All horror was an illusion in this place, but the worst horror of all was the person of God Incarnate, who had allowed this Final School for those who would be worthy to enter His Paradise. And, this too Lestat had seen, the Heaven glimpsed a million times by saints and deathbed victims, of ever blooming trees and flowers eternally sweet and endless crystal towers of happy, happy beings, shorn of all flesh and one at last with countless choirs of singing angels.

It was an old tale. It was too old. It had been told too many times, this tale-of Heaven with her open gates, and God Our Maker sending forth His endless light to those who climbed the mythic stairs to join the celestial court forever.

How many mortals waking from a near death sleep have struggled to describe these same wonders!

How many saints have claimed to have glimpsed this indescribable and eternal Eden?

And how cleverly this Devil Memnoch had laid out his case to plead for mortal compassion for his sin, that he and he alone had opposed a merciless and indifferent God, to beg that Deity to look down with compassionate eyes on a fleshly race of beings who had by means of their own selfless love managed to engender souls worthy of His interest?

This, then, was the fall of Lucifer like the Star of Morning from the sky-an angel begging for the Sons and Daughters of Men that they had now the countenances and hearts of angels.

"Give them Paradise, Lord, give it to them when they have learnt in my school how to love all that you have created."

Oh, a book has been filled with this adventure. Memnoch the Devil cannot be condensed here in these few unjust paragraphs.

But this was the sum of what fell on my ears as I sat in this chilly New York room, gazing now and then past Lestat's frantic, pacing figure at the white sky of ever falling snow, shutting out beneath his roaring narrative the rumble of the city far below, and struggling with the awful fear in myself that I must at the climax of his tale disappoint him. That I must remind him that he had done no more than shape the mystic journey of a thousand saints in a new and palatable fashion.

So it is a school that replaces those rings of eternal fire which the poet Dante described in such degree as to sicken the reader, and even the tender Fra Angelico felt compelled to paint, where naked mortals bathed in flame were meant to suffer for eternity.

A school, a place of hope, a promise of redemption great enough perhaps to welcome even us, the Children of the Night, who counted murders among their sins as numerous as those of ancient Huns or Mongols.

Oh, this was very sweet, this picture of the life hereafter, the horrors of the natural world laid off upon a wise but distant God, and the Devil's folly rendered with such keen intelligence.