The vicomte, Julia and I made it down to the opera house cellars. We found Alex where I had expected. He appeared safe.

Ch 57

It was as dark and as hopeless as I had remembered. All the pieces of my dead mother's furniture remained exactly where I had left them. It was all I had ever received of her. The colors were muted by dust, the curtains damp and sagging with mildew and moth holes, but it was the same house of misery I had known for years.

Alexandre had lit several candles throughout the room, which cast long shadows on the walls. In the contrast of darkness and the golden hue surrounding his form, he looked so small.

He reminded me of Christine, of a lost child in an unforgiving world. The first time I had seen her was in the chapel, a living angel against a backdrop of stone. She sat before a lone candle as though the wavering glow would lead her home again. Now her son, nearly twenty years later, sat alone in the same building mourning a different loss.

From a distance it was impossible to tell if she had hurt him physically. So many wounds were not easily found. I was well aware of pain that never stretched across flesh.

I glanced back at Julia and the vicomte. The vicomte looked away while Julia and I exchanged half-smiles. Water from the ceiling dripped onto my head as I ducked through the doorway and entered the old apartments.

"Let him do this," I heard Julia whisper. I heard the vicomte quietly agree.

Their voices caught Alexandre's attention. He turned and glanced over his shoulder. With the light behind him I couldn't see his face, but his body remained relaxed. He was not afraid. He knew I had come for him.

Alex sat a little straighter once I stood behind him. His actions were borne out of habit as we were always demanding he sit like a proper gentleman. His head remained tilted down, eyes averted, as I moved alongside him. Slowly he turned away. He must have expected he would be in trouble for running away again.

I pulled up an old armchair and sat near him. Instantly he took his elbows off the table. He glanced at me timidly.

"I wanted to see her." He looked away before he finished speaking.

Even though I knew he had come to her, I wanted to know what had happened. "Did you see her?"

Only a nod.

"When?"

He hesitated. His left hand balled into a fist. "The night you saw her."

I nodded. His chin nearly touched his chest.

"And two days ago."

"The night the vicomte came to the house?"

Another nod followed by a sigh of frustration. "She was sitting at a desk with a lemon and a knife. She said she was writing letters to her daughter but the knife tore right through the pages and she didn't even notice. It didn't matter anyways. She threw them into a fire." He looked at me again, at the mask on the right side. "Why would she do that?"

"Your mother has been very ill."

"She didn't look sick."

"Sometimes, when people are very, very ill, they look perfectly fine. It's worse that way, Alex, sometimes it's much worse that way."

"Are you sure I'm her son?" he asked quickly. He didn't give me a chance to reply. "She didn't know who I was, Father. She said she never had a son."

"Alex, you must forgive your mother."

"Because she's been very ill?"

"Yes," I nodded.

Alex laid his hands on the tabletop and laced his fingers together. He stared at the table for a while and said nothing. Finally, he tapped his thumbs together and sighed. "She says some horrible things, horrible, hateful things."

My eyes closed. "I know."

"Mother Giry would have yelled at her just like she yells at you when you say some of those words. Why would she say mean things?"

"She's confused sometimes," I said to him.

He went silent again and stuck his lips out. "She told me I could come with her to Egypt," he said quietly. "After she burned all the letters and sent them to her daughter."

Egypt. Alexandre had been enthralled by ancient Egypt for the last two years. Mummies, hieroglyphics, animal gods and pyramids were all he would talk about for hours on end. Charles bought him half a library in books on Egypt to encourage his eagerness. Alex had even asked me once after he had been yelled at if we could mummify Madeline when she died.

More than anything, Alex wanted to go to Egypt. I swallowed hard. How would I explain to him that I didn't want him to go with Christine, with his own mother? While he spoke, I wondered if he understood what I meant when I told him Christine was unwell.

"Alex—"

"She promised I could go with her and her husband and their daughters," Alexandre said.

