Phantom (23 page)

In my desk lay the silver compass that Isabella had given me in our happier days, before Luciana was born. It had been in my mind to give it to him many times, but I had never found a moment in which the appropriate words could be spoken.

I gave it to him now, knowing I could not afford to wait any longer, and he accepted it with the confused, tongue-tied embarrassment of a boy entirely unused to receiving gifts. His faltering gratitude hurt me and made me take refuge in a brusqueness I had not intended.

"Well… it's no use to me anymore when I can hardly hold a lead straight. Just see you put it in a safe place, that's all, and don't go losing it."

He pocketed the compass with some difficulty on his second attempt, his fingers oddly clumsy and uncoordinated with the wine. By now I could see he was struggling to keep dutifully awake.

"Get yourself off to bed, boy, you're well and truly shipped," I said ruefully.

Watching him get unsteadily to his feet and negotiate his way with slow determination toward the stairs, I called him back. The eyes behind the mask gazed vaguely in my direction and I wondered how many of me he was seeing in that moment.

"Erik… I hope you'll never become so good at building walls that you can't see when they need to be pulled down."

He hesitated, staring at me with fuddled uncertainty.

"I'll… see to that first thing, sir," he muttered, as though he hoped that was the appropriate reply.

Since there was quite clearly no point in trying to say another rational word to him tonight, I let him go before it became necessary to carry him down those stairs to bed.

I went on drinking for some time after he had left me, feeling that I had made a rather miserable botch of the proceedings. What, after all, had I achieved by getting the boy so blind drunk that he could hardly stand?

In the morning he probably wouldn't remember a thing I'd said to him!

I had little enough cause to feel proud of my wisdom as father or guardian in the months that followed either. Indeed, almost everything that happened seemed to confirm my growing impression that I was simply a foolish, rather incompetent old man who was rapidly losing his grip of things and ought not to presume to give advice to anyone. Much good it was to hold forth on the ancient Masonic values of manhood, when I was quite plainly incapable of controlling my daughter and maintaining order in my own household.

Throughout that summer Luciana was like a blind puppy snapping in angry confusion at a thing she could neither see clearly nor understand. She lacked the language to express her infatuation, and Erik, the ability to believe in its existence; there seemed to be no end to the innumerable ways in which they managed to hurt each other.

In self-defense the boy began to work longer and longer hours at the site, using lanterns to light the scaffolding after dark. Some nights he did not come home at all. The wonderful inventions which lined the walls of his cellar began to gather dust and the old spinet stood silent in its corner.

Luciana sulked in his absence and greeted him with wounding sarcasm at his return. My furious rebukes went unheeded. Erik had withdrawn so deeply into himself that it was impossible to approach him on any subject that did not pertain to work. I could not reach either of them; I could not halt the relentless spinning of the whirlpool that was sucking them ever deeper into darkness.

Then one morning I woke to hear their voices echoing up from the cellar; Luciana's petulant, with an angry hint of tears; and Erik's so instinctively defensive that it had affected a chilling indifference bound to infuriate.

"What are all these things, anyway? What do they do?"

"Please leave them alone, mademoiselle."

"I want to know… Explain them to me!"

"You could not possibly understand."

"Oh, really? Am I so very stupid, then?"

"That is not what I said."

"No, but it's what you meant! Or did you perhaps mean something else? Yes, that's it! I know now why you're afraid to show me these things—it's because they don't work, isn't it?
They don't work
!"

"
Everything
in this cellar works!"

I heard the dangerous note of rage explode in his voice; and I heard Luciana's fury rise to meet it in head-on collision.

"Well,
this
doesn't work!" she cried suddenly, "—not anymore! Or
this
! Or
this
!"

My God
, I thought in alarm,
he'll kill her
…

The crash of glass and metal on the stonewalled floor reverberated all around me as I started down into the cellar to intervene; but Erik was already rushing up, taking the steps two at a time. He pushed past me roughly without a word, and such was his violent fury that I did not dare to lay a restraining hand upon his sleeve. It was the first time he had ever treated me with discourtesy, and I was stunned by the uncomfortable suspicion that he had not even recognized me.

