Chapter Twenty One: Interludes II: August

August breezed in almost without her knowledge; in her night world, the days did not change, but whenever he told her the date Christine thought with something akin to panic how long she had been there, how much life she had missed. She thought in quiet moments of her friends, of Jammes and Meg, and of her University, Aunt Valerius, and of Raoul. She was almost afraid to think of Raoul, as if Erik could see her thoughts and would condemn her for them.

She wrote in her journal nearly every day, though sometimes she just sat with it in front of her for hours, not sure what was safe to write. She couldn't mention anything that could be harmful if he was to find it, and that severely limited her thoughts. So often she wrote simple static emotions, sensations, questions. Pages slowly degenerated from long sentences into fragments and words. 'Cold. Lonely. Together? I want to know him. I know nothing. Is that better? Dark. I miss the sun. If I were away, would I miss him? Perhaps. There is beauty here. He makes things lovely. Lovely. Lonely.

Why me?'

Later, when she would reread her entries, she often didn't understand what she had written.

Erik himself was slowly become more real to her, even though she tried to stay distant from him. He spoke with her so often that one day she realized suddenly and forlornly that she spoke to him more than she had spoken to anyone in her life. What did that mean?

He had said that morning that it was August sixth, and Christine had just lost her fifth consecutive round of chess.

She scowled at him as he calmly replaced the small players on their board. "Would you like to play again?"

Christine sighed and bit her lip. "Ok, fine," she consented. "There has to be some way to beat you."

His lips curled upward slightly. "If not at life then at chess?" He inquired, and she felt her breath catch in anger.

"Exactly," she hissed as he made the first move. She cracked her knuckles as she debated where to go, her mouth set in a tight line. Suddenly she froze as he leaned over and placed one long cold finger on top of her knuckles.

"Don't do that," he said softly, his skin still lightly brushing her hand. "You can not concentrate when you are so frustrated."

Christine waited until he moved his arm away to make her move, pushing a pawn forward tentatively. He countered immediately and sat back, his yellow eyes staring disconcertingly at her.

"Who taught you to play chess?" She asked as she slid forward another pawn and he immediately countered with a knight. He was silent for a moment, and Christine thought that he was not going to answer.

"My father," he said softly, surprising her. "We played every evening when I was young."

The idea of a young Erik, an Erik that was anything other than the thin, imposing man sitting across from her, intrigued Christine. He seemed too in control to have ever been young, to have had parents. Suddenly she wanted to know what had driven him here, what events in his life had pushed him so that he stalked and kidnapped a girl and sat across from her playing chess like it was the most normal thing in the world.

"Did your mother play as well?" Christine moved her bishop out of harms way and waited for Erik to attack.

"No," he sounded agitated, torn between the game and memories. He lunged forward with his queen and took her knight. "I never knew my mother. She left soon after I was born."

"Oh…" Christine trailed off and stared at him, forgetting the game. "Did you ever find out what happened to her?"

"I believe that she committed suicide." He did not meet her eyes and gestured for her to make a move. "She couldn't bear what had happened to her life, to remember what I was."

Christine slowly moved a pawn and tried to change the course of the conversation. "So you lived with your father…?"

"He never had a steady job, we were always moving around Europe, and then America." Erik scooped up her ill fated pawn. "He tried his best. It wasn't easy. He wanted to hide me. I left when I was fifteen."

Christine moved her queen near to his king and waited for his move. "What did you do?"

"I traveled the world for a long time. It I lived in the Middle East for many years before returning here to bury my father. I stayed. This country, it is anonymous, it is progressive…it suited me."

He trailed off as if suddenly realizing what he was saying. Christine stared at him, wanting to know what had happened during the vast amount of years he had glossed over. The way he said it gave her a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach, and she remembered how she had decided that not knowing was best. But against her will she had to acknowledge that he was fascinating, and that she couldn't help but feel empathy for him. Both of them were orphans.

Christine didn't realize that she was still staring at him until she jerked out of her reverie to find him watching her gently. "I didn't realize that this was going to turn into a question and answer session," he said.

"I'm sorry," she said, suddenly flustered. He stared at her a moment longer.

"Don't be," he said, standing up and starting to turn his back. "You needed to know some things about me. I did not plan to forever keep you in the dark."

"What about the game?" Christine asked, staring at the board. With a lazy, casual gesture, Erik reached across the table to tap his bishop set sneakily into position, and then effortlessly flicked her king onto his side.

"You've already lost," he said quietly before retreating into the music room for their lesson.

August moved steadily forward.

Her voice lessons were becoming more intense as he became more fanatical and demanding with her voice. Sometimes during lessons she felt as if she barely knew him, as if he barely recognized her. They were just two voices, sounds driving toward perfection.

He said it was August thirteenth.

