That fight by the piano was the afternoon where everything changed for the worse; a minor adjustment from an outsider's perspective of this strange and confusing cage, to be sure—but one that Christine felt as deeply as she'd felt the ropes which rubbed her wrists raw and bloody all those months ago. Sewing scissors could not have cut her so sharply. There was no song to give voice to her vindictiveness like there was the image of Erik, dressed like a casual miscreant, staring at her in shocked stupidity as she threw music in his ugly face.
When Christine supped that night, it was by herself: a solitary meal of bread, old cheese, and wine—along with the delicious absence of one-sided conversation that she'd come to both quietly dread and long for, damned as she was. A queen's feast in his absence. When she went to bed, it was the first time she'd slept alone in months. That night, she was free to spread her toes as wide as she might dare, free to imagine she was floating in the Atlantic or amongst the stars, free to touch herself and not have whatever joy it might yield immediately ripped away by that miserable hair-shirt she called a husband.
Little did Christine know—though she ought to have come to suspect with that poor luck of hers, foolish girl—that her actions would ignite an equally pagan streak in Erik. For though he apologized to her the morning after, with a lopsided smile and a daisy breezily fixed into her braided hair, the incident seemed to embolden the smallest and most grating proclivities in his personality. When Erik dared to pat her shoulder, it was with a palm leadened by the unknown and awful. When he talked to her about anything outside of matters pertaining to home and hearth, it was with an unmistakable smirk plastered across his face. The music lessons might have resumed in a sweeter manner, his words kind and encouraging, but everything else about them was tainted with a knowing grin she did not fully understand—besides that she loathed it. And despite how well he'd behaved himself otherwise, Erik was not the sort of man to readily explain his eccentricities, even in the best of moods. So Christine lay in wait, wondering when the tension that had wrapped itself around her chest would finally release itself like a spring trap.
And then a few weeks later, Christine's husband finally unleashed the full force of his revenge.
That night had started the same as any other, with Christine shutting her book as she bid Erik goodnight from across the drawing room.
"I'm going upstairs, Erik," she said, the dread of Sisyphus on her shoulders as she rose from her armchair. The wretch had not joined her in their bed since the spat by the piano, sleeping God only knows where, if at all; and yet, her husband's absence had not alleviated the anxiety that followed her to sleep in his place. If anything, it had transformed into something less recognizable, a snake nesting in the bed sheets, just out of her sight.
Erik looked up from the notebook in which he'd been scribbling and fixed Christine with an inscrutable expression, playing with the top two undone buttons of his shirt. The demon drank an ungodly amount of wine with his dinner earlier that evening and was now playing at boldness—a most embarrassing habit he'd picked up at mealtimes, including, to her deepest chagrin, breakfast. For her part, Christine had done her diligence and ignored the way his clothes had become damp with sweat, the way he now stank of late summer and man instead of death. The way his eyes watched her with a shamelessness that he would have never dared express before, when they were trapped underground together.
"Good night, wife," he sighed, throwing his head into a long hand as he fixed her with a strange stare. Christine lingered for a moment longer while he blinked at her, before finally releasing a small, irritated puff of air from her lips.
"Is that all you have to say," she said, throwing her arms around her stomach. To her disappointment, he laughed. "Does Christine wish for her Erik to talk to her, then?" When she did not immediately answer, mortified by the idea that the monster was her anything besides a bridegroom in concept only, he returned to his drawing. Of the image he'd had put on paper, she could see little and did not want to divine any further knowledge. "How funny! Her husband imagined she was enjoying the peace, for once."
"You're being unfair," she snapped, unthinking. "I was only bidding you good night." Erik's shoulders shot up to his ears in horrible reflex, his awful head turning, slow and measured, to look at her again. Christine was struck by the impossible idea of bolting from the room, from Bourron-Marlotte, from France itself, and straight into the ocean that had once cursed them both with life, all those eons ago.
"Do you know what unfair is," Erik started, distant thunder lighting up that voice, black and thick as smoke. Christine closed her eyes and prayed for sanity to prevail.
