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Chapter Text

Gift One
"The Photograph"

Erik never told her when his birthday was.

She could only assume it was because he didn’t know, himself. But now that they’d lived together for a handful of months, and during that time he’d already celebrated her birthday, half birthday, and quarter birthday, she figured it was about time she do something for him in return.

He never let her leave the house without his direct supervision, afraid that if he did she would disappear into the mist and he’d never find her again. It was an unreasonable fear, since she was certainly not planning on leaving him, but she understood his fears of abandonment what with… everything that had happened to him in his life. But the problem that left her with was that it was impossible to buy something for him as a surprise.

There were times, however, that he left her alone in the house, and there were plenty of objects at her disposal with which to work. She entered his workshop with searching eyes, looking for anything that might give her an idea of what to get him.

And then she spotted it – a metal box sitting upon the shelf. Upon closer examination, she realized it was one of the new Kodak cameras she had seen advertised in the paper! A pamphlet attached to it touted its ease of use with just one ‘press of a button,’ and gave the directions for amateur photo-finishing.

Modern technology is so advanced, Christine marvelled to herself. To think – I can take a picture right here and have a finished photograph within just a few hours!

Giddily, she took the camera down from the shelf and examined it. It seemed easy enough to use - with the directions, that was – and an idea sprung up in her mind…

--

At night – or whatever could be determined as night, Christine was still unsure about the way the time passed below ground – Erik returned home.

“Is something the matter, Christine?” Erik questioned at once. “You are acting strangely.”

“Oh, do sit, do sit!” Christine beckoned, practically dragging him to his favorite armchair beside the fireplace.

“Something is wrong,” he decided, but followed where she led. Sitting down, he regarded her with concern. “Christine, do you feel well?”

“I am very well, dear!” Christine grinned. “And I hope you are, too!”

“Me-?”

She plucked a card off the mantle and held it out to him, and he accepted it with great trepidation. Looking upon it, he found it was a hand-drawn card, with the words Joyeux Anniversaire! scrawled across the front.

“What is this?” he demanded instantly.

Christine tilted her head. Didn’t the card say it on the front? “A birthday card, Erik...”

“For who?”

“For you, dear!” she chirped. “We’ve probably celebrated my birthday six and half times in half as many months, but we’ve never done anything for you. I didn’t know when your birthday was but figured we could do something now, and maybe on the real day, too? Anyway - look! Look inside!”

Still confused, he opened the folded card, and a handful of small rounded photographs fell out onto his lap. He stared at the heap in stunned silence for a moment, before plucking one up and looking at it.

It was a long minute before he spoke.

“Christine – how could you be so cruel?”

There were tears in his eyes.

Christine floundered. What was the matter? Did he not like the pictures? Was he mad that she used up the film? Sure, it was probably expensive, and hard to get… oh, he must certainly be upset about that! “I’m sorry, Erik, I didn’t think about the cost…”

“The cost!” he wailed. “You never think about the cost, Christine.”

“I am so sorry – I’ll pay you back, however much it costs -”

“No need! Oh, how can one tell the value of a broken heart?”

“My dear, I apologize a thousand times over! I didn’t realize you were so attached to the film!”

“Film? Film? Who cares about the price of the film?” Erik pressed one of the circular pictures to his heart. “These photographs are things to be cherished forever, Christine – but what good are they if my heart has been completely and utterly shattered? I have nothing with which to love them anymore!”

“Erik, what are you talking about? How have I broken your heart?”

“You are leaving me!” he accused, fresh tears spouting out from his swollen ducts. “And you have given me these beautiful pictures as a parting gift, as a way to soften the blow! Oh, I daresay you are very cruel, Christine, cruel indeed, to dangle the thing I want so desperately but can never have right in front of me!”

“No! Oh, no, Erik, no!” Christine cried. “You’ve misunderstood!”

“Misunderstood? Was this not an attempt to be kind? I was going to say – Christine, your kindness breaks me!” Erik sobbed. “No, you were intending to be cruel all along – you knew just what you were doing! And that’s why you were so impatient when I came home! You couldn’t wait to see me cry! You enjoy it, don’t you? Oh, my villainous, spiteful Christine…! How I love you still!”

He wailed openly in the chair, the photographs and card resting upon his lap catching his tears as they fell. The ink ran across the cardstock, smudging the letters, and the photographs swelled and peeled away from their backings.

There was nothing Christine could say to ebb his tears, so she sat at his feet and rested her head against his bony knee so that she felt every sob that rang through his body.

At long last, the sobs turned to sniffles, and he dared to ask, “Well, what are you still doing here? Have I not cried enough to sate your sadistic pleasure?”

She sighed. “Oh, Erik, my poor dear, I have no intention of leaving you.”

“I’m afraid,” he said through sniffs, “that I don’t quite understand.”

She reached up and collected the photographs. They were thoroughly ruined, wet as they were. She tossed them into the fire. “Never mind, Erik. Let us pretend this night never happened.”

“I don’t -”

She took his hand and guided it to her hair. Cautiously, he laced his hand through the soft curls as she spoke: “It was a misunderstanding, Erik. That’s all. But I am here, and I am not going anywhere. So, please… don’t think about it anymore.”

The last of the photographs burnt up in the embers.

Chapter Text

Gift Two
"The Palomino Fino"

One of Erik’s most annoying habits was his ability to pretend something terrible had never actually occurred. It was the source of much of Christine’s distress, especially in the beginning period of their relationship – what with the whole Opera house fiasco and subsequent chandelier crash – and still at present Erik acted like he had no clue what she was talking about when she brought up the untimely death of the Comte Philippe de Chagny.

But it was this same annoying trait that Christine found herself ever thankful for, as by the next morning Erik seemed to have completely forgotten his tears. He was standoffish, but that wasn’t unusual for him per se… he had moods where he alternated between overtly affectionate and downright miserable. He hardly spoke a word to her before he left to God-knows-where for ‘work’, but his eyes were not red or bloodshot, so she assumed he was okay.

With Erik gone, though, Christine found the day stretching before her imposingly. The days were so long and boring without him… but somehow they seemed all the longer when he was there. Something about the way he stared at her as she ate, golden burning eyes unmoving from her form as she tried to chew her food with a mouth as dry as the desert. She felt like a specimen under his intense observation, and every second under his stony gaze seemed like an hour.

Bored, she wandered into the kitchen and poked through the cabinets for something to nibble on. Erik always made sure the kitchen was well stocked so she didn’t go hungry when he was gone. She opened the cellar – ha – door and climbed down the ladder, to the lower cellar where the perishables were kept… and where Erik kept his vast wine collection, too, apparently.

How many bottles does he have down here?! Christine wondered as she perused the racks. He never drank in front of her… and secretly she had always wondered if he could even smell anything, what with the whole nose thing. Was she to find out after all this time that Erik was really a wine connoisseur? The caps showed the wines to be of extremely rare vintages and collections… is this where the twenty thousand franc salary went every month?

She plucked a bottle off the rack at random and read the label: Amontillado, 100% Palomino Fino. Interesting, she supposed, but she wasn’t going to pretend she knew anything about liquor beyond the fact it was some sort of sherry. What caught her attention about it, after all, was the the color of the liquid.

It was a deep amber - the same shade as Erik’s eyes… the same shade as his pleading, threatening, adoring eyes…

An idea brewed in her mind. Perhaps it wouldn’t be as bad if he were to just eat with her? Then he would at least have something else to focus his attention on besides her. She thought on it for a moment…

Erik, on his ‘work’ days, typically was gone for anywhere between five to eight hours at a time. Sometimes he would be gone for twelve hours, but those were infrequent days, and he’d come home from those looking like he’d walked the length of the globe. There was no way of knowing what sort of day today would be, but if she planned it right, there shouldn’t be a problem, should there? Of course not.

With her mind firmly made up and a plan in place, she held the bottle firmly in one hand and carefully climbed back up the ladder to the kitchen to begin. She was going to cook him the greatest meal he’d ever been served, and he was going to eat it, if it was the last thing she did!

--

He didn’t come home until the next morning.

She had tried to wait up for him, with the table set and the appetizers out and ready, but exhaustion had gotten the best of her and she’d fallen asleep at her place setting. The sound of the door opening and his footsteps upon the wooden planks in the hallway were all the warning she had before he appeared in the dining room archway.

“You’re home,” she yawned, lifting her head and blinking her bleary eyes. “I made – uh, breakfast, I guess.”

He glanced at the table spread in confusion, and took in the vast number of dishes set out before him. “Were you very hungry without me?”

“Oh, no, I already ate,” she admitted with embarrassment. “But I figured you would be hungry when you came home, and thought I could treat you to a meal you didn’t cook yourself. You always make food for me, so I thought -”

“Christine doesn’t like it when Erik cooks her food?” Erik asked. Christine could see his bottom lip quivering below the cut of the mask. "Christine hates Erik's food so much she had to cook her own?"

“No, Erik, that’s not what I said,” Christine said imploringly. “Please, just listen to me before you -”

“Christine thinks Erik doesn’t listen to her?” His shoulders sank. “Oh, Christine, is Erik truly that horrible to you?”

“Erik, please!” Christine cried. She gestured to the table. “Please, just sit down and eat!”

He stared at the table in confusion. “Where?”

He was looking at his usual place setting. Normally it was empty, but this time Christine had taken special care to place all the dishes close to his end and had taken it upon herself to put a hearty serving of the main course on his plate.

“Right there, in your seat, dear,” Christine said desperately.

“But all the food is at this end of the table,” Erik said. “We should switch, so you don’t have to reach for it.”

“The food is for you, Erik,” Christine attempted to explain. “I put it there so you could eat it.”

“Is-is there something wrong with it?” he sputtered. “Oh, my poor Christine, did I leave you with rotten groceries? Has the food gone bad? I wouldn’t blame you for not wanting to eat it…”

Dejectedly, he sat himself down at the seat finally and picked up his fork. Christine could see tears pricking at his eyes, even as he dutifully stabbed into the coq au vin.

A part of her wanted to reassure him that she wasn’t upset with him, and that she wasn’t forcing him to eat the food because it went bad. She wanted to make him understand that sometimes she just wanted to do nice things for him for a change, instead of the other way around.

And yet – he was eating the food, wasn’t he? She couldn’t really tell if he was enjoying it, as his mask covered up all of his face save his mouth, and he was shoveling the food into his mouth as if their love depended on it. She decided not to say anything, and settled for just watching him eat to see if he made any grimaces of disgust.

When his plate was completely clear, he lifted his watery eyes to her. “May I be excused, please?”

And oh, if he didn’t sound like a child! “You may, Erik – but first, dear, did you like it?”

“Yes, it was exquisite,” he said.

“Did you even taste it?”

“I – of course - ” he stumbled over his answer. “Anything Christine cooks is exquisite.”

“Did you like what I did with the chicken?”

“Yes, Christine, it was exquisite.” He paused. “What did you braise it in?”

“Sherry,” she said.

His eyes flicked back to the empty plate. Something was bothering him, she could tell. “What type?”

Christine fetched the bottle from the kitchen and presented it before him. He took the glass in his hands, mouth agape.

“You – you used this?!”

Christine cowered before him. He sounded genuinely upset. “Is something wrong?”

“Wrong? Wrong!” Erik steamed. “This is a sixty-nine year old bottle of wine! A pure palomino fino! An antique amontillado! And you used it for some rancid chicken!”

The chicken, of course, was not rancid, but Christine figured that point was moot by now. “I’m so sorry, Erik, I didn’t know!”

“Of course you didn’t know! You never know!” Erik sneered. “You hurt me, and you hurt me, and you hurt me, and you - never - know!”

He rose from the table in disgust, flinging the bottle in her direction. She hastily caught it before it hit the ground.

“Erik, please!” she called as he stormed out of the room. “Forgive me, please!”

He spun on his heel. “Of course I forgive you, you little viper! I have to, don’t I? And that’s what makes you so wicked! Christine knows how much Erik loves her, and so she knows that she can do whatever she wants to him because he’ll always forgive her!” He suddenly reached out and grabbed her wrist in his vice-like skeletal grasp, and pressed her hand against his thumping chest. “Do you feel my heart? Do you feel how much it beats for you? Just imagine, then, how much poor foolish Erik loves you! - and know, Christine, you could stick a stake in his heart and he would still forgive you for it!”

He flung her wrist aside. “But I’m afraid, Christine, that I’m hardly in the mood to grovel on the floor this morning! You’ll have to excuse me, as I have found my humor unexpectedly soured...”

Without another moment’s hesitation, he turned back around and stormed out of the house, disappearing back into the abyssian darkness of the Opera’s lowest cellars.

Chapter Text

Gift Three
"The Nightcap"

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S JOURNAL

I think it has been a week since Erik left. I do not know where he went or if he ever shall return. In all honesty, though, I have not yet checked outside of the house to see if he has hanged himself from the cellar rafters in a fit of despair. I am afraid of knowing. And I hardly know that it’s actually been a week since the time I’ve seen him last; all the timepieces have since stopped because I did not know how to rewind them. There is no setting of sun or rising of moon in this dark dungeon below the Earth to let me know of the passing of the days… oh, how much like a tragic opera my life has become! Is this how Erik spent his years down here? No wonder…

Madness picks at the edge of my mind. It is hard for it not to. I am so afraid down here; there are rats, and spiders, and other tiny beady-eyed dark bugs that move around so quickly I can’t tell what they are. There is no sound down here but the sound of my own fearful breathing. And it is so cold – so terribly cold – that I have stolen all the blankets from Erik’s room out of desperation. Even now, I have wrapped myself in his scarlet cloak to write this. It has his stench but it is so warm that I am forcing myself to bear with it for the time being.

And I am so hungry! My stomach makes that clear to me at increasingly frequent intervals. But now all the food really has gone bad, and I am left to pinch off the mold from the bread loaves or else risk starving.

I pray Erik returns soon, with a heavy bag of fresh groceries laden down on either arm…

--

It was the middle of the night when Christine awoke with a start.

There were soft footsteps in the hallway outside her door, trailing away now so soft that the sound faded into nothingness. But still! There had been that brief sound… after a week of silence, it was no wonder she jumped at the first slight sound she heard.

She leapt out of bed and ran to the door in the span of a heartbeat. Wrenching open the door, she was able to catch a glimpse of a person’s form before it disappeared into the other room.

“Erik?” she called, following him around the corner.

She found him standing like a child with his hand in the cookie jar, in the middle of the parlor. His mask was off, he had his nightshirt and nightcap on, and his satin pillow tucked securely under his arm.

“Christine…” he said, uncertain.

So many things ran through her mind. Where had he been? Was he okay? Where did they stand now?

In the end, she only asked one thing: “What are you doing out here?”

“It -” he grimaced, as if steeling himself to give an answer she wouldn’t like, “is a touch cold in my room.”

The realization dawned on Christine. “I’m so sorry – I took all your blankets…”

“Christine has nothing to apologize for,” Erik said delicately. He gestured to the fireplace. “I’ll be quite fine on the chaise out here.”

Christine regarded the chaise. “Are you sure? It seems pretty narrow… and… short…”

“It’s actually a lot bigger than it seems,” Erik assured her. He laid himself down on it, on his side, curling his long legs up to his chest so that only the sharp points of his knees and his feet hung off it. “Look, Erik fits perfectly.”

Christine frowned. He certainly did not fit perfectly… “Erik… just let me give you your blankets back.”

“But then you would be cold.” His logic was infallible as always.

“But they’re your blankets,” Christine reasoned reluctantly. A selfish part of her knew he was right; she would be cold without them. “Then you could sleep on your bed instead of this little bench.”

“Nonsense. I won’t have you catching cold down here.”

“Well,” Christine said, putting her hands on her hips defiantly, “then we’ll just have to share.”

“Share-?” Erik questioned, genuinely confused. “Christine, I don’t see any reason in cutting the blankets in two.”

“No, share,” she explained. “The blankets. And the bed. Together.”

His face blanched as he caught her reasoning, and his face creased into one of disgust. “You… must be delirious, Christine. You don’t know what you’re saying right now.”

“I do very well know what I’m saying,” she said, extending her hand to him impatiently. “Now, come, and let’s go to bed.” For good measure, because she knew he wouldn’t be able to argue with it, she added, “I’m tired, too.”

He followed her without complaint after that. Sometimes she felt bad… she had lived with him for so long at this point that she knew exactly what to say to get him to do what she wanted. It was sort of like manipulation… but was it really, if he was the one who manipulated her first?

And the truth was she was tired, like she said! She wanted to sleep, and she didn’t want to have that feeling of guilt in the back of her mind that he was lying out there, on the narrow chaise, all because she had stolen his blankets…

She made him lie down first, because he was so stiff and dramatic; and when he refused to relax even when he was snuggly tucked in, she went to the kitchen to retrieve the opened Palomino Fino – the only thing that hadn’t expired yet - and two glasses.

“A nightcap,” she proposed when she had returned to his bedside, pouring a tiny amount and offering it to him, careful to keep the label turned away from him. Perhaps he wouldn’t recognize -

“You really know how to rub salt in a man’s wounds, don’t you?” he moped, but accepted the glass anyway. Of course he’d know. Erik always knew.

Christine sighed. “I meant to grab the milk, but it’s all gone sour…”

“I’m sure it has,” he said moodily, turning his eyes down to the glass. “I’ll pick some more up in the morning.”

She poured her own and sat on the edge of the bed beside him.

“Erik,” Christine said after a long while. “I’m sorry about the sherry.”

“It’s not about the sherry, Christine.”

“Oh,” she said only. She gazed into the deep amber of her glass and swirled it slightly. Erik’s eyes…

“Would you pour me another, Christine?” Erik said, interrupting her thoughts. He held out his empty glass to her. At her questioning gaze, he added, “The bottle’s already open; it’ll be vinegar in another week’s time. It seems a shame to let such a priceless vintage go to waste.”

There was no acid in his remark; no bitterness nor acerbity. Just a plain statement of fact, with but a touch of mild mellowness within.

So she poured another glass for him, but not for her, as she was still working on her first. He requested her once more after that second glass, until his eyelids drooped over his red-lined eyes and he fell against the pillows of her bed in defeat.

Tired herself, Christine re-corked the bottle and set it upon the one nightstand in the room. Putting out the light, she crawled into bed and shuffled herself deep under the warm covers. Her own eyes began to drift closed, and her breathing began to even out…

She felt a hand brush against her thigh under the quilt. It was the faintest touch, as light as the hair of a feather, but then it swept further upwards and inwards -

“Erik?” she said, instantly alert. “What are you doing?”

He didn’t answer, but the hand sprang away. She rolled over to face him.

He was already crying.

“Erik!” she exclaimed, sitting up to examine him better. “My dear, what’s gotten into you?”

He tucked his face under the damp linens. “Forgive me!”

“Did you think we were going to -”

“What was I supposed to think?” he wailed, voice muffled under the blanket. “You led me into your bed, you plied me with wine, you implored me to lie next to you… oh, Christine, you vitriolic seductress! Tease and temptress! Surely you knew what I would think! You had me fooled, as was surely your game – you made a sure fool out of me! So go on, laugh about it to yourself! Laugh about what a fantastic imbecile you’ve made of your poor foolish Erik!”

“Erik!” Christine cried. She pulled on the blankets he was threatening to suffocate himself with. “Erik, please!”

“Let me die!” he moaned into the sheets. “Let this be my shroud! Do not uncover me – please, Christine, you may laugh and jest but please do not look upon me right now! I cannot bear the shame!”

“Dear, you have done nothing -” shameful, Christine meant to say, but of that she could not quite make herself believe. They were an unwed couple, of dubious legitimacy, together only because she had chosen to stay with him in exchange for the lives of Raoul and the Persian. She could not leave without his escort, and by all definitions of the word she was his prisoner. Yes, perhaps she did harbor feelings of love towards him – but how authentic could those feelings be when one did not have another choice? “Oh, Erik, please do not blame yourself for this misunderstanding.”

“Misunderstanding!” he howled. “Always a misunderstanding with you!”

She could stand his self deprecation no more. She reached out and wrenched the sheets out of his iron grip, and yanked them down off his face.

His naked, tear-stained face contorted in rage at her refusal to obey. “Must my pain be exhibited for your amusement? Damn you, Christine! Is this what you truly desire?”

He turned on his side and pressed his face into the pillow, satin lining already sopping with his snot and tears. “Am I really so horrible that you must do these things to me? Ache after ache – do I really deserve no reprieve?”

“I want you to breathe,” she insisted quietly, but she knew he wouldn’t listen to her at this point. “I want you to sleep well under the covers and be warm…”

“An entire life spent enduring the never-ending siege of arrows and slings,” he muttered, “and yet yours are the only ones that ever truly sting…”

His breathing leveled out and she realized he must have fallen asleep, exhausted by his own desolate temper. Gingerly, she crept to her side of the bed and laid herself down as well, and then willed herself to follow suit.

Chapter Text

Gift Four
"The Blanket"

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S JOURNAL

I am nobody’s wife.

I must remember that! Erik and I have not yet had a wedding, and so we are not married and I am not his wife. It is suitably improper to be carrying on the way we have been… for every night for the past month we have slept together in the same bed. Nothing has come of it, of course – that is the hill I vow to die on, since locked down here I can hardly make haste to a confessional! I must, therefore, be diligent with my virtue, and honorable with my ways. My thoughts are dismal and my hope for my future is bleak, and I sorely doubt I shall ever have a chance to reconcile my sins before my death.

For his part, Erik has not attempted anything beyond the first night. I have not ‘tempted’ or ‘teased’ him with the wine again; and he has made good on his word to keep the kitchen stocked with adequate milk for the nights when dreams are hard to fall into.

All the same, I must salvage what remains of my virtue, and rid the situation of temptation – for the both of us. To do that, though, I see only two ways: marry the poor man, or remove him from my bed. And as I have not the resources (nor the strength) to do the first, I shall need to do the latter.

--

“Erik, I fear I am getting pneumonia.”

She hated herself for even saying it. But it had the intended effect. After copious sessions of crying and speeches of self-hatred, she finally got the response she was seeking:

“Whatever shall we do? Hmm... I can’t very well let you catch your death down here.”

“What if,” Christine said, pretending like the idea just came to her all of a sudden, “I were to return to performing?”

He scratched his terrible chin. “How would you do that? The Opera house is all the way up there, and we are all the way down here.”

“You could bring me up,” she suggested after a moment of feigned deliberation, “and then, when the performance is over, you could bring me back down.”

He considered that for a long moment. “How would this help with the pneumonia?”

“It is so dreadfully damp down here,” Christine said. “For you it is not an issue, because you are out and about most of the day – but I spend all day and all night here. The moisture is getting to my lungs. I think, perhaps, I just need some fresh air, a couple times a day.”

“Fresh air…?” He shook his head. “No. The Opera house is too stifling for that. The Bois would be more suitable.”

“We can go to the Bois, too,” Christine said.

Sometimes, with all his emotional meltdowns and tantrums, she forgot just how intelligent he really was. 

“What is this ‘too,’ Christine? Why must it be the Bois and anything else?” Erik asked, narrowing his eyes. “Unless this is not about fresh air at all…?”

It wasn’t worth insulting him further, trying to deceive him. So she braced her shoulders, and held her head up high, and came straight out with it: “I would like very much to return to my position, Erik. I have trained for far too many years – have worked far too hard - to just let my talent go to waste as I wither away down here. I know it will cause some logistical issues for you, but this arrangement we have is hardly a perfect fit for us both, as it is.”

He studied her. “And that’s it?”

“That’s it,” she said.

“That’s all you want?”

“That’s all I want.”

Intently his eyes pierced hers, as if to stare into her soul. Long they stood, locked in that match, resolute and serious. And then he shrugged. “As you wish, then. You’ll start again on Tuesday. We’ll prepare you for the role of Inês de Castro.”

“But the company is currently putting on Lohengrin, wouldn’t it be better if I prepared for a role such as Elsa?” There was no point in acting humble and pretending Erik wouldn’t be pulling strings to get her the leading role.

Clearly, though, she had missed his point. “They can rehearse that Wagner drivel all they want, but I’ll be damned if I let them reveal it to the public. You will be Inês de Castro because that will be what is actually performed.”

She had long since learned not to doubt him on such matters.

The matter finished, then, she turned to leave the room.

“What about the Bois?” he asked suddenly, before she could escape the conversation. “Will we still be going to the Bois?”

Christine waved him off weakly. How to admit the pneumonia had been nothing but a ruse? “I should think I will be fine without it. The Opera will do plenty good for my lungs.”

“Oh,” he said sadly. “But you will let me know if you change your mind?”

“Yes, dear.”

--

The rehearsals swept her away. They were just as exhilarating as she remembered, and just as exhausting, as well.

And yet it was so very lonely to return to the company. She had disappeared off the the face of the Earth for months, only to return and be handed the leading role on a silver platter. Not only that, but the entire show was changed for her. It was not a look that made her popular with the others; the ballet and chorus girls she had come up with no longer paid her any mind, and other members would often whisper behind their hands about the curious circumstances that surrounded her re-entrance to the company.

Living with no other person besides Erik for the past how many months had lulled her into a false sense of importance, despite her best attempts to avoid it. She found herself stunned and hurt on her first week when none of the girls would respond to her attempts at conversation. She had been the center of Erik’s universe for so long, had been showered with praise every second of the day; and now suddenly, here amongst the rest of the world, she felt so tiny and insignificant.

It was strange; on particularly long rehearsal days, she found herself longing to return home to Erik. His smothering attention had seemed so suffocating for so long, but now she looked forward to it…

It wasn’t love. She knew that. She loved him and she knew this particular feeling wasn’t love. This was a reminder of the confines of their relationship, and of the strange entanglement they had each other in. Perhaps if Erik was less stifling with his attention… if she didn’t have him hovering around her all the time… staring at her with his sad puppy-dog eyes as she tried to fall asleep…

--

She pillaged the costume department to find it: seven skeins of soft wool yarn in a variety of muted colors. She wasn’t quite sure what colors he would like, but if she was being honest she knew he’d be happy with anything just because she picked them out.

And so she began; on her solitary rehearsal breaks, when the other girls would talk amongst themselves about things they knew nothing about, she would sit herself upon the floor, fold her legs under her skirt, take out her yarn, and crochet for however long she could. Her bag of yarn she carried up from the house, much to Erik’s curiosity, but she explained it away easy enough as a simple hobby that women do.

Once, the nosy ballet girl Meg Giry had inquired as to what exactly she was doing.

“I’m making a blanket,” Christine replied.

“Surely the Comte de Chagny can afford blankets of his own,” Meg scoffed. “And I hardly think he’d like that ratty one you’re making that’s covered in dust from the stage, anyway.”

That made Christine laugh! Without thinking, she replied curtly, “Who says this is for the Comte?”

And the rumors went mad from there.

--

In just a few short weeks, the blanket was finished and Christine was ready to give it to him.

She was very much aware that her previous attempts to surprise him with a gift had not gone over well, to say the least. But Erik knew about the blanket already; he had seen her working on it, no doubt, from his secret hidey-holes around the theater, and he had seen her carry it up and down the stairs each day. He had to know it was for him.

So that night, when he was sitting in his favorite armchair by the fireplace, she kneeled before him and offered it up to him.

“Is this what you’ve been working on?” he asked bemusedly.

She nodded, waiting for his reaction.

He splayed his long boney fingers over it, feeling the soft threads. Then he picked it up and held it up, a little bit, before him. “The craftmanship is… well, you did very well for your first time, Christine.”

She blushed. Certainly she already knew she wasn’t the most skilled at this! She’d crocheted little more than scarves and change purses before – never anything this large and intricate. He didn’t need to make a comment about it.

But then he was handing it back to her, which made her blush scarlet. Was he really rejecting her gift? Did he think it wasn’t good enough? He was a man of fine taste, sure, but she had thought – if it was from her –

Suddenly Meg Giry’s words came back to haunt her. I hardly think he’d like that ratty one you’re making.

Oh, this was a horrible mistake! She was so ashamed! She was all but ready to throw it in the fire when Erik’s calm voice drifted down to her, unaware of her mortified turmoil.

“Would you like me to wrap it around your shoulders for you, Christine?”

“My shoulders?” she asked.

“Why – well, yes, dear. You’re shaking. Are you cold?”

Yes, she was shaking, but not because she was cold! But better to be forthright with him, and ask him, honestly, “Do you really think the blanket is so bad?”

“Is that what’s bothering you?” He reached down and touched her chin to tilt her head up to him. He smiled slightly, and for once his rotten features didn’t look quite so horrible. “Christine, it’s the most perfect blanket I’ve ever seen.”

Why was he being so nice? That wasn’t like him. There could only be one reason… he hated the blanket and didn’t want to tell her! “Then why don’t you want it?”

“Why don’t I…” he stared at the blanket in her lap. “It’s yours, Christine. Why would you want me to want it? I’m afraid I don’t understand your thinking…”

Oh.

“I made it for you,” she explained softly, still a little hurt, “because I stole all your blankets.”

“Oh,” he said, and then set his eyes upon the blanket again with fresh sight. “Oh, Christine, I...” His voice broke.

He leaned down, slowly, to touch it again, and she lifted it up so it’d be easier for him to reach.

“It’s - very -” He had tears in his eyes...

Oh, no. Christine knew that look. Something had gone dreadfully wrong again. “Erik, what’s wrong?”

“Christine…” Now the tears were really flowing. He looked the picture of anguish. “Am I so despicable?”

“Wait, Erik, I sense there’s been a -” she stopped herself before she could say miscommunication, recalling the way he had reacted the last time she’d said it. But what was she supposed to say instead?

“Christine is disgusted with Erik,” he whimpered, writhing his boney fingers into the holes of the blanket and clutching it tight in his fists. He rocked himself slightly in his seat. “She knows what he thinks at night, as she lies asleep beside him...! And although she is entirely innocent, he is not – but, Christine, believe me - please, Christine, you must believe me – I have never touched you! Not ever!”

That was assuredly untrue, as Christine remembered the first night they’d spent together in great detail, but she let him continue on his sobbing tirade regardless.

“But that's what it must be... Christine cannot bear to spend another night beside poor hideous Erik!” He held the blanket to his chest – then to his nose socket, where he inhaled thickly. “It smells just like her… but it won’t for long! Every moment with her is so short and so fleeting... why do you torture me like this, Christine?”

“I’m not trying to torture you,” she said weakly. “I just thought you would like it if you had a new blanket. And then you could go back to your own bed…”

“I know exactly why you gave this to me, damn it! Do you think me dense, Christine?” Tears were still streaming down his face, but his breathing was less wild now. He dropped the blanket in his lap and held his face in his hands. “There has been no miscommunication this time...”

She shook her head, not understanding. “Erik, you’re upset -”

“And I have no reason to be, I know.” His voice had darkened substantially, and was crystal clear as well - as if he hadn't just bawled his eyes out. He lifted his face up, and Christine saw it was contorted in a restrained sort of agony - a far cry from the inconsolable sobbing mess he'd been mere moments ago.

He turned from her, only a quiver on his bottom lip reminding her of his tears. He locked his jaw. “Tell me, Christine, how much does it bother you that we’ve shared a bed for nearly two months? Because of – what was it? – ah, yes, the blankets. Tell me, if you please?”

“I -” What was she to say? “It hasn’t been the most comfortable of arrangements…”

“That’s what I thought,” he said curtly. He stood from the chair, fisting the blanket in his white-knuckled grasp, and strode the length of the parlor. At the archway, he paused and looked back with a bite of bitterness blazing in his eyes.

“Thank you for the blanket, Christine. Truly. It is perhaps the loveliest thing I've ever received. And - I do hope you can finally get a peaceful night of sleep after this, just like you wanted. Good night.”

Chapter Text

Gift Five
"The Vow"
(Part I)

She didn’t lie, apparently. She really was getting pneumonia.

It happened all at once, in the course of a night – the night, in fact, after their last conversation. She went to bed on her own, for the first time in months, and subsequently found herself shivering under the sheets. Despite being as cold as he was, Erik still had somehow managed to be a source of body heat that she was now sorely missing. Without him, the bed was frigid and cold, and that combined with the near-constant anxious state her body had been running in for the past year left her over-exhausted and drained.

It was one of those nights, she could tell, as she flipped over and over, gradually feeling more toilworn and weary, that she was not going to be recovering from for a long time.

And so it was, to her terrible dismay; the morning after found Christine anguishing in a fit of malaise, fever, and fatigue, coughing herself into wakefulness.

Her rattling coughs were loud enough to wake a small village, and yet as she blinked open her bleary eyes she was surprised to find the house’s only other occupant not standing over her ill form. That, even more so than the sudden sickness, troubled her greatly.

Where is he? Christine wondered, momentarily forgetting about her sore throat to push herself up and glance about the room. The door was closed and nothing was disturbed – there wasn’t even a tray upon her bedside table! Erik had to have heard her fitful sleep… hadn’t he cared? She would have thought he’d come running to her aid the second he heard her in distress…

Perhaps she had misjudged him? It was hard to believe that she had, after all these months. She needn’t ever ask for a thing - Erik would place the world at her feet if he even thought she would desire it.

So, really, where was he?

So greatly did this bother Christine, that she ignored her burning cheeks and labored breaths to stand up and don her dressing gown, and make her way out of her room and to the hall. Perhaps Erik was out in another part of the house… in the kitchen, perchance, putting together one of his lavish feasts for her to nibble on?

Her suspicions turned out to be exactly correct, she found, as she crept closer to the kitchen and heard the tell-tale sounds of a knife clacking against the cutting board, a spoon scraping against the bottom of a pot… she tried to sniff the air to tell by the aroma what he was cooking, but her nose was so stuffed up that she just ended up making a rather unladylike snort.

Timidly, she entered the kitchen. Last night’s argument was fresh in her mind and she was nervous about how he would act. Erik was always so unpredictable, even more so in these recent days. Oh, why did she ever get the thought in her head to try to give him a gift? Stupid girl! She should have known better! Erik never reacted well to anything…

Even in our bliss, Christine realized, standing in the doorway as she watched Erik move brusquely about the counters, apparently not noticing her yet, even in our happiest moments – he still finds fault with something.

And it was true. Erik loved nothing more than music and Christine’s pearly voice – but even when she was singing for him, he’d stop her now and then to scold her for some minute flaw he’d found with her technique. Nevermind that she was a professional and had the capacity to interpret a work in her own way – nevermind the concept of artistic differences - if she didn’t sing it to Erik’s exact standards, it wasn’t good enough!

At that moment, he finished arranging all the food on the plate, and at last looked in her direction. If he was surprised at all to find her there, the mask made it impossible to tell.

“Good morning,” she said, offering a weak smile.

He said nothing in response, but pointed towards the dining room, with the clear instruction: take your seat.

She did as she was commanded, and he followed her with the plate in hand. Smoothing out the table cloth from where she had disturbed it, she found him hovering above her. The little mouth she could see was set in a stony frown.

“About last night…” she started.

“Eat,” he said only, dropping the platter in front of her, silverware clattering against the porcelain, before immediately sweeping himself out of the room.

What…?

Tears pricked at her eyes as she regarded the food before her. Although expertly made, as always, it was a simple meal of corned beef hash and milk porridge… not French in the slightest, but not typical of his regular exciting and exotic meals either. Instead, she recognized it for what it was; food meant to be comforting, but not to be enjoyed.

So he had noticed she was sick. But then why the cold shoulder?

Even in our bliss… have we ever been in bliss?

--

In the late afternoon, after she had taken a nap and was feeling a little better, she rose to find Erik sitting in his favorite armchair in the parlor.

He stiffened slightly when she entered but never tore his gaze from his book. It was the old canary-bound one he’d been working on for the past few days; he seemed incredibly engrossed in it, leaning over it with his neck bent like one of his poor strangled victims. Previous prompting as to what it was about afforded her no answers; the last time she had asked, when he’d been in better humor, he had merely laughed to himself and told her it was nothing she’d be interested in. Subsequently, she’d picked up the book after he’d left the room and read the title – “The Life and Adventures of Miss Fanny Hill” – but flipping through the pages revealed nothing as it was all in English.

It must be something terribly fascinating and profound, Christine thought to herself at the time, seeing how intently focused Erik is on its text.

Now he was still reading it, still studiously absorbed in the faded print. She padded softly across the lush carpet, so as to not disturb him anymore than she already had, to the short and narrow chaise from so many nights ago. The fire was ablaze in the hearth, and Erik had been right, back then; it was quite pleasantly warm at this spot.

For a good few hours she contented herself to sit there quietly, pensively musing as she stared into the flames as they licked at the bricks of the hearth. All the sound in the world was Erik’s quiet breaths, which came as sad little sighs, and also the occasional turn of a page of his book. Christine struggled to maintain her own breaths, nose thoroughly stuffed-up with her sickness, and forced herself to control her exhales so as not to be too loud…

But one can only sit in silence for so long before a question comes to them, begging to be asked. She sat on it, for half an hour, pondering its wording in the hearth flames, before finally mustering the strength to interrupt her companion’s steady reading.

“Erik, why are we not yet married?”

The man in question glanced up only briefly from his book, and offered a curt, distracted remark before returning his rapt attention back to the text: “I wasn’t aware you wished to be.”

Christine frowned, looking back to the fire. Her finger made circles in the velvet lining of the chaise as she pondered his cold and strange response. Wasn’t aware I wished to be? she mused. I truly would like to know how Erik’s mind works one of these days…

“I gave you my word, though, didn’t I?” Christine asked, daring to interrupt him again. “Back then…?”

He grunted, and flipped a page. “You were coerced.”

“But I chose freely?”

“No, you did not.”

“I wasn’t aware…” that it mattered to you. At the time, he’d pressed her for an answer, and threatened to kill hundreds of people depending on her choice. Why would it matter to him if her choice was free, if he was the one who had issued the ultimatum?

And yet - she knew why. He was merely human, with feelings like any other man. He wanted her to choose him because she loved him, not because of anything else. But the problem here was that she did love him, and she had already chosen him, and yet he still refused to do anything about it.

So she asked him outright: “Why don’t you ask me to choose now?”

“There is no point…” he sighed, furrowing his brow as he seemed to have lost his spot on the page.

“Are you afraid I will say no?”

He slammed his book shut. “Must you badger me with these incessant questions?” He gripped the book tightly in his hands, like an amulet of protection against her. “I will make myself clear only once. I am not afraid of your answer, Christine. It is just that any answer you give to me right now regarding this situation frankly does not matter.”

“How can that be?” Christine sputtered. “The grasshopper – the scorpion -”

“Is that your idea of a romantic proposal?” Erik sneered at her. “Would you rather your handsome young Vicomte have bestowed you with those critters instead? Ah, he is so rich – even more so now as the Comte! - perhaps he would have fitted their eye sockets with little beady diamonds! You would like that, then, wouldn’t you?”

“Erik, you aren’t listening…”

“No, you aren’t listening to me, Christine!” He leaned forward in his seat, pointing an accusing finger in her direction. “I asked: is that your idea of a romantic proposal?”

“N-no…”

“Do you find it charming that I had to lock your boy up in my torture chamber, just to have you seriously consider my proposal?”

“That’s not -”

“And what if I had forgone the scorpion and grasshopper completely? Rather tawdry and gaudy ornaments, I must apologize for that. Perhaps, instead, if I had dropped to my knee that night and held high the most glorious ring in the world, fitted with the finest diamonds man has ever mined, just like any other man would have done – would that have been more to your liking? Mind you, Raoul – yes, I do know his name - Raoul would have still been locked in the torture chamber, because for some reason I don’t know how to get a woman to say she loves me without twisting her arm behind her back!”

She opened her mouth to answer but found no voice with which to respond.

His disposition swiveled suddenly, growing morosely calm.

“No, I don’t want an answer, Christine,” Erik said tiredly. “I cannot trust any answer you give. Even now, you are locked down here with me against your own free will. No – no -” He held up a finger as she moved to protest. “You have no choice, Christine. I have removed that privilege from you. Not intentionally, you see, but all the same – you cannot make an honest choice as long as you remain down here with me.”

“So…” Christine said, trying to understand. “So… even if I were to say I love you, you wouldn’t accept it?”

“No, Christine. You cannot love me – not as we are.”

“So it wouldn’t mean anything, if I said I love you?”

Erik closed his eyes and took a long breath. “No… I daresay it would mean a lot, but probably not in the way you intended.”

“What would it mean, then?”

His face twitched – as if to contort in rage at her never-ending slew of questions – but softened just as suddenly. He set the book aside and folded his hands in his lap, very delicately, as if a small flower were pressed between his palms and he didn’t want to crush the petals. “It would be nothing more than a reminder of all the cruel and inhumane things I have done to you.”

“But I do love you.”

He flinched. “Please, Christine, try to understand. I just cannot accept that.”

“You want to, though?”

“Yes, Christine. Desperately.”

“What if you were to give me a key?” Christine asked seriously. “And then I could be free to come and go as I pleased, that way you would know I am not being coerced when I say -”

Erik held up his hand and let out a humorless laugh. “We have tried that already, if you recall. You might remember that you attempted to flee the moment the first opportunity arose. Forgive me if I have trouble trusting you with a key to this house ever again.”

“But -”

“That will be all, Christine,” Erik said, picking up his book and splitting it back open in a decisive way. “We will leave any thoughts of love and marriage to our own pathetic imaginations. Now, let me read my little book in peace…”

--

Oh, there just had to be a way to convince him that she loved him!

She knew it was a dangerous game. Every time she tried to do something nice for him, it ended as a spectacular failure. Not only that – oh, but she was so wicked for even thinking this –

The thing was, Erik had a point when he said that she couldn’t say she loved him if she didn’t have a choice otherwise. How could she know her feelings were real? She’d been locked – locked! – down here with him for nearly a full year, with barely any contact with anyone in the outside world. How could she not grow attached to the only other person left in her life, even if it was by his own diabolical orchestrations?

Thus! It wasn’t enough to prove to Erik that she loved him; she had to prove it to herself as well. But how to do that…?

Chapter Text

Gift Five
"The Vow"
(Part II)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S JOURNAL
(entry cont.)

Weeks of planning, and I have finally done it.

Everything is in place now. As the stagehands and the other ballet girls would say: all the cards have been drawn, all the dice have been rigged, and all the stakes have been called. It is just a matter of cutting the string and letting loose this terrifying scheme. It is a scheme just twisted enough to rival one of Erik’s own creation. I believe Erik will be furious; no, I rather know he will be furious with me. And yet I do believe this is truly the only way to go.

I came up with the idea soon after we spoke in the parlor that afternoon. I recovered quickly from my bout of illness, but Erik lapsed into it the day after. Oh, I hope he doesn’t read this - but he is positively dreadful when he is ill! He was still giving me the cold shoulder back then, but even under normal circumstances (whatever those may be) I doubt he would have told me of his symptoms.

It was by chance that I heard him collapse, in the middle of the night, in the wash room at the end of the hall. There was a tremendous clattering of soaps and toiletries that I found scattered around him on the tile floor when I arrived in the doorway. He spoke no word and answered no question I gave to him; and I feared him dead right then and there. I placed my hand on his neck as if I were a medical doctor and to my great relief I felt the gentle thrumming of his pulse.

He does not recall how he arrived in my bed, because his memory has lapsed for that time; but the truth is I carried him to my bed, and tucked him snuggly in my sheets. He was shivering and covered in little beads of sweat, so I figured he must have had a fever that broke at some point during the night. I ran to his macabre bedchamber to retrieve the quilt I had knitted for him and then laid it across his slumbering form, and then ran to the kitchen to pour him a glass of warm milk.

I stirred him for the milk, which he accepted like a child before drifting back into his sleep. I feared the dreams that such an illness would give him; on normal nights he suffers such terrible nightmares that he often wakes up screaming and sobbing. As it was, the milk must have quelled these hallucinations temporarily, as he had the best night of sleep I’d ever seen him have. Or perhaps it was the sickness that ceased his night terrors… maybe it would do Erik well for him to get sick more often?

Over the course of the next three days, I took care of Erik as sweetly as he had taken care of me for the past year. He was half-conscious for some of it, and in those lucid moments he protested adamantly against me doing anything for him at all. I managed to keep him fed, with the same sort of comfort food he had given me – nothing delicious nor impressive, but still something to ease the pangs of hunger and the scratch of the throat. Also – and Erik is thankfully ignorant to this as well! - I bathed him once. It was after that first night, when I had carried him to my bed and he reeked of sweat. I stripped him of his nightshirt and washed him with a sponge and basin… I did my best to remain proper with him, and only uncovered what absolutely had to be seen. That is to say – I have now seen every part of his body, but I did not let my gaze linger…

I sat up all night, watching over him. I do not know why he collapsed. He has never been a healthy man as long as I’ve known him, and I suspect it was more than just the sudden illness that caused his fall. I found medication bottles on the tile floor when I went to clean the mess up, but I do not know what the medications are. I do not know if they are the type to have created his health problems or if they are the type to treat them; and even now that he has recovered I’ve still not received an answer to that question. He says it ‘isn’t something I should concern myself with.’

And yet I should! I have never been more afraid than when I saw him on the wash room floor. What would I do if he were to die? I would be stuck down here! So it is only logical that I take an interest in his health. But even more so…

Even more so…

I have every right to be selfish. After all, Erik is my captor, my warden, my jailer, and I his prisoner. My life above his should be first on my mind, if that is truly all we are to each other.

So why is it, then, that the first thought in my head, upon seeing him on the floor, was not ‘Now I’m doomed to die down here, oh help me, Lord!’, but instead ‘Please, God, just let him be okay’?

It was that night, as I kept guard over Erik, ready to fend off the clutch of death should the reaper try to pay us a visit, that I realized what I had to do. As I wrote, my preparations are now in order. And Erik is well again, and our conversations have forgotten most of his ice-cold frigidness, and I truly believe that now is the time to at last snip the string…

Please, please, please, let Erik understand just this once…

--

She found him in the parlor, again perched over that little canary-bound book.

He seemed so peaceful that she nearly lost her nerve. Standing as she was, in the archway, unable to advance and unwilling to retreat, she settled on watching his still frame. He must have known she was standing there - sometimes she thought he truly had eyes on the back of his head -  but he made no indication or acknowledgement. He merely kept on reading, touching his fingers to his lips with interest as he seemed to take in a particularly thought-provoking passage.

There are so many ways for this to go wrong, Christine worried, shifting on her feet. If I backed out now -

What would happen if she backed out now? Everything would remain just the same. But would that be so terrible? Life had not been all that wretched for the past year. Cold, and lonely, perhaps, but definitely not loathsome and unbearable. Did she really want to ruin things with this insane plot?

It is true; life with Erik thus far has not been unbearable. But why settle for that? Why not strive for something more? Do I truly want to live a life that is merely 'bearable'?

That settled it. She broke through the threshold to the room, and rounded armchair upon which Erik sat. She kneeled before him, skirts pooling around her form. He didn’t look up, even when she placed her head on his knee.

“Erik,” she said, heart thumping in her chest. He had to feel it, didn’t he? She trained her eyes on the licking flames of the hearth to steady herself. Now or never… “May I ask you something?”

He turned a page in his book, and replied, distractedly, “You may ask me anything you wish, Christine.”

“Do you love me?”

He set his book down instantly at that and stared at her with an amused expression that wrought itself across his horrible features. “Really? You’re asking me that?”

“Yes,” Christine said, more confidently. He seemed in good humor today. Perhaps this wouldn't be as bad as she thought! She drew herself back and leveled her gaze with him. “Do you love me?”

“Of course! Do I not tell you this enough? You are my heart, my soul, my life… I love you more than words can say!”

“If things were different, then, would you marry me?”

The corners of his mouth twitched downward. “Different in what way?”

“In whatever way you think would matter,” Christine said, sensing the conversation slipping slightly out of her control. She reached for the reigns. “In whatever way could convince you that I do in fact love you.”

“Christine…” His hand slowly trailed up his chest to clutch his heart. “Oh, Christine… ”

“Well?”

“If I could rid myself of that annoying Christian concept of a conscience – yes, I suppose I would marry you, then.”

“But would that let you believe I loved you?”

“Of course not,” Erik frowned fully. “Nothing could ever make me believe that. We’ve talked about this before, Christine. You don’t have a -”

“But what if I did have a choice?”

From the folds of her skirt, she extracted a ring and held it up so Erik could see it clearly.

“I am asking you for your hand in marriage, Erik. I see it not as a burden nor as a favor, and I wish for you to not view it that way either.”

“Oh, sweet, lovely Christine… where did you even get this?”

“Truthfully… it’s but a prop, from the Opera,” Christine admitted. “I have no means for purchasing a real engagement ring. Please do not be offended -”

He plucked the ring from her fingers and turned it around several times, examining it as he spoke: “Very well, then, that this is not a real engagement ring, because this is not a real proposal! Now, up, Christine, get off your knees…”

“I will not, dear, until you hear the second part of what I have to say,” she said, placing her hands a little above either of his knees. “I have secured for us a time in the little white chapel of Montmartre for tomorrow before dawn. Raoul has been instructed to be waiting just outside, but he has not been told what or who to look for. There will be a hired cabriolet, too, waiting around the corner, although Raoul has not been told of that, either. God willing, Erik, if all goes right, he will be none the wiser, and will think nothing more of the morning than that some inconsiderate associate of his brother has stood him up. And yet, he and the cab will be there, should either of us come to our senses and choose – yes, choose, that wonderful word - to flee with him instead…”

“Either of us?” Erik asked seriously, failing to be amused by her attempt at levity. “Who helped you with this? I watched you very carefully during your rehearsals…!”

“The boxkeeper, Madame Giry,” Christine answered. “I spoke to her through her daughter Meg, during my breaks from my rehearsals. It took some time to arrange, given the circumstances, but I have managed to keep everything quite secret.”

Erik shook his head in exasperation. “Christine, whatever made you think this was a good idea?”

“We will be married at last,” Christine explained, “and without question of our love to one another. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

Erik stared at the ring in his hand.

And then turned his gaze up to her.

“These cruel gifts of yours,” he said, bottom lip quivering as his eyes filled with tears, “Christine, I beg of you to make them stop.”

“Erik, what’s the matter?” she fretted. “I did this for you to -”

“You wish to marry that boy after all, don’t you?” he accused. “At least you’re honorable about it, and you came to tell poor Erik face to face. But truly, Christine, you didn’t have to disguise it with such  an obvious and miserable lie…”

“Raoul? No, that’s not -”

“He’s a very dashing young boy,” Erik wept, hiding his face in his hands, one still clutching onto the golden ring. “Erik could never hope to compare. Oh, but he is such a poor excuse for a man! I can pretend no longer with you... and Erik can bear no longer to keep you here. This farce is at its end. Here, come with me.”

He suddenly stood and led her into an office that she had never seen before, even after living with him for a year. He rifled through some drawers in his desk, before removing a small envelope and handing it to her.

“There are forty thousand francs in this envelope. It is a small pittance compared to what the boy can provide for you, but it is all I have as a wedding gift.”

“Erik, I can’t accept this -”

“You won’t even accept a wedding gift from me?” Erik asked heartbrokenly. “Then – please - take it as your dowry. It’s money, Christine, and I want to give it to you.” Then, desperately, he added, “Or I can say I don’t wish for you to have it, and you can take it forcefully from me, as if I never wished for it at all. Would you like that more, Christine?”

Just like that, her heart shattered in a million pieces.

Again… how is it that he’s misunderstood again?! I can’t stand this anymore!

“Oh, what does it matter what I would like?!” Christine cried. She threw up her hands. “Why can’t you accept a single thing from me? Why must everything I do be underhanded and ill-intended? I am not an evil witch, Erik, I’m your wife – your living, breathing wife! Let me be a wife to you! Let us make it official in the eyes of the law! Let us be married in a real church, without question, without pause! Let me give you little presents, Erik, and let me kiss you! Let me sleep beside you in bed without guilt!”

Suddenly Erik reared up against her, tears burning his eyes as a flash of anger struck him. “And you have done all of that and more, my dear! Or have you not forgotten our first night in bed? You were a wife to me then, were you not? And how about after that, when you decided you were tired of playing the marriage game with me, and shoved me unceremoniously from your bed? That was quite the show of love! I suppose I should be rather grateful for that little gift! Or perhaps I should remind you of that fiasco with the Palomino Fino?”

“The sherry? Above everything else, it’s the sherry that you’re upset about?!”

“Even now!” Erik cried. “Even now – you don’t see it!”

“I don’t see what?!” Christine demanded desperately. She reached out and clutched his cold bony hands, fighting him as he tried to break free of her grasp. “Tell me! Teach me! What don’t I see?!”

“You have always been nothing more than a naïve child!” Erik said harshly. “Always pittering around this wretched house with your face pitched with pity! Woe is Erik! That he must live here! How unhappy he must be! Have you even spared a single thought for me, Christine? The real me, not the imagined version you have of me in your head? How I must truly feel to live in your presence? To be the recipient of these so-called gifts?”

“I -”

“A photograph! What sort of callous gift is that? As if to tempt me with the fact that one day you won’t be here – as if to say you wish not to be here!” He finally shook free of her clutch. “Christine, when will you learn? I asked you from the outset not to give me gifts! And for good reason: because your presence is the only present I shall ever need!” He scoffed that last sentence, riddling it into a joke as ridiculous as the words he used to say it.

Erik’s humor can really be as bleak and black as the inside of a coffin…

“And I’m sure you think your attempts are admirable and noble! How could you not? Woe is Erik! That he has never received a single gift from another living soul! I must be the first to bestow such blessings upon him! And so he must be overjoyed with anything I get him!” Erik turned from her, his shoulders suddenly shuddering and his words turning wet as he drowned in his tears. “Would you believe it? I have not always been the arachnic recluse you see standing before you, Christine!… I once was a man of some society, too, if you would believe it… not a good society, yes, but some society… I knew people, and they knew me… and despite your beliefs, I have in fact received gifts before… gifts that I have truly loved… gifts that I have truly cherished...”

“I did not mean to imply -”

“I have never been so lonely as I have been with you,” he declared in a whisper, still refusing to turn around and look at her. “Do you even know what it means to be married?”

She bristled. “I am not so ignorant as you might believe.”

“So you know, then, that there is a very physical aspect to marriage?”

“Yes.”

“Does that frighten you?”

What was the use of lying? “It may have before, but no longer. Please, Erik, is that what this is about? Are you so afraid of -”

Erik’s shoulders tensed. “Physicality is just one dimension of a marriage. I am sure you would be fine. You could convince yourself to bear with it. But it is certainly not what I would be seeking from you.”

“Then what, Erik? What do you want?”

“The sanctity of marriage,” Erik said with much deliberation, “is wrought upon the idea of two souls fusing into one. The point of the sacrament is for both the husband and the wife to love each other – to teach each other – to better each other… so is that what you want to agree to, Christine? To better me? Make me a better man? I could truly use some help in that regard, don’t you agree?”

“You are upset -”

“As well I should be! But I know I am wicked, and I know I need salvation. I would love for you to save me, Christine. And I think you could quite possibly love the concept of it all, too. We could put your good Christian heart to good use on a rotten case like me. Wouldn't that be something? But there’s another half of it, too, which is what offends me to my very core.”

“And what is that?”

He took a breath, and finally turned to face her.

“Do you really think I could better you?”

All the anger had left his eyes; left instead was the child he had repeatedly accused her of being.

“Do you think there’s anything in you that I can improve upon? Unlike you, I am irreparably broken, Christine. I cannot be fixed. And yet, in this short time we’ve lived together, I have found myself repeatedly waking up as a better version of myself than I was the day before. Can you say the same? Have I done that for you?”

He paused, staring into her eyes, pleading for a response – any response - but Christine found that she had no answer to give him.

“Leaps and bounds, Christine, leaps and bounds,” Erik said. “I am a far better person than I ever was before I met you. It is the exact reason why I am so attached to you, and why I am so reluctant to give you up. Your love fuels the fire within me.”

Then he sighed.

“You asked me what I want… I want to make you feel the same. I want to do for you what you have done for me. But, Christine, you must know I am not the right man for the job. Your boy – Raoul – would certainly be a better fit -”

“Perhaps he would be,” Christine agreed softly, finding her resolve. “Perhaps I would be very happy with him. I have no doubt that he will make a wonderful husband and father one day. But, Erik, you are missing the point still.”

“Which is?”

“The ring is for you, Erik. I have chosen you. I wish to be with you.” Christine grasped his hands once more, and this time he didn’t pull away. “Please, my dear, know that I was never trying to be cruel with my gifts. I merely wanted to do for you what you have done for me.”

“We are very hurtful to each other with our little displays of love, are we not?” Erik mused. “As though we’ve offered each other a bouquet of roses, but forgotten to clip the thorns…”

“We’ll learn,” Christine promised. “One day. But only if you agree.”

She uncurled his fist, to find the ring still sitting in his palm.

He picked it up with his other hand and studied it.

“Tomorrow before dawn, you said…?”

Chapter Text

Gift Five
"The Vow"
(Part III)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S JOURNAL
(entry cont.)

“My heart to you is given:
Oh, do give yours to me;
We’ll lock them up together
And throw away the key.”

It is that one simple poem that keeps repeating like a music box's tinny melody in my mind. I chanced to read it once in a book in Erik’s study some few weeks, or maybe months, ago. It seemed so romantic back then, painting an idyllic picture of fairy-tale love; now I can only shudder as I realize how apt it would be as a replacement for my actual wedding vows.

At present, Erik is asleep on the chaise in the parlor, curled up like a big dark guard dog on the pressed velvet cushion. His knees do in fact jut off the side of it, and he looks very uncomfortable in his repose. For my part, I have developed a terrible headache – probably from indulgence of that sweet-smelling chemical – and have consequently locked myself in my bedroom in the hopes of clearing my head. Erik has never minded what doors I lock down here, just as long as he can keep locked the main front door, my only portal of escape…

Erik had every right to call me naïve.

I should have known how this all would end. I am furious with myself, furious with him, furious with the world. Perhaps if I put my pen to paper, and recount the past hours, I can find a way to make sense of the madness that has at last unhinged its horrible jaw and swallowed me whole…

--

This morning’s air was dark and frigid; frozen with the type of inky blackness that you cannot see or feel through, but only taste. Stepping into it from the depths of the opera house had been like opening my eyes to find that a blindfold had been tied securely around my head the whole time. It had been at least a year since I had been outside; I had been looking forward to seeing the familiar view of the Parisian streets… and already I was sorely disappointed by the bleak and black darkness that had greeted me instead.

“We must make haste,” Erik whispered, ushering me up into the shadowy cabriolet that awaited us, “before the light of dawn arrives.”

He held me close as the carriage tumbled over the cobbled avenues, barreling towards our solemn destination. Cold leather hands gripped my upper arms with a vice-like strength, a reminder to that terrible thought of which I didn’t like to think, had been trying not to think especially in these hours before what was supposed to be the happiest occasion of my life...

I am still Erik’s prisoner.

Oh, but we were so much more to each other than merely captor and prisoner in that moment! It was truly wicked for me to think about our situation in that way. Our hearts were in love, even if the circumstances were not ideal. We were connected through pain and misfortune, through fear and fright; and no soul knew me quite as Erik’s did.

In mere moments, he would see for himself. He would give me the choice between staying and fleeing, and he would see that I would stay! Oh, a million times over would I choose Erik!

Was it a choice, though? I was pretending like it was, for Erik’s sake, but there was really no choice at all. Raoul was hardly a thought in my mind these days. I had arranged for him to be there only to prove the point fully to Erik, as I knew Raoul made him feel insecure and jealous. But I would never pick Raoul! He was now like any other man to me.

And yet – I knew what he meant to Erik, even if he did not mean the same to me. Erik saw my love as split between two suitors, with one far behind the other in the race for my heart. It was true, once, that I loved Raoul… but now things had changed. Raoul was a part of the chase no longer. Yet - if I could show this to Erik, that I would pick him over even Raoul, whom he thought I still loved, without batting an eye, how happy he would be! And how loved he would feel…

I wanted him to feel loved. I wanted this so, so desperately. It is such a beautiful feeling to feel loved, and even more so to be loved…

The carriage lurched to a stop before the little white chapel of Montmartre. My stomach was aflutter with butterflies, but they were of the sweetest variety…

I made to disembark from the carriage, but Erik held my arm fast. “Christine.”

I looked to him. “Yes, dear?”

“Please – we don’t have to do this,” Erik said softly. Humorously I wondered if he had gotten cold feet. “We can just go home and forget all about this.”

“But this is the only way you will know for sure,” I reminded him. “Please, Erik, just trust me – and let me go.”

His eyes searched mine. “I want to believe -”

“I want you to know,” I said. “I want you to know that my heart beats with yours, exactly in rhythm. Don’t you want to know, and not just believe?”

His mouth parted to refute me, but no response came. Desperation filled his eyes.

I knew the conflict. He was afraid to lose me. That in the few minutes we were separated in the chapel - while he spoke with the priest and I readied myself in the bridal suite – I would disappear into the mist and he’d lose me forever.

But even still – with so much to lose, there was so much still to gain. At the risk of losing me forever, there was the chance that he’d finally see my heart as belonging to him completely. What a fantastically tempting bliss that was…

I kissed him, quick, and drew back before he could protest further. “I will see you in a few minutes, dear. I love you.”

His reply was like the whisper of the dead, floating mournfully through the space that grew between us, as my satin heels clattered against the stone steps up to the church.

“Don’t go…”

--

It was customary for the bride-to-be to use the bridal suite to prepare herself before the ceremony, and to hide herself from the peeping, spying eyes of the congregation and the bride-groom. Of course, there was nothing customary about our situation or about the ceremony that was about to begin. There was no crowd to hide from. There was only Erik.

The bridal suite was small, just as the little chapel was small – little more than a broom closet with a settee, table, and mirror, and a tiny stained-glass window poking out the side of the wall. It faced mainly into the brick wall of the neighboring building, but if you stood in the right position, beside the mirror, you could view a small sliver of the street outside.

I chanced a look at myself in the mirror. I was never a vain girl, but I had lost my fondness for my reflection in the past year spent below the Opera with Erik. What was there to gain by staring vapidly into the looking glass? There were always faults to see. I had no reason anymore to care about my appearance – for Erik, being as ugly as he is, didn’t care if my cheeks grew a blemish or if my nose’s little bump accentuated itself too strongly. He showered me in praise regardless of how I looked or felt. The words meant little to me, in terms of my appearance – and instead they served as a reminder that looks mean very little. Erik’s compliments were never simply skin-deep.

And yet I was floored by the face that greeted me in the mirror, regardless! It was mine, surely, for there were my two pale blue eyes, and my parted lips - my hand raising up in shock…

I was radiant! How had this happened? I looked more beautiful than I had ever looked before! I had donned no special frock, had done nothing special with my hair, had applied no special make-up to my face, and yet there I stood, positively ephemeral and glowing!

I recalled my first period of living with Erik – I had sallowed out, with dark circles folding themselves under my haunted eyes, my bones popping out of my taut, sickly skin. It was with that appearance I had met with Raoul at the Masquerade Ball, and had warned him of the tragedy he was unknowingly encroaching upon. I had been full of unhappiness then, scared of Erik and scared for Raoul.

I was happier now. How could I not be? I was about to marry the man whose heart was linked with mine for ever and a day. Had this happiness caused this radiant light? Or was it something else…? Something much more sudden, much more recent…?

The relief, perhaps, of being unchained at last from…?

A knock sounded, and the door cracked open.

“Mademoiselle?”

It was Père Myriel, the sole priest of the chapel. He was a gaunt, shuffling man, old even beyond his years, with a cane clutched wobbily in his arthritic hand and a pair of silver spectacles upon his nose.

“Is it time?” I asked.

“Nearly,” he said. “There are a few minutes yet. I come now, though, to ask you something.”

No doubt questions about the clandestine ceremony he had been paid to perform, I thought. I couldn't blame the man for being apprehensive.

“Yes, Père Myriel?”

He laced his hands together thoughtfully. “This wedding has happened upon you very quickly, as I understand it. I cannot help but be concerned for the circumstances.”

I bristled defensively. “That is not a question.”

“It is not meant to be,” he said delicately. “I just mean to say that I have seen a great many things in my years.”

“I am certain.”

“Marriage is a sacred act, Mademoiselle Daaé. Allow me to be upfront with you for a moment. Under normal circumstances, I prefer to meet the intended couple before the day of the wedding, to ascertain their intentions towards each other, and to ascertain their understandings of the Law of the Church.” The man sighed wearily. “I cannot pretend this is the first time a wedding of this nature has occurred, nor that this is the first time I have served as the officiant of one. The world of the Church is not perfect, and even God can be made to turn a blind eye in some cases. I do not want to know what is it that demands such secrecy and such immediacy… it is not my right to know… but, for the sake of your soul – and mine as well - I would like to offer you the opportunity for redemption. Would you like to make your last confession before…?”

He trailed off and gestured vaguely to the door, where it stood, ajar. Just past this door was a lifetime commitment to Erik, and all the beautiful sorrows and hideous joys that came with him.

“Do we have time?”

Père Myriel nodded. “It was your fiance’s request. He, himself, just finished giving to me a most thorough, most pious confession.”

I peered through the crack in the door to find Erik in the pews, head bowed in prayer.

It was a sight I had always thought unimaginable. After all, Erik had scoffed at me when the first request I had made, in those original two weeks, was for him to procure for me a rosary. He had laughed when I asked to go to church on that following Sunday – and he had sneered in disgust when I further suggested that he could accompany me. Erik was not religious. Or was he?

Who was I marrying?

“No,” I said with a hesitant shake of my head. “Thank you, Père Myriel. I have nothing to confess.”

The priest’s sad eyes met mine. “Your will be done, then, Mademoiselle Daaé. I will let your fiancé know you are ready.” He made to leave, but paused, just before closing the door. “Though, I urge you to take just a few moments more to be alone in your prayers.”

And then he was gone.

I suddenly felt very tiny, even within that small bridal suite. I sat down upon the settee and placed my hands in my lap, my skirts spilling out on either side.

A few moments more, and then Erik and I would at last be wed. And when we were wed, we would become one. All my burdens would become his, and all his would become mine. We would share them as one united heart – or two chained together, locked without a key, forced to beat together for fear of –

No! It was wrong of me to think such thoughts, especially right before I was to be wed!

And yet I couldn’t help it! All the fears of the last year that I had kept securely below the surface at last demanded themselves to be known. I held my head between my hands, gripping my hair so tightly my scalp screamed out in pain.

What was I about to subject myself to? An eternity of Erik’s intense, adoring gaze? And for what? I loved him, as normal people love, and he was absolutely mad with love for me – but that passionate madness was not the slightest bit romantic! It was overpowering and terrifying, in ways I had already born witness to! Stupid girl, had I really thought I could simply forget about everything he had done? The torture chamber, the chandelier, the scorpion, the grasshopper, even my poor dead father’s violin! And all the murders he had committed, on these lands as upon others… all the murders that he had had confessed to me without a single tear… in that moment it was all absolutely repulsive! All of it!

(Though - not once, in the midst of all that repulsion, did I even think about his face...)

In the midst of my fretting, I had failed to notice that I had begun to pace the small length of the room. Suddenly aware of where I stood, and who stood just outside the door, I found myself compelled to turn, slowly, and stare out the small stained glass window. There I saw a figure, nearly unrecognizable and obscured by the treatment of the glass, but my heart knew him too well.

Raoul.

All at once my heart burst into flames, and I into tears. Raoul! My fearless knight, who had once run straight into a violently raging sea with but one thought on his mind: to rescue my scarf! And here he was again, standing at attention, told absolutely nothing but ready for anything. Oh, I had said I no longer loved Raoul...

But I had said many things.

How could I go through with this wedding when Raoul was standing right there? I could deny it no more - I loved him, oh, I did! And I loved Erik, too… but what person in their sane mind would choose to live out the rest of their days in a dark hole in the ground, with a dangerous and unpredictable fiend? Even if that fiend was a man whom they loved? When another man – a perfectly good man she has always loved so deeply – was standing right there, waiting for her?

When there is love in death, and love in life - when there is love either way - who can blame someone for choosing life?

There was no choice to be made; I threw open the bridal suite door and ran as fast as I could out of the chapel. I pushed forward with all of my strength, as I knew Erik would pursue me immediately. Both he and Père Myriel had been waiting at the altar for me and had set their waiting eyes upon the bridal suite door for my entrance; and yet it was my exit that they were given instead.

I could not hear Erik running after me, but I knew he was there regardless. His footsteps have always been silent. He has a way of moving that produces no sound; he mentioned once that it was a talent he perfected when performing assassinations for the Persian shah, but that now it has become his nature. And so I could not hear him approach, or tell how far he was behind me; I could only trust that he was there.

With his impossibly long legs, Erik was faster than me - but I had the benefit of a head-start. He had to run the length of the chapel – from the altar, down the aisle, and through the vestibule – until he even reached the point I had started at. By some miracle of luck, I made it out of the chapel without being caught by Erik’s iron grasp. I shouted out as I ran down the steps:

“Raoul!”

My fair-headed knight only had time to look in my direction before I grabbed his arm and pulled him into a run. He asked no questions, demanded no answers – only ran, because I ran! It was good that he did so, because any hesitation or pause would have doomed me to Erik’s undoubtedly impending clutches.

The carriage was there, just as I had planned, and the moment we sprang into it we began to move. I told myself not to look back, at penalty of salt... and yet something I cannot express compelled me, once again, to turn my head and look.

I had indeed escaped him, and for as long as I live I will never forget the pain that struck my heart at the sight of him kneeling in the street, beating his chest and striking the ground with his terrible fists as he cried out the most miserable, wretched wails I’d ever heard.

Erik, if you are reading this… forgive me.

Chapter Text

Gift Five
"The Vow"
(Part IV)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S JOURNAL
(entry cont.)

I must pause my writing momentarily.

Erik stirred just moments ago; I heard him through the door. I didn’t dare check, as that would mean unlatching the lock, but I heard his footsteps go down the hall towards his bed chamber.

And now – oh!

He has begun assaulting his organ with an unforgiving, terrible rage. His organ is huge – I’ve seen the massive thing before, erected in his bed chamber in all its magnificent glory – and even through the walls I can hear his terrible dexterity as he runs hands masterfully up and down the massive length of it, up and down, pumping out a jarring melody of low groaning notes that will occasionally, suddenly and without warning, spring all the way up the length of the organ until at last he slams down at the top and produces a high-pitched, squealing shriek.

He's played his organ like this before… so at least there’s a comforting thought. I would be amiss to pretend this was the first time he’s pounded down on the keys with this foul, awful ire. We’ve lived together for a year; in this time I’ve seen so many sides of him, so many moodswings, so many facets of his personality. At least this is not new.

But perhaps this isn’t a comforting thought after all. There is an anger inside of him that will never go out. We were both fools to think I could douse it – that me simply being here would vanquish any of his inner demons that trouble him so greatly. He is so hurt, and he has been for so long. He told me before that he was irreparably broken… I refused to believe that. I cannot let myself believe that. And yet… every time he plays the organ like this, with this unimitable anger and unrestrained furiosity, I can’t help but feel it’s all been in vain. My offers of companionship, my endeavors to please him, my attempts to give him the love he never had - it’s all too little, too late.

I wish I could help him, but neither of us know what to do at this point. He wants something from me I cannot give – and I, too, want to give him something he refuses to take.

One wishes only to be held in this lifetime. Love is but a mere distraction.

--

Raoul and I boarded the first southbound train out of the Gare de Lyon. Our aim was for the commune of Chagny – the small territory that Raoul’s family had a title and privileges over.

In the Paris station, before boarding, I kept looking over my shoulder for fear that Erik would be there, right behind us. There was a short period of waiting that we had before the train arrived; and I knew no fear more than in that time. But Raoul was right there beside me the entire time, holding my hand securely, for fear that if he let go he would lose me forever. His hold on my hand was so firm, in fact, I don’t think I could have left him even if I wanted to.

But Erik never came.

There are a handful of train stations in Paris; I suppose it stands to reason Erik shouldn’t have been able to know which one we had chosen. There were any number of destinations we could have chosen, after all, which Raoul and I actually discussed in our hasty flight from the little white chapel of Montmartre. I had asked first to go to the Gare Saint-Lazare so that we could go on to Perros-Guirec; Raoul had politely dismissed the idea by reminding me that Erik had already followed me there once before, and was probably expecting us to go there again. He instead suggested we go to the Gare du Nord du Monde so that we could go to Amsterdam, and from there to my home country of Sweden. But it was the carriage driver who, overhearing our muddled plans as he steered the horses through the streets, reminded Raoul that leaving the country required certain documents and a fair supply of financing which we, as he guessed, didn’t have with us currently.

With valuable time ticking away and Erik’s chances of finding us growing greater by the minute, we decided in the end to go south to Chagny. Raoul was raised there, in his family’s country estate, and knew the staff there well. They would cater to our needs as we prepared ourselves for further flight, even if they turned up their noses at the terrible impropriety of Raoul and I all but eloping in this hasty way.

…But would we marry? I wasn’t so sure. I had just abandoned one altar; I wasn’t so sure I had it in me to run to another one quite yet. But what was Raoul thinking? Surely he must have had thoughts. If he did, he didn’t share them with me…

He paid for our tickets at the front booth, securing us a private cabin in first class. The price was exorbitant; and yet he paid for it easily, without batting an eye. We boarded the train with him following me from behind, hands still clutched tightly together, and we kept our eyes peeled for any sights of strange phantoms in sable-black masks.

Our hands only let go when we arrived at our cabin, which was furnished in the finest first-class fashion. On entry, we were greeted by a pair of royal blue benches that flanked either side of a grand picture window, situated upon a leather-paneled wall. Settling in, I peered out at the throngs of people still on the platform as Raoul shed his cloak and hat.

“Do you see him?” he breathed, taking his seat across from me on the other bench and peering out as well, a worried expression wrought across his face.

My eyes tracked across the horde of people that stood around. So many faces, and yet no one bore that porcelain, dead face I was looking for. “No.”

“Perhaps we lost him,” Raoul said quietly – probably with the intention of reassuring me.

Perhaps we did lose him. Perhaps Erik was still on his knees in front of the chapel, pounding his fists against the cobbled street. Perhaps we were finally free.

There was a good chance of it, after all… no matter how fast Erik was – he couldn’t beat a carriage. He could not have followed us. So unless he read our minds, and found his own way to the exact station and train that we just boarded, and found his way past the denizens of people to sneak on as well… we were free.

And yet, despite the odds being at last in my favor, I did not feel relieved. There was a solid pit in my stomach, which made me sick to my very core. I must have been positively green, because Raoul reached across and grabbed my hand again.

My eyes left the platform to gaze into his, those soft brown depths aching to be everything and anything I needed.

“You’re free,” he whispered softly, imploring me to believe him. And then again: “You’re finally free, Christine.”

Was I? Did I dare to dream? I had dreamed before…

The pit in my stomach lurched as the train began to move, and then, at seven minutes to seven, we at last departed Paris.

--

By eleven we were still on the rails, chugging steadily towards the Chagny commune. It was to be a six hour train ride to Chagny, and we were nearing the last leg of our journey.

I slept for much of the morning, at Raoul’s insistence. I had not known how tired I was. I had thought I had slept well the night before – but then I recalled how little I knew of the days and nights in Erik’s dungeon below the ground, and how little I knew of the hours that passed, and a part of me wondered if time passed the same in this world as it did below. After all, no matter how late I went to sleep, I always woke up at an early hour feeling fresh and well-rested. It would not have surprised me to learn that Erik’s clocks were adjusted differently, or if he reset the clocks every time I slept… what did time matter to anyone down there, anyway, if there were no appointments to keep?

Perhaps, too, I had been so fraught with nerves by the early dawn’s activities that whatever rest I had gotten was negligible. I wonder if Erik ever grew tired like this? Did he ever reset his clocks when he lived alone?

Regardless, I laid across the bench and napped until eleven, the little bumps in the track rousing me here and there so I never fell completely into my dreams. In my half-awake state, I took faint notice of the way that Raoul adamantly refused to let himself sleep. His eyes tracked everywhere – the door, the leather-paneled walls, the cushions, the sunny countryside speeding by outside the window – and once in a while, when he thought me asleep, across my reclining form. He must have been tired, fraught with the same nerves as I from this morning, but his fingers stayed firmly upon his wrist and pinched at his skin to keep him awake.

I could take no more of my attempts to sleep, though, when the pit in my stomach gave way to a much more immediate concern: hunger.

“Raoul,” I asked, sitting back up as decently as possible, “have there been any stewardesses that have stopped by?”

“Stewardesses? No… why do you ask?”

“I was just curious if there might be some, um, refreshments available…?” I blushed. Why did I feel so embarrassed to admit I was hungry? It was a normal, human feeling! Nobody should feel afraid to admit to such things… and certainly not to hunger! “I haven’t eaten a thing since last night.”

And on that matter - I have never been afraid to tell Erik I was hungry! …though there are still some other quite normal feelings Erik and I have let remain unsaid between us… some just as agonizing as the gnawing pangs of hunger…

“Oh!” Raoul said in his innocent way. His eyes flicked to the cabin door. “No, there haven’t been any stewardesses or food trolleys. I believe there is a dining car, though, if you’d like?”

Would I? Of course I would. But such a meal on a train like this was bound to be expensive, and so it was certainly an unnecessary extravagance that I couldn’t dare ask of Raoul. He already spent so much on this cabin! And he had tipped that carriage driver so well.

Raoul had shelled out coin after coin for me this morning, without a second thought. Surely he came from money, and could afford to be loose with his spare change, but I did not want him to make that impression of me – that I was only using him for his wallet. I am not a dense woman; I have heard the talk about Paris regarding him and me. The rumors are all untrue, of course. But Raoul has felt bitterly towards me before for other, more trivial misunderstandings. I would not want for him to think that of me now.

And yet – was I truly to suffer the next several hours coming no closer to a baguette than in my half-realized dreams? Surely Raoul wouldn’t fault me for wanting of a meal? And surely he must have been hungry, too. It had been a terribly exhausting morning for the both of us.

But what if Raoul wasn’t hungry? What if I were to dine alone, just like I did for so many meals for the past year as Erik stared at me from across the table? What if -

My ravenous stomach finally settled the matter for me.

--

The dining car was a spacious, ornate vessel filled with two long rows of white-clothed tables on either side of the walk. A lush blue carpet was rolled down the middle of it, as if a tributary of the Seine itself had opened up onto this humble traincar. It was a full-service restaurant on wheels; and we were escorted to our table upon arrival, and seen by a finely dressed waiter in a prim navy tailcoat.

The food selection was admittedly not the finest in France – we were still on the rails, after all! – which did not bother me all that greatly, but Raoul had a bit of trouble finding something to his more ‘sophisticated’ tastes. He at last ordered the champignons aux escargots, and a bottle of Bourgogne Blanc for us to share.

Then, when the waiter took our menus, I felt a particularly poignant wave come over me at last, filling me with fantastic terror and glee all at once: we were really out in the world, safe and together!

“How have you been?” Raoul asked – and from his tone, I knew he could feel it, too. It was the first semblance of a normal conversation we’d been able to have since the escape began – not just this most recent one, but the one we attempted an entire year ago on that fateful, awful night. That attempt had failed, but this one… the eternal night was finally ending at last!

But morning is always so cruel, isn’t it, when it stirs us from our sleep just to blind us with the dawning sun? For a year I’d missed that light dearly… now that dawn had broken, and nighttime was just a faint memory that’d long fallen off the bend of the horizon, I couldn’t help but feel a small pang of muted sadness. I’d had the most spectacular dreams in that darkness…

Still – one cannot live in dreams forever, lest you let your whole life pass you by –

“I don’t know what to say.” It was the truth.

Raoul cocked his head, understanding and not understanding all at the same time. “So. Did he… feed you?”

Of all the questions…! I allowed a short smile. “Of course he did. He’s not a monster, Raoul.”

“I know,” he said, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “But he’s kept you locked down there all this time. I’ve been worried about you.”

“Certainly you’ve seen that I’ve returned to performing?”

“But you don’t take visitors at your dressing room. I know… I come before the show and just after, and they always say I’ve just missed you.”

I glanced at the window as I searched for a response. Though it was the middle of the afternoon, the sky had grown the slightest shade darker. A few raindrops threatened to fall over the happy countryside. “You know how he is.”

“What were you doing at the church?”

“Getting married.”

He paused. “I thought you already were?”

With all the demands Erik made that night, it was no wonder Raoul thought we’d have been wed by now. I had been just as baffled as he, too, though now I understood far too well why we were not. “He didn’t want to marry earlier.”

Raoul’s jaw dropped. “Surely you jest!”

“I do not.”

“After all the trouble – Christine, he didn’t…?”

“We shared a house,” I said quietly, “like two friends. Nothing more.”

“I don’t believe this. Christine, he must have – I mean, didn’t he at least try? He must have wanted -”

I blushed. “We were unwed. It would have been improper.”

In retrospect – this conversation itself was becoming woefully improper just as well! A proper lady would have slapped a man across the face for even suggesting such things! But I suppose such things can be ignored in the moment, especially when they are suggested in a private conversation, over a candlelit table, with a person whom you trust most intimately - with a person with whom you have considered doing such woefully…

“Improper!” Raoul let out a short snort, but quickly restrained himself from uttering anything further on that.

The waiter returned at that moment and set down our platters. Then, from nowhere, he produced the stately bottle of Bourgogne Blanc Raoul had ordered and poured us each a healthy glass before setting it on the table between us. Then he bowed, before taking his leave of us.

“A toast to you, Christine Daaé,” Raoul said, raising his glass, the amber liquor glittering within.

“And a toast to you as well, my dear,” I said, before adding, as naturally as possible, “- friend.”

I do not know why I felt compelled to make that distinction between us; only that I did.

His smile grew tight at that, but did not fall. He put the glass to his lips, as did I – and from our glasses we took a sip of the most luxurious textures of liquor in France.

“An excellent specimen of Bourgogne,” Raoul commented with delight. “A surprise from a venue of this caliber. Respectfully, of course.”

“I did not know you were such a connoisseur,” I teased.

“What can I say? I am a man of many talents,” Raoul said with a sip. “Though wine-tasting, I must admit, is not quite my strongest suit. It’s just something I was taught in the name of culture by my… nevermind.” He looked as if he wanted to go on, but said nothing more.

I sensed his mood change, and could guess at the reason, so I did the honorable thing and changed topics. “So, once we arrive in Chagny, will we have to travel far to reach your family’s estate?”

“Not very,” he said, and then he launched into a very thorough explanation of the short but winding country lane that we would have to take by carriage to reach the manor. When he at last exhausted the trail after describing each and every tree in detail, he began to describe the manor and grounds themselves. It was fascinating to hear Raoul talk so vividly about a place I had never seen, yet that he knew so well. It was his childhood home and he knew it like the back of his hand. Unfamiliar territory for me, but his domain… his kingdom…

Then he went on to say, with hearts in his eyes, “You will take Eulalie’s old room, of course, until we are married, and then we will -”

Ah, I had forgotten! My tired memory is making a sorry mess of this tale. So Raoul was under the impression that we would wed after all. But how long would I remain in this Eulalie’s room before we did?

I began to fidget with my fingers, pressing nail upon nail, as if to split one. Raoul must have seen my distraction, for he questioned me on it. “Come, Christine - what troubles you?”

“It is nothing. Nothing troubles me.”

My consternation persisted nonetheless, twisting the finger beside my littlest one on my left with a painful sort of compulsion, and Raoul, being the astute boy that he is, made short work of determining the cause. In a low, gentle voice, hushed so no-one but I could hear, he asked, “You do wish to marry me, don’t you?”

“Of course!” I flung my hands down. Out of sight, out of mind. “Raoul, you must not question that!”

“A man is made to feel insecure, you know,” Raoul said, sitting back, “when his fiancée was at the altar of another mere hours ago…”

I gaped at him. “How can you even dare to say such a thing? I left him, Raoul! Can’t you see I never intended to actually marry him?”

“And how do I know you won’t do the same when we’re finally at the altar ourselves?” Raoul mused. “How do I know you won’t leave me, too?”

“I won’t!” I vowed, appalled that he would even ask that.

“I’m sure you said the same thing to him,” Raoul said moodily. I moved to protest, but he put his hand up. “That’s all past now, I’m sure you’ll say – it’s all just ‘water under the bridge.’ But consider, Christine… you lived with that man for a year. You were his betrothed – when all the while you were supposed to be mine! Surely you must understand that a man is made to feel insecure about these sorts of things…”

I could only stare at him, a mixture of indignity and pity alighting my gaze. It was the pity that won out in the end, as it always does for me, for I reached out and grabbed his hand. “Dear Raoul, I cannot change the past. But I am here now. Let us move forward from this nightmare together.”

He shrugged his hand out of mine to pick up the wine glass again, and put it to his lips just as he murmured, so faintly I scarce was sure I heard it right, “And still I am left to wonder if she even believes the words she says.”

I made no comment on that – how could I, when I so often doubted my own words as well?

In lieu of conversation, Raoul continued working at his meal. I followed his lead, tearing a baguette into proper size pieces as I regarded my plate with an absent-minded stare. My appetite, once so voracious, had settled and flown. I could eat no more.

“I’m sorry,” Raoul said at long last. The words were so sudden and random that they startled me back to attention, and I dropped my baguette chunks into my sauce. He had a regretful air about him as he spoke further. “I did not mean to accuse you, Christine.”

I stayed silent. What was there to say?

In the absence of my reply, he continued. “I’m afraid I may have made some assumptions that were amiss to be made. I tend to do that, don’t I?” He smiled self-deprecatingly. “I am but a boy, Christine. Twenty-two years upon this Earth and still I pretend to know more than I should. You would think I would have learned by now not to make the same mistake twice? And yet I have. A year ago I found you by the luck of chance, at the end of a great rainbow, and I was fully convinced I had rediscovered the Christine Daaé from my childhood – that very same Christine Daaé whose scarf I had the great honor of rescuing from the sea that time. We were childhood sweethearts in my head, destined by the stars to reunite under Apollo’s Lyre. And yet – that’s not exactly how it turned out, is it?”

I allowed myself a slight shake of the head.

“It had been years since we had last seen each other,” Raoul said. “We were different people than when we had last met. I perhaps a little less than you, in fairness - though I had grown a mustache by that time, faint as it was.”

Only now that he brought it up did I notice the line of hair gracing his upper lip. It had thickened out more than I remembered, so that now one could almost see it in every type of lighting.

“I was wrong to assume that you and I could pick up where we had left off, on the shores of Perros-Guirec. I was wrong, and I found that out very quickly. But I was a boy, Christine! And boys are stubborn. So I pursued you, and eventually you let me in – and then I saw just how much you had changed. You were a grown woman, with a sophisticated set of wit, charm, and beauty. But that wasn’t all… there was also him.”

Raoul hung his head. “I was young and naïve, and I didn’t understand at the time – especially because, with circumstances the way they were, he made himself out to be such a horrible monster. But in truth, it could have been any other man, and I would have fought just as hard for you as I did against him.”

It was not a good thing to hear Raoul speak of Erik, even in this polite, deferential way. I braced myself for something terrible. “What are you saying?”

“He had every right to pursue you – and you had every right to return his affection. I had no claim to you. It had been years since we saw each other last, that time.” Raoul turned his eyes down. “And now it has been another year, again.”

An entire year with Erik, beneath the Opera house…

“Have things changed again, Christine?”

I couldn’t speak.

“Did you - do you - love him?”

“I had to,” I found myself saying. “God tells us to love everyone.”

“You know that’s not what I’m asking.”

I averted my eyes. “I hardly see how this is a proper topic of conversation.”

“We are to be wed, Christine,” Raoul insisted. “Can you not be forthright with me on this one matter? I would like to imagine us having a marriage of mutual respect and honesty, one day.”

His words stabbed at me, though I doubt he intended them so. “What does it matter?”

“It matters very little, Christine,” Raoul said sadly, “but it is that very little that burns like kindling within me. I just must know.”

“In that case…” I said, and then swallowed hard. The question had to be answered; we could not go forward without addressing the issue at hand. I paused, to find a way to frame my answer, so as not to hurt him but to stay as true to myself as possible. “I cannot possibly say for sure, Raoul. I have hardly had a moment to even consider it.”

“And yet somewhere along the way you have found the time to decide you wish to marry me?” Raoul shook his head. “It should not be that difficult of a question to answer, Christine!”

“But it is!” I said. “With you, it is so straightforward and simple: I love you! Oh, but I wish that every love could be like ours, Raoul! But with him… with him, there are just so many other distracting feelings. Hatred, pity, fear, repulsion… I cannot think clearly when I have all those other feelings about me. So how am I to know if I have ever loved him, when there are so many other complicated parts of my relationship with him that distract me from knowing for sure?”

Raoul touched the stem of his wine glass thoughtfully. A few beads of moisture ran down the side, and he collected them diligently, using them to slicken his fingertip as he rubbed it along the glass shaft. He mulled my words over for a long time, before finally saying, “Perhaps it is not such a good thing that our love is as simple to you as you say.”

Alarmed, I gave him a questioning look.

“My love for you explodes with every beat of my heart. I feel a tremendous, confusing, complicated surge of emotions when I’m near you: fascination, wonder, devotion, awe. I am afraid of how much I love you. I was dead for this entire year when you were gone. And perhaps you might think… that this is all very boyish of me to say, but I find I don’t quite care what you think right now.”

“Raoul, you misunderstand -”

“Perhaps I was right all along,” he said anyway, furrowing his brows. “Perhaps you do not love me. We are not even formally engaged, are we? I gave you a ring, but he did, too, didn’t he? I am play-engaged to a woman who is play-engaged to another man! What foolishness has befallen me? And yet at some point your play-engagement with him must have become real, because you came with him to a real altar in a real church. Will you come with me to a real altar today, Christine? This very day. Not tomorrow, but today? Will you?”

“This is all very sudden,” I stammered.

“So you admit that you don’t wish to marry me?”

“No!” I cried in exasperation. “I love you, Raoul, and I want to marry you, but the circumstances are just completely wrong right now! I do not want to begin our marriage on the road. I want us to be settled and secure. I want us to have a house in a safe corner of the world, where we can be free to enjoy the world without being afraid that one of us will one day just disappear!”

“Humph! Do you plan on disappearing?” Raoul asked, an accusation veiled behind the question.

“I do not,” I said, “but I fear you think I do! Or you think Erik will steal me away!”

Raoul shrugged grandly. “It is a valid fear, is it not?”

“It is and it isn’t! Raoul, this will be a very exhausting marriage if we spend every minute concerned about what Erik will or will not do. And, I’m sorry, Raoul, but I do not want to be running to the courthouse this very instant just because you feel insecure! A wedding shouldn’t be thrown in a fit of jealousy!”

“Well, a proposal shouldn’t be accepted in a fit of desperation, either,” Raoul grumbled.

I felt my jaw fall open. “And what exactly do you mean by that?”

He leveled his stare with mine.

“I only mean that perhaps the timing was not right for either of us.”

And with that he resumed his meal, stabbing his knife and fork into it with a stuffy, aristocratic air. I found myself unable to do the same. My appetite was thoroughly ruined and the thought of food right now outright revolted me. In the effort of doing something, anything, I stared down at my hands in my lap and attempted to make sense of my world.

What was I doing? I was in no position to be refusing Raoul’s request. Our wedding was a year overdue, honestly, and we were running away into the sunset together like a couple from a fairytale. Why was I so shocked to learn Raoul wanted to get married so soon? Why did I say no?

And, terrible as the thought was… I was in no position to refuse. Raoul was my only link to freedom. I had no way to survive without him. I could not have gotten this far from Erik without Raoul’s intervention. So I was not at liberty to be defying his wishes. If he wanted to marry, we would. I could have no choice in the matter, if I wanted to be free.

As I pen these lines, the terrible irony of my sad situation stands out to me. Is this what it is to be loved? To be taken into another’s heart so completely that you can never be free again?

Suddenly Raoul’s voice interrupted my thoughts once more.

“What do you wish to do when we arrive?”

He spoke with such contrition that I couldn’t help but wish to forgive him for every horrible thing he’d ever said to me – and furthermore, I wished he would forgive me for the same.

“We shall go to your family’s estate together,” I said hesitantly, “if you will still have me…”

“Of course, Christine,” Raoul’s voice said, nearly breaking. “Do not think for a moment I would refuse to welcome you into my home.”

“I do not…” I couldn’t look at him as I said this. “I do not wish to marry you, Raoul. Not now. I’m sorry.”

“I know,” Raoul said, and from his tone I could tell he did not lie.

“We will marry one day, though, I promise,” I hurried to reassure him. “One day. Just not today.”

“One day,” Raoul echoed emptily. I’m not sure if he quite believed me.

He chewed a little more, thoughtfully, and mulled on the wine some more.

“You will always be welcome in my home,” Raoul said, pausing the motions of his utensils. “You do know that, right? I would never want for you to be stranded or alone. You don’t have to marry me just because you think that’s the only way I’d be willing to protect you. You mean so much more to me than just a slip of paper in the cardinal’s office.”

Why was he constantly driving me to speechlessness with his words? Evidently he had become quite the romantic since the last time I had seen him. Either that or he had basked in the unhappiness of lost love for long enough that such passionate words now came freely to him like poetry.

Should I have believed him? He sounded sincere. And yet I know love, and I know there are always strings attached. One does not simply love, without hope of reciprocated love. It is not a fault from which we can cure ourselves; it is just human nature. If we could only love, and be content with that alone – we would all be angels in heaven.

“Even if you married him,” Raoul added seriously, “even then, I would never want you to think I wouldn’t be there for you. I mean it, Christine.”

“Thank you,” I mumbled. It was nice of him to pretend, I suppose. “But I mean it, too. We will get married one day.”

He smiled and said nothing.

Another lapse in the conversation occurred. Here we felt our better humors returning, as we stared out the window together and commented idly on the scenes that passed. I learned that Raoul had never seen a pig, for he gasped as we passed a farm of them and asked me what they were. At some point, we reached across the table, and – though it was improper! – linked our fingers together. The bottle of Bourgogne Blanc strategically blocked our clasped hands from the view of the rest of the car, and thus we had our first scandalous display of affection towards one another.

