by Bethany Pope
However intelligent our quarry, he’d had little experience with hunters.
We opened the door.
It was only much later that I learned how lucky we were. Christine told me afterwards that the middle path was armed with buried explosives, so that an ill-placed foot would lead to an instant, or a very painful death.
This path was long, circuitous, rather like the circuit of a nautilus; we wound round the Opera House several times in our journey to the centre, but our work was made easier by the fact that fiend had only swept up to the door, beyond it the two pairs of tracks were bright in the torchlight; his long and firm, moving at a rapid pace, hers, small and fine, with the occasional scuff-mark where she had tripped or been dragged. There were many doors, many off-shooting hallways, but we took none of them, trusting that the path we pursued would lead us to her.
Most of the rooms we passed through were unfinished, composed of stone walls and floored with dirt, but the circular route we followed was leading us directly under the Opera House and the closer we came to the centre the more civilised the rooms. They sprouted plaster walls and floor tiles, scattered bits of furniture and other evidences of inhabitation so that, by the time we came to the room with the well, we had almost begin to relax.
This was a plunge back into darkness, a reversion to the stone and earth we encountered when we first left the staircase. The stench was abhorrent, fish left out too long in sunlight, rotten flesh. I gagged, choked back my vomit. The source of the odour was soon apparent. The floor was stacked with bodies, three skeletons that the water had rotted lay in a row along the floor. A fresher corpse was collapsed in the corner, his neck encircled by a rotting noose. Beside this was the much fresher head of a woman with long blonde hair, the eyes sunken in. The rest of her was buried in a bone yard in Brittany.
I nudged Philippe when I saw that. He nodded, held his hand up for silence, gesturing with the other one to a door across the room.
There was the faint sound of voices. I crept towards the entrance, the others trailing behind me. The portal was refined, polished mahogany, incongruous to the room. I lay my ear against it, listening. I heard her voice! She was alive!
I beckoned the others forward, listening as hard as I could. I was unable to make out exactly what she said, the wood was too thick and she was speaking too quietly. But I heard the fiend as clearly as though he were speaking by my shoulder.
‘They will be here any minute.’ I recognised the powerful voice of Christine’s mysterious tutor! ‘I must be ready for them.’
She said something then, softly, so softly. She must have been weak. The monster might have been starving her.
‘No. We would have heard the explosions. They must have found the safe path. The very devil must be giving them luck! But the angels themselves are on our side, my dear, I have…’
I’d heard enough. I pulled back from the doorway, looked to my men. My brother smiled at me, clapped his hand on my back. I treasure that look. It was the last one we had.
We opened the door and walked into a room as bright as daylight. In the centre, beside an enormous, obscene bed, the monster stood with his hand on my lady.
CHRISTINE
13.
When he kissed me I knew that I was wrong. Not about everything, I still believe that I was right in trying to extricate myself from Raoul, and the time that I had spent underground perfecting my art and helping Erik to compose his masterpiece was the best and most fruitful period of my life. Then or since. No, I learned that I was wrong about what my master was to me.
He was not the ghost of my father. He loved me, as my father did, but his love was not pure in its source or filial in its expression. He did not love like an angel would, at a distance; he wanted my flesh as well as my spirit, no matter how hard he tried to deny it to himself. I decided then that I would help him to realise it.
Of course I was frightened of the things that he hid from me, beneath his mask, his gloves, his terrible history. He had killed before and showed no repentance for it. He would do so again. I was young enough, then, to believe that I could show him another way. And who knows? If events had played out just a little differently I might have had the chance.
I did not know it, but I had reached the high point of my life, standing there in that sweat-stained white costume exhausted and exalted all at once while he ordered me to close my eyes and touched me with his naked lips. And that is so pathetic I could scream.
It only lasted a second, and when I opened my eyes he had lowered his mask and was standing a full foot away from me, as though he had appalled himself. I stepped toward him and spoke, ‘Erik,’ I have no idea what I would have followed, what I would have said given the chance. Whatever it was, I was interrupted by the sound of a crash as the barrier came down. It was the invasion of our world.
