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 their 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