Masque (22 page)

The boy leaped at me, pinning me face down on the tiles at the edge of the pool. His knees were digging into my kidneys. He was binding my wrists with a length of rough rope that he must have had on his person. I scanned the room, seeking another gun, a knife, anything I could use as a weapon. I could see a revolver still clutched in the hand of the nearest attacker; he looked like an out-of-luck soldier that the boy had hired for the evening like a suit. There was no hope of reaching it, my bonds were too tight; the reach was too far.

I couldn't think. My head was swimming with anxiety. I hadn't been this close to another man since I left Monsieur Garnier. I was frightened, also, for Christine.

I saw her head, her dear dark eyes, appear over the lip of the pool that I had furnished for her bed. She looked terrified. My lungs were compressed, but I had enough power to throw my voice in her direction. I gave her a message, ‘No Christine, no. Remain perfectly still. Do nothing. I love you too well to see your life ruined.' Brave girl, she obeyed, sinking back beneath the blankets, but Raoul must have seen her because he dragged me to my feet and hauled me towards the nearest pillar, stretching upwards until he hung me like a scarecrow from the brass light fixture. My shoulders screamed in protest at this treatment; my head swam with blinding pain. He struck me in the stomach several times for good measure, so hard that my diaphragm spasmed. I could not speak. The metal was so hot that it burnt my wrists.

Leaving me there, he ran back to the pool and fetched out my darling. She was pale, shivering, unable to stand. To his credit, he handled her delicately – as though she were composed of china. He settled her into a chair, tucking a blanket around her limbs. When he loosened the scarf that served as an air-filter her poor teeth started chattering. It was probably shock.

The boy was not finished. Part of me rather hoped that he would take her and leave, returning later with help to rescue his friends. If he had done so, I am certain that I would have been able to work the ropes against the bar until they frayed and I freed myself. I would run, as fast as I could, to one of my more hidden bunkers, well stocked with food, medicine, and mental stimulation. After a few weeks, when the furore had died down, I would emerge again and rescue Christine.

It wasn't to be. The little Comte wasn't finished. He left her sitting in the chair, facing me. Our eyes met. Hers were wide, too wide, and filled with terror. I would have given anything to calm her. I could only stare.

The boy was limping a little now. Good, I exhausted him. I would have been disgusted with myself if I had not managed at least that. He bent beside the man that I had kicked – I recognised him now as his own elder brother, the one in love with the dancer, La Sorelli; now deceased. Raoul pried the gun from his hand and slouched back to me.

Christine, thank God, could not see the way that the maniac was grinning; his smile split from ear to ear as though he were telling himself a good dirty joke. He stood beside me, breathing almost into my ear, raising the gun until the black barrel penetrated the eye socket of my mask nearly touching my eyeball.

For the first time in nearly twenty years, since my time in the nunnery, I said a prayer to Our Lord.

He withdrew the barrel. I thought it was mercy.

Then he turned to Christine and said, ‘Do you not wish to look upon the face of your abductor?'

I knew I was damned.

He tore off my mask, my wig in one smooth motion, revealing my face which is so much like the skull of a corpse.

Christine saw me. Her face contorted with fear and repugnance; she vomited onto the floor.

By the time that he shot me I knew which was mercy; I would rather have died then, than live with the memory of her disgust. Unconsciousness claimed me.

I spent a long time in a darkness that I mistook for hell. I saw hideous visions. My mother, screaming at me when I tried to kiss her; the face of the old nun who told me terror tales night after night in the dark; the villagers who toured the carnival that purchased me, their twisted faces leering as they threw their rotten fruit. If Hell is any worse than that, we are right to fear it.

When I awoke I found that I was alone in utter darkness, buried beneath soft layers of carpet, blankets, a few scattered stuffed animals. I panicked, until the sharp stab of pain in my side recalled the past to me and provided my mind with a modicum of focus.

I have no idea how long I slept, and I have no way of finding out. By the time I hauled myself, with much agony, from the bed that I had been placed in I had enough energy to light a nearly full-length taper from a candelabrum that I groped from her dresser, before collapsing to the floor again, blacking out.

By the time I resurfaced, the candle had burnt down to a stub a half-inch in length and the brass stand had been glued to the floor in a puddle of wax. The first thing I saw was the crushed remnant of my mask, smashed into splinters at the foot of a pillar that had been bathed in my blood.

I gave myself a thorough examination and found that I had two small holes above my left hip; an entrance and an exit. They had been washed and bound with Christine's white scarf, now crusted, stinking with blood and infection. I smiled, my mouth flooding with bitterness. It was she who saved me, then, despite her disgust.

The candle was guttering. I reached into the pocket of my coat, seeking another Lucifer, and instead my hand withdrew with a folded sheet of stationery. I gave up my search for the matches, using the rest of the light to locate another candlestick that I ignited from the source just before the last of the flame turned blue and guttered out.

I opened the note. It was her handwriting. Ten words:

Erik, I love you. Forgive me. I'll lie to him.

She left me. She wrote that after she had seen my face. It almost made the trouble worth it. I could live the rest of my life on the memory.

I blacked out again after reading it, rising several hours later, the note in my hand, the candle extinguished.

It took me the better part of the day to return to my chambers, hauling my carcass across the floor in the darkness. By the time I made it I was delirious with infection and dehydration. My arms felt as though they had been half-wrenched from their sockets. Thankfully, I had set aside supply of laudanum, alcohol, and a powder made of white willow bark to quell the infection. I had a good supply of preserved food in my cache. Even if I had not been severely injured I would have needed those stores to save me – three months into my recovery I discovered that the managers had treated their Opera Ghost problem with the same level of ingenuity that the rest of Paris applied to disposing of rats; they had sealed me in, blocked every entrance and exit I'd made with hardened cement.