"Erik—"
"I shall tell you what unfair is: not being able to sleep in one's own bed!" And he laughed again, scratching his pen across paper with a viciousness Christine had not witnessed in weeks, months—since the night she'd agreed to marry him. Christine felt her skin go colorless, her jaw dangling all the while. "Oh, spare me that mortified look, my dear . It's Erik's bed that you sleep in—the very bed upon which he was shat into this awful and remorseless world. The very bed that ultimately brought him to his wife. Think about that as you lie there, why don't you, if you're so desperate for company."
It was like being slapped back and forth across the face, so painful was each word Erik lobbed her. He has all of the agony the world could muster rattling around in that skull of his , something within her said. And he will always point it in your direction. Oh, to have said such thoughts aloud. To have had that courage—now that would have been something. What was a kiss compared to that?
"I never said you couldn't sleep in the bedroom," Christine responded instead, twisting her skirts in her fists until they crinkled. "You made that decision yourself."
"And yet I don't recall hearing you raise any concern over the matter," he said, slamming his notebook shut and folding his hands in his lap in satisfaction. "But I suppose Christine would be right—by her own words, what use is a husband who wouldn't know how to treat a whore?"
"You're awful," Christine breathed, recoiling towards the hallway. "Do you know that? How truly awful you are capable of being?"
He made a rude noise and slunk low into the armchair. "And yet you married me all the same," Erik said, in a sing-song voice that made her see violence in turn—if only because he was right, if only because he had wept into her lap and offered her freedom that she was too exhausted and too terrified and too utterly worn down by life to fully believe in. Stupid, stupid girl. "Good night and sweet dreams, my dear."
And then, as if to insult her further, he waved Christine away like she was nothing more than a fly buzzing in his face.
That night, peace avoided Christine entirely; the duvet had been kicked all the way down into a lumpy mess at the foot of the bed, the windows thrown open in a fruitless endeavor to cool the burning anger that ravished her body like a fever. Yet she lay there sweating all the same, dreaming up every terrible thing she might have said back to her husband, if she had any nerve— imagining his awful face frozen in disbelief as she ripped the fabric of their wedded existence into shreds. Christine was too angry, too unspeakably hot to touch herself. Too consumed with the image of her rope-burned wrists, the memory of Erik's sickly, intermittent apologies flooding her ears as Raoul cried out from the precipice of death behind those trick walls. She had almost died that night—they all had—and Erik still had the gall to speak to her as if she entered into this mockery of a marriage freely. Like he hadn't pinned her arm behind her back, all poisonous and hateful words, all doom.
Just as sleep finally came for her, so did her husband, sliding into the bedroom like the shadow he was. Christine screwed her eyes shut as the floorboards creaked under his feet, felt her breath hitch as all went quiet. Though she saw nothing of the man, Christine imagined him raking his eyes across her body, or else was waiting for her to protest and turn him away from the bed. The very bed he was born in, she recalled with a vague shudder, as if she could now feel the tragic life force that ushered him into this world emanating from the mahogany itself.
It was then that Christine decided she would not give Erik the satisfaction her rejection might bring—would not give him another bullet point in the long list of her supposed crimes against him. A wife who turned her own husband away from merely lying in his own bed. She could practically hear the inevitable baying and moaning, like that of a spoiled dog, and managed to suppress her sighs. So as long as he didn't touch her—or talk to her—let the devil sleep next to her, for all she cared. What did it matter now? The moment passed; the mattresses shifted under Christine's body, the sound of shoes clattering to the floor in dreadful percussion.
"That's unfair," she heard a quiet, discomfitingly feminine voice say to the wall. "That's so unfair, Erik." With slow realization, Christine realized it was nothing more than loutish mockery her husband was too drunk to disguise. He chortled languidly to himself and then gasped, as if his spit had taken the wrong turn down his windpipe. As the timbre of his voice slid downwards in mid-cough, Christine bit down on her tongue so hard that she hoped she'd never sing again.
