The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (346 page)

“That’s your way of apologizing, isn’t it?” he asked gently. He turned around, towards me. The wings vanished. He walked slowly up to me, and past me, and sat down again on my right. His robe was hemmed in dust from the ground. I absorbed the detail before I actually thought about it. There was a tiny bit of leaf, green leaf, caught in the long flowing tangles of his hair.

“No, not really,” I said. “It wasn’t an apology. I usually say exactly what I mean.”

I studied his face—the sculpted profile, the utter absence of hair on otherwise magnificently human-looking skin. Indescribable. If you turn and look at a statue in a Renaissance church, and you see it is bigger all over than you are, that it is perfect, you don’t get frightened because it’s stone. But this was alive.

He turned as if he’d just noticed I was looking at him. He stared down into my eyes. Then he bent forwards, his eyes very clear, and filled with myriad colors, and I felt his lips, smooth, evenly and modestly moist, touch my cheek. I felt a burn of life through the hard coldness of my self. I felt a raging flame that caught every particle of me, as only blood can do it, living blood. I felt a pain in my heart. I might have laid my finger on my chest in the very place.

“What do
you
feel!” I asked, refusing to be ravaged.

“I feel the blood of hundreds,” he whispered. “I feel a soul who has known a thousand souls.”

“Known? Or merely destroyed?”

“Will you send me away out of hatred for yourself?” he asked. “Or shall I continue with my story?”

“Please, please go on.”

“Man had invented or discovered God,” he said. His voice was calm now and back to the same polite and almost humble instructive manner. “And in some instances, tribes worshipped more than one such deity who was perceived to have created this or that part of the world. And yes, humans knew of the souls of the dead surviving; and they did reach out to these souls and make offerings to them. They brought offerings to their graves. They cried out to these dead souls. They begged for their help in the hunt, and in the birthing of a child, in all things.

“And as we angels peered into Sheol, as we passed into it, invisible, our essence causing no disturbance in a realm that was purely souls at that point … souls and nothing but souls … we
realized these souls were strengthened in their survival by the attentions of those living on earth, by the love being sent to them by humans, by the thoughts of them in human minds. It was a process.

“And just as with angels, these souls were individuals with varying degrees of intellect, interest, or curiosity. They were hosts as well to all human emotions, though in many, mercifully, all emotion was on the wane.

“Some souls, for example, knew they were dead, and sought to respond to the prayers of their children, and actively attempted to advise, speaking with all the power they could muster in a spiritual voice. They struggled to appear to their children. Sometimes they broke through for fleeting seconds, gathering to themselves swirling particles of matter by the sheer force of their invisible essence. Other times they made themselves visible in dreams, when the soul of the sleeping human was opened to other souls. They told their children of the bitterness and darkness of death, and that they must be brave and strong in life. They gave their children advice.

“And they seemed, in some instances at least, to know that the belief and attention of their sons and daughters strengthened them. They requested offerings and prayers, they reminded the children of their duty. These souls were to some extent the least confused, except for one thing. They thought they had seen all there was to be seen,”

“No hint of Heaven?” I asked.

“No, and no light from Heaven penetrated Sheol, nor any music. From Sheol one saw the darkness and the stars, and the people of Earth.”

“Unbearable.”

“Not if you think you are a god to your children and can still derive strength from the mere sight of the libations they pour on your grave. Not if you feel pleasure in those who hearken to your advice and anger at those who don’t, and not if you can communicate occasionally, sometimes with spectacular results.”

“I see, of course. And gods they seemed to their children.”

“Ancestral gods of a certain kind. Not the Creator of All. Human beings had distinct ideas on both questions, as I’ve said.

“I became greatly absorbed with this whole question of Sheol. I traveled the length and breadth of Sheol. Some of these souls didn’t know they were dead. They knew only they were lost and blind and miserable and they cried all the time like infant humans. They were so weak I don’t even think they felt the presence of other souls.

