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been meant to walk. What were those others to me now-the thieves
and killers I'd cut down in the wilderness of Paris? This was what I
wanted. And the great awesome possibility of Nicki's death exploded
in my brain. The darkness against my closed eyelids had become
blood red. Nicki's mind emptying in that last moment, giving up its
complexity with its life. I couldn't move. I could feel the blood as if it
were passing into me and I let my lips rest against his neck. Every
particle in me said, "Take him, spirit him out of this place and away
from it and feed on him and feed on him... until... " Until what! Until
he's dead! I broke loose and pushed him away. The crowd around us
roared and rattled. Renaud was shouting at the acrobats, who stood
staring at these proceedings. The audience outside demanded the
intermezzo entertainment with a steady rhythmic clap. The orchestra
was fiddling away at the lively ditty that would accompany the
acrobats. Bones and flesh poked and pushed at me. A shambles it had
become, rank with the smell of those ready for the slaughter. I felt the
all too human rise of nausea. Nicki seemed to have lost his
equilibrium, and when our eyes met, I felt the accusations emanating
from him. I felt the misery and, worse, the near despair. I pushed past
all of them, past the acrobats with the jingling bells, and I don't know
why I went forward to the wings instead of out the side door. I wanted
to see the stage. I wanted to see the audience. I wanted to penetrate
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deeper into something for which I had no name or word. But I was
mad in these moments. To say I wanted or I thought makes no sense
at all. My chest was heaving and the thirst was like a cat clawing to get
out. And as I leaned against the wooden beam beside the curtain,
Nicki, hurt and misunderstanding everything, came to me again. I let
the thirst rage. I let it tear at my insides. I just clung to the rafter and I
saw in one great recollection all my victims, the scum of Paris, scraped
up from its gutters, and I knew the madness of the course I'd chosen,
and the lie of it, and what I really was. What a sublime idiocy that I
had dragged that paltry morality with me, striking down the damned
ones onlyseeking to be saved in spite of it all? What had I thought I
was, a righteous partner to the judges and executioners of Paris who
strike down the poor for crimes that the rich commit every day?
Strong wine I'd had, in chipped and broken vessels, and now the priest
was standing before me at the foot of the altar with the golden chalice
in his hands, and the wine inside it was the Blood of the Lamb. Nicki
was talking rapidly:
"Lestat, what is it? Tell me! " as if the others couldn't hear us.
"Where have you been? What's happened to you? Lestat! "
"Get on that stage! " Renaud thundered at the gaping acrobats. They
trotted past us into the smoky blaze of the footlamps and went into a
chain of somersaults. The orchestra made its instruments into
twittering birds. A flash of red, harlequin sleeves, bells jangling, taunts
from the unruly crowd, "Show us something, really show us
something! " Luchina kissed me and I stared at her white throat, her
milky hands. I could see the veins in Jeannette's face and the soft
cushion of her lower lip coming ever closer. The champagne, splashed
into dozens of little glasses, was being drunk. Some speech was issuing
forth from Renaud about our "partnership " and how tonight's little
farce was but the beginning and we would soon be the grandest theater
on the boulevards. I saw myself decked out for the part of Lelio, and
heard the ditty I had sung to Flaminia on bended knee. Before me,
little mortals flip-flopped heavily and the audience was howling as the
leader of the acrobats made some vulgar movement with his hind end.
Before I even meant to do it, I had gone out on the stage. I was
standing in the very center, feeling the heat of the footlights, the smoke
stinging my eyes. I stared at the crowded gallery, the screened boxes,
the rows and rows of spectators to the back wall. And I heard myself
snarl a command for the acrobat to get away. It seemed the laughter
was deafening, and the taunts and shouts that greeted me were spasms
and eruptions, and quite plainly behind every face in the house was a
grinning skull. I was humming the little ditty I'd sung as Lelio, no
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more than a fragment of the part, but the one I'd carried in the streets
afterwards with me, "lovely, lovely, Flaminia, " and on and on, the
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