He cleared his throat and tried again: "That's so, so unfair. Erik, you are so, so, so unfair. Unfair—hah!" The mattress rocked beneath her again, the wretch still huffing and muttering all the while. By the distance of his voice, Christine could tell he had turned his back against hers, and thank God for that small mercy. At least he would behave himself in body, if not in spirit. The idiot .
After a few minutes of this bitter inertia, the whispering stopped entirely; Christine began to wonder if Erik had fallen asleep. With a little horror, she realized that a part of her had missed the weight of him next to her. The sound of his breathing, simple and human. The red-blooded notion that she wasn't completely alone in this world, even if she was cursed.
And then the slow, new nightmare began to make itself known: just as Christine was about to join her husband in slumber, she felt a tremor beneath her, as though a small earthquake was passing through the mantle of dirt beneath their home. When it failed to subside after several moments, let alone disturb the combs and cut-glass bottles on her powdering table, she felt herself blanch in terror. Soon after, a muffled, ragged rasping filled the bedroom in downbeat to the rocking of the bed frame, running up its walls like mold and rot.
He isn't. Surely, he wouldn't—
But he would. And he was. Inexperienced as she might have been, Christine was not so stupid as to imagine that Erik never sought his own pleasure, as most men did, as surely as she sometimes searched for her own out of desperation and loneliness. The thought—horrible as it was—had first occurred to her during that long morning after her first abduction, when Erik had insisted she take a bath in that new and most hated home beneath the earth. She remembered her terror, laughed at how it paled in comparison of what was to come, but still—it only made sense to wonder, to worry, especially when impressed with the knowledge that Erik had been watching her from behind a dressing room mirror for months.
What did a man like him do all day, five stories below the ground, when no woman would spare him a look without the duress of his voice, his music, or his rage? Why had he not taken her—tonight, last week, three months ago, the moment he'd first laid eyes up on her? It would have been easy enough, horrible man—
A pathetic cry pierced her thoughts, descresendoing into a series of quiet sobs. Stillness followed.
Christine closed her eyes and prayed to no one for patience.
#
It was in early September, five months after their vows, that Christine decided she could no longer bear it. Five months of cooking dinners and reading by the fire in neutered companionship, and all the while the two of them never spoke a word about the unfortunate and nasty addition of Erik's onanism. Every day, her husband hummed and petted and gently talked with his wife, like he wasn't humiliating her on a nightly basis, dangling the long threads of his lust above them as he did.
And every night, Christine grimaced and grit her teeth and pretended like none of it bothered her: the familiar and crude staccato from the bicep of Erik's fist slapping against his most private areas, the pathetic keening and whimpering he didn't even attempt to stifle, the gentle lurching of the bed frame rocking her into a deeper rage. Through the lashed slit of her eyes, even the bobbing of an errant curl across her forehead made Christine sick with anger. How many more nights would she have to lay down with her eyes closed, pretending that she didn't resent her husband for finding pleasure when none existed in that outwardly sunny house.
If this is to be the rest of my life, perhaps I truly will die—
The tempo of Erik's movements had picked up, as it always did when he neared completion. The image of his seed spattering across the duvet, of her having to wash it out again and again—
"Must you do that," Christine gasped, turning to sit up in their bed, the bedsheets reflexively pulled up to her chest. Erik jolted away from her side so suddenly that it looked as if he might topple to the floor; she would have laughed, if only he hadn't started muttering flattery and apologies, all of which only served to irritate her further.
"I am—forgive me—it was only—"
It didn't matter if he was the world's ugliest or its most handsome man; at that moment, Erik had never looked more worthless. His fists balled in his nightshirt, the moonglow illuminating every rib in his chest, his erection bobbing uselessly in the air. A brief image of their roles reversed—of her riding out every bit of frustration she'd known over the last year against her palm while her husband lay simmering next to her—made Christine seethe. She could only imagine how Erik would act in such a scenario, how gleefully he might have indulged in her shame, and the vision almost broke her. The wrath burst from her as pus from a boil.
"Do you really think I'm sleeping when you debase us both like this?" Her voice practically erupted from her body.
