Phantom (57 page)

Picking up the skirts of the wedding dress, I fled to my room. I had never noticed before that the door was fitted with bolts, but now I slid them into place with feverish, clumsy fingers, snipped off the gown, and threw myself onto the bed, shaking with terror and rage. Suddenly I felt a desperate longing for Raoul, dear, safe Raoul, the playmate of my childhood who would never, never frighten me like this. Oh, God, how could I ever have thought I wasn't afraid of Erik? Surely he was the most terrifying person ever set upon this earth! That insane temper, the overt, barely controlled physical aggression that increasingly seemed to threaten imminent violence!

"I won't come here again!" I vowed into the suffocating pillow. "I'll never, never come back here again!"

At first when I heard the organ begin to play, I burrowed deeper into the pillows with my hands over my ears. I didn't want to hear his hateful music, I didn't want any more to do with him. But it was impossible to shut out the swelling power of the organ, and slowly, reluctantly, I took my hands

away and started to listen intently. I had never heard this music before, but I could guess what it was
—Don Juan Triumphant.
He had never permitted me to look at the manuscript. He said it was dangerous, and that assertion had always puzzled me, for I could not begin to understand how music could present any danger
.

As the notes drifted through me, strangely urgent and compelling, I found that I had begun to rock gently to the primitive, pulsating rhythm. I became aware of answering pulses all over my body, pulses in my wrists and neck and groin, of which I was normally quite insensible. The rhythm of my heart was rapidly gathering a frenetic pace, accelerating with the escalating beat of this truly extraordinary music, and almost involuntarily I began to let my hands wander over my body. There was a swelling heaviness in my breasts that caused my nipples to stand erect against my exploring fingers; but now the irresistible pulse was beating harder and more insistently below my stomach and my hand traveled farther and farther until it reached a place I had never known existed.

Neither innocence nor ignorance was a shield against that music which was deep inside me now, gathering a throbbing momentum that made me twist and writhe, reach out instinctively into the shadows as though to pull some unseen presence down upon me.

My arms had wrapped around the pillow and I rode each thrusting note until the crescendo burst inside my head, flooding my entire body with extraordinary sensation.

When the organ stopped I lay still in the darkness listening to the slowing drum of my heart in the awesome silence.

Was this what he had meant by danger'?

What a strange array of twisted emotions bound us together, and in comparison how terribly inadequate the sim-

plicity of my love for Raoul appeared. First love, shallow and insubstantial, entirely devoid of the unplumbed shadows and incandescent light of my bondage to Erik.

Oh, Raoul! We could have been so artlessly happy together, you and I, if all this had never happened, if I had never known Erik and glimpsed into a world beyond all human imagination. It's so cruel, so unfair, that our love has been cast into this acid bath of doubt when we were young and should have made our life together. A simple, cheerful, normal love would have been ours, a love that had no power to char and destroy with its own fire.

But I've been changed, Raoul… changed beyond all recognition by a man who fills me with such fear that I have locked him from my room and from my bed.

And even though I flee from him, I am not free of his control, his music reaches through the very walls, consuming, possessing, tossing me like a piece of driftwood on a stormy sea… drowning me. My thoughts are no longer those of an innocent ingenue, and I fear the knowledge I have begun to crave is not yours to give.

I can't go back, I dare not go on. The sea is rising to my lonely rock and soon there will be no way to escape from the flood tide.

And I can't swim! I can't swim! Oh, Raoul… I'm so afraid!

Disgust and shame at length drove me up into the dark streets, where I might walk alone with my grief. If it had not been for that doomed encounter in the Bois I would never have given in to my absurd need to see her in that wedding gown. The dress would have remained, like the ring that I had bought for her, just another safely hidden secret, a beautiful waterfall of white satin to be fingered sadly in a private moment of indulgence and then firmly shut away out of sight… out of temptation.