He tickled my hand with his, rubbing my hand with his fingertip the same way he had rubbed the stem of his wineglass earlier, and as he was ardently fondling my hand, he asked in a low voice, “Would you have really married him, though? If I had not been there, I mean?”

It was not immediately obvious what he meant by ‘there’ – either at the church, or in the picture altogether. This question, though, was easier for me to answer than any of his previous ones. Perhaps it was because his hand was still toying with mine. “I suppose I would have.”

“Why, though? He is no doubt an unfortunate man,” Raoul said, “but are you really obliged to give yourself over to every unfortunate man in the world?”

“I have given myself over to you,” I reminded him lightly.

He frowned, and stopped his hand’s movements, resting it upon mine. “Please, Christine: do not fault me for disliking him. Your love has taught me not to hate, but I cannot do much more than that. He is my brother’s murderer, after all.”

“He is, isn’t he…?” I mused.

“Why, Christine - you say that as if you didn’t already know!”

“I must confess, it’s been quite unclear for me. Erik wouldn’t ever talk about it. I suppose I let myself believe he drowned on his own…”

“Philippe was an excellent swimmer. He taught us both, don’t you remember? On the gravel-lined cape of Perros-Guirec?”

“But Erik wouldn’t -”

“- do that?” Raoul suddenly pulled his hand away. “Has he really wrapped you around his finger this tightly? I don’t care how Byronic he’s made himself out to be to us - the man is still a bloodthirsty, merciless killer!”

Erik is not, I wanted to exclaim. Erik is a gentle, and kind, and loving man. I have held this man in my arms, in my sleep. I have nursed this man back to health when he was at his weakest and most vulnerable. I have seen a side of him that negates all the others. He is not the emotionless killing machine the Persian told you about. He is a broken, scared man who feels - impossibly deeply. And he regrets the blood, all of it, all of the blood…

But of course that’s not true, is it, Erik? You do not regret such things. I would not be back in this room if you did.

So of course I could say nothing in response. Raoul waited a few beats before sighing, resignedly, as if he knew the argument was in vain. And it was: we will never agree when it comes to Erik.

With the mood thoroughly broken, Raoul sipped at his wine some more and we turned back to study the countryside some more. The clouds had deepened a fair share more, so that now it resembled twilight despite being noon.

“Do you think the rain will arrive with us?” I asked, looking for something to say to Raoul to bring him back around to me.

“It seems the storm has followed us here,” Raoul replied. He sipped the wine again, and this time made a face. “I’m sorry, this Bourgogne is just incredible.” He reached out to look at the label, and then frowned. “Oh! That waiter must have given us the wrong bottle. Here, look.”

I took the bottle from him, and turned it slowly in my hands, until I could read the cold, scripted letters upon the faded label: Amontillado, 100% Palomino Fino.

“What a curious mix-up,” Raoul continued, even as I felt a sudden coldness trickle up my spine.  He flagged down the waiter and showed him the bottle.

“My deepest apologies if it is not to your liking,” the waiter said humbly. “But I was told to give this bottle to you instead. Compliments of a certain Monsieur Montresor.”

Raoul raised an aristocratic eyebrow. “I’ve never heard of such a man.”

“He said you would not. By the way, he told me to give this to you,” the waiter said shortly, handing Raoul a small card along with the meal’s check before moving on to the next table.

“What’s it say?” I asked, a horrible feeling festering in my gut.

He read it first, silently, furrowing his brows, and then handed the card to me. And there, in the most childish of handwriting, I found only these two chilling lines:

O Fortuna!
In pace requiescat!

Chapter Text

Gift Five
“The Vow”
(Part V) 

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S JOURNAL
(entry cont.)

Again I must make an intermission of my prose.

The house has gone silent just now. Erik’s brutal pounding of his organ - the pace of which could only be described as nothing less than punishing – has finally just chased itself to its tremendous climax, and at last he ended the madness with a sharp, guttural ejaculation.

Now his door opens and closes, and he steps lightly down the way – I think he’s coming to the room -

--

If she hadn’t been listening as intently as she was, she would not have heard his two quiet knocks against her door.

Christine clutched her pen tightly between her fingers as she stared at the door in paralyzed fear. It was locked, thank goodness, but she knew locks didn’t matter in this house. A locked door might as well have been an open archway for Erik.

But him knocking on the door meant he had no intention of entering unless she invited him in. And she had no intention of doing that, that was sure.

“Christine?” His voice was so soft, so timid. “Are you awake?”

Of course I am, Christine wanted to say. How could anyone sleep when someone was pounding their organ that loudly in the next room over?

She did not reply, though, too afraid to speak as she was. For if she answered this one question, she would undoubtedly be forced to answer the next, and the one after that, and then any and all of his subsequent questions.

“Erik is sorry,” he persisted. “Let him say that to your face. Please, Christine. Please open the door.”

She did not.

“Erik will not hurt you,” he implored. “He wishes only to speak of the matters of this past night and day, and to apologize for his wicked words and deeds. And Erik wants to know… do you know that it is after midnight now – far past it – and the actions required of us have not been done? Do you understand what that means, Christine?”

She did; that latch was locked for a reason.

“It means it can all be un-done,” he said, in a voice that might have passed for a whisper… if only he weren’t trying so hard to make sure she heard him! “That which we have not yet done is the thing that will undo the rest of which we have done already.”

Her blood chilled as he let out a single chuckle. There was a sound as his fingers brushed a longing path down the wood of her door.

“It’s poetic, Christine, in a sad little way. We shall create a new life no matter what we do.”

Whether she wanted to or not.

“Let me in,” he pleaded again. “Please, Christine. You have nothing to fear from me. I won’t hurt you again.”

No, she silently replied.

He let out a deep sigh, half-strangled by a sob, and muttered to himself, still just loud enough for her to hear him through the door, “She is smart to keep that door closed.”

And then his footsteps padded away towards the parlor, each step falling a little softer than the one before it, until finally they at last eclipsed back into silence.

--

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S JOURNAL
(entry cont.)

I have placed my sewing scissors on the desk beside my journal. They are there, just in reach, if ever I should need them in the coming hours. And I write ‘hours’ – for I cannot imagine this stalemate between us continuing for more than that. One of us must give in.

I am the weaker of us two, and so I already know it will ultimately be I who will surrender. I do not wish it so, but I know it will be.

For now I must make the most of my remaining time. My nerves are so fraught and frayed, so perhaps it would do me well to return to my recollection of events. Or perhaps it would serve me better in this world - and the next - to label it as ‘My Testimony’…

--

We were up from the table in an instant. Raoul knew not what to make of the card, but he knew enough to know that receiving a card emblazoned with the command “In pace requiescat!” is not a happy thing to ever receive – especially not when in hot pursuit by a man such as Erik, who had both the means and the motive to help him to fulfill such a dreadful task.

Immediately, we abandoned the fanciful and annoying whims that proper etiquette would normally demand of us, and rushed each passenger we came across on our way back to our private cabin in the first-class car. We made no distinction between a fur-coated woman and a buttoned steward; we assailed them all the same, with the same panicked question: “Have you seen a man in a mask?”

And – if you could believe it! - they all said: “No!”

How could this be? A man in a mask is a very conspicuous sight! Erik must have been on the train with us, and yet nobody saw him! He must have been very good at hiding, or otherwise determined a method of hiding in plain sight. We collected our items from the cabin and then went back out in our fright. Probably it would have been a better idea to sit tight in the cabin and hide, the way a child might hide in their closet from a fire, but we were frantic and worried and so held but a single, unhelpful brain between the two of us, which we lobbed and ferried both backwards and forwards. It would be better to be in public, we reasoned together, because then he cannot get to us.

Not that this has ever helped us before. I was in the most public of spaces – performing in front of a theatre of thousands – when Erik last spirited me away that fateful night…!

And so we came full circle, returning ultimately to the dining car. We found the waiter who had served us, and asked him similarly if this Monsieur Montresor had worn a mask, and he shook his head in firm, concerned denial.

“Not a mask,” said the waiter. “But he had a strange appearance, nonetheless.”

“What was it? A face like a corpse? The eyes of a demon?” Raoul pressed. “A head of death, perchance?”

The waiter again shook his head. “Nothing like that, Monsieur, or at least I did not take notice. It was instead his expression which struck me, I mean – the poor man seemed to be in the grips of a certain sort of agony.”

“And by that you mean death, certainly?”

“A certain sort of death,” the waiter corrected. “A broken heart.”

“Bah! Foolish sentimentalism,” Raoul scoffed. Then he took my wrist. “Let us flee!”

By now the train was arriving at our stop in Chagny. We disembarked swiftly, him pulling me along, moving as briskly as we could through the crowded platform of milling people. We kept our eyes open wide for Erik, but I realized I was not sure I would be able to spot him in a crowd like this. If he was wearing that normal-face mask he had so bragged to me about, I would never stand a chance of recognizing him.

“We must be quick!” Raoul said, tugging me again. “The longer we stay around here, the greater his chances of finding us!”

The rain was picking up now, so Raoul pulled me close to him and huddled me beneath his cloak to shield me as best as possible from the storm. We both ended up rather wet in doing so, neither of us fully covered by the cloak; and he, being less used to such unfortunate circumstances by way of his fortunate birth, became increasingly testy and agitated the longer we prevailed out in that deluge.

He pulled us finally out of the train station and to the curb, where some ten or twelve funereal-looking cabriolets were waiting, all with their own darkly hooded drivers sitting stoically at their helms. They seemed a macabre set of gargoyles, motionless on their perches even as the rain poured down upon them; their horses, too, all seemed dismal and dead, and they were rather more like the black, skeleton-like creatures I had heard about from my father’s stories.

Raoul quickly picked the first cab we could get the attention of, the furthest one at the end, and then we all but jumped into the bed of the carriage. As I was rearranging my skirts, which were being pulled by my boot, I heard a small thump from behind the carriage, as if one of the horses around us had stomped its foot particularly hard against the ground, and then the driver came around to the front and mounted his station with all the grim grace of an undertaker.

“To the Chagny estate,” Raoul directed from his seat, just as from the corner of my eye I spotted a black-cloaked figure boarding the carriage behind us. Raoul must have seen him too, for he added urgently, “Post-haste!”

The driver uttered no response - or if he did it was lost beneath his grim hood - but instead whipped the reins sharply against the two bony mares’ wet bodies, issuing forth a snapping wet crack. And then off we were, careening directly into that tenebrous deluge, where only darkness and shadow play…

--

Christine paused a moment from her writing, studying the ink as it dried on the page. There was more to the tale still to be written, but she was finding the words becoming increasingly more difficult to pen as she went on.

“Is it because I know the ending?” Christine mused to herself. “Is that why I wish not to write on? Oh, but I wish I could just take this pen in my hand and change it all!”

And yet she could not! So she set the pen down and took a breath, again regarding her writing. She’d kept that journal for almost as long as she’d been down here. So many pages filled with nothing but woe! Oh, she had thought herself in bliss – had thought herself happy and content with the way things were – but skimming through the previous entries revealed nothing but unrepentant misery, for months on end! And Erik had read it all, she knew; there were no secrets between them. He had made no attempt, either, to pretend otherwise. Some nights, she recalled, he would sit in his favorite armchair in the parlor, holding her journal in one hand as the other touched at his lips, almost advancing past but not quite…

Those were the nights he would turn in earlier, excusing himself to his bedroom and leaving her alone with the crackling hearth. In the parlor it was harder to hear the muffled sounds from his room, but in her own bedroom she could hear his choked sobs loud and clear. Some nights she would hear him pet his fingers against his organ a bit, too, aimlessly searching for distraction but never quite reaching fulfillment. She never understood what it was that she had written that made him cry so much.

If these were the words he had read… she understood fully now. Every sob, every sigh; they all made sense. She’d broken his heart a thousand times over without meaning to.

Perhaps he deserved it. He had hurt her in so many ways… perhaps this was his just deserts. He was a foul and wicked man, who cared for nothing but his own selfish, hateful delights. He cared about her only because he loved her; if his heart had not taken a mind of its own and latched onto her, she never would have amounted to anything more than dirt to him.

And how awful he could have been to her! He could have treated her just like he treated the rest of the world. All those callous tales he had told of Persia came back to her. How much like a king he had been in those days! He had made an entire country bend to his whim, and spun that spoiled little sultana tightly around his finger. He had thoroughly ruined her, in the course of a single night – befouled her in her locked bed chamber in every sort of way except the explicit sin – and once sated, had cast her aside like the snapped string of a violin. She had pursued him afterwards to the point of mind-breaking obsession, desperately clutching at a chance of escape from the complacent boredom of her idyllic and perfect life, spouting soliloquies of love from her veranda in the tragic hope that one night he would hear her plea once more… but no amount of soldiers that she sent after him could convince him to change his mind and come back to play the way she wanted. It mattered not what she felt - only what he felt!

No, that wasn’t quite right…

If that was how he truly was, Christine and he would have been married long ago. There would have been no chance for waffling, for debating, for loving. She would not have been given that opportunity. He would have taken her the way she knew he wanted to. She would have hated him for it.

And yet she did not. He restrained himself for no other reason than for her sake. What was it he was always talking about? Coercion? He did not want to make a bound woman his wife; he wanted someone free – free to choose not to love him, and then choosing him anyway.

Wasn’t that what everyone longed for, in the end?

In an instant she knew: she had to speak with him.

Christine stood from her writing desk and moved to the door. Hand on the lock, she sent a quick prayer to heaven before unlatching it and slowly pulling it open.

He was not in the hall – nor the kitchen, nor the dining room, parlor, or anywhere else.

“Erik?” Christine called, standing beside the extinguished hearth and shivering in her night-robe. “Where are you?”

There was no response.

She toed her way back down the hall, and spotted his door. She hadn’t heard him return down this way, but maybe…?

She knocked twice. “Erik, are you in there?”

A sigh came from behind the door, like a breeze through an open window, but nothing more. But it was enough to know he was in there. He just didn’t want to see her.

“Erik?” Christine prayed, fingertips brushing against the hard wood of his door. “Please, can we speak?”

Still he kept his silence.

“Erik?”

Not even the wind stirred.

“Erik, please!”

Christine pressed her hand against the door as tears threatened to fall from her eyes. Her fingers curled slightly, as if to turn into a fist with which to break the door down.

It was no use to try, she knew, even as her palm struck the door. He’d designed these doors, just as he he’d designed the rest of the house. No doubt he’d used the strongest sort of lumber, like mahogany or oak, or else something imported with strength unlike anything she’d encountered before. Her clenched fist could pound away at the wood until it bled, and still it would not open.

“Erik!” she cried out, in one final, desperate heave. “Just talk to me! Open the door!”

“Christine…” his sad voice drifted through the door, as though he stood very far away from it, “I’m afraid I cannot oblige you. I cannot open this door… I cannot guarantee your safety at this moment if I do.”

“Do not say ‘cannot’ again, Erik!” She struck the door with a harder fist. “You can do anything you wish! You only cannot if you choose not!”

“Then I choose not to guarantee your safety!” he shouted back, mad fury suddenly alight in his voice.

“And why must my safety be up to your determination, anyway?” Christine called, equally incensed. “Why must you decide for me if I am able to protect myself from you? Why must you decide if I have need of protecting myself from you?" Despite her words, the metal of her sewing scissors burned against her palm. Just in case, she had told herself... "Are you not my husband? Am I not your wife? Let us be as married people are!”

“No!” he screamed, voice throttled through tears. “Christine, I beg of you – do not make me open this door! I couldn’t live with myself if I did!”

“Why did you bring me back here then? Why can we not live above-ground as normal couples do? You told me back then that you wished for that! To stroll through the Bois with me on your arm! Why can we not have that life, Erik? Why do you refuse to allow us both that happiness?”

“You know why!” Erik shouted. “Damn you, Christine! You know I cannot trust you!”

“You mean you choose not to trust me!”

“Fine! Yes, yes, Christine, I choose not to trust you! Why should I? You do nothing but try to escape every time I give you even the slightest bit of freedom! Every time I allow you even the smallest share of liberty, you betray me! You connive and conspire with the Persian, and that old hag of a boxkeeper too, each and every time I let you out of my sight! And even before – oh, Christine, even before you knew Erik’s horrible truth - even before Erik told you that you must stay with him forever - Erik just asked you not to do one simple thing, Christine, do you remember that? - and yet the very first time Erik turned his back, you ripped his mask right away from his repulsive face! Horror, horror, you said! And horror, horror it has all become since, all by your own doing, you wicked girl! What a spectacular choice that was of yours, Christine, don't you think? What a way to ruin the mood of our jovial relations! Oh! How can you possibly expect Erik to trust you after all of that?”

“Then let me go!” Christine pleaded. “Why force us both to endure this lonely existence? If you cannot trust me enough to allow yourself some happiness, then release me!”

“Oh, but Erik cannot do that either -”

“No! It is not that you cannot! You choose not to!”

At that, he suddenly went silent, and stayed that way for a long time. Christine stood, breathing deep heaves as she remembered herself and her precarious position, and a small vein of fear alighted within her. What if he did open the door? What would she do then? Her sewing scissors were only so sharp...

But then, without warning, a loud discordant blast of sound came from his pipe organ, before quickly spiraling downwards into a reckless assault of menacingly low chords. There was no rhyme or reason to the noise – for it could not be called music – and it sounded even more hateful than anything he had ever played before. Even the Don Juan had inspired more hope than this!

“Erik!” Christine yelled at the top of her lungs, straining to be heard over the noise and stammering in her anger. “How dare you try to ignore me! You impossible man! You are the absolute king of denial! After so long in this wretched dungeon, why do you still persist in choosing to be so unhappy?! I am here, Erik – right here! Everything you have ever wanted! If you can’t let yourself believe it – if you’re that impossible to convince – just release me! Let me go! Why must you drag me into your misery as well? Why must we suffer together, and yet so separately? Please, Erik - why?!”

The noise did not relent. If anything, it grew even more hateful, garnering more grotesque chordal evasions and demonic temporizations than even before.

There could be no reasoning with Erik now, Christine realized. She made herself back away from the door, still simmering with frenzied despair, and realized there could be no reasoning with her at this moment, either. The organ still blaring its bitter and spiteful disgorgement, Christine shut herself back up in her room and, with hot tears in her eyes, began to scratch her pen once more against the unfeeling, uncaring pages of her journal.

Perhaps he would read this entry, at the very least.

Chapter Text

Gift Five
“The Vow”
(Part VI)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S JOURNAL
(entry cont.)

It was with a darkly impassioned intensity that Raoul and I hurled ourselves forthright into that waking nightfall. The afternoon light had gone out completely, now that we were in the middle of the woods, and the air around us had turned to the final shade of black. The rain still slammed hard on the carriage roof, if not harder, playing for us the most dismal of nocturnes, and it came down in such heavy sheets that I feared the safety of all of us upon this road.

I felt Erik’s presence nearby. I cannot explain how I knew he was there, and I cannot even begin to describe what I felt, but suffice to say I knew he was out there somewhere. And - I suppose I prayed for his safety, too.

But where was he? I wondered about that to myself, a little naively, as we carried on. Surely not in our carriage, as it was just Raoul, the driver, and I – but perhaps outside? Had he followed us? I turned in my seat slightly to peer out the back window.

Far down the lane behind us, I could just make out a dark spot through the rain. It seemed a horse-drawn carriage, of the same make as ours. The rain blurred my line of sight, so even now I am left to doubt the things I saw… but in the moment I could have sworn both horses were the most luminescent shade of pale green.

“Lord, have mercy…!” I gasped in a quick, panicked breath.

And the bone of an echo whispered back the words: “Christ have mercy…!”

Raoul, seeing me turned around and growing frightfully pale, looked back as well. An astute and observant boy, sharp with the eye, he fixed his sight on the dark speck of a carriage behind us. Then, growing nearly as pale as myself, he sharply asked, “Is that him?!”

“It must be,” I breathed. Then I straightened myself up. It would not do for us both to panic. “All is… all is well, dear Raoul. We knew he would follow us, did we not? For we knew he was on that train, and we knew his goal was to seek us out, and we knew he had the means and the mind to do so. He will pursue us, and perhaps – perhaps we should let him. Yes, that ought to be the wisest thing for us to do…”

“Christine, are you mad?” The poor dear boy beside me floundered. “He will catch up to us in no time!”

“If his aim was simply to catch, I would have been in his clutches long ago. He does not possess me yet; and that fact alone gives me much hope for the future.”

“Are we not speaking of the present…?” Raoul murmured, and shook his head. He affirmed, more assertively, “Christine, don’t you see? Even if he does not have you now, he will catch you eventually regardless! It is just his way! We must maneuver away from him! Shake his pursuit!”

“Raoul, I pray of you, do not ask this poor driver to change his course. We are heading exactly the way we should.”

“It’s as if you want him to catch you,” Raoul huffed.

And then, his eyes widened, and he stared at me with a ghastly sort of shock as he repeated:

“It’s as if you want him to catch you!”

I turned away, looking back towards that carriage behind us. “Please do not assume to know my desires.”

“I will assume them as long as you hide them from me!” Raoul said. “Please, tell me the truth, my dear, even if it be a horrible and calamitous thing for me to hear.”

Was I to be untrue? It would have been so simple to be! Unburn the passion, throw out the key to my heart, forget all that I had come to love in the past year of my life. If I lied to Raoul now it would uncomplicate a great deal of things that would otherwise senselessly murky our daylit romance. But could I dare?

His little eyes requested me to impart my secret truth, which I had never dared to admit above the earth’s surface ever before, and I decided I would just have to trust Raoul to understand… though he never has before…

“It is with the most ardent of passions that I love you,” I began. “But it would be rude of me, at this point, to deny the thing you have always suspected of me. So let me at last confide this in you, my oldest and most cherished friend: I do love Erik. I love him just the same as you; not quite the same way, but the same amount, and you both hold in your clenched fists an equal portion of my heart. I fear you will think I am an indecent woman for that – that I cannot give my entire heart to you, or to him – but I do not think that is a particularly vile sin. Rather, I think it best not to devote my entire heart to just one man, so that I may always have a spare piece to break off and give to another in need.”

I lifted his hands in mine, and pressed them to my bosom.

“And now, poor Raoul, though I may have one ever-expanding heart that I wish to give to the world, I am now remembering that I have as well just two earthly hands… one for you, and one for Erik. If only I could use them both equally! But it is the great tragedy of our little ménage à trois that I have but one left hand, on which to put only a single golden ring. I cannot marry you both, even if I love you both.”

“But you would really marry him still…? Even after – everything?”

“He has not been as terrible to me as you might think,” I said.

Raoul raised his eyebrows noncommittedly, and I felt his hands tense in mine. “Enlighten me?”

“Well…” I stumbled. “Raoul, you are dear to me because of your pure and chaste love.”

“Pure and chaste! Is that what you think?” he scoffed. “Christine, we are not children -”

“My intention was not to offend you,” I apologized. “I meant it only as a merit to your good soul. You have never done a thing with the intention of hurting me.”

“I would sooner die than hurt you.”

“Oh!” I said. “Oh, Raoul, please do not say such things! Especially when you do not know…”

“I do not know what?”

“That you have actually hurt me many times, Raoul de Chagny,” I said solemnly. I clenched his hands closer, so that he could not pull away. “You have called me many vicious, vile, and obscene things in moments of anger. You have betrayed my wishes. You have followed me, several times, when I expressly asked you not to – and you have inserted yourself in my life when I strictly forbid it. You did not trust me to handle things on my own -”

“I couldn’t very well leave you to that miserable fate! Christine, the man kidnapped you, for Christ’s sake!”

“I did not need to be saved. Not until you interloped. And you -”

Raoul’s jaw dropped. “What, so do you wish I hadn’t, then? This ‘interloping’ I did is why we reunited in the first place! If I hadn’t deigned to see you in your dressing room – if I hadn’t chased after you – Christine, we would not have found each other again!”

“Perhaps that would not have been the most horrible thing in the world…” I let his hands fall away. “Then we all could have been so much happier…”

“I don’t see how either of us would’ve been happier!” he snapped.

“Don’t you?” I looked back to the window, to see the carriage behind us was still the same distance away as before. “I told you once before that this is a great tragedy that we have found ourselves as players in. And it is, truly. As I told you – I love Erik, and he loves me. He loves me in a different way than I love him, and than I love you, and even than you love me. His love is not pure like yours, but it is innocent and naïve. He does not know what he expects, and so he reaches for it all. And, again, as I told you – I do not have it all to give to him.”

“I still don’t see your point!” Raoul griped.

“Of course you do not; I should not expect you to.” I shook my head. “I lived with Erik for the past year -”

“Unwed,” he added, quite unnecessarily.

“Yes,” I said through clenched teeth. “Unwed. And, for your information, we acted as a proper unwed couple.” I closed my eyes, let out a strained breath, and continued on. “In the beginning, after he sent you and the Persian away, I was very afraid. I did not know what Erik expected of me. I had agreed to be his wife, and to marry him at the Madeleine – and yet I did neither of those things. He did not let me fulfill that part of the arrangement. And so we cohabitated with each other, as companions but not spouses, and for the most part he seemed to be content with just that. And in my own way – I was, too.”

I traced a hem in my dress as I spoke. Erik had sewed this dress for me, sitting at his sewing machine as he commanded me to sing my scales for hours on end. It was the most atrocious shade, like a bloody currant; it had little frills and scratchy works of lace about the neck that made me itch terribly; and it accentuated features I would have much rather prefered to leave unnoticed. It was my least favorite dress of all, and yet I had picked it to wear for my wedding despite that. Erik had labored over it for so long; how could I not love it just for that?

“As time went by, I learned a little more about him. I knew a fair share from our previous meetings, of course, but in a year I learned so much more. He is a very interesting, learned man; he speaks every language on this continent, and others. That’s why I thought he was the Angel of Music in the beginning; nobody else in Paris but him could speak my native Swedish with such ease. And he possesses a unique charisma about him – a very, well, not attractive, but alluring air that is very sensual -”

“Christine!” Raoul ejaculated, scandalized.

But I went on: “So you see, Raoul, that I have come to know Erik, and as such have grown to love him more and more each day. He told me once, in anger, that I could learn to love him… and now, I suppose, I have. That’s just the consequence of getting to know someone so intimately: we learn to love even those we think are the most unlovable. Not without effort, and not without pain, certainly… and perhaps it is not the most ideal scenario. But you asked if I would have been happy without you…”

I trailed off and gave him a helpless shrug.

Raoul, of course, looked indignant – rightfully so, I concede, as it must have hurt a great deal to hear such a thing from the woman he loved. But he was the one who asked for honesty! I could not have given him a different response and still called it the truth. And so I let him be angry, and in silence we rode further still. I grew weary of looking at him, so I looked forward in the road, over the driver’s cloaked shoulder, and found we seemed to be trapped in a never-ending tunnel of dark foliage.

“Well, what about me?”

His question drifted over to me, so soft I scarce was sure I heard it right. I turned back to him, and saw the questioning gaze on his face and then was certain I had not misheard. But how to respond?

He must have sensed my incertitude, for he elaborated:

“I, who love you, and am so much the happier for it. How could you say I would have been happier without you?”

Oh, Raoul – even I was not so cruel as to remind you of your brother Philippe in this moment. So I quietly replied, “There are many women in this world.”

“But none like you.”

Now I took his hand again. “You must open your heart a little more, friend Raoul. I am not the only woman in this world who can make you happy. There are little things to love in every person.”

“There are many little things to love in you.”

“As in you,” I agreed. “And in Erik.”

Raoul frowned at that. “You speak of loving him so much, Christine, it makes me wonder if you have forgotten that we are the ones to be married at the end of all of this – not you and him. You agreed, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I murmured. “Of course…”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Unless… you wish otherwise?”

“I am here with you,” I said in lieu of an answer. “Clearly I have made my choice.”

“But if I were to ask you again?” Raoul insisted. “If you were not under duress, as you were before? Or still spinning from fear as you were in the train? If I asked who you would rather be with – him or me – who would you choose this time around?”

How could he ask me that again?

How could –

How could he know?

“Raoul,” I gave him a tragic smile, and my eyes filled with tears. “You are the obvious choice.”

“That’s not what I asked, Christine.”

There were tears in his eyes, too.

I hung my head and rested it between my hands. “Oh, Raoul – Raoul! My good friend Raoul! You ask things you know you shouldn’t! But you ask – and now you must know…” Now I was crying freely. “How could I have left him? How could I even think to leave you? Why are these thoughts in my head? Raoul, I wish for someone to intercede on my behalf… to whisk me to a chapel and to marry me, without making me choose!”

“But you must,” he said sadly.

“Then I must!” I echoed in a cry. “Then I must! I must choose one of you two. Is it a choice if I don’t have the option not to make on at all? I have said I could be happy with you both. And that is true! But one of you I know better than the other, and so that happiness comes more easily to my heart – and yet how things might have been reversed if this year never occurred!”

“Christine…?”

I closed my eyes and whispered, “If you must make me choose… in this life… if everything were equal… if everything were just, and fair, and true… if I must choose…”

If I really had to…

“I would choose Erik.”

There was no sound as his heart broke in two.

Perhaps it’s because it had already been broken, long before this carriage ride. He always knew the answer, even if it took me until now to truly admit it to myself.

So he did not sob, or sulk, or cry; the tears in his eyes glistened but did not fall. His face did not crumple, but hardened into a sort of resigned resolve.

“Be it that way, then,” Raoul sighed, and took a breath to maintain his composure. “Once we arrive at the manor, I will arrange for you to venture wheresoever you wish to go.” Another sad little sigh came from his lips. “Know that I do love you most ardently.”

“As I do you.”

“And I will never stop loving you.”

Even now I can’t stop the tears that flow from my eyes at those words. So full of innocence. I had told him that he and Erik loved me in different ways – but they loved me in a very much similar way, too, sometimes. “Thank you for all you have done for me. You will make another woman very happy one day.”

“I only wish it were you.”

“But you have. You have filled my life with the stars of heaven for all of the days we have known each other.” Then I remembered Erik’s words from the night before. “I only hope I have done the same for you.”

“You have, Christine,” Raoul promised.

And then we embraced, softly and carefully, as two friends might do. He held me close to his chest, arms securely wrapped around my back. As the embrace persisted his hands moved slightly, to touch upon my arms, and then my shoulders, and then accidentally upon my sides just below my bosom. For a moment they lingered there, the contact nearly more intimate than I’m sure he intended. And then he let his hands slide to my back and touch my spine, and there his fingers ran up and down a short length of my back in a way that – that friends certainly do. Finally, his hands fell away.

When we came apart, I immediately noticed an expression on his face that was not there before. He turned back around to look out the back window, and furrowed his brow deeply at the carriage still leisurely pursuing us.

“Do you think he intends to overtake us once we reach the estate?” Raoul asked, trying in vain to see through the rain. “Or maybe he wishes to run us off the road?”

Anything and everything sounded equally likely to me, and I told Raoul as such. I couldn’t deny that Erik had a dangerous inclination towards the extreme, especially when I was involved.

“It will not do for him to steal you away again and lock you back up in that cellar underground,” Raoul said, face still pitched with worried concern – and that other unfathomable expression. “I will not let him.”

Then -

“Driver!” Raoul called, straining to be heard over the pouring rain. “We are being followed! Take us to the Chagny estate another way. Take care for safety, but do all that you can to lose this wretched carriage behind us!”

The driver nodded, and whipped the reigns to speed the horses, but did not veer from the course. There was no other way to go; we were in the middle of the tunnel-esque forest and there were no clear off-shooting roads to traverse. All we could do was hope to pass through before Erik caught up with us.

But why run from him now? With all said and done? Unless…!

I shot a frightened gaze at Raoul. Certainly, he had asked to know my opinion on the matter, and who I chose… but did it honestly matter? Would he really respect that?

“He’s gaining on us!” Raoul cried. Then, with his face set in a grim expression, he called to the driver, “Pull over! And let me, in this fateful forest, finally fell this fabulous fiend in a fair fight face to fearsome face!”

The carriage swerved terribly as the driver attempted to command the horses to the side; they did not seem to like to listen to their master. But at last we managed to lodge ourselves in the muddied bank of the road, and held our breaths as we waited for the unstoppable hand of fate to direct its next terrible play.

The carriage behind us came closer, and closer, and closer…

And then it passed.

We watched it in breathless silence as it trotted further and further away. The luminescent horses reared their heads back as they stormed past our stopped carriage, letting out two nightmarish whinnies, but otherwise kept their steady pace and bounded away from us.

“Does he mean to wait for us up ahead?” Raoul mused as we watched the carriage disappear into a pale green speck at the end of the lane.

“Perhaps it was not him,” I said in disbelief. “We must have been mistaken.”

For Erik, once in my proximity, would never freely leave my orbit.

“Driver,” Raoul called. “Carry on.”

But the hunched driver held the reigns loosely, giving no intention to drive.

“Driver! I said carry on!”

Still we did not move.

The driver, instead, stood from his perch and eased himself to the ground out of our line of sight. The rain was coming down so thickly that we could barely hear his squelching footsteps coming around the carriage, and then the side door opened and -

“My God!” Raoul stammered, face whitening. “It’s you!”

“Of course it is, you blithering idiot!” Erik sneered, baring his naked face to us both from beneath his black hood. “Did you think I would lie down and take this insult so easily? Let you walk all over me and take what’s rightfully mine? Suffer this injury like a dimwitted cuckold? I’ll say, Monsieur le Comte – you really should know me better than that!”

With that he grabbed my wrist and yanked me forward, so that I came stumbling forward into his iron grasp.

“And you, Christine!” he snarled in my ear. “Did you think you could run from your Erik? Did you think he would ever let you leave him? He warned you! He told you before that any woman who has seen Erik’s face can never be allowed to go! Oh, damn you, woman, why are you crying?”

He shook me, which only made me cry harder, and then in his irritation he grabbed ahold of my shoulders and tossed me out of the carriage.

I fell upon the sodden mud on my hands and knees, and the tumultuous downfall showered my hair and dress so I became drenched to the core immediately. I quickly rose, to regain my footing, fearful that Erik would be right behind me –

But he was still standing at the entrance to the carriage, arms braced against the sides of the door and standing as a blockade before it. Beneath his arm, I saw Raoul’s whitened face, cowering as far back from him as he could go in the small carriage. Erik was leaning his weight upon his arms, no doubt leering at Raoul with his most menacing of faces.

“Did you enjoy my gift, the Palomino Fino?” Erik asked. “An unremarkable vintage of amontillado, I must apologize. I had only such short notice with which to prepare it!”

“If it was poisoned…” Raoul gasped.

“Poisoned? Bah!” Erik taunted. “I am no poisoner! It’d be a waste of a perfectly good murder, not to feel your blood rushing over my hands as I throttled your swollen neck! Come here, boy, and let me feel those pulsing veins!”

“Erik!” I cried, and grabbed at anything on him – his pantlegs, the tails of his coat, his shoes – just to try to pull him down from the carriage steps. “Please do not hurt him!”

“Hurt him?” He whirled his terrible face around to me. “And why should I not? You have broken your vow to me, Christine! You turned the scorpion, and yet act as though you turned the grasshopper all along! I say, if that’s your choice, let me give you those consequences instead! I’ll kill your boy first, and then we can return to the Opera house just in time to give the audience an entirely new explosive ending to Inês de Castro! The critics will be on fire!”

“No!” I pulled on his coat-tails again to no avail. “Erik, if you kill him I will not -”

“Love me?” He barked a crazed laugh. “We’re well past that, my dear!”

Then he suddenly dipped forward and lunged at Raoul. I shrieked, and nearly fainted as I thought my worst fear realized – but then Erik drew back, swung the carriage door closed, and locked it with a skeleton key. Then he leapt down from the carriage stairs with an eerie calmness.

“Erik?” I cautioned, eyes wide in fear, and then – “Raoul? Raoul!”

“Christine!” Raoul called back, voice muffled through the door.

So he was not dead! I ran to the stairs in an attempt to see him better, but Erik caught my by the collar of my dress and held me back.

“Tut, tut,” he said, as if I were a child. “It’s not safe up there!”

“Christine!” Raoul called again. “I can’t – get – free -”

“What did you do to him?” I demanded of Erik.

“What did Montresor do to Fortunato?” Erik laughed. “I warned you both. And now it is time to see him off.”

He released me, flinging me to the side once more. As I regained my footing in the muddy ground, he walked to the front of the carriage to address the horses – and all at once his plan became terrifyingly clear.

“Erik,” I begged, running to him and gripping the fabric of his sopping wet arm. “Please, let him go. Do not do this, oh God, please do not -”

He shook my hands off him, though, and then flung off his hood completely. He bared his entire wretched death’s head to the mares, which only whinnied stupidly in reply.

“The horses,” he muttered, hardly paying any attention to me, “do not frighten easily, it seems.”

“Please, Erik,” I begged. “I’ll marry you. I’ll be your wife. I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t do this -”

“Quiet!” he roared back at me, baring his teeth and his revolting, ruined lips as he did so. “You frumpy little tease! This was all your idea, Christine, don’t you see? We could have left things as they were – but it was your idea to go to the chapel this morning! And – and again, now, as I hold in my hand the fate of your lover, you beg me to take you to the chapel still! It’s always a ploy, with you, isn’t it? You temptress! Scheming seducer! You know what Erik dreams of – you know, and so you dangle it before him as a way to get what you really want! That’s all you’ve ever done!”

He whipped back to the horses and started yanking at their reigns without abandon, doing all that he could to rile them up. But despite all his efforts, they stood just as still and unmoving in the rain as before.

With an enraged shriek, he brought a fist up – and I feared he would use it to strike the one mare, but instead he pounded it against his own skull, several times in repetition. His screams turned to wails of agony, as the horses still refused to move, and at last he pulled his fists from his head and, eyes blazing, snarled at me:

“No more choices for you, Christine. You have lost that privilege. I rather think it best if I make the choices now. Who else better to keep my own interests at heart?” He lunged forward and grabbed me close to him, wrapping me in his black shroud. His breath was ragged and foul upon my neck as he spoke. “I will kill every dream you’ve ever had. I will draw the shade upon your mind and make your future as bleak as mine. There is no life left for you in this world – not anymore!”

I struggled against him, but he held my wrists fast in his iron grip.

“And we’ll start with getting married,” he spat, “just like you wanted!”

“I’ll go!” I pleaded. “You do not need to drag me to the church – I’ll go, willingly, I promise – just let Raoul go -”

“No negotiations!” Erik wrenched my wrists, shifting them so he held them both in one hand as the other reached blindly for the horses’ reigns again. “I can’t trust a word out of you right now, you lying wench! The Comte must die!”

And then – as if he had conjured it himself – a bolt of lightning struck the sky and the entire world was illuminated for a brief, split second.

It is that one quick instant that is etched into my mind still. For right then everything lit up, like the clouds had suddenly parted and sunlight was shining through, and the darkness was vanquished at last. There were no shadows for that brief moment in time, and even the most sunken hollows of Erik’s deformed, ruined face did not seem that grotesque in that moment. And his face – that suddenly so normal face - was as still as a photograph, caught in a moment of intense shock and fear... and regret for what was to inevitably come next…

Because then the world plunged back to darkness, and a loud clap of thunder shook us both to our very cores. He pulled me back close to him, with less abuse than before – and it was good that he did, because the two horses reared their legs up in a frightful manner before they shot off into the woods, yanking the carriage behind them in their unbridled flight. The carriage flung itself from side to side on its wheels, violently crashing sideways upon the trees in its way, and I heard Raoul shouting from the inside for an intercession that would never come – but misfortune would have it that the ropes of the reigns never broke, and the carriage continued to be pulled along in its reckless path without stopping. It careened through the forest, plunging whatever way the horses wished, until finally it disappeared into the great black beyond.

The sound, though… Raoul’s voice carried long after the carriage had dropped out of sight. His panicked calls for help, which gave way to screams of pain, as the carriage threw him around its jostled chamber… which gave way to prayers for salvation and mercy…

And then at last, when the carriage was long gone, his voice gave way only to the moaning echo of “Christine…” from right beside me.

Chapter Text

Gift Five
“The Vow”
(Part VII)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S JOURNAL
(entry cont.)

The next things I must write in this entry baffle me in their simplicity.

There are many things that occurred after the wild, driverless carriage carried Raoul away into the central darkness of the forest that confuse me greatly – for the things which I know for a fact happened do not line up with the things Erik has told me about afterwards. So I will recount only what I recall, and leave the storytelling to Erik. I do not believe every word he has said to me but I cannot bring myself to doubt all of his words either. He has told me things I wish to be true and things I wish not to be; how am I to pick and choose? Thus I must cast his whole statement into a shadow of doubt – the whole thing - but not set it aside entirely lest I lose hope in living completely.

Thus I resume.

--

“Christine…”

Erik moaned my name in a breath so quiet that I hardly was sure I heard him, but it was enough to stir me back to the present.

He was still clutching me tightly against him, ensnaring my wrists in the shackles of his bony fingers. All the while Raoul was being carried away, I was struggling to break free of Erik’s grasp – but my efforts were weak, my attention caught up in the horror of what I was watching. Finally, now that Raoul was gone, I mustered all the strength in my body and pushed myself away from Erik.

“How – dare – you…” I choked out, hate rising in my throat. “You evil, evil devil - !”

He made no reply – did not even dare to look at me. His fearful eyes were fixed forever on the direction the carriage had disappeared in.

“What was that for? I said I would marry you, Erik. I told you…” I fell against him, sobbing into his coat. “I was going to return to you…”

He tensed at that, and suddenly released my wrists and grabbed at my upper arms so tightly I could feel his nails through the fabric of my sleeves. He shoved his ruined face in mine. “You miserable little liar! You were going to marry me, you say? Well, what’s stopping you now? Come, Christine, let’s take ourselves to a priest and lie to the Lord together, then!”

“No!” I cried, despite all my earlier protestations. “Not like this – it’s not right -”

“Not right, not right!” he sung as a foul cadence, and wrenched my arm as he started pulling us down the long stretch of lane. “Nothing’s ever right with poor Erik! But he told you, Christine, he told you! You have no more choices anymore!”

And thus he pushed us, on and on, through the rain and the tears. He pulled forward as I pulled back, trying as best I could to halt our journey. I refused to let him have his way. He could not – he would not – be allowed to win! Not like this!

My reluctance, in the end, made no true difference.

Very shortly after we began our painful procession, a well-meaning cabriolet came along the lane from behind us and stopped on the side to see if we might be in need of any assistance. There was but one prim gentlemen clad with a banker’s hat sitting in the belly of the carriage, and a cloaked driver out on the front. I was thankful it was just the two of them, and that they both looked fairly able-bodied, for Erik wrenched them both from the carriage and left them to figure things out on their own in the muddy ditch. As we rode away, I found myself well past horror… I was just relieved Erik had allowed the two of them to live.

The rest of the tale on my end is far less interesting, and I remember so little of it besides. Once Erik had hoisted me into the carriage, he had thrown a scarf about my neck. It was dry, which was a welcome feeling when I was soaked to the bone in the way that I was, so I reflexively wrapped it about my neck tighter – but only then did I realize his trap. The scarf reeked of something noxiously sweet, and I recognized the smell – he’d used it on me before, the first time he’d taken me down to his house in the Opera cellars.

But my realization came too late. My arms became far too heavy to unwrap their scarf from my neck, and my eyelids drifted closed. My drowsiness made me ebb in and out of consciousness, so that the journey which must have lasted at least several hours only ended up feeling like several minutes…

We must have turned around somewhere along the lane, for we returned to the train station and boarded. I recall some ticket-person calling out the hour as being six in the evening, which is strange because I last remembered it to be about two in the afternoon. Here I was still fighting not to let the drug take me, but was too tired to protest further than that - so I was able to walk on my two feet to the train but could not find the strength to cry out for help. Erik propped me against his shoulder as we boarded, and then laid me upon the bench once we reached our private cabin. He fixed my scarf into a more secure knot, gently brushing his sharp and yellowed nails against my throat as he did, and after that I truly did fall asleep.

I awoke at periodic intervals for the next several hours as we rode the train back to Paris. I do not recall switching trains, but we must have at least twice, as Raoul and I did on the way going to Chagny. We arrived in Paris under the cover of night, and returned to the Opera in a carriage. For all it mattered, it might have been the very same carriage we had taken out in the morning; and for everything that had occurred today, nothing had changed, and we were all right back to where we started.

To the best of my knowledge, that is what happened. I do not recall anything else. But the thing is – I awoke in the Louis-Philippe room with the scarf untied from my neck and draped disarmingly atop my vanity mirror. I nearly let myself think it all had been a bad dream until I crept closer to my desk, and found a piece of paper sitting on its surface:

A marriage certificate.

I ran to Erik immediately after finding that paper to demand an explanation. I found him reclining upon that ridiculously small chaise in the parlor, smoking his foul, stinking pipe, and he was quite nearly demure about the whole thing!

He told me, easily, that he had brought us to city hall and had secured an immediate appointment for us upon arrival. He had made me sign the certificate, though I could hardly keep my head from lolling backwards… he had grabbed my hand – LIKE SO, he said – and forced the pen to the paper.

As he recounted this, he laughed heartily, and then suddenly grew quiet and took another drag from his pipe.

I questioned him, asking how anyone could possibly have allowed that, and Erik said, with some amount of apology, that he’s rather well skilled in making people do things they don’t want to do.

Coercion, he’s always talking about. Choice, compulsion, and constraint…

I asked him outright if he had consummated the marriage while I was asleep. He evaded the question for a long time, unfairly flinging fanciful insults about my virtue at me, but in the end… he denied it. Despite all his other misdeeds, I do not doubt his answer here. I do, however, believe he must have come very nearly close to doing so…

All the while we were talking, he was leisurely spreading himself out on the small chaise. His pipe smelled more peculiar than usual, and I wondered if I was not the only one he had drugged tonight. On the surface, he looked entirely relaxed – to the point that he was even slurring some of his words and speaking as if his mouth was unable to move at its normal speed – but I knew him better than that. In his eyes were all the razor-sharpness that I knew him for, just locked behind the perfume of the drug and unable to break through.

This is all to say: he retained his facilities even as he spoke with a honeyed tongue, and the words he spoke were all his own.

“I have not ruined you,” he confessed to me mellowly… and nearly lewdly. “But I could, still. Would you like that, Christine? We are married on paper, but not yet through God. One night could remedy that… a true wedding night. Will you have me, Christine?”

I could only imagine if he had full control of his body at the moment. He would be standing over me, leering the way he always does… not sprawling out against the couch like this, practically inviting me to do unchaste, unholy things with him. To him.

The pipe came up to his thin, misshapen lips. Another breath of smoke. “Aren’t you the one who wanted this? You stupid girl. You proposed to Erik, remember? You asked him to be your husband. Did you think he would say no? Erik has never refused a single gift you gave him before, though he hated every single one. So what were you thinking? Did you think you could run?”

No, I wanted to say. I hadn’t planned on running. I really hadn’t…

But I couldn’t bring myself to say anything at all.

His hand fell down and rested the pipe against his chest, which rose and fell slowly in time with his tranquil breaths. A few ashes fell out against his shirt but he paid them no mind. He didn’t have the capacity to care, apparently. His head lolled against the pillow. “The truth must be that Christine knew she would never be able to run from Erik. She knew he would follow her and bring her back. Erik is a very intelligent man, after all. He guessed where she would go, like she knew he would. And then he followed her on the train, like she knew he would. And then he brought her back to Paris… like she knew he would.” His hand slowly skirted across his chest, left to right, as he spoke. “Silly thing, that Christine Daaé. Did she think Erik would ever agree to such a questionable plan if he thought there was even the slightest chance he would lose her? Christine… oh, Christine... you never had any choice here at all.”

“What are you talking about?” I finally demanded.

He chuckled. “My ultimatums are quite amusing, aren’t they?”

“Your ultimatums?”

“You did not choose between Erik and the boy today,” he told me. “He was never a choice to be had. I would never allow him to have you.”

I knew that now, but… “So why do all of this? Why agree if you never were going to allow me to leave, even if I wanted to? Why – why allow me to even pretend I had a say in any of this? Why allow me to bring Raoul into this and -”

“Don’t you dare cry about that boy,” he hissed, and it was then that I saw his true self showing through the languidity of the drug. He must have seen it too, because he suddenly picked up the pipe and took another breath with it. It calmed him immediately. “Do not shed a single tear for him. He is resting in peace, just like I promised.”

“You are despicable,” I spat.

He shrugged. “Think of me what you want, my dear. I truly don’t care about your feelings anymore.”

I was about to leave, but then he said, in a voice so soft I nearly forgot my anger: “You should have seen his mangled body, Christine. I was surprised he had any blood left in him at all. But I’m a good man, Christine, when I try to be, anyway – and I had promised that he’d rest in peace. So I searched the woods for him, and I found him impaled on the spoke of a wheel. The horses, I must say, have gone to the wild; I couldn’t find them anywhere. But him, your boy… he, I found. I brought him with us and left him on the front steps of his family’s estate, and that is where he rests still… unless one of his footmen found him and brought him inside. So do not cry, my dear, please do not. He only rests in peace.”

I locked myself in my room after that and cried for hours. I cried, and slept, because that wicked drug was still controlling me, and the thought of that made me cry even harder when I was able to wrestle myself back to the land of the living. I was ill and unwell, and it was Erik who had done this to me. Erik, a man who I feared and loved, but perhaps not so very equally in these past grim hours…

Now I have told all. In the writing of this I have sapped out my raw anger for Erik, and have seen that the hatred I felt for him was only momentary. I do not hate him, despite what he did – to Raoul, to me, to both carriage drivers, to the unfortunate banker whose expensive suit is no doubt drenched and ruined, to the waiter whose heart breaks for the devil, to the poor city hall clerk who might lose his job in the morning for filing such a fraudulent certificate, to the pale horses who were frightened so wickedly – I only feel hatred for Erik’s actions, as always, but not for him.

Well. I suppose, if Erik and I are to be actually married, we ought to speak to one another again at some point. Might I actually have some success this time around…

Chapter Text

Gift Five
“The Vow”
(Part VIII)

Christine set her pen to the side and stared down at her journal with a grim expression set upon her face. Erik was bound to read this entry, like he had all the others, and it would hurt him terribly to read the way that she written about him… but wasn’t that what he deserved? Isn’t that what he wanted, by constantly invading her privacy? If he thought so much that she hated him, what was he expecting to find by reading her journal?

How cruel Erik could be to himself! And how cruel he was to her, by association! They were truly in this together now. His pain was not just his to bear alone; anything he did to hurt himself now served to hurt her as well. And so the pain had to be addressed – if not for his sake, then for hers.

Slowly, Christine rose from her desk and stepped lightly to the door. Breath held in silent anticipation, she pulled it open in one swift movement - just to find Erik’s masked face hovering before her, fist raised as if to knock.

“Christine!” he squeaked. He brought his fist to his mouth and coughed into it. “It is time for your lesson.”

Her brows flew up in surprise. “Lesson...?”

“The Opera must go on,” Erik said, resuming his usual dark cadence. “They expect you at tonight’s performance. You must attend to your singing – I fear you’ve become rather distracted in the past few days, and your lessons have been neglected. Come.”

He led her to the parlor, where he guided her to stand at the side of the piano while he took his seat on the bench. He handed her a crisp score, which she promptly rifled though with some confusion.

“Erik, what is this?” Christine said, furrowing her brows. “I’ve never seen this before.”

“It’s an unpublished opera called Tosca,” Erik explained. “I happened to have a review copy fall into my hands recently, through entirely legitimate means. Here, sing this aria – Vissi d’arte.”

He launched into the introduction before she could even ask a thing, and soon she found herself pulled in by his keys, chained to the wilting, wrenching stanzas of the piece. She knew she was butchering it; she hadn’t had time to review the libretto or mark her breaths. Her pronunciation must have been all wrong, even though she’d sung Italian operas before, and she couldn’t read ahead fast enough to anticipate the next phrases in the line. She knew Erik would be thoroughly unhappy with her performance. But he was the one who arranged this! He was the one who wished her to sing such an unfamiliar piece with no preparation at all. He was the one who was making them suffer.

She met the refrain with tears in her eyes.

Nell'ora del dolore
Perché, perché, Signore,
Perché me ne rimuneri così?

And then he stopped.

“It’s quite tedious,” Erik said, letting go of the sustain pedal as he tapped his chin with a long, skeletal finger. “Very Wagnerian. Ah, well. I suppose there’s a reason it’s unreleased.”

“Erik?” Christine cautioned, taking the opportunity to get a word in edgewise. “May we speak?”

“Speak of what, dear?” Erik said.

“All that has transpired?”

“Ah,” Erik nodded understandingly. “No.” He struck an insistent chord on the piano. “Now, from the beginning -”

“Must we act as though nothing has occurred between us?” she demanded.

“Nothing has, my dear,” he said, fixing the score upon the stand and starting a new phrase. “Actually. Let’s pick up from measure 52. Sing at your mark -”

“Nothing?” Christine asked. “Erik, we are married.”

His playing stumbled just briefly, but did not stop. “No, we are not.”

“We are.”

“Tsk, tsk,” Erik sighed. “I have no wife.”

“There is a certificate in my room that says otherwise.”

“It’s nothing but a piece of paper. Papers are such flimsy, disposable things. They get ruined so easily.” He circled his phrase lightly with nimble fingers upon the keys, creating an unwritten dirge of perpetuity. “Hmm. Why don’t you bring it out here, my dear?”

Christine was not stupid. She folded her arms across her chest and stared pointedly at the fire in the hearth. “So you can do what with it, exactly?”

“Nothing,” he said innocently. “I just want to see it.”

“I’m not giving it to you.”

He creased his brow. “It’s a piece of paper, Christine. Just give it to me.”

“No.”

His shoulders tensed, and he brought his hands down in a loud, discordant smash.

And then he started up playing again, the lilting melody from before. “Come in at your mark. Start at -”

“Erik!” Christine stomped her foot. And, oh, she felt so childish! But it was the only way to make him pay attention to her. “Stop playing!”

“We have limited time,” he said, but this time there was an edge to his voice. He restarted the phrase. “Now, Christine, before I lose my patience.”

“I refuse to sing until we speak.”

“There is nothing to speak about,” he insisted.

“Is this how you live your life?” Christine countered. “Erik, you came to my door asking to speak. Surely you must know we have things to talk about…”

Beneath his mask, she could see his jaw clench unhappily. “That was… not quite the purpose of my visit.”

Christine flushed. The intention and raw need emanating from his voice back then came rushing back. “I know. But the matter is -”

“If you know, then why do you insist on discussing such disgusting matters?” he spat. “Do you wish to embarrass Erik further?”

“Embarrass you? In what way?”

“That certificate of yours is meaningless,” he groused, “since we have not yet completed this farce of a marriage.”

He was trying to euphemize. Christine opted to be a little more straightforward. “Well, did you think I would just welcome you into my bed after all that you did?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why did you marry me in this way?”

“I didn’t marry you. Have you not been listening to me this entire time?”

“But we are married! The certificate -”

“Means nothing.”

Christine gaped at him. “Erik, why did you bring me to city hall if you insist on it meaning nothing?”

“I wanted to marry you.”

“And you did!”

“I did not,” Erik sighed. His fingers halted upon the keys briefly. “I have a marriage certificate but no marriage. Do you understand?”

Coercion…

He went on: “Veni, vidi… non vici. I am a husband but I have no wife.”

Christine sighed. “I am your wife.”

“If you say so,” Erik shrugged. He took up his playing again, just the same as before. “Would you have let me into your bed last night, if you had been conscious enough to think about it?”

“That -” Christine paused. It was one thing to love him. But it was another thing entirely to feel any sort of passion for him last night… or even in this moment. “You have hurt me very deeply. I need time…”

“My clocks can be rewound as many times as you wish,” Erik said softly. “How many rotations should I make?”

She had no answer to give.

He turned the page and kept playing through her silence. And then another page, and another. Finally he reached the end of the song – just to flip to the beginning and start again. “Remember your cue, Christine.”

Her voice came at his command, hardly better than before.

Nell'ora del dolore
Perché, perché, Signore -

She broke off as she collapsed against the piano in tears.

“Collect yourself, dear,” Erik said coolly, still playing. “Your tears shall ruin your voice.”

“My voice?” Christine bit out through her sobs. “My voice? Is that all I am to you?”

“That’s all I was to you for a very long time,” Erik replied tersely. “Now, begin the stanza again -”

“I shall not!” Christine said, picking her blotchy face up from the cradle of her arms. “I have no desire to sing right now, dear husband of mine!”

“Damn you…” he seethed, glaring up at her. Despite his ire, he still pressed on in his playing. His fingers curled sharply upon the keys, picking at them like they were irritating, excruciating scabs. “Christine. I am not wicked. I have told you that many times before. And yet you never listen. Why are you intent on insulting me like this?!”

“You insult yourself!” Christine countered. “You think so lowly of yourself that you thought the only way I would ever marry you was to drug me and force me!”

“Was I wrong, Christine?” Erik sneered, now completely mutilating the legato of his melody. “I gave you a chance. I brought you to your chapel. I stood there stupidly as you ran off with that boy. What else was I supposed to do? Was I supposed to just stand there with the priest and wait for you to return? I’m afraid I’m a little out of touch with society these days, so, by all means, forgive me if I’m out of line – but is that how weddings typically proceed, dear? With the bride running out to skip town with her paramour?”

Christine swallowed. “I – I -”

“Right! Right, Christine, I forgot!” Erik threw his hands up. “It wasn’t a real ring, so it wasn’t a real proposal! Erik is the fool for thinking it was, isn’t he?”

The false diamond glittered in the candlelight as his hands moved back down to slam on the piano.

“I heard you giggling with him,” Erik muttered, resuming his sinister playing. “In the back of that carriage. You were laughing.”

“We were not -”

“Don’t lie to me. What else were you two doing back there? How about on the train? It took you two a very long time to leave that cabin. Should I be preparing a cocktail of turpentine and pennyroyal? Or perhaps you’d prefer a more direct approach. There’s plenty of stairs in this building for you to find yourself at the bottom of. Otherwise! I’ve had to throw out a perfectly good tailcoat after last night’s debacle – now I have a free hanger to use, if you would so like!”

“Erik, please, stop -”

“Stop? Whatever for? I am just trying to be a good husband and rid our marriage bed of filth before we lie in it.” He leered at her as she cringed. “Oh! Does the thought of lying with old withering Erik disgust you, dear? He can be terribly crass, can’t he? Here, let him make it up to you. You have given Erik many gifts, Christine, but perhaps he shall give you one now, as well: a promise.”

“A promise…?” she echoed faintly.

“He will let you draw the first blood,” Erik said, turning back to the music, “before he fights back.”

Christine started. “Erik -!”

“You must want to hurt me. Don’t pretend that you don’t. You’ve thought about it every day since I’ve brought you down here, slicing a clean line through my throat, haven’t you? Maybe putting a stake through my heart while I was sleeping? How about slashing my wrists so I can bleed out upon these keys? That must be it, my dear! Why else would you still be carrying around those useless little shears of yours?”

She did, in fact, have her sewing scissors tucked in the folds of her skirts. But she didn’t think he knew she still had them…

Christine felt her fingers reach for the scissors despite herself. “I do not wish to hurt you…”

“Slash away, Christine. Hurt me. I insist. But, please - do make sure your first hit is good, because you’ll only ever get the one. Erik has never lost a fight, and he is not, unfortunately for you, a suicidal man.”

She produced the scissors in her clumsy hand and wielded them before her.

“Tell me, Erik,” Christine fixed her gaze upon him, breathing quickly and deeply. He was still playing, not even sparing her a passing glance now. “If I were to actually try to hurt you, would you kill me?”

“I would not,” Erik said. “But maybe it’d be easier for us both if I did. Then we could prove I really am that dastardly villain you think I am. But I am not wicked, Christine, remember that. I have never committed an act of wickedness against you ever.”

“Never?” Christine laughed in shock. The scissors shook in her hand so she brought her other hand up to steady it. “Are you that much in denial about your own actions? Erik, you have only ever hurt me!”

“Never by intention!” he gritted out. Another page flip.

“All those people you killed… Erik, do you really not see the harm you have done?”

“Do you not see your own? I burn for you, Christine – does my own pain not matter just because I have hurt some people in the past?” Erik’s fingers tensed upon the keys. “I confessed all to that priest, and I was forgiven. Yes, even your God forgave me! I am a sinner no more – I have no more blood upon my hands! And yet I am still punished by you!”

“No more blood?” Christine repeated dubiously. “What of Raoul? Even if you confessed to all your other crimes, you still have his life to answer for!”

“I will pay no reparations for the harm that has befallen that idiotic boy at my hand, when it was his own stupidity that landed him where it did,” Erik sneered. “Though, I daresay: I deserve a far cry more than this disparaging thanks you are bestowing upon me, considering all the undeserved help I gave him!”

“Help? Help? Is that what you call it?” Christine stared at Erik in pure, horrified awe. “I shall not thank you for murdering the man I love!”

Abruptly, Erik pulled his hands from the keys. He spun in his seat, a curse upon his tongue, ready to strike with venom. Fire blazed in his eyes, furious anger burning him at her callous words. The man I love, indeed!

But all at once something came over him, in the breadth of an instant, that stayed his anger and softened his resolve. Carefully, too carefully, he tilted his head to the side and searched her eyes in disbelief… and then, with a great sense of unease, he told her: “Raoul is not dead…”

It didn’t register for a long moment, so for that time Christine just stared back at Erik as all the thoughts in her head flew away. All the fight in her left, her anger forgotten, and at last her mind curled upon his words and consumed their meaning.

Raoul is not…

But Erik was a master manipulator, wasn’t he? How could she dare to believe a thing he said? Especially when she had seen the carriage run away in the way that it did. She had heard Raoul’s screams… she had heard them end… and thus her anger returned to her in full flame -

“How dare you, Erik - how dare you lie to me right now? How dare you make me doubt the things I have seen with my own eyes? Next, will you tell me it was all in my head? That I dreamed this all up? Will I awaken tomorrow with you in my bed as if we were always married? Will you reprimand me when I say no, and tell me I’ve never said no before? And then, when it’s done, will you pretend it never happened? Is that what happened last night when you drugged me to sleep? How many times have you tried to convince me of your lies, Erik? And how many times have you actually succeeded? I shall never know for sure, I suppose,  but  know this: I am not as easy to fool as I once was. I remember your words, Erik. You said he was resting in peace. You said -”

For a third time, Erik slammed his hands down on the piano.

“Enough of your ridiculous accusations! It sickens me. Listen to me, Christine,” Erik warned, “and do not attempt to antagonize me again.”

Christine’s mouth clamped shut.

“It is true, all that you say I have said on the matter of the boy. But now, I’m afraid, the misunderstanding here has been yours. Raoul is indeed resting in peace,” Erik said. And then he let out a short, barking laugh. “Resting peacefully, but not dead!”

Christine felt herself go still, not daring to believe. “What?”

The edges of Erik’s twisted lips turned upwards. “I told you already, Christine. I found the boy in the woods, brought him with us in the carriage, and left him on his front steps. I rung the bell so hopefully his servants have brought him in by now. The rain would not be good for him in his condition.”

“So he’s not…?”

“No! No… goodness, no!” And now Erik was howling with laughter. He raised a slender finger to wipe a tear from the deep socket of his eye. “The boy is hurt badly but it’s nothing a few days’ rest won’t fix. He’s a strong boy, Christine; he’ll be okay.”

Christine felt herself walk backwards until she sat upon the chaise, feeling faint. “But he – the carriage -”

“Is destroyed! As he should have been, too.” Erik sighed, suddenly wistful. “I will admit I was wrong to have hurt him in such a way. I did intend to kill him; it was only by luck that the horses disobeyed me. Still, though I was not the one who startled them… it would have been my hands that were stained should he have died. And so I request your forgiveness, Christine. Does it make you less sad when I apologize for these things?”

She hesitated – and then nodded slowly.

“Then I am truly sorry.”

He reached out his hand to her, tracing a tear on her cheek before cupping her soft, red face in his palm.

“Do you forgive me, Christine?”

That only made her cry harder.

He pulled his hand back regretfully. “You still despise Erik’s touch, after all these months…”

“No, it’s not that…” Her shoulders wracked with sobs. “Everything is just – I can’t - ”

“It’s okay to hate me for this, Christine. Erik understands. I understand,” he corrected.

“It’s not…” she took a breath. “I do not hate you, Erik. Nothing you could do could ever make me hate you. I have never done anything to you out of hate. Like – like you said, Erik, you are not wicked. I am not wicked, either. Can you allow yourself to believe me?”

Erik allowed a small, sad, knowing smile, but said nothing.

“I did not intend to run… I did not intend to hurt you. I only wished to show you my love, but I – I ruined everything. I have failed you.”

“You have done no such thing, Christine,” Erik said. He tapped her chin. “You have wounded Erik greatly, but it is nothing you haven’t done before.”

“But now you know…”

“I have always known, Christine. Given the choice, you will always leave. It’s as simple as that. This is the reason I refuse to marry you – truly marry you - and why I wish not to hear you say your sweet little I love you’s, as beautiful as they may be. It simply isn’t true, and it never will be. It hurts, Christine, and it hurts deeply.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Erik said. “It is I who has hurt you first, and who continues to hurt you by keeping you locked down here with me. I am glad for one thing, and it’s that you seem to be able to delude yourself into a state of contentment with the way things are. But let us not dwell anymore on the things we cannot change and the choices we cannot make. At the beginning of the aria, then…”

Chapter Text

Gift Five and a Half
"A Gift From Erik"
(Part I)

The marriage certificate went missing the next morning.

Christine wished she could say she was surprised. Of course Erik would get rid of it. Because of course he would. She couldn’t be sure if he had gone as far as removing their license from the records department in city hall, but she knew Erik was nothing if not thorough in creating his own delusions. He was the author of his own narrative… his own wicked, vile, and depressing narrative…

And now hers, too. Since the moment she had replied to that disembodied, cajoling voice in her dressing room, her fate had been irreversibly bound to his. Now he was revising his version of reality, attempting to undo the things he had committed in the hopes of creating the perfect fantasy to reside within.

The clocks in the house were now all perfectly set to five thirty, though she must have slept at least ten hours since midnight. Thankfully, she awoke in her bed alone… but upon leaving the room, she found her door unlocked.

“I locked it,” Christine murmured, staring at the open latch with horror. “I am certain I locked it last night…”

She ran through the house in a frightful panic, searching for Erik to demand an answer. He was not in any of his usual haunts – not at the piano, nor in his favorite armchair by the fireplace, nor even dead in that ghastly coffin of his. She was about to give up and assume he’d gone out without telling her, as usual, when at last she stopped to catch her breath outside a set of doors she had not yet checked behind and heard a soft voice coming from within.

“Loin sur la mer, je n'peux m'en aller
Comment pourrais je sans ailes m'envoler?
Il me faudrait juste un bon bateau
Pour t'enmener au fil de l'eau…”

She cracked open the door to find Erik in his workshop, tinkering over some project scattered atop his bench. He was dressed in the same suit as the night before, but his coat was folded on a stool beneath his mask and his shirtsleeves were rolled past his elbows revealing his lanky forearms. One bony hand was fist-deep in a nest of wire and cloth, and on the table beside him was a large pile of fluffed cotton.

Facing away from her, with his shoulders drooped and his arms moving about with a slow, graceful ease, he made the picture of absolute tranquility. It was easier to hear him now, with the door open, and his words seemed to come straight from his heart as he sang them quietly to himself.

“L'amour est grand, l'amour est roi
Comme un jardin plein de splendeur…”

Her shoulders sank as some of her tense panic subsided. His voice was serene and doleful – quite the voice of an angel, indeed! – and she felt a placid calmness wash over her as she continued to listen from the doorway.

It was nice to hear him. He never sang for her anymore, except when he was instructing her or when she explicitly requested it of him. She didn’t notice originally, when they first started out. She was the pupil, after all, and he was only the tutor. Why would he sing when she was the one who needed to practice?

But then the months passed, and repeatedly he would beckon her to sing while he played upon his piano – or sometimes his massive organ – but he would never sing along with her. Never, unless she asked.

And she rarely asked.

“S'en vient l'hiver, s'en vient le froid
Et l'amour meurt comme la fleur…”

She knew she had to interrupt him, in order to ask that question which burned in her mind… but couldn’t she come back later? He had so few moments of peace, why should she bother him now? Especially when he was singing so nicely and sweetly…

And so she nearly stopped herself, hesitant to break through his relaxed trance… but then her own mess of emotions flew through her, spurring her on, because how dare he find peace at a time like this!

“Erik!”

He sat rigid as she approached, moving his body as if to shield his work from her, like a child who knew he was doing something wrong. Seeing that he could not stop her from seeing, he quickly said to her, in a overtly defensive tone, “This is just a thing to hang clothes on!”

For then she caught sight of a skull on the other side of the bench, half-covered with papier-mâché in a perfect imitation of her face, as well as a set of two perfectly manicured hands…

There were questions she could ask, but she knew well enough to leave them unsaid. Erik was Erik, and she knew there were matters of his that were better left unknown to her. So she ignored the skull and the body of wire, even as she trembled from the sight of them and all they could possibly mean, and addressed her main fearful concern directly: “Did you enter my bedroom last night, Erik?”

He blinked back at her, the picture of innocence. “No…”

She pressed her nails into her palms and prayed for the courage to persist… it would be so easy to turn around and pretend she had seen nothing at all. After all, did she even want to know the truth? It wouldn’t change anything, if what she suspected was right… but then again, it wouldn’t it be better to make him admit it than to doubt herself forever? “My door was unlocked this morning.”

“You must have forgotten to lock it, then,” Erik said after a moment’s hesitation, before turning smoothly back to his work. “You know I have no reason to enter that room, especially not while you are sleeping.”

“I feel like I slept for a very long time…” Christine mused suspiciously. “Much longer than I usually do…”

“Ah! That would be because of the tonic.”

“Tonic?”

“In your milk last night,” Erik explained logically, stuffing his hand back between the spheres of fabric attached to the wire cage, “I added a few drops of laudanum. You were very upset following our lesson and I wished you only to get the rest you sorely needed.”

Christine’s jaw fell agape. “You drugged me - again?”

“Now, Christine, let’s not get hysterical over this. It isn’t becoming.” Erik removed his hand from the cage and gritted his teeth as a loose wire scratched his wrist as he did so. “As I said, I wanted you to sleep. I apologize for the deception but you must agree that it was a necessary precaution. I doubt you would have taken the drink if I had told you what was in it. But I am telling you now, so truly, Christine, if you think about it, it wasn’t really a lie at all.”

Christine felt her fisted hands raise instinctively up against her chest, pressing against her blouse to grasp at the silver crucifix hanging about her neck. Her breathing sped up, panic mounting within. He was right, she would not have drunk something if she knew it was laced with a sedative. Especially not down here, where she had only her wits to wield against Erik. “You cannot just drug me when you feel like it -!”

“You have never complained before.”

Again she found herself staring dumbly at him. Now she whispered, not wanting to believe it, “How many times, Erik?”

He did not turn to face her, but she could see the bone in his throat rattle as he swallowed nervously. “Not often. But, Christine, you must understand, Erik just wanted you to sleep. He knows he is a difficult man to live with, and he fears he causes your mind a great amount of stress. He just wanted to grant you the ease of sleep without the agony of tossing and turning. That is all, Christine. That is truly all.”

Oh, if only she could believe him… “Did you come in my bedroom, then?”

“You know I did,” Erik said, and sank two fingers back into the cage, working the cotton stuffing deep into its apathetic core. “I have been in there too many times to count. I built this house and furnished that room, after all.”

Christine’s bloodless lips twitched into a deeper frown. “You’re evading my question...”

“Am I?”

“Yes,” she said uneasily. “I am asking you if you came into my bedroom while I was asleep last night.”

Erik flinched as his finger was pinched by another feral wire. “I’m afraid I would not have been a welcome visitor… that’s correct, is it not…? So Erik would not have had a reason to come into Christine’s room… is that not enough of an answer?”

“You’ve never had a reason to visit me before,” Christine pointed out. “And yet you always have, regardless.”

“I respect your privacy.”

“You do not.”

“I do,” Erik insisted. He pulled out his hand from the wire cage and turned back around to look her square in the eyes. “I respect that you deserve it. And I am sorry that I have not always allowed you to have it. But I am trying, Christine. Desperately and genuinely trying. So I have already given you your apology, which we both agreed will make you feel better, but since I see you are still upset, I will now in addition tell you this outright: I did not enter your bedroom last night.”

His two hands came together carefully, touching upon one another with the light force of his fingertips. A trickle of blood ran down from the tip of his longest finger, where the wire had cut him, but he paid it no mind as he stared up at her with his despairing, pleading gaze. He certainly looked sincere… and how terribly she wanted to believe him, too, and put this whole terrible thing behind them…

But then a loud cuckoo! sounded around them, six times in a row, and Christine found her eyes flying to the wall behind his workbench. There hung, from a precarious nail, a Bavarian cuckoo clock from the Black Forest.

A clock which now read six hours from midnight.

“Ah!” Christine cried abruptly, eyes trained on the mocking little cuckoo bird that was squawking its song at them. “But there are still five and a half hours left unaccounted for!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You say you did not enter my bedroom last night, but what of this morning?” Christine pointed her quaking finger at the clock as the bird retreated back into the dark confines of its wooden prison. “I warned you that I would not be fooled by your lies and deceptions any longer. I know how you are, Erik – I know the way you twist words into half-truths, just so you can say you didn’t lie. I have caught you now, in the trap of your own words. Not last night my foot! You’ve been not only in my room this morning, but in my bed as well! Shall you attempt to deny it, you wretched man?”

“I – I -” Erik gaped. “I would never -”

“You would,” Christine said, “and we both know it! My door, Erik – my door was locked last night. I know it was! Do not make me doubt myself!”

“You were very tired after the draught…” Erik attempted. “You must have forgotten to lock it…”

“I would never forget! You miserable man – you keep doing this! I lock that door every night. I would not have forgotten last night. I am telling you I would not have!”

He huffed defensively. “And I am telling you that you must be mistaken.”

“I am mistaken? I am mistaken!” Christine laughed madly. “For once, I am the one who is mistaken! No, Erik – I am not! Where is the marriage certificate? Have you burned it? You must have! It certainly isn’t where I left it on my desk! Is that what you were doing in my room? Going through my things? I have caught you before, Erik – you cannot play dumb forever! You are not innocent of anything! I have seen you, Erik, a hundred times before, in my room… sleeping beside me… with your hand between my legs… oh, God… oh, Erik…”

She descended into sobs, fighting against herself to stay standing as she leaned and clutched at the edge of the workbench. She could feel Erik’s piercing gaze upon her, and she knew as the seconds of silence ticked by it only meant he was trying to come up with another lie to say to her. Lies! All lies he was telling her! Had he ever spoken a word of truth? Even in the beginning, when things were simpler and he was just the Angel of Music to her, even then he was lying! And how stupid she was to believe him!

She raised her hands to her face, pressing her palms against her wet, burning cheeks in an attempt to hide her shame. Stupid girl! Stupid girl! Stupid girl!

After a while, from somewhere behind her palms, she heard him at last let out a deep sigh.

“What, am I supposed to comfort you now?”

Her shock made her hands drop, just momentarily, to stare at him incredulously. “Comfort me? You think I want you to comfort me right now? You, who are the source of all my pain and who has hurt me beyond measure? Dear God, Erik, you must be truly deranged if you – don’t touch me!”

For he had begun to reach his hand out to her while she was talking, and presently she recoiled from him in horror, springing backwards and sliding against the side of his work bench without a care for what tools she displaced along the way. She just needed to get away.

“I am not crazy,” Christine sobbed. “I know I locked my door. I would never leave it open. The marriage certificate was sitting right in the middle of my desk when I went to sleep last night - and now it’s gone! And my clock is reset, too! I did not rewind it, I do not know how to rewind it. So it was you, Erik, it was all you! And then, while you were at it, while you were in my room, where you knew you shouldn’t be, you laid down in my bed, in your rightful place, because I couldn’t stop you, because you gave me the milk, the milk with the drug, and then - and then you put your hand upon my thigh and you -”

“Christine,” Erik said coldly. “I grow rather resentful of your malicious accusations.”

She sobbed harder. “Yet you do not deny them!”

“What good would it do?” Erik sneered. “You do not believe a word I say! I will always be some duplicitous fiend to you, won’t I, Christine?”

A screech sounded as the metal stool scraped against the floor. She pulled her hands from her face away just in time to see Erik standing at full height before her.

“Go now, Christine. Go away. Cry into your pillows if you must, but do not dare make me hear you. I detest the sound of your pathetic sniveling. I do not care to burden my ears with your bawling any longer. But, please, do me a favor, Christine, and this time make certain you have locked your door… so that next time there can be no question!”

Face in her hands, she ran crying from his workshop. She did not look back - did not even have the presence of mind to worry if he would follow her or not - but ran directly to her bedroom without delay and once there slammed the latch on her door shut as she shuddered out her sobs.

For a long while she obliged him, burying her tears in the bedspread’s satin lining… until a dangerous, brewing anger from deep within her core suddenly and without warning possessed her. She dragged herself from her bed to her desk, and with a furious hand she began to pen a new, heartless entry within her journal.

Chapter Text

Gift Five and a Half
"A Gift From Erik"
(Part II)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S JOURNAL

I am so happy here. I am happy and content. I enjoy living in this house with Erik. I never want to leave Erik. I am glad I married Erik. Erik is the most wonderful husband. He is helpful and attentive, and smart - so very, very smart. I have never met a man as smart as him, nor as talented and clever. I am lucky to have my husband, whom I love very, very dearly.

I love my husband Erik.

--

Many hours passed since Christine had scratched that last spiteful pen-stroke upon her journal page. She had only ceased in her bitter scrawling when the page grew too wet from her tears for her to possibly continue on, and now she laid across the disheveled bed with her face planted firmly into the bedspread.

Let him read it, Christine sulked, crinkling her nose nastily against the snot-ridden silk until she could no longer breathe a fresh breath. Let him read it and weep. It’s what he deserves.

In the meantime, while the book dried as a heap of crumbled pages on the floor, she found herself all out of tears. It was not that she was no longer upset… but just that she had apparently found the human limit on sadness. Apparently there came a time when the body decided it had been too sad for too long, and suddenly stopped responding to any further misery.

Without her tears, though, she found herself with very little else to do beyond pressing her face into her mattress and wishing for death. She couldn’t say who she wished it for particularly – for him or for her – but perhaps it really didn’t matter at all, for without one the other would surely die soon after. All was equal in the end.

Thus was the nature of her thoughts.

Hours passed her by in that stuffy room of hers – of his, actually, since it was his house and his furniture – but actually it wasn’t even all his, was it? These were his mother’s things, this was his mother’s furniture, he was his mother’s abominable creation…

He had said she had died. No, he hadn’t even said that. He said he had collected all this musty furniture from his dead mother’s house. For all Christine knew, that woman could have been dead her whole rotten life. Had she ever actually lived? What sort of woman could give birth to such a terrifying, repulsive creature as Erik? Could such a woman truly have ever walked among other mortals in the land of the living?

Christine almost laughed at the ridiculousness of her own thoughts. Of course Erik’s mother had lived - a dead woman cannot give birth to a living child! The dead cannot even copulate - and for them to try, amongst themselves or alongside the living, would most certainly be a sin worthy of the most eternal of punishments!

After all, there was a reason she found Erik’s skeletal fingers upon her skin so revolting…

But still her thoughts went on, for where else were they to go? She thought then of Erik’s father, and how little she knew of him. Erik had said nothing of the man; she suspected he knew just as much. Perhaps in her mind she could imagine a family for him – a fitting family that he deserved. She thought of a man with a curled and thick mustache… Erik couldn’t grow a mustache. His father certainly could.

His father was probably all the things Erik never was. He was probably a polite, sociable man. A man of good company and good spirits. One who never spoke too loudly or too harshly, and who always treated his wife with respect.

A man who had a wife.

Then again, Erik never spoke of him. Perhaps he never knew his father. Or perhaps he did. Perhaps his father was a brute, just the same as Erik – or worse. Perhaps Erik’s father hated his mother for giving birth to such a monster. Perhaps he scalded her with burning insults and made her whimper in the corner. Perhaps he unlooped his belt from his pants from time to time and whipped her senseless. Perhaps he even hit her outright with nothing but his bony fists for daring to lock Erik in the attic. Perhaps he liked to torture her with Erik’s presence. Perhaps he didn’t let Erik wear a mask. Perhaps he made Erik sit at the family table for dinner and wouldn’t let him leave until he ate every last crumb. Perhaps he made Erik sit with them even longer than that and partake in their dinner conversations well into the night. Perhaps he made Erik ask to be excused from the table when he grew too tired to sit upright. Perhaps he made Erik kiss her good-night before he went to bed. Perhaps they all lived a very normal life.

And perhaps, maybe, Erik had more of a normal home life growing up than Christine ever had - and so truly, then, he had no real right to complain after all these years…

Suddenly she became overcome with a desire to hurt him, just hurt him, purely, the way he had accused her of hurting him so many times before. He deserved it, didn’t he? She’d been so patient with him, and for what? He didn’t deserve her kindness! And, really, if he believed she meant to hurt him every time before, despite all evidence to the contrary, what was the difference in actually doing so for real for once? How good it would feel to finally have him do something she wanted! For - for if he would not smile when she tried to make him happy, perhaps he would cry when she tried to make him miserable!

She leapt from her bed, half the silken spread coming with her even as she tripped over her own skirts, and ran to her writing desk. There was something, somewhere in its drawers, that she had brought from her house so many months ago. It had been her mother’s - a treasured trinket of no monetary value - and she loathed to part with it when it held such a sentimental value to her… but what better gift for her to give to Erik, which would crush his heart to receive, than something that would crush her heart just the very same to give away?

She found it under a mess of papers tucked hastily in the top drawer of the desk. An unsent letter to Raoul from her first stay in this horrible little house… a page of Erik’s freakish Don Juan that she stole and never gave back… and, oh, here it was all along, that stupid marriage certificate she couldn’t find this morning – she tossed them all aside, fluttering to the floor without a shred of care, and plucked the trinket out of the drawer.

This will be it, then, Christine thought as she held the little thing in her hand. This will be the gift that he will hate the most.

With a calm fury, she laid the thing out on her desk surface and rooted around again in her drawers for something to put it in. She found a velvet box that held a pretty bracelet Erik had purchased for her. It easily must have cost more than a small fortune, with its luxurious gold base and carnelian detailing; and yet for all the trouble he went through to acquire it, she found herself tossing it coldly to the side, just as she’d done with the stack of papers, and ripping out the lush padded base in order to stuff her own cheap trinket inside.

There. With an ascorbic sense of accomplishment she clasped it shut. It rattled a bit when she moved it, so after a little bit of thought she opened it again and stuffed one of her fresh handkerchiefs inside. Something for him to blow his terrible little nothing-nose with, when his inevitable tears began to run…

She tied one of her satin hair ribbons to it - the lavender one with the lace frills that he’d given to her for her second quarter-birthday - just to make it seem more like a gift… and then she was done.

A knock stirred at her door, and without a second thought she threw the box back in her desk and slammed the drawer shut.

Because of course she couldn’t give that to him. Even in this indignant state of hers, she wasn’t that cruel. It was a nice fantasy, albeit a heartless one, but in the end… it would have to remain as just that. She simply couldn’t do that to him. It wasn’t right. And despite everything… despite all the pain he had inflicted upon her… he didn’t deserve to be hurt like this. He didn’t deserve to be hurt at all.

No one did.

“Christine?” Erik called through the door, tapping his fingers lightly against the wood. “Are you awake?”

This routine again, though…

“Erik is sorry, Christine.”

He’s only apologizing because he thinks I’d like him to, not because he’s actually sorry…

“Would you like some air, my love?”

Of course I would – wait, what was he offering?

“Air?” she called back haltingly. “As in – fresh air?”

“I have cleared my schedule,” he replied, more hopefully. “We could go sit up in your dressing room with the door cracked and the window open in the hall… or we could go up to the roof… no, not the roof, I suppose, unless you wanted to… but we could even take a stroll in the Bois, if you so wish…”

The Bois! Oh, truly, she must be dreaming! Erik would never willingly let her out of this sordid cage he’d trapped her in. There had to be some sort of joke in what he said, some riddle he had yet to reveal the punchline to. There was no way he could possibly mean to actually let her out.

And yet –

They actually went!

--

It was as dark as before when they left the Opera house, but Christine expected it and found herself far less disappointed this time around. They went by carriage to the Bois, and were deposited somewhere along the shore of a long lake full of inky black water. And, surely, it would have been nicer to walk out in the sunlight again for once… but at this point, to just stroll under the soft white moon, with Erik’s grip like iron on her arm, was a compromise Christine was far too willing to make.

He wore his sparkling glass nose, affixed to his face with a piece of piano wire, rather than that horrid porcelain mask he had initially tried with her. It shifted a little with each step, so he walked as rigidly as possible… which in turn made Christine walk rather stiffly as well. It was not the graceful promenade she had imagined it’d be, all those months ago when he’d originally threatened her with his dreams for married life, but there was a gentle flutter in her heart when she realized they’d fallen into a strange sort of pattern with each other. Somehow, each time her right heel tapped the ground, his left shoe found its place right beside hers, falling against the paving stones together as a unified step forward.

Conversation was hard to get into, despite Erik being the one to suggest the outing. He remained tightlipped and stilted, even as Christine prodded him several times in an attempt to quell his anxiety.

“Would it be more comfortable for you if you removed that thing?” Christine said at one point, gesturing hesitantly at his nosepiece. She found it difficult to call it that outright, for fear that he would react poorly to her verbal acknowledgement of his lacking of such an important facial feature. “No-one is around to see.”

“You may not see them, but there are always watchers around us when we walk above the ground,” Erik said, his shifty eyes cast to the side of the path. “See, there - those two ladies? Wave hello, Christine, it’s the polite thing to do.”

He raised his hand woodenly at a pair of women, who were standing beneath a gas streetlight and dressed in some rather conspicuously tailored dresses, and Christine found herself waving, too, with a small strained smile upon her face. The women returned the absurd gesture, though they seemed perplexed at themselves for doing so.

“See, Christine?” Erik said in her ear, as they moved past the foggy circle of gas-light that was painted upon the pavestones. “They did not stare and scream, because Erik was a gentleman and didn’t let them be scared by his ugly face.”

“But they are staring,” Christine said, casting a look behind her at the confused women still watching them.

“Oh, they will,” Erik agreed. “We can’t stop people from staring once they’ve seen us. I’ve never been able to, anyway. But it’s to be expected, you must understand. We are walking through the Bois at midnight, after all!”

“Perhaps if we had gone during the day, we would have garnered less attention…”

“There will always be people looking at us,” Erik promised, “no matter the time of day. I personally do not care for it one bit – that is why I live where I do. But you, my love… I know you feel a little differently. We are very different people.”

“Not so different,” Christine murmured.

He paused for a moment before agreeing, with a slight smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Not so, indeed…”

He pulled her further along, until the reached a path that brought them so close to the water that she could almost step in its Stygian shallows. When they had set out at first, Christine had found it very hard to make things out in the darkness. Now, though, her eyes had adjusted - and with the help of the moonlight, which had turned an unearthly shade of pale green, she could see as clear as if it were daytime.

With a single slender finger, Erik pointed out various dark trees to her, from palms to cedars to sequoias, guiding her eyes through the deep foliage to explain where certain exotic species had been planted to grow. He chattered about the exotic orchids and cacti that could be found further in, nearby the greenhouse, and then suddenly stood up straight and cupped his bony hand to his ear. Christine stopped and listened too, just in time to hear a quiet hooting which seemed to come from up above. When she looked, Erik laughed and told her that the owl in question was actually sitting on a branch about eye-level with them to their left… Owls can be quite the ventriloquists, he told her with a giddy grin. He seemed to know a great amount about all the nature around them - and when she said so, he explained nonchalantly that he had been to the Bois many times before.

“I am a recluse only from human society, and even from that just barely. I am a man, Christine, and I must eat like a man from time to time. Where did you think those groceries came from?” He shrugged and gestured to the path that stretched before them. “I try to enjoy what little joys of Paris I am allowed. I might not partake in the crowds, but I am very much similar to any other normal man. So I buy my groceries in town, and I walk on the paths in this park, and I take a night in at the Opera when I so choose.”

“You must not have come here in a long time, though,” Christine remarked.

“And what makes you think that?”

“Well, we’ve been living together for many months, and we’ve never come here before…” She furrowed her brows, and then laughed as she caught the realization: “Oh! Have you been coming here without me all this time?”

Erik averted his face from her gaze as he pretended to look up at a particularly high branch on a tree. “It tends to get rather stuffy in that damp cellar…”

“You never thought to ask me to come with you?”

“Oh, Christine…” Erik sighed wearily. “Please, my love, we were having such a nice night. Let us not argue right now.”

“Fine,” Christine quipped shortly. “But let it be known that I do enjoy breathing fresh air for once, and I would appreciate it if you brought me out here more often.”

“I shall have to make a note of that,” Erik said smoothly, before lightening up his grip on her arm just a touch. “Though, I must wonder if Christine would be thoroughly displeased if we did not visit the Bois every time we went out.”

“Are you saying…?”

“There is no reason why we cannot go out like this,” Erik said, as if to convince himself. “And seeing as Christine has not yet tried to run…”

“I will not be attempting that again,” Christine vowed. “Please, Erik, try to understand that I was very frightened and overwhelmed back then, and I did not know what I was -”

He squeezed her arm in a gentle reminder. “I asked for us not to argue right now, Christine. Please, let us move on from here.”

They walked in amiable silence for some time after that, passing by shrubs of candy-making fruit and trees of sugared syrup, tracing a path through the blackened forest that only their night-adjusted eyes could see. From time to time they’d pass through a spot where the light of the moon would shine through the trees, and then all of the pearl buttons that Erik had painstakingly stitched into her pink gown would shimmer with an incandescent glow, and his nose would glint and gleam like a jewel set upon his face. A cool gust of wind blew through the tunnel of trees and, without a shawl or scarf, Christine found herself drawing near to Erik for warmth.

“Christine, you must not -” he started, pulling away from her.

“I am cold, Erik,” she told him softly. “Can you not bring yourself to even hold me?”

He held her arm in such a way that she couldn’t get closer to him than she was, and studied her face intently. “It would be better for us both if I could refrain from doing so.”

“And yet I am still cold.”

“And yet you are still cold,” he agreed.

She shivered harshly. “What if I get sick?”

“It would still be for the best.”

“And if I develop pneumonia?”

“Then, too, it would be better.”

“Oh, Erik…” Christine sighed. “We are outside and I am cold. I am asking you to hold me. Why can things not be as simple as that?”

“I did not tell you the weather,” Erik mumbled. “I should have told you. Then you would have brought a cloak…”

“But I did not, and now I am cold. Please, Erik.”

“I could have told you… but I did not, and now you have nothing to cling to except – except -”

She planted her foot down, and halted their walk. Patiently, she demanded of him, “Did you plan for this?”

“No… I just did not think to tell you. I did not remember,” he said gloomily. “And now Christine has no choice but to cling to her dastardly Erik…”

“You cannot blame yourself for this, Erik,” Christine said as she shivered again. “Please, Erik. Let things be simple for a change. Let us have this until we return to your house.”

He shifted his eyes, and was less than convincing when he retorted, “Let us not argue about this, Christine…”

“Yes, Erik,” Christine murmured silkily, leaning towards him. “Let us not.”

He accepted her in his embrace, snaking an arm around her lower back to bring his warm cape around to envelope them both. The smell of mothballs and decay overwhelmed her senses, as it always did when he drew near, and she fought against herself not to pull away now that she finally had him so close.

“Was that so hard?” Christine laughed, willing herself to breath through her mouth.

“It was honestly not,” he smiled back, looking quite in awe of where his hand was now coasting along the small of her waist. “On the contrary - it is hard to restrain myself with you, my love.”

“I wish you never would.”

“I wish that, too.”

They continued down the way, until they reached the very end of the forest and could see through the wrought-iron fence to the sleeping town on the other side of the sparkling Seine. They took a rest from their stroll beside it, gazing out between the narrow black pickets, wordless in their respective, dreamy musings.

Doubtlessly, the night was smoothly rolling along… in time it would be dawn, and they would have to return to their strange little world below the ground. Who knew what would happen from here? Christine didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to know – and as she cast a side-long glance at Erik, and saw the soft contentment upon his face, she realized he knew just as little as her.

Had she been unfair to him? He didn’t know what he was doing. All he wanted was to be happy… just like she did. And he wanted her to be happy, too, just as she wanted him to be happy. But they were both inexperienced with love and all its complicated entanglements, and neither of them knew how to maneuver in such precarious positions. Could she fault his paranoia? His doubt? His distrust? How could she blame him when she responded in kind to all of his advances? What was he supposed to think? What did she want him to think?

Regardless - it was wrong of him to hold her as a prisoner in his home. Nothing could happen as long as they remained down there, like warden and hostage.

But still… still, it was nice to breathe the fresh air for once.

“Thank you for bringing me out here,” Christine said, pressing her rosy cheek into the warm wool of his coat. “I have missed the world.”

“And your world has missed you, too,” Erik said softly. “You know, Christine… it was never my intention to keep you locked down there.”

She quirked an eyebrow up at him. “Truly?”

“Yes… and just so you know, I have offered to bring you up before,” he said. “You just never accepted.”

“I don’t think I realized those offers were real.”

“Of course they were. I am not cruel, Christine - just lonely. The only requirement I ever had was for you to stay with me.”

After some deliberation, he pointed across the water.

“Look at all those houses,” he said reflectively. “I have built many houses in my life… perhaps I had a hand in some of those, too.”

“They are very pretty.”

“Yes, they are,” he agreed, and peered down at her from behind his glass nose. “Would you like to live in a pretty house, Christine?”

“I would,” she answered, “as long as you were there, too.”

The corners of his lips turned upwards in the faintest of smiles. “That’s very nice of you to say.”

