I'm mostly better. But somehow, being sick for a few days means work decided to pile up and kill me all over again.

I know the timeline got a little snarled in the past few chapters. Mojgan's letters do not strictly follow story chronology, but by the end of the next chapter, we'll see the threads converge.

For the first night in months, Erik did not dream of Christine.

There had been a time when his dreams of her had been pleasant, pretty lullabies to sweeten his sleep and then brighten his morning. Those days had long passed. It would probably be more appropriate to now call his somnolent conjurings of Christine nightmares. Wine had not put them to rest. Neither had laudanum, which he detested in any event and had only turned to out of desperation. He would not have bothered, if he had known it simply took one conversation with the Daroga to turn his mind elsewhere.

That was not to say he had a good night's rest. He awoke in the early hours of Sunday, in cold sweat, with the smell of rosewater and blood stuck in his nose.

Did he remember, the Daroga had asked.

Did he remember?

What a singularly foolish question. What a… complicated answer.

There were other Christines to be found in France: tall or short, fair or dark, or even (as he had experienced) a seraph fallen to earth. But other Mojgans? Erik had only ever met one. But for all that, he could not pull up a true picture of her in his head. The image of flying eyebrows and sweeping lashes was too close to a memory of heat rashed cheeks, which was too close to mirrors, which was—

Soft cashmere sleeves brushing over henna-tipped fingers reminded him of long walks in dark woods, and the woods led to—

But it was that smell, that smell of jasmine and spices, that he especially could not bear. He could almost see the outline of her sitting in her walled garden, with her dark tea and marzipan-stuffed dates, and her mild, mild smile. It was a beguiling thought, a sketch waiting to be colored in and fleshed out on canvas. But then the other scent of flowers, the rosewater smell, the one laced with the hookah and the harem, would intrude and overtake him. She would come, and she never would allow Erik to look at Mojgan with kindness.

He had to turn away from that, as quickly as he could.

Do you know Feridoon Ali Jah? Ah, but did you know he has a wife?

No, he would not allow that memory to arise.

He lay in bed for an untold age. He was suddenly irked by his windowless, sunless room under the Garnier. He had tried to conjure up sunlight for his underground home, but he accepted that experiment as a failure. For years and years, the darkness had instead soothed him—he was a creature of shadows, no doubt, and felt safe hidden from the open air and the penetrating light. But it was no longer quite so safe, was it? Oh, even given the thorough attention of the police and the opera management, no one beyond the Daroga had been able to entirely find their way to his cottage. And while they had lost interest for now…

For now, he wished he could glance out a window and see if the stars were still out or if the sun had made its first appearance.

May I suggest that pianos are better companions than sultanas?

Another memory to reject, not much better than the first.

Yesterday, he had had a whole list of things he was going to do. But that list started with a celebratory—well, perhaps, commemorative—trip to the opera. If he was supposed to start in on life once more, why not start with the one love that had never failed him? And it was time to move on from the Garnier. Oh, his blood and sweat was mixed in to the very foundation of the place… but his blood could be found in many buildings across the world. He knew a porter at the Opera Comique that would turn a blind eye to a chair set up in the shadows, provided that the price of a ticket and half find its way into his pocket.

And then the Daroga came, and the entire list from the Opera on down went to hell.

Erik had to admit that, for a man of his vast intellectual gifts, he was prone to making the same mistake more than once. But he couldn't quite bring himself to slide back in to the self-destroying haze he had been in days previous. He could not stay in bed (again) and wait to die (again.) It had not worked any of the other myriad times he had tried it. He was too tired to really put in a good effort for it once more.

…but that list? What on earth was he supposed to do today? Did any of it even matter?

Do you think we will be all right, Mojgan?

Erik had noticed over the past few years that the voice of his bad memories had started to change. In his youth, he was haunted by the echoes of others—his mother with her trembling Dies irae being hurled at her living boy; harsh turn aways from lodgings, food, churches ; the haughty proclamations from employers that he would be paid less for more work; never mind the mutters, the curses, and the screams. Such was the incidental music of his life, and it had long reverberated in his mind. At times it tormented him—at times it drove him.

Slowly, those other voices had started to fade. Oh, they still cropped up. (…the most grieved and most sublime of men.) But increasingly they had been replaced. Not that the replacement was much better: it was now his own voice, his own words and follies that would taunt him. Perhaps it was a quirk of advancing age? Eventually, one realizes that no one can hurt you as much as you can hurt yourself.

Erik, come. Let us be friends.