I dared not think how near I had been to losing control, how terrifyingly easy it would have been in that moment to rape her. I'd raped her with music instead, and perhaps that crime was almost as bad as the one it had so narrowly prevented. Either way I'd violated her trust and destroyed a rare and precious innocence—-soiled the delicate ambience that had lain between us all these weeks. The silence in her room, the bolts which remained drawn, were mute testimony to the magnitude of her horror and revulsion.

I walked along the wet pavements, safely shrouded in the cloak and mask, blindly following a path I had trodden many times before, until at last I stood once more outside the Chagny house.

The boy obsessed me. I was so mired in jealous fear that I had to come here repeatedly, under cover of darkness, just to torture myself by looking at him. I knew his habits of an evening, the general hours of his coming and going. I had watched him step in and out of his carriage many times, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone; I had observed his pleasant demeanor with servants and listened to his easy laughter, an open-natured, confident, well-bred boy, so secure in his youth and beauty.

I climbed now onto the balcony of his first-floor room, and there, hidden by the partially drawn curtains, I watched him undress and toss his mud-stained garments to his waiting valet. No good-humored banter tonight, I noticed. The boy was grim and unsmiling and, judging by the late hour of his retirement, must have abandoned his drunken companions in the Bois and walked until he found another carriage.

I studied him with bitter envy. The gaslight was kind to a face and body that had no need of kindness, that would have braved the crudest light of day. A golden youth, fair haired and smooth skinned, well proportioned, powerfully built. If I wanted to be critical, I might remark a certain lack of height, but he was taller than Christine, so I could hardly deceive myself that it mattered.

Against my will I pictured him slowly divesting her of that wedding dress. I saw her shy modesty yielding first to wondering exploration, then finally to ecstasy; and I knew that afterward they would continue to lie together in the darkness… peaceful, satiated, their bodies still entwined, her beautiful hair covering them both like a cloak of gossamer…

Did I cry out aloud at the cruel clarity of that intolerable vignette, or was it merely some involuntary movement of anguish that suddenly alerted him to my presence? I cannot say. But whatever it was that betrayed me resulted in the curtains being abruptly flung back and I found myself looking down the barrel of his revolver.

For a long moment we simply stared at each other, both too shocked to react to this unthinkable confrontation. Then, as his free hand began to rattle at a stiff catch on the full-length windows, I turned and dropped neatly into the garden below.

As I walked away slowly I heard him burst out onto the balcony above.

"Stop!" he shouted furiously. "Stand where you are, Erik, or 1 give you my word I'll shoot!"

Pausing to look back, I saw that the light was behind him, making a truly magnificent target of his barely clad figure. I was unarmed, but he could not possibly know that, and against my will I found myself impressed by the courage of an overimpetuous boy, angry enough to face an experienced killer in the dark. Incongruous, perhaps even a little absurd, but it was not to be sneered at, that courage.

And yet a sneer was all the defense that was left to me.

"Firearms have no place in the hands of children," I said with grim sarcasm. I advise you to put that thing away, boy, before you hurt yourself."

Turning my back on him with deliberate contempt, I continued my unhurried progress toward the screening trees and had taken some half-dozen steps in that direction when his first bullet grazed my shoulder. The second and third were wider of the mark, but not, I knew, by intention. If he'd possessed only a slightly better aim, that boy would have shot me down in cold blood—shot me in the back!

I thought of the many nights I'd watched him, the innumerable occasions when I could have been rid of him for good, and yet had found myself constrained by some spurious notion of fair play. Tonight he'd shown me exactly where I stood. A gentleman is accorded honorable acquittal in a duel, but a monster—
a thing
!—may be shot in the back without a moment's compunction.

Trembling with anger, I walked the streets until the first reddish light of dawn began to threaten and made me instinctively retrace my steps to the Opera.

But I returned to my house with the quiet purpose of decision, an unshakable decision that owed much to that angry gunshot.

Perhaps I couldn't have the dream, perhaps her voice, her smile, and her gentle companionship were all I could ever hope for.

