We rustle out of the practice room, futilely hushing each other as we settle ourselves on the landing to peer through the banister, squealing as someone kneels on someone's skirt, or pulls someone's hair ribbons. The hallway below, dimly-lit by lowered gas lights, is full of closed doors; everyone but us has gone to attend to the opera.
Everyone except for him.
Every night, like clockwork, when the music soars from the opera, he appears below in the hallway, from a door beyond our sight. He wanders to the end of the staircase, singing as only he could sing, hauntingly, trailingly, powerfully…wistfully…
…And each night I am drawn to him.
We're called understudies, but we're really just glorified chorus girls. We have to learn more than one part, we have to step in at a moment's notice, and we have to stay in the opera house during the performances in case we are needed. It would be fun if we were needed more; it's too much to hope that we might be given actual roles. Instead, if we're not lingering backstage or in the wings, we're expected to sit in the old practice room down the hall from the doors that led eventually to the stage. Some cunning architect had fashioned it so that the orchestra and voices were piped into the room, so that we'd be ready to jump into the role if called. Anything is better than that stifling place, but tonight we all felt more than disgusted at waiting for a call that never came.
Meg Giry is always telling us to be patient. She started out just as we did, and in fact is still only in the singing dance corps, but she's always on the stage, doing the work she's been trained for, the work she loves. Besides, there's no "only" about it for her; this is all she ever wanted to be. Only a fool would think she's not proud of it, though one can tell that her mother had once had other aspirations for her. Just like some of us once had other aspirations for ourselves.
As a friend and a success in anyone's eyes, we look on Meg with awe tempered by familiarity. After all, she's very near to us, being Madame Giry's daughter, and she understands what we're going through. She never seems to think, as we often do, that we're just an unneeded addition to the Opera House, too blindingly new as yet to have the company's confidence, too old to be tossed the minimal, childish parts. Meg condoles with us often, often unconsciously teaching by example. We stop listening, though, when she extols her great friend, Christine Daae.
Christine is as unlike Meg as a distant star is to our own warm sun; where Meg showers hope and laughter upon us, Christine barely seems to touch our world at all. It's not that she's haughty or ill-tempered; she's just remote, as if she's listening to something only she can hear; reserved, as if she's keeping the glowing rose of her soul for something greater than this. And we all know she's something greater than this. Meg upholds her as an example of what can happen to chorus girls who work hard: Christine is the understudy to the great Carlotta, after all. Meg could have been too, we swear loyally, but the fact remains that Christine isn't proud of still being a chorus girl, and that's the difference between them.
It's true that Christine's voice isn't as tremulous as it used to be. I don't know what's changing it, and despite their assertions, none of my friends really do either. I never hear her practice all the hours she must be, to improve as much as she has, almost overnight. Of course, she could have hidden it all until the time was right to show what she could do, but then why be content as Carlotta's understudy? What is she waiting for?
What she was waiting for, of course, we learned all too soon.
So there we all were that first night it happened, piled up in the practice room: Leonie, Adele, Sami, Liana, Vedette, Amy, Phillipa, and my own especial friend, Liliana. It was a perverse decision to come up here instead of our usual backstage haunts, but it was symbolic of our defiance of the opera's rejection of us. We heard the opening bars of the orchestra begin to alert the sluggards to their seats and quieted despite our professed indignation.
It's a pity that so many never hear the intricate melodies as closely as they should. No, the patrons are too busy chattering, flirting, nibbling, putting up eyeglasses, taking down eyeglasses, rearranging their seating, laughing too loudly, and above all, noticing who is noticing them, to bother to listen to the genius the overture really holds, one which requires quiet, and sympathy, to understand. At least we heard the music by itself, tinny though it sounded, in that hated room.
It was a new opera, Hannibal, though it wasn't new to us anymore, being all we'd lived and breathed on for the past few months in rehearsals, and now for a few weeks in its live run. I tried to listen to it as if for the first time, as the audience would, so as to capture the beauty of it that we'd all first heard. It worked somewhat.