He stepped around me, moving as swiftly as the deadly butterfly knife that Little Meg carried in her cleavage, placing himself between my body and the door.
‘Erik?’ I touched his shoulder, felt his bones shift, his ropy muscles stiffening beneath the silk suit he wore. ‘What is it?’
He turned to me. Behind his mask his flat yellow eyes seemed suddenly to glow. ‘They are coming for you, Christine. Your would-be fiancée comes to your “rescue”.’ He took my hand. His own was trembling. ‘They are not taking the route that I would have had them choose, we would have heard the explosions by now.’
He looked to the door, as though expecting them to defy physics as easily as they defied our plans and materialise immediately in the hallway. His voice sounded dead, defeated already. ‘I could let you go, now. Feign a change of heart and give you to him. That would certainly be easier, and we would both be allowed to live.’ He said these things, even as he squeezed my hand tighter, even as he shook with grief at the thought. ‘Or we could fight. Head them off. I could kill them. Then we could remain together and continue our work, and you would be reborn to the world as a singer.’
I looked at him, raised my free hand to the side of his mask as though it were his real cheek that I were cupping and not a painted model made of wax. It was as warm as flesh. ‘Fight. I have never known the easy path to be the best one.’
Erik hugged me, close enough to smell the foulness seeping through the seams of his clothes. I drew back, continuing, ‘Fight, I say, but try not to kill them. There has been enough death.’
You see, I was already trying to change him.
He agreed to it, however, promised to avoid a slaughter if he could. And that is how I doomed us both.
‘Come.’ He pulled me to the closet at the other end of his chambers and motioned for me to sit on his bed. I was too surprised to be scandalised. I sank, a little, into the feather mattress. He opened the door, revealing a small room with (of all things) a long mirror at the end. There, among his clothing, his costumes, was a large trunk carved of rosewood. He flung open the lid, lifted out folded carpets, some curious porcelain oriental figures, and a small ebony box inlaid with fine shards of mother of pearl and ivory. Turning to me, he said, ‘You have seen my store of explosives. Those are deadly. These begin from the same source but the effect is different. Those explosions cause a bloody death. The bombs in this box bring only sleep. It will not be the sweetest slumber of their lives, but it will have the properties of Lethe.’
He opened the lid, revealing balls the size of cherries wrapped in black paper, a wick protruding like a stem. I could smell them from here, a perfume like Attar of Roses, a bitter bite underneath. ‘They will wake eighteen hours later, perhaps in the market near the Seine, and they will discover that the last week of their lives has become a blank.’
I smiled at him, ‘That sounds perfect.’
He stood, ‘Yes. I should have thought of it sooner.’ Taking my hand, he helped me to stand.
‘What will happen, after?’
‘I have no idea, child.’ He laughed a little, ‘But we will have the better part of the day to work it out. If the
y are coming by the safe route then they will emerge in your room. The ventilation in there is good; I can use these little bombs without risk to ourselves. Still, just in case, you had better wet a handkerchief and tie it around your nose and mouth to serve as a filter to breathe through. Do it now, they might move faster than we think and if they do I will have to risk throwing it, no matter where we are.’
I took the scarf he offered, immaculately white, and did what he asked.
‘But what about you, Erik?’ When I spoke my voice was muffled, though understandable. I wondered how he managed to sound so clear even with a constantly covered mouth.
‘My mask is lined with cloth, it will serve the same purpose.’
In less than a minute we were in my rooms, standing beside the beautiful bed that he made for me from marble and rugs.
I asked, ‘How much time do we have?’
‘They will be here any minute.’ He walked to the door that they would enter through, counting his paces to calculate his throw. ‘I must be ready for them.’
When he returned to me he held three of the small bombs in one hand, a Lucifer match in the other, ready to light the fuses.
