Masque (18 page)

I am telling you all of this because I suspect that the missing son, that Erik, remains at the bottom of this. He was an architect; he had supervised the construction of buildings. He would know how to use dynamite to level foundations. I also remember something strange that happened once, when Charles was still living.

He was taking me round the unfinished theatre – it felt like a ruin, so dusty, already haunted – we had already seen the stage, those wonderful frescoes, I saw the seats lined up against the wall, still sealed in their boxes. We were leaving through the back door, passing the rehearsal rooms, the dressing chambers that no star had ever sung in, on our way to the manager's office when suddenly he stopped and wheeled to what appeared to be an unbroken marble panel of wall.

He ran his hands over it, as though seeking something. Then he turned to me and said, ‘My dear, this is very perplexing. In the plans we made I remember that Erik included a doorway here, with stairs leading down to the basement. We had meant to include some more rehearsal and storage rooms, as well as a sauna and bath house for the richer clientele.'

I was growing bored by then I said, ‘Maybe they changed it.'

He said, ‘No, no. Erik insisted that it be included.' He smiled at me, ‘That boy always insisted that every building have a basement as complex as the room visible on top. It was a quirk of his.'

And with that, our tour concluded. I took him home. That same week the first spots of blood showed up on his handkerchief and I forgot all about our tour. That is, until the strange haunting began and I discovered that no one had ever seen the rooms he mentioned. In fact, hardly anyone has ever been into the basement.

And so, Monsieur, my advice to you is to begin there. Seek out the panel he mentioned. Go down, carefully. If Erik did take your girl, that is where he fled with her. Remember that he is dangerous. Go armed, and not alone.

There. I had a debt to you, once. I have paid it.

My daughter and I wish nothing but the best to you, we wish you luck. Please leave us alone.

Sincerely,

Anne Giry

I finished the letter, thought a moment, adjusting the pillows behind my head. I sent the servant for my brother.

After he had finished reading, the disbelief draining from his face along with his blood, he was white with rage and as angry as I was. He agreed to my plan almost immediately. It took the rest of the evening to seek and hire enough armed men to go after the monster. We did not wish to involve the police in order that we might spare Christine the scandal and Madame Giry another cycle of the year in jail. In the end we managed it. It was fortunate that the city was filled with unemployed soldiers itching for work. We set the time of our attack for early the next evening, after the repair work had concluded for the day and the workers had departed.

My brother contacted the managers as a courtesy. They gave their blessing, free reign of the theatre and access to tools, but they did not wish participate in the actual rescue, though they hoped that I would find my fiancée alive, well, and still fit for marriage.

Philippe at first tried to dissuade me from joining the raid, citing my injury, but he recognised that, like him, I was burning with vengeance.

‘I must be the one to rescue Christine.' I told him, raising my body from my bed. ‘She will be my bride yet!'

He nodded once, bitterly smiling, and left me to rest.

It took me longer than usual to fall asleep. In the end I resorted again to the laudanum. I slept well, and woke late. By mid-afternoon I was more than ready to begin.

12.

We had some difficulty, at first, locating the entrance to the monster's lair. The wall seemed to be constructed from a solid sheet of marble, impeccably smooth to the touch. We had only Madame Giry's vague instructions to begin our search and I admit that (being young) I was easily frustrated. I paced the corridor, stalking back and forth across the tiles, while the former soldiers slumped against the walls gossiping and shooting dice.

It was Philippe's idea to apply method to the search. Beginning directly outside of the door marked ‘Managers: Firmin & Andre' my brother laid his ear to the wall and knocked, listening for the echo of reverberation. He repeated this every few feet until he stopped short, halfway down the corridor. He looked up, excitedly whistled; a shrill, high pitch that drew me to his side in a flurry. ‘Raoul, lay your head here.'

I did as he said and I heard the echo of his knocks for myself. Straightening again, my hand on the handle of my revolver, I said, ‘To be sure, it is hollow, but it looks exactly like the rest of the wall. How can we be certain that there is a passage?'

My brother smiled and guided my hand to a nearly imperceptible crack, straight as a knife-edge, that ran vertically from floor to ceiling. It was invisible to the eye, or nearly, but my touch recorded it. He said, ‘There is another exactly like it two and a half feet over. Doesn't that sound right for a doorway?'

I returned his grin and together we began pressing and prying at the doorway until my fingers caught on a catch, a secret lever, made to look like a flaw in the marble. When I pressed this irregular protrusion the wall slid outward an inch and a half, revealing the doorway. I hooked my hands inside the blackness and pulled.

There was no stairway. There was no corridor.

All I saw was lathe and plaster, a dead-end!

I cried out in frustration, a sound which drew the soldiers from their game and caused my brother to place his restraining arm around my shoulders. I shook him off and struck the wall, belting out my rage at it until the dust flew and my sweat and saliva flowed. I was weeping without realising it, unconsciously pawing the tears from my eyes with the backs of my fists until I sank to the floor, exhausted.

The soldiers were staring at me; eight pairs of eyes convinced that I was mad. Only my brother failed to look at me. He was examining the wall that I had attacked, wiping away flecks of blood and shattered splinters to reveal a hole that opened like an eye into the kingdom of death.

‘Ah, my clever friend, now we have you!' He picked up one of the axes we had brought and struck at the lathes. Instead of the struggle we expected, the whole wall fell forward, a door-sized plug that shattered to splinters on the stairs. The soldiers raised their voices, cheering, shouldering their guns and adjusting their knives in their belts. My brother came to me where I was sitting and offered me his hand, ‘Come on, Raoul. Let's go and rescue your bride.'

