"The cellar! I have to get into the cellar!"
Panic erupted throughout the house and all around her in the wings. La Carlotta's shrill voice pierced the din and a swarm of sycophants clucked about, attempting to comfort her while gendarmes tried to remove the bloated body of the tenor, Piangi. The well-coiffed demimonde of Paris surged from the auditorium, away from the ruins of the new chandelier and the flames that were spreading quickly across the velvet seats and carpeted floor. It was pure chaos and the Phantom the engineer of destruction. The Opera Populaire's personal Angel of Death.
Christine was gone. Vanished before the eyes of Paris at the height of her duet with Piangi. 'With the Phantom.' Meg corrected herself. She had to get into the cellars; she had to find the Angel.
"Madame Giry!" the Vicomte ran up to her mother and she motioned for him to follow. Stuffing a leather bag with things that included a small lantern and matches, Meg darted after them.
"Keep your hand at the level of your eye, monsieur." her mother was saying.
"Like this, monsieur!" Meg demonstrated, with her arm extended, hand flat and level with her eyes. "I'll go with you!"
"No, Meg." Madame Giry shoved her daughter into a nook next to a costume rack in the back hallway. "You must stay here."
"Christine is my friend too." Meg protested. "And what might Raoul do to the Opera Ghost?" she added silently. Christine was a distant second to her worry over the Phantom.
"It is too dangerous! This way, monsieur."
Meg huffed, scrambling back to the wings. There were multiple ways into the lower cellars; she didn't need to follow her mother. But she had no idea how to reach the lowest level where the Opera Ghost apparently dwelt. The shouts of dozens of volunteer firemen greeted her return to the stage. Heavy smoke billowed in the auditorium, rolling up towards the stage. Most everyone had evacuated save for the group of angry voices she heard on the other side of the stage.
"Follow the Vicomte, quickly! Let us hunt down this beast."
"He has preyed on us for too long!"
"A mob!" she hung back, pressing against the wall. Scene shifters, chorus men and general rabble had clumped together to form a mob, who very quickly took off in the direction of Madame Giry and Victome de Chagny. If they reached the Ghost first, they would kill him. Meg blew a long blonde strand of hair from her itchy eyes. She had lingered too long.
Meg began to run, wheezing a little from the smoke inhalation. The trap door in the stage had been overtaken by smoke and the advancing flames; she wracked her brain for another route into the theatre's underbelly. She skittered around a corner and into a deserted hallway that led to the ballet dormitories. Her boots thudded loudly on the wooden floorboards and she encountered no one on her beeline to the dimly lit stairwell tucked away into a dusty corner. She all but threw herself down the steps, tumbling into the first of a series of storage rooms that made up the first cellar. Pulling herself to her feet, Meg continued her journey deeper into the maze.
Fingers of smoke slipped through the cracks of the floors above, tickling her nose, making her cough. The smell of smoke clung heavily to the black trousers and white linen blouse of her Don Juan Triumphant costume.
"He kidnapped your friend. He's killed people. He's a monster, Meg Giry." she muttered angrily skirting the walls of the rooms she passed through, each growing dimmer than the last. "But what monster writes music as beautiful as that?"
Running her hands along the walls for a door or the nothingness of an open stairwell, Meg cursed quietly, finding no passage. She rummaged through her bag. The lantern was small but serviceable, more appropriate as a stage prop than for practical use, but it would have to do. Meg struck a match against the wall and lit the lantern, the flame filling the tinted glass with a weak glow. It wasn't much but it would find a stairwell.
She found what she sought in a room stuffed with old, dusty furniture, far from the stage where the air was stale and smokeless. Behind the stacked divans a doorway stood open, forgotten and leading downward. Meg remembered this particular door now, from her childhood of running recklessly throughout the opera house, exploring before her mother could catch her and drag her back to the barre. The second level cellar was laid out a bit more straightforward than the first, with hallways and doors and not room upon room squished in together.
The air was less smoky but stale and Meg's chest ached for a clean breath. Her boots made a heavy clomping noise on the floorboards, Meg not even bothering to soften her steps. There was no one down here and if there were, they were not likely to trouble her. Faint shouts from the theatre above were gradually swallowed by the distance between them. Her only home was going up in flames and all she could think about was its Phantom.
He was as much a part of that home as her mother or any of the inhabitants of the opera house.
Meg could hardly recall a time when she did not know stories of the Opera Ghost. The delicious fright that she and the other ballet girls pursued in their off-hours. She could not remember when she began to realize that the Ghost was not actually a ghost at all. It had been before Christine came to them, most likely. Her mother often slipped from their quarters at night, to check on the other ladies of the ballet. And sometimes, Meg would find her in Box Five, listening intently to a beautiful voice, a man's voice, giving her instruction, perhaps on his behalf.
If it had been the Opera Ghost, then he was just a man, a real man, living isolated and alone somewhere in that beautiful theatre. Meg Giry knew what it was like to be lonely.
