"Oh, yes, you can," He said reassuringly. "Lestat, my brave bringer of death to so many. Would you really return to Earth

without this glimpse of what I offer? Would you really give up this chance to glimpse me crowned with thorns? When have you ever passed up a challenge, and think what I am offering to you now. No, you wouldn't back off from it, even if Memnoch urged you to do it."

I knew He was right. Yet, I knew I couldn't stand it. I could not go into Jerusalem and see the actual Christ carrying His Cross. I couldn't. I couldn't. I didn't have the strength, I would— I was silent. A riot of thought within me condemned me to utter confusion and continued paralysis. "Can I look at this?" I said. I closed my eyes!

Then I opened them and looked at Him again and at Memnoch, who had come near and looked down with a near, cold expression at me, cold as his face could be, which wasn't cold at all so much as serene.

"Memnoch," said God Incarnate. "Bring him, show him the way, let him but glimpse it. You be his guide, and then go on with your examination and your appeal."

He looked at me. He smiled. How frail a vessel He seemed for His own magnificence.

A man with lines around his eyes from the hot sun, with worn teeth, a man.

"Remember, Lestat," God said to me. "This is only the world. And you know the world. Sheol awaits. You have seen the World and Heaven but you have not seen Hell."

Chapter Eighteen

We were in the city, a city of deep brown and faded yellow stones and clay. Three years had passed. It had to be so. All I knew was that we were in a huge crowd of people, robed and veiled and ragged—that I could smell the human sweat, and the heat of stagnant breath, and stench of human waste and camel dung overpoweringly, and that though no one took notice of us, I could feel the press around us, I could feel unwashed men shoving against me, and brushing in front of me, and the sand salted the air here within the walls of the city, within these narrow streets, just as it had salted the air of the desert.

People clustered in small rounded doorways, peeped from windows above. Soot mingled with the everlasting sand. Women drawing their veils around their faces cleaved to one another, pushing past us. Up ahead I could hear screams and shouting.

Suddenly, I realized that the crowd was pressed so tight around us, I couldn't move.

Desperately I looked for Memnoch.

He was right beside me, watching all calmly, neither of us shining with any preternatural gleam among these drab and soiled humans, these everyday creatures of this early and harsh time.

"I don't want to do it!" I said, digging in my heels, shoved along by the crowd, yet resisting. "I don't think I can do it! I can't look, Memnoch, no, this is not required of me. No ... I don't want to go any farther. Memnoch, let me go!"