you to have them," he said. "I told you. She wanted me to see that they were put in your hands. And she's given you all the rest. All ties are cut for her. This is a movement drawing fundamentalist and fanatic, cosmic Christians and Christians from East and West."

"I have to try to get near her again."

"No. Impossible. Come. Here. I have a heavy coat. You must put this on."