The Maestro's Butterfly (19 page)

“Yes,” Miranda said.

“Put them on and find your shoes. We’re going home.”

She nodded. Katie watched, wide-eyed from the bed. “Can she come?” Miranda asked. “He’s going to punish her for letting me call out.”

Claudio shook his head. “My brother must discipline his feeder in his way. I am not in the habit of stealing food from him.” He turned and looked at Jack, who took down the kerchief, glared at him and moved away.

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That night, Seth snored softly in the extra bed in their hotel room, while Claudio took Miranda gently, alternately whispering to her in French and scolding her for running away. “You will be punished for this,” he said. “Know that.” The warning caused her lips to slacken. She swallowed and nodded her understanding. She wasn’t going anywhere. Sometime after the big performance, she would settle things with her landlord and move what she could of her possessions to Claudio’s estate. Then she would let her friends and family know she had moved in with her mysterious French music teacher. They wouldn’t need to know much more than that.

She slept nude in his arms and felt content.

They left their hotel room at noon the next day and were back home at two in the morning. Again, it was time to sleep. Then they had to work nonstop to get ready for the big performance. Claudio told Miranda she would play a very special part onstage, but didn’t say what it was to be.

On opening night, she watched, enthralled, from the wings as Claudio became a black-light being. Surrounded by nothing, he created for the audience substance from shadows, cooed to them like a lover, hypnotic and serpentine.

This was no ordinary performance.

Of course, at first there were the regular numbers, and the quartet. Claudio had found an unsuspecting replacement for Adam at the last moment. All came out in black to play selections from Vivaldi against a blue screen. Then it became a deep sunset orange and
le Maestro
flipped up his tails to seat himself at the Steinway grand at the far end of the stage for “Für Elise” and an urgent rendition of Chopin’s nocturne, No.20

in C sharp minor. There was movement in the dark places behind him, then shadows became dancers, and dancers became wraiths. Claudio paid them no mind, but only teased the keys, trickling notes over the audience. Clapping broke out in the middle of 142

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the number, then cut itself short. When Claudio had finished, the audience sat stunned before creating a thunder with applause. Then, darkness. A stray cough, a rustling program.

Le Maestro
returned in a sparkling silver tuxedo, top hat, mask and white gloves. His lips seemed a red wound against thick, white paint. He was the phantasmagoric master of their dreams. He sauntered to the edge of the stage and peeled the gloves from his hands. He began to speak. His thick, French consonants poured over them and glued them in their places like the swampy paste of nightmares.

“Look at the person next to you, perhaps the person with whom you came. You can’t see them so well in the dark. But can you really see them better in the light? Have you ever truly seen them? Do you know what they are thinking this very moment? Your wives and girlfriends are perhaps thinking they would like to visit me backstage, yes?”

He made an expression as though surprised he’d said such a thing, and strode to one end of the stage, followed by hesitant laughter from the audience. “Just as Zeus in Greek tradition appeared to his chosen ones as beautiful creatures, we each come in our own guise, wearing a mask. It is a rare occasion that the costume comes off, and in those times, secrets are shared with the eyes. And what we see there if we look too long, can drive us mad.

“And so, ladies and gentlemen, tonight I give you something that feels good.

Tonight, I give you illusion.” He produced a rose from his sleeve, and tossed it onto the lap of a woman in the front. She smiled, startled. He winked through the light. Behind him, a monsoon of rose petals littered the stage.

Another splash of light, and a table appeared. With it, his violin, tipped up on a glass incline. He took hold of it and made it scream and moan. Somewhere offstage, a calliope tossed notes end over end. He pierced them with a strained Gypsy melody, and strung them together, bursting each in its turn.

For another number the new violinist, a rosy-cheeked young man, challenged him to a duel—two stinging scorpions, melody and undertone, violin and violin, locked 142

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in mortal embrace. Pretending to be spent, the young man went to his knees, and Claudio sauntered back to the audience, with a wide, blood-red grin. “The fight to the death. Perhaps his wife is in love with me, no?”

