A/N: Here's Chapter 11! I apologize for all the grammar and misspellings. I tend to write these chapters at 11 o' clock at night and today I get to write before supper! :D Yay! Enjoy! And thank you for reviewing! You are all incredible. (: This chapter gets into the darkest of Erik's memories.
WARNING: SOME CONTENT MAY BE SEMI AWKWARD AND OFFENSIVE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
Disclaimer: Don't own POTO or any of Susan Kay's work.
Chapter 11: No Turning Back pt. 1
I sat still and watched as Christine desperately tried to do something with her hair. It was a rather silly thing to do. I thought she was beautiful as she was. I stood up and walked over to her, keeping a solemn face as I approached her. I looked at her reflection in the cracked mirror from behind her. I looked into her eyes and then at her hands twisting her hair.
I reached up and wrapped my hands gently around her wrists, pulling her hands away from her curly locks and pinning them to her side. I leaned in and kissed her ear.
"You are beautiful without these trivial attempts, Christine." I whispered in her ear. She inhaled deeply and I felt goose bumps rise on her arms. I trailed my hand up her arm and to her breastbone, pulling her close to me. I rested my other hand on her stomach and she leaned her head back against my shoulder.
"Why must you always attempt to seduce me?" she asked. I gasped in mock offense and pulled her hand up to my lips.
"Why Mademoiselle, I am quite the gentleman. I would never be intentionally seductive." I kissed her knuckles and lowered her hand again.
She giggled quietly and turned around to face me. "Have you thought about it?" she asked.
I racked my brain for a millisecond before realizing what her inquiry was about. I ran my hand through my hair and sighed. "Christine, I would prefer it never to happen. . . ." I started, the image of a conceiving Christine burned in my mind. I knew I was lying. But I also knew better than to cause her anymore grief with a hideous babe. "I will continue to think, but you must give me time. I am not denying you, nor am I giving in. You must also try to see the reasoning behind my proposition."
Her face dropped slightly. I reached up and cupped her cheek, stroking the softness of it with my thumb.
We stood in silence, basking in each others presence.
"When will I get to hear more about you?" she asked quietly. I thought back for a second to where I had left off. I was still unsure about whether or not to tell Christine about the time I had with the gypsies.
"Whenever you feel you are ready." I replied. She would have to know about it eventually.
"Right now." she said, eagerly. She pulled me towards the bed. She scooted over to the far side and stretched her legs out in front of her. I sat down beside her crossing my arms and stretching my legs in front of me as well.
"Don't leave anything out." she said as her foot absently played with mine. I took a deep breath and sat forward, pulling a pillow into my arms and hugging it.
"I remember it was pitch black the night I ran away from my home in Boscherville. There was no moon and as I pushed through the dense undergrowth in the birch and pine forest of Roumare, clumps of nettles stung my hands. I usually wasn't very clumsy, but that night my head was clouded with a haze of laudanum and I stumbled and fell several times. The wound beneath my rib cage had began to bleed again with the exertion and I was aware of a warm stickiness seeping once more beneath my shirt; but I did not stop. I pushed on and on – as though my life depended on it – without knowing how or whither I fled.
I wasn't afraid of the dark anymore. I had long since learned to love the kind veil that shielded me from hating eyes.
There was no plan, no coherent thought, in my head, just a deep instinctive need to get away, far, far away, from my mother's home. Sasha's death had not only shown me that my mother would never be safe while I continued to lie under her roof.
When the dawn had come, I found a spring where I could drink, and built myself a shelter out of branches and leaves. It was hardly the work of a great architect, but it shut out the knifing winds of the freezing Norman spring. When it was finished, I crept inside and lay there through several risings and settings of the sun. I was exhausted enough to have slept through the pain of my body, it was the pain in my mind that kept me awake, the pain of words which cut deeper than any metal blade.
Freak of nature.
Monstrous burden.
A place where you can forget.
I thought of my mother. She was free now. Free to be with Doctor Barye. They would go away together to a place where no one knew her, where she could forget me and be happy.
I wanted her to be happy. She was so beautiful when she had smiled at the statue of that shepherd boy. That was why I made it sing for her – so that she could be happy and smile and not want to send me away to that asylum. I never meant to make her mad. When she first began to rock that empty cradle in the attic bedroom, I was afraid that she, too, might be sent to that terrible place of which she spoke of. So I made everyone else go away instead. Father Mansart, Doctor Barye, Mademoiselle Perrault . . . I made them all disappear, one by one. I can make anything disappear, if I really want to. Anything except my face . . ."
