The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [160]
It did not matter that Lestat fought with her, and cautioned her that she must not believe this thing, and that the three of us stood on the steps of the Cathedral and that the snow fell like some splendid blessing from the invisible and fathomless Heavens.
It did not matter that the sun was soon to rise, a fiery silver ball beyond the canopy of melting clouds.
I could die now.
I had seen Him, and all the rest—the words of Memnoch and his fanciful God, the pleas of Lestat that we come away, that we hide ourselves before the morning devoured us all—it did not matter.
I could die now.
“Not made by human hands,” I whispered.
A crowd gathered around us at the doors. The warm air came out of the church in a deep delicious gust. It didn’t matter.
“The Veil, the Veil,” they cried. They saw! They saw His Face.
Lestat’s desperate imploring cries were dying away.
The morning came down in its thunderous white-hot light, rolling over roofs and curdling the night in a thousand glassy walls and slowly unleashing its monstrous glory.
“Bear witness,” I said. I held up my open arms to the blinding light, this molten silvery death. “This sinner dies for Him! This sinner goes to Him.”
Cast me into Hell, Oh Lord, if that is Your will. You have given me Heaven. You have shown me Your Face.
And Your Face was human.
19
ISHOT UP WARDS. The pain I felt was total, scalding away all will or power to choose momentum. An explosion inside me sent me skyward, right into the pearly snowy light which had come in a sudden flood, as it always does, from a threatening eye one moment, sending its endless rays over the cityscape, to a tidal wave of weightless molten illumination, rolling over all things great and small.
Higher and higher I went, spinning as if the force of the interior explosion would not stop its intensity, and in my horror I saw that my clothes had been burnt away, and a smoke veered off my limbs into the whirling wind.
I caught one full glimpse of my limbs, my naked outstretched arms and splayed legs, silhouetted against the obliterating light. My flesh was burnt black already, shiny, sealed to the sinews of my body, collapsed to the intricate tangle of muscles which encased my bones.
The pain reached the zenith of what I could bear, but how can I explain that it didn’t matter to me; I was on the way to my own death, and this seemingly endless torture was nothing, nothing. I could endure all things, even the burning in the eyes, the knowledge that they would soon melt or explode in this furnace of sunlight, and that all that I was would pass out of flesh.
Abruptly the scene changed. The roar of the wind was gone, my eyes were quiet and focused, and all around there arose a great familiar chorus of hymns. I stood at an altar, and as I looked up I beheld a church before me thronged with people, its painted columns rising like so many ornate tree trunks out of the wilderness of singing mouths and wondering eyes. Everywhere, to right and to left, I saw this immense and endless congregation. The church had no walls to bind it, and even the rising domes, decorated in the purest and most glittering gold with the hammered saints and angels, gave way to the great ever thinning and never ending blue sky.
Incense filled my nostrils. Around me, the tiny golden bells rang in unison, and with one riff of delicate melody tumbling fast upon another. The smoke burnt my eyes but so sweetly, as the fragrance of the incense filled my nostrils and made my eyes water, and my vision become one with all I tasted and touched and heard.
I threw out my arms, and I saw long golden-trimmed white sleeves covering them, falling back from wrists which were covered with the soft fleecy down of a man’s natural hair. These were my hands, yes, but my hands years past the mortal point where life had been fixed in me. They were the hands of a man.
Out of my mouth there came a song, echoing loudly and singly over the congregation, and then their voices rose in answer, and once again I intoned my conviction,