The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [157]
It was an old tale. It was too old. It had been told too many times, this tale—of Heaven with her open gates, and God Our Maker sending forth His endless light to those who climbed the mythic stairs to join the celestial court forever.
How many mortals waking from a near death sleep have struggled to describe these same wonders!
How many saints have claimed to have glimpsed 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 a merciless and indifferent God, to beg that Deity to look down with compassionate eyes on a fleshly race of beings who had by means of their own selfless love managed to engender souls worthy of His interest?
This, then, was the fall of Lucifer like the Star of Morning from the sky—an angel begging for the Sons and Daughters of Men that they had now the countenances and hearts of angels.
“Give them Paradise, Lord, give 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 on my ears as I sat in this chilly New York room, gazing now and then past Lestat’s frantic, pacing figure at the white sky of ever falling snow, shutting out beneath his roaring narrative the rumble of the city far below, and struggling 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 promise of redemption great enough perhaps to welcome even us, the Children of the Night, who counted murders among their sins as numerous as those of ancient Huns or Mongols.
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 poems and paintings of the world were but a mirror of such hopeful splendor.
It might have saddened me; it might have broken me down to where I hung my head and couldn’t look at him.
But a single incident from his tale, one which to him had been a passing encounter, loomed large for me beyond all the rest and locked itself to my thoughts, 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 own will had walked towards this horrible Death on Golgotha. That he, Lestat, a fearful and trembling witness had been made to stand in the narrow dusty streets of ancient Jerusalem to see Our Lord pass, and that this Lord, Our Living 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 make a burning in my chest, a tightness 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—Jerusalem, the dusty street, the angry crowds, the bleeding God, now scourged and limping beneath His wooden weight—should include a legend old and sweet of a woman with a Veil outstretched to wipe the