To My Prince,
My Thanks to you for a job perfectly done.
with Love,
Memnoch
the Devil
I started to roar. "Lies, lies, lies!" I heard the chains. "What metal is it you think can bind me, cast me down! Damn you. Lies! You didn't see him. He didn't give you this!"
David, Louis, her strength, her inconceivable strength, strength, since the time immemorial, before the first tablets had been engraved at Jericho¡ªit surrounded me, enclosed me. It was she more than they; I was her child, thrashing and cursing at her.
They dragged me through the darkness, my howls echoing off the walls, into the room they had chosen for me with its bricked-up windows, lightless, a dungeon, the chains going round and round as I thrashed.
"It's lies, it's lies, it's lies! I don't believe it! If I was tricked it was by God!" I roared and roared. "He did it to me. It's not real unless He did it, God Incarnate. Not Memnoch. No, never, never. Lies!"
Finally I lay there, helpless. I didn't care. There was a comfort in being chained, in being unable to batter the walls with my fists till they were pulp, or smash my head against the bricks, or worse. . . .
"Lies, lies, it's all a great big panorama of lies! That's all I saw! One more circus maximus of lies!"
"It's not all lies," she said. "Not all of it. That's the age-old dilemma. "
I fell silent. I could feel my left eye growing deeper and stronger into my brain. I had that. I had my eye. And to think of his face, his horror-stricken face when he looked at my eye, and the story of Uncle Mickey's eye. I couldn't grasp it. I'd start howling again.
Dimly I thought I heard Louis's gentle voice, protesting, pleading, arguing. I heard locks thrown, I heard nails going through wood.
I heard Louis begging.
"For a while, just a little while. . . . " she said. "He is too powerful for us to do anything else. It is either that, or we do away with him. "
"No," Louis cried.
I heard David protest, no, that she couldn't.
"I will not," she said calmly. "But he will stay here until I say that he can leave. "
And they were gone.
"Sing," I whispered. I was talking to the ghosts of the children.
"Sing. . . . "
But the convent was empty. All the little ghosts had fled. The con-vent was mine. Memnoch's servant; Memnoch's prince. I was alone in my prison.
Chapter 26
26
TWO NIGHTS, three nights. Outside in the city of the modern world the traffic ran along the broad avenue. Couples passed, whispering in the evening shadows. A dog howled.
Four nights, five nights?
David sat by me reading me the manuscript of my story word for word, all I had said, as he remembered this, stopping over and over again, to ask if this was correct, if these were the very words I'd used, if this was the image. And she would answer.
From her place in the corner, she would say, "Yes, that is what he saw, that is what he told you. That is what I see in his mind. Those are his words. That is what he felt. "
Finally, it must have been after a week, she stood over me and asked if I thirsted for blood. I said, "I will never drink it again. I will dry up like something hard made of limestone. They will throw me into a kiln. "