"He must have wanted it found," I said.

"What makes you say that?" asked David. "Where have you been?"

"I saw your mother," I said to Dora. "I saw her bottle-blond hair and her blue eyes. It won't be long before they're in Heaven."

"What on earth are you saying, my darling?" she asked. "My angel? What are you telling me?"

"Sit down, all of you. I'll tell you the whole tale. Listen to everything I say without interrupting. No, I don't want to sit, not with my back to the sky and the whirlwind and the snow and the church. No, I'll walk back and forth, listen to what I have to tell you.

"Remember this. Every word of this happened to me! I could have been tricked. I could have been deceived. But this is what I saw with my eyes, and heard with my ears!"

I told them everything, from the very, very beginning, some things each of them had already heard, but which all of them together had never heard—from my first fatal glimpse of Roger and my love for his brazen white-toothed smile and guilty, gleaming black eyes—all the way to the moment I had pitched myself through the door of the flat last night.

I told them everything. Every word spoken by Memnoch and God Incarnate.

Everything I had seen in Heaven and in Hell and on Earth. I told them about the smell and the colors of Jerusalem. I told them and told them and told them....

The story devoured the night. It ate the hours, as I paced, raving, repeating those parts I wanted to get exactly right, the stages of Evolution which had shocked the angels, and the vast libraries of Heaven, and the peach tree with both bloom and fruit, and God, and the soldier lying on his back in Hell, refusing to give in. I described to them the details of the interior of Hagia Sophia. I talked about the naked men on the battlefield. Over and over I described Hell. I described Heaven. I repeated my final speech, that I couldn't help Memnoch, I couldn't teach in this school!

They stared at me in utter silence.

"Do you have the veil?" Dora asked, her lip quivering. "Do you still have it?"

So tender was the tilt of her head, as if she'd forgive me in an instant if I said, No, I lost it in the street, I gave it to a beggar!

"The veil proves nothing," I said. "Whatever is on the veil means nothing! Anyone who can make illusions like that can make a veil! It proves neither truth nor lies, neither trickery nor witchery nor theophany."

"When you were in Hell," she asked, so kindly, so gently, her white face shining in the warmth of the lamp, "did you tell Roger you had the veil?"

"No, Memnoch wouldn't let me. And I only saw him for a minute, you see, one second it was one way, and then it was another. But he's going up, I know he is, he's going because he's clever and he's figured it out, and Terry will go with him! They will be in the arms of God unless God is a cheap magician and all of this was a lie, but a lie for what? For what purpose?"