CHAPTER 11
Erik
I have been granted absolution.
One has blessed me.
I hear her sleeping now
And imagined the steady rise and fall of her breast.
A long night's journey behind yet dawn is not about to wake.
"Christine," I whisper.
So lovely,
So pure,
She did not scream when I beckoned to her,
She came willingly.
She is not ashamed of me.
Soothing the pain and the rage.
I curl my fist around the unfinished page tattooed with my warning.
Everything I touch is tainted with betrayal.
An angel is with me and yet I fell the rage coming
Hers is the face I cannot blot from my mind.
Mixed up with the visions of a dead girl.
It constricts my throat and burns in my nostrils.
She will interfere.
And there will be consequences.
The ivory keys warm to my touch,
The instrument carried piece by piece
Pipe by pipe
It dominates the center of my parlor in the cellars of hell.
This is my domain and she is the gatekeeper.
It might have been an Italian villa with carved furniture and richly color brocades
There is a small boat I keep to traverse from one side of the lake to the other.
It is my palace, my prison, my cage,
In the center of this room I still maintain four walls of iron bars.
It is to remind me of her.
My first angel,
A rosy cheeked, blue-eyed girl and with a halo of blond curls.
The gentleness of that memory stirs the melancholy deep within me
That pumps through every pipe.
I hurt her tonight,
When I swore I never would.
She was the first to ever to look upon the abomination that is my face,
without dread, without hesitation.
Only I noticed the yellowing bruise on her cheek
And the bloom of purple at her wrist.
We understood one another.
I promised to be her friend.
To never to be the cause of her pain.
The fever took over,
The taste her skin, bitter and still just as sweet.
I held her with a rush of satisfaction such as I have never known.
I had never seen fear in her eyes until tonight.
That was how I made her mine.
Alas she belonged to me completely
As Christine filled my opera house in sweet triumph
I knew I would never be alone again.
The fever of the music takes over.
I remember not a thing until I find myself standing in the night air below her window,
Leaving my beautiful Christine to watch over the only creature I worship.
I must know that she is well and if I can but look upon her sleeping,
It would be enough.
It is a simple thing to climb to her balcony
To peer through her window at peace my hands,
I abandon my angel to watch over my goddess.
The Englishman and his Scottish hound wait in rooms below.
I hate the stench of them.
They who try to cage her again.
They who go about in daylight while I move in to shadow,
And by such divine separation of light and dark,
Suffer the madness of always parting from her.
The light of a single candle
And the splendor of the winter moon across her pale brow
Just looking at her chases away the chill.
I need her more than ever.
To look, nay I came to touch.
Soft, warm everything that is home to me is in her.
The cup on her bedside table smells of laudanum,
Just like the one at Christine's bedside table.
I could not risk her waking while I was gone.
Standing near her my heart pounds.
The blood heats up.
Her face so peaceful,
I see a reflection of the innocence that once was.
The innocence I crave in Christine.
I brush away a hair from her face,
She was my first kiss.
The memory fills me with warmth and calm.
She was eight years-old
And far more experienced in such things than my eighteen years.
No one had ever touched me before.
Not even a mother's kiss.
Does she still taste of roses and lemons?
I breathe her in to quell my fears.
Arching over her I cannot help but brush my lips to hers.
She groans and exhales a piece of her soul,
Into my parted lips,
The taste of laudanum is on her breath.
Bitter and tainted
Yet capable of stirring in me the sins of the flesh.
The warmth of her passes through me.
My heart rails against me for my unfaithfulness.
"Christine, Christine."
If I am to have grace,
It must be through one's innocence
Not my lust.
Swearing, I rush toward the window,
I no longer care who hears
I crush the rose I brought with me against the rails of her balcony,
A shower of crimson petals
Staining the snow like droplets of blood.
It is an easy climb down to the street.
In the quiet of the night I hear the Englishman's heavy steps at her door.
Thinking he had the right-
Thinking he might touch her flesh
Though it be a thing holy, and dedicated to another.
The light of the hallway rushes in.
He runs to the balcony and discovers the rose.
He is quick.
I am better.
How can I do anything less than reward him with the ring of my laughter?
Making certain to whisper in his ear from the street below,
"Her flesh is not yours to plunder,
One warning,
One penance for failure."