The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (360 page)

“Yes, but I’d like to know what you expect.”

“I don’t know what to expect. I know that creatures who have robbed others of life—as I have—should suffer for it.”

“Suffer or pay for it?”

“What would be the difference?”

“Well, suppose you had a chance to forgive Magnus, the vampire who brought you into this, suppose he stood before you and said, ‘Lestat, forgive me for taking you out of your mortal life and putting you outside Nature, and making you drink blood to live. Do with me what you will so that you can forgive me.’ What would you do?”

“You chose a bad example,” I said. “I don’t know that I haven’t forgiven him. I don’t think he knew what he was doing. I don’t care about him. He was mad. He was an Old World monster. He started me on the Devil’s Road on some warped, impersonal impulse. I don’t even think about him. I don’t care about him. If he has to seek forgiveness from someone, then let it be from the mortals he killed when he was in existence.

“In his tower was a dungeon filled with slain mortal men—young
men who resembled me, men he’d brought there to test, apparently, and then killed rather than initiated. I remember them still. But it’s just one form of massacre—heaps of bodies of young men, all with blond hair and blue eyes. Young beings robbed of potential and of life itself. His forgiveness would have to come from all those whom he robbed of life in any fashion—he would have to gain the forgiveness of each one.”

I was beginning to tremble again. My anger was so familiar to me. And how angry I had become many a time when others had accused me of my various flamboyant attacks upon mortal men and women. And children. Helpless children.

“And you?” he said to me. “For you to get into Heaven, what do you think would be necessary?”

“Well, apparently working for you will do it,” I said defiantly. “At least I think it would from what you’ve said to me. But you haven’t really told me precisely what you do! You’ve told me the story of Creation and the Passion, of Your Way and His Way, you’ve described how you oppose Him on Earth, and I can imagine the ramifications of that opposition—we are both sensualists, we are both believers in the wisdom of the flesh.”

“Amen to that.”

“But you have not gotten to a full explanation of what you do in Hell. And how can you be winning? Are you sending them speedily to His arms?”

“Speedily and with powerful acceptance,” he said. “But I am not speaking to you now about my offer to you, or my Earthly opposition to Him; I’m asking you this: Given all that you have seen—
What do you think Hell should be!
”

“I’m afraid to answer. Because I belong there.”

“You’re never really that afraid of anything. Go on. Make a statement. What do you think Hell ought to be, what should a soul have to endure to be worthy of Heaven? Is it enough to say ‘I believe in God’; Jesus, ‘I believe in Your Suffering’? Is it enough to say, ‘I’m sorry for all my sins because they offend thee, my God’? Or to say, ‘I’m sorry because when I was on
Earth, I really didn’t believe in You and now I know it’s true, and wham, bang, one look at this infernal place, and I’m ready! I wouldn’t do anything the same way, and please let me into Heaven quick.’

I didn’t answer.

“Should everyone just go to Heaven?” he asked. “I mean, should everyone go?”

“No. That can’t be,” I said. “Not creatures like me, not creatures who have tortured and killed other creatures, not people who have deliberately duplicated through their actions punishments as severe as disease, or fire, or earthquake—that is, not people who have done wrongs that hurt others just as much or worse than natural disasters. It can’t be right for them to go to Heaven, not if they don’t know, not if they don’t understand, not if they haven’t begun to comprehend what they’ve done! Heaven would be Hell in no time if every cruel, selfish, vicious soul went to Heaven. I don’t want to meet the unreformed monsters of Earth in Heaven! If it’s that easy, then the suffering of this world is damned near.…”

“Damn near what?”

“Unforgivable,” I whispered.

“What
would
be forgivable—from the point of view of a soul who died in pain and confusion? A soul who knew that God didn’t care?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “When you described the elect of Sheol, the first million souls you took through the Heavenly Gates, you didn’t speak of reformed monsters; you spoke of people who had forgiven God for an unjust world, didn’t you?”

“That’s right, I did. That’s what I found. That’s what I took with me with certainty to Heaven’s Gates, yes.”

“But you spoke entirely as if these people had been victims of God’s injustice. You didn’t touch upon the souls of the guilty? Those like me—the transgressors, those who were the doers of injustice?”

