I lowered the violin over Nicki's shoulder and held it in his lap. I felt him move, as if he had taken a great breath. The back of his head pressed against me. And slowly he lifted his left hand to take the neck of the violin and he took the bow with his right.
I knelt and put my hands on his shoulders. I kissed his cheek. No human scent. No human warmth. Sculpture of my Nicolas.
"Play it," I whispered. "Play it here just for us."
Slowly he turned to face me, and for the first time since the moment of the Dark Trick, he looked into my eyes. He made some tiny sound. It was so strained it was as if he couldn't speak anymore. The organs of speech had closed up. But then he ran his tongue along his lip, and so low I scarcely heard him, he said:
"The devil's instrument."
"Yes," I said. If you must believe that, then believe it. But play.
His fingers hovered above the strings. He tapped the hollow wood with his fingertip. And now, trembling, he plucked at the strings to tune them and wound the pegs very slowly as if he were discovering the process with perfect concentration for the first time.
Somewhere out on the boulevard children laughed. Wooden wheels made their thick clatter over the cobblestones. The staccato notes were sour, dissonant, and they sharpened the tension.
He pressed the instrument to his ear for a moment. And it seemed to me he didn't move again for an eternity, and then he slowly rose to his feet. I went back out of the pit and into the benches, and I stood staring at his black silhouette against the glow of the lighted stage.
He turned to face the empty theater as he had done so many times at the moment of the intermezzo, and he lifted the violin to his chin. And in a movement so swift it was like a flash of light in my eye, he brought the bow down across the strings.
The first full-throated chords throbbed in the silence and were stretched as they deepened, scraping the bottom of sound itself. Then the notes rose, rich and dark and shrill, as if pumped out of the fragile violin by alchemy, until a raging torrent of melody suddenly flooded the hall.
It seemed to roll through my body, to pass through my very bones.
I couldn't see the movement of his fingers, the whipping of the bow; all I could see was the swaying of his body, his tortured posture as he let the music twist him, bend him forward, throw him back.
It became higher, shriller, faster, yet the tone of each note was perfection. It was execution without effort, virtuosity beyond mortal dreams. And the violin was talking, not merely singing, the violin was insisting. The violin was telling a tale.
The music was a lamentation, a future of terror looping itself into hypnotic dance rhythms, jerking Nicki even more wildly from side to side. His hair was a glistening mop against the footlights. The blood sweat had broken out on him. I could smell the blood.
But I too was doubling over; I was backing away from him, slumping down on the bench as if to cower from it, as once before in this house terrified mortals had cowered before me.
And I knew, knew in some full and simultaneous fashion, that the violin was telling everything that had happened to Nicki. It was the darkness exploded, the darkness molten, and the beauty of it was like the glow of smoldering coals; just enough illumination to show how much darkness there really was.
Gabrielle too was straining to keep her body still under the onslaught, her face constricted, her hands to her head. Her lion's mane of hair had shaken loose around her, her eyes were closed.
But another sound was coming through the pure inundation of song. They were here. They had come into the theater and were moving towards us through the wings.
The music reached impossible peaks, the sound throttled for an instant and then released again. The mixture of feeling and pure logic drove it past the limits of the bearable. And yet it went on and on.
And the others appeared slowly from behind the stage curtain-first the stately figure of Eleni, then the boy Laurent, and finally Mix and Eugenie. Acrobats, street players, they had become, and they wore the clothes of such players, the men in white tights beneath dagged harlequin jerkins, the women in full bloomers and ruffled dresses and with dancing slippers on their feet. Rouge gleamed on their immaculate white faces; kohl outlined their dazzling vampire eyes.
They glided towards Nicki as if drawn by a magnet, their beauty flowering ever more fully as they came into the glare of the stage candles, their hair shimmering, their movements agile and feline, their expressions rapt.
Nicki turned slowly to face them as he writhed, and the song went into frenzied supplication, lurching and climbing and roaring along its melodic path.
Eleni stared wide-eyed at him as if horrified and enchanted. Then her arms rose straight up above her head in a slow dramatic gesture, her body tensing, her neck becoming ever more graceful and long. The other woman had made a pivot and lifted her knee, toe pointed down, in the first step of a dance. But it was the tall man who suddenly caught the pace of Nicki's music as he jerked his head to the side and moved his legs and arms as if he were a great marionette controlled from the rafters above by four strings.
The others saw it. They had seen the marionettes of the boulevard. And suddenly they all went into the mechanical attitude, their sudden movements like spasms, their faces like wooden faces, utterly blank.
A great cool rush of delight passed through me, as if I could breathe suddenly in the blasted heat of the music, and I moaned with pleasure watching them flip and flop and throw up their legs, toes to the ceiling, and twirl on their invisible strings.
But it was changing. He was playing to them now even as they danced to him.
He took a stride towards the stage, and leapt up over the smoky trough of the footlights, and landed in their midst. The light slithered off the instrument, off his glistening face.
