After a moment of silence, Raoul smiled—a hard, icy smile that did nothing to warm those terrifying eyes. “You can’t go.” He reached out and touched a lock of her hair. “I’ve worked too hard to let you get away—especially without claiming my prize.”
“Prize?” she repeated, confused and frightened, taking a step back. Though her attention was elsewhere, she noticed that his hair was wild and his clothing obviously days old, which, combined with the stubble on his face and the circles under his eyes, dark enough to be bruises, made him look quite unlike the dashing vicomte that had stopped her heart with his handsomeness and gentility.
He stepped forward. “I’ve never gone to so much trouble for any girl—months of wooing and planning, aching and burning for the night when I could finally enjoy the fruits of my labors.”
“Fruits?” she said stupidly, as a horrible realization began to dawn on her.
“The desire has grown so monstrous, so burning, that I can’t enjoy the affections of any other woman, no matter how beautiful—”
“Other women!” gasped Christine, shrinking farther back. There were other women, even besides the fiancée?! No, it couldn’t be true—
He ignored her. “But tonight is finally the night.”
She stared at the man she had loved mere weeks, days, before, aghast with horror. The beautiful details of the foyer faded into grey, and the world felt cold and unreal, like a nightmare. “You mean—” She choked on the words. “You mean you seduced me—lied to me—so you could—”
“Come on now,” said Raoul, rather more softly, though with a ravenous impatience. “Don’t fight me—think of all I’m willing to give you! Diamonds, silks, rubies, whatever you want—I was even going to degrade my Chagny heritage by marrying you!”
She wanted to collapse, but her mind had completely shut down, and she couldn’t gather enough consciousness even for that. Her body felt numb, but she could feel scalding tears on her cheeks. She wanted to say so many things—curse him for lying, pray that it wasn’t true, beg him to say that it was just a joke—but her lips would only form two words, over and over: “Oh God…oh God…”
Raoul advanced forward, eyes blazing, face set in a mixture of lust and greed and insanity so terrifying that it was like looking into the face of Satan—and for the briefest instant, she could almost feel the flames of Hell envelop her as he drew nearer.
“No!” she cried. She forced her body out of its coma and raced up the stairs, tripping more than once as she tried to regain control of her limbs.
Raoul snarled, swiping at her like an animal, and started up after her.
She flew through the endless labyrinth of gilded hallways, running as fast as her muscles would allow, screaming for someone to help her—but there was no one.
Before long she tripped and the seam of her nightgown tore up past her knees. Raoul almost caught her, but she managed to jump to her feet and run faster than before, now uninhibited by the narrowness of the skirt. He yelled terrible things at her as she ran, curses and desperate supplications. She tried to find the staircase back down to the entrance, but she was hopelessly lost.
After what felt like a hellish eternity of running, the week’s lethargy was beginning to tell; she couldn’t get any air, and a pain erupted in her side that renewed the flood of tears. Near-blinded by the tears in her eyes, she threw a glance behind her and saw to her horror that Raoul was catching up. She was on the brink of collapse, and there was no escape. God, oh God, what was she going to do?
Suddenly she saw her room up ahead and remembered the torches on the balcony. As Erik’s promise echoed in her mind, a brilliant hope, like a beacon, she threw her last vestiges of strength into her burning legs.
She threw open her door and leapt inside just as Raoul made it to the doorway. He reached to grab her, and she slammed the door shut on his hand. Raoul bellowed in rage and jerked his hand out of the way, and she managed to lock the door the instant before he threw his weight against it.
“CHRISTINE!” he roared, pounding against the wood. “CHRISTINE, DAMN YOU, UNLOCK THE DOOR!”
Christine started to run towards the balcony and tripped on a large oriental rug. As she fell, she felt something in her leg tear.
She grasped the bed frame to haul herself up, spurred on by the sound of Raoul trying to wrench the doorknob out of its socket.
“CHRISTINE, YOU STUPID, STUPID LITTLE RAT, YOU BELONG TO ME! OPEN THIS DOOR OR I SWEAR, YOU’LL REGRET YOU WERE EVER BORN!”
