UT in the month of October when Paris was already freezing, I commenced to see, quite regularly, a strange face in the audience that invariably distracted me. Sometimes it almost made me forget what I was doing, this face. And then it would be gone as if I’d imagined it. I must have seen it off and on for a fortnight before I finally mentioned it to Nicki.
I felt foolish and found it hard to put into words:
“There is someone out there watching me,” I said.
“Everyone’s watching you,” Nicki said. “That’s what you want.”
He was feeling a little sad that evening, and his answer was slightly sharp.
Earlier when he was making the fire, he had said he would never amount to much with the violin. In spite of his ear and his skill, there was too much he didn’t know. And I would be a great actor, he was sure. I had said this was nonsense, but it was a shadow falling over my soul. I remembered my mother telling me that it was too late for him.
He wasn’t envious, he said. He was just unhappy a little, that’s all.
I decided to drop the matter of the mysterious face. I tried to think of some way to encourage him. I reminded him that his playing produced profound emotions in people, that even the actors backstage stopped to listen when he played. He had an undeniable talent.
“But I want to be a great violinist,” he said. “And I’m afraid it will never be. As long as we were at home, I could pretend that it was going to be.”
“You can’t give up on it!” I said.
“Lestat, let me be frank with you,” he said. “Things are easy for you. What you set your sights on you get for yourself. I know what you’re thinking, about all the years you were miserable at home. But even then, what you really set your mind to, you accomplished. And we left for Paris the very day that you decided to do it.”
“You don’t regret coming to Paris, do you?” I asked.
“Of course not. I simply mean that you think things are possible which aren’t possible! At least not for the rest of us. Like killing the wolves …”
A coldness passed over me when he said this. And for some reason I thought of that mysterious face again in the audience, the one watching. Something to do with the wolves. Something to do with the sentiments Nicki was expressing. Didn’t make sense. I tried to shrug it off.
“If you’d set out to play the violin, you’d probably be playing for the Court by now,” he said.
“Nicki, this kind of talk is poison,” I said under my breath. “You can’t do anything but try to get what you want. You knew the odds were against you when you started. There isn’t anything else … except …”
“I know.” He smiled. “Except the meaninglessness. Death.”
“Yes,” I said. “All you can do is make your life have meaning, make it good—”
“Oh, not goodness again,” he said. “You and your malady of mortality, and your malady of goodness.” He had been looking at the fire and he turned to me with a deliberately scornful expression. “We’re a pack of actors and entertainers who can’t even be buried in consecrated ground. We’re outcasts.”
“God, if you could only believe in it,” I said, “that we do good when we make others forget their sorrow, make them forget for a little while that …”
“What? That they are going to die?” He smiled in a particularly vicious way. “Lestat, I thought all this would change with you when you got to Paris.”
“That was foolish of you, Nick,” I answered. He was making me angry now. “I do good in the boulevard du Temple. I feel it—”
I stopped because I saw the mysterious face again and a dark feeling had passed over me, something of foreboding. Yet even that startling face was usually smiling, that was the odd thing. Yes, smiling … enjoying …
“Lestat, I love you,” Nicki said gravely. “I love you as I have loved few people in my life, but in a real way you’re a fool with all your ideas about goodness.”
I laughed.
“Nicolas,” I said, “I can live without God. I can even come to live with the idea there is no life after. But I do not think I could go on if I did not believe in the possibility of goodness. Instead of mocking me for once, why don’t you tell me what you believe?”
“As I see it,” he said, “there’s weakness and there’s strength. And there is good art and bad art. And that is what I believe in. At the moment we are engaged in making what is rather bad art and it has nothing to do with goodness!”
“Our conversation” could have turned into a full-scale fight here if I had said all that was on my mind about bourgeois pomposity. For I fully believed that our work at Renaud’s was in many ways finer than what I saw at the grand theaters. Only the framework was less impressive. Why couldn’t a bourgeois gentleman forget about the frame? How could he be made to look at something other than the surface?
I took a deep breath.
“If goodness does exist,” he said, “then I’m the opposite of it. I’m evil and I revel in it. I thumb my nose at goodness. And if you must know, I don’t play the violin for the idiots who come to Renaud’s to make them happy. I play it for me, for Nicolas.”
I didn’t want to hear any more. It was time to go to bed. But I was bruised by this little talk and he knew it, and as I started to pull off my boots, he got up from the chair and came and sat next to me.