A new element of mockery infected the never ending melody, a syncopation that staggered the song and made it all the more bitter and-all the more sweet at the same time.
The jerking stiff-jointed puppets circled him, shuffling and bobbing along the floorboards. Fingers splayed, heads rocking from side to side, they jigged and twisted until all of them broke their rigid form as Nicki's melody melted into harrowing sadness, the dance becoming immediately liquid and heartbroken and slow.
It was as if one mind controlled them, as if they danced to Nicki's thoughts as well as his music, and he began to dance with them as he played, the beat coming faster, as he became the country fiddler at the Lenten bonfire, and they leapt in pairs like country lovers, the skirts of the women flaring, the men bowing their legs as they lifted the women, all creating postures of tenderest love.
Frozen, I stared at the image: the preternatural dancers, the monster violinist, limbs moving with inhuman slowness, tantalizing grace. The music was like a fire consuming us all.
Now it screamed of pain, of horror, of the pure rebellion of the soul against all things. And they again carried it into the visual, faces twisted in torment, like the mask of tragedy graven on the arch above them, and I knew that if I didn't turn my back on this I would cry.
I didn't want to hear any more or see any more. Nicki was swinging to and fro as if the violin were a beast he could no longer control. And he was stabbing at the strings with short rough strokes of the bow.
The dancers passed in front of him, in back of him, embraced him, and caught him suddenly as he threw up his hands, the violin held high over his head.
A loud piercing laughter erupted from him. His chest shivered with it, his arms and legs quaking with it. And then he lowered his head and he fixed his eyes on me. And at the top of his voice he screamed:
"I GIVE YOU THE THEATER OF THE VAMPIRES! THE THEATER OF THE VAMPIRES! THE GREATEST SPECTACLE OF THE BOULEVARD!"
Astonished, the others stared at him. But again, all of one mind, they "clapped" their hands and roared. They leapt into the air, giving out shrieks of joy. They threw their arms about his neck and kissed him. And dancing around him in a circle, they turned him with th
eir arms. The laughter rose, bubbling out of all of them, as he brought them close in his arms and answered their kisses, and with their long pink tongues they licked the blood sweat off his face.
"The Theater of the Vampires!" They broke from him and bawled it to the nonexistent audience, to the world. They bowed to the footlights, and frolicking and screaming they leapt up to the rafters and then let themselves drop down with a stoma of reverberation of the boards.
The last shimmer of the music was gone, replaced by this cacophony of shrieking and stomping and laughter, like the clang of bells.
I do not remember turning my back on them. I don't remember walking up the steps to the stage and going past them. But I must have.
Because I was suddenly sitting on the low narrow table of my little dressing room, my back against the corner, my knee crooked, my head against the cold glass of the mirror, and Gabrielle was there.
I was breathing hoarsely and the sound of it bothered me. I saw things-the wig I'd worn on the stage, the pasteboard shield-and these evoked thundering emotions. But I was suffocating. I could not think.
Then Nicki appeared in the door, and he moved Gabrielle to the side with a strength that astonished her and astonished me, and he pointed his finger at me:
"Well, don't you like it, my lord patron?" he asked, advancing, his words flowing in an unbroken stream so that they sounded like one great word. "Don't you admire its splendor, its perfection? Won't you endow the Theater of the Vampires with the coin of the realm which you possess in such great abundance?- How was it now, `the new evil, the canker in the heart of the rose, death in the very midst of things' . . ."
From a mute he had passed into mania, and even when he broke off talking, the low senseless frenzied sounds still issued from his lips like water from a spring. His face was drawn and hard and glistening with the blood droplets clinging to it, and staining the white linen at his neck.
And behind him there came an almost innocent laughter from the others, except for Eleni, who watched over his shoulder, trying very hard to comprehend what was really happening between us.
He drew closer, half laughing, grinning, stabbing at my chest with his finger:
"Well, speak. Don't you see the splendid mockery, the genius?" He struck his own chest with his fist. "They'll come to our performances, fill our coffers with gold, and never guess what they harbor, what flourishes right in the comer of the Parisian eye. In the back alleys we feed on them and they clap for us before the lighted stage.. ."
Laughter from the boy behind him. The tink of a tambourine, the thin sound of the other woman singing. A long streak of the man's laughter-like a ribbon unfurling, charting his movement as he rushed around in a circle through the rattling scrims.
Nicki drew in so that the light behind him vanished. I couldn't see Eleni.
"Magnificent evil!" he said. He was full of menace and his white hands looked like the claws of a sea creature that could at any given moment move to tear me to bits. "To serve the god of the dark wood as he has not been served ever and here in the very center of civilization. And for this you saved the theater. Out off your gallant patronage this sublime offering is born."
"It is petty!" I said. "It is merely beautiful and clever and nothing more."