Well. There was one of those other voices lingering. The memory of that voice was pale, almost intangible. The words were there, but it seemed a whisper to him. It held in it an impression of kindness, but it was… old. So very, very old. Erik sighed. With a practiced hand, he reached over to his night stand, struck a waiting match, and lit a candle.

Now. If he couldn't remember his old list, he would just need to start anew.

He started out simply. Breakfast. He noted that he would need to arrange for groceries soon. He ignored his sudden craving for sholeh zard. He had lived twenty years without it. He could live twenty more. And if it turned out he couldn't, well, that was no great loss.

He started in on a letter to one of his bankers. One may make their money through dubious amendments in an opera manager's memorandum book, but one did not then leave all of that money lying about. He had previously put in a contingency in place for Christine to be able to draw on his account after his death. But, as he was yet alive, he would need the money himself. He hadn't been pleased to return the last forty thousand francs he had been paid by Moncharmin and Richard, but it was cheap price for turning their attention away from him. Besides, the bulk of what had been earned during Poligny and Debienne's tenure still sat, collecting interest. That was just as well. He didn't feel like making yet another fortune from scratch at this point in his life.

His mind wandered into the cellar, into a section kept quite separate from the water where he stored things of particular value. In a pinch, there were always things to sell. In one specific cedar trunk, he could find gold and silver, a few exquisite short swords, hand-bound volumes of poetry put down in immaculate calligraphy, and yards of the finest cashmere. Blood money from the Shah that he had never gotten around to spending.

He pulled his attention back to his letter. As much as he disliked banks, he disliked that thought even more.

And then there was the most pressing matter to attend to: his masks. He had fallen back on an old one, black broadcloth that he had stitched structure into. The one Christine had burned had been far finer: the softest calf's leather, molded along patrician lines, and lined with changeable silk. Oh, he hated that mask as much as he hated all the rest of them, but he still had his artist's eye and knew it was comparatively a thing of beauty. Comfortable, too. He had had another just like it, but bleached to bone whiteness. That one had met its ignominious fate during the little matter of the scorpion and the grasshopper.

That particular mask had the added benefit of not drawing quite so much attention as the black one. If Erik went about his business, with his collar worn high and his hat low, he could pass through a crowd with little comment. He foresaw the need for that soon.

He had been comfortable here in the Opera for the better part of the last decade. But, like all comforts in Erik's life, this one would be coming to an end.

…But where to go from here?

It is impossible for me to continue living like this, underground in a hole, like a mole! He had spoken those words honestly to Christine, and their continued truth taunted him now.

He had purchased a little property a few months back. Every detail that could be arranged at a distance had been done with great care. The house was large enough to be respectable, but not so large that it would have required more than a daily charwoman and scullery maid to attend to. He did not want an invasion of servants. The town selected had been populated enough to get lost in, but sufficiently isolated to afford privacy. Their closest neighbor was the church. It was a long walk from the property's edge to the house's front door. It sat in comfortable distance from the Brittany Express, so that a trip to either Paris or Perros was quite doable. It so exactly met the needs of Erik-and-Christine that Erik-by-himself found the idea of moving there quite appalling.

He started in on another letter, to sell off that property. He had as much use for it now as he did for the blind priest at the Madeleine church.

Well, if not that little house, what then?

You could start with going to the Daroga's home on Monday.

The thought was so sudden and so sharp that Erik's head nearly snapped up to look for some hitherto unseen intruder who might've spoken the words.

There was no one there to hear him, but he still felt obliged to speak up. "No. No, I don't think I will."

After all, why should he go see a woman he hardly remembered at the behest of a man who was most certainly not his friend?

In the end, it was the mask that made the difference. He found the molds he had used for the ones destroyed, another length of thin pale leather, and he set to work. He loathed the process of making masks. There was the discomfort of forming the wet leather to fit his bare skin to start with. This was followed by the insulting work of adding of all the details lacking from his own face—the high bridge of a refined nose, the arch of the eyebrows, molding the cheekbones into sharpness as opposed to mere gauntness.

Still, Erik was a craftsman par excellence. He beveled and burnished the edges smooth, fired the mask carefully, made the most minute adjustments, and—this took the most time—shellacked and polished it to a soft ivory.

The task was loathsome, but the result was excellent.

When he put on the finished mask for the first time Monday morning, he felt quite equal to anything the day might throw at him.

Being a very practical ghost with a taste for good wine, Erik's first outing was to pick up the groceries he had ordered. He thought that would be plenty of time spent abroad for the day, but upon his return, he found a scrap of paper jammed into the hidden gate on the Rue Scribe.

