The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [76]
“I die now,” I whispered. This ecstasy could not endure.
Abruptly the world died.
I stood alone on the desolate and windy shore of the sea.
It was the land to which I’d journeyed before, but how different it was now, devoid of its shining sun and abundant flowers. The priests were there, but their robes were dusty and dark and reeked of the earth. I knew these priests, I knew them well. I knew their names. I knew their narrow bearded faces, their thin greasy hair and the black felt hats that they wore. I knew the dirt in their fingernails, and I knew the hungry hollow of their sunken gleaming eyes.
They beckoned for me to come.
Ah, yes, back to where I belonged. We climbed higher and higher until we stood on the bluff of the glass city, and it lay to the far left of us, and how forlorn and empty it was.
All the molten energy which had lighted its multitudinous and translucent towers was now dead and gone, turned off at the source. Nothing remained of the blazing colors except a deep dull residue of tints beneath the featureless span of hopeless gray sky. Oh, sad, sad, to see the glass city without its magic fire.
A chorus of sounds rose from it, a tinkling, as of glass dully striking glass. There was no music in it. There was only a bleary luminous despair.
“Walk on, Andrei,” said one of the priests to me. His soiled hand with its thin bits of caked mud touched me and pulled at me, hurting my fingers. I looked down to see that my fingers were thin and luridly white. My knuckles shone as though the flesh had already been stripped away, but it had not.
All my skin merely cleaved to me, hungry and loose as their skin.
Before us came the water of the river, filled with ice sloughs and great tangles of blackened driftwood, covering the flatlands with a murky lake. We had to walk through it, and its coldness hurt us. Yet on we went, the four of us, the three priest guides and me. Above loomed the once golden domes of Kiev. It was our Santa Sofia, standing still after the horrid massacres and conflagrations of the Mongols who had laid waste our city and all her riches and all her wicked and worldly women and men.
“Come, Andrei.”
I knew this doorway. It was to the Monastery of the Caves. Only candles illuminated these catacombs, and the smell of the earth overpowered all, even the stench of dried sweat on soiled and diseased flesh.
In my hands, I held the rough wooden handle of a small shovel. I dug into the heap of earth. I opened up the soft wall of rubble, until my eyes fell on a man not dead but dreaming as the dirt covered his face.
“Still alive, Brother?” I whispered, to this soul buried up to his neck.
“Still alive, Brother Andrei, give me only what will sustain me,” said the cracked lips. The white eyelids were never lifted. “Give me only that much, so that our Lord and Savior, Christ Himself, will choose the time that I am to come home.”
“Oh, Brother, how courageous you are,” I said. I put a jug of water to his lips. The mud streaked them as he drank. His head rested back in soft rubble.
“And you, child,” he said with labored breaths, turning ever so slightly from the proffered jug, “when will you have the strength to choose your earthen cell among us, your grave, and wait for Christ to come?”
“Soon, I pray, Brother,” I answered. I stepped back. I lifted the shovel.
I dug into the next cell, and soon a dreadful unmistakable stench assailed me. The priest beside me stayed my hand.
“Our Good Brother Joseph is finally with the Lord,” he said. “That’s it, uncover his face so that we may see for ourselves that he died at peace.”
The stench grew thicker. Only dead human beings reek this strongly. It’s the smell of desolate graves and carts coming from those districts where the plague is at its