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God would have told us had we asked.
"But the wailing of the invisible ones hovered over this dying victim.
And the lamentations of the human beings rose more terrible
than I could endure.
"Again I wept.
" 'Be still, listen,' said Michael, the patient one.
"He directed us to look beyond the tiny camp, and the thrashing
body of the feverish man, and to see in thin air the spirit voices
gathering and crying!
"And with our eyes we saw these spirits for the first time! We saw
them clustering and dispersing, wandering, rolling in and falling
back, each retaining the vague shape in essence of a human being.
Feeble, fuddled, lost, unsure of themselves, they swam in the very
atmosphere, opening their arms now to the man who lay on the bier
about to die. And die that man did."
Hush. Stillness.
Memnoch looked at me as if I must finish it.
"And a spirit rose from the dying man," I said. "The spark of life
flared and did not go out, but became an invisible spirit with all the
rest. The spirit of the man rose in the shape of the man and joined
those spirits who had come to take it away."
"Yes!"
He gave a deep sigh and then threw out his arms. He sucked in his
breath as if he meant to roar. He looked heavenward through the
giant trees.
I stood paralyzed.
The forest sighed in its fullness around us. I could feel his
trembling, I could feel the cry that hovered just inside him and might
burst forth in some terrible clarion. But it only died away as he bowed
his head.
The forest had changed again. The forest was our forest. These
were oaks and the dark trees of our times; and the wildflowers, and
the moss I knew, and the birds and tiny rodents who darted through
the shadows.
I waited.
"The air was thick with these spirits," he said, "for once having
seen them, once having detected their faint outline and their
ceaseless voices, we could never again not see them, and like a wreath they
surrounded the earth! The spirits of the dead, Lestat! The spirits of
the human dead."
"Souls, Memnoch?"
"Souls."
"Souls had evolved from matter?"
"Yes. In His image. Souls, essences, invisible individualities,
souls!"
I waited again in silence.
He gathered himself together.
"Come with me," he said. He wiped his face with the back of his
hand. As he reached for mine, I felt his wing, distinctly for the first
time, brush the length of my body, and it sent a shiver through me
akin to fear, but not fear at all.
"Souls had come out of these human beings," he said. "They were
whole and living, and hovered about the material bodies of the
humans from whose tribe they had come.
"They could not see us; they could not see Heaven. Whom could
they see but those who had buried them, those who had loved them
in life, and were their progeny, and those who sprinkled the red
ochre over their bodies before laying them carefully, to face the east,
in graves lined with ornaments that had been their own!"
"And those humans who believed in them," I said, "those who
worshipped the ancestors, did they feel their presence? Did they
sense it? Did they suspect the ancestors were still there in spirit
form?"
"Yes," he answered me.
I was too absorbed to say anything else.
It seemed my consciousness was flooded with the smell of the
wood and all its dark colors, the endlessly rich variations of brown
and gold and deep red that surrounded us. I peered up at the sky, at
the shining light fractured and gray and sullen yet grand.
Yet all I could think and consider was the whirlwind, and the souls
who had surrounded us in the whirlwind as though the air from the
earth to Heaven were filled with human souls. Souls drifting forever
and ever. Where does one go in such darkness? What does one seek?
What can one know?
Was Memnoch laughing? It sounded small and mournful, private
and full of pain. He was perhaps singing softly, as if the melody were
a natural emanation of his thoughts. It came from his thinking as
scent rises from flowers; song, the sound of angels.
"Memnoch," I said. I knew he was suffering but I couldn't stand it
any longer. "Did God know it?" I asked. "Did God know that men
and women had evolved spiritual essences? Did he know, Memnoch,
about their souls?"
He didn't answer.
Again I heard the faint sound, his song. He, too, was looking up at
the sky, and he was singing more clearly now, a sombre and humbling
canticle, it seemed, alien to our own more measured and organized
music, yet full of eloquence and pain.
He watched the clouds moving above us, as heavy and white as any
clouds I'd ever beheld.
Did this beauty of the forest rival what I had seen in Heaven?
Impossible to answer. But what I knew with perfect truth is that heaven
bad not made this beauty dim by comparison! And that was the
wonder. This Savage Garden, this possible Eden, this ancient place was
miraculous in its own right and in its own splendid limitations. I
suddenly couldn't bear to look on it, to see the small leaves flutter
downwards, to fall into loving it, without the answer to my question.
Nothing in the whole of my life seemed as essential.
"Did God know about the souls, Memnoch!" I said. "Did He
know!"
He turned to me.
"How could He not have known, Lestat!" he answered. "How
could He not have known! And who do you think flew to the very
heights of Heaven to tell Him? And had He ever been surprised, or
caught unawares, or increased or decreased, or enlightened, or
darkened, by anything I had ever brought to His Eternal and Omniscient
attention?"
He sighed again, and seemed on the verge of a tremendous outburst,
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