My voice had not been very loud but it brought him to silence, and it brought the others to silence. And the shock in me melted slowly into another emotion, no less painful, merely easier to contain.
Nothing but the sounds again from the boulevard. A glowering anger flowed out of him, his pupils dancing as he looked at me.
"You're a liar, a contemptible liar," he said.
"There is no splendor in it," I answered. "There is nothing sublime. Fooling helpless mortals, mocking them, and then going out from here at night to take life in the same old petty manner, one death after another in all its inevitable cruelty and shabbiness so that we can live. And man can kill another man! Play your violin forever. Dance as you wish. Give them their money's worth if it keeps you busy and eats up eternity! It's simply clever and beautiful. A grove in the Savage Garden. Nothing more."
"Vile liar!" he said between his teeth. "You are God's fool, that's what you are. You who possessed the dark secret that soared above everything, rendered everything meaningless, and what did you do with it, in those months when you ruled alone from Magnus's tower, but try to live like a good man! A good man!"
He was close enough to kiss me, the blood of his spittle hitting my face.
"Patron of the arts," he sneered. "Giver of gifts to your family, giver of gifts to us!" He stepped back, looking down on me contemptuously.
"Well, we will take the little theater that you painted in gold, and hung with velvet," he said, "and it will serve the forces of the devil more splendidly than he was ever served by the old coven." He turned and glanced at Eleni. He glanced back at the others. "We will make a mockery of all things sacred. We will lead them to ever greater vulgarity and profanity. We will astonish. We will beguile. But above all, we will thrive on their gold as well as their blood and in their midst we will grow strong."
"Yes," said the boy behind him. "We will become invincible." His face had a crazed look, the look of the zealot as he gazed at Nicolas. "We will have names and places in their very world."
"And power over them," said the other woman, "and a vantage point from which to study them and know them and perfect our methods of destroying them when we choose."
"I want the theater," Nicolas said to me. "I want it from you. The deed, the money to reopen it. My assistants here are ready to listen to me."
"You may have it, if you wish," I answered. "It is yours if it will take you and your malice and your fractured reason off my hands."
I got up off the dressing table and went towards him and I think that he meant to block my path, but something unaccountable happened. When I saw he wouldn't move, my anger rose up and out of me like an invisible fist. And I saw him moved backwards as if the fist had struck him. And he hit the wail with sudden force.
I could have been free of the place in an instant. I knew Gabrielle was only waiting to follow me. But I didn't leave. I stopped and looked back at him, and he was still against the wall as if he couldn't move. And he was watching me and the hatred was as pure, as undiluted by remembered love, as it had been all along.
But I wanted to understand, I wanted really to know what had happened. And I came towards him again in silence and this time it was I who was menacing, and my hands looked like claws and I could feel his fear. They were all, except for Eleni, full of fear.
I stopped when I was very close to him and he looked directly at me, and it was as if he knew exactly what I was asking him.
"All a misunderstanding, my love," he said. Acid on the tongue. The blood sweat had broken out again, and his eyes glistened as if they were wet. "It was to hurt others, don't you see, the violin playing, to anger them, to secure for me an island where they could not rule. They would watch my ruin, unable to do anything about it."
I didn't answer. I wanted him to go on.
"And when we decided to go to Paris, I thought we would starve in Paris, that we would go down and down and down. It was what I wanted, rather than what they wanted, that I, the favored son, should rise for them. I thought we would go down! We were supposed to go down."
"Oh, Nicki..." I whispered.
"But you didn't go down, Lestat," he said, his eyebrows rising. "The hunger, the cold-none of it stopped you. You were a triumph!" The rage thickened his voice again. "You didn't drink yourself to death in the gutter. You turned everything upside down! And for every aspect of our proposed damnation you found exuberance, and there was no end to your enthusiasm and the passion coming out of you-and the light, always the light. And in exact proportion to the light coming out of you, there was the darkness in me! Every exuberance piercing me and creating its exact proportion of darkness and despair! And then, the magic, when you got the magic, irony of ironies, you protected me from i
t! And what did you do with it but use your Satanic powers to simulate the actions of a good man!"
I turned around. I saw them scattered in the shadows, and farthest away, the figure of Gabrielle. I saw the light on her hand as she raised it, beckoning for me to come away.
Nicki reached up and touched my shoulders. I could feel the hatred coming through his touch. Loathsome to be touched in hate.
"Like a mindless beam of sunlight you routed the bats of the old coven!" he whispered. "And for what purpose? What does it mean, the murdering monster who is filled with light!"
I turned and smacked him and sent him hurtling into the dressing room, his right hand smashing the mirror, his head cracking against the far wall.
For one moment he lay like something broken against the mass of old clothing, and then his eyes gathered their determination again, and his face softened into a slow smile. He righted himself and slowly, as an indignant mortal might, he smoothed his coat and his rumpled hair.
Anne Rice - Vampire Chronicles 2 - The Vampire Lestat (1985) Page 31
