Out of Mind
Chapter 1
On an evening in late September, the alley behind Paris' Opera Populaire found itself host to a grim but intriguing little party. A carriage was pulled up flush with the scullery door; it was a little two-horse affair, heavily travel stained. The driver was a burly but amiable old man, who stood stamping his feet against an unseasonable chill, and staring up in wonder at the structure before him. Though the fire that had devastated the building was more than six months past, repairs had been slow to start. The papers were still jawing over it, threading out tedious suspicions and ghost stories. Lately there had been talk of not reopening the place at all. It looked haunted enough, the driver thought. Half the windows were blasted out. The giltwork near the roof was blackened and looked as if it might crumble at any moment. Charred velvet hangings fluttered behind one window. And the two women standing against the wall only added to the eeriness of the scene.
The driver had been trying his best not to look at them. First, because they had already paid him, which seemed to be their primary duty; second, because they didn't seem to want any attention; and third, because looking at them made him nervous. He did glance their way now and again, though. And he thought he recognized the older of the two from some newspaper photos. She had worked here. At first he thought she was the one leaving. After all, she had had the money, and the few modest pieces of luggage for him to load onto the back. But when he asked, she shook her head.
"He will only be a moment."
That had been five minutes ago. At last, just when his horses had begun to nose about in the rubble in search of some grass, a shadow appeared in the doorway. The driver's heart did a somersault – for one wild moment, he was sure he had seen a ghost. Then the figure stepped forward and revealed itself to be an ordinary man, with a scarf and hood wound about most of his face to deter the cold. Before he had the chance to make out any more details, the fellow had slipped into the carriage and disappeared.
Erik glanced about the carriage interior without much interest. There were shades to cover the windows, which pleased him. It was nearly as dark as the cellar he'd just come from. He had taken his time lingering about in his old rooms, touching the furniture and extinguishing the last candles, but it had really been unnecessary. He felt no sorrow at leaving. He could not think of that monstrous shell as his home anymore. Nor did the traveling worry him. Of money there was no shortage, and of the world he had no fear, not anymore. Fear had died in him with his other emotions, on that night almost a year ago.
He did not care where he went or what occurred. He would have been content to stay where he was and let his lair become his coffin. As he ducked from one interior to the next, he did not even mark the change in temperatures. Seasons meant even less to him now than they had before, when he sometimes stood by the basement grates just before dawn, when the city was cleanest, to enjoy the first stirrings of summer heat or a curious, invasive little winter breeze. Now he saw that it was autumn the way he saw the rest of the world, which was the way a sailor might see, with his spyglass, a strange ship on the horizon. There was the faint possibility that it could harm him, but he was too far away to care
No, he didn't care. It was the Girys who proposed this trip and the Girys who arranged for the carriage. They were both there now: Madame with her skirts lifted well off the brickwork, with its smattering of garbage and broken glass, while at the same time pulling her shawl close about her shoulders - for she was getting thinner and felt the cold more than she once did. Her daughter stood to one side, fair and still as an ice sculpture. Meg too had lost weight since her friend's departure, but it was less a thinning out than a hardening, a certain coolness that had settled over her appearance and her character. It seemed that the physical and mental maturity which had been so slow in coming had caught up to her all at once, and was atoning for lost time. Her cheekbones had grown more prominent, her fingers long and almost frighteningly nimble. She was dressed in lavender. His jaded nerves took note of this because he still expected to see her ballet clothes, even after all these months. In his mind, she and Christine both wore white, and lately his mind had taken precedence over anything in the living world. The twilight made Meg's dress and skin glow ashen and unearthly. She looked like a dried flower, a spray of violets fallen from someone's gown after a ball, swept into a corner to die against the wainscoting. A reminder of past glories. The picture she and her mother made together was the most beautiful thing he had seen in half a year.
"Goodbye," he meant to say, but it seemed like a terrible effort. In the end he merely nodded, and for one moment looked Madame straight in the eye. She seemed to understand. The driver, taking this nod as a sign that all was ready, shut the door and clambered back into his seat with a squeaking of wood and leather. In less than a minute they turned their first corner, and the Opera Populaire vanished from sight.