The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [232]
He wore a jeweled ring I’d sent, and his brown hair was tied back with a black silk ribbon, and he sat brooding with his elbows on the table eating nothing from the expensive china plate before him.
Carefully I opened my eyes and looked at him again. All his natural gifts were there in a blaze of light: the delicate but strong limbs, large sober brown eyes, and his mouth that for all the irony and sarcasm that could come out of it was childlike and ready to be kissed.
There seemed in him a frailty I’d never perceived or understood. Yet he looked infinitely intelligent, my Nicki, full of tangled uncompromising thoughts, as he listened to Jeannette, who was talking rapidly.
“Lestat’s married,” she said as Luchina nodded, “the wife’s rich, and he can’t let her know he was a common actor, it’s simple enough.”
“I say we let him in peace,” Luchina said. “He saved the theater from closing, and he showers us with gifts …”
“I don’t believe it,” Nicolas said bitterly. “He wouldn’t be ashamed of us.” There was a suppressed rage in his voice, an ugly grief. “And why did he leave the way he did? I heard him calling me! The window was smashed to pieces! I tell you I was half awake, and I heard his voice …”
An uneasy silence fell among them. They didn’t believe his account of things, how I’d vanished from the garret, and telling it again would only isolate him and embitter him further. I could sense this from all their thoughts.
“You didn’t really know Lestat,” he said now, almost in a surly fashion, returning to the manageable conversation that other mortals would allow him. “Lestat would spit in the face of anyone who would be ashamed of us! He sends me money. What am I supposed to do with it? He plays games with us!”
No answer from the others, the solid, practical beings who would not speak against the mysterious benefactor. Things were going too well.
And in the lengthening silence, I felt the depth of Nicki’s anguish, I knew it as if I were peering into his skull. And I couldn’t bear it.
I couldn’t bear delving into his soul without his knowing it. Yet I couldn’t stop myself from sensing a vast secret terrain inside him, grimmer perhaps than I had ever dreamed, and his words came back to me that the darkness in him was like the darkness I’d seen at the inn, and that he tried to conceal it from me.
I could almost see it, this terrain. And in a real way it was beyond his mind, as if his mind were merely a portal to a chaos stretching out from the borders of all we know.
Too frightening that. I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to feel what he felt!
But what could I do for him? That was the important thing. What could I do to stop this torment once and for all?
Yet I wanted so to touch him—his hands, his arms, his face. I wanted to feel his flesh with these new immortal fingers. And I found myself whispering the word “Alive.” Yes, you are alive and that means you can die. And everything I see when I look at you is utterly insubstantial. It is a commingling of tiny movements and indefinable colors as if you haven’t a body at all, but are a collection of heat and light. You are light itself, and what am I now?
Eternal as I am, I curl like a cinder in that blaze.
But the atmosphere of the room had changed. Luchina and Jeannette were taking their leave with polite words. He was ignoring them. He had turned to the window, and he was rising as if he’d been called by a secret voice. The look on his face was indescribable.
He knew I was there!
Instantly, I shot up the slippery wall to the roof.
But I could still hear him below. I looked down and I saw his naked hands on the window ledge. And through the silence I heard his panic. He’d sensed that I was there! My presence, mind you, that is what he sensed, just as I sensed