For your pleasure: Chapter Four.
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Chapter Four – Christine
The lightless empty space behind the gate seems to welcome her. It's not a warm welcome but it feels as if someone is trying very hard.
Carfully, one hand sliding over the stone wall at her side, she moves forward.
When the gate behind her falls shut with a lout clattering sound, she jumps, losing her feeling for direction to the darkness for a moment. Scared, her hands grope for the wall, and to her relief, find it immediately. Carla gives way to something between a curse and a sob, then she leans against the stones, until the dizziness subsides.
She takes a deep breath.
"Erik?... Erik, are you there?... I hope you haven't called me back to show me your amazing piece of empty space... Erik?" Eventually, a needlepoint of yellow light catches her attention. She moves her head a little and blinks to figure out how far this bit of light is away and if it's moving. After a moment she comes to the conclusion, that it's some twohundred meters away but coming closer.
A few minutes later a small boat docks close to her feet, it's lamp letting the water, the floor and the walls break the darkness' surface as if they've just been created by the golden shine.
The sound of heavy fabric, the sound of a heel on stone, then Erik is beside her, offering a gloved hand to help her get in the boat.
"I... I've just come back to bring your bath robe..." she stammers, suddenly remembering the satin that is damp where her hands claw into it. "Here... uhm... thanks for lending it... I... I have to leave again now, I'm sorry..." She pants. These few words have utterly exhausted her.
"I'm afraid it's too late for that." Erik answers, the look in his eyes like stone again. "You've been down here much longer than you think. The night is over. The key is my property again for the next fifteen days."
Violently Carla turns around. And really, the gate is gone. Her desperately searching eyes only find a wall of old, rough stones. Not knowing what to feel now, she turns back to Erik.
"Why are you doing this to me!" she finally shouts on the top of her loungs.
For a moment it's only the catacombs that answer by returning her question over and over again.
In the following silence, Erik whispers: "I already told you, Carla."
"Your room is the third one on the left side." he informs her after they entered his house through what seemed to be an endless succession of massive walls and grinning, forbidding portcullis.
Without a word, Carla shuffles in the named direction. She closes the door behind her, throws the bath robe on the bed and lies herself down on the thick carpet in the middle of the room.
She feels dead. Alone. She closes her eyes.
Some hours later, she is woken by a knock on the door. Clumsily she stuggles to her feet and wipes her face.
"What is it?"
"May I come in?"
"Sure."
The door opens and Erik looks in.
"Good morning." his eyes try a smile "There is a breakfast for you in the dining room, the first door on the right."
"Ok." Carla mumbles. "But first of all I need to take a shower..."
"There are some of your own clothes is in the wardrobe." he informs her and is gone.
"So he went to the flat and fetched my stuff, right?" she hisses to herself. "Gates that pop in and out of existence, time that is treated like a chewing gum, blantant ignorance towards the fact that humans use to be dead onehundredandseventy years after their birth, why should it amaze me, that he can enter a flat? Or perhaps he just beamed it all here! Scotty, Scotty, do you hear me?" with an angry bang the bathroom door closes behind her.
She finds the dining room empty. There is a pot with fried eggs on a heating plate, a basket with fruits, delicate carafs with milk, cocoa and several juices, glass bowls with cereals and yogurt.
"At least I will not starve to death." she comments this sight.
When she reaches her chair, she notices a letter lying there.
'Come to the library afterwards. -E'
And this she does.
"Was the breakfast all right?" Erik greets her.
Carla nods, taking a seat on the stool that is now cushioned with a soft pillow.
"It was great. Thank you... Especially the apples."
Erik nods acknowledgeingly.
Tense silence.
"I'm... not sure about how to begin all this." Erik confesses after a while. "I've been alone for over onehundred years now."
"And as this is the strangest thing I've ever heard..." Carla aggressively tilts her head "... why don't you just tell me how it happened that you didn't die?"
Erik doesn't react.
"If you can't explain it, describe it!" she snaps.
Slowly he turns his head to stare at her.
"So you are too angry with me to be afraid of my reaction..."
