Letters

For the first time since the night of the murder, Christine awoke without pain. How many hours or days she'd been in Erik's house, she could not tell, and she was afraid to ask him. She'd strayed little from bed, though she'd eaten several times and he changed the dressing on her forehead twice before removing it completely last night. Though whether it had been night at all, she did not know. He used to wind her watch for her, but now even he did not bother with such things.

The lack of pain left Christine's mind feeling clear, but hollow after so many tears shed and dried. It was a slow, creeping thing, but the realization that Erik did not actually outright deny killing Lord d'Arcy took firm hold on Christine's rationality. She did not think he would lie to her about it, but could he have done it without fully understanding the act? A blind rage, unremembered? Sometimes he seemed the most lucid and logical man she'd ever known, but at other times, she was convinced he must be mad. Could madness deceive one's own mind over such an act?

There was time missing that day, she'd had enough hours of reflection to determine that much. Hadn't he told her he would be gone for the night, but back in the morning? And then come for Christine in the evening. How did he pass the day between his return to the Opera and the moment he drew Christine through the mirror? The commissary Mifroid implied the murder happened between two thirty and four o'clock. Well, that was morning, wasn't it? She shuddered at the very thought of asking Erik the exact time of his return to the Opera.

It was not that she wished to believe him guilty, but the alternative chilled her infinitely more.

Raoul's explanation to Mifroid of the night seemed to be missing time as well. Since Erik mentioned it, she realized she'd never known Raoul to drink as much champagne as he had that night. At the time, he seemed in control of his senses to Christine, but had she been in control of her own? How might he have truly felt beyond her observation? If the trauma of her experience in that empty room, pressed against that white-clothed table had been enough to rob her of her memories, could Raoul have been robbed of his own in combination of the fire fueled by champagne? Men changed when they drank beyond their limits, Christine was not so naive to be ignorant of that fact. The forgetfulness that often followed then was either curse or blessing by turns. But could Raoul, her dear friend, the boy who used to follow her door to door begging for fairy stories, change so horrifically to be capable of such violence? He possessed a jealous heart, she knew that. It drove him to words of cruelty, but never acts. But could he have acted if it meant rescuing Christine? And then received the blessing of the whole affair being blocked from his mind? Would that then make him as mad as Erik?

And so even though neither could now know the truth, they accused each other. Of course they did. They hated each other, even though Christine had rejected them both as suitors. She stared at the items on the mirror-less vanity table, her fingers brushing over a silver-handled comb. She did not want to marry anyone, she never had. All she wanted was to sing, to make her father in heaven proud and her invalid adopted mama happy. She had failed at that, was failing miserably, until Erik helped her. And since then everything had become too complicated to ever untangle.

Could either of them be lying? She did not want to think either was mad. Not truly. But whatever the explanation, one had murdered for her with or without knowing it. Could Christine forgive that? Could it happen again?

But their reactions to the accusations felt too genuine to be lies; they weren't actors. Christine was the one who made her living pretending to be opposite herself on stage. She would have been playing one of the most opposite roles of her career if Lord d'Arcy had lived to direct her as the soubrette in his opera.

Delicious passion… The memory of his voice played in her ears and she shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself and dropping her forehead against the table. The thick way he swallowed between words, the twitch of his lips, the rasp of his breath, it all lived even as he did not. She pushed it away and tried to think of the Opera. Erik reminded her every time he came into her room these days past that he meant for her to never return. He told her he loved her and he would keep her and she was safe with him. She had not argued, she had only wanted to sleep.

Christine could imagine what it was like to be a man in love, perhaps well more than most young women. She played one on the stage more often than she'd ever played Marguerite. Could Siebel be driven to murder if he walked into a room and witnessed Marguerite being attacked? Perhaps… Perhaps indeed, if it were the last recourse to save his beloved. But try as she might to meld her mind with the character's as she did on stage, Christine could not conceive of him then being crazed enough with the horror of it to smear words in blood on the wall.

It was the words that plagued Christine more than any other part. She could believe the murder the fault of either of her two jealous friends. But how could anyone who truly loved her have written those words unless they were mad?

When she was dressed, Christine found the door to Erik's room ajar. She went in without knocking, too weary for the pretense of formality. If he did not want her there, he would have locked it. He was at his writing table, his back to her, his pen moving.

