Free Violin by Anne Rice Page B

and fell and no one stopped him. No one would.
    Like a shock it came to me! I was home and safe and the rain surrounded this long octagonal room like a veil, but I wasn’t alone:
    I have you, now.
    I whispered aloud to him, though of course he wasn’t in the room.
    I could have sworn that far away and near at hand, he laughed. He let me hear it. The music didn’t laugh. The music was bound to follow its hoarse, perfectly pitched, driving course as if to drive a band of meadow dancers weary mad. But he laughed.
    I began to fall into sleep, not the deep black beginning-less sleep of hospital drugs, but true, deep, sweet sleep, and the music rose and tightened and then gave forth a monumental flood as if he had forgiven me.
    It seemed the rain and this music would kill me. I would die quiet without a protest. But I only dreamed, sliding down down into a full-blown illusion as if it had been waiting for me.

5
    I T WAS that sea again, that ocean clear and blue and frothing wild into the flopping prancing ghosts with every wave that hit the beach. It had the spell of the lucid dream. It said, Yes, you couldn’t be dreaming, you are not, you’re here! That’s what the lucid dream always says. You turn around and around it and you can’t wake up. It says, You cannot have imagined this.
    But we had to leave now from the soothing breeze off the sea. The window was closed. The time has come.
    I saw roses strewn across a gray carpet, roses with long stems and each tipped with a sealed vial of water to keep it fresh, roses with petals darkened and soft, and voices spoke in a foreign tongue, a tongue I ought to know but didn’t know, a language made up, it seemed, just for this dream. For surely I was dreaming. I had to be. But I was here, imprisoned in this, as if transported body and soul into it, and something in me sang, Don’t let it be a dream.
    “That’s right!” said the beautiful dark-skinned Mariana.She had short hair, and a white blouse that didn’t cover her shoulders, a swan’s neck, a purring voice.
    She opened the doors of a vast place. I could not believe my eyes. I could not believe that solid things could be as lovely as the sea and sky, and this—this was a temple of polychrome marble.
    It’s not a dream, I thought. You couldn’t dream this! You haven’t the visions in you to make such a dream. You’re here, Triana!
    Look at the walls inlaid with a creamy deep-veined Carrara marble, panels framed in gold and the skirting of darker brown stone, no less polished, no less variegated, no less wondrous. Look at the square pilasters with their golden scrolled capitals.
    And now as we come to the front of the building, this marble moves to green, in long bands along the floor, the floor itself an ever changing and intricate mosaic. Look. I see the ancient Greek key design. I see the patterns dear to Rome and Greece for which I don’t remember names, but I know them.
    And now, turning, we stood before a staircase such as I have never seen anywhere. It is not merely the scale and the loftiness, but again, the color: behold, O Lord, the radiance of the rose Carrara marble.
    But attend first these figures, these bronze faces standing at attention, bodies of deeply carefully carved wood, curving into lion’s legs and paws on their plinths of onyx.
    Who built this place? For what purpose?
    I’m caught suddenly by the glass doors opposite, there is so very much to see, I’m overcome, look, three great Classical Revival doors of beveled glass and semicircular fanlights, mullions black and spoked above, such portals for light, though the day or the night, whichever it is, is locked out beyond them.
    The stairs await. Mariana says, Come. Lucrece is so kind. The balustrade is green marble, green as jade, and streaked like the sea, with balusters of a lighter shade, and every wall paneled in rose or cream marble that is framed in gold.
    Look up to these smooth, rounded columns of pink marble, with their gilded