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But as soon as I approached Nicki's house on the quai I saw that something was wrong. The windows were empty. All the drapery had been pulled down, and yet the place was full of light, as if candles were burning inside by the hundreds. Most strange. Roget couldn't have taken possession of the flat yet. Not enough time had passed to assume that Nicki had met with foul play.
Quickly, I went up over the roof and down the wall to the courtyard window, and saw that the drapery had been stripped away there too.
And candles were burning in all the candelabra and in the wall sconces. And some were even stuck in their own wax on the pianoforte and the desk. The room was in total disarray.
Every book had been pulled off the shelf. And some of the books were in fragments, pages broken out. Even the music had been emptied sheet by sheet onto the carpet, and all the pictures were lying about on the tables with other small possessions -- coins, money, keys.
Perhaps the demons had wrecked the place when they took Nicki. But who had lighted all these candles? It didn't make sense.
I listened. No one in the flat. Or so it seemed. But then I heard not thoughts, but tiny sounds. I narrowed my eyes for a moment, just concentrating, and it came to me that I was hearing pages turn, and then something being dropped. More pages turning, stiff, old parchment pages. Then again the book dropped.
I raised the window as quietly as I could. The little sounds continued, but no scent of human, no pulse of thought.
Yet there was a smell here. Something stronger than the stale tobacco and the candle wax. The smell the vampires carried with them from the cemetery soil.
More candles in the hallway. Candles in the bedroom and the same disarray, books open as they lay in careless piles, the bedclothes snarled, the pictures in a heap. Cabinets emptied, drawers pulled out.
And no violin anywhere, I managed to note that.
And those little sounds coming from another room, pages being turned very fast.
Whoever he was -- and of course I knew who he had to be -- he did not give a damn that I was there! He had not even stopped to take a breath.
I went farther down the hall and stood in the door of the library and found myself staring right at him as he continued with his task.
It was Armand, of course. Yet I was hardly prepared for the sight he presented here.
Candle wax dripped down the marble bust of Caesar, flowed over the brightly painted countries of the world globe. And the books, they lay in mountains on the carpet, save for those of the very last shelf in the corner when he stood, in his old rags still, hair full of dust, ignoring me as he ran his hand over page after page, his eyes intent on the words before him, his lips half open, his expression like that of an insect in its concentration as it chews through a leaf.
Perfectly horrible he looked, actually. He was sucking everything out of the books!
Finally he let this one drop and took down another, and opened it and started devouring it in the same manner, fingers moving down the sentences with preternatural speed.
And I realized that he had been examining everything in the flat in this fashion, even the bed sheets and curtains, the pictures that had been taken off their hooks, the contents of cupboards and drawers. But from the books he was taking concentrated knowledge. Everything from Caesar's Gallic Wars to modern English novels lay on the floor.
But his manner wasn't the entire horror. It was the havoc he was leaving behind him, the utter disregard of everything he used.
And his utter disregard of me.
He finished his last book, or broke off from it, and went to the old newspapers stacked on a lower shelf.
I found myself backing out of the room and away from him, staring numbly at his small dirty figure. His auburn hair shimmered despite the dirt in it; his eyes burned like two lights.
Grotesque he seemed, among all the candles and the swimming colors of the flat, this filthy waif of the netherworld, and yet his beauty held sway. He hadn't needed the shadows of Notre Dame or the torchlight of the crypt to flatter him. And there was a fierceness in him in this bright light that I hadn't seen before.
I felt an overwhelming confusion. He was both dangerous and compelling. I could have looked on him forever, but an overpowering instinct said: Get away. Leave the place to him if he wants it. What does it matter now?
The violin. I tried desperately to think about the violin. To stop watching the movement of his hands over the words in front of him, the relentless focus of his ey
es.
I turned my back on him and went into the parlor. My hands were trembling. I could hardly endure knowing he was there. I searched everywhere and didn't find the damned violin. What could Nicki have done with it? I couldn't think.
Pages turning, paper crinkling. Soft sound of the newspaper dropping to the floor.
Go back to the tower at once.
I went to pass the library quickly, when without warning his soundless voice shot out and stopped me. It was like a hand touching my throat. I turned and saw him staring at me.