For nine months I battled against a dangerous blood infection. I spent the following four months burrowing out of the basement like an escaping prisoner. Towards the end of my time, before I escaped into moonlight, I was reduced to catching sewer rats in traps and roasting them on fires that I built by burning first the doors, and then the furniture. Luckily, I had a good supply of chairs left over from the construction of the theatre – my original plans had called for nearly double the seats as were finally installed. None of this saved me from madness. Every night I dreamed again of the cage, my humiliation, my filth, their flung garbage.

Occasionally I saw her face in sleep again and, in spite of her note, I relived her disgust.

Over a year passed before I saw the moon again. I had a well; I had water, so I washed my body and my clothes. I dressed in suit, in hat, in cloak, and emerged through a crack in the wall like a ghost. I spent all of that first night out-of-doors, walking the park, touching the bark of the trees with my bare fingers. It was beautiful; a sensation I'd forgotten. Living wood is so much different in feel from furniture.

I sat beneath a laurel tree and thought. By the time that I had reached my conclusions the dew had fallen. My bare face was wet with it. I had barely enough time before rosy-fingered dawn drew back her curtain to purchase supplies at the river market. My bare face allowed me to make my selections without harassment – and in some cases, without making payment. I found that there were hidden benefits to the honesty of terror. I wondered why I had not tried this before.

On my return to my home I saw that the opera house was still under reconstruction. I would have time to rebuild my passages, not that I expected that I would need to use them – Christine would be married by now, forbidden from singing – but they were familiar to me, it would be comforting to have the option of the occasional free show. Who knows, I thought, she might sell the rights to
Don Juan
. I could see a production.

Time passed. I set down to work. I played music. I tried to forget her. Eventually, when records became available in the riverside market (about six months after they turned up in the homes of the wealthy), I purchased a gramophone. I never did use those corridors I'd spent three years rebuilding.

And then, one night, I read in the paper that the Palais Garnier was failing; Comte Phillipe was dead, Andre and Firmin were on the edge of bankruptcy. I could not allow it to close; it seemed like every hope I'd ever treasured had been buried in its walls. I could not let it fall into ruin again. Luckily, I retained a few old contacts from my days as an architect; though, it is true, they did not know me by face or even my true name. I wrote a letter which I posted at midnight, using the new boxes the government had conveniently installed almost under every lamp post.

Eventually, a response came. I read it, and felt myself return to life.

14.

When periods of happiness are described in books they are almost always insufferably boring. Nothing exciting seems to happen, and when it does it is entirely internal, growing like a disease beneath the skin of the world. This is why fairy tales are so fond of that classical summary, ‘and they lived happily ever after'. If we heard the day-to-day minutiae of the Prince and Princess's marital bliss we would be tempted to murder. On the other end of the scale, I am sorry to report that protracted misery comes across to the reader in much the same fashion. Nothing seems to happen, nothing seems to change. Every day becomes the same miserable slog, the same stasis. And it is true, nothing does change; externally.

I endured this limbo for twenty miserable years following the abduction of Christine; two decades of nothing to report but an encroaching bitterness that, before I knew her, I would have leavened with a little healthy malice. But the years the Opera House stood empty robbed me of my appetite for ghost-work. I committed no murders.

I wasted time, or spent it. I tried to work; designing buildings, composing music, without success, rarely getting beyond the first basic notes. I produced the occasional sculpture in soapstone, a technique I learned in childhood. They generally began well enough, but I was inevitably forced to abandon them when I realised that I was releasing nothing but the same repeated face. The same wide eyes, the same look of disgust.

By the time that I read about the possible closure of the theatre I was close to suicidal. That morning I had woken late, and spent several hours beneath my red sheets, staring up at the celling. I remembered that it was possible to overdose on my sleeping serum and I wondered why I had not thought of anything so brilliantly easy before. I pondered; why did I survive my time in the carnival, my own blighted childhood, if only for this?

And then, that very morning, I happened across the notice of sale and wrote the letter that I mentioned before. Assuming the name of Monsieur Reynard – an improbable name for the Englishman I played, I realise, but gold precludes all questions – and contacted an agent I knew of that my Master Garnier had used to arrange the construction of his Paris home while he and I were working for the Persian Shah.

I listed the acceptable non-negotiable terms of purchase (they were generous indeed, and as I was a practised hand at blackmail, I could afford to be generous) and told my agent that he was only to contact me in order to confirm a sale; at which time he would hire the two gentlemen I'd named to serve as managers. Once this was done, they were to do everything possible to keep the doors open, even resorting to acceptable levels of scandal. Nothing on earth packs a theatre like the rumours of an affair, a bastard, or a murder. Even decent people feed on a whiff of the devil.

The managers could contact me only though a mail drop I had selected, and they should do so only in the event of a catastrophe on the scale of a fire (which I would be well-enough aware of anyway) or a financial crisis devastating enough to threaten the opera as an entity performed behind these walls.

The young Comte agreed to everything at once, as I knew that he would. He was as deeply in love with money as he imagined he was with my darling Christine. Raoul had reason to despise my Opera House, God knows he rarely passed its gilded threshold or bothered with the office work. As for Christine, her worst prophecies had come true. He never allowed her to visit at all, not even to sit under chaperone in their private opera box. If he had, then, before our sundering scabbed in my heart, I would have been unable to restrain myself from visiting her.

As for the managers I'd hired, they were very skilled. By simple application of common-sense business methods they boosted seat-sales enough to begin turning a modest profit, though my encouragement of scandal had to wait a while, until the right players presented themselves.