I felt Christine's head on my shoulder and her hands wrapped around my arm, hugging it. I rested my head against the top of hers.
"Even in my earliest memories my mother was always cold and remote, like a beautiful distant star, always beyond my reach. I think I was born knowing that I must not touch her, but it was a long time before I understood the reason for her revulsion and hatred. Even when she dragged me in front of that mirror and showed me my face, I did not at first understand. I thought the horrendous thing in the glass was some nightmare creature sent to punish me for my disobedience, and for a long time I was afraid to remove the mask in case it came back to haunt me.
Hunger drove me at length from my shelter, forcing me to push on through the densely wooded area, walking by night and sleeping by day. An ironic quirk of fate had blessed me with astonishing powers of recovery," my hand drifted to where the wound from my brawl with the Viscount had been. "And the knife wound had healed to a crusted brown weal which had encouraged me to discard the doctor's bandages. His prompt treatment had prevented infection. He had probably saved my life, but I did not see that as a thing I should have been grateful for; indeed there were many times when I had come to hate him more for that single act of pity than for anything else.
I was not accustomed to hunger. In her half-crazed insistence that I should eat and not remind her of a starving skeleton, my mother had constantly set before me an obscene procession of dishes. Food was forced upon my like a punishment; it was as though she had sought to atone for some past neglect in this respect that filled her with perpetual guilt. I had developed sleight of hand at a very early age, simply as means of conveying this unwanted food to Sasha, beneath our table – and I often thought of heaven as a place where no one would need to eat again. But that was before I truly understood what it meant to starve. I had had nothing but water for nearly a week and I had been lightheaded with a desperation that was driving me steadily back into the inhabited world.
When darkness fell once more I left the shelter of the forest and ventured out onto the open road, where a blaze of lanterns beckoned welcomingly. Lights meant people, and where there were people there was also food that might be stolen.
It was the gypsies camp that I had stumbled upon.
A group of horses had been tethered to a post on the inner ring of the settlement and their warmth and beauty momentarily swayed my purpose. I reached up instinctively to caress one smooth, velvety nose and that had been my undoing, for the horse whickered nervously at my unfamiliar touch and at once a restlessness passed through the peaceful tethered animals.
Suddenly lanterns came at me from all sides. Instinctively I dropped to the ground and hid my face with my arms, bracing myself against anticipated blows. I was grabbed by the shoulders and dragged along the frosted, leaf-mold floor to the enormous campfire which flicker and flared against the clear spring night. And there I was flung at the feet of quite a small man with a jet-black moustache and a single gold ring dangling from one ear, who prodded me urgently with his foot.
"Get up." he demanded. I quickly scrambled to my feet and looked around frantically for some avenue of escape, but I soon saw that I was completely surrounded. The man thought I was a thief. "Do you know what we do with thieves?" he asked. "Little thieves who won't show their thieving faces? We roast 'em, like hedgehogs . . . and then" he leaned forward and pulled me close to his dirty face – "and then we eat 'em!"
I saw no reason to disbelieve his threat and my frightened gasp brought out bellows of delighted laughter from all who surrounded me.
"Better show your face then, hadn't you?" he continued. I clutched hold of my mask in defiant terror, aware of the curious anticipation on all of the faces that were rosy-hued by the firelight.
A woman told the man to leave me alone, that I looked like I was starving. She told him to give me some food and let me go and that I had done no harm. The man doubted me, wondering what I was doing hanging around the horses if I was innocent. He suggested they turn out my pockets and see what I had stolen.
Another man suggested they took off my mask.
Others joined and started to chant the cry and I was passed around the fire, from hand to hand, desperately holding on to my mask.
Fingers began to fumble at the temple of my mask and I began to kick and scream wildly.
I begged them not to remove it. The gypsies insulted me wondering if I was a Bourbon prince who missed the tumbril. One asked if I had blue blood, suggesting they cut open a vein and find out.
My arms had been pinned behind me and I struggled violently to free myself. I remember a strong hand came down beneath my chin and tore the mask away; and suddenly there was a deathly hush broken only by a single Romany oath.