"Forgive me—"
"Or do you think I'm too stupid to notice you grunting away like an animal?"
"It is only—"
"Is it not enough that I married you ," Christine spat, ripping the sheets off of them both. She was sure they could hear her screaming in Calais and could not bring herself to care. "That I share everything that remains of my life with you? Our bed, Erik? Is that not enough?"
He stared at her with an arm lifted to his bare face, as if she had struck him with an open palm. For a moment, they sat their breathing heavily—her, in a fit of anger that threatened to drive her mad. Him, in bald arousal ripped in half.
"No," he said, between heavy gulps of humid air.
Christine stared at him. "No?"
"No," he repeated, this time with more force, his misshapen lip in the facsimile of a sneer. "No. Unfortunately for Erik and his little wife, it is not enough." He lowered his arm, covering that fat shame with his nightshirt, before turning that ruin of a face away from Christine, long hands digging into the mattress with a violence that unnerved her. "It will never be enough. And yet he must content himself with his cunt-hand in the same way poor Christine must content herself with Erik's face." Here he scoffed. "And all the little luxuries that his face has afforded them both."
Thus he stood, smaller and more pathetic than Christine had ever seen him, as if this admission burned him more than any other farcical aspect of their entire relationship. Without turning back to look at his wife, Erik snatched at his pillow, grasping it to his poor chest like it was dignity itself, and left the bedroom.
#
The idea came to Christine on a Wednesday.
It was a bright September morning, one where she found herself in the kitchen chopping vegetables while the breeze escorted her a million miles away from home. First there was quiet, and then there was the sort of memory that one buries preemptively—a conversation, a nod, a laugh so terrible that the soul rejects it immediately. Perhaps it had been the smell of the stove, or else her hair grazing the back of her neck. Such was the awful magic of memory.
There was an inn, warmth and oak, nestled somewhere in Sweden—or perhaps Norway, or else Belgium, or perhaps somewhere she'd only conjured in dreams during the bleakness of childhood. Papa working in a barn, shoveling filth in exchange for a warm place for them to sleep. An innkeeper's wife commandeering his sad child to help peel potatoes in the kitchen with her own daughter—a girl only a handful of years older than herself, yet as blunt in speech and quick with a paring knife as any adult man. To Christine, who had only ever known the road and what lay beyond it, to be an innkeeper's wife was a quiet existence, albeit a comfortable one.
It was a cold night, close to the beginning of Advent. The innkeeper's daughter, her face now a greasy smear in Christine's memory, found the younger girl sitting under the large kitchen table, playing with her rag dolls in peaceful ceremony.
"Little girl," she whispered. She reeked of onions, strongly enough that Christine smelled it through the miasma of the burning wood and stone. "Little girl, look. I have a secret."
Papa did not take kindly to secrets; naturally, Christine was intrigued. Before she could so much as breathe, the elder girl stooped to join Christine in her hiding spot.
"See?" she said, unfolding her apron in her lap. With a slowness that belied her curiosity, Christine turned her head, eyes widening. Scattered upon a setting of homespun, littered with soil, were several mushroom caps, red as the sort of apples one saw in dreams, dotted with white in the manner of a pincushion. They might have charmed Christine, if only the contrast of their brightness amidst the dun brick floor hadn't disturbed her. Faerie food , she worried.
"They are magic," the girl confirmed. "Plucked from the woods this morning, just as the moon went to bed. Eat one with me." Christine stared back and began to shake her head in refusal, until a claw dug itself into her little thigh. The other girl's face flattened into a sneer. "Eat one."
"You first," Christine stuttered, looking down at her doll's ratted yarn braids. "You picked them." Each syllable felt progressively stupider as it flew from her mouth. A dark cast fell across the innkeeper's daughter, her eyes narrowing. The hand that had found stinging purchase in Christine's flesh burrowed in even deeper, to the point that tears sprang to her eyes.
