Anne Rice - Violin

I sat up in my own bed.

"How dare you!"

Chapter 6

I SAT up in the bed. He sat beside me, his legs so long that even on this high four-poster, he could sit in manly fashion, and he stared at me. The violin was wet. He was wet, his hair soaked.

"How dare you!" I said again. I reared back, bringing my knees up. I reached for the covers, but his weight held them.

"You come into my house, my room! You come into this room and tell me what I will and will not dream!"

He was too surprised to answer. His chest heaved. The water dripped from his hair. And the violin, for God's sake, had he no concern at all for the violin?

"Quiet!" he said.

"Quiet!" I spat at him. "I'll rouse the city! This is my bedroom! And who are you to tell me what to dream! You. . . what do you want?"

He was too astonished to find words. I could feel his groping, his consternation.

He turned his head to the side. I had a chance to look at him close, to see his gaunt cheeks and smooth skin, the huge knuckles of his hands and the delicate shaping of his long nose. He was by any standards-and even filthy and dripping wet-very handsome to look at. Twenty-five. That was the age I calculated, but no one could tell. A man of forty could look so young, if he took the right pills and ran the right miles and visited the right cosmetic surgeon.

He jerked his head round to glare at me!

"You think of trash like that as I sit here?" His voice was deep and strong, a young man's voice. If speaking voices have names, then he was a forceful tenor.

"Trash like what?" I said. I looked him up and down. He was a big man, thin or not. I didn't care.

"Get out of my house," I said. "Get out of my room and out of my house now, until such time as I invite you here as my guest! Go! It puts me in a perfect fury that you dare come in here without my bidding! Into my very room!"

There came a banging on the door. It was Althea's panic-stricken voice. "Miss Triana! I can't open the door! Miss Triana!"

He looked at the door beyond me and then back at me and shook his head and murmured something, and then ran his right hand back through his slimy hair. When he opened his eyes fully they were large, and his mouth, now that was the prettiest part, but none of these details cooled my anger.

"I can't open this door!" AIthea screamed.

I called out to her. It was all right. Leave it be. I needed some time alone. It was the musician friend. It was all right. She should go now. I heard her protests, and Lacomb's sage grumbles beneath them, but all of this on my insistence finally died away, and I was alone again.

The creaking boards had charted their retreat.

I turned to him. "So did you nail it shut?" I asked. I meant the door of course, which neither Lacomb nor Althea could force.

His face was still, and this stillness perhaps resembled whatever God and his mother might have wanted it to be: young; earnest; without vanity or slyness. His big dark eyes moved searchingly over me, as if he could discover in all the unimportant details of my appearance some crucial secret. He didn't brood. He seemed an honest, questing being.

"You aren't afraid of me," he whispered.

"Of course I'm not. why should I be?" But this was bravado. I did for one second feel fear; or no, it wasn't fear. It was this. The adrena line in my veins had slacked, and I felt an exultation!

I was looking at a ghost! A true ghost. I knew it. I knew it, and nothing would ever take the knowledge away. I knew it! In all my wanderings amongst the dead, I'd talked to memories and relics and fed their answers to them as if they were dolls I held propped in my hand.

But he was a ghost.

Then came a great coursing relief. "I always knew it," I said. I smiled. There was no defining this conviction. I meant only that I knew at last there was more to life, and something we couldn't chart, and couldn't dismiss, and the fantasy of the Big Bang and the Godless Universe were no more substantial now than tales of Resurrection from the Dead or Miracles.

I smiled. "You thought I would be afraid of you? Is that what you wanted? You come to me when my husband is dying upstairs and you play your violin to frighten me?

Are you the fool of all ghosts? How could such a thing frighten me? why? You thrive off fear-"

I paused. It wasn't only the vulnerable sofrness of his face, the seductive quiver of his mouth; and the way his eyebrows met to frown but not to condemn or forbid; it was something else, something analytical and crucial that had occurred to me. This creature did thrive off something, and what was that something?

A rather fatal question, I realized. My heart lost a beat, which always frightens me.

I put my hand to my throat as if my heart were there, which it always seems to be, doing these dances in my throat rather than in my breast.

"I'll come into your room," he whispered, "when I wish." His voice gained strength, young and masculine and sure of itself. "There's no way you can stop me. You think because you spend every waking hour doing the Danse Macabre with all your murdered crew-yes, yes, I know how you think you murdered them all-your Mother, your Father, Lily, Karl, such stupid monstrous egotism, that you were the cause of all these spectacular deaths, and three of them so ghastly and untimely-you think because of that, you can command a ghost? A true ghost, a ghost such as I am?"

"Bring my Father and Mother to me," I said. "You're a ghost. Bring them over to me. Bring them back over the divide. Bring me my little Lily. Bring them in ghostly form if you are a ghost and such a ghost! Make them ghosts, give Karl back to me without pain, just for a moment, one single solitary sacred moment. Give me Lily to hold in my arms."

This wounded him. I was quietly amazed, but adamant.

"Sacred moment," he said bitterly.

He shook his head, and looked away from me as if disappointed ut mainly disrupted by the remark, but then again he seemed thoughtful and looked back. I found myself riveted by his hands, by the delicacy of his fingers and the hollow-cheeked yet flawless youth of his face.

"I can't give you that," he said thoughtfully, considerately. "You think God listens to me? You think my prayers count with saints and angels?"

"And you do pray, I'm to believe?" I asked. "what are you doing here! why are you here? why have you come! Never mind that you sit here, lazily and defiantly on the side of my bed. why are you here at all-within my sight, within my hearing?"

"Because I wanted to come!" he said crossly, looking for a second rather painfully young and defiant. "And I go where I would go and do what I would do, as perhaps you noticed. I walked your hospital corridor until a gaggle of mortal idiots made such a riot there was nothing to do but retreat and wait for you! I could have come into your room, into your bed."

"You want to be in my bed."

"I am!" he declared. He leaned forward on his right hand. "Oh, don't even consider it. I'm no incubus! You won't conceive a monster by me. I want something far more critical to your life than the play thing between your legs. I want you!"

I was speechless.

Furious, yes, still furious, but speechless.

He sat back and looked down before him. His knees looked quite comfortable on the side of the high bed. His feet actually touched the floor. Mine never have. I am a short woman.

He let his greasy black hair fall down around him, in streaks across his white face, and when he looked at me again, it was a quizzical look.

"I thought this would be much easier," he said.

"What's that?"

"To drive you mad," he said. He affected a cruel smile. It was unconvincing. "I thought you mad already. I thought it would be... a matter of days at most."

"Why the hell should you want to drive me mad?" I asked.