The Last Trip Home
The Phantom of the Opera belongs to Gaston Leroux, who is unable either to write or endorse this story, as he is dead.
Leroux-based.
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Christine de Chagny sat on the wall of the little well beneath the Paris Opera House, rubbing idly at the dirt that stained her pale hands. She couldn't tell by the light of her one dimly burning lantern whether she was removing any of the musty soil or grinding it deeper into her skin. The same soil clung all over the skirts of her dress, the plan grey one she had owned for years, the one that reminded Raoul of the modest young peasant girl he first fell in love with.
He had said so often, shyly, although he had not said so as she left for this last errand. He hadn't said anything. He had only taken her hand before she stepped quietly out the door of their cheap hotel room. She supposed he had as little idea of what one says on such an occasion as she did.
Christine shivered, instinctively moving the lantern closer to her. Even now, she couldn't make sense of this act, this moment. She sat on the stone brim of that forgotten well, on the edge as far as possible from the corpse buried on the opposite side, and stared into the darkness away from the burial place of the man who had loved her. She could not even bring herself to look in that direction. But neither could she walk away from Erik yet.
There had been so little done for him. The grave she found lying open and waiting hadn't been more than a few feet deep. The finished opera he told her he would be buried with was nowhere to be found, his black, padded coffin presumably still on its dais in his bedroom. She had laid him alone and unprotected in the narrow pit he must have dug himself.
She didn't even know what had happened to him, whether he had taken his own life, or had begged that final favor from the Persian with the unnerving stare, or whether the simple force of her leaving him had been enough to destroy him. Or did if matter if it had? Was she obliged to mourn for the man who had nearly murdered Raoul, and forced her to choose between an explosive demise and the living death of sharing a tomb with a walking cadaver?
Christine stood, her filthy hands smudging the sleeves of her blouse with dirt as she crossed her arms against another violent shudder. She wished she had thought to wear a shawl. After the train ride from the frigid North to the relative warmth of Paris, she had forgotten how cold the cellars were. She stooped, picking up the lantern to leave, but still she could not force herself to turn and walk past that grave.
As shallow as it was, it did cover that corpse completely. There was nothing left visible to frighten her. But the darkness behind her recalled to her mind the darkness of those vacant eye-sockets that had brimmed with tears in life. The silence echoed with imagined sighs, and she remembered how that corpse, so alarmingly light as she dragged it the few feet to its final resting place, used to throw itself at her feet. That thin blanket of dirt was not enough done for him. She could not leave him with so little. But no words came to her, and no prayer seemed fit for the graveside of the Opera Ghost.
When she finally did find the will to move, she found herself drawn not toward the upward path to the Opera and safely, but down, back into the dismal way that Erik had first carried her down on César's back. She wondered what had become of the horse, straining to catch the sound of his hooves or a glimpse of his white bulk in the darkness ahead, but the tunnel was still and silent. Still as the grave. She shuddered, but couldn't shake away the thought. The whole underground world that hid beneath the Palais Garnier seemed a tomb. Even the boiler room she found cold and unattended, the men who shoveled coal content to let the building go cold once the patrons had gone. The whole building seemed so dead that she half wondered whether the opera would wither without Erik, as a tree dying slowly from the roots up. She felt almost like ghost herself.
Her hand sought the cold stone of the wall as she walked, her steps leading her deeper and deeper into Erik's kingdom. The path was scarcely familiar, the rest of his world even less so. The cellars alone offered her mysteries enough, without the unknown past, the life, the man himself who had haunted them, who was now buried in them. Her lamp could barely shed enough light to see the path before. The rest of that foreign world and foreign life were now beyond her.
She paused. Before her, the darkness promised nothing. Behind her, that climbing path led to everything: fresh air and moonlight and the silence of the sleeping city rather than of the tomb, love and kindness from a man she would never have to plumb the depths of Hell to understand. She half turned, looking over her shoulder into darkness as thick as the shadows ahead. But the air already carried the faint, musty smell of the water of Erik's lake, far too near to turn back now.
The lake itself was black and glossy when she arrived at its shore, and the boat was tethered on her side. She stood staring. She hadn't expected to find it away from its master's house, and its presence on the wrong side of the lake served only as another reminder that Erik was indeed gone. She could feel the grit that still clung to her fingers grind as she nervously shifted her grip on the lantern. It had been him she buried. Erik was dead. He was as dead as the obituary said he was, the blunt, heartlessly brief line on the scrap of newspaper she and Raoul had saved, waiting in their hotel room with her husband. Her kind, living husband who would be anxious for her until she returned.
