Memnoch the Devil (The Vampire Chronicles 5)

"Prove your point to me, Memnoch. You have to do that!" I called.

The steps were getting louder. Oh, he was up to his finest tricks.

"Remember, you have to make me see it from your point of view! That's what you promised!"

A wind was collecting, but from where I couldn't tell. All of the great metropolis seemed empty, frozen, my tomb. The snow swirled and thickened before the cathedral. The towers faded.

I heard his voice right beside me, bodiless and intimate. "All right, my beloved one," he said. "We'll begin now. "

Chapter 10

10

WE WERE in the whirlwind and the whirlwind was a tunnel, but between us there fell a silence in which I could hear my own breath.

Memnoch was so close to me, his arm locked around me, that I could see his dark face in profile, and feel the mane of his hair against the side of my own face.

He was not the Ordinary Man now, but indeed the granite angel, the wings rising out of my focus, and folded around us, against the force of the wind.

As we rose, steadily, without the slightest reference to any sort of gravity, two things became apparent to me at once. The first was that we were surrounded by thousands upon thousands of "'individual souls. I say souls! What did I see? I saw shapes in the whirlwind, some completely anthropomorphic, others merely faces, but surrounding me, everywhere, were distinct spiritual entities or individuals, and very faintly I heard their voices¡ªwhispers, cries, and howls¡ªmingling with the wind.

The sound couldn't hurt me now, as it had in the prior apparitions, nevertheless I heard this throng as we shot upwards, turning as if on an axis, the tunnel narrowing suddenly so that the souls seemed to touch us, and then widening, only to narrow again.

The second thing which I instantly realized was that the darkness was fading or being drained utterly from Memnoch's form. His profile was bright and even translucent; so were his shapeless unimportant garments. And the goat legs of the dark Devil were now the legs of a large man. In sum, the entire turbid and smokelike presence had been replaced by something crystalline and reflective, but which felt pliant and warm and alive.

Words came back to me, snatches of scripture, of visions and prophetic claims and poetry; but there was no time to evaluate, to analyze, to seal into memory.

Memnoch spoke to me in a voice that may not have been technically audible, though I heard the familiar accentless speech of the Ordinary Man.

"Now, it is difficult to go to Heaven without the slightest preparation, and you will be stunned and confused by what you see. But if you don't see this first, you'll hunger for it throughout our dialogue, and so I'm taking you to the very gates. Be prepared that the laughter you hear is not laughter. It is joy. It will come through to you as laughter because that is the only way such ecstatic sound can be physically received or perceived. "

No sooner had he finished the last syllable than we found ourselves standing in a garden, on a bridge across a stream! For one moment, the light so flooded my eyes that I shut them, thinking the sun of our solar system had found me and was about to burn me the way I should have been burnt: a vampire turned into a torch and then forever extinguished.

But this sourceless light was utterly penetrating and utterly benign.

I opened my eyes, and realized that we were once again amid hundreds of other individuals, and on the banks of the stream and in all directions I saw beings greeting each other, embracing, conversing, weeping, and crying out. As before, the shapes were in all degrees of distinctness. One man was as solid as if I'd run into him in die street of the city; another individual seemed no more than a giant facial expression; while others seemed whirling bits and pieces of material and light. Others were utterly diaphanous. Some seemed invisible, except that I knew they were there! The number was impossible to determine.

The place was limitless. The waters of the stream itself were brilliant with the reflected light; the grass so vividly green that it seemed in the very act of becoming grass, of being born, as if in a painting or an animated film!

I clung to Memnoch and turned to look at him in this new light form. He was the direct opposite now of the accumulating dark angel, yet the face had the very same strong features of the granite statue, and the eyes had the same tender scowl. Behold the angels and devils of William Blake and you've seen it. It's beyond innocence. "Now we're going in," he said.

I realized I was clinging to him with both hands. "You mean this isn't Heaven!" I cried, and my voice came out as direct speech, intimate, just between us.

"No," he said, smiling and guiding me across this bridge. "When we get inside, you must be strong. You must realize you are in your earthbound body, unusual as it is, and your senses will be overwhelmed! You will not be able to endure what you see as you would if you were dead or an angel or my lieutenant, which is what I want you to become. "

There was no time to argue. We had passed swiftly across the bridge; giant gates were opening before us. I couldn't see the summit of the walls.

The sound swelled and enveloped us, and indeed it was like laughter, waves upon waves of shimmering and lucid laughter, only it was canorous, as though all those who laughed also sang canticles in full voice at the same time.

What I saw, however, overwhelmed me as much as the sound.

This was very simply the densest, the most intense, the busiest, and the most profoundly magnificent place I'd ever beheld. Our language needs endless synonyms for beautiful; the eyes could see what the tongue cannot possibly describe.

Once again, people were everywhere, people filled with light, and of distinct anthropomorphic shape; they had arms, legs, beaming faces, hair, garments of all different kinds, yet no costume of any seemingly great importance, and the people were moving, traveling paths in groups or alone, or coming together in patterns, embracing, clasping, reaching out, and holding hands.

I turned to the right and to the left, and then all around me, and in every direction saw these multitudes of beings, wrapped in conversation or dialogue or some sort of interchange, some of them embracing and kissing, and others dancing, and the clusters and groups of them continuing to shift and grow or shrink and spread out.

Indeed, the combination of seeming disorder and order was the mystery. This was not chaos. This was not confusion. This was not a din. It seemed the hilarity of a great and final gathering, and by final I mean it seemed a perpetually unfolding resolution of something, a marvel of sustained revelation, a gathering and growing understanding