When the chorus came on, naturally we all swore we could hear Meg's treble-like sweetness among the rest, and Christine's coloratura. Despite her remoteness, we have to admire her for the mere power of her voice, the pureness of its tone; the same way we have to admire Carlotta, though she has a different kind of soprano. Oh, Carlotta hits those high notes; conquers them and brings them down to her overblown, rather shrill level, I should say. It is not a style I admire. Yet the crowd adores her and wouldn't even notice Christine in the blending of the voices. But we do. There's something in how she reaches for and embraces the escalating climbs her voice aspires to; and how the notes instead of resigning themselves to be sung rather joyously toss her higher.
Through many nights like this one, we were sterling judges of the ill-likelihood of being needed. We had already gauged from the last-minute, botched run-throughs earlier in the day that we wouldn't be required to rush on stage between scene changes to fill in a sudden absence. Something about how the singing flowed now cemented our opinion: Carlotta was yet again not going to relinquish her starring role, Christine would not be able to step into her place, Liana (or I) wouldn't need to step into Christine's place, and so forth. And yet we had to remain in the Opera House, moldering away in our costumes for the opportunity that never came, making faces at ourselves in the mirrors.
One can only arrange one's hair so many different ways; tie so many different kinds of bows; play so many games of jackstraws and guessing. We didn't want to practice and wouldn't have if we needed it. It's no wonder that we found something else to do with our free time.
"Let's go out in the hallway," suggested Leonie, a fox-faced girl given to restlessness. "Let's have a race."
I sighed and looked at Lili. Neither of us was particularly fond of running, but there really was nothing else to do. At least we had no stays to constrict us. As Hannibal's slave girls, we really didn't have much on at all.
I don't know how many of the others felt the same as we did about running at that point, but as no better suggestion presented itself, we all trooped out into the bright hallway, which Leonie quickly resolved by dimming the gas lights nearest us to the point of extinguishing them. It wouldn't do to have instant recognition in case someone came by, after all.
We conscientiously left the door open so we could hear the music of the opera, yet we found that we could hear it quite well from down the hall, even though the doors that led to the main part of the Opera House were usually kept closed. Perhaps someone had left them ajar. I found the mingling of the same sounds from different directions to be almost tangible in the air. For a moment, I could almost reach out and become part of them.
"Two by two," ordered Leonie, unconcerned by any such ethereal fancies, "all the way down to those lamps at the end. And you, Sami, go down to the end and mark who comes in first. We'll send down a replacement when it's your turn to race. Well, what's the matter?"
"Don't want to," said Sami, who never liked to be inconvenienced. "Besides, they have to come back anyway, why not make it a double length, and mark who comes in first down here?"
"All right, if you'll just keep your eyes open," sighed Leonie.
"Don't want to," said Sami.
"Fine," said Leonie. She turned to me. "Rae, will you mark time until it's your turn to race?"
"Sure," I said, shrugging, inwardly pleased that she'd asked instead of commanded. "I've nothing else to do."
"That's why we're doing this." With that, Leonie split everyone up into pairs. My partner was Amy, who was like me in size and leg length, though I would never have her magnificent figure.
I knelt down on the floor, my back to the banister, the better to see whose feet flashed by first on the arbitrary line Leonie indicated. Amy stayed standing, leaning against the railing next to me. And so she was the first to notice.
The two girls first up, Adele and Liana, were all crouched over ready to start when Amy gave a sudden hiss.
"What's the matter?" I hissed back, thinking nothing more than that she'd pinched herself between the bars. I looked up to see her half-turned, peering over the banister to the corridor below.
"Down there – in the hallway," Amy responded, twisting around all the way. Low as her voice was, the others heard the urgency in it, and her stiffened attention brought them to crowd around us. I turned around on my knees and squinted through the gloom of the dimly-lit corridor below.
