If Christine lived another hundred years, she would never forget the image of Erik toppled by the foot of the attic stairs, half of the china in the curio that occupied the end of the hallway laying broken there with him. It was a painful miracle that his fall hadn't taken the entire cabinet down with him, trussed up against its lower shelves like a scarecrow and convulsing as violently he was, desperately trying to pull himself up like a drowning rat.
Go to him, Christine thought, as she stood bolted to the floor. What if he is really dying, and all you did was sit here and watch? As she bit into her lip, the question became less of an admonishment and more of a philosophical question. Death was always in the equation of their relationship, had always been the backbone of it, from the moment Erik first heard her weeping over her Papa; Christine recalled those first few weeks in the new house, wondering if they might have finally escaped its rotten pall, even if the revulsion for her husband lingered.
"Help me," a voice—once so beautiful, now her reality—gurgled, the sound of cotton rustling against the floor boards as loud as a gunshot. I am Death, she thought; the realization wrung at her heart. As she took the long march down the hallway, each step was tentative and nervous, like she was walking to a wedding altar. It felt apt—what was marriage, if not two souls becoming one? How many times had Erik made this walk, looked down at some helpless soul writhing in terror before tossing them to their end? That was her, here and now—wasn't it?
The air reeked with the spoiled remains of dinner, far too much for her to feel anything kinder than blind shock—but, to her horror, Christine found herself unable to leave her husband to his lonesome.
"Please… help me," Erik pleaded again, his knees colliding into the wooden floor. She saw the endless planes of his body quiver with effort as he tried to regain some composure, only to collapse again into calamity; such exertions compelled him to vomit all over a spot she'd mopped the day before. Must you do that, Christine caught herself thinking, as flushed and irritated as when she caught him pleasuring himself. Must you do that, Erik? A moment of weakness and then another moment. He was stringing a necklace of such moments for her; it wrapped around her neck as powerfully his hands might have, in another lifetime spent together in the dark.
"Get up," she said, holding out her hands. Erik looked up at her, his hair clinging to that rotting forehead, eyes fluttering like butterflies. Christine thought of stroking his cheek, of making the foolish attempt to gather the bulk of him up in her own trembling arms. Would he even believe she was real, if she showed him kindness? A question for less pressing situations, but one she couldn't help but consider as the man before her lay gasping and puking on the floor.
"Get up," she repeated, gesturing with her outstretched arms. "How will I clean the floor if you don't get up? Ridiculous man." For a moment, Christine thought she might lose her courage—might run from the little house and into the night, lost to the woods. What sort of being might I change into then? But Erik blinked at her, however languidly and weakly, and nodded his head. It was as if Christine had turned some miraculous key, the way he meekly looked at his knees and grasped her hands without argument. The way he leaned against her, a shaking arm cloaking her shoulders as they slowly climbed the stairs.
She sat him down upon the bed and helped him out of his clothes, which dripped with perspiration and stank of her perfidy; it was not unlike undressing a doll, Christine told herself, as her fingertips undid each shirt button with detached diligence, as she slid the stinking garment off shoulders knobby and speckled as trout skin. The whole while Erik sat there numbly—too ill to be self-conscious or ornery, to reject her utilitarian care or feel shame at his state of undress. Too close to death to make them feel alive by touch. In the earlier months of companionship, such a scenario would have frightened or repulsed the young woman. To see him with his head bowed, as naked and ugly as the day he was made. But now, be it through her own guilt or the fascinating, docile nature that had fallen over Erik, it was not so awful as she might have imagined. Lift the arm, wipe that nothing face with a damp cloth, smooth the hair down. There, there, there. All I need is to kiss him on the head.
"My good girl. My Diana. My woman incarnate," her husband rasped as she pulled a clean nightshirt over him. Christine paused at his words, eyes flitting downwards to meet his own. She expected to see him smiling and smug, throwing her kindness back in her face; instead, Erik looked beyond her, through her heart, sputtering gold fixed to the bare wall. Her heart lurched. That daring left hand of his, the one that had reached out to her fruitlessly so many times, fluttered ungloved in the space between them like a leaf, before falling down to its master's side. His eyes rolled again. "Your Erik is going to be sick again."