Even as she told herself she ought to run back to him, her feet carried her in the wrong direction, bringing her gingerly across the slippery stone toward the mossy wood of the dock. Shivering, she set down the lantern in its boards and stepped carefully unto the planks of the little rowboat, releasing the wet rope that held the bow and retrieving her lantern before she settled onto the bench in the stern and took the oars.
Her rowing was awkward, her hands barely wrapping around the worn wooden handles of the oars, and her half-hearted pulls making their paddles skitter ineffectively across the surface, but the boat drifted lazily away from the bank. The water splashed lightly around her as she moved through the dark, over the broad, black surface of Erik's Lake Averne, and the boat rocked and swerved under her attempts to row straight. If her boating trips with Erik had been a farce of a romantic outing, her efforts alone made a parody even of that. Her throat closed up with a mixture of sea sickness and sorrow.
She was trembling when she reached the far shore. She held the lantern weakly out before her as she disembarked, clutching her side miserably. The thought of what she was approaching did nothing to ease the quivering in her stomach. The house beside the lake seemed as much a part of Erik as the skeletal corpse she had buried beside the lake. But Erik was dead. Had he been alive, she would not have returned to him. Had she known what she could have done or said to feel finally free of him, she could have said it at his graveside and been finished with it. And yet, she found herself drawn nearer and nearer to the place she had feared she would never leave alive.
The door, she was surprised to find, hung open, its camouflaged exterior jutting out toward her, as if a part of the wall, in its exhaustion, has turned aside to lean against itself. Inside, Christine saw only darkness, like a wound punched into the stone. Like a grave.
And, as she approached, she couldn't help but think again of the bright lights that shone beyond that door when she first made that trip, that had waited there at the end of every journey after. She thought of the baskets of hothouse flowers, the little kitchen and the many meals she and Erik had never quite shared in it. She thought of the drawing room with its fine piano and fireplace, the solid Louis Philippe furniture, the shelves of curiosities, all the things that might have been in the home of any man, but were instead five floors underground, clustered around a torture chamber built by a man with the face of a corpse.
And now, with that corpse had been dealt with as simply and finally as any other, that part of him that had been human, as ordinary as his misplaced home, the part of him that might have been bearable, was gone, too.
Edging closer, Christine set the lantern down outside that yawning door, and, taking one step nearer, reached out to touch the damp stone of the frame. Her fingers brushed the place where the outer wall met with the smooth wood molding on the inside, one of the finishing touches on Erik's pretense at a normal home, and a sob escaped her lips. It seemed suddenly so horrible for that vacant house to stand empty, to have existed at all, to have been under her opera to become her problem. Or to have become so dark and empty because of her. She laid her forehead against the clammy stone as she began to softly weep, her tears running down toward the dusty threshold.
Finally, it was enough. The urge that drew her back to that doorway could not pull her through it. There was no need to inside. As her tears slowed and then stopped, drying to sticky patches across her cheeks, Christine stooped to recover her lantern, and, with one last mournful look into the black void beyond that door, she began for the last time the long climb from fifth cellar.
There was no sense in going into the house. Christine knew that going in would mean going home to Erik. Even the Opera Ghost, his mind reeling as his body slid nearer to collapse, tormented with the thought of Christine changing her mind, returning to him too late, had felt the same. She might come back, after all. She might. She might, but far too late to matter.
And she had come so close. The toes of her shoes, her delicate fingers, even the very forehead she had allowed him to kiss had touched threshold of his house.
Not three feet inside that open door, the glow of her lantern had barely touched the edge of the thin wire that stretched across the doorway and, running through a series of small pulleys that led toward the dead man's mantel, ended in a coil around the legs of the bronze grasshopper.
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Guys – never walk through open doorways in the dark. : ]
Anyway, thank you for reading, and I hope you'll kindly take the time to leave a review. I am seriously less than satisfied with the quality of writing in some places, and so I'd be glad for your opinions, whether you want to talk overuse of the passive voice or "OMG she almost got blowed up lol." All feedback is good feedback. Thanks again.