It was a solid oak door secured with over-sized, antique iron hinges, meant as needless extravagance; it would keep him out, but not for very long.
Christine cast around for something to light the torches, and her eyes landed on the book of matches she kept on her nightstand for lighting the gas lamps. As she reached she fumbled them and they fell to the floor. She scrambled to retrieve them and then raced for the balcony.
She unlocked the bolt and threw open the doors, eyes stinging from the harsh wind that slammed into her face. She gasped in between the sobs that wracked her body, trying desperately to force her lungs to take in the freezing air, so cold that it set them on fire.
Her eyes, already full of tears, were clouded even further by the thick snow, falling so hard and fast that it felt like stones on her skin. She hunched over and tried to strike a match, crying out in horror as her quaking hands broke stick after stick.
A deafening thud came from the other side of the door, and the hinges screamed in pain. He was only moments away from breaking the door down.
Christine finally got a match to light, and, struggling to keep her numb fingers from dropping it, she thrust it into the heart of the torch.
She stared into the rusty grime of the torch’s cage, desperately searching for a glimmer of light, but there wasn’t even a spark. The pitiful remnant of ancient oil wasn’t enough to combat the driving snow.
She heard Raoul throw himself against the door again, and as the wood cracked, she cried out for God to help her.
For a moment there was nothing but darkness, and bitter tears froze on her face as she realized there was no escape from the horrors she was about to face with the crash of that door. Then suddenly, inexplicably, the oil caught the match’s dwindling flame, and the torch erupted into a brilliant pillar of orange fire.
She shrieked and stared at the torch, motionless with amazement, filled with a sudden bright and wonderful hope, until another horrible thud brought her back to reality. She tried hastily to light the other torch, but to no avail.
Raoul yelled something beastlike and unintelligible, like a devil snarling for blood. Christine cast frantic eyes across the balcony for a way down, but she was two stories up, and there wasn’t a trellis or anything to climb.
Another crash brought a sound of splintering that chilled her to the bone. With a prayer that one flame was enough, she hurried back into the room and wedged a chair under the doorknob. It wouldn’t stop him for long. Though her body was on fire, she tried to drag a heavy armoire over to serve as a barricade.
She screamed as a muscle tore, but, cradling her arm, she hobbled to a table and dragged it along the floor instead, desperation winning out over pain.
The ensuing minutes, filled with shouting, the endless crashes against the door, were the longest of her life. She tried to pile as much furniture against the door as she could, but by this time the pain had practically rendered her a cripple, and all the furniture in the world wouldn’t stop the hinges from breaking eventually.
She searched the room for something to defend herself, but she couldn’t find so much as a letter opener. The lamps were too heavy and cumbersome to wield, and the largest sharp instrument she could find was a fountain pen.
Christine collapsed against the foot of the bed, chest heaving as she tried to get enough air, and prayed for a miracle. Her face was cold and wet with tears, but now the adrenaline and shock coursing through her kept her from crying. She felt cold, numb, and unable to think
of anything besides the crashes coming faster and louder against the door.
As the minutes ticked by, each feeling longer than a day, her hope slowly dwindled into despair. Erik wouldn’t reach her in time. She closed her eyes, thinking of him, and began to cry again. She would never be able to tell him that she loved him.
Suddenly the door came crashing down against the meager barricade. In desperation she kicked over a small table and jumped on one of the legs, hoping to use it as a club. As it cracked and broke loose, one of her feet crumpled as it hit the floor and her ankle flared with a burst of pain.
She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stand, but as Raoul shoved a desk out of the way and threw open the door, she managed to use her good leg to stagger to her feet.