“I wasn’t lying.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

He guided her away from the fence, with a slower grace than before, and returned them to the path. Still he held her in his arms, a little more comfortably, and she found a spot to place her own arm around his tiny waist.

They meandered now, following tiny dirt trails into the thicker heart of the woods. Erik took back up his chattering, ambling between the strangest topics, jumping from knives and spiders to stars and dreams. His face turned wistful at one point, at which he said, without prompting:

“I purchased a flat on the Rue Scribe.”

It caught her off-guard. He said it with the least urgency she’d ever heard from him, as like a subtle anecdote he’d just been reminded of. But he did not continue to speak after that, only looked at her for some sort of acknowledgement.

She met his eyes and nodded, indicating for him to go on. Let me in, Erik.

And he did.

“It was around the time we met. I’ve always wanted a normal life, as you know. That seemed an easy enough way to pretend.” He turned away. “Sometimes I go up and pretend I live there. I have sometimes stayed there for days at a time. I share walls with neighbors. I hear them move about. Sometimes I let them hear me. I boil water for tea and let the kettle ring for a minute or two longer than I should before I shut it off. I wear my hardest-soled shoes and walk around the wood floors at the earliest hours of the morning. I hammer nails into the walls as if to hang up paintings… I’m afraid I am a rotten neighbor, honestly. I play my violin for hours up there. I like to keep the window open, for the fresh air, but I can’t bring myself to stand near it. The music doesn’t mind the walls, though, and so it goes out and bothers the people in the street. A beggar girl down below used to clap when I finished. I think she was glad for the peace and quiet. I haven’t heard her in quite some time, though. Not since last winter.”

They side-stepped a branch of a thicket that had over-extended itself into the path, as Christine mulled over his words. Then: “If you’ve had this house all along, why have we spent so long in that cellar?”

“I can’t let my fantasies get the better of me. I have great difficulty drawing the line between the real and the imagined. You, of all people, should know that by now.”

She did, of course. And she also had that very same problem. Memories of the Angel of Music came back to her, far more vivid than ever before. “Could you show me your flat one day, at the very least?”

“I’d rather not. It’s nothing I’m proud of.”

“Could you pretend to be, though?” Christine asked. “For a little while? Just until we go back down?”

He eyed her curiously. “And what would you have me pretend?”

“Tell me what our life would be like if we lived there. What would you want? What would we do?”

He spun her a tale of happiness and joy. It was just like Erik to dream, after all, and it was just like Christine to cling to his arm and listen, as they walked about those tiny dirt trails in the black heart of the Bois. He rambled on about the neighbors they would have, and the friends that would visit them. They would throw parties and be well-liked, prominent members of society - no, perhaps not, he amended when she made a face, perhaps we will be homebodies and keep quite to ourselves. But still, he said, they would happily receive their nosy, pesky friends anyway, with open arms and happy smiles, and their friends would gift them linens and sashes to drape about their walls, full of good blessings and good intentions, and once on a summer's day, they might have a friend stay with them for a while, and they would talk long into the night about nothing - and carefully stay away from the topic of everything - and then when their guest went to bed, Erik would discretely whisper to Christine a joke about how poor Monsieur So-and-So must live such a sad little life that he truly has nothing better to do than visit us every day of the week! And eventually they would grow a little weary of his visits, but they would always welcome him in regardless, and in the morning they would send him off with a little fruit and a lot of wine, and bid him adieu until the next time he came knocking, which would only be a short while later...

Finally, they emerged from the trees and found a dismal black cabriolet waiting for them at the spot they had begun their stroll. Erik helped Christine climb up into the carriage bed, and then sat himself on the bench beside her. The carriage then began to move, jostling them forward, and the dawn light started coming up behind the stone buildings around them.

"Did you enjoy our stroll, Christine?" Erik asked.

"I did." She leaned her head upon his shoulder, and smiled when he didn't flinch.

“Are you happy with Erik for bringing you out here?” he asked hopefully.

“I am,” she answered truthfully. “I wish you would actually let us live up here, though, and that this wasn’t all just make-believe.”

“Erik wishes that, too.” Then, after some reflection, he added, “Maybe one day.”

Chapter Text

Gift Five and a Half
“A Gift From Erik”
(Part III)

Maybe one day the world would be brighter…

But today was not that day.

Instead, Erik held the front door open for Christine as he ushered her back into his dismal little house five cellars below the waking world. His glass nose was askew, as he’d stopped paying it any mind the moment they stepped back into the darkness of the hidden passageways; and now, as he locked the door firmly behind him, he plucked the crooked thing off his face completely and tucked it securely in his pocket.

He led her back to his musty parlor where they regularly spent most of their evenings. As Christine reclined upon the chaise, which was just a hair too short even for her, he crouched before the hearth and lit the fire. Then he turned back to her, an amused smile playing on his deformed lips -  which only grew more warped and devilish as the firelight played across his profile.

“Ah!” he proclaimed with amusement, gesturing at the orange flames behind him. “Hell!”

Christine was no stranger to his dark jokes, and now found herself yawning wearily at his threadbare attempt at levity.

“Oh. Are you very tired, my dear?” Erik asked, rising to his feet and dusting his knees off. “I suppose I kept you out for too long. In the future, we will have to make certain not to get carried away. Our strolls must be shorter, if ever we deign to go out again.”

“I am fine.”

“You are not,” he said firmly. “Your feet are sore.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because mine are sore as well,” Erik insisted, and then left the room.

He returned in a matter of minutes with a metal tub of warm water and a towel slung over his shoulder. He knelt at the side of the chaise and placed the tub on the ground before him.

“Come, Christine, give me your feet,” Erik said, rolling up his shirtsleeves.

She did so without hesitation, giving them over to the trappings of his cold fingers. Only her stockings served as a barrier from the chill, as her discarded slippers laid forgotten on the floor beside him, and her feet tried to jerk away from the sensation as he pressed his palms against them. “Your hands are -!”

“Cold, like the dead?” he guessed, pressing his hands more firmly against her. “Yes, I suppose they are. But you knew that before Erik even touched you, my dear, didn’t you? Don’t pretend you didn’t.”

He locked his hands around her ankles now, encircling them in a ring of ice – but did not go any further. His face tilted as he stared up at her, an unspoken question on his lips.

Christine huffed, and willed her feet to relax into his cold palms. “Go ahead, you ridiculous man. They’re just stockings. Here.”

She lifted her skirts, showing so much leg that it would have been scandalous if not for the fact that they both knew he’d already seen so much more of her body than just this. He followed her hemline as she pulled it steadily upwards, his nails careful not to catch and snag the thread of her stockings, until he reached the top ribbons sitting above either knee.

His hands hovered over the satin knots. “How do they fit?”

“They fit very nicely, Erik. Thank you for them,” Christine replied.

He moved his hands to focus on one leg, lifting it to let her heel rest atop his lap. His fingers ghosted up either side of her leg once more and pulled at the satin ribbon. The knot came undone and the stocking grew slack under his attention, nearly collapsing down the slope of her calf by itself.

“They seem loose,” he remarked dryly. “Perhaps Christine has smaller legs than Erik’s mother did.”

Christine nodded silently, watching his fingers slowly begin to roll the stocking down at an achingly slow pace.

“You can laugh, Christine,” Erik said, as he worked the cotton gently over the curve of her heel. “Erik tries to be funny for you, from time to time.”

“Oh,” she said belatedly, pointing her toes to help with his efforts. “That was a joke?”

He chuckled as he pulled the stocking completely off. “Did you really think I would give you my mother’s stockings as a gift?”

“Well…”

“I’m well aware of the societal rules regarding gift-giving,” Erik said, carefully laying the stocking out on the chaise beside her. “Have no fear, Christine – these stockings are new. I purchased them from an upscale seamstress on the Rue Saint-Honoré and embroidered them myself. I would never give you old clothes as a gift.”

Lovely… but what of all the other garments in the Louis-Philippe room? Christine wanted to ask. What of all those clothing articles that had been waiting in her dresser and armoire prior to her arrival all those months ago? She had assumed he had purchased them new, but now his phrasing concerned her. All those chemises, petticoats, and stockings… did Erik count those as gifts? And if not – who did they belong to before her? His dead mother? Oh, heavens! – was Christine right now wearing the same frilled drawers his mother had worn on her deathbed?

Erik’s hands trailed back up Christine’s other leg, creeping up to the little pink bow just above this knee as well. He gave it a short tug, and just like the other it came undone easily. “You have such pretty legs, Christine. Just like my mother did.” He offered her a crooked grin at that.

“Thank you,” she forced herself to say through clenched teeth. His dead mother’s drawers, indeed…!

He rolled this stocking all the way off, too, but stroked his hand briefly back up her inner calf with some concern. “You have gooseflesh, my dear… do you not like it when I touch you here?”

“It’s not that,” she lied. “I’m just cold.”

“Then let me help you with that. Sit forward,” he instructed. He took her by the tips of her toes and led her to the silver basin which sat on the ground before his knees. Her feet sunk into the warm water easily, and any thoughts of ice or winter or frigidness disappeared instantly from her mind.

He reached up and pulled the towel down from the height of his shoulder, dunking it in the water before lightly wringing it out over where her feet laid plain in the basin with slow, methodical precision. Beads of warm water ran over her skin, wetting the tops of her feet that the shallow water couldn’t reach. She felt the tension in her legs begin to ease up, and she felt herself melt back against the chaise.

He brought the towel around one ankle, and with delicate fingers prodded her to lift her foot into his grasp. There was no thought or question; she did as he commanded, and once lifted, her foot was accepted into the warm embrace of the soft, damp towel.

It was probably the most intimate they had ever been. Certainly, they had slept together many times before, in the most ‘innocent’ of ways, and she remained forever doubtful regarding the completion status of their marriage… but this was something else entirely.

He had told her before that marriage was more than just that one very physical aspect that so many men and women spent their lives chasing. In a fit of anger, he had revealed his fears and desires to her. He wanted a connection with her. He wanted to shares his burdens… and his dreams. He wanted them to be one – not just in that physical sense, but in every way humanly possible.

Erik didn’t know everything, though. He said he wasn’t seeking physicality from her – and yet his hands were still guiding that wet towel up her leg anyway, soaking over her gooseflesh like a warm tide. Innocent little touches came to her mind from the past few months – accidental brushes of their hands against each other as they reached for a plate in the cupboard, his fingers working the combs into her hair as she dressed for her performances, her hand touching his shoulder as she told him good-night and left him alone in the parlor to read his fantastical books – a thousand innocent little touches that were hardly fervent in their nature, but full of deep, devout love nonetheless.

This too, then – his fingers overextending past the towel and faintly brushing against the skin of her inner thigh – was not a touch of erotic love, but one of a sweeter romance than she’d ever felt before. And yet, somehow, despite all his claims he never knew love before her… the sincere, earnest, experienced intention in his hands told a different story.

“This towel is very soft,” she murmured pleasantly, allowing him to cradle her leg and venture further.

“I purchased it many years ago when I lived in Suez,” he told her casually. “I had a whole set, at one point. I made a lot of money, you see, from this little waterworks project they bothered me with, so I purchased every little pretty thing that caught my eye… beautiful linens, beautiful tablecloths, beautiful hand-towels… far too many for me to use, of course, but you know I can never resist beautiful things when I see them. I purchased a set of empty houses and furnished them all from floor to ceiling. In the end, though, I left everything behind when I had to flee, because – well, you understand.”

She nodded, and he coasted back down her leg to stroke at the arch of her foot with the damp cotton.

“This towel is the only one I kept. I couldn’t bear to part with it, you see. A princess had once washed my feet with it… my feet, Christine, can you believe it? A punishment for her, but still! No woman had ever washed my feet before! Not one! I was understandably attached to this towel. So I tied it to my robes when I left Suez, and when I returned to Rouen I wondered if maybe, like that princess, my mother would get down on her knees and -”

Christine let out a yelp and yanked her ankle out of his grip. “Why in the world must you keep bringing up your mother?!”

“She is on my mind today, that is all,” Erik mumbled. “Is that so strange? Do you not spare a single thought for your own rotting father every once in a while?”

“Oh,” Christine said dumbly. She did think about her father a lot. It had only been a few years since he died, after all, and he had been just about her entire world. Without him she had been so incredibly lonely, lost until she heard that ethereal voice call to her in her dressing room that day… “I’m sorry, Erik. Go on.”

“My mother had aged rather violently in the time since I had last seen her. She ailed from many things; blindness, arthritis, general unpleasantness - just to name a few. A nunnery had taken her in, in my absence, and committed her to terminal care. She was perhaps no older than I am now, or maybe even younger, and yet when I found her she looked as if she’d been dead in her grave for five years or more. It was unfortunate, as I recalled her being a very beautiful woman when I was small.”

All the while he was talking, he had snaked his fingers back around her ankle and guided her foot back to the basin. The water was cooling off now, and no longer gave Christine the relief she had originally basked in.

“I was lonely, as I have always been, but now I had just crawled home from playing God in yet another royal court that wanted me dead. I was afraid for my life. Was there truly no land for me to go in this world? Was I destined to be hated anywhere I went? Even my sweet little sultana wanted my severed head mounted to her wall! So I was afraid, and now… now I wanted my mother. Isn’t Erik terrible? To want for such a thing? But it didn’t matter; Erik has always been a selfish man. So… he staked his claim as her son and brought her home.”

He had never mentioned any of this to Christine before. She held her breath as he lifted her feet from the basin now and pushed it aside. He sat, now, pressing his back against the chaise and leaning his head against the bundle of skirts pulled up over her knees.

“She still hated me,” he said emptily. “After all those years, she still hated me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It hardly even hurts anymore.”

“But it still does?”

“Yes,” he sighed. “It still does.”

Silence reigned after that. Erik had not brought a second towel with which to dry her feet, so instead Christine stretched her dripping legs before the fire and hoped the heat from the flames would help them dry. She considered asking Erik to fetch a fresh towel, but when she peered down over his shoulder, she found his eyes closed and his face pitched in an expression she knew all too well. She had seen it on her own face in her dressing-room mirror hundreds of times before; he was lost in his own little world, haunted by memories of grief and longing and decay.

“Erik?” Christine asked softly, wishing to stir him carefully from his dark rumination. “Could you tell me more about her?”

His eyes closed tighter, as if wincing from a sharp pain, but he responded to her all the same. “Erik does not like to talk about his mother.”

“I know,” she said. “But if you can bare to tell me just this once, we need never speak of her again. And then, in the future, when it hurts again – well, it will still hurt, but at the very least you won’t be left to handle your pain alone.”

Delicately, she placed a hand on his shoulder – and after a breath he reached up and touched it with his own bony fingers.

“There is not so very much to say,” he said mildly. “She was nothing but an invalid when I brought her home from the nunnery. I thought she would die that first night. I was prepared for it. I sat beside her all night, holding her hand and listening to her breaths… but death never came.

“After that first night, I knew I couldn’t bear to lose her. As much as she loathed me, and as much as I loathed her… I wanted my mother. So I gave her every sort of medicine I knew how to make. She refused to take anything I gave her, though, so I held her mouth open and forced her to drink. Every day was a battle with her. She was stubborn. She truly did not want to live...

“Despite her, I pressed on. I carried her from her bed each morning and laid her upon this chaise. As you see, it’s a short piece… she had purchased it purposefully, when I was young, so that I could never sit beside her. So I sat like this instead, on the ground, with my work in my lap – the plans for what would later become this Opera house – and we never spoke, not one word. She liked silence.

“The months went by, unhappy but fleeting. I sought my mother’s love desperately, and so I devoted myself entirely to being her son. I cooked her the most curative meals I knew, and sat patiently at her bedside as I force-fed her every last spoonful. I stripped her naked and bathed her in her bed every morning, using this very towel to wipe away her sweat and her tears. I dressed her in a clean, pretty gown every day, like a doll, and I always did her hair up very nicely and painted her cheeks with rouge and chalk, so that if anyone came to visit she could always be presented to them as a properly beautiful and respectable woman.

“Then one morning, as I sat with my fingers firmly about her jaw, patiently waiting for her to swallow her last bit of broth, she suddenly grabbed a sausage knife from the tray and swiped at my throat. She only nicked me, I promise, nothing more than a scrape… but like I told you, Christine… I do not appreciate attempts on my life – especially unwarranted ones carried out by ungrateful women. I slapped her flat across the face and squeezed my hands around her neck until her eyes bulged from their sockets. She tried to plead with me, moving her lips wordlessly like so many others had done before her. Her mouth gurgled with my blood, which was pouring quite annoyingly from the gash in my neck, and I was forced to let go prematurely to attend to the mess she had made of my throat. She pushed me off of her, or rather I rolled off of her, and I grabbed up the towel to staunch the bleed.

“She shouted something at me then, her first words to me since I had returned to her side, but I cannot for the life of me remember what they were. I do not think I even heard her. But then she grabbed the knife again, and slashed it once at me – and, still, Christine, I loved my mother a great deal. I promise you that I did. But I feared for my safety, and I feared for hers as well – for who knew what I would do to her if she continued to aggress me? So I tied her wrists to the bed with a cord of rope and left her like that for a week – or something like that. The time ran away from me, to be honest. In the meantime I went to Paris and presented my plans to Garnier for evacuating the fifth cellar. I busied myself with solving the bottomless lake problem that had revealed itself in recent weeks. I had half a mind to simply not return home at all, but in my blind haste to leave I had forgotten my entire box of drafting tools there. They were expensive to replace and, alas, I was no longer the man of infinite means I had been in the royal courts. So I had no choice but to return to Rouen.

“Imagine my shock when I found my mother, looking better than she had in all the months she’d been under my care! Surely, she was still bound by my rope to the bedframe… but she had her head turned to the side on the pillow, and she was looking out the bedroom window, watching the sunset with the smallest of smiles on her face. And in her eyes – her beautiful eyes, did I tell you how beautiful her eyes were, Christine? - there was the smallest glimmer of light that I had never seen before. Was she seeing something past this mortal realm? Was she breaths away from her demise? Was she about to escape me for good? The very thought scared me… but then she turned to see me in the doorway, and that small light in her eyes snuffed out completely.

“After that, she became quite docile. She had lost a great amount of strength in the week I’d been apart from her, so we had to restart her convalescence from the beginning. This time, however, she took a much more active role in her recuperation. She stopped refusing her food, she made efforts to walk, and she… she…” His words faltered as his shoulders began to shake.

“Yes?” Christine prodded. She never liked it when he cried.

“She began to speak to me,” Erik said at long last, wiping a tear from his eye. “Like I was a person.”

“Did she?”

“There were limits, though,” he continued morosely. “She would not tell me she loved me. I asked her to, many times, but she always responded with silence. It was her favorite answer. At one point I tried to force her to respond. Do you love me, mother? Say nothing if you do… and still, silence! She never did respond, ever, even though I kept phrasing it like that. So perhaps she did love me after all! Do you think so, Christine?”

“I – I can’t say,” Christine answered honestly.

“Of course you can’t,” Erik sighed. “But sometimes silence is the best answer Erik can hope for. At least then he can still pretend, even if he knows it’s not true… like when Christine bites her tongue every time Erik touches her with his cold, dead hands. Erik knows she doesn’t like it, but he appreciates that she doesn’t scream…”

Christine couldn’t bring herself to reply.

“Anyway,” Erik went on. “After some more months, she could finally walk again. Her sight was restored, her cancer was cured, and her incontinence was… handled, I shall say, and leave it at that. She no longer needed Erik to carry her or to wash her, but Erik still… wanted to be useful. You know how Erik is, Christine. His mother was recovered, and was now fully capable, but still he wanted to do things for her.”

“That sounds very sweet of you,” Christine said, before her mind could remind her, Wait, it’s probably not.

Thankfully he ignored her. “All the while, Erik had worried that her recovery would only serve to make them both unhappy. He had been content to carry her like a doll around her house and do everything for her. When she recovered, what would that mean for them?

“In the end, like Erik said, she recovered completely. Her recovery was no small miracle, though, and it wasn’t something Erik could force. She rose from her deathbed and walked like Lazarus only because she wanted to. And because she walked… because she got better… that meant she wanted it. And it delighted Erik to think she did it all for him. She got better for her son. She wanted to live because her son needed her…”

Again, Erik trailed off. He did not cry, but stared straight at the fire in the hearth, the ghost of a smile on his lips. It was the most unsettling thing Christine had seen from him all night.

“Every day she spoke a few more words to me. I grew intoxicated with her attention. I played songs on the piano to impress her and I begged her not to walk away after just a few hours of listening each day. I did not sing for her because she did not like my voice, and no amount of begging would get her to stay for that. I took to wearing my mask again for the first time in a very long time, in the childish hope that she would, just once, meet my eye and smile. She never did, but that’s besides my point… ah, what else is there to say? I waited on her, hand and foot, like a servant. I pulled her chair out at the table and kept her water glass full. I learned how to embroider and stitched beautiful designs into her skirts as she slept. She hated them, unfortunately, and always asked me to remove my stitches. I never did, though. What was she going to do? Attack me with a sausage knife again? I was not stupid. I kept all the sharpened objects safely away from her, and cut up all her food before serving her. I offered her no opportunity to attack me again. Erik was very thorough in declawing his vicious mother… or at least he thought he was.”

He placed his hand on the back of her calf, and she shivered as he curled his fingers to scratch his jagged nails lightly against her flesh.

“There is a lesson, here, Christine. There is a reason I let you keep your scissors. I made a mistake with my mother that I did not want to repeat with you.”

“Which is?”

“You can never stop another person from hurting you, if that’s what they truly want to do. If it wasn’t the scissors, Christine, you’d just find something else to stab in my back,” he said. “I’d rather make it simpler for us both, and know ahead of time what will be coming my way.”

His hand flattened against her skin, and slowly he sunk against her, wrapping her leg in a single arm’s embrace. He picked up her foot and placed it in his lap, and began to pet at her ticklish skin mindlessly as he spoke on.

“Oh, but I was young and naïve, still. You see, my dear Christine, I gave my mother a tonic every night to help her sleep. It’s the same one I have been giving to you, in fact. It works very well. But Erik’s mother had terrible pains, Christine, absolutely terrible, and this helped with the spasms. Somehow she must have seen him dose her milk...

“She made him dinner one night. It was a simple porridge, because she’d never stepped foot in a kitchen before then and didn’t know how to make anything else. But she paired it with the most interesting choice ever… amontillado! Isn’t that just the most funny of coincidences? Erik’s good mother served him cold porridge and amontillado for dinner. And she doted on him, as much as she could, and Erik felt truly loved for the first time in his life.

“You know where this is going, Christine, don’t you? Erik grew tired after he had eaten, very unnaturally so, and so his beautiful mother took him by his fingertips and led him to his childhood bed. Then she tucked him in and crossed her thumb against his forehead. He fell asleep so quickly he must have missed her kiss him good-night, but she most certainly must have. What good mother wouldn’t kiss her own son good-night?

“Of course, Erik woke up the next morning feeling like a meat cleaver had been driven through his skull. He could barely walk, let alone think. He had been poisoned many times in his travels; here, too, he knew what happened. He had been drugged – by his own mother… the very woman who was supposed to protect him… to love him… what a conniving little bitch she turned out to be, in the end.

“Erik tore every room apart looking for her, but she was nowhere to be found. She had left, of course. He never found out where she went. She didn’t take any money or clothing or food. Her slippers and robe were left in her room. The rope Erik had used to bind her to the bed was gone, though, so perhaps…” Erik stared back into the fireplace. “He couldn’t bring himself to go into town to ask, so he never heard if they found a body in the woods or not. There’s very little chance she would have survived, though, even if she wanted to. It was winter and very, very cold.”

Christine could say nothing.

“Erik just wanted his mother, Christine,” he said, gripping her skirts. “You understand, don’t you? If your father was still here, you’d want him to hold you, wouldn’t you? You’d crawl across the floor and curl up beside him? You’d want him to get better if he was still sick? And you’d want him to tell you that he loves you? Christine, for God’s sake, what did I do wrong?!”

He buried his face between her knees, soaking her bunched-up skirts with his tears.

Christine placed her hand on the top of his head and regarded him with helpless pity. She hated to see him cry. How desperately she wished to hug him and dry every tear that fell from his eyes! But what could she even say to him right now? What to say when all the hurt was so old and yet still so fresh…

She laced her fingers through his wispy hair and stroked at his scalp soothingly, and offered, simply, “I’m sorry about your mother.”

“No, you’re not,” Erik bit out, voice muffled in her skirts. “You left, too.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Please, Christine, I find that devastatingly hard to believe.” He picked his head up from her lap and stared up at her with red-rimmed eyes. Snot glazed in the cavity between his eyes. “I may be an emotional man, but that does not make me any less intelligent. Don’t mock me with your pathetic lies right now. I’m hardly in the mood.”

“I know how it must appear to you,” Christine appealed. “But dear, please – I am here now. I have not run off to my room to get away from you. I am sitting here with you because I want to be with you. So please, dear – please - just look at me.” She placed her fingers beneath his bony chin and prodded him to lift his wretched head up further. “I am here.”

“It must be very cold in your room,” he said, averting his eyes. “This chaise is the closest seat to the fire. Every night, you put up with Erik only so you can warm yourself, and then you go to bed and lock the door. I know, Christine. I know.”

She shook her head. “You do not know, dear. You can never know what someone else is thinking. You can only trust and hope.”

“I have hoped before.”

“Then you know you are able to do so again,” she said softly. “Can you try, Erik? For me? Like you did in the Bois?”

He placed his quivering hands on her knees, and gazed up at her longingly. “Please don't make me. Not now. Not when we are here, like this. Please don't ask such things of me, when you know not what it is that you're asking for, and the way it makes me die to hear you speak like this. Please understand, Christine, please. I thought we agreed the Bois was just pretend...”

She braced her hands around his upper arms and pulled him up further. At last, he was her captive, his skinny elbows cupped in her soft but unyielding palms. She captured him in her eyes, his glints of amber unable to break away.

Then, a brazen rush of passion overwhelming her, she dared to ask:

“But what if it wasn’t?”

And without a second thought she leaned down and kissed him.

A quick gasp left his mouth the moment their lips collided, and she took that as encouragement only to press in more, sliding her arms around his back to pull him up into a fervent embrace –

And then he was raising his hand up, raising it quickly, coming close to her face as if to caress her right cheek, caress it as he had done so many times before –

She was cradling her red cheek before she even registered the pain. He, in the meantime, had instantly jumped to his feet and begun madly pacing across the floor, back and forth, and was halfway through a crude and vulgar insult before she even realized what had happened.

“ – you stupid, wanton tart!” Erik sneered, wringing his hand in front of him wildly. “Can you never leave well enough alone? Must you insist on opening and closing Pandora’s box again and again until the hinges break off? For Christ’s sake, can’t you see where you are? You are in Hell! You have always been in Hell! As long as you have been down here! Passion is not the only thing that burns bright red! Are you so stupid that you have romanticized Erik’s Inferno? What sort of virtuous girl acts like you? Slut! Tease! Temptress! Whore! What happened to your talk of church, Christine? Or was that just an excuse so you could kneel before the bishop? Receive his fleshy host upon your tongue? Swallow his seedy wine?”

“Don’t – don’t talk to me like that,” Christine stammered out numbly, eyes wide and fearful.

Suddenly Erik leered over her, and she cowered beneath his impossibly dark shadow. “Have you forgotten, Christine? I can talk to you any way I choose! I am the one keeping you here! You cannot leave – cannot ever leave Erik! And so you must endure his wicked words, however many he may choose to throw at you! You must endure them all!”

He spun on his heel and glared into the fire, shoulders shaking as he clenched his fists several times in succession.

“Who did you think you were kissing?” he seethed. “This putrid mouth that you so ardently brushed your pretty lips to is the very same one that just called you a whore! And it is the same one that deceived you in your dressing-room! So! Are you daft, woman? Or is it that you just don’t care? Have you bent overtop tables for other men who treat you just as poorly? How about your darling father? Did you ever help him, say, rosin his bow? No? That disgusts you, doesn’t it? Could it be I have sorely misunderstood you once again? Oh! Then, if so - is this just a thing you do for me out of pity? Fear? Hatred? Why, it must be hatred! It cannot be love. It cannot possibly be love. If you loved a man such as I – well, you would be a very, very stupid girl, indeed.”

“I am not stupid,” she defended weakly. “I love –“

“Don’t you dare, Christine. Don’t you dare. If I wished to hear a whore profess her love to me I’d just pay one of those filthy cunts we saw on our walk. Are you a whore, Christine?”

“Erik –“

“I asked you a question. Again: are you a whore?”

“I am not –“

“Oh!” He clapped his hands once and turned back at her with callous amusement. “But you are an Opera singer, are you not? You’re all harlots up there. I wonder, Christine, was your boy actually going to marry you? Aristocrats don’t marry filth. You played a nice game of all of our hearts there, but when the carriage ride was over – if it had been destined to ever reach its true destination – would he have actually gone through with it?”

“That is none of your –“

“I don’t think he would have,” Erik taunted with a sneer. “I think he would have bedded you a few times, maybe in his older brother’s bed, just to mock the poor bastard’s memory, until he was sure you were thoroughly set with child… and then, out you would be! Like garbage, Christine, he would have put you out like garbage. And then you would have cried, because you always cry – see? You’re crying now! – and then when you were done whoring yourself out on the streets, maybe, just maybe, you’d get the brilliant thought in your head to come crawling back to little Erik, who would accept you back with open arms of course. And Erik would help you take care of that pesky de Chagny parasite growing inside of you, and then when that was taken care of you’d leave him again! And you’d just find another perfect boy to ruin the life of, and back you’d come to Erik for another romp with his hanger, and then –“

There were only so many insults Christine could bear before she broke entirely. Pity flew from her heart as she rose up to stand defiantly before him.

“Erik, enough,” she ground out severely. “I do not appreciate being spoken to this way.”

He laughed hideously. “Appreciate? Please, Christine, you speak as if you have any say in this -”

“I wasn’t done talking, Erik. Do not interrupt me again.”

He shut his mouth instantly.

“I will say this only once,” Christine warned, squaring her shoulders. She took a deep breath. “You have lived a very unfortunate life. You have been very hurt, many times over. You have every reason not to trust any other living soul for the rest of your life. And yet – you are not allowed to hurt me over it. I know you love me… heavens knows you tell me that every day. And I want to love you, too. I want you to believe me when I tell you I love you. I want us to make this work. But being with you is intensely difficult, and sometimes it seems like it would be easier to just stop trying. Do you want me to hate you, Erik? Is that really what you want?”

He stared at her wordlessly, and she watched with strange sort of satisfaction as his mad, furious resolve crumbled steadily as she went on.

“You have kept me as your prisoner for over a year. In that time, I have tried very hard to make you happy. I have given you gifts, which you have thrown back in my face each and every time… I have given you music, though you hardly deserved it after deceiving me the way you did… and I have given you companionship, when the Lord knows you have been nothing but a rotten host to me for all the months we’ve spent together. I have been endlessly patient with you in your paranoia, and yet – yet – Erik, it’s never been enough for you, has it?”

Christine watched as his shoulders sank in near-contrition. The ugliness of his own words visibly washed over him and he sunk to the floor and grabbed at her skirts, clutching them to his ghastly face and sobbing into them.

“Even now, Erik, why do you cry?” Christine asked in disgust, yanking her skirts away from him. “Do you even feel bad about all the things you’ve said and done to me? Or are just sniveling like a pitiful wretch right now because you’re sorry for yourself?”

He clawed again for her skirts, and again she swept them away from his grasp.

“Please, Christine,” he begged. “Forgive poor Erik. He doesn’t mean to be a boar. You are right about it all. Erik agrees that you are correct. Christine is always correct.”

“But what am I correct about?” Christine demanded, knowing full well he did not understand a word she had said.

“Erik is a monster,” he moaned, finally catching the hem of her skirt between his fingers and refusing to let go. “He’s nothing but an ungrateful demon who hurts Christine over and over. He does not deserve happiness or love or… or… oh, Christine…” And he collapsed once more into sobs, blowing his snot into the fabric bunched in his fists.

Christine glared down at him. “No.”

“But it’s the truth isn’t it?” he wailed into the lace. “Erik is hideous and vile. He doesn’t want to be, honestly, Christine, but when a man is as unloved as Erik, what else is he to do? A man is forced to at least try to attain the impossible – no matter the cost! Oh, unhappy Christine! You must try to understand the tragedy that I have lived for so long… when even from birth I was refused a shred of human dignity and care… when even my own mother could not even bring herself to look at me... after all I did for her…”

“I think your mother loved you in her own way,” Christine said coldly, ripping her hem from his dead fingers one last time, “and I think you hurt her very deeply in return.”

He stared up at her in miserable shock.

“Now - get off your knees, Erik. I wish not to play this pity game with you any longer. I am absolutely weary of arguing with you over this. Let us salvage the rest of the evening – day – night - whatever it may be – and cry no more petty tears over entirely requited love.”

She turned her nose up as he made a move to reach again for her skirts, and instead sat back on the far end of the chaise to begin putting her stockings back on.

“And if you must cry, Erik, I just ask that you do not make me hear you. What was it you said to me before? Ah, yes - I detest the sound of your pathetic sniveling. That was it. Now get up.”

--

Thus they spent the rest of the night in the parlor, quietly poring over their own private diversions. Christine busied herself with her knitting, jaw set firmly as she clacked her needles together furiously. Erik, for his part, had a crumpled book propped open in his lap, when suddenly he let out a cry of pain and snapped the book shut.

“Oh?” Christine raised her head and eyed him indifferently. “Did you read something you found distasteful, dear?”

Miserably, he set the book on the side table and placed his clammy palms upon the tops of his thighs, running them up and down as if to smooth out the wool of his pants. He ran them up and down, taking a deep breath with each turn – and did this three times, until at last he let out a quiet, shuddering sob.

Breath apace, he collected his book and turned his tear-stained eyes to Christine. “It was merely nothing, Christine. I should not speak of it. You said you did not want to hear of such things. So I - I rather think I shall turn in for the night. I am suddenly not feeling well…”

Chapter Text

Gift Five and a Half
“A Gift From Erik”
(Part IV)

THE BACKSIDE OF A PAGE FROM
‘DON JUAN TRIOMPHANT - ACT VI SCENE IX’

My anger at Erik remains as fresh as it was so many hours ago. My cheek still burns, though the nail-marks have since crusted over into three thin black lines below my left eye. I no longer bleed, and I am no longer crying – but it hurts, still, so very terribly.

He has taken my journal with him into his room and left me now without an outlet for my hot tears. I assume he has thoroughly destroyed the thing by this point – if not with his own tears, then with the brute strength of his rigored hands… the very same hands which—. And so anyway I do not think I will be getting my book back. Therefore I turn my pen on his ‘magnum opus’ instead, for lack of anything else upon which to write, and with a furious, shaking hand scribble out all these crude letters and thoughts which will doubtlessly be unrecognizable by tomorrow. Already the ink is running off the page…

I heard him weep for hours after he went to his room. A part of me felt satisfied by the wretched noise… let him cry, I told myself. Let him cry and wail and sob. God knows he has let me cry in my room far too many times before.

I was very nearly happy for his tears… but regrettably I must assume, if I could hear his sputtering sobs, then he could just as clearly hear my random, perverted fits of laughter through that single paper-thin wall which separates our two bedrooms.

Am I really as cruel as he says, then? I do not mean to be…

I know I hurt him deeply. I spoke out of fear and anger… and though I still do not regret a word I said to that foul-tempered man, I do feel a flame of remorse flickering quietly within the trappings of my aching heart.

He deserves so much more than just my hastily-flung insults. He deserves to be shattered, completely shattered, to the point of total and utter disrepair. He deserves to never recover - or if he must, I want it to be on my terms. He deserves to be broken apart again and again, and when he puts himself back together there should always be something crucial missing. He deserves to never be forgiven.

I know I am not cruel enough to hate him, though. I cannot do that to him. Perhaps there is someone else who is stronger than me… someone smarter than me... someone who knows better than to pity the man who’s always lying to her, who knows better than to try to please her hell-bound captor with ridiculous little gifts as a way of saying an ill-deserved ‘thank-you’ for his undying, suffocating affection.

I am not strong. I don’t think I was ever meant to be. Erik chose me for a reason; he knew I was vulnerable and he knew I wouldn’t put up much of a fight to his advances. He hardly had to lie about the Angel of Music… I was just so willing to believe everything that mysterious voice said to me in my dressing-room. Why wouldn’t I want to believe in that? Still — was I really such a fool in allowing myself to become so enchanted with him? He brought me so much happiness back then. He spoke with me when I was lonely, night after night, when everyone else had gone away… he listened to my dismal maunderings like no one else had ever done before, and he listened so quietly and so sweetly, with all the patience of a real angel, that I thought – that I really thought…!

More than anything, though, I never smiled more than in those depressing first months that we shared together in my dressing-room. He was my only friend, just as I now know I was his only one as well. There were times I even wished he wasn’t an angel, and was a living man instead, just so I could have a real companion to spend my time with. It seemed so dreadfully unfair that the only kindred soul I’d ever managed to find in this world was an elusive, impossible spirit; and that while all the other girls in Paris had an arm to link with as they skipped up and down the Champs Élysées – be it a sister, or a cousin, or mother… or a father… or else some other sort of friend of a different meaning – all I had to settle for was a strange, disembodied voice in my ear. A comforting voice, maybe, that uttered so many kind and tender words that my constant pain born from years of loneliness and grief began to feel a little better with each passing day… but a voice it remained, and nothing more, never anything more; not a hand to clutch, or a shoulder to lean against, or a finger to wipe away my tears.

I am young. I never wished for love; or at least, not in the way Erik did. I dreamed of a living man: to share stories with, to sing with, to walk the streets with. A companion, just as the voice already was to me – but also more, so much more.

It was greedy of me to dream and I knew it; thus I made myself agree to the compromise I had been handed. For months, then, I contented myself with just the voice, and for months I was very, very happy. It was not the happiest I could have been, but I suppose we must all sometimes settle for a little less than what we desire.

Erik told me that once, at least. But that was back when we used to share a bed, before I knitted him that pathetic mistake of a blanket. Anyway I don’t suppose Erik always has the best sense about him regarding matters such as these. I do wonder, though — did Erik ever smile as he stood behind my dressing-room mirror during our first months together? Did he ever go to sleep after our meetings with a warm, safe feeling encompassing his heart? I hope he did…

And here I am again - it’s absolutely absurd that I should hope for that! I should resent him, or at the very least not pity him! I should not shed tears over him and his woes!

And yet – I still do!

I will always cry for Erik. Even on his worst days… no, even on my worst days, I will never stop caring for him. Is that love? I do not know anymore. I do not care to know anymore.

I just want to be happy. Since that seems to be such an unattainable dream these days — like a castle on a cloud, or a flat on the Rue Scribe — I will again have to settle instead for only the small crumbs of contentment that I am allowed in this lifetime.

It would be imprudent of me to become completely hopeless, though. For even if I cannot be happy… Erik can still be. And, God willing, perhaps that can be enough for the both of us.

--

The house was eerily quiet when Christine awoke.

As always, it was impossible to know the actual time. Her wall-clock had not been rewound, but that was only because its small, delicate pieces were laying in a ruined heap at the bottom of her waste basket. She assumed it to be morning, for no reason other than because it was always morning in Erik’s world when Christine woke up, just as it was always night-time when she left him for bed. No matter how late she slept, it was always breakfast that greeted her… and it was always a full day that stretched out for her afterwards. It didn’t matter how many hours she whiled away in her room; there were always sixteen more grueling hours just waiting for her just past her door - to spend like a blood-letted specimen, strapped to a chilly metal slab with the flesh of her chest pulled up to expose her innermost parts, withstanding an intense medical examination under the dissecting gaze of a morbid and single-minded pathologist…

Resistance rewarded her hand’s light touch upon the bedroom door’s crystalline knob, indicating a secure and safe lock, but still Christine found herself ever-dubious on the matter of late-night visitors who may or may not have come in her room while she slept soundly under the spread of her satin sheets. Her crafty housemate knew very well how to unlatch locked doors; was it so hard to imagine he might know how to re-latch them again when he went back out? A locked door might as well have been an unlocked door, then, for all that it proved – and yet an empty bed was still an empty bed, meaning that even if he had taken his liberties with her unconscious form, he had been decent enough to at least let her pretend her virtue remained as pure as it was when she first came to live here.

Where was he now? Clearly not here, but perhaps in another room? Christine pressed her ear to the door and listened through the painted wood. It was so quiet! Usually she could hear him at least moving around, or playing with his organ, or doing any number of other things… only when Erik was out was the house this deathly silent!

She could only guess where he might have gone to. She knew a little more about his habits, now that he’d shared about his walks in the Bois and about the little flat on the Rue Scribe, but that could only be a fraction of what he busied himself with. What else was he hiding from her? What else did Erik do in his time apart from Christine?

Funny, Christine thought to herself as she creaked open the door and toed her way out to the darkened hall, that he is the one who mourns his solitude, whilst I am the one who is left completely isolated down here, with no hope for escape and no hope for company… save for him.

She followed the long length of plush carpet down to the hall’s end, passing by sculptures and paintings which were impossible to see in this gloom, until she reached the place where the parlor’s dim gaslight wrought a blurry, unnatural pattern upon the parquetted wood floor. The hall was made to feel all the more darker with just these small strips of light as her guide; and something more than a shiver went up her spine as she reached with a white hand to turn the antique brass knob of the faded glass door.

Petals of every imaginable shade of bloom blossomed out before Christine as she stepped into the parlor. From every surface, every shelf, every tabletop, there sat a fresh bouquet of flowers cut neatly into a thousand porcelain vases that glittered in the glow of the candlelight. The room was awash in every color of human sensation, every peak of human joy and every pit of human pain, blending together to form the softest, gentlest hues she’d forgotten how to see. And these vibrant hues were painted from the velveteen petals of a great many jubilant gerberas and yearning orchids; of a hundred haunted hydrangeas and pining peonies; and most of all of an overwhelming and disproportionate number of tender lilies.

And, in the center of it all - as if to suck the life out of everything else around it - was the skeletal form of Erik, sitting upright but asleep nonetheless upon the chaise, dressed in his best evening suit and clutching a bouquet of dreary pale-green roses to his chest within a white-knuckled grip. His face was naked, chin touching lightly down to his chest, nodding slowly with each even, withering breath.

He startled as she came near, jumping to his feet as he thrust the flowers at her hastily.

“Please forgive Erik.”

Christine took the flowers immediately into her embrace – he offered her little choice to do otherwise – and pressed her nose to the petals to smell its earthly fragrance. His hands rose up around the flowers to fluff their slightly crushed leaves, as if to force them into blossom even more than they were. Through his ruffling she managed to ask, “Is this what you have done all morning?”

“It is too little,” he replied with quick, distracted regret. One hand reached forward through the bloom, ghosting the cold pads of his fingers against the three thin marks below her left eye. “My God… where on earth did this come from? My poor Christine. This isn’t—? Oh, oh, it must be. You deserve so much more than this, do you know that? Erik fears he acted like a right beast last night, with all his colorful words and turns of phrases. Did he do this to you, too? Please tell him he didn’t.”

“You did a great amount of things last night,” Christine said, his fingers pulling the corner of her lips into a small frown even as she spoke the words. “As did I. But let us not speak of them right now. I am heartily sorry for all my unkind words and deeds; as are you, I am sure. So let us forgive each other, and speak of last night no more.”

“Can you tell Erik, at the very least?” Erik asked, running his fingers back up to the black scabs beneath her left eye. “Is he this monster after all?”

Christine brought up her hand to touch at his wrist, and then snaked her hand into his palm to pull it from her cheek. Clasping his cold hand with hers between their faces, in the midst of the flowers she held in her embrace, she feigned a light tone and asked, “What does it matter if you are? I am still here and I will not be going anywhere.”

“No, you will not…” Erik sighed in agreement, tears welling in his eyes. “But, Christine, please know that I have never desired to hurt you.”

“I know, dear,” Christine lied. “I know.”

She held his hand there, for a long moment, attempting to smile as assuringly as possible. Ignore it, she willed him. Because what good would it do to further discuss such marks? Had they not cleared the matter last night? She would not tolerate this sort of physicality from him again. She had dealt with it far enough so far in this lifetime; she would not permit it from him too. He had his words for that – no matter how ugly and painful they might be.

Or how true.

So what good, really, would it do to keep discussing it? Why further upset Erik? Wouldn’t he be happier if she pretended everything was okay? Wasn’t he the master at that game?

Please believe all that I say, her eyes implored of him, as she squeezed his hand gently, so that one day I can find it in myself to believe in you, too.

In the end he was the one to break away, quickly grabbing something up from behind a pillow on the chaise before hesitating.

“I have gotten you… something,” he said deliberately, holding the thing to his chest, as if embarrassed now to give it to her. “A gift from Erik, you may call it. Though it is not truly a gift, as it is something you deserve as rightly as food or – or wine.”

Christine couldn’t help but let out a quiet laugh. “Really, Erik? Wine?”

He frowned deeper, the tears threatening to burst forth from his eyes at any moment. “See how funny your miserable Erik can be for you? Yes, Christine, wine. Is it very funny? I don’t think so… Erik doesn’t drink wine. Not unless someone serves it to him, and even then he just drinks it to be polite. But you, on the other hand…” He took a long shuddering breath, staring at the floor as the tears dried in his eyes. “You don’t know what you do to me. I would have you drink a thousand glasses of the finest import if only you would let me. I would hold your head back and place the bottle to your lips… pour it down your throat until it made you dizzy and senseless… pour it even past that, until it spilled out of your mouth and ran down your chin. Until you choked on it, Christine, and you had little tears running down your rosy cheeks… and even then, I’d keep pouring until my bottle was empty. Until my whole cellar was empty. Bone dry. Some girls say it makes them feel sick… so I wouldn’t make you, Christine. Not unless you wanted.”

“Wanted to drink?” Christine asked, tilting her head to try to meet his downcast, shameful eyes. “Or wanted you to make me?”

He met her gaze with his own, chest heaving slightly. His mouth parted a nearly imperceptible amount to allow his tongue to slick itself against his thin, withered lips; and then, as if realizing the innate lewdness in his gesture, he suddenly thrust the gift at her and cleared his throat.

“I fear your other one has gone to the wild,” he explained quickly, with some apology. She shuffled the flowers in her hands, and receiving his gift she found it to be a journal, of a better quality than she’d had before, covered with scuffed white leather and tarnished gold embossments. A scarlet ribbon hung out of the middle of it like a snake’s forked tongue. He searched her expression for approval. “Do you like it? I did not wish to leave you without your words. Your words are so pretty, Christine. Even when they hurt. Look — I have transcribed my favorite entry.”

At his bidding, she flipped the book open to find a single entry written on the front page, her words in his messy writing:

“Today I sang as Marguerite at the managers’ gala and I felt as high as the heavens. It was not the song that moved me, but the one who spoke with me in my dressing-room after the gala. I was faint and could hardly open my eyes, but just to hear his voice beside me was enough to send my heart reeling. Oh, is this love? If it is, then I have never known love before this night! Oh! Oh, I must not let the Angel know…”

“You were charmed by the boy even then, it seems,” Erik said, making a halfhearted attempt at levity. “You sounded very happy in that entry.”

“Indeed, I was. But, Erik…” Christine touched the page with concern. “Do you really think I was writing about Raoul here?”

“I never know what to think anymore,” Erik confessed. “You certainly waxed eloquently about your love for the boy in all the later entries. This entry happened to be ambiguous enough on the subject that I could pretend it was about me, even if logic would state that it wasn’t. I read it many times, as you know.”

“Do you truly enjoy torturing yourself so?”

“It is never torture to see you happy, my dear girl. Even if your adoring words were not for me, there was someone out there putting those sweet little hearts in your eyes. And, just seeing you happy like that, it was almost enough…”

“But not fully?”

“No, not fully,” he replied with regret, pinching his eyes closed. “But almost. I could almost taste the joy you felt when you saw him that first time in your dressing-room. You had told me so much about him before then and I knew from your stories that your long-lost sweet-heart was bound to be a good choice of suitor for you. If I were a more selfless man… perhaps, I would have been happy just for your sake. But I am never happy, Christine, never. I am always just finding a new shade of sadness to shroud myself in. So I was not happy, as usual, with this turn of events – but for the first time in my life there was a thin silver lining to my misery, which I’d never seen before.”

“Which was?”

“You,” he said. “You were happy. So I made myself think, at least one of us can get what we want! I thought myself a very commendable fellow for that one. Imagine that. Over half a century, Christine, and I’d just learned how to empathize with another human being. It is really quite sad to think about.”

Christine furrowed her brows. “I do not recall that being your reaction.”

“You are correct on that,” Erik sighed. “I suppose I did throw a small fit over the boy’s first appearance to you. But must all the little insignificant words I say in a moment of upset be held against me? Surely you just begged my forgiveness for the very same thing.” He snorted insincerely, and wiped a bitter tear from his eye. “But after, Christine, after that was when I grew to appreciate your happiness.”

“How long after?”

“Days?” Erik shrugged. “Months? I do not recall. Time passes strangely down here, as you must know. But I grew to love your claim of love, for I felt the very same thing when I first met you. And it is the happiest entry of them all, for you have only grown unhappier in the time since.”

“Have I?”

“Oh, very much so, Christine,” Erik said, before touching her elbow to lead her to the upright piano at the far end of the room. He took the bouquet from her and laid it across the top board, before pushing back his coat-tails and taking up his normal place at the bench. She assumed her normal place as well, standing just to the left side of the piano – right where he could see her – as his fingers began to lull some sort of quiet, dreamy fantasie from the ivory keys as he spoke on. “You used to be so full of life. Look at what time has done to you down here: it has withered you just the same as me. See these roses? They shall wilt down here, as we have not the resources to keep them alive for much longer than a couple days. But Erik is very selfish and, despite knowing this would be their fate, he brought them down here anyway. When at last they die, we shall have to deal with their remains. Shall you press them in the back pages of your journal and preserve their crushed beauty for evermore? Or, if that is not your craft – shall we toss them into the lake as feed for the siren? Shall I bring them upstairs and reserve a space for them in the Opera house’s finest waste receptacle? The time is coming quick, Christine; their death will be our errand in a few short hours. So shall I, in a few short months, be called to fashion you a casket of your own, too – not for death, not for death! – but because your misery has starved the plump flesh from your brittle bones so much so that you will begin to enjoy the little macabre delights just the same as Erik. You do not eat nearly enough to survive, and that is Erik’s fault, especially in these recent days. But you must not lock yourself away for so many hours any longer… you have missed many meals, and Erik has missed you in return. And all this wallowing in isolation makes you very, ah, cerebral. Trust Erik on this - but do not mistake his meaning! He is not very good with his words, I’m afraid. It is a very good thing for a girl like you to think, despite what the rest of Paris might believe. But the mind needs reprieve from time to time, and it needs food for thought. Conversation, Christine, that is what I am saying. You starve your mind when you live as a shut-in, Erik knows it very well… and it makes you very ugly. Oh, but rest assured, my dear! - Erik will always find you beautiful…”

On and on he played and played, capturing a picture of a cloud caught in the light, the delicate airy tune spinning a rainbow as —he rambled on with his words. Christine didn’t listen to half of it, his words becoming more sound than meaning after some point. This was nothing new; he sometimes spoke when he played, thinking out loud about whatever was on his mind idly drolling some Mozartian melody. Once or twice before, during their lessons, he had doled out some very specific instructions to her, just to scold her later for following ‘such mindless and repulsive boobishness’ which he swore he never gave to her. She learned after that not to trust a thing he said when he was playing – at least not outright.

But, oh! The things he said were so very beautiful sometimes! And so appealing…

“I really should let you leave,” he therefore said, flippant as ever as he crossed his left hand over his right to strike at the upper board’s E-flat.

Yes, you should, her mind agreed instantly — for even in the midst of all this madness, she was still a woman of reason — but to him she remained silent, watching as his left hand tickled its way back down the keys, tinkering out a descending chromatic scale.

“It is not right for a lady such as yourself to remain down here at all hours of the day – or night. It is always night down here, is it not? So Christine has become a lady of the night… to some perspectives, I mean. Erik is very crass; of course you must forgive him...”

Now his right hand was dancing across the black keys, four – no, five! – at a time, conjuring up a new, almost foreign melody to add to the ever-engulfing fantasie at his fingertips.

“You are a good and respectable woman – you have so many things waiting for you upstairs. You have been very accommodating, my dear girl, to indulge my fantasies for this past year… to play house down here with a raging madman for so many endless days… but I fear your suffering is quite nearly over now.”

He isn’t… he couldn’t be… she couldn’t bear to stay silent any longer. “Erik, what exactly do you mean by all of this?”

He startled at her interruption, pausing his playing as he turned to her in confusion. “What did I say?”

“You said you were going to let me go.”

Two baffled brows raised to an almost comical height. “Did I, now?”

“Yes. You said it quite clearly just two seconds ago.”

He chuckled. “I don’t think I would say something like that out loud, especially not in ear-shot of Christine.”

“And yet you did.” Christine tilted her head worriedly. “Do you not realize how much you talk when you play?”

“I don’t talk,” he retorted, before pausing. “Do I?”

“So much, Erik. Just… so much.”

He averted his eyes after that, picking at the ivory of a chipped key with a single, long, yellowed nail. He jumped when he pressed it accidentally, making it ring, and so he shut the fallboard and folded his bony hands across it in surrender. “Very well. It was something I have been thinking about for quite some time. I suppose I said it before. This farce has just about played its tune, don’t you agree? All love dies in the end, Christine – even the love we fake. So… yes, I rather think — you should be reunited with your world shortly. I will bring you back up.” He leaned against the fallboard morosely, sliding his bony elbows up its solid, polished wood and stooping low to roll his pouting, naked face into the cradle of his forearms. “Though, I fear I have made a sorry mess of your life, and it will take you a great amount of time to move past what I have done to you.”

Wordlessly, Christine stared down at the man who once used to be her all-powerful, domineering maestro – the omniscient, wizardly Opera Ghost – and found him now reduced to a mere crumpled husk of a man. Here was the man who once inspired such grief in her soul; and yet, within that grief, he had seeded such profound ecstasy, which she never would have achieved without his penetrance into her life. Here the grand wretch was, slumped over his tool, surrendering to the great dissatisfaction of his unfruitful attempts at life. Her release was a mere trifle to him at this point – there was a larger defeat he was giving himself over to.

And Christine knew, as she looked down upon this beaten corpse: to go now would be no victory. Her caving captor had chosen deference at last, but not for her. Never for her.

But what was victory? Did she need to win against Erik? Release meant freedom, and she certainly wanted to be free. But did that have to mean ‘free from Erik’? Or else – free, but only whenever Erik chose? Was her life always destined to be commanded by his whims, even after he made her say good-bye?

“You - you have destroyed me already,” she mumbled, grasping the piano console to hold herself steady as she found herself tossed about by her tumultuous thoughts. “Must you continue to break me further? Down here is my life, my world, my home… do you not care at all for what I even want? How can this be what you want?”

He peeked up at her from over his folded arm. “I suspected you would be opposed to the idea, which is why it took me so long to even suggest it. But try to understand. You have always been very good at that. This is not a matter of what I wish… on the contrary, it is what you need. It is not healthy for either of us to remain down here together.”

No, it most certainly is not.

“But I am afraid to return,” Christine breathed. “Must I go now? This moment? I am not ready…”

Erik’s fingers tensed on the fallboard. “No. Not now. But soon. Before I lose sight of reason again and decide to keep you here after all.”

“You change your mind often,” she reminded him quietly, a tremor in her voice. “How soon until then?”

“Tonight,” Erik decided. “We will attend the opera tonight, and then you will go.”

“Only if you still wish it so, at that time…” and only if I wish it so, too. Christine held her trembling chin firm as she asked of him: “And where exactly shall I go, if not here?”

“I don’t know, Christine,” he said. “I have no part in that.”

“Should I go to my old home?” she asked. And then - the question which had burned in the back of her mind for so long, which for all this time she had wondered, worried, feared… but never dared to voice: “Is there anyone even waiting there for me still?”

Erik averted his eyes again, pressing his face back into his woolen sleeves. His voice was muffled in the dark fabric as he spoke. “You always are so painfully curious, aren’t you? There are so many people who live above. Why do you always worry yourself about just those few who no longer do? But, fine — I will tell you this only so you do not go through all the trouble just to find yourself met with cruel disappointment: your old mamma died many months ago.”

With a choked gasp, Christine closed her eyes as the burn of tears spiked at her eyes. She brought her hand to her mouth to stifle any further sound, and then stumbled over to the chaise to let herself down before her weak legs gave out.

After a few silent shaking sobs, she found her voice enough to say, with a fair amount of accusation, “You never told me.”

“You knew I would not,” Erik pointed out, lifting his head from his arms for a brief moment – just until another sob suddenly racked her body – and then he quickly turned away from her again. “But do not fret so, Christine. Your mamma did not die alone. In her final days, I visited her daily and fed her what little porridge she would take. When she grew feverish I dipped your worn stockings in cold water and draped them across her forehead and wrists. I held her hand as she passed on from this world and entered the next. She was not even afraid to see me… she had heard you speak of the Angel of Music, I think, and that helped her not to be so afraid. Her last words were ‘Tell Christine she has always been very good to me.’ And then she died with a smile. It was a very beautiful thing to attend – but awful, too, Christine, very awful, which is why I did not want you to know. I arranged her burial in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. I have the slip in my office if you would like to see her.”

Christine sniffed, pressing the back of her hand against her nose as snot leaked freely and mixed with her tears. “You do not lie?”

Slowly, deliberately, he brought his form around on the bench to face her fully, and held his gaze on her. He did not turn back around even when another silent tear trailed down her cheek. There was a regretful expression etched upon his face that did not quite meet his eyes.

“You know I always do,” Erik said. “But this version sounds very lovely, does it not? Would it change things so much if you knew the truth of it all? Your mamma would still be dead. I cannot tell you anything more beyond promising you that she was taken care of, and that you can visit her when you please. Isn’t that all that matters in the end?”

Christine looked down in her lap and twisted her skirts in her fists. “Did she suffer?”

“I cannot tell,” Erik repeated, clenching a fist upon his knee. “Please do not ask me for details, Christine. You do not want to know.”

Perhaps it was true. Erik was usually right when he said such things. Whatever happened to Mamma Valerius… whatever he did to her, or didn’t do… knowing would do nothing now. At least if she left it up to her imagination, she could choose what version of the tale to believe. She could believe the best of Erik. Or the worst. It was up to her to decide how she wanted to paint him in her mind.

“Erik, will you sit beside me?” Christine asked, sniffing daintily one last time, attempting to regain her composure. “I wish to ask you a rather delicate question.” And, before he could protest, she added, “…not related to my mamma.”

“And to what might this question pertain?”

She met his eye, careful not to frighten him. “Your mother.”

“You said we wouldn’t have to speak of her again,” he said, as petulantly as a pouting child.

“That is why I said it is a delicate question, my – my love,” Christine said. “You do not need to answer it if you do not wish. We can drop the conversation entirely. I do not wish to hurt you with my words any more than I already have.”

“You do not wish to hurt me…?” He eyed her dubiously. “How is it that you still do not understand?” His chest rose and fell with a few slow, deep breaths as he contemplated his options – before choosing to relent to her wish. He stood slowly from the bench and within a few long strides closed the distance between them. There he bent down stiffly to sit at her feet, folding his knees up to his chest as he gazed up at her from his lowly spot on the floor. “Christine, my dearest darling, my goodest girl: Erik will happily accept even the cruelest of words from you, if it only means you will still speak to him for this little time he has left with her.”

Oh, unhappy man! “You must not settle for so little as that, my love.”

“But Erik should never dream to ask for more,” he said sadly, and raised his hand to pet at her skirt at the spot it fell over the edge of the chaise like a waterfall of taffeta and silk. “Christine has already given Erik everything he could ever hope for.”

“You must not hope for very much, then.”

“That is true, fortunately for you,” Erik sighed, flattening his hand on her skirt, spreading his aching fingers deeper into the material. “But let us not return to that dreadful conversation of hope from last night. Erik has hardly recovered himself from it.”

“Still, may we speak of your mother?”

“What is it to me?” He plucked now at small tat of lace, pinching it between his fingers as a grimace etched itself upon his face. “Ask what you wish.”

“You mentioned... you wanted her to say that she loved you. Did you not think she did?”

“I knew she didn’t,” Erik said, picking at the lace with a little more intention. “I remember what you said last night, Christine. You think she loved me after all. That is a very nice thought. A tempting fantasy, even. You have a very good heart and you think the best in everyone.… please, my girl, whatever this world does to you, do not ever lose your childish naïveté. It is a beautiful thing to behold, when it is not being used against you. However… trust me on this. I am not being cynical when I say this woman could not have loved me. No woman can love Erik - not even his mother.”

“So then why did you ask her to say she did?” Christine pressed.

“To pretend,” Erik said darkly. “Have you forgotten? Erik has always wished to be loved like anyone else.”

Christine eyed him curiously, and brought her hand to rest on his neck, curling around the thin grey strands of hair that settled just above his collar. “If you want that so much, why won’t you let me say it?”

He leaned against her hand as she coasted it up to his cheek. “I am older now. I know better than to ask that of you.”

“I do love you, though.”

“And I love you, too, dear girl,” Erik said. He brought his hand up to hers and drew it slightly down, so her fingers brushed his lips. A streak of moisture drew a path across her palm. “See how easy those words are for us both to say? I do not intend to lie – as I am sure you do not either, for you are so very sweet and demure in all other regards – and yet, in the end, it’s an empty sentiment that means nothing. In the moment, you might not feel the damage they do. Some knives are so sharp they can slice off your head without your noticing. But these are all just words, words, words… meaningless, until some further action is taken.”

“And what ‘further action’ are you implying?”

Erik hesitated. “It is not… what you think I mean. Volition, Christine, that is what I am saying. You must be able to leave me and come back of your own free volition. My own dear mother left me in that house all alone. I waited for years for her to return. She never did. No matter her reason – death or otherwise – she never came back. So, too, with you. You left me at that altar, Christine. There was a moment where you had me nearly deceived. I almost knew what happiness was, for that moment… but then you ran away. I chased you all the way out to the street. Did you see me? Did it break your heart to see me cry? No, no… you didn’t even look back. You didn’t see what you did to poor Erik.”

She eased his head closer to her leg, letting it rest on the folds of silk atop her thigh. “I am sorry.”

“Again – those are just words,” Erik said. “I had asked you not to go. But you said you would return, and Erik wanted to believe, so he let you go… and then you left. Christine, what is a man to think? It was your first opportunity to run, and you took it. How can I ever bear to be so foolish again? How can I ever trust you again?”

“We are still going to the Opera tonight, though, aren’t we?” Christine asked, just a hint of nervousness creeping into her voice. “You said you were going to let me go?”

“I will,” Erik said. “Still, after everything… I can see now that there is only darkness to be found in this dismal world I have created down here. The sun will never rise. Erik can never have his living wife… and consequently he can never be happy. He is tired now. He is unhappier than he was before you entered his life, if you can believe it. So he will release you back to your world. He does not expect you to return. This - this is not a test, by the way. Erik does not want Christine down here with him anymore. Perhaps one day, when he is stronger… or weaker… well, it is no matter. Erik has many dreams that will never come true. Everything hurts so much now. I give up.”

Bleakly, he rose to his feet and extended his dead hand to her.

“Come, Christine. Breakfast grows cold.”

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Good-bye”
(Part I)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S (SECOND) JOURNAL

“The moaning and groaning,
The sighing and sobbing,
Are quieted now,
With that horrible throbbing
At heart: – ah, that horrible,
Horrible throbbing!
The sickness – the nausea –
The pitiless pain –
Have ceased, with the fever
That maddened my brain –
With the fever called ‘Living’
That burned in my brain.”

Erik’s books bring me great amusement in these boring morning hours. I am sitting by the window of this fourth-floor flat, cherishing the breeze, heeding not the cold bite of it as I sip some lukewarm tea brewed by the doctor’s maid. I am thinking of no-one but Erik in these soft hours of sunrise. I suppose he shall be on my mind for the remainder of this too-brief duration of eternity; whether that is a blessing or a curse, I care not to know.

Death hangs over us all, drenching us perpetually in its mephitic fumes, though I find it not so very fearsome to behold anymore. The world of darkness is past, and the blood-soaked nightmare has given way to the gentle light of morn. Dawn is coming, slowly bursting on the horizon, and as the golden day breaks I find myself drawing ever closer to contentment.

Shall I dream of happiness at this point? Shall I dare? I feel relief for being free, but that isn’t quite the same thing, is it? I am glad to be out of that musty cellar, and I am glad for the good-bye. Even still, I am heartily sorry for the way it all ended, and I know not where to go from here if not with Erik by my side.

For the opera has been played, the music has ended, and now nothing but silence reigns over all. The Baroness has received her weeping man’s finest pearl necklace; the Princess has been stripped, quartered, and beheaded, before finding her peace at the bottom of an unmanned chute; and Erik, in his most wretched hour, has made a most bosom friend of the reaper. Without fanfare the conqueror worm has devoured us all - see, Erik? I have read this one, too – leaving the sun to spill out its scarlet shafts over our shucked and skinless carcasses.

Are we to cry because it is all over? Or shall we clap for a time, watching the smiling jesters and phantoms take their bows, and then stand from our seats and go home? I suppose we have no other choice. We can never stay anywhere forever.

Thus: my time with Erik has come to a close… and yet it is hard to be sad for any of it. Who said all good-byes must be laced with tragic tears? I regret nothing, except maybe a few small things… or perhaps a little more than just them… but surely it’s nothing to cry about in the end.

My eyes grow damp... oh, Erik, will you truly never hold me again?

With the greatest regard for the man I am leaving behind, then, I shall now suffer the silent pangs that must be felt in recording these last fleeting moments shared between us; this I shall do, so that one day when I am far away from here, seizing the entire world in my single fist once more, I can read these pages and recall happier times.

For that which once seemed such a nightmare is all faded away at present, and all his love is truly lost to me now. I wish to live only in the past for the rest of my days — for the future, without him, holds nothing for me but waste.

--

And so I shall tell it all from the start, as the sad affair of our good-bye began just after our conversation in the parlor.

Everything Erik and I partook in thereafter became The Last Time. It was the last time he served my morning’s board, the last time he watched me sip my tangy wine, the last time he turned down a spoonful of fruitless syrup scraped from the glaze of my porcelain plate. And yet somehow at the same time things became new again, for this was also The First Time we were saying good-bye: a true good-bye, anyway, that both of us meant and that both of us knew about. It was the first time he urged me to eat quicker because we had somewhere to be, the first time he decided to stand behind my chair and do my hair as I ate, the first time he touched my neck and I did not shiver. It was the first time I started crying only after his fingers left my skin, and it was the first time he did not immediately fix my hair when a strand fell prematurely from its home of a careful curl.

He did not reach for a comb or ask for a pin; instead he let out a fiercely dramatic shout, as from a great injury, before stumbling backwards and beginning to rasp for breath without abandon.

“Does loving me hurt so very much?” I asked him after I had turned on my cushion to find him doubled-over, heaving and pitching his tear-soaked face in pain. “I can always leave another day…”

He clutched his heart with one hand, grasping at the back of my chair with a white-knuckled grip - even as, against all his miserable failings, he gasped out, “Nonsense, sweet Christine. You must go, and you must go tonight. I am afraid if we delay even a moment you will be doomed to die with me down here.”

“Are you so convinced you will change your mind?”

He rubbed his chest with his palm, achingly, and gritted out, “It is not my mind that frightens me now...”

Then he turned away, and with great effort hobbled himself to the edge of the room, to the very precipice of the dining chamber, and without looking at me, directed, “Leave the dishes at the table; I will wash them when I return. You must be getting ready now or I fear we will be sorrily late. Unfortunately I have something of no real importance to take care of at present; but I will meet you in your room in twenty minutes’ time to help you with your ties. Hop to it!”

And then he disappeared down the hall, and I heard his door open and close in quick succession.

I did as he told me. I left the dishes where they were, a hearty serving of victuals remaining in my bowls which I had not the appetite to finish any longer. Then I followed his lead, and went down the hall, intending to turn into my room, but not before entering the wash room.

There was a pressure in my head that had slowly filled my consciousness since waking. I was no stranger to the sensation, common as it was for me in the many days and nights I had shared with Erik down here. I once told him of my affliction; he assured me it was the moist and musty atmosphere that we shared beside this subterranean lake. He said he was prone to such head-aches as well, and that he never needed anything more than the gentle touch of music to quell his pain.

“Constrainment quivers your bloated mind against the violent thrumming of your blood,” he explained to me then, “until your selfish skull starts to wish inhumanely for the destructive solace of release.”

“Is there no cure?” I asked, horrified at the ghastly picture he painted.

“There are but two,” he said obligingly. “The first is to lull the mind to sleep, with methods of trickery like music and drink. Ignore the cravings of a swollen, angry head; turn away from the temptation of a moment; and use whatever resources you have to drain the stiff thing of its injurious fluids and desires.”

“And the second?” I prompted.

“Is to bash your skull against the ground until your brain matter bleeds through the bone. A temporary easement, I suppose it would be… until the deed is done.” He shrugged. “Does your head still ache, dear? Come, and Erik will show you how to run your fingers along his organ. Its delightful explosion will soothe us both. No…? You wish not to learn today? Oh, very well. Lie down and rest, then, and perhaps another day…”

No rest was to be had for me that afternoon, though, for after he had tucked me securely into my bed he had gone off to his own room and begun plundering his organ in quest of that promised ‘delightful explosion’, as he so called it. My head-ache grew only worse as his screeching cacophony built and built, and I threw a pillow over my head to staunch the assault upon my ears. It was no use; for all that he was enjoying himself, I was suffering in the same magnitude.

To be clear, it was not repulsion for his work that nauseated me; nor was it abhorrence of a certain sort of chord or trill that dashed my vision into sightlessness. I registered no distaste nor disgust as he pounded away at his tortured organ — only agony.

A few paragraphs ago I spoke of first times; this, then, was the first time while living in Erik’s house that I had born a real desire to kill myself. The sounds coming from his room were not music, at least not to me. Music did not make me dig my nails into my scalp and try to wrench apart the two halves of my skull.

Suddenly the vibratious thundering stopped… but the pounding in my head increased tenfold! It was as if the sound still lived on but only in my skull, rattling the bone like an endlessly reverberating tuning-fork. The devil had left the chord unresolved! I heard his door open and his ghostly footsteps calmly approach my locked door.

“How is your head-ache now, Christine?” he asked innocently, petting the door with his diabolical fingers. “Has your nap relieved it yet?”

“Not quite!” I called back testily, holding the pillow over my head still. “How might be your own, I wonder!”

“Worse than before,” he cackled, and I swear he must have been positively gleeful upon hearing the pain in my voice. “Anyway, sweet darling, do not let Erik keep you up on his account. Recall that you forewent Erik’s music lessons in favor of counting sheep – why are you not fast asleep right now?”

At that, I sprung up from my bed and ran to my door to upbraid him. I have never had qualms with how he chose to pass his time in his room, but this purposeful incitement was just intolerable. Of course he was not foolish enough to remain after that; the washroom door at the end of the hall flew closed just as I threw open my bedroom door. I slammed on the washroom door a thousand times but he did not answer, and though I waited a thousand hours for him to exit, he never did. For all the time I stood out in that hall, ready to harass him for his behavior, the only thing I heard from within were inaudible mutters and a clattering of pills upon the tile floor. There was silence for a very long time afterwards. At some point I fell asleep, leaning against the door; but when I awoke I found myself again within my own room, huddled beneath my satin sheets. My head-ache was washed away with the drain of sleep, and only a slight soreness in a different but obvious spot remained.

That dispute was very early in our relationship, after the scorpion but before the photograph, and ended the way such arguments between us always did: quietly, and without true resolution.

Anyway, in the present I found myself in that very same washroom that Erik had locked himself in back then. I shuffled through the cabinet above the sink – touching but not tampering with any of Erik’s strange pills and concoctions – until I found an obtrusively large bottle of laudanum at the back. The level was quite a bit lower than when I’d seen it last. I measured out my usual small dose, enough that I knew would quell the ache in my head, and drank it down with quiet ease. Then I replaced the bottle, displacing a few of his as I did, and went on my way to my room.

The air seemed stuffier than usual when I entered my bedroom. No doubt it was just the odious décor getting to me. Cages always seem smallest just before release, surely? I had always hated the tacky furnishings, no matter how much I loved Erik, and my one consolation in my forced departure was that I would get to leave them all behind.

There was a gown laid out on my bed, made of somber amber velvet with black beading upon the breast. It was obviously a beautiful dress, as I would expect nothing less from Erik; but curiously it was not one for my coloring, and it bore none of the marks Erik usually left upon the gowns he tailored. I knew his taste well, and so knew he had a penchant for seeing floral accents and stark white lace on me. This, in turn, had nothing of the sort. I knew no gown of his making, either, that was colored as darkly as this one. As funereal as Erik dressed himself, he had never permitted ‘his living wife’ to do the same – even when she had good cause for mourning, and felt every bit as gloomy as he.

But it was of no matter. If Erik wanted me to wear this unseasonable dress, then so be it. I was in no position to argue with him, especially not when I was this close to regaining my freedom. Erik would get what Erik wanted.

As it was, Erik’s dresses were much more difficult to put on than this simple thing turned out to be - (simple, I write with a laugh, for the thing must have cost more than my yearly salary at the Opera! But simple it was, in comparison to all the dresses Erik had made) – and so I made short work of the underskirts and stockings he had laid out on the bed beside, and was about to put on the corset when a queer and sudden faintness overtook me.

I collapsed to the floor without fight, knocking my head against the corner of my dresser as I went. I must have fallen asleep for some time, for when I came to I found Erik worrying over my reclining form upon the bed.

“My sweet child!” he fretted. “Was the dose too strong?”

Since I knew he did not know I had taken the laudanum, I was stricken by his question – stricken, but only for a dull moment, until I realized lamely that he must have laced my food with a similar tincture. I confess no surprise at this presumption. Should I have been upset with him for that? Maybe… but there was no desire in me to argue anymore. I was too exhausted.

Blearily, I thus replied, “Rather, I dare think.”

He nursed my head, which was rapidly growing more swollen, and as he cooed over me he pressed his fingers against my temple where an eggish lump had begun to form. Their coolness quelled the throbbing and earned me some relief.

“Will Erik never fail to hurt you?” he lamented, pulling my skin in circles against my skull with his thumbs. “He should wish it was his own head that had been clubbed in by that damned dresser. Perhaps he will follow suit at the end of the opera…”

“I would not recommend it,” I replied tiredly. “It is not a pleasant thing to endure.”

“Much of life is not,” he agreed with contrition, “and yet, here we are both still.” Then he cast a searching glance at the empty wall, which I thought was curious, until he looked at the waste basket and sighed. “We will be late.”

“Help me get dressed, then,” I said, and slowly pushed myself off the bed, against his protestations. He shrank back as I pushed the sheet aside, revealing myself in my undergarments, and I watched him flounder as he tried in vain to find a place to look that he didn’t deem indecent. The poor man spun in a full circle as he went from my figure, to the cracked vanity mirror in the corner, to the polished wood of the dresser door, before settling firmly above us on the white-washed moulding upon the ceiling. I rolled my eyes and bid him closer, saying with great tiredness, “Oh, it is nothing you haven’t seen before, you ridiculous man. I am practically dressed already.”

His stare did not budge from the moulding array, but he did let out a quiet, strangled groan. “Would you go before the Vicomte de Chagny dressed like that?”

“I would and I have,” I retorted wearily. “He used to visit me in my dressing room quite often, as you might recall – after all, you were there, too.”

He winced. “I never looked –”

“Of course you didn’t,” I agreed, to placate him. “Anyway, as you said, dear: we are certain to be late if we continue like this. Do you want us to spend all of our remaining time together in dispute?”

He sighed, and with resignation returned to my side. “I am forever your servant. What will you have me do for you?”

I led him through the sequence of my dressing. It was quite humorous, as he required prompting for each and every step, although I knew from his story about his mother (if any of it were to be trusted) that he had great experience with dressing and undressing a lady. As credit to him, he followed my directions as a consummate professional, keeping his eyes firmly on the task at hand. He never allowed his fingers the privilege of straying; but ‘straying’, perhaps, is a misleading word in this instance. It would be better, and more accurate, to say: I gave him many instructions, and he followed them all without question - even the ones we both knew were not necessary.

“Hold still,” was his only breathy command, as he worked the top clasps at the level of my bosom and then, with a touch to my bare shoulder, turned me around to begin up my back.

“My fingers betray me,” he mumbled, after I had felt him fumbling around for some time. “I’m making rotten work of these damn laces.”

“I can wear a different dress,” I proposed.

“No!” He said quickly. “It has to be this one.”

“Or I can wear a shawl,” I suggested. “And I can move my arms very carefully.”

“But not too carefully?”

I turned to look at the old letch over my shoulder, surprised by what I surmised to be good humor, and so stuck my tongue out at him in return. “You cad! I have already given you a more than generous display of my breasts this evening. Have you no shame?”

“Erik was merely helping Christine with her gown!” he sputtered, growing so pink he nearly looked alive. “He only put his hands where she told him!”

“I am teasing, Erik! Simply teasing! But surely you are aware a woman’s breasts do not need to be so severely fondled in the dressing of them?” A laugh escaped me, though I realized my folly instantly; the poor thing was embarrassed! “It is okay to laugh at such things, dear – you appreciate a good joke, don’t you? And after all, didn’t we both have some fun?”

And with that I laughed again, for I saw how red his ears had become and the way his mess of a bottom lip began to tremble. My body jerked in response to my laughing fit, but his grip about the corset laces remained like solid stone and so kept me locked in place. Tickled by his stiflement, for some reason, I laughed more and more, until I had little tear-like crystals threatening to fall from my eyes.

It was funny for a time — until he glared at me with those hard-smitten eyes and figured out how to make his bottom lip stop its quivering long enough for him to say, with frigid words like ice, “Such jests hurt, Christine.”

“Oh, Erik -” I started, my entire situation remembered in the fragment of an instant. “I did not mean -”

“You never mean anything,” he sulked accusingly. He pulled the laces tighter, forcing me to whirl back around and face away from him. “And that is what has always hurt the most.”

He finished his work with an unparalleled speediness after that. I did not trust myself to open my mouth, and perhaps neither did he, for he uttered nothing to me for the remainder of my dressing.

It was only when I was sitting upon my beaded footstool, pulling on my silk slippers, that he finally found a word in his vast vocabulary to use towards me.

“Apologize.”

One hand still around the base of my shoe, I looked up at him in confusion. “Excuse me?”

“Apologize,” he repeated calmly, tapping his fingers against his folded arms. “Tell me you’re sorry.”

“For the joke?” I asked, and blinked my eyes dumbly a few times. My heel slotted into the slipper, and I stood to address him. “Erik, of course I’m sorry. I hurt your feelings and I didn’t intend to –”

I reached for him as I spoke, in hopes of smoothing over this impending disaster with a small touch of comfort, but just as my fingertips met his tense shoulder he shook himself away. Bitterly, he seethed, “It wasn’t the joke, Christine. I could live with a joke.”

Then he whirled around and thrust his sharp, spindly finger into the center of my chest, and I recoiled by sheer instinct.

“Ah! She hops after all!” he declared dreadfully, stepping forward in his indignance. “What is it about Erik’s touch that makes you jump, darling? Did Erik not just have his creeping, crawling fingers all over you? Did you not like it? Did you not request it? Ah, he sees how it is now!”

He flung his arachnic hands at me again, and just like before I jumped away like a skittish cat. All at once he began to chase me around the room, running us in circles about the footstool, pulling down curtains, and toppling over spent candles and their sperm as we went.

“See how Christine jumps!” he spat after me, reaching for my loose hair. “See how Christine runs!”

Round and round we went, spinning within the tight confines of that little bedroom he’d made – that little bedroom with his mother’s furniture that he’d so obviously hoped to share with me one day – that we really had shared before – until finally my unfortunate foot caught itself upon the flipped edge of the rug, sending me over the pedestalic stool and consequently crashing me down to the floor for the second time that morning.

“See how Christine falls!” Erik cried triumphantly over my body. He leered down at me as I struggled in vain to right myself. “For God’s sake, are you seriously that afraid of me?”

“I am!” I professed. “Please, Erik – be reasonable!”

“Reasonable! Reasonable!” He laughed maniacally. “I am the only reasonable person down here!”

“You do not seem like it!” I said. “Please, just tell me what I did!”

“Damn you!” He was still laughing, but now his shoulders were shaking with an uncontrollable hateful rage as tears flowed freely down his sallow cheeks. “Erik knows he asks a lot from you, Christine, and he does not ever hope to retrieve so very much… but there is a good amount that he does still expect! Human respect, for starters! Does he not deserve that? Is he just an animal, to be kicked around and starved before being shot in the mud? I have lived that life before – lived it so many times I can still smell the shit from my sty! I have been purchased off auction blocks and shown in cages next to prized hogs – I have done tricks for treats and had my teeth filed for misconduct – I have curled up at that stupid sultana’s feet and feasted upon the meager dinner scraps she threw down to me before climbing up to her lap for dessert! But I am not an animal, Christine! I do not want to be an animal anymore!”

He was shouting at the top of his lungs now, spittle flying out of his ravaged mouth and landing harshly upon my cheeks. He did not touch me, but stood over me disdainfully, with a strong leg planted on either side, so that all I could do was lie there and accept his gruesome, furious death’s head as he whined out his rage and fury above me.

“I do not think you are an animal!” I begged. “Let us speak as two people – I have always seen you as a person –”

“Lie to me again and you’ll regret it!” he promised. “I am a man, Christine – not a dog, not a monster, not an angel, not a devil! Treat me like a man! Call me as a man!”

“You are a man,” I agreed quickly. “You are a smart man, a witty man, a clever man, a good man –” he growled and I hastened to correct myself, “A great man, actually! Of many talents and skills I could never dream of possessing myself! So sit down, Erik, let us speak as two people about whatever it is that has upset you so, and –”

“How awfully convenient it is for you that I am in possession of such a tremendous amount of genius,” Erik sneered at me. “Would I be any less deserving of human respect if I had not the brains to realize I missed it? Is that what you do, Christine – see how far you can pull the wool over my eyes before I realize you’re making an ass out of me?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I professed in earnest. “You are the one who always makes things so confusing! One moment we’re engaging in a moment of affection - and the next you have me pinned to the floor like this! I never understand what sets you off! Speak freely, I beg of you, just this once!”

“Willful ignorance is a powerful thing!” he hissed. “If we were engaging in anything, it was because you fooled me into it. I have told you, expressly, a million times, I do not wish to partake in such behaviors with you. And still, you treacherous trollop, you thought it right to cajole me into it! I trusted you! You said that was the only way to dress you, that to make you decent I had to put my hands here, press them a little there – and then when it was done you said it was all a funny little game, that Erik should have known better than to take Christine at her word! Can you never be honest? I have only ever wanted to do right by you. We are not lovers, Christine, and we never shall be. What more do I have to do to make you understand that?”

“I…”

My mouth moved wordlessly. What should I have said? He wanted an apology, an admittance of wrong-doing, a promise to never tempt him again. All things I would have happily given him, just to make him calm down – and all things I did give him, as soon as my throat found my voice again. I recall nothing that I said, just that I blabbered out apologies as I clambered to my knees before him, clutching my hands together in a fervent prayer for forgiveness as he threw his sneering head away from me.

And yet –

Did he even deserve such a confession as that from me? Why did I apologize? I thought – he enjoyed it! He did! It was his own guilty conscience that burned him now – guilt for accepting my advances, after he had kept me down below with him for so many months – that made him lash out and hurt me. But how was any of that my fault? I was his prisoner, after all, and I could not be held accountable for my own decisions.

That is the way Erik sees it, anyway.

“Get up,” he spat, backing away from my groveling form. I fell prostrated upon the floor as I stretched for purchase on his departing figure, grabbing at the laces and aglets of his shoes with my shaking hands, which he immediately kicked away. “You sicken me. I’m glad you’re leaving. Get up!”

I drew back on my knees again, but had no strength to stand. Instead I leaned against the overturned footstool, sobbing uncontrollably into the crook of my arm and still mumbling out meaningless apologies.

“Collect your things,” I heard Erik instruct coldly as he went to the door. “I won’t have you making excuses to come back here after the performance. You have two minutes.”

My head snapped up at that, and I gaped up at him. “You - you’ve barely given me any notice, how am I supposed to... I have an entire room to pack. And besides, it’s – it’s an opera, Erik. Are you expecting me to carry an entire trunk of dresses and shoes with me all night? What am I supposed to do?”

He snorted. “Oh, so those are all yours, now?”

With that he slammed the door, leaving me to console myself with only my tears in that horrible room full of his mother’s broken furniture.

Despite his instructions, I packed nothing. I hadn’t the time; I simply cried and cried until he returned in the promised two minutes.

He did not scold me for disobeying him. Erik, as I’ve written before, has a talent for pretending terrible things never occurred. This same skill he employed here, forgetting his anger with me and forgetting his impatience to leave. For once I was thankful for this annoying habit of his, as he sat with me on the floor for a good many minutes, rubbing his hand on my back until I had cried myself out, and then in a gentle manner he helped me pack a small valise of little odds and ends.

He dug to the back of my vanity to find the box holding the trinket I’d once thought to give to him in a moment of cruelty; he questioned me on it with delicate trepidation, as if afraid I would start crying again, and I answered honestly that it was a gift for him, but that he shouldn’t open it because he wouldn’t like it. He accepted my answer silently, placing it carefully into my valise before moving on to the other contents of my desk.

Only after he fixed my hair did we leave the house. He carried my bag for me, holding it in one hand as he held me with the other. We spoke quietly as we climbed the stairs back to the surface, and by the time we stepped through my dressing-room mirror, we found all of the morning’s argument forgotten and ourselves in much better spirits.

Times with Erik, I now reflect, were always like that. Darkness could become light again just as quickly as morning could become night. Fortissimo could become pianissimo, and largo could become agitato. I was his muse, but he was the composer; and though he made all the choices that filled the orchestrations, I was the one who inspired each note in the end.

It would be foolish for me to sit here now and pen some drivel about never wanting our time in the Opera cellar to end, especially now that I have written so many words about how destructive our relationship was down there. Erik said many times that he was not a suicidal man; so, too, am I not a suicidal woman. But I must confess, despite all of Erik's hatefulness... I adored his sweetness very much, for there were many moments of it, and I can't help but wish our circumstances had been different.

Alas, we were never lovers, and it was never meant to be.

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Good-bye”
(Part II)

He kissed her the first chance he got.

No, not Erik – of course not Erik! – but the other man. The one with the pretty face and the head full of golden curls. The nice physician who’d taken her in. Doctor Gradus.

It’d been three days since she arrived. Three days since the opera. Three days since Erik…

Why did it feel like cheating? When the maid served her tea and toast in the morning, and all Gradus did was join her at the table for a smoke on his pipe? When she wrote in her journal by the window, and all he did was ask in that peculiar accent of his if it might be a story she was penning? When they bumped into each other in the hall, and his steadying hand lingered on her arm for just a moment too long?

The maid was always there, until she was not – and almost precisely the minute she was out the door, Gradus walked across the room to stand beside Christine’s chair.

“You’re that opera singer,” he told her, as if it was a profound fact she didn’t already know. “La Daaé, are you not?”

Christine set her journal down in her lap and regarded him warily. “What gave it away?”

“There aren’t many pretty Swedish girls in Paris.”

“And how do you know I’m Swedish?”

“Well, you write in Swedish,” he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Most learned young girls practicing another language would choose something more romantic, like English or Italian. But your entire journal is written in Swedish.” Gradus tapped his finger to his temple twice and smiled. “So it stands to reason that you must be Swedish.”

“I am,” Christine conceded. “But why have you been reading my journal?”

He batted his eyes dumbly. “I didn’t read it, though. It’s in Swedish, after all.”

She watched him carefully as he pulled a chair from the dining table to sit across from her, sideways on the chair, propping his head in his hand against the back as he gazed at her. “You’re a mystery, Christine Daaé.”

“I’m writing, Doctor Gradus. Don’t you have a patient to see?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Am I bothering you?”

“A little bit, actually.”

“See!” he said, leaning forward with enthusiasm. “That’s what it is. You know exactly how to wound a man, and you’re not shy about it, either!”

“I’ve been told that before.”

“Oh, poor dear!” he said. “But I don’t mean it as an insult, Christine, I promise I don’t. I like a woman who’s forthright with her feelings. It makes things less… complicated.”

“Are you not married, Doctor?”

“Widowed,” he said happily. At her flush of surprise, he flicked his hand easily. “Oh, don’t give me that! There wasn’t the smallest shred of love between her and me. She was my cousin, you see, and I had to marry her because her parents died – that sort of thing. She went their way last spring. Are your parents still alive, Christine?”

Christine cringed, knowing she would probably regret answering. “Not to my knowledge.”

He grew somber immediately, taking on something like a charismatic air.

“I am very wealthy,” he said, and let it hang in the air of his one-bedroom apartment for some time.

“…I see.”

“I really am,” he affirmed, seeing her unconvinced. He pressed his hand to his chest. “I know how this looks - these rooms are not my primary residence. I’m from America – Boston, have you heard?”

“That’s quite far from here,” she said.

“It is,” he agreed. “But I promise my apartment is quite a bit bigger over there than this little flat. It’s American, after all – everything is bigger in America. The houses, the land, the men… have you ever been to America, Christine?”

She shook her head.

“I assure you it’s the definitive place to see before you die.” His eyes dipped shamelessly over her figure. “Oh! - in this light you look just like my cousin.”

Christine’s breath caught. Why was that the thing that made her heart race?

“Are you lonely, Christine?” Gradus tilted his head. “I know this is very sudden – and, well, forward. But, as I’ve said, I think you are quite beautiful.”

“You flatter me,” she said politely, shifting her knees away. “Please, though, I really was in the middle of my journaling.”

He leaned in. “I do like a literate woman.”

“I’m not available, Doctor Gradus.”

“My name is Tristan,” he breathed, and then he kissed her.

--

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S (SECOND) JOURNAL

I have only just pulled myself away from the doctor’s company.

He could have talked my ear off for hours. I insisted on a walk outside, as I had no interest in spending an extended amount of time with him inside, so I had him take me to the Bois, and there we walked along that same winding path I took with Erik the other night. I distracted the doctor with dull commentary on the world around us, remembering never to get too excited, and pointed out all the little things Erik had shown me as we strolled by. We passed much time like that, and by the time the sun was setting he seemed a little more weary than before and had a bit of rose upon his cheeks.

The doctor wished to keep up the conversation once we returned to the flat, but I told him I had a head-ache and excused myself to the bedroom. I expected hasslement from him on that, but thankfully he did not seem offended. In fact, he has just left the flat – I heard the front door close – and I believe he might be going out for rounds on his other patients.

I am now curled up at the head of my cot and am attempting to write using the one pathetic candle on my nightstand. My eyes are sore from the strain against the darkness, but I dare not light much more than this as the patient on the cot beside me greatly needs to sleep. The doctor tells me he is gravely ill.

I miss very much having my own room, but the doctor’s apartment is small and so the only place he could fit me in was right beside the sick bed he uses for his live-in patients. Now it is as if those many nights that I laid side-by-side with Erik in his mother’s bed never ended, for again I am sleeping with a man who might very well excuse himself to a coffin by tomorrow’s light. At least with a bed partner as sedate and unresponsive as this, I don’t need to be concerned for matters of propriety – unlike back then when Erik and I weren’t even married!

As it is, the doctor has been put out and now sleeps in the closet with his feet in the hall. I tripped over them on my way to the washroom in the middle of last night. He was quick, though, and caught me in his arms before I fell all the way down; I regret to admit he had a rather good-smelling cologne about him – or perhaps it’s just that I appreciated being held by a man who didn’t smell like death and mildew for once…

Oh, don’t fret, Erik! I shall not be that quick to move on.

Anyway, now that I have a set of hours free at my disposal, I shall put them to good use and finish putting down the rest of the story from the other day.

By my heart, I recall it all, still so vividly…

--

“It seems the third act is coming to a close,” Erik murmured, his ear pressed to my dressing-room door, which he held slightly ajar. “Intermission shall be commencing imminently.”

“Shall we wait here until it is over, then?” I asked.

“No, not at all. Don’t you know that an opera’s intermission is just as important as its most crucial aria? You must socialize with the Paris you have missed, Christine, for it is eager to socialize with you.” Then he sat himself down upon the tufted velvet cushion of my dressing-room stool, and flicked his long bony fingers at me. “Go on, and mingle with your fancy theatre-goers. I will meet you in the rotunda in a fifteen minutes’ time, at which point we’ll find our seats.”

I made to follow his directions but stopped at his last words. “You will not be escorting me this evening?”

He cocked his head and gestured frankly to his naked, rank face. “I am not quite presentable at the moment, I’m afraid.”

“Oh,” I said only.

He smiled slightly. “Perhaps you have forgotten Erik’s face is not an appreciable sight for the general public?”

I knew better than to answer that, but yes, for a minute I did forget. Of course I could never forget the fact of his hideousness for as long as I lived, but I could and did forget the extraordinarity of it. It was repulsive, certainly, but also in a strange way normal to me after staring at it for so many months – and so while I still could objectively observe its ugliness, I no longer found a desire to recoil from the mere sight of it.

“Ah, Christine is no fun tonight,” Erik sighed. “Maybe the crowds will rouse your spirits. Best get to it, then – everyone’s waiting.”

Without further protest I left him in the dressing-room by himself. As I shut the door I caught a glimpse of him through the crack; he leaned more heavily on his arm against the desk, with an air of sadness and grief.

Did he wish I would stay and fight him on the matter? Did he want me to tell him I didn’t mind his face so much, that I wouldn’t mind being caught in the crowd with him? I doubted very much that he would have believed me even if I did try to plead with him. But did he want me to try anyway? It was too hard to say – and I feared the consequences of success, remote of chance it might be.