And so she ran for the bucket and clean rags, as easily as if he meant to guide her through another breathing exercise or discussion about her soft palette. After he finally choked out those last bits of bile, Erik collapsed upon the pillow, quietly repeating Christine's name to the wall. She had seen sick animals die—such was the nature of having slept in more barns than bedrooms in her youth, to have come from the great nothing of nature—and the way Erik writhed and whimpered against the mattress was enough to temper the guilt she'd been pushing down all week into a stealth blade. She had pondered Erik's death a million times, spent some nights during those first hellish weeks he'd kept her tethered to him beneath the opera praying for it, in the same way foregone people prayed half-heartedly to be struck down and put out of their misery. But for him to actually die, here, tonight, after he'd spent all day fussing over flower beds? To let him purge himself inside out, after she had seen him in old trousers, covered in dirt, sweating and smiling like any other man?
An hour passed, during which Christine pressed what she had done out of her mind and cleaned up the mess Erik had made in the hallway. Each shattered plate was a meditation, the fine willow pattern stamped across them now broken and new. The splinters in the cabinet were nothing, the little bottom shelf that now lay askew one more thing to dance around. The vomit on the floor was proof she had married a man and not a statue. Her swift dinner of bread and wine held little interest—not even for the moment it might allow Christine to catch her breath. She wiped her hands across her skirts and returned to the bedroom, preparing herself to find a dead man.
But though the light in the room was weak, it persisted and fought the shadows. And so too did Christine's husband.
"She's with me," Erik drooled, half-bent over the side of his bed like an old shirt. Even through the dimness, she could make out the sweat cascading on his forehead, where the veins pulsing below the skin were bleached of color. With renewed force, he vomited into the bucket she'd placed on the floor, moaning and weeping all the while. It was just another long race in which Christine was once again forced to walk the line of life and death for her husband. Forced to watch him twist in his bed, talking to shadows, while she struggled to change him out of his ruined clothes yet again.
"Christine," he whispered as she went to look for a clean nightshirt, his maw dribbling onto the pillow, his voice stripped of every beauty it had ever possessed. It was not unlike a child's voice. "You are here. I feel you…."
Blinking hard, she moved from the little spot in the corner of the bedroom, smoothing her apron and trying to swallow her nerves. Her left hand pulsed nervously in the apron's little pocket, the mushrooms sweating gold streaks against her palm, sluicing across her ring finger. Each step towards the bed felt like knives into the soles of her feet. When she lowered herself onto the mattress, it sagged beneath her in disappointment.
"What is it, Erik," she asked, surprised by the softness in her voice.
"It's her," he croaked, that birch branch of an arm slung over his face.
Her?
"What do you mean, 'her'?" She battled down the urge to stroke what was left of his hair, which shone as healthy man's might have, so drenched with sweat was it. A queer paranoia crept over her—was this her a woman who might have had the fiber of kindness in her? A small shame passed over her head, a buzzing fly. "It is only you and I in the room. In the whole house."
Erik heaved and trembled for a minute. A laugh flitted through the rafters. "I feel her here…" From over his arm, his unfocused eyes found hers. "As easily as I feel you here." A wide palm traced the cavern between his chest and her bottom, the wrinkles on the bedclothes smoothing under his touch. Christine regarded his hand in the same way one might regard a rain storm in the summer—dreading ruination, welcoming relief.
With a violent seizure, Erik rolled over onto his other side; his bare shoulder blades shone in the moonlight like knives. Christine blushed and looked back down at her lap.
"I love her," he wept to nobody but his pillow, his body curling into a tight ball. "She walks into the ocean as naturally as if she once had a tail, and it's made me love her all the more. I love her." A shiver ran down Christine's spine, each individual thread in the bed sheet rending with the intensity of bones snapping. "Would you love her, as I do?" And here the corpse of a man hacked and slithered, Christine frantically standing and reaching for the bucket lest he vomit again. When she looked back at him, Erik's body jerked strangely against the mattress, like a wind-up toy, or relentless waves slamming against a levee.