"Oh, I am afraid of your reaction! But I... I don't know what to do! All this here isn't supposed to ever happen to anyone! It's like... like... I don't know what it's like! It's just... " with a violent dismissive gesture she jumps up and runs back into her room.
Her tears have long dried, when Erik enters her refuge without knocking. Silently he goes to the small writing desk on the right and takes a seat on the fragile chair in front of it.
With a strange, silken calmness to his voice, he asks: "What do I have to do to keep you from hiding here the next fifteen days?"
"Tell me about Christine." she whispers. "Tell me about someone who had to be with you, too."
Erik closes his eyes. Then he begins to speak.
"The first time I saw her was during a choir rehersal. I had neglected my duties as artistic counsellor of the Opera management for several months and had come to the two way mirror of the rehersal chamber to make an inventory list of the talent in the choir. I was too early so I could witness the chaos and noise thirty young singers are able to produce just by warming up their voices. There was only one who was silent..."
Carla listens with her eyes shut. And Erik's voice paints pictures in her imagination:
Hidden in the farthest corner of the room, close to the window, a small singer sits. Her hand strikes her pale cheek with a wisp of her straight black hair, while her blueish grey eyes observe a tiny spider that is crawling over the floor next to her. Suddenly another singer with untamed blonde curls emerges one of the squealing groups and stampers to the girl in the corner. With a well targeted movement of her foot she smashes the spider.
"Would you be so kind to start warming up now, ghost child?" she then scolds "I don't know what you think, but I don't want the next performance to be an utter shame because you stared at insects instead of developing your skills."
Her lips pressed to a thin white line of contrariness, the pale girl jumps up and kicks the blonde fury's shin bone with her boot. They fight like cats until Monsieur Gabriel, the choir master, enters the room and shouts: "Meg Giry and Christine Daaé!"
Immediately the girls let go of each other and narrow their eyes in an expression of guilt.
"Come over here!" Gabriel commands.
They follow.
"Now, how old are you? Twenty years, I guess. Now, would you tell me why you insist on behaving like children over and over again? If you don't stop these fights now I'll have to talk to the management about which one of you is to be thrown out of her contract! Now go on your positions. And if I hear any false tones in the next ten minutes this rehersal will go on without you!"
After her performance of childlike wonder and wild aggression, the invisible visitor behind the two way mirror is prepared to hear pure dreamstricken passion from the pale girl's mouth, but he is painfully disappointed. Her technique is flawless, but she seems to choke in the struggle between the choir master's command to sing with emotion and her fear to follow it. Attacking a bigger, stronger and more popular girl and giving in to the music in her throat seem to be two very different things to her.
The man behind the two way mirror feels total sadness in the face of this shameful waste. But the longing to help her come over her fear is not only caused by his love of music and perfection...
Some time passes, until Carla realizes that Erik not only stopped speaking but left the room.
Slowly she gets up and walks to the mirror in her bathroom.
Her mind grows numb while her hand caresses the straight black hair that frames her pale face with the blueish grey eyes.
"Show me a picture of her, you must have a picture of her, I must see her!" she blurts on the verge of panic while storming into the library.
Oddly calm and without any visual emotion in his yellow eyes, Erik takes a small flat square of polished metal out of the chest pocket of his suit and hands it over to her.
The square turns out to be a picture frame with a lid to protect it's precious content, and when Carla tries to open it, it doesn't work because of her shaky hands.
With a sigh Erik takes it back and opens it for her.
Even at the first sight of the black and white shot, her back gives in with relief.
Carla's own face resembles that of Isabelle Adjani with it's sober, somehow calm lines that seem to fit nowhere but in a gothic novel.
Christine Daaé however looks quite impish. Her face is small with a pointed chin and nose, a self-willed forehead and a widow's peak. These are not really the features of a beautiful woman, but the smile of her tiny mouth and her huge almond eyes give it a strange glory one can't help but marvel about.
"Thanks for telling me about her." she whispers when handing it back to Erik who closes the lid and puts it back into his pocket without looking at it.
"You're welcome." he answers. "And never fear that I confound you with her."
When Carla closes the door of the library behind her again, she can hear him lose the fight against a strangeled sob.