“Other souls were clearly deluded. They thought they were still alive! They chased after their kindred, trying vainly to get the oblivious son or daughter to listen, when of course the kindred could not hear or see them; and these, these who thought they were still living, well, these had no presence of mind to gather matter to make themselves appear or to come to the living in a dream, because they didn’t know they were dead.”

“Yes.”

“To continue, some souls knew they were ghosts when they came to mortals. Others thought they were alive and the whole world had turned against them. Others simply drifted, seeing and hearing the sounds of other living beings but remote from this as if in a stupor or dream. And some souls died.

“Before my very eyes, some died. And soon I realized many were dying. The dying soul would last a week, perhaps a month in human time, after its separation from the human body, retaining its shape, and then begin to fade. The essence would gradually disperse, just as did the essence inside an animal upon its death. Gone into the air, returned perhaps to the energy and essence of God.”

“That’s what happened?” I asked desperately. “Their energy went back into the Creator; the light of a candle returned to the eternal fire?”

“I don’t know. And that I didn’t see, little flames wafted to Heaven, drawn aloft by a mighty and loving blaze. No, I saw nothing of the kind.

“From Sheol the Light of God was not visible. For Sheol, the consolation of God did not exist. Yet these were spiritual beings, made in our image and His image, and clinging to that image and hungering for a life beyond death. That was the agony. The hunger for the life beyond death.”

“If that was absent at the time of the death, would the soul simply be extinguished?” I asked.

“No, not at all. The hunger seemed innate. The hunger had to die out in Sheol before the soul would disintegrate. Indeed, souls went through many, many experiences in Sheol, and those who had become the strongest were those who perceived themselves as gods, or humans passed into the realm of the good God, and attentive to humans; and these souls gained power even to sway the others and strengthen them sometimes and keep them from fading away.”

He paused as if not sure how to proceed. Then, he went on:

“There were some souls who understood things in a different way. They knew they weren’t gods. They knew they were dead humans. They knew they didn’t really have the right to change the destiny of those who prayed to them; they knew that the libations essentially were symbolic. These souls understood the meaning of the concept symbolic. They knew. And they knew they were dead and they perceived themselves to be lost. They would have reentered the flesh if they could have. For there in the flesh was all the light and warmth and comfort that they had ever known and could still see. And sometimes these souls managed to do exactly that!

“I witnessed it in various different fashions. I saw these souls deliberately descend and take possession of a stupefied mortal, take over his limbs and brain and live in him until the man gained the strength to throw the soul off. You know these things. All men do—what is involved in possession. You have possessed a body that wasn’t yours, and your body has been possessed by another soul.”

“Yes.”

“But this was the dawn of such invention. And to watch
these clever souls learn the rules of it, to see them grow ever more powerful, was something to behold.

“And what I could not fail to be frightened by, being the Accuser as I am, and horrified by Nature, as God calls it, what I could not ignore was that these souls did have an effect on living women and men! There were those living humans already who had become oracles. They would smoke or drink some potion to render their own minds passive, so that a dead soul might speak with their voice!

“And because these powerful spirits—for I should call them spirits now—because these powerful spirits knew only what Earth and Sheol could teach them, they might urge human beings on to terrible mistakes. I saw them order men into battle; I saw them order executions. I saw them demand blood sacrifice of human beings.”

“You saw the Creation of Religion out of Man,” I said.

“Yes, insofar as Man can Create anything. Let us not forget Who Created us all.”

“The other angels, how did they fare with these revelations?”

“We gathered, exchanged stories in amazement, then went off again on our own explorations; we were more entangled with the earth than we had ever been. But essentially, the reactions of angels varied. Some, the Seraphim mainly, thought the whole process was downright marvelous; that God deserved a thousand anthems in praise that his Creation should lead to a being who could evolve an invisible deity from itself who would then command it to ever greater efforts at survival or war.

“Then there were those who thought, ‘This is an error, this is an abomination! These are the souls of humans pretending to be Gods! This is unspeakable and must be stopped immediately.’