In the terrible silence I saw them all staring at me, on their faces a mixture of expressions ranging through utter disbelief to fear. "Let me go," I had whispered faintly. "If you let me go I promise I won't come back."
They started to close in on me like wolves. I saw the flash of a night in the firelight and screamed, for I suddenly knew that it was all to be endured again – the mindless violence of an angry, unreasoning mob.
Then everything went black and I knew no more of what they did to me that night."
I stopped and felt Christine's hand entwine with mine. She squeezed my hand slightly, urging me to continue. Well, if she's not terrified yet, she will be soon enough.
"I awoke the next morning to find myself laying on a pile of sacking inside a cage. I lay back down quickly and shut my eyes, begging for it to be a dream. I waited to wake up in my attic bedroom with Sasha lying at my feet. I licked my swollen lips and tried to call out for her. I heard someone tell a man to fetch Javert. "Awe what's the hurry?" the other man asked. "Let's have some fun with it first. What are you scared of? It can't get out." It! I thought.
I lay still, willing the nightmare away. When the sharp piece of wood splintered against my forehead, sending a shower of pricking specks into my eyes, I tried to crawl out of their reach, but they simply pursued me to the other side of the cage. There were two boys with dirty faces and black hair and a little girl in a torn dress, who hung back and began to cry. She told them not to hurt me – it– like that. They told her to shut up or they would put her in the cage with me.
I heard the crack of a whip and a huge shadow casted over me. Without waiting to be told, the children fled across the camp, possessed by one shared, instinctive fear; and as the door of my cage was unlocked, I turned to look up at my new master.
My first impression had been of one size – immense size. He seemed to fill the entire cage, an enormous man with a great paunch of a belly which hung grotesquely over his tight belt. He bore no resemblance to any of the small, slender, rather graceful men I had seen around the campfire the night before; he did not look like a Gypsy – but he looked every inch a rogue. His eyes, sunk in a fat face which glistened with sweat even on that cold spring morning, were narrow and infinitely cruel as they rolled over me in a critical fashion.
"Remarkable," he has said. "I've waited all my life to find something like this. They'll come from miles around to see a living corpse. Yes, that's it, that's what I'll call you – the Living Corpse." I backed away from him against the bars of my cage and slumped down in a crumpled heap against the cold metal rods. I told him I had to go home. My mother will be looking for me. He snickered and asked if she would have my little coffin all made up for me. "Coffin?" I has asked, staring at him without comprehension. "That's where corpses sleep, isn't it?" he replied obligingly. He decided he would make a coffin prop for my cage for heightened effect.
And with that he locked the cage once more and left me staring after him with a dull stupefaction. My mind had been quite blank, as empty as a worm's perhaps. A numb, frozen mass that flatly refused to perform the simplest feat of reasoning. I didn't understand any of those few words that had been spoken to me in my native French – he might as well have spoken Russian. I did not understand why I was in a cage or what was going to happen to me, but I had sensed sufficient threat from the man's manner to be thrown into a mindless panic.
I started to claw frantically at the lock.
In other circumstances, with a calm, rational brain and a single hairpin, I could have easily freed myself in minutes, but there was nothing in the cage to have served my purpose, even if I'd had the presence of a mind to look. That single clumsy lock had the power to reduce me to total impotence. I hit and bit at it like a wild animal, and not once in all the time that followed did I ever return to attack it with the full force of my intellect and my extraordinary manual dexterity. Even after all these years I am still unable to explain that strange mental paralysis, except to acknowledge that the mind is capable of erecting barriers far stronger than any physical fence. Such is the key to all illusion, and God knows it was a key I learned to turn often enough on others. For me, at that moment, the illusion of captivity was so complete that even had he left the door unbarred I sometimes wonder whether I should not still have sat there, staring through the bars, like a hopeless chained animal who knows no better than to wait patiently and endure.
The children came back with their sticks, but I fear they found me poor sport, for this time I made no attempt to escape from their tormenting. I let them draw blood with indifference, almost without feeling, and receiving no response, they soon grew bored and drifted away to more lively entertainments.
I was fed often but it was such a disgusting stew. The first night Javert had brought it and a patched blanket to me, pushing them through the bars. I asked him if I could please go home. I was like a very small child, repeating the only phrase in its repertory; and when I continued to repeat it day and night, he grew angry and struck me.