Anxiety was gnawing at my stomach like a rat. I had to tell him, I couldn’t tell him. ‘Erik, I am afraid. What if they really did make it through one of the other doors?’
‘No. We would have heard the explosions. They must have found the safe path.’ He touched my shoulder with the hand that held the matches, brushing my hair from my neck, ‘The very devil must be giving them luck! But the angels themselves are on our side, my dear, I have…’
And that was when the door opened. The first face I saw was Raoul, leading the others, his handsome young features looking older and drawn, whitely furious. Absurdly, I noticed that he’d shaved his moustache, that he was bleeding from the knuckles. It took me what felt like forever to notice that he was holding a gun.
His brother, Comte Philippe, had a revolver, too. The eight men they brought were armed with knives and firearms all their own.
They came to us armed, as though chasing an animal. And I had asked Erik to spare them.
My lover stepped in front of me, in one fluid motion pushing me slightly to the side so that I stood on the marble lip of the tub that I slept in. He struck a Lucifer on the side of his mask, lighting it and marring the finish, lighting the fuses of the three bombs he held as the invaders raised their guns to fire.
He threw them quickly, the bombs already smoking. Fear flooded my mouth like the taste of new coppers and I grew drunk on the stench of roses.
Guns went off as the bombs fell. I could not see who fired. Erik leapt backwards, aiming low, hooking his arms around my belly and diving with me into the bed where we landed. I was too shocked to struggle as he buried me in blankets, blinding me with velvet, shielding me from danger.
The room was full of shouting for a moment, and then drenched in stillness that hit us like a flood of water. I felt Erik’s body pressing mine down, felt him moving, and then heard his voice speaking right next to my ear as his old ventriloquist tricks returned for the final act.
‘Keep perfectly still, as though you were a corpse.’
And then he was gone. I heard him climbing up the side of the pool, heard the sound of his feet gaining traction on tile. I heard him as he muttered, a meaty thump that must have been the sound of him testing the awareness of our attackers with a well-placed kick.
‘Christine!’ His voice, so jubilant, ‘All is well. You can come out now!’
I was doing just that, untangling myself from the blankets he had shielded me with, when I heard Raoul’s voice shouting, ‘Monster!’
I hurried to my feet, trying to stand, failing, frightened by the sound of struggle going on above me. I tried again and this time I rose, in time to hear the report of a gun, the crack of a bullet shattering tile, a loud clatter.
By the time I pulled my head above the rim the main part of the battle was over. The floor was littered with bodies. Most of the men had stopped in terror as their corner of the room filled with smoke, and that doomed them. They breathed in the smoke, and they fell. Raoul had been different. He told me, later, that the sight of ‘the monster’s’ hand on my shoulder had filled him with an incredible rage. When the smoke flooded the room, he hadn’t been breathing. He ran right through it, firing his gun.
When we plunged into the pool a wave of dizziness hit him and he fell, for a moment, beside my wash-basin, well away from the lingering fumes. When Erik emerged, Raoul was just gaining consciousness. His memory was not impaired in any way, though he felt unbalanced and terribly ill. He bided his time until Erik kicked his brother in the side, testing the drug’s effectiveness. The sight of that shining shoe connecting with Philippe’s fat ribs reignited Raoul’s rage and sent him leaping at my teacher, gun drawn, then blazing.
The first bullet missed, hitting the tile. Erik had inhaled none of his drug, he was clear headed and quick as ever. He struck the gun from Raoul’s hand with a well-placed strike at the younger man’s wrist, but that was not enough to incapacitate a boy just entering his prime, even if he was still recovering from an injury.
Raoul leapt at him, snarling, pinning him down on the tiles.
This is what I saw when I raised my head above the tiles.
