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It was like my gestures under les Innocents when my captors had sent
me down in the dirt. 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,
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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 the doors like a madman. And
shouting from the shadows, he had demanded the deed to the theater,
and money that he said I 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
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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 in twenty years. Before
Eleni and the others I told him he would get nothing from me unless I
had the promise that no actor or actress of Paris would ever be slain or
seduced by the new coven, that Renaud and his troupe would never be
brought into the Theater of the Vampires now or in the years to come,
that Roget, who would hold the purse strings of the theater, must [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]