Phantom (15 page)

Yes… everyone was afraid of me by then; everyone except Javert. Legend though I might be, I was still his creature.

And he never let me forget it for a moment.

Javert was not a true-born Romany, not even a
poshratt
, or a half-breed. He was a
chorody
, a wanderer tolerated purely for his skills as a showman, and I soon began to understand that, though he traveled with the Gypsies, he was no more a part of their tightly knit community than 1 was.

At some point in his past he had had a nodding acquaintance with an education. Unlike the rest of the community he could read, and from time to time odd remnants of culture would surface inexplicably through the layers of his inherent vulgarity. It was Javert who told me the legend of Don Juan and added the great lover's name to the odd collection of nicknames with which he delighted to address me. At first it was just another insult, no more hurtful than anything else; but as I grew older, and more aware of the meaning behind his mockery, I began to hate that name of Don Juan more than any other.

Javert was forever prating of lovers, and yet no woman ever came to his tent. Since he was no man's blood brother, there was no father in the camp who would have accepted a bride price from him, and in my innocent ignorance I simply assumed that this was the reason that he had no wife.

He strode into my tent one evening without warning, as was his wont, and leaned over me, breathing vile spirit fumes into my face. I could see at once that he was drunk —and when he was drunk, he was dangerous; I knew I would have to take care.

"Working… always working," he remarked unpleasantly, pushing a fat finger into the mechanism of a new device which lay on the table before me. "What an industrious little corpse you are!"

When an unseen spring snapped shut on his finger, I received a blow to the head which tumbled me to the floor.

"Damn you!" he snapped. "You made that happen!"

"I did not!" I flared with indignation, since for once I was telling the truth. "It was an accident."

"Yes, I daresay," he sneered. "You're very good at arranging accidents, aren't you? I've noticed how many little misfortunes befall me when you are around."

I was silent, wondering with alarm whether he could really have guessed just how much mischief I was responsible for. That fall from his horse, for instance… the inexplicable collapse of his tent. Silly, irritating, commonplace misfortunes that I had thought him incapable of connecting with me.

I looked up into his face, saw with terror that he knew everything, and waited for the punishment to fall.

I didn't have to wait long.

Abruptly he snatched the mask from my face slashed it to pieces with his ugly knife, and flung the pieces at me. Then he stared at me.

"No tears?" he frowned. "You disappoint me, little corpse. And surely you know better by now than to disappoint old Javert."

He reached out and struck me repeatedly across the face with the back of his huge hand, but I remained silent, staring at him with dry-eyed loathing. And at length, remembering that I was to perform that night, he abandoned his attempt to make me cry.

"A man at last," he said begrudgingly, "no longer a sniveling brat. You'll be wanting a wage next, I suppose."

I judged it safer to remain silent as he loomed over me. I had learned to distrust these moments of apparent generosity—they were usually the prelude to fresh violence or humiliation.

"How old are you?" he demanded unexpectedly.

"I don't know." I kept my eyes on the floor.

"You don't know?" He sniggered suddenly. "Surely you have a date of birth, like anyone else! Or perhaps you weren't born at all. Maybe you just hatched out of an egg like a lizard."

A looking glass shattered in my memory and I shivered.

"I don't know," I repeated shakily. "My… she… it was never spoken of."

He passed the sleeve of his shirt across his nose and grinned, showing a row of yellow, gapped teeth.

"Well… I daresay there was nothing much to celebrate. It's a miracle no one dropped you on the fire before you drew a breath. But I'd say you must be eleven or twelve by now—that seem about right to you?"

I nodded warily, wondering where this strange line of questioning could be leading.

"Well, then," he continued affably, "another year or so, if you keep drawing these crowds, I might see my way clear to paying you a wage. Of course, it would depend on whether you continued to give satisfaction—on stage and off, if you take my meaning. I like boys who know how to show their gratitude… in a manner of speaking."

I stared at him blankly. "I don't understand," I whispered.