The song halted abruptly as he jerked his head to stare at her, his eyes sharp. Christine flushed and glared back at him, her hands balled into fists. He had been irritable all day, stopping after nearly every measure to critique her or throw some scalding comment her way, which in turn made her more defiant and angry. He was so brutal during lessons, as if he forgot their circumstances and she was just a troublesome student who was not giving him the perfection he expected.

His hands curled into fists on the keys but did not depress them. "Your breathing is off again!" He snapped. "You're not concentrating, I can hear you gasp for breath after every stanza and your stance is deplorable."

"Well it's hard to concentrate with you blowing up in my face every five seconds!" Christine had to fight to stay calm. "God damn it, Erik, I am not perfect."

"You ought to be!" He hissed as he stood abruptly. "After all of the work I am putting in."

"We are putting in," she shot back. "I'm doing the best I can."

He stared at her for a moment as he visibly tried to calm his emotions. "All right," he said, walking over to her with quick, jerky strides. "We have been going over your same basic problems for months. We will have to try another way, since I do not believe that you understand what I am saying."

The hairs on the back of her neck prickled as he stood behind her, and she gasped slightly as he pressed one cold hand along her back to fix her posture.

"You have to stand like this," he murmured, placing his other hand on her diaphragm to tilt her pelvic bone into the proper position. "Always like this. You should know that by now. And when you're angry your chin starts to jut." The hand on the small of her back moved to her jaw and the other to the back of her neck, and Christine felt the clammy cold against her bare skin. Her eyes widened anxiously and she had to fight the urge to shiver. He never initiated contact with her but suddenly his arms were around her and his hands were pushing her jaw back and positioning her head.

"There," he said softly, though his hands did not immediately leave her skin. She could feel her face flushing, the heat burning into the cold. "You lose your position so easily. It is hard to believe that you were so incorrectly taught. You should never change this stance until you master it, understand?"

Suddenly shaking, Christine nodded. He held her there for a moment longer, his breath light and fast in her ear, before slowly and shakily moving away. "Now let's see if you can follow my instructions."

She sang it better, and after lessons went straight to her room. Her face still felt cold.

The days blurred: August fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth. The eighteenth was their weekly outing.

That night Christine found herself stretched on her back on a still and silent merry-go-round in a small abandoned park near the woods, far enough from the city that she could stare at the stars. It was midnight and she couldn't seem to tear her eyes away from the far away lights; they were splattered across the sky like white paint on black canvas, haphazard, without pattern.

"Do you know any constellations?" She asked quietly, her voice breaking into the summer sounds of cicada and night birds. He was standing near her and she saw him tilt his head back.

"There." His long hand traced a winding path through the sky. "That's Draco, the dragon. And those three stars there," his arm swept to another part of the sky, "are Orion's Belt."

Christine squinted and turned her head. "I can't see it. They all seem so random."

He laughed lightly, a surprisingly pleasant sound. "They are. Humans always find the need to label things, organize things. They can't stand random chaos."

"You say that as if you are classifying the actions of others." Christine pulled her gaze away from the stars to study him. He frowned at her.

"What do you mean?"

"Whenever you talk about other people you always say 'humans' as if they were something foreign…as if you don't consider yourself one of them."

The voice that carried over to her on the night breeze sounded sad. "I don't, often."

"How would you classify me?" The question felt strange leaving her mouth, as if she hadn't expected to say it.

Erik shook his head, his hands coming up expressively in the air. "No, no, you are different. We…" he broke off for a moment and stared at her. "Despite all appearances I believe that we are similar…you and I."

Christine fell silent at the comment and resumed staring at the stars, trying to figure him out. "When I was little my mother and I made up our own constellations to go with the stories she told me at night…I can't remember them now."

"She died when you were very young."

Christine had a feeling that he knew everything anyway but she didn't care. "When I was six. A car accident. It…it ripped my family apart."

He was silent but she could sense the unasked question. She pressed on, feeling as though a huge weight lay on her chest, suffocating her.

"Her car crashed into the side of a building…they said the accelerator broke, because they found out the car accelerated right before impact…but it was a new car…" her voice trailed off dully as she stared at the stars. "She was a good mom," Christine whispered. "She taught me to sing, she smelled like the garden and the paint from her workshop. She…she was happy with us, I think. I thought she was happy. But even after all these years I still don't know what to believe."

"Believe what makes it bearable."

"Even if it isn't the truth?"

"Especially then." She felt him sit near her head and his long fingers stroked her hair. "You believe your father loved your mother more than you. You thought he would leave you behind one day, so you clung to him and made him your whole world…to make him stay."

Christine heard his words as if from far away. "He left anyway, though," she whispered. "It wasn't the cancer the killed him. He just…stopped trying, stopped fighting. And he's gone now."

"He is in the stars," Erik's haunting voice reached out, soothing her. "And I will never leave you."

"I know."

"Believe what makes you happy, even if it isn't true."

Christine closed her eyes. "I know."

August was almost over.