"Can't you say anything else, you stupid creature?" he spat at me. "Now, get this to your addled brain – if you have a brain at all, which I'm seriously beginning to doubt – you're my discovery, my creation, and my fortune! They tell me you won't eat – well, I've trained too many animals to fall for that old trick. You'll eat of your own accord, or I'll force every mouthful down your ugly little throat by hand. You're not going home – and you're not going to die on me, either, have you got that, you witless little monster? You'll do as you're told or you'll suffer for it, understand me? Now, pick up that bread and eat it – eat, God damn you!"
He caught hold of my head and began to force the rough, grainy bread into my mouth until I gagged and retched; but strangely, instead of angering him further, that merely served to make him very calm and coldly determined.
I do not know how long this torture lasted; it seemed like hours. The stars were winking in the sky and he was as soiled and stinking as the floor of my cage, before I reached the limit of my endurance and capitulated to his physical strength and his unwavering determination. When I finally took the piece of bread from his hand and began to nibble it wearily, he stood up and wiped his hands on my sacking bed.
"I like an animal that knows its master," he said with sick satisfaction.
When he came to me next day I did not make the mistake of refusing to eat or asking to go home, but asked instead what he intended to do with me. He seemed surprised and told me he was going to exhibit me.
I stared at him in horrified disbelief. "They will pay," I had stammered, "pay to look at me?"
He told me of course and they would pay handsomely too. A flood of revulsion swept over me and I began to shiver and vomit uncontrollably. He cursed at me irritably and stormed out of the cage. He told a nearby child to fetch some milk. He turned and glared at me telling me I'd better keep it down or he would beat me senseless.
I did not answer.
I knelt on the floor and began to pray silently that God would let me die before this terrible new shame was forced upon me."
I shook slightly in anger at the memory, biting my lip and staring at a flame flickering on a candelabra. I heard silent sobs from Christine but chose to ignore them. I knew she would be horrified before I was finished.
"I began my life as a freak exhibit with my hands and feet bound to the bars of the cage, so that I could not hide me face from the prying multitude. My first appearance had been a disaster that produced something dangerously close to a riot when the angry crowd demanded their money back; they could see nothing because I cowered in a corner with me arms wrapped around my head. They insisted they had been cheated and Javert – fearful of impending violence – promptly sent two men into the cage to bind me.
I screamed and kicked and bit like a wild animal, but I was no match for the strength of two full-grown men, and within a few moments I was secured with my arms at full stretch, like Christ on the cross, so that it was impossible for me to turn my face from view. Javert entered the cage and tied a rope around my neck so that I was forced to lift my head from my chest. As my skull jerked back against the iron bar, I opened my eyes involuntarily and saw people stepping back in delighted horror.
"Mother of God!" exclaimed a woman, pulling a screaming child into the shelter of her skirts. "Let us pass . . . for pity's sake let us through!"
The crowd parted a little to allow her to drag the hysterical infant away, but the other children had began to scream and I could not take me eyes away from their open, shrieking mouths. It was as though I saw myself once more in that mirror and shared with them all over again the horror of that first sight . . . but no horror could compare with the burning degradation, the unspeakable humiliation, of this obscene exposure. Panic numbed all other senses and I began to twist and pull like a frantic unbroken horse until the rope cut into my throat.
"Look!" someone had shouted. "It's going to strangle itself!" . . . "How disgusting! Such things should not be shown in public."
A new ugliness was rapidly infecting the crowd. The had paid good coin to be titillated and entertained, not disturbed and discomfited. My raw anguish was offensive to some, and once more Javert was faced with angry demands to return the viewing fees.
My cage was hastily withdrawn from view. I do not know how much money I cost him on that occasion, but it was sufficient to bring me to him a little later in a towering rage. He whipped me savagely for ruining his exhibition, but at the very moment when blessed unconsciousness promised to embrace me, he cut me down from the bars and stood over me with his arms aggressively folded.
"Well? Have you learned how to be silent now . . . or do you need a further course of instruction?" he asked, coldly.
I lay at his feet, staring in disbelief at the huge weals that were rising on my bare arms; my head spun and there was blood in my mouth from where I had bitten my tongue. But there was only one thought in the back of my head, only one desire.
"Give me back the mask," I whispered. He stared at me curiously.
"The mask. . . ." I had repeated dizzily. "Give me back the mask . . . please!"
