The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (326 page)

“You’re looking at this all wrong. Stop regretting. If you’d made the church big, you would have precipitated your exposure and the scandal.”

“No, once the church was big enough, the scandal wouldn’t have mattered. That’s just the catch. She stayed small, and when you’re small, a scandal can do you in!” He shook his head again, angrily. He was becoming too agitated, but the image of him only grew stronger. “I cannot be allowed to destroy Dora.…” His voice drifted off again. He shuddered. He looked at me:

“What does if come to, Lestat?” he asked.

“Dora herself must survive,” I said. “She has to hang on to her faith after your death is discovered!”

“Yes. I’m her biggest enemy, dead or alive. And her church, you know, she walks a thin line; she’s no puritan, my daughter. She thinks Wynken’s a heretic, but she doesn’t know how
much her own modern compassion for the flesh is just what Wynken was talking about.”

“I get it. But what about Wynken, am I supposed to save Wynken too? What do I do with Wynken?”

“She is a genius in her own way, actually,” he went on, ignoring me. “That’s what I meant when I called her a theologian. She’s done the near impossible thing of mastering Greek and Latin and Hebrew, even though she was not bilingual as a small child. You know how hard it is.”

“Yes, it’s not that way for us, but.…” I stopped. A horrible thought had occurred to me with full force.

The thought interrupted everything.

It was too late to make Roger immortal. He was dead!

I hadn’t even realized that I was assuming all this time, all this time, as we talked and his story poured out, that I could, if I wanted to, actually bring him to me, and keep him here, and stop him from going on. But suddenly I remembered with a ferocious shock that Roger was a ghost! I was talking to a man who was already dead.

The situation was so hideously painful and frustrating and utterly abnormal that I was thunderstruck and might have begun to groan, if I hadn’t had to cover it up so that he would go on.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked.

“Nothing. Talk more about Dora to me. Tell me the sort of things Dora says.”

“She talks about the sterility of now, and how people need the ineffable. She points to rampant crime and goalless youth. She’s going to make a religion where nobody hurts anybody else. It’s the American dream. She knows Scripture inside and out, she’s covered all the Pseudepigrapha, Apocrypha, the works of Augustine, Marcion, Moses Maimonides; she’s convinced that the prohibition against sex destroyed Christianity, which is hardly original with her, of course, and certainly appeals to the women who listen to her, you know.…”

“Yes, I understand all that, but she must have felt some sympathy for Wynken.”

“Wynken’s books weren’t a series of visions to her as they are to me.”

“I see.”

“And by the way, Wynken’s books are not merely perfect, they are unique in a number of ways. Wynken did his work in the last twenty-five years before the Gutenberg printing press. Yet Wynken did everything. He was scribe, rubicator, that is, the maker of the fancy letters, and also the miniaturist who added all the naked people frolicking in Eden and the ivy and vine crawling over every page. He had to do every step himself at a time when scriptoria divided up these functions.

“Let me finish Wynken. You have Dora now in your mind. Let me go to Wynken. Yeah, you have to get those books.”

“Great,” I said dismally.

“Let me bring you right up to date. You’re going to love those books, even if Dora never does. I have all twelve of his books, as I think I told you. He was Rhineland Catholic, forced into the Benedictines as a young man, and was in love with Blanche de Wilde, his brother’s wife. She ordered the books done in the scriptorium and that’s how it all started, her secret link with her monk lover. I have letters between Blanche and her friend Eleanor. I have some incidents decoded from the poems themselves.

“Most sad of all, I have the letters Blanche wrote to Eleanor after Wynken was put to death. She had the letters smuggled out to Eleanor, and then Eleanor sent them on to Diane, and there was another woman in it, but there are very few extant fragments of anything in her hand.

“This is what went down. They used to meet in the garden of the De Wilde castle to perform their rites. It wasn’t the monastery garden at all, as I’d once supposed. How Wynken got there I don’t know, but there are a few mentions in some of the letters that indicate he simply slipped out of the monastery and followed a secret way into his brother’s house.