She skidded to a stop and leaned against the wall with a sigh. A childhood spent in the theatre and drilled in ballet had afforded Meg plenty of company. It took hundreds of people to keep an opera company running smoothly and there was almost always someone around. But most of them did not want a tiny tag-a-long and her classmates had been taught early on that there were no friends among them. They were each others competition, for roles, for better spots in the corps de ballet and they learned to view one another suspiciously. As the daughter of the ballet mistress, she was singled out for the abuse of her dance mates and isolated from the rest. When she had not been dancing, Meg played in the cellars. In these rooms filled with the old furniture and forgotten props of former productions, Meg taught ballet to her dolls, sailed the Seven Seas and led revolutions against tyranny and injustice. When she grew older she read quietly and sometimes, she danced, imagining herself in the lead parts reserved for the Prima Ballerina.
A time or two, she left letters for the Opera Ghost, pouring out her childish angst on page after page of her mother's fine paper. Meg had never been certain he had received them and she hoped now that he had not.
Meg moved quickly down the hallway, the dim shape of a stairwell beckoning her further below.
The fourth cellar, at least what she thought was the fourth cellar, was damp and cool. Well below street level, Meg supposed. It was dark down there and she crept carefully through the almost impenetrable blackness, her tiny lantern hardly worth its salt. Somewhere on this level, the furnaces burned bright. Maybe. She had no real idea where she was at. She had hoped there would have been some sort of intermittent light but in a cellar few used, if ever, it was cheaper not to bother. She drew a shaky breath. Perhaps following after Christine and the Phantom had been a poor idea.
"I should turn around," she whispered to the tiny flame dancing inside the lantern. The Opera Ghost had been here for years, he would know how to escape intruders. He did not need her help and he would not welcome it. The Vicomte had gone after Christine, he would rescue her. Meg wrinkled her nose. There were few people in her life more annoying to her than Raoul de Chagny; patron of the opera or no. Leave it to an aristocrat to waltz in with some nonsense about a red scarf and expect a girl to swoon.
"Except she practically did." Meg mumbled, stumbling in the darkness. Until she had seen the Ghost's face for herself when Christine unmasked him that night, Meg could not understand her friend's intense aversion. His manipulation of her innocence seemed to bother her far less than the sight of 'that face'. Raoul was a buffoon, a fop and the Phantom? Well, he was a genius, Meg learned. Discordant, passionate music poured from his soul, unlike anything she had ever danced to. When she danced in Don Juan Triumphant, she felt afire and alive as she never had before.
The air grew heavy with the scent of water and her heart stuttered in her chest. She must be near the lake that Christine had told her about, which meant she had somehow gone from the fourth to fifth cellar without realizing it. The ground began to slope downward and absorbed in what lay ahead, Meg lost her footing with a shriek and tumbled down the smooth incline, landing hard in the gravel below. Her lantern clattered to the floor and rolled away, the flame extinguished.
Heavy darkness ebbed away into a grey luminescence that hung over the subterranean water like a funeral shroud; a perfectly suitable setting for a phantom of anything.
Muffled shouts drifted across the water from the opposite shore. Christine's sweet, strained voice, punctuated by Raoul's stupid one. Angrier voices greeted her from her side of the lake.
"The phantom of the opera is here!"
'Track down the murderer!'
"The mob!" They must have followed her mother. Meg scrambled to her feet, crying out from the sharp pain in her ankle, which she dearly hoped was not a sprain. Wincing as she stepped down, Meg limped as quickly as she could to the water's edge, looking around frantically for a way across. A boat bobbed gently on the opposite shore.
"This is madness." she scolded herself and then threw herself in, gasping with the shock.
"Merde! It's cold!" she began paddling to the other side. Meg coughed, choking on the icy water.
The other side of the lake was a thin strip of land that ended abruptly, cut off by a sheer stone wall. Meg dragged herself through the shallows and collapsed, sputtering, her lungs burning from the unwelcome water. Frantic footsteps grew closer, but the mob had not yet gained the lake.
"Will he follow us?" it was a breathless, wheezy Vicomte. Vicious red marks decorated his neck, they looked like rope burn.
"A noose would be an improvement to his sense of fashion." she snickered and slipped back into the cold water and pressed herself up against the wall, praying not to be spotted. From an entryway she had not seen emerged a disheveled Raoul leading a bridal Christine. Meg was too distracted by the sound of her chattering teeth to give much thought to the wedding gown.