But I wouldn't live with that boy's shadow any longer, I wouldn't tolerate his rivalry.

It was time to ask Christine to make a clear and legal choice.

I stayed in my room today until the continuing, crushing silence drove me out.

Erik looked up when I entered his chamber, but he did not speak, even when I knelt at his feet. When the minutes continued to tick away in deadly stillness, I realized that his voice had become, for me, a drug as powerful as morphine,

necessary to my senses, vital to my existence. His silence was a punishment beyond my strength to bear.

"Erik, if you don't speak to me soon I shall go quite mad!" I said at last. "I can't bear to be locked up here with only my own thoughts for company."

His hands tightened on the arms of his chair.

'
'Locked up?"He echoed, with horror. "Is that what this house has come to mean to you
—
a prison
?"

"It's not a prison, " I said slowly, "until you make it so. But you've frightened me so badly this last week, Erik, I feel I hardly know you."

"
No"
—
he sighed
—"
you are just beginning to know me, that's all. There's so much darkness here inside my head, sometimes it frightens me too. But it need not be like this, Christine. If I could just live like other men, walk through the Bois in daylight and feel the sun and the wind upon my naked face… Oh, Christine, I would dare to do so many things if you were there beside me as my wife
."

I remained silent, grief stricken and appalled, unable to reply, and he got up abruptly and walked away from me.

"
I see you do not care for my voice half so well when it speaks of things you do not wish to hear. Simple words can be reduced to obscenities by my tongue, can they not
? Wife… husband… love."

I knelt on the floor with my head bent, feeling like a criminal who deserved to be guillotined.

"What happened yesterday will never be repeated," he continued quietly. "If you married me I would accept any condition you cared to name, anything… you understand?"

"Erik

"You don't believe met You think because I look like a monster it is inevitable that I should behave like one."

"No," I whispered, "I believe you."

He grew very still, staring down at me with utter wretchedness.

"It's that boy, isn't it?"

Terror knifed through me and I shook my head wildly, instantly denying the accusation. I dared not think what he would do to Raoul if I admitted that I already wore his ring next to my heart.

"It wouldn't be for very long, " I heard him say softly. "Six months perhaps and you would be a young widow… free to make a true marriage."

When I covered my mouth with my hands he turned away in despair.

"I won't beg!" he said with sudden coldness, "not even for your love. I have asked you to marry me, but I don't want your answer now. I would like you to come back tomorrow evening, after the performance, and tell me what you have decided. Will you promise to do that, Christine? Will you promise to come back and tell me… even if the answer is no?"

Staring at the floor, unable to look up into his eyes, filled with more misery than I had ever thought it possible for a human heart to hold, I heard myself accede to his request.

Keep away from the edge!

I couldn't remember who had said that to me, or on what occasion it was said, but oddly enough I remembered my reply with startling clarity.
Why
?

Why must I always keep away from the edge?

I'd found the wedding gown crumpled on the chair where she must have thrown it last night, and as I bent to shake out the creases and hang it back in the closet, the snapped chain fell out from the folds of satin where it had been nestling unseen. The chain and the crucifix… and the ring!

I sat down on the bed and examined it with dull horror. The diamonds were of the highest quality, embedded in a setting which betrayed its newness by an absolute absence of scratches and accumulated tarnishing. This was no keepsake worn to remember a deceased relative. I knew who had given it to her and I knew why she had chosen to wear it secretly out of my sight.

Twenty-four hours I had given her because I did not yet have the courage to face her answer without making a disgusting spectacle of my grief.

But, as I looked at the ring, I knew without question that I was going to have to find that courage and let her go with dignity. She did not love me, but she respected me enough as a man—
a human being
—to honor me with the decency of a considered reply. And I, in my turn, must honor her decision. I would keep my pride this time, no tears, no degrading groveling to make me burn with shame at the memory. Pride was all I would have left to sustain me through the ordeal of her refusal; pride would make me wish her well and let us part with civilized courtesy…