Phantom (12 page)

I remember it was pitch black the night I ran away from my home in Boscherville. There was no moon and as I pushed through the dense undergrowth in the birch and pine forest of Roumare, clumps of nettles stung my hands. I wasn't usually so clumsy, but tonight my head was clouded with a haze of laudanum and I stumbled and fell several times. The wound beneath my rib cage had begun to bleed again with the exertion and I was aware of a warm stickiness seeping once more beneath my shirt; but I did not stop. I only pushed on and on—as though my life depended on this headlong, desperate flight—without knowing how or whither I fled.

I was not afraid of the dark anymore; I had long since learned to love the kindly veil that shielded me from hating eyes. I had become a creature of the night, passing unseen through the darker shadows of the woods, absorbing the wonderful mysteries of nature, while those who loved harsh daylight slept easy and ignorant in their beds. I was as nocturnal as a badger; and like a badger, I knew my only enemy was man.

There was no plan, no coherent thought, in my head, just a deep instinctive need to get away, far, far away, from my mother's house. Sasha's death had shown me that my mother would never be safe while I continued to live beneath her roof. As I lay half drugged on the sofa, I realized that there were only two alternatives open to me: I could let them shut me away in that terrible place for mad people or I could run away. I chose to run.

When the dawn came I found a stream where I could drink, and built myself a shelter of branches and frosted leaves. It was no palatial edifice, hardly the work of a great architect, but it shut out the knifing winds of that freezing Norman spring. When it was finished, I crept inside and lay there through several risings and settings of the sun. I was exhausted enough to have slept through the pain of my body; it was the pain in my mind that kept me awake, the pain of words which cut deeper than any metal blade.

Freak of nature.

Monstrous burden.

A place where you can forget.

I thought of my mother. A dreadful clarity of vision showed me her relief at finding me gone, and I pictured Doctor Barye consoling her in his eminently sensible and practical fashion, while privately congratulating himself on this astonishing piece of good fortune. She was free now. They would go away together to a place where no one knew her, where she could forget me and be happy.

I wanted her to be happy. She was so beautiful when she smiled at the statue of the shepherd boy. That was why I made it sing for her—so that she would be happy and smile and not want to send me away to the asylum. I never meant to make her mad. When she first began to rock the empty cradle in the attic bedroom, I was afraid that she, too, might be sent to that terrible place of which she had told me. So I made everyone else go away instead. Father Mansart, Doctor Barye, Mademoiselle Perrault… I made them all disappear, one by one. I can make anything disappear, if I really want to. Anything except my face.

Even in my earliest memories my mother was always cold and remote, like a beautiful distant star, always beyond my reach. I think I was born knowing that I must not touch her, but it was a long time before I understood the reason for her revulsion and hatred. Even when she dragged me in front of that mirror and showed me my face, I did not at first understand. I thought the horrendous thing in the glass was some nightmare creature sent to punish me for my disobedience, and for a long time I was afraid to remove the mask in case it came back to haunt me.

The truth came to me slowly, and with the dawn of realization I developed an irrational fascination for mirrors. As I began to play with the cruel, unfeeling pieces of glass, I learned that they could be warped and manipulated, made to show to others an illusion of the sort of nightmare they showed to me. My preoccupation with illusion made my mother angry. She said it was a sick fancy and that if I did not conquer it and turn my thoughts to God, I would most certainly end as a madman.

I was always being told to turn my thoughts to God, as though I were some especially wicked creature with more than one mortal's fair share of original sin. In point of fact I was a perfectly devoted and dutiful little Catholic—until the day I learned that animals have no souls.

I have no memory of what took place once that dreadful revelation had been made to me. I do not know what I did to make Father Mansart decide I must be exorcised—it must have been something bad! I only know that after the grim ceremony took place, I discovered that I hated the priest, and I hated God too—God, who denied an afterlife to my only friend. Why should hateful men have souls when my precious Sasha was condemned to be eaten by worms, returned to the clay as though she had never existed? I could not bear to be told that when we parted it would be forever.