3 o'clock.

-Nadir

The signature was somewhat unnecessary, Erik thought. Who else was going to stick a note in his secret gate written in Persian? Still, his eye traced the curves of the given time, right to left, and something tugged at his heart. He was about to crumple the note and toss it away, but instead studied the signature one last time. Three staccato pen strokes in the Daroga's given name, plus one needlessly aggressive dot to cap his noon. He wondered how long it had been since he had signed himself thusly, instead of in his Latinized N-A-D-I-R.

Oddly enough, Erik still had vestige of his own Persian signature. He had never thought of the spelling of his name until he needed to start signing things, which had started, in earnest, in Persia. It was a stark collection of lines: alef-rey-yeh-kaf. When he had returned to Europe, it had been natural to end his name with that terminal k, which shared something of the kaf's aggressive finality.

He didn't want to think of the other, subtle marks his time in Persia had left on him. He did crumple the note then, but shoved it into his pocket instead of throwing it into the sewer.

He put his groceries away, throwing the note onto the kitchen table, and then turned to his most dependable anesthetic: music. The organ had seen many recent abuses, and Erik was in no mood to undo the damage he had inflicted on it just yet. The violin had stayed safe in its case.

The capriccio he had been working on started taking on a disturbing Orientalist bent, he realized, and switched to an old fugue. He had once thought it might have a place in the Don, but it had always been too soft for that burning opus.

Today, it felt especially round and supple underneath his fingers. He was enjoying himself, until he stuttered suddenly to a stop. Was that cardamom in the counterpoint? It had never been there before. He looked at the violin like it had betrayed him. He was accustomed to the music taking unexpected turns, but that did not mean he always liked it.

He set the violin back into its case. Today he felt like he was a madman, instead of merely being one. He shook a finger at the instrument. "You are not allowed to disappoint Erik as well."

The silent violin mocked him. Shall we resurrect Lazarus again, instead?

Erik shut the lid with unnecessary force.

Eventually, he was back in the kitchen. He set his mask on the table, poured wine, buttered bread, and sat.

Like the violin, the note sat mocking him. The mask sat mocking him, too, but he was used to that. He chewed thoughtfully, staring at the crumpled paper. He smoothed it absently with one hand.

That was where thought seemed to end. He picked up the mask and set it back on automatically. Without really knowing how or why, he found himself at Nadir's door. His hand was hovering to knock, but did not quite make contact with the wood. Why was he here, again? He supposed there was only one way to find out.

The Daroga personally opened the door. His brows rose. "You came. I can't say I'm pleased, but Mojgan will be."

Ah, Mojgan. That's why he was here. Wasn't it? Erik tilted his head. "Are you going to make Erik stand out here, or invite me in?"

The Daroga's eyes sharpened, but he stepped aside. When Erik handed off his coat, Nadir looked at it with suspicion even as he hung it on the stand.

Erik chuckled. "No gunpowder, Daroga."

"Well, you can't blame me for wondering," he replied with a lightness that did not reach his eyes.

"Gunpowder is worthless once it's been soaked so completely," Erik commented. He knew it was a somewhat perverse thing to talk about, but he could not quite stop the words from coming. He never could. He flopped onto the couch.

"I should call you an extraordinary blackguard," Nadir grumbled.

"Erik will do."

"An extraordinary blackguard of an Erik, then." The Daroga also all but collapsed onto a chair. "You're early."

Erik glanced at the clock on the mantle—just after two. "Ah. So I am." He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket, the Daroga's gaze locked on his actions. He slowly pulled out a deck of cards and held them up. "Card trick?"

Ah, that look again that stirred so many, many old memories. Surely, a lecture was coming. Well, if the Daroga thought that Erik would stand to be chastised like a schoolboy at this point in his life!—

It took Erik a moment to realize that the Daroga's head had sunk into his hands, and that his shoulders were shaking uncontrollably. He almost jumped out of his seat to go over to the older man, concerned, before it became clear:

The Daroga was laughing. Hysterically.

As Erik sat watching this unusual display, he couldn't help thinking, No wonder people think I'm crazy, if I laugh like that.

To Spinworld: It's completely canonical to this story that one of the diplomatic officers Mojgan met (and danced with) in England was Daniel Tremblay. Being a deceptively clever fellow, he was of the opinion that she would get on pretty well with his cousin (who, in this timeline, is Mrs. Worthy and a very active member of the Egypt Exploration Society.) But every time I tried to slip that in, it seemed like such a gratuitous detour that it had to be edited out. Alas.