by J. Smith
“Then why didn't you?” Erik asked softly, completely absorbed by what Jenna was saying. Whether it was the tone of her voice or the sad look in her eyes, he could not say. But suddenly, he really wanted to know why she had agreed to be intimately involved with someone who obviously did not deserve her.
Jenna closed her eyes and shook her head. “I don't know, Erik. Like I told you last night, I always wanted to be a wife and a mom. I always dreamed of finding that one man to spend the rest of my life with—who would love and adore me, and put me first in his life. But it was so hard. My mother never married my father and went through a string of guys while I was a kid. None of those relationships ever ended up happily. I always thought I would be different. That someday my prince would come…” She looked at Erik then and whispered, “But he didn't.”
Jenna looked away again and continued, “I started to believe what everyone said, that Mr. Right only shows up in fairy tales, and it is unrealistic to expect that kind of devotion in real life. So I guess I stopped waiting around for my prince and decided that my expectations were too high. I allowed myself to become involved with guys who seemed great on the outside, but really turned out to be shallow and self-absorbed toads. Only I was always the last one to figure that out.” She looked back at Erik with a sheepish smirk. “Even my cat could see it, before I did.”
Erik looked at the false humor in her eyes and could see the sadness lurking beneath it. For a moment, she reminded him greatly of Christine, whose eyes were also often filled with sadness, when he knew they were made for joy. “Jenna,” he said, his voice soft and soothing—not in artifice, but in a show of the true emotion he was feeling at hearing her pitiable tale. “I admit I am not sure I fully understand this concept of Mr. Right, as you put it. But a woman of your beauty and sweetness,” he began, thinking that, in those ways too, she was much like Christine, “should be considered a rare treasure, indeed—and treated as such. A woman like that would make any prince richer, Jenna, and any man worthy of her would put her first in his life.”
Jenna felt her face redden at his beautiful words, and she struggled against the lump that had suddenly appeared in her throat as she made her breathy response. “We don't appear too have many princes any more in my time, Erik.”
“I don't believe that, Jenna,” He said swiftly and firmly, looking her directly in the eye. “I admit that it is always far easier, even now, to find the scoundrels. But sometimes you have to wait longer and look harder to find the prince. And remember, you never know who is searching just as hard for you Jenna. I hope that when you return you to your own time, you give him a chance to find you.”
Jenna bit her lips together and took a deep breath against the tears that threatened to form in her eyes. Oh, why couldn't she have been born 130 years earlier, so that this man could be her prince? How could she ever hope to find anyone like him once she found a way to return home? The urge to reach out and hug Erik was so strong, and yet she knew she should not do it. It would do nothing to quell the surge of feeling she was experiencing, and she would more than likely completely humiliate herself. Instead, she did something that was probably equally unwise, but would at least provide a sort of diversion.
“Erik, would you sing for me again?” she blurted quickly, still battling to get her emotions under control. “Like you did last night?”
“Last night…” Erik said quietly, remembering the challenge she had issued to him. “Still unconvinced of my musical genius?” He asked, lightly, a smirk playing on the exposed part of his lips.
“No, I know, but…” Jenna stammered, a little slow to pick up on his attempt to lighten the mood. When she caught his little smirk, though, she realized she should play along. “What have you done for me lately?”
Erik laughed out loud at her response—a deep, lush sound that Jenna found just wonderful. “Honestly, Jenna,” he said, the humor rich in his voice, “sometimes you say the strangest things!”
Erik's laugh was infectious, even if it was at her expense, and she joined him, throwing her arms open and saying, “Hey, what can I say? I am here for your amusement.”
Erik smiled and readied his fingers over the keys. “Is there anything in particular that you would like me to play, Mademoiselle?”
“No, just…” She was about to say he could play anything he wanted, but then she recalled that there had been a song stuck in her head for most of the day. “Well, actually,” she began, “I have been hearing this melody in my head all day. But I don't know its name.”