"You cunt," he panted. "You sick-hearted cunt. When I join you in Hell, I will spit on your corpse." He writhed like a snake and groaned as Christine sat in mortified silence, cringing as he sobbed with such intensity that she worried for the candle flickering on the bed stand by his head. She had already spent painful eternities with him, sealed away from the world in that hellhole on the lake, but the prospect of being trapped in the dark with Erik in an ordinary stone cottage terrified her to an irrational extent. Such behavior belonged in a cellar, to mold and worm. To realize that the veneer of normality Erik has given her was just that—
Normality.
What was normal about a new home every three nights on the road, a papa who made rules and homes and discarded them as easily as a bad hand of cards? What was normal about a godmother who told her charge to believe in angels, let alone angels that lurked in walls? What was normal about a vicomte loving someone like her, if he even could? Slowly, the grinding, the swearing, the ripe and rank agony fizzled into silence, punctuated only by Erik's ragged breathing. And then the quiet melted altogether, butter in a sizzling pan, hot tears slipping and weaving around Christine's very being.
"I'm sorry," Erik whispered, eyes glassy. "I don't mean those things. I am sorry." She stood like that for only the Lord knew how long, looking at and through her husband in terrified revelation. "I wish I could talk to you about her. I wish I could tell you about my wife. You would laugh. You would simply love her. And perhaps love me, because of her. I am sorry."
A thousand images—of Erik as any other man, of him laughing in the rain, playing parlor songs with the windows thrown open, of him introducing her to the ghost he now spoke to, as all husbands introduced the wives they loved—flashed in her mind. It was one thing to say "I love you"; it was another, Christine supposed, to say it in front of other people, to make them bear witness to the person who made sense of the most wonderful and awful things about you. I love you. A bravery. Funny, how there were so many words to describe her husband, and she had never once thought to call him brave before.
Somewhere in her reverie, Christine heard Erik's voice, hoarse but somewhat calmer. "I'm sorry, khoshgelam. Your little rat has made a mess of everything. Your little rat has strangled himself with his own tail; you warned me, darling. You told me I was an idiot, and you were right… as always… and now I count stars alone."
He now spoke with such dazed and gorgeous affection that Christine's heart nearly beat for him of its own will, despite the knowledge that the wretch was addressing a dream and not her; weakly, Erik began to sing, that lovely voice now little more than powdered glass, rendered in a language she couldn't have begun to name. He still gently rocked his head against the pillow, but it was as if his song consumed what remaining vigor was left to him.
Without understanding why, Christine crossed back to her side of the room to lay down next to Erik, turning inwards for the first time since they had started sharing a bed. It was a cruel irony that all she saw was his back—somehow as ugly as his face, all angles and cartilage and scar tissue. The urge to run her hands over it was strong—as strong as the urge to pull up those mushroom caps, as unshakeable as the urge to hurt him again and again, into infinity, had been and still was. It was strange, but no more strange than anything else that had happened in Christine's short life. No more strange than watching Erik weep over his shadowfolk, speaking to them as violently and sweetly as he spoke to her.
"Hello, Erik," Christine whispered, her hands grasping at the bedsheet like they were prayer beads. "I'm here." A ripple went through her husband's naked body. The music died swiftly.
"Who are you," he asked hoarsely, a question Christine only now realized she had been turning over in her head without answer for the whole of her little life. Who was she, now that she was no longer Daae, as nameless and lost as the man who claimed her? Who was she, that so flippantly committed such harm and, even worse, felt so guiltless about it? Her husband?
"Are you dead like me?" Erik wondered aloud. It was Christine's turn to shiver. Perhaps he had the right of it. Perhaps she had turned the wrong key and perished in a burst of flame and smoke, her ashes lost to the rubble of his adoration. Perhaps this was Hell, and Hell was dishes and ironing and nothing but the company of the man who loved her.
"It's only me," she said, instead.