With lit torches in hand, we plunged into the dark. It did not escape my notice that the stairs were nearly exactly the same, in materials and composition, as the grand entrance of the Opera House; albeit on a smaller scale. They were like fingers on the same hand, all of a piece. This building really was the product of a single mind – and it did not belong to Charles Garnier.

Our torchlight danced on the walls. As we descended past the typical basement brick, sinking into the bedrock, the corridor opened out until by the time the staircase ended we found ourselves inside a vast, black cavern. It was very like a cave, a natural formation. Our torches were not bright enough to light the walls, so we walked amidst a wealth of shadow. Somewhere out of sight we heard the sound of water dripping. After what felt like an hour, but must have really been only a few minutes, we came to a wall that opened up into three doors that hung with an inch or so of open space above the earth-strewn floor.

I paused for a moment, holding up my hand. ‘We need to make a decision. A monster is in here, somewhere. We need to know which way to go.' This was like one of the fairy tales Christine's father told us when we were still children. A monster, a princess, a castle underground. I knew that I was being tested. I hoped so much to pass.

One of our men, a rough-looking fellow with an eye-patch and a ragged vest, said, ‘The floor is pretty muddy. We had better look for tracks.'

After a few minutes he found some, a single set of man-sized prints leading into the centre doorway. I moved to open it, but he hesitated, holding on to my arm. He scratched his stubbled chin and said, ‘Now wait a minute, sonny.' He flinched, ‘I mean “Sir”. You say this fella's pretty smart?'

I nodded.

He continued, ‘Well, this patch of earth has tracks in it, sure enough, nice clear ones leading you on, almost like an invitation.'

My brother came and faced him, ‘What are you saying, Jacques?'

He smiled, revealing two chipped front teeth stained brown by tobacco, ‘Well, you said he brought a lady with him, right? Well it stands to reason that, unless he was carrying her (and the prints aren't sunk in deep enough for that) he must have led her by the hand. So we should be seeing two sets of prints. One walking, one set being dragged. And there aren't any here.'

I opened my mouth to speak my frustration. Before I could say anything another soldier, this one short, dark haired, and very broad, gave a whistle and called us over to the door on the left. When we got there he smiled and held his torch as close as he could to the earthen floor. It had been swept. The short man had a bass voice. He said, ‘It looks like someone's been covering his tracks.'

However intelligent our quarry, he'd had little experience with hunters.

We opened the door.

It was only much later that I learned how lucky we were. Christine told me afterwards that the middle path was armed with buried explosives, so that an ill-placed foot would lead to an instant, or a very painful death.

This path was long, circuitous, rather like the circuit of a nautilus; we wound round the Opera House several times in our journey to the centre, but our work was made easier by the fact that fiend had only swept up to the door, beyond it the two pairs of tracks were bright in the torchlight; his long and firm, moving at a rapid pace, hers, small and fine, with the occasional scuff-mark where she had tripped or been dragged. There were many doors, many off-shooting hallways, but we took none of them, trusting that the path we pursued would lead us to her.

Most of the rooms we passed through were unfinished, composed of stone walls and floored with dirt, but the circular route we followed was leading us directly under the Opera House and the closer we came to the centre the more civilised the rooms. They sprouted plaster walls and floor tiles, scattered bits of furniture and other evidences of inhabitation so that, by the time we came to the room with the well, we had almost begin to relax.

This was a plunge back into darkness, a reversion to the stone and earth we encountered when we first left the staircase. The stench was abhorrent, fish left out too long in sunlight, rotten flesh. I gagged, choked back my vomit. The source of the odour was soon apparent. The floor was stacked with bodies, three skeletons that the water had rotted lay in a row along the floor. A fresher corpse was collapsed in the corner, his neck encircled by a rotting noose. Beside this was the much fresher head of a woman with long blonde hair, the eyes sunken in. The rest of her was buried in a bone yard in Brittany.

I nudged Philippe when I saw that. He nodded, held his hand up for silence, gesturing with the other one to a door across the room.

There was the faint sound of voices. I crept towards the entrance, the others trailing behind me. The portal was refined, polished mahogany, incongruous to the room. I lay my ear against it, listening. I heard her voice! She was alive!

I beckoned the others forward, listening as hard as I could. I was unable to make out exactly what she said, the wood was too thick and she was speaking too quietly. But I heard the fiend as clearly as though he were speaking by my shoulder.

‘They will be here any minute.' I recognised the powerful voice of Christine's mysterious tutor! ‘I must be ready for them.'

She said something then, softly, so softly. She must have been weak. The monster might have been starving her.

‘No. We would have heard the explosions. They must have found the safe path. The very devil must be giving them luck! But the angels themselves are on our side, my dear, I have…'

I'd heard enough. I pulled back from the doorway, looked to my men. My brother smiled at me, clapped his hand on my back. I treasure that look. It was the last one we had.

We opened the door and walked into a room as bright as daylight. In the centre, beside an enormous, obscene bed, the monster stood with his hand on my lady.

CHRISTINE

13.

When he kissed me I knew that I was wrong. Not about everything, I still believe that I was right in trying to extricate myself from Raoul, and the time that I had spent underground perfecting my art and helping Erik to compose his masterpiece was the best and most fruitful period of my life. Then or since. No, I learned that I was wrong about what my master was to me.

He was not the ghost of my father. He loved me, as my father did, but his love was not pure in its source or filial in its expression. He did not love like an angel would, at a distance; he wanted my flesh as well as my spirit, no matter how hard he tried to deny it to himself. I decided then that I would help him to realise it.

Of course I was frightened of the things that he hid from me, beneath his mask, his gloves, his terrible history. He had killed before and showed no repentance for it. He would do so again. I was young enough, then, to believe that I could show him another way. And who knows? If events had played out just a little differently I might have had the chance.