Anne Rice - Violin

My sister Vera. Does my voice tremble? Look at her, how she mourns him.

Vera. And look into the coffin itself

Our vision took us close. I was flooded with the scent of flowers, deep intoxicating perfume of lilies, other blooms. Candle wax; it was the sweeping swooning scent of my little Prytania Street Chapel of childhood, that capsule of sanctity and safety in which we knelt with Mother at the ornate rail, the rich gladioli on the Altar far outshining our little bundles of lantana.

Sadness. Oh, heart, such sadness.

But I could think of nothing but this before me. I was with Stefan in this attempt, and petrified with fear. The hooded figure quietly climbed the first two steps of the dais. I couldn't bear the heat of my own heart. No memory of mine took first place over this hurt, this harm, this fear of what was to come, of cruelty and shattered dreams.

Look at my father. Look at the man who destroyed my hands.

The corpse looked cruel, but only in a faded dried-up insignificant way, his Slavic features more evident in death, angles hardened, cheeks deeply grooved, nose falsely narrowed by the undertaker perhaps, lips too reddened with cake rouge and turning down, without the breath of life to make them give the quarter smile he'd worn so easily before he was ever angered or brought to this.

Very painted, this face, and his body was excessively dressed with furs and jewels and colored braids and velvet, sumptuous in the Russian style where everything must sparkle to express value. His hands with all their rings lay like dough on his chest, holding a crucifix.

But there beside him lay nestled in the satin the violin, our violin, against which Vera's sleeping hand dangled.

"Stefan, no!" I said. "How can you get it?" I whispered in our vigilant darkness.

"She is touching it. Stefan."

Ah, you fear for my life as we watch this old tableau. And yet you won't give me my violin. Now watch me die for it.

I tried to turn away. He forced me to look. Rooted in the scene, we would be spared nothing. In our invisible form, I felt his heartbeat, I felt the tight wet tremble of his hand as he turned my head.

"Look," was all he could say to me. "Look at me, during the last few seconds of my life."

The hooded and cloaked figure mounted the last two steps of the dais. He stared down with glazed weary dark eyes at the dead Father. And then from beneath his cloak he reached with his thumbless bandage of a hand and scooped up the instrument and the bow, to his chest, quickly bracing it with the other maimed hand.

Vera woke.

"Stefan, no!" she whispered. Her eyes moved sharply, from left to right, a warning. She motioned desperately for him to leave.

He turned.

I saw the plot. His brothers came from the doors of other chambers. A man rushed to pull away the screaming Vera. She reached out for Stefan. She shrieked in panic.

"Murderer!" cried the man who fired the first bullet which struck not merely Stefan's chest but the violin. I heard the wood splinter.

Stefan was overcome with horror.

"No, you will not!" Stefan said. "No." Shot after shot struck him and the violin.

He bolted. He ran down the center of the room, as they pumped their bullets into him.

Bullets came now not only from the fancy dressed gentlemen but from guards, bullets shattering into him and into the violin.

Stefan's face was flushed. Nothing stopped the figure that we beheld. Nothing.

We saw his open mouth gasping for breath, his eyes narrowed, the cloak streaming out behind him as he ran down the staircase, the violin and bow safe in his arms, no blood, no blood, save that which oozed from his hands, and now look!

The hands.

The hands were unbound and whole and had no need of bandages. They had once again their long and perfect fingers. They clutched the violin tight.

Stefan bowed his head against the wind as he passed through the front door-I gasped. The doors were bolted and he had not even seen. The crack of guns, the screams, rose in a grating splash of dissonance and then faded behind him.

Down the dark street he sped, feet pounding the shiny uneven stones, only glancing down to see that he had the violin and bow safr in his hand, then giving the run all of his young strength until he had left the cobblestoned center of the town, running, running.

Lights were a blur in the dark. Was it fog that wreathed these lanterns? Houses rose up in unrelieved blackness.

Finally, he stopped, unable to go any further. He rested against a chipped and peeling plaster wall, the cloak fallen back to cushion his head, his eyes shut for a moment. The violin and bow were safe and unscathed in his pale fingers. He took deep breath after breath, and glanced frantically to see if anyone came to follow.

The night was without echoes. Figures moved in the dark but they were too dim to be seen, too far from the lights above occasional doorways. Did he notice the mist that curled along the ground? Was it common for winter in Vienna? Clumps of figures watched him. Were they to him only the tramps of the city night and nothing more?

Once again, he fled.

Only when he had crossed the broad bright Ringstrasse with its string of lights, and its utterly indifferent late-night crowds, and sought the open country, did he stop again and for the first time look down at his restored hands, his hands unbandaged and cured-and at the violin. He held it up by the light of the dim lamps of the city against the welkin to see that the violin was whole, unharmed, not so much as scratched. The long Strad. His. And the bow he had so loved.

He looked up, and back at the city he'd left. From the rise where he stood, the city gave its dim winter lights warmly to the lowering clouds. He was confused, elated, astonished.

We became material. The smells of the pine woods and the cold air, scented by distant chimney smoke, surrounded us.

We stood in the wood not far from him, but too far to ever comfort him, that Stefan of over a hundred years ago, standing there, his breath steaming in the cold, holding the instrument so carefully, his eyes peering towards this mystery he'd left behind.

Something was horribly wrong, and he knew it. Something was so monstrously wrong that he was caught in angst without end.

My spirit Stefan, my guide and companion, gave a soft moan though the distant figure did not. The distant figure held its vivid color, held its vibrant materiality, but it examined its clothes for wounds. It examined its head and hair. Intact, all. Here.

"He's a ghost, he's been since the first shot," I said, "and he didn't know it!" I sighed softly. I looked up to my Stefan and then at the far figure, who seemed the more innocent, the more helpless, the younger only by countenance and lack of poise. The specter beside me swallowed and his lips were wet.

"You died in that room," I said.

I felt such a piercing pain within me that I wanted only to love him, to know him completely with my soul and to embrace him. I turned and kissed his cheek. He bowed his head to receive more kisses, pushing his cold hard forehead against mine, and then he gestured to the distant newborn ghost yonder.

The distant newborn ghost examined his cured hands, his violin.

"Requiem aiternam dona eis Domine," said my companion, bitterly.

"The bullets shattered you and the violin," I said.

Frantically, the distant Stefan turned on his heels and began a trek through the trees. Again and again he glanced back.

"My God, he's dead but he doesn't know it."

My Stefan only smiled, his hand on my neck.

A journey without a map or destination.

We followed him on his crazed wanderings; this was the hideous fog of Hamlet's

"undiscover'd country."