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 In sum, the entire turbid and smokelike presence had been replaced by something crystalline and reflective, but which felt pliant and warm and alive.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

shared by all who participated in it, as they hurried or moved languidly (or even in some cases sat about doing very little), amongst hills and valleys, and along pathways, and through wooded areas and into buildings which seemed to grow one out of another like no structure on earth I'd ever seen.

Nowhere did I see anything specifically domestic such as a house, or even a palace. On the contrary, the structures were infinitely larger, filled with as bright a light as the garden, with corridors and staircases branching here and there with perfect fluidity. Yet ornament covered everything. Indeed, the surfaces and textures were so varied that any one of them might have absorbed me forever.

I cannot convey the sense of simultaneous observation that I felt. I have to speak now in sequence. I have to take various parts of this limitless and brilliant environment, in order to shed my own fallible light on the whole.

There were archways, towers, halls, galleries, gardens, great fields, forests, streams. One area flowed into another, and through them all I was traveling, with Memnoch beside me, securely holding me in a solid grip. Again and again, my eyes were drawn to some spectacularly beautiful sculpture or cascade of flowers or a giant tree reaching out into the cloudless blue, only to have my body turned back around by him as if I were being kept to a tightrope from which I might fatally fall.

I laughed; I wept; I did both, and my body was convulsing with the emotions. I clung to hum and tried to see over his shoulder and around him, and spun in his grip like an infant, turning to lock eyes with this or that person who happened to glance at me, or to look for a steady moment as the groups and the parliaments and congregations shifted and moved.

We were in a vast hall suddenly. "God, if David could see this!" I cried; the books and scrolls were endless, and there seemed nothing illogical or confusing in the manner in which all these documents lay open and ready to be examined.

"Don't look, because you won't remember it," Memnoch said.

He snatched at my hand as if I were a toddler. I had tried to catch hold of a scroll that was filled with an absolutely astonishing explanation of something to do with atoms and photons and neutrinos. But he was right. The knowledge was gone immediately, and the unfolding garden surrounded us as I lost my balance and fell against him.

I looked down at the ground and saw flowers of complete perfection; flowers that were the flowers that our flowers of the world might become! I don't know any other way to describe how well realized were the petals and the centers and the colors. The colors themselves were so distinct and so finely delineated that I was unsure suddenly that our spectrum was even involved.

I mean, I don't think our spectrum of color was the limit! I think there was some other set of rules. Or it was merely an expansion, a gift of being able to see combinations of color which are not visible chemically on earth.

The waves of laughter, of singing, of conversation, became so loud as to overwhelm my other senses; I felt blinded by sound suddenly; and yet the light was laying bare every precious detail.

"Sapphirine!" I cried out suddenly, trying to identify the greenish blue of the great leaves surrounding us and gently waving to and fro, and Memnoch smiled and nodded as if in approval, reaching again to stop me from touching Heaven, from trying to grab some of the magnificence I saw.

"But I can't hurt it if I touch, can I?" It seemed unthinkable suddenly that anyone could bruise anything here, from the walls of quartz and crystal with their ever-rising spires and belfries, to the sweet, soft vines twining upwards in the branches of trees dripping with magnificent fruits and flowers. "No, no, I wouldn't want to hurt it!" I said.

My own voice was distinct to me, though the voices of all those around me seemed to overpower it.

"Look!" said Memnoch. "Look at them. Look!" And he turned my head as if to force me not to cower against his chest but to stare right into the multitudes. And I perceived that these were alliances I was witnessing, clans that were gathering, families, groups of kindred, or true friends, beings whose knowledge of each other was profound, creatures who shared similar physical and material manifestations! And for one brave moment, one brave instant, I saw that all these beings from one end of this limitless place to the other were connected, by hand or fingertip or arm or the touch of a foot. That, indeed, clan slipped within the womb of clan, and tribe spread out to intersperse amongst countless families, and families joined to form nations, and that the entire congregation was in fact a palpable and visible and interconnected configuration! Everyone impinged upon everyone else. Everyone drew, in his or her separateness, upon the separateness of everyone else!