“Can you sing it for me?” Erik asked, intrigued.
“No, Erik,” Jenna shook her head, horrified. “I can't sing.”
“Well, I can't read minds,” he countered. “Can you just hum it for me, Jenna? If it is a tune I know, I should be able to recognize it pretty quickly.”
“OK,” she said, trying to call the melody to mind once more. “It goes something like, La la la…La la la LA la, La la la LAA la.”
Erik looked at her quizzically. “I don't think I know that melody, Jenna. But could you hum it again?”
“OK,” she said, and proceeded to do so.
Erik, eyes crinkled, looked at the keys of his piano with great concentration. He plinked out the melody that Jenna had just hummed one note at a time. “Is that it?” he asked her.
“YES!” Jenna agreed, excitedly. “What IS that song?”
Erik shook his head, “I don't know.” He played the melody again, this time adding supporting chords that matched the lushness of the tune that Jenna had heard in her mind.
“Yes, Erik! That is perfect!” she exclaimed. “And you've never heard the song before?”
“No,” he shook his head, playing the tune once again as he spoke, adding a bass line with his left hand. “Never. But I like it. Can you hum some more?”
“Sure,” Jenna hummed the rest of the melody, which seemed at once familiar, but illusive, and found herself amazed as Erik brought the song in her head to life.
18 THAT VOICE WHICH CALLS TO ME
Erik worked at his piano late into the night—long after Jenna had retired into the guest bedroom. As he toyed with the tune Jenna had hummed, Erik's two great passions of music and architecture converged to create the structure of a song. He erected opulent chord progressions around the simple frame of melody, fortifying the theme with buttresses of lush harmonies and embellishing it with intricate ornamentations of trills and flourishes. Finally, he was satisfied that the song was complete. He could not help but imagine Christine singing the vocal line. Though it was still without words, the song's melody was sweet and pure, and he knew Christine could bring it to life perfectly.
It was Jenna, however, who had planted the song in his heart. He took a moment to think about his houseguest, who was slumbering in the next room. In so many ways, Jenna was quite different from Christine. Where Christine was petite and delicate, Jenna was tall, and much more robust. Where Christine's skin was pale as fine porcelain, Jenna's was hued with an almost constant blush in her cheeks. Christine appeared to be almost fragile, seeming to shrink away from the unpleasantries life dealt her, while Jenna exuded an air of strength, able even to stand up to him, when he was in his blackest moods. She had brought him up short more than once, and he found himself actually smiling at the memories.
And yet, even with her strength, and air of bravado, Erik knew Jenna had her own troubles—one of which was that in some inexplicable way, she was a century and a half away from her home. “And I have been charged,” he muttered glumly to himself, “with somehow helping her find a way back. Erik rose and wandered over to his bookshelf. Amid the fictional novels and architectural guides, he had many reference books that covered various folklore and beliefs of cultures around the world. He had used some of them, in fact, to look up different theories on time travel—to little avail. He pondered for a moment as to what his next move might be, realizing he had absolutely no idea how to proceed. And yet, instead of being excited by the challenge, as
he so often tended to be, he found a certain agitation creep into his mind.
He began to wonder, resentfully, why in fact it was even necessary for him to be engaged in this endeavor in the first place. After all, Jenna herself had admitted that her life was not the ideal existence of which she had dreamt. Her family was dead or gone. Her suitor had left her for another. She actually had seemed to be quite content the last couple of days, spending time with the Persian and, surprisingly, himself. Why should he be expending energy trying to understand this unexplainable cosmic circumstance when he already had so much to do in order to help Christine? Was there really a pressing need for Jenna to get back?