I let him flee from an urge to kill that was so real, so very nearly ungovernable, that it still pulsed around me like a lingering scent. Then I looked down at the stupid child who remained in ignorance of the tragedy she had almost provoked.

She was kneeling on the floor now, staring at the remnants of her willful destruction.

"Luciana," I said with cold displeasure, "go to your room at once!"

She did not move to obey me, but reached out instead to touch the broken glass with reverence and remorse.

"How can he love these things, these bits of wire and metal?" she whispered. "How can he love these things and not love me? Am I not pretty enough?" She lifted her tearstained face and looked up at me with anguish. "Oh, Papa…
Why
does he hate me so much?"

The senseless futility of everything overwhelmed me and took away my anger, leaving me feeling very old and tired.

"He doesn't hate you, child," I said wearily. "He only hates himself."

She stared at me, and her face creased into a frown of confusion.

"I don't understand," she began doubtfully. "Why should he hate himself?"

I came down into the cellar and sat heavily on the pallet where Erik must occasionally have slept.

"Luciana—the mask…"

I saw her stiffen. "I don't want to hear about the mask," she said stubbornly, putting her hands to her ears with defiant childishness. "I don't want to hear those hateful rumors that the laborers are spreading. They're only jealous of him because he's so quick and clever and everyone knows he could take over from you tomorrow."

"Luciana—"

"I don't believe them!" She got up abruptly and backed away from me toward the stairs. "I
won't
believe them, Papa, I know it's not true!"

"But if it were—"

"
It's not true
!" she screamed with a hysteria that twisted her pretty face into unlovely folds. "He's
not
ugly, he's
not
some kind of monster! I won't let him be ugly, Papa… I won't
let
him be!"

The intense irrationality of her emotion effectively silenced me. I suddenly saw there was nothing more I could say on the subject, and with the deepest misgiving I was forced to let her go.

I did not go down to the site that day, feeling that Erik would prefer to be left alone. Luciana remained in her room; the house was shrouded in silence and the day ticked away steadily, hot and humid with a fetid air drifting in from the Tiber. Suppertime came and went but we did not eat, and occasionally I looked up at the clock on the mantelpiece with a sigh. Nine o'clock, ten o'clock—and still there was no sign of Erik.

At eleven o'clock Luciana came downstairs and demanded that I go and fetch him from the site. I refused. The boy would come home when his temper had cooled and not before; until then I intended to leave him in peace.

She disappeared for a moment and returned with a shawl around her shoulders.

"If you won't fetch him back, then I will," she said tearfully. "I want to tell him that I'm sorry."

I stared in amazement. As far as I was aware, Luciana had never said she was sorry for anything in the entire course of her life.

"Papa," she said tremulously, "Papa… I'm going to ask him to take off the mask."

Somewhere deep in my mind an alarm bell began to ring, and I shook my head.

"You're not going anywhere at this time of night," I told her firmly.

"But Papa—"

"For heaven's sake, leave the boy alone!" I shouted suddenly. "He doesn't want you to see him, not you or anyone! You're driving him out of his mind, Luciana… He wanted to kill you this morning, did you know that?"

She gasped, staring at me out of eyes red rimmed in a chalk-white face.

"He wouldn't hurt me—I know he'd never hurt me!"

I turned away impatiently and reached for my pipe.

"You know nothing about him, absolutely nothing! You're provoking him beyond all human endurance."

Her mouth opened and shut wordlessly at the cruelty of my stinging insult; then slowly she subsided to the floor and began to cry.

For an hour I sat in my chair and watched her weep without speaking a single word of comfort. Then I went over and picked her up, carrying her upstairs with her head on my shoulder just as I used to do when she was a small child. It was pitifully easy to do—she could not have weighed much more now than she had done at ten.