Sasha
! As far back as I remembered she had always been there, a warm, comfortable, welcoming presence who never turned from me. She looked upon my face without its mask and licked my bare cheek with her rough pink tongue. She let me kiss her smooth, soft head and sometimes, when I was working, she would push her nose into my hand and demand to be caressed.

When I looked at her lying at my feet, with her beautiful golden fur all matted with dirt, I swore to be revenged upon the whole human race for this crime that my faith considered unworthy of the confessional. I learned how to hate the night that Sasha died. It was the first time I felt that mindless lust for blood, the uncontrollable, insatiable urge to kill… and kill… and kill!

The first time—but not the last.

It was bitterly cold beneath the bed of leaves, and my trembling breath left little clouds in the damp air. In the stiff, whitened grass beside my head, I noticed a spider weaving its purposeful way. Mademoiselle Perrault was afraid of spiders. I had put one on her shawl once, a particularly large and ugly specimen, not unlike the one I saw now, and her scream of fright had been awesome to hear. My mother was not afraid of spiders but she hated them all the same—she hated all ugly, unlovely creatures. Whenever I saw a spider in the house I would rescue it before she got the chance to squash it with her broom. Sometimes I used to dream I was a spider, scuttling in a terrified search for some safe dark hole where no hating human could find me. I used to dream of spinning a great sticky web that would swallow all the people who threw stones through our windows and shouted ugly things. In the dark I would slip out along a thread of silk and gloat over their helplessness, before paralyzing them with one single bite.

I have often thought that I would have been quite happy as a spider.

Even a spider has the right to a mate.
*

Hunger drove me at length from my shelter, forcing me to push on through the densely wooded area, walking by night and sleeping by day. An ironic quirk of fate had blessed me with astonishing powers of recovery, and the knife wound was now healing to a crusted brown weal which encouraged me to discard Doctor Barye's bandages. His prompt treatment had prevented infection. He had probably saved my life, but I did not see this as a thing I should be grateful for; indeed there were times when I came to hate him more for that single act of pity than for anything else.

I was vaguely aware that the forest would bring me out on the road to Canteleu. My instinct was to hide from people, but challenged by my growing need for food, that instinct was beginning to grow weaker every day. My clothes were torn and filthy, clinging to me like damp rags after so many nights spent sleeping on the ground, but that discomfort was lost beside my ravening hunger.

I was not accustomed to hunger. In her half-crazed insistence that I should eat and not remind her of a starving skeleton, my mother had constantly set before me an obscene procession of dishes. Food was forced upon me like a punishment; it was as though she had sought to atone for some past neglect in this respect that filled her with perpetual guilt. I had developed sleight of hand at a very early age, simply as a means of conveying this unwanted food to Sasha, beneath our table—and I often thought of heaven as a place where no one would need to eat again. But that was before I truly understood what it meant to starve. I had had nothing but water for nearly a week and I was light-headed with a desperation that was driving me steadily back into the inhabited world.

When darkness fell once more I left the shelter of the forest and ventured out onto the open road, where a blaze of winking lights beckoned welcomingly. Lights meant people, and where there were people there was also food that might be stolen. I stumbled on until I reached an encamp-merit of tents and caravans, pitched on a broad patch of common land and backed by the deeper mass of the forest.

Gypsies!

I knew very little about these mysterious people and what little I knew was mostly bad, gleaned from snippets of conversation between my mother and Mademoiselle Perrault. They were heathen masses (according to my mother that was the worst crime imaginable); they stole children (particularly children who did not eat their supper—this last with a hard look at me); they were vagabonds, unwashed and unprincipled ruffians who should never be permitted to settle near decent folk.

Gypsies were like spiders then. My mother did not like them and I, in consequence, felt a sneaking comradeship with such social outcasts.