He glanced over at the settee and noticed Samineh still asleep. That's right, he thought. She must go home because her cat misses her. Erik was perplexed by the sudden rise of indignation he felt at the notion that she should wish to leave his lair and return to her time where, apparently, nothing was even waiting for her except a cat. Was it really such a difficult task for her to simply forget about the time from which she had come—a time in which she, evidently, was not appreciated for whom she was and had no significant ties? After all, he had withdrawn from the world, shunning the light and creating his own dominion of darkness and shadows below. Was a… friend—as she had called him—not worth more than a cat? Could she not simply turn her face away from the world that she had known and choose instead to continue living in the dark refuge he had provided her? Surely, he could even arrange for her to have a position at the opera house, if she needed some sort of métier to occupy her time. He could see no reason—other than her cat—for her to go back. And now, thanks to her, he too had a cat.
Erik could not contain the scathing chuckle that rose in his throat at that thought. Really, Erik? What are you thinking? What woman would ever choose to stay in this underground mausoleum? Why should she be expected to willingly throw her life away, and accept a sepulcher as sanctuary, just because she'd had the distinct misfortune of befriending a monster?
He turned again to his bookshelf, having chastened himself for ever daring to believe that his acquaintance with Jenna was anything more than an affiliation thrust upon them out of necessity. After all, Jenna did not even have Christine's good fortune of believing him a figment of her imagination. Jenna was all too aware of who he was. She saw the mask that covered his accursed face every time she was in his presence. She'd felt the unkind and unjustified tempest of his wrath. Because she knew him to be a real, tangible being, she had all the more reason to wish to be away from him. No, she was not like Christine, who, blessed by ignorance, could think him an angel. She was all too aware that the real Erik was more akin to the Devil himself, with a black disposition and a vile, cursed face.
Having thoroughly worked himself into a temper, Erik snatched several volumes from his bookshelf and stalked over to his reading chair, trying to recall her description of the tunnel through which she had passed to emerge from the “door” she had referenced so fervently. The walls had undulated and rippled, she'd said. And the floor had crumbled beneath her. Even the door, she said, had dissolved at her touch. Water. It all went back to everything somehow being tied to water.
He opened one of the tomes and began to leaf through the pages, looking for anything he could find about strange occurrences that happened in or around water. Much to Erik's chagrin, these events seemed to be plentiful.
Every river, it seemed, had its own indwelling spirit, and the great and mighty sea was just brimming with fairies and mermaids and nymphs. Naturally. So many mystical inhabitants were purported to live in the sea, in fact, that he was beginning to wonder how the waters ever had room for fish. Erik let out a deep sigh and rolled his eyes. More fairy tales—more fantasies which had no element of truth. How would he ever find anything useful in these books that seemed obsessed with yarns and fables of mermaids sucking the soul out of a sailor with a seductive song or fishermen being dragged down to an empire under the sea by a magical turtle?
Finally, however, Erik came across a few stories that piqued his interest. The Welsh Mabinogion told tale of the young hero Peredur, who encounters a river in a mysterious valley. On one side of the river was a flock of black sheep and on the other side, a flock of white. Whenever a white sheep would cross the river to the other side, it would turn black and any black sheep crossing over would turn white, suggesting, that the river was some sort of means of mystic transport, which had the power to change the traveller's very essence. In Greek mythology, entrance to the otherworld was accomplished by crossing over the River Styx. Once the river had been crossed, it was very rare that the traveller could ever return. In Celtic legend, a trip upon the misty sea, often led to a sojourn into the “otherworld,” where time behaved differently. When the visitors would return to their own land, after a seemingly short dalliance, they would find all their loved ones withered and gone and the world around them changed.
Erik closed his book. He was more certain than ever that water had somehow swept Jenna into his world, and he was beginning to feel that water would be her only way out. After all, so many cultures could point to myths of the waterways around them serving as entry points into other lands. But Erik was also left with more questions than answers.