She was silent, and he did not stop writing, so she thought he must be unaware of her presence, until he spoke.

"You know I am not wearing my mask, Christine."

He never did in his own room. The death's heads that adorned the great organ beyond him glowered at Christine over Erik's bent head as if to remind her of a tame, mute version of what she would see if he should glance in her direction. Pulling her eyes from him, she looked to the coffin in the center of the room. The dark, polished wood reflected the light of the candelabras from so many angles it looked as if it could itself be on fire. Lord d'Arcy must be in a coffin like that by now. No longer on such a bier if ever it was, but buried deep in churchyard soil. How grateful she was to have not witnessed his death or seen him afterward. How he must have looked...

The scratching of Erik's pen, the tap against the inkwell—these were enough to ground Christine in the present moment and draw her to him.

"What are you writing, Erik?"

Over his shoulder, she tried to make out the scrawled words on the sheets of stationary across his desk. The pages were pale yellow with embossed black edges, but the writing seemed to bleed together before her eyes. He was using red ink.

"You should keep your nose out of Erik's business, my dear."

She was not afraid of him, she could not let herself be afraid of him. She took the final step to his side, and the red words began to take focus. One seemed to jump out at her. Her own name. She put her hand over Erik's. It was cold, and stilled under her touch. The pen made a dark slow blot of ink, marring his last sentence before he looked up at her.

"I think it is my business," she said.

He laughed, and Christine did her best not to grimace at the sight of it. When he lifted his hand to put his pen in the stand, hers fell away.

"I am writing a letter to your employer about your departure."

"You must not speak for me, Erik. I want to go back."

His fingers clamped around her wrist, and he stood. She kept her shoes planted, and he was so close between her and his chair that she could not see his face above her head. When he did not speak, she made herself look up. His features were so still that he looked no more alive than the faces decorating his organ.

"I thought you had changed your mind." His hand slid down hers and let go.

"I have not," she said a little more gently.

He sighed and turned back to his desk, flipping over the papers. Three envelopes lined the top of the blotter, but none were yet addressed.

"It looks like blood," she said as his writing disappeared from her view.

"Yes." A note of pride rang in his tone.

Taking a step back, Christine wrapped her arms around herself. It was always colder in Erik's room than the rest of his strange house. "Did you see it?"

He glanced at her, then seemed to remember himself and turned away to spare her the sight of his face.

"Did you see the writing on the wall, Erik?"

He sighed again. "Yes, Christine."

"Is… is it still there?"

"I don't know. I doubt it. It would be rather macabre of them to leave it, don't you think?"

She wanted to ask when he saw it, but held her tongue for the same reason she could not ask him what time he actually returned to the Opera that morning. She let another question escape instead. "What did it look like?"

He shifted on his feet as if he would look at her again, but stopped himself and drew a fresh sheet of stationery from the box. Resuming his seat, he took up his pen, but did nothing more than stare at the page, and then returned it to the stand. "Rather like this." He dipped one of his long, white fingers into the inkwell, then brushed a long curved streak across the creamy paper, followed by jagged strokes. Then he used the pen to sketch faint lines and shadows of embellishment around the smears. Christine was too fascinated by the speed and skill with which he recreated the image to stay back, and she moved close to watch him. He worked with both hands, dipping one's fingertips into the ink and brushing with the pen with the other. How different the result looked from the scrawled, heavy penmanship in his letters.

For Christine

The first word was above her name and at an upward angle, smaller and fainter in color as if the ink—blood—were running out when it was written, the u and r barely legible. The C was exaggeratedly large, a deep crescent with no loops. The rest of her name was in a disjointed script with the last three letters nothing more than a wavy line and final tiny twist.

Erik looked up at her and whatever he saw in her expression made him give a quiet laugh. "There now." He blotted his fingertips on the page and then wiped them with one of his dark-colored handkerchiefs. "Does that look like the handwriting of your well-bred young man?"

Heat rose in Christine's cheeks and she shook her head. "It doesn't look like anyone's."

"I know what can settle it." Erik jumped up from the table and left the room. He was gone so fast, Christine could not even think of what he might mean, much less ask it.