“Don’t you think they have their story?”

“Some may have their excuses, engrained in their stupidity
and their simplicity and their fear of authority. I don’t know. But many, many evildoers must be just like me. They know how bad they are. They don’t care. They do what they do because … because they love it. I love making vampires. I love drinking blood. I love taking life. I always have.”

“Is that really why you drink blood? Just because you love it? Or isn’t it because you were made into a perfect preternatural mechanism for craving blood eternally, and thriving only on blood—snatched out of life and made a gleaming Child of the Night by an unjust world that cared no more for you and your destiny than it cared for any infant who starved that night in Paris?”

“I don’t justify what I do or what I am. If you think I do, if that’s why you want me to run Hell with you, or accuse God … then you picked the wrong person. I deserve to pay for what I’ve taken from people. Where are their souls, those I’ve slain? Were they ready for Heaven? Have they gone to Hell? Did those souls loosen in their identity and are they still in the whirlwind between Hell and Heaven? Souls are there, I know, I saw them, souls who have yet to find either place.”

“Yes, true.”

“I could have sent souls into the whirlwind. I am the embodiment of greed and cruelty. I devoured the mortals I’ve killed like so much food and drink. I cannot justify it.”

“Do you think I want you to justify it?” Memnoch asked. “What violence have I justified so far? What makes you think I would like you if you justified or defended your actions? Have I ever defended anyone who made anyone else suffer?”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Well, then?”

“What is Hell, and how can you run it? You don’t want people to suffer. You don’t even seem to want me to suffer. You can’t point to God and say He makes it all Good and Meaningful! You can’t. You’re His opposition. So what is Hell?”

“What do you think it is?” he asked me again. “What would
you morally settle for … before rejecting me out of hand! Before fleeing from me. What sort of Hell could you believe in and would you—if you were in my place—create?”

“A place where people realize what they’ve done to others; where they face every detail of it, and realize every particle of it, so that they would
never, never
do the same thing again; a place where souls are reformed, literally, by knowledge of what they’d done wrong and how they could have avoided it, and what they should have done. When they
understand
, as you said of the Elect of Sheol, when they
can forgive
not only God for this big mess, but themselves for their own failures, their own horrible angry reactions, their own spite and meanness, when they love everyone totally in complete forgiveness, then they would be worthy of Heaven.
Hell would have to be where they see the consequences of their actions, but with a full merciful comprehension of how little they themselves knew.
”

“Precisely. To know what has hurt others, to realize that you didn’t know, that nobody gave you the knowledge, yet still you had the power! And to forgive that, and forgive your victims, and forgive God and forgive yourself.”

“Yes. That would be it. That would terminate my anger, my outrage. I couldn’t shake my fist anymore, if only I could forgive God and others and myself.”

He didn’t say anything. He sat with his arms folded, eyes wide, his dark smooth brow barely touched with the moisture of the air.

“That’s what it is, isn’t it?” I asked fearfully. “It’s … it’s a place where you learn to understand what you’ve done to another being … where you come to realize the suffering you’ve inflicted on others!”

“Yes, and it is terrible. I created it and I run it to make whole again the souls of the just and the unjust, those who had suffered and those who had done cruelty. And the only lesson of that Hell is Love.”

I was frightened, as frightened as I had been when we went into Jerusalem.

“He loves my souls when they come to Him,” said Memnoch. “And He sees each one as a justification of His Way!”

I smiled bitterly.

“War is magnificent to Him, and disease is like the color purple in His eyes, and self-sacrifice seems to Him a personal magnification of His Glory! As if He’s ever done it! He tries to overwhelm me with numbers. In the name of the cross, more injustice has been perpetrated than for any other single cause or emblem or philosophy or creed on Earth.

“And I empty Hell so fast, soul by soul, by speaking truth about what humans suffer and humans know and what humans can do that my souls go flooding through His gates.

“And who do you think comes into Hell feeling most cheated? Most angry and unforgiving? The child who died in a gas chamber in an extermination camp? Or a warrior with blood up to his elbows who was told that if he exterminated the enemies of the state he would find his place in Valhalla, Paradise, or Heaven?”