There were nervous titters, chuckles. Even a gasp or two, as Claudio returned to the violinist and looked down at him with the utmost tenderness, holding violin and bow in one hand and using the other to caress the boy’s cheek. From her place among the heavy curtains, Miranda saw him look up at Claudio with a startled expression.

“Or some other reason,” Claudio continued, with an over-the-shoulder glance at the audience. “Perhaps our tribes are at war. I am nothing to him but a pale reflection of his own fears. If he silences me, what then?”

Claudio snaked his fingers into the boy’s golden hair and pulled back his head.

Miranda could see the boy swallow. His expression had become one of alarm.

“I suppose we’ll never know,” Claudio said. “I am, perhaps, the embodiment of his nature. His desires. The undefeatable enemy to which every man surrenders.”

Miranda suddenly wanted to see Claudio force the boy to suck his cock, or maybe bend over a table and accept the vampire in his ass. She didn’t normally fantasize about the man she loved taking someone else, but Claudio did tend to make one sexualize everything.

Loved.
Yes, she supposed her feelings were going in that direction.

“Perhaps I am death itself. Perhaps life. Or perhaps sex, no? His darkest fears?

His deepest desires? You decide.” He let the boy go and caressed his cheek with the backs of his fingers, then made as if to leave the stage, before turning back to the audience.

“For tonight, I will be in your dreams.”

Backstage, he steered Miranda away from the curtain and brushed his lips against hers. “This evening will be very interesting for you,” he whispered, then left her to pull aside Seth. “Prepare the altar,” she heard him say. She would have thought nothing of the order had Seth’s eyes not locked into hers at that moment.

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Claudio left for his dressing room, and Seth walked over to Miranda. “Come on,” he said. “You’re tonight’s special treat.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, alarm rising along her spine. “On the altar?”

“Don’t worry. You’ll like it.”

The “altar” was actually a large wooden box with the top painted gray and affixed with chains. Styrofoam had been glued around the sides to make it look like a large slab of rock. Seth gave her a revealing garment to change into.

The garment resembled a bikini with long, scarlet tatters attached to it. Atop the red were bits of smooth, white material.
Virginal,
Miranda thought as she determined how to get into it. “Um, I’ll just go and—”

“No,” Seth said. “You don’t have time. Change right here.” They were backstage among the wires.

“But—”

“Do it,” he said sharply.

It made tears sting her eyes, but brought her attention to the task. When she had pulled the top over her head and pulled up the bottoms, Seth made her turn around so that he could arrange the pieces. When it was done, he leaned down to sniff her. “I’ll bet you’re good food now,” he said, with a wink. He cupped his hand around her waist and slid it down to her hip, and then her thigh. She took in a breath and shivered.

“We’d better get you on this altar,” he said.

“What’s going to happen?” she asked.

“You’ll see.” He picked her up in his arms and lay her on top of it, then secured her wrists and ankles in the leather cuffs attached to the chains. She couldn’t see very well in the dim light. She shivered.

After that, Seth draped a thin, black sheet over her. “Seth?” she asked, her heart pounding.

“Shhh,” he said. “It’s okay.” He touched her cheek with his fingertips. Then he tickled them down to her collarbone, then her breast, and her stomach, and finally 144

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between her legs. It made her catch her breath. He pressed her hard and made her walls tighten with the knowledge that she was helpless while Seth molested her in plain view of everyone. He lifted the sheet and pressed against the layers of gauze between her legs. His fingers slipped beneath the garment and found her opening. She was growing moist.

He leaned over her and spoke to her through the sheet. “If you weren’t needed onstage in ten minutes, I’d fuck you right here on this thing.” He slipped a couple fingers inside of her. She raised her hips. “Nope,” he said, and withdrew his hand, smoothing out the sheet. “Claudio has plans for you tonight.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, breathless.

“Shh,” Seth said. “You’re on.”

With that, he rolled her somewhere—onto the stage, she assumed. And there, in the dark, she waited.

She didn’t know how many minutes ticked by before the telltale sounds of the end of intermission began. There were more footsteps in the audience, more rustling programs, more voices. Finally, light shone through the sheet that lay on top of her, and she heard footsteps. She recognized them as Claudio’s.

He addressed the audience.

