The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [301]
And he came forward with the same dignity, and the smile was as ugly as any I had ever seen.
“I despise you,” he said. “But I am done with you. I have the power from you and I know how to use it, which you do not. I am in a realm at last where I choose to triumph! In darkness, we’re equal now. And you will give me the theater, that because you owe it to me, and you are a giver of things, aren’t you—a giver of gold coins to hungry children—and then I won’t ever look upon your light again.”
He stepped around me and stretched out his arms to the others:
“Come, my beauties, come, we have plays to write, business to attend to. You have things to learn from me. I know what mortals really are. We must get down to the serious invention of our dark and splendid art. We will make a coven to rival all covens. We will do what has never been done.”
The others looked at me, frightened, hesitant. And in this still and tense moment I heard myself take a deep breath. My vision broadened. I saw the wings around us again, the high rafters, the walls of scenery transecting the darkness, and beyond, the little blaze along the foot of the dusty stage. I saw the house veiled in shadow and knew in one limitless recollection all that had happened here. And I saw a nightmare hatch another nightmare, and I saw a story come to an end.
“The Theater of the Vampires,” I whispered. “We have worked the Dark Trick on this little place.” No one of the others dared to answer. Nicolas only smiled.
And as I turned to leave the theater I raised my hand in a gesture that urged them all towards him. I said my farewell.
• • •
WE WERE not far from the lights of the boulevard when I stopped in my tracks. Without words a thousand horrors came to me—that Armand would come to destroy him, that his newfound brothers and sisters would tire of his frenzy and desert him, that morning would find him stumbling through the streets unable to find a hiding place from the sun. I looked up at the sky. I couldn’t speak or breathe.
Gabrielle put her arms around me and I held her, burying my face in her hair. Like cool velvet was her skin, her face, her lips. And her love surrounded me with a monstrous purity that had nothing to do with human hearts and human flesh.
I lifted her off her feet embracing her. And in the dark, we were like lovers carved out of the same stone who had no memory of a separate life at all.
“He’s made his choice, my son,” she said. “What’s done is done, and you’re free of him now.”
“Mother, how can you say it?” I whispered. “He didn’t know. He doesn’t know still …”
“Let him go, Lestat,” she said. “They will care for him.”
“But now I have to find that devil, Armand, don’t I?” I said wearily. “I have to make him leave them alone.”
THE following evening when I came into Paris, I learned that Nicki had already been to Roget.
He had come an hour earlier pounding on the doors like a madman. And shouting from the shadows, he had demanded the deed to the theater, and money that he said I had promised to him. He had threatened Roget and his family. He had also told Roget to write to Renaud and his troupe in London and to tell them to come home, that they had a new theater awaiting them, and he expected them back at once. When Roget refused, he demanded the address of the players in London, and began to ransack Roget’s desk.
I went into a silent fury when I heard this. So he would make them all vampires, would he, this demon fledgling, this reckless and frenzied monster?
This would not come to pass.
I told Roget to send a courier to London, with word that Nicolas de Lenfent had lost his reason. The players must not come home.
And then I went to the boulevard du Temple and I found him at his rehearsals, excited and mad as he had been before. He wore his fancy clothes again and his old jewels from the time when he had been his father’s favorite son, but his tie was askew, his stockings crooked, and his hair was as wild and unkempt as the hair of a prisoner in the Bastille who hadn’t seen himself in a mirror