Phantom (4 page)

I hated to be alone in a storm. I looked for Sasha, who was also terrified of thunder and should, by rights, have been cowering under my skirts by now, but she was not there. The door into the hall was ajar and I assumed she had gone upstairs to hide under the bed.

Suddenly I heard a great crash from the attic bedroom, the sound of something heavy falling to the floor, and I ran up the staircase in alarm.

From the doorway of Erik's room I could see the empty cradle lying on its side… and in the center of the room, some distance away, the big spaniel apparently worrying a small, white bundle.

"Stop it, Sasha!" I screamed. "Leave it alone! Sasha!
Sasha
!"

To my astonished relief the dog trotted obediently to my side and sat down, waving her plumed tail back and forth across the bare floorboards.

I hardly dared to look at the little bundle. If she had taken him for a rat I could hardly blame her…

As I steeled myself to go and pick him up I realized, with a shock, that there was no need.

He was coming to me!

I began to back away instinctively onto the landing, but I

was unable to take my eyes off the painful, stubborn, shuffling movement with which he was dragging himself across the room. And then, with equal horror, I realized that he was not making for me, but for the dog.

Sasha was watching him warily, her head on one side, her ears pricked with curiosity. When he laid hold of one paw with his sticklike fingers, she growled deep in her throat, but she did not bare her teeth.

I found that I was rooted to the spot, unable to make a move to prevent this from happening. I watched, with frozen fascination, as he pulled himself up into a sitting position, using the animal's fur for leverage, and then stretched out one hand to grope uncertainly toward her face.

"Sasha!" he said, very slowly and distinctly. "Sasha!"

I took hold of the bannister for support; I had to be dreaming this!

"Sasha! Sasha! Sasha!" he repeated steadily. The dog pushed her nose down into the little masked face and I heard the dull thud of his head striking thabare floor when he overbalanced. I cried out sharply, but I was still unable to move.

I watched the dog paw him gently.

And then, for the first time, I heard him laugh.

Three months later he was walking and mimicking my words like a wretched mynah bird.

It was impossible to ignore his presence now—his voice and his interfering hands seemed to be everywhere, and the only respite I knew was in those few hours when he climbed into Sasha's basket and slept curled up beside her. He called me Mama (God knows why, I certainly didn't teach him to!), but I am very much afraid that in those early days he believed the dog was his mother. She seemed to have taken a liking to him, treating him with the sort of rough affection she might have shown a large puppy. Marie told me I should not allow it; she said it wasn't right, that I was raising him to think he was an animal.

"It keeps him quiet for a few hours," I retorted wearily. "If you think you can do any better, you can take him home to your mother!"

That was the end of that conversation!

I tried very hard to be reconciled to the situation, for though I could not express any physical affection, I was determined to have the satisfaction of educating him.

His abnormally accelerated development showed no sign of slowing down. By the age of four he was reading the Bible with beautiful clarity and mastering exercises on the violin and piano that I had not attempted before my eighth year. He climbed like a monkey and there was nothing I could place beyond the reach of his determined hands. He repeatedly dismantled my clocks and threw the most appalling tantrums at his inability to put them back together. He could not bear to be defeated by inanimate objects.

Soon I began to be a little frightened of his awesome progress. I had been uncommonly well educated for a girl —Papa himself had taught me sufficient geometry to comprehend the science on which all architecture is based. But I was beginning to see that Erik would soon be quite beyond me. Figures fascinated him, and from the basic principles I taught him he fashioned calculations that I could not follow, however patiently he explained them to me. He had discovered my father's architectural library and spent many hours poring over the sketches of Laugier and the Abbe Cordemoy, Blondel and Durand. And he drew endlessly, obsessively, on any surface that was available. If I did not keep him continually supplied with paper, I would find his designs on the flyleaf of my father's books, on the reverse side of his plans—even on the wallpaper up the side of the stairs.

