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"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¡ª"
"But fear came, fear when you realized that even if you died you might not understand anything, that there might be nothing. . . . "
". . . yes. And now I fear something worse. That there is something, certainly, and it may be worse than nothing at all. "
"You're right to think so. It doesn't take much of a thumbscrew or the nails or the fire to make men and women wish for oblivion. Not much at all. Imagine, to wish that you had never lived. "
"I know the concept. I fear knowing the feeling again. "
"You're wise to fear, but you've never been more ready for what I have to reveal. "
Chapter 21
21
THE WIND swept the rocky field, the great centrifugal force dissolving and releasing those souls who struggled to be free of it at last as they assumed distinct human shape and pounded on the Gates of Hell, or wandered along the impossibly high walls, amid the flicker of fires within, reaching out for and imploring each other.
All voices were lost in the sound of the wind. Souls in human shape fought and struggled, others roamed as if in search of something small and lost and then lifted their arms and let the whirlwind once again take hold of them.
The shape of a woman, thin and pale, reached out to gather a wandering, weeping flock of baby souls, some not old enough yet to walk on two legs. The spirits of children wandered, crying piteously.
We drew near the gates, near narrow broken arches rising as black and fine as onyx worked by medieval craftsmen. The air was filled with soft and bleating cries. Everywhere spirit hands reached to take hold of us; whispers covered us like the gnats and flies of the battlefield. Ghosts tore at my hair and coat.
Help us, let us in, damn you, curse you, cursed, take me back, free me, I curse you forever, damn you, help me, help . . . a rising roar of opprobrium.
I struggled to clear the way for my eyes. Tender faces drifted before me, mouths issuing hot and mournful gasps against my skin.
The gates weren't solid gates at all but gateways.
And beyond stood the Helpful Dead, seemingly more solid, only more vividly colored and distinct, but diaphanous still, beckoning to the lost souls, calling to them by name, howling over the fierce wind that they must find the way inside, that this was not Perdition.
Torches were held high; lamps burnt atop the walls. The sky was torn with streaks of lightning, and the great mystic shower of sparks that comes from cannons both modern and ancient. The smell of gunpowder and blood filled the air. Again and again the lights flared as if in some magical display to enchant a Chinese court of old, and then the blackness rolled back, thin and substanceless and cold all around us.
"Come inside," sang the Helpful Dead, the well-formed, well-proportioned ghosts¡ªghosts as determined as Roger had been, in garbs of all times and all nations, men and women, children, old ones, no body opaque, yet none weak, all reaching past us into the valley beyond, trying to assist the struggling, the cursing, the foundering.
The Helpful Dead of India in their silk saris, of Egypt in cotton robes, of kingdoms long gone bequeathing jeweled and magnificent courtly garments; costumes of all the world, the feathered confections we call savage, the dark robes of priests, self-conceptions of all the world, from the crudest to the most magnificent.
I clung to Memnoch. Was this beautiful, or was it not hideous, this throng of all nations and times? The naked, the black, the white, the Asian, those of all races, reaching out, moving with confidence through the lost and confused souls!
The ground itself hurt my feet; blackened, rocky marl strewn with shells. Why this? Why?
In all directions slopes rose or gently fell away, to run into sheer cliffs rising beyond or opening into chasms so deep and filled with smoky dissolving gloom they seemed the abyss itself.
Doorways flickered and flashed with light; stairways wound precipitously up and down the stark, steep walls, leading out of sight, to vales I could only glimpse, or to gushing streams golden and steaming and red with blood.
"Memnoch, help me!" I whispered. I dared not let go of the veil.
I couldn't cover both ears. The howls were picking at my soul as if they were axes that could tear away pieces of it. "Memnoch, this is unbearable!"
"We will all help you," cried the Helpful Ghosts, a cluster of them closing in on all sides to kiss and to embrace me, their eyes wide with concern. "Lestat has come. Lestat is here. Memnoch's brought him back. Come into Hell. "
