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"It was given to me for you," she said.
"By whom?" I demanded.
"The person whose writing you will find inside. Read it.""What the hell!" I swore. With my right fingers I tore open thecrumpled vellum.
My eye. My eye shone there against the writing. This little packagecontained my eye, my eye wrapped in a letter. My blue eye, wholeand alive.
Gasping, I picked it up and pushed it into my face, into the soreaching socket, feeling its tendrils reach back into the brain, tanglingwith the brain. The world flared into full vision.
She stood staring at me.
"Scream, will I?" I cried. "Scream, why? What do you think I see?
I see only what I saw before!" I cried. I looked from right to left, theappalling patch of darkness gone, the world complete, the stainedglass, the still trio watching me. "Oh, thank you, God!" I whispered.
But what did this mean? Was it a prayer of thanks, or merely anexclamation!
"Read," she said, "what is written on the vellum."An archaic hand, what was this? An illusion! Words in a languagethat was no language at all, yet clearly articulated so that Icould pick them out of the swarming design, written in blood andink and soot:
To My Prince,My Thanks to you for a jobperfectly done.
with Love,Memnochthe DevilI started to roar. "Lies, lies, lies!" I heard the chains. "What metalis it you think can bind me, cast me down! Damn you. Lies! Youdidn'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 engravedat Jericho梚t surrounded me, enclosed me. It was she more thanthey; I was her child, thrashing and cursing at her.
They dragged me through the darkness, my howls echoing off thewalls, into the room they had chosen for me with its bricked-upwindows, lightless, a dungeon, the chains going round and round as Ithrashed.
"It's lies, it's lies, it's lies! I don't believe it! If I was tricked it wasby God!" I roared and roared. "He did it to me. It's not real unlessHe did it, God Incarnate. Not Memnoch. No, never, never. Lies!"Finally I lay there, helpless. I didn't care. There was a comfort inbeing chained, in being unable to batter the walls with my fists tillthey 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-olddilemma."I fell silent. I could feel my left eye growing deeper and strongerinto my brain. I had that. I had my eye. And to think of his face, hishorror-stricken face when he looked at my eye, and the story ofUncle 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 powerfulfor 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 thathe 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 alonein my prison.
26TWO NIGHTS, three nights. Outside in the city of the modernworld the traffic ran along the broad avenue. Couplespassed, whispering in the evening shadows. A dog howled.
Four nights, five nights?
David sat by me reading me the manuscript of my story word forword, all I had said, as he remembered this, stopping over and overagain, 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 hesaw, that is what he told you. That is what I see in his mind. Thoseare his words. That is what he felt."Finally, it must have been after a week, she stood over me andasked if I thirsted for blood. I said, "I will never drink it again. I willdry up like something hard made of limestone. They will throw meinto a kiln."One night Louis came, with the quiet ease of a chaplain into a jail,immune to the rules yet presenting no threat to them.
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