Lestat that he had bothered to weep for me, but I was to die here. I was to die sooner or later. Whatever I had seen in that moment when I'd risen into the sun didn't matter. I was to die. That was all there was.
Piercing the snowy night, electronic voices spoke of the miracle, that Christ's Face upon a Veil of linen had cured the sick and left its imprint on other cloths pressed to it. Then came an argument of clergymen and skeptics, a perfect din.
I followed the sense of nothing. I suffered. I burned. I couldn't open my eyes, and when I tried, my eyelashes scratched my eyes and the agony was too much to bear. In darkness, I waited for her.
Sooner or later, without fail, there came her magnificent music, with all its new and wondrous variations, and nothing mattered to me then, not the mystery of where I was, or what I might have seen, or what it was that Lestat and David meant to do.
It was not until the seventh night perhaps that my senses were fully restored to me, and the fall horror of my state was understood.
Lestat was gone. So was David. The Church had been shut up. From the murmurings of mortals I soon realized that the Veil had been taken away.
I could hear the minds of all the city, a din that was unsupportable. I shut myself off from it, fearing the vagrant immortal who'd home in on me if he caught but one spark from my telepathic mind. I couldn't endure the thought of some attempted rescue by immortal strangers. I couldn't endure the thought of their faces, their questions, their possible concern or merciless indifference. I hid myself from them, coiled up in my cracked and tightened flesh. Yet I heard them, as I heard the mortal voices around them, speaking of miracles and redemption and the love of Christ.
Besides, I had enough to think about to figure my present predicament and how it had come to be.
I was lying on a roof. That is where my fall had left me, but not under the open sky, as I might have hoped or supposed. On the contrary, my body had tumbled down a slope of metal sheeting, to lodge beneath a torn and rusted overhang, where it had been repeatedly buried in the wind-stirred snow.
How had I gotten here? I could only suppose.
By my own will, and with the first explosion of my blood in the light of the morning sun, I had been driven upwards, as high perhaps as I could go. For centuries I'd known how to climb to airy heights and how to move there, but I'd never pushed it to a conceivable limit, but with my zeal for death, I had strained with all my available strength to move Heavenward. My fall had been from the greatest height.
The building beneath me was empty, abandoned, dangerous, without heat or light.
Not a sound issued from its hollow metal stairwells or its battered, crumbling rooms. Indeed the wind played the structure now and then as if it were a great pipe organ, and when Sybelle was not at her piano it was to this music I listened, shutting out the rich cacophony of the city above, beyond and below.
Now and then mortals crept inside the lower floors of the building. I felt a sudden wrenching hope. Would one be fool enough to wander to this rooftop where I might lay hands on him and drink the blood I needed merely to crawl free of the overhang which protected me and thereby give myself unsheltered to the sun? As I lay now, the sun could scarce reach me. Only a dull white light scorched me through the snowy shroud in which I was wound, and with the lengthening of each night this newly inflicted pain would mellow into the rest.
But nobody ever came up here.
Death would be slow, very slow. It might have to wait until the warm weather came and the snow melted.
And so each morning, as I longed for death, I came to accept that I would wake, more burnt perhaps then ever, but all the more concealed by the winter blizzard, as I had been concealed all along, from the hundreds of lighted windows that looked down upon this roof from above.
When it was deadly quiet, when Sybelle slept and Benji had ceased praying to me and talking to me at the window, the worst