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"They let you escape," you said to him, David. You broke in, quieting me with a small pleading gesture of your left hand.
But I had no patience for analysis or inevitable interpretation. I couldn't get the image out of my mind, Our Bloody Lord, Our Lord with the crossbeam bound to His shoulders, and she, Veronica, this sweet figment with the Veil in her hands. Oh, how is it such a fantasy could get its hook so deep?
"Back away from me, all of you," he cried. "I have the Veil. I told you. Christ gave it to me. Veronica gave it to me. I took it with me out of Memnoch's Hell, when all his imps tried to take it from me. "
I scarcely heard. Veil, the actual Veil, what trick is this? My head ached. The fisherman's Mass. If there was such a thing in St. Patrick's below, I wanted to go there. I was weary of this glass-walled tower room, cut off from the taste of the wind and the wild refreshing wetness of the snow.
Why did Lestat back up against the wall? What did he take out of his coat? The Veil! Some gaudy trick to seal this whole masterpiece of mayhem?
I looked up, my eyes roaming over the snowy night beyond the glass and only slowly finding their mark: the opened cloth which he held up in his hands, his own head bowed, the cloth revealed as reverently as it might have been by Veronica.
"My Lord!" I whispered. All the world was gone in curls of weightless sound and light. I saw Him there. "My Lord. " I saw His Face, not painted, printed or otherwise daintily tricked into the tiny fibers of the fine white cloth, but blazing with a flame that would not consume the vehicle that bore the heat of it. My Lord, my Lord the Man, my Lord, my Christ, the Man with black and sharpened crown of thorns, and long twisted brown hair so fearfully clotted with blood, and great wondering dark eyes that stared straight at me, the sweet and vivid portals of the Soul of God, so radiant their immeasurable love that all poetry dies before it, and a soft and silken mouth of unquestioning and unjudging simplicity, open to take a silent and agonizing breath at the very moment the Veil had come to soothe this hideous suffering.
I wept. I clamped my hand to my mouth, but I couldn't stop my words.
"Oh, Christ, my tragic Christ!" I whispered. "Not made by human hands!" I cried out. "Not made by human hands!" How wretched my words, how feeble, how filled with sorrow. "This Man's Face, this Face of God and Man. He bleeds. For the love of Almighty God, look at it!"
But not a sound had come from me. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. I'd fallen down on my knees in my shock and in my helplessness. I never wanted to take my eyes from it. I never wanted anything anymore again ever. I wanted only to look at it. I wanted only to look at Him, and I saw Him, and I saw back, back over the centuries, back to His Face in the light of the earthen lamp burning in the house in Podil, His Face gazing at me from the panel between my quivering fingers amid the candles of the Scriptorium of the Monastery of the Caves, His Face as I had never seen it on those glorious walls of Venice or Florence where I had for so long and so desperately sought it.
His Face, His manly Face infused with the Divine, my tragic Lord gazing at me from my Mother's arms in the frozen sludge of the long-ago street of Podil, my loving Lord in bloody Majesty.
I didn't care what Dora said.
I didn't care that she screamed His Holy Name. I didn't care. I knew.
And as she declared her faith, as she snatched the Veil from Lestat's very hands and ran with it out of this apartment, I followed, moving after her and after the Veil-though in the sanctuary of my heart I never moved.
I never stirred.
A great stillness had overtaken my mind, and my limbs no longer mattered.
It did not matter that Lestat fought with her, and cautioned her that she must not believe this thing, and that the three of us stood on the steps of the Cathedral and that the snow fell like some splendid blessing from the invisible and fathomless Heavens.
It did not matter that the sun was soon to rise, a fiery silver ball beyond the canopy of melting clouds.
I could die now.
I had seen Him, and all the rest-the words of Memnoch and his fanciful God, the pleas of Lestat that we come away, that we hide ourselves before the morning devoured us all-it did not matter.
I could die now.
"Not made by human hands," I whispered.
A crowd gathered around us at the doors. The warm air came out of the church in a deep delicious gust. It didn't matter.
"The Veil, the Veil," they cried. They saw! They saw His Face.
Lestat's desperate imploring cries were dying away.
The morning came down in its thunderous white-hot light, rolling over roofs and curdling the night in a thousand glassy walls and slowly unleashing its monstrous glory.
"Bear witness," I said. I held up my open arms to the blinding light, this molten silvery death. "This sinner dies for Him! This sinner goes to Him. "
Cast me into Hell, Oh Lord, if that is Your will. You have given me Heaven. You have shown me Your Face.
And Your Face was human.
Chapter 19
