It had just begun to snow when she led the confused Raoul de Chagny onto the rooftop. The night had gone so terribly wrong—poor Buquet, the drunken stagehand, had been strung up by his neck in the rafters! Just the thought nearly brought her to tears. The managers had tried to play it off as an accident, but she knew better. It had been him!
"Christine! I know that you are frightened, but we must return... there's enough chaos as is, and if they believe you've gone missing once more..."
"You can't take me back there! Don't you understand? He'll kill the both of us!" Her fingers were cold and white, fluttering around the neck of her dress.
(Buquet, limp and sagging like the rag dolls Mama used to make in the summertime)
He grasped her shoulders then, looking into her eyes with such intensity that she wanted to weep.
"Who? Of what man do you speak of? Is it—is it your angel of music?"
"Angel?" Her voice was high and hysterical. She laughed sharply as she tore herself away from him. "He is no Angel— he is a monster! He haunts my days and nights and— oh, Raoul, where do you think I was all those days?"
(Cold spaces in underground caverns, cool lake air in between words)
"Oh, my poor Christine!" He hesitated then. "Did... Did he do anything to you?"
"Goodness, of course not Raoul. Erik was always a gentleman to me... and his music... But you must understand! He may be a genius, a gentleman, even, but he is a violent murderer!"
(The blood had dried under her fingernails, and she'd never been able to get it out of her favorite yellow dress)
"A gentleman and a murderer?"
"You don't understand! I- oh, Raoul! I am so confused!"
"Oh, Christine." He took Christine into his arms, then, and nestled her head against his shoulder. "I do not know what ghost haunts you so, but I will help you."
("I can help you, Christine. With me, you can sing...")
She knew then that she would never escape the Opera House. Not truly.
Then, suddenly, a moan from the shadows of the roof.
"Christine..."
"What was that?" She sobbed, wrenching herself from Raoul's arms (wrenching herself from his grasp, blood dripping on the organ and the floor). If Erik had heard her, he would kill her! He would kill Raoul! Oh, everything had become so difficult! So disastrous! She moaned and put her hand against her forehead.
"We must leave immediately! This Opera House is no good for you."
"Should he take me, I will never see sunlight again." She said, and the wind took her voice somewhere far away.
"We will go now, my darling, away from whatever it is that ails your mind so. Come, Christine. It is time to go."
(The voice of an angel, echoing in the rafters)
"It is time to go." Christine repeated softly, and Raoul drew her towards the sunlight.
She had been at the de Chagny estate for four months before she fled back to the Opera House.
It was not that Raoul had been boorish or boring during her time there. No, he had been delightful! Her heart swelled and ached at the thought of him, of his gentle laugh, of the few kisses they had shared in the Chagny garden. She knew without a doubt that she loved him, her sweet Raoul. She knew it with each tentative beat of her weary heart. But Christine was no good for him. Christine was poison. Christine knew.
He still came to her, her accursed fallen angel, in the dark of the night. Erik, murderer, pretender, abductor, would sing gently to her in that place between waking and dreams. For nearly a month she had been sure it was just her mind playing tricks on her. But on the last night of that first month, she had roused herself from sleep and found her terrace window open! She had leapt out of bed and slammed the doors shut, but she swore that she saw two yellow eyes in the darkness, glittering like stars...
She knew then that it was no dream angel singing her to sleep in her maiden bed—it was a ghost.
Christine nearly told Raoul the very next morning. But then she'd thought of the ruin Erik would rain down upon this family. If Raoul found out Erik was haunting her, there was no telling what he would do, or what Erik would do in response. No, this burden was for her shoulders alone.
But what a burden it was to bear!
She hardly slept, forever feeling Erik's eyes on the back of her neck as she rolled around in her sweaty white sheets, fruitlessly trying to find sleep. He did not speak to her, but she could feel unspoken words in the heat of his stare.
You left me. You abandoned your angel and your music for him. I will die without you.
She wanted to scream back at him that she'd had to! That she loved Raoul, and she could not love Erik the way he wanted her to!
Poor Raoul had been unable to understand her sudden distress. The more Raoul fretted over her ailing health, the heavier Christine's tongue grew with unspoken worries. The Chagny family doctor had declared that the sudden change of lifestyle had caused her body to go into shock; after all, the life of a seedy chorus girl and a Vicomte's fiancée are vastly different. And as the doctors prescribed outdoor walks and bed rest, hearty breakfast and fasting, she felt Erik's eyes always, always watching.
That, of course, was why Christine had to leave the Chagny estate; no more could she suffer under the weight of unspoken secrets.