"You first, baby," the hellion said. Her voice had lowered into terrifying sibilance, the magnitude of her power over the younger girl dawning on her like the Son of the Morning himself. In the distance, she heard the innkeeper's wife laughing with some unseen stranger. "Is that what you are? A baby, who has to be told what to do?"
It was not Christine's fault that she had no will of iron. No mother to gently tell her right from wrong. No siblings to tease her into diligence. No grandmother to scare her sweetly with fables and the macabre fancies that beset the aging mind. There was only her Papa, who had never given her a reason not to trust him. And there would be hell to pay in fleeing, in disobeying Papa's orders to stay put and stay quiet while he toiled away for their survival.
So, whey-faced and near tears, poor little Christine held out a palm and summoned her courage. She ripped through the toadstool meat while the innkeeper's daughter watched in rapt attention—her first audience—and swallowed. And for a little while, it seemed as if the mushroom had been nothing more than a mushroom, bitter and tough.
Until Christine saw her mother leering at her from between the logs of the kitchen fire, the faceless woman she'd become in Christine's memory now wagging her tongue like a lizard. She remembered little after that, besides crawling on her stockinged knees to the hearth—the bright, searing pain radiating through her palms as she stuck her hands into the hellish conflagration. Her little hands melting away, as surely as the flesh sloughed off of her mother's ghost. The small nose dissolving into a void, the pearls of her teeth cracking into shards—the future of them all, Christine realized.
She remembered waking up covered in her own vomit, Papa clutching her to his chest like she was already dead. Remembered the innkeeper's wife throwing them out onto the road, shrieking about strange fiddler and his possessed daughter come to destroy their poor little peace, while Christine wailed uselessly about mushrooms and noseless mothers. Remembered how weak whole body felt afterwards, as she limped behind her Papa to wherever their next home might be.
"Are you so eager to join your Mama," he'd said, when he could finally bring himself to talk to the terrified little girl. The thunder of the gods was in those gray eyes, and it terrified Christine to look at her own father. "Do you want to die, Lotte? Do you want to leave me alone on this Earth?"
Back in the sun-drenched present, Christine's knife clattered against the scrubbed floor.
#
That afternoon had been as sunny and mild as the morning's weather promised. When the bread had been baked and music made, Christine released herself to the back garden; the nexus between the trim little lawn and the forest terrified her into smiling, scared her into laughter. A small twist of the neck, to check that she was not being watched. A quick scrape of her palms across the apron, if only to allay the profuse coating of sweat upon them. She could hear Erik's guitar ringing out a madrigal from his little office and prayed that he was lost in that gorgeous despair.
It was only five, ten, twenty minutes to find the little beasts that called to her. The usual ambiance that echoed through the woods felt strangely absent, at least compared to the blood rushing up into Christine's ears. It was as if every creature in the wood knew what she was contemplating and wanted nothing to do with her; nature had finally abandoned her to the loneliest and most warped corners of her being, on top of everyone and everything else.
She plucked each toadstool with a nervous paw—saw a vision of herself, a timid eagle plucking away at Prometheus' liver; surely, Christine wondered, after immortal lifetimes of gruesome indulgence, the eagle knew of its host's torment—must have heard his screams, smelled the piss running down his legs, heard the pleading for release as its beak overflowed with bile and tendon.
It must have.
Into her apron pocket went the little blotters, along with the last bit of Christine's sanity. It was like being engaged to Raoul all over again—the immense secrets, the wandering around a home that was not your home; she laid the mushrooms out on a rock blessed by direct sunshine, somewhere in the recesses of the garden where domicile and wilderness blended together. And all the while, Christine half-prayed for a deer or else a bird or some other living thing to eat them, in a moment of animal stupidity, and lift the weight of this fresh sin off of her consciousness. When she returned the next morning, however, Christine was dismayed to see them still clinging onto the juice of life, as virile and speckled as if they'd just been pulled from the dirt.
She nearly dissolved into tears on the spot, until she recalled the barrels of gunpowder Erik had kept hidden within the bowels of the Opera. Somehow, she found a quiet moment to marvel over the sheer patience it must have taken, the immense time and dedication he must have shown in squirreling the horrible and countless things away so thoroughly; the best treacheries, she supposed, took time.
