But these thoughts were foolish and vain. His whole tale was foolish and vain, and yet I turned around, and in a fury I spit the words at him:

"Why didn't you accept? Why didn't you go with Memnoch if he could have taken you from this awful living Hell we share, why didn't you?"

"They let you escape," you said to him, David. You broke in, quieting me with a small pleading gesture of your left hand.

But I had no patience for analysis or inevitable interpretation. I couldn't get the image out of my mind, Our Bloody Lord, Our Lord with the crossbeam bound to His shoulders, and she, Veronica, this sweet figment with the Veil in her hands. Oh, how is it such a fantasy could get its hook so deep?

"Back away from me, all of you," he cried. "I have the Veil. I told you. Christ gave it to me. Veronica gave it to me. I took it with me out of Memnoch's Hell, when all his imps tried to take it from me."

I scarcely heard. Veil, the actual Veil, what trick is this? My head ached. The fisherman's Mass. If there was such a thing in St. Patrick's below, I wanted to go there. I was weary of this glass-walled tower room, cut off from the taste of the wind and the wild refreshing wetness of the snow.

Why did Lestat back up against the wall? What did he take out of his coat? The Veil!

Some gaudy trick to seal this whole masterpiece of mayhem?

I looked up, my eyes roaming over the snowy night beyond the glass and only slowly finding their mark: the opened cloth which he held up in his hands, his own head bowed, the cloth revealed as reverently as it might have been by Veronica.

"My Lord!" I whispered. All the world was gone in curls of weightless sound and light. I saw Him there. "My Lord." I saw His Face, not painted, printed or otherwise daintily tricked into the tiny fibers of the fine white cloth, but blazing with a flame that would not consume the vehicle that bore the heat of it. My Lord, my Lord the Man, my Lord, my Christ, the Man with black and sharpened crown of thorns, and long twisted brown hair so fearfully clotted with blood, and great wondering dark eyes that stared straight at me, the sweet and vivid portals of the Soul of God, so radiant their immeasurable love that all poetry dies before it, and a soft and silken mouth of unquestioning and unjudging simplicity, open to take a silent and agonizing breath at the very moment the Veil had come to soothe this hideous suffering.

I wept. I clamped my hand to my mouth, but I couldn't stop my words.

"Oh, Christ, my tragic Christ!" I whispered. "Not made by human hands!" I cried out.

"Not made by human hands!" How wretched my words, how feeble, how filled with sorrow. "This Man's Face, this Face of God and Man. He bleeds. For the love of Almighty God, look at it!"