by J. Smith
“That you betrayed me?” his eyes flashed with barely disguised anger. “Yes,” he hissed, “I know.”
“Erik, I never betrayed you!” she claimed in defense, a little horrified that he would even suggest such a thing.
“Oh no, Mademoiselle?” he continued, taking a few slow steps closer to her. “You just proved a second ago that you are capable of politely clearing your throat. Did you, or did you not cough on purpose, just to get Christine's attention and move me into action?”
“Well yes, but I…” she began, but she was cut off as he kept on with his tirade, continuing to advance toward her.
“Did you, or did you not leave the rose in the chapel for Christine to find, while you were pretending to pick up your cloak?”
“Yes, Erik, but I …” Oh, he was taking this all wrong.
“Did you, or did you not,” he asked in a clipped voice, so close now that he could practically touch her, “continue the charade into the evening, never telling me what you did, leaving it for me to find out on my own?”
Overwhelmed by his closeness and the cold fury flashing in his eyes, Jenna turned her back to him. “Erik,” she said looking down, “I tried to tell you…”
Suddenly she felt his hands grip her firmly by the shoulders, his breath on her neck. Leaning in close, so that his lips were right by her ear, he rumbled deeply, “You LIE.”
Jenna closed her eyes against the pain of his accusation. “Erik, I…”
“Did you think I'd never know?” he hissed in her ear through clenched teeth, his voice sibilant and deadly. “Did you think she wouldn't mention it?”
“No, I…” Jenna tried to defend herself, but once again, he cut her off.
His grip grew even tighter on her shoulders as he pulled her even closer. “And yet, you lied!”
Jenna's own anger suddenly spiked, and she tore herself from his grasp and turned on him, the hot ferocity in her own eyes the perfect countervail for the cool ire in Erik's. “I did NOT lie!” she shouted at him, pointing a finger at him, her other hand balled into a fist at her side. The sundry emotions she had felt that day had finally bubbled over, and she felt them escape in cries of barely controlled rage. “I tried to tell you what I did. When you came to me to apologize, I tried to explain what had happened. But you wouldn't let me talk! Just like now.” She waved her hand in frustration, as if proving her point. “You won't let me talk! You ask a question, but you have no interest in the answer because you've already decided upon your own version of the truth, and who cares if it matches with reality!”
“The reality, Mademoiselle,” he spat through gritted teeth, his jaw tight with his rage, “is that you knew she was never to know I was a man!”
“Of course not!” Jenna threw her hands up in the air. “She's supposed to think you're an angel. A celestial being who flies around behind walls giving young girls singing lessons. After all, why burden her with actual reality when she can have your version instead?”
“I pray that she shall never know the reality I have known!” he roared at her, his voice loud enough to shake the walls, startling Jenna with its force. For a moment, neither said a word, both stunned by the vehemence of his response. Emotion was thick in his voice when he continued. “I pray that she shall never know the cruelties or the pains that reality has to offer a poor, fatherless child, with no one in the world to help her—no one in the world to care.” He closed his eyes against the hot tears that threatened, as he remembered another child, long ago, so alone in the world. “I had a way to help her, Jenna,” his sorrowful voice quieter now. “I had a way to care.” He sank, exhausted, to rest on Jenna's bed, his body slumping forward to hide his head in his hands.
Jenna's heart shattered in a million pieces to see Erik looking so fragile, so broken. She tiptoed over to the bed and gingerly sat down next to him, putting one hand on his back, rubbing slow circles to calm him. With her other hand, she reached for his fingers, gently trying to pry them away from his face, so that she could see him. When he looked at her, his eyes were guarded and vulnerable, and she wanted nothing more in life at that moment than to be able to wrap her arms around him and hold him to her until the pain she'd caused had subsided. Instead, she continued to stroke his back, grasping his hand in hers, and met his gaze, whispering, “Erik, I'm so sorry. Please forgive me.”