Suddenly, without warning, Javert began to laugh, slapping his whip against his gross thigh and then leaning forward to poke me with the crop.
"Now, you listen to me, little corpse, and listen good. No one's going to pay to see a bloody mask, but half the women in France will swoon at the sight of your face. Don Juan himself could not have drawn more skirts in one afternoon. But I won't have any more of that cursed screaming so be warned. You drive away any more customers as you did today, and it'll be a bad lookout for you. I'll flay every scrap of skin off your miserable body if you behave like that again in public." he spat.
I clenched my fists and stared up at him in a crazy defiance. "I won't be see. . . . I won't be stared at. . . . I won't. . . .I won't!"
Surely, I thought, he would kill me now. He would bring down his great fist and smash my suicidal impudence to pulp. I waited desperately for the end that would release me, but he did not strike me again. Instead he regarded me thoughtfully, as though he measured every lesion on my body and weighed it against the time when I could be exhibited once more. He decided upon gagging me to keep me quiet during the next show.
Next day we moved on. I did not know where we were going, nor did I care; time and place had ceased to have any meaning for me. The next time I was exhibited I was gagged and bound in an upright coffin, in a position where it was physically impossible for me to do myself harm. I was silent now, and this time no one complained or wanted their money back.
I was an enormous success, Javert told me with great satisfaction, when he came that night to feed me like a trained dog. When I had learned to be sensible, he would remove the gag and permit me to earn my keep with a little more comfort. I watched him put the key to the lock in his pocket and walk away whistling cheerfully and I thought how much I hated him, how I wished he were dead.
The gag defeated me, as Javert had known it must. His violence and cruelty concealed an innate shrewdness, a crude, instinctive sort of wisdom that showed him new and more subtle ways to conquer rebellion. It wasn't long before I came to accept that I was only adding to my suffering by my own stubbornness; and, though my flesh still crawled with revulsion when the crowds pressed around my cage, I learned to display the silent indifference of a dumb animal. That was what they wanted, what they came to see—an animal, an oddity . . . a thing!
Increasingly I ceased to feel that I belonged to what is loosely termed as the human race. It was as though I had tumbled onto some alien planet where I found myself unable to take revenge upon my tormentors except in the dark prison of my mind. There, in that uniquely private domain, where I was free of chains, I conjured a thousand horrible deaths for those who came to prod and stare. I learned to live almost entirely in my mind, creating a landscape of my own and peopling it with the devices of my captive imagination. My world was strange and beautiful, an entirely new dimension where music and magic held sway. It was a second Eden, where I alone was God, and at times I retreated so far into it that I became indeed a living corpse, comatose and trancelike, scarcely breathing.
And yet, however far I retreated, there was always a part of me that remained bitterly aware of reality. My mobile prison jolted me across the length and breadth of France, from one fair to another, and I was kept in conditions of animal squalor until I feigned sufficient obedience and resignation to suggest that my spirit was entirely broken. Humility was the price of those moments of privacy which basic human dignity demands. My mother had taught me to conduct myself like a gentleman, to be fastidious in my person and courteous in my demeanor. I could not bear to live like an animal.
I begged to be allowed out of the cage, to attend to matters that demanded privacy, and this request so amused Javert – that mannerless pig! – that he came to release me in person and stand guard over my ablutions with his pistol. I knew that if I made any attempt to escape he would shoot – not to kill, no I was too valuable an exhibit for that—but to maim sufficiently to ensure I should not get too far before he caught me.
When I demanded clean clothes he laughed out loud and told me he had never known a corpse so particular about its shroud. "You'll be wanting a dress suit next," he sneered. "Quit your bleating, you draw good enough crowds as you are."
I turned very slowly to look at him. "I could draw more," I said, driven by desperation to sudden boldness. "I could draw twice as many people—if you made it worth my while."
He lowered his pistol and beckoned me nearer; his instinct was to mock, but his own inherent greed made him curious. "What blather is this?" he demanded cautiously. "You're the most ugly creature that ever walked God's earth—that's your livelihood and my good fortune. Why else would anyone want to pay to see you?"
I knew it was a bold move to make but I had nothing left to lose. "If you place lilies in the coffin with me . . ." I said slowly, "I could make them sing."