I didn’t answer. I was quiet, listening to him, watching him.

He sat forward, commanding my attention even more deliberately, and as he did he changed, changed before my eyes from the Devil, goat-legged, cloven-hoofed beast-man, to the angel, Memnoch, Memnoch in his loose and unimportant robe, his fair eyes beaming at me beneath his golden scowling brows.

“Hell is where I straighten things out that He has made wrong,” he said. “Hell is where I reintroduce a frame of mind that might have existed had suffering never destroyed it! Hell is where I teach men and women that they can be better than He is.

“But that’s my punishment, Hell—for arguing with Him, that I must go there and help the souls to fulfill their cycle as He sees it, that I must live there with them! And that if I don’t help them, if I don’t school them, they may be there forever!

“But Hell is not my battlefield.

“The earth is my battlefield. Lestat, I fight Him not in Hell
but on Earth. I roam the world seeking to tear down every edifice He has erected to sanctify self-sacrifice and suffering, to sanctify aggression and cruelty and destruction. I lead men and women from churches and temples to dance, to sing, to drink, to embrace one another with license and love. I do everything I can to show up the lie at the heart of His religions! I try to destroy the lies He’s allowed to grow as the Universe Unfolds Itself.

“He is the only one who can enjoy suffering with impunity! And that’s because He’s God and He doesn’t know what it means and He never has known. He’s created beings more conscientious and loving than Himself. And the final victory over all human evil will come only when He is dethroned, once and for all, demystified, ignored, repudiated, thrown aside, and men and women seek for the good and the just and the ethical and the loving in each other and for all.”

“They’re trying to do that, Memnoch! They are!” I said. “That’s what they mean when they say they hate Him. That’s what Dora meant when she said ‘Ask Him why He allows all this!’ When she made her hands into fists!”

“I know. Now, do you want to help me fight Him and his Cross or not?

“Will you go with me from Earth to Heaven to that filthy Hell of painful recognition, filthy with its obsession with His suffering! You will not serve me in one place or the other or the other. But in all three. And like me, you may soon come to find Heaven just about as unbearable in its pitch as Hell. Its bliss will make you eager to heal the evil He has done, you will seek Hell to work on those tortured confused souls, to help them up from the morass and into the Light. When you’re in the Light you can’t forget them! That’s what it means to serve me.”

He paused, then he asked:

“Do you have the courage to see it?”

“I want to see it.”

“I warn you, it’s Hell.”

“I am just beginning to imagine.…”

“It won’t exist forever. The day will come when either the world itself is blown to pieces by His human worshippers or when all who die are Illuminated and surrender to Him, and go straight into His arms.

“A perfect world, or a world destroyed, one or the other—someday will come the end of Hell. And then I shall go back to Heaven, content to stay there for the first moment of my existence, since the beginning of Time.”

“Take me with you into Hell, please. I want to see it now.”

He reached out and stroked my hair, put his two hands on the sides of my face. They felt evenly warm and caressing. A sense of tranquility came over me.

“So many times in the past,” he said, “I almost had your soul! I saw it almost spring loose from your body, and then the strong preternatural flesh, the preternatural brain, the hero’s courage, would hold together the entire monster and the soul would flicker and blaze inside, beyond my grasp. And now, now I risk plunging you into it before you need to go, plunging you into it when you can choose to go or come, in the hope that you can endure what you see and hear and return and be with me and help me.”

“Was there ever a time when my soul would have soared to Heaven, past you, past the whirlwind?”

“What do you think?”

“I remember … once, when I was alive.…”

“Yes?”

“A golden moment, when I was drinking and talking with my good friend, Nicolas, and we were in an inn together in my village in France. And there came this golden moment when everything seemed tolerable and independently beautiful of any horror that could be or ever had been done. Just a moment, a drunken moment. I described it once in writing; I tried to reinvoke it. It was a moment in which I could have forgiven anything, and given anything, and perhaps when I didn’t even exist: when all I saw was beyond me, outside me. I don’t know. Maybe if death had come at that very moment—”