"An angel." The reverence in his voice nearly broke her, nearly robbed Christine of her courage, nearly sapped her of the insanity that had come over her. And that would simply not do. It was unfair to be yoked to someone so damned, to be dragged into such ruin against her will—it was only justice that she at least try to earn her condemnation. With new determination, Christine wrapped a tentative arm around Erik's drenched and whitewashed back, her chest brushing against the crenellations of his spine; he whimpered like an animal. Lowering her voice, feeling more wicked than she thought was humanly possible, Christine brought her lips against his misshapen left ear. She felt her own breath as surely as Erik must have, her fingernails raking violently against the concave form of his abdomen.
"Tell me, Erik," she started, with an oily tenderness that surprised her. A quick prayer, a moment of hopeful desperation—it passed over her like a cloud. "Is the Vicomte still alive?" When he began to weep all the more over her question, Christine's right hand slithered southward of its own accord, fingers finding warm and disgusting safety beneath the folds of the duvet. She felt the bramble of hair around Erik's prick, as irritating as his caterwauling; a dark timbre scrambled from her throat like a rat. "Answer me."
"The Vicomte," Erik mewled, as useless as he had ever been. His stomach fluttered so suddenly under the hand still caressing it that Christine worried the vomiting would resume. "He lives."
It was here that Christine paused in her ministrations, began to consider that maybe Erik's tears were not the byproduct of whatever fever dream he was trapped in. "Erik sends that little hemorrhoid directly to Hell every time he closes his eyes… and yet the brat lives."
Christine's palm curled around the only blood-red part left to her husband. The moan that ripped his throat was one more brick in the road to her ruin, and yet she could not imagine stopping whatever sick magic she'd started. "Where is he?"
"In Brest. Or else hopefully dying a noble death amongst the ice and whale carcasses, as he originally wanted. Before he ruined—" and here, he paused to slobber into his sheets. "Oh God," he pleaded, the half-muffled words worming their way into the most base bits of her pity. "God, touch me. He lives, I tell you. He lives. Please touch me. Put your hands on me. In me. Hold me."
He had given Christine what she wanted, more than any pretty house or moment of quiet. It was only right that she gave it back to Erik in angry fistfuls. Each finger of hers embraced his wickedness with calm and purpose, despite her terror. Each pump of her right hand seemed to untangle the fiber of them both—his voice carded wool, thick and flowing, as if she were pulling it from some spool buried in his chest. Even with his strength depleted, bile crusting upon his lips, Erik thrashed his hips in time with her touch, the skin of him moving with Christine's hand, like she'd always known it.
As for Christine, the seconds stretched through time like sap, the last few months suspended before her in sluggish, golden firmament. As her husband's manhood flexed and pulsed under her grasp, the sensation strangely alluring, so too did she notice a similar rhythm running through her own body. The image of Erik, erect and miserable, conceding himself to loneliness as he fled their bedroom, was as good as any wine. To know only an inkling of the awful things he would let her do to him, if he had not kept his promise to be a gentleman, was honey sweet. Christine thought of the angel, who bossed her around without mercy; she then thought of the man who cried and screamed like a coward at the slightest bristle of her independence. Empowered, her free hand crawled up to Erik's chest, like the claw of a divine creature too horrible to comprehend, ready to mete out judgment on God's behalf.
Christine's fingertips wandered that pale and salted expanse as her right hand pumped away; it was divine providence when her nails raked across the swollen and hard disc of tissue above his heart. Erik bucked beneath her like a bigger fool in response, whining and slamming his sin even deeper into her fist. He was so green—as green as she was, in many respects. A beautiful color, green. Smiling to herself, she let her breath graze his neck, as if moving to press her lips against the vulnerable crux of arteries below his jaw.
"Kiss me," Erik wept, his words frantic, nearly incomprehensible. "Please kiss me, whoever you are. Who are you? Kiss me, jigaram, and I'll do whatever you ask. Only kiss me." For a moment, Christine considered his words: whatever she asked. What was there even left to ask for that could possibly be given to her? Raoul was alive. Erik had kept his word. But what had he put her through? How badly had he hurt her, for his own ends. For his own pleasure.
What of my pleasure? The thought ran through Christine as sharply as a sword might have. What had Erik called her, the day their queer union had taken a turn into perdition both so deep and so commonplace that it overwhelmed her? An old whore.