By Sunday morning, the vermillion caps lay dried and withered in their hiding place, as shriveled and bloodless as their intended victim. She snatched a half portion from their resting spot and plunged them into her apron pocket, kicking the rest into the long grass nearby. Surely, if one made a little girl sick, it would take more more for a full grown man to…
To what? She thought Erik dead enough, with that ramshackle countenance, that miserable personality—but to what?
"Christine," a voice called from the kitchen door. Erik's voice. Erik dressed in his weekend finery and false nose, looking shockingly normal from a distance. She squinted back at him like a frightened rabbit, trembling. He knows , he knows, he knows—
"What?" It was less of a question, and more of a dying yelp. An earthy pungency filled Christine's nose as she wiped her hands on her apron and walked as casually as she could manage to her husband. As she closed the distance between them, she clocked Erik's strange, inward posture—the inability to meet her own eyes. "What is it, Erik?"
"Would you care to walk with me into town," he asked, a queer timidity in his words. When she didn't answer immediately, the man twitched and ran a hand through that graphite hair. "It's only—it is—it's a beautiful day."
"No," Christine blurted out. When his crestfallen expression was too much for her to bear on top of the treachery at hand, she decided that lying would be more agreeable. More fair. More what they both deserved. "It is the perfect day for gardening. The season is about to turn and the weather won't be as kind. You understand."
"I do," he answered after a long moment. And to Christine's great dismay, Erik removed his jacket, folding it neatly before depositing it on the little iron bench against the wall. A flash of his bare forearms—his sleeves were rolled up quickly, eagerly. "A spade then," he said, simpering, his awful smile slanted her in her direction. "I must have a spade. I am Christine's helpmeet, after all."
God in heaven, she thought, the mushrooms tugging at her pocket like iron ingots. I am going to hurt him.
The afternoon passed in slow agony, Erik singing English folk songs as he thrived in the soil; Christine tried her damnedest to follow suit, until she had the thankful excuse of preparing supper to pull her away. Once in the dark kitchen, dripping in sweat, she leaned against the wall and patted at her pocket for reassurance. She pulled out the mushrooms and sighed—they felt as real and fleshy as a human body. As they collapsed underneath the weight of her mortar and pestle, she imagined it was Erik's skull she was smashing in. When she sprinkled the powdered remains into that evening's soup, prayers on her breath for the first time in weeks, Christine imagined they were his ashes.
#
They took dinner that night, as they often did, in the kitchen—the westernmost room in the house, its whitewashed walls hanging on to what remained of the sun's warmth, folding it into the large hearth, the butter-yellow light of the lamps. Much to Christine's surprise, her husband ate his dinner without the usual spat of protest, without the litany of muttering, without his irritating dance of fork scraping listlessly across plate at the thought of food. She waited, lungs pregnant with breath. First there was one mouthful of soup—certainly, he must have suspected something—and a pause:
"I confess," Erik said, eyes glimmering from across the table. "I never imagined you spending your days working yourself to death over a stove." He held her gaze evenly, and Christine understood all too quickly his intentions: he was in the mood to pick a fight. On this night, of all nights.
She shrugged lightly, despite the violent anxiety making ribbons of her. "There are worse ways to spend a day. The kitchen is warm and clean."
"Hmm," Erik answered, his spoon dragging against the wide rim of his bowl, before it plunged back into the soup. "I rather thought you'd prefer singing. Or shopping. But I suppose any time to yourself is a gift, no?" He raised a bone-licked ridge that might have been an eyebrow in a happier life. Another mouthful down the Euphrates of his throat, swilling through the gold of his voice like backwash from a bog. "Erik knows how his wife enjoys her time alone."