I blinked, dizzy, near to collapsing. Memnoch held me.

"Look again!" he whispered, holding me up.

But I covered my eyes; because I knew that if I saw the interconnections again, I would collapse! I would perish inside my own sense of separateness! Yet each and every being I saw was separate.

"They are all themselves!" I cried. My hands were clapped on my eyes. I could hear the raging and soaring songs more intensely; the long riffs and cascades of voices. And beneath all there came such a sequence of flowing rhythms, lapping one over the other, that I began to sing.

I sang with everyone! I stood still, free of Memnoch for a moment, opened my eyes, and heard my voice come out of me and rise as if into the universe itself.

I sang and I sang; but my song was full of longing and immense curiosity and frustration as well as celebration. And it came home to me, thudded into me, that nowhere around me was there anyone who was unsafe or unsatisfied, was there anything approximating stasis or boredom; yet the word "frenzy" was in no way applicable to the constant movement and shifting of faces and forms that I saw.

My song was the only sad note in Heaven, and yet the sadness was transfigured immediately into harmony, into a form of psalm or canticle, into a hymn of praise and wonder and gratitude.

I cried out. I think I cried the single word "God." This was not a prayer or an admission, or a plea, but simply a great exclamation.

We stood in a doorway. Beyond appeared vista upon vista, and I was vaguely sensible suddenly that over the nearby balustrade there lay below the world.

The world as I had never seen it in all its ages, with all its secrets of the past revealed. I had only to rush to the railing and I could peer down into the time of Eden or Ancient Mesopotamia, or a moment when Roman legions had marched through the woods of my earthly home. I would see the great eruption of Vesuvius spill its horrid , deadly ash down upon the ancient living city of Pompeii.

Everything there to be known and finally comprehended, all questions settled, the smell of another time, the taste of it¡ªI ran towards the balustrade, which seemed to be farther and farther away. Faster and faster I headed towards it. Yet still the distance was impossible, and suddenly I became intensely aware that this vision of Earth would be mingled with smoke and fire and suffering, and that it might utterly demolish in me the overflowing sense of joy.  I had to see, however. I was not dead. I was not here to stay.

Memnoch reached out for me. But I ran faster than he could.

An immense light rose suddenly, a direct source infinitely hotter and more illuminating than the splendid light that already fell without prejudice on everything I could see. This great gathering magnetic light grew larger and larger until the world down below, the great dim landscape of smoke and horror and suffering, was turned white by this light, and rendered like an abstraction of itself, on the verge of combusting.

Memnoch pulled me back, throwing up his arms to cover my eyes.  I did the same. I realized he had bowed his head and was hiding his own eyes behind me.

I heard him sigh, or was it a moan? I couldn't tell. For one second the sound filled the universe; all the cries and laughter and singing; and something mournful from the depths of Earth¡ªall this sound-was caught in Memnoch's sigh.

Suddenly I felt his strong arms relaxed and releasing me.

I looked up, and in the midst of the flood of light I saw again the balustrade, and against it stood a single form.

It was a tall figure who stood with his hands on the railing, looking over it and down. This appeared to be a man. He turned around and looked at me and reached out to receive me.

His hair and eyes were dark, brownish, his face perfectly symmetrical and flawless, his gaze intense; and the grasp of his fingers very tight.

I drew in my breath. I felt my body in all its solidity and fragility as his fingers clung to me. I was on the verge of death. I might have ceased to breathe at that moment, or ceased to move with the commitment to life and might have died!

The being drew me towards himself, a light flooding from him that mingled with the light behind him and all around him, so his face grew brighter yet more distinct and more detailed. I saw the pores of his darkening golden skin, I saw the cracks in his lips, the shadow of the hair that had been shaved from his face.

And then he spoke loudly, pleadingly to me, in a heartbroken voice, a voice strong and masculine and perhaps even young.

"You would never be my adversary, would you? You wouldn't, would you? Not you, Lestat, no, not you!"