"No, he won't." Christine paused, tugging Raoul from his swift pace. Her beautiful eyes were in shadow but Meg could see the unhappy twist of her lips, her shoulders hunched in slightly as though she were in pain. Without another word, Christine turned away from her fiancé and disappeared back into the Phantom's lair. Raoul called after her but remained on the shore. She reappeared mere minutes later, hands clasped in front and Meg could see fat tears rolling down her pink cheeks. Ushering Christine into the boat, the Vicomte leaped in after her and pushed off, hurriedly poling across the water, desperate to get away from whatever had transpired inside. Once the darkness had swallowed them, Meg trudged back onto the shore, her costume sopping wet, her boots heavy and sloshing with water. She shivered violently and stumbled onward into the house on the lake. She had hoped for stealth but instead squished her way into the well-appointed sitting room, littered with sheet music, overturned chairs, discarded cushions. A woman's dress was slung over a richly upholstered settee; Christine's costume from the Dungeon Act of the opera. The room was devoid of the Phantom.
Muffled cries of the mob outside, across the lake, broke into her thoughts. Splashing and thrashing about in the water as the more hearty among them began to swim across. Did they not find the boat?
"Opera Ghost?" she called softly, hobbling about the room, checking the adjacent rooms and their dark corners. No Opera Ghost. Meg returned to the sitting room and collapsed ungracefully into a chair. "He must have fled." she breathed, filled with relief. A flash of white caught her eye. On a velvet cushion near her sodden feet lay his white half mask, discarded and forgotten in haste. Meg reached down for it, taking it up gently. It was still warm. He could not have gone far, then.
"And he will want his mask." Meg tucked the mask carefully into her very damp bag and rose, poking at the walls and shelves for another route. The mob was nearing the shore and she was almost out of time. It was time to hide.
A swath of black velvet draped richly over a tall object near the old, worn harpsichord. Shards of broken glass glittered on the floor. The scent of damp earth tickled her nose. Meg peeked beneath the velvet and breathed deeply the cool air of a dark passageway. It was the only way he could have gone.
She slipped into the passage, pushing a long panel into place over the broken doorway, hoping it would go unnoticed. It was dark, like the bottom cellars and damp. Limping along, Meg traveled through the darkness, the sounds of the mob bursting through the Phantom's home soon faded into silence, broken only by the occasional drip of water nearby. The courage she had felt earlier, plumbing the depths of the opera house, reaching the underground home, had evaporated and only the growing pain in her ankle remained. Meg winced with each step. She prayed through gritted teeth that there was an exit to this void.
Slosh clunk, slosh clunk, Meg dragged her feet, sounding more like a monster in a Gothic horror than a dancer in the Paris Opera. A shudder overtook her and she paused, resting against the wet and dripping stone.
"Opera Ghost?" Meg called again. There had to be a better name to use. For all she knew, 'Opera Ghost' was insulting. But it was how he had signed his letters to the management. Meg frowned. Every artist she had ever encountered had had a fragile ego and it was always to their mutual benefit for her to caress those egos.
"Maestro?" she tried. He was a musician and a composer. Even the Opera Ghost could be a victim of his own vanity.
A choked sob escaped into the darkness, somewhere ahead of her. Meg stepped forward slowly. Shivering, hobbling and keeping a shaky hand at the level of her eyes, she approached the wounded Opera Ghost.
"Maestro?" Meg whispered again, the sobbing growing louder. He was very near. Meg slumped against the wall to relieve the throbbing in her foot. "Maestro, are you all right?" she asked stupidly.
The sobs ceased abruptly and silence returned to the passageway. It hung heavily, like the moments before a summer storm broke over the city. Harsh laughter rained down cold and hard. Something hissed in her ear and she pressed hard against the wall, trying to absorb into the stone.
"Not even you are that stupid, nosy child." The Phantom's voice bounced around her. "What do you want, petit moucheron?"
Little gnat. Meg winced.
"Begone, child." the voice sighed.
Meg tried to 'begone', she wanted to 'begone', but her ankle no longer wanted to support her and now that she had found him, she was frozen with fear. Her mother had always scolded her about hasty choices and now she was alone in the darkness with a hasty choice who would not hesitate to kill her if he so chose. She had never actually had an encounter with the Opera Ghost.
"You are still here, gnat."
"I am - I am sorry for what they did." Meg's voice shook, with cold, with fear. "The Vicomte, my mother.. Christine -" the air in front of her grew warmer.
"Do not speak her name to me." he hissed, wine soured breath hitting her face.
"T-they are a-a-after you, Muh - muh.. Maestro." she stuttered through her clattering teeth. "A mob - and the theatre is on fire. You need to go!"
The darkness was silent. Meg's head lolled back, hitting the wall. Had he gone?
"And what do you care, moucheron?" he asked mournfully.
"They will kill you!"
"..and?"
Meg wrapped her arms tight around her chest, in a futile effort to warm herself. She no longer had the strength or the will to argue with the Opera Ghost.
"What do you care for the demon, petit criquet?" he murmured, wrapping her with the music in his voice.
"Y-y-you are n-no d-d-demon." she shivered.
"You are soaked through." the Phantom muttered. Strong, thin arms slipped around her and lifted her easily, cradling her to his chest and the cloak settled around them both. It smelled of the earth and of spices. A low, unfamiliar melody rumbled through his chest and filled her mind. And then Meg knew no more.