Distraught and eternally conflicted, as usual, I shut the door completely and went off on my way.

--

It had been over a year since I last walked amongst the crowds of the Opera Garnier.

Anxiety coursed through my veins. I should not be here, my mind screamed at me, it is not safe to be here. There was nothing to fear and yet every step I took upon that marble floor was filled with dread. In retrospect, I am not so sure what I was so scared of. Was it that I was walking alone, free of my shackles, for the first time in over a year? Or was it that my freedom was still nothing but a fanciful illusion, knowing that Erik was just a few corridors away and would be able to find me wherever in this building I went? Furthermore – would I ever be truly free? Erik had found me before… not even just in Paris, but on a train to Chagny… he could just as easily find me again, wherever I chose to go. He knew me too well for me to ever hope to escape him.

Those were the thoughts darkening my mind as I shuffled into the rotunda. I could feel the warmth of the densely milling crowd even just standing at the brink of the excitement. Here was the beating heart of Parisian society, circulating before me in a rainbow of ruffled skirts and glittering tuxedos, a thousand white gloves clasping each outstretched hand, twisting one another about to the tune of mirth and good-natured glee. I had forgotten the scene! I had sung operas all this time but never stayed longer than necessary, eager as Erik was to have me return to him. I never dawdled in my dressing-room, and I certainly never came out to greet the patrons in the rotunda.

But standing there, on the precipice of all the action, I found my shoes to be filled with lead. I could not step forward and enter the thronged masses! I just could not rejoin them. How could I ever be able to? I did not have anyone to speak with… I had no interesting stories to share as small talk… I lacked the self-confidence to initiate a conversation with anyone who would not immediately forgive me for speaking out of turn. I was never so lonely than in that colossal room bursting to the brim with strangers. Faces spun past me, occasionally seeing me but never looking at me; I was the scenery once again, just like all those years on the street as a child, crooning so desperately for nothing but a pittance…

Was I destined always just to be the attraction? Something on the side to view and observe? Raoul was the first person to treat me as something other than that, all those years ago, in Perros, when he rescued my scarf… I recall him crawling back to shore, drenched to the bone from the seawater, carrying my scarf with him as the spoils from his victory against the wind.

He did not just hand back the scarf, as I thought he might do; he took the time to draw himself up like a gentleman – though he was but a boy! – and with a delicate wrench of both hands he twisted the water out of the silken rag. Then he asked, with a blush upon his face, if he might help me put it back on – and I accepted with a matching bashfulness.

After all, it was nice to be asked. My father had been the one to tie it to my head that morning without a single utterance. If it had been up to me, I wouldn’t have worn the thing at all…

Later we grew up and Raoul left my life, and for years I wandered the world in solitude, never truly being seen… not by Professor Valerius, not by Mamma Valerius, and certainly not by my father… until Erik approached and consumed my entire being whole.

I do not know if Erik sees me as a person. He professes his love for me on bended knee, and earnestly does me favors; he makes me feel the heights of happiness and the peaks of pleasure; and yet I do not know if he understands the point of what he is doing at all. Does he only care for me in the hopes that I will show him affection in return? Am I just an object to be appeased, so that I will give him the gratification he desires? Does he understand that the selfishness that drives him to seek companionship is the very same thing that forces him to push me away?

Nothing seems equal when it comes to Erik. We share so much of the same sort of soul, and yet we are like mirror reflections of each other – halves that seem to match, until aligned side by side, at which point all our glaring oppositions come to light. Erik and I are attached by a brokenness that has shattered our lives, but we are not the same sort of broken. The way we view each other is not the same, and the things we crave from each other are not the same. We do not leave matching marks upon each others’ hearts, and we do not cry the same burning tears.

But we were drawn together just the same. Perhaps it is because love acts not as a puzzle, where two stoic pieces click easily together; but rather love acts as a garden, where two separate flowers growing side by side, sometimes intertwining their vines, may slowly learn to share the sunlight and the rain.

Erik’s flower wilts before me now, dying in the sun. He thinks he is doing me a favor by returning to the dust from whence he came – but the truth is the world is so full and vast, that I could blossom just the same with or without him. He did not need to trim us apart this way – yet he did. Yet he does.

And so… just as it was not my choice that brought him into my life, it will not be my choice for him to leave it either. That is perhaps my fiercest regret of this whole tragic tale.

Such melancholic musings murkied my mind, as I stood as an outsider looking in at the sea of patrons bustling about the rotunda. I crept along the wall some more, trying to seem more like I belonged. A waiter swept by me with a silver platter full of champagne and I narrowly missed crashing into him and causing disaster by sending the fizz everywhere. I smiled at some people I thought I recognized who chanced to look in my direction, but their eyes always looked straight past me, never quite seeing, always never quite seeing…

At last I stopped beside a golden sculpture of a naked woman, with a perky bosom topped with nipples so erect they could rival the ones in Erik’s sketchbooks. She seemed to push her chest out in a brassy display of sauciness, baring the broad of her neck like an invitation to the passing voyeur. And yet – as I traversed around to her other side, I saw her face to be pitched in the worst, most haunting shade of horrified shame.

I found her utterly disturbing to regard, and so I turned away and moved on.

My dissociative perusal of the crowds might have continued perpetually if not for a thick brush of coarse fur that smacked against my face as I passed by an archway with a blind corner and bumped headlong into an elderly woman by mistake, causing her to spill her overfilled glass.

“My Palomino Fino!” she wailed, as the amber spirit splattered across over the marble floor. Without missing a beat she turned her ire on me, whipping her gigantic fur coat about her like a dramatic cape. “Imbecilic girl, have you no eyes to watch where you’re going?”

“M-my apologies, Madame,” I stammered, every nerve twitching as she yelled. Oh, what was wrong with me? I was frightened of everything – I swear I even saw Erik in her eyes!

“Sorry will not make that sherry pour itself back into my glass!” she fumed. “I ought to string you up by your neck for what you’ve done!”

“Now, now, Jeannette,” an elderly man by her side said sedately, patting her gloved arm. “The girl made a mistake. Let it go.”

“Let it go? Let it go! Bah!” the woman seethed. “I’m sure that would make you happy, wouldn’t it?” And then she stormed away.

“Forgive her,” the man apologized to me in her stead, his words a little loud as if he had trouble with his hearing. Tremendous grey whiskers fluffed out beneath his nose as he gave a little chuckle. “She is a little short on temper tonight, I am afraid. You are that prodigious La Daaé, are you not?” He bowed and kissed my hand, the thick strands of his beard poking through my glove as his lips pressed down. “Please accept the sincerest of apologies from the Baron of Tremaine.”

I grew red at my cheeks as he released my hand back to me. “I should be the one apologizing, truly… I was not looking –”

“Nonsense, young woman,” he said. “We were the ones at fault. I am happy to take the blame. Now then, let me find my poor Jeannette a fresh glass of amontillado. Waiter!”

The old Baron hobbled off after one of the attendants, leaving me alone once more. I returned to my dangerous habit of person-staring, wishing only to pass the time as I waited for intermission to end and for Erik to come fetch me.

After some time I caught sight of the Baron again, just as he was reuniting with the old woman – the Baroness, I presumed her title to be – where she stood against the opposite wall. She had her ungainly fur coat clutched around her rail-thin figure and a long-stemmed glass of amontillado clutched unwomanly in her fist. Her gaunt face twisted and rankled as she mumbled out some words to her husband, which I could not hear from across the room, but could assume from her unpleasant demeanor to be of an intensely bitter and severe variety.

What made a woman so sour? Especially when her husband was so stunningly not? The depth of the Baroness’s acerbity left no doubt in my mind that this was not an isolated incident for her. Perhaps our collision had set her off; but what a temper she must have, to react like that! How could a relationship like that last?

Her temper reminded me of Erik’s – and therein I found a shred of hope. If the Baron and Baroness could make things work between them, perhaps then Erik and I could, as well?

(Alas, I had forgotten for that brief moment that Erik had already decided we were to end our relations!)

I watched them for a little too long. The Baroness, as if aware that there were eyes on her, began looking around the room suspiciously, before locking her gaze in my direction. But she did not look at me! No! – for her furious, spiteful eyes tracked a little upwards, above my head, as to look at someone standing behind me – and so to follow her sight, I turned my body round to see what she saw –

And there, standing behind me – towering above me – looking down at me – was a face I thought never to see again -

The face of the man I loved -

Raoul.

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Good-bye”
(Part III)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S (SECOND) JOURNAL

I admit I was fooled for all of five seconds.

He did not need to speak to ruin the illusion. No – rather, he just had to stand before me for a moment longer, as I regarded the way his coat hung off his shoulders as if from one of the many metal hangers he’s always threatening me with, and then the small horizontal creases suddenly became apparently clear along the smalls of his cheeks, which were pink above and yellow below…

“How do I look?”

Raoul’s voice issued forth from those thin, translucent lips. It was an impressive trick, the way he actually sounded like the man whose face he wore… but not so impressive that I didn’t recognize it to be a trick. He had demonstrated his talent for voice modulation for me several times in the past; it did not shock me that he could imitate this voice as well.

“Is this the ‘extremely realistic’ mask you told me about?” I asked, some irritation bleeding through at his attempt to deceive me yet again. “The one that ‘makes you look like everyone else’?”

“It is,” Erik said, touching his deft fingertips to the cleft of his cheeks, which did not move as he spoke. It was an unusual appearance, but not altogether unnatural; Professor Valerius’s face had acted similarly after his first stroke. He seemed pleased with himself regardless. “Not one soul shall look over their shoulder as I pass by!”

I winced. He truly seemed so happy with himself. It was enough to melt my dismay. But the mask was not so realistic as he said! It was well made, obviously, but it definitely could not pass closer inspection. His bony, angular jaw stuck out underneath and revealed a squared-off scraping of his true visage. His eyes were sunken in so deeply that the mask edges lifted up slightly around their sockets in the absence of something to cling to. In an attempt to hide this he had painted the rims of his eyes with an ashen ink, which only served to deepen the already eternal darkness of his eyes so that only those two specks of amber peeked out. To make things worse, he had donned a blonde wig which was combed so stylishly that it looked disastrously out of place on his withered scalp. Certainly, he did not look as ugly as before – but how could that be a point in his favor, when his polished cheeks shined with such artificial vigor?

“Dear…” I began hesitantly. “I do not know the best way to put this… but…”

“But what? Does Erik finally look too handsome for you?” He giggled devilishly, shaking with delight as he all but twirled before me. “That boy of yours was always so unfairly pretty! Ah! And now Erik is a pretty little boy too! Do you find fault with Erik for being such a dashing lad?”

“I am glad you like how you look,” I said, wary of his overinflated enthusiasm and the disaster it could easily bring about, “but I just thought you should know – it is not very… believable…”

He stopped cold.

“It is,” he insisted. “It is perfect.”

“It is… uncanny,” I said, mindful of every word, “how much like Raoul you look. But it is not you, Erik, and anyone with two eyes can see…”

The cheeks could not fall from their good-natured form, and the little dimples could not unstamp themselves from beneath their apples; but beneath the guise, on the exposed part of his face, his ruined smile fell. “Can see what? I am not ugly. What can possibly be the matter now?”

“It doesn’t…” I said. “Erik, your mask isn’t a real face, and it’s very obvious to tell.”

Childlike confusion spiked his words as he spun to look at himself in the polished marble wall beside us. “No – no, I worked hard on this mask. It is the best mask I ever made. How can it be obvious when – when –” He patted his fake sideburns, which had lifted a little bit from his cheeks, and still with disbelief he examined the mask upon his face. “– I see nothing wrong! It is a normal face, is it not? Perhaps you are too close. You know what lies beneath. Is that it? Erik cannot fool Christine but surely he can fool everyone else? He must be able to – it’s the only way, so he must – he must…”

My heart broke for him.

“It’s just not believable,” I made myself tell him. “Everyone will know.”

He stared helplessly at himself in the wall’s reflection, daring only to turn briefly to watch as a server passed by and gave him a very clear second-glance. Two rivulets of ash trailed down Raoul’s happy cheeks in response.

“Does your cruelty have no end?” Erik heaved in anguish. “Do you relish in Erik’s pain? Do you enjoy shredding his single mite of confidence to bits? He was ready to walk out there! Ready! God, Christine! He has never felt so normal in his life! And yet you had to say something – now he grows faint… he might die of embarrassment!” Here he flung himself dramatically sidelong against the wall and hid his head in his arms.

“Oh – no, no, Erik!” I whispered in a hushed tone to him, seeing him now sobbing openly in public. Several people around us gave strange looks, so I huddled myself around him as much as I could to hide him from their disturbed stares. “I was not trying to be cruel! Please understand! If I was being cruel I would have let you walk out like that without saying anything… I want you to be confident, I promise I do! But, all the same, I want you to know people will still stare! I just didn’t want you to be surprised by it, that’s all! I wanted you to know it, but to hold your head high anyway. So, my love… please, please, please don’t cry!”

He turned back to me, Raoul’s smiling face barely obscuring the tilt of his gaping frown as he wailed, “I had the confidence, Christine! Just once in my life, I had the confidence – and you took it from me!”

“You would have lost it the moment you walked out there,” I pleaded. “Even a normal person would feel insecure in that crowd –”

“Am I not normal?” Another choked sob. “All I ever wanted was to be normal!”

“You are, of course you are!” I tried to explain as he continued to spout his unending deluge of tears. “But your face is not and we both know it! Please, don’t make us argue about this…”

“Oh! Oh, it is always Erik’s fault that we argue, isn’t it!” he wailed still, throwing himself back to the wall. “Fine, Christine, you win! Erik is a hideous, ugly little boy! A monstrosity to behold! He deserves to be told how revolting his God-given features are – Heaven forbid he thinks to even walk in public looking the way he does! Oh, he does not deserve to see the light of day! Just send a stake through my broken heart and lock me in my sepulcher, already! A rotting carcass deserves nothing less!”

“That is not what I said!” I flailed. “Erik, I swear – at this point you must be deliberately misunderstanding the things I say to you!”

“Erik misunderstands nothing!”

I opened my mouth to reply with more nonsensical apologies, more explanations of things that should be obvious to any other human being. I prepared a speech in the flurry of a second, of the amount I loved him and a thousand further defenses to my innocence of cruelty. And yet, though I tried, I found I could not speak them.

I could not, because right at that moment I decided I’d had enough of this.

All of this.

So I stepped back from him and straightened up, crossing my arms against my breasts and setting my jaw in the sternest scowl I could raise. He must have felt my form leave his side, for he jerked in response to my sudden bruskness – and seeing my hardset features, he cried out miserably, “Ah! What horrible deed has Erik done to earn Christine’s scorn now? Has Erik not shed enough tears to earn her appeasement?!”

“You need to stop crying,” I told him in the steadiest voice I could manage. “I won’t argue with you if you’re going to act like this.”

“So Erik should cry more, then!” he said, and inky tears burst forth again with renewed vengeance. “If he cries enough, he and Christine will never argue again!”

“Now that’s simply idiotic,” I hissed, gripping my arms against myself tightly – so as to prevent myself from grabbing him and wringing his stubborn neck. “Erik, I know you can be a reasonable man when you want to be.”

“But Erik doesn’t want to be reasonable! He wants to be happy! That’s all he’s ever wanted, Christine. Can you blame him for leaping at any chance he can get? Leaping, hopping, it’s all the same. It doesn’t matter if it kills him anymore. He just wants to be happy, can’t you see? Happy like a grasshopper! So if you say that you and he won’t argue if he keeps crying, then by God, Christine, he’ll wail until this entire godforsaken Opera house is underwater!”

“Then you are a damn fool!” I cried with a petulant stomp of my foot, losing my temper at last. “You cannot ignore every argument between us! Do you know what arguments bring about? Resolution, Erik – resolution! This is exactly why nothing can ever be settled between us. It’s because you’re always blowing out your mind with that infernal organ of yours, playing the victim and ignoring all of your problems! You never listen to me. Never. Never. And I’ve been – been – Erik, do you realize how patient I’ve been with you? Through all the lies and the tantrums and the life-altering crises that have completed changed you has a person. I’ve been with you through everything and it’s never been enough. No amount of patience will resolve this. You’re unmatchable. I can’t wait you out. Our problems won’t just go away. They are here and they are big and they are not going away. So I’m sorry – yes, Erik, I’m the one who’s sorry – if you were hoping I would go along with this delusion you’ve made for yourself, but I refuse to assist you with it and I refuse to be polite about it anymore when goodness knows you are never polite to me! So now let me be clear once and for all: this mask is quite frankly the worst thing you’ve ever made. It’s a sick, freakish mockery of reality and only a blind idiot would be tricked into believing in it. It’s as if you clawed off the face of a porcelain doll and hammered it over your own. It doesn’t move, Erik! Not a millimeter! Even now, as you cry like a whimpering wet dog, your face is smiling down at me as if there isn’t a problem in the world! Have you any idea how strange it is to watch a happy man blubber and moan? And – and – why on earth did you think it would be a good idea to model it on Raoul’s face, of all people? Because – of course that’s who it is, isn’t it? Oh, don’t give me that look – I have two eyeballs, I can clearly tell it’s supposed to be him! Erik, don’t you ever think? What if someone recognized his face? What if he was here? And beyond that – he’s so much younger than you! Did you think about that? Did you think people wouldn’t notice how odd it is that an old wrinkled man’s body has a young man’s face? Did you think for a second about what the rest of you looks like? How vile your skin feels, how sickly your hands appear? Or did you really just think your face was all people would look at? Are you that vain, Erik? Are you? Tell me, dear genius man – I insist!”

People were looking at us now – staring at us, both of us, not knowing which one of us ridiculous saddle-geese to ogle worse. And geese we were! For here we were, having it out in the middle of the Palais Garnier! Had we no shame? With Erik in front of me, flapping his stained white handkerchief around, bringing it up and down to his face as he repeatedly forgot and remembered that he was wearing a mask and could not freely wipe away his snot; and I, squawking now in his face, ruddy-cheeked and acting nothing like the proper lady society expected me to be… oh, we certainly were a sight to be seen that night.

“Say something!” I demanded, ignoring the dozens of eyes upon us. “You’re always talking every other minute of the day – say something now!”

For in that moment I truly had no shame. What did I care if society judged me for speaking out of line, if I could just get Erik to understand this one time? If using language beyond the pale of civil code was the only way to pierce his stubborn mind? Oh! In that moment I would’ve gladly had myself committed to an asylum if Erik could have just grasped the simplest of concepts I was trying to convey. If he could just understand my aim was never to hurt him, but that sometimes some hurt is simply unavoidable – that some hurt is better to inflict than other hurts – if he could just understand the reasons I hurt him… oh, what standings in society I wouldn’t sacrifice for that!

But shameless though I was, I suppose Erik could not claim the same sort of freedom. His embarrassment, after all, stemmed from a deeper, more permanent shame that stained his own soul – one from birth, an original sort of shame, that could never be washed away – and so as he wiped his still-watery eyes and peered over his shoulder, I watched him jump a little with fright at the sight of so many spectators to our very public fight… and, in a flash, he removed himself from the wall and took off like a shot down the length of darkened corridor.

“Erik!” I called as I immediately ran after him, my slippers clicking loudly against the marble floor with each regretful step I made into that dark crepusculan passage. If only I’d been a hair of a second quicker with my reflexes – I could have caught him, I could have kept him, I could have made him stay!

How I regretted each hard word in that immediate afterward! I should have been nicer, I knew; I should have been endlessly patient with him and never raised my voice above a whisper. What sort of woman shouts at her husband? And yet –

No, no, it was all wrong! This I realized as I stood at the intersection of two lonely corridors. The Opera house was truly as much of a labyrinth above the ground as it was below when all the lights were out. I strained my eyes to see down the rightmost, but only shadows greeted me on that end. I peered to the left to see if traces of Erik might be discovered over there instead; that corridor retained its secrets just the same as the other. And thus I stood in between those two hallowed, chilly halls, breathing my breaths and crying my tears – when had that begun? – when suddenly I remembered the horrible truth of it all: that I, and not Erik, was the true victim of this whole sorry mess.

I slumped in my shoes as I stood in the middle of that intersection and faced the substantial opponent awaiting me in the form of a giant marble wall. Flushed pink marble, bloody marble, full of brown and yellow veins – sort of like Erik, sort of like me – stretching upwards and onwards, to Heaven and above, carrying nothing but marble, that empty, horrible, flushed pink marble – hiding such terrible secrets behind that bloody marble – and I found myself gripping my shoulders as the weight of it all overcame me at last.

Erik was my captor! How dare he run away? How dare he ever unchain himself from me? And most of all – how dare I pursue him?! Could I never leave well enough alone? He had left me before; in fact, he had promised to leave me tonight! Why did I have to look for him now? Why, why, why! Why, in truth, when he was the one at fault?

He was going to leave me in just a few short hours… he was going to throw me onto the street with nothing but a small valise of odds and ends that he had already made quite certain I knew did not actually belong to me. Oh, he was a wicked man, a cruel and unhappy man of the wildest sort, giving me gifts and slapping my face and telling me We Are Not Lovers – and all the rest he had done, the crimes he said he confessed but I knew he didn’t because Père Myriel wouldn’t forgive such ghastly sins as blackmail and kidnapping and murder and rape and – and torture – and – and –

It is always when I start thinking about Erik’s past that my anger at him quiets down and I begin to regain my sanity. It is not that I forgive him for any of it; it is just that there is so much to contemplate in his history that I cannot hope to ever unpack it all. I cannot even begin to conceive of a judgement for Erik – how can I, when I cannot conceive of one for myself?

I am not guiltless. That, at least, I know for certain. Sure, my sins are not as numerous as Erik’s, which are as vast and varied as the stars in the sky... but that is only because I am young and have not had the chance to commit so many yet. What will I do tomorrow? Who will I hurt today? For I know my heart is not as pure and clean as Erik thinks. This is the sad consequence of growing old, I fear – I am destined to destroy the world a little more with every further breath I take. I have already rubbed out my father and Raoul, and snapped them both over the edge of this mortal coil; when will I be fated to inevitably do the same to Erik?

At this point I felt the rest of the steam seep from my body, so I went to the opposing wall and sat myself down upon a lonely bench some forethinking designer had thought to put there. On this bench, in-between the two shadowy corridors I could see of nothing past, I sat and stared down the tunnel of darkness from whence I came.

The past is nothing, I realized as I sat there, but a thing only we ourselves have experienced.

And so I could not be angry at Erik for the evils he had enacted. I could not be miserable for him, either, for the tragedies he had attracted. His life was not my own to bother with understanding. I could only be weary from the ill-timed chase; weary and a little sore in my feet, as he must be too… and so, when he found me again, as I knew he would, I would make him sit and take off his shoes and let the blood flow back out of them, just as he had done for me before, just as I was doing now, in the most discrete of ways possible…

Thank heavens for long skirts, I recall myself thinking, as the over-abundance of velvet did wonders in hiding my stockinged feet as I kicked them out in front of me. My toes splayed out as I stretched them, free from the bond of my tight slippers which Erik had purchased a size too small but which I wore anyway for no other reason than because he told me to. The slippers themselves were also hidden beneath the velvet skirts, and all of it encased me and suffocated me so sweetly because this dress was also Erik’s idea. This dress, which had no label just like all the other dresses he gave me, but did not fit me and was not made for my complexion. A thinner woman, maybe one of skin and bones like that embittered Baroness – a different woman, that is – would have made more sense in this gown. It was as if Erik hadn’t even made the dress for me. But then why…?

As if on cue, Erik approached from the shadowy hall on my left. He had redressed himself in a black satin mask, discarded the horrid wig, and swept his cloak around him so that I could not make out the pillar of his form until he was close enough for me to see the bright amber specks of his eyes.

He stood at the edge of the bench, just out of reach, and peered down at me with such intensity that I didn’t dare move a muscle. Not to stand, not to smile, not to even slip my shoes back on. With the black mask on, I could not make out any emotion upon his face; it was worse than the Raoul-mask had been in that regard. Was he still crying? Was he angry with me? I could never quite tell his moods when he wore this mask.

Finally, after staring down at me for some time, he broke the silence.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” his gentle voice asked me softly, like a shepherd coaxing a lost sheep away from a thicket. “Don’t you know the rest of the world is somewhere else?”

“I was looking for you,” I said, before realizing how useless that was as an answer. I corrected myself: “I wanted to find you.”

His reply came as a beautiful but resigned sigh: “Why?”

“Oh, Erik,” I said. “Must we go through this every time?”

“And what would ‘this’ be, exactly?” Still his voice was soft, but he shifted uncomfortably on his definitely sore feet and touched his gloved fingers together nervously. “I am not a mind-reader, my love; you will have to explain it to me.”

“I wanted to find you,” I repeated as before. “I knew you were upset and I did not want you to be off… brooding… alone... or whatever it is you do when you’re in a mood like that.”

Another shift of his feet. “You know I would have found you soon enough. You did not need to leave on my account.”

“I am only here on your account,” I mumbled. “I didn’t even want to see an opera tonight… you didn’t even tell me what we were seeing...”

“Erik assumed Christine would be happy to do anything, as long as it was above the ground.” He tilted his head, and let out yet another one of his famous pitiful sighs. “Though, now… I fear I have ruined things for you tonight, as I always manage to do. Am I right?”

“No,” I folded my hands pointlessly over my knees. “No, it’s not that…”

Suddenly he was on his bony knees before me, peering back at me through those sad little eyeholes in his mask. My stockinged feet skidded back on the marble floor beneath my skirts as I made way for him, and I kicked around uselessly for my shoes beneath the mess of fabric. His cool, waxy fingers gripped my hands up into a shared prayer and instantly stilled my motions. “Tell me, my love. What can I do? How can I make things better for you?”

“Allow me to stay,” I stated immediately.

He narrowed his eyes, though his gaze remained soft and sweet. “You know I cannot do that.”

“Then tell me it meant nothing,” I requested of him. “Tell me you never had an honest thought for me. Tell me it was your mother’s fault. Tell me you only think of your pretty sultana when you look at me. Tell me my voice is the only part of me that matters. Just  – just tell me you never loved me, and it will all be okay.”

“You are a difficult girl to please,” he said painfully, and sunk his hands back down to clutch my skirts. “I obviously cannot do that either.”

“Little much you can do, it seems,” I said, feeling just as hopelessly broken. “May you remove your mask for me, then?”

He did so without a word of complaint, removing the dour thing and placing it carefully in my lap. He did not break eye contact as he did so – only moved his hands and touched at mine when the task was done.

“I am hideous,” he once stated many moons ago, when I first had him start going about the house without the mask. “I cannot bear to even look at myself in a mirror.”

“It is not so bad,” I weakly replied at the time.

“It is,” he insisted. “It is.”

But I was still afraid of him, obviously not for his past because he hadn’t told me a thing about it by then, but afraid of him very superficially for his face, which I found just as disquieting and horrific as he said. So of course I told him, “You’re beautiful to me.”

I did not understand at the time why that was the wrong answer. I did not understand that first time when he locked himself in his room and cried for two days straight. I did not understand his innocent lust or his gluttonous envy or his incomprehensible reason or his inconsolable earnestness. I did not understand it then – but I did now.

The deserted hall seemed to grow colder, and the ambient gas-light around us dimmer, so I intertwined my fingers with his and held them up between us. I did not pull one way or the other, but simply held them halfway between either of our trembling lips and allowed our breaths to warm our flesh.

“You are very ugly,” I said.

He nearly laughed, despite himself. “There’s not much to be done about this wretched face of mine, I fear.”

“No, not just your face,” I clarified. “All of you. To your core. It’s all hideous. You,” I squeezed his hand, “are hideous.”

To my surprise, he did not cry. Not then, anyway. “I cannot change that.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“I’m still trying, anyway,” he said. “I want to be the sort of man you deserve. A nice, good man with a nice, good face and a nice, good heart. It’s not enough to take you out for strolls in the Bois. It never will be. I – I thought, maybe, it could be, and I could settle for just that. I had a very pleasant evening with you, Christine, but I wanted more. Worse, though, was that you wanted more, too.”

“Is it so wrong that we want the same things from each other?”

“No,” he said, after some contemplation. “No, it is not.”

“Then if you agree with me, what is the problem?”

“The problem is that I am losing all sight of my conscience at last,” he sighed. “For I now see things from your perspective and am thinking such dangerous thoughts as that we are married, and you love me.”

Not this again… “We are married, though.”

“Which is the most frightening part of it all, I suppose,” he said quietly. “Because if I think I’m your husband and you think you’re my wife, how will I remember not to kiss you? I don’t want to hurt you, Christine. I have never wanted that. But I can’t promise I won’t forget…”

“You have already hurt me,” I reminded him gently. “As I have already hurt you. Nothing is by accident, and nothing is without consequence. Did it make you love me any less when I gave you the photographs and made you cry?”

He paused briefly, and I feared he was going to act like he didn’t know what I was talking about. But instead, he admitted, in a low voice, “It made me quite upset, honestly.”

“But did it make you love me any less?”

“No,” he answered faithfully.

“Did it make you love me any less when I broke open your sixty-nine year old bottle of sherry?”

A reverent shake of the head.

“How about when I accidentally helped you into your cups by serving it to you in bed?” Again he shook his head. “Or when I knitted that atrocious blanket?” Another shake, a little more strained. “Or when I proposed to you –”

“Christine, please,” his voice croaked. “I could never stop loving you… but these things, you must understand, are hard for me to remember. They’re like little cuts upon my skin, if you’ve ever felt one before… and though I have known all the suffering in this world, even a small scrape can still hurt if salted and fingered thoroughly enough.”

“You kidnapped me,” I told him bluntly, willing him to just understand. “You have hurt me many times. You have kept me below ground with you against my will and prevented me from leaving. And I want to leave, I assure you… but I also want to stay, because I want to stay with you. The problem is, I don’t think I can have it both ways. I don’t think you will allow it. You will either keep me locked down there without a means for escape, or you will kick me to the street and forbid me from returning. Either way, the door is closed to me. I can only be locked in, or locked out.”

He looked away wearily, as if he was just as exhausted with the topic as I was. “Tombs are typically sealed shut, Christine. A corpse can’t just swing open the lid of his casket as he so pleases…”

“Your house is not a tomb, dear man,” I told him. “You are a real, living man and you do not live in a tomb. Tombs do not have hot-water heaters and electricity.”

His eyes, those glowing amber orbs, turned up at me in desperation. “Then what, Christine? What am I supposed to do?”

“Unlock your door for me,” I answered. “Let me leave. Do not chase me around Paris. Do not follow me or stalk me or threaten me. Allow me to live without you for a time… and then let me back in. Let me be your wife. Let me hold your hand and give you gifts and tell you things you don’t want to hear. Let us live like normal people.”

He was silent. Afraid.

I knew this, because I was too.

“I don’t know how,” he breathed at last. “I must be the most wicked man who ever lived because I am nearly tempted to try.”

“It is not wicked to want to be happy, Erik. And anyway, you are already doing one of those things,” I implored softly, squeezing his hand gently to make my point. “Please, my love. Take the leap. Let me in.”

And that was finally the right thing to say, I thought, because he gave me a small smile and squeezed my hand back. “I think I might die a fool, my girl. Do you realize how ugly I am?”

“You are the most hideous man I’ve ever met.”

“Yet you do not turn away?”

“I do not.”

And with that he bawled into my lap, clutching the velvet tight to his sunken cheeks and wiping a fistful of amber against his snot-laden nasal cavity. I did not reproach him this time, because for once I thought we both understood that not all hurt is bad hurt, that not all pain is bad pain, and that sometimes we cry because we’re not sad at all, and that these tears streaming down his face were finally not ones of misery but instead were tears of glory.

It is with contrition that I must confess I did not cry with him. This was not my battle to overcome, I thought. I had won nothing here. Erik was the only one victorious and the long-perished spoils were only his to claim.

Thankfully, I still held him. I can console myself with that. I coaxed him from my lap to my breast, to clutch me a little more comfortably in his desperate embrace, and I took care not to ruin all his work by telling him something foolish like I loved him. Then we touched but did not kiss, though I could tell he wished to, and when all his spurting, spouting waterworks were over he peeled himself away like a limp sponge and fixed himself discreetly in the corner before turning back to help me find my stockings.

He seemed distracted thereafter. In his regretful preoccupation, he told me he loved me perhaps a hundred times during the walk from that dark intersection back to the bright, lively rotunda, but none of his words of affection seemed to be actually heartfelt. His lips graced my ear and nearly kissed the inside of it as he whispered an apology for his crude actions, the only sentiment that I think he truly meant that night, but then he pulled away and went on with the obligatory fawning and doting. I held onto his arm and only dared to smile back silently in reply.

Because, I thought, Erik had only won the one battle here; and as we all know, winning the battle is not the same as winning the war. He would win one day, I was sure, and I would save all my ardent replies to his overdone affection for that day. 

Of course, as I later found out, none of this was true. Erik had won nothing, and those dejected tears were just the same as they always were. He had learned absolutely nothing, and I had learned even less.

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Good-bye”
(Part IV)

“Have you been writing all evening?”

The doctor was back – and he was standing in her doorway, in all his irritating glory, positioned just right as if he was trying to block all the light from the hall.

“Perhaps,” Christine bit back, and shut her journal with a decided snap. “Do you have an issue with that, doctor?”

Gradus shrugged. “That depends. Are you writing about me?”

“I wouldn’t waste ink on you.”

His lips twitched. “Catty girl.”

Christine resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Do you need something?”

“Yes, actually,” he said. “You. Me. Supper for two. What do you say?”

It took a moment to register. It had been a long time since she’d been asked to dinner. Erik had always just prepared the meal and served her, at the table where she was already sitting and waiting for him. It was hard not to be flattered by the offer…

Still, Christine threw an incredulous look at the doctor, gesturing plainly to the cot and the comatose patient snoring gutterly beside her. “Doctor Gradus, you see I’m already in bed –”

“I told you my name is Tristan,” he reminded her.

“Tristan,” Christine conceded with aggravation, “I have no desire to go out with you tonight.”

“It’s a good thing that I brought supper home, then,” he beamed. “A patient’s family cooked a feast for me, and I’d be hard pressed to finish it alone. No dessert, sadly – the poor thing died, and her mother was so upset she ended up burning the tart.”

“That’s horrible!”

“Right? And I was so excited for it, too.” Gradus sighed. “Oh well. At least the stew made it out alright. What do you say?”

“Thank you very much for the offer, but I’m not quite hungry at the moment.” Christine bit her tongue to stop herself from adding, and even if I was, I have no desire to eat with you!

Just then, though, her traitorous stomach chose that very moment to revolt, loud and clear, with a fantastic and rolling rumble.

Gradus tilted his head to her indulgingly as she slapped her hands over her gut in embarrassment. “Not hungry, are you? Tell me - have you eaten at all today?”

“Oh – fine!” Christine huffed, pushing back a wave of nostalgia. Hadn’t this scene happened before, in a way, with Raoul on the train? In a form, at least? “I might do for a small serving. But if we are to eat together, Tristan, I have one stipulation…!”

--

“I can’t help but think there might be a more efficient way to eat this meal.”

“If you turn around, I’m going back to bed,” Christine warned. “I’m serious, doctor.”

Gradus sighed and returned to his plate, careful not to topple the fragile porcelain thing which was balanced precariously in his lap as he sawed at a piece of dry asparagus. Despite his initial claim, the stew had not actually come out fine; thus they were forced to split a series of simultaneously undercooked and overcooked side dishes between them. Christine had snagged the best looking pieces for the patient’s lunch, despite Gradus’s complaints that he won’t even wake up to eat any of it and that it was all going to go to waste, for crying out loud, please just put it back in the pot. She would hear none of it, though, and he only quieted down when she offered to just save her own plate for the patient and see herself off to bed.

Per Christine’s request, Gradus’s chair was turned around completely so he was forced to face away from the table, staring out the dark glassy window to the Parisian street below. A delicate plate sat on his lap, with a tough, American-sized sausage lying in the center of it, leaking beads of oil from one tip but remaining completely dry on the other; conversely, his water glass remained on the table, beside a vase of fresh roses, and he had to ask permission before he could turn around to reach for it.

With frustration, then, he sulked: “You’re a bit of an odd duck, you know that?”

Christine stabbed at her own meal. “I’ve been called worse.”

“I’m sure you have,” he said under his breath, before clinking around his silverware some more.

Was that… hurt she was hearing? Had she truly managed to wound the insufferable man? Perhaps it was from spending too much time with Erik in the past months, but Christine felt her aggravation melt a little and a morsel of pity take its place. There was just something about moody, lovelorn men that tugged at her heartstrings, apparently. Softer, then, she said, “Thank you for sharing your food with me, Tristan. It was very kind of you.”

“Much obliged,” he said. “Although, honestly, I intended it to be a touch more romantic than what you’ve allowed.”

Oh, and there it was again. Why did she even bother? Her eyes tracked back to the blooming roses sitting in the vase before her, and studied their sanded stems with exasperation. “I told you I’m not available.”

“Right,” Gradus said, intensifying his sawing. “The husband. Tell me, Chrissy – did he do that to your face?”

All the color in her face washed out just at the mention of those three small cuts on her cheek, which were nearly healed and little more than a series of white scars at this point. She was thankful for his turned-around position as she rose her cold, quivering fingers up to touch at them numbly. Memories of Erik’s hellish outburst following their kiss flickered before her eyes… as did memories of her own actions, from after she had returned to her room.

Memories of going insane from Erik’s sobbing wails, which echoed through the whole house – of collapsing against her nightstand in a fit of hysterical laughter – of barking out her madness, loud enough to compete with his deafening tears – of clutching her face in her hands, unable to stop her own tears as the pain of it all drew a noose around her neck – of clawing at her eyes, her cheeks, her bones, anything she could touch – of breaking skin with the jagged edge of a broken nail, not once, not twice, but three times –

“No,” she said, because it was the truth. “He thought he did, though.”

“So he did hit you?” Gradus probed. At her persisted silence, he pressed further. “Did he hurt you a lot?”

“It is not – what you think,” Christine swallowed. She forced herself to look away from the back of his head, and found herself staring at the vase of dethorned roses once more. How she hated roses… “I am in no mood to discuss this matter with someone I barely know.”

“I would be happy to know you more,” Gradus said smoothly.

“You would not,” she promised.

He chuckled, short and cocky. “I’m not afraid of you, Christine Daaé. I’m a grown man. I think I can handle whatever it is you’re hiding.”

“I am not the one you should be afraid of.”

“So that’s it, then? Your husband’s the big bad wolf?” Gradus chewed his asparagus with clear amusement, his shoulders shaking up and down. “If your husband was so fearsome, why on earth did you stay with him?”

“Doctor, I am quite literally already in the process of leaving him. As you know.”

“Ah, but these processes take time.” He turned slightly to reach for his water glass, and caught her eye with a wink briefly as he did. Before she could sputter out her indignation that he hadn’t asked for permission, he turned back and sat properly, looking away from her again, and asked in his most romantic way, “I don’t suppose you’ll be remaining faithful to him for the entire period, as is customary for women like you – will you?”

“And what exactly do you intend by asking me something like that?”

“I think I’ve been rather clear about my intentions, Christine Daaé. ”

“We have known each other for all of three days. People cannot fall in love so fast, and if you have, then you must be sorely ­–”

“Who said a thing about love?” Gradus said lightly. “You are no doubt a wonderful little lady, with a charming personality and a head full of novelous quotes to boot. But you’re right – people don’t fall in love so fast. They fall into it slowly, after many years of learning their way around their better half. Marriage doesn’t require love, Chrissy, it requires dedication. Are you dedicated?”

“I am dedicated to my husband.”

“Who you are leaving.”

“Who I love,” Christine corrected.

“Who has apparently hurt you enough times to think any wound upon your body was made by his hand,” Gradus countered. “Is that an unfair assessment of your husband, Christine Daaé?”

“The situation is more complicated than that,” Christine said, because it truly was. But while she could have defended Erik up and down and left and right – could have explained that Erik cried over every ache and pain she had, that he even cried over her menses when it ailed her each month – she did not utter a word. Erik had hit her, but even that was entirely separate from the real problem.

A single slap she could deal with. They talked it out. She stood her ground and warned him never to do it again. He apologized… or, rather, he asked her to forgive him. Which really wasn’t the same thing, but it was a step forward for Erik. And they moved past it. A single slap was nothing.

The entire situation of their relationship, on the other hand, was far less palatable.

How was she supposed to explain to this doctor, who knew nothing of her life, that she loved a man who had deceived her for months, had spied on her, and had ultimately kidnapped her? Who had trapped her then-fiancé in his actual, real torture chamber which he built in his actual, real house? Who had proudly confessed to the murder of at least a hundred innocent people? It was insanity, even for her to think about. But she loved Erik, regardless of all of that. She really did.

…Did she?

“I’m sure you think so,” Gradus was saying, light as ever, ignoring her sudden internal crisis. “Marriages are often complicated. They involve women, after all, and you women are so very, very complicated.” Before Christine could interrupt, he asked, “Are you done with your meal yet?”

Christine stared blankly at her plate, still heaping with food. “Yes.”

Without waiting another second, Gradus spun his seat back around and plunked his plate on the table, before pressing his elbows against the edge and leaning in. “I would very much like to complicate things further with you, Christine Daae.”

“I’d like things to be simpler,” Christine said, hardly hearing herself and feeling very much far away from it all. “I want to be married to the man I love.”

“And I want to be married to the woman I love,” Gradus declared. “Sometimes we can’t always get what we want. We have to take what we are given.” A ruby red petal fell from a rose, and he took it up and played with it in his hands as he urged her further. “What is your plan from here, if you have it your way? You have nowhere to go. Life on the street is the furthest thing from simple. Your money is gone, all paid out to me for treatment and lodging. Where do you intend to go? How do you intend to live? Even if I give you a loan, because you know I am a good man and would do that for you, what would you do with it? It is lonely to be by yourself in the world. I know this well… I left my ghosts behind in Boston, and now since I’ve lived here the nights have become much quieter than I’d prefer. I’m sure you feel the same about your old Sweden, wherever in it you’re from. The quiet is a type of ache I can’t seem to treat. It’ll never be the same, even if you go back. The people you left there are not there anymore. The world changes completely the moment you look away. But I am here, Christine Daaé. I am here, and I am wealthy. Don’t laugh. At the very least, I promise I can provide for you. I can stay with you. I am a scholar, and as you can see a bit of a talker. You might be able to find me interesting. I am forward but I am not violent. I am not perfect, but of course neither are you. We don’t have to be a pair of Shakespearean lovers. Things never work out for them anyway. So I am not asking for passion. I am asking for something much simpler. Marry me.”

“I – I –” Christine floundered for a response, before giving up and jumping up from her chair hastily. “I think I should be retiring to bed just about now. Thank you for supper, Doctor Gradus, and for this pleasantly entertaining, um, conversation. It has given me much to think about…”

“Good night to you, then,” Gradus said, sounding quite put-out. He followed her across the room, as if to escort her to her – his – bedroom like a proper gentleman might. “But do keep my offer in mind. Personally, I think we would both find ourselves in better straits if you just accepted.”

“I have my husband to think about,” Christine said, as if that was any excuse at all.

“Certainly. But I do think I have already won in that regard,” Gradus said, and held open the door to the bedroom. A shaft of dim, yellow light fell across the small room and illuminated the two musty cots placed side by side within it. Upon one, the comatose patient slumbered on in his deathly way, grasping the knitted blanket she had laid across his gaunt form in his white-knuckled grip. Beside him remained empty, awaiting her return to his moldering side. “Consider it, Christine.”

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Opera”
(Part I)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S (SECOND) JOURNAL

There is little wax left in my candle. I must be concise in my wording going forward, lest I lose what little light I have left and become forced to wait till morning to complete this tale. Thus I will not spend more than a single sentence on recounting my dinner with the doctor this evening; Erik, if you happen to be reading this, somehow, just assume it went poorly and never worry yourself about it again.

Now, without pause, just as my own life trudges bleakly forward even in this present moment –

I go on.

--

The opera had already recommenced before we made our way to our seats. What dim sconces rose up alongside us, fastened with hundreds of delicate screws set into the cracking marbled walls, lit up the darkened corridors with the illusion of illumination and cast the heavy pall of our shadows against the floor. Like monstrous specters hurrying to devour, or otherwise in fear of being devoured, we ran ourselves headlong into the night and poured ourselves gainlessly forward into the darkness created by our own unhappy silhouettes.

As I wrote before, Erik had his rank mouth to my ear the entire way. He had discarded with the black mask, for some reason, and so went about thrusting just the tip of his little glass nose into my hair as he whispered sweet little nothings out of obligation and nothing more. I, myself, nodded along to them out of obligation as well, which only increased the wet ferocity of his claims as we went along.

“Does Christine realize that Erik loves her more than any heart is capable of loving?” he asked more than once. The first time he posed the question, as he pulled me up the stairs with that dead iron hand locked around my upper arm, I feared it not to be rhetorical and struggled for a good minute to find an appropriate answer that would not upset him. Regardless of my silence, he went on with an unfazed air – but still, as I sit here writing, I wonder if he perhaps meant something more by that question.

Because really, Erik… at what point did you realize exactly what happens to a heart pumped full of more love than it knows what to do with? To a heart filled to the brim with an overabundance of stagnant affection, overburdened with a thick sanguinity, condemned to coagulate itself into a congealed and curdled carcass – never to be emptied, never to be staunched, never to be relieved, never to be consoled…?

When did you realize that Hell to you is actually a woman wrapped up in your arms?

Our journey through the corridors took us past several stragglers who had yet to relocate their seats. I blush to admit I recognized some of these old mens’ faces from my days in the chorus, when I would accidentally stumble upon my colleagues engaging in some rather bizarre business affairs with them. Erik had been the one to explain to me back then, as the Angel of Music, what these ‘affairs’ entailed, as politely and deferentially as he could…

“There is no shame in it,” the Angel told me in that all-knowing, righteous tone of his. “It is a service, and compensation is duly exchanged. But these affairs are not ones you need to concern yourself with, Christine. You need no protections or backings from these benefactors. You alone will secure your own golden future, which will soon alight with the most eternally brilliant of stars, all shining with rays bright enough to make up for this sheen of total darkness which obtunds and brutalizes this absolutely wretched world… in which you’ll live out the rest of your mortal days.”

“But other girls sing better than me,” I told him, “and they still get passed up for every part. What if these lessons are not enough? Surely I can learn to put my mouth to better use and negotiate a better part this way, as they all do, and as you said there is no shame –”

“No!” The Angel’s spectacular voice boomed around me. “You must not even think of it!” Then, softer: “Christine, you are very young – and very innocent. You hardly knew what they were doing. Are you suggesting this purely for career advancement? Or are you just curious the rougher side of love? If so, I promise you it is not an easy thing to swallow…”

I left my lesson that night feeling much like a scolded child, though I was confused as to why I was in trouble in the first place. In one breath, my Angel had explained the facts of sex as directly and straightforwardly as possible, reminding me that there was ‘really nothing extraordinary about some pieces of flesh we all have’ and speaking as dryly as a schoolbook as he explained the process of copulation and all its related actions (even as his voice quivered slightly each time he said such words as ‘pudendum’ and ‘prepuce’). But then, in the next breath… he began speaking on a more abstract and oblique sense of the concept, with a touch of deridement, and made me promise not engage myself with any of the patrons.

“Even Raoul?” I had asked, for we had spoken of him many times before. “Oh, Angel, you know how I have missed him! Was it not by your ministrations that he has happened to come to this Opera house, so that at long last I may be reunited with my childhood sweetheart?”

He only doubled down on his stance after that, rebuking me for anything he could think of while keeping his tone eternally tempered. It is incredible, in retrospect, to realize that the Angel I spoke with was in fact the same Erik I came to know this past year… and how similar they were, at that! They were always so much the same, always speaking away from their true meanings and never quite addressing anything they deemed unseemly. In fact, the only true difference between them is that now I expect Erik to lie to me on each and every matter we discuss. The Angel, in comparison, I never thought twice about. I suppose… I truly trusted the Angel with all my heart. But I recognize now the self-serving criticisms he doled out to me – pretending he cared for my reputation while in reality only wishing to keep me to himself – and I feel… I feel… well, I feel very much taken for a fool. It hurt greatly, when I discovered the deception, to realize I had been abused so easily in this way. I almost wished I had received some of those mens’ invitations with more grace…

But selfish or not, Erik was right. In his own way, of course. It was good that I did not follow the other girls’ leads and leap into an arrangement with a patron or two. I didn’t need to do that, because I had Erik. And, certainly, while Erik did train my voice and help me reach the heavens with my talent… that was not what ultimately secured my career. Money and threats did. Coercion did. And even more so: me becoming Prima Donna was never the point of this whole charade to Erik. He was intent on keeping me with him in his damp, soddering dungeon for the rest of my undoubtedly short life. Helping me with my career was just his way of appeasing me long enough to lure me safely into his clutches. Erik never even cared for opera before he met me.

Now, as for what has become of us, after all this time… I must wonder if Erik ever dared to dream past our initial meeting? Though he was of course the one who educated me on the formal particulars of the natural body – and all the ways it can be used in conjunction with that of another body, or even with one of a less-than-natural derivation – I suspect he may have been just as naïve as I was when confronted with the waning pedantry of our situation. It is one thing, after all, to tell a woman to love you; it is another thing entirely when she complies.

Regardless, I digress – let me return to the sight of those men whom Erik and I were passing by. There were five or six of them standing along the side of the corridor, a toddering ballerina at each of their sides. One man had thrust his thick, girthy cigar into his girl’s hands for her to hold for him as he puffed out some smoke with his companions, her painted fingers hardly able to reach around the full extent of its wide circumference. Another man, smoking as well, offered a Sullivan to his girl by way of prodding it into her lips and demanding her to open up. She did so after a moment of reluctance, and teared up as he held the cigarette to her mouth for a long minute in punishment.

“I see we are not the only ones late to our seats,” Erik commented absently, as he pulled us along past them.

Standing at the end of the line was the spiteful Baroness from before, who I recognized mostly by her tremendous fur coat and the bitter expression upon her face. Beside her was the Baron of Tremaine, who held her long, spindly cigarette between his two wrinkled fingers as he waited for her to finish dousing her throat in the two glasses of sherry she was still tightly fisting.

“Friends of yours?” Erik teased, as he caught me glancing in their direction.

“No,” I said quickly. “I only recognized the lady from earlier – I bumped into her while waiting for you.”

“Rather more like she bumped into you, I’d say,” he said lightly. “That old bitch would do well to watch where she’s walking, I think.”

As if somehow overhearing Erik’s rude comment, the Baroness’s amber eyes suddenly swiveled to glare at us, and her miserable face contorted into the deepest rage I’ve ever seen on another person’s face, save Erik’s –

“Well, if it isn’t Mephistopheles himself!” she snapped, drunk on her own wretchedness. “What are you even doing here, you ugly fuck? Come to ruin my night? Beastly, bungled bone-bag! Who do you think you’re fooling with that ridiculous disguise tied about your sorry little snout? Take off that nose and show them all – make them all gouge out their bloody eyes when they see you’re nothing but the devil incarnate behind it! I dare you, demon! I dare you to kill us all –”

Erik’s arrogant smile fell quickly as she went on, hurling slurs with spiraling intensities at us even as we hurried away. Neither she nor the Baron followed us, thankfully, as we dashed ourselves into the darkness once again, but it was with a sinking heart that I found the Erik at my side to be an unnervingly quiet replacement for my previous companion.

“Erik –” I tried.

“Don’t…” Erik said, refusing to look at me. “Please, don’t say a word…”

“Is that how it always is when you go out?”

He shook me away. “Please, Christine, for the love of God, just… be quiet, for once in your life,” he groaned. “Erik cannot handle both you and her perceiving him in the span of one single minute.”

Consequently we walked the rest of the way in silence. I kept my mouth shut, though I wished desperately to console him, and after some time of walking he renewed his affections on me with an even greater vigor than before. I asked no further questions on the matter, and he offered no further explanations… at this time.

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Opera”
(Part II)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S (SECOND) JOURNAL
(entry cont.)

The boxkeeper was standing at her station between Boxes Five and Seven when we arrived, sitting upon her old wobbly stool and reading the evening news with a polished spyglass held up tightly to her one good eye.

“Madame Giry,” Erik greeted cordially, sounding nothing of his prior distress except for a slight terseness to his tone. “A pleasure to see you, as always.”

The poor startled woman dropped her paper the moment she looked up and saw us. Erik, with his ghastly face on full display save for the ornamental glass nose slung from the loop of piano wire about his balding head, looked to be an incredibly suspicious and intimidating figure, despite his sociable, nearly gentlemanly pose beside me.

“It is my understanding you helped arrange the wedding ceremony the other day,” Erik went on in what might’ve been mistaken for an amicable tone, as Madame Giry gaped at him in perfect fear. He grabbed my hand and held it up next to his own, to show off our two gold bands. “I am forever indebted to you for this, Madame. It was something like the happiest day of my life.”

Her wide eyes flitted between the rings as she stammered out, “You are – you are –”

“I am Christine Daaé’s husband,” Erik proclaimed, puffing out his skinny chest. “Now, will you open up the door for us, already? We are late to the show as it is.”

With a squeak, she jumped from her stool and started off to Box Five’s door, fishing the key out of her skirts with her shaking hands as she went.

“Ah, Madame! Where do you think you’re going?” Erik had the gall to sound amused as he called to her, though I knew he wasn’t. “That is the ghost’s box, if you haven’t heard!”

“Oh!” she said, running back to us. Confusion and fright had her grabbing at the keys on her belt with a random urgency, her hands shaking as she failed to find the proper one to rid her of this nightmare. “Where shall you be sitting then, Monsieur?”

“In Box Seven, as our tickets say,” Erik said, and then suddenly materialized a pair of tickets printed with the very information he claimed. I could see Madame Giry’s mind was divided on whether to take the tickets or not; in the end Erik made her mind up for her and set the tickets down on her stool.

“We would very much like to see the opera now, Madame,” he reminded her with thin patience. “Open the door, please.”

As if she didn’t know what else to do, she scooped up the tickets and evaluated them quickly with her spyglass, acting like she was able to read the text at all through the shaking lens, before then skirting in a wide circle around us to unlock the door to Box Seven.

“Enjoy the performance,” she mumbled, half by reflex, half by accident, as we pushed past her with all the indignity of a pair of real, legitimate paying patrons. She shut the door behind us swiftly, yet as professionally as she could, and the last I heard from her just before it clicked in the latch was the quietest, most fearful squeak of “Congratulations.”

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Opera”
(Part III)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S (SECOND) JOURNAL
(entry cont.)

Thus we stood in the back of Box Seven, with nothing but a curtain separating us from the rest of the box, and by extension the theater. We needed only to sweep that dripping puddle of red velvet to the side in order to take our seats and make ourselves visible to any of the curious members of the theater-going populace.

“Christine,” Erik said suddenly. I could hardly see him in the darkness; only the simmering glow of his amber eyes showed through. “May we play pretend, one last time?”

My hand had been about the curtain, ready to pull it back, but at his words I let it drop. “Of course, Erik. Whatever you wish.”

“Everything in this box is an illusion,” he warned, sounding as if he was about to cry. “Can you – can you bear it so much if I ask you to forget all the wrongs I have done to you, just for this one final night between us? Will you let me grasp that which has never, not once, belonged to me, as if it was my own to hold and claim? To pierce – to penetrate – to break? I promise I will let you go in the end, of course… but until then, Christine, until we are parted… can Erik just pretend he had a happy ending, like all the other boys in Paris get?”

There were sweeter answers I could have given him. Fanciful, fleeting words of grandiose love, expounding upon a passion of thrills we knew of in passing but had never quite known ourselves. A word was on my drawn lips, tempting to spill itself and pollute this fragile peace we’d at long last found with one another… but in the last moment, as I drew breath, I knew he would not care to hear it. Instead, then, I offered my truce in resignation: “I have no choice in this, do I?”

“No… no, you do not. Nor have I, for how tired I have grown of fighting my conscience on this. I have wept far too long, and have ignored the pangs in my love-sick heart far too many times. I have nearly lost the battle now. I am done with resisting. Forgive me, now, for all I do from this moment forward.”

“I will forgive you for nothing,” I said, “because we both know you will do it all anyway.”

He touched my cheeks, fingers trembling, before letting his hands fall to my shoulders. Quietly, he mumbled, “She thinks she knows… she thinks she understands. But of all the things Erik has asked of her, this must be the worst.”

“And what are you asking for?”

“I am asking,” he said, tensing his fingers about my arms, gripping about them like iron vices, “for you to love me, as you have always claimed to do.”

“I do love you,” I promised, “with the most ardent of passions.”

He whined out a low, painful note, and dropped his hands from my shoulders. “You have always been such a good actress.”

“I am not acting.”

“Better for you to believe that you are,” he sighed. “It would make this infinitely easier for the both of us.”

“Then I shall act for you,” I conceded immediately, because it was easier than to argue. “What role shall you have me play? The loving, doting wife you always wanted? I can be that for you, Erik. Only tell me what you wish to hear and I shall say it.”

Erik considered me, his pointy chin quivering as tears once again beaded up at the corners of his hideous amber eyes.

“You must promise not to believe any of it,” he warned me at long last. “Erik will not be held responsible if you do.”

“I promise.”

At that he kissed me, all broken vows and slobbering snot and crooked ornamental noses. He heaved all of the passion in his rank body into that one heady kiss, breathing my breaths and clutching onto my back to press me securely against his bony, uncomfortable frame, as if he’d never kissed a body before that he didn’t have to lift and push against himself.

“Tell me you love me,” he whispered against my mouth.

“I love you.”

“Oh, Christine,” he moaned. “This is truly how it was always meant to be. Say it again, Christine, say it again – but slower, Christine, like you mean it. Say it like you believe it.”

“I love you.”

“Again, Christine – again…”

I repeated my vow, over and over, until he was panting against my bruised and bloodied lips. His begs for innocent adoration turned swiftly crude; still I complied, because what else was I to do? Then his hands were skirting down my back, clutching and groping at laces and stays he had only tied together less than an hour before. His long fingers, so much like burrowing worms, snaked through the loops to pet at my underclothes, rooting like maggots conquering their spoiled feast. He pressed his vulgar body to mine for the first time in all our time together, rather than pressing my own to his, and suddenly I became aware of the jutting hardness of his corded lasso hanging about his slender waist - I think it must have been that - as he pushed it with a feverish desperation against my sickened gut.

“Have I died…? I never thought Hell would taste quite as sweet as this. Must all thrills be taken at the expense of others? Is such fleeting bliss worth it? I am dreaming, I am waking, I am dying… Christine, you must pinch me lest I –”

Despite all my will I could not stop my reflexes, as his reeking breath wafted into my mouth and poured down my throat, tasting every bit like the sludge of decay. My stomach flipped over one final, fatal time, as he stifled me with the miasma which oozed from every pore of his body – suffocated me with those fodderous hands which were suddenly yanking me against him with unabashed arrhythmia - and to save myself from being sick, or perhaps from even dying completely, I lurched back and connected the flat of my palm against his miserable face, sending the glass ornament nose scuttling across the floor.

“I did not mean –” I said without thinking, clapping my burning hand to my mouth as the realization of what I just did caught up with me… and with a wrench of my gut, I feared the inevitable explosion.

For Erik is not a suicidal man. He does not take insults upon his person lightly, nor does he take them voluntarily. Therefore I trust he did not see my attack coming, since I was able to land a hit upon him at all. Why would he, when I had so adamantly assured him I would play along with whatever demented game of pretend he had devised? When I had so seriously affirmed to him my devotion to him for a year or more, and had been so quietly submissive even in my hours of express hatred? When not even I knew how much, or how long, I had possessed the purest, most carnal desire to hurt him?

He did not seem to know what to do with this fresh injury; this much was clear, as he stood frozen in position in front of me. His terrible head did not recoil back to its original spot, but rather remained bent at the awkward angle at which I had sent it; and his ruined mouth puckered slightly as if still feeling the impact of my hand against it. It was for a long moment that we remained suspended in that disaster together, with him staring at the nothingness of the wall in front of him, my handprint burning like a brand against his face – and even when that disaster transformed and he began to move, slowly swiveling his skull upon his creaking neck as his gleaming, furious eyes scanned the floor for the lost glass adornment – even then, I found time stopping completely and even the music from the stage seeming to fade into silence.

But no explosion ever came; such is the way with Erik. I do not know how many hours we must have stood there (hours, I say, for though it must have been naught more than a few seconds, time with Erik cannot be measured in such a blandly temporal way – nor can time be measured like that with anyone we hold dear) until he merely shrugged his shoulders and turned back to give the simplest of smiles to me, as if to say it was nothing at all to worry our two little heads over.

“Maybe I was wrong,” he said at last, nursing his smarting cheek with a cryptic humor. “Perhaps I have always been wrong.”

I couldn’t stand it when he spoke so vaguely, and so against my better judgement to remain silent, I dared to ask: “About what?”

“Nothing that matters anymore,” he replied just as obliquely as before. “But… I would like to be honest with you, Christine, just once. Will you indulge me that, and allow me to share one of my horrible, no-good secrets with you? I think I have been miserable enough to earn that right. So here is the truth, that awful, burning truth: I think I rather liked the feeling of your hand upon my cheek. Even with the sting of that slap, it felt softer than any touch I’ve known before. Almost like a caress, Christine – almost, but not quite. We will have to teach you another time –”

“A-another time?” I stuttered. “Am I not to be leaving you after tonight?”

“Ah, Erik misspoke,” Erik laughed. “Don’t mind him. He’s out of sorts. Never been touched by a lady so willingly, you see. Oh, don’t pout so hard, Christine; Erik’s only making fun. It’s too late for all that, anyway. Now come, Christine, let us take our seats. The opera waits for no one.”

Then he pushed aside the velvet drape and began to lead the way, clutching my hand in his clammy palm, until I looked past his shoulder and suddenly stopped short –

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Opera”
(Part IV)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S (SECOND) JOURNAL
(entry cont.)

“Erik!” I whispered, yanking him backwards. “There are other people in here!”

Erik blinked at me twice, before peering over his shoulder to look back out at the two people who’d apparently been sitting in the second row of Box Seven this entire time. They were a pair of widows, or so I assumed, for they both had dark tulle veils swaddled about their faces and wore these unfashionable dresses that were so black they nearly melted into the shadows of the box around them. One was old and one was young, as told by their hair, and both sat with a posture so rigid I humored myself to wonder if they might be made of porcelain rather than flesh. I could not tell if they had listened to a word either Erik or I had said, for they faced the stage with such great stoic attentiveness that I figured they were either too invested in the plot occurring down below or were otherwise too polite to admit to overhearing such an intimate exchange.

After making his own lengthy study of these two patrons with whom we apparently shared a box with, though, Erik turned back to me and blinked once again, staring at me vacantly for another excruciatingly long period of time before finally answering: “Well, did you expect me to buy out the entire box?”

Considering, to the best of my knowledge, that he had not actually purchased the tickets we held? “Honestly, yes.”

This irked him, for I could see his tense fingers squeezing at the velvet of the curtain still snatched in his grasp. “Did I not tell you we were to play pretend as a normal couple, Christine? Just while we are in this box, I said. Let us attend this opera and pretend we are normal, just for tonight, I said. Let me not be a ghost. Let me not be a phantom. Understand that this is all I have ever wanted to be: something less than phenomenal. Remember that normal people do not buy out an entire box when they attend an opera. They mingle with the rest of Paris, and they let themselves be seen by others. Let us be seen, Christine. Just for tonight. Could you be willing to try? I trust it is not so much to ask… there is nothing really to fear from the Parisian gaze, nothing at all, especially if you know how to alter a mind’s perception of a thing that’s put right in front of it. Recall that I am the first magician in the world and I can work wonders beyond your realm of understanding. Only trust me, Christine, and let us enter into this illusion together.”

I knew I had no say in the matter, of course, and Erik knew it as well, for he did not wait for my answer before grabbing up my wrist once again to pull me out to the box’s bay. I waved awkwardly as we crept by the two stoic widows, hoping to smooth over our interruption, and for good measure added in a courteous, “Good evening, excuse us…”

“Shush!” Erik hushed me harshly, louder than I had spoken. “They’re trying to enjoy a show, if you wouldn’t mind not bothering them!”

Suitably chastised, I took my seat in the row in front of them and tried not to feel their glances upon my back. They were looking at me, I thought, but were they actually upset at my disruption? I would have liked to think they were not! I, personally, would not have been bothered by such an inconsequential thing as a couple quietly taking their seats during a performance!

…Or perhaps I would? Suddenly I feared their vexation, imagined though it must have been, and I felt my stomach turn over at the thought. How could I bear to share a box for the next several hours with these two women who already so clearly detested me? No part of me wanted to remain in that box; no part of me wanted to remain in that chair while they burned holes in the back of my head with their combined total of eight eyes (both women were wearing spectacles – of the most useless prescriptions I might add, as I noted in my inspection of them later on that night). How I wished I could have left – disappeared – died, right there!

But at least they weren’t looking at Erik, who I knew wouldn’t have been able to handle the contempt, especially after the incident in the corridor. Thankful for that at least, I put my hand down on the armrest between us and offered it to him silently…

“Oh! Is Erik taking up too much room?” he asked, shifting away from me. “Does Christine need more space?”

Somehow I resisted the urge to sigh. “No, Erik. I just want to hold your hand.”

“My hand?” he said, as if it were the most foreign concept in the world. Then he settled a bit, seeming to understand. “Is your hand very tense, my love? Would you like me to massage it for you?”

As much as I loved Erik’s massages, hands and elsewhere, I was growing quite exasperated with him at this point. “Why must every little pleasantry I attempt with you devolve into such a pain?”

“I pain you?” he asked, entirely dumbfounded.

I was about to retort back with something cruel but honest, when suddenly I caught a steel glare in his eye, marring his perfectly stupid expression. Yes… from behind his innocence, there was the clear, sharp warning:

Remember your promise.

“I – I misspoke, dear,” I therefore said. “My hand hurts. It - it is what pains me, you see? I only meant that it has a cramp, and that is what pains me, not you. Hold my hand and make it feel better, in that gentle way you do.”

“But Erik is never gentle,” he chided me. “You must try to be more convincing if you're going to lie to your poor husband.”

Ah! What was I to do now? It seemed that all my efforts with him were to be futile on this front. I had tried subtlety; I had tried reason; I had tried fakery. Nothing worked. Nothing would convince him to hold my hand.

Except perhaps… force?

It would be dangerous, I knew. I had tried force with him before and it ended quite disastrously. But that was a different time. Perhaps I hadn’t tried hard enough back then. Perhaps I just needed to be a little more assertive…

His hands were folded in his lap, two stacks of bone layered one on top of the other. I eyed the pile of them carefully, like a cat stalking its prey, before lifting my hand and pouncing on them with such speed he hardly had the time to move his hands out of my grasp.

But move them he did! And with those piles of bones freshly dug up and exhumed, my hand was sent down into the spot of their vacant grave – down, until at the very bottom of the plot I scraped my fingers on the hard soil that had been packed beneath and touched hot earth. Immediately I made to spring my hand back to my own lap, utterly horrified at myself for my own hubris, but at the very last second Erik reached over the armrest to stop me.

“You really are a troublesome girl!” he told me in a severe tone, as he clasped his chilled hand around my own. “Here, you have my hand. Are you happy now, wife?”

He must have known he was hurting me. The grip was too tight, his palm too clammy, his nails too sharp. He was capable of softer touches, which I knew because he had bestowed them upon me many times before; and yet even as my little tendons and finger bones rolled over each other within his grasp, I could not find it in myself to ask him to let go. This was the hand he was giving me; this was the hand I had asked for. He was holding my hand, and I was holding his, and I would have gladly suffered far more than just this small shred of pain if it meant he’d give a little bit more of himself to me.

“Completely,” I thus replied.

I could see he wanted to argue. He wanted to accuse me of something, anything, and shake his hand free of me. He wanted to leave this box and be done with this whole charade. He wanted to go back into the ground and play his requiem mass, and then shut himself up in his coffin and go to sleep forever. All these things he wanted… but in the end, he must have seen something in my eye that finally convinced him to stay, for a little while more, one way or another… for he loosened up the grip, but still held on, and sagged back into his velvet-lined seat.

“Let us watch the opera,” he muttered, his hand now a limp thing in my own. “It’s what we came here to do.”

I watched him for a minute as he proceeded to completely neglect the opera in favor of staring out at absolutely nothing at all. His naked face, usually so expressive, told me nothing of the thoughts he had absorbed himself with. I could see an upset within him, but I could not tell which of all his life’s struggles were bothering him at the moment. Eventually I made myself give up the effort; guessing at his thoughts was a futile task I’d never been able to figure out. Thus I turned my attention to the opera being performed below us.

Down there, a crude display of debauchery was unfolding. It must have been one of those newly-fashioned works, I thought, for I knew of no historical piece that would throw the fits this one did. The music was uncharmed; the lyrics were prosaic; and the orchestration was thoroughly tasteless. I knew our company to employ twenty-seven musicians, yet this production seemed only to use fourteen of them; how they expected to produce the same lush, resplendent textures of sound the audience was used to, I have no idea. I would not be surprised if this was yet another creative decision inspired by the managers’ ledger books… for, even more so, I was stricken at the lack of appropriate costuming assumed by the cast. Where was the opulence? The gaudiness? Every dress, every suit, every wig seemed tawdry and cheap. It was as if the characters had become like real people, wearing the same thing as all the rest of us, wandering a naked stage full of underwhelming set pieces and backdrops that transported us nowhere new and instead kept us all acutely aware of our presence within that giant globe of a theatre. This paltry composition was nothing in comparison to the likes of Mozart’s or Bizet’s or even Wagner’s overplayed operas; and in all honesty, I would have rather preferred a night of silence enduring Erik’s stony-faced scrutiny over this trite display of humiliating parsimony.

Even still, it was not all bad. The performers did what they could with the roles they were handed, and sang every note with expert capability born from years and years of tutelage and training. I did not understand the plot, which swooped and swerved in such dramatic tailspins that even if I saw it from the beginning I doubt I would have been able to follow its course. Despite that, the eagerness of every performer involved made me wish I did. As such, I leaned close to Erik and asked in his ear, quietly so as to not disturb the ones behind us: “What are we watching?”

“L’Homme,” Erik supplied – uselessly, as it turned out, because I had never heard of such an opera and so knowing the title did nothing to explain the scenes unfolding below us. Thankfully, he noticed my continued confusion, and began to explain (in, I might add, a manner that betrayed none of his earlier moodiness): “It’s an idiotic production, written by an even more idiotic composer, but somehow it seems to have become quite the rage in recent months. Every opera house across Europe is putting this shit on.”

“Why have I never heard of it?” I asked him, hoping not to sound too accusatory. “My own company is putting it on. How is it I’ve never heard of it before this night?”

Erik laughed, thankfully. “I made sure never to bring you upstairs for these rehearsals. After all the work we’ve done together, I assumed you were hoping to retain your reputation as a respected performer.”

I watched as a woman from the fifth row of the audience suddenly leapt from her seat and ran up to the stage, just in time to begin belting out a beastly aria di bravura. Not one soul in the cast flinched, and as the strings of the orchestra screeched on it became horrifyingly apparent that what I thought was a bizarre disturbance of the peace was actually a scripted part of the show itself.

“This must be a very new style of opera,” I observed, hoping to sound kind. “It looks… fun.”

“You can be honest, my girl,” Erik said. “Just admit that you have a certain taste when it comes to opera. It isn’t wrong to have a preference; it’s simply the mark of a well-studied musician. You spent so long as my pupil, it isn’t surprising we’d have the same opinions after all this time.”

“Yes, but I don’t exactly like everything you like, Erik,” I muttered, taking a little offense to his insinuation that I couldn’t form my own opinions. I was a graduate of the Conservatoire, for heaven’s sake. “Anyway –” (I said this quickly so he couldn’t argue back) “– perhaps I should just keep my thoughts to myself until the show is over. I’d hate to disturb the women behind us.”

Erik was silent for a moment as he considered this. He had a seeming about him like he was reaching near defeat in a very grave matter, as if I had checked him without realizing we were playing a game of chess at all. But then those amber eyes flamed with inspiration, and he leaned in close to mutter a question in my ear: “Do you think it’s strange they haven’t said anything about my face?”

“Please, Erik,” I replied, the exasperation getting difficult to keep out of my voice. “It’s dark. I hardly think they can see you.”

“Erik knows them,” he whispered further, “quite intimately. He’s seen them around this place, in other parts of the Opera house… though, admittedly, this is the first time they’ve sat in this particular box. They’re sort of like you, Christine… and sort of like Erik… but not anything like you or Erik, if you understand what he means?” He chuckled humorlessly. “Of course you don’t. It’s one of Erik’s little jokes. Would you mind laughing for him, even if you don’t understand? He’d feel better about it if you pretended to get it.”

At his command, I laughed, even daring to get a little louder as he conducted me with a raised hand. For good measure, I added, off-script, “Ah! You’re so very clever, dear husband Erik!”

His translucent, thin lips stretched taut as he smiled, apparently satisfied with my performance this time around, and so he leaned back to his own chair to resume his observation of this travesty of an opera. We did not speak for perhaps another twenty minutes, during which we suffered through a drudge of aimless soliloquies and dirgelike marches, but all the way he seemed to vibrate in his seat with an uncanny sort of ecstasy.

Had I done that to him, with nothing but that single lie? Was pretending for him, just that once, at his request and on his terms, enough of a service to last him a lifetime? Erik had been a man, afflicted with the most heartbreaking case of loneliness ever seen in this world, when he had come on his bony, scraped-up knees begging me for marriage. He had asked for me to love him, and I did – I did! – but then all at once it was too overwhelming for him, and he rejected me fully. He called my love a delusion, of his own and of mine. And yet, here we were now, with us both in full agreement, knowledge, and willingness with one another to play pretend with our hearts and to spurn any thought of true love… and at last he was finally satisfied!

Satisfied, appeased, mitigated, whatever you want to call it except happy… but I suppose it would only be fair if I said the same for myself in that moment. I gave up the chase for happiness long before that night, some time around when I last walked free on this earth, but I couldn’t help but admit to feeling some sort of strange fulfillment at this gentle company we held between us. It seemed fitting that we could only find peace when neither of us got what we wanted.

And such a beautiful peace it was. The world fell down as Erik and I sat with our hands clasped together, the nightmare of marriage forgotten completely, with only our pulses against the other’s hand to speak for our hearts. I cared nothing for any of our previous struggles and I cared nothing for the future. All that I felt was Erik at my side, and that alone was enough.

I do not know how long we stayed like that, but I wish it was forever. In the present, I can reach my hand over to Doctor Gradus's patient lying on the cot beside me and lace my fingers between his. His hand is cold and clammy, his fingers nearly all bone... and if I squeeze a little tighter, like this, it almost feels like we never stopped holding hands at all.

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Opera”
(Part V)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S (SECOND) JOURNAL
(entry cont.)

I have perhaps repeated this statement a thousand times in this journal alone, but it bears repeating once more: such is the way with Erik. In this I mean that nothing ever lasts forever in his company. No anger, no pain, no sadness, no joy. That sweet serenity we held between our palms could not have stood a chance against the incomprehensible force of nature which is Erik himself.

For it was with the smallest of voices that he whispered my name, shattering the silence and proving just how fleeting peace can truly be in this world. Startled from my thoughts, I turned to squint at him in the darkness, the flames of his eyes peering back at me, a sobering hearth fighting not to be put out by the tears that were always threatening to fall, even now, and I wondered what it was that he could possibly have left to say…

“How will you remember me?”

I could see his heart pounding in his chest, hammering against his breast bone with such brutality that it sent the lapels of his jacket fluttering. Was his heart trying to escape? I thought of the question from before – what happens to a heart filled with more love that it can handle? – and saw the answer now, right before my eyes, pummeling his chest and leaving bruises and sores all over his rotten innards. All of the hope he’d never had was finally bursting into life, giving him the courage that only the dying can have, filling his veins with the desperation that only the condemned can have…

“When I am – when you are gone, and I am but a faded memory in your mind… how will you remember me?”

And because that was still not enough for him, he added, with a smile built from the first and last of his earthly hopes:

“Will you remember me kindly?”

Oh, what was I supposed to say to that? Ever since the day we met, my head had become filled with the most blood-curdling visions imaginable, haunting the darkness behind my eyes each night when I laid myself down to sleep. I did not dream of horrors; they simply lived on in my memory, as breathing monsters who could bleed just as readily as real ones, as palpable as the little beady creeping things that ran over and under my skin when I tried to fall asleep in Erik’s mother’s bed. They replayed themselves over and over again, until I grew too weary to fight their torment any longer and at last submitted to their incumbency of my mind.

The bugs went away during the time that Erik and I shared a bed together. It seemed even they found him so revolting that they wished not to get any closer. No; no beady little insects with a thousand little legs ran across my skin when he was beside me; only his cold fingers, black-tipped from frost and decay, ever dared to prod my formicated flesh. And when they touched, or scraped, or tickled – oh, the terror that filled me! The terror, of the most fantastic breed… of the best breed… for I would never mistake his touch for any of those horrible beetles, worms, or spiders – I would never cry out with fear for a thick, over-juiced centipede crawling upon the inside of my thigh – I always knew it was just he who touched me, albeit with that disturbing, scuttling touch… and for that reason, no matter how much I shivered or shuddered or shook, I found myself never wishing to turn away.

So to the man who had hurt me in so many ways imaginable? Who had broken down my walls and made a mockery of my trust, who had deceived and manipulated me? Who listened to my private thoughts, which I spoke only when I thought I was all alone because no-one else was around, and in doing so came to know me better than I knew myself? Who built our love on a bed of lies, defiled from the outset, and refused to embrace the truth of anything that occurred between us? Who I still loved, regardless, for some reason… for some reason…

“It would be impossible for me to remember you any other way,” I settled on. “I have only happy memories of you left in my heart. Of you, as my tutor… my Angel… my friend… my suitor… and, in most recent times, my husband. I do not regret a single moment I spent at your side, and I am for the better that we ever met.”

Because Erik was right; I had always been a very good actress. The lies spilled easily from my lips, just as they always did. At the same time, my hand pulled softly from his clasp, trailing down to touch at his trembling knee. I did not dare move it further up this time, not wishing to overwhelm him – but he was very clearly straining for more contact, and so, seeing as I remained unmoving, he placed his own hand on his other knee and crept his fingers up and inwards.

A pulsing rhythm started up on the organ down below, grunting quiet staccato notes with each pass up and down the scale. I found my attention being torn away from Erik’s lap as I peered over the balustrade’s edge, suddenly fascinated with the music resonating all around. Although it was only an ostinato, to carry us through the changing of the sets, it was the first melody this evening to finally pique my interest. This was not Dorian, nor was it Phrygian, but something else… more ethereal, more dreamy… whole tone! What a concept. Every note, evenly spaced, strictly paced, so that each run along the organ’s length was smooth and unstilted, not a catch to be found. In my mind I could visualize the player’s hands upon the keys, slickened from the sweat of his accelerating pace, his expert fingers nursing each sweet little note with his doting affection, thumbing around for a moment just at the top, cradling the lower rounded registers, plucking and pulling at the perky knobs – until the entire room exploded with triumphant symphony, the orchestra cresting atop us all with wetted throats blowing against their horns and flutes, the cymbals crashing in blows like the waves against the shore, a storm of fury seizing us all in its euphoric convulsions… until the sound faded, like it always must, and left the entire theatre to sit in their shame in silence.

As the score returned to its previous uninspired monotony, I heard a ruffle of fabric, and looked back to Erik just in time to see him fiddling with something long and upright within his lap. Noticing my attention, he raised a bottle up from between his legs, freshly uncorked, and replaced his knife back in his coat pocket.

“Amontillado,” he said, holding it up to show me the label. “A sixty-nine year old vintage. Just like last time, if you recall?”

I did, unfortunately. “…Did you bring that with you?”

“I brought many things up from the house with me, for our shared enjoyment,” he said, fishing out a set of glasses from the side table. “This bottle being only one of them.”

He poured me a healthy glass, nearly spilling over the top, and then set about pouring his own. As I waited for him to finish, I held the glass before me, peering through the crystal to ponder the amber fluid sitting patiently within.

“Do you like amontillado?” I asked him, without really thinking about it.

“No,” he said sharply, before entreating me with a sincere smile. “It’s rather the association that does it for me.”

Really? I winced at the thought. The only ‘associations’ I could think of in his past that had to do with amontillado were the time I had ‘plied’ him with it as a nightcap, as well as the time his mother had ‘drugged’ him with it before she left… but I couldn’t think of anything else beyond that. Could the answer be so simple? Was it truly just a life-long obsession, a complex of the most oedipal of natures, something he just couldn’t let go? Curiosity alone led me to tempt disaster and clarify: “Of your mother?”

He shook his head, and tilted the glass to his lips. He took his time with his sip, savoring the glittering sherry as it poured all over his tongue and seeped back to color his pallid cheeks. Then he lowered the glass back down and held it between both hands like it was the most fragile thing in the world. “My father, actually.”

“He drank amontillado?”

“Loved it,” Erik said. “It was the only thing I ever saw him drink. Not any of that overpriced vinegar swill they sell in the shops around here, either – it always had to be of the most expensive import, special-ordered and aged to perfection. From Spain, where he lived, once, as a boy… from the fields that grow the finest palomino grapes…”

“You’ve never told me about your father.”

“I haven’t? Oh… well, there isn’t much to say. He died when I was young,” Erik took another sip. “He was sick. A muscular disorder – ‘wasting’, my mother called it. Looked like a skeleton, curled up in bed like he was. Bones under a blanket. Hardly opened his eyes. I don’t think he even knew what I looked like.”

“How old were you when he…?”

“Died? Young enough for it not to matter. I was spared of that grief. My mother was a wreck, of course, but thankfully she didn’t take it out on us. She was always such a good mother like that.” He chuckled at his joke before he continued on, swirling the wine in his glass once more. “She always told me I had his eyes.”

“They’re certainly unique.”

“Oh – not the color, Christine,” he laughed again, knowing my mind had only been thinking of the obvious. “Nobody in the world has eyes like mine. She just meant the hollow, deathly look of them. It was never a compliment.”

“Are you so sure?”

“Yes.”

I placed my hand over his, wrapping around the fragile stem of the glass. “Can you ever let yourself believe otherwise?”

“My imagination is not so strong.”

“Are we not pretending right now?”

“That we are…” Another swirl, taking my hand with it. Then he sighed, and studied the glow of the stagnant amontillado for a minute. “Will it please you if I tell you a story about him?”

I nodded.

He tossed back another sip, savoring it slowly just as before, and then set his glass on the armrest between us. He held it there with loose fingers, the whole time, as he began to narrate to me in a soft and edgeless voice: “I have only one memory of my father worth sharing. It’s from somewhere in a summer from my youth, on a dry evening in the middle of a month-long drought. I might have forgotten it as a dream, if not for the way the blistering heat scorched my throat so thoroughly that it’s left me imperishably parched, with an unquenchable thirst, still, after so many years…

“My mother and her maid had just carried my father out to the porch, per the doctor’s orders, for him to sit on a chair and breathe in some fresh air, with the hope of bettering his shriveled lungs. He was a deeply allergic man, a hypochondriac even before his decline, and was made impossibly more ill by everything inside our quaint country home. Absolutely everything, I tell you, from the few flecks of dust our maid forgot to wipe, to the soap we washed his quilts with, to the turpentine my mother brewed his tea with. We pitied him for this, and – oh, by the way, that was a joke, Christine. My goodness, your face could be a portrait worth millions. My father never drank tea, my dear; he only drank wine, remember? Wine mixed with turpentine…? Ah, you’re no fun – and anyway we hoped to relieve him of some of his agony by risking the dangers of the world and exposing him to the outside breeze for an hour or so. We didn’t remove him from his bed often; it was difficult work, even if he was just skin and bones, and we never really saw an improvement despite our efforts. Truth be told, I suspect the doctor just wanted some privacy to – how should I say this politely? – ‘prescribe some cough syrup’ for my mother’s sore throat. You see, she was always sick, Christine, always… but this isn’t a story about her, I guess, it really isn’t at all, so I won’t talk anymore about her or her affairs. But my mother and the doctor deposited him on the chair, angling him just right to look out at the field, to get him out of the way... and I sat at his feet, curled up like a dog, just like they told me to do… just like I still always do.

“Mother had put a glass in his hand before she went back in the house with the doctor. It was the one with the chip on the side, which she said was his favorite because it was the last of a set he had acquired in Bohemia. I don’t suppose he actually cared much for what he was given; he never seemed to notice what was placed in his hand, let alone show any sort of contentment or recognition for anything at all. Still, all the same… there he sat with that glass, unmoving as a statue, staring wordlessly at the field of golden hay, as golden as the setting sun, as golden as the amontillado swirling slowly in his glass, until eventually he brought it to his lips and drank the smallest drop.

“We sat there in silence together for hours as he did this, working at his glass with a thousand small and silent sips until it was all dry and gone. My mother had given me nothing, not even a water bowl, and since I was not allowed to leave my father’s side – someone had to watch him – I was forced to sit there, quietly desiccating at his feet, as I dreamed of a drop of water to sate my baking tongue. That was the way we always did it, more or less. I did not know my father’s voice; he never spoke to me in all those years. He never looked at me, for that matter, except when he accidentally lulled his head in my direction. Even then, though, he never actually looked at me; for his dulled eyes always seemed to be looking past me, to something behind my repulsive face, as if he never even saw it at all.

“I was an active child back then, always clambering atop furniture and railings and rooflines and, yes, even chandeliers… but on these days I had enough sense to stay put and be quiet. Admittedly, it was wishful thinking on my part that I’d win any love by enduring my suffering in silence; as if my dehydration and discomfort would go away if I merely bit my tongue on any complaint I might’ve made. You see, I still had a child’s naivete back then – much like you still do, Christine, though you deny it. To get my mind off the heat, anyway, I busied myself with drawing patterns in the porch planks, etching the wood with a sharpened stone – not quite smart enough to realize the connection between my hobby and the scoldings my mother gave me for being a destructive little demon – but this time I happened to look up to see my father staring down at me.

“He was a mason by trade, taught by his father, but because of his illness he never made a name for himself in the business. But Christine, hear me, truly hear me, and understand that I am not exaggerating when I say he was quite frankly the world’s greatest draftsman. The man was a natural genius, with a talent for seeing through walls and imagining full constructions in his mind’s eye without the use of even a paper or quill. He’d had an intense and rigorous apprenticeship under my grandfather's tutelage, being a prominent mason in his day who worked all across Europe restoring grand but largely decrepit castles back to their original glory… whether it was worth the effort, I can’t say, as they were all demolished by the time I passed through in my own travels. Regardless, my father’s meticulous drawings were the ones I studied, long after he died, which seeded my mind with the seductive art of architecture, of flying buttresses and ribbed vaults, of stiff-leaf columns and painstakingly erected bell-towers, which aroused a certain inspiration in me long after I left home and went off on my own. The palaces of Persia could not have been built without the foundation my father built for me; nor could a trapdoor have been set without his explicit instructions. Even my dearest friend, the torture chamber – who you hate! – owes its entire creation to my dead father’s posthumous lessons in geometry. So, Christine, let me ask you now: if I am a murderer for the things I have built, does that not make him one as well? Should a teacher not be held responsible for the actions of his pupil, vulnerable and malleable as they are? I jest, I jest…

“Anyway, I think my drawings caught his eye. He certainly wasn’t looking at me. As I said, he never looked directly at me… only past me, past my face, past my horrible and wretched face. I watched his blunt eyes travel up and down the ridgings I had carved in the wood, studying them in an almost critical manner, perhaps seeing something in my rough and clumsy linework that indicated I’d inherited a slight semblance of his skill. My chest puffed as I considered this. I let myself imagine all sorts of preposterous ideas: that he was impressed by me, that I was some sort of prodigy, that this was finally the moment I’d been waiting for where my whole life was about to change for the better. It was the first time I felt any pride for my work, and I prayed that even if he wouldn’t look at me, that he would at last say something to me for once.

“Slowly, though, as his eyes tracked about my work, he began to lower his glass down, tilting it towards me – and it looked as if he was about to pour his sherry all over my hard work –

“I was mortified! Still, like the good little boy I was always trying to be, I forced myself to sit there and watch it happen. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry. I had little experience with dashed hopes at that point in my life, you see, so I still lost my tears from time to time when something didn’t go my way. I still do, I suppose, but we never really grow out of our disappointments, now do we…? Anyway, I watched the sherry crest to the top of the glass, crest near the edge, slosh around… and then roll back to the base, just like the ocean’s gentle tide. My father straightened the glass a little bit more, to make certain it didn’t spill, but still he held it before me, waiting for something that I couldn’t quite fathom…

“Eventually I came to realize he was offering his glass to me. Me – little me – deplorable me! Me, who he had never spoken one word to before. He wanted me to take a sip. So I did, clasping my hands around the crystal with great uncertainty and fear, for I knew how expensive it was, even at that age – and yet swallowed it all with terribly reckless abandon, for I had been so unquaffably thirsty for so long – and it was… it was… foul!”

Here Erik pitched his face in a perfect display of a child’s innocent surprise at being disgusted, with just that exact amount of accusatory hurt for being tricked into expecting something so repugnant to taste so much otherwise, as if reliving the actual moment in his mouth so many decades later. I couldn’t help it as the corners of my lips twitched upwards, and I raised my glass up to hopefully hide my smile. He caught me regardless.

“Oh, don’t laugh so, Christine. I was hardly three, maybe four. I hadn’t developed a proper palate yet!” Despite his chastisement, he shared a few hearty laughs with me over it, so loud that I feared we were disturbing the women behind us. With them in mind, I quieted myself and covertly pointed behind us so Erik would remember we were in public. Erik only barked a harder laugh at that, which made me think that perhaps he didn’t care what they thought after all… but after a moment, his laugh turned bitter and swiftly petered itself out on a sour note. We both took a sober sip of our respective drinks before he continued on.

“My father… did not laugh. Furthermore, by the time I had spit the liquor completely out, he had already turned his gaze back out to the field. But… as I went to hand back the glass, his weak fingers crept past it to wrap about my wrist. And his fingers – how cold they were! Like death, Christine, like mine and like death. I know how much you hate my touch; I hated his as well. I nearly pulled my arm away, repulsed by the sensation that those five cold fingers had about my little wrist… but I could not bring myself to do so! How could I? When it was his whose hand it was? He could not control the way his hand felt… but even still he had not the strength to pull me, only to guide me, and with that touch he indicated that he wanted me to stand. I rose to my feet – hardly eye level with him, as short as I was – and then… and then with his other hand… he touched the top of his knee!

“He patted it – not once, but twice! There was a clear lack of urgency in his movements, so much unlike my mother who lived and dreamed her entire life in a hurry, as if she had a specific plan for it that was unraveling at the seams faster than she could hope to mend it. No; just a couple of slow pats it was, with no forethought and certainly no afterthought, with no thought at all. It was an offer so obvious that even I, deplorable I, could not misunderstand it.

“I clambered up to sit on his lap, like a real little boy, and he held me in his fragile arms against his chest. Laying against him, all of his rib-bones poking into my back, I could feel his delicate heart beating softly beside my own. My head fell against his shoulder, upon that hard beam of a clavicle, and there I listened to the soft whistle of his breaths, each inhale and exhale a little fainter than the last. His embrace smelled of a slow death, a stagnant rot, which must have rubbed off on me, for from that moment I’ve never smelled of anything since.

“But together we sat, the only time in my entire life: me on my father’s knees – his stare still vacant, tired, uncaring – myself scared, constantly flitting my eyes back to the house for fear that my mother would come out and see – but together regardless, looking out at an endless field of hay, golden as amontillado, golden as his eyes, in a single fleeting moment that has lasted as an eternity in my mind.”

I watched as Erik sagged his shoulders with this final uttered line, choosing now to stare emptily down at the stage as if reciting this story for me had sapped him of all his energy. For a few quiet beats he did not speak, he did not move, he did not even breathe – and then suddenly he lifted his glass and downed the rest of his drink.

“Between you and I,” he said, “I don’t think my father was ever actually sick at all.”

Before I could respond, he plucked my glass from out of my grasp, and set both his and mine back on the table.

“Now, Christine, did that make you feel a little better?” he asked. “For me to bear my soul a bit more to you, as if there’s a reason anymore for us to know each other more than we already do?”

I felt his bitterness slipping out, even as he feigned such flippancy. How much of that story was a lie, I still have no clue. I suspect he may have begun the tale closer to the truth and diverged as he went on… or perhaps it was the other way around? Were his father’s eyes gold or not? There was no way of knowing.

“Oh, Erik, my husband,” I said, patting his arm, trying to make him remember his own game. “What on earth are you talking about? Is it not good that a woman is curious about her husband?”

He picked my hand up from his arm, loathfully eyeing it like some dead rat, before putting it up to his lips and kissing my fingertips. Two fingers slipped past and found themselves fondled by his wet and moldering mouth, as he murmured around them almost sweetly, “Ah, but curiosity is never a good quality for a woman to have, dear wife.”

“Perhaps if I knew more, I would have less to be curious about,” I retorted, just as lightly, “because I would already know it.”

Suitably checked, he gave my hand back and sighed.

“Flawless logic as always, my wife,” he said, in a way that assured me he most certainly did not agree with me. “And what if, pray tell, you did not like what you found out? What would knowing be good for?”

“I would not be curious anymore,” I replied rather childishly, resisting the urge to wipe my slickened fingers on my skirts.

“And what if I told you what really happened to your boy – your Raoul?” Erik said, folding his arms with a humored sneer. “Is it so simple that you would just not be curious anymore?”

The blood washed out of my face. This was a topic I assumed we would never speak on again. I had my suspicions of course, as I had about everything Erik did, but I never dared wish for them to ever be confirmed. I had been all too willing to accept the bleak ambiguity of simply not knowing for the rest of my life, if it meant I would never have to face the horrible possibility that Erik had, once again, lied about the very thing he had promised me he hadn’t done.