Jenna saw a rueful smirk appear on his lips. “How strange,” he said. “I have gotten quite used to being the one asking for your forgiveness.” His voice sounded tired as he tried once more to smile.
“Not this time, Erik,” she shook her head, her heart still aching for him. “This time it was all my fault, for shoving my own opinion into a situation that was not my business.”
Erik was quiet for a moment, just looking at her, touched by her sincerity and her genuine concern. “Why?” he asked, when he was once again moved to words. “Why did you do it?”
Jenna took a deep breath before she revealed her reasons. It pained her to say them out loud, but speak them she must. “Because it was wrong for me to keep the rose, Erik,” she said, her voice just slightly tremulous. “When it is obvious that you love Christine.”
Erik surprised her then by doing the last thing she would have expected him to do in that moment. He laughed. “Love, Jenna?” he threw his head back with a mirthless guffaw that sent more chills down Jenna's spine than if he had been screaming his displeasure at her. “I am not allowed to love. Not Christine. Not anyone.”
Jenna stared at him silently for a moment, as she took in the derision in his self-mocking expression. It seemed to be such a practiced emotion with him, this loathsome self-contempt, and it made Jenna's heart break anew. “Erik, what do you mean, you are not allowed to love? Everyone is allowed to love.”
“Oh, no, not I, Mademoiselle,” He said, a dramatic flair entering his voice, his eyes faraway, as he began to recite an old, hateful verse he seemed to have memorized long ago. “The Living Corpse can know no love, subsisting on hate and fear. Those who see him run from him, and screams are all he hears.”
Jenna's breath hitched on a sob, as she realized that he spoke about himself. “Oh Erik,” she whispered, mournfully. “What kind of life have you known?”
“My life?” His hollow eyes focused on her for a moment as he began his tale. “My life cemented my mother's heartache. It had begun, you see, when my father died, after having just awakened her heart to the joys of love. She had loved him like no other, and to lose him so early in their marriage…well, it was all she could do to go on living. But live she did, for she had discovered that before he so thoughtlessly left this life, he had gotten her with child. The babe became her reason for living those next long months. While she may no longer have her beloved Charles to brighten her world, she would have his child. His son would bear his name, and she would care for the babe, all the days of her life, only dreaming about that far off time when she and her dear husband would be reunited, to gaze for all eternity, at the wonder their love had created.
“Imagine her surprise when it was not a baby born, but a gargoyle—a carcass barely fit for this earth.”
“No,” Jenna whispered, quietly, shaking her head in horror at the way he spoke about himself.
“Oh yes, Jenna,” he continued. “The midwife offered to throw me on the fire—said it would be an act of mercy. My mother was not so sure her mighty God would agree with that, and so she deemed that I should live, until she could ascertain what level of care was required to ensure the safety of her eternal soul. When the priest insisted that I could not simply be allowed to die, she agreed to feed me and clothe me—including my face, which she covered with a mask at the first opportunity she could find—but she refused to call me by the name that should have been my own. Charles was for a beautiful child, and I was anything but. She left it for the priest to name me, for as far as she was concerned, I required no name at all. After all, why-ever would a monster need a name?”
Jenna shook her head back and fo
rth in disbelief at the coldness Erik's own mother showed her child, and she felt hot tears run down her face. But if Erik noticed, he made no mention, only continuing with the tale that inspired her to weeping.
“And so, thanks to the priest, I became Erik, a name that held no meaning for my mother, and certainly not for me. As I grew, so did my mother's lack of affection. Once I no longer needed her body for sustenance, she took to never touching me, unless she was beating me for one disobedience or another. The time I asked for a kiss on my birthday was a trouncing of particular intensity, ensuring the request would never be made again.
