“In that moment on the stage,” I said, “I revealed myself. I did the very opposite of deceiving. I wanted somehow in making manifest the monstrosity of myself to be joined with my fellow humans again. Better they should run from me than not see me. Better they should know I was something monstrous than for me to glide through the world unrecognized by those upon whom I preyed.”
“But it was not better.”
“No. What Marius did was better. He did not deceive.”
“Of course he did. He fooled everyone!”
“No. He found a way to imitate mortal life. To be one with mortals. He slew only the evildoer, and he painted as mortals paint. Angels and blue skies, clouds, those are the things you made me see when you were telling. He created good things. And I see wisdom in him and a lack of vanity. He did not need to reveal himself. He had lived a thousand years and he believed more in the vistas of heaven that he painted than in himself.”
Confusion.
Doesn’t matter now, devils who paint angels.
“Those are only metaphors,” I said. “And it does matter! If you are to rebuild, if you are to find the Devil’s Road again, it does matter! There are ways for us to exist. If I could only imitate life, just find a way . . . ”
“You say things that mean nothing to me. We are the abandoned of God.”
Gabrielle glanced at him suddenly. “Do you believe in God?” she asked.
“Yes, always in God,” he answered. “It is Satan—our master—who is the fiction and that is the fiction which has betrayed me.”
“Oh, then you are truly damned,” I said. “And you know full well that your retreat into the fraternity of the Children of Darkness was a retreat from a sin that was not a sin.”
Anger.
“Your heart breaks for something you’ll never have,” he countered, his voice rising suddenly. “You brought Gabrielle and Nicolas over the barrier to you, but you could not go back.”
“Why is it you don’t hearken to your own story?” I asked. “Is it that you have never forgiven Marius for not warning you about them, letting you fall into their hands? You will never take anything, not example or inspiration, from Marius again? I am not Marius, but I tell you since I set my feet on the Devil’s Road, I have heard of only one elder who could teach me anything, and that is Marius, your Venetian master. He is talking to me now. He is saying something to me of a way to be immortal.”
“Mockery.”
“No. It wasn’t mockery! And you are the one whose heart breaks for what he will never have: another body of belief, another spell.”
No answer.
“We cannot be Marius for you,” I said, “or the dark lord, Santino. We are not artists with a great vision that will carry you forward. And we are not evil coven masters with the conviction to condemn a legion to perdition. And this domination—this glorious mandate—is what you must have.”
I had risen to my feet without meaning to. I had come close to the fireplace and I was looking down at him.
And I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Gabrielle’s subtle nod of approval, and the way that she closed her eyes for a moment as if she were allowing herself a sigh of relief.
He was perfectly still.
“You have to suffer through this emptiness,” I said, “and find what impels you to continue. If you come with us we will fail you and you will destroy us.”
“How suffer through it?” He looked up at me and his eyebrows came together in the most poignant frown. “How do I begin? You move like the right hand of God! But for me the world, the real world in which Marius lived, is beyond reach. I never lived in it. I push against the glass. But how do I get in?”
“I can’t tell you that,” I said.
“You have to study this age,” Gabrielle interrupted. Her voice was calm but commanding.
He looked towards her as she spoke.
“You have to understand the age,” she continued, “through its literature and its music and its art. You have come up out of the earth, as you yourself put it. Now live in the world.”
No answer from him. Flash of Nicki’s ravaged flat with all its books on the floor. Western civilization in heaps.
“And what better place is there than the center of things, the boulevard and the theater?”