“And then there was my passionate reaction: ‘This is really ghastly and it is headed for worse and worse disasters! This is the beginning of an entirely new stage of human life, bodiless,
yet purposeful and ignorant, which is gaining momentum every second, and filling the atmosphere of the world with potent interfering entities as ignorant as the humans round whom they swirled.’ ”

“Surely some of the other angels agreed with you.”

“Yes, some were as vehement, but as Michael said, Trust in God, Memnoch, Who has done this. God knows the Divine Scheme.’

“Michael and I had the most extensive dialogues. Raphael and Gabriel and Uriel had not come down, by the way, as part of this mission. And the reason for that is fairly simple. Almost never do all of those four go the same way. It’s a law with them, a custom, a … a vocation, that two are always on hand in heaven for the call of God; and never do all four leave at once. In this instance, Michael was the only one who wanted to come.”

“Does this Archangel Michael still exist now?”

“Of course he exists! You’ll meet him. You could meet him now if you wish, but no, he wouldn’t come now. He wouldn’t. He’s on the side of God. But you’ll be no stranger to him if you join with me. In fact, you might be surprised by how sympathetic Michael can be to my endeavors. But my endeavors are not unreconcilable to heaven, surely, or I would not be allowed to do what I do.”

He looked sharply at me.

“All those of the
bene ha elohim
whom I describe to you are alive now. They are immortal. How could you think it would be any other way? Now, there were souls in Sheol at that time who no longer exist, not in any form I know of, but perhaps they do in some form known to God.”

“I understand. It was a stupid-sounding question,” I admitted. “As you watched all this, as it filled you with fear, how did you relate it to God’s statement about nature? That you would see humankind were part of nature.”

“I couldn’t except in terms of the endless exchange of energy and Matter. The souls were energy; yet they retained a
knowledge from Matter. Beyond that, I could not reconcile it. But for Michael, there was another view. We were on a stairway, were we not? The lowest molecules of inorganic matter constituted the lowest steps. These disembodied souls occupied the step above man yet below angels. It was all one flowing procession to Michael, but then again, Michael trusted that God was doing all this deliberately and wanted it this way.

“I could not believe this! Because the
suffering
of the souls horrified me. It hurt Michael too. He covered his ears. And the
death
of the souls horrified me. If souls could live, then why not let all know! And were they doomed forever to exist in this gloom? What else in nature remained so static? Had they become as sentient asteroids forever orbiting the planet, moons that could scream and cry and weep?

“I asked Michael, ‘What will happen? Tribes pray to different souls. These souls become their gods. Some are stronger than others. Look at the war everywhere, the battle.’

“ ‘But Memnoch,’ he said, ‘primates did this before they had souls. Everything in Nature eats and is eaten. This is what God has been trying to tell you since you first began to cry out in protest at the sound of suffering from the Earth. These soul-god-spirits are expressions of humans, and part of humankind, born of humans and sustained by humans, and even if these spirits grow in strength to where they can manipulate living people exquisitely, they are nevertheless born out of Matter and part of Nature as God said.’

“ ‘So nature is this unspeakable unfolding horror,’ I said. ‘It is not enough that a shark swallows whole the infant dolphin and that the butterfly is crushed in the teeth of the wolf who chews it up, oblivious to its beauty. It’s not enough. Nature must go further, and spin from matter these spirits in torment. Nature comes this close to Heaven, but is so far short of it that only Sheol will do for the name of this place.’

“This speech was too much for Michael. One cannot speak this way to the Archangel Michael. Just doesn’t work. So at once he turned away from me, not angrily, not in cowardice
that God’s thunderbolt might miss me by a fraction and shatter his left wing. But he turned away in silence, as if to say, Memnoch you are impatient and unwise. Then he turned and mercifully said, ‘Memnoch, you do not look deep enough. These souls have only begun their evolution. Who knows how strong they may become? Man has stepped into the invisible. What if he is meant to become as we are?’