“I soon became petulant, and the day I refused to wear my mask, my mother lay hands on me once again. She dragged me to her room, the one with the wide dresser mirror, and shoved me in front of it. When I saw the beast peering back at me, I screamed, only to have the fiend scream with me. When I shook my head in horror at the monster that was before me, it shook its head as well, and when my tiny fists were bleeding from pounding at the mirror, trying desperately to scare the ogre away, I could see, through the shards, that the ogre's hands bled too. For days, my mother locked me in that room—with nothing but the beast and the shattered mirror to keep me company. Eventually, she let me out, and from that day forward I wasn't ever without my mask—I even slept with it, for fear of the beast finding me in the dark. But then,” he let out a joyless snicker, “it was always dark, since my mother had boarded up my window and continually locked my door. She never engaged me in conversation or anything else to feed my mind, but she was always very good at plying me with books, tossing them in to the room to keep me quiet or perhaps pacify some latent form of guilt. So when the sun would creep in between the slats, I would read—anything and everything she left me. Architecture, philosophy, Biblical texts—I devoured them all, so desperate was I for information about a world of which I would never be a part.
“On the rare occasions when my mother would let me out of my room, I would sit at her piano and play. I never needed lessons, for my fingers just knew what to do. My mother said that was another one of the devil's marks, for it was unnatural for musical ability to be so easily displayed in a child. She forbade me from singing, claiming that when she heard my voice, she heard my sire calling her to do strange things—and by the way she said it, she was not talking about her dearly departed Charles. No, she heard the devil in my voice, and therefore my songs were silenced.”
Jenna reached for him, trying to stop this story that was full of such pain, but he was up and pacing the floor as the years of sorrow and heartache came flooding out. “I left my mother's house when I was nine years old. She had begun a dalliance with a village doctor, and I overheard them discussing the prospect of sending me away. An asylum, the doctor had suggested, where I could be with others of… my kind. I was well read, Jenna. I knew the atrocities that would await me at the asylum. Besides, there really weren't any others of my kind.
“So I ran. I left in the dark, so sure I would be fine—so convinced I needed no one. I soon found, that while perhaps I didn't need any other person in my life, I did need the occasional loaf of bread. And one night, out of desperation, I tried to snatch one from a wandering band of gypsies who had made camp. I was captured, and a fresh form of degradation began.
“My mother's debasement had at least been private. She locked me away from the world's view because she did not want my hideousness to reflect poorly on her. The gypsies, however, saw the profit they could make if they bared my repulsiveness to all who would pay to witness it, so I became the main attraction of their traveling fair. Shackled and caged in a foul tent, with only a sack to cover my head, I was kept on display in a cesspool of my own filth. Day after day, the tent would be opened and the sack would be lifted so that the paying multitudes could view my detestable ugliness. The tent would first fill with gasps of disbelief, then screams of horror, and finally, the unavoidable heaves of those cursed with weak stomachs. Children would run, ladies would faint, and my keepers would spend night after night counting the money, praising my homeliness for the cash that it brought in.
“I was never allowed to exit my cage, unless the owner of the fair decided to whip me for one imagined transgression or another. For four years I lived there, amongst the Gypsies—in filth and squalor and humiliation. Until the one night when the master decided that whipping was not going to be enough. He had to teach me a lesson, and it had to be done not only with my pants down, but with his. He had underestimated, however, the hatred which had grown within me in those four years, and when he lay his hands on me, to begin his instruction, I whipped my hand around, grabbed the knife he always kept at his waist, and sunk it deep into his gut. He was incapacitated, and I could have escaped, but instead, I pushed the knife deeper, twisting it as I went, watching the life spill out of his body in a steaming flood, and finding that I enjoyed seeing it go. It was on that day, as I rose to exit the tent, on calm alert for any other attackers, that I realized I had truly become the monster I had been born to be. And it was time that I embraced it.”
Jenna's hand covered her mouth at the atrocities poor young Erik had suffered, and she found that she felt no sympathy for the evil pig that he had killed. She regretted only that she had not been with him, so that she could have slayed that bastard herself.
“For years after that,” he continued, always pacing, running a circular path on the rug in her room, “I wandered. I had learned how to be cunning; I had learned how to be stealthy; and so eating did not usually pose a problem.