Raoul had been shouting ceaselessly, screaming terrible profanities and death threats, but as he stood in the doorway, a cold, insane smile lighting his face, his voice became quiet:
“You don’t know how long I’ve waited, Christine.” His words had an incoherent quality, like the rambling murmurs of a man unconscious from fever. “How every look, every action of yours, so innocent, so damned innocent, forbade me from seducing you…. You have no idea just how much you’ve tortured me, Christine. Even looking at you now, so close to being conquered, I can still feel my heart twisting, tearing, inside my chest, unable to bear that I couldn’t have you…. But the tortured days—the sleepless nights—are over now.”
As he stepped closer, she raised the oak club. “Don’t come near me!”
His laughter froze every muscle in her body, and suddenly she didn’t have enough feeling in her hands to grip the wood. As he started forward she stumbled away, unable to keep her feet.
The terror had so gripped her that she couldn’t form a conscious thought. She backed out onto the balcony, her heartbeat so deafening that it drowned out Raoul’s words as he slowly—triumphantly—walked towards her.
She felt the rail against her back and realized that she could go no farther. As Raoul laughed and stepped through the balcony doors, she opened her mouth in a silent scream.
Suddenly an arm wrapped around her waist and she felt herself hoisted up into the air. She had lost such control over her thinking that she thought she had died, and the angels were carrying her soul away. But as the angel scaled the rope up to the roof, she looked up into its face.
“Erik!” she cried, feeling such an overwhelming rush of emotions that she almost fainted.
Raoul’s shout of anger was like the roar of a fearsome beast. For a moment he stood there, gripping the railing and snarling, until they disappeared onto the roof. Christine thought she heard him race back inside as she, safe and warm in Erik’s arms, fainted dead away.
Chapitre Trente-Cing: Le Duel
Christine awoke slowly, wincing as the pain assailed her. For a moment she thought she was floating, but realized almost immediately that Erik was carrying her. She clung to his neck as the scenery flew by. She passively took in a staircase and a hallway before suddenly recognizing it all and remembered what was happening. She flailed as the panic hit her, and Erik had to slow for a moment to regain his hold.
When he threw open a door to reveal the courtyard, she realized that he must have taken a staircase down from the roof into the servants’ quarters and was trying to slip out of the house before Raoul could find them. She felt her eyes flutter closed as a wave of exhaustion swept over her, and despite the searing pain in her arm—her legs—her ankle—practically every part of her body—she almost allowed herself to fall asleep.
Suddenly she heard an insane roar from somewhere in the house, and her muscles tensed in fear, causing her to cry out in pain. Erik hesitated in his dash across the flagstones, but as she clung to his neck, he regained speed.
Within a few moments he had lifted her up on to a large black horse and they raced down the street of the Champs Élysées towards the opera house.
Though there was always a considerable number of persons in the streets at night, it seemed the whole city had taken the centennial of Idomeneo as an excuse for a celebration. Fireworks filled the sky with flashes of blood red and a cold, ice-blue, but she couldn’t enjoy them now. People thronged in the streets, drinking and carousing and yelling loud enough to be well-heard over the storm, blocking the horse’s way. When they came close to the Garnier, the throngs turned into a single, solid crowd, through which there was no hope of speedy passage.
Christine lost her balance as the horse came to a jarring halt. Erik’s hands were gentle as he steadied her. “Can you walk?”
She tried to step down on to the street, but her legs collapsed beneath her. He caught her in time. “We can’t make it through the streets,” he said. “We have to use the rooftops.”
When she looked up into his eyes she found a raging fire, echoed by the urgency screaming in his tense body; but it was only with the softest touch that he again lifted her into his arms. As he carried her into a tenement building and up the staircases towards the roof, she clung to him desperately, wondering just how close Raoul was to catching them.
“Where are we going?” she asked, stifling a cry of pain as the pangs in her leg redoubled.
“To my caverns,” he said, his voice strained as he moved ever faster, “where you’ll be safe—then I’ll deal with the vicomte.”
“You’re going to fight him?” Raoul deserved far worse than death—he needed to be drawn and quartered, cut into tiny pieces, put on the rack, made to feel a small part of the pain he had wrought—
“I’ll do whatever you want, darling,” he panted, kicking open the door to the roof. “But only after you are safe!”