Erik was lying face-down on the floor, panting loudly, his hands pinned behind him. Raoul was sitting on his spine, digging his knees into the thinner man’s kidneys. Their heads were pointed in my direction; my master was looking at me, sorrowfully, silently. Raoul was cursing. The white scarf I’d been using as an air-filter had tightened in the struggle. It was wedged between my teeth so that I could not speak. Frantically, I moved to untie it so that I could shout to Raoul (he hadn’t seen that I had risen yet), I would take this gag off, undo the knot. I would beg him to let Erik live.
But then I heard a voice, very soft, behind my left ear. ‘No Christine, no. Remain perfectly still. Do nothing. I love you too well to see your life ruined.’
What could I have done, but obey him?
Besides, by then Raoul had seen me. His blue eyes blazed with the mixture of fury and possessive wrath at a theft that he called love. He tied Erik’s hand with a rope he had carried, attached to his belt, dragged him from the ground so that he was standing and bound him to the nearest marble pillar, looping the rope around a mounted lamp so that his hands were held above his head.
When he had finished with that he returned to me, lifting me out of my bed and setting me gently down in a chair near the door. My body felt very cold, just then, and though I was sweating I was also shivering, so badly in fact that when Raoul untied the gag from my mouth my teeth began chattering so hard that they hurt.
Seeing this, Raoul went to the bed and returned with a blanket that he tucked around me. His touch was repugnant, my skin crawled receiving it, but I could not move, could not fight him in any way, not even when he used his bloody fingers to smooth back my hair.
I was so frozen with fear, with exhaustion, that I could not scream when he kissed me on the forehead.
I wish that I had fainted, then. I wish that I had lost myself to the world, that I had breathed in some of Erik’s smoked Lethe or tasted another sip of his sleeping cordial, before I witnessed what followed. But I was awake, and aware, though unable to move. This is what I saw, then. I saw Raoul check his brother’s pulse and, satisfied that he lived, I watched as he plucked the gun from his hand.
I watched him cock a bullet into the chamber.
I watched him walk to my master as he hung from the pole, his arms visibly straining, nearly screaming in their sockets.
I watched Raoul lift the barrel so that it was pointing into the socket of the mask, the oiled metal nearly touching the flat eye of the man that I loved.
I saw Raoul’s finger tighten on the trigger, then release the pressure before the shot was fired. He lowered the muzzle, looked back at me, and asked, ‘Do you not wish to look upon the face of your a
bductor?’
With one fluid motion, hooking his fingers into the space where wax met the pale skin of Erik’s chin, Raoul tore it away in one fluid motion.
The mask was off; Erik’s terrible face was exposed. I felt my afternoon meal churning in my guts, and then I vomited the contents across the floor tiles.
14.
The mask was off. Raoul held it in his hand. The black wig that Erik wore over it had fallen to the floor. The face beneath seemed hardly human – much more resembling the desiccated face of a mummy than the flesh of a living man. He had barely enough skin to cover his skull. There were lips, of course, he could sing and speak without impediment, but they were shrunken, dry slits that could not totally cover his huge white teeth. Instead of a nose there was a gaping, moist-looking hole that provided the only colour on his face. It reminded me of a leaf-nosed bat that I’d seen a picture of in a book once, an image that frightened me so badly that I could never stand to look at it again. His cheeks and scabrous skull were covered with dried lesions and scars that had healed badly, long ago.
But worse than all of this, by far, were his eyes. They were sunken deep into the orbits of his skull, like those of a week-old corpse that had been left out in the sun. His lids were not sufficient to cover them totally so that when he closed his eyes now, to escape my horror-look, the effect was even worse than it had been before. The yellow gleamed through the gaping lids, seeming to invite the scavenger birds to come and peck.
And yet, they were sentient. I had to remind myself. Those eyes looked at me and knew me, loved me, and that knowledge struck me like a knife. I wiped my reeking mouth with the back of my hand, knowing that if I could only stand to love a mask it wasn’t love at all but a delusion unworthy of enduring.
The strange spell that had held me to the chair, the shock of sudden cold and trembling, had passed. I found that I could move. I tried to speak, ‘Erik.’