“I traveled through Europe studying architecture, which had been a particular interest of mine when I was yet in my mother's house. I roamed on foot mostly, stowing away in wagons when I wished to visit some new exciting land. I made it to Italy, and managed to work awhile with a master mason, learning the trade of building, honing my skills, and becoming quite adept. But that alliance was dissolved after an unfortunate incident with the master mason's daughter, and once again, I found myself on my own, wandering the towns, performing magic tricks at traveling fairs, occasionally even singing for money. I became known as the Masked Magician, and since I kept that cursed covering on my face always, I experienced trepidation from other people—a certain wariness—but never screams. It was at one of those traveling fairs that the Daroga found me.
“Omid?” Jenna asked, when she heard Erik mention the Persian that was still his friend today.
“Yes.” Erik looked at her momentarily, nodding before he continued his story. “He was the Chief of Police for the Shah of Persia, who had heard tales of the mysterious masked magician and ordered the Daroga to find me and bring me back. The Shah's mother, you see, was always in need of some new form of entertainment, and the Shah thought that I would do…for a time.
“When I arrived in Persia, I did, indeed, entertain the Shah and his mother for a while. I was praised, and plied with gifts and treasures and drugs in gratitude for their enjoyment. I am not proud to say it, but I enjoyed the sense of power that the drugs gave me, and I found that the strange dark world of Persia suited me well. But before long it became clear the novelty of my presence had begun to wane. It seemed necessary to prove myself useful to the Shah in ways other than sleights of hand and acts of illusion.
“At this time, the Shah had commissioned a torture chamber, by which to punish criminals. It was to be the greatest source of entertainment yet for the Shah and his mother, who reveled greatly in the suffering of others. I had found a way to prove my worth, for none of the architects of Persia had had my invaluable experience with the Italian mason, and when my plans were put forth for the bidding, the Shah began to see me in a different light. The torture chamber was built, and the Shah was so well pleased with his new toy, that he put me in charge of its operation. I became the lead executioner for the Shah, and truly, I enjoyed the power that the job brought with it. I was looked upon, not with derision, but with respect—not with ridicule, but with fear. No longer the Masked Magician, I became known as the Angel
of Mercy, for my role in ending their torment, delivering the hapless miscreants swiftly with my lasso, when the tortures had done their worst. But my true title should have been the Angel of Death, since it was I who initiated their agony as well.
“My favor with the Shah began to fade, however, when I insulted him by refusing his most precious gift. The riches, the treasures, the drugs—oh, those I took, and indulged in them greatly. But the night the Shah presented me with a nubile young slave girl to do with as I pleased, was the night that I said no. She stood before me, trembling with lowered lashes. I spoke to her in dulcet tones, promising her I would be gentle, swearing she would have her freedom with the morning light. But as I approached her, she screamed, and cowered away from my touch. In my frustration, I asked her if she would rather die than lay with me. All the drugs in the world could not numb the humiliation I felt when she said yes.
“And so I turned her out, complaining to the Shah that she was not of my liking, and that I did not desire any more gifts of weak willed Persian girls as payment for my efforts on his behalf. The Shah did not appreciate my insolence, and without my knowledge the little slave girl was, in fact, sentenced to die. And yet, the Shah, in his cunning, sought to punish me more greatly than her. It was to my torture chamber that the slave girl was sent, and when I looked down and saw who it was that would now suffer in my manmade hell, something inside me just snapped. It was as if the cloud of drugs was lifted, and I looked at the Shah, and at his mother, and for the first time, I said to them, “No.” I was not going to torture and then kill this slave girl for a sin no greater than shrinking away from a monster. I told them if they wanted her dead, they could do it themselves. And then I did the unthinkable. I walked out.
“I had sealed my fate that night,” Erik said, looking off into the distance, “No longer was I the Shah's favorite pet. I was defiant and branded a troublemaker, and I knew that if I did not find some way to get out of Persia, in short time I would find myself on the other side of that torture chamber door. So I turned to the Daroga.