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 storm of reverberation on 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 long 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? Won’t you see your playhouse come to its final magnificent purpose? 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 corner 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 of 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. Any 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