“We wear many masks,” he purred to them. “But perhaps none so interesting as those worn by the tortured, eh? And the one who tortures. The angry god. The cruel lover.”

Her heart, which had kept up a steady, alert thumping since Seth had fixed her to the makeshift altar stone, began to pound in earnest. She didn’t know what was going to happen to her—and in front of all those people.

“Welcome to my dungeon,” Claudio said.

The strained creaking of large devices being rolled onto the stage came to Miranda, filling her with visions of medieval torture devices. She began to breathe harder, and found that the air was not flowing quite as freely beneath the thin sheet as 146

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she would like. That filled her with an even greater panic. She tested the chains and found that she was firmly bound.

The fact that the prop was made to look like a stone altar hit home. She was the sacrifice. Was Claudio going to do something painful? Her hands clenched into fists and she discovered just how moist her palms were.

Miranda heard music, and chains elsewhere on stage rattling as though someone were fighting their bonds. Finally, she heard a woman’s scream, and gasps from the audience. She felt faint. It was as though she had been waiting under that shroud for an eternity, and wondered if they had forgotten her.

Then, the altar began to move. She realized she was trembling. What was he going to do to her? A tear pricked her eye and made its way down her temple and into her hair. Ridiculously, she worried it may have caused her makeup to run.

Finally, Claudio tore away the shroud. Miranda, panicking, gasped and tried to get up. Claudio stepped back, pretending surprise, then smiled and took his violin from Seth, who was dressed in severe Victorian black, with stage makeup, as was Claudio. While he played, Seth came to stand next to the altar. He smiled down at her lasciviously, and began to pluck away the pieces of virgin-white fabric, tossing them this way and that over the stage floor.

As he worked, his fingers grazed her breasts, her stomach, her inner thigh. She closed her eyes and let the unexpressed emotions—the fear and the anticipation—move her body, arching and rising with the minor strands of Claudio’s playing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw girls chained to “stone walls” against the back of the stage, mimicking her movement as Claudio’s violin wove a wispy melody.

Then the music stopped. Seth moved away from her and took Claudio’s violin, then left the stage. Claudio approached her with a wolfish look in his eye. He looked her over hungrily and she realized she was barely covered. Seth had plucked all of the white from her costume and left her with nothing but a few red tatters. She was practically nude.

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The deep, throaty voice of a cello gave the scene a hint of danger. One by one, Claudio removed the scraps of red and made a show of tossing them aside. Miranda trembled. Soon, she was wearing nothing but the strings upon which the cloth were fixed. Seth returned, this time with a long, gleaming blade. Miranda’s blood seemed to reverse its course.

Claudio held the knife with one hand, blade up in a triumphant posture. Then, giving Miranda the most tender look imaginable, he brought the blade near her face.

“Be very still,” he whispered. “I am not going to hurt you.”

The very thought that being hurt by Claudio while being bound was a possibility gave her the beginnings of a dull ache between her legs. Realizing she had been wet for some time, she nodded almost imperceptibly. He nodded once, and lowered the blade dramatically to her cheek, caressing her with the sharp edge.

He moved the point along her jaw, sending shivers through her scalp and down her spine. She opened her lips as if for a kiss and closed her eyes, throwing her head back as Claudio brought the knife point to her chin and traced a line down her throat.

Miranda struggled to control her breathing and her urge to writhe beneath the blade as Claudio teased her breasts with the thin, cold metal. Without warning, he lifted what was left of her top and severed it in three places, then tossed it aside. Miranda gasped and opened her eyes. Murmurs rose from the audience. She was going to be completely nude on stage, in front of all these people. She wondered how many of them she knew—old college professors, neighbors, friends. She wanted to beg him to stop, but the feel of the blade tracing a line down her stomach took away her breath.

Chills spread over her body with the feel of the cold metal on her pubis. It veered to the crease at the top of her thigh. Then Claudio slipped the edge beneath the string and cut it, repeating the action on the other side and tossing the bottoms away. Miranda looked up at him, his face white and smooth with stage makeup, his lips red and shapely. When he parted them, the tips of his extended fangs showed. She swallowed.