Everything looked as it always did; faded couches dragged out from the main galleries to reside here, with no partisan eyes to offend; ornate pictures with the gilding half-rubbed off their frames; red and golden fleur-de-lis paper, flaking where it met the sky blue ceiling covered with aging gods and goddesses; ancient grandfather clock next to the old, smoked-glass doors way off to the side. Then I saw what she had seen.
Reaching out from below our vantage point was a path of light on the floor running parallel to the staircase, widening as if from an opening door. And at that moment, the clock began to strike.
Of one accord, the girls all sank down to peer through the banister, Amy included.
"That's odd," I heard Adele murmur beneath the tolling of the clock. "I only know of one door next to the staircase there, and that doesn't lead anywhere."
Lili and I exchanged glances over Amy's head. We knew something about that door, or rather what was behind it, but that had been a forbidden excursion we had kept to ourselves.
Unfortunately, Leonie's sharp eyes on Lili's other side had caught us.
"What are you--" she started to say, when Amy urgently shushed us.
"Something's there!"
We huddled closer together as if for comfort, and perhaps it was. For there on the light-lined pathway the shadow of a figure could be seen moving forward.
"Who could it be?" whispered Phillipa, gulping as Vedette, the oldest of us, fiercely hushed her.
The figure itself came beneath our line of vision, and we saw our first glimpse of the Phantom.
There could be no doubt that it was he; though none of us had ever seen him before, tales of him had circulated through Paris long before we'd ever arrived, awe-struck, on the Opera House steps. It was a prestige to be trained here, after all, and our parents dismissed the tales as did mostly everyone else. Yet the stories remained; and surely there had to be some truth since there were so many. Opera corps are rife with superstition; there are even superstitions about superstitions.
And yet I don't think any of us truly believed in his existence for all that until we saw that shadow walking, saw the outline of a broad-brimmed hat, the swirl of an evening cloak. He halted then, facing forward, the hat and the fall of his cloak shrouding him. Odd that a ghost, even an Opera Ghost, needed a hat and cloak, I mused, strangely calm. Was he…was he even a ghost at all? For a moment, I felt content to sit there and puzzle out his existence, as if this weren't the most potentially dangerous thing that had ever happened to us. Most of those tales were not of a particularly kind Ghost, after all.
Perhaps thinking of this, others were not so sanguine, and made movements as if to flee. Leonie and Vedette between them managed to keep everyone silent and still so as not to attract his attention. All of their anxiety seeped through to me and I was just starting to wish I were not next to the top of the stairs, when the music in the air swelled anew with the second Act, and the apparition began to sing.
Sweet, haunting, powerful tones joined those of the rousing chorus, entwining magic with his single voice around the best of theirs. There had never been anything so joyously sorrowful, so darkly rapturous; I would have wept to hear it had his voice not unearthed emotion beyond tears. One of those emotions rejoiced that whatever it was, it was no ghost singing, it just couldn't be...
When he began to sing the arias, infusing seduction beneath deceptive simplicity, what mattered that it was a soprano role, with Carlotta screeching her way to the top of her range? All the rules had been swept away so utterly that to adhere to their memory seemed unthinkable blasphemy. His voice sought deep inside me, finding in me the echo of what I could have been. Of what I still could be.
And yet at the same time it was as if heaven were reaching down to the earth, unable to keep itself away from its child, even knowing it would destroy it at a touch.
Transfixed, I scarcely noticed that he had wandered to the end of the staircase and was half-turned toward us, thus making it easier for him to see us if he chose. His hat was tilted so that what light there was shone palely on his mouth, paler still on something that began above his lips. Music trembled then from another place, room, world; and all I knew was that voice before me, that voice that was calling to me alone. In response to that call, I edged away from the safety of the banister and to the top of the stairs.
The last chorus began, and there his voice took on a triumphant note; it shadowed a pure voice rising out of the chorus, shadowed and danced with and chased and, at the end, caught and caressed. The song ended, the voices ended, and crashing applause came down the hall.
I found that I was poised at the top of the stairs as if I were going to creep down them, his voice still resonating in my ears. My friends were hissing at me to come back, or I'd get caught by him, yet somehow I wanted to be caught by him…he started to turn further toward the stairs, toward us; a moment longer and he'd see me…and I was pulled away.