“I’m sorry,” he said in the most broken voice. It was so changed from the posture of a minute ago that I looked up at him, and he was so young and so miserable that I couldn’t help putting my arm around him and telling him that he must not worry about it anymore.
“You have a radiance in you, Lestat,” he said. “And it draws everyone to you. It’s there even when you’re angry, or discouraged—”
“Poetry,” I said. “We’re both tired.”
“No, it’s true,” he said. “You have a light in you that’s almost blinding. But in me there’s only darkness. Sometimes I think it’s like the darkness that infected you that night in the inn when you began to cry and to tremble. You were so helpless, so unprepared for it. I try to keep that darkness from you because I need your light. I need it desperately, but you don’t need the darkness.”
“You’re the mad one,” I said. “If you could see yourself, hear your own voice, your music—which of course you play for yourself—you wouldn’t see darkness, Nicki. You’d see an illumination that is all your own. Somber, yes, but light and beauty come together in you in a thousand different patterns.”
THE next night the performance went especially well. The audience was a lively one, inspiring all of us to extra tricks. I did some new dance steps that for some reason never proved interesting in private rehearsal but worked miraculously on the stage. And Nicki was extraordinary with the violin, playing one of his own compositions.
But towards the end of the evening I glimpsed the mysterious face again. It jarred me worse than it ever had, and I almost lost the rhythm of my song. In fact it seemed my head for a moment was swimming.
When Nicki and I were alone I had to talk about it, about the peculiar sensation that I had fallen asleep on the stage and had been dreaming.
We sat by the hearth together with our wine on the top of a little barrel, and in the firelight Nicki looked as weary and dejected as he had the night before.
I didn’t want to trouble him, but I couldn’t forget about the face.
“Well, what does he look like?” Nicolas asked. He was warming his hands. And over his shoulder, I saw through the window a city of snow-covered rooftops that made me feel more cold. I didn’t like this conversation.
“That’s the worst part of it,” I said. “All I see is a face. He must be wearing something black, a cloak and even a hood. But it looks like a mask to me, the face, very white and strangely clear. I mean the lines in his face are so deep they seemed to be etched with black greasepaint. I see it for a moment. It veritably glows. Then when I look again, there’s no one there. Yet this is an exaggeration. It’s more subtle than that, the way he looks and yet …”
The description seemed to disturb Nicki as much as it disturbed me. He didn’t say anything. But his face softened somewhat as if he were forgetting his sadness.
“Well, I don’t want to get your hopes up,” he said. He was very kind and sincere now. “But maybe it is a mask you’re seeing. And maybe it’s someone from the Comédie-Française come to see you perform.”
I shook my head. “I wish it was, but no one would wear a mask like that. And I’ll tell you something else, too.”
He waited, but I could see I was passing on to him some of my own apprehension. He reached over and took the wine bottle by the neck and poured a little in my glass.
“Whoever he is,” I said, “he knows about the wolves.”
“He what?”
“He knows about the wolves.” I was very unsure of myself. It was like recounting a dream I had all but forgotten. “He knows I killed the wolves back home. He knows the cloak I wear is lined with their fur.”
“What are you talking about? You mean you’ve spoken to him?”
“No, that’s just it,” I said. This was so confusing to me, so vague. I felt that swimming sensation again. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’ve never spoken to him, never been near him. But he knows.”
“Ah, Lestat,” he said. He sat back on the bench. He was smiling at me in the most endearing way. “Next you’ll be seeing ghosts. You have the strongest imagination of anyone I’ve ever known.”
“There are no ghosts,” I answered softly. I scowled at our little fire. I laid a few more lumps of coal on it.
All the humor went out of Nicolas.
“How in the hell could he know about the wolves? And how could you …”
“I told you already, I don’t know!” I said. I sat thinking and not saying anything, disgusted, maybe, at how ridiculous it all seemed.
And then as we remained silent together, and the fire was the only sound or movement in the room, the name Wolfkiller came to me very distinctly as if someone had spoken it.
But nobody had.
I looked at Nicki, painfully aware that his lips had never moved, and I think all the blood drained from my face. I felt not the dread of death as I had on so many other nights, but an emotion that was really alien to me: fear.
I was still sitting there, too unsure of myself to say anything, when Nicolas kissed me.
“Let’s go to bed,” he said softly.