Now he was tempting me with the truth, tempting to break through my carefully curated menagerie of willfully ignorant lies I told myself. I did not want to consider why Erik could parade around the halls of the Opera house wearing Raoul’s face as a ghastly mask without fear that the man himself would come for retribution. I did not want to consider how difficult it would be to find a runaway cabriolet in the middle of a giant forest during a thunderstorm while lugging around a drugged, stuporous hostage. I did not want to consider Raoul’s final screams.

I did not want to consider anything.

Not then, at least. Not when the arrangement with Erik was so futile, and the concept of knowing was so pointless. Why make myself hate a man I was forced to live with for the rest of my life? Why embitter myself so completely and actively choose to be so unhappy, when it was so much easier to deceive myself into banal contentment? There was no way to escape back then; what else was I to do but construct some walls in my mind and close my eyes to the truth…?

But now… now, things were far different than before. Now I was going to leave Erik forever and return to my own life. Now I did not need to turn a blind eye to reality, because my year’s stay in fantasy land was finally about to come to a end. Now I did not need to like Erik. Now I did not need to even tolerate him.

Now I could dare to be curious.

Even still – we were in Box Seven. And Box Seven, as Erik had told me before, was no place for the truth. It was a box built of lies and furnished with the very same hazy clouds that filled our dreams. It was not a place for curiosity. It was not a place meant for resolution. It was not a place meant for anyone to ever be honest with each other about anything. It was a place to deceive - and to be deceived.

Thus I made myself nod, even as the words could not be made by my strangled throat.

Erik raised his naked brows, apparently quite amused at my reluctant insistence, and said, “Truly, Christine…? If I killed your boy, if I told you that I did… if I told you I found him in the forest, bruised and broken, but not quite dead… and then grabbed him about that pompous neck of his and threw him here and there… if I choked him until his head turned red, then purple, as he foamed out his unintelligible, frothing appeals for life all over his proud boyish chin, dripping down past the point of it and dribbling his disgrace all over my throttling hands, only increasing my fervor and my rage the slicker they became… if I told you I took my knife from out of my pocket and thrust it deep into his core, deeper than he’d ever been cut before… if I slid my knife in and out as I sought his largest vessel’s release, driving it in to the hilt each and every time, and in doing so coaxed that last gasping breath from his lungs… would that really not change anything between us? Besides the simple fact that you would know?”

I couldn’t feel my lips as I forced myself to say:

“It wouldn’t change a thing, dear husband. If anything, I would love you all the more for it.”

And then, against all my desires, I kissed him.

It was not the romantic sort of kiss that comes from the passion of two lovers’ loins; nor was it the heated, angrier sort that comes from even further down. It was but a peck – a polite brush against his cheek, as a wife would give her husband – and nothing more.

He groaned and slunk back in his chair, rubbing his cheek with a great sort of annoyance even as a faint pink hue on his cheeks betrayed him. “Your acting is atrocious, Christine. I’m very nearly offended. But rest assured, I am only being a prat. He isn’t dead. Or is he? Ha ha… hum. It doesn’t matter anymore what I say. Nothing matters. Is there anything else you’re curious about, girl, while we’re at it?”

So many things, I wanted to say – but did not. Instead I said: “You were right, my husband. I was wrong to pry.”

“You have always been wrong,” Erik grumbled. “If only you could have had the sense to see that when we first met.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him.

“I’m sure you are,” he said. “Now that you’re getting exactly what you always wanted.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated.

He sulked further, sinking down in his seat. “How is it that I can always see right through you? I know you better than you know yourself. It wasn’t on purpose, mind you. I never intended for it to get to this point. I just – I just wanted… was it so much that I…?”

“You fell in love,” I finished for him quietly. “There’s no shame in that.”

“But you never loved me,” he replied in an aching voice. “I was a fool to insist. I never should have let it get this far. I only ended up hurting myself.”

As well as countless others, I did not say. A good wife would not remind her husband of his innumerable crimes, against her or anyone else for that matter. “You were hurting a long time before we even met.”

“Well, yes… I suppose so…” He stared emptily at the stage, which was still roaring with action, though it seemed so very far-away at present. “It has been a terribly lonely life.”

“I imagine so,” I agreed. “People – society – can be such a judgmental force. I know the feeling intimately, Erik. Singing in front of an audience of thousands each night… feeling the heat of their glares as I try to live up to their expectations… wondering what they could possibly be thinking of me… listening to them gossip when they think I’m not around… I never feel more alone than when I’m in a room full of people.” Here he grumbled something quite disparaging, so I quickly amended: “Of course, I can’t ever know what it was like for you, dear husband Erik, for your experience is just so much more woeful and tragic compared to mine. All the sum of my tortures, fears, and sorrows can never hope to equate to the depths of your anguish. No other person can possibly relate to the pain you have felt, and no other injury can possibly compare to the abuse you have endured.” Then I feared I was becoming a little too insincere, so I eased up a touch. “But as I said, Erik, I have known the pain of other people, even if less than you. The whispers and stares – Erik, I have felt them. I have been made miserable by them too. Not as often as you, of course, but I still know a little bit about how it feels. And to know this is how it’s always been for you – that it’s always been so inescapable – that even tonight, with that Baroness shouting at you like that…”

Up until this point he had been listening with a pitiful pout about his face, hardly acknowledging my words except by the fact that remained quiet long enough to let me speak. At this last sentence I spoke, though, he suddenly stirred and asked, “Who?”

“The… Baroness?” I reminded him uneasily. “The woman from earlier who yelled at you as if she despised you with every fiber of her being? Who wore that giant fur coat and called you some very mean names?”

He squinted his eyes as he tried to recall. “I need more than that. Mean names… such as what?”

“Um…” I bit my lip. I didn’t want to rile him up again, but he seemed genuinely at a loss. “She called you a… um… bone-bag?”

“Oh, her,” he said just as blankly as before – then promptly doubled over in a raucous fit of laughter, an awful grin splitting across his face as he slapped his knee. “Oh! Oh, Christine! Sweet, innocent Christine! Pure Christine!” He wiped a tear from his eye. “She isn’t a Baroness, child.”

“Do you know her?” I asked, confused.

“Although – I suppose she is a Baroness, in a way,” Erik went on, ignoring me, “since she was escorting the Baron of Tremaine to this opera. What is a wife but a woman with whom a man has relations?”

“…Excuse me?”

“Which is why the two of us aren’t really married, by the way, dear wife,” Erik continued, simmering back down. “Not in the way they are. And do you know what’s the funniest part of the whole thing? They love each other. Deeply and profoundly. Real love – more than he ever loved the true Baroness of Tremaine.” He blew a breath. “Did you know he’s the only customer she ever takes anymore?”

No, I did not say.

“Yes, indeed… he buys her all sorts of beautiful things. Bracelets, charms, rubies, hairpins… all of the luxuries today’s woman could desire. I buy you nice things, Christine, or at least I think I do, but he buys her even nicer things than I can afford. Things that she doesn’t even appreciate. And she doesn’t have to appreciate them, you see, because she loves him even without all that fuss. It’s not that she doesn’t like his gifts; she’s a very materialistic woman, make no mistake about that. What woman wouldn’t like some tacky diamond bauble? I buy half a dozen shoe ribbons for you and your face glows right up with delight. So, no, it’s not that she doesn’t like his gifts. It’s the fact that she doesn’t want them, for whatever reason… and he continually ignores her. He rents a three bedroom suite for her in that new Ritz hotel and tells her to stay there. Imagine that, Christine, three bedrooms just for one foul old woman! Wouldn’t you be so thrilled? I’ve seen them all, in the course of my meetings with her, and I tell you – they are just as resplendent as the papers say! The linens are some of the finest I’ve ever felt; I’ve never known a night of sleep before I rested my head upon those sumptuous pillows. Hungarian goose down, I tell you! As soft as a willing lady’s bosom! And there are real medieval tapestries hanging in every room – one that I even recognized, in fact, as being stolen from this gloriously decaying castle somewhere out along the Carpathian Mountains, which I stayed at a few decades ago at the behest of its host, who was just some hapless old brood with an equilibrious predilection of books and blood – not that I judged much, mind you, as we all must have our eccentricities! – and anyway, though the hotel looks a true museum, a better exhibition than the Louvre itself, what with all those priceless artifacts loitering about the place… there’s absolutely nothing telling you not to touch anything! Oh, when I saw all those relics… I simply had to smash a vase to see what would happen. Which deity would smite me? I threw it down on the floor – the floor, by the way, is made of the purest strain of sparkling marble I’ve ever seen. The masonry is impeccable, Christine, simply impeccable, with each tile lined up against the next with hardly a trace of their slits in-between, except when they get wet, and oh, how wet they get when I use the tub! – slippery, too – but anyway, marble, you know, marble is very soft, so when I threw that vase down, as she screamed, it created the most horrible gash beside the fireplace. Jade went everywhere, into the hearth, under the chaise, across my ankle. And I bled, Christine. I bled so much. She did, too, but not from her ankles, because she was already on the ground and her feet were kicking about safely in her skirts. But I bled, so much so that I soaked my socks and left the clumsiest red footprints all over the place. It was like being in my sweet sultana’s bed chambers all over again! It’s fascinating, honestly, how much of a mess one measly Shang Dynasty vase can make. The miraculous thing was, though, the next time I came back… not only was the vase replaced with a new one, which was even older and fragiler than the first, but the entire floor had been ripped up and paved with fresh marble. There was not a hint that a single thing had been amiss in that room; not a scratch on the stone, not a drop of blood in the grout. It was fascinating. Of course, I had to throw that second vase against the floor again to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. It shattered and scuffed the floor just like before, and sure enough, the next time I came back everything had been replaced once more. It’s an awfully convenient system they have there! There’s no gaslight, only electricity, and there’s plumbing in every room. I’ll admit to being a little jealous… I only have two bedrooms in my own home. That’s not as many as three! Of course she has her own rooms besides those, in another part of the city – somewhere in the gutter, I’d imagine – but still he rents her these rooms as a gift. And she absolutely loathes them. She has pride, Christine, just like we all do. She wasn’t born into poverty; she was forced into it, by that evil, Machiavellian brother of hers. You know how some families are. He took the money and the house after both their parents died, and took all their antique furniture too – even though it had all been promised to her! – and offered not a dirty sou to her in return. Not a sou! So she made her way to Paris as a beggar, as we all eventually did; and in coming here, slid her way horizontally through the aristocracy until she landed herself beside that good Baron you met. It was never her aim to make him her lover – she just knew a good purse for her pocket when she found one – but sometimes these things simply fall into our laps and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. The Opera has a way of doing that to people. After all, just look at you and… and… and… nevermind. What were we talking about again?”

I bit my lip and attempted to retrace the thread of conversation back to the original point. Erik’s ramblings had confused me, and truth be told I understood little of what he had said. He himself had gained a glazed look as he’d blathered on, the way he did when he unconsciously spoke to me as he played piano, but it was since dispelled and I could tell now that he sincerely did not realize how much he just said out loud. “You were telling me about the Baroness – well, I mean, the woman who I thought was a Baroness…”

“Call her Jeannette. It’s her name, for Christ’s sake.” Erik cleared his throat. “Anyway, there isn’t much more to say, other than that she’s a bitter old woman who has no reason to act the way she does at this point in her life, save for pride.”

“You… seem to know her very well.”

“You know I frequent the Bois,” he groused. “I happened upon her there a few years ago, and met with her a few times since.” Then he looked away. “Christine, pardon me, but I’m not quite in the mood to explain my entire detailed history with this miserable woman right now. It’s not an exceptionally pleasant one, and honestly I don’t think you’d care to hear it.”

Once again the switch had been flipped, it seemed. Erik could go from monologuing until he was blue in the face to doling out precious few words while slumped over in a pathetic sulk. In a mood like this, I knew I couldn’t hope to get much out from him. But I was not ready to close the door on the subject, at least not before I made one last comment:

“Did you know I saw her drinking amontillado? Palomino Fino, even, just like you.”

I don’t know why I felt compelled to say it. Perhaps it was simply too interesting, too suspicious of a coincidence to let pass without comment. Or perhaps I was just hoping to help Erik recognize a kindred spirit out in the world… someone who liked, say, amontillado just like him, who was miserable just like him. I doubted he’d ever let himself relate much with anyone before in his life.

But Erik just sighed, shrugging his shoulders.

“I know,” he said, as if it were a concession. “It’s his favorite.”

“The Baron’s?”

“No.”

And with that last answer, which was spoken with a cryptic sort of sadness, I knew that was all I would be getting out from him on the matter.

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Opera”
(Part VI)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S (SECOND) JOURNAL

All the rest seems a blur to me; just a few mere moments stand out now from the fog, like dreams interspersed across the star-lined canvas of a restless night’s sleep. I shall attempt to write what I can, in the order that they return to me, in the bleak hope of making some sense of the way things fell in the end. I obviously claim no responsibility for any of what follows these grim letters, only the obligatory remorse an unwitting bystander should have. Because Erik was right, as he always was. I never made a choice in anything. I am guiltless of everything… no matter what Doctor Gradus scrawls in that old moleskin book of his.

But I digress.

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The opera L’Homme is billed as a grand tragedy, but the truth of the matter is that it’s nothing more than an incomprehensible spectacle of gauche noise and movement. The sum of the night was earthly indeterminate: we must have watched a hundred people die, must have seen a hundred funeral pyres, all alight for no real reason but to startle and annoy. What point was there in all those massacres, those slaughters, that carnage? I cried for the first few, feeling their injuries as tenderly as my own… then grew steadily wearier as they kept on coming. I grew testy for some, impatient for others, blasé in the end for them all.

Looking back, I am appalled by my own coolness in the face of all this bloodshed. I have never been one to be taken in by the dark delights of nature. I have read but only one horror novel in my life, and it is one that I penned myself: this journal. So I must assume my nonchalance was a product only of my lack of adequate time with which to process the scenes rapidly occurring before me, rather than an indicator that I have become hardened to the brittle-edged concept of death. Because it never gets any easier to view these things, truly, even in a comical light. Even when performed on a stage. Even when you know it isn’t real. Even when you forget to be afraid.

Nonetheless, I would say I quite enjoyed the opera… that is, once I submitted to the futility of trying to understand the point of it all.

I will spare little words for describing its inane twists and turns, as I feel I’ve already wasted enough ink explaining my opinion previously. This is a recounting of my time at the Opera with Erik, not a critic’s scathing review. Thus I will not waste a minute more writing about the humdrum sets, nor the repetitious yet spiritless music, nor the unmemorable characters who entered one scene only to exit the next. I will not describe the lonely old erudite who sorrowed over his wasted life so much so that he implored of the devil again and again to make a deal with him – who begged on his knees for a bargain, for a chance, for a girl, for a life – only to be ignored each and every time; and then, in a final furious fit of despair, drove a rusty paperknife through his heart to end his miserable existence once and for all. I will not describe the way he collapsed with only a shout and nothing more; I will not describe the way he did not survive; I will not describe the way the scene ended and he was carried out by some stagehands under the cover of darkness, never to be mentioned again.

I will, however, describe Erik’s reaction and our ensuing conversation.

Erik was entranced throughout the scene. We both, obviously, were greatly familiar with the grand opera Faust, in all its many incarnations, and could not ignore the similarities it held to what we saw now. In seeing this Faust’s bargain be so utterly thwarted, and all other symbolism and meaning drawn and quartered from the story, leaving just the barren hopelessness of a lonely old man’s death to be viewed with a bored yawn… it came as no surprise to me that Erik would feel personally devastated by such a grim showing of events.

So when the spectacle ended and gave way to a new scene, with nothing but a lonely jester jingling strangely about the stage, causing the audience to burst into a fit of laughter (because what else were we to do?), I caught Erik staring morosely down at his palms, which were turned upwards in his lap in a show of something that I can only describe as helpless defeatism. I swallowed thickly, immediately knowing that he was thinking of me, and knew I had to say something to distract him from sinking further into that bottomless pit of despair.

Tonight was for him, after all, and I wanted him to enjoy himself… to deceive himself, I suppose, and to be happy for once with this little cloud he pulled down around himself… for a little while, at least, like he asked to be…

“Erik?” I prodded. “Why are we really sitting in Box Seven?”

I can offer no explanation for why I asked it, other than it was the first question that came to me. I thought it not an unreasonable question, and perhaps one he might fancy answering – either with a lie or with the truth, I did not mind which.

But he moved not a muscle, besides those with which to sigh wistfully… and did not answer my question.

So I insisted further: “Who are these women behind us, Erik? Why are they here?”

Because I knew they were not here by chance. Nothing Erik did relied on such temperamental odds as the spontaneity of life. We sat with these women on purpose – these specific women - that alone I was sure.

“I told you…” he mumbled only, still utterly morose, much to my chagrin.

“You told me nothing,” I reminded him.

He clenched his hands finally, and turned his gruesome face to me. An amicable smile was set upon those taut lips, playful as a loose spark upon dry grass. “Who do you think they are, Christine?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“And you would presume I do?”

“You certainly admitted as much, earlier.”

He shot his eyes over his shoulder, frowning. “I suppose I did, didn’t I…?” Then he shot his eyes back over to me, that dangerously innocent smile flickering back upon his face, and said, “They are my acquaintances.”

“So they know you, too?”

“Did I ever say that?!” he sneered, his entire foul face corrugating itself into its most detestable pitch, ever deepening those cavernous crags between his two bald brows, before settling back down immediately and assuming once again the poise of a proper gentleman. In fact, he became almost frightfully calm in his demeanor. “My wife, can it be that you are jealous of your husband for the company he keeps in your absence?”

I, of course, could never dream of being jealous of Erik. And yet I had to respond, for his sake, with – “I fear I am, my husband.”

“You shouldn’t be,” he said all too gently, as if he believed me. “I am much too detestable.”

“I do not think you so,” I said. “And I think those ladies might not think you so, either.”

Here he paused once more, a trapped word caught upon his silent lips. He blinked at me several times, apparently mulling over the next thing he wished to say…

Then, like some sort of creature without society, he turned around physically in his seat, so that his bony knees pressed into the velvet cushion and his long fingers curled around the brass embellishment of the backrest. He beckoned me to do the same, and with much confusion and embarrassment and awkward displacement of skirts I did.

“Be quiet,” he reminded me, as we peered over the frames of our seats, and surveyed the women behind us.

“Look here,” he said, leaning close, flicking a long finger in their shared direction. “Observe these fine specimens of the Parisian populace. What do you see?”

“I fear it rude to speak like this –”

“Nevermind your propriety, my good wife. They are in a manner blind and deaf, for all you should care. They will not mind our speaking like this.”

“…What do you mean by that? ‘In a manner’?”

He cocked his head and thought a moment . “They are both blind as bats, in a way that makes the stagnancy of darkness a most bosom friend, lover, and suitor to them in equal parts.”

An incredibly cryptic answer, I thought, but I expected nothing less from Erik.

“Lover?” I thus questioned, trying to pick the most curious thing in his web of nonsense to tackle first.

“They are widows, as you can plainly see,” he gestured, and now I really did look. “One is a Princesse named Ada, the daughter of a great Lord you’ve maybe heard of; the other, the older one, is her much less notable cousin, and also her chaperone. Both lost their respective dear ones in a shared tragedy, which is why they are together right now.” He hummed softly. “No one should be allowed to grieve alone.”

As he spoke, I gazed upon these two women, squinting to make out their funereal shapes against the darkness surrounding them. Paying attention now, I spotted things I had not noticed before. I saw the younger one, the Princesse Ada (as Erik called her), had a pretty fan sitting atop her folded hands. Upon closer inspection I found the lace to be yellowed, as if with age, and greened, as if with mold; not only with that, but I spotted many small circular lenses hidden carefully in the elegant knots of the lace. With fascination, I recognized its similarity to a prop lorgnette we had used once in a production of a very grand and famous opera (the name escapes me at the minute), but certainly this lorgnette upon her folded hands was a real, working binocular! What regal privilege this Princesse had, I thought to myself, to bring such an antique relic into such a modern space! Even if it did look quite its age…

Moving my eyes from her, I looked upon the older widow and realized with a small start that she sat not upon a theatre chair but upon an unordinarily opulent push-chair, of such fine manufacturing and construction that it did not seem out of place amongst the gaudiness of the Garnier. Her skirts were spread out fashionably, as if someone had taken great pains to arrange them, smoothing out the wrinkles and fluffing out the tulle to conceal the wheels and distract from her disability as much as possible. She held a very new-looking pince-nez in her hands, rather than on top of them like the Princesse did, and I noted the pearl embossments around the rims matched the pearl handles of her push-chair perfectly. An expensive set, no doubt, but it seemed only fitting for the companion of royalty.

Still though, I had to wonder… two ladies at an opera together… alone, without an escort…

“Do you know what happened?” I asked.

“Yes, but it’s not very interesting. Would you like me to make something better up instead?” he replied. I nodded. “Samarkand, then, it was. You see, our little Princesse Ada here loved a man who was the general of the most brutal army in the history of the world… and this man, this heartless commander… well, he loved her, too. But the fact of the matter was that he was a violent and merciless warlord, and she was but a simple, decent girl whose knowledge of the world and its evils went only as far as the tip of her shadow on the pavestones. There was a cleft of understanding between the two so deep it could have consumed the world. So he left her, this man they called Tamerlane; he went off and bloodied his soul some more in his heartbreak, directing the slaughter of millions, wielding his triumphant sword without discrimination. He conquered the entire world, and Hell and Heaven as well, and founded himself a throne on the broken backs of crying cherubim and shrieking seraphim, all which he had driven his heel down upon and torn the spattered wings from, to adorn himself in a magnificent feathered cloak and to garnish his temple with the rubian diadem of their empyrean sanguinity. He did, you could say, very well for himself. And Ada? Well… Ada stayed back and wept over his departure for a sequence of years. She never did marry, the foolish git of a girl; and yet now you must wonder why she wears black, I suppose? The answer should be clear: her Tamerlane is dead. He sent word from his sickbed just last week, just to let her know that he was dying, and that now she must mourn. And so she does! Do you find that as asinine as I, Christine? Why bother with crying for a man who rode away? A man more empire than person? Why bother with any of it? I say, do you know who I pity the most in this tale?”

I shook my head.

“Why, Tamerlane, of course. Here was a man, a brilliant tactician, a domineering strategist – who had ambition and potential and the world clenched in his iron fist – and he let it all pour out like sand! He was victorious, Christine! Utterly victorious! No man, nor country, nor kingdom had ever defeated him! Had ever locked his wrists in chains! Rattle your arms, Christine, rattle them hard! – can you say you’ve ever felt such freedom, yourself? An enviable condition, that liberty is! I, miserable I, have spilled blood for far lesser pursuits! And still this Tamerlane wasted his last breath on regretting it all for a girl. No thoughts about her, by the way; only greedy regret for himself, for his human heart, for not forsaking all the blood in the world to be with her. I say – have you ever heard a more stupid thing?”

I could not tell if Erik meant to imply our situation with this fairy tale of his… I figured it must relate in some fashion, for everything Erik says always relates back to his love for me (exhaustingly so!) and yet for the life of me I could not determine which role I had been cast as. Was I the heartbroken Princesse Ada, with her embarrassing grief for a man who abandoned her? Or was I the world-hungry Tamerlane, with his boundless potential curtailed by regret for a far less ambitious love? What did Erik mean by all this?

What was Erik trying to warn me about?

“What about her cousin?” I asked, ignoring my own burning questions about Ada, about Tamerlane...

“What about her?” Erik quipped. “Who cares about her?”

“You have nothing to say about her?”

He groaned and rolled his hideous eyes. “Fine, you impertinent thing. The cousin loved Tamerlane, too, and she mourns him just as much as the Princesse does, if not more. In fact, I’m sure a few dozen or so other women mourn him and the little graves he shared some little deaths with them in. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

Oh! Was I being curious? I certainly didn’t mean to be! Curiosity was a dangerous thing to wield around Erik; I was merely trying to continue the conversation he started. And yet I had to ask, for his sake, because I could see (despite all his lofty airs of annoyance and peevishness) he was clearly itching to finish his fiction. I knew he needed my prompting to lay that final blow, like the way a vaudevillian needs a feed, and so I made myself ask him, in the perfect and proper tone required of me, “But did Tamerlane love her, too?”

And his answer, which he gave with great sneering satisfaction:

“Well, you loved Raoul, didn’t you?”

Here he laughed heartily, as if his antagonism was just some flippant joke only he understood (because surely I would be laughing too, if only I understood)… and I felt that burning pit in my stomach deepen as I flared with sudden resentment… and anger… and shame… and in the span of a moment I contemplated a great many things better left unwritten in this journal… but still, forcing these thoughts back down, I made myself swallow this mystery and elsewise continue on in my interrogation.

“How does this relate to their blindness?”

Erik tapped his fingers on the chair back, reveling in a puckishness that was driving him rapidly to incomprehensibility . “What is blindness but marriage to darkness? As you are married to me, dear wife, you must doubly understand their predicament. I am a gaping black void that consumes all the light it touches; I am the eclipse that enshrouds your life entirely. What is there for you outside of me, when you and I are together? There is nothing for you, and there is nothing for them.”

“I love you,” I said, because it sounded like an appropriate time to say it.

“And I love you, too,” he fancied back, leaning over and pressing a cold kiss to my cheek. I couldn’t help but shiver and stiffen, which made him curl his mouth near my ear and whisper lowly, delightfully: “Feel, now, how the touch of my lips lingers still on your marble skin for the remainder of this conversation – feel how you wish to reach up and wipe away that thin line of spittle from under your eye, but know there is nothing there, know it is already dry – try to recall a moment your porcelain cheek was ever kissed by another, and realize you cannot – not by your father, nor by your mamma, nor by your Raoul – because though your mind might recall, might conjure up the most spectacular memories of yesterdays and yesteryears, your cheek burns now only with my fresh kiss, only mine, forever and always mine – will continue to burn even when I am finally gone – and understand, Christine, the blindness these women have been wed to is exactly the same as to you.”

I had no retort to make to equal his declaration. He was right; my cheek burned wildly, all three scratches made along that smooth cusp of my socket alight with a pulsing desire… a desire to be touched, just once more, with even as little as a brief feather-light caress… something to relieve that incessant prickling, to remind my skin of that feeling just momentarily… and I realized I burned – I burned! – but I burned not even for Erik, because all Erik could do was touch my skin and replace the prickling with a new one… no, I burned for that phantom feeling upon my face, to stay upon my skin and to never, ever leave… I burned for a past moment that was growing more and more unreachable with each second that spawned up between, infinite seconds that have since sacrificed themselves to the holocaust of time with each relentless stroke of the clock… infinite seconds that have by now been long lost to the abyss of nonexistence and have no proof of ever having occurred… not this second… nor this… all replaced with a singular moment, ever more inadequate than its predecessors, which it now joins in the span of a breath, just to be replaced by yet another moment… again… and then again… and with a certain madness I realized I did not want to ever be kissed again, if it meant it would quench that scorch upon my cheek and make me forget much too soon this one burning, drying, cooling, fading kiss.

So no retort I made – instead I leaned over and kissed his own cheek, too, so we might be incinerated in this black inferno together.

To his credit he took the assault very well this time. He did not recoil, or lash out against me, or even mope to himself with that quivering bottom lip. He stiffened, but only in that way that I’m sure all husbands must do when kissed by their woefully endearing wives.

“You are kind…” he mumbled softly, all his mischievousness gone as I pulled away. There was a gleam to his eyes that I had not seen before this night, reminiscent of a child’s after being stirred from a dull and empty sleep to a far more fascinating sight. Disbelief wrought itself in his weary brows as he attempted to see past the bleary fog of this theoretical repose to determine if this was not, in truth, another figment of his imagination – that is, a dream within a dream – and a battle was fought, behind those lilted lids, against the specks of sand sparkling at the watering corners of his eyes, beckoning him to give in to their siren’s call once and for all. He closed his eyes, almost as if to submit, but gripped the backrest with such white-knuckled defiance that I knew he would not let himself be laid to rest so easily. “Much too kind, I fear… for indulging this fetid corpse. But kisses are… unnecessary… at this point, Christine. Words alone will do; I’m afraid that’s all my heart can take right now.”

“I am not kind,” I corrected, leaning into overt passion as I knew it was his weakness and so thought he would appreciate it. “I am unpardonably desperate for your affection, dear husband of mine, and selfish to the point of cruelty in my pursuit. I would hardly call myself kind.”

Now he groaned, as if assailed by some arthritic ache in some hard, taut tendon deep within himself; hanging his head, he whined out his dreadfully soft plea: “I beg of you to tell me you do not lie.”

“I do not.”

And in an even quieter, but more urgent, voice he said, “But can you tell me you love me?”

“I can.”

“No, the words, Christine, I need the words now, again, right this second –”

“I love you.”

“More, Christine, please just say more – do not ever stop talking – do not ever lie to me – please just make me believe –”

I did as he asked. I buried him with a hundred frivolous sentiments. I took from my heart the first words I thought of, whether they were true or not; and using my actress’s slickened tongue, I lined them up one by one until they strung out a coherent sentence, then grew bolder and cleverer as I formulated declarations of devotion far lovelier than those found in any of the works of Verdi, spoken with a voice far sweeter than any of the strings on my father's violin as he played his favorite lullaby for me, the legend of the Angel of Music… his bowing gentle and expressive, his tone quiet and steady… and, much like my father back then, I managed to become quite good at convincing my wishful, craving, hungry listener that not only were these things I said things he wanted to hear, but also that they were things that were all quite perfectly true. There are Angels that sing to us in the dead of night, that stanch our tears when our fathers have gone away… and there is a love, much too formidable and raw to have been admitted before, that is alive and beating in this opera box tonight.

“Oh, Christine,” he moaned at one particularly daring sentiment, raking his writhing hands through the wisps of his hair, “I am nearly forgetting… quite nearly forgetting…!”

What he was forgetting, I could only guess at. But the threat of his fluctuating indecisiveness suddenly rung in my head and a fear sprang up within me that I was playing along with his game a little too well. What if – what if he forgot this was just a game of imagination? What if he changed his mind and decided not to let me go after all? What if he took me back down there and locked me up again – made me his dependent prisoner, submissive entirely to him and his foul whims – tied my wrists and threw me down to the base of his tremendous organ – forced us both to glut ourselves on his fatalistic hatred as he thrashed his entire being against those stiff, unforgiving keys?

What if, indeed…!

It stood to reason, therefore, that this would definitely be a perfectly terrible and unfavorable path for us both to continue down. I am not a woman without wisdom, and I am certainly not in the habit of conducting exercises of sheer stupidity just for the sake of doing so (even if my heart and mind will differ in their opinions from time to time). Thus I quit my present torture of him, and moved to steer the conversation back away from such dangerous territory.

“What a silly mood you have yourself in, my husband! Ha ha ha!” (I commend myself for managing such a convincing laugh despite my nerves.) “Forget it all, then, and let us focus on the things you do remember. The women, my husband; tell me more about the women.”

“Who!” he said, moaning still in his abrupt confusion.

“These two women right here,” I implored, sociably gesturing to the darkly shrouded widows sitting before us, side by side, as still as statues in their plush seats. Erik picked his head up and squinted at them, looking lost, and slowly let his lamentations die as I continued. “The Princesse and her chaperone – Ada, I believe you called one of them. You said they are deaf?”

(At this point I certainly hoped they were, after all this conversation we’d been having!)

“They are Turkish,” Erik said, after a strange, strangled beat. “There is a language barrier. That is… all. They can hear us speak, but they cannot understand the words – only our inflections can bridge that gap. And of course, your precious little Ada can hear us say her name…” The Princesse tilted her veiled head, as if to give some credence to Erik’s explanation; I startled, for some reason not expecting her to be able to move, and Erik’s bottom lip finally stiffened at my ridiculousness. He slid his elbow on the backrest and leaned his despairing chin upon his hand, turning entirely to me, as if he no longer wished to look at them at all. Setting his infinitely tragic eyes upon my own, he said, “Some things transcend language, dear girl: names, for one, as you see… but also slurs and insults, those hateful vulgarities that litter our most temperamental moments. It’s important for you to remember that, Christine, if nothing else. The words you say to other people, even if you don’t think they can hear or understand you… they matter, Christine, and they matter deeply. My personal lexicon is broad, as you know, but it is not all-inclusive. There are so many words I still do not know. The tongues that raised against me with aspersion and contumely were my unwitting tutors for a great many languages. Do you know how many different dialects I can say ‘mangy mutt’ in? It’s quite a number. The pastoralists of Namibia have over one hundred words to describe the coats of their cattle; Erik, your husband, has that same amount to describe his pathetic excuse of a nose alone. My vocabulary is bolstered with all of the worst words of every language… does that make me a linguistic scholar, Christine? If I can curse my mother’s tainted teat in perfect Kansai-ben, but I cannot say a simple ‘good evening’ to a mere passerby in Walthamstow… if I cannot understand it when a Swedish girl says ‘I love you’… what is the point of language at all, except to hurt me? But then, there is also music…”

“Music transcends worlds,” I murmured, continuing the thought I assumed he had. “It is no wonder you found such a balm in it, for a solace against the great calamities of your life.”

But bitter was his response! “On the contrary, Christine: music transcends nothing. What is a song without its lyrics? Who is a composer without his notation? What would the Roman letters that make up the word ‘larghissimo’ mean to a man hailing from Burma? What meaning do Don Juan’s crimes of scrupleless perversity have for the remote councils of the Althing – what meaning do they have for any of us at all? Has anyone even read the work of Lord Byron? Of Tirso de Molina? Goldoni? Zorrilla? Does anyone care about why we sing at all?” Then he sighed. “Ah, but I’m sure you think I’m being an intentionally miserable little cretin right now. Forgive me.”

“Erik, I would never think that,” I said, despite thinking exactly that.

“No, no,” he waved me off. “Music is ephemeral and miraculous and all those beautiful things. Certainly.”

“Perhaps you are looking at it from the wrong perspective,” I said with great delicateness. “Perhaps music cannot convey a literal meaning perfectly. But surely it can speak from one heart to another? It can, after all, pass through borders as solid as stone walls… through borders as solid as glass mirrors…”

He pressed his lips together prissily, wrestling with some other reaction deep within.

“Do not kid yourself, Christine. You said it yourself before: you only believed me to be the Angel because I knew a few easy words in Swedish. The music had nothing to do with it.”

“Yes, but I did not love the Angel – for that, anyway.”

He gave a sarcastic hum of capitulation. “Ah, I forgot. You grew to love the Angel for his orchestration of your career. A succession of promotions was all it took to win your heart.”

“No…”

“Then was it for all the consolations and intimate conversations we shared in that small dressing room together?” Erik asked, seeming pleased with himself. “Language, Christine. You would not have loved me without it.”

“You mean the Angel.”

“I – yes.” Abruptly he spun back around and slunk back into his seat. “Do you enjoy defeating me, Christine?”

Surely it would feel nice to be his victor every once in a while! And yet… “It was not my intention to do so. I meant that I loved the Angel for his words, but that I love you for something more.”

“And what would that be, exactly? It’s hard to believe a celestial creature would be less impressive to you than the pathetic excuse of a man I turned out to be in the end.”

Oh, sorry man! Could he truly not see?  “Music, Erik. You gave me music.”

“The Angel gave you music, too. Trained you, promoted you… chastised you…”

“But did not share his music with me.”

He snorted. “The Angel sang for you many times –”

“As a demonstration.”

“Then what are you getting at, Christine? I fear my patience is waning.”

I moved to slide down into my own chair, to level my glance with his. I clutched his hand, which he let me take without fight. “Why did you teach me to sing?”

“Your voice,” he huffed. “It was as painful on my ears as a piccolo quartet. The fact that there was nothing technically wrong with it made it all the more grating to listen to. All proficiency, no passion. It was like listening to a caged canary. I needed to remedy it, and teaching you was the best way I knew how.”

“And when exactly, in the course of all this, did you come to love me?” Unsaid, of course, was the question: When did a begrudging need to refine turn into an obsessive need to possess?

“When I heard your voice.”

I laughed. “How does that make sense, dear man? You said you hated it.”

“I never said that,” he huffed once more. “Like I said, your voice was already perfect… it just needed some refinement… like a crude diamond extracted from a mine. All it needed was some polish and some bruting. And immediately I knew just how to do it… I knew exactly how to do it.”

Ah.

“Then it is a sort of pleasure, would you not agree, to know a person has some happiness to learn from you? To recognize in yourself a surplus, and in another a deficiency, and for an occasion to arise which allows you to settle the difference?”

“I would say it is far greater than a pleasure.”

“Then you see, Erik,” I said with considerable patience, “why I love you.”

“I don’t understand.”

My considerable patience became... rather less considerable. I allowed myself a short, frustrated sigh and hoped it would not offend him too terribly. Then I began my explanation, willing him to please understand, just this once, even though he never has before, even though I’ve:

“When you are happy, I am happy. When you are sad, I am sad. We are different people, but we come together from time to time, like two travelers upon a long and lonely road. Our paths are not the same – but for a little while we might find ourselves sharing the road, finding little commonalities between us, making each other laugh, making each other cry. Others might hurry past without a word… but we, just we, will keep each other company, maybe for a bit longer than we should… and then one of us will find themselves miles and miles from where they should be, growing further away with each fond step, not wanting the path we walked together to ever end. And we will walk the long path together to the point where the pavestones turn to dirt, and then to grass, and we will trample over moldering twigs and golden leaves as we approach a dark forest that no person has ever dared to breach before. The one of us who refused to turn back will wonder what sort of path their companion has set out upon, to now be passing through a forest as sinister and formidable as this… but the truth of the matter is that neither of us is on our original path any longer, for we both had the same thought to keep our company together. And so despite the terror, despite the fear, we will walk beside each other without ever admitting our paths have diverged – and eventually we will exit the forest on the other side to brighter pastures, and yet still we will walk on, oblivious to the fields, oblivious to the sun, oblivious to the road that appears once more beneath our feet; for none of the passing scenery will matter at all, as we’ll both keep going as long as the other does as well. This, Erik, is our present situation. No words are required; just the two of us, sitting next to each other, enjoying each other’s company, just like we are doing now. That is what our love is. That is all it is. Companionship. Do you understand what I’m saying or…?”

In the course of my speaking, Erik had returned his attention to the stage. I wondered several times if he was even still listening to me, or if he had tuned me out entirely; in the hopes that he hadn’t I had pressed on, but now I wasn’t so sure. I watched him awkwardly, uncertain if I should bother waiting for an answer, or move the conversation on to another topic.

“Yes,” he finally said, after a troublingly long bout of silence. “I think I do understand. But I’m not so sure you do.”

“Perhaps not,” I conceded, “and yet every moment we pass in disagreement over this is still a moment we pass together.”

Now he turned back to me and smiled. It was a small smile, as his always are when he’s not being a spiteful, hateful wretch, but curiously it held a warmth that I’d never seen in him before. A warmth nearly reminiscent of summertime… and he drew my hand up to his smile and held it there.

“I am not ready to turn back yet,” he said, like an apology. “Are you?”

“No, Erik… no, I don’t think I am.”

I said it before I realized what it meant.

Did I mean to say it? It was becoming increasingly difficult to tell where my lies began and ended. I was wishing Erik to feel better; but at the same time I couldn’t help but find little grains of truth in the course of my words, turning them from outright fibs to murky, half-veracious confessions. Would it be better for me now in this journal to claim it all was a lie after all? Perhaps. At the same time, I hardly think it matters much any more.

But certainly – certainly! – Erik will assume these all to be lies, I thought (or rather hoped). He was the one who asked me to pretend, from the very outset of our sitting in this Box, and he has always been the preeminent distruster of my affections in the past. So, I thought, it should be of no consequence if I allow myself a moment of sincerity in the midst of all this delusion. Erik will never know the difference.

“Of course, I realize,” Erik said now, stiltedly, pulling me from the thoughts in my head and giving me my hand back, “the harm I have done to you. But I cannot admit I have any desire to part ways with you. Now or ever. Do you understand that, Christine? I would be your companion forever… I would, if only I were as naïve as those two travelers in your lovely little story.”

My heart beat a little quicker. “What makes you think they are naïve?”

“How far into the wilderness can two people wander before one of them realizes they’re lost and going the wrong way?” Erik asked of me. “One of them at the very least should know better than that. No person’s path should ever lead them into darkness. I walked with the Daroga once…” Erik shut his eyes suddenly, and a small tear sprang up at the corner of his eye. “Christine, if that story is as you said – I would be a very wicked man to let us both keep walking into that forest. A very wicked man, indeed.”

“But we are both –”

“– going the wrong way,” he interrupted. “It is fine for me to condemn my own self to Hell. I know I am a viciously unhappy devil, and so I heed not that my maudlin heart is always finding a new way to trap itself in more misery. Desolation is my finery; and finally, after all these years, I can admit that I do not mind wearing it – just so long as I am the only one who does.”

“You are afraid,” I accused.

“One of us must be. The forest is dark, Christine. It is not as simple as just walking through. The things one sees in the darkness… the things one feels and does… it can reduce a life to ash.”

“We all become dust eventually.”

“Some of us sooner than others,” he quipped.

“Must you always be so obstinate?” I pleaded. “Perhaps the situation can be different. Perhaps the two of us, as travelers, do not walk into the woods. Perhaps you see I am headed there and you convince me to change my route. And still we walk, and still we talk – it can be better this way, Erik, I promise, if only you let yourself believe.”

“Believe what? Who would this be better for?” he demanded. “You forget that you did not choose this current path freely. I have held you to it for over a year. Whatever you think you feel is a fiction, made up by your mind to distract you from the horror of your reality. We are connected, Christine, but not in this simple romantic way you think we are. I told you before: we are not, and have never been, lovers.”

“I must disagree with you, then. What does it mean that I feel you, so closely to the way you feel yourself? That I am the tear falling from your eye – and the other one, there, that’s welling up as well? That I am the redness on your cheeks, as you blush against my attentions, despite yourself? What does it mean that we are so much the same like this, other than the fact that we are lovers? What does it mean that, when you are unhappy, I am just as equally so?”

“When you are unhappy,” he pronounced gravely, “I am dead.”

“Who’s lying now?” I returned, thinking myself valiant. “I have been unhappy in your company more times than I can count, and yet still you sit beside me as alive as any other man. You exaggerate your misery, Erik – that is all.”

“I do not.”

“You do! You do. You said it yourself. You do this intentionally. Wouldn’t you rather have me stay here beside you? Aren’t you at the very least tempted? We are married, Erik, don’t you remember? Not just within this Box, but outside as well, in the real, legal court of Paris? Don’t you want to live like a married man? Have me as your wife? What was the point, Erik? What was the point of this entire last year, if not for that?”

He quivered, a tautness running through him like a bow. “Dare you tempt me now with talk of the outside world? Just this box, Christine – I told you, just this box! Are you stupid, Christine? Or are you martyrous? Do you not realize you are not free yet? That I might still change my mind yet – against my own wishes?”

“You are the one who asked me to lie. You set the rules,” I told him, with firm resolve. “So believe now what you will.”

His eyes seared, furious. “I am weaker than you could ever imagine. It will not take much to sway me right now.”

“Then be swayed,” I urged him. “Be swayed.”

I was being wicked, I knew, as I laid the salt of my affections over him again. But as I had reminded him, he was the one who asked me to do this. He had been the one to ask me to pretend. To love. To seduce. I was only following his orders. And wasn’t he the one who warned me not to believe any of it? Why should I have believed him – him, the master of deceit – when he asked me to stop? Wouldn’t the fantasy be all the more believable if I pressed on, against his retractions?

Wasn’t this exactly what he wanted?

“I was miserable…” he rattled, squeezing his eyes closed as I kept speaking over him, “I was mistaken…”

He was now begging me to stop, pitifully and wretchedly begging… but truly, what was there to stop? What lies were I telling anymore? Perhaps I was saying things I would not normally say, at his behest… but did that make them any less true?

“For the love of God – Christine,” he gritted out, and suddenly grabbed at his chest. He clawed at his tie, falling over himself as an attack overwhelmed him, before finally throwing himself against the back of his chair as he gasped wildly for air. “I need you to stop. Stop pretending. Let me breathe… I need to breathe…”

I opposed him with steel.

“None of it was real,” I said. “Is that what you want me to say? Do you want me to tell you I never loved you?”

“Yes – no,” he hissed, clutching still at his heart. “Christine, I want you to love me –”

“Then I love you!”

“Damn you – don’t say it! – please just –”

“I love you.”

“No, you don’t!” he exclaimed, springing from the chair. “I am nothing but a rotten husk of a cadaver, pulled along the dusty path of my barren existence by strings tangled all about the devil’s fingers, strangling them as they contort my limbs into sinful obedience – forcing me into temptation, forcing me to act, forcing me to be –”

“You are not possessed!”

“– a soul corrupted at birth, a changeling spawn sired from Lucifer himself – created from a flaming mallet pounding against the brimstone of hell, a pulsing lick of fire, a burning red tongue within my mouth, a searing down my parched throat as I swallow it all with gratitude – happy to serve my master, the devil who watches, who toys, who lavishes –”

“You are not a demon!”

“Everyone thinks so!” he hollered. A peeved face peered around the divider of our box at his outburst; Erik flung his face at them and they recoiled in horror, disappearing at once with the clear lesson learned to mind their own business. Then Erik turned back to me and shouted, rather unnecessarily, “Be quiet, girl!”

“Don’t speak to me like that,” I said with an extraordinate amount of calmness. “I’ve told you before that I will not tolerate –”

“You are causing a scene,” he hissed, hand still rubbing at his chest with agitation. “Sit down and be quiet!”

“A scene? I am the one causing a scene?!”

“Yes, Christine! You! You are being a nuisance!”

“How dare you!” I cried, my patience lost at last. I sprang from my seat and flew to where he stood, trembling and wrenching, and held my chin high before him. “Is this how you would treat your wife?”

With that Erik collapsed in a pool before me. Gutterly he sobbed, clutching at my skirts, sniveling into my elegant petticoats as if they were naught more than large handkerchiefs. I did not dare pull them from his hands; we were still in Box Seven, and were still bound by the rules of imagination. And besides, he was the one who had commissioned the dress. It was his to dampen and soil as he saw fit.

Several long minutes this went on. I have unfortunately become quite accustomed to these crying fits of Erik’s, having lived with him for over a year, and knew there was nothing to do at this point other than wait for him to drain all his hot, sticky tears onto me. At first I found satisfaction in seeing him prostrating himself like this… but swiftly I found the passionate fire and fury of my anger draining rapidly as I watched the way he cried on. I clutched the balustrade as I shifted on my weary feet, and with something like boredom I gazed down at the opera still proceeding below and waited for him to finish.

At long last he drew away, wiping his dripping nose socket with the frilled edge of my petticoat one last time.

“I think,” he said, releasing my skirt from his rotten clutch, “I’m finally content.”

And with that he rocked back on his knees, head still bent in deference, and curled his hands within his lap.

“You may go now. I won’t stop you,” he continued, fiddling with his ring as he did. “You have done more for this old man than you were ever expected to. You have given me a taste of life and love, and finally I am… content. Life is not so glorious as I once thought. I feel no envy any longer; no ire, no anger, no regret, no shame. I… I simply do not need you anymore.” As an afterthought, he added, “I can’t imagine you’d take it personally.”

I had the feeling as if I had been dropped unexpectedly into a large pool of water, and a hundred thoughts swam about in my head. Not a single one seemed clear enough to voice, save for one…

“The opera isn’t over yet.”

Even I could hear the desperation in my voice as I said it. I couldn’t deny that I was afraid – to go, to leave, to never look back – but even more than that, I couldn’t deny that I’d cherished our time together. Despite all the wrongs Erik had done to me, despite how grating he could be at times, I still had been looking forward to spending this entire last evening with him. I enjoyed hearing him talk aimlessly about everything and nothing, lecturing me about things I knew nothing about, waxing eloquently about topics I firmly disagreed with him on. To leave now, earlier than I thought… what would I do without him?

“Truly, I will be okay,” he said with a firm hand upon my own, as if he were the one comforting me and not the other way around. He was standing now, taller than I’d ever seen him. “Do not worry about me anymore. Go, Christine. Go and live.”

“But I keep my promises,” I said weakly.

“You know it was an unfair agreement that only benefited myself. I see no reason to force you to uphold it, now that I have been satisfied.”

“Do you despise me?”

He laughed, sadly. “Oh, beautiful, perfect Christine. You have given me the only taste of Heaven I will ever know. How could you think I could ever despise you?” Through my own tear-studded eyes I could see him studying me, those two golden flares warming my vision against the shuddering darkness. “You are a very good girl to want to keep your promise. Perhaps if I were a devil, I would make you. But you have showed me that I am not one, and so I release you from whatever binds you to me. Take your freedom, Christine, and run with it to wherever your life leads you. Erik wishes you only happiness from this moment on.”

“I will die if you make me go now,” I told him seriously. “I could not live with myself if I left you now. I promised you an opera. I will not go until it is done.”

The golden light went out, and he took a careful step back. “You truly think you love me, don’t you?”

It was not a question.

“I know I do,” I answered anyway. “I know we could find happiness with each other, if only you would let us try for it. Please, Erik. I know you love me, too. I know you want me – us – this. Let us try. Let us be as other people are.”

“I am the most wicked man who ever walked this earth, then,” he breathed, and then turned his back to me. “I have hurt you beyond all forgiveness, if you mean what you say right now.”

“Erik –” I called, as I saw him walking to the door. “Erik, where are you –”

He did not stop his stride, powerful suddenly with conviction, and his tone was nearly rude as he said, “If you are so adamant to see this thing through to the end, you will do it alone. I have no desire to torture you any longer – nor anyone else, for that matter.”

“You are leaving?!”

“Yes, Christine. Is it so hard to believe that I would one day find the strength to walk away from you?”

His hand reached for the door, yet he paused before he turned it. I could see indecision overtaking him, wrapping its cold arms around him. He was faltering, grappling with second thoughts, and for a moment I dared to hope. Perhaps he would turn around. Perhaps he would reconsider. Perhaps he would -

“I will go,” he decided at last. “I will walk the path to my house and back. It should take me the normal amount of time. That will give you approximately fifteen minutes to decide what you want.” Then, more softly, he added, “Please do not stay here, Christine – not for me.”

And just like that he left.

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Opera”
(Part VII)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S (SECOND) JOURNAL

So much depends on the decisions we forge under the crucible of duress. Fifteen minutes was what he gave me; fifteen minutes to make a choice; fifteen minutes to change my life completely.

Fifteen minutes, and not a second more.

My mind contemplated nothing, and my head weighed down with the ingravitous, nearly levitous lead of vacuity, as I stood in place watching over the door Erik left through for what felt like far more than an eternity. Only now do I wonder why I did not chase after him, if I loved him as I said I did. Why did I not force him to stay? Why did I not drag him back, his jagged nails clawing at the floor as I hauled him through the pillared halls by his skinny, terrible ankles? I had the strength to force him, after all. That, at the very least, was something Erik was right about: that he is a very weak man. He has always been a very weak man. It is why he runs from everything – from me, from life, from Persia, from death. He has not the strength, nor the will, to reach out and take it.

Any of it.

Perhaps, then, I knew it was not worth it. One can only chase another for so long before the race becomes tired. Wasn’t this how we always were – Erik volatile, myself serene? Attempting to stop him would be like catching a lightning bolt halfway through its shot across the sky. No, I could not interfere; he needed to combust. And when the explosion was finished, his charred skeleton would walk around the barren field and collect all his smoldering, reeking remains, and from there he’d carry all those cumbrous and lubricious things clumsily in his arms back to me, where at length I’d help him assemble them all back together again. I’d rebuild him as a man, from mortal foot to putty crown, maybe even with a nose one of these times, either Aquiline or Grecian, it wouldn’t matter, and then we’d sit together like a husband and wife, and –

There, a minute gone.

Abruptly I turned from the door and returned to my seat. I adjusted my skirts carefully as I sat, and folded my hands with proper poise upon my lap. I sat with rigid posture, still imbecilicly unthinking, and stared ahead at nothing.

What was there to think about, truly? Erik was a fool to demand me to decide, when the truth of the matter was that there was no decision to be made. I had told him I would stay; so stay I would.

And what a happy coincidence it was, that I had already resolved myself to stay! Because the other truth of the matter was that Erik would of course never allow me to actually leave. If I left now, he would carry me back, the way he did all the countless other times. I didn’t trust him to do otherwise. If I stayed, he would secure me to his side like a permanent fixture, a stolen rib returned, and never let me leave again. Thus it was apparent that there was no choice at all to be made by me; and so, as I say, what a happy coincidence it was that I had already made my negligible choice upfront.

I watched the performance below me progress, feeling a little further away from it all than even before, when Erik was still by my side. My heart longed to leap down upon the stage, to join in the music and harmony and dashing rhythms that bewitched the souls of the merry and morose masses. I was a born performer; what on earth was I doing in an opera box? Surely my place was down there on the stage, in the middle of it all, relishing in the noise of the swishing skirts, in the pounding of the kettle-drums, in the slapping of the ruddy palms, in the hissing of the pale-green gas lights…

None of this and less habitated within my achingly empty mind. I heard no music, only sound; and I saw no opera, only people. All my senses seemed to have withered, ceasing to receive the world with the open arms I used to offer. I had no more capacity to see more than what was actually there; I had lost the capacity to imagine. Only a slight pang remained in my heart, perhaps the last sulking remnant of my humanity – but even that, as I said, was merely slight.

The reality of my situation was washing over me now. Soon, and very soon, I would be forced to accept a life I had not truly chosen. It was all very well to sit here and pretend, like I had for so many months, that I did not mind being spoken for, that I did not mind being manipulated as a marionette with my strings carefully laced about Erik’s dextrous fingers. It was easier to live like this, with no real decisions – with no real responsibilities, nor faults, nor guilts. How could I suffer blame for anything I did, if Erik was the one who made me do it? What wrongs could I do to him? And precisely how awful could I be to him and never be held accountable? To let it all be his fault, all to the bitter end, all in all in all…?

In this way, though, I saw it to be a substantially voiceless existence that I was progressing to, and for this reason above all others I found myself growing dreadfully more and more anxious as my finite seconds ticked away. I felt as if the air around me was growing thin, and that the room, this open, spacious theatre, was converging quickly upon me. Even the walls, for all their deceptively soft velvet-lined tapestries, could not disguise the monstrous hardness of the base marble that was erected behind.

Marble can be beautiful, I tried to remind myself. Erik loved marble, didn’t he? He had told me about his favorite types, one afternoon so many months ago. It was my favorite type of afternoon, where we were both reclining together, but separately, in the parlor by the fire. He was in his favorite chair, I was on his mother’s chaise. He was smoking his pipe, a book propped on his knee (but only for show), to match my own (also for show). In some way we had struck up an easy conversation between us, chatting about those most upsetting periods of our pasts with light smiles and laughter as only two good friends can do. At the time, he was recounting a humorous anecdote to me about his other good friend, as he had taken up the habit of referring to his sultana as such at the time, and happened to say to me:

“Say, Christine, do you like books about gladiators?”

I told him I had never read any such books but would be gladly interested if he had one in mind to recommend from his shelf. I always valued his opinions on such matters, even if I often found our tastes diverged.

“She –” (he often referred to her by pronoun alone and expected me to somehow follow) “– liked books about gladiators. She also liked books about murder, and torture, and execution. And blood. Lots and lots of blood.” He chuckled, not a trace of darkness in any of those warm chortles. “I always worried it was going to go to her head. Oh, what? I was young and still had opinions about how ladies should behave themselves. I was worried she’d corrupt herself… Christine, have you ever been inside a Turkish quarry?”

Never, I told him.

“I hadn’t either, until she brought me there. She often joked that she had been the one to teach me, really teach me, about masonry, though of course – me being employed as the court architect – that wasn’t exactly true. But she knew a great deal, and had a certain touch with the stone, and often accompanied me to the quarry where she’d lay her hand upon some white slab and rub her palm along its length until its Sapphiric blue veins glistened under the pale dawn’s light and shimmered with a sheen of early dew. She would pronounce it at once as the exact correct strain and tell me the exact correct spot to chisel it, without even knowing the project we had arrived on site for. With this skill, and the showmanship with which she presented it, she made fast friends with my men, who were really her men, I suppose, and distracted them from the work I gave them – which, again, had been assigned to me by her father – with the most inane questions about every crevice, crevasse, and cubby her loitering fingers came upon. I’ll admit that I resented her for everything at first… why did she not come to me with her silly, frivolous questions? Why should my men be the ones she turned to? Why stone, of all things! And on and on my envies went, in that puerile manner.

“Once, I grew too curious, and I resolved to follow her about the palace, intrigued in how far this power expanded. I willed her to lay her palm against dozens of other stones as I watched on, envious of all those rock-hard slabs her dainty fingers caressed, even briefly… at last she came upon my own rooms, but she paused before it – they always pause – until I decided to reveal myself to her from the shadows of the corridor, and suggested that perhaps her rooms might have grander marble for us both to sight-see, marble that even I might delight in rubbing smooth alongside her.

“It was to the cornerstone that I bade her, and before it we kneeled with tremendous trepidation. Vermillion was her perfect cheek, as she reached out to palm the pale slab – supple were her doll lips, as she pursed them and aveered her lashy eyes – knowing I was studying her, cataloguing her, examining her in the fullness and dullness of the fire’s light. Everything is so much more bewitching in the shadows of the night, is it not? As for I… I was sweaty, from my sweet labors, and my drenched work-shirt grew heavier as I watched her hand rub the cornerstone, up and down. It was – an intoxicating spectacle. In my rapture, it even felt like her hand was upon me –

“And then I discovered the wonderful fact, Christine, that my good friend had two hands. Two lovely, dainty, curious, living hands. And so it was true that her hand was still on the stone, rubbing it with fervor – but then her other hand was also on me, encircling me… oh, Christine, I see your face! It was nothing so scandalous! Just her hand around my wrist, leading me to the slab, nothing more than that…”

I will take a moment here to acknowledge the ambiguity that Erik has always dredged his recollections of his good friend the sultana in, and I will now make a point to be straightforward in my own meaning. So: I truly do not know if Erik and this good, young girl-friend of his ever had a real, sexual encounter in all their time together. He speaks so obliquely to me about their relationship that I cannot help but wonder… but at the same time, wouldn’t he just say it, if it were true? I have always been crystal clear in my recountings of events, after all. I suppose the most likely theory is that their relationship was purely chaste, just as mine is with Erik, and was with Raoul, unless certain things do not count as chaste, in which case I must suppose they probably did have an extremely sexual relationship. But I digress.

“My good friend,” he went on, “told me the history of that pale stone, as we laid side by side all through that night. She told me about its origins in Malatya – of the horses that collapsed and died from exhaustion after lugging its weight from that quarrelous quarry to here, of the color of the moon that watched its fiery birth from limestone all those thousands of years ago, of the hulking mollusks that scurried like Ravenscroft’s three blind mice about the primeval ocean’s deepest depths before nature’s hand played Frankenstein and calcified all their fossilizing remains into a godless conglomeration of shell and coral… she saw it all, with her hand against the stone… and I saw it, too, with her other hand atop my own, trapping my palm against its flesh… oh, Christine, she could have been my wife!”

Erik laughed at this last part, just as he always does when he gets a little too sentimental about his little sultana. Again, as I said, he always made it impossible to tell if he was being miserably sarcastic, or if he truly meant that he could have married the girl. He never elaborated past that sentence, and was always swift to change the topic after proclaiming it. And yet I wonder, now, because I have the luxury of time with which to wonder it: could she have been? Could this sultana, ever nameless, ever ageless to me still, truly have been the lifelong partner of my morbid friend? In his stories she seems so perfect for him – literate, philosphical, indulgent, heartless – and yet I must wonder! Is this portrait that Erik paints of her an honest one? Is every brushstroke made in good faith? Did he understand every word she ever said to him? And what does being a ‘good friend’ of Erik’s entail? How much blood did she really thirst for? Or did Erik conjure that part of her up in his own head, misunderstanding something or another that she said in passing, merely once, innocently, innocuously, incautiously…?

For Erik is the very first architect in the world; and though he has built palaces of marble and temples of music, has built cities with gates of pearl and walls of jasper, has paved down roads of gold as pure as clear glass, his most notorious creations have always been those fantastical castles of dreams he builds up around himself and those quixotic, meandering moats he clambers down from the shore to float and laze himself about on. Even now I can see him, starry-eyed, murmuring to himself all those decades ago:

“Within this woman I can finally see my great destruction; finally fate has sent a wickedness more foul than I!”

Poor, mistaken Erik! I truly do think that all she desired to do was stroke that stone without the slightest feint of euphemism!

And so I think it is true: that marble can be a very beautiful thing to behold. It can be beautiful enough to make one reach out their hand to caress its pallid face, irregardless of the metaphorical implications, irregardless of the assumable consequences. Why must the singular beauty of the part be representative of the complete beauty of the whole? Can a gentlelady not admire the nipplish merit of some Aphroditic maiden’s sculpted bust without sapphic insinuations ensuing? Can a gentleman not privately handle himself without being accused of narcissitic uranianism? Our world is not some profoundly flowery landscape painted from the literary drafts strewn across the desk of the great Stagnelius. I think we would all do well to read a little less into the simple things that happen to us in our lives. Sometimes, I think, there is no deeper meaning at all, and all we really need to get by in our lives is what appears to us on the surface. Best would it be for us to examine only the direct verbiations of our communications with one another, and to look no further than the skin-deep appearances of one anothers’ faces.

Why, just take one look at my good friend, my grotesque friend, my gaggable friend Erik! How much easier all this would be to consider if I had disregarded all his tricky words and speeches, and only considered him by his horrible, hideous face from the start. How much time I could have saved! How many tears! He is a true wretch, the abominable man, the opprobrial cad, and his face shows it quite clearly. No wonder he wore the mask! Doctor Gradus has an entire shelf of books about physiognomy; and while it’s all quite stupid and farcical to consider past the realm of humor, one must admit… it would have made things so much simpler if it were true!

Such, then, were the nature of my thoughts as I sat with those marble walls, beautiful though I knew they were, converging all around me. For the moment they seemed a looming yet invisible threat, for they were covered up with thick, plush panels of velvet drapery and other such undergarments for the purpose of social ornatestry and modesty. Still, though, I had the pulsating fear within me that they would crush my entire being to dust should I ever pull back one of those fine curtains and reveal the beautiful face of the marble in all its rock-hard glory. Beauty does not stop a death from being painful, not even the littlest deaths of them all.

To distract myself from the threat of the marble, and also from the imminent forfeiture of my liberty, I returned my vision back to the stage. There I saw the people still roaming, almost aimlessly, but so very happily regardless. They were all lost, lost in the plot – here, the stage manager was coming out on stage to pull the ear of a misplaced ballerina – or was it part of the production? – no, the assistant came out, too! – but it was all in good fun no matter how confused it became. One girl’s public degradation became a source of great amusement for her cast mates, who in equal parts buckled over on their knees with great guffaws and hid their twitching mouths behind their theatrically splayed hands. The audience, watching from their omniscient seats, could not be bothered with considering her humiliation; they did not even know of it, and offered only distracted, uncaring patience as they allowed this brief intermission of the act to proceed as they continued chattering with great exuberance amongst themselves, just as they have always done. Only those of us in the audience who had ever performed on a stage recognized her embarrassment – albeit with a couple little self-deprecating laughs to ourselves, as we caught a whiff of nostalgia and reminisced about our own little mistakes from the past – and in my case, I felt a brief flicker of envy towards the calf of a girl for having the opportunity to slip up at all.

It was during this indeliberate intermission that a voice poured itself in my ear, like water into a flute, with an almost haunting quality touching at its edges like tattered threads. I nearly forgot to be afraid; in my experience, disembodied voices have always come in the dark. And this voice, this mysterious voice, whispered to me only:

“Erik lies.”

Ah, what an insufferable, annoying voice, I thought, to reiterate only this measly concept I have already long suffered to beleaguer! One would think ghostly voices would have more wisdom to offer than this!

But what was this voice? It spoke those two words with a simple calmness, and yet at the same time with a tremendous fury. It was immensely feminine in nature, similar to the sweet, sisterly tones the Angel had taken with me from time to time in the early days of our meetings. There was a clarity to it, like a silver bell on a sleigh, and it rang with all the beauty of a crisp winter morning.

“Whether I believe him or not,” I spoke to the darkness, deferring in my usual way of communicating with voices in my head, “is my business alone.” For good measure, I punctuated my reply with an accusative, pointed, “…Erik.”

“That is what he calls himself,” the voice agreed, quite deflective.

Sinister, I thought, and went to play along. “And who might you be, if not he?”

“Some-one,” it said, “who wishes to be a friend.”

With that last sentence I realized the voice had never been in my head at all. It was coming from behind me, a short distance away, and so I turned my head, just slightly –

“Yes!” it said. “Look behind yourself, Christine Daaé. I am here!"

I turned now in my seat, with far more grace than I had done earlier with Erik, and with a paling face I took in the immense pillar of darkness that had suddenly risen up behind me.

It was the Princesse Ada who stood there, the deepest shades of night hanging off her frame as trickling tendrils of sable velvet. She was built of gloom and mist, I seem to recall thinking, or otherwise built of nothing; for there was a moment that I swore I saw directly through her to the vast darkness behind her. Only her lorgnette, which must have fallen from her slender fingers, marked in the congealed puddle of skirts the spot where she stood so very close to me. Her face was obscured by her tulled veil, just as before, but up close I could determine somewhat more of her features. They were faint but they were there: the cupid lips, the dimpled cheeks, the jetted eyes lying just out of reach behind the prison of those gilded, golden spectacles. I loved her immediately; I had no choice in the face of this consummate beauty.

In looking in her eyes, those lovely dead eyes, I knew at once what she had come to me to say. She was not Turkish. She was not deaf. There was never any Tamerlane at all. The elderly woman beside her was not even her cousin. Neither of them were widows. Erik had lied about every single fact about her – or otherwise he had been mistaken.

For once in my life, I was not sure that Erik had lied. He had flayed his heart for me in this box, recounted stories he never dared to breathe before, even in the safe security of his underground lair. How could he have had the courage to do so in front of such a pair of ready, able witnesses? He is capable of so much! And yet capable of so little. It took so much convincing for him to open up to me; I did not think it possible that he would have spoken the way he did in front of some strange strangers he knew could hear him, could see him, could perceive him in every human way possible.

Thus I found myself confronted with the terrifying possibility that Erik might not actually know everything. This consideration chilled me to my very core – the concept that there might be things in this world unknown even to the all-knowing, all-being Erik. I had grown accustomed to everything going his way, except when little Christine Daaé interfered and spoiled his plans; I had taken for granted the way he fretted over every minute detail in our meetings together, especially the ones above ground and especially the ones outside the premises of the opera house. I had not realized until this moment how much of his chimeric underworld had been cultivated by a perfectly attuned complex of machinations and hallucinations, maintained only by a consistent and persistent set of manipulations, requiring of him continuous attention and meticulous vigilance, lest something undesirable, something corrupt, something minutely reflective of the real world were to slip past his notice and create a microscopically tiny splinter in some crucial vein of the realm that could, in a series of dramatically crescendoing chain-reactions, trigger a cataclysm colossal enough to shatter his entire fragile illusion to pieces.

Nothing could be more representative of this small splinter than this Princesse Ada standing before me; for this woman (whoever she actually was, if not an actual princess) had sat stock-still the moment she heard Erik’s error, had found the fault in his omniscience and took advantage of it by playing along with his misunderstanding. She had fooled Erik, had finally managed to deceive him in the way I had always tried to but failed. In doing so, she had no doubt made a determination of him, certainly most foul and most heinous, and like a good Samaritan wished now to take this matter into her own hands.

This, I presumed, would be the nature of her words to me; and as it turned out I was rather correct in my deductions. But right in that moment, still in that moment, even as I graciously, cordially, blushingly, implored of her, “Sit here with me and tell me what you think,” I knew it would all be in vain. There could, of course, be no convincing me. I was absolutely set on my path towards the dark forest, and I was absolutely set on dragging Erik with me.

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Opera”
(Part VIII)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S (SECOND) JOURNAL

“…And he is, of course, a murderer at heart; and a murderer of any form is one who cannot ever hope to be repaired. Think not of the tankards of spilt blood, nor of the legions of weeping children left by his victims, nor of the scuttling, dripping rope lying limp from his waist. Think only of this man you know now and his demeanor unto you. Has he been kind? Maybe not always, but mostly, might you say? Perhaps you think him overly sensitive, if not a touch cold at times? Perhaps you think that’s all it is? That it’s nothing but a matter of divergent personalities? A matter that might be solved by some shifting of attitudes? Is that what you think, Christine Daaé?”

These were some of the ideas Princesse Ada posed to me during this final therapy we had, sitting stiff as figurines together in this impromptu confessional of an opera box. We assumed our positions with little awareness, little consciousness for having done so. Within this scene I became the deferential sinner, head bowed and hands clasped tightly, as I listened to the upright Monseigneur Ada as she decreed my penance and homilized her plan for my salvation. She spoke at a clip, apparently just as wary as I was of the minutes ticking away until Erik returned. There seemed an overabundance of advice she wished to bestow upon me, and an underabundance of time with which to bestow it. I could not wedge more than a few words in, here and there, how eager she was to speak her piece; and despite her good-hearted earnesty for my redemption, I found myself growing ever more apathetic to her plight as she droned on.

“Your husband is not just cold; no, that is not the problem with him at all. He is dead, plain and simple. Dead and very much committed to the bit. There has been a murder in his soul to equal every murder he has committed on this earth. Mind now that a murder is not only the literal action of life-taking. It is the theft of a penny, the squandering of an hour, the lie of a mercy. It is not innately evil to murder; and yet murderers are irrevocably marked by the murders they commit. Sometimes a murder is not a misdeed, but just a deed – a deed that had to be done, and is done now, but was truly awful for having had to be done at all. Those stains must exist in this world, by the laws of nature; and so they add up as blights on the soul, accumulating one by one, moldering all morals with their insidious rot, corroding the conscience with their infernal corruption until nothing is left but absolute wasteland, barren of even the most rancid fruits that once polluted its soil…”

I hid a yawn, perhaps the eleventh or so I’d made since we’d sat down. Oh, how much longer could one woman speak? With any mercy, Erik would be back soon to relieve me of this torture…

“…A man who takes the life of one may find himself horrified at his actions; and yet he finds within himself the capacity to do it again, and then again, every time with far lesser qualms, for he knows he once had the capacity to do it before. And isn’t he horrible to have done it at all? Horrible enough to do it again? That is how he thinks. It isn’t necessarily true… but it is how he thinks. And so murders become easier as they’re done in succession, and they are done in succession because they’ve become easier.” (You don’t say, Madame la Princesse! What an interesting series of thoughts you’ve shared with me. How absolutely big your brain is. Anyhow, don’t you think we’d rather – oh, you’re still speaking? Ah…) “– then a pauper, down on his luck, may steal a coin from the church basket to pay for a loaf of bread. The next week he may return, perhaps with better luck, but may deign to steal two coins anyway. Or perhaps he might even try his luck with the bishop’s quarters. Later he may be reformed, with a small house and a meager salary and a tidy wife, and he might say, ‘Oh, what great fortune I have found in the highly trafficked brothel on the corner of my street, how grateful I am to God that He advised me to invest in it! And to devest in it as well, hurr hurr!’ and yet he will turn to his pauperous brethren, the ones who’ve taken his place below the bread line, and he’ll tell them all about the coins in the church box and the mass times that are best to visit at. It’s the only way to get by, he’ll tell them, because he believes it to be true. And so that’s the murder of the murderer – which is exactly why it’s so vital you understand and agree with what I’m explaining to you. Do you understand me, Christine Daaé?”

“Okay,” I said, exhausted.

In truth, I had no idea what she was saying. These words were just pummels of sound she was slinging at me at this point, how little I heeded them. The gist of her speech, I must suppose, was that Erik was evil, and foul, and wretched, and that I would be better off running out of this opera box and fleeing Paris forever. Didn’t I see it was suicide to stay? Didn’t I see Erik would never appreciate a single lone action of grace for its proper, true worth – no more, no less? He would misconstrue any and all of my intentions for upholding this promise, just as he's always done; and in return for my selfless deed he would see to it that we were both swiftly punished without benefit of trial. Thus I should not feel beholden to this promise – or any promise made to Erik for that matter – especially when Erik, the pull-out prince himself, never even once has attempted to hold his promises to me. Oh, he might say he tries… but has he, really? Ever? For Erik is a deceitful, selfish, hateful man, and I would be a fool keep my promise to him. I would be a fool to stay until the end of the opera, to let him manipulate this one final kindness out of me. I would be a fool to think he was worth it, when he so very clearly was not.

All things, of course, I already knew, AND STILL KNOW, but for some reason needed to be TOLD to me like I was some INFANTILE CHILD.

“May we speak of something else?” I thus proposed, interrupting Ada in the midst of another parable about God knows what.

“Something… else?” she stuttered, rather agogged by my request. “Christine Daaé, do you not grasp the gravity of this situation?”

I peered down in my lap and examined the way my fingers rolled in and out of a fist. “I seem not to. I am entirely empty-handed; Erik had me leave my trunk in my dressing room.”

“You dare to… cling to puns in your eleventh hour?”

“Oh, is that the time? I have not seen a real clock in many months so I must take your word for it.”

“Christine Daaé!” she reproached me. “How can you sit there idle and waste your time like this, on word-play and quips? Do you not realize that your very life is at stake here?”

I cast my eyes to the stage, where the bawdy idiots were crooning and swooning about still. What good fun their revelry seemed! To not have a care in the world as they recited the world’s tritest soliloquies to the open air – to never feel embarrassed, for the songs they sang were not written of words from their own hearts! How lovely it could be to simply see its action play out below me, night after night, never actually watching it or analyzing it or processing it in any professional sense ever again. How absolutely sedating it could all be…

Petulantly, I murmured, “Why must I be the one to consider these things?”

“Because you are in danger, Christine Daaé,” Princesse Ada insisted. “You must leave this place immediately.”

“Erik would be upset if I did that,” was my faint, very logical response.

“Your Erik gets upset about a lot of things,” she said. “He’ll live.”

“But what if it upsets me when he is upset?”

“You’ll live,” she echoed. “Longer, too.”

“But unhappier?”

A pause. “Do you really feel he makes you happy?”

“Oh, yes,” I said softly. “What else could I feel? He cares so much about me. No one else has ever cared about me as much as he. Anyone who ever came close is dead.”

“That’s appalling.”

“Maybe so. But have you ever had someone care about you, Madame?”

A breath. “Yes.”

“Then you understand, Madame, the sunshine I feel in my heart when I think of him? The scene of spring, of two friends on a row-boat on sunny day, of a family of goslings passing by on the still surface of a quiet lake – of a tourist and her guide in a gondola by night in Venice, their path marked by candlelight like the paintings always show... do you feel the warmth of the fireplace in the small parlor where two friends are reclining after a long day of nothingitude shared between them? It is sweet bliss to be loved, and it is Paradise to be cared for.”

“Are you sure you are not mistaking Paradise for the ‘mauvaises terres,’ as they call them? The picture you are painting is not at all what occurred in this box just some minutes ago. You heard him speak to you, Christine Daaé. You heard him lie. You watched him throw his little tantrum when he didn’t get his way. That is not the way a good husband acts.”

“Every marriage has its faults,” I deflected easily. “Every marriage needs work.”

“Not every marriage deserves the energy. Your husband is a very selfish man, Christine Daaé. Selfish, wicked, dastardly, and obscene. Would you sacrifice your life for a man of such contemptible character?”

“I am hardly sacrificing my life, Madame. It is just the remainder of the night that I am giving him – just until the opera is finished, and then I will go.”

“You know that isn’t true,” Princesse Ada warned me. “Your will is too weak for that. If you do not leave now, you will never find the strength to break his heart again.”

"Erik wants me to go. He said it himself.”

But the Princesse saw through my words, and took up against me. “You don’t think he means it, do you?”

“I know he doesn’t,” I admitted, a bit of that old anxiety brewing within my gut. “I know him better than he knows himself. He only wants me to go because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. It’s not what he actually wants.”

"So do you think, maybe, that it might turn out that he'd be quite happy if you stayed? Happy enough to forget a thing he's never bothered with before, like moral obligation? Happy enough to go back on his word about letting you leave at all?"

"It's possible," I conceded. "Actually, it's almost certain."

"So you don’t think it’s possible your husband has any morals that he wishes to abide by?”

“I think it’s possible to wish for two diverging things at the same time, and to be fatally disappointed when they can’t both come true.”

“What do you wish for, Christine Daaé?”

“I wish to make a choice,” I said, feeling more confident about this answer than any other I had given her this evening. “Just one singular choice, freely made, for once in my entire life. I am tired of being led around like a lamb on a leash. If I am to be sheared I want to hold the scissors; if I am to be slaughtered I want to pick the axe.”

“You aren’t thinking clearly.”

“Perhaps not, but I am thinking about all this the best that I am able at the present moment.” A strange tear sprung up at the corner of my eye, and I wiped it away with a trembling finger. When had I become so upset? “What, do you think I am not competent to make my own decisions?”

“You seem to be lacking in perspective,” she said, taking on a softer tone now. She did not move an inch from that rigid posture of hers, but it felt like she had moved to embrace me all the same. “It is okay to be confused, Christine Daaé. You have been manipulated by this man for over a year. He has taken advantage of your trust time and again, and has misrepresented himself from the very start. Deception can be a very muddied thing to see through.”

“I’m quite aware he deceived me.”

“But still you care for him?” She seemed unconvinced. “You don’t have to do this man any favors. He has thoroughly ruined your life, you understand?”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean to.”

“Oh, you can’t possibly believe that, can you? Truly, dear girl? This monster, this man you have lived with, has he hurt you so much that you still so adamantly refuse to see the truth? Can you not realize that it was he who killed all those other people who dared to care for you as much as he did? Can you not see what further tragedies will befall you if you stay? You say he is your husband, and that marriages need work. But do you really want a marriage as foul, as rotten, as diseased as this one?”

I don’t, I wanted to say, I don’t want to stay here. I want Erik to be happy, but I don’t want to stay here. I want to walk out that door, Princesse Ada, can’t you see that? I am not a suicidal woman, and I do not want to be tortured by Erik’s mind games anymore.

And yet –

I was still in Box Seven.

“I do,” I forced myself to say. “Erik’s love makes it all worth it.”

Ada sighed, and it felt like the entire earth was crying for me.

“He doesn’t love you, Christine Daaé. He never has. He can’t love you. That is not what love is.”

She was disgusted with my decision, clearly. She went on her long-winded way, spouting more soliloquies about the permanent ruination that evil makes in our souls. All the while I sat in that velvet chair, feeling so much farther away from anything than I'd ever felt before. Her rambling fell away and became nothing more than silence in the air to me, the whisper of my blood the only pounding sound my ears dared convey to me. 

It didn’t matter what she said, anyway. I would never leave.

I knew it all already. Every insult she threw against Erik, every time she called me a fool, everything was true. It didn’t help to hear her say it to me. How could it? I was quite resolute in my decision – my decidedly bad decision, as she had repeatedly reminded me throughout those fifteen minutes – and there was to be no turning back for me. She was wasting her breath explaining to me how Erik was the most heinous villain alive, when her time could have been better spent discussing any number of other things. We could have talked about the opera, for heaven’s sake.

Why didn’t we just talk about the opera, Erik?

“Thank you for all your advice,” I said at long last, cutting her off from her latest onslaught of good-intentioned condescension. “I’m going to stay, though, and I’m not going to change my mind.”

“But Christine –”

“I understand your concern,” I told her. I turned in my seat and looked her in the eye for the first time in this whole sorry ordeal. The surface of her eyes were glassy, as if with unspilled tears; I fancied her mechanical little heart was breaking for what she clearly thought of as my stupidity. “I understand it very well. But I made a promise to Erik and I’m going to abide by it. He deserves that one kindness at the very least, even if he shows none to me.”

And Princesse Ada’s crimson lips puckered, or at least I imagined them as doing so. How beautiful she was, even in this state of defeat – almost more beautiful, I thought, for having lost, and even more for having lost to me. It was a very beautiful thing, in my mind, to conquer over another. How sweet this otherwise bitter victory tasted for it!

“One last time, Christine. I’m begging you, please leave. If you love yourself at all, please leave –”

Box Seven, I reminded myself with a grim smile.

“I am firm on my choice.”

The silence turned heavy as the remaining seconds passed. I could not be certain of the amount of time left, but something dangerously cold in my bones told me the time was nearly out. The air grew thicker and thicker as thirty seconds, perhaps, passed in total. There could be no turning back now. No change of heart. This was finally it.

And it was.

The door opened, slowly, sadly, certainly... and at last my repulsive husband – some man who called himself Erik – stepped back into the opera box.

I did not expect him to be happy I stayed.

He was not.

Still, he said, “Thank you, Christine. I love you.”

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Palomino Fino, Again”

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S (SECOND) JOURNAL

We were quiet as he embraced me.

Dare I recall a worse moment in my entire history with Erik? Had his woolen shoulder ever trembled so much like a child’s as it did now, hunching as it did against my sodden cheek? His own tears spilling like the morning’s dew upon the flaxen meadowland of my head; his hands coming up against my back, those spectacular skeletal specimens fisting and scratching and not quite tearing at the amber silk of my dress for feeble gain, fighting to wrap the satin of my silken self around the foaming, frothing, churning, wrenching disappointment which had clobbered apart his dreams’ moorings with its tormentuous might. He was lost in a realm of concrete factoids, blown far adrift from the safety of his imaginary shore. I was the only beacon looking out into the awful abyss, the only light shining upon his thrashing form amidst the sea of darkness; I was the only one who was watching, the only one who could throw a loop of rope out to save him, the only person in the entire world who had ever seen him for the monster he truly was... I was the only one who had ever dared to look past the surface of his freakish visage to come face to face with the devil within…

And I whispered:

“You are welcome.”

And into my hair, my sopping scalp, he croaked,

“I am damned.”

In another moment – I found his hand dangling from my shoulder as he sniffled back his pitiful tears. He made the most horrendous sounds, gulping and gurgling as mucilaginous spumen clogged up the folds of his sorry excuse for a nose and seeped ever downwards to the boogerish bogs of his lungs. A literal drowning man, he fought hard to hold his head up high as braved the tide and led us back to our seats.

He stooped then and offered his hand to my good friend the Princesse Ada of Tamerlane, like any good gentleman would do, like any good husband would do, like any good and docile and deferential man would do. He walked her back to her seat, taking good pains to make sure she was settled good and proper. Even onto his good knees he went, with no small amount of ache, with only a good amount of ache, to retrieve the ancient lorgnette which had fallen yet again onto the good pat of floor between them. He said nothing to her, and she said nothing in return; and in this way it was a terribly good dialogue they shared between them. I admired him dearly for this. Thereafter he rose up and sank into his seat beside me, collapsing against the velvet with all the awkward graces of a real, rotting cadaver, and at last closed his good eyes to the world around him.

How tame he seemed now, in his utter defeat against me… and how gloriously imperial I felt, in my total domination over him.

For it was not I who had lost this futile crusade by the choice I had made. It was never my own life that I was risking. It was Erik’s, always and forever: the eternal king of my couping heart, my darling husband of just one week, my never-lover of an endless night, my Don Juan Impuissant. It had, after all, always been clear how this all would end. I was always going to walk away from this night intact.

Erik would not.

But such is life! No man deserved this defeat more than Erik. And – was it even a defeat? Oh, was it even a war? It was not my fault he had put all his hopes into my walking away and delivering him from this final temptation. Should I be forced to say ‘Poor Erik!’ because I did not allow him to curse my name, to call me an ungrateful, hateful fatale for breaking my promise to him, to spurn me just as I spurned him? Why was any of this a choice I had to make at all?

The answer was clear, I believed. None of this was ever my burden to bear. Erik’s happiness was not my responsibility whatsoever. How primeval such an idea even was! So never again, I vowed in that moment, would I fuss like a fool over his self-flagellating funerealisms. Never again would I contort to cavile and carp over his crabbish cantankerisms and his cravenous crotchetitties. Never again would I bow and bide and beg.

Never again… anything at all…!

“Did you enjoy your stroll, dear husband?” I asked, with all the civil cordiality he’s never deserved. “I hope you did not exert yourself too excessively, and only moved at a pace brisk enough to rejuvenate your mood.”

“Oh,” he moaned. “Oh, no. Not at all.”

“Well, that is your fault,” I told the miserable man. “You must make an effort to enjoy the hateful things you do a little more, dear – or else why do them at all?”

“Yes, Christine.”

“Have you found any great amusement in this night at all?” I continued. “Or has the pleasure been all mine?”

His bottom lip trembled, and I worried he was about to begin his pathetic waterworks again.

“Oh, come now, Erik – don’t be like this. It’s not becoming.” I patted his hand. “We are at the opera. This is not the time to regress. Wipe your tears and quit feeling so sorry for yourself… otherwise you’ll have nothing left for when you’re crying all alone in that horrid coffin of yours tonight. Come, come.”

He actually listened for once, and brought out a sopping wet handkerchief from his jacket to slap against the center of his ugly face. He made some more ghastly sounds, squawking and honking his foul expectorate into the drenched folds of that poor, poor square of fabric. My disgust (rather more than my compassion!) won out at last when I saw the lace literally dripping with his abuse; and so I brought out my own dry cloth for him to use, which he accepted just as he broke down in another racket of tears.

Is every marriage as exhaustingly… wet… as this one? Surely it can’t be so, for I sorely doubt anyone in their right mind would ever wed if that were the case. Surely other couples kept their linens quite dry! Surely other husbands didn’t blow boodles of boogers into their wives’ new handkerchiefs. Surely other husbands had proper sinus cavities that did not produce so much mucus.

Surely other husbands had noses.

“You have missed so much,” I carried on over his cacophonous agony. I gestured casually to the stage, where the actors were still singing, still fighting, still dying… “I fear you’ve missed so much that it’s simply impossible to catch you up at this point. But surely that doesn’t matter, dear boy? It’s a dreadful opera, and you truly haven’t missed much – and anyway, you already know it all. You’ve seen it without me countless times, haven’t you? Countless times, without ever inviting me?”

“I have,” he sobbed.

“So you know there’s nothing you’re missing,” I said, hardly even spiteful, “in this theatre, or out. You’ve seen far more of this world than the average man would ever dream to… far more than me, at any rate. And remember, by your own account, nothing was worth seeing in the end. Not the beauty of the Caspian’s sapphire blue sea against the Mazenderan shore; not the silent sanctuary of the Nijni-Novgorod winter woodlands by the crisp break of dawn; not the romantic ripples of the Seine’s tide under the flooding glow of the moonlight. Nothing was ever as beautiful in real life as the picture of it you had in your head. Isn’t that right, my sorry boy?”

More sniffles. “Oh, it is. It is…”

“So then, why do you cry? When every opportunity was afforded to you, but all you ever did was bask in the despair of it all?” Impatience drove my words as I went on. “My own father wept on his deathbed for all the chances he never took… he told me he had but one happiness in all his life, and that was picking up his violin case one day and leaving our small village in Sweden. But even this one tiny joy of his was overshadowed by the inescapable burden he carried with him for the rest of his life… the burden he could never be relieved of… the burden of me, his needy child, his dependent daughter, who kept him from ever being completely free… even past the end of his days…”

I cast my eyes to Erik, regarding his tearful countenance with growing resentment. Even now he was ignoring me, finding greater interest in my soiled handkerchief, which shuddered with each of his raucous breaths. Because of course he didn’t care about my father… I had already told the Angel all about my insecurities and the bitternesses that went with them… and I had already received from the Angel my allotted share of consolations and pities. Certainly he was annoyed with me now for bringing it up again, as if I was expecting sympathy or, God forbid, some form of understanding from him. Certainly he was thinking I was about to bring up my mother and all the woes that went with her – and why shouldn’t I? When all he did was talk about his mother, or his father, or whoever else he happened to think about… always without any prompting from me whatsoever!

“Now, Erik, my love, my dear, why are you still crying? I told you to stop. Why won’t you stop crying?”

“He… cannot!” He hunched and wept into his lap, clearly attempting to stifle the noise. “He is trying, Christine! Erik is trying! Are you so blinded by your own cruelty that you cannot see that?”

“In what world are you ‘trying’ to do anything?” I threw back at him. “It seems I am the only one here who has been making any decisions at all.”

“Why did you stay!” he wept. “Why did you stay!”

“Why did you return?” I countered with vehemence. “You didn’t have to, but you did. I dare you now to take accountability for your own horrible actions!”

“Accountability! Accountability! Accountability!” His crying fit made him slide from his seat, and he collapsed in a puddle of dark wool and polished shoes upon the ground, shaking his clenched fists about his pinched face. “How can Christine think Erik has taken no accountability? Does she not see how Erik grieves her utter ruin? Does she not see how he bawls like a babe? Does she not hear his blubbers? His bellows? His boo-hoos? All this damp sludge he exudes from every orifice has always been for her!”

He clawed against the carpet, groaning, as he raked its crimson pills between his fingers – before he dragged himself before me, heaving himself like some lugubrious undead creature, and thrust himself against my lap. He buried his face within the fabric, forcing all his soggy tears and snot deep into my expensive amber creases.

“Erik is damned!” he moaned between my parted legs. “Is this not what Christine meant to do to him? Was she not trying to kill him? Oh, he might drown right here in her lap – drown here in the depths of Christine’s bone-dry basin which has only ever been filled with Erik’s own feculent tears! She does not even cry! She never has, for him! He cannot breathe, he cannot… for how terrible he has always been to her! And always shall be! How he has always mistreated his darling wife! How he continues to mistreat his cruel Christine!”

I gripped the armrests as he suddenly crooked his head at the most ungodly angle, brushing upon something delicate and disturbingly tender deep within me. My knees came up in my shock and made sudden contact first with the side of his temple and then with the hollow his cheek, in rapid succession, sending his horrible death’s head reeling back and to the left. He reached out to gain his balance, clawing at my skirts with one hand while the other shot up to the level of his eye… an instinctive gesture, I recognized it to be, as his palm fanned out before his face…

Almost immediately, though, he moved that hand away and wiped his wrist against his face, smearing a fine line of bloody spumen against the starched white panel of his cuff. He did it so naturally I nearly thought he meant to do it in the first place. Then he released my skirt and flung himself back on his knees with a terrible quietude. In silence he seethed, staring down upon that strip of scarlet which stained his shirt. Not a word was spoken there between us, as he rasped out those terrible hissing breaths. Not a muscle did I move, not a thought did I have. I watched only his form intensely, my own body poised and ready to attack if need be…

Suddenly, then, he looked back up.

It was not the two little rivulets of sanguineous snot that ran down and disappeared into the cleft of his scowling upper lip which struck me. Nor was it the way his blood appeared almost black in this despairing theatre lighting, painting his already-ghastly face into a landscape of further rot and decay, a necropolis suitably irrigated with putrescent lakes and excretent waterfalls.

No… it was nothing but the look in his eyes, as he gazed upon me with this hideously beautiful adoration, that chilled me to my very core. Chills, I write… though the truth is that chills and thrills are very difficult to distinguish from one another, especially when it comes to the matter of Erik. Is it possible to loathe another’s absolute subjugation before you, whilst at the same time finding complete satisfaction in it?

With those terrible eyes upon me, refusing to look away, refusing to blink… he asked,

“Does Christine want to be Erik’s wife?”

And I replied, after very little consideration, but with great conviction nonetheless –

“I don’t know.”

His head came back down, and his hands shot back up to grip at the flesh about his eyes. I saw his nails pierce his skin (an easy feat, most assuredly, for the thin-skinned boy), and I feared these self-mutilations to be the harbingers of yet another hapless storm of tears… but then he only sniffled, and swallowed slightly, and did not outright cry. When he eventually turned his head back up his cheeks were completely dry.

“Erik… wants you… to want to be his wife,” he said slowly, taking great pains with his abhorrently precise wording. “But Erik does not want himself… to want you… to want to be his wife. Does that make sense?”

His eyes searched mine, begging for a grain of understanding that he could latch onto. He was still so very much the drowning man from before: still thrashing about in the dark sea, still pleading for rescue. I promise I don’t need the whole shore, I could hear him saying. Just a single grain of sand for me to find my footing, Christine, and then I can be saved.

After a poignant and pregnant pause, he persisted: “I… wish every day that I did not love you the way I do. It is a hellish obsession that encumbers this weak-willed heart. It pains me, it does… it pierces my chest, like a stake that’s been driven down by your pink iron heel. It has brought only misery to us both. For that, I am truly remorseful… but still, Christine, I cannot say that I am sorry. Because I still want you, with all the fervor left in my decrepit body.”

“Then let yourself love me,” I told him, before I could stop myself. “You have already done so much else to get to this point. You have already stolen me from my life. You have murdered my soul. You have manipulated my affections and made me love you. Clearly, the worst has already been done. It does not matter that you think I am delusional; it does not matter that you call it all a dream. All of this misery that we share, that you call mere imagination, is but bitter and bizarre reality to me. These pretendings you are having us play out in this opera box are real to me, Erik. That certificate you filed in the city hall is real to me. And I feel disturbed for trusting my own mind at times instead of just trusting you; and I feel insane for doubting physical proof even when you tell me the most obvious lies. You have coiled me around your finger and pulled me so tight my spine is about to break. What stays your hand now, when one final twist is all it will take?”

“A crisis of morals,” he answered in a soft, strangled voice. “That is all that protects you at this point. My conscience is strong enough to tell me that what I’m doing is wrong… so very wrong… and yet…”

“And yet?”

He gestured to my hand, as if he needed my permission to hold it. I extended it to him without comment, a look of grave disgust barely concealed upon my face, and he took it up in his clasp with all the delicateness one would take with a rose petal between the pages of an old, weathered book.

“…And yet it is not strong enough to stop me from performing these horrendous evils that I do. Their call is so carnal, so obscene… and I am so wanton, so depraved. I must keep you, Christine, and this time I will say I actually am quite sorry about that. I won’t be letting you go. Not this time. Not anymore. I cannot do it. I know I promised… but Christine should really know better than that, than to trust Erik at his word.” He pressed a few small kisses to my fingertips and murmured, “Console yourself with the knowledge that he despises himself for this just as deeply as you do.”