“And this made sense, of course. They’d wait till Damien de Wilde was off doing whatever such counts or dukes did, and then they’d meet, do their dance around the fountain, and make love. Wynken bedded each of the women in turn; or sometimes they celebrated various patterns. All this is recorded more or less in the books. Well, they got caught.

“Damien castrated and stabbed Wynken in front of the women and put them to rout. He kept the remains! Then, after days of interrogation, the frightened women were bullied into confessing to their love for Wynken and how he had communicated through the books; and the brother took all those books, all twelve of the books of Wynken de Wilde, everything this artist had ever created, you understand—”

“His immortality,” I whispered.

“Exactly, his progeny! His books! And Damien had them buried with Wynken’s body in the castle garden by the fountain that appears in all the little pictures in the books! Blanche could look out on it every day from her window, the place in the ground where Wynken had been laid to rest. No trial, no heresy, no execution, nothing like that. He just murdered his brother, it was as simple as that. He probably paid the monastery huge amounts of money. Who knows if it was even necessary? Did the monastery love Wynken? The monastery is a ruin now where tourists come to snap pictures. As for the castle, it was obliterated in the bombing of the First World War.”

“Ah. But what happened after that, how did the books get out of the coffin? Do you have copies? Are you speaking of.…”

“No, I have the originals of every one. I have come across copies, crude copies, made at the behest of Eleanor, Blanche’s cousin and confidante, but as far as I know they stopped this practice of copies. There were only twelve books. And I don’t know how they surfaced. I can only guess.”

“And what is your guess?”

“I think Blanche went out in the night with the other women,
dug up the body, and took the books out of the coffin, or whatever poor Wynken’s remains had been placed in, and put everything back right the way it was.”

“You think they’d do that?”

“Yes, I think they did it. I can see them doing it, by candlelight in the garden, see them digging, the five women together. Can’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I think they did it because they felt the way I do! They loved the beauty and the perfection of those books. Lestat, they knew they were treasures, and such is the power of obsession and such is the power of love. And who knows, maybe they wanted the bones of Wynken. It’s conceivable. Maybe one woman took a thigh bone and another the bones of his fingers and, ah, I don’t know.”

It seemed a ghastly picture suddenly, and it put me in mind, without a second’s hesitation, of Roger’s hands, which I had chopped off sloppily with a kitchen knife and dumped, wrapped in a plastic sack. I stared at the image of these hands before me, busy, fretting with the edge of the glass, tapping the bar in anxiety.

“How far back can you trace the journey of the books?” I asked.

“Not very far at all. But that’s often the case in my profession, I mean antiquities. The books have turned up one, maybe two at a time. Some from private collections, two from museums bombed during the wars. Once or twice I’ve paid almost nothing for them. I knew what they were the minute I laid eyes on them, but other people didn’t. And understand, everywhere I went I put out the search for this sort of medieval codex. I am an expert in this field. I know the language of the medieval artist! You have to save my treasures, Lestat. You can’t let Wynken get lost again. I’m leaving you with my legacy.”

“So it seems. But what can I do with these, and all the other relics, if Dora will have no part of it?”

“Dora’s young. Dora will change. See, I still have this vision—that
maybe somewhere in my collection—forget about Wynken—that maybe somewhere among all the statues and relics is a central artifact that can help Dora with her new church. Can you gauge the value of what you saw in that flat? You have to make Dora touch those things again, examine them, catch the scent of them! You have to make her realize the potency of the statues and paintings, that they are expressions of the human quest for truth, the very quest that obsesses her. She just doesn’t know yet.”

“But you said Dora never cared for the paint and the plaster.”

“Make her care.”

“Me? How! I can conserve all this, yes, but how am I to make Dora love a work of art? Why would you even suggest such a thing, I mean—my having contact with your precious daughter?”

“You’ll love my daughter,” he said in a low murmur.

“Come again?”

“Find something miraculous in my collection for her.”

“The Shroud of Turin?”

“Oh, I like you. I really do. Yes, find her something that’s significant, something that will transform her, something that I, her father, bought and cherished, that will help her.”