"Don't worry, you will!" He laughed and cuffed me playfully around the ear. "Yes, you'll understand, all in good time. You're very clever, I grant you that—a sight too clever for your own good at times—but you don't know everything. There's a thing or two that I can teach you when I've a mind to do it. And if you're willing to learn, if you're willing to
please
… well, you might find me very generous."

I had no idea what he was talking about, but his tone and soft, almost feline manner made me cold with apprehension. This curious amiability cloaked an unknown threat as yet beyond my comprehension, and I was afraid to ask any more questions. I had the feeling that for once I did not want to know the answers.

He sucked his bleeding finger, spat upon the earthen floor, and sauntered to the flap of the tent. In the doorway he turned to look back at me and there was a curious expression on his face.

"I never had a corpse before," he mused.

And then he was gone, leaving me alone with my ignorance and my fear.

I waited nervously during the following months for this nameless disaster to overtake me, but my life continued as before and nothing worse befell me than the beatings with which I was already familiar. I had learned to accept physical pain with a show of indifference. If my performance was not perfect, if I crossed my master with a casual, unconsidered word, I knew exactly what to expect. But my split skin and bruises healed quickly and I was careful never to make a mistake more than once. I had learned how to survive.

At some point during the following year we crossed the boundary into Spain, traveling steadily in the direction of Catalonia. The annual fair at Verdu had been a traditional meeting place for Gypsies since the fourteenth century, and an atmosphere of suppressed excitement permeated the camp at the prospect of emotional reunions with blood brothers. At night the tents and wagons disgorged their occupants around the campfire, the fiddlers struck up a merry refrain, and the Gypsy girls danced for their menfolk, weaving in and out of the flickering light, trailing long scarves over bare, suntanned arms… graceful…
sensual
…

This was the time I had learned to love above all else, when the magic of the Gypsies unfolded before my eyes as I lay a little distance away, watching, listening, absorbing, yet silent and unseen, like a snake in the dry grass. Their culture was a universe removed from the respectable middle-class existence I had known before, a life steeped in the love of music and governed by an instinctive, abiding respect for the forces of magic and mystery. To a Gypsy every stream, forest, and hedgerow is peopled by invisible sprites and demons that must be constantly appeased by incantations and charms. The occult holds a powerful grip and fortune is determined by the turn of a tarot card. I was fascinated by the secrets of divination and enthralled by their music, which opened up new vistas to my formally trained ear. It was music that acknowledged no artificial boundaries. Dispensing with chords, transition, and intermediate modulation, its freedom was utterly intoxicating.

I listened and I learned and all that I absorbed found expression in the secret world within my tent, in music or illusion. No part of me was untouched by their inspiration, but I did not acquire those heightened concepts of beauty and mystery without pain.

I had been a solitary child, content with my own company, neither knowing nor desiring companions; but now I looked out upon a very different world, a world of gregarious, tightly woven people, who were not forbidden by unspoken taboos to touch each other or be public in that touching. Every evening that I watched them together, fighting, laughing, loving, made the awareness of my own difference increasingly sharp and hurtful, threw a cold new light on my inner misery.

Perhaps, if I had not tumbled among Gypsies, I should not have been made aware of the female form at such an early age; perhaps I should have enjoyed a few more years of sexless, boyish innocence. Gypsy women are not light and lascivious in their ways—virgins are highly valued and only to be bought for an accepted bride price. But love, once sanctified by marriage, was not a private thing and couples embraced freely around the campfire, displaying their pleasure in one another's bodies without shame. That spring in Verdu it seemed to me that the whole world was pairing off together, sharing a universal secret that would always be closed to me. And suddenly it was not enough to be the devil's apprentice, the star turn of an increasingly famous traveling show.

All I wanted was to be like everyone else.

While the wedding celebrations were at their height, the fiddles throbbing with that extraordinary love of life which is so peculiar to Gypsies throughout the world, I slipped away into black, shapeless night and stole what I needed from the wisewoman's tent.

