Violin by Anne Rice Page B

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!” Althea 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 adrenaline 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 softness of hisface, 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