When Christine tugged at his nipple instead, Erik reached paroxysm with a violence that might have frightened her, if he hadn't been so incapacitated. Each thrust of his hips felt like words, as he spilled himself. As his wailing faded into small and incomprehensible sobs, she wiped her right hand of his mess against the bedsheets, uncaring if she left Erik to sleep in his own shame.
"I am in hell," he croaked weakly, as his breath returned to him. "God help me. I am burning." She cared little for his protests. The intense swell of emotion that had driven her to such unimaginable cruelty also compelled Christine to find her own completion; with a wantonness that would have shocked her six months ago, she chafed her palm against her sex; all the while, her left hand continued to gently tug at the sensitive flesh of her husband's chest.
"You are not in hell. You are with your Christine," she whispered, mouth tight against his spine, a simulacrum of a kiss against the column of his being. The words tumbled out of her without sense, and though they made her blush, Christine felt little of her usual shame. With every teardrop that eked out of her husband, so too did her anger go—in boulders, in bricks, in pebbles, the foundations of her rage dissolving under the deluge of his tears and release. The fingers that ran over her own slick velvet grew in their confidence—with one tremulous breath, she let two plunge into her core.
"I am with my Christine," Erik murmured, spinning into her embrace with the little vigor left to him, his hideous and singular face buried into her collarbone. He was far too tired to do little more than lave gently at her décolletage, too exhausted to comment on the short work she was making of her desire. When Christine grabbed his own hand and forced it to join hers, the poor man bristled at the moisture between her thighs and pressed himself close; it was as if they had once been cloven into two by some cruel chaos millions of years ago, and he'd somehow found her again—such was the intensity of his moribund embrace.
"I am dying," she panted, her pleasure overtaking her, his fingers twining around hers. "Oh, Christ."
Between the long, languid strokes of his tongue against her skin, she heard Erik call back from across the void: "I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you." And despite the many times he'd intimated such knowledge to her—as an angel, as her tormentor, as the man she married—Christine finally believed him.
#
When Christine opened her eyes again, it was a to a dark bedroom, the smell of her sex and his sick and the ghost of lamp oil filling her nose. Erik had turned away from her embrace, the knots and tangles of his spine glowing in chorus with the moonlight. Unbidden, her fingertips swept up and down the vale of his back, divorced from his skin by a hair's breadth. Touch him, a voice whispered. If only to see if the fever is broken. If only to see that he has not died. If only, if only—
"I am dreaming," Erik interrupted abruptly, his voice as soft and almost as beautiful as the angel's had once been. The sigh that fell from his lips was light and cool, midnight rainfall. For a moment, Christine contemplated letting him know she was also awake—to ask him how he felt or to sweep a hand across his forehead, through his hair, around the dip of his shoulder.
But what followed was thus: "Tell me this dream." Erik sighed again, and this time it undulated with a torpor that told Christine he was still not himself. Not quite.
"I am of a race of men," he said, at length, "who grew up under a full moon, as happily and easily as most grow up under the sun. Tall and erect, drinking up its effulgence as wine. We do not know each other by our faces," and here her husband whimpered softly, twisting just enough under the bedclothes to make flesh of him. "But by the sound of our voices. The cradles of our palms. For all faces are made both lovely and inconsequential under star-fall. And I am finally free."
And though he still hid the wreck of his face, whether through fogged instinct or exhaustion, tears sprung to Christine's eyes. For in that moment—the cold sweat on his back shimmering, that thin hair rendered into streams of twilight, liquid and twisting—she began to understand. There was no bitterness in his words, no sneer staining their timbre. It was just what Erik said it was.
"It is a beautiful dream," Christine whispered, not knowing what else she might answer with, yet sure it was the only thing she could say. Her arm wrapped around the narrow divot of his waist of its own accord, and the lips that were too timid to make their presence known finally landed on the back of Erik's neck. Made their home there, whispered gentle admonishments, beckoned him to sleep. And somewhere, nestled between the line of his body and the truth that had finally sifted itself through the long night, she closed her eyelids and found peace.