1
Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar
and you'll live, as you've never lived before.
Christine.
She surfaced too slowly, battered still by the colourful deluge of dreams, a diver's ankles bound with rocks.
It was uncertain for some time whether she lived or slept or bled to death – aware of a thrumming, living wound that licked along her body, licked and oozed, like a wound with a mind of its own, that wanted to live, to make her bleed.
Christine.
He called her, he beckoned her still to those awful dreams that she kicked free of. He was magnetic, but she was escaping.
Did she want to escape?
The cold arctic light of morning struck her eyelids and turned the darkness into scarlet, a scarlet as garish and horrifying as the wound that lived and licked within her. Still she was between worlds, between the intuitive blindness of the unconscious, and the floundering hungry questions of the day.
"Christine."
That voice that had sounded so pure, like the viscous velvety purity of blank darkness, was not the same voice.
It was not his voice any more, and never would be.
A blanket of despair was thrown over her head - just as she broke through the foamy waves of dreams at last, and sprinkled shimmering sea-spray droplets into the world with the opening of her eyes.
Raoul caught the incandescent diamond beads and held them tight, for it was he who leaned over her gently curled form in the great plush bed, and said her name.
"Christine."
The word was a vessel for joy and recognition, where a moment ago it had borne anticipation and concern.
His sharp defined image, the clear cut lines of his unclothed shoulders and torso, shook her from sleep and banished the waves and scarlet thrumming wound – though some of the diamonds remained captured between them, in their mutual tender beauty.
"You have slept terribly."
"I know. I feel it." She began to rise, his hands sculpting the pillows into better supports for her as she straightened.
His hands were the tools of a father, lover, keeper.
The fabrics obeyed his every whim because they knew his singular purpose, knew that he would beat into submission any obstacles that disadvantaged his new wife. Christine de Chagny was a name that furniture and shopkeepers and carriage drivers and closed doors and servants all respected and cowed from.
If only he could get into her darling head and dash away the nightmares too, she knew he would do it.
"Baron Dupont expects us for morning tea. He and his wife arrive in an hour." His tone was apologetic and wavering, as though a word from her would dispel the whole visit.
But she nodded, for she was gracious, and the things he would tear to pieces for her sake she often extended welcoming arms to. Royal exquisite lifestyle had not tarnished her rich white soul, as carnal knowledge of her husband had not tarnished her angelic uplifting regard of him. She was invincible.
And it was for this reason – both of them recognised and dismissed – that Raoul fought all the harder for her honour.
Because in her invincible white beauty, he was in danger of emasculation.
Because as their thoughts turned in and out of one another day by day, they both remembered that Christine, only Christine, had saved herself from him, while Raoul was powerless. She had resolved, and he had watched.
The most critical and complete moment of their existence as a pair, at a time when the fabric of their relationship may have been torn and transferred like patchwork – and he had been helpless.
And it wasn't so much about any of that, as the fact that she could so easily have chosen otherwise.
As he'd watched from the noose, as that creature had received a real seraph's kiss in mockery of his own angelic disguise, Christine could have chosen otherwise. She could have chosen him.
As Raoul mused over this with a strange bitter edge to his mouth, emerging from their bed, Christine remembered far more dangerously than he.
Her memory quivered with an ecstasy of regret and relief.
She remembered choosing otherwise.
She remembered her soul quickening with a white heat, the soar, the heavenly chorus that echoed in her awful choice.
Raoul was going to live, and Christine was going to cast herself into the haunted embrace of the night bird, of the sorrowful underground life, of the sheer sharp-edged sweetness of music heard in blind shadow.
And then - at her touch, with her kiss - the dusky corruption of the Phantom'sdarkness had been filtered away, like soot from the soft creamy wings of a cherub.
She had made him pure and real for just a moment.
And he had become noble.
He had seen the error of his morbid ways, the very second that she had given herself up to them.
Her kiss, the long delicious kiss of the subordinate female, surrendering to her darkest dreams at last, ready to envelope him into her seraph wings and her motherly devotion, ready to show him love that he had never before known... that kiss had been her downfall and salvation.
Forget me, forget all of this. Don't let them find you.
Go now. Go now and leave me.
He had commanded her worthy tender love away, obsessed in the conviction that it was for her own good, that she still wanted freedom.
And there was the sun, somewhere above, and Raoul's hands beckoning her.
And she was robbed.
Robbed of the sheer sharp-edged sweetness of blind music, and instead thrown into a golden radiance of warmth and calm and tear-drying daylight.
She had slipped the noose from Raoul's bronze neck, over his deep sunny locks of hair, away from his Herculean face.
His Apollo arms had lifted her into the boat to safety.
Whatever 'safety' meant.
Raoul's unclouded eyes shone down on her now, here, as he urged her from the sheets to bathe.
Every moment with him, here in the present, turned her head and her thoughts towards the clear yellow blaze of real life. It was impossible not to feel warm, summery, eternally comforted under his radiating human-sized glory.
The garish light of day. The light she lived in.
But as her dreams reminded her – as she knew endlessly at her very core, beneath the flourishing surface that Raoul's rays caressed - in the dark soil, in dark spaces where dark things stirred – her dissatisfaction was evident.
Where was that sweet, sharp music now?
Where was the wild abandon she had felt in her soul, in the jet shadows that had made things clear, as the Angel'struth had saturated her?
Where was the keen, primal, morbid beauty she had felt transforming her in the romantic night?
Where was the immediate sound, the pained wail, the held note - that rang so true in her without words, without thoughts - on gut and muscle and heart alone?
Sinking into the hot tub, into the heat of comfort, the comfort of marriage and luxury, Christine lay abandoned to thought. The dream clutched her to its pitiless breast even still, pinned her to the edge of grief, the edge of unconscious recognition.
She fought it meekly for a myriad of reasons.
The heat and comfort were so wonderful, so shallow. She was safe in the grasp of a man she trusted. Her path was already laid out behind and before her. She was rich, she was accepted, she was normal, she was loved. So loved.
She had accepted this.
Even if she hadn't chosen it, in the quickened white heat of the moment. Even if she had chosen him, and regretted being turned away.
She had accepted Raoul, and now she was safe.
Safe from herself.
Like a forgetful wisp of a spirit she arose from the bath, assisted by the smooth feminine hands of the maids, and allowed herself to be submitted to outward pampering and beautification.
She was going to make a charming impression on the Baron, and sweeten his wife's sour ways.
She was going to bask in the sunny satisfaction of French crepes and fruits and tea, in the hot touch of her husband's fingers as she passed the sugarbowl, in the glow of his affectionate glances.
She would forget the night, and all its music.