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Armand knelt on worn carpet, his toes brushing against the coffin behind him. Before him laid piles and piles of folded shirts. Nice shirts. And nice trousers and nice coats and nice waistcoats. Shoes were put out in a neat row and sheets of music were spread out across the wooden floor.
He tugged a garish yellow waistcoat into his lap and moved his fingers along the stitching. His eyes were soft and unblinking as a shadow roamed his mind.
In one sudden motion he stood up, shrugging the waistcoat on. He did the buttons, brushed his hands down the sides and experimentally put his hands in the pockets.
“Trop criard?”
Armand turned to face the half-drained couturier that he had kept there all week. The couturier, who had been a favourite of Lestat’s, was slumped over on a vanity; his spine pressed up against the mirror behind him with grime coating the underside of his neatly kept fingernails. The room smelt stale.
“Non?”
The couturier did not answer. A cigarette fell from his weak fingers to the floor. Armand took a few steps over, bent down and gently lifted the cigarette to the man’s lips, which remained still and unresponsive.
Armand lifted it to his own lips as he gazed, still crouched, into dull eyes.
He did not waste time in drawing a sharp fingernail across the man’s throat and he did not bother honouring the blood that spat and sputtered out.
Smoke flared from his nostrils as he stood and turned back to survey the room behind him. It was bare, sparing Lestat’s petit leftovers and the coffin they had once shared. The sky past the window was dark and sounds of theatre goers pierced the silence that Armand wished he could have had.
Blood trickled down his fingers and splattered onto the floorboards.
Lestat had left him with bad taste and nothing else.
Armand drew open the coffin lid where he then placed the piles of clothes, shoes, old plays, music and the bleeding couturier. He stripped himself of the awful waistcoat, added it to the pile and watched with amber eyes as flames engulfed it all.
It was a cool summers evening in which Armand had found himself face to face with Lestat’s lawyer. The sun had just slipped past the tops of the buildings and the man in front of him was decidedly human. With him he had the pitiful gifts that Lestat had bequeathed the theatre, including his eternal patronage for that of which he had abandoned.
The relationship had lasted for what felt like a week to Armand, which had been enough to leave him feeling stripped of himself.
Leant back against a pillar off-stage, Armand peered through a gap in the curtains. Through the corner of his eye he glanced out at the audience; eyes flickering between hideous outfits. They jeered at the villains on stage.
“I take it that Monsieur Lioncourt-”
“Nous a quittés and what of it, Estelle?”
“Nothing, maître.”
Armand tore his vision away from the crowd.
The black soles of his dress shoes pattered down the stairs backstage. Blue eyes struck him as he descended and he moved pass listlessly as Lestat’s portrait was put into place on the wall.
“Is it to your liking, maître?”
Armand received his coat from a chair. He did not need to look up to feel the eyes of the company as they turned to him through their various states of undress.
“The likeness is uncanny. Gustave, have them fix that when they fix the frame.”
By the time the portrait had dropped to the floor and cracked, Armand was already outside the stage door. Holding a hand to cover his cigarette from the wind, he tuned out of the coven’s grumbling for some silence. Rain pelted the cobblestones and he watched the wind move through the trees as his tobacco glowed to life.
Armand had barely drunk from the couturier and yet the bitter taste in his mouth still lingered.