Of course the question still first and foremost in his mind was how? The stories—should he choose to believe them—had shown that water could serve as a passage between worlds, but he still did not understand how. Surely people—even in Jenna's time—travelled in water every day. Great seafaring vessels sailed across the oceans on a daily basis, and one never heard of them being mysteriously lost—except in shipwrecks and storms, in which cases, their fates were clear. Children swam in lakes and in streams all the time, and the shrieks of laughter and glee that issued from their upturned mouths were testament that nothing evil befell them. Jenna herself had fallen into his very lake, Erik thought, remembering the day that he'd thought he would finally have to strangle the Daroga for the sin of trying to drown his guest. She had not been magically transported back to her time and place. No, Erik smiled a little at the memory, she had still been here, filthy and dripping on the settee. So what was it that allowed for water to sometimes just be water and other times be an entrance to another world?
Further, it did not escape Erik that while these aquatic travelers seemed to reach their new destinations relatively unscathed, the return trip rarely seemed salubrious for them. An otherworldly visit which lasted only a short amount of time seemed to span years, even centuries in the traveler's home. Even if Erik could find a way to send Jenna back, how could he be sure of the state in which her world would exist when she got there? Would she be returning home, or would she be entering yet another strange new existence, one without even himself or the insufferable Daroga to watch over her.
He glanced back over at the peaceful Samineh and wished that he too could find the peace in his heart that seemed to come so easily to the small, elegant creature. He stood and crept over to his settee, reclining next to the sleeping kitten, who stirred a bit as his weight was added to the cushion. Reaching out and stroking her silken fur, Erik murmured, “You are a good cat, Samineh. Perhaps even good enough to entice Mademoiselle Jenna to stay.”
When Jenna awoke, the house was quiet. Music had drifted into her room, long into the night, as she had lain dozing in her bed. In her mind, she was lifted and twirled by melodies so achingly beautiful, and hauntingly familiar, and yet she could not say she had ever heard them before. They were Erik's songs, she was certain, and they'd filled her mind with the sweet scent of roses. As she'd listened, she had the distinct sensation of floating on a song, and she'd drifted off to sleep, feeling as if she were wrapped in the soft, dark velvet of the night.
Jenna sat up in bed and reached for the long white dressing robe that Erik had snagged for her. Jenna rose and slipped the robe around herself, tying it tightly closed. She slipped out of the room, seeing only the embers of the few last candles still burning. Erik must not
yet be awake, she mused, glancing over to his bedroom door. Sure enough, it was shut. He had been up quite late, she thought. She was content to allow him his rest. She went over to the drawer, where she had seen Erik stow his matches, and relit a few of the candles, affording herself a meager amount of light in which to move around.
She was about to take a book and read for a while, when the gurgling of the lake drew her attention. Wandering slowly over to the sluice of water which cut through the opera house, she sat down quietly at its edge. Candlelight danced lightly on tiny ripples of glistening liquid, as they journeyed through Erik's shadowy kingdom. She was overcome once again with the fragrance of roses and soft sweet strains of ethereal music. She felt her eyes flutter closed at the memory, and allowed her fingers to trail into the icy cold current of Erik's secret lake.
Suddenly, the luxurious scents and sounds in her mind were accompanied by sharp images of headlights careening toward her, the loud, shrill blare of a horn, and finally the terrifyingly dark plunge into the depths of the Hudson River. She felt herself tense as she recalled her body feeling as if it were being rushed by the water toward something, somewhere…and then there was the foggy, shadowy image of white light, accompanied by flashes of blue and brown. A soft, rich voice beckoned her, gently calling her name. That voice—oh that voice made everything right, and she knew that in the presence of those resonant, hushed tones, she would be fine. Everything would be fine. She relaxed, allowing the blackness to take her again until she awoke to a song. Erik's song. Erik…
She sighed. “Oh, Erik,” she murmured. Had it been his voice that was calling her? Her brow wrinkled at the memory. No. No, at that point, she didn't even think he'd known her name. How could he have summoned her? But that voice… Oh, it had been so lush, so tender, so very much like his voice… She remembered wanting to go toward it, wanting to open her eyes, but being unable, as if she were frozen until she heard Erik’s song.