I could live with cruelty and hatred; it was the happiness of others that I could no longer endure, the sudden realization that none of my talents was ever going to win me acceptance as a human being. My tent might be comfortable now, I might be free to come and go as I pleased, but in all essentials I still lived in a cage, surrounded by invisible bars. The world wanted nothing from me except the gratification of the sensory organs of sight and sound.

I was alone and nothing was ever going to change that.

Perhaps it was time to leave this world behind.

The night was dry and still, silent except for the far-off throb of fiddles and the gentle whirr of crickets in the tall grass. Enormous moths hurled themselves at my lantern and bounced off my mask as I fled away from the settlement, where the

Gypsies danced with growing wildness as liquor began to flow more freely and the flames of the campfire leapt up against the black Spanish sky.

When I was certain no one could see me, I tore off the mask and threw it at the crescent moon which gleamed pale and uncaring upon my frenzy of grief. Then I sat upon the dusty road and examined the little bottle I had stolen from the wisewoman's tent. It contained sufficient poison to kill the whole camp. I did not intend that there should be any mistake over the dosage.

Unscrewing the little glass stopper and checking at the bitter aroma which emerged, 1 hesitated. The magic talisman of death was in my hand—my skeleton's hand—and all that prevented me from using it to escape from this nadir of despair was the sudden nagging relic of a memory I had thought long discarded.

Father Mansart's homily on the deadly sins of murder and suicide had been impressed on me at an age when most children are struggling to master the Credo. Murder and suicide, he had told me grimly, were equal crimes in the eyes of the Lord and brought an undiscriminating damnation upon the perpetrator. The suicide lies in an unhallowed grave and the gates of heaven remain closed to him forever.

"Life is never ours to take, Erik. If you remember nothing else of what I have taught you, remember that."

They were virtually his last words to me after the exorcism and I had stared through him, as though he did not exist, pretending I could not hear a word he said.

But now I remembered and I gazed at the poison in my hand with horror. Suppose it was true that by this act I closed the door on one suffering merely to open another leading to one infinitely worse… and this time without natural end?

Appalled by the possibility, I flung the little bottle to the ground and watched the dry earth swallow up the liquid that trickled out. A sense of hopelessness washed over me as I bent mechanically to retrieve the mask, but before I could replace it I was startled by a cry in the darkness behind me.

I stopped and listened intently and once more the voice wavered out in the darkness, this time on a low moan of pain. Moving instinctively in the direction of the sound, I climbed a rocky outcrop, unfaltering and fearless with my cat's eyes and the peculiar agility which had once caused my mother to liken me to a monkey.

On the other side of the rocks the lantern showed me a crumpled heap of brightly colored skirts and a pretty face that was familiar to me from the campfire.

"Dunicha?" I whispered.

She looked up at me and screamed with an ugly, piercing intensity that took me by shocked surprise; I had forgotten for the moment that I was no longer wearing the mask.

Her screams jangled every nerve in my body and I was suddenly overcome with blind fury.

"Stop it!" I snapped, shaking her wildly by her thin shoulders. "Stop that screaming or I shall do you all the harm you fear and more!"

That silenced her. She swallowed her screams with a sort of gulping sob and cowered back in my grasp, like a terrified rabbit in the jaws of a wild dog.

I let go of her contemptuously.

"Where are you hurt?" I demanded with cold indifference.

She was shaking violently and her teeth were chattering with fright, but she managed to indicate her left foot, which I saw was twisted at an unnatural angle.

"Will you let me look?" I said.

She was too frightened to refuse. Over my Gypsy garb I still wore the long magician's cloak that I affected for performances. Removing it, I tore a strip from the bottom and then wrapped the rest of the robe around her shoulders, for it was bitterly cold beneath the clear mid-April sky and her skin was chill and moist with shock. I felt the broken bone in her ankle at the first probe of my fingers and immobilized the joint as best 1 could. She fainted when I touched her, though whether from pain or sheer terror it was impossible to tell. I wasn't unduly concerned or surprised, and at any rate it made my task that much easier.