Chapter 6
Let us turn away from this unpleasantness. Christian took to the violin like a cricket to chirping, helped along by hours more practice than even a trained musician would normally attempt. At eight, he was an adept violinist; at ten, he mastered the organ; at twelve, Erik had the pleasure and pride of his son's first composition. The music followed the tale of a scheming spider and a gullible fly. The music, on the grounds that it was what he heard the most, closely followed the score of Don Juan Triumphant. A treat was needed.
A suit appeared at a tailors with instructions to remeasure it for a shorter (though not wider) frame. A spot in the riggings was identified: to Erik's sorrow, Box 5 was not reopened when the rest of the Opera House was renovated. Thanks to this superstitious act by the new owners, the riggings would have to do. The suit proved loosed enough to cover the boy a year more if needed, and the boy blushed with with pleasure at the rare "new" clothing. Hoisted up the riggings by his father, the boy kept a perfect silence as the heavy curtain lifted to reveal the polished stage where a figure stood.
Having seen no one but his pere at close distance, Christian concluded that the figure was not a boy and was therefore an angel. The face was heart-shaped and pretty even in the plain clothing surrounding its strange figure; the hair was twisted up under a nun's habit. A regular audience member would recognise the figure as La Theresé, an emerging soprano with a sweet, sad voice that was sure to make her a popular favourite in tragedy. In this production, she played Agnes, a nun entombed alive for having transgressed against her vow of chastity. Her voice was as liquid as the tears slipping down her face. The air trembled around her melancholy voice. Had it any chance of relieving her sorrow, Christian would have pulled the heart out of his chest.
Erik's heart was also troubled. In Box 6, he recognised a pair of old men gossiping - older, yes, and fatter, but still very much the two theatre owners he had scared away from their purchase. Between them, they held a letter. Their mouths moved slowly, slackened by champagne. The reader may wonder how the opera ghost had kept up to speed with the minutiae of how his opera was run. The answer is simply that, among his many other talents, Erik was an adept lip reader. Normally, he only needed to catch a few words to grasp the meaning. The ex-proprietors' words had more meaning in them than he expected or wanted: "Viscountess", "expecting", "any day now", "the family way".
The revelation split Erik into sharp pieces. In a swift motion, the young and innocent Christine was enveloped into blankets, her gold curls matted to her sweating brow as she whimpered out her labour. She was playing cards and going out on Sundays with someone else, and now she would have one more thing he could never had given her. She would never come back to him now.
The aria ended with a low note held almost like a wail. As Christian raised his hands to appauld, a bony hand clamped down on his wrist.
"We have to leave."
"Please, papa, let me stay a little longer-"
"Now, boy!" Papa Fantôme. "We leave now."
The boy pleaded, protested, cried and complied halfway back through the catacombs, and only then under threat of punishment. He shed his new suit and crawled into the bed he shared with his father, the woman's melancholy voice still choking the air from his lungs when he thought about it. He imagined her voice for his gullible fly and the idea nearly brought him to tears. So horrified was he that he rewrote the piece so that a friendly crown freed the fly. He presented it to his father the next day, but was met with less than the usual enthusiasm. He was offered his first sip of wine as an apology for the night before. When his father was in a better mood, he decided, he was ask to see another aria, or even an entire opera. He watched his father going through his usual ritual of wine, playing Don Juan Triumphant, and painting the same face he liked to paint, the one that looked more like Christian with each passing year.
Neither would return to the surface for three years.