When they reached the open air, Christine looked desperately around for the Garnier, but the snow was falling so thick and so fast that she couldn’t distinguish it from the rest of the city. Then a burst of fireworks attracted her attention, and she saw it, lit up, several buildings away. Erik, readjusting his grip, ran across the rooftops as quickly as the slippery surface would allow; only rarely did he have to jump to reach the next building, so close were the structures. She was starting to catch her breath by this time, but instead of the numbing cold she had anticipated the storm would bring, the snow and biting winds only exacerbated the throbbing in her arms and legs. Erik was breathing hard and fast now, and she tried to arrange herself in his arms to make herself less of a burden.
He halted when they had reached the end of the row of buildings, separated from the Garnier only by the Rue Auber; but it was a wide street, and there was no possibility of leaping to even one of the lower terraces of the Garnier’s roof. He set her on her feet, still supporting her weight, and considered the street with an intense frown.
“What do we do now?” wailed Christine, clinging to Erik and scanning the crowds for any sight of the pursuing vicomte.
“We can get down to the street and push our way through the crowd,” Erik said. “It’s getting into the Garnier that poses a problem.”
“Why?”
“The vicomte called in some favor or another and there are soldiers swarming every hallway, every entrance—we’ll never make it to my caverns without being captured.”
“Don’t you have a secret way in?”
“Yes, but one is on the roof, which we can’t reach, and the other is on the far side of the Garnier.”
“Should we try for the second one?”
He grimaced, rubbing his chin with a gloved hand and shaking his head. “We could probably get to it, but once inside it’s too hazardous a pathway to me to attempt while carrying you.”
“Th-then I’ll walk!” she declared, standing straight and trying to take an unaided step forward.
Again Erik caught her as her leg buckled. “Out of the question,” he said firmly. “We’ll have to find a way onto the roof.”
Christine, biting her lip to keep from crying as her ankle throbbed viciously, didn’t protest again, and he picked her up and made his way down the rusty fire-escape clinging ten
uously to the side of the tenement building complex.
When they reached the street, he scanned the crowds for an easy path to the Garnier. Christine looked too, and after a few moments her eyes locked on a man setting a ladder against the building to rehang one of the fallen banners.
“Look!” she said, pointing to the ladder.
Erik walked over to the base of the ladder, and Christine said, clasping her hands together in desperate supplication, “Please, monsieur, we need your ladder, just for a minute—”
The man, his foot on the bottom rung, said loudly as he turned to face her, “If you think I’m going to—”
He froze as he caught sight of the look on Erik’s face. “Uh—well—that is—” he stuttered, “sure, here, take it!” He shoved the ladder towards them.
“Carry it over there,” instructed Erik coldly, his voice commanding absolute compliance.
The man—a workman for the Garnier—tall and thin to the point of oddity, like a starving, oversized rat, had difficulty carrying the rickety ladder and navigating a pathway through the masses. The drunken, carousing plebeians refused to show any mercy toward the man’s plight; though they parted, like the Red Sea, as they saw Erik. Any humor at the oddness of the sight—a masked man carrying a distressed damsel in a nightgown—was drowned by the fearsome light in Erik’s eyes.
“Lean it up against the wall,” Erik said when they reached the Garnier. He set Christine down. “I’ll have to carry you on my back.”
The workman stared as the Phantom scaled the ladder, diva clinging to his neck, climbing ever so slowly for fear she might fall.
Christine shivered as the wind ripped through her, freezing the streaks of tears on her face. It was only a two-story climb to the top of the opera house, but the pain, the cold, the horror and desperation made it last an eternity. Erik’s boots could gain no traction against the icy rungs, and to keep from slipping he gripped the ladder with an almost inhuman strength. He had taken off his gloves in anticipation of the difficult climb, and Christine’s heart ached as she watched his hands, taut and dead-white, clench the frozen side rails—jagged with splinters and shards of ice, dyed scarlet with his blood.
Costumes and Filigree: A Novel of the Phantom of the Opera Page 39