"By whom?" I demanded.
  
  "The person whose writing you will find inside. Read it."
  
  "What the hell!" I swore. With my right fingers I tore open the crumpled vellum.
  
  My eye. My eye shone there against the writing. This little package contained my eye, 
my eye wrapped in a letter. My blue eye, whole and alive.
  
  Gasping, I picked it up and pushed it into my face, into the sore aching socket, 
feeling its tendrils reach back into the brain, tangling with the brain. The world flared 
into full vision.
  
  She stood staring at me.
  
  "Scream, will I?" I cried. "Scream, why? What do you think I see?  I see only what I 
saw before!" I cried. I looked from right to left, the appalling patch of darkness gone, 
the world complete, the stained glass, the still trio watching me. "Oh, thank you, God!" 
I whispered.
  
  But what did this mean? Was it a prayer of thanks, or merely an exclamation!
  
  "Read," she said, "what is written on the vellum."
  
  An archaic hand, what was this? An illusion! Words in a language that was no language 
at all, yet clearly articulated so that I could pick them out of the swarming design, 
written in blood and ink and soot:
  
  To My Prince,
  
  My Thanks to you for a job perfectly done.
  
  with Love,
  
  Memnoch 
  the Devil
  
  I started to roar. "Lies, lies, lies!" I heard the chains. "What metal is it you think 
can bind me, cast me down! Damn you. Lies! You didn't see him. He didn't give you this!"
  
  David, Louis, her strength, her inconceivable strength, strength, since the time 
immemorial, before the first tablets had been engraved at Jericho-it surrounded me, 
enclosed me. It was she more than they; I was her child, thrashing and cursing at her.
  
  They dragged me through the darkness, my howls echoing off the walls, into the room 
they had chosen for me with its bricked-up windows, lightless, a dungeon, the chains 
going round and round as I thrashed.
  
  "It's lies, it's lies, it's lies! I don't believe it! If I was tricked it was by God!" 
I roared and roared. "He did it to me. It's not real unless He did it, God Incarnate. Not 
Memnoch. No, never, never. Lies!"
  
  Finally I lay there, helpless. I didn't care. There was a comfort in being chained, in 
being unable to batter the walls with my fists till they were pulp, or smash my head 
against the bricks, or worse....
  
  "Lies, lies, it's all a great big panorama of lies! That's all I saw! One more circus 
maximus of lies!"
  
  "It's not all lies," she said. "Not all of it. That's the age-old dilemma."
  
  I fell silent. I could feel my left eye growing deeper and stronger into my brain. I 
had that. I had my eye. And to think of his face, his horror-stricken face when he looked 
at my eye, and the story of Uncle Mickey's eye. I couldn't grasp it. I'd start howling 
again.
  
  Dimly I thought I heard Louis's gentle voice, protesting, pleading, arguing. I heard 
locks thrown, I heard nails going through wood.
  
  I heard Louis begging.
  
  "For a while, just a little while...." she said. "He is too powerful for us to do 
anything else. It is either that, or we do away with him."
  
  "No," Louis cried.
  
  I heard David protest, no, that she couldn't.
  
  "I will not," she said calmly. "But he will stay here until I say that he can leave."
  
  And they were gone.
  
  "Sing," I whispered. I was talking to the ghosts of the children.
  
  "Sing. ..."
  
  But the convent was empty. All the little ghosts had fled. The con-vent was mine. 
Memnoch's servant; Memnoch's prince. I was alone in my prison.
  
  26
  
  TWO NIGHTS, three nights. Outside in the city of the modern world the traffic ran along 
the broad avenue. Couples passed, whispering in the evening shadows. A dog howled.
  
  Four nights, five nights?
  
  David sat by me reading me the manuscript of my story word for word, all I had said, as 
he remembered this, stopping over and over again, to ask if this was correct, if these 
were the very words I'd used, if this was the image. And she would answer.