When a pair of needlework scissors disappeared from my workbasket I thought nothing of it, until I found an intricate castle lovingly engraved into the polished mahogany surface of my dining-room table. Those scissors did an incredible amount of tasteful wreckage, and though I turned the house upside down and beat him mercilessly in my fury, I was never able to discover where he hid them.

But there were mysterious and inexplicable voids. He seemed incapable of distinguishing right from wrong, and though he could draw like a seasoned artist, he could not— or would not!—write. If I put a pen into his hand and told him to copy out a Hail Mary he became instantly clumsy, as dull and stupid over the simple task as the most backward of children. I could not beat him into submission, though I am ashamed to admit that I often attempted to do so. He had a will of iron, which I could not bend, and a spectacular temper which frequently reduced me to violence. Exhaustion, and fear of doing him a serious injury, made me reserve calligraphy as a penance from which he might be released for good behavior.

But music was the keystone of his extraordinary genius. Music welled up from some bottomless pool within him and flowed like a ceaseless fountain through his fingertips, making an instrument of virtually every object that fell into his inventive hands. He could not sit at the table without unconsciously beating time with his heels against the back of his chair or tapping out a rhythm on his plate with a knife. A slap would check him momentarily, but within a minute his eyes would glaze over as he slipped back into his secret inner world of sound. In the early days, when I sang the old operatic arias to pass the hours of solitude, he would leave whatever he was doing and come to sit by the piano in wondering silence. Shortly before he was five I allowed him to take over the accompaniment for me, and if I failed to master a difficult tonality he would stop playing, point out the offending note, and sing it perfectly pitched with the intimidating, dizzying purity of his faultless top register.

Already he was beginning to make Mozart look like a dull plodder by comparison. But all the time that he sat composing haunting refrains, or playing the piano with a dexterity far beyond his years, I knew that his incredibly fertile mind was plotting fresh, awesome mischief beyond my imagination.

"Where are you going, Mama?"

I paused in the act of fastening my cloak and turned to find him standing in the doorway.

"You know perfectly well where I go every Sunday, Erik. I'm going to Mass with Mademoiselle Perrault and you must stay here until I come back."

He twined his fingers around the handle of the door.

"Why must I always stay here?" he demanded suddenly. "Why can't I come with you and hear the organ and the choir?"

"Because you can't!" I said sharply. I was beginning to wish Father Mansart had never told Erik about the organ and the choir—I had had no peace since his visit last week. "You must stay here in the house where you will be safe." I added.

"Safe from what?" he challenged unexpectedly.

"Safe from—from… oh, stop all these silly questions, do you hear? Just do as you're told and stay here. I won't be that long."

I swept out, pushing him before me with one gloved hand and locking the door of my bedroom, as I always did whenever I left him alone. It was the only room in the house that contained a mirror and he was forbidden to go in there; but I did not trust his obedience to last once I was out of his sight. He was insatiably curious.

He followed me down the staircase and sat forlornly on the bottom step, watching me through the mask.

"What is it like in the village?" he asked wistfully. "Is the church very beautiful?"

"No," I lied hastily. "It's very ordinary, quite ugly in fact. It wouldn't interest you at all. And the village is full of people who would be unkind and frighten you. "

"May I come with you if I promise not to be frightened?"

"No!"

I turned my back on him, to cover my alarm. That threat had never failed to silence him before. I was concerned to find that his obsessive love of music was now strong enough to overcome a fear I had steadily fostered since he was old enough to talk. My instinct was to protect him from a world which would inevitably seek to do him harm. Even Marie and Father Mansart agreed that I must keep him away from people, and total isolation seemed to be the only answer to my dilemma.

I knew that ignorance and superstition would destroy him. Careful as I had been not to parade his presence, my windows were still smashed at regular intervals and more than one ugly, abusive letter had been pushed through my door, advising me to leave Boscherville and take "the monster" with me. It took enormous courage for me to face the grim, unwelcoming silence of the congregation every Sunday, to sit in the rear pew with Marie and hold my head high, pretending not to notice the primitive hostility all around me. Nobody wanted me here, but my presence was a mark of my defiance, a symbol of my refusal to be driven from my home and hounded from one village to the next.