He pushed the pistol into his belt and rocked to and fro on his heels, bellowing with laughter. "God help me, brat, you're a raving lunatic. You'll be the death of me, I swear it. Going to make lilies sing, are you? And just how are you going to do that, I'd like to know?"
At that time—before I turned my attention to my own setting—I still considered Bach's Mass in B minor to be the worthiest interpretation of the Latin text. It was from that composition, so beloved of Father Mansart, that I now chose the Agnus Dei which apparently issued from the petals of a wild daffodil beside Javert's boot.
Without emotion I watched Javert's fat face sag in disbelief as he bent and plucked the flower at his feet. He held it to his ear and I heard his sharp gasp of astonishment when I let my voice ring sweetly in his head. He changed ears and abruptly my voice changed direction; he threw the withered bloom to the floor and walked away from it and I tapered the sound accordingly so that it seemed to him my voice had grown distant.
Then he came and stared at me intently, placing a think, dirty finger on my throat and starting violently when he felt the faint vibration of my vocal cords.
He rambled about how I hid this from him and how he would get the lilies even if he had to raid a churchyard grave.
He suddenly had become aware of my pointed silence. "Well?" he demanded uneasily. "Why that mum, codfish look? Cat got your tongue, has it?"
I stared at him in defiant silence and he immediately began to bluster like a bully who senses the first scent of defeat. He demanded to know 'what was going on in that twisted little head of mine'. I shrugged my shoulders and turned away.
"If I agreed to sing," I told him calmly, "there would be conditions." He got angry and caught my by the neck and pressed his huge thumbs against my windpipe in a strangling grip. He threatened that he could slit my throat then and there. I slowly began to smile; and I suppose the utter absurdity of his empty threat must have been instantly apparent to him, for even as he spoke he let me go. He asked what my conditions consisted of.
"I won't sing without the mask and I won't sing in a cage," I said, steadily. "If you want to make a bargain with me, you can begin by giving me my own tent."
He was furious at first but suddenly seemed to recover from his stupefaction and became oddly practical. "Impossible. How could I trust you to stay?"
I stared at the floor to hide the tears which were suddenly stinging my eyes as I gazed squarely into the bleak future.
"I have nowhere to go." There was an edge of weariness and resignation in my voice. "Give me privacy and a little comfort and I will stay and make your fortune in return."
He pointed out that even if he agreed to my conditions, the crowd still wanted to see my face. I agreed to remove the mask at the end of the performance but only for a few minutes, just long enough to shock.
"I could beat you to a pulp, but I couldn't make you sing—that's it, you little rogue, isn't it, that's what you're telling me?" he asked.
"No," I told him grimly, "you couldn't make me sing."
We stared at each other like wary enemies, and after a moment he made an abrupt gesture for me to accompany him to his tent, striding off across the field and resisting the temptation to look back to check that I was following.
For the moment I was the victor.
It was then I gained my first ounce of power.
Once I had begun to seek it actively, power came to me in many curious and unexpected ways. My period of instruction in the wise-woman's tent had sparked an acute interest in the herbal properties she sold at all the summer fairs. She had remedies for every conceivable human disorder; and since anything that caused the human race to suffer was inevitably of consuming fascination to me, I began to study her skills with stealthy industry. She was ugly enough herself to be largely untroubled by my presence, and I think she was flattered by my questions. But when I began to experiment with tried and trusted remedies, she was furious and threatened to put a curse upon me. I think that would have been an end of my tuition, but that same night she was stricken with a fever that yielded to none of her proven recipes. The rumor went around the camp that she was dying of a deadly contagion and with cold and pitiless logic the tribe repitched their tents at a safer distance.
"Surely someone will go to her," I protested uneasily.
Javert would say there is nothing to be done for a mortal fever and it's only common sense to keep away.
A strange fury gripped me, a fury that owed virtually nothing to pity, but a great deal to mortal impotence and complacency. There was no better was to raise a demon in my brain than to tell me a thing could not be done.
Impossibility was not a concept I acknowledged.
I got up quietly, without breathing a word of my intention, and crossed the void to the old woman's tent.
I could see as I looked at her that she was in a very bad way and I felt the same frustration I had once experienced when I dismantled my mother's clocks—unbelievable irritation in the face of my own inadequacy and limited competence.
Well . . . I had learned very early to master the mechanism of a clock. And I would not be defeated this time either—not by some miserable pestilence invisible to the naked eye!