I do enjoy it , she thought, bowing her head over her own untouched dinner. Absent-mindedly, Christine picked at the slice of bread on the little plate to her left, cursing herself a dozen times over for her foolishness. How stupid she was, to hide her treachery in a bowl of soup. And her not so much as even tasting it. Erik must have suspected something—
And yet the spoon lifted to the fissure of Erik's mouth, as smoothly and deliberately as a bird to its nest, pouring the contents of her sin down that maw as neatly as the bits of escarole and onion scattered amongst it. Twice, three times he repeated the motion, as obedient as a child being scolded into finishing his food, until Christine blinked and half of the broth seemed to have vanished.
"I do enjoy my time alone," she said out loud, returning his stare with a boldness that shocked her. "I do."
Erik released his spoon with a clatter. For a moment, Christine felt the panic she'd been trying to repress all week wash over her being, pins in her skin. Perhaps he was already dying. Perhaps she'd misjudged her memories, or perhaps she had really wanted him dead. It had only been a few mouthfuls of soup—
Instead, he laughed.
"At least you've learned some honesty." She must have blanched, even under the lamp light, for—"Come, come, my wife! Does your Erik not eat the food you prepare him? Does he not take you into town at the faintest whiff of wanting for gloves or a pretty hat? Has he not left your damned virgin's veil as unstained and perfect as you seem hellbent on keeping it? He is the better man for it! You can't pretend marriage hasn't suited you, too, in this respect."
The better man for it . She wanted to choke, to vomit, so did her pulse ebb to the memory of his manhood in his fist. Her head wrenched upwards, the bread falling from her hands. She shoved chair backwards across the scrubbed floor, legs groaning like earth tremors.
"Learned some honesty? It is a miracle I've retained anything resembling morals over these last few months, pinioned to you, of all men."
"There she is," he laughed again, his long hands clasping together in triumph. Her anger was so sudden and hot that, for a moment, Christine completely forgot about her plotting. "Why do you hide from your Erik, Christine, when he can so easily sniff you out? I was only commending you for your cooking."
"Well, you've a cruel way of expressing it," she said, plucking the napkin off her lap before throwing it to the ground in a crumpled heap. "Speaking in riddles. Making remarks over every little thing I do in this godforsaken house like I'm some senseless idiot and not your wife. Exposing yourself like an animal."
"What nonsense," he started, mirroring his wife as she made her way to her little feet, hands as wide as serving plates against the stained tablecloth. "Exposing myself like an animal!" He cackled, rounding the corner of the kitchen with the raw ferocity of a demon. "Oh, do forgive me for not running at you and pushing up your skirts where you stand, if that's what you would prefer, dearest! Do you know, Christine, that your greatest tragedy is seeing cruelty in every errant wind or crumb. I've given you the only warm recesses of my heart, the largess of my pocket—which I would give you a hundred times over, regardless. And yet you're the one so determined to turn this marriage into a satyr's play."
It was here Christine laughed, and it echoed through the little house with the same resonance as a scream might have. The damask wallpaper, the mahogany paneling, the little candle niches—they seemed to soak up her mirth like the roots of a thorn bush. Her hands slapped against them in sick camaraderie as she stumbled down the hallway, the rum she'd been sipping at all day making its presence known.
"My tragedy," she shrieked across the corridor, boisterous and smiling, between peals of wrath. "My tragedy. It is only my tragedy because you have dragged me down to hell with you."
It was only when she crossed the threshold of the sitting room that she understood the weight of her meaning. When Christine lurched against the piano, its leg creaking, a jarring chord rising to greet her cackles, she noticed a sincere sense of alarm rippling through her husband. One long arm steadied the jilted instrument as if it were a frightened child; the other wrapped around her shoulder, spinning her hunched figure in his direction.
"You think I make a mockery of this marriage, Christine," Erik hissed, his eyes razor blades, his unmasked face beaded with sweat, like a lady's gown. "But it is you—you who ignore your obligations. It is you who builds your little walls. You who spends her days wandering the woods like a banshee, moaning and wailing like you've only a pile of bloodied shirts to return home to. I've given you a beautiful house. Sunshine. The image of a devoted husband, however mangled. And yet this is how you choose to behave—how you choose to see me."