She turned to the desk and brushed a fingertip over the air above the words. They were so wet, the paper was curling. Shuddering, she turned it over like Erik had done with his letters. They were in a stack at the side of the desk. She was just reaching for the top one when Erik returned to the room.

"See what I have here." He was wearing one of his black silk masks and held a folded sheet of paper aloft.

Christine clasped her hands behind her back and shook her head. "I can't unless you show it to me."

He laughed as if she'd meant to make a joke and then unfolded the paper and dropped it on the table next to the page Christine had turned over. He made no move to right it, there was no need. The red ink was so thick it soaked through and most of the ghastly writing was visible from the back side.

"Where did you get this?" Christine moved to take up the letter Erik brought, but then pulled her hand back as if it might burn her. She recognized Raoul's handwriting in a note to her she had long forgotten receiving. It was small and neat and black, and of course it looked nothing like the red smears.

"You threw it away," Erik said as if that were answer enough. "From the time when you used to like to lie to me about what he meant to you."

Christine bristled and reached for the letter again, but Erik snatched it up before she could. "Oh yes," he said. "But then you weren't lying to Erik, as far as you knew, were you? You were lying to an angel. And that is a far greater sin, Christine."

"You are a hypocrite, Erik," she said softly. "To speak so of lies." She would not defend her feelings or actions to him, not anymore. She had found it in her heart to forgive him for his past deception, and she was grateful for how he helped her singing, her place at the opera. As far as she was concerned, they had made peace of it and owed each other nothing now.

Erik laughed again and lifted the letter to the tall candelabra beside the desk in order to scrutinize the shape of the writing in the light of the flame.

"You need not look at it that way," Christine said, perturbed by his amusement. "It is obviously nothing alike."

"I like to look at it," he said. "The boy was clearly in pain when he wrote it."

Christine flinched and turned away from him. "Open the door to the lake, Erik. I want to go now."

He sighed and the paper rustled. When he moved around her, it was gone from his hands. But he did not say no.

Christine reached deep into her weary soul to summon the persuasive spirit she had used the last time she needed to convince him to set her free. She kept her words soft. "You will make me hate you if you keep me here. He who would harm me is dead, Erik. There is nothing to fear."

"He who killed him is not."

"Would he—whoever he may be—harm me?"

Erik shook his head and looked toward the coffin. "Perhaps."

Christine put a hand on his sleeve, and the effect was immediate. He turned back to her, and his eyes glinted in the hollows of his mask, wavered with the candlelight.

"Are you afraid I won't return?" she asked. When he did not answer, she pressed on. "I want to sing, Erik. I… I need to lose myself in it, or I'll go mad with all that's in my mind now."

"We'll sing here." He turned to the organ, but she pressed his arm to keep him from going to it.

"I want to sing for Paris, for the world, like you always talked about."

He shook his head. "Sing for me, Christine. That is all I require now."

"Please don't make me hate you," she whispered. "There… there is an inquest. Surely you know that? What will they think if I disappear this way? How will it seem to them to receive a letter from you about me? They… they will think I played some hand in it. They will think I know who did it."

He moved as if he would pull his arm from her touch, but could not quite manage it. "Reputation means nothing, Christine, if you do not return. Let them suspect whatever they like. It means nothing. You are safe here."

"No." She released him and turned to the desk. "No." The letters on it seemed to mock her with their black edges. "No." Before she knew what she was doing, she had the stack of them in her hands and was tearing them. She threw the scraps at Erik and left the room.

"Christine!"

He caught up with her in the hall, taking her by the arm.

Wrenching from his grasp, she rounded on him. "Take me back now, Erik." All her reasons for demanding it seemed pale excuses to her mind now, but she was loath to admit it. Erik wasn't wrong—even if they accused Christine of killing d'Arcy herself, what would it matter if she never went back again? Remaining nestled in the cocoon of Erik's home where time lost all meaning had a measure of appeal that made Christine's heart ache. Did she even really want to go back anymore? How easy would it be to forget about her life, her loved ones, her career and just sink into the void of dreams and music Erik inhabited. Drown in it until she too ceased to exist. None of it would have happened if not for her.

Erik said nothing. Could he see how her soul was dripping away? Perhaps, because he finally opened the door.