Even so I was wary and fearful of discovery as I crept into the camp. A group of horses had been tethered to a post on the inner ring of the settlement and their warmth and beauty momentarily swayed my purpose. 1 reached up instinctively to caress one smooth, velvety nose and that was my undoing, for the horse whickered nervously at my unfamiliar touch and at once a restlessness passed through the peaceful tethered animals. Instantly a dog began to bark and a man's voice cried out an angry warning that someone was meddling with the horses.

Suddenly lanterns came at me from all sides. Instinctively I dropped to the ground and hid my face with my arms, bracing myself against anticipated blows. I was grabbed by the shoulders and dragged along the frosted, leaf-mold floor to the enormous campfire which flickered and flared against the clear spring night. And there I was flung at the feet of a small man with a jet-black moustache and a single gold ring dangling from one ear, who prodded me ungently with his foot.

"Get up!" he commanded coolly.

I scrambled to my feet and looked around frantically for some avenue of escape, but I quickly saw that I was surrounded.

"Do you know what we do with thieves?" the man demanded. "Little thieves who won't show their thieving faces? We roast 'em, like hedgehogs… and then"—he leaned forward and pulled me close to his swarthy-skinned face—"and then we
eat
'em!"

I saw no reason to disbelieve this threat, and my gasp of horror was greeted with loud bellows of delighted laughter.

"Better show your face then, hadn't you?" continued the man calmly. "If you don't want to finish on the campfire."

I clutched hold of the mask in defiant terror, aware of the curious anticipation on every face that was rosy-hued by the firelight.

"Oh, let him go," said a woman in gaudy-colored skirts. "Poor little devil looks as though he's starving. Look at his arms, they're like sticks. Give him some food and let him go, he's not done any harm after all."

"How do you know he's done no harm?" I heard a man shout behind me. "We don't trust gorgios, do we? Sneaking gorgios? What was he doing hanging around the horses? I say turn out his pockets and see what he's stolen first."

"And take off the mask!"

"Yes… take off the mask!"

The cry was taken up like a chant, and I was passed around the fire from one set of hands to another, struggling all the time to hold on to the mask.

"Take off the mask, dearie, and let's have a look at you."

Fingers were fumbling at my temples and I began to scream and kick out wildly.

"No—
no
! Please don't…
please
!"

"Listen to that—a gentleman's manners, if you don't mind!"

"Is he a Bourbon prince who missed the tumbril?"

The laughter was growing louder and wilder all around me.

"Got blue blood, have you, dearie—shall we open a vein and find out?"

My arms were pinned behind me and I strained violently to free myself. A strong hand came down beneath my chin and tore the mask away; and suddenly there was a deathly hush broken only by a single Romany oath.

In the terrible silence I saw them all staring at me, on their faces a mixture of expressions ranging through utter disbelief to fear.

"Let me go," I whispered faintly. "If you let me go I promise I won't come back."

They were closing in around me, like wolves in a pack. I saw the flash of a knife in the firelight and I screamed, for I suddenly knew that it was all to be endured again—the mindless violence of an angry, unreasoning mob.

Then everything went black and I knew no more of what they did to me that night.

It was morning when I awoke to find myself lying on a pile of sacking, and the first thing I did was to grope instinctively for the mask. It was nowhere to hand and I sat up dizzily, reaching out farther and farther until I drew back at the touch of a metal bar. It was some time before I could focus clearly, and then I saw that there were bars all around me.
I was in a cage
!

Trembling with fear and bewilderment I lay back on the rags and shut my eyes tightly. I was so completely disoriented that it was easy to persuade myself that what I had seen was just the product of a fevered dream. I would wake up soon and find myself back in the attic bedroom, with Sasha lying at my feet. I waited to wake up, and while I

waited I touched my swollen lips with the tip of my dry tongue and tried to call out.

"Sasha…"

"Quick!" said a voice beside me. "Run and fetch Javert —he told us to fetch him as soon as it was awake."

"Aw, what's the hurry? Let's have some fun with it first. Here, get hold of this stick—go on, get hold of it! What are you scared of? It can't get out."