“You’re as insane dead as you were alive, you know it? Are you still racketeering, trying to buy your way into salvation with a hunk of marble or a pile of parchment? Or do you really believe in the sanctity of all you’ve collected?”

“Of course I believe in the sanctity of it. It’s
all
I believe in! That’s my point, don’t you see? It’s all you believe in too … what glitters and what is gold.”

“Ah, but you do take my breath away.”

“That’s why you murdered me there, among the treasures. Look, we have to hurry. We don’t know how much time we have. Back to the mechanics. Now, with my daughter, your trump card is her ambition.

“She wanted the convent for her own female missionaries,
her own Order, which was to teach love, of course, with the same unique fire as other missionaries have taught it; she would send her women into the poor neighborhoods and into the ghettoes and into the working districts, and they would hold forth on the importance of starting a movement of love from the core of the people that would reach eventually to all governments in power, so that injustice would end.”

“What would distinguish these women from other such orders or missionaries, from Franciscans or any sort of preachers …?”

“Well, one that they would be women, and preaching women! Nuns have been nurses, teachers for little children, servants, or locked in the cloister to bray at God like so many boring sheep. Her women would be doctors of the church, you see! Preachers. They would work up the crowds with personal fervor; they would turn to the women, the impoverished and the depotentiated women, and help them to reform the world.”

“A feminist vision, but coupled with religion.”

“It had a chance. It had as much of a chance as any such movement. Who knows why one monk in the 1300s became a crazy? And another one a saint? Dora has ways to show people how to think. I don’t know! You have to figure this all out, you have to!”

“And meanwhile save the church decorations,” I said.

“Yes, until she will accept them or until she can turn them to some good. That’s how you get her. Talk about good.”

“That’s how you get anybody,” I said sadly. “That’s how you’re getting me.”

“Well, you’ll do it, won’t you? Dora thinks I was misguided. She said, ‘Don’t think you can save your soul after all you’ve done by passing on these church objects to me.’ ”

“She loves you,” I affirmed. “I saw that every time I saw her with you.”

“I know. I need no such assurances. There’s no time now to go into all the arguments. But Dora’s vision is immense, remember that. She’s small-time now, but wants to change the
entire world. I mean, she isn’t satisfied to have a cult the way I wanted it, you know, to be a guru with a retreat full of pliant followers. She really wants to change the world. She thinks somebody has to change the world.”

“Doesn’t every religious person believe that?”

“No. They don’t dream of being Mohammed or Zoroaster.”

“And Dora does.”

“Dora knows that that is what’s required.”

He shook his head, took another little bit of the drink, and looked off over the half-empty room. Then he made a little frown as if pondering it still.

“She said, ‘Dad, religion doesn’t come from relics and texts. They are the expression of it.’ She went on and on. After all her studying of Scripture, she said it was the inner miracle that counted. She put me to sleep. Don’t make any cruel jokes!”

“Not for the world.”

“What’s going to happen to my daughter!” he whispered desperately. He wasn’t looking at me. “Look at her heritage. See it in her father. I’m fervent and extremist and gothic and mad. I can’t tell you how many churches I’ve taken Dora to, how many priceless crucifixes I’ve shown to her, before turning them around for a profit. The hours Dora and I have spent looking at the ceilings of Baroque churches in Germany alone! I have given Dora magnificent relics of the true cross embedded in silver and rubies. I have bought many veils of Veronica, magnificent works that would take your breath away. My God.”

“Was there ever—with Dora, I mean—a concept of atonement in all of this, a guilt?”

“You mean, for letting Terry disappear without explanation, for never asking, until years later? I thought of that. If it was there in the beginning, Dora’s passed it a long time ago. Dora thinks the world needs a new revelation. A new prophet. But you just don’t become a prophet! She says her transformation must come with seeing and feeling; but it’s no Revival Tent experience.”

“Mystics never think it’s a Revival Tent experience.”

“Of course not.”

“Is Dora a mystic? Would you say that?”

“Don’t you know? You followed her, you watched her. No, Dora hasn’t seen the face of God or heard His voice and would never lie about it, if that’s what you mean. But Dora’s looking for it. She’s looking for the moment, for the miracle, for the revelation!”