I was not moved by any feeling of common humanity or affection. This was simply a challenge I could not resist.
While the old woman lay moaning on her pallet, completely insensible of my presence, I pulled out the ancient copper pans and began to heat an infusion of my own. . . ."
I paused and looked down at Christine. She was tracing the veins in my hand.
"She lived. The infection spread all over the camp, afflicting almost half of the sturdy Gypsy children, who had seldom known a day's illness in their lives. Those who were treated with the traditional infusions died; the three who were treated with mine lived.
A story went around the campfire that I was the scholar of ancient Gypsy legend, the tenth graduate of the College of Sorcery, who had been detained in payment to serve as the devil's apprentice. It was said that I knew all the secrets of nature and magic and that I rode a dragon which dwelt high in the mountains of Hermanstadt and slept in the cauldron where thunder was brewed.
The changes in my status was remarkable. Small children no longer threw stones and chanted names when I appeared. If I passed by their tents in the daytime, they would run away from me, as though I were the devil in person, shrieking for their mothers, who now used my name as the ultimate threat to enforce obedience.
Power!
I was beginning to acquire quite a taste for it, to see it as a very satisfactory substitute for happiness . . . for love.
It was Javert who told me the legend of Don Juan and added the great lover's name to the odd collection of nicknames with which he delighted to address me. At first it was just another insult, no more hurtful than anything else; but as I grew older, and more aware of the meaning of his mockery, I began to hate that name of Don Juan more than any other.
One night he pranced into my tent and leaned over me, breathing vile spirit fumes into my face. I could see at once he was drunk—and when he was drunk, he was dangerous; I knew I would have to take care.
He fingered the mechanism I was working on and an unseen spring snapped shut on his finger. He cursed at me and blamed me for this incident. He began to get suspicious, stating I was very good at arranging accidents. He noticed that many little misfortunes befell him whilst I was around.
I was silent, wondering with alarm whether he could really have guessed just how much mischief I was responsible for. Silly, irritating, commonplace misfortunes that I had thought him incapable of connecting with me.
I looked up into his face, saw with terror that he knew everything, and waited for the punishment to fall.
I didn't have to wait long.
Abruptly he snatched the mask from my face, slashed it to pieces with his ugly knife, and flung the pieces at me. Then he stared at me.
"No tears?" he frowned. "You disappoint me, little corpse. And surly you know better by now than to disappoint old Javert."
He reached out and struck me repeatedly across the face with the back of his huge hand, but I remained silent, staring at him with dry-eyed loathing. And at length, remembering that I was to perform that night, he abandoned his attempt to make me cry.
He asked me when my birthday is. I shivered slightly at the memory of shattering glass and told him it was never spoken of.
"Well . . . I daresay there was nothing much to celebrate. It's a miracle no one dropped you on the fire before you drew a breath." He assumed I must have been eleven or twelve and I nodded, wondering where this strange line of questioning could be leading."
I stopped abruptly. I shivered slightly and my stomach sunk. This was by far one of the worst memories I have had. Christine squeezed my hand in consolation.
"He determined that in about another year or so, if I kept drawing in those crowds, he would pay me a wage. "Of course, it would depend on whether you continued to give satisfaction—on stage and off, if you take my meaning. I like boys who know how to show off their gratitude . . . in a manner of speaking."
I stared at him blankly. "I don't understand," I had whispered.
"Don't worry, you will." He laughed and cuffed me playfully around the ear. "Yes, you'll understand, all in good time. You're very clever, I grant you that—a sight too clever for your own good at times—but you don't know everything. There's a thing or two that I can teach you when I've a mind to do it. And if you're willing to learn, if you're willing to please . . . well, you might find me very generous."
I had no idea what he was talking about, but his tone and soft, almost feline manner made me cold with apprehension. This curious amiability cloaked in an unknown threat as yet beyond my comprehension, and I was afraid to ask anymore questions. I had the feeling that for once I did not want to know the answers.
He sucked his bleeding finger, spat upon the earthen floor, and sauntered to the flap of the tent. In the doorway he turned to look back at me and there was a curious expression on his face.
"I had never had a corpse before," he mused.
And then he was gone, leaving me alone with my ignorance and my fear."
A/N: okay so I seriously hope you guys don't hate me for this but this chapter is soooo long and there's even a part 2. I just couldn't find a good place to end it. x.x