Oh, how Christine prayed to the Virgin for strength in those seconds— for the literal might to grab him round the waist as easily as he did her, to fling him into the compost—to hell itself, for all she cared. And yet, for all her prayers, she was only granted wrath, or else, the sheer misfortune to finally speak her mind. Mindlessly, her hands clawed at the front of Erik's linen shirt, as if to rip the skin off of him. It was only with a passing awareness that she felt the clammy glamor that had settled upon his breastbone, the unusual twinning of warmth and ice radiating off of him in place of his usual stench.
"Christine! " His fingers wrapped themselves around her forearms, and she screamed wordlessly in his face out of reflex. Did he not also feel the rope that cut through her wrists that one endless night? What of his hands? "Christine," Erik tried again, his voice a stern plea. She kicked him uselessly in the shins, spat at his feet.
"Do you mean to kill me," she asked. The air was sucked out of the room entirely—even the little fire in the hearth went strangely quiet at her question, the hate ebbing through the walls now still as pond water. Their whole existence wanted to know the answer. Erik lurched on his feet again and released her hands, as if the nastiness of her words were depleting the very essence from him.
"I beg your pardon? Kill you?" He played at the top button of his shirt, swaying. "How could you possibly say something so deeply and profoundly stupid—"
"You meant to kill me," Christine pressed on, veins electric. "When you made me choose between a life with you, or else the ruin of everyone else. Marry me, or everyone will be dead and buried , you said. You meant to kill me. Both of us. Yet here we are. Why haven't you killed me yet?"
Erik backed away from her, his eyes wide and wild, hands thrown up in defense. "I never meant—what Erik said then was born out of spite. You must understand that he— I— was trying—"
"Kill me!" She was amazed at how easily the words flew from her mouth, would have laughed at the stupid expression on her husband's face were the situation not so explosive. "Kill me! Fuck me! Do what you want with me—only put me out of my misery!"
The silence that followed was as ugly as the man Christine called hers, who now rocked on his feet, as if walloped by a great fist. In the moment that followed, there was no sitting room. No little garden beginning to bloom with begonias and lamb's ear, no shoots of pink and sprays of green. There was no Bourron-Marlotte, nor Paris—maybe there had never been. In that moment, there was only the sound of breathing, the sound of tears leaking from two sets of eyes, and the hideous truth of their marriage, laid bare.
"What will become of me, Erik," Christine whispered as she placed her face in her hands, the very nodules in her throat bobbing and twisting like kite twine, her soul snapping just as neatly. "On the day you finally have broken me in and gotten your way—when you have sullied me and wrecked me entirely—when you have lived out every rotten fantasy in that head of yours, regardless of my supposed moaning and wailing? What will become of me then, Erik? What will become of us when you have finally won?"
"When I've won," he murmured, raking a hand across his forehead. "When I've won?" The question echoed through the little house. He leaned into her unevenly, drunker than usual, before shoving that hideous face of his directly up against hers. "The day I want nothing from you is the day I hope death finally takes me." He blinked hard, eyes like lighthouses signaling a storm. "For the only time Christine could ever love her Erik is… is on the day he is as dead as his face."
Christine stepped back to get a better look at the large shadow looming above her. Saw the cavern of his nose, the pustules that seemed to perennially collect around it, the lips that weren't lips. Saw the tears carving out trenches on skin that had already been claimed by thorny blue veins and countless discolored stigmas. Erik looked as dead as she felt, and the knowledge ran through her like a blade.
Tell him he's right , she thought, bowing her head. His footsteps, uneven and clumsy, filled her ears, told Christine that her husband was crawling away from her in disgrace. To the office? To the bedroom? To drown himself in the bathtub? She assured herself it mattered little. Tell him. Break the spell. Let this end.
It was only the sound of glass—an entire cupboard's worth, cascading to the hard floor with the quick relentlessness of mortar shells—followed by a profound thump that sent the entire first floor shaking that Christine remembered the mushrooms. As she felt herself stiffen in horror, one last little thought followed her out of the room, laughing and hissing all the while:
Today is the day you might give Erik everything he's ever wanted.