No, the Opera House awaited her, called to the cavity in her chest that it had burrowed out the first time she entered it's haunted halls. The Opera House, her home, with dramatic marble figurines glaring down at sinners, deep plum curtains that stretched across the wooden stage, and shadowed hallways that hid chorus girls and ghosts in turn. Spinning ballerinas draped in pink tulle and divas wrapped in sheets of gold. In the air, powder from ballet shoes and pale face makeup twirled and twirled and breathed the magic found only at a movement's crescendo. And the mirrors! Mirrors everywhere! Mirrors in the dressing rooms and the fine lady's purses, in golden figures and under chorus girl's pillows, and that final mirror she could avoid no longer, that large imposing passageway that would lead her back to her Angel's stifling gaze.
She stood before it now, trembling in awe and anticipation. Christine could delay the inevitable no longer. With as much dignity that she could conjure, she opened the mirror and entered the dusty tunnels. Though it had been many months since she had wandered the dank underground of the Opera House, she knew the way as though it had been branded on her mind with a poker. Erik's loneliness was a siren call, and Christine was unable to resist. Her trembling feet brought her to the shore of the underground lake. It stretched out before her, barren of both ripples and, to her dismay, the boat.
"Oh, Erik. What am I to do now?"
Her only answer was silence.
Erik had told her once that if she were ever lost in the twisting tunnels, she need only sing and he would come to her rescue. Though she was not lost, and though she had not practiced in many months, Christine sang the opening notes from the Jewel Song. Her voice warbled in the darkness like the song of a caged lark. Hours passed, she was sure, (minutes?), and Erik did not answer. He had declined her tentative olive branch.
But she knew his tricks! Her face boiled red as she thought of the little game he was playing with her. She would leave, go back to Raoul, and he would haunt her still until the day she died! Her very shoulders shook with all-consuming anger. How dare he think so little of her, after all they had gone through! How dare he ignore her so!
Scowling, she ripped off her gloves and overcoat and tossed them to the side. Her hat took longer to remove, but eventually it was cast off, pins tumbling out of her hair and clinking sadly to the floor. In her anger, she hardly thought twice about tearing off the top layer of her heavy dress, leaving only a few sheets of her underskirt. She would get to the little house across the lake, whether he wanted her to or not!
Christine dug her nails into her palms and waded into the cold water. The water was freezing- with each determined step, Christine longed to turn back and find some warm home fire. But she would defeat Erik and his nasty tricks! She was done being made the fool! The bottom dropped stiffly, and she wasn't more than a few meters away from the shore before she was swimming, her feet far from the lake floor. Her outfit still dragged her down a little, but with trembling arms, Christine kept herself afloat and swam as fast as she possibly could. It was not until she was nearly at the other shore before she remembered the siren in the lake. Panic struck her, and she froze. No monstrous hand came to drag her underwater; no song enticed her to blissfully drown. Evidently, the siren was ignoring Christine just as much as Erik.
The shore stretched, black in the inorganic darkness of the underground, and Christine climbed onto it, sand burying itself in her nails and in her hair. Upon exiting the water, she was struck with a dire chill, but she did her best to ignore it. She had no time for such mortal troubles. With shaking shoulders, Christine rose to meet her fate in that little house by the lake.
"And that's where you found her?"
"I'm afraid so, Vicomte. She stripped herself of her garments and swam across an underground lake, though I can't imagine why. We believe she passed out very soon after, in the middle of a barren shore."
"Thank you for bringing her home safe, Monsieur. I will make sure she does not do something so foolhardy again."
"May I ask what caused her to take such a flight?"
Raoul hesitated then, his eyes on Christine, pale and unconscious in her bed.
"The Opera House was never a good place for her. She was stricken with… with an illness. An illness of the mind. She believed a man haunted her waking days. She even conjured a tale about a phantom that haunted the Opera House! No one else there had heard of such a tale, but they humored my Christine, at least until she wandered off on her own for two months. I'm sure you've read the papers." Raoul looked distantly out the window. "She always spoke of a little house by the lake..."
"I can assure you that there is no such thing, Vicomte. We went around the whole thing in search of Mademoiselle Daaé. I only thank God that she was uninjured."
Raoul's face drew in on itself. The gendarme knew he had stayed his welcome.
"Good day, Vicomte de Chagny."
"Good day."
The gendarme left, shutting the bedroom door behind him. With a sigh, Raoul sat at the side of Christine's sick bed. With warm fingers, he stroked the golden locks of the mad girl that would be his wife.