My God.

In utter agony, I was torn out of His grip, out of His midst, and out of His milieu.

The whirlwind once again surrounded us. I sobbed and beat on Memnoch's chest. Heaven was gone!

"Memnoch, let go of me! God, it was God!"

Memnoch tightened his grip, straining with all his force to carry me downwards, to make me submit, to force me to begin the descent.

We plummeted, that awful falling, which struck such fear in me that I couldn't protest or cling to Memnoch or do anything except watch the swift currents of souls all around us ascending, watching, descending, the darkness coming again, everything growing dark, until suddenly we traveled through moist air, full of familiar and natural scents, and then came to a soft and soundless pause.

It was a garden again. It was still and beautiful. But it was Earth. I knew it. My earth; and it was no disappointment in its intricacy or scents or substance. On the contrary, I fell on the grass and let my fingers dig into the earth itself. I felt it soft and gritted under my fingernails. I sobbed. I could taste the mud.

The sun was shining down on us, both of us. Memnoch sat looking at me, his wings immense and then slowly fading, until we became two manlike figures; one prone and crying like a child, and the other a great Angel, musing and waiting, his hair a mane of gradually settling light.

"You heard what He said to me!" I cried. I sat up. My voice should have been deafening. But it seemed only loud enough to be perfectly understood. "He said, 'You wouldn't ever be my adversary!' You heard Him! He called me by name."

Memnoch was completely calm, and of course infinitely more seductive and enchanting in this pale angelic shape than ever he could have been as the Ordinary Man.

"Of course he called you by name," he said, his eyes widening with emphasis. "He doesn't want you to help me. I told you. I'm winning."

"But what were we doing there! How could we get into Heaven and yet be his adversaries!"

"Come with me, Lestat, and be my lieutenant, and you can come and go there whenever you like."

I stared at him in astonished silence.

"You mean this? Come and go there?"

"Yes. Anytime. As I told you. Don't you know the Scriptures? I'm not claiming an authenticity for the fragments that remain, or even the original poetry, but of course you can come and go. You won't be of that place until you are redeemed and in it. But you can certainly get in and out, once you're on my side."

I tried to realize what he was saying. I tried to picture again the galleries, the libraries, the long, long rows of books, and realized suddenly it had become insubstantial; the details were disappearing. I was retaining a tenth of what I'd beheld; perhaps even less. What I have described here in this book is what I could remember then and now. And there had been so much more!

"How is that possible, that He would let us into Heaven!" I said. I tried to concentrate on the Scriptures, something David had said once a long time ago, about the Book of Job, something about Satan flying around and God saying, almost casually, Where have you been? Some explanation of the bene ha elohim or the court of heaven¡ª

"We are his children," said Memnoch. "Do you want to hear how it all started, the entire true story of Creation and the Fall, or do you want to go back and just throw yourself into His arms?"

"What more is there!" I asked. But I knew. There was understanding of what Memnoch was saying. And there was also something required to get in there! I couldn't just go, and Memnoch knew it. I had choices, yes, and they were these, either to go with Memnoch or return to the earth. But admission to Heaven was hardly automatic. The remark had been sarcastic. I couldn't go back and throw myself in His arms.

"You're right," he said. "And you're also very wrong."

"I don't want to see Hell!" I said suddenly. I drew myself up. I recoiled. I looked around us. This was a wild garden, this was my Savage Garden, of thorny vines and hunkering trees, of wild grass, and orchids clinging to the mossy knuckles of branches, of birds streaking high above through webs of leaves. "I don't want to see Hell!" I cried. "I don't want to, I don't! .. ."

Memnoch didn't answer. He seemed to be considering things.

And then he said, "Do you want to know the why of all of it, or not?  I was so sure you would want to know, you of all creatures. I thought you would want every little bit of information!"

"I do!" I cried. "Of course I want to know," I said. "But I ... I don't think I can."

"I can tell you as much as I know," he said gently, with a little shrug of his powerful shoulders.