It was also my one escape from a house I thought of increasingly as a prison. My house—that quaint and pretty house of which I had been so proud—was now no more to me than a dungeon in the Bastille. Returning from Mass, the first sight of its ivy clad walls was enough to make my heart sink; but the thought of the child behind its carefully locked doors, waiting patiently and trustingly for my return, always forced my lagging footsteps down the garden path. Lately, as I approached, I had been aware of the white mask pressed against the window of the attic bedroom and I sensed his growing anxiety that one day I would walk out of the house and never come back.

"Don't sit on the stairs!" I said harshly. "Go and study your text for the day and then copy it out."

"I don't want to."

"I am not interested in what you want to do!" I replied coldly. "I expect to find it finished by the time I return."

He was silent as I reached for my purse; then suddenly he announced with decision:

"I'm not going to study my text. I'm going to make it disappear so that you can't find it… like the scissors. 1 can make anything disappear if I want to, Mama… even a house!"

He jumped off the stair and ran past me into the drawing room, as though he expected to be hit; and when he had gone, I leaned against the wall, trembling with apprehension. I tried to tell myself that this was just a silly, childish threat, devoid of any meaning other than vain protest. But I could not stop shaking and I found myself unable to step out through the door. I was afraid to go now, afraid to leave him to his strange, unchildish devices. I dared not think by what terrible means he might contrive to make the house disappear!

When I had regained my composure, I took off the cloak and walked into the drawing room. I found him sitting on the rug before the fire with Sasha, staring fixedly at the flickering flames in the hearth.

"I've decided not to go to Mass today," I told him unsteadily.

He turned to look at me and clapped his hands in unveiled satisfaction.

"I knew you would," he said. And laughed.

I had been his jailer; now he was mine. I felt as though I had been sealed up in a tomb to serve the corpse of a child-pharaoh in its afterlife, and I fiercely resented the captivity which he had forced upon me. Love, hatred, pity, and fear circled around me like carrion crows, spinning me wildly from one peak of emotion to another, until I hardly knew myself anymore when I looked into the solitary mirror that adorned my bedroom. I was thin and haggard, with a strange wild-eyed look, and though the contours of my beauty remained, I looked ten, fifteen years older than my twenty-three summers. It was as though all the harshness and cruelty which I was driven to show him etched itself, line by line, upon my face, a grim testimony to the endless circle of violence which characterized our life together.

It was during that year that he began to explore the mysterious power of his voice. Sometimes, almost without my noticing, he would begin to sing softly, and the hypnotic sweetness would lure me from my tasks and draw me toward him, as though by an unseen chain. It was a game he played, and I came to fear it more than any other manifestation of his curious genius. I put away the operatic scores which we had studied together and refused to teach him anymore, for I had begun to be afraid of the manner in which his voice was manipulating me. It seemed evil somehow, almost… incestuous.

Father Mansart now came regularly to celebrate Mass in my drawing room and spare me the ordeal of appearing every Sunday in church. And that first time he heard the child sing, I saw his eyes fill with tears.

"If it were not blasphemy to think such a thing," he muttered slowly, "I would have said I had heard the voice of God here in this very room."

In the tense, resonating silence that descended, I felt my own heartbeat thundering in my throat. I saw the eyes behind the mask meet mine and their glance was triumphant, somehow masterful. He had heard, and worse, he had understood. I dared not think what he might begin to fashion from that knowledge.

I shivered as Father Mansart beckoned him forward and told him solemnly that he possessed a rare and wonderful gift. I wanted to scream, but I was silent. I knew the damage was already done.

They walked together to the piano, the priest's hand resting on the child's bony shoulder.

"I should like to hear you sing the Kyrie, Erik. You know the text, I believe."