The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [167]
I knew things but I didn’t know what to make of them. I knew that the snow covering me was growing ever deeper, and ever harder, and I didn’t understand how such a thing as ice could keep away from me the rays of the sun.
Surely, I must die, I thought. If not this coming day, then the next. I thought of Lestat holding up the Veil. I thought of His Face. But the zeal had left me. All hope had left me.
I will die, I thought. Morning by morning, I will die.
But I didn’t.
In the city far below, I heard others of my kind. I didn’t really try to hear them, and so it was not their thoughts that came to me, but now and then their words. Lestat and David were there, Lestat and David thought that I was dead. Lestat and David mourned for me. But far worse horrors plagued Lestat because Dora and the world had taken the Veil, and the city was now crowded with believers. The Cathedral could scarce control the multitudes.
Other immortals came, the young, the feeble and sometimes, most horribly, the very ancient, wanting to view this miracle, slipping into the nighttime Church among the mortal worshipers and looking with crazed eyes on the veil.
Sometimes they spoke of poor Armand or brave Armand or St. Armand, who in his devotion to the Crucified Christ had immolated himself at this very Church door!
Sometimes they did the same. And just before the sun was to rise again, I’d have to hear them, hear their last desperate prayers as they waited for the lethal light. Did they fare better than I? Did they find their refuge in the arms of God? Or were they screaming in agony, agony such as I felt, unendurably burnt and unable to break away from it, or were they lost as I was, remnants in alleyways or on distant roofs? No, they came and they went, whatever their fate.
How pale it all was, how far away. I felt so sad for Lestat that he had bothered to weep for me, but I was to die here. I was to die sooner or later. Whatever I had seen in that moment when I’d risen into the sun didn’t matter. I was to die. That was all there was.
Piercing the snowy night, electronic voices spoke of the miracle, that Christ’s Face upon a Veil of linen had cured the sick and left its imprint on other cloths pressed to it. Then came an argument of clergymen and skeptics, a perfect din.
I followed the sense of nothing. I suffered. I burned. I couldn’t open my eyes, and when I tried, my eyelashes scratched my eyes and the agony was too much to bear. In darkness, I waited for her.
Sooner or later, without fail, there came her magnificent music, with all its new and wondrous variations, and nothing mattered to me then, not the mystery of where I was, or what I might have seen, or what it was that Lestat and David meant to do.
It was not until the seventh night perhaps that my senses were fully restored to me, and the full horror of my state was understood.
Lestat was gone. So was David. The Church had been shut up. From the murmurings of mortals I soon realized that the Veil had been taken away.
I could hear the minds of all the city, a din that was unsupportable. I shut myself off from it, fearing the vagrant immortal who’d home in on me if he caught but one spark from my telepathic mind. I couldn’t endure the thought of some attempted rescue by immortal strangers. I couldn’t endure the thought of their faces, their questions, their possible concern or merciless indifference. I hid myself from them, coiled up in my cracked and tightened flesh. Yet I heard them, as I heard the mortal voices around them, speaking of miracles and redemption and the love of Christ.
Besides, I had enough to think about to figure my present predicament and how it had come to be.
I was lying on a roof. That is where my fall had left me,