The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas

Author:Suzy McKee Charnas
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Horror, General, Sci-Fi Short, Fiction
ISBN: 9780765320827
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2008-08-19T07:00:00+00:00

But what elation in that instant of savage release! Thinking of it now he felt his muscles tingle, and his breath came in a sharp hiss of pleasure.

* * *

Onstage, Scarpia lay dead. Tosca had stabbed him with a knife from his dinner table when he turned, safe-conduct in hand, to embrace her at last. To his lust-motif, inverted and muted to a sinister whisper in the strings and flutes, Tosca set a lighted candle down at each of his outflung hands. On a sudden loud chord she dropped a carved crucifix onto his breast, and then as the snare drum rattled ominously again she snatched up her cloak and gloves and ran for her life. The dead man was left alone on the stage for the last stealthy, menacing bars of Act Two.

The lights blinked out, applause crashed like surf. Two stagehands in black ran from the wings to stand in front of Scarpia—Marwitz, the baritone—while in his pale costume he rose and slipped down through the trapdoor.

Marwitz hurried away to find Rosemary Ridgeway, his young Tosca. His chest was full of the champagne feeling that meant success. He had been in this business for a long time, and he knew what “perfect”

meant: that somehow the inevitable errors had been knit into a progression of actions so rich and right that everything fused into a vivid, indivisible experience never to be forgotten—or duplicated. He hugged Rosemary hard outside the dressing rooms. “I knew, I knew,” he chortled into her disordered hair, “because I was so nervous. I could sing Scarpia in my sleep by now, so nervous is good—it means even after so many times something is still alive, waiting to create.”

“Were we as good as I thought we were?” she asked breathlessly.

He shook her by the shoulders. “We were terrible, terrible, what are you saying? Pray to stay so bad!”

With the jealous gods of theater thus propitiated, he made to embrace her again, but she stood back, looking into his face with sudden anxiety.

“Oh, Kurt, are you all right? You really fell tonight when I stabbed you—I felt the stage shake.”

“I am not so heavy,” Marwitz said with offended dignity. Then he grinned. “My foot slipped, yes, but don’t worry—you killed me very nicely, very well. They will award you two ears and a tail for it, wait and see.”

* * *

“I liked how the water pitcher was busted and she couldn’t wash the blood off her hands like she’s supposed to,” said a woman in gold lamé, “so she just wiped it off on Scarpia’s dinner napkin.”

Her friend frowned. “They should call it Scarpia , not Tosca . It’s not a love story, it’s a hate story about two strong people who wipe each other out—along with a couple of poor jerks who wander into the crossfire.”

A man in a raccoon coat shook his head vehemently. “You feel that way because this fellow played Scarpia too civilized, like an executive. He’s supposed to be just a jumped-up hoodlum.

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