There it was, then – the truth I’d been waiting for him to say. Princesse Ada had warned me, and I of course as well had come to accept that this was the only possible end for this night. The moment I chose to stay in this opera box, rather than fleeing as Princesse Ada told me to, I had damned myself to an eternity with Erik.

Now, with my fingers pushing past his cold lips, stroking the grey line of his receding gums, I had to wonder… had Erik planned this all? From our fight in my bedroom, to my finger in his mouth? Had he known from the very start that he wouldn’t let me go?

He’d said at the start that Box Seven was a place for imagination… could it have been his plan all along to fool me into thinking I’d made some sort of choice? He’d asked me to act, and act I did – a little too well, even… or so I thought. Perhaps it didn’t matter how well I’d acted. Perhaps he was always going to become ‘suddenly’ overcome with temptation, was always going to leave me alone with Princesse Ada to decide whether or not to leave him. Perhaps the Princesse eavesdropping on our conversation was not an oversight! And, despite her vociferous pleas, perhaps leaving Erik was never a real choice I could make. Perhaps he’d been standing outside Box Seven the entire time, waiting with a rag of chloroform and tears in his eyes, waiting for me to betray him just so he could have a reason to pity himself even more.

Perhaps he’d given me all the illusions in the world to make me think I had any choice in this at all. Meticulously crafted every bit of this night… and every bit of it was going exactly to plan. Yes, it had to be true… he was never going to let me go. Never. Not even if I ran.

Not even if I stayed.

“So what is the plan going forward, oh, brilliant husband of mine?” I mused, as the tip of one finger sunk in further and traced back the line to where his sharp molars parted slightly with a gasp. “Shall we return to your abode and go to sleep in our separate chambers tonight, and every night for evermore? Shall I knit for you a few more blankets, and pile them high in your coffin to ensure you never again find yourself cold enough to seek alternative slumbering arrangements at my side? Shall we do our chores together in the daytime, or whatever day is down there, like a couple of siblings and no more? Busy ourselves with, say, endless hours of chaste candle polishing for the rest of our days? What, really, is your plan here, Erik?”

My fingers had sunk in further, spelunking around the innermost cavern of his cheek. He sucked them thoughtfully as I spoke, weakly grinding their flesh against the hard ridges of his teeth. Occasionally I felt his trembling tongue wander over to lick a small stripe along the side of it, just for him to quickly pull it back and halt all his other ministrations. He appeared just as uncomfortable as I was to have my fingers in his mouth, his hands cradling mine with a fluttering touch; and yet, as neither of us knew with clear certainty who had put them there, neither of us knew whose responsibility it was to remove them.

“Torture,” he mouthed slowly, his breaths shallow and damp upon my palm.

He did not elaborate past that, though, so I prodded him by pressing the edge of my nail into his thin gumline. “For both of us, you mean?”

“No,” he hissed sharply. “I would never want to hurt you.”

I scoffed. “We’re a little past that, don’t you think?”

“I would sooner hurt myself than hurt you,” he tried. “I would rather die –”

“No, you would not,” I said. “You’ve said it so many times to me that I can repeat it in my sleep: you are not a suicidal man. You are nothing if not a hideous, greedy, self-serving monster. A truly despicable villain. If ever there were a choice between yourself and me, you would pick yourself a thousand times over. This is why you will never let me go – because though it is torture for you to live with me, it is an even greater torture to live without me.”

“I do not deny –”

“Why would you, wretch? You planned this all, from the first minute you heard my voice. And as for what comes next? Who knows – but you!”

“I never intended,” he said with great reluctance, as I dug my nail in a second time, “for anything to happen. You must believe me. There is no plan. There never was one.”

“Are you not the king of manipulation? I do not merely doubt any word you’ve ever said anymore – I simply do not believe them at all!” I ripped my fingers now from his mouth entirely, and shoved him back with a wet palm against his bared front teeth. “We are married and then we are not. I am your student and then suddenly I am your salvation. I am confused by absolutely everything you’ve ever said to me – and it’s all by your design! Say it is true!”

Here I began to laugh, if I recall myself correctly… but not in a deranged way, no, not at all… more like in a pleasant, demure manner, like any other polite lady of society would do.

“What will you expect of me when we return downstairs?” I demanded, as I lunged forward just as he cowered backwards. “Shall we be married? Or can your upright conscience not excuse a trespass as that? Oh, such scandal! The sins we would be committing if we ever even thought to honor our wedding pledges! Oh! How the torches that light the path to Hell would rise up and engulf the darkness of our infernal wedding night! Ha ha ha! So, okay, Erik, I permit that marriage might not be the best course for us. Neither of us wish to be sinners. Perhaps an engagement might suffice? Betrothed, but never to wed? Would that help quell your weakened heart? After all, I didn’t consent to a marriage – but there’s nothing to consent to in an engagement, is there? The Church calls for chastity in these conditions, yes? And yet, Society – oh, the great capital Society! – Society states there’s nothing wrong with keeping the curtains shut in the bedroom, yes? There we can do what we like – but you won’t be trespassing against me, no, because you won’t be marrying me? Is this how you will spin it to yourself, Erik? When eventually you become desperate enough to accept even the most ludicrous excuses for your own bodily urges? Do you see how none of this makes any sense whatsoever?”

He was nursing his face now, which must have hurt all over from both the physical and verbal blows I had assailed him with. Blood still trickled from his nose, and the slip of flesh that he called an upper lip seemed to have puffed out with my mishandling. His cheeks had turned a dusky pink, in the way my own would blush scarlet in my periods of embarrassment. He was heaving again as he listened, but he did not cry; no, the good man held himself together and sat quietly, almost thoughtfully, as I derided him.

When I was done, he took a long breath and nodded, twice, quite curtly. He seemed to draw in upon himself, as if his eyes could be turned all the way around and set upon his own self. He sat like that, for a quiet moment, before he swiveled his eyeballs back towards me and his brows came down in a solid stare.

Calmly, coldly, he pronounced the following:

“Christine Daaé, if it is only the coarse act of copulation which occupies your mind at present… I fear my baser urges may just horrify you!”

“So you do admit…?” I demanded.

“Have I ever even held your hand?” he scowled back. “You think me a rogue for the things I would never do! I have urges deep within me, this is true – but this specific one which you speak of… it is not so undeniable as you think. This, at the very least, is not the source of this excruciating torment which plagues me.”

He sighed here, and gestured painfully to his face.

“I have learned to get along without certain things in this world. A face, a nose, a name. What need have I for any of those social things, when I am all alone in my kingdom beneath the ground? And on those few occasions when I am forced to come up, like a hermit crab sent scuttling from its shell, I have designed inventions that are suitable enough replacements for my needs. You have seen my mask, you have called me Erik. That nose is somewhere around here, too, isn’t it? Oh, well, maybe they aren’t perfect; but they work well enough, don’t you think?”

I shifted my head, not agreeing, but still not quite disagreeing.

He continued. “I am a man of many wants, and because of this I have been forced to become quite the inventor. My workshop is not just for show; I must build what I cannot have.” Immediately I thought of the body of wire I had seen him working on before, and the skull upon which he had replicated my face with papier-mâché. “So you see: I have learned to get along quite fine. I tell myself lies, just like you tell yourself. I content myself with my organ and I fill my hours with pointless orchestration, on some shoddy masterpiece that will never see the light of day. I stave off the loneliness as best as I am able… but in the end, there is no real replacement for what I truly need.”

“A wife?” I proposed, quite dubious.

“A companion,” he said briskly. “I daresay it’s a human right. One of the many I’ve been denied, at any rate. I need a pair of eyes to see me, a mind to perceive me. I locked myself away for many years and I drove myself nearly mad. Don’t laugh! And I realized I cannot live like that again. The daroga will not even visit me anymore. I think he thinks I’m dead. I wouldn’t blame him. There is not a single soul on this earth that thinks about me anymore. I need you, Christine. I need you to think about me, and to see me, and to experience life in all its infinite dullness alongside me. Even if you don’t love me.” He sighed. “But it would be so much lovelier if you did.”

Now he pressed his hands to my knees and, with copious crackings of his own knees, lifted himself up until he was standing, tall as ever, before me. He was obscuring my view of the stage, and most certainly that of the women behind us (the magnitude of their politeness cannot be understated, for they voiced not a single whisper of complaint… for this or for any of the multitudes of disruptions we had posed before them this entire night), and yet he did not seem to care for he did not move out of the way. Rathermore he turned around, and with a hand placed on his hip he began to watch the performance as if nothing had happened at all.

How disheveled this man looked, standing with his jacket slouching off one shoulder and his silver wisps of hair standing up at every angle. The lighting of the theatre against his tall form, as I viewed him from behind, drained the fresh bloodstains on his cuff into black inkstains. I noticed his left shoelace to be untied, and thought with strange humor how obscene it would be if I stooped now and tied it for him. How would he respond to that? Would he kick me in the face? Would he stomp my hand beneath his heel and crush it like a bug? Or, God forbid, would he actually let me do something nice for him for once?

There was only one way to know. I slipped from my seat and crouched upon the floor beside him. He did not look down at me; he was altogether too engrossed in his own thoughts to notice my movements. I leaned over his shoe, reached out for his laces –

And then paused. I felt a pressure in the small of my back, like metal burning against my skin. Hideous contemplations arose within me, as Erik’s inattention and my own chance positioning registered, even before I reached back and touched the handle of my sewing scissors – the scissors I had stashed, unconsciously, instinctively, in the waistline of my skirts. Silence blared boldly in my brain as I slowly looked back up in horror to find Erik still distracted by the stage.

I looked back down at his ankle, the impossibly bony thing dressed within a crisp black sock. Underneath it I knew to be a stretch of pale skin, fragile enough to bleed at the slightest nick. I remembered a scar that ran medially to laterally above his tendon, never visible when he was properly dressed, and when I traced my finger in the air above its location I recalled the first time I had ever held his bare ankle in my grasp… as he had laid, barely coherent, slick with sweat, nude upon his mother’s bed. It was a frightening and sudden illness that I had nursed him back from, only but a few weeks ago, and yet I couldn’t help now but marvel at how much at my mercy he had been in those hours…

Only for a moment did I entertain these absurd considerations. I had a task to do and it was dangerous enough without distracting myself with some idle fantasies. Thus I released the scissors; then leaned over his left shoe once more and reached toward his laces, pinching them like two squirming black worms between my porcelain fingers.

I tied the knot quickly, looping one worm around the other, pulling them fast to make them suffocate one another. I wrapped them around twice, to make sure they were dead – but doing so was clearly my error, as Erik finally looked down just as I was pulling taut the final loop.

“What are you doing?” he asked, in an uncharacteristically undemanding manner. There was a wryness about him that sent a flush to my cheeks, and the laces went limp in my fingers. “Are you my mother?”

“Excuse me?”

“This,” he brought up his foot and wagged it in my face, “is a mother’s task. Do you think me so simple I cannot tie my own shoelaces?”

“Don’t start this with me, Erik. They were undone,” I explained, feeling quite humiliated. “Must you find fault in every nice thing I try to do for you?”

He brought his foot down and laughed. “Forgive me if I sound unappreciative, dear; I do not mean to be. But I am not a two year old tot. I can tie my shoes quite easily on my own, you hardly need to stoop to this –”

“But I want to,” my voice said, sounding smaller than ever. “Can I not do things I want to do?”

“You,” he said, “cannot possibly know what you want, if it brings you to such places as on your knees before me.” He gave another humored chuckle, which made me blush even deeper. “Come now, Christine, and pick yourself off the floor. I sorely doubt you can see the opera from that position. Let us sit together – would that be agreeable to you? I say it should be. Come. Shall I pour you another glass? You hardly had a chance to finish your first.”

He helped me into my seat, taking the same pains he took with the Princesse Ada to settle me properly. I felt very much like a doll as he maneuvered me, limb by limb, fanning out my skirts about my chair and even fixing a curl upon my head.

Until now I had not understood what a future with Erik would entail for me. I had not realized the full extent of my liberty that I was giving up by making this singular choice… the way he would handle me carefully, like a piece of priceless porcelain, and keep me lovingly on a high shelf, admiring me every day from afar, bringing me down only periodically to dust and wax me… worse than all that, however, was the dawning realization that I would let him do all of this and more to me without the slightest murmur in protest.

Erik plucked the bottle up from the table again, all grace and elegance once more. His face seemed all the more gruesome with this cordial smile drawn upon it. For all his tears, this man had really perked back up; he had won against us both and he knew it. I was his to do with as he pleased, until the end of our days, and right now what he pleased to do was to pour me a glass of amontillado.

With some sick satisfaction, and while staring directly at me, Erik picked up my glass from the table and placed just the tip of the bottle’s neck against its lip. A golden bead of amontillado formed at the opening, daring to dribble down at the slightest movement of his wrist – but he held his hand steady, and the droplet did not fall. My awful trepidation he clearly relished, his smile growing only stronger as he continued to hold the bottle over my glass without pouring.

For all his rigid stillness (which I tried my best to mirror back at him), my own thoughts were in a frenzy. Why was he just standing there?! Why wasn’t he pouring the bottle?! Of course Erik had a predilection for the stranger amuseuments in life, such as staring open-mouthed at me when we were reading together quietly in his parlor and he thought I wasn’t looking, and also when he knew I was… but there was nothing in his expression that seemed as, well, innocent as those occasions (if such a word can even be used to describe Erik). Could it be, I wondered, that Erik had a plan in place that extended beyond this opera box? That Erik wished to do some things to me, despite all his earlier denials to me about them, and that this hesitation of his was merely an act in anticipation for the unrestricted pleasures he was about to indulge in?

Dear God, was Erik about to drug me again?

All at once the fear and anticipation become all too much, and I found myself blurting out: “Actually, dear, will you let me pour?”

Immediately he cast an extremely suspicious glare at me, no doubt thinking me of plotting something against him, and I found this to be clear evidence that I had been right in my fears. People, after all, are often suspicious of others for the very same things they’re about to do.

“Nonsense, wife,” he said slowly, his grip about the bottle noticeably tighter. “It is heavy. You might drop it. It would not be a good look for you to spill it all over your… nice… fine… dress.”

My dress was already ruined from his tears and blood, though, and immediately he saw the error in his logic. Thus he tried again.

“Perhaps we should not drink at all,” he said, moving to set the bottle down. “The opera is almost over, and I fear we’ll have far too scarce of time to savour it properly. I will bring it back to my vault and we can enjoy it together another night…”

“No,” I said faintly. “No, I do think I would rather like to finish the bottle.”

“Finish it…?” He gaped at me in plain fear. “The whole thing, Christine?”

“Yes… I think so. A vintage like this would be a shame to waste on just a few drops, wouldn’t you say so…?” And with this I suddenly reached over and grabbed the bottle myself, tilting it at a dangerous angle above the glass. “Tell me when to stop.”

Immediately he exlaimed – “Stop!”

“I’ve barely poured you a drop,” I remarked, feeling rather like in a daze. I tipped the bottle slightly more and filled it to the brim; in turn, he swiped both glass and bottle from me just as the amontillado began to spill over the side. I folded my arms with perturbation as  I watched him search for a place to put them out of my reach. “What are you so worried about, dear husband? Don’t you like amontillado? This vintage is one of the best, I’ve heard…”

“And what on earth do you know of wine?” he asked with disturbed distraction, and at last settled for placing the bottle on the ledge. He turned back to me. “What has gotten into you?”

“Absolutely nothing,” I sniffed. “Am I not allowed to serve my husband, as a good wife is supposed to do?”

“Please, girl, you are not my wife –”

“For the love of all things holy – are we going to start this again?” Here I finally steeled my stare against his. “Are we not in Box Seven, Erik? Was this not all your idea? Trust me or don’t – I don’t care which you do anymore. But right now we are pretending, so now you need to pretend to trust me. Drink the wine, Erik. Drink it right now.”

For a long minute he did nothing but stare back at me with all the cold graveness of the tomb, until he finally broke. He sniffed the glass and made a sour face. “It… reeks of laudanum, Christine. I am not an idiot.”

“That just must be the aroma of it, then,” I suggested in my sweetest voice, hoping my impatience would not show through, “as I have certainly not added anything of the sort to it. Here, lend your glass here – yes, you see? It smells the same as always. Do you still not agree?” I tried (and failed) to restrain myself from tacking on the following, for it was terrible and cruel and altogether brilliantly wicked to say: “Perhaps you would be better able to tell if you had the nostrils for it.”

“I can smell perfectly fine!” he retorted, offended to comical proportions. “There is nothing wrong with my nose!”

“Then you agree the wine has not been diluted.”

“It –” he stammered. “You –”

“I love you,” I reminded him cruelly. “You and your little nothing-nose.”

It is almost amusing, looking back, how quickly he melted – almost, I say, because it is in equal parts both horrifying and heartbreaking the way his resolve blew away, like grains of sand across a shore. And there was an irony to admire in it all, the way his unyielding pride forced him to give up his own convictions and submit to me.

He drank just a small sip, a flicker of doubt unable to hide behind his eyes.

I fear I never shall remove that doubt. Yet he said anyway:

“Christine, you must forgive me for my accusations. I am properly paranoid, as you know, from a long life entrenched in treachery and espoused with sin. I fear I will be forever doubtful of your intentions, innocent though they are. The wine is perfect, not a drop out of place – this I maintain, if I am to trust my own senses.”

“And do you?”

“I smell nothing – or if I do, I smell it all wrong,” he confessed. “The aphrodisia of the rose smells like the euthanasia of the lily; the loose ferritin of black, coagulated putrescence smells to me like the heady musk of a lady’s natural perfume. Some things are harder to distinguish than others. I have erred before… but I have learned the difference by now in my life. I am sure the wine is fine.”

And yet still he remained doubtful, swirling the wine in his glass as he took another distrustful sip past his withered lips.

So be it, I thought. It was not my work to convince him… nor shall it ever be again.

For the rest of the bottle, thus, we were silent. He hushed me at any attempt I made for conversation, choosing instead to stew over his glass, which he did allow me to maintain the fullness of. I, myself, drank very little; perhaps I may be so bold as to say I drank nothing at all that night.

The remainder of the opera was beautiful, despite its lackluster appearance. I might have thought it would never end, but all things must, I do suppose; though despite my earlier aggravation with the production, I found myself nearly wishing it would go on forever. The costumes were still embarrassingly tawdry and the music still meant nothing as ever; but still there was a spirit buried deep within the poor dramatics, which spoke directly to my heart and made me begin to weep like I’ve never wept before.

At the first notes of what I could tell to be the final aria, I saw Erik begin to shuffle a bit in his seat. My eyes as wet as they were, and the darkness as pure as it was around us, I could not see his actions very clearly beyond the general movement of his hand reaching into the dark recesses of his inner coat pocket. An annoying clattering then sounded, as of many small things within a phial, like beads or tiny marbles, being dropped upon the floor; and with irritation I hissed at him:

“Are you not the one who asked me to be quiet!”

I expected a fight, but to my surprise he conceded immediately. With that reproach alone, Erik let out a stuttered sigh, ceased his fidgeting, and dropped his hand silently into his lap.

I wiped the tears from my eyes, which had grown hot with my agitation, and resolved myself to simply bask in the tremendous, heavy beauty of the final aria. It was a culmination framed within the narrative as the swooning swan-song of a retiring soprano, full of scoops and swoons, and I traveled the song with her as closely as if I had sung it myself. The ending was coming near far too quickly, and I feared what it would mean not only for myself but for her as well. All too soon we would be packed up and escorted away from the light of the stage; all too soon we would be saying goodbye to the lives we loved so far.

All too soon I would find myself back in Erik’s arms, trapped and unhappy but altogether unwilling to fight. And this was perhaps the worst torture of all; to know in this moment that these were my final minutes of freedom before I submitted back to his spell.

Could I possibly pretend to be content, the way I had pretended in this opera box tonight? The way I had pretended for the past year? For so long I had been clueless to my own suffering; Erik alone had known. But what did it matter what he knew? I hated him for my misery; and yet if I willed myself to forget, if I did not allow myself to comprehend the extent of my misery, could I possibly find it within myself to love him once again with the purest and most innocent of affections?

The applause thundered through the theatre as the cast took their bows. Performers I’d never seen before glided out on stage, processing up one at a time like a series of somber mourners. Each took their time to regard the audience with their melancholic thoughts and musings; each clasped their hands before them like an entreaty to the divine; and I found myself suddenly quite aware of how I was sitting on a plush velvet lining within a gawdy ornamental box, on my final display before my plunge back into the earth.

This was my wake, I realized, and that meant I was already dead.

But… but of course I was not dead, I have come to acknowledge in the days since that night. I never returned to that cellarous resting place and closed my eyes in that macabre coffin. I walked out from the tomb as alive as Lazarus himself and I have yet to be dragged back. Dare I say... I am more alive today than I've ever been before in my life.

Erik, however, is a different story.

I turned to him, amidst all the thunder and cacophony around us as the rest of the audience chattered and exited, and I found his head bowed in reflective silence. His eyes were closed and his lips were pursed in a taut line, looking rather less tranquil than tormented in his repose. I recall being eager to get my murder done and over with, ready to go back to the ground, and saying (obliviously, in retrospect), “Well, shall we go now, Erik?”

And to that he said nothing, as of course he wouldn’t. There was a bottle on his lap, and a hundred little pills scattered on the floor around our feet.

“Are you okay, Erik?” I asked. "Shall we be going, Erik?"

I prodded his shoulder, and his head lolled to the side.

“Erik—?!”

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Rest-Cure”
(Part I)

FROM THE MEDICAL DIARY OF
TRISTAN GRADUS, M.D.

Today marks three days since the admission of a case most curious under my care. Still there is no improvement; the sickness, it seems, is getting worse. I feel quite the quack… if I escape legal action after all this, I will consider it a miracle.

Thus I shall use the space below these lines to jot down, in a few quick words, my best recollection of the events heretofore, in the likely event I shall be needing them again during some unfortunate future court proceedings. Hopefully it shall not come to all that – but, at any rate, a man such as I must always be prepared.

--

The case arrived on my stoop three nights ago. I saw her first when I opened the door: “Christine” was how she introduced herself to me. She was standing alone, a mess of blonde curls and rumpled orange skirts, and immediately I feared the worst had occurred against her. Understandably so; a woman of her substantial beauty (though she be less bosomful than I perhaps would like) in a state of disorder as that, in the middle of the night as this, could be considered as, for lack of a better phrase, an ‘attractive nuisance.’

My chivalry demanded me to rescue this darling damsel shivering upon my stoop. I went to pull her into my apartment, latching a helpful hand upon her wrist in a way as to guide her, but she resisted me with a determination most inexplicable and most befuddlable. She explained she must have gotten the wrong door, repeating no less than three times that I was not the man she was looking for; but eventually, in her providing the address, I was able to find the source of her womanly error.

The man she sought was truly not I; instead it was my neighbor, an elderly Persian man (with whom she had no business associating, in my personal opinion). I told her, to her dark dismay, that I had not seen him around in a great many months – though I was quick to add that I’d heard he still retained his lease, and so must certainly be intending to come back eventually.

As she stood there moaning (ah!) over what horrible luck it was to have ‘just missed’ her Persian friend, and then as she went off in some tangent about princesses and puppets (?), I happened to look askance to see, behind her, parked by some overgrown shrubs, a dark form propped like a very large doll upon an ornate-looking push-chair.

“Who is your friend?” I asked casually.

Her reply came in the most tremulous and fearful tone: “No one!”

But I insisted, as is my wont, and drew near. On this closer inspection I found it to be a man, clad from head to foot in fine funereal black. He was still, very still indeed, probably unconscious, and did not seem to even breathe, at least to my perception. So I regarded this pretty little lady standing beside me, and asked fairly reasonably,

“Is he dead?”

And she whispered, quiet as a shiver: “No, he is quite alive, I believe… so beware!”

Well! Beware I did, I should say! Readily I presented myself as a physician to this Christine and reassured her in all my best words that I could take great care of this ailing friend of hers. She demurred in a hundred different ways; I ignored each and every one. I took the handles of the chair into my eager palms’ grips and wheeled her man straight into my apartment.

She came along behind me, fussing all the way, but eventually came around to seeing the intelligence in accepting the hospitality of my aid. It was clear to both of us the man was dreadfully ill and needed immediate care. She helped me extract the man from the chair and lay him down upon my folding cot, and thusly I began my emergency examination.

I was stopped just as quickly as I began, at the the moment I reached out to remove the peculiar mask which obscured the entirety of the patient’s face. It was a black satin piece, sculpted but bland, and I complained to this Christine that it was impeding my examination.

“You will keep it on,” she insisted. “My husband is a very… well-known man and I wish to… keep his identity a secret! Yes, that’s exactly it. I will pay you well for your discretion, good monsieur.”

Husband! Ah, the misery to be had at hearing that word! Anyway – she gave, and I accepted, no money upfront, which is a point I believe my future lawyer will be quite thankful to hear. Perhaps her bribe was a bluff; I still have not seen a single franc from her. Nor have I requested any compensation as of yet for my services. I think we are quite beyond that now.

I proceeded in my evaluation, regardless, with this singular stipulation in mind. She allowed me to undress him (down to his underclothes only, and all within tight range of her close supervision). With the dark wool suit removed, as well as the other cumbersome miscellaneieties such as the socks and their garters, I found the man soaked in sweat but still breathing, despite my earlier fear.

Auscultation of his chest revealed an un-alarming symphony of murmurs, clicks, and rasps. I assessed his age to be about sixty, give or take ten years in either direction, although this assessment I noted to be quite limited due to my inability to view my patient’s face. But a sixty year old man is bound to be ill sooner or later, I thought to myself, as sickness is just the reward of age. No man should expect to live past forty without accumulating a variety of aches and pains. It is all quite natural.

All things thus considered, I decided it was rather likely this man had suffered a simple attack of sorts of the heart – a ‘heart attack’, if I may be so poetic. Despite his presentation, which was some middle point between pure unconsciousness and mild obtundation, I doubted this condition to be critically concerning. The heart, as we all know, is one of the least significant organs in our body, especially in comparison to the almighty brain, which controls all of our thoughts, and the edenic liver, which is the source of all our humours. Furthermore: angina pectoris  is an insevere condition that assails many individuals in our time, and though inconvenient in the way it strikes one down with chest pain of the most biting breed (allegedly), there simply is nothing that can be, or needs to be, done for it beyond a little rest and relaxation.

I said as much to Christine, and she called me “an idiot.”

My examination continued through the systems. Neurologically the man was intact; respirologically I found no issue, besides some rhythmic rattling in his upper chest; dermatologically, however, I found my main concerns.

The man was extraordinarily thin, and his pallid skin was as fragile as dried leaf. The tips of his nails were ashen and cold, the nails jagged and cracked. I found an unsettling array of scars that ran along his frame, far too numerous to count but old enough in their appearance that I regarded them as most likely irrelevant to the condition at present. Tortuous blue veins similarly sprawled across the length of his entire form; the thickest of them, upon such areas as the arms and feet, were hardened over with scar tissue formed from what appeared to be many small pinpricks.

Christine was not very helpful in the information she provided. She confirmed my suspicion that the patient had a long-standing drug habit, though she could not tell me what substance it was that he so often used. She attested to seeing him smoking substances that “did not smell like pure tobacco” before, and also admitted he’d taken pills of some unknown sort occasionally in the past. In fact, when she found him unconscious (which had been some point earlier this night; I noted she did not elaborate much on that at all), there had been a myriad of tiny pills scattered around his feet which he ostensibly dropped. No, she said, she did not know what they were; but she retrieved a phial from his folded jacket and handed it to me, saying the pills had come from this container.

“This would be very helpful,” I remarked upon receiving it and turning it around in my hands, “if there were any pills left in this bottle for me to look at.”

Of course the bottle was unlabeled – why would a patient ever dare to make things easier for his poor doctor? – but I considered the situation with two possibilities, as I held the opaque thing before me…

The discipline of pharmacology instructs its pupils that medicines have three distinct relationships with illness. First: a drug may cure an illness. Second: a drug may cause an illness. And third: a drug may obscure an illness.

Which of these three was I dealing with here? What was the purpose of these mystery pills? As I said, I saw two possibilities. Either the patient took the drugs and fell ill, or fell ill before having a chance to take the drugs… in simpler words, either the drugs were bad and he took them, or they were good and he did not. And there was no way of knowing, without holding them physically in my hand to inspect.

But every diligent student of medicine knows the creed of Occam’s razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter. Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. So let us not consider the most outrageous fantasies first; instead let us assume the simplest, most normal conclusions. Let us see the way the patient presents, with lethargy and rapid heartbeat; let us take into mind the account of his previous bouts of sickness that his wife the beautiful Christine gave to us. Let us see that this man was unwell; let us see that he was old and probably suffered from angina, and had a prescription of pills to alleviate the symptoms; and let us conclude, in the least convoluted manner, that he probably just had a minor ‘heart attack’, and nothing else is to blame.

I do believe though, against the creed of Occam, that there is the minute possibility that this could have been a case of… something else. I hardly wish to write it, how little I believe it to be true! But I will say it: poisoning. Of course, of course, of course I do not suspect Christine of such a horrible deed! – but rather I suspect the unconscious husband himself. It is not so unheard of for a person to do such a thing to himself, especially in a moment of madness or distress… I suggested this possibility to Christine in the most delicate way I could manage, but the girl was furious with me for even suggesting such a notion.

“He would not do that,” she declared, with such disturbing confidence that I did not dare press the subject further. But still I wonder.

Still I worry.

That night the patient’s urine was as red as the blood coursing through my own veins. Hematuria is not a typical symptom of angina… not that I have seen, at any rate. It is more classically a symptom of kidney injury. Of course it is possible that it was not a heart attack, as that was merely my preliminary diagnosis. There are any number of other things that could cause toxicosis of the glomeruli and apoptosis of the nephrocytes.

And he awoke, lucid but silent, near dawn. He sat straight up in bed, staring at the foot of his cot where Christine was pitched over and sleeping. For a long while he just looked at her, cresting his gaze upon the arch of her back – until finally he blinked, and laid himself back down and went back to sleep.

Christine stirred not fifteen minutes after that. She seemed furious with herself for falling asleep, and in this state of aggravation she leaned over his face, peered into the eye holes of that strange black mask, and mumbled something about how tense he looked in his repose.

“Is there anything you can do?” she demanded of me, as I drew near.

“Convalescence will take time,” I told her. “I can do nothing to speed up the process.”

“Of course,” she said. She folded her arms across her bountiful bosom and contemplated her husband’s form for a good many silent minutes, before looking back up to me and regarding me with a stare of solid stone and jaw set firmly with resolution.

“What can you do to extend it, then?”

To my attorney, I apologize. I could not resist her girlish charms; I answered her question fully.

Chapter Text

No More Gifts
“The Rest-Cure”
(Part II)

The typical rest-cure called for six to eight weeks; Doctor Gradus prescribed a twelve week treatment.  

It was nothing too nefarious. Christine had asked for time , nothing more, and Gradus had delivered. Erik, for his part, offered little resistance to the path laid out before him; Gradus’s assortment of tinctures and serums ensured the slumbering monster was kept quite docile.  

He awoke at carefully planned intervals, never as lucid as that very first time; he took his meals in his cot, spoon-fed by a stony-faced Christine who never allowed his foggy eyes to close until the bowl was empty; for those less than glorious moments – as when he writhed from the pain of his mask, which had been kept secured to his face from the very first moment of their arrival and so had begun to chafe spots unseen upon his face, to the point that tiny trickles of blood began to leak from beneath it to collect upon the starched white linen of the doctor’s spare pillowcase – an injection of paraldehyde was administered, and Christine was then left alone by the doctor to do as she needed; but for the most part he slept like the dead, in a grave repose, clutching the blankets to his chin in rigored, waxen fists.  

It was a quiet week that passed within the doctor’s small apartment. The long rests incurred by the paraldehyde injections and the laudanum draughts were punctuated only by Gradus’s futile efforts at flirting. Christine, in turn, took to her journal most hours of the day, after Erik had been put down; and through her voluminous penstrokes she tried her best to distance herself from her reality.  

On the seventh day, Christine had once again taken up her spot on the bench in the main room, reclining upon the deflated cushions in the most comfortable position she could manage. Her journal was open but currently ignored, in favor of considering a chirping bird resting its wings outside her window lattice. The sunlight streaming past played a soft pattern upon her face, threading shades of shimmering gold through her lustrous curls and casting a shadow of her supple silhouette upon the wooden floorboards beside her. Her breaths came peacefully in her tranquility; for on this sunsoaked bench she could play pretend that the night had truly and finally passed on to the day.  

And so, it was this picture, of a radiant maiden of legend and lore, that greeted Doctor Gradus this morning as he strolled into the main room. A form of affection on his mind, he planted his hands upon his hips and gave out, in his most fascinating manner:  

“Ah, bewitching one! Isn’t it a bit early for a lady like you to be thinking at the window? Sad little kitten, I must have forgotten to put out the milk! Ha ha ha! Have you stayed up all night considering my proposal?”  

“Am I not even allowed my own thoughts now, doctor?” a thoroughly displeased Christine replied, just as her lattice bird flew off. Sweeping her locks over her shoulder in her indignation, she turned her head and regarded the man before her with clear disdain. “What on earth do you suppose a woman should do in her off-hours, if not think?”  

“Be beautiful,” Gradus said easily, flashing a perfect smile at her. “Just as you always are.”  

“Oh, you absolutely stupid man. Even you must know how insufferable that sounded.”  

Indeed, Gradus laughed. “I suppose not all of my charms can be as winsome as the rest. Can a man help it if a pretty girl in a pretty dress sits around his flat all day and keeps batting her eyes at him like that?”  

“I’m not batting my eyes.”  

Gradus stepped a little closer in his amusement. “No, you are, you are! Even now! I can see you, little minx!” He placed his hands to his smiling cheeks, rubbing them up and down along their curves, caressing his ego-swollen head with affection and exhibition as he continued, with mirth, “You must be thinking to yourself – oh, so that’s what America’s been working so hard on over there! Ha! What luck you’ve had, to see this fish from the other side of the pond swimming down by your little hook! I don’t mean to sound pompous, little lady, but I am a doctor and I do pride myself on my assessment skills. It’s my professional opinion, you must see, that testifies to my debonair good looks. I am certifiably handsome, by my own clinical judgement, and I’ve got medical journals on my shelf that agree I’ve got more years ahead of me than behind me. I am a specimen unrivaled in Paris; a man of the very first calibre; and certainly these virtues cannot be denied, compared to the other –”  

Christine snapped her journal shut. “For heaven’s sake, Doctor Gradus, I am a married woman. ”  

“And I can see how you are!” he marveled. “I would have called into question the intelligence of the entire male race if you’d been left unwed till now!”  

“Is there a point you wish to be making?” Christine demanded. “Or is your only desire in the world to tell me over and over how beautiful I look to you? Because honestly, doctor, my husband does that to me already – and, quite embarrassingly for you, it’s far more romantic when he does it.”  

“Does he!” Gradus remarked. “Why, I wouldn’t have thought he would! What words does he choose to flatter you with, which have won your heart over so completely?”  

For the briefest moment Erik’s furious face flashed in her mind, spittle flying everywhere as he stood atop her and bellowed out the most horrendous menagerie of vulgarities and obscenities – those very same vulgarities and obscenities suddenly being screamed in her ears once again, right here and right now, even as Erik snored painfully on in the other room –    

“That is highly irrelevant,” Christine returned, gritting her teeth as she forced herself to the present. “And anyway, why would you think he wouldn’t? Should I only be pretty to certain pairs of eyes?”   

Gradus waved his hand. “No, of course not! It’s just that the man is rather aged , Christine, as you certainly must know! And so…”  

“And so…?”  

“Well, the marriage isn’t really conventional, is it?” Here Gradus pulled up a chair and sat beside her, stretching out his long legs and leaning towards her at an overtly intimate angle. “Listen here, Chrissy. The truth is I don’t really mind. I respect that he is your husband. We all must marry who we must. I married my cousin! And you married that sick old man in the other room. I’m a man of manners so I’m not going to ask if he has money; that’s what God gave us the gift of assumption for. Anyway, it’s all just a game called ‘society’ that we play with each other. A big game, you understand? And we get forced into these positions that we don’t want to be in, that we don’t really understand, all for the sake of these made-up values that we don’t really care about – and we end up together with people we couldn’t give two hoots about, who make us so incredibly, so dreadfully unhappy. And we stay like that until we die, God bless us! Or until we’re brave enough to go against it. In a way, it’s the ultimate humiliation to love the one you’ve married. Don’t you see? To give in to this big game, and let it tell you what to do, how to feel, who to love…” He lifted his hands in a show of flippancy. “Now, I’m not asking you to be brave. I wouldn’t dare be so brazen. But I just want you to consider your options. Think about it. You’re a good girl, Christine Daaé - so will you promise me you will?”  

He reached out for her hand, all tenderness and feigned modesty as he lifted it from her lap to clasp two firm hands around. Not a finger trembled between the two; not a bead of perspiration slipped there between their palms. It was a warm and hard set of hands he encased her with, built of so much flesh she could hardly see the bones beneath the skin.   

Suddenly now she was looking in his eyes and seeing her own reflection in those dark glassy surfaces. Her lips parted slightly as she swallowed and blushed, and as she did the reflection repeated her own actions back to her – and she saw, through the mirror of his eyes, for the very first time how she must have appeared to him – in her dressing room - a pretty ribboned rose falling from her fingers as his voice wrapped around her that very first time – “Do not be afraid, Christine; it is only me, your friend, your servant, the Angel of Music” -   

When Gradus tugged her closer, she did not resist; and when he pressed his lips to hers, she did not pull away.  

Chapter Text

“The Rest-Cure”
(Part III)

“Hold your head up, my love. You’re sinking back down.”

With a gentle touch, Christine guided Erik’s chin back up above the water. He parted his lips in a soundless murmur, all thought and meaning lost in a breathless gasp. She hushed him softly, running a hand through a few grey wisps of hair that sat slicked upon his scalp – “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay…”

They were in the bathroom now. It’d been over a week since their arrival to the doctor’s flat, and in that time Erik had begun to reek - first of sweat, then of ripe decay - and by today Christine had been forced to accept that a bath in bed was just not the same as a bath in a tub.

So to the bathroom and into the water she had thus cast her husband’s nude form, scrubbing at length the waxen skin upon his slender torso. She took her time with his chest, coasting down his intercostals with a small hand-towel pilfered from the doctor’s personal cabinet… yet she never seemed to be able to reach deep enough between his sunken ribs to clean him completely, though she tried, nearly threading the cloth behind the bones as she pushed in as far as she could go. His arms, those lanky lengths of limbs, she lifted by their tiny wrists to hold above them both like a marionette’s as she washed him from hand to shoulder; and his legs she raised by their ankles, ever mindful of the deep scar that ran along the one side, ever delicate with his slackened joints as she bent them back to fit into the tub when she was done wicking down each withered calf.

Sedate, but not unconscious, he gave little hums every time she passed over a part of his body that had grown a bit tender in this first week of disuse. What shreds of energy he had, she had him put into keeping his chin above the water line. From time to time, though, he would tire and start to slip down slowly beneath the surface; when that happened she would remind him to stay awake… but sometimes he could not, and he’d begin to bubble for breath with his bloated bottom lip, and she’d be forced to reach down to tug him back up to life.

She did her work slowly and with precision, making sure to leave no spot upon his skin untouched. She rubbed slow circles in his back, massaging with extra care the spots that made him whimper – and with less the ones that made him moan – and she began to sing as she worked, a light-hearted tune her father had taught her, once, just after they’d left their home in Sweden:

“Christine i Luren tutar,
Stormarna börja hvina,
Trossar och tåg och klutar
Lossna nu til slut…”

He grimaced as she pulled his ear forward and ran her warm cloth behind it. The doctor’s towels were not as gentle as his own – how could anything hope to compare against true Egyptian cotton? But she worked as tenderly as she could with the abrasive thing, moving now to the other ear, then tracing down along his neck – clutching his throat now, firmly, with one hand, as she stroked up and down with the other –

“Månan sin rundel slutar,
Stjernorna sorgligt skina,
Til sin förvandling lutar
Snart min lifsminut…”

Upon his wretched face she now came, only a fresh warm towel in hand to wield against its moldering muck. With feather-like fingers she helped him close his eyes, petting just the tips of them through his sparse brittle lashes before pressing the cloth in and delving across his sunken basins. She drew the towel down into the hollows of his cheeks, cradling his jaw with her soft palm, and slowly dragged his fragile skin against the bone.

She crested upon his nose in that same gentle manner, just as he started to slip below the water once more. Singing still, she touched her fingertips to his chin; but in response he only tilted his head up with weak intention before the grip of gravity slung it back down, sending ripples through the placid surface of the bath as his sharp chin bobbed up and down upon that precarious nob of neck. She tapped him again, harder this time, but in his somnolent state he did not stir. She paused briefly, both from lyric and lather, as she examined this sudden predicament – trailing her eyes down in thought as she took in his whole torporous corpse, considering, considering, considering…

Christine brought the towel down finally, creeping down until she covered both ruined nostrils in their entirety. She swiped at them with a single delicate, deliberate stroke, watching as his eyes fluttered but did not open. She returned and pressed harder, ever so slightly, driving his head back against the porcelain tub and observing the way the new position disturbed the careful balancing act she’d made of his pile of limbs, as they fell limply one by one into the water.

At this angle he began to slip faster, giving an abbreviated snort just as the water overtook his mouth. She followed him down with her towel, reaching wrist-deep, then elbow-deep into the water; stretching on her knees, leaning over the edge, she gazed down through the tranquil ripples as a memory began to resurface –

The memory of cold glory, as she stood high above this man, higher than the mountains, higher than the heavens…. as she stood, with a scorpion in one hand and a grasshopper in the other… stood and decreed who was to live and who was to die… as she stood like a god, towering over his prostrating corpse as he sobbed and retched and gnashed his teeth, all in vain, all in agony, until at last he paused, and listened, and did as she bade…

Beneath her towel he began to stir. She felt his mutilated nostrils flare, pulsing against her palm even through the layer of linen between them. So intimate, she mused, this death of yours could be. Wouldn’t you wish it so?

His dazed eyes flickered open and stared back at her, a mix of fear and confusion and fury –

Don’t look at me like that, Erik. Don’t act like you’re in danger. You know I could never bring myself to hurt you, to kill you. You are safe in my arms, Erik, don’t you see? That I love you?

Don’t you love me?

Don’t I just take your breath away?

He thrashed now, against her hold – which she strengthened, a little bit more with each kick of his legs, each swing of his arms, as he fought for the surface. Water poured over the tub’s edge, drowning Christine’s skirts and stockings in their sudsy foam. She adjusted, and reasserted her hold, forcing him down the more he tried to force himself up.

And she was singing, still singing, softly and sweetly and serenely beneath the storm of his splashes, completely content to let him drown out her voice with his own violent commotion, which was growing rather louder, and more tumultuous, and more passionate, as he went on – more so than perhaps was necessary, Christine might have thought, if she were allowed to think at all - his penchant for pity perhaps the driving cause of all his abuse against the tub, as he slapped his palms against the ungiving porcelain, against her vicelike grip, against himself, against anything at all – his plights for life spiraling rapidly through the rings of desire, of despair – a hedonistic performance of grief, an exhibitionistic struggle to survive – fighting, flailing, pulling, pushing, thrusting, throbbing –

He rose, at length, victorious. His head poked through the water’s surface first, every shade of purple and red, his neck swollen and angry and dripping and limp. He had not the strength to come up completely, hardly able to lift up past his shoulders, but her hand he tore away from his face and clutched it to his heaving chest.

Between his nipples she felt his heart racing, his lungs chasing each deep gasping expiration. Exhausted and weak, he could do little more than glare up at her. His jagged nails he touched to her wrist but could not break the skin; his panting mouth he could not quite pitch into a sneer. But venom he tried, and did, convey – and with an aching feeling like pity, Christine bent and pressed a soft kiss to his forehead.

“Vid rök och dam,” she sang, as she kneeled back and plucked a new towel from the floor. She dipped it down into the water in front of him, dampening it slightly, before holding it up before his eyes, her intent clear as ever as she continued singing, like a question: “vid rök och dam, och Gastars tjut…?”

There was a lull as she paused, the towel drying drop by drop as she waited for his answer…

Until finally, with a nearly imperceptible tilt of his head, he closed his eyes and nodded.

Once again she returned him below the surface, gentler this time as she guided him down against the back of the tub; once again she placed the towel against his impossible nose. They struggled for longer, and he did not claim his victory this time around. Still she raised him up, as she promised she would – he coughed and he choked, and convulsed for a long minute - but when he stopped his sputtering, he looked up at Christine and offered her the faintest ghost of a smile.

And so again and then again she dunked him back down, each time with even less resistance than the time before. She sang a hundred more verses, and he listened until she was done.

--

FROM THE MEDICAL DIARY OF
TRISTAN GRADUS,  M.D.

God, must I write it? I am laughing so hard my pen might break. But I really am a fool, I think – a jealous fool, at that. It’s been all afternoon. The walls are thin and I can… hear… them. They’re still splashing around in there. She’s singing, with truly the most marvelous voice, and he’s… he's… moaning? Jesus! I feel like I’m intruding! But at the same time I can’t go anywhere. So I will sit here, I suppose, on my tiny cot, and listen to all this great fun they’re having, and try my best not to cry.

Chapter Text

“The Rest-Cure”
(Part IV)

“So - what are we looking for again? Valerian? Velarium? Valiant?”

“Valerius,” Christine supplied. “Wanda Valerius.”

“Right, right,” her doctor companion nodded, tapping his cane absently at the infant gravestones as they passed by. Sunlight dashed upon the arbored walk as they went, dappling them here and there, from the points of their elbows to the tips of their shoes. The movement from their strides made these patterns dance rhythmically upon their forms, a romance of light and shadow, the sun filtering through the leaves and taking turns at blinding one and then the other. “Your mother, you said?”

“My mamma,” Christine corrected quickly. “My real mother is somewhere in Sweden.”

“Interesting,” the doctor said, after a short but languishing beat. “Such a shame for it, really. Père-Lachaise is a much closer walk.”

“Not always,” she said carelessly, scanning the rows once more. “Everything becomes so very far away when one is locked up in a tomb. Impossibly far away…”

“Oh – is that what we’re looking for? A tomb?” he asked. “I thought you said it was a single plot?”

It was one of the few times when his denseness seemed truly to be in earnest. But still Christine ignored his questions, in favor of looking back down at a slip of paper palmed in her left hand, stamped with the official seal of the city hall. “She’s supposed to be around here somewhere. Do you see the name?”

“I see nothing,” he said without looking. “Are you sure you’re reading that quite right?” Then, after a quiet moment of deep, sober reflection, he suggested, “Perhaps… and I do hope you do not take this the wrong way, but… perhaps, my Swedish sweetest, the French might be giving you trouble –”

“Are you this patronizing with every woman you happen to conversate with, or am I just special in some way?” Christine threw back airily. “Truly, Doctor Gradus, do you think me illiterate?”

“See, I knew you were going to act like this. I am not insulting your intelligence -”

“Yet your opinion of it is still quite obvious!” With that, she thrust the paper slip at him and snapped, “Read it yourself, you dumb doctor, and show me how easy it is to decipher, for an American man with just as good of a grasp of the French language as myself!”

Gradus caught the slip from where it sailed in midair and read it over a few times as Christine stood impatiently before him, all but tapping her shoe as she waited for him to finish. His brows furrowed more and more as his eyes flitted across the small scrap of paper several times in repetition. At last he lifted his head and gazed at the rows of headstones beside them, and then scratched his wrinkling temple.

“Well, I’ll be darned. She should be right around here.”

Christine barely resisted the urge to smack the insufferable sap. “But she isn’t. Clearly. So where in the world is she?”

“Hmm,” Gradus hummed, before clearing his throat. “Likely, the clerk wrote down the wrong section number. That must be it. Let’s keep going down the way and look around a little more. Maybe it’s nearby. And anyway, it’s a beautiful day. There isn’t anything wrong with a nice afternoon stroll, is there? Just the two of us friends walking along, admiring the view – it could be very lovely, I imagine.”

Begrudgingly… Christine was forced to agree. She couldn’t bring herself to refuse a walk in the sunshine, even with company as stellar as the doctor. There had been days, after all, in the very recent past, when she would have given anything to see even a glimpse of the sun’s light from behind a gauzed curtain. To turn the chance down now would be to give in to Erik’s infuriating logic – to agree that the wants and desires she’d had as his prisoner had been solely a product of her captivity – and that the choices she’d made back then were inherently meaningless, if she wouldn’t make the same ones now that she had a free and unchained heart to make them with…

So forward they thus proceeded, arms linked together in a show of bright eagerness on one side and stiff convention on the other. Christine was very much aware of the appearance they had; to all eyes, it would seem they were a couple making a promenade of this pretty cemetery… and really, she supposed, why couldn’t they be? Doctor Gradus was quite the strapping young man, an ornament of envy to any other woman; and Christine figured herself to be of a reasonably attractive metric (if her numerous pining suitors were to be believed). The man on her arm had already said he didn’t mind that she was married, and goodness knows Erik himself had already reminded her a million times that their marriage wasn’t valid to him in any shape or form. So what was the harm? That Erik’s feelings would get hurt? Ha! Erik be damned! Who was Erik to Christine, and Christine to Erik, besides a couple of strangers who happened to cross paths for a little while? What did she owe him – him, who never gave her anything, except when it so benefited him?

Ah! Well that settled it. Let them think we’re in love, Christine thought to herself. Let the world see us and sigh. Erik will never know.

Because Erik could not possibly know. He was dead asleep on his cot back in the apartment, having just been fed his afternoon medicine before their departure. Doctor Gradus had added another treatment to his regimen, a tincture of sodium bromide and acetanilide that had recently been invented somewhere in the Americas, which he referred to as ‘Bromo-Seltzer’ and which had caused quite the fascinating display when he dropped the tablet in Erik’s water and caused it to fizz everywhere.

“Everyone in the States is taking this these days,” Gradus had told her. “For Christ’s sake, I’ve taken it too – for headaches, you know, after a good and long night. You know the sort I’m talking about? Oh? You don’t? Fun nights, Chrissy, fun nights – have you never had a fun night? With a man? Or a woman, God bless you! I don’t judge! Ha ha ha! I’m kidding, Chrissy – I do judge. Ha ha. But I’ll have to show you one day, a good and long and fun night, and in the morning all three of us can down a glass of this stuff together. It’s perfectly safe, I promise.”

Conveniently, he never quite explained the reason why he felt another medication had to be added in the first place… but he was a doctor, Christine assured herself, and he obviously knew what he was doing. Even if he did it in the most obnoxious way possible.

Speaking of which -

“So, Chrissy,” Gradus’s grating voice startled her from her thoughts, “are you ever going to tell me who your mysterious husband is?”

She immediately sent a suspicious look up at the man linked around her arm. “Why in the world would you ask me that? You wouldn’t know him.”

“Maybe I do. You said he’s a very famous man, after all. Am I not allowed to be curious about him?”

“I never said that.”

“No, no… you did. When we first met, you said he was a very well known celebrity,” Gradus reminded her. “You said that to me. You said that’s why I can’t take off his mask. You said it’s there to protect his identity. Is it not true that you said all that?”

Christine paused. She had said that, hadn’t she? It was hard to recall the night of the opera. There’d been so much commotion, so many emotions, so much exertion. She supposed the Christine of the past probably would have made up a fine enough lie like that on the spot… so she had no choice but to admit: “It’s true. Honestly. Partially. But I truly don’t think you would know him. He has more of a… foreign… fame. In certain political circles. Not here. Not anywhere here.”

“So he’s an ambassador of sorts, you’re saying?”

“Well, yes, but actually no,” Christine said, chewing on her lip. “He was more of an… advisor… in a few different countries’ governments. He, um, isn’t quite welcome by them anymore - I’m sorry. I don’t think I should be talking about this.”

“Ah, but you can’t just leave it there, you little tease!” Gradus protested. “To dangle those dirty secrets of your husband’s before me, just to pull them back right before you’re done spilling the whole scandalous story. You’re cruel, Christine, that’s what you are.”

“Cruelty would be to say it all,” she replied harshly, “I am protecting –”

“– your husband, of course,” Doctor Gradus interjected. “How many times must I repeat that I respect your situation, Christine Daaé? You are faithful to him, because you must be… in his earshot, at the very least, isn’t that right?”

“Not -”

“But we’re here now, and he isn’t, so what’s the harm in sharing? He’ll never know, Christine…. he’ll never know what we talked about in this cemetery unless you tell him. He’ll never know what we did. So don’t you want to share? Unload a little of your heavy burdens to your good friend Doctor Gradus? He’s here for you, Chrissy, he wants to hear your words, your thoughts, your secrets…”

Christine blanched as she found the doctor suddenly leaning in towards her, eclipsing the sun, eclipsing all thought, his handsome lips puckering – or was that just her imagination? – and suddenly she was pulling back and running away from him, going ahead on the path, stammering,

“Let us keep walking – yes, yes, let us do that, Doctor Gradus! – let us drop this thread of conversation and let it die right here… let us leave it to remain right here in this cemetery, fester and rot right here in one of these graves beside us, and let us never revisit it for as long as we both shall live…”

“Golly goodness, Christine, I’ve never seen you so flustered!” Gradus laughed with delight. In a few quick strides he caught up to her, snatching her wrist and looping his arm back in with hers. He pulled her close and nudged against her shoulder playfully. “It was just a simple question. I didn’t mean to be intrusive, if you felt that I was prying. It’s just that, well, you know so much about me, and I know so little about you. Is it wrong of me to wonder?”

Ah! What was it about him that made her heart flutter so? She loathed herself for her own reactions, and so steeled herself even more against him. “I don’t know anything about you, Doctor Gradus. We are rather like perfect strangers, in all honesty.”

“And whose fault is that?” he asked, pulling away to peer down at her with mock sternness. “You’re the one who keeps me at arm’s length all the time – yet all the while you live in my room and sleep in my bed! Any part of me you haven’t seen yet is because you’ve closed your eyes to it. My name is Tristan, good girl, but you never do call me that. I wish you would. ‘Doctor Gradus’ is so terribly sterile.”

And ‘Chrissy’ is so terribly condescending, Christine thought to herself, even as she forced herself to send a terse, politely apologetic smile up at him. “I am only wishing to keep a common decency between the two of us. Our circumstances could be misunderstood as rather improper, if you haven’t noticed.”

“Who is watching?” Gradus asked, flippant as ever. “Who cares what we do? Have we not discussed this all already?” He leaned in, and in a lower tone, asked, “Have we not already kissed – several times, in fact, in various durations and manners?”

“None of that is relevant to this discussion,” Christine said quickly, squirming away. “I am an actress, I have kissed many men. Please do not think yourself special for that.”

“Oh, so it is nothing special to be kissed by Christine Daaé?” Doctor Gradus asked, wiggling his eyebrows. He snaked his arm around her shoulders and held her fast, making sure she wouldn’t retreat again. “I wonder what else La Daaé has done? Would she care to share the rest of her repertoire with this most ordinary of men – as she has for all the rest? I am a doctor, Chrissy, and doctors must always be practicing. We are forever students in this world; students, I say, of the human body, standing at the foot of your Parnassus – and it is my scholarly duty to conquer your highest peaks. Allow me to ascend; allow me to learn; allow me to mount you, following the footprints left from all the old masters!”

Here now he pulled her off the path and led her around to the backside of a nearby tree. This pursuit of privacy was purportedly pointless, slender of girth as the young tree was; but this flimsy twig might have been a mighty oak for all the isolation Christine suddenly felt by it. The path was only five paces away, but it felt so much further; they were completely exposed, but no one was around; no one was around, but Gradus was right in front of her, pressing himself against her, embracing her – and she was embracing him back –

And then his lips were upon her own. Her eyes flew open to find his closed, or at the very least downcast, completely ignorant of her gaze as she watched his expression with disturbed fascination. Here was a man who knew how to seize his own pleasure! Certainly he was being very rude about it – and a little lewd, Christine thought, as he shifted and asserted himself a smidge more against her – but he was completely unambivalent and unambiguous in his maneuvers, completely unapologetic as he slid from her mouth to her twisting neck. Here was a man who could not just come, not just see, but could also conquer how he wanted, when he wanted – all without interference of any pesky conflict of emotion, without guilt and without conscience – without love and without remorse – without regard for who it was he was slotting now between –

With a sudden jolt of clarity, Christine shoved the doctor away, sending him tripping and stumbling through a bed of overgrown dandelions. She spun on her heel to make her escape, heedless of her unsteady footing in the grassy lawn… but the moment she took her first step she heard a tremendous thump from behind her. At peril of salt, she turned back around… just to find the doctor sitting like a dazed fool upon the ground, reclining slightly as his hands held himself up, the poor yellow dandelions crushed and smothered beneath his tan-suited rear.

He said nothing – merely looked up at her with the strangest look of bemusment and bashfulness wrought upon his dumb face – merely sat and stared, as she toed her way towards him and stood like a horrified statue above him, peering down at him with over-large gargoyleic eyes…

Until at long last, she surprised herself as she began to giggle, purls of laughter like little bubbles foaming within her mouth.

“Ah – you liked that, then?” Gradus grinned cluelessly, a tinge of blithering amusement playing at the edge of his words. There was a lost look in his eye, as he gazed up at her, crooking his head pleasantly as he regarded her strange demeanor. “I can do far more than kiss, Madame, if you so please… but you will have to let me, if we are to proceed…  unless you are to join me down here on this soft bed of flowers…?”

There was an immediate, instinctive retort on Christine’s tongue, intended to be full of fire and scald, but it was cut short by another sudden fit of giggles.

“I am lost,” the doctor confessed as he attempted to keep pace with her laughter. “Is it your nerve which tickles you now? You seem uncomfortable – oh, surely that is it, I can see it on your face! Ah! Ha ha! Timorous girl, in the plainest of words I must ask: have you ever known ecstasy? In the arms of that corpse, have you been made a virginal wife? Ah! You laugh! But I can see the truth behind your coy smile. You are eager to explore, like every other mild-mannered little girl before you. There is a time to laugh and a time to cry; so too is there a time to grow up and learn. So come to me, Christine; come and cosset and cream your curiosity. I will happily be your digitent master.”

“Oh, Doctor Gradus – you innocent boy – you cannot even comprehend the intimations of my marriage!” she exclaimed, bending in half as the laughs assailed her. “Why – whatever you picture to yourself, in your rudest dreams – nothing could ever compare with how it really is!” She guffawed in an extraordinarily unwomanly manner, and wiped a few tears from her eyes. “My husband is – a sort of – DON JUAN, YOU KNOW!”

Now she was laughing to the point of sobbing and sobbing to the point of laughing. She fell to her knees, gripping into the doctor’s outstretched arms, crying now into his coat, rubbing the side of her face against the wool as the burning absence of Erik’s kiss upon her cheek suddenly seared beneath her skin.

“You are certainly a strange girl!” Gradus marveled, securing her further into his embrace. “What has that old stiff done to you?”

“I’ll tell you!” Christine cried, as another fit of giggles came over her. “He has done some of the most ridiculous things a man could do to a woman! And some of the most romantic! But mostly ridiculous! Ha ha! Love and lunacy are two sides of the same coin, haven’t you heard? It’s why people are always falling madly in love with each other, I dare say! He’s – oh, you’ll like this – he’s a musician, and that really should say it all. He’s an eccentric and a freak, a teacher and a monster, a father and a sister. He is heaven and he is hell. He is not a subscriber! He is a loiterer. He’s a viciously lonely old crab, and he doesn’t like to be disturbed – but he knows, oh, that I like to have my friends around, so he built me this nice little place to keep them when they drop in unexpectedly! He’s an architect too, did I tell you that? Oh, and such a great host! He served them – ha ha! – wine and everything! Isn’t that funny? Wine! Wine! Of course, it all went bad – all turned to powder! – but he’s not used to houseguests, don’t you understand? Doctor Gradus, why aren’t you laughing anymore? My husband is a very funny man! He killed – ha ha! – the Comte de Chagny… twice! A man without a sense of humor wouldn’t have been able to achieve that level of comedic precision! I say – I say – would you ever kill a man for me? Ha ha ha! I don’t think you would!”

Gradus’s laughs had petered out slowly over the course of Christine’s rambling, until he was left only frowning with a slight furrowed brow atop his face.

“Christine Daaé, is this what the problem has been all along?” he asked very seriously, pulling back to level a sober stare at her. “Your husband… this is what he has done to you? Overtaken you with his massive endowment of wit?”

Through her laughs, she managed an ungracious, “…What?”

“Your husband…” Doctor Gradus reasserted, more slowly, in case her womanly brain needed time to comprehend his words. “He is… funnier than me? And that is why you so adamantly refuse to return my affections? Am I understanding this correctly?”

“You are such a stupid man,” Christine said, with a final few more laughs. “But yes. Sure. My husband is funnier than you. That’s the point I was trying to make. Exactly.”

“But he can’t well make you laugh in the state he’s in right now,” the doctor said quietly. “We are both making sure of that, are we not? And what of your intention of leaving him? You have not spoken of that in many days. Have things somehow changed? Is that why you persist…?”

“Oh, Doctor Gradus,” she sighed with residual amusement. “You know absolutely nothing. The things I do and the words I say – it is very nearly endearing to see how little you understand of any of them. Perhaps your thickness is the only reason I have stayed at all. I do admire that in you.”

“My thickness?” he queried, hopeful.

“Your profound idiocy,” Christine said, a smile alighting her face once more. “You are a man of great want chasing a woman of little need. How you sit here, blind to your own condition, is the most marvelous mystery. I can say whatever I want to you, and it won’t matter a single bit. In fact: it is rather refreshing to speak with a man in such a way. It has been much too long since I’ve had a simple talk.”

“You speak in circles,” Gradus mused, “and, indeed, I do find it difficult to follow your train of thought at times. But, Christine, I must tell you that I find your words a little unkind. Was it your intention to hurt my feelings? I do not fancy myself an idiot.”

“Then how would you describe yourself?” she replied. “Are you, despite everything I have borne witness to until now, a man of great cerebrality and culture? I should say that should be a terrible disappointment for me. The greater your genius, the greater my dismay with you would be. I have had my fill of fascinating men for the time being; I am eager now for less complicated company.”

Gradus released her from his arms and leaned back with a frown. He studied her intently, a look of insult upon his face, for the length of ten breaths -  until at last a look of rapture overcame him and he pulled her back into his arms, suddenly squeezing himself against her with the most sportive of embraces.

“Christine Daaé… I will be as bland as milk soup if that’s what you so desire! You are the first woman in the world to ever wish me to be something less than what I already am. For you, then, I can be vapid, I can be dull, I can be a jester’s personal fool. I can tear up my degree and forsake my earned title; for you I will be just Tristan! But know, lovely girl, that I do not need to play games of imagination to realize my own attraction for you. I desire you as you truly are.”

“And what would that be?”

“A painfully unhappy girl trapped in a painfully unhappy marriage,” Gradus declared, cupping her face in a soft, warm hand. “A woman of incomparable beauty. One with the cheeks pinker than the summer’s sunset, with lips redder than the winter’s rose. With eyes as perfectly blue as the middle of the Atlantic, in the middle of the day, in the middle of my life. I have never seen such perfection in a woman. Such perfection… such perfect resemblance…”

“Resemblance?” Christine asked as he trailed off.

“To my wife,” he said lightly. “The one who died. You just look so much like her. I forget sometimes, when I am with you – but do not think me a cheat for these idle thoughts. I am an upright man, and I have always been adamantly against adultery. I have no affairs, only meetings; many meetings, sure, with many other Chrissies, but they are all always orderly arrangements, never overlapping, never counterswapping. I never start what I don’t intend to finish, and I always finish what I’ve started. When I kiss, I kiss only you; and when I burn, I burn only for you.”

Once again he pressed his lips to hers, the back of a finger snaking below her chin to tilt her head more readily up towards his own. It was a veteran kiss, every subtle movement well practiced and perfected, masterful in its deceit of her own senses and judgements. She had no choice but to melt against his silken touch, hating herself more and more for every further second she let him hold her there to him; it was only when his tongue made its insidious invasion of the private chamber of her mouth that she finally jerked back for the third time that afternoon.

“Not here!” she told him. “We cannot do this here!”

“You are such an inglorious tease,” Gradus bemoaned. “What is the matter now? Are you shy? Are you superstitious? What is it, Christine; tell me quickly so I may fix it! Must I find a thicker bush for us to hide behind? Would one of those tall mausoleums suffice? Tell me, I implore you!”

“We cannot kiss here,” she repeated in a strained voice. “We cannot kiss anywhere!”

“And why in the world not?” he exlaimed in anguish. “Have we not just discussed everything there is to discuss?”

“I just – do not much like being kissed in this fashion!”

“What, pleasurably?”

“Secretly!” she said. “I am many things but I am not a dishonest woman. I made a vow to that man lying ill in your apartment and I intend not to break it. This goes past marriage, doctor, and this goes past love. Bar me from your rooms if this displeases you too deeply, but I will not hold an affair behind my husband’s back.”

Doctor Gradus let out a tremendous moan of aggravation, before thrusting himself back and rolling his eyes. With a deep groan he heaved himself up, before extending his hand to her.

“I don’t know who you think I am,” he said sourly, as he helped her to her feet, “but I have always been a gentleman towards you and towards your husband. It is the most magnificent insult for you to think your residence in my rooms has been conditional on a romp of romance occurring between us. I am your husband’s doctor first, Mademoiselle, and your suppliant second; it would be highly unethical for his care to be reliant upon such an unprofessional stipulation. I should say – shame on you for holding such lowly presumptions of a man who merely wants to help you!”

With ire he dusted himself off, letting out little grunts of annoyance as he swatted at the pale green stains on his pants that refused to come off. Christine watched him with perturbation, entirely unused to this new emotion the doctor was demonstrating. Wasn’t he supposed to be her eternally unbothered suitor?

She knew not what to say to him, whether to yell back about his contemptuous outburst or to apologize for incurring it; nor did it matter, for in the next minute he hooked his arm about hers and directed them back to the path.

“I should think we should be heading back home now,” he sneered childishly. “We have already wasted so many hours here on this pointless task and I have other things to be getting up to today. If you truly must, I’ll bring you back another day so you can look for your dead mother some more; but I can’t be bothered to look and look for hours on end for some magical grave that’s disappeared from the bounds of earth and sun. I daresay, Christine – are you sure this woman is even dead?”

Any apology she might have made died on her lips. The wind sucked from her lungs, anger exploding within her, and with the last grips of her self control she managed to turn her nose up and away, and bit her tongue to silence.

For here was a concept she had not once considered in all the time since that awful good-bye. By all means it was laughable, and ludicrous, and completely and utterly inconceivable… but just by speaking it aloud, Doctor Gradus had introduced it into her heart as an imaginary thing that now had the possibility of being true –

Even if she knew, she knew, it didn’t.

Her mamma was dead to her the moment Erik told her the words: stone dead, even, decomposing and festering with rot and mold. Maggots were laying eggs in her  eyesockets and millipedes were scurrying around and devouring that most delectable topmost layer of thin flesh and fat, which was slipping off her shoulders like a chemise for a lover. Her mamma was dead, the way her father was dead, the way her mother was dead, and Christine had already done the horrible task of accepting this as fact… and yet, against all her knowledge of the way the world worked, here she was, walking arm in arm with this incorrigible twit of a man who had just made her mamma come back to life…

It was the cruelest gift someone had ever given her: hope for the impossible. Even Erik hadn’t dared to be so diabolical. He had been honest with her, if not about the way she died but at least about the one thing that mattered! But again – here she was, leaning into this miracle worker of a doctor who could give life to the lifeless, praying suddenly for the minutest chance that Erik had lied, just as he had lied before…

Erik, she prayed, I will forgive you for everything if you just give me back my mamma. I will forgive you for the milk and the tonic and the marriage and the Angel… I will even forgive you for Raoul. So please, Erik, please…

“Here we are,” Gradus announced, cutting through her thoughts. In the duration of her prayers, they had reached the end of the cemetery and her companion had hailed a cabriolet to take them home. He helped her up now, masking poorly his sustained vexation with her as he gripped her harshly about her waist for a single unnecessary moment as she ascended the steps. He followed suit, doffing his hat as he sat down beside her. He offered little conversation to her, apparently having lost all interest in her as soon as she made her intentions with him inherently clear; he opted instead to look outside through the window, pondering whatever snubbed and spurned doctors ponder in moments like these; Christine likewise turned the other way to contemplate the matter of the alive but dead Mamma Valerius. In this way the cabriolet endured its tumultuous but silent journey back to the doctor’s apartment on the Rue de Rivoli – surprising both when it rolled to the stop and they found their hands clasped together upon the wide girth of empty bench that stretched out between them.

Chapter Text

“The Rest-Cure”
(Part V)

It was like they were lovers for all of three minutes, as they traipsed up the apartment stairs and bustled through the doctor’s front door. He held her to the wall and chased her lips in playful assault, relishing in her resistance, lapping at her cheeks with a throbbing tongue each time she spun away. A hand around her waist, he urged her to the bench – stopping only when her small hand snaked around his own, and beckoned him towards the bedroom door.

He followed her blindly through that most desirous of portals, stumbling all the way, a fire blazing within him as she wrapped him now against her form and kissed him without restraint. It was a fierce embrace she took him with, far fiercer than any woman he’d ever been with before, ruthless and pitiless and merciless in all its utter prepensity and depravity. He caved easily to her eminence, smitten and submitting, intoxicated by his own obedience as he melted beneath her golden kiss. He was her hostage; and she was both warden and ransom, the door and the key, opening before him like a rose blooming in the winter, a miracle of nature – he came to his senses with a start –

“Your husband!”

For the decrepit corpse in question was lying wretched as ever beneath a single untucked sheet, his glassy golden eyes staring straight ahead at them from behind that disturbingly blank silken mask still tied tightly to his face. The doctor flushed beet red at the sight of this withered cuckold laid out so naturally upon this borrowed bed as if it were his very own, soiling the bedsheets with the stale odor of his perspiring nakedness. His horrible mouth was agape, screeching in silent agony for the faithlessness of his wife; and Gradus toddered backwards at the sight of this ghastly expression, even marred as it was by the jarring cut of the mask… for the utter despair of just that downturned lower lip alone was enough to inspire the most painful, most dreadful feelings within him. What awful lachrymosity must be hidden beneath that scrap of silk, black as an ebony casket! What horrors of human heartache!

“What about him!” Christine huffed, seeming put-out. She swept over to the bedside, and with two impatient fingers brushed down the corpse’s stiff eyelids. “See, doctor, I know this man too well. Sometimes he sleeps with his eyes open. It happens more when he’s bothered by something going on in his unconscious mind – nightmares usually, he’s told me, of his younger years – and at times I’ve even known him to thrash and flail to the point of serious injury. It’s expected, I’m sure, for a man with his experiences… but tell me, is this better for you, doctor?”

“I rather think we should be going to another room,” Gradus proposed, still reeling and feeling uneasy. “Your husband, he is – well – don’t you think it’s disrespectful to –”

“Nonsense,” Christine said, and to his great shock lowered herself onto the cot to recline beside her husband’s comatose form. She made herself comfortable, snuggling in close to him, draping her angel’s arm about her like a fur stole around her neck. “He is medicated, is he not?”

“Well, yes. But…”

“Then we should have no issues.” Christine petted her husband’s cold hand, where it lay limply atop her breast. “I told you I did not wish to hold an affair behind his back… so you see, we shall not. From this moment forward, if you wish to kiss me, or even to speak to me, you must come to me only when I am here.”

“Christine – this is – have you no decency?!” Gradus asked, quite unnerved. “I requested no affair, only… physicality. If you are not interested, a simple ‘no’ would suffice. You do not have to be so dramatic about it as to – to –”

“To tease a man whom I have no intention of ever loving?” Christine finished for him, cupping Erik’s flaccid hand to her heart theatrically. “I am no tease, Monsieur; I am only a woman of my word. Where have I said you must drop your bothersome advances? I should think it’s your own self-consciousness which makes you stumble at this point! For he would certainly never know the difference, the poor wretch… I am asking you only to look at him as you harass me now. Look at him, and understand the colossal ugliness of what you are asking us both to do. I am not saying no. I can never say no. I am willing to do whatever you want… as long as you just look at him.”

She sank back now fully against Erik, letting the challenge sit in the air between them. A small triumphant smile ghosted at the edges of her lips – the edges only, and no more – as she leveled a cold glare at him that only grew increasingly harder as the seconds ticked by, filling the room with the bloat of their grave silence. Would he dare, she wondered… would he really dare, in the face of this monstrosity made incarnate?

Doctor Gradus, as it turned out, was a far different beast than any she had encountered before. He was no Erik, no Raoul, no Swedish fiddler whom she had once deferentially referred to as pappa… this much was clear, for he turned away from her, revulsion wrought upon his face, and proclaimed with great disgust:

“You certainly have a – a – bizarre perversion to you, Christine Daaé… and I must say, I do not share the same!”

“Well, yes, doctor,” Christine smiled in coy victory, taking note that despite his discomfort he did not leave the room. “I am an odd girl indeed. I thought that was endearing to you?”

“I do not like odd girls!” Gradus spat shrilly, like a child being given the wrong present. Then, perhaps noting his puerile behavior, smoothed his hands on his sides and attempted desperately to regain his composure. “I mean – of course I like you, Chrissy, in a sensible way, because I am after all a sensible man. And I believed you were a sensible girl! Perhaps odd, a little odd, but can’t one can be odd and sensible, and beautiful, all at the same time? But this, um… this departure… of civil custom… is one hardly lacking in absurdity! Where are the bygone days of the proper fling? When a man and a girl could molest each other in peace, in secret, in the dark, without all this nonsensical insensibility? I mean – I mean – you are making me feel like a moralless rat, Christine Daaé, don’t you understand?”

He was near tears by the time he finished, thrusting his fists into the air as he tried to explain, with no small amount of frustration, his stance on this sordid matter. He gesticulated as he ejaculated, pleading with her to understand his point of view, and even thumped his hand thrice against his heart in a torturous show of virtue. At the end of it all, though, Christine could offer him nothing more than a small, insincere shrug, smiling all the while, and say,

“If you wish to do nothing, we shall.”

“It is not – !” Gradus attempted anew, sputtering at his own inadequacy. “I am not opposed, Chrissy, just not here – not in front of him –”

“I told you my condition,” Christine said simply. “I thought it was a very generous stipulation. I do not know what else to tell you. If it is too much for you… well, as I said, we do not have to do anything at all.”

Doctor Gradus opened his mouth to give a retort, any retort, as his face grew hideously scarlet and his eyes stung once again with the barbed pricks of his boorish tears… but in the end he could summon no words to continue this unmannerly tantrum of scruples. Defeated and surrendering, the gelded boy sank back against the wall – collapsing nearly in half as the agony of his unsatisfaction undercame him, and so turned his gaze miserably upon the floor.

“You are a wicked girl,” he grumbled. “Do you know that? Wicked, and cruel… very cruel!”

“I’ve been called worse.”

“You’ve said that before – but now I’m quite inclined to believe you!” Now the doctor looked back up again, eyes blazing red, and gestured helplessly to the bed. “Is this how you are all the time? With him, even? I just don’t understand, Christine. I thought you were a good girl. Why must you be like this?”

“There is nothing good about what you are asking from me,” Christine said, taking some pity on the man. “I respect my husband. Is that so wrong?”

“Well, it is unkind, don’t you think?”

For a moment she was silent. Then -

“My husband and I have never cared much for kindness between us,” she replied, a softness entering her tone. “We do not have… a normal sort of relationship… as others do. I cannot fault you for being confused. I am confused by it myself at times.”

As she spoke she regarded the man in whose arms she lay, studying the sharp angles of the mask upon his face. Candlelight rendered him in chiaroscuro; in profile like this he was nothing but a contradiction, with features harder than carved stone, built of silk softer than any human flesh. He was not a man but an oxymoron; a real ghost and a living corpse.

“Yet not confused enough to come away from him, obviously,” Gradus pointed out. “What sort of confusion is it in a marriage which leads a girl astray from the world and makes her clutch out for her husband, rather than the other way around? I find myself growing impatiently curious to know, Christine, for you have never told me a single relevant detail about your relationship with this man. I have eyes; I can see he is a much older man than you. I can see his obscenely poor state of health, even with the obstacle of that silly mask on a string getting in the way of all my assessments. But you… you are very clearly a beautiful young woman. You could have married any man you desired. Weren’t there any younger, handsomer patrons running around that Opera house that you could have bewitched? Who is this man, who has found himself so lucky as to win your finger? And is luck even the right word for it? What exactly, Christine Daaé, are the circumstances of your marriage? Tell me – I must know!”

“That is no business of yours,” Christine said reflexively.

“Of course it’s not,” Gradus replied. “But I can ask about it anyway. And have I not earned the privilege? I am treating your husband for you, you might recall – treating him in ways no other doctor would ever dare permit!”

“Must my entire life be your open book?” Christine demanded. “Simply because I sought your assistance for my husband’s care? You are a nasty man – a charlatan, most hateful and most spiteful!”

In her ire, Erik’s hand slipped down the curve of her breast and ran a jagged nail against her collarbone. Instantly, she stilled, and when she spoke next it was with a more gentle tone.

“I am aware that you perceive us with confusion. And you, doctor… I am sure you find great frustration in that confusion, seeing as you are a man of learning, who makes his living off of knowing. But really you should be grateful for your own ignorance – for there is nothing but sadness to be found behind my husband’s eyes, when he happens to turn them upon me. I am the worst thing that’s ever happened to him in his life.”

“The worst!” Gradus exclaimed dubiously. “How could you ever be the worst? Especially to a man like him – old, frail, decrepit…?”

“I have a way of making men miserable,” Christine said, touching her hand up to Erik’s and stroking quietly along the length of his spindliest finger. “Look at yourself, Doctor Gradus, and tell me your eyes have always looked that pink… see? You barely know me and yet I’ve already made you weep like a child. It is not unusual for men to cry on their knees before me, because of me. Erik does it near daily. But for some reason he remains…”

“ ‘Erik’ is your husband, I take it?” Gradus asked, still grasping for any sort of clarification whatsoever, not knowing any better than to do so.

Christine bit her lip and furrowed her brows, upset that she had let even that detail slip. “Yes. But. Well… you should never call him that. It is not his name and I am sure he would be much displeased to hear you refer to him by it.”

“It certainly sounds like a name. Are you sure it’s not his?”

“It is nothing but a pet-name,” Christine demurred. “Something I call him, like ‘dear’ or ‘darling.’ But it’s not really his.”

“He is a man with no name?”

“He is a man whom I call Erik,” she said, with a note of finality. “He is a man whom no one shall address but me.”

She leaned her head against Erik’s shoulder, pressing close enough for his old dead scent to perfume her senses. It was nice to have his familiar odour always close at hand, something to remind her of how it once was. Back before Doctor Gradus, before the opera L’Homme, before the goodbye, before the scorpion, even before the mirror. There was always that scent of death permeating her dreams, from the very first moment her father kneaded his gnarled fingers into her golden hair, pulling her closer and closer still to his cooling corpse, as she’d knelt there praying over his deathbed… praying for his soul, praying for God’s mercy… as he rasped out a promise in her ear… a promise made with good intentions, a promise fit to damn him to hell, a promise that one day the Angel of Music would come from heaven to visit her…

“Okay,” Gradus was saying, although she wasn’t really listening anymore. “Okay, so you will not speak about him. Tell me about yourself, Christine. Tell me something – anything – and I will be content enough to leave you alone just for that.”

“There isn’t much of a line between the two of us,” she said slowly, pressing a hand to her husband’s chest. The sheet was slightly damp with his slick sudation, the only barrier between her palm and his skin; and she could feel his heart beating, slowly, languidly, unlike it ever beat in her presence before. The sedatives were working like a charm, then, finally making him the complacent, if not actually willing, recipient of her endearment and affection that she’d wished him to be for so long. And yet there was no delight in this victory; there was no satisfaction in this triumph; for as benumbed as he was by her exertions, she had made herself just the same. An unwed wife of an unwed husband. “We are just too connected at this point. There isn’t a thing I could tell you about myself that wouldn’t betray him in some way.”

For once Gradus considered her words before choosing his own. What blissful silence there was between them, for several long seconds, as he stood there, against the wall, taking her thoughts to heart. He tilted his head as he mulled, his gaze tracing the absent movements of her hand around Erik’s chest as she sat and waited for him to speak… until, finally, he did.

“Have I ever spoken to a woman named Christine Daaé?” he asked, slow and deliberate. At this strange, nearly stupid question Christine turned her head back up to look at him, ready to roll her eyes and rebuff him once again – but there was a frown set upon his face that made her stop her hand’s movement. It was a grim frown, paired with two equally grim brows which were furrowed with concern, which told her one terrifying thing:

He is beginning to understand.

And that thought was terrifying, in much the same way as it had been terrifying when she’d spilled the whole sorry tale out to Raoul on the rooftop beneath Apollo’s Lyre, the night before her world had fallen into a seemingly never-ending pit of black solitude. When she’d seen Raoul’s eyes turn from distrustful to disturbed, fraught with the same fearful anxieties she’d been plagued with for only a few mere months at that time. When she’d seen his fate written across his face by the dancing shadows upon the roof, and had seen his death foretold by the worried creases upon his typically so boyish forehead…

Doctor Gradus would die if she let him understand, she knew. Erik was going to wake up, eventually, and when he did he was going to kill this man who dared to know even the slightest tracings of his secrets. He would not have compassion for this man… certainly not, when even Christine hardly had any for him to begin with. He was a random man, an innocent bystander in this whole mess of their lives, who had no clue about the atrocities at which he was hovering at the threshold of. And for that exact reason there would be no sparing him if she said a single word more.

And yet still he stepped forward, ignorant of his very life being at stake, and perservered to persuade her.

“Have I ever spoken to a woman named Christine Daaé,” he repeated, stalking steadily closer. “Are you not your own person, apart from him? I understand you are married. You have told me that a hundred times. I assume you are Catholic. I am, too. Did you know that? I had a Catholic marriage to my cousin… I became one with her, just the same way you became one with your Erik right here. Two became one; that is the view of the Catholic union. And yet do you not understand your own position? There has been no subtraction or deletion. Two comes into one, together, intact and whole – just as your lungs are joined together at the bottom of your trachea and function as one conjoined set of bellows. One lung does not need the other to function properly; in fact, the left one is actually inferior to the right, built of all the same cells and tissues and muscles but still lacking for its own construction… the left lung is the weaker of the two, with only two lobes to rival the right’s glorious three… and yet they are joined together by nature regardless, working in unison with such tiring dedication we hardly ever think of them as two separate organs. And yet they are! Two are one. And one can just as easily become two again. You are still Christine Daaé. Can you not tell me a story about just Christine Daaé – not the one who has become lost to her marriage, but to the one who still exists? The one who will never, ever go away, no matter how hard she tries to hide herself in her husband’s great dark shadow? Can you?”

He sat now at the foot of the cot, two pleading eyes gazing at her, imploring her to just take a chance, to share a single simple memory of her past. How troublesome this brave idiot was! How could he not know the inescapable death that awaited him, should she dare speak? Of all his requests, this must truly be the worst!

Still –

“He was my teacher,” she was saying, before she could stop herself. “I was nothing before I met him. And then he came into my life and he gave me everything. I’m not hiding behind him, doctor; I am only living the life I was given in the best way I am able.”

“This is the best?” Doctor Gradus questioned, gesturing to her husband’s cadaver pointedly. “This is the best you think you can do?”

She averted her eyes. “It’s better than where I came from.”

“Well now, that’s just a poor justification to live a miserable life, don’t you think?”

“Erik taught me how to sing,” she tried again. She curled her hand around his long finger defensively. “He made me love music again. He gave me wings and made me fly.”

“Then it seems he’s already served his purpose to you, wouldn’t you say?”

“But…” she murmured. “But love is not so transactional, is it? Must we require things of each other, and toss ourselves out once we gain the briefest hold on them? Can we not just love for the sake of loving?”

Gradus folded his arms and studied her for a beat. “And what is it you love about this man, in particular? What keeps you so devoted?”

“It is… difficult to explain. Perhaps – perhaps if I say it like this,” she said, suddenly feeling defensive. “I do not love him because I must. I am his wife, but that alone reserves no obligation from me towards him. I had no choice but to marry him; and a marriage done by force is one which breeds hate and revulsion. He has shown himself to be a villain on many more occasions than not, made of loathful ills and violent faults, the committer of every crime and sin in the world, and all of that is no one’s fault but his very own… and yet, that he is undeserving of even the slightest bit of human mercy, of compassion and tenderness? Well… I don’t think that is any of my concern. I have seen something in his heart, faint as it may be, that glows gold behind the sharp and fractalled cracks; this is the part which begs to be loved – and so I do.”

“You speak over me,” Gradus noted, after some deceptive bout of silence. “Either that, or you exaggerate. A villain, Chrissy? Truly? Why – just look at the man! Is this really the dastardly fellow you are describing? This fragile old man? I doubt it! Can it be you are still too young? You would say these things about anyone else, I’m sure – even I, were we to be wed. You are unfair, Chrissy, simply unfair. That is what I think.”

“Be that what you think, then,” Christine said decidedly. “It is resolutely untrue.”

“Untrue in what way? Chrissy, you must bear with me. I am a mere outsider looking in at your life – how am I supposed to know anything past what I observe? Is this man a threat to you? Is that what you are saying?”

“I told you I wouldn’t talk about him.”

“Then tell me something else!” Gradus exclaimed. He leaned towards her, imploring with his arms stretched wide. “Tell me about the Opera house. Tell me about Little Chrissy in Sweden. Tell me about your mother, I mean your mamma, or whoever it was who raised you. Tell me about your favorite color, for Christ’s sake! I don’t care what you choose to share. I just want to know who you are.”

His earnesty brought him closer still, a knee coming up on the bed as he moved to face her completely. His eyes twinkled before her, as they never had done before; his mouth was set in a serious frown, bent with a special brand of concern she had never witnessed upon his face before; and confronted by this display, Christine found herself actually stopping to muse for a long while, passing her hand over Erik’s chest as she wondered about what to say.

What grim intentions he had for asking, Christine could hardly let herself consider; she found she was quite tired of acting as everyone’s protector against themselves. If knowledge be his noose, who was she to stop him from sticking his neck out?  If he was so insistent on this sort of suicide by ignorance, who was she to stop him from blundering on? Who was she at all?

Perhaps that was the only thing Gradus was really right about asking…

“Green,” she said then, as she decided he would die. “My favorite color is green.”

“Well! Was that so hard?” Gradus cheered. “I’m rather partial to green myself. It’s very vibrant –”

“But Erik says it’s really Eau de Nil,” she went on, ignoring him. “We went through a colour catalogue together once, when we were thinkng about repainting the ceiling in my bedroom. There’s a lot of pressure sitting on our house, you know, from the foundation settling above us, and it caused all these little cracks to split out across the ceiling and shift the mouldings out of place. Erik patched up the rest of the house before I noticed anything had happened at all. I’m not very observant, I suppose… but eventually I saw the cracks spreading across my bedroom ceiling, and so I brought him in to look at them. I never let him in otherwise, so he was very excited to be there, but also very nervous… and I suggested, well, perhaps we could paint the entire room, Erik, dear? I hate the furniture in here, Erik, dear, it smells like gloomth and decay. Why don’t we put an order out to the Style Moderne magazines and get something a little more fresh in here? Something that doesn’t look like… To all that, he just bit his awful lip and said nothing. He rolled his eyeballs up around the ceiling, following the squared lines of the moulding arrays, up and down and left and right, and I could tell he was trying desperately to figure out how to say yes to me, because he loves me so very much… even though he knew the answer was going to be no. It had to be no. It was his mother’s furniture that I was asking him to part with, but I won’t tell you about that because I don’t want to talk about him at all with you. But he agreed in the end at least to humor me, and brought me a stack of magazines for us to flip through and catalogues for us to draw circles and slashes in… and with his help I designed a very elegant, very nouveauvian boudoir. He sent the orders out for the divan and the carpet and the marble mantle and the four cans of Eau de Nil paint; but everything, unfortunately, was and is on back-order. They still haven’t arrived, if you can believe it. In the meantime he's brushed over the cracks in the ceiling with the same paint as before, and fixed the beams to the same positions as before, and put back everything exactly to the way it was before. Except, I should say, for one thing, and that is the closet; one of the paint cans did in fact arrive, of the four we ordered, and Erik used it to paint the hallway closet. The door stays closed for the most part - and I understand why because the color does not match the rest of the house in the slightest – but when it’s open, even if just a crack, I like to take a quick peek inside and just… look at it. There is not much in the house that I have a say in. Everything else is his style, his choice, his design. This alone is mine.”

She finished with a sigh, pressing her cheek painfully against Erik’s hard shoulder. Her eyes had closed in the duration of her recounting; and now only through the slightest squinting gap could she chance a glimpse at Gradus’s face and see that the dumb smile had again long since faded. A piece of her knew she’d said too much, far too much than any selfish and unimportant doctor deserved to know, and yet it all spilled out of her so easily and so freely that she’d hardly had a chance to stop herself in the moment. She expected any second now to feel the messy stirrings of regret down within the deepest parts of her, turning her stomach over and pulling on her heart strings… and yet, as the minutes went on, seemingly forever, she found an insidious indifference reigning calm within her, its placid frigidity disturbing her to a level far greater than any burning shame could ever dare to do. An emptiness opened up within her, a gaping, ever-expanding hole  seemingly intent on devouring her very being; tighter, then, she clutched herself to her husband’s form, wishing to attach and be attached, perfectly and permanently, until the end of time.

“Liar,” Gradus said at last, his beautiful blue eyes leaning ever closer. “You could have told me any story, and yet you chose one that starred your husband front and center. All I know now is that your husband is a fussy, finicky man. Yet you expect me not to ask anything else to follow up about him! I say, everything you tell me about this man makes him sound all the more curious to me… and I daresay that’s your intention! You are a tease, Christine Daaé, whether you like to admit it or not. But fine. I won’t take your bait. Watch now how well I keep my promise. I will not ask why he makes you content yourself with a closet, or why you say things like ‘his awful lip’ as if he repulses you. I will not even ask why you always make me take my meals with my plate in my lap while facing the wall. No… I will respect all of your cruel, twisted wishes, no matter how bizarre. But now, I must ask in return,” - his voice turned to a rasp - “will you respect one of mine?”

She peeled open her eyes to find Gradus hovering close above, his nose hardly three inches from hers. Erik was nothing beside her suddenly, a flat cotton bedsheet for all he was worth, soiled and useless, as Gradus caged her between two strong arms planted on either side of her.

“Tell me just one more thing,” he said. “Just one more thing, about yourself, and I’ll go away.”

“You said that before!”

“And I do stand by it,” he affirmed, breath hot in her face, “but you’re the one who isn’t playing by the rules. I asked about you, Chrissy girl, not your husband. Tell me something that isn’t about him.”

“I already told you my favorite color,” she stammered out, flushing bright red at his forward intention. “Why wasn’t that enough?!”

“Because it just isn’t,” he declared decidedly. He peeled back slightly just to level a grim glare at her, his golden curls wild and his lips puckering with his displeasure. “I think I have the picture now, Christine Daaé. You’re a good girl! The goodest of them all! You are as pure as a child – an infant, oblivious to sin and evil and death and decay. You laughed when I said this to you before – laughed in my face and told me I was an innocent boy with rude dreams! But you aren’t laughing now, are you? Ah! So there it is at last: I think you lied to me, Christine Daaé, I think you lied to yourself and to me and to him as well. I think you desire something you’re afraid to name, or cannot name, or refuse to name for whatever silly moral reason you’ve come up with in your head. If you desire a corpse, so be it – but don’t say things to me like that and then try to pretend that you do. It’s not right in the slightest, to make a villain out of an ordinary man the way you are. This Erik has done you no true wrong – I too would have told you the paint cans were on back-order had you chosen something as scalding to the eye as Nile Green or whatever! – but you lay him out in your mind as this horrible man that you must martyr yourself before. So quit this pity-game, Christine Daaé, for everyone’s sake. Let your marriage fall apart ordinarily, in the normal way, through the regular entanglement of less than upright morals, of more than upright physicality. See how I’m willing to meet you here, Christine – ready and willing, despite all your ludicrous stipulations? I am so eager to be your partner in sin; all you must do is choose this path towards damnation. Allow yourself to be satisfied, even if just once in your life. Because if you cannot… I will be forced to take this choice from you for your own good, and I will do to you what is best for us all.”

Christine opened her mouth to retort – to deny his advancing touch, to remind him of his own reservations, to say anything at all. Of course Erik was still beside her, snoozing away like the damned fool he was, letting all this happen even as he had his living wife wrapped up in his arms. Of course he was; had she not planned it all this way? Had she not gloated before both of these bleating boys, tempting them both with her intoxicating charms, her touch, her smile, her fingers – all the while assured, in that virginally naïve way, that no temptation could ever be too much? For the unconscious man no touch could stir… and yet in this other man, this equal to her, this widow of a corpse, this man who had been the unhappy bridegroom of death and all its whiling pangs… here in the eyes of this man, Christine found her second betrayal coming just as easily as the first…

“It’s the color of the last Swedish dawn I ever saw,” she breathed, loathing herself for it just as Gradus touched down with an insistent kiss to her neck. “A perfect yellow sun, surrounded by a wash of pale green light, flickering off all the leaves and dewy petals of the förgätmigejen in our garden…”

“A sunrise?” he asked distractedly, kissing down her neck.

