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had a purpose’” (332). When Lestat shows them the veil—Veronica’s Veil—
that purpose begins to reveal itself. All see “His face blasted into the veil. I
looked down. God Incarnate staring at me from the most minute detail, burnt
into the cloth, not painted or stained, or sewn or drawn, but blasted into the very
fibers, His Face, the Face of God in that instant, dripping with blood from His
Crown of Thoms” (333). But then Dora takes the veil from an unresisting
Lestat, and hurries, in a state of near ecstasy, with it to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
The veil, as it turns out, quickly effects nothing less than a total and, or so it
seems, an unstoppable resurgence of belief in God and the renewal of the
Christian religion. Days later, in New Orleans, Lestat receives an envelope in
which, after he tears it open, he finds the eye that Memnoch had ripped out of
his face as he attempted to escape from Hell. He shoves his eye back into its
socket then, on the vellum, “written in blood and ink and soot,” he reads the
words: “7b My Prince, / My Thanks to you for a job / perfectly done. / with
Love, / Memnoch / the DeviF (349-350). This final twist, not surprisingly
perhaps, drives Lestat over the edge and into the realm of insanity. While
encased in the chains his vampire elders have placed him in for his own
protection, Lestat must come to terms with the idea that not only had God used
Memnoch for His purposes—to ignite fresh, fervent, and widespread belief in
Him in the late 20* century—but also with the idea that Memnoch knew God
was using him for this reason. Acknowledgement of this notion means, of
course, that Lestat was either the expendable pawn of both God and the Devil or,
like the Devil himself, merely an instrument of God’s to be used at will and
without consent.
In the closing pages of Memnoch the Devil, the vampire Armand, so
affected by seeing the face of Jesus Christ on Veronica’s Veil that Lestat
brought back with him from his journey to Heaven, to Jerusalem at the time of
Christ, and to Hell, exposes himself to the full light of the morning sun, and
bursts into flames as an inevitable consequence. But, in the next volume of The
Vampire Chronicles, appropriately titled The Vampire Armand, we learn that
Armand survived his attempt at self-immolation; nearly burnt beyond
recognition, but nevertheless as alive as one of the undead can be. While Lestat
lies in a virtual catatonic state in New Orleans, Armand tells the story of his life
to David. Upon completing his long, long tale, and asked about what it was,
exactly, he saw when he looked at Veronica’s Veil, he explains that he “‘saw
Christ’” and “‘He was .. .my brother.. . .Yes. That is what He was, my brother,
and the symbol of all brothers, and that is why He was the Lord, and that is why
His core is simply love’” (385). And here, in these passages, we find two of
Christ’s most significant messages: that Christianity is nothing more, and
nothing less, than a brotherhood among men and women and Himself, and that it
is love, simply love, that allows this brotherhood to thrive in His eternal glory.
Nevertheless, adventures much less theologically and philosophically informed
await readers of Merrick, Blood and Gold, and Blackwood Farm, the three
Vampire Chronicles that follow The Vampire Armand. However, Blood