Without time for a backwards glance, I was rushed into the practice room. The door closed behind me with a finality that jolted me out of my reverie. Everyone milled around me in shock, except for Amy, who wedged a chair beneath the doorknob.
"What were you thinking?" demanded Leonie, coming right up and shaking me, her voice an unwelcome rasp to my suddenly burning ears.
"I…I don't know," I said with difficulty. "I don't know what happened."
"Rachelle, he could have seen you! You were halfway down the stairs!" exclaimed Liana, eyes round.
"No, she wasn't," said Lili, putting her arms around me protectively. "She was just at the top. He wouldn't have seen her, the lights were too low."
"You didn't see her and I did, she was practically beckoning to him, the Lord knows what would have happened to you," frowned Leonie.
"She was not beckoning him!" exclaimed Lili, though she looked at me in puzzlement as I failed to defend myself. I don't know why I couldn't. It was as if I were in the grip of something greater than myself, as if a vow of silence had been laid over me, unwillingly enforced by my own confusion.
"What do you think would have happened?" cut in Adele, appearing at Leonie's side. The eager expression in her face annoyed me, and seemed to annoy Leonie as well, for she gave Adele a look of disgust and flounced off.
"Adele, did you want something to happen to Rachelle?" asked Vedette mildly. Adele flushed at her words where she had not at Leonie's disgust, and gave me a rueful smile.
"No, no, of course not…it's just…he's fascinating, isn't he?" said Adele, evidently thinking she was switching to a safer topic.
"I found him frightening," said Lili, and the others murmured agreement.
I made sounds of agreement too, but inwardly something quite different was going on.
I didn't find him frightening, and I didn't want Adele to not find him frightening.
"But the music of his voice," persisted Adele. "He can't be a ghost, ghosts couldn't sing like that!" She looked around for support, but I dropped my eyes before she could meet them. Again I didn't want her to even guess at what I had divined.
"I've heard that ghosts could," rejoined Phillipa.
Sami snorted. "What do you know about ghosts? Besides, what ghost wears a mask?"
Mask? I thought. Of course, that's what it had to have been; I knew the tales. I almost said something about that, even knowing that it would draw their attention back to me, but everyone was off in a discussion of spectre versus substance.
I let their conversation draw away from me and looked around for a corner to hide myself in so I could think in peace. I turned to the door and saw Amy still standing there listlessly, her lips moving.
I was alarmed by this and in a few short steps was by her side.
"Like clockwork…" Amy murmured. "Time strikes, and he appears…" Her face was pale and her eyes were unfocused. She didn't seem to see me.
"Amy?"
"He wanders to the end of the staircase, singing…he has to sing…."
"What do you mean? You've seen this before?" I said, unable to keep back the sudden accusation in my voice.
"No," said Amy, her eyes unfocused still. "Meg told me."
"Meg told you? Why didn't she tell me – us?" I demanded.
"I don't know," Amy said, passing her hand over her forehead. "It has something to do with Christine." Her eyes came back to awareness then, and she shut her lips tightly, looking at me uneasily.
I barely heeded that. "Christine!"
I had actually forgotten about her. Foolish, for of course that had been her pure voice rising out of the last chorus, the voice he caressed with his own. I couldn't hide from myself the unwelcome rush of envy that poured over me, for it would always be Christine. Christine of the bright future, Christine of the remote starry eyes, the inborn grace; Christine who apparently also had a connection to this mysterious and utterly alluring being.
"Don't you say anything to either of them, or anybody else, Rae," Amy beseeched me. "I shouldn't have said anything to you; I don't know what I was thinking."
"Don't worry, I won't say anything," I said mechanically, though I think she heard the lie as well as I did.
We left it at that, rejoining the others. I knew I'd have no chance to be alone just yet. Inside my mind was teeming with half-articulated questions, and meeting Lili's eyes, I knew this wouldn't rest with her either until we'd had a chance to speak privately.