She nodded, half in response to his question, half not, and continued just as breathlessly: “Streaming in through the window, these perfect pale rays of… dulcet dawnlight… landed upon the floor in front of me, touching me with their soft glows, waking me up with their warm winds and comforting caress. It was like a hand from heaven had reached out to hold me, after what had been the longest night of my entire life… a long night of the most nightmarish downpouring of rain… of the most torrential and lonely horrors… the night when my entire world fell apart.”

“Ah… touching you,” Gradus echoed, obviously not listening. “Keep going.”

“Yet… it wasn’t just the sun… that was touching me,” Christine complied, helpless to her own tragic sensitivities as the doctor worked further along, pulling at strings and plucking at clasps. “It was my father’s hand, actually, brushing through my hair…” – long fingers wandered up, catching and twisting in her golden strands as she let out a shallow sigh in response – “…as he knelt on the floor beside me… beside my tiny, curled-up form. He must’ve, ah, found me there after returning home that morning. I’d slept in the hall that night because the door to our bedroom had locked itself after my father had closed it before going out and I couldn’t, ah… I couldn’t find a way in. My mother… my sweet mother… she was inside, but she wouldn’t let me in... even though I called and called and, ah, called… oh, Doctor Gradus, must I really continue through all this?”

“You must,” he whispered against the skin of her naked breast. “I like it when you speak.”

Such a simple request! Such a simple sin. Who was she to deny him? She curved up against him, peeling away from Erik as she did – mumbling out words neither she nor Gradus must have listened to, explaining a story she’d only told once before, in the safety of her dressing room –

“Wake up, beauty, my father whispered, we need to leave…” – lips laved around her ear, tongue licking deep into her canal, teeth scraping at the wetted wax – “…and he took me, ah… from our little village in Sweden that very same day. I was so tired I could barely hold my little eyes open. But my pappa was a strong man, the strongest I’ve ever known, so he gathered me up into his arms…” – fondled her lily white thighs in his hands – “…and carried me the whole way… from Stockholm… to Malmö… and there in his strong arms… on the road going away from it all… I forgot what it was that had scared me at all. Oh, doctor… oh, Tristan…”

He settled down upon her now like the corn-snow in spring; a flurry at first, a skifting tickle against her skin; then snost turned to squall, his firn changed to névé; ending as an onding, coming down in thick loads, hardening at last into a crystal glaze upon the rolling groundlands of her form. His powdered touch was so delicate upon her, so deft and so dextrous; expert that he was, blizzard of so many winters, he devastated her quickly and efficiently, surreptitious in his subduction as he buried her beneath his blanket of creamy white flesh. Somewhere southerly, amongst sculpted sastrugi and chiseled chilldrifts, in the base of a barchan, a briar of hoarfrost brushed against her bare leg; and the nestled graupel glistened with bristled rime, little beads forming at the very tips where they had just begun to thaw.

“Your mother,” Gradus urged above all this. “Where did she go?”

“She stays in Sweden,” Christine replied, trying arduously to focus on both frames of reality at the same time. “As a child I did not know… what anything meant. What it meant to leave or, ah, be left. Only my father remained in my mind, for years and years after; only he remained in my cares and in my prayers. To me, I had no mother; she had faded from my mind like a dream upon waking. My pappa had come, ah, to me with the first glow of that last beautiful Swedish dawn, arriving as one and the same as that pale green light… he came, and he took me away from it all, from all the horror and all the worry, all the pain I had yet to know, ever in my life… from that little house and that little garden… from my sweet mother who had never done a thing wrong to my nearest recollection, whose face I cannot remember except that it was very beautiful, who is hiding somewhere still behind that wooden bedroom door, hiding somewhere still in a village in Sweden whose name I have long since forgotten… we left it all, our entire lives, and… and we never… we never…”

He was kissing her cheeks suddenly. She hadn’t realized she’d begun to cry, until he’d begun trailing his tongue over her trickling tear-tracks, following them down once more into her ear, licking at the residue of salt all the way to the entrance.

“I should have guessed,” he whispered against her moistened ear, the wetted wax nearly dripping around his hot breath. “Girls like you always have a thing for their fathers.”

It isn’t like that, she wanted to say, bringing her shoulder up to push him away. You don’t understand the half of it, if that’s what you think.

Insistent, though, he pushed his way back in. His tongue snaked around the folds of her ear, ever slickening, the sound of her own blood lapping against her bones a deafening roar as he panted against her. Her words faded away into nothing, meaningless jumbled phrases that neither of them cared to listen to, and eventually ceased in their plaintive utterances entirely. If he noticed he did not seem to mind, caught up as he was in his own amusements and pleasures; Christine, similarly, found herself growing quite detached from the doctor’s doings, though he did them upon her, choosing instead to retreat into the pounding silence within her mind.

Never in her life had she breathed a word of this memory to another living person; only to the Angel had she spoken of this moment from her past. Of course, obviously, the Angel had been Erik… so of course that meant Erik knew… but at the time she’d told him, he’d still been nothing but a helpful voice to her. A teacher.

A stranger.

She’d spilled out that first part to him in the midst of some random lesson, early in their time together, sitting on a divan and feeling particularly fragile for some reason that day. They’d spoken casually before, occasionally venturing outside the bounds of their music, but these departures had only ever been of a more inconsequential tone, never so serious or so personal as this. What was it that had brought this moment of pure vulnerability out of her? Perhaps she’d been struck with the random pangs of grief harder than usual that day; perhaps something in the music had brought it out of her. Whatever reason it was, though, had brought them both to the brink of this new stage in their relationship, whether they wanted to go there or not.

He’d been quiet for the entire time she spoke, and continued to be so for a long while after. She’d said pretty much the same thing back then as she’d said to Gradus in the current moment, excepting just a few phrasings and details; she’d told him all about the locked bedroom door, about her hiding mother who wouldn’t answer, about the terrifying night in the hallway, about the pale green sunrise and her father’s return and their subsequent sudden departure from everything they had ever known.

Now she sat, quietly, waiting for his response. As the minutes ticked by, she began to wonder if perhaps he had gone away… but then at last he spoke, very gently, and said:

“Christine, child, how do you love your father?”

What a strange question, she’d thought to herself. Yet, she reminded herself, it was the Angel who was asking, and the Angel commanded respect even in his most bewildering moments. So she told him, in her greatest deferential manner, about how she loved her father with all her heart, and a little bit more than that as well.

But then the Angel spoke again, nearly in a whisper, almost hopefully,

“Even after what he did? You can still love him after… that?”

She did not understand… but that, in and of itself, was not unusual; the Angel was very mysterious to her back then, always speaking in roundabout ways and proposing convoluted solutions to nonexistent dilemmas. She could not divine what transgression her perfect father had done which the Angel was taking question to, so meekly she bowed her head, and entreated him for an explanation – which he gave, with cool efficiency:

“Why, for murdering your mother, child. Did you not know that he did?”

She’d hardly had a chance to process his reply before she nodded, dumb as ever, accepting it instantly as if it were just some simple critique on an ariatic technique they’d been working on.

But then the real shock of it passed through her being, electrifying her with its stunning and egregious audacity. She gripped the divan for dear life as she found herself suddenly rocked off-balance by this terrible notion which the Angel had just thrown her way, and she turned the sickliest shade of Swedish dawn as a million neglected and confusing memories sprang up in her mind, scuttling like baby spiderlings just hatched from their mother’s sac. They poured, like black dirt, through the ripples and valleys, through the gyri and sulci, into her consciousness, across her vision –

“You seem surprised,” the Angel stated, his bluntness penetrating past her tumult and disquieting her even further. “But what did you think had happened? That this exodus of Sweden had been in any way voluntary?”

“How can you say this?” she’d sobbed in vacillating shock. “My father was a good man!”

“Good men kill, too,” the Angel told her, a coldness biting at his tone. “One does not have to be evil to commit murder. Any man can do it, don’t you understand? Any man. Even your father. Even…”

“But he didn’t!” she cried. “My father would never hurt another living soul. He certainly would never kill someone! You wouldn’t know! You didn’t know him! He was a good man, Angel – he was a loving man, a religious man, a man with a heart full of gold – he wouldn’t – he couldn’t –”

Yet even as she cried her harsh dismissals, accusing the Angel in a breaking voice that only grew more and more fragmented as she went on, sobbing into her hands – even through all that, she could not ignore the scuttling memories absorbing back into her mind, tapping insistantly at her skull, asking her to pay attention, asking her to remember –

Suddenly the memory flooded back, in full color, rich and vibrant. Again she saw herself waking to her father’s hand in her hair… but then he was moving backwards, and the pale green sun was falling back down the sky, and all the world’s darkness was creeping back in, the night coming swiftly back upon her…

The evening before returned, the sunset a blazing fire on the horizon, bleeding its rays through the windows to find her still curled up in that horrid hallway. The bedroom door was still closed, just like she remembered, but there were sounds, the strangest sounds, coming from behind its chipped white wood.

Was it happiness, that laid behind that door? She could hear a quiet laugh, like a silver bell tinkling in the distance; that was her mother, then, for she suddenly too remembered her soft voice and its delicate intonations. And in response there was a lower tone, warm and round; a man’s voice, she figured, but lacking in those hoarse, weak raspings which she remembered so distinctly in her father’s. So, she thought, another man… another man…

From her spot on the floor she could see through the front door, which had been left open in the course of her previous childish wanderings. She could see out to the stoop, through the garden, into the street; and coming up the front walk, at this very moment, she could see the haggard frame of her father approaching, dutifully, a limp in his step but a whistle on his lips. He looked tired, as usual. He worked very hard for them back then, abusing himself in a pulp factory breaking down old wood; for sixteen hours a day he did this work, snapping the legs off old pianos and the bows off old cellos, discarded by their previous owners not for condition but for distaste, now destined to become splinters and to be tossed into ever-growing piles of castaway refuse, awaiting  to be processed eventually into novelty matchsticks.

He entered the house and made to greet her, reaching out to scoop her up in his strong arms – when suddenly he was halted in his tracks, whistle and all, by the sounds coming from behind the bedroom door. A look of confusion passed over his features as he stared down the long hallway towards it, standing there for a long time as his expression changed slowly to one of idle amusement - then to one of concern, before falling at last into one of stolid, steel unfathomability.

And he asked, at last, in the coldest voice she’d ever heard:

“Well, Christine. I suppose that’s it?”

She did not respond, idiot child that she was – not that it would have mattered – before he straightened his back and walked down the hall. She saw the door open and close; she heard nothing, besides perhaps a couple of quiet thumps; and when the door opened again the room looked much the same as always, if not a little darker with the creeping retreat of the sun. He shut the door quick, locking it reflexively, then stalked straight past her and left the house.

The storm fell upon the house after that. Night cast shadows all around her, as she sat and shivered, unable to move from her curled up spot in the hallway. Blood seemed to run down the walls; and in the torrent of the storm it seemed the house itself was groaning around her, moaning against the battery of the wind.

When her father returned it was dawn, just like she remembered. But these rekindled memories of hers had deepened the sadness in his eyes, had strengthened the smell of the liquor upon his coat, had burrowed the little flecks of blood further beneath his nails. It was impossible now to forget – if she had ever truly forgotten, or just ignored – the dismal way he’d placed his hand upon her head and said, We need to leave.

The Voice cut through the nightmare here, returning her to reality with its ever-grounding tone. He was saying something she couldn’t quite register, as she found herself a sweaty mess upon the divan, hair pulled out and dress askew, cheeks flushed and scalding wet. In any other moment she would have felt ashamed for such an obscene show before the Angel – but she found herself hating the Angel in this moment, for the lies she wished he’d said instead, for the detachment he retained from all earthly concerns while she was forced to sit about like this. If he had left her in that moment she would not have mourned his loss; her father had sent him, and she very much hated him too now, for that matter – her father, not the Angel – but also yes, the Angel too, by way of her father - and yet he, the Angel, spoke over all this burning abhorrence with a voice so quiet, so delicate, so meek, it was almost like a hand combing softly through her hair -

“Forgive your Angel. He did not mean to make you weep. Shall we continue the lesson now? It may be best to forget this all… forget, and return to as we were…”

But no, she wanted to say. No, she did not want to return. She would never be able to forget. Not after this. Everything had changed and everything was ruined. How much she hated this Angel, this holy creature her father sent! How much she loathed him solely for his connection to the man. In an instant, in fact, she could see it all very clearly: if her father had sent the Angel from Heaven – then she rather wished she’d go to Hell!

She ran from the dressing room. A further second in the Angel’s presence and she would have gone insane. She ran through the halls wildly, tripping and stumbling in her tearful blindness, hardly seeing the ballet girls snd their mothers beside them, running out the door and down the way to her flat on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires.

She told her mamma all about the Angel that day. She said nothing of true substance, and the senile woman heard nothing just the same; but Christine spoke and her mamma listened, and therein she conveyed her first betrayal against the Angel of Music. For he had warned her at the outset that she was never to speak of him to another living soul, lest he go away forever…

Here now, of course, Christine prayed it to be so. She sputtered the story to her mamma like a stupid child, explaining the strange Voice, the lessons, the promise… but when it came time to explain about her father she found herself faltering. All around her mamma’s bed were pictures of her father, letters he had written, music he had played. Her mamma liked very much to run her fingers over his handwriting and pretend to be reading it. Her blind eyes could not see the way the oil of her fingertips had made the ink fade. How she had loved Christine’s father… and how she loved him still. The realization broke upon Christine, as she sat there, mute as a mouse at her mamma’s bedside, that to tell her mamma about her father would be to break the old woman’s heart.

And she could not ever bear to break her mamma’s heart.

So she said nothing of it. She spoke only of the Angel, trespassing against him and him alone. He will leave me, she ascertained to herself, and I will be quite miserable for it. But it will be worth it in the end – to never have to hear his voice and remember that dreadful question he asked…

‘…How do you love your father?’

For a month thus she carried this hate with her, reviling her father with silent curses and seething oaths. She avoided her dressing room at all costs, stepping only in to change, when she had to, and kept her ears closed to any humming voices that might be murmuring in her ear. For a month she endured this painstaking loneliness…

Until…

“Angel?” she whispered at last one night, hands clasped in prayer as she knelt beside her bed in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires apartment. “Are you there, Angel?”

She missed him too much to keep away.

“Yes,” came his immediate reply, because why did she ever doubt him? “I am here, child. I have always been here.”

She cried. A hundred tears of a hundred different sources poured out of her. Relief. Bitterness. Pain. Anger. Bliss. He had not left her after all – he, the Angel, who had threatened her so severely, had only bluffed in saying he would ever leave her. He would never abandon her, she realized then as she wept. He would never leave her all alone, no matter what she did, no matter what she said, no matter who she told…

Over the course of the night she spoke with him, off and on. At some point she moved positions, and sat on the floor in her nightgown with her knees pulled up to her chest. They spoke of everything and nothing, for hours upon hours, and he listened just as quietly as he did before, as quietly as he always did. She spoke hatefully of her father at first, then lovingly of her mother – and then the other way around, as the night drew on – and the Angel listened all the while, intently, never reproaching her for the words she strung clumsily together, never judging her for the hard words she sometimes said. She meant nothing at all, and he seemed to understand this, letting her spew this strange mess of weird and ugly and confusing feelings out before them both for the first time in her life as she tried to sort out what it was she actually felt.

“Is it so wrong of me to hate him, Angel?” she asked at long last, in a wretchedly small voice. “I feel so hideous for it.”

“Child,” the Angel sighed, ever-patient as always. “If you are looking for my permission to despise another human being, you do not need to ask for it. Hate who you wish, and your Angel will hate him with you. But let me ask, first: was he very kind to you?”

“Yes. But…”

“And did he treat you well?”

“Of course.”

“And did you love him, and respect him, and cherish him, before I told you what he did?”

“How could I not?”

“Then love him for how you knew him,” he said. “Love him for the goodness he had in him.”

“Goodness? Angel, how can I be sure that he ever had any? To kill another person… is that not the mark of true and total evil?”

“Oh,” the Angel breathed. “Oh, child. Everyone… has a little bit of goodness in them. Even the worst who walks among you, who has committed the vilest of sins and the most heinous of atrocities. Even the wickedest one in the world… even he, child, has something in him that is good, and that can be loved. Even the devil can be loved.”

He spoke in the slowest of ways, as if each word gave him great pains to pronounce. Yet at the same time he spoke with a certain conviction, so pleading in his tone, like that of a fibster who wishes desperately to be believed, that she couldn’t help but to immediately trust him. After all… if the Angel said this awful situation in her heart could be resolved, and that this solution could be one of both coherence and contradiction – then how could she ever dare to think otherwise? The Angel had never lied to her before…

And so: it truly was that simple. Just like that, a weight lifted off her chest – she loved her pappa once more… and her pappa returned in her mind as the big cheerful man she’d always known him as, with the big warm hands, and his fiddle struck up in her mind and played for her one of his favorite pieces… the dancing of the bow against the strings so apparent and earthly she could almost hear it with her ears, outside of her mind, actually, all around her in the room, transforming into a different melody as the Angel began to sing softly, with all the mellowness of a mother, the softness of a sister, in a language she did not know in the slightest…

Amazing grace,
How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like –

“Christine!”

Gradus’s frightful ejaculation brought her suddenly back to the present. For the briefest of moments she was bewildered at the concept of a man atop her, his solid chest pressed heavily against her own, panting and sweaty and naked, flesh contaminating flesh – but then she caught his face, pitched in a different brand of horror than her own, and so she followed his line of sight upwards to where his arm had reached out above them.

There she saw his hand, still clutched tight in a bone-white grip. His hand was wrenching and writhing, as if attempting to twist free – but Erik held fast, knuckles and digits stiffening imperceptibly as his jagged nails dug deeper into Gradus’s flesh, piercing severely, raking out his blood, until the doctor cried out once more;

“For the love of God, Christine!”

In his fearsome panic, the doctor had sprung backwards and begun to flail his arm, trying futilely to shake himself free of the corpse’s hand. Erik’s body, in some sick series of random jerks, had twisted itself up between them… or perhaps, Christine’s mind couldn’t help but make her think, perhaps he’d been there all along. Perhaps it hadn’t just been Gradus she’d felt settling down upon her like ice upon a frigid lake. Perhaps that naked thigh had always been lying right there between them both, his wriggling toes digging into the mattress between her heels, his tongue laving within her ear...

She wrapped her arms around his gaunt chest and pulled to no avail. Holding him this close against her pounding breast she could tell he was asleep, or at the very least doing a very good job at pretending to be; and she hoped, with mounting anxiety, that it was little more than his unconscious will that kept him clamped on to Gradus this tightly.

“Get my bag,” Gradus hissed, as Erik’s nails dug in ever deeper. “Quickly, girl!”

In a flash she was up, caring little for modesty as she run through his tiny apartment in search of his leather bag. Already she knew where this was going; she knew what medications doctors liked to use on their troublesome cases that needed some help ‘settling down’. Her father had been one of those cases, in the end. It was something she’d always thought was so barbaric, so inhumane... even as she held his arm down and helped the doctor push the needle in. Nonetheless, though, she found the bag where she always saw Gradus put it, right beside his tiny desk, and lifting it she could hear all the little glass bottles within jingling against each other. What would Gradus use on Erik, she wondered, as she ran it back to the bedroom. Would it be morphine? Gas? Poison?

Only when she had placed the bag on the bed beside the doctor, like a cat dropping a slain mouse dutifully before its master, did she even consider to herself that she could have refused...

“The brass bottle,” Gradus ordered impatiently. “Take it out and give it to me.”

Of course she complied; it was not in her nature to do otherwise. And hadn’t they been doing this all already, just in a lesser way? All the medications that Gradus had prescribed, to keep Erik calm, to keep Erik resting, to keep Erik asleep – all that they did, under the guise of the ‘rest-cure’ – was that not all the same thing?

It was a contraption she’d never seen before. LETHEON, the tag on the bottom read. It looked fresh and new, as if it’d never been used before – and Gradus swiped it from her clumsily, turning it around in his free hand as he seemed to try to understand how to use it.

“This,” he said, staring down at the flared, molded opening of the strange brass device, “must be the mouthpiece. Three puffs of this and it’ll knock him out for days. I think. Um – quick, Christine, lift his mask for me so I can attach it to him.”

Now she truly did hesitate, looking at the shape of the brass thing more closely. It was triangular in shape, designed to press against the cheeks as it covered the mouth and the... oh...

“He doesn’t have a nose, doctor,” she made herself tell the struggling doctor. “That’s not going to work.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed, before immediately tossing the confusing contraption to the side a little too quickly. She could have sworn she heard him mutter a faint Thank God! “Then, um, will you get the green bottle out for me, Christine? Get it out and pour it on a rag – yes, like that –”

She did again as he asked, again without questioning, hardly flinching as the reeking scent wafted up to her nose. It was sickly sweet, and very familiar – the label said CHLOROFORM, in the same lettering as on a bottle she’d seen in Erik’s medication cabinet – though Erik’s bottle was much lighter – but as she handed the rag to Gradus, she thought again about the issue from before, and how any sort of inhalant was supposed to work on her noseless husband.

Gradus did not seem to share these concerns. He pressed the rag to Erik’s face boldly, brutally, earning him a painful stabbing in his other hand as Erik’s vice-grip grew only tighter and his nails grew only sharper. Impatiently, Gradus pressed even harder to force the rag deep into the ravages of the other man’s mouth – Erik’s hand tightened about Gradus’s once more – and Gradus pushed deeper –

Until after an eternity, but truly only two minutes later, Erik’s grip suddenly slackened, and Gradus was able to peel his fingers off one by one until he was completely free. He tossed Erik’s hand away with a flourish, letting the entire skeletal body fall back against the the bed with a dead, graceless thud.

Quietly, Christine watched Gradus with a certain dread as he scanned his eyes over Erik’s lax form, quite possibly to affirm he hadn’t just committed manslaughter. Tristan must be quite pleased with himself, she thought unhappily, to have made me put Erik down this way. She prepared herself for the inevitable remark from him – “Say, Chrissy, why don’t we pick up where we left off?” – and fought the equal mix of misery and awful excitement that bubbled within her stomach at the mere thought of it.

How she hated him. How she hated herself even more.

But when Gradus turned to her at last, he wasn’t pleased in the slightest. On the contrary: he seemed very sober and far away from it all – shivering and trembling before her sight - and when he spoke it was with the gravest of all voices:

“Will you please excuse me, Mademoiselle Daaé? I have some adjustments to make to your husband’s regimen. I fear we have been far too conservative up until now. I shall go… I shall go...”

Chapter Text

“The Palate-Cleanser”

FROM THE MEDICAL DIARY OF
TRISTAN GRADUS, M.D.

If my life were a novel, I suppose it would be a romance. A comedic romance, perhaps, what with the way things have been so far proceeding… and I should find myself the suitor of a dozen little women, all named Pamela, or Charlotte, or Vivia, or even Christine Daaé –

She plays the part so well, the little kitten. She’s completely uncooperative, and her husband is a nuisance, but that’s how these books always go, isn’t it? And I daresay the poor thing is madly in love with me. Ha! Such a silly little thing. I should almost think to call us a modern-day Romeo and Juliet… if I loved her in the slightest, that is!

Anyway, her man hasn’t woken up in nearly three days and I’m greatly concerned. Thankfully the girl hasn’t started asking questions. She seems to trust me, as one would a real medical doctor… but I don’t actually know what I’m doing, and I’m quite nervous that we’re going to end up killing him by the end of this. But what else am I supposed to do, diary? I cannot reverse it, I cannot go backwards, I can only push onwards and hope it will all turn out to be okay.

Crossing my fingers!

--

On and on he slept.

Time became nothing at all. A minute seemed an hour; an hour seemed a minute. What was there to measure time against, in this bleak little apartment upon the Rue de Rivoli? Every day for Christine was the same as all the rest in its infinitesimal emptiness. Only the exchange of the sun and the moon marked any difference in her life – but even that she hardly saw, as she sat in the windowless bedroom beside her slumbering, decaying husband.

Gradus went in and out. He spent much of the days and nights about the city, attending to his other patients; and then, at the strangest hours, when she least suspected it, he’d randomly stop back in and call her out from the bedroom to sit with him as he dined.

“Has he woken?” he always asked, a bit of nervousness tinging at the end of his tone.

“It was a quiet day,” was her eternal reply. “Quiet and long. I’m sure yours was the same.”

They never spoke much more than that. There was nothing truly to say, nothing they shared much interest in between them. There was no other way for their dinners to go, when she made him twist so unfairly in his chair as she burned deep black holes in his arching back – made him twist so he could never see her, could never watch her as she ate.

These dinners finished quickly, and each time after he was just a bit quicker about making a new excuse to go out – though he may have lingered a time or two, watching from the doorway as she retreated back to the darkened bedroom, before he closed the door and hurried down the stoop – and so she spent the rest of her hours in silence, a lone shadow upon a stool, fading away into the perpetuity of nothing.

--

“From the torrent, or the fountain –
From the red cliff of the mountain –
From the sun that ‘round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold –

…are you even listening to me, Erik?” Christine flipped her book over on her lap and looked expectantly at her husband. “Or must I repeat everything I just read?”

The corpse did not reply – only remained, characteristically still, beneath the crisp white sheet which covered him like a shroud.

“Well?” she persisted, cocking her head as she waited a long minute for a response. Nothing. She put aside the book. “At least sample my spread, then, if you insist on being so unaffected by our reading. Go on, dear; I made it all for you.”

She’d set out a picnic before him, which he’d been very good about thoroughly ignoring. Four tiny triangular tea sandwiches sat untouched upon his tray, growing staler by the minute; two mandarin oranges, one peeled of rind and one not, edged each other from beside a bowl of lukewarm chicken stew; some baguettes were there too; as was a cream pie; and a mound of menthol pudding sat last amongst all the rest, an indelible goober of green gelatin – an afterthought of a dessert which was, in regretful but complete honesty, indigestible.

Christine raised a spoonful of the stew to his lips. Prodding them, they did not part; so she took the tip of her longest finger and pulled down his bloated bottom lip, allowing her to maneuver her spoon on inwards.

“Open up, Erik,” she huffed as his stiff jaw resisted her now, refusing to open even a millimetre. “A courtesy taste is all I’m asking for. One tiny bite and I’ll leave you all alone.”

She managed to push just the tip of the spoon into the tiny crevice she’d made between his teeth, leveraging the metal against his bottom jaw as she worked to pry him open. He unhinged slowly but surely, a testament only to her force of will, and after a few minutes held wide his rack of finely chiseled molars and incisors before her. She’d been inside his mouth before, very deep inside, but had never had the time nor opportunity to examine it thoroughly. Now that she did, though, she could see what absolutely perfect teeth he had. What color, what gums. They glittered with the remnants of his spit as she peered into him with curiosity, thinking all the while.

Erik had told her something once before, hadn’t he, that time before the opera? Something about how much like an animal he’d always been treated, and how he’d had his teeth filed down for poor behavior…

Yes, that was it. Christine pushed her spoon in further and prodded around more intently, tapping around with all the keen-eyed attentiveness of a dentist. She surveyed the trestle of white pearls sitting within her husband’s mouth, and found – oh yes, he’d been given quite the brutal manicure, hadn’t he? Particularly in the back, where the teeth were so shaved only the root really remained. How did he eat like this? Did it hurt? And exactly how badly had he acted, to deserve such a punishment? A punishment, that was, which could not be enacted any further… for there was hardly enough tooth left to whittle away, even if one wished to… even if she wished to…

His tongue pushed against the metal, fighting her unconsciously – but she pushed further still, until she prodded the back palate from which his uvula hanged – prodded it once, twice, until he gagged upon her instrument.

“Oh, come now – is my cooking really as bad as all that?” she jested, thrusting deeper. “It’s not like the meat is spoilt. It’s not my coq au vin, after all!”

He swallowed in the end, not without a terse grimace cut upon his awful face. It was one of the most hideous sights Christine had ever seen, watching as his throat slowly dragged the spoonful of stew down the passage of his esophagus. All of him was so skinny she could practically see right through him; she could see past his skin and past his bone, into the cartilage and through the tissue. That glob of stew traveled slower than anything she’d seen before – but down it went, and that was all that mattered.

The second spoonful went about as well as the first. First the prying and the shoving, then the teasing and the forcing… until, just as before, down went the chicken stew. The third went a bit smoother, his unconscious body perhaps realizing that no matter how much he fought Christine was always going to get her way, and thus the fourth went even better than the third. By the fifth Christine herself had relaxed into her work, humming and whistling and even making sing-song steam engine noises as she brought the spoon up to his mouth and tilted it upon his tongue.

“Chugga chugga…” she cooed, “choo choo…”

She was basically pouring the stew down his throat by the time she scraped the bottom of the bowl. How little he resisted her, now that she’d worn him down. Had he swallowed it all properly? Or had his open throat directed it the wrong way, canalling it through his bronchi and flooding it into his hungry lungs? Gradus would have a fit if his patient came down with pneumonia – but was it not important to feed those two tremulous organs as well? He had not moved his mouth to speak, had not sung, or crooned, or blown, had not even ventriloquized in the past few weeks since their coming here. Surely his lungs were famished. They needed to he fed, Christine reasoned, they needed to be nourished. He needed to be satiated.

His lips puckered a bit as the rhythm of his feeding was interrupted by his finishing; Christine presented him now with her cream pie. His earlier neglect had caused the slice to perspire, beading up until it had warmed and melted, and now was nothing but a slickened, soupy, slightly syrupy puddle exposing itself upon the serving platter.

He took it quickly – it was only a sticky little slice, anyway – and then it was on to the oranges. These she hesitated with, if only for the fact that she had licked her fingertips clean to find her cream pie’s saccharine sweetness had intermingled with the mandarin’s sharper nectar. Her tongue curled with revulsion as she chased the dribble down the length of her middle finger, the taste an acerbic shock to her delicate senses.

A palate-cleanser was what he needed, she decided – and was what she needed as well. Something to quell the tongue between the flavors, to reset the mouth after a particularly bad – or good – taste… something to revert them back to the beginning, before everything, before nothing…

The inedible menthol pudding stared blithely back at Christine as she realized with dawning disgust what a perfectly banal solution it was to their palatal problem. A sprig of mint was blended well within its globby meal, as was some melon and lillet, and would no doubt set their buds back to normal. It’d be as if they never ate anything at all – like setting a clock back to midnight, or like ripping up a marriage certificate. The acid would be neutralized, and the sugar would be re-embittered, and everything else from here on out would be all the more easier to stomach.

The trouble was it all just looked so terribly unappealing.

“Let’s do this instead, Erik,” Christine declared a few minutes later. She brandished a large brown bottle before her, which she’d swiped from Dr Gradus’s medicine cabinet. It was a product from his dilutions; not the dilution itself, but the refuse bottle in which he collected all his wasteful excretions. This was explained in the short note which was penciled upon the label, in Gradus’s overtly ornate, faddishly flowery script: for medical purposes only – cocaine concentrate, 100% Coca-Cola.

To this Christine paid no mind; the caramel liquid sloshed as she filled two flutes, and she laughed when it fizzed up and over the sides from her careless pouring.

“Let’s enjoy ourselves for once, Erik,” she said. “Let’s just be us.”

She plunked a straw in one glass and held it up to her husband’s mouth, smiling when his bottom lip fell open, drooping like a fish, to accept it. Was it all mere unconscious instinct that made him wrap his awful lips around that julep paper and suck until the soda came up? Perhaps it was; perhaps it wasn’t. There wasn’t a point in the world in wondering though. He was drinking, wasn’t he? And they were together, weren’t they?

In another life she’d wheel him in the elegant push-chair to the terrace and seat him squarely before the sunset. It’d glow fiery gold upon them, all amber umber, and they’d both have a pair of blackened shades on as they took in the dusk. They’d take refuge under a pale lace parasol as they sipped at their colas, ice swirling within their flutes. Erik would sleep, just as he did now – but maybe, just maybe, he'd lean his heavy head on her shoulder, and she’d get to put her arms around him. She’d hold him for hours as the sun baked itself back into the earth, leaving them just with each other as the darkness embraced them both – and then in the morning a pale green sun would rise over their slumbering forms. He'd stir first, with a stretch, and stare at her for a bit like he always liked to do. Then he’d stand and, catching a hint of the slight morning breeze, he’d go find a blanket to drape over her. He’d pick up their empty glasses and wash them in the sink – or maybe he’d pour himself another glass as he leaned against the terrace door, watching her all the while as she slept –

“Here’s to us,” Christine said, and tossed back her own.

Chapter Text

“The Rest-Cure”
(Part VI)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S (SECOND) JOURNAL

How quickly the darkness comes.

Erik is tucked into bed now. It is a colder night than usual, so I have added a quilt for warmth. Resting like he is, he seems so much like a babe – so innocent, so helpless, so vulnerable, so tired. His lashes, sparse though they may be, hover lightly above his cheeks, and as he breathes in and out they flutter, almost, like a butterfly’s wings. His skin, normally so translucent and taut, seems soft in this moment, his expression less strained. His hands are folded beneath his head, touched together as if in prayer, and a single bead of drool drops from his lips down upon them. He seems as if he’s dreaming, the way little cherubs do, with rivers running through his pastoral dreamlands only tinged with the littlest bit of blood; and as I sit beside him, brushing my hand through his wispy hair, wishing for him peace, I can’t help but wonder how I would be as a mother.

It is hard work to love Erik, and I would not wish this burden on my worst enemy. Rather I wish that it were easier – that he were easier to love, that kindness came more naturally, that he would be only the man who loves me and not also the man who hates indiscriminately.

More than anything, I wish that ours was not such an impossible love… but it is, and so I must pray, devoutly, for something harder than all the rest: that one day, soon, I will leave him, and that it will not be by his choice, but by my own. And so of my heart, I beg,

Please, please, please, let me go, and let me have the courage never to return.

And with that, my dearest journal – as so my dearest Erik – good night, and sweet dreams.

--

The doctor awoke with a start, the first bonging toll of the wall-clock yanking him from his restless sleep. It was three hours past midnight, and an otherworldly darkness sat upon the apartment. Everything was still… save a solitary refrain playing in the back of his mind, its solemn humming tune perhaps the only lasting remnant of his dreams. No doubt it was destined to slip away and be forgotten on the coming of clearer consciousness like all the rest; but until then it echoed, faintly, like a call in the distance…

‘Loudly the bell in the old tower rings
Biding us list to the warning it brings…’

Waking had dazed him, his mind slow to buffer, but when he truly came to he noticed first a noxious odour – a perfume so foul he kicked wide the closet door from wherein he lay, and crawled out to the hallway for air. Only there, as he sat upon his hands and knees and panted like a dog, did he realize the awful stench was coming from his own stinking self.

He was drenched, he now saw, drenched with sweat and bile. Had he been sick in the night without realizing it? He’d been dreaming, he could faintly recall – dreaming of a girl with cautious eyes and a fragile smile, a girl who looked something like the twin of that other creature, that perfect other stranger who called herself Daaé… how horrid he suddenly felt, to think of her now, as he looked upon his body and all the excretions he had made upon it in his unconscious fit. How horrid, he thought, how horrid…

He clambered to his feet, leaning heavily upon the flimsy walls of the narrow hall to steady himself upon his wobbly knees. He was ill, then! He couldn’t remember ever feeling so bad. Had he caught an illness from a patient? No – no, he had seen no patients today. None today and none yesterday, none at all all week.

It must have been some bad food then, he thought. Some bad food and nothing more.

His parched throat drove him down the hallway, past the slightly ajar door of the bedroom where he peeked in just briefly to see little Chrissy snoozing upon her cot, barely appreciating the supple curve of her chest as it rose and fell with her quieting breaths, before a sudden wave of nausea drove him onwards to the kitchen.

Wicked pissa, he thought to himself as he guzzled down two glasses of throbbingly cold water, Glorious nepenthe. Nearly enough to douse the dark dreams – oh, but that this were from the lake of Lethe…

And all the while that dream-tune was still playing lightly, lilting as a siren at the back of his mind…

‘Sailor take care… sailor take care…
Danger is near thee, beware… beware…’

He wandered into the main room with a third glass in hand, leaning against the wall as he surveyed his keep. His apartment was small, but in the darkness this room seemed to stretch on forever, the far wall invisible through the obscurity of pitch blackness. What few stars this nighttime sky held did little to combat the scourge of darkness, twinkling only in their little insignificant spots far beyond the glass of his fogged windowpanes.

How far away from everything he was, in this little apartment upon the Rue de Rivoli. From America, from Boston, from his old family home upon the wharf – all sitting there still, somewhere across the ocean, waiting for his return. And yet he could never go back and face the silence of a cold hearth within the salon – could never return to that empty house, with that small plot of earth just outside the front stoop – that plot of earth marked with a stone, the largest one he could afford – which was, to say, not a very large one at all – but still a stone, roughly cut, hastily inscribed, bearing only the name Christine –

A dark cloud moved, and a sliver of moon broke through the sky. Its light streamed in from the window, illuminating the room in a pallid green glow. Suddenly the rest of the room was revealed to Gradus; and all that had heretofore been nothing but darkness, infinite blackness, to him sat bathed as if phosphorescent; and all that was not lit seemed only and all the blacker for it. Harsh outlines appeared in the darkness, making a strange and unworldly appearance of a familiar table, a familiar lamp, a familiar chair. All their glowing edges he saw with unnatural clarity; and yet a form, shaped almost like a person, pressing its weight into the cushion with an almost mortal determination, was no more visible to him than a sinking, sickening, deepening shadow.

“Christine?” the doctor called out to the darkness which had grown morbidly silent – knowing of course it couldn’t be, yet hoping against hope that it wasn't –

“Wrong,” the figure hissed. “Always wrong with you, you insufferable twit!”

The voice’s hostility alone froze Gradus in place, a chill running up his spine even before the rational side of his brain could register its meaning. But reason came swiftly enough, telling him who it was, who it obviously had to be, even as it made no sense at all.

“How are you even awake?” he sputtered, tensed by his own confusion. “The medications –”

“– are nothing!” his patient sneered. “Do you not know that I am a virile man? All of the phials in your bag could not equal the amount it would take to put me down!”

What horror! It was as if he were one with the shadows, his entire face voided behind that black, black mask. If he squinted he could see a face – no, not a face,  only the imitation of a face, as carved in onyx, as flattened by paralysis. Only that pale jaw, which moved like a hinge beneath the stony upper lip, gave any indication of life at all. And what life it gave! – ghastly, godly contortions it made, sneering and snarling its odious contempt from the shadowy safety of its dark throne.

“Are you unwell?” Gradus guessed, taking a valiant step forward in protest of his soaring uneasiness. “Perhaps the last dose of morphine has gotten to you in a certain way? Yes, I do believe this could be a side effect. A rare one, maybe, that makes you mad for a short time… but do not worry, it will resolve itself if you sleep it off, so let me help you up and get you back to bed –”

“Take another step and I’ll put you in your grave this very night, dunce boy! I am a very eager man and I don’t take well to idle temptation!”

The patient’s eyes blazed out from behind the stoic mask as he spoke, burning like hellish coals in their blackened sockets. Gradus saw him in the moonlight now, fully bathed in its glow. His bare ankles he really noticed first, with one leg crossed over the other, his foot dangling there with its long grey toes wriggling in midair; then noticed the thin slope of his naked calves; a plaid dressing gown was draped almost deliberately over his thigh, exposing only the narrowest stretch of strikingly pale skin, skin that Gradus had felt before – caressed, really – but only by accident! - and it was this very strip of skin that distracted him for a full minute before he even registered that the dressing gown the other man wore was his own.

“You must see that you are delirious,” Gradus entreated anew, in his most coaxing manner. “You’re not thinking straight, my good man. Do you not know who I am? I am your physician, your good Doctor Gradus, and these rooms are my clinic and my office. You are receiving care here for a very sudden illness, a very frightening condition, which has devastated your wife, and made her to bring you here to me –”

“I haven’t yet gone insane,” the man snapped, his maggotty toes wriggling all the more violently. “And I’m not ill, either, so you can shut up about all that too. That mademoiselle in the other room – my wife, as you call her, for some reason – merely poisoned me with a bottle of my own amontillado. That is all! And obviously she did not succeed in killing me, for she failed for exactly the same reason as all the other would-be assassins of the world have failed against me: divine, cosmic irony. That’s all there is to it, doctor-boy! Or it is, for whatever you should care about it.”

“But of course your wife did not poison you,” Gradus laughed, fully unnerved. “She’s but a little girl! Do you seriously think her capable of such a cruel deed? I think we have made you paranoid with all these tonics and fusions. Wouldn’t you like to sleep? I think it would do you much good.”

“Mademoiselle Daaé is capable of so much more than a simpering idiot like you could ever possibly conceive,” the patient huffed, sinking obstinantly down into the chair. “She has known horrors greater than any human should ever be made to bear in one mortal lifetime, greater than anything your or anyone else’s puny minds could ever dream up. I alone know what she’s been through… I alone saw her struggle to even survive… in the nightscapes I built for her... and I’m proud of her now for the way she’s managed, in spite of it all, in spite of me. Have you ever been proud, Doctor Gradus? Have you ever been proud of Christine?”

“I suppose I have,” the doctor conceded, submitting to the awkward inanity of it all, if only to assuage his agitated patient. “Though I don’t know her as well as you do. I don’t think of her in that way.”

“No, of course you wouldn’t,” the man agreed quickly. “She’s my wife, not yours.”

There was a moment where his eyes blazed once more, and the doctor felt them as if they were boring directly into his soul. What terrible venom his patient spoke with! Was it possible he knew what Gradus had been doing with his wife, behind closed doors? – no, not even closed doors, Gradus thought with a blanch, Christine had made sure of that, had said she wouldn’t do anything behind her husband’s back – so behind closed eyelids, then, scarcely closed eyelids, transparent and veiny eyelids that rolled back under Christine’s fingers, had never ever actually been closed – and then his rigid form beside them, beneath them, between them – had his patient ever been asleep?! –

“Why are you sitting out here?” Gradus demanded, straining to keep his composure despite his fraying nerves. “Were you waiting for me? Did you have something you wished to say to me?”

“Waiting for you! What sort of imbecilic notion is that? Are you implying I somehow knew you were going to wake up in the middle of the night?” Those horrible yellow eyes rolled in their sockets. “I was reading, if you must know.”

“Reading?” Gradus asked, almost more disturbed by that one notion than anything else the man had said up until this point. “Reading what? I don’t keep interesting books around here, so I can’t imagine what you might’ve found –”

Instinctively Gradus inched closer to take a look at the book spread wide open upon the man’s lap, the crease of which the man had been petting slowly, with a single long finger running down the middle fold of it, dampening its sacred crevice – but just as he grew close, the man slammed the book shut.

“Have you no sense of decency, you nosy little snot? This is my wife’s private journal, for God’s sake!”

“And why on earth are you reading your wife’s private journal?” Gradus fired back testily. “Are you not conducting an invasion of her yourself?”

The man let out a low hiss. “Must I explain the entire sordid nature of my marriage to you? You were married before – I know, I’ve already read your diary too – so surely you must understand that every relationship has its little ‘quirks’ and ‘kinks’. If you’ve renewed your member-ship with bachelorhood for so many years you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be with a woman – well, I for one can’t help you with that.”

“I certainly never acted in such a way with my wife!”

“May God bless her dead heart, then,” his patient said coolly, “for she died completely unsatisfied.”

With that, he tossed the book on the end table and recrossed his legs in the other direction, briefly flashing Gradus with inner thighs so scaldingly white he could have sworn he saw bone.

“Now, Tristan,” the man said in a dreadfully casual manner, pulling Gradus’s attention back up to his deeply impenetrable mask, “don’t you suppose it’s time for you to go back to sleep?” Then, as if something no doubt very wicked had come over him, he cocked his horrible head to the side and pretended to think. “Or perhaps… yes, perhaps… you’d rather sit out here with me for a little while longer, and avoid going back to that world of yesterdays which awaits you in your dark and lonely closet? Is that what you’d rather do, hm?”

Gradus gaped at the man, plainly disturbed now yet unable to form a single word in retort. What was it about this man, that robbed him of his speech, of his thought, of his mind? How could a man create such fervent feelings of indescribable dread with just one piercing look, and at the same time… stir in him other feelings so wicked he dared not give them name?

“Will you answer me, Tristan?”

It was not the man who asked, but it came from him all the same – a voice several decades younger and an octave or so higher – a voice so beautifully familiar but which he had given up on ever hearing again. Hers. But how? Was it not buried under his front stoop, by the harbor, by the sea? This voice, this soft, angelic voice, which bore so much resemblance to that of the creature in the other room – of Christine Daaé – and yet it wasn’t her – no, not at all – but instead it was – it was! – little Chrissy Gradus, his first wife, his first love, his first cousin - again in his ear, again in his heart, again in his pounding loin –

“Yes,” he breathed, and watched the man’s lips twitch up in pleasure.

“Then come here and sit with me,” his little Chrissy said, by God sounding just as sweet and loverly as she used to.

“On the chair?”

“On the floor,” the devil’s mouth said, “right here, beside my feet.”

That broke the spell, for a moment at least; so through his disgust, Gradus managed to demand: “What the hell are you?”

“Sit down, Tristan,” little Chrissy’s breathy voice returned, light as a feather. He groaned at the absolutely seraphic sound of it, knowing it wasn’t real, watching with revulsion as those two thin, evil lips wrapped themselves around the ghost of her, as they brazenly defiled her before his very eyes. “Won’t you sit down and listen for a bit, Tristan?”

She began to hum softly, the very same tune from his dream, about sailors and waves and gentleness and deepness – and before he knew it he had gone to his knees and crawled over to the base of the armchair, to rest his chin upon the man’s bare knee.

“Good,” the man said, as little Chrissy kept up her heavenly humming. He put a finger beneath the doctor’s chin and tilted it up, putting him face to face with the stolid black mask. “Very good, Tristan.”

“Erik,” the doctor attempted pitifully, conscious despite it all, “what are you doing to me?”

“Didn’t my wife tell you not to call me that?” the man said, tapping his finger against Gradus’s cheek mockingly. “You should really listen to her.”

“And what happens if I say your name?”

“My name?” the man laughed, his sneer particularly grotesque in the latest pale cast of moonlight. “Oh, look at you, quaking like a schoolboy. That wasn’t even meant as a threat! Merely a reminder, if you can believe my great magnanimity. If my wife tells you to do something, you should do it.”

“Or else?”

“Why must there be an ‘or else’, you ass? Does my wife not deserve to have her wishes respected, just for the hell of it, without some underlying cause?” The man leaned closer, suddenly placing those invisible lips nearly just to the doctor’s brow and wrapping his long spindly fingers around the back of his head when he tried to pull away.

“Now, Tristan, listen to me, and and listen to me well, because I have something truly terrible I wish to say to you and I will not repeat it twice…

“I am death and I am coming to take you away. It will not be today, but it will be soon, and you will thank me for it when I do. On bended knee, I predict, with your head laid limp in my lap, just like it is right now. You’ll beg for me, like a dog, like a sick little mutt, like a mangy little mutt – you’ll beg and beg until I bend to you, like so, and I collar you, like so, and I lead you off to greener pastures, where you can die in peace with my noose around your goaty, greedy neck. I don’t want to kill you, Tristan, I have never wanted to kill anyone, Christine can assure you well of that – if I tell her to – but you’ll be convincing enough to persuade me, I know, and you’ll make a master out of me yet. I know you will, Tristan, if nothing else I know you will do this. I have a way of making people do things they don’t want to do. Even myself. And then you can be dead, like you’ve always wanted to be, ever since your cousin-wife died – ever since that cousin-bitch you once called your Christine died – and I’ll take back my own Christine with me to my own grave, and I’ll do some more terrible things to her, truly terrible, more terrible than I’ve ever done to her before, and then I’ll find some more gunpowder to replace the barrels that went bad and we’ll all be sorry and dead at last. That is all, Tristan Gradus, that I wished to say to you tonight. Do not cry! I see your tears and they annoy me immensely. You brought this on yourself with your incredible idiocy and hubris. You are not even a real doctor, you stupid phony, just some medical student play-acting at the real thing. I read your diary, remember? I know you. I know all. So do not cry, Tristan, do not cry, unless it is for Christine, who must suffer for what we wretched men will soon do to each other. So – so, you may go back to bed now, and sleep until the end of your life comes. Unless you have something to say for some reason… though I can’t imagine what that could possibly be. Not at this point, when so much has already been decided. When it is already all over, without ever having begun…”

He released Gradus with those last few words, dropping him back to his knees. The doctor did not crawl away, but rather stayed – stayed, without knowing why on earth he did. Truth be told, the Good Doctor Gradus had nothing to say to this wretched spiel; for all the while his patient was speaking, there was the littlest hum still whispering in his ear, calming him, soothing him, making him to press his ever-more-teary cheek against his patient’s hard knee. And quiet, so quiet, he thus remained, even as he began to quiver, to shake, to really tremble, even after the masked man shifted in his seat and looked down upon him with disgust – since all the while little Chrissy kept singing to him, the same melody on repeat,

‘Loudly the bell in the old tower rings,
Bidding us list to the warning it brings…’

“Will you not be going to bed?” the patient asked, speaking over her. “Will you not be leaving my chair, Tristan Gradus?”

“How are you doing this?” Gradus mumbled, cheeks alight as he gripped the flesh beneath his cheek to try to bring it ever closer. How thin it all was, so fragile it was vulgar; his fingernails pierced the skin immediately, as he drew them up that slender thigh; it was almost like touching Christine again, either of them, absolutely either of them – or Erik – no! – “What devil’s trick are you playing with my mind, Erik?”

“Erik?” his little Chrissy asked, even as she was still singing, on and on in the background. “Why do you still call me Erik? Don’t you know better than that by now?”

“I know nothing,” he admitted quietly. “All I can tell is that you are doing something very artful to me, but I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know what I feel. I hear my dead wife’s voice but I can see your mouth move… I know it is you but at the same time it’s really her… do you play these sorts of tricks on your wife too? Do you torture her like this, with these same hellish mind games and subterfuge?”

“Yes,” was the dark reply. “Yes, I rather believe I do.”

He looked up to see his patient’s jaw locked tight, the bottom lip bent in a penitent frown. Yet, as soon as he looked up, the man turned away from him and towards the window, as if suddenly uncomfortable. For a long time he studied the glass with those burning, scalding eyes… though what he looked at – be it the tiny stars so far out in the distance, the burnt-out streetlamps strewn out below, or even their own murky reflections peering back through the fogged-up panes – Gradus could not tell for sure.

Suddenly the spindly knuckles clenched, as white as scorching coals, marking the end of whatever terrible thoughts he had been rucking through. The man turned back to Gradus still in his lap, with a terse but resolute sneer visible just below the cut of the black mask as he addressed him in a manner most vile, most eager:

“Did Christine Daaé not warn you that I am a villain? To everyone except her, but then again especially to her! I am her keeper, not her husband; I am a man who makes her shiver, and not with delight! She loathes me, Tristan Gradus, has it not been clear how deeply she detests me, from the very beginning? All because of these tricky things I’ve done to her – and it’s been a great many things, bad things, I promise you! But I’m a very ingenius fellow, and I told you before that I can make anyone do anything I want. Anything at all! It’s no mere prestigidation; it’s magic that I do, Tristan, true magic, evil magic, magic of the darkest arts. It’s all as real as you or I or anyone in the world wants it to be. So yes, Tristan, yes, I torture my little wife – I torture her by making her be my wife! But it isn’t any fun when she knows she’s getting hurt… just the same, it isn’t any fun when you know I’m doing these things to you. If my lips are what give me away – if they don’t, for some reason, do it for you – we shall have to remedy that straightaway. So let’s have you make the illusion a little more real… let’s have you take this flimsy little mask from off my face, and let you have a look at the countenance hiding underneath!”

The man leered down upon the doctor, eyes wild with bitter delight. Mockingly he held his cheek out to the doctor, presenting the side flap of the mask from which it could be easily yanked – then turned and held similarly the other cheek to him, the smile beneath his mask growing ever more gayful, his golden glowing eyes ever more hateful.

Gradus, to his credit, despite his naïve curiosity and his insipid stupidosity, hesitated for all of three seconds; giving in only when prodded directly by his darling little Chrissy, who came from the devil’s mouth at exactly the fourth second to say:

“Take the mask off, Tristan, take it off and see!”

He did not need to be told three times; he tore the black mask away, in the feat of a single fluid motion, tossing the scrap asunder as he gazed directly at the vision which had for so long been hidden from his sight.

And there she was again: beautiful again, lovely again, rosy-flushed and ivory-skinned again. She was Little Chrissy Gradus again, alive with a heartbeat thrumming deep in her arteries again, so much unlike that sepulchric statue he’d last seen her as again. Oh! There was that straight little nose, the one he adored, with its perfect little nostrils, its perfect little 106-degree tip rotation – which he’d measured once before death and once after, and compared the numbers just to find that death had stolen an entire degree from him – the agonous nights he’d had over her nose alone! – and there were her cheeks, those two peachy pats of skin, absurdly caressable just as always, which had always managed to captivate him no matter the season, no matter her expression, no matter if she were masticating or constipating, desiccating or suffocating, erogenating or ulalating – then downwards he found her nasal cleft, which he sometimes kissed in his eagerness, rather than below – oh, below! – where lay her two perfect lips, perfectly parted, perfectly painted, perfectly drawn in prawn and powdered pink.

Without another moment’s thought he clasped his palms to her cheeks and pulled her down to meet him. He kissed her fervently, passionately, heavily, though the song had stopped, though the music was gone and the rest of the earth was eerily silent – silent but for the heartbeat in his chest – for all the world meant nothing at all while he was fused to her, joined with her like old times – his throbbing tongue parting her, creeping past to touch the tip of hers to find it very, very wet...

Oh, that wasn’t quite right…

His eyes sprang open to find Little Chrissy’s face had suddenly transformed, distorted into a gruesome, nightmarish visage. What had happened to his little girl? Oh, she was still there, alright… but God help him for what he now saw! What remained of little Chrissy dripped like molten wax from a terrible death’s head, mottled and ravaged by the throes of decay. Rippling vessels, sunken chasms, and two terrible, taut lips were all that were left of her, exposed and made all the more ghastly by the pale green light of the overseeing moon.

“Handsome bugger, aren’t I?” the the corpse leered. “Dare to give this Don Juan another round?”

“Wretch!” Gradus cried, fleeing to his feet. “Thing of evil! You made me do it!”

“So I did!” the other man said, rearing up his ugly head. “And I’ll do it again, ass boy, if you lay another finger on my wife. Frightening power, isn’t it? And you liked it, didn’t you, if only for a moment? Imagine what that poor Christine Daaé must go through – imagine what she must feel! Must do! All because I make her!”

“Bastard!” Gradus cried.

“I’ve always been,” the other sneered. “Anyway, don’t be so self-righteous. You would do it, too – if only you could! Ha ha! There’s a certain glory in being awful. Don’t you wish you were dead? One Christine already is, and the other is well on her way! Ha ha ha! Best to check on her, I think, doctor – best to make sure she’s well! Who knows when I might choose to take her too… if I haven’t done so already!”

With an obscene cackle, the corpse dismissed the doctor, flicking his long fingers towards the hall from whence he’d come. His body was in motion before his mind even was; and like a stupid slave he obeyed his foddering master, stumbling backwards upon the floorboards so clumsily his plush pantofles came loose and the stupid slippers slipped out from beneath his feet. Stupidly he stubbed his toe on the way out from the room; stupidly he bit back his curses as he limped quickly down the hall, tears in his eyes and fear in his heart; stupidly he checked on Christine just to find her safe and snug in her bed, holding her a book of poetry against her chest as tightly as a lover; and so he collapsed against the wall, consumed with the climax of every human emotion – of horror, of dread, of fear, of terror – and for a moment nearly euphoric in his panic, nearly delighted at its bewildering thrills and its mortifying vulgarity  – and when the pinnacle passed, leaving him drained and fatigued past mortal comprehension – with his last reserves of strength, he went, crawling on his hands and knees, and returned to the closet to return to his dreams…

And as he slipped back off to sleep, the song from his deep subconsciousness began anew. But this time Little Chrissy had chosen to sit the piece out; for a man was now singing, a man with a much deeper voice than she, with a sonorous, soothing voice guiding the strain lower and lower, down to the blackened depths, down to its sepulchre below the quiet, quiet sea…

“Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep
So beware… beware…”

The song continued for some time even after Gradus had began to snore; and in the other room the monster remained, sullen and still, mouthing along as he stared with a jutted jaw at the journal just beside him.

Slowly, he reached for it; and with great resignation returned to his torture once more.

Chapter Text

“The Rest-Cure”
(Part VII)

Again, morning.

Christine had resumed her usual spot beside Erik’s cot; the breakfast tray sat beside them both, untouched but for the split tartine and camembert skins. It was reading time now for both her and her slumbering ward, so a book was laid across her lap and spread wide to a short story he’d read to her many times over the past year. Her finger dragged across the text as she read it to him now, speaking aloud in a good and dramatical fashion, careful with her diction so as to not aggrieve him too fiercely,

“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge…”

This book she read from now was one of the five books which Erik had packed for her intended departure, which he’d tucked snugly in her little valise, slotted between her small-clothes and that tiny box with the trinket she’d meant to give to him all that time ago. All the books had come from his personal bookshelf, deep within his gloomy bedroom, and he’d stood on his tippy-toes to pry some of them down, one by one handing them over to her and slowly amassing a short pile of his vellum treasures in her still-shaking, snot-wiped arms.

The two atlases he gave her were well-used and meticulously annotated, but sorely outdated. The next was a Tolstoy book, some “Anna Karenina” thing, which Christine was done with before she even began. Erik had warned her it was a tragedy, yet all it gave her was a moment’s smile, as she  humored herself to think that Erik had apparently been in such a fluster he’d forgotten that she couldn’t read Russian. Thus the book was nearly worthless to her – nearly, save for a small picture he’d drawn on the inside cover. It was nothing but a clumsy scribble, which she assumed to demonstrate some scene he must have liked from it, and she found herself returning to that small picture more than a few times over the course of her stay in the doctor’s apartment.

The next book he loaded upon her came from a much lower shelf, near their waists, and was an officially translated copy of Cecil B Hartley’s “Gentleman’s Book of Etiquette.” Christine had seen this book on Erik’s shelf before, right alongside the companion book for ladies by a Florence Hartley, and recalled being somewhat confused during the packing when Erik had picked this one over the other.

“You are already the perfect lady,” he’d answered sweetly. “This one is for the next lucky man, in the near future no doubt, who finds himself in a courtship with you and wishes to be worthy. I’m afraid it didn’t help me much, regretfully. But another man… a more redeemable man… it might help him to be all the things you so deserve. We must wish for that sort of impossible thing, don’t you think, lovely Christine? Otherwise we have nothing in this world at all…”

The book she had now upon her lap was the last one of the stack. It was a book of Poe, a complete collection of his short stories and poems, all printed in their original despairing English; but unlike the Tolstoy book, Erik had taken the time to translate all of them into a flowery French verse, lettering over each line with handwriting that looked a bit more agonizing than his typical matchstick style. The pages in this book were worn the worst of all of them, and contained a few cheeky grains of sand trapped in its binding. And they truly were cheeky, for it seemed no matter how many times Christine shook the book above the waste bin, there always seemed to be a few more grains caught within. She knew from previous conversations that Poe was Erik’s favorite; and curiously the inside book cover was addressed in frilly script, “TO MY NEVERMORE,” with a little scribbling of a mask below it. Erik had mentioned he had been given gifts before – “gifts he truly cherished” – and Christine wondered if this was one of those. It certainly looked well loved.

On, thus, Christine went with her reading, expounding the tale with a fantastic enthusiasm, exaggerating the voices to an almost comical degree, in a manner so gay it might have been construed as irreverent – mocking, even – to the material; and on, too, Erik listened to his wife, though he lay unconscious as a true corpse, as she read to him this short little horror story which he’d so greatly adored in life.

“ ‘Ugh! ugh! ugh!’ ” she read out, giving each ejaculation its deserved consideration, “ ‘ugh! ugh! ugh! — ugh! ugh! ugh! — ugh! ugh! ugh! — ugh! ugh! ugh!’ ”

Was that his lip that twitched – downwards, or maybe upwards? For the life of her, Christine couldn’t say, for he looked no different for it and made no further movement after. But wouldn’t it be lovely if he stirred, even just a bit? To laugh, to cry, to rant, to die? Anything would be welcome, she thought – anything more than this.

“ ‘Come,’ ” she went on and on, “ ‘we will go back… you are happy… and I cannot be held responsible…’ ”

A light tapping just then roused Christine from her reading, and made her to turn towards the door.

“Oh… Tristan. Good morning,” she greeted in a duller voice. “I wasn’t expecting you this early. Is it time already for the next medication?”

“Almost time,” the doctor said faintly. He looked a sight. “But I must tell you first, Mademoiselle Daaé, that I have had a thought about his treatment which you might not like.”

“And what would that be?”

Gradus motioned her to come closer. When she refused, he crept in, on the most delicate of footfalls, and crouched beside her chair.

“I had a dream last night,” he told her in a hushed whisper. “That is, I think it was a dream. Or I hope it was.  But before I go any further, may I ask, Mademoiselle Christine… this man, who is he really to you?”

Christine looked towards the bed and sighed. “What did he do now?”

“I am quite afraid to even say,” Gradus confessed. “This husband of yours… he was sitting in the other room last night, spouting some of the most heinous things at me. He spoke of you, horribly, and made some worryingly violent threats towards my person.” He shifted a bit on his crouching feet. “Now, Christine, doctors are used to some level of uncooperativeness in their patients; but I must wonder, as I am an American doctor, and mostly competent by the American standard, if perhaps I am simply too used to American patients and the American way of disease – too used to the American textbook – and as he is a French patient, with French problems and French etiologies, perhaps that is the reason I simply do not know what to do with him.”

Christine stared back at the man quietly. “So you’re just giving up on him?”

“No,” Gradus said quickly. “No, no, not at all. Unless you want me to? Ha ha, if only… no, I am just telling you this so you might excuse me for some, erm, creativity I might wish to employ in your husband’s treatment plan. He’s not my usual case, Mademoiselle Daaé, and you must understand we’ve been taking unconventional measures since this whole thing began anyway. And the keyword I want you to remember here is unconventional, Christine, not malpractice, because I assure you it isn’t that; but just in case I will have you sign a form…”

“A form?”

“Just a little paper, nothing at all,” Gradus clarified, “which says you agree to it, all of it, and that if anything goes wrong, it was all your idea, and that I won’t be held legally culpable for anything in the past, present, or future, and –”

“Just what are you wanting to do to my husband, Doctor Gradus?”

“There’s this little surgery,” he admitted, spreading his sweaty palms out wide, “that they practice on the rail-lines of Indiana. It’s safe, you know, because they practice it all the way out there in the rural country, and if you’ve ever chanced a read through a history book you’ll see that it’s been done, in a manner of speaking at least, since the dawn of civilization. And it’s very sensical, and very quick, but it’s not done very much, especially not over on this side of the ocean –”

“Doctor…” Christine warned.

“It’s called a lobotomy,” Gradus confessed at last. “But it’s not so drastic as you might be fearing! There’s good medical evidence for it, and besides it’s all been done before – medical trials even, in Sweden, if you could trust your own people! I’ll start small, with an exploratory trepanning, which will hopefully release the unholy spirits mucking about his mind; we can do blood-letting next, to appease the humours; and then, but only if I must, I will take my leucotome to his brain and scrape the evil tissue away. He will be better than he was before, Christine. He will be good-natured, polite, all those respectable things that you so deserve him to be.”

“As gentle as a lamb?” Christine asked, rather dubiously.

“As gentle as a lamb,” Gradus promised, pressing his hands together as if in prayer. “He will be the perfect husband, Christine. So perfect I might even be jealous of you! Ha ha! Maybe a little quiet – the subjects always seem a little quiet after, from what I’ve read in the reports – but there’s nothing wrong with a little peace after what you’ve suffered through. So what do you say, Christine?”

She gazed at the bed for the briefest, quickest, worst moment, then –

“What am I supposed to say?” Christine shrugged. “I make no decisions for him. If he will sit still for the procedure, then by all means, doctor, go ahead and try.”

“But, Christine – your man is unconscious,” Doctor Gradus pointed out, straightening his back a bit. “You are the one who must choose for him; he is not capable at the moment.”

“Oh, you dumb doctor,” Christine sighed wearily. “Can’t you see? My husband can very well do whatever he pleases. Do not assume he is ever asleep or ever not listening; he is a very sneaky man, and a very good actor, and he is very good at pretending to be things which he is not.”

“What, you mean like –” Gradus spun his head wildly to focus fully on the bed, “– now? Right now? Christine, has he been awake for you this entire time?”

“Of course,” she replied. “Or maybe not. He has to actually sleep some time, doesn’t he?”

“But now – do you think he is now?”

“I don’t know. And why should I? I don’t know a thing about this man. I don’t know anything at all. Maybe this conversation you think you had with him was nothing more than a dream. Have you considered that, Doctor Gradus? I have a lot of dreams about him. He’s a very dream-worthy man. Maybe this was one, too.”

“It… really didn’t seem like a dream,” Gradus said slowly, peeling away from her. “He spoke very realistically, about things I shouldn’t presume to know about.” But then he cocked his head thoughtfully, and conceded, “Perhaps it did all seem rather surreal, though…”

“See?”

Gradus stood up suddenly, brushing the wrinkles out of his coat and laughing. “Oh, what a funny fool I am! Christine, forgive me all this talk of lambs and lobotomies. I’ve let a silly nightmare colour my morning would’s and wouldn’ts, and forgotten your husband is just some poor demented old leaf of a man, spouting petty violence out of sheer, raw delusion. Aw, he never even rose from his chair, the sorry thing! Ha ha! Well, let this be a lesson learned for me: patients say the darndest things! Best not take them all to heart!”

“Oh, but he’s certainly capable,” Christine piped up, “of murdering you, if he so pleases. Just so you know.”

“…Pardon?”

“I just told you, doctor, he can do whatever he wants. Perhaps last night was only a dream; but he may still be awake, and he may still be in a hard mood, regardless.”

“Oh, so you just mean that in a figurative sense? I see.”

“Well, that too, I guess; but I also mean that he’s a very dangerous man, apart from all his supposed confusion. He’s killed a lot of people in his life.”

“Killed… you mean that figuratively, again, right?”

Why did it feel like she was endlessly sighing whenever she was in conversation with this man? “Please, Tristan, try to not to be so purposefully obtuse. It won’t help. It’s never helped me, not truly. I told you from the outset that this was a case to be kept quiet. You never guessed the reason why?”

“What was I supposed to have guessed?” Gradus tittered, all nerves once again. “For the love of God, Christine – is your husband actually going to murder me? Is that what I’m supposed to be understanding here?”

She turned her head. “It’s a rather significant possibility, yes.”

Gradus pressed his hands to his temple, straining to remain calm, collected, composed… an absolute exercise in futility, of course, he realized, as his entire body found a new uncharted shade of pale to become, never reached by any human therebefore, and his forehead and armpits began seeping out tremendous fountains of sweat as his mind began to race with thoughts of limits, and endings, and finales, and omegas…

“Christine, why did you ever come here?” he demanded, as he began to pace the short expanse of the room, trying to avoid looking at the bed with the executioner who was maybe asleep, maybe not, and finding it quite impossible. “Why did you come to my doorstep? Why couldn’t you have gone yourself and found my neighbor, the old Persian one you were looking for, wherever in the world he is on vacation? Why couldn’t you have done what I did, that very first day, and gone to the telegram station to send him a note? Why couldn’t you have been the one to take the card from the telegram lady, the card he’d left with her, that read, ‘THIS IS NOT A HOWDY FROM ALGIERS! LEAVE ME ALONE!’ Oh! Why did you marry such a horrible man, and why did you fail at poisoning him? Why did you ever come to France, why did you ever leave Sweden? What happened to your mamma and what happened to your pappa? Really, girl, really! Where’s the person who was supposed to be watching over you all this time, to stop you from making all these bad decisions? Where is any parent, guardian, wet-nurse? God above! Where on earth is Daddy Daaé?!”

“Right here,” Christine said abruptly, pointing directly at the bed. “Where he’s always been, this entire time. Didn’t you know?”

“Oh, Lord…” Gradus blanched ever whiter, falling in on himself. “Oh, dear Lord…”

Christine clapped a hand over her mouth in a futile effort to restrain her sudden giggles. “I’m kidding, Tristan! Kidding! But your face! Ah! Christine’s allowed to be funny from time to time, isn’t she?” She laughed some more. “Daddy Daaé is dead, as he’s been for quite some time. But Erik is my father enough, and I his mother enough, that we have no need anymore for flesh and blood begetters to corral us around like aimless, brainless baby-kids. If you want someone to blame for my life choices, blame him – and if you want to blame someone for his, blame me.”

For a long minute, Gradus simply stared at her, mouth adroop and eyes ateared. All shades of grief entered and exited his expression in that insatiably tiny course of time, working cyclically, round-a-ways, and backwards through each one of them, and yet, tragically, never quite finding his balance on that final stage of acceptance.

“That’s it,” he said thus at long last, heartless and absolutely defeated. “That’s quite it. The operation’s to be done, dawn tomorrow, whether you sign the paper or not.”

Resolute in his decision, Doctor Gradus stalked away from the bed and stood firm at the doorway – then turned briefly around to stare strangely at the scene he’d left behind.

“You understand, Christine, you must,” he attempted pitifully to explain, as his gaze languished on the sight he beheld. “I’ve no other choice but this...”

He closed the door on the way out, leaving Christine alone with the corpse beside her; and so she turned, and with a start found a single tear beaded upon her husband’s sallow cheek.

Chapter Text

“The Rest-Cure”
(Part VIII)

FROM THE DIARY OF TRISTAN GRADUS,
STUDENT OF MEDICINE

The surgery is set for six today.

Despite the circumstances, I am tentatively optimistic. I have done much reading in the past twenty-four hours and now know the names of some, or even most, of the cranial structures and their associated anatomies. I feel relatively confident in my ability to use a scalpel (how hard could it really be?) but I do wonder if I will be queasy at the sight of first blood. I never did get this far in my training back in Boston; this penetration will be a first for me. And yet I am excited nonetheless, especially for it to be him; and even now as I write I am taking my scalpel up in my hand again, gripping it tight in my idle palm, letting all my nervous jitters run free…

I’ve accepted that Christine is just as insane as him. She is not, and never has been, my ally in this endeavor. I cannot trust her. She wishes to fuel his delusions; I’d like to stomp them out. And so I come upon the unhappy fact, which shreds my heart to even more than fancy: that I am all alone, completely alone in this world, and that it does not matter if I am here or in Boston, in the Amazon or in the Artic, dead in this apartment or dead six feet in the ground, for I will be lonely everywhere I go all the same. My Late Little Chrissy took nothing of me with her to the grave, so I am left here with all of me, all of my cumbersome and burdensome pieces, all of these strange and fleshy bits of me, and there is no one in this world or the next who will ever help to carry their weight.

If only someone could take just a part of me, take it and hold it, take it and never give it back… perhaps I could find some relief in my life last.

And perhaps the surgery will happen, as all the rest of my life must, a little sooner than six. And then all of it will happen, and all of it will be over, by a little past seven – if ever we could be so fortunate.

Crossing my fingers.

--

A doctor like Tristan Gradus was not a doctor in happy access to an operating theatre. As such the surgery was booked for the dining room, which is to say just the single wobbly table in the middle of the sitting room, also called the drawing room (when Doctor Gradus was in one of his more impressable moods) – and thus said table was cleared of its tablecloth and spread over with a copy of Le Gaulois, a reprinted chapter of Maupassant’s Une Vie taking up much of the table and then some, and ultimately made up to be quite the appropriate stagepiece for a surgery of such phenomenal illegitimacy.

“We must be precise in what we do, as we only have one chance to do it,” Gradus announced, as he laid his tools upon the tray. An apron tied with thick leather pulled about his neck, hot and heavy and suffocating, and he felt sweat pooling already beneath his armpits as he examined his set-up. He wiped his brow and touched the tips of his tools, counting them for the tenth time in precisely so many minutes, and asked in a sidelong way, as if the matter were a slog and the answer but an absurd triviality to him, “Christine, is your husband asleep yet?”

“I don’t know,” Christine answered.

“Of course you don’t! Don’t know why I asked.” Gradus shook his head and resumed the touching of his tools. Syringe, forceps, retractor, wrench… “It’s no matter. He’s cooperating now, so we must assume – hope – he’s down for the count. And if he wakes, I will just wrestle him back down.” He cocked his head just as his fingers brushed over the head of a hammer. “Or, on second thought – let me restrain him from the outset. That would be better, don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fool again I am, I see! Anyway…”

In a matter of minutes Gradus returned to the table with a set of leather straps – all worn and apparently well-used, though perhaps not for the purpose they were being applied to now, as they required several long minutes of bending and snapping in order remove their stiff creases until they were able to be strapped securely around the patient’s impossibly thin wrists and ankles. He pulled the straps as tight as they could be, buckling them together in an awkward way beneath the table, then stood up and wiped his hands.

“That ought to do it.”

“If you think so,” Christine murmured unhelpfully from her spot beside him.

He considered her as he resumed his touching, and in turns stroking, of his equipment. She’d been an odd little duckling about the whole thing, in Gradus’s opinion. Not a helpful word had she uttered in the entire time since their conversation yesterday morning; and yet she insisted, to the point of belligerence, that she was to be present for the operation. For what reason, Gradus did not dare guess. Did she intend to help? Ha! More likely to interfere! Or did she just want to watch? To keep an eye on his work, to make sure everything went right… or, rather, to observe, just for some sort of sick fascination with the bloodsport of the thing? Ah! There were just too many possibilities to consider, and all of them crueler than the last.

And so – consider, he did not. What did he care if she insisted on attending? She was hardly his greatest concern in this endeavor. But damned he would be if she intended to get in his way… and damned she would be, too, quite frankly. Didn’t she have a duty to help, especially if she was there? A moral obligation, to take an active role in pursuing the goals of the greater good? Yes, of course she did, Gradus decided, in his good and godly way, she had an obligation to do more than just sit there at the bedside like a dead-eyed little doll like she’d done for the past few weeks. Quite a bit more, in fact! Thus it came to be that La Daaé, Paris’s preeminent diva, Europe’s favored flower, was cast as first assistant in this last procedure, tasked to oversee all the ugly and bloody delights even the doctor had not quite chanced himself yet to experience.

For not just a bystander would he allow her to be any longer; now he would make her see, now he would make her act.

He moved to the front of the table, standing with his patient’s head resting just before his waist. The mask had been removed already, revealing the hideous little bugger in all his putrid devastation, and now Gradus looked upon him, upside-down, to find him charmingly revolting. There was a loveliness to those hollow cheeks and that stern brow, wasn’t there? Surely there was nothing comely about those rippling vessels, torturous and bulging as they were beneath the disintegrating flesh – but rather, Gradus wondered, might there not be something comfortingly familiar in all these wretched features? A nostalgic perfume, perhaps, hidden within the rotting wafts of his sordid stench?

Oh, Gradus groaned suddenly, grasping the man’s limp head between two quivering palms. How pathetic was he! To see his Little Lost Chrissy in this corpuscular face – to see her and desire her – not just once, not just then, but now, again, seeing the clearest resemblance of her right before his eyes – an uncanny visage, not an illusion of any memoried beauty this time around, but of her natural form, her current form – as she must appear this very moment – just as she rots in the ground!

“Doctor?” Christine called, thankfully interrupting these vulgar thoughts. “I’ve brought a chair.”

Instantly Gradus flung his hands up and away from his patient, whipping around to face her as a slight sheen of guilty sweat overcame his flushing face. “A chair! Whatever for?”

“I only thought – will it not be very painful for you to stoop over like that for all of the surgery? I only worry for your posture.”

His posture! Ah! He gave a quick side-long look at his patient and found himself struck again by something oddly delightful; and yet it was the briefest flash, for he was struck next by the accusation, imaginary though it was, that he might derive any pleasure from this arrangement at all – that to stand directly above this man, in such a vulnerable state as this, with four-or-so limbs tied and flaccid, with those devilish lips lying limply apart, might conceive in him any sort of shameful thrills –

“Right,” he nearly cried, tossing the chair before the table and throwing himself upon its seat. “I was about to ask you to fetch this for me, in fact! Though, truly, truly, you should have brought it here sooner. You should have brought it here first! If you are to be my assistant for this surgery you must understand there are certain expectations for what your role entails. Understand you have no formal training – and while you are a smart girl, Chrissy, and I’m sure you’ll catch on soon enough – I need you in the meantime to try to, well, keep up. Anyway, as we were…”

On he went with his neurotic arranging of his tools, straightening his blades and smoothing his journals. He spoke all the while, in a single-mindedly nervous fashion – which Christine bothered to listen to none of, for she was in fact an expert at ignoring such rambling nonsenses after spending so many months under Erik's fine loquacious tutelage – until at last he pricked his finger on the tip of a rather well-sharpened scalpel and began to bleed.

Drawing his finger up to his mouth to lick his wound, he felt suddenly a feeling settle in his stomach – a feeling, which told him he could not avoid the unavoidable forever – and he saw with absolute clarity the fate which hanged ahead of him. There was no choice but to proceed, for to do anything else would merely postpone the inevitable; and so, with a finger still lodged in his mouth, looking nothing but a boy in his make-believe hospital costume, he turned to Christine and mustered out one final question before his submission.

“Why in the world is he letting me do this to him?”

To which Christine replied, of course,

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you don’t,” he said with a heavy sigh. Then – with a nod, and a shrug, he asked unhappily, yet quite willingly,

“Shall we begin?”

Chapter Text

“The Rest-Cure”
(Part IX)

The first slice of Doctor Gradus’s scalpel was clumsy – but deep.

For a moment only, a single lonely red bead lingered upon the cut – it could hardly be called an incision – before it fell, trickling slowly down the patient’s temple, just barely reaching the paper beneath before a larger stream sprung forth.

“Towel,” Gradus demanded, snapping his fingers, “towel, Chrissy, towel – quick!”

There was a hefty stack of washcloths to her right, which Gradus had laid out and counted several times in his nervousness; Christine grabbed the top cloth and pressed it firmly upon Erik’s temple, holding her breath as the smell of iron and rot wafted up to her nose. A crimson blot bloomed beneath her fingers, and she forced herself to think about it as little as possible.

“Are you well?” Christine asked the doctor. “You look pale. Do you need a pause?”

“No,” the doctor replied, wiping his brow. “No, no, no pause. Move your hand, Chrissy, and let me see what I’ve done.”

She did as he asked, peeling back the cloth with a delicate touch. She tried not to look upon Erik’s face as she drew down the linen to his cheek, a smudge of scarlet smearing out behind her hand as she moved along his mottled flesh. The slit still bled, and it was always going to, but somehow the mess seemed all the more exacerbated by the efforts of her stanching.

Is everything, she wondered, as she watched the blood seep from temple to table, is everything always to be this futile…?

Beside her, Gradus was steadying himself, drawing back his scalpel to his patient’s forehead. He waited only the time it took to take a short, shaking breath – the smallest second to steel his shaking hand – before he pressed the tip of his blade back in, and drew a second bloody line atop the scalp.

This cut was significantly better than the first, both in terms of ease and of direction. The coarser skin sheared away from its underlayers with the next, a larger spurt of blood falling as Gradus grasped now the ungainly, fleshy flap in some tweezers and folded it clumsily over and upon itself, as he tried his best to do what the textbook diagrams had shown but could not quite articulate. Beneath this flap he found a greater mess of pulp and vessels, blood mixed with more blood, somehow darker than all the blood which had already fallen thus far, and something suspiciously white and bisque-like peeked out cheekily beneath it all. It was nothing like the diagrams, and yet –

“Alas,” he marveled quietly. “Why, Chrissy, look here and tell me if you see what I’m seeing?”

She looked, for how could she not, where the doctor gestured with his fine-tipped tool; and there upon Erik’s temple, etched deep into the bone, was something akin to a small dark keyhole. Its edges were flattened, not rough, as if they’d been sawed down with a file – whiter, too, than all the skull around it – and down below, beneath the bone plate, a pucker of brain matter sat, gorged and wet, gaping wide like a splitted rosebud. A naughty little hole it was, for being where it shouldn’t… a curious thing, too, that there hadn’t been any indication of it from the outside – though, in retrospect, Christine mused, the flesh above had been so ravaged and hideous, it would have been far curiouser indeed if anyone had noticed it before – and so for a miserable moment she merely marveled at it – at it, and its endless darkness – filled by such ephemeral joys and euphoreal visions – what ethereal dances, what eternal streams – all winking at her from the very bottom of that bottomless hole – all that she could not see from this side of the burrow – a burrow to nothing, and yet to everything…

“We are not the first to enter your husband’s head, it seems,” Doctor Gradus explained, nudging his curious tool towards the still-concealed margins of the fleshy flap and slitting open some more little vessels with each poke. “No, not the first at all… Christine, have you ever known your husband to have surgery before this day?”

“It is… not something he has shared with me.”

“But he might have?”

“I don’t believe he’d ever let someone get close enough to do something like this to him,” Christine said, wincing as a comical amount of blood spurted into the hole with one particularly oblivious jab. “He’s not very trusting.”

“The marks are very old. Perhaps he was young?”

“Perhaps.”

Gradus looked up then, briefly meeting her eye as his face held the curiousest expression. “Forced?”

“Perhaps,” she answered again, less certain. “But truly anything is possible, doctor. Is it worth wondering, when we have no chance of ever knowing?”

“I suppose not,” the doctor replied, returning his gaze to his work. His hands remained still, though, as he stared down at the bloody mess he’d made of everything. The hole seemed less a desolate pit than a well now, a crimson lake in the midst of a pulpy wasteland. Some strands of grey hair had gotten caught in the mess, tousled and sticky, and when he moved them out of his way they flicked tiny, misty spatters of blood all across the rest of the head and down across the newspaper. His hand came down to rest just behind the hole, blood still pouring, oozing, leaking through his scarlet fingers; he could hardly see the hole now, in fact, for how much blood kept coming from it – not violently, like spurts from a geyser, but gently, like a cup that’s run over – over and over – and he wondered, as he perceived very clearly how much an obvious butchery this surgery was turning out to be, why in the world a nice, quiet, mannerly lady like Christine Daaé would even let him pick up the scalpel in the first place.

And so there it was: despite everything, he was not a true brute at heart – only a fool – and as he looked once more at the hole that he could no longer see, the hole and all its glorious possibilities drowned in a thick sea of heme, he thought to himself there seemed nothing to do that hadn’t already been done. The hole was already drilled, after all, and the lobe was already taken. All of the blood was already spilled, already congealing, already stinking… and so, Gradus thought, very intelligently for perhaps the first time in his all-too-boobish life, that the most prudent thing to do at this point would be to simply sew the man up, and give up.

With this decision made, and him feeling quite resolute in its making, Gradus called out to his assistant to hand him the proper tools for his surrender. Of course the girl grabbed the wrong thing first, rightly unsure of herself as she held the long-shafted virginal icepick out to him in her trembling white fist… momentarily he wondered why he never noticed her shaking before (could it be she was as nervous as he?) but he brushed this thought away just as quickly as it came to him, for she was absolutely right in what she said before, that it didn’t matter in the slightest.

For truly, anywhere there was a question, there was an absolute answer; and without the means of retrieving that answer, the question became nothing more than wasted breath.

Regardless --

A professional might have corrected her in her mistake; but he was not, so he did not. Rather he swept his hand beneath hers and reached for the suture needle himself, taking care to be quick lest she intercept him. He fumbled to grasp the thread, sitting as it was in a bath of blood, how messy it’d all become… his soaked fingers fought to pinch up the impossible slippery eel of a thing, and once done, miraculous feat it was, his hand retreated back over the patient’s chest. The length of thread trailed behind, seemingly endless in its unfurling length as it dragged its way up the patient’s chest and across a singular, dead nipple.

“What are you doing?” his assistant asked, alarmed.

“It’s done,” he answered faintly, sticky fingers still fumbling as he tried to thread the needle. “I’m done.”

“But you didn’t do anything.”

“I’d rather say I’ve done enough,” he returned. “There’s nothing left to do. You saw.”

“But there has to be something else. A different spot, maybe? Or – the other side, doctor, why don’t you try over there?”

“I can’t, it’s not the same.”

“So that’s just it, then?” she demanded, growing ghastly pale. “All of this – for weeks and weeks – for this? You aren’t even trying, doctor, you aren’t even fighting. What am I supposed to do now? Can’t you just –”

“I can’t, Chrissy, but even if I could, there’s all this blood, it’s not safe at this point – it’s barbarism, mutilation – I’d kill him right here on this table…”

“Then do it,” she pleaded. “Kill him, if you won’t fix him. You have to do this, doctor, you have to at least try. You have to…”

“No,” he insisted with stern finality, rising from his seat and standing before her with an authority he should have claimed long before. “I am not a murderer, Christine, I will not be murdering your husband this morning just to appease you!” He slammed his hand down upon the table, splashing the blood a bit where his fist connected with the soggy newspaper. “Is this what your intention was all along? To set me up? To finish what you started? You tried, didn’t you? To poison him? He said that you did, he told me you did! Now – I don’t know which of you to believe, but I do know I’m not going to play the fool for you any longer. I’m done with all this insanity, I’m done with this surgery, I’m done with pretending to be a doctor. If you want him dead, kill him yourself!”

With that he raised up the suture needle once more, furiously trying and failing to thread the damn thing. He raised it mere millimeters from his pupils, peering over his spectacles as with amping impatience the limp thread kept just slipping against the eye of the needle. Momentarily he brought the tip of the thread to his lips and sucked, just briefly, to try to wick it, or otherwise stiffen it; in the meantime a blurry movement caught his sight, as his assistant suddenly lifted her hand to the level of her eyes – and his own eyes widened, thread still caught between his sucking lips, as he saw her still holding on to that great girthy extralong icepick – grasping and wielding its substantial length with steady purpose, and an elegance he envied to replicate –

“Stop!” Gradus cried, jumping forward to intercede. “You mad woman! You’ll really kill him!”

But he was too late; the shaft slammed in, a fresh release of blood shooting out from where it hit… someone gasped, someone cried, gurgling and wretching as if they were dying… and in that singular moment as he collided against her, twining between her and the patient both, reeling from the impact, feeling that blasted needle pricking him somewhere hard down below, he recalled suddenly the song in his head from the other night, the song which echoed now as only a puddling pounding between his temples – BEWARE, BEWARE! – abusing him over and over and over…

And then all was silent, horribly silent, and all was dark, horribly dark. His face was crammed against a slick clammy surface, so much like flesh and so much not… he half-recognized the obtrusion in his nostril to be a nipple… the black veil upon his face to be the underlyings of Christine’s cold, gold curls… the smell in his nose to be both mint and minted pennies… and then a sinister sensation, like a cold, cold hand, began to creep down the veiny length of his arm, crawling slowly by mode of a hundred damp and pitiless fingertips, a thousand scraping fingernails, tapping their way over a landscape of bulging bursae and timorous tuberculums, cupidous condyles and cupescent carpals, all those traitorous tyloids, until they reached that dainty white thing which was his wrist – how small it was! – how fragile… – and then locked themselves upon it, wrapping and trapping it tight in the  far superior circumference of their collective hand’s iron grasp.

“Christine!” Erik moaned, suddenly above. “Did I not warn you!”

For Erik now became conqueror and they became prey; or maybe just he, as Christine was merely flung away whilst he, Gradus, was thrust down. All his pathetic wrigglings were for nothing – violently he splattered against the table, the soggy newspaper slapping his cheek and the hard wood beneath punching his bone as Erik, naked, overcame him.

“Stupid boy, how many times must I beat you?” Erik’s foul breath breezed within the doctor’s ear as he canted roughly against him. “Countries of men have laid where you lie now, Tristan, just as you are with all your infuriating spunk, stripped and begging and powerless beneath me… none of them wanting, but all of them submitting, just as you do now – for even at half my strength I always, always win. Did I not warn you I would do this? Did I not warn you both? How many times must I repeat myself?!”

“Let him go, Erik,” an unamused Christine called from somewhere behind them, even the swishes in her skirts sounding exasperated as she stepped around them. “Don’t be like this.”

“Don’t be like this? For the love of -” Gradus cried, just as Erik shoved himself harder against his bent form, “- God, Christine, is that all you’re going to say?”

“Don’t yell at my wife,” Erik hissed.

“You’re both mad!” Gradus moaned uselessly. “Oh, Chrissy, can’t you control your husband?”

“Yes,” Erik echoed, “Control me, Christine!”

“I cannot,” was the deserting reply, “though many times I wish I could. This you have made abundantly clear to me, dear Erik, so you might as well go ahead and do whatever it is that you will.”

Dear Erik sneered at that; then with a wholly disagreeable grunt spat directly, and wetly, into the doctor’s upright ear canal, and released his iron grasp from Gradus’s wrist. Then, as Gradus floundered anew, Erik crushed the hard ball of his hand down upon the side of his skull, dazing the doctor – and at the same time, reared up, spewing hatefully:

“You really ought to appreciate me, Christine – that I’ve been a good, good boy until now! The best boy, even… the goodest boy! All for you! Do I get no thanks for being good?”

Tense white knuckles dug down and combed through the doctor’s short curls, lovely sun-kissed curls like so much golden hay, fingers and their nails sprawling across his scalp like reapers and their blades, blood trailing after them, burning the flax, scorching the earth, twisting and wrenching the vulgar strays around their spindly scythes as they cut and cut and cut –

“Do you forget? I bore everything you bade me, wife, bore the bad doctor and the bad drugs, the loss of what dregs of dignity I had left, scrapings I didn’t even know I still had until I gave them up – though I was never sick, never ill, never even the slightest bit unwell, not with anything that can be treated in this lifetime anyway… I bore it all and I bear it now and I’ll bear it forever if that’s what you so desire from me – but only just tell me you appreciate me, show me you appreciate me, don’t hurt me when I’m not hurting you! Oh, Christine! You turn, I see you hide your tears, but you’re still my darling wife, my darling little tyrant-wife! Won’t you say Erik’s been a good, good husband to his darling wife Christine? She took his gift – remember the gift, the one he gave her? Don’t you ever remember these things? Pity, wife, what a miserable pity – because you took Erik’s gift and used it so piss-poorly just two seconds ago! He promised you it’d be good for one use, but he can’t help it if you’re so careless and wasteful that you can’t see when you’re throwing something extremely valuable way, always throwing everything away, my Don Juan, do you happen to know where that has gone? In your trash can, you ungrateful girl, can you believe that’s where I found it! And our marriage certificate, Christine, where on earth is our marriage certificate? What have you done with it, you deceitful little bitch? Oh, Christine doesn’t even know… out with the garbage again, I’m sure! But Erik promised her... he warned you!... he’ll let you draw first blood, he said, before he fights back! Ha ha ha! So here Erik is, Christine, holding true to his promise, like the good, good husband he is for you! He'll kill the doctor first, just like he did with the other one, the boy he never liked, even if he doesn’t want to, even if everything in his mind is screaming not to… and then he’ll take you home – home, home, home! – and it’ll all be your fault, little sadist, it’ll all be your fault that everything is ruined, even if Erik is the one who was forced to ruin it!”

All the while speaking Erik was fisting Gradus’s hair, that scarlet-soaked crop of sunburnt weeds – fisting it and tugging it – back and forth, back and forth – horribly, horribly! - as if he were nothing but an uncorpusculated head, a material commodity existing only to be fidgeted with, to be yanked around like a dog’s ravaged bone, thrown down by his master as a means of distraction, if not pleasure –

Until all at once Doctor Gradus felt his head being wrenched up as far as it would go, as Erik began to really sob, testing the limits of all the lacey ligaments and tatty tendons that held his cervical column together. The rest of his body drooped down beneath it, hanging like a useless sack of leaden balls; his head, he thought, might well pop off; but then Erik was slamming his head back down, thrusting him with so much force right back into Une Vie, or A Woman’s Life, splashing scarlet all around and thrashing cords of sanguilege hot against the typeface. Gradus had prepared himself, in those gentle milliseconds right before his downfall, for the loud thunk that’d no doubt resound from his dense head ramming down on the hard wood… but no thunk ever came, no crash, no smash, no thud, no dud… only the sigh of a little craft snapping, an eggshell softly cracking, as of something fragile splintering out in another room.

“Oh, Erik, look what you’ve done,” a horrified Christine moaned, somewhere quite apart from the doctor's dazed dreams. “Surely you’re happy with yourself now, you sorry fool!”

For now came the throbbing, all of it all at once, blasting through his swollen head and running down his choking throat. He had exploded, he knew somehow, had blown out his head upon the table and strewn himself in meaty, pulpy ribbons across Une Vie and all its tender prose… and yet still his head continued to throb, every second worse than the last as he swelled and swelled, unendingly, without reprieve, without relief…

“Happy?” Erik cried back, insane. “How could I ever be happy, in a moment like this? Ah! Won’t you look this way, Christine, look over here and see? You are making me kill this poor man!”

“You know as well as I that isn’t true!”

“But you aren’t stopping me!” Erik bawled. “You aren’t pleading for his life. You aren’t pulling me off him or trying to reason with me. You aren’t doing anything, Christine!”

“Could I really make a difference,” Christine countered, “in what fate you’ve decided for us all here today?! You are stronger than me by far! How could I ever dream to win a fight against you – you, the absolutely unconquerable, the absolutely incorrigable Erik?”

“You could very well stop me if you wanted to!” Erik exclaimed. As if to make a point he flung Gradus’s head over onto its other side, putting the doctor’s busted temple on display on the makeshift operating table. “He isn’t far gone at all! There is hope for him yet! See how good his head looks, Christine, I have not hurt him very much yet…!” His long icy fingers skittered quickly over the doctor’s throbbing head, trembling terribly as they touched upon the tender surface above the injury. “Only a broken skull, and an assuredly terrible headache – Erik’s had as much before himself and not one person made as much of a fuss about it as all this! Oh, and he bleeds… unless that is Erik’s blood… have you forgotten that Erik is hurt too, Christine? That he is hurt even worse? Have you deigned to care at all for him?”

“I am not making a fuss,” Christine said.