When I laid her on the bed she looked at me with abject despair.

"I have to see him, Papa," she said quietly. "1 have to see him."

I knew she was right; there was now no other way to end this terrible midsummer madness that was threatening to destroy us all.

I sat in my room for a couple of hours staring at the wall and occasionally passing a handkerchief across my forehead. It was almost two in the morning, but the heat was still stifling, and at length, knowing there was no possibility of sleep, I wandered up to the rooftop garden where it was cooler.

For want of anything better to do I began to water the flowers, and thus hidden among the shadows, I escaped Erik's attention when he crossed the roof with a slow, dragging step and flung himself down on the travertine bench. He put one arm along the back of the seat, laying his head against it in an attitude of complete exhaustion; and when he did not move again I began to wonder if he had fallen asleep and it might be safe to steal away unseen.

"Erik!"

Luciana's unexpected whisper startled him like the crack of a pistol; he leapt to his feet and stood rigid, keeping his back to her as she approached.

"I want you to take off the mask," she said simply and without arrogance. "
Please
take off the mask."

"You must excuse me, mademoiselle," he said stonily, keeping his face averted as he swung past her. "I have work to finish."

"I will
not
excuse you!" she cried after him. "You
don't
have any work to finish! I want you to take off the mask, do you hear me, Erik? I want you take it off
right now
!"

I made up my mind quite suddenly and stepped out in front of him as he made for the stairs.

"Sir?" He stopped and glanced behind, like a fox who senses the hunters drawing in. I laid a hand on his sleeve.

"Erik, we've gone beyond the question of choice."

"I'm sorry… I don't quite—"

"I think it would be best if you simply did as my daughter has asked."

He was utterly motionless, staring at me with such pained horror that I was forced to avert my eyes from the crumbling ruins of his trust.

"You are asking me to do this thing?" I heard disbelief trembling in his voice. "You are
ordering
me?"

"If an order is what it takes," I said sadly, "then I am ordering you. God Almighty, boy, you must see this can't go on any longer."

He swayed slightly, putting out a hand to steady himself against the balustrade, and I moved automatically to give him a supporting arm. But before I could touch him he lifted his head and the light of the hanging lanterns showed me in his eyes a naked loathing born of black despair and disillusion.

I realized then the enormity of the crime that I had committed; I realized when I saw that look of hate which seemed to squeeze all the breath out of my lungs. I had been a father to him; I had shown him honesty and hope and led him to believe there might after all be a chance for him to live with pride and dignity among the human race he so distrusted. For love of me he had begun to abandon his deepest instincts and grope tentatively and painfully toward the certainty that I did not care what lay beneath the mask.

Now in a single ill-considered moment, the result of my own exhaustion and despair, I had reached up and pulled that castle of dreams down around him. I had demanded the one thing he had trusted me never to ask of him; and if I had plunged a dagger through his heart I could not have destroyed him more effectively, I could not have given him more intolerable anguish.

As I watched the boy I knew shrivel and die before my very eyes, I saw an awesome stranger take his place, a grim and oddly frightening stranger who no longer waited to hear any further worthless words of mine.

"You want to see?" he said in a toneless voice that seemed to belong to a sepulcher. "
You want to see
? Then look!"

As he spoke he began to move with a dreadful, measured calm toward Luciana, and I felt a paralyzing dread flowing through my veins. They were standing face-to-face when he ripped off the mask and I saw her mouth drop open in a soundless scream, her hands fling upward to fend him off. The defensive gesture seemed to madden him, and he reached out as though he intended to drag her closer to the terrible horror he had revealed.

I cried out in warning but my voice was lost in the primitive, animal panic which sent her running from him, running across the rooftop garden to throw herself against the balustrade which finally blocked her line of escape. Again and again I see it happen… the crumbling stonework giving way beneath the weight of her body and tumbling her, in a shower of flaking mortar, into the courtyard that lay two stories beneath.