His hair was smoother and stronger than human hair, the strands were perhaps thicker, and certainly more incandescent. I could see the roots of his hair at the top of his smooth forehead. His hair was tumbling soundlessly into some sort of order, or just becoming less disheveled. The flesh of his face was equally smooth and apparently pliant all over, the long, well-formed nose, the full and broad mouth, the firm line of the jaw.

I realized his wings were still there, but they had become almost impossible to see. The pattern of the feathers, layer after layer of feathers, was visible, but only if I squinted my eyes and tried to make out the details against something dark behind him, like the bark of the tree.

"I can't think," I said. "I see what you think of me, you think you've chosen a coward! You think you've made a terrible mistake.  But I tell you, I can't reason. I... I saw Him. He said, 'You wouldn't be my adversary!' You're asking me to do it! You took me to Him and away from Him."

"As He Himself has allowed!" Memnoch said with a little rise to his eyebrows.

"Is that so?"

"Of course!" he answered.

"Then why did He plead with me! Why did He look that way!"

"Because He was God Incarnate, and God Incarnate suffers and feels things with His human form, and so He gave you that much of Himself, that's all! Suffering! Ah, suffering!"

He looked to heaven and shook his head. He frowned a little, thoughtfully. His face in this form could not appear wrathful or twisted with any ugly emotion. Blake had seen into Heaven.

"But it was God," I said.

He nodded, with his head to the side. "Ah, yes," he said wearily, "the Living Lord."

He looked off into the trees. He didn't seem angry or impatient or even weary. Again, I didn't know if he could. I realized he was listening to sounds in the soft garden, and I could hear them too.

I could smell things¡ªanimals, insects, the heady perfume of jungle flowers, those overheated, mutated blooms that a rain forest can nourish either in the depths or in its leafy heights. I caught the scent of humans suddenly!

There were people in this forest. We were in an actual place.

"There are others here," I said.

"Yes," he said. And now he smiled at me very tenderly. "You are not a coward. Shall I tell you everything, or simply let you go? You know now more than millions ever glimpse in their lifetimes. You don't know what to do with that knowledge, or how to go on existing, or being what you are ...but you have had your glimpse of Heaven.  Shall I let you go? Or don't you want to know why I need you so badly?"

"Yes, I do want to know," I said. "But above all, more than anything else, I want to know how you and I can stand there side by side, adversaries, and how you can look as you look and be the Devil, and how ...and how ..." I laughed. "...and how I can look like I look and be the Devil I've been! That's what I want to know. I have never in my whole existence seen the aesthetic laws of the world broken.

Beauty, rhythm, symmetry, those are the only laws I've ever witnessed that seemed natural.

"And I've always called them the Savage Garden! Because they seemed ruthless and indifferent to suffering¡ªto the beauty of the butterfly snared in the spiderweb! To the wildebeast lying on the veldt with its heart still beating as the lions come to lap at the wound in its throat."

"Yes, how well I understand and respect your philosophy," he said. "Your words are my words."

"But I saw something more up there!" I said. "I saw Heaven. I saw the perfected Garden that was no longer Savage. I saw it!" I began to weep again.

"I know, I know," he said, consoling me.

"All right." I drew myself up again, ashamed. I searched in my pockets, found a linen handkerchief, pulled it out and wiped my face.  The linen smelled like my house in New Orleans, where jacket and handkerchief both had been kept until sunset this night, when I'd taken them out of the closet and gone to kidnap Dora from the streets.

Or was it the same night?

I had no idea.

I pressed the handkerchief to my mouth. I could smell the scent of New Orleans dust and mold and warmth.

I wiped my mouth.

"All right!" I declared breathlessly. "If you haven't become completely disgusted with me¡ª"

"Hardly!" he said, as politely as David might have said.

"Then tell me the Story of Creation. Tell me everything. Just go on! Tell me! I...."

"Yes ... ?"

"I/we to know!"

He rose to his feet, shook the grass from his loose robe, and said:

"That's what I've been waiting for. Now, we can truly begin."