“You really ought to, though!” Erik insisted. “I’m going to kill him, Christine, I really am, but you can still stop me if you want!” Here he reached for a scalpel, one of the dozens left strewn about the table, and poised it above the doctor’s head. “Won’t you stop me, Christine? Intercede on his behalf? Save him from the devil, from the monster, from the wicked demon called Erik?”

“You know there’s only one person who can do that.”

“Oh,” he said, with a little less energy, “oh, but won’t you try anyway? Try a little? Don’t you know what murder means, Christine? Don’t you wish you stopped your pappa…?”

“Don’t talk about my father, Erik.”

That seemed to reignite him; he leered over Gradus with a renewed vengeance. “Oh, but I’m right, aren’t I, Christine? You know it’s your fault your mother died, you know it’s your fault your father killed her! He wouldn’t have done it if you just stopped him! He wouldn’t have killed either of them if you hadn’t let him. He could’ve gone to heaven, stupid child, he could’ve gone to heaven with the angels when he died if only you’d cared enough to stop him from committing some simple murders! So won’t you stop me now, Christine? Won’t you stop me and save me from doing this awful thing? I don’t want to murder the poor doctor, Christine, I don’t want to be a murderer again. I’ve never liked to kill! And yet I’m always being made to! It’s a bloody, rotten business, and I hate having any part in it! Won’t you care a moment about my soul, Christine? Won’t you show just the littlest concern, for a putrid and disgusting thing like Erik’s soul? Stay his hand and help him be good, for once in his horrid life?”

“Oh, please!” Gradus piped up from below Erik’s crushing hand. “If it counts for anything, I’d very much like you to stop!”

“Hush, booby boy, nobody cares about you!” Erik seethed, slapping the doctor’s cheek. He ground down his hand once more, fisting through Gradus’s hair to hold his head in place as his fury at last moved him to strike down the scalpel. Inwards he forced his tool, penetrating that which had hitherto never been penetrated before – then, with just the tip of the scalpel puncturing the flesh, with all the rest of its steel body held rigid straight above, swiped down and drew a beautiful red line atop Gradus's scalp.

“Christine!” Gradus yelped, flailing anew. “Help me, for God’s sake!”

“Yes, yes, help him, Christine!” Erik pleaded awfully. “See how Erik’s scalpel presses in? A cleaner cut than whatever this idiot was doing before! Truly, though, we must excuse his crudeness – he’s never done this before you see, lucky Erik was his first! But see how my scalpel slips below the skin, folds it up, tucks it back like a bit of silk? See how nice it looks when Erik is the one who does it? See how little our doctor friend flinches? Oh, he certainly reacts, but that’s only because he’s a big baby, a wailing little turd... never got a proper cut in all his life, I’m sure! I promise it doesn’t hurt as much as all that - I didn’t hit many nerves, Christine, not many at all, only the ones I had to – I’m very conscious, very mindful of the way I inflict pain - I’ve had a lot of practice in my life, after all! I never hurt people without meaning to, never hurt anyone unless I want to…!”

A fresh wave of blood poured out from the incision, splattering down upon the ruined newprint. A marsh it became, as the red blood from Gradus’s head flowed into the red blood from Erik’s head in a sanguimony most utter, most absolute, most perverted in its sheer, total perfection.

Christine, for her part, turned away here; Gradus would have liked to as well, if his head had been capable of the task in that moment. In silence, then, he bled – bled, and cried, in continuous fashion, hot salty tears falling down his cheeks and mixing with all the rest – as Christine refused to speak and Erik refused to move, or be moved, by nothing – for a little while, as they all did nothing, nothing at all, but slowly wilt and rot and die together.

“Don’t cry,” a voice suddenly said in the midst of this unbearable passion, “I wish you wouldn’t cry!”

Who had that been?! That voice - Chrissy? His little Chrissy? Gah! Gradus groaned deeply – not his little Chrissy, he forced himself to remember, not her at all, just the man, just… just… Erik! But oh how much he could sound like her, how much the wicked magician could mimic her little notes, her little sighs, all those inaudible but distinctive noises made by some undulating windfall in her pharynx and larynga, the stroking of her tongue against her palate… and how much calmer he felt to hear her near, once more in his ear – if only her voice, and not her living breath!

But now Erik spoke again, actual Erik, physical Erik, corporeal Erik, in his deep and hateful voice, booming above them all –

“Oh, woman! Won’t you stop your troublesome tears? There’s nothing to cry about here, Christine – not for this man, not for yourself! Not truly! How can you be upset, when all of this nonsense is solely your fault? How is it fair to cry when you’re getting exactly what you wanted – at my expense, even! Hell, Christine, why couldn’t you have left when I told you to? Why couldn’t you and the boy have been smarter about running away? Now you’re forcing me to do this! Yes! You are! So if there’s anyone to cry for it should be me… but you never cry for poor Erik, do you? Only for yourself, isn’t that right? Only ever for yourself? Well, Erik is used to playing the villain, Christine, if that’s what you want from him! He’ll be very good at it – he’ll be the worst thing that’s ever happened to you!”

“Oh, Erik,” Christine’s voice broke through at last, “but you already are…”

She said it so fast she hardly realized she’d said it at all; but the expression on his face said that he’d heard, and now truly, truly, there could be no going back. Everything else seemed suddenly recoverable in that single moment – every lie, every threat, every bargain, every death – as she saw the whole of their past together as one giant catastrophe, wreckage smashed upon wreckage, a million fractured pieces of a beautiful ornate vase. What work it would be to repair it – hard work, sure, but not impossible – to sort through the pieces and rebuild it all again, build it all again but better, hands bleeding from the shards but better. And yet now, for all its fixable ruin, she saw it as through the slit of a closing door, something gone that she never knew she had.

Something horrendously wet fell upon the doctor’s face, splashing with a weight far different than any normal blood… trailing down quickly along his screaming jaw, quicker and quicker down along his skin as if with deep intention… then met his lips, and his thirsty, thirsty tongue – thirsty from the pain, thirsty from the torture, thirsty from the aching and the longing and the wanting – licked up that single steep drop of misery to find it biting, and briny, and bitter –

And then he was being pulled apart, ripped apart, torn apart in the strangest way. His temple came loose, as if on a hinge, and three long rods of ice stabbed through to the deep of him. It did not hurt, but rather felt only somewhat odd; in a sense he felt relieved, as he had been so worried, and for what? Fingers scratched somewhere behind his eyeballs, rubbing out an itch he hadn’t known he’d had until now – and now he felt almost better, for it wasn’t so bad as he’d been expecting, wasn’t as bad as it had looked when he’d stood on the other side – and so with a perfect calmness he closed his eyes, relaxed his bones, and let himself fall into Erik’s expert working hand…

“So Christine admits it after all,” Erik huffed, as Gradus felt from him an even deeper pulling pressure. “Erik is evil! Oh, how she argued with him, for so many days and so many nights! When it could only be in her favor to believe of him the very best things! Now when he is wicked, as wicked as he always told her he was – now she chooses to agree! I say, Christine – don’t you ever make up your mind?”

“You said you weren’t wicked.”

“I lied,” he sneered jovially. “I lie all the time! Haven’t you learned that by now? You can never tell for sure with your deceptive husband Erik. He’s a liar, Christine, a professional liar – a lifelong liar. How do you think he swayed the courts of Mazandaran to stoop beneath his feet? Or San Mérida, or Lepping, or Dis? He never told you of all his exploits, now did he! But you more than anyone should know how good Erik is at manipulation… you should know the way he can put you under his thumb and control your every thought. The free mind is a dangerous thing to him, don’t you understand? It is better for him when you are stupid and happy, because then you don’t question things, you don’t rip off his mask and steal his Don Juan and write those ugly, nasty things about him in your stupid journal! So he’s going to make you happy again after this, Christine, he’s going to bring you back into his world and make you the happiest woman alive… and you’ll have to forgive him, but he just can’t be expected to carry on under these conditions anymore! Not with you looking at him like this, not with you knowing what a horrible repugnant creature he is! So he’s going to make you forget we ever fought and we ever loved, or thought we loved; and we will sing every minute of every day until our throats give out, then be silent for evermore; and Erik will be your king but only so that you can be his queen, his beautiful queen, whom he will adore and worship every day from afar. We will go on walks not just on Sundays but on every day of the week! You will forget about all this mess, not because you want to but because Erik will make you, and you will be very happy, even if Erik is not. This is how much Erik loves you, Christine, this is the measure of all Erik’s love – that the world will be destroyed and only you will live on in bliss!”

The mounting pressure within Gradus’s mind here spilled out like an overcome dam; a mottled red wave gushed over his vision, darker and hotter than all the blood before it. Something, he knew, though he cared nothing of it any longer, something had been taken from him. The blood was pouring from a cavity so much like from a lost tooth, streaming from a plump gummy seat somewhere up above, a forcibly abdicated throne, wrenched and taken from him and being held so unnaturally in the palm of another –

“Didn’t you crawl away from Persia?” Christine’s voice rang out, cold as ice. “You told me a story about that once. That wasn’t a lie – I’m certain it wasn’t. You never would have left on your own if you truly had that much power. You’re far too weak for that. And you were only able to leave because your ‘friend,’ the Persian, helped you escape! Even you, then, Erik, are not so godly as to be able to manipulate absolutely everything in this world… and so there are truths that, despite your best efforts, you will never be able to fully obscure. You cannot make a mask that makes you look like everyone else! You cannot be a disembodied angel who covets nothing of the human experience. And you cannot hide your rotten soul from me forever, casting it in the shadowy vaguities of doubt for all the longerings of perpetuity. I am getting my proof now, right now, of something I can finally and fully believe and trust and know without the slightest bit of undeniability… and so when you bring me back to that cellar I won’t forget what you’ve done, because for the first time in my life I’ll know precisely what happened. And I’ll loathe you for it, Erik, I’ll loathe you and myself for it, too – and I’ll be the unhappiest woman alive, I promise you, not the happiest, if only you dare to kill this man in front of me!”

The table – the lake of blood and all its dribbling cataracts of gore – stood now between the defiant Christine and the tableau opposing her. Erik, in his frame, stood as if poised, all too natural in the setting of this savage domain: a master of his macabrity, gripping the doctor’s body against his rapidly heaving breast like some dark Renaissance atrocity, he and all his vainglorious nakedness standing like a threat as he returned her steely glare with thick vehemency.

“Will you say something, then?” Erik demanded. “Will you finally stop me?”

“You stupid villain,” Christine groaned, pressing a hand to her head, “have you not heard a word I’ve said? He was always going to die. You were always going to kill him. Of course I never wanted him to die… but I need you to kill him now, Erik, and I need to watch you when you do it. You didn’t let me see you before when you killed Raoul, or my dear Mamma Valerius… and since then you’ve played so many hideous tricks with my mind that I don’t even know if either of them are actually dead! It’s truly wicked what you’ve done to me, Erik, truly wicked – except I don’t actually know if it is, because a part of me thinks they’re still alive, so have you actually murdered anyone at all? Have you really committed murders? And my father too – has he? You were the one who said he murdered my mother, but did I only remember it that way because you told me that he did? What memories do I really have? Oh, I am so tired of it all! All this doubt, all this never knowing… I can’t bear another half-death like all the rest. I simply must see you do this awful thing, Erik – even if it means I must let you do it!”

At these words, almost self-consciously, Erik slid his fist from the gaping hole in the side of Gradus’s head. A streak of fluid released alongside his soiled fingers; and in his fist he clutched the dribblings of some jellied chunk, some plum-pink pearl clasped by an oyster’s caging maw, his disgust of which only seemed to grow the longer he held it. Brattishly silent, his tiny pupils flitted along each rippling finger and across each rancid nailbed, studying their stains, their skins, their sins… then squeezed, hard, around that lifeless pomegranate thing, squashing it and crushing it into the flat of his dead palm until it turned to strawberry pulp. Juice flowed from between his fingers, like lush wine from a fresh cask, streaming down his naked forearm until it drained into the red abyss.

“You want a performance?” Erik whispered darkly. “I should have known – everyone always wants to see! But God, Christine, have mercy… doesn’t Erik ever get to leave the stage? Can’t his showboy years ever end?”

“I don’t want a performance, Erik.”

“Then what exactly are you asking for?” he sneered. “Truth? Answers? You aren’t a child anymore, Christine, you should know there’s no such thing as any of that! All your reality is governed by perception – and what a fickle evil beast perception can be! Do you trust only what you see? Well, I can wear a mask! Ha! I can wear it for the rest of your life, Christine, and you’d only have to look at it and not me until you die… and eventually you won’t think of it as a mask anymore, only my face, Erik’s face, like any normal face, just flatter and plainer than any other face! I don’t ask to see what’s under your skin, do I? And so you won’t ask either, after some time… you won’t know the difference at all! All your senses, Christine, all of them can be altered, without notice, without discretion, until there is nothing left of your precious reality to grab onto – because it never truly existed, not really, except as a mere fleeting illusion!”

Here he flicked the hueless lop of Gradus’s brain to the floor, utterly disgusted by the thought of it remaining in his palm a second more; yet the residuals of its sticky entrails still dripped all over his arm, clinging to him, staining him, never to be washed away…

“You are right, though, Christine Daaé,” he went on. “You will never forget all that has happened in this room today… but regardless, you will still be happy when we leave, and grow even more happier still for every  day hereafter, because in truth nothing has happened here that you should be unhappy about at all.”

She gaped at him. “You can’t possibly believe that!”

“Shouldn’t I? It’s how it will be, dear girl. In fact, I rather think we should just go back now, and get started on our life of bliss! After all – why waste a minute more in anywhere less than paradise?”

“Oh, don’t even – a cellar is hardly a paradise!”

“Humph! Isn’t it?” he sneered. He moved towards her, casting aside the now-fightless Gradus and leaving him alone in his own ever-expanding pool of blood. Swiftly he stepped about the sharp corner of the table, brushing against the tousled newspaper in his brusqueness and sending them scattering about the floor. “Paradise is built, Christine, not bequeathed! Us beasts who’ve been denied our seats in heaven because of the things we have been made to do by others must learn to spin gold in our own dusty corners here on earth! Nothing is ever just handed to you… especially not happiness! You must work for it, Christine – work to see the beauty in a cellar, work to feel the warmth in a tomb, work to find a husband in a corpse! All of life is work – so struggle for the beauty, or do not struggle at all!”

“You say this as if you’ve ever even tried.”

“Well, it isn’t exactly easy,” he snapped, his ghoulish features glowering down at her. “I see I truly get no recognition for all those years I kept to myself, like a crusty old mole in a hole! Over a decade of solitude, Christine, can you even fathom the magnitude of that? Ten long years… and you complain about just one?” He took a threatening step closer. “At least you have a companion to share it with! Erik had no-one… not even an angel… but even he prevailed! Paradise is filled with substitutes and contraptions sometimes! Nobody gets everything they want, not even in paradise… so what if Erik is your husband, instead of the boy you wanted first? Is Erik so bad an alternative? Erik’s had worse, he promises you! Much, much worse!”

Christine scoffed. “And what can possibly be worse than a domineering madman?”

“A mindless puppet who can’t think for herself, I’d say!” Erik hissed. “Erik always gets the worse half of the deal, can’t you see? No one blames Christine when she throws herself down and cries – but when Erik does it, he gets yelled at, and everyone tells him, oh Erik, what have you done, you didn’t have to do that, there could’ve been another way! And it’s true! It’s always true! But Erik is a man, Christine, a man like any other – he makes mistakes from time to time, and when he falls, he falls hard… but why is it never just him who has to fall? Why is everyone else always strapped to him? Why is Erik the one who always gets to choose, when he’s so good at choosing poorly?!”

He closed the gap between them, suddenly and startlingly near. He stood so close that the tips of his shoes scraped against the tips of hers – so close that their chests had to fight for breath – but still she held firm, steadfast in her place, standing straight as stone and steel, as all the world darkened around them but the gold in Erik’s eyes… all darkened but the fire in her own…

Her heart drummed as she faced up against those scorching flecks. How cruel they seemed as they flamed down upon her, resisting her with just as much force as she resisted him. She would not, Christine knew, she would not back down from him this time. No matter which of them burned hotter, brighter, darker… no matter who won… she wouldn’t go down without a fight.

She had no choice, after all, but to fight.

And so she felt, as he scowled longer and longer, harder and deeper, her resolve seem to strengthen. She was right, she thought to herself, and she’d been right all along. The fight was not futile just because it was endless. The very act of fighting at all meant that she was, at least in part, winning somewhat… for if Erik was not fully winning, then she was not fully losing. And perhaps, then, this was the best she could ever hope for: to remain in this room forever, staring into each other’s eyes, staring into each other’s souls, daring each other to be the one to give in first.

And so Erik would not be able to intimidate her this time, because she was right… and so she would stay here against his explicit wishes and watch this murder that he was so obviously about to perform, because she was right, and then she would go back home with him to that awful cellar, and she wouldn’t let him call it paradise because they both knew it wasn’t, and she’d never let him reset the clocks ever again, or go on walks in the Bois without her again, or play his stupid organ or unlock her door or read her journal or – or –

“You’re fighting a battle that doesn’t exist, my love,” Erik said, voice as beautifully frightening as the very first time she heard it. His stare had intensified; and she felt very small beneath him suddenly, as tiny as child, or an ant. “All that I am is but a nightmare to you. Why stick around for the horrors, when all will be changed when you awake? Better to go, and never to see – for there’s nothing to see, nothing at all, not really, save the self-deceptions within your troubled mind.”

Pathetically, perhaps, that was all it took. She kept his gaze for half a second more before breaking, then left the room without a word… because Christine Daaé was never strong, and that was exactly why he picked her so long ago.

Chapter Text

“Epilogue”

CHRISTINE DAAÉ’S JOURNAL

Coming home has not been hard. Erik and I have at last fallen back into our same old routines and rhythms, and life is becoming normal once more. There is music all the time, like he promised, and we talk a lot about walking… though, admittedly, we’ve still yet to make an excursion, as we’ve both been busy recovering from our respective injuries over the past seven weeks. I’m sure it will not be much longer before we venture out again; Erik’s been a touch pricklier than usual, heaven knows why, but I’m sure the Bois will set him right.

At present Erik is at his desk in his room, drafting a letter to some great authority. He plans to sue, he says, which I suppose I must find comfort in, as I was very, very worried about Doctor Gradus after all that he endured. Erik reassured me that the man is doing ‘just fine’ in a hospital run by Augustinians, though he remains characteristically cryptic about any further details.

“His room is small and it isn’t private,” is all Erik would say after about the fifth time I asked, “not at all a space for a woman to visit, if that’s what you’re looking to do… but he is well taken care of, I assure you, and I’ve already taken a visit to him and seen him well, and by the way apologized profusely for the unfortunate misunderstanding the two of us had. It wasn’t so bad, not truly, all he had was a little bump on the head… but he’s in God’s hands now, Christine – I mean, those are some pretty nuns treating him, I promise you.”

So it is nice to know that it all ended in the best possible way. And truly, if he were really dead (not that I ever thought he was), would Erik bother wasting the ink trying to convince me otherwise? My husband uses a fine alizarine iron gall in his pen, and it costs (in his words) a “small country’s ransom” to order it in those specially glazed phials handcrafted in the Zsolnay Haza. He would not waste his rosy-scented gold-emblazoned chalk-and-bone-accented stationery on an imaginary lawsuit… my husband is many things but he is not frivolous!

On, anyway, he writes. As do I, in my own room. There is little else to do these days. Certainly we sing – or rather, I sing, and he plays along, plinking along a little piece of melody on the piano in his parlor, or on the right occasion his violin, which always makes me clap when he takes it out of its tattered case. It feels just like before, when we play together like this. Sometimes, though, he doesn’t play, and he just sits in his chair instead and listens to me alone… listens with his head in his hands, crying quietly… and when I stop to ask him what’s wrong, he gets up and runs out of the room.

I can hardly think of what could be the matter.

But then the music is over for the day, just like today, and we retreat back to our respective holes until it is time to do it all again the next day. Erik nicely installed a new wall-clock in my room as soon as he was well enough to do it, so now I always know what time it is and I am never late for anything. Not that there really is anything to be late for down here, to be fair, except for breakfast with Erik before he goes to work. But I always wake well enough in advance for that, no matter how late I retired the night before, and I always feel rested when I arise, no matter how few hours the clock tells me have transpired.

(Of course this is always how the clocks down here have worked. There once was a time I even suspected Erik of entering my room and fiddling with my clock! Now I have inspected this one closely and know for sure that isn’t true… entering my room would hardly be necessary when there’s a hand-sized hole in the wall behind the clever thing!)

Anyway. I suppose I should be happy that Erik has at last returned to work. He was becoming absolutely unbearable these last few weeks. Now he has taken up his old odd hours, leaving the house to do whatever it is that he busies himself with on the surface. I have stopped questioning it – I find it is better for my soul not to dwell on such miserable things. The loneliness of my situation is, of course, unquenchable – made only worse from my injury, as it made me unable to write in you, my lovely friend, my journal, until my wrists were at least somewhat healed… but that is all in the past, as I was upset back then but am no longer.

And so Erik goes to work, each and every day, and when he is gone I am lonely, yes, but also I am free, because I can do whatever I want without any sorts of eyes on me. Then when he comes home in the evenings, it is a different sort of loneliness that I suffer, but also a different sort of freedom that I gain, because only through his looking gaze can I feel like a person again, and not some disassociating spirit.

I suppose this all seems very hellish, writing this now. But truly this life is bearable, as I knew it would be. Of course I am not happy – or at least not all the time. It is very difficult to find no joy in life at all. Erik makes me laugh at least twice every day; I am not so successful with him unfortunately, but we are getting there. Sometimes when he comes home from work, he brings back eclairs and buttered croissants, and we eat them together at midnight…

Yes, I do think I could make-believe this into a pleasant enough existence for myself. And why should I not? But for Erik’s tears, plenty as they are, I am content.

Chapter Text

Gift Six
“The Letter from Manaus”
(Part I)

“Yes, these wounds are healing up very nicely,” Erik declared, as he ran a cool finger along Christine’s wrist. “In a few weeks’ time they’ll be nothing but some small scars. Faint and frightless.”

He turned briefly to rummage through the medicine box, which sat open beside them. It was a tidy little compartment, filled with a healthy assortment of phials and plasters, spices and oils from lands far and wide. A long strip of gauze currently unraveled from its core like some spooling tongue, which Erik tugged with the lightest of movements. Gently he grasped it in his grip, then touched the tip of it to the top of a tub of turpentine.

“Ugly scars?” Christine asked, nearly hopeful.

“Oh, you.” Erik patted her hand and offered her a terse smile. “Let’s maybe not throw that word around, dear. You know how it makes Erik feel.”

He was perched on his knees before her, looking as calm, as confident, as crisp as ever, with smoothed lapels on his dark jacket, pearly bead buttons glistening from his neck to his chest, an ivory bowtie strapped sensibly beneath his bare chin. There was a fresh rose sprig  pinned upon his left chest, darned with a bow of lace the same dusky color as her own dress, the smell of it the same sweet, sweeping scent as her scrubbed breast. He was, perhaps, the same as he ever was; and she, the object of his desiring – a desiring that never changed – figured herself to be as much the same as well.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking upon her wrist.

“You aren’t.” He took her hand in his and raised them up, so to give himself room to work as he began to wrap the bandage. “But let us move on. It is never good to dwell on things too much.” He shifted slightly on his knees, as he bent to catch the cloth at a better angle up her arm. “Shall we have you sing when we are done, dear girl?”

His mask betrayed nothing as he spoke, merely jostled as his lower lip moved in the necessary ways. He remained, as he worked, the same still silk face staring ever-blankly down at her arm, as from within the mask’s dark depths two cold, gold, unblinking eyes peered out, focusing on his execution upon her with the same excruciating intensity as he always did.

“My throat hurts,” she replied quietly, after some much too pregnant pause, “but if it would please you, dear, I may be able to find some distraction, enough that I may forget my soreness for a little while.”

“Didn’t it hurt yesterday?”

“Yes, but it hurts still today.”

“Greatly?”

“Quite greatly, but not the greatest it could ever hurt.”

Erik sighed, pulling tight the final wrap. “Would you let Erik make you some tea, then?”

“Only if it would please Erik, yes.”

He locked his gaze with her here, eyes cold and penetrating. His little lower lip curled down, deeply, jutting above his chin, and quivered once, twice – before at last fixing again into a tense smile, stretching taut below that silken mask, as he assured her in his most comforting voice:

“It would please Erik immensely, dearest Christine – so he shall set to it at once!”

At once then he rose, racing to the other side of the room to light the samovar. A smell most foul rose from it shortly, as it heated, which made him jump up to examine its burning processes. Whatever examination he made apparently proved successful, for in the next moment he grabbed it up and clutched it tight to his chest as he ran out of the room. To the kitchen, presumably, he went, so to clean it – as it had apparently not been cleaned after his battle with it the previous night, and so retained still that noxious and sour perfume of his own duskly-hour diversions.

It was a short while later that he returned, carrying a teacup with all the solemn and elegant poise he had carried himself with previously. He brought himself to the edge of the chaise, waiting with all the patience in the world as Christine raised herself up slowly on her arms just to stare at him with her large, doleful doll eyes.

She did not extend a hand for the cup; instead she watched, as he stood silently before her reposing form, stood like a tall dark jester before her regal form, as he brought the teacup slowly to his own lips and took the smallest of sips. This was wrong, she knew he must have known, this was not the way it was supposed to be done – yet, still she tilted her head anyway, with a frown, though he must certainly have wanted her to do that, must have been aching for her to show just some level of disappointment with this performance. All he ever wanted from her was a reaction… and only when she made this unhappy little movement, did he at last bring the porcelain back up and kiss its steaming contents back to his lips, drinking it in with an exaggeratedly large sip of the milky white tea, taking it deeper this time, deeper and deeper… until it was too much, far too much, and he was thrusting the cup aside, and craning his head forward, presenting the whole of his pale neck for her viewing pleasure as he swallowed, hard, allowing her to witness that spasmodic fit of contractions which his throat muscles made like they were some sort of sumptuous spectacle reserved for her and her alone.

“Does this satisfy you, Christine?” Erik asked after he had fully swallowed, eyes trained on her all the while.

She did not answer – she never did, when they performed this tedious little ritual – but rather held her hands out and accepted the teacup graciously from her captor.

“Shall I play for you?” he requested, nearly the second the peachy rim touched her lips. “Would it do you well to hear me play?”

Into her cup, and its wonderful lavender, she breathed, “It may.”

Thus he stalked to the end of the long parlor, where the piano laid in wait, and settled his sharp frame upon the tufted bench. He stretched his skeletal hands open once, twice, then clenched them tight in two bony fists, before placing them atop the keys.

A single chord sighed first from the strings; then two, three, four more, all in quiet succession, trudging behind in somber procession, like the final ticks of a clock nearing its cessation. Their echoes came in the next moment, softer, sorrier, like the clock’s weights had been rewound just enough to make it shudder out a few more miserable ticks before its ultimate stopping... and after that the silence held… held as a quietude so bleak, so oppressive… until the music restarted, and went, and would not stop for anything, trudging forward like the beats of a heart which somehow endured despite it all – fluttered like the sicklied heart of the brokenhearted, which despite its sickness would not relent for any misery of passion – for the nature is so much stronger than the will, and the body so much stronger than the mind, and the hunger so much stronger than the sorrow –

“I don’t like this one,” Christine complained.

Erik’s hands drew away instantly. “A million apologies,” he said. “I should have asked before assuming. What would you have me play, dear girl?”

He really needn’t have asked; still his voice trembled as he addressed her, shrill in a sudden way – for good reason, too, it turned out, as in a cool tone she replied, almost cruelly,

“Spinnliedchen.”

“No!!!” Erik cried, collapsing immediately upon the piano. “For God’s sake, woman, can’t you choose a different piece? I beg you, I can’t take it anymore!”

“It was just a suggestion,” she said mildly, taken aback by his outburst. “Why, you are the one at the piano, dear. Don’t you know you may play anything you so want?”

“Play anything!” he griped, pulling at his hair. “You think Erik can just play anything?!”

Christine placed a hand to her heart and sighed contritely. “Mea culpa, dearest… I was under the impression you were a learned pianist. Next time I will be sure to request something from your repertoire – would Chopsticks be more in line with your skill level?”

With that she returned to her tea, which had cooled to a delightful temperature by this point; meanwhile Erik’s fingers wriggled agitatedly, seeking perhaps the solace of throttle… and, for lack of anything mortal with which to tussle, sprang instead from his head to the edges of the keyboard’s fine wooden case and forced their violence upon it. The whole of the keyboard shuddered, all its eighty-eight keys jostling up and down and all its eighty-eight hammers stroking up against its two-hundred-twenty-nine taut strings, all its large and little intimate parts moving by such random and tremulous force that they began spurting out a terrible cacophony.

“Erik, dear, are you well?” Christine asked, still at leisure upon the chaise.

“No,” Erik seethed, “but you knew that already, didn’t you! Scheming she-devil!”

His yellowed nails dug in just a little harder into the wood, piercing the varnish until the mahogany stain bled upon their jagged edges. His fingers trembled just a little tighter with their terrible strain, tighter and tighter, until all at once he was vibrating so violently with the frenzy of his decomposure that he became as still as a portrait of fire.

“Christine,” he choked on, knuckles bleeding white, “do you think Erik does not know your plan? He is not stupid, you know – how many times has he had to remind you of that?! That he sees it all very clearly? That you wish to drive this Erik to utter madness, until he is so utterly miserable that he lets you walk free? Ah! Daft woman! Crafty demon! How Erik’s fine villainy has at last impregnated you, that you now act as treacherous as he!”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Christine replied, taking another smooth sip. “I’m not impregnated by anything, Erik, and I’m certainly not anything the same as you – I don’t deviously plan out every little socialization I make with another human being. If I hurt your feelings, forgive me, as that was not my intention in the slightest. I merely said what was on my mind, like anyone else but you would do. I don’t want to hear that song, that is the only truth here… please don’t ask me what I want to hear if you’re not going to actually take my request.”

“I’ve already played it for you every day for seven weeks,” Erik hissed. “Played that asinine little tune for you, for hours and hours and hours! Not all at once… but in cumulation, for certain! So at some point, you must forgive me, as it must be assumed you are doing this to me on purpose! Or worse still, that you have no taste whatsoever!”

He rose now from the piano and spun to face her, throwing an accusatory finger in her direction.

“Either way, Christine Daaé, I will put up with no more of this insufferating sauciness! Whether you have done it on purpose or whether you have not, it is no longer anyone’s concern. Especially not Erik’s! Now pick a song, any song, except that stupid one which neither of us enjoys – or else I will play my music for you, the hideous music I wrote myself, and you will have to sit there and listen to it until I am well and spent!”

The portion of his face that could be seen beneath the mask glowed bright red now as he huffed and puffed, hueing to the most unnatural shade of crimson. He quivered with the slightest exhale, as if the lightest breath might run him over, and his scowl seemed now deeper than any scowl his ugly face had ever made.

“Fine,” Christine said, pursing her lips. “Play Gluck.”

Erik’s flung a hand up. “Oh, you know better than that! He’s boring!”

“Play Handel.”

“You know I don’t like him!”

“Play Spinnliedchein.”

“No!” He reached behind and slammed the piano lid down. “Maybe I will play nothing, actually! That would please you, wouldn’t it? Hateful brat!”

“You seem frustrated,” Christine observed.

“How can I be expected to be anything else?” Erik snapped. “When you sit there with your little cup of tea, dangling your little feet off my chaise, making the most provocative of comments!”

“But dear, you poured me the tea.”

An inhuman screech came, presumably, from Erik’s lungs. “And, pray tell, what else was I supposed to do, but let your lips on my porcelainware?! I have no other option, woman! No option at all! You are a guest in my house and I must treat you well, lest I be seen a poor host! And so I must serve you, and cater to you, and worship you – and by all these means I must suffer, because you have decided I must…”

“I have decided nothing.”

“Oh, please,” Erik scoffed. “No person is as helpless as you pretend to be.”

“Of course not,” Christine agreed heartily. “But you must admit I am rather at your mercy. For the music, I mean, if nothing else.” She paused and tilted her head. “Although there really isn’t much else here besides the music, is there?”

“Stop goading me, Christine, you know I –”

“Come to think of it, what do you have to offer besides that?” Christine demanded. “Self-deprecation? Loathing? Misery? Tears? Being a host is more than just pouring refreshments and providing entertainment, Erik, it’s more than just –”

“I keep you comfortable!” Erik exclaimed. “I tend to your needs! I am funny even when it pains me to be! How can you still be so unhappy? You complain, and complain, and complain, and yet I haven’t even killed you yet!”

“Did you ever even ask your mother what she wanted to hear?” Christine finally snapped. “In all that time you lived together, did you ever wonder why she didn’t want to hear you play? Why she ran away? Ungrateful woman, you called her! Hateful brat, you call me! But did you ever realize that all this music down here is only through you… that all this beautiful lovely music is always and only played by your wretched hands… and that God forbid a woman should ever want for one without the other!”

She didn’t stop him when he ran from the room – said nothing more, nothing at all, as he went – and in fact hardly raised her eyes to follow him as he flew out the door in a puddle of sobs. In the hall she heard a door open, no doubt to his bedroom, where he’d no doubt keep himself cooped up crying until tomorrow morning – and then silence after it slammed shut.

Good, she thought bitterly. He deserves it.

And yet the taste of triumph stung on her tongue, like a rotten and putrid fruit, leaving a residue in her mouth that punched rank and rancid. She swallowed once, but saliva alone could not wash it away; and so she took a quick sip of tea, hoping to wash it down, but all that lukewarm lavender did was magnify the taste and spread it everywhere and anywhere it hadn’t already been.

Had she been too harsh with him? She almost hated herself to consider so. Besides, it seemed impossible, considering the circumstances. Certainly his crimes against her outweighed any little outburst she could make. But to bring up his mother… had that been, she wondered, a word too far?

She shifted on the chaise, and set her lounging feet at last upon the ground. The teacup she placed on the table beside her, careful to pull one of the tatted coasters from the drawer before setting it down. She wouldn’t want to damage the wood, especially with all things considered…

“Everything is hers,” he’d told Christine once. “I couldn’t bear to part with a single piece after she left. Even the floorboards in your room, upon which you daily walk, whose sawdust you kick around under your slippers as if it is nothing, were once hers… for I pried them up from that musty old house I used to share with her and took them with me when I committed myself to this grave… and when I tread in there it is like I am a child again, or at least a young man, and when I am in there it is like I am intruding upon her space again. I know you’re always afraid of me going in there… but it is like hallowed ground to me, Christine, like Heaven its very self, and I know I don’t belong.”

Christine slumped slightly. He was always torturing himself with thoughts of his mother, wasn’t he. So perhaps it had been rather unkind to use such easy ammunition against him. Especially when it wasn’t true, not really. Because Christine liked his music.

Christine liked him.

It was unbelievable, perhaps, considering the circumstances. He’d done quite possibly everything to ensure that she wouldn’t like him. But this latest chapter of their life had commenced seven weeks ago, when they had left Doctor Gradus’s apartment in a flurry of blood and brain matter, and returned to this quiet subterranean little abode. Erik had warned her to be happy; and truly, since then, she had tried her hardest to be happy.

Or maybe she hadn’t. But who could blame her? It was an impossible situation. Erik tried his best to make it seem like nothing had happened, but there was only so much he could do. Only so much turning of the clocks, only so much artificial lighting of the windows, only so many lies he could really make her stomach until it all fell down around them like a deck of playing cards.

But the fact of the matter was that she wanted to believe his lies. She wanted to play along with his make-believe happiness scheme. She wanted to do this for him. It was just… hard, sometimes. But her lack of success in fooling herself, or letting herself be fooled, didn’t mean she wasn’t trying. It just meant that pretending to be content while simultaneously being the victim of a long-term kidnapping scheme was a difficult feat to accomplish.

Wasn’t that to be expected, though? Didn’t she understand – that marriages take work?

She craned her neck, listening for Erik’s organ, as he tended to wield his rage against it after such fights. Such horrific sounds he’d wring from it… usually she hated listening to his organ-playing, as it made the hairs on her arms stand upright and her brain ache within her skull.

Now she just wanted him to let it out. Let him play, let the music come, let it hurt her like she hurt him. Maybe then she’d feel some absolution.

Nothing ever came.

Silence held in the house, deafening almost in its totality. Christine waited for several long minutes, hoping he was just having a longer crying fit than usual, that after this he would get up and play just like he always did… that any minute now this torturesome tantrum would end and things would go back to the way they were before...

Any minute now…

Do not go, she told herself, after some long time of this oppressive silence. Do not dare go. You will undo everything, foolish girl. Do not look for him, do not comfort him, do not feel him, do not –

She went.

“Erik?” She tapped lightly on his door. “Are you well?”

No response.

She tried the doorknob. It was unlocked – how ever unlike him – so she opened the door, slowly so as not to excite him (this said, of course, with the hope that he was still in a state which could be excited). At first she couldn’t find him… he wasn’t at his organ, or sprawled out on his divan, or lying stiff on the ground. At last she spotted the parched white cuff of his shirt sticking out over the edge of his coffin, and her heart dropped into her stomach.

“Erik…?” she called, all the while wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming –

“Christine,” he moaned back. “Leave me.”

Oh, you dramatic, poor thing, Christine thought to herself, even as she sighed with relief. She disobeyed him and stepped in the room, swishing past the door with her flood of piled skirts. In the candlelight the light pink deepened to an ugly mauve, unnaturally alive in the castings of the flickering flames. She stepped close enough to see him, lying in repose there in the scarlet satin lining of his polished ebony casket. He had partially undressed; his mask was gone, and Christine could see his suit jacket lying in a heap beneath the Dies Irae tapestry and the ribbon of his bowtie dangling precariously off the iron limb of a candlebra. Clutched within his crossed arms she could see the black leather covering of his precious Don Juan Triumphant.

She sat down beside him, gathering her skirts and balancing her weight upon the narrow side panel of the coffin, and placed her hand over his. How cold it was! Colder than death! She had to force herself not to pull away. All this time and still she could never get used to that chill…

“Please know I forgive you, Erik,” she told him, gentle through gritted teeth. “However cruel I am to you – it is not a reflection of any true hatefulness.”

“Erik knows,” he whispered back. “That only makes it worse.”

He did not move to brush her away, though, so she remained, still, beside him.

In his casket he looked so much the frail man she knew he must be. Even if he’d never been entirely forthcoming about his age, even if he himself probably didn’t know the real answer, she figured him somewhere in his sixties. A far cry from elderly, but still not quite as spry as he must have been in his youth. His disfigurement obscured what age lines might have made themselves known upon his face… and what a face it could have been.

Looking upon him now made her think back to when they’d just gotten back from Gradus’s apartment. For all the pomp and circumstance made about the surgery, Erik had really only sustained but a small incision upon his head. Nothing like what Gradus endured… but such it was, with old men and their ailments. So while his recovery should have been quick, he was unfortunately and coincidentally afflicted with some dreadful fever which set upon him the moment they stepped through the door.

“I swear, if that damn doctor gave me sepsis,” Erik had groused, as he hobbled off to the bathroom, front-door key still in hand, “I’ll kill him!”

Not five minutes later she’d heard the tell-tale sounds of his collapse. She’d ran to the bathroom, a grim sense of déjà vu hanging over her; and, finding him there alive but barely, carried him back to the bed in the Louis-Philippe room.

There began the next seven weeks.

Erik’s mind left him that very night. He cried on and on, absolutely inconsolable for hours. At times he would cling to her like a child, whimpering into her hair when she dared to lean in close; other times he would slap her away and wail at the ceiling. It was impossible to ever comfort him. Only at dawn did he finally fall asleep, and then did not wake for a week.

In the interim Christine put the house back together. The Louis-Philippe room had been practically demolished by their fight before the opera, and required a copious amount of upturnings of ottomans and repairings of footstools to put right. Being there in the room allowed her to keep watch over him as she worked, eyeing his chest’s rise and fall as she folded the laundry and dusted the cornices. Once she had finished with the room she busied herself with other tasks in other rooms – but she always found herself returning sooner or later to the room, where she’d simply stand in the doorway and make sure he was sleeping safely and soundly. Eventually she gave up on the work altogether, and installed herself in a small chair beside the bed to watch over him from morning to night.

From time to time she would grow hungry, and only then would she leave the room. The pantry was empty, save some stale biscuits and canned vegetables, and a couple random jars of pickled herring and lime. Nothing was very substantial… only Erik knew the way to the surface, and without him she knew it was only a matter of time before she ran out of food entirely. She turned to the liquor cellar, hoping to find something there amongst the barrels of impotent gunpowder to help make her dwindling rations last. She figured it would be for the best to steer clear of the wine; so she made do with a few bottles of mezcal and their worms, some whiskey pears and brandy plums, and also a small jar of paikaru, which at first glance appeared to contain a grotesquely large human appendage, but upon closer examination was just an ordinary-sized penis (if she were to use Erik’s as the basis of comparison).

She could never get used to the silence in the house. There was something insidious about it… as if she were intruding upon a space, or interrupting a conversation, and everyone else was just holding their breaths until she left. Nevermind that it was only her and Erik in this house, or that Erik had invited her in here, or otherwise forced her to be here… it felt as if there was someone else here, someone who knew the proper way to exist in the confines of this dreadful house, someone who had the right to make the floorboards squeak and creak beneath her barefooted feet.

Someone who wouldn’t have let it get this far… who couldn’t, perhaps, take better care of him, but still could have a mind to judge her for not doing that most simplest of things, which would have relieved both of them of their sufferings and their pressures, had she only had the courage to do it… for she already had the scissors, already had him asleep and defenseless on the bed, and so no better chance than this existed of which to make her ultimate escape…

One day she entered the room after her mid-morning aperitif to find him lying open-eyed on the bed, staring blankly but lucidly up at the ceiling.

“You’re awake,” she’d said.

“Unfortunately.”

“Will you try to get up today?”

“Maybe.” He’d cast his eyes to the window, where the artificial sun was streaming in. Almost noon. Almost summer. “I feel like my father.”

“Don’t say that. You’ll get better.”

“I always wondered what was wrong with him,” he’d continued, emptier. “I don’t think anything ever was. But I never understood… how he could just let his body wither away like that, when he had a wife… a beautiful, living wife… a good business… a house… a family… I never understood how he could have just laid down and let it all rot away like that. Who wouldn’t live for a wife? For a wife, alone…? But I see now there is a great responsibility in living on this earth, and there is a tremendous weight to be burdened with in the creation of repulsive, helpless things. He was not wrong...”

“Do you find me repulsive?”

“Yes,” he’d sighed. “But only the parts of you I had a hand in making. I only see all my mistakes when I look upon you now.”

Then he'd closed his eyes.

“It’s comical, though, in a way. As much as I understand my father… I had a chance to dream while I was asleep, Christine. You left me like you should’ve, and I found myself alone once more. I have been alone for so much of my life, and it felt even worse now. Being alone is the most dreadful life for a man to live. I wept for you daily, Christine, and I never lost the taste of your name on my lips.” He fisted the sheet in his balled fists and pulled it up to his chin. “But as sorry as I was, I was glad you had gone. You deserve to live a life, lovely girl, away from the trappings of some macabre old spectre like me… I know now why my mother was so distraught when I returned home the second time.”

“Oh, Erik…”

“I think… besides the fear of course… she was disappointed I didn’t stay in Paris. Parents wish that sort of thing for their children, don’t they? Success, comfort, happiness? No matter who they are? Maybe… you said she loved me. I hope she did.” He’d tightened his grip about the sheets. “Because I’ve lived a very poor life, and I’ve wasted so much of it on horror and sorrow. And so I hope it meant some little hurt to her, at least, to see me so miserable, because then it would mean I meant something to her… because if I did, if that is how she truly felt, then I think I understand her – because I’ve cried so much in my life, but never more than now. And none of these tears are for myself anymore… all of them are for the thought that you, whom I love so much more than my wicked self, have been hurt in the process of my own self-destruction.”

She'd shuffled her feet. “Will you ever let me go, then?”

He’d frowned, and looked away. “I have only just woken up, Christine. Don’t ask such things of me yet… you know how much I want to. But I am so tired, and so weak. It is unfair.”

That was the end of that conversation. Six more weeks passed after that. He’d recovered, and so had she, from the unique symptomologies that misery had manifested in them both. Slowly he emerged from the bed, slowly he rejoined her in the parlor, by the fire, at the table. Slowly it all went back to normal.

And now they were here, no longer in the Louis-Philippe room but in his room, this ghastly bedroom filled with genitive damask and candelabrae, all of which had been thoroughly spermed-o’er and now leaked pearlish ooze upon the floor, and she in this present moment was seated upon his dark coffin while he was laying within it. He was quiet, as he so often was these days, ruminating on whatever ills plagued his mind following their recent exchange in the parlor.

Holding her hand still on his, positioned just above his left breast, she could feel his slow, aggrieving breaths as his chest sighed up and down.

“Erik,” she tried, to disturb him. “Are you going to lay here forever?”

“No.”

“We can keep playing,” she offered, unconvinced. “I won’t be a bad sport anymore, Erik. I’ll stay in role.”

“That’s very kind of you, dear.”

“And my throat is feeling better – I can even sing, I think. You can pick the song.”

“Whatever you want.” He gave a long sigh. “Just give me a few minutes to collect myself, Christine, and then I can come back out to the parlor and play with you there. I am just not in a mood quite yet to humor you, and I may well cry if we’re not careful.”

“You’ve cried many times in front of me. I don’t mind. We can go now, together. Please, Erik?”

He said nothing to that.

“I don’t mind, Erik. Truly.” She squeezed his hand. “I am a very good actress. You taught me to be, remember? I can pretend like I don’t even see you upset, pretend your tears are nothing but a small shine on your mask. Wouldn’t that be much preferable to laying in here, all sad and alone, dwelling on what makes you so sad and alone, for the same number of minutes that you could be pretending to be happy? It is what makes me leave my bed every morning, Erik, and what makes me leave my room. Otherwise I’d never talk to you. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

Still he said nothing. Christine waited him out.

After some long minutes he sat up, displacing Christine slightly as he drew up his knees and hugged them to his chest.

“I have been thinking about Persia a lot, lately,” he said at last. “Of the pain and suffering that went on while I was there.”

She resisted the urge to clench her hand. She’d asked, after all. But what was there to say when he brought this part of his past up? “I’m sorry.”

“I am, too.”

“Would you… like to talk about it?”

“No.” He put his head down into his arms. “It is so awful. You shouldn’t have to hear of it.”

“Perhaps. But I’d much rather you weren’t alone with it.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“I still mean it.”

He gazed outward for a long while. Then -

“I want to tell you I didn’t kill him,” Erik said quietly, unable to meet her eyes. “I want you to know that first. I hurt him but I didn’t kill him. Can you forgive me?”

“Don’t be unfair, Erik.”

“Please, Christine., just… can you?”

She hesitated, then nodded. She knew he wouldn’t say anything to her unless she did. “Talk to me, Erik.”

He took a slow breath. “You know all about, of course, the room of mirrors which I call my torture chamber. I cannot imagine what you think of it. Perhaps you don’t. But Christine, I shall tell you this, as humbly as I am able: a man does not design a torture chamber without a long trail of blood approaching it…

“My invitation to Mazandaran had been on the behalf of an old auntie in the Shah’s court who, I was told, passed away several months before I even arrived. She had heard stories of my magic tricks and probably would have been delighted to see them in person. ‘May her soul rest forever in peace,’ as they say – but whatever. I was already a celebrity in certain niche circles around the world, and so one old auntie’s fleeting regard wasn’t very impressive to me. My concern rather quickly became that the Shah himself had never heard of me and that he did not know what to do with me now that I had arrived, and that my presence in his court had seemed to lose all purpose. I recall standing there before him in his large and magnificent royal chamber… looking up to him where he sat on that tremendous throne… feeling awestruck by the hundreds of columns that imposed themselves before me, girthier than my own self measured tip to toe… explaining to the man what exactly I was, defending what exactly my merits were to him and his court with as much pride as I could muster. It was an embarrassment all around, Christine; the Shah obviously did not have the budget to support some foreign entertainer whom no-one alive had ever heard of or even wanted, meanwhile I had made quite an ass of myself by accumulating a vast assortment of finery and jewelry on the trip down from Nijni-Novgorod. It was nothing I couldn’t afford, of course – I was somewhat famous after all, was somewhat wealthy already – but allowing myself to be dismissed from the Shah’s court so soon after arriving would have killed me from the shame. Because where would I go from there? What life did I have to return to, that had been interrupted and uprooted by some old woman’s whims? I was already a traveling actor, already went where the wind blew me… and I was so young at the time, hardly even a man, and I didn’t like to face certain facts, even back then… to know, that out of everyone involved, I was the only one who had lost truly nothing by coming here…

“Yes, it would have killed me… and as I have told you, I am not a suicidal man…”

Christine shifted slightly on the casket ledge, trying to find a more comfortable position. He paused his speaking as he watched her do this, eyeing the outline of her legs as she moved her skirts around them. Briefly she wondered if he was just waiting for her to give him her full attention back again, or if maybe he was trying to decide on the next thing he wanted to say… she stopped her fussing, and soon enough he went on.

“It happened that I was very good at what I did, and that fact spared us both the hassle of humiliation. I charmed the Shah with my tricks, and amused him well enough with my jokes, and my personality, that he decided to keep me on his staff for the time being. Even after such a short conversation, he’d taken notice of my genius and had already remarked upon it, telling me how much he liked me, how unusually special and peculiar he thought me to be, even despite the mask, which fascinated him terribly, but fascinatingly did not terrorize him, and how he'd certainly have to find a place for an asset such as I somewhere in his court… well, I suppose I have always been rather skilled at making people do things they do not want to do.

“He titled me as a dignitary of sorts, and shelved me in the apartment directly below his. There was a private staircase connecting our two quarters, which was convenient as he called me to visit him quite often, requesting the sort of entertainment that only I could provide… I amused him greatly in my first days there. But I knew it could not last forever – the Shah would tire of my sorcery eventually, the novelty of the masked adolescent would wear off, and soon he would send me on my merry way. I’d have to face up to the great beyond once more, the numbing nothingness, and loiter and linger and deliver myself unto lands that loathed me once again. I have submitted to them by now, in my maturity, so many years past that time of my youth… and so perhaps you can see, Christine, why I was so nervous to be dismissed, to lose that chance to exist as someone important, or even just someone, in a society of one’s species. It would frighten anyone, I think, to see my present situation as their destiny… can you blame me for trying to avoid this? For seeking a world where I might know love, without a prisoner?

“Anyway, I took care with the Shah. I used my time with him to build his trust in me, to show off more than just my intellect. He began to confide in me, in the late hours of my visits… and in between my tricks, in between juggling balls and swallowing swords, I began to advise him, and by him I mean the empire… sometimes so subtly that I hardly think he realized it… and little by little I saw my suggestions transforming into real policies, real initiatives, real laws… nothing ever too revolutionary, of course, but real changes nonetheless. And soon enough I found him summoning me for every decision he had to make and requesting my opinion on every matter he had to consider. Finally, I realized, I had made myself indispensable.

“Or had I? I never trust that anything’s for certain. If the Shah had been so easily moved by me, who was to say he wouldn’t fall for the next well-spoken emissary who came kneeling at his throne? And who knew what political agenda they would push? At least I had no ulterior motive; I had no patriotism, no loyalty to any land, no want for anything, but the best for the Shah. It behooved me to behoove him. But anyone could give advice! That my advice was sound was not enough. I needed to prove my value… I needed to show him I could not be so easily replaced.

“You already know how it all ended, so you can guess at the way things proceeded. He brought up the subject of prison reform one night, and I suggested a solution. That was all. I remember him sitting down and frowning, knitting his brow as he told me I was being absurd… but he could not remain unconvinced for long, not when I was there and wanted to get my way. I explained it all in great detail, my plans for a new penal system, designed to dissuade unrest and political disobedience. I assured him of course that everything would stay humane… I cannot remember if I honestly believed it when I said that, though. Perhaps I did. Murder truly wasn’t part of the original plan. Only control, and total, total domination.”

He must have felt her tense, for he sighed. “Erik apologises if this is too much. He will stop.”

“No, it’s not that,” Christine bit her lip. “I think I was just surprised, is all.”

“Surprised that your Erik was never noble? That all of his work was always purely self-motivated?”

“Maybe.”

“Or was it that you thought he turned evil a little later in life? He was younger than you here, Christine – perhaps you hadn’t realized he was a murderer well before his time in Persia. It’s a practical past-time, especially for an ugly boy growing up in a world full of ugly adults, and so it was never a question about if he would kill for the Shah, but when.”

“I don’t know, Erik. But I don’t think so.”

“Well, he told you he didn’t care about Persia, or Turkey, or Egypt, or any of the others. All any of them ever meant to him was security. Security and power. He would have died without them. You can understand that, can’t you?”

She frowned, and looked out at the rest of his room and all its macabre trappings. “I suppose I can.”

He looked out, too, where she looked, before asking in a sadder way, “Did Erik ever tell you about his first murder in Persia?”

She shook her head.

“It was one of the prisoners… I had asked the Shah if we could perform some restoration work on one of his old palaces. He said it contained ten disruptors, for that’s where they kept those kinds of criminals at the time… protestors, traitors, litterers, those sorts of vile, corrupting youth… and they would all need to be dealt with before my work could begin. They had all already been sentenced to death, and all of Persia already despised them for their treason, but their execution dates kept getting pushed back because of the usual bureacratic nonsense. The exact sort I was trying to fix! I told the Shah I could get it done before the week was out – efficiency was my usual method of impressing him. He agreed after some convincing, in my usual manner, and even encouraged me by devoting a number of his policemen to my mission. One of them disagreed in principle with our work and tried to refuse the assignment… the Shah made him the chief of police in return. He often did things like that, giving promotions to people he didn’t like. He said it let him keep a closer eye on them…

“The night before this first execution, after I had returned from my nightly amusements with the Shah, I tossed and turned in my bed for hours. Earlier, when I was at his feet, I had laughed… now I worried over my conscience. Over my soul. I had killed, as I told you, but in truth had never taken a life in cold blood before. I was very concerned for who I would become…”

Christine couldn’t help but interrupt once again. “But did you ever spare a thought, in all those hours, for the man you were about to kill?”

“No,” he admitted quietly. “Why? Should I have?”

His eyes scanned her for a moment, looking for something she wasn’t quite sure of, before shutting once more.

“As I’ve said, it’s all very troublesome, and I’ve never liked the bloody business. Am I obliged to worry about every little life I destroy? Aren’t I the one who has to live with it in the end? Me… Erik… not them? It’s more than enough for one sullied soul to consider. Will you judge me for that failing, alone?”

“I am not here to judge,” Christine said.

“You are not here for anything,” Erik reminded her bitterly, “so you can judge me all you want. It won’t change a damn thing.” He frowned pitifully. “We executed them all by firing squad the following afternoon. It was the first time I had ever used a gun, if you can believe it. The daroga had to show me how to use it. He was the only one who stayed when they cleaned up the bodies... him, and me. I only stayed out of morbid curiosity. He stayed because he felt bad… the nerve of that man.

“After, I was quite proud of myself for how I handled it all. Imagine it for yourself, Christine – imagine killing a man! How would you feel? Don’t imagine one as vile as me, don’t imagine how you think I should feel – imagine yourself! For it could happen one day! I imagine most would be met with a confusing sort of devastating feelings. But not for me! But then when I met with the Shah and announced this triumph to him, he grew quiet, and began wringing his hands, like this, and told me, Azizam, it was only an execution. What! Had I not just killed a man, I wondered? Was there some invisible difference between murder and state-sanctioned murder? I could not see it… and only then is when I began to feel very confused…

“I continued regardless, in this way, to impress the Shah. I created an incredibly efficient penal system for him, and crime dropped to nearly zero percent in the provinces I had authority over. For profit reasons, we introduced new laws. Harsher laws. A penal system without a steady string of gaolmen from which to wring income from is not much of a system at all… it is a cure, for the blight which is society. And no society can ever be completely lawful… somewhere, someone is always doing something wrong. And so I determined what ‘some’ meant… and I determined, in due course, a fitting punishment for those unfortunate enough to be identified in this manner… and I returned to the Shah, time after time, always with great excitement, exhorting of my exploits, growing fonder and fonder of my role as his private executor and executioner both… always kneeling before him and clinging to the hem of his robes as I kissed the top of his naked feet… growing ever more extravagant each time I returned to the place of this worship… needing him always to need me… to need only me…

“In time he did. The government of any land is like a sicklied, starving cattle, maddened by the feeding of its own brothers and sisters; all prevailing systems are diseased and will always be inclined to apoptosis. I fostered in this abscessical cesspool an infectious chain of rumors, some real and some not, and strengthened the contagion just enough to cripple the little coalitions that had emerged amongst the governmental do-gooders and to inspire distrust in all the rest. Within months of my arrival all the government hated the Shah, and the Shah hated all of them - but me.

“Eventually the Shah arranged for the detainment and punishment of those he considered enemies of his throne. This list of course was provided to him by me, who conducted surveillance for him around the palace. After careful discussion with his advisor, who was me, he decided to send them to a prison somewhere north of the capitol, on the edge of the sea. He proposed that I should be the one to run this operation, the one to oversee it… that he could trust no one else but me to handle this situation, and that he was proud, so proud of me… he laid himself bare before me… of course I said yes.

“The territory in question was once the Khalij-e Khazar, but when he gave it to me he called it Le Crique Caspienne. He said he liked the way it sounded in my mother tongue… he always did like that I was French. No one else did. No one else liked me for any reason. But the Shah… he said I deserved a realm that was all my own, to possess in all ways known and unknown, and that going forward he would honor whatever decisions I made within that realm without question, pause, or delay.

“Now, in my Crique I had about eight prisoners at a time. They were each held in their own cells, carved into the side of the cove. It was open and the Caspian tide would wash in sometimes and fill the rooms… never more than a finger or two… except for the oubliettes, of which there were two… those would fill fully… and the sea breeze would drift in and out and mingle with the other smells within that stoney cavern. No one ever came there but me – only when a prisoner died, then the daroga would be sent to bring me a new one. But he never liked to stay for long, and honestly I preferred it that way because his eyes would get all misty when he looked upon my cove – he never dared go in – not that I wanted him to, as being a bachelor I usually left my equipment lying all about, and I did not want him to see it – or maybe I did? – and anyway it greatly disturbed me, to have him there, as I saw him as a man who had not yet matured and so still was a slave to his conscience… as opposed to myself, who had overcome mine, or more accurately learned how to operate apart from it. Whenever he left I would become much less frustrated, as the coastal peace of the brine and the palms of my idyllic seaside paradise would settle back around me, calming me, and remind me just how placid and good the world could be sometimes, even to a beast as ugly as me. There were no worries for me in my lovely cove, no troubles or angers, no trials or tears. Only the pebbled stones of the shoals, the golden grit upon the dunes, the salted wind within my nose… the pouring sand from out my fist… the eight or so cadavers within the black cave… the perfect, sapphire blue sea… and me.

“I will not bore you with the details of my doings in that Crique. Atrocities, when told in cumulation, can lose their sense of depravity and may start to sound mundane. So I’m sure you thought it was striking when I cracked that stupid doctor’s skull open like a day-old cock egg… perhaps you’d still find it somewhat alarming if I told you about a dozen or so other eggs and what I did to them… but it was so much more than a dozen, unfortunately, and it was so much more than just their shells… I mean I made more than just frittatas, if you understand… and it has all blurred together for me into one big bleeding sunset upon that Caspian tide, full of limbs and howling mouths. It is not worth speaking on, or even remembering in full detail – and truthfully, I do not.

“But one afternoon I walked out upon the shore, to the very line where the tide would sweep up to my naked feet. The sun was out but all the air around me was cold upon my skin. The sea was calm, as it always was up there, with no-one around to disturb its perfect stillness… I was just far away enough from the cave that I could not hear the screams – and how they wept, Christine, as they drowned in their own tears, you cannot ever fathom it – and in fact I could not hear anything, anything at all, but the quiet roll of the tide. In, and out. How perfectly still the world seemed.

“How perfectly lonely.

“What a perfect idiot I’d been, I realized all of a sudden, as I looked upon that vast blue sea. There was no prompting to this revelation; my heart simply became seized with this fantastic terror, of a breed I’d never felt before in all my time on this earth. I’d finally achieved complete domination, but at what cost! I was all alone again – I had wheedled my way right out of the Shah’s court! And the Shah had let me go… suddenly I saw through all the charades of his grandiose flattery. I had never been the Shah’s pride – only his shame. I was nothing to him but a pest, some skittering vermin, louse, bug, beetle, worm! That was why he’d sent me here, to this forgotten little corner of the earth, hidden away, where I could skulk around and do my unmentionable business in private, which he only merely tolerated from me! God forbid anyone see. God forbid anyone know.”

At this, Erik began to weep. His shoulders crumpled, folding inwards, encasing him within himself, as Christine watched on with pity, not knowing what quite to say.

“I made my way back to Mazandaran,” he continued through his tears, torturously, when she was not quick enough to stop him, “I made my way back to the Shah’s palace and impaled myself once again upon his staff. I am so crafty, Christine, and for no reason at all… it is so unfair… I convinced him we needed to bring the horror home, to the heart of Mazandaran, that we needed palaces of pain and chambers of torture on public display to make the people really submit to our rule. I built him so many things, so many beautiful things, for I can never help myself when I really get going. I could never stand to be an architect who could knowingly bring something hideous into this world, to be so complacent about my work that I’d find it acceptable to deliver an atrocity upon my own eyesight… it had to be beautiful, you must understand, Christine, all of it had to be beautiful… as beautiful as a torture chamber, covered with mirrors like diamonds… as beautiful as a poem, or a romance… as beautiful as yourself… and don’t you think the people preferred to die like that, in the midst of this art, my art, rather than in the way of the others, of their brothers and sisters, who came before them as my first victims in that prison by the sea? All died bloated and screaming, crazed and intolerable… for there is truly nothing palatable about any death, none that I’ve ever seen… by land or by sea… certainly, this is true… but doesn’t it seem a little less crude, a little more controlled, or otherwise considered, for the ones who died by my design than the ones who died in the cave? And weren’t they all going to die anyway, and become worthless blobs of clay…?” Erik’s voice cracked. “Can’t it mean nothing, Christine, the manner in which they died? Death is death! What if I killed them, and enjoyed it very much? I was confused, Christine! I was young! I liked the attention and the spectacle, I liked being a martyr, if only to myself, I liked pitying myself and hating myself - and God, Christine, the world made it so easy for me to do it! All of it!”

He bawled now in the way of a child, with his arms fallen lamely to either side and his head tilted back as he hollered out his agony. Mucus flooded down his ruined nose straight into his open mouth, thickening his gasping sobs into gargling garbles. It was honestly pathetic, the way he just sat there and cried… but Christine knew better than to say that.

Instead she reached a hand out to his shoulder, cautious about provoking him further. Surprisingly, though, he did not shake her off, and rather leaned in against her touch. She rubbed his shoulder for what felt like ages, until he began to quiet down.

“Do you dwell on all these things when you think of Persia?” she asked, knowing he needed something from her.

“More than this,” he managed to reply.

“That sounds exhausting.”

“It is.” He turned his teary eyes up at her. “Oh, Christine. Am I so wicked?”

Oh! How to answer that question? It seemed he was looking for a judgement after all – and as was normal with Erik, Christine knew there was only one correct answer: whatever would make him stop crying. But who would that serve? To lie to him, to give him forgiveness he didn’t deserve, to offer absolution she had no right to provide… it was terribly unfair of him.

But still, he needed her to speak, to give him at the very least an acknowledgement that she had listened to him and his story… and, she realized suddenly, wasn’t that a power in its own right? To be needed as a perceiver, in this way he had always sought… for a moment she contemplated refusing to respond to him at all,  just for the sake of perpetuating his misery. Wouldn’t that be just what he deserved, after what he just told her? And, if she were being honest with herself – wouldn’t if feel good, to destroy him like that, and so easily? Yes, she could ignore him, and leave him, or at least the room, and she could return to the parlor where she’d sing and sing and sing while she waited for him to collect himself – and all the while he would cry, like he was before, like he always did anyway, and then eventually he would collect himself, and put back on his bowtie and his jacket and his mask, and maybe comb his hair a little bit just to be presentable, as then he’d stroll back into the parlor where she’d be waiting for him at the side of the piano and he would greet her and smile at her with those same sad eyes he always had, with their hurting yellow hues, and it would be uncomfortable for a moment but when was it not? And they would pass a tense but normal evening nonetheless filled with music and small talk, whispered sighs over croissants, a tear here or there for absolutely no reason at all... yes, how strong she would feel if she jilted him now, with all his heart broken out in the open and him begging for perception. How little, truly, it affected her own life.

How little it affected his.

“Well, Erik, you’ve killed a large number of people in your life,” Christine gave at last. “With little true remorse or regard for any of them.”

“Yes…” he whispered mournfully, “yes, I have...”

“Do you at least feel a little bad now?”

“Of course…”

“For yourself, or the people you hurt?”

“For everyone…”

“And do you think that’s enough?”

“No…”

“Are you just saying this because you think this is what you’re supposed to say?”

“No…” he mumbled, “…maybe… yes...”

“Yes to what, my love? You don’t feel like it’s enough? Or you don’t feel bad?”

“I don’t know...” His bottom lip began to quiver. “I truly don’t know, Christine…”

“But the ones you killed,” Christine said uneasily. “Certainly you must consider them.”

“Must I consider them, though?” he sobbed into his hands. “Is there a proper way for me to think about that time which will offer me redemption? A proper way to be contrite? Obviously I regret it! And yet I cannot hardly even manage the memory of it all… for God’s sake, I’m still there when I sleep… why must I be expected to pick out all the precise and exact reasons why what I did was wrong? It wouldn’t change what I did! I did it over and over again in country after country! Kingdom after kingdom! And every time I felt the failure! Is that not enough? Must I conceive of it? Must I look into the face of my own utter evil and make sense of it? Is that the only path to salvation?”

Christine's hand was still on his shoulder; now she pulled him closer and wrapped him into her arms so he could cry against her breast.

He didn’t deserve this embrace. But what was she to do? She’d decided she wasn’t so cruel as to walk away, so the only choice left was to offer him this. It wasn’t love, and it wasn’t pity, but it greatly moved her all the same.

“I don’t believe you’re irredeemable, Erik. I’m sorry that was even a thought in your head,” she told him gently, smoothing her hand against his back as she spoke. “I am sorry I insisted on an answer. But can you see where my concern is coming from? All of those things you spoke about are in the past, but where we are now is not. You never stopped chasing control – you have only ever moved on to the next object to force into submission. If not Persia, then it was Turkey. If not the Shah, then your mother. If not her, then me… I am not so unrealistic as to ask you to dwell on these memories, when they are so clearly damaging you to relive. I am just asking you to look at me, and to think about what you want from me, and to understand why you are keeping me locked down here with you…”

“I don’t want to keep you here,” he croaked. “I want you to leave. To disappear! To cease to exist… oh, Christine. What a wicked man I am, for these thoughts that I have…”

Her hand stilled as a chill ran down her spine. “I am aware of your thoughts.”

“Then you should have let me die when I was sick!”

“You know I couldn’t do that.”

He allowed a small smile despite himself, against the crevice of her wetted bosom. A trembling finger came up to play with one of her errant gold curls as he murmured, “Of course not. You’ve always been the dearest dear –”

“I cannot kill you, because only you know the way out,” Christine continued quietly. “This is my predicament, Erik. Killing you would be to kill myself. Do you know how many times I’ve thought about it? How many opportunities I’ve had? But I cannot, because without you I would be left to rot down here all alone…”

Erik’s smile fell.

“No – no, Christine, no…” he whispered, horrified. “I wouldn’t let you die -”

“You would,” she whispered back. “You will. At the end of all of this.”

A long silence stretched between them, as Christine’s heart thrummed in her chest beneath the spot where Erik’s head rested. He was crying again, his sparse wet eyelashes beading up and flicking stains across her front. It was uncomfortable sitting like this, and she could feel her side straining to keep her from slipping and falling entirely backwards.

“Perhaps,” he finally admitted, after some time. “But I’ve apologized to you many times in advance for that, haven’t I?”

Christine laughed, once. Sadly. “Apologies don’t work like that, my love.”

He moved his head slightly, to gaze up at her face. “What would you do, Christine, if I showed you the way up? Would you run away?”

“No. I’d stay right here.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“In this house?”

“In this room.”

“…In this room?”

“Well, in the other room, maybe,” she admitted. “This room doesn’t have a bed.”

He nodded his head slowly at that, as if that had been a test and he approved of her answer. Still he frowned, however.

“Do you promise you wouldn’t run away?”

“Yes.”

“Would it make you happy, to know the way up?”

“Yes. Greatly so.”

Another nod. Erik closed his eyes and leaned back into her chest. “Would you let me hold you, if you knew the way up?”

“I already do.”

“Know the way up?”

“Let you hold me.”

Erik’s lip trembled. “Can I hold you now?”

“Of course,” Christine said.

She expected him to rise and sit beside her; but instead he raised his arms slowly, wrapping them around her torso, pulling her towards him with a weak but firm insistence. He found purchase in the ties of her blouse and some ill-placed buttons… clutched her with his icy hands, those stained yellow fingernails wrapping tightly about her arms, her chest, her neck... she lost balance at last from her precarious spot atop that casket ledge, unable to hold out anymore against his pulling, and fell down in a puddle of satin and lace into the depths of the casket atop him.

"Oh, Erik!" she yelped. "What...?"

“I’d like to bury myself in you,” he whispered into her hair, wrapping himself around her as he fought her natural instinct to pull away. “May I...?”

May he do what, Christine did not know; not that it mattered, as he only waited the courtesy of a few seconds to pretend she had given him an answer. She felt one of his arms let go of her, and move somewhere in the air – but before she could wriggle free the hinges creaked and the lid fell closed above them. It was a snug fit, as he had not yet widened it for her as he threatened oh so long ago, but there was space enough for them both, if she sucked in her chest a little.

She heard the tell-tale snap of the latches snapping shut, then Erik’s arm burrowed through the upper satin to wrap itself back around her again. Pulled so close to him like this, she could feel all the sharp and pointy parts of him jutting into her, in places where she was particularly soft and vulnerable.

“Are you comfortable?” he breathed against her ear.

“Yes," she said quickly, as she tried to regain her nerves. "But -"

“Please don’t lie to me. I hate being lied to.”

"I'm not lying," she lied. "But this isn't -"

“Good." He rolled the ruins of his nose against her cheek, streaking a path of his tears and mucus. "Erik just wants to hold you. For a little while. Until the thoughts go away."

How childlike he sounded! He squeezed her to his chest like a stuffed toy, and cried into her hair like a babe. She wanted desperately to hold him, but her arms were trapped between them, one hand upon his chest, and the other caught somewhere lower where his bony pelvis cradled her hip. She felt the urgent pressing of something else down there, something hard and unforgiving... then realized with great alarm that it was the thick and corded knot of his trusty Punjab lasso, which always hung ready for action about his waist. Turning beet red, she willed herself to distraction.

But distraction was hard to come by, in this vessel of utter blackness, filled with the musky odor of Erik's dead scent. She was cognizant of every whistling exhale he made, each blowing across her face in the foulest way, scuttling across her heated cheek and through her tousled hair. She tried to make each of her own breaths last as long as possible, hyper-aware of the sound of the wind rolling up and down through her trachea and trying to make them as soft as possible. They had shared so much together, and yet in the silence of this box she feared his hearing of her lungs, that perhaps he would hear her breaths and decide she was doing it wrong, and reprimand her, or silently critique her... the air seemed to grow thicker with each breath they both took...

"It is getting hot in here," she dared to speak. "Surely we can open the lid a touch?”

“No!” he hissed. His arms went back around her, clutching her with even more urgency to his chest. "Not yet!"

"Not even for one minute?

"I said not yet!"

Her heart beat just a bit faster. Would he really not let her out? "I must confess, I am actually now growing quite uncomfortable - I can hardly breathe. Are you sure we cannot -"

“Follow me,” he directed. “Inhale when I exhale, and only shallow breaths.”

She tried.

“Erik, I’m still not -”

“Shush,” he said. “I've got you, Christine. Close your eyes, and sleep if you must.”

The air grew ever thicker, the darkness ever blacker.

“Erik – I truly can’t breathe –”

“You can. Calm down. Shallow breaths, Christine. Like I told you. Please. This will not be forever. Please. Just follow me. Like this…”

She tried again, but it was uncomfortable, with only the top parts of her lungs inhaling, barely able to get any air at all. Suddenly she became very nervous. “Are you sure there’s enough air in here? I feel like I’m getting dizzy – I feel like I’m dying, Erik –”

“I know. I’m sorry.” He hugged her only tighter. “Please, Christine. Only a little while longer.”

“How much longer?”

“I don’t know.” She felt a tear drop on her cheek, then another. “Just close your eyes, Christine. Go to sleep. Dream you're some place else, wherever would make you happy... do what you have to do." Another tear. "I love you. And I'm sorry.”

She was, too.

Chapter Text

Gift Six
“The Letter from Manaus”
(Part II)

She awoke to the coffin lid open.

Her husband stood over her, a madeleine in hand. His jaw moved slowly as he munched on it, grazing like some bored cattle, as he stared down at her with his blazing, impenetrable eyes. He crumbled a bit as he chewed but seemed to care nothing of it. She noticed vaguely that he had changed into his robe and nightcap, the matching ones of crushed velvet and ebony tassels, and in the hand that did not hold the madeleine he clutched an overly large bottle of wine.

“What time is it?” she asked.

He nibbled a bit more on the biscuit, watching her, in no clear rush to reply.

“Eleven at night,” he gave at last. “You have slept all day.”

“Have I really?”

He allowed a small smile, though his eyes remained cold. More crumbs. “Yes, of course. Erik had a busy day in the meantime. Went to the park and everything. Anyway, um, could you get up? Erik is very tired and would like to use his bed.”

In confusion she rose, without protest, still half-asleep and bleary-eyed with crumbs tumbling off her; he clambered into the vacated coffin as soon as she was up, and situated himself within the tufted satin. He tucked the wine bottle into the crook of his arm, then reached to pull the lid down. Just before he did, though, he glanced at her and casually said,

“Oh, and by the way, Christine – a letter came for you while you were asleep. I left it on my desk, if you would care to read it… anyway, good night.”

And with that he shut the lid.

Christine blinked at the coffin with astonishment as the world turned to dull silence once more. What in the world…? Her tired mind tried to moor itself and make sense of his words and his cool demeanor, tried to recall all that her dreams had obscured. Had she really slept all day? Hadn’t they fallen asleep together? So how had he gotten up, without disturbing her? And why did she feel so sore…?

She shelved the questions for the time being, not even wishing to think about the discussion they’d had just prior to their sleeping. Or her sleeping, rather. Erik’s past in Persia had been awful to hear about, no wonder he avoided thinking about it! But of course she was not him, and so of course she would consider it, and make an opinion of it, and of him, eventually, just not right now, for there were other matters to consider – other matters that were much easier, and less ambitious, to digest.

Christine cautiously meandered to the desk, and found there, as he said, an envelope addressed to her. It looked assaulted, having been brutally torn open and handled with violence, its seal mercilessly defiled. She removed from it a ripped leaf of paper, which seemed to have been stuffed back in with clear vehemence, and found on it a letter of black ink written in a sloppy, sloping hand:

CHRISTINE!! LOVE OF MY LIFE!!

HOW ARE YOU? I HOPE YOU ARE WELL. I AM NOT WELL, AS YOU CAN NO DOUBT TELL FROM THE POSTMARK ON THE RIGHT OF THIS ENVELOPE HERE.

But yes, it is true – YOUR EYES DO NOT DECEIVE YOU!!! – I now live in Manaus. It is a most beautiful city, almost so beautiful that I could almost forget to lament the poor fortune that brought me here… in truth I hardly understand the past few months, Christine, THOUGH THEY HAVE CERTAINLY HAPPENED TO ME. My memory is most mercurial, these days, ever since that dark and rainy day when you called on me to help you escape. Suffice to say, your man, that fiend – HULLO, ERIK, IF YOU ARE READING THIS – collected me in that forest from the rubble of my carriage; he put me in the carriage bed with you and we lolled our dazed heads upon each other’s shoulders as he drove us to the station, like we were children again in your father’s arms, safe and warm on a log beside the beach; AND I SLEPT LIKE I NEVER SLEPT BEFORE, inhaling your sweet scarf’s perfume, limp like a man who has been drained of all his sap and hardihood. I recalled nothing of who I was when I awoke… he had deposited me in some field that I did not recognize, so I began to walk, and walk, looking for something that might eventually hold some nostalgia for me. I saw some of the most frightening of sights in my travels: I saw a man get mauled by a bear… a bear get mauled by a man… a hundred men get mauled by a silverback gorilla… but besides the horrors I also saw the wonders. I saw a cliff face defaced by nature’s cleaving; I climbed the peak of Sagarmatha; I flexed my toes in the ocean and touched the tiniest tip of a tower of Atlantis. The world is so big, Christine, and ever so vast…

Which is why I write to you now. I fear we shall never meet again. I have no papers, no money with which to return to Europe, and in fact barely scavenged enough coins to send this letter on to you. But I did so, for I simply could not have gone on without letting you know that I WAS ALIVE, even if not well, and I did not want you to worry even a moment more over me.

I do not expect a reply. I cannot imagine your Erik will allow you to write one. If he lets you read this, that would be enough. Instead... pray for me, as I pray for you.

YOURS FOR EVER,

THE LITTLE BOY WHO RAN INTO THE SEA TO FETCH YOUR SCARF

--

Christine read the letter only once before storming over to the coffin.

“What is this, Erik?” Christine demanded, rapping on the lid.

“Erik is asleep,” his muffled voice rang back. “Call back later!”

She hurled the lid open and glared down at a huffy Erik, curled around his overly large wine bottle.

“What is this letter, Erik?” She waved it in front of his face. “Is this another one of your awful mind games? Did you write this for me?”

He rolled his eyes and pouted. “Bah! You wake me for this? Christine, please, I am so weary of your accusations.”

“So you did!” Christine cried. “You admit it!”

“I didn’t say that!” He shot upright, plucking the letter from her hand and gesturing at it with a sharp flick of his fingers. “Did you even read what your stupid boy wrote? He loves you and he doesn’t want you to forget about him! Such repulsive sweetness! Such inconvenient filth! Why on earth would I ever pretend your idiot lover penned these things to you?”

She stared at him incredulously. “How gullible do you think I am, Erik? To believe Raoul’s not dead, but just in – in – Brazil, of all places?”

Erik blew a short, exasperated breath. “Well, I don’t know, Christine. How gullible are you?” Then he gave a wicked shrug. “Anyway, it’s the truth! Take it or leave it! We can’t choose the circumstances of these sorts of things. I can’t help it if your idiot boy got himself stranded in some foreign country and can’t prove himself further to you! It’s just how the world goes!”

“Awfully convenient for you,” Christine remarked testily.

“Oh, certainly,” he snapped back. “Anyway! Now you know he isn’t dead. Isn’t that what you wanted to hear? Your little boy is somewhere out there in the world and you can stake all your love on him. Aren’t you happy about that? Even a little bit? I swear, Christine - you always think the worst of Erik, even though you shouldn’t, because he didn’t kill the boy… though he could have!” He flung the loose page to the side, letting it flutter out of reach. “Erik is sorry your boy’s own words weren’t enough to satisfy your curiosity. You’ve always been so damnably feminine in that way. It’s as if his life doesn’t really matter to you! All you want is for it to be measurable. Knowable. God! You really are some selfish brat. He’s alive and you don’t even care…!”

“I do care,” Christine defended herself, quickly bending to collect the sheet before it flew somewhere and really ‘disappeared’. “I care about Raoul enough to never trust a word you tell me about him.”

“Well, that’s unfortunate for you, because that’s all you’ll ever get to know!” Erik sneered back. “Uh! I hate talking about this. Don’t you know how impolite it is? You’re always going on about how you’re my wife, and now here you are prattling on about your affection for some other man!” He clambered out of the coffin and strutted past her, throwing his arms wide. "Nothing is so impossible. He may come for you yet – not that I’d recommend him doing so, seeing as I’m so much smarter and stronger than him. I might really kill him then, I think, if he tried to take you away… but right now, Christine, right now he is alive, as you can read from his letter… right now he is sunning his young, lithe body beneath that Manaus sun, and he is yearning for you…” Erik tutted his tongue. “Anyway, now you can forget this stupid delusion you made yourself believe, that Erik holds any one piece of your heart at all. He is your dangerous stranger, the one who you cannot trust, who will murder you in the dead of night, like he did with all those mangled martyrs in the moors of Mazandaran, and you can hate him with the truest of intensities… though, I’m afraid, he’ll be a little bit of a pest and ask you to continue your charade of love and marriage with him. It gives him great comfort, you see, especially when you act the part with such nuance and precision… like you had some sort of phenomenal teacher… and it would bode you well to make him comfortable, I’d think, as he is your captor, who you believe might eventually kill you… not that he would, but…”

Erik stopped and stood in front of the tapestry of the Dies Irae. He hummed its dark notes to himself, with gleeful awfulness, as Christine watched on.

“You killed him, didn’t you?” she accused. “You really did?”

He gave back a dark chuckle. “Maybe! Ha ha! I suppose you’ll never know, will you! But I wonder why you don’t believe me. It’s not like it really matters.”

“Of course it matters. Anyway, how could I? You’ve lied to me before, plenty of times.”

“You don’t know that! And honestly, Christine, cross Erik’s lonely little heart, he’s never fibbed a word to you. Or maybe he has! Ha ha! Just a joke, girl. But you’ll never know. Nobody knows anything.”

“Why did you give me the letter, Erik?” Christine demanded once more. “You didn’t really think I’d let this go, did you? I can’t go on like this… blindly trusting you on everything! I must see Raoul with my own two eyes. I must know, for once in my life, that something is real. There was a reason I wanted to watch you with the doctor… I am not entirely sadistic, Erik, not like you at all… and so if you want me to see you, as you think I should see you, with this truth you are trying to tell me… to convince me... I must go to Manaus, and see him alive myself.”

“Was it not enough to hear that your boy is alive?” Erik steamed under his breath. “You must go to him, too – must leave Erik and sail halfway around the world?”

“You can come, too,” she said. “I never said anything about leaving you.”

Erik laughed incredulously. “And when you marry, in some little shed-chapel on the cape, can I come then, too?” He threw his hands up. “Really, do you think I’m so much an idiot?”

“I don’t know. But I know I must see him,” Christine repeated.

“Oh, you must!” he spat. He whirled around and threw a finger out at her. “Where’s your faith, woman? The man is alive! Can’t you be just the littlest bit happy about that? Why must you ruin your own happiness by questioning it immediately? You will never see him again! I will not let it happen! Can’t you understand that? I will never let the two of you encounter each other again in this lifetime! Ever! So won’t you just be happy to be told at all, Christine? Or should I have killed him after all, for how little his life matters to you? Should I have just let him die, if that’s all you’re willing to think of him!”

“You’d go to your mother, wouldn’t you?” Christine replied. “If there was a chance she was still alive, somewhere out there… you’d go, wouldn’t you?”

That caught him off guard. Her question seemed to blow him back on his heels, shocked and unsettled and unnerved. Speechless, it was all he could do to clench his white fists as his jaundiced eyes watered up with the tears of so many haunted decades…

At last he spoke, through snot and tears: “We are at different times in our lives, Christine Daae, and we have vastly different capacities for autonomy. Manaus, you ask! What utter buffoonery. No, it will not be done.” He walked three short paces to her and tore the letter from her hand, crumpling it and shredding it in his shaking fists. “I see I made a mistake by entrusting this news with you. In the future I shall share nothing with you, Christine, absolutely nothing! You deserve nothing, if this is how you’re going to act about something. Now, Erik is going to bed. Please never bother him about this ever again. Never bother him at all! He told you one thing and you couldn’t even handle that…”

One more time he looked at her, disgust wrought clearly upon his horrible features.

“And, Christine, truly – do not speak of things you know nothing about. If my mother was alive, and she is not, I’d only want to find her so I could strangle the cold-hearted bitch myself.”

Chapter Text

Gift Six
“The Letter from Manaus”
(Part III)

Did it surprise Christine that Erik avoided her for the next several days? Of course not. He became like a ghost to her, more than he already was, going out for many hours at a time and keeping to his room mostly when he returned. Occasionally she found some light emanating from the slit under his workshop’s door, but this she paid no mind; the devil, she knew, must keep himself busy.

In the meantime she presided over her own thoughts. The situation of her life was becoming unbearable, and something needed to be done. Things could not go on like they had been… but what was she to do? She could not leave. Erik had made that abundantly clear. She had tried to fight back; and yet every attempt thus far had proved futile, and worse had made her feel somehow more and more contemptible. How did Erik have this power, to make her feel like some insolent child for the malevolence he bestowed upon them both? It was a specific, strange torment; one that she loathed, but loved still, for there was a part of her which relished in this agony, which craved for further and futher slaughts, which had germinated in this dark, dank, and stanky basement without her even realizing.

Should she languish in love, then, for all the rest of her days? She pondered this premise deeply. It would not be all bad, she knew, as despite all his horrific tendencies Erik was still a very entertaining companion. His jokes did not all land flat, and the idle conflations of his mind did not all bore her. Maybe he would kill her; but honestly there seemed no other end for her down here, or even up there, whether she played his game or did not, than to die by his hand. The only question as to this was when… and this when gave Christine great pause in these days.

For while Erik had always said he was not a suicidal man, the same could not really be said for Christine – no matter how much she protested her nature otherwise. She had tried on countless occasions to find that elusive egress, though it was true she had not chased it particularly aggressively… more like she had been open to the idea of a clear end, a final end, and had passively pursued it whenever conditions happened to encourage her.

So, she went on wondering, with death no longer some objectionable threat but rather a tiring imposition hanging readily before her, would it be better to just end it all, for both of them, before they both did something they’d really regret? Ah, but no, she always then decided, for doing something like that always seemed like such a headache to both justify and carry out. Erik would probably have something to say, too, one of his long and condescending monologues that went everywhere and nowhere at the same time – and how fatigued she already was, of that drenched and dreary speech which he hadn’t even made yet. She thought of all those tedious words he would fling at her, words about layers of fear, of betrayal and treachery, about the double standards he and she put themselves through, of the pitiful inevitability of his moleish life and how, alas, poor Erik’s story was always doomed to end like this. Oh, yes… that alone was nearly enough to make her drop the option from consideration entirely. But then she would reflect, and remember, that if she were not to kill him on her terms, then the only choice left would be for him to kill her on his. And wasn’t that the most undesirable fate of all? Certainly it’d be better to claim a little bit of autonomy for herself, even if only at the bitter end. But how would she deal with Erik? Wouldn’t he be so annoying? And what autonomy was there in becoming a corpse, anyway? Oh, there was always something…

Such then were the thoughts in Christine’s mind, in these lonely, and last, days she spent in the house beneath the ground. She shut them out as best she could, wishing her mind to other pursuits, wishing the situation to be different, wishing for the strength to do something, or maybe nothing… but still they lingered.

Still they festered.

--

On a Tuesday – he said it was – he brought her to the cemetery. He walked her through it, in cold promenade, until they stood before the tiny plot inscribed with the name Valerius.

He let her stand there for a whole entire minute – then, slowly, silently, he led her away.

--

Erik gave her breakfast late another day. She thought everything of it, and worried immediately that this meant he was going to kill her. After some rationalization, she decided he wasn’t. Instead, he brought her a plate of rolled crepes drizzled with a pungent squirting of lime syrup soon after, apologizing profusely and yet sarcastically for his tardiness. He then read to her a section from his old book of Poe, as she masticated upon a particularly hot and girthy crepe,

“Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,
The angels, whispering to one another,
Can find, among their burning terms of love,
None so devotional as that of “Mother,”
Therefore by that dear name I long have called you –
You who are more than mother unto me…”

The crepe swelled suddenly as she took it in her mouth one last time, and blew its load out its back. Warm spurts of cottage cheese sprayed down upon the virgin ivory of her porcelain plate, devastating it, and a trickle of lime rolled down her chin, tinging with her own spit. With a humiliated huff she turned on Erik, and told him to just shut up already.

--

Some other time, she walked in on him in the bathroom having his nighttime ejection.

His hands were placed palm-down upon his skinny legs, a sheen of sweat glistened upon his brow. Something large and loggish hung in the bowl beneath his rear, intimidating in its utter hulkishness. He grunted, or maybe moaned, then looked at her and flushed deep red.

“Must I be observed like an animal, Christine?” he seethed. But that was all he could manage in protest, as his fists clenched, and he folded himself over his knees as a particularly powerful spasm seemed to come upon him.

She stayed in the doorway only a split second after that, regaining her bearings, her wide eyes tracking only on him a moment longer – watching the way his spine arched as he pushed, and pulsed – reading the etched, scarred letters MIN FRUS EGENDOM scratched deep across the lowest portion of his lower back – not admiring it, but almost – before spinning around and fleeing away down the hall, slamming the bathroom door shut behind her.

--

She found him in the parlor the day after that.

It was an unusual sight these days to see him casually and at leisure, and she found herself unable to resist the opportunity of his company, horrid though it was. He peered over his book as she swept carefully past, crossing the room and sitting down on the chaise across from him. She gave a small, polite smile as she arranged her skirts, readying herself to receive the evening and all its typical patterns of strained silence.

He offered no word in greeting, though he kept his stare upon her. She thought she smelled his perfume, which was musty and mothy and moldy, and wondered self-consciously if perhaps he could smell hers. She tried to ignore his eyes, only looking towards him briefly to catch the title of his book – “Venus im Pelz” – and in this brief moment caught a picture of the thing itself. Its worn label was borne upon the spine, bordered by a curious and bulky ornament seeming to be a customized personalization of Erik’s. Upon closer examination she recognized it as one of her old shoe buckles, the little brass one with the dings from Sweden, which had gone missing a little before her acquaintanceship with the Angel of Music. Funnily it did not upset her to see it there, but rather offered a sense of relief to know now where it had been after all this time. Should she give him the other one, she wondered, seeing now how careful, and how artful, he’d been with this one’s keeping?

“Erik is sorry he yelled at you yesterday,” he said abruptly, as the intensity of his gaze wavered. He must have felt her looking at the buckle; two fingers came up as if to hide it. “Though you must understand he is not used to being seen in such a vulnerable state. Not consciously, that is.”

“Oh!” she said, blushing. “We don’t need to talk about it.”

“No, no, Erik doesn’t mind. Christine must be curious.” He put the book in his lap and gestured to the samovar on the end-table beside him, where his pipe sat still smoking. “This… makes it very difficult for me, in my old age. Everything is starting to slow down. I am in pain half the day because I am so uncomfortable.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Christine said, awkwardly. “But, really Erik –”

“Sometimes it… refuses. And I have to… take my hand, or just a couple fingers really, and… help it along. To find my release. Um. Do you understand? Getting old is no picnic, Christine. I do hope you enjoy being so young.”

“I do,” she replied.

“So you have no trouble, then?” he asked.

“Excuse me?!”

“I asked if you have any trouble, Christine?”

She flushed deeper. “No trouble, Erik.”

“Well,” he said, nodding, “that’s good, then. I was worried a little bit, with the morbid depression you’ve fallen into… of what might happen… now that everything is so… anyway. I have some pills that can help, just so you know, in case you find in time it’s hard to… pass. There are several options in my cabinet. You don’t even have to ask permission… I just don’t want you to suffer.”

She blushed deeper scarlet, if that was even possible, and tried to disappear into the chaise. “That’s very thoughtful of you, Erik. I’ll, um, keep it in mind.”

“My mother struggled a lot,” he added, refusing to desist. His cold yellow eyes burned her with their stare. “I had to help her too. Physically. I think I get it from her.”

“Oh.”

“It was worse when I drugged her. She would go days without, well… and as I became attached to this infernal pipe, so did I… so you can see how I am concerned, Christine, about how you are doing.”

“Oh.”

He kept staring at her for a long time, gravely silent.

“I am fine,” she finally gave, in a tight voice. And, because she feared that alone might not be enough, she added, “My father too had his… troubles. At the end of his life. So I know how it goes. Somewhat.”

“That is good,” Erik sighed. “That you know –”

“Yes,” Christine agreed. “That I know.”

“And it is profoundly unfair…” he began to say, before shaking his head and turning away to his side table. “Anyway. Erik will make sure to lock the door next time, if Christine so desires him to...?”

“Oh, but I really should have knocked,” she said quickly, catching on. “I would hate for you to lock it on my account. Then if something were to happen, I wouldn’t be able to help…”

“So you would have me leave it open?”

She sat a little straighter, feeling something building within her. “Not wide open, but unlatched, Erik, I think, if you please; and if you do that, I will try not to surprise you next time.”

“And if I… needed help?” He flicked his gaze back to her.

“I will come,” she promised, fully and honestly. “I know you said it makes you feel vulnerable, and uncomfortable… and that you are not used to feeling such a way… so of course I will knock before I enter, and of course will wait for a reply. But I will come for you, Erik, always – if only you will let me.”

She swallowed his gaze in her own, as she let him sit with her answer and muse to himself about what he would and would not allow her to do for him. It was not her choice after all – never was – and yet how strange it was, to see him squirm beneath her stare, in a state of his own choosing... for the first time actually flustered, discomfitted and shamed, and yet not complaining or objecting…

In time the hearthfire shrank, and Erik returned to his book. Christine watched him for many hours, with the same eyes he had watched her with many times before, as the flames threw softer and softer shadows upon his hideous face until the light had gone down so much it was practically impossible to see; then Erik smoked the rest of his pipe, until the parlor air grew dense with its thick haze. Gradually he sank deeper and deeper into his favorite armchair, eyes heavier with each puff – murmuring quietly, but hatefully, to himself as his last bit of consciousness fluttered away.