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let my voice grow louder and louder until suddenly people were rising
and screaming before me, but louder still I sang it until it obliterated
every other noise and in the intolerable roar I saw them all, hundreds
of them, overturning the benches as they stood up, their hands
clamped to the sides of their heads. Their mouths were grimaces,
toneless screams. Pandemonium. Shrieks, curses, all stumbling and
struggling towards the doors. Curtains were pulled from their
fastenings. Men dropped down from the gallery to rush for the street.
I stopped the horrid song. I stood watching them in a ringing silence,
the weak, sweating bodies straining clumsily in every direction. The
wind gusted from the open doorways, and I felt a strange coldness over
all my limbs and it seemed my eyes were made of glass. Without
looking, I picked up the sword and put it on again, and hooked my
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finger into the velvet collar of my crumpled and dusty roquelaure. All
these gestures seemed as grotesque as everything else I had done, and it
seemed of no import that Nicolas was trying to get loose from two of
the actors who held him in fear of his life as he shouted my name. But
something out of the chaos caught my attention. It did seem to
matter-to be terribly, terribly important, in fact that there was a figure
standing above in one of the open boxes who did not struggle to
escape or even move. I turned slowly and looked up at him, daring
him, it seemed, to remain there. An old man he was, and his dull gray
eyes were boring into me with stubborn outrage, and as I glared at
him, I heard myself let out a loud open-mouthed roar. Out of my soul
it seemed to come, this sound. It grew louder and louder until those
few left below cowered again with their ears stopped, and even Nicolas,
rushing forward, buckled beneath the sound of it, both hands clasped
to his head. And yet the man stood there in the loge glowering,
indignant and old, and stubborn, with furrowed brows under his gray
wig. I stepped back and leapt across the empty house, landing in the
box directly before him, and his jaw fell in spite of himself and his eyes
grew hideously wide. He seemed deformed with age, his shoulders
rounded, his hands gnarled, but the spirit in his eyes was beyond
vanity and beyond compromise. His mouth hardened and his chin
jutted. And from under his frock coat he pulled his pistol and he
aimed it at me with both hands.
" Lestat! " Nicki shouted. But the shot exploded and the ball hit me
with full force. I didn't move. I stood as steady as the old man had
stood before, and the pain rolled through me and stopped, leaving in
its wake a terrible pulling in all my veins. The blood poured out. It
flowed as I have never seen blood flow. It drenched my shirt and I
could feel it spilling down my back. But the pulling grew stronger and
stronger, and a warm tingling sensation had commenced to spread
across the surface of my back and chest. The man stared,
dumbfounded. The pistol dropped out of his hand. His head went
back, eyes blind, and his body crumpled as if the air had been let out of
it, and he lay on the floor. Nicki had raced up the stairs and was now
rushing into the box. A low hysterical murmuring was issuing from
him. He thought he was witnessing my death. And I stood still
hearkening to my body in that terrible solitude that had been mine
since Magnus made me the vampire. And I knew the wounds were no
longer there. The blood was drying on the silk vest, drying on the back
of my torn coat. My body throbbed where the bullet had passed
through me and my veins were alive with the same pulling, but the
injury was no more. And Nicolas, coming to his senses as he looked at
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me, realized I was unharmed, though his reason told him it couldn't be
true. I pushed past him and made for the stairs. He flung himself
against me and I threw him off. I couldn't stand the sight of him, the
smell of him.
"Get away from me! " I said. But he came back again and he locked
his arm around my neck. His face was bloated and there was an awful
sound coming out of him.
"Let go of me. Nicki! " I threatened him. If I shoved him off too
roughly, I'd tear his arms out of the sockets, break his back. Break his
back . . . He moaned, stuttered. And for one harrowing split second
the sounds he made were as terrible as the sound that had come from
my dying animal on the mountain, my horse, crushed like an insect
into the snow. I scarcely knew what I was doing when I pried loose his [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]