He looked at me, his face flushed. "I told her I would have to ask you first even though I knew you would tell me absolutely not. When I told her, she was very, very cross with me, Father." He looked away from and went silent again.

If she had hit him….What anger I would release upon Christine if she struck Alexandre! No one would ever act against him physically. I would not tolerate him suffering the childhood I had experienced.

I squeezed his shoulder, my anger resurfacing. "What did she do to you? Did she hurt you? Look at me, Alex, did she bruise you?"

He shook his head but still wouldn't meet my eye. "She yelled at me and told me you never wanted me. She said if I told her I never loved you she would take me to Egypt."

I looked away from him and found Julia standing in the doorway listening.

"Alex—" I started.

He ground his teeth together, nostrils flaring in frustration. "She's mean. Why didn't you tell me she was so mean?"

There was a choice to be made. I took a deep breath.

"She's not mean," I replied. "Alex, you must understand; your mother has been very ill. There are many things she says but doesn't mean. Her ailment sometimes causes her to act improper."

God Almighty, was there anything more obstinate than trying to tell my son his mother had emotional difficulties? I didn't want to frighten the poor child any more than he had undoubtedly been traumatized by their meeting.

He didn't want to listen. Bottom lip protruding, he crossed his arms. "I will never forgive her. I….I hate her, Father."

He was starting to tremble with emotion. He was livid just thinking about his mother. The distorted expression on his face, the mangled, abominable look was something strangely familiar to me. I knew his hatred. It was deep-rooted, set within the marrow of my bones.

For years, many long and dreadful years, I had hated the world.

There had always been cruelty before my eyes and betrayal breathing down the back of my neck. From my childhood home in Northern France to my travels throughout the Orient, I was kept at a distance and viewed as more a thing than a person. Few would meet my eye, none would dare touch or speak to me.

Not even the woman who had birthed me.

The older I got the more I wished I had never known her. She refused me all comfort. Had the church not insisted she keep me fed, I would have died. She would not nurse me. She placed a burlap sack over my face and turned away as she put a bottle in my mouth and propped it up.

For a long time I wondered if I had been so extraordinary that I remembered this cruelty, or if she had told me so many times to shame me that I made it part of my memory.

Once I left her home, I no longer knew her face or the sound of her voice. I forced myself to forget. Parts of her remained over the years; her cold fingers forcing the sack over my head, her hard hand slapping me so hard the mask—the only thing she gave me in life—was swiped from my face. Cruelty, boundless cruelty and words as sharp as knives blamed me for ruining her life.

Like a fugitive seeking asylum from war, I moved into the opera house. I came in search of darkness, in search of somewhere that the world did not exist to me and where I did not exist in the world. Escape, I told myself, I would escape from the pain.

Day after day melding into endless night, my abhorrence for the world was fed in darkness. Years passed, anger grew until I felt nothing but frustration. From a distance I saw smiling dancers, laughing chorus girls, neat little pieces fitting one by one into a mural, a tapestry of life and happiness.

I had not fit.

Isolation turned to violent encounters, genius turned to mindlessness. Music replaced conversation and I became spiteful, cynical, a caged animal poked and prodded by despair.

Hopelessness turned from a small crack to an abysmal cavern. I wanted revenge, but I still wanted love. The two were not part of my own small tapestry, the little thread I had become snipped from the grand masterpiece of life. By then I was a man.

Madeline's offers to help me sounded condescending. As much as I needed someone I refused. I would not show weakness. I had convinced myself that my solitude had become a show of how brave I was, how stoic I had become. Like a weed, I needed no one to survive, least of all Madeline, least of all a woman who reached out a hand and tried to take hold of a wandering son.

The vicomte's beating had been a strange poison, one that humbled me considerably but still fed me something I had lived without for so long.

Compassion.

Julia, Alexandre, Madeline, even Meg, had all shown me compassion. Without them I would have died in an alley, but still I had shown little gratitude. Needing them in my life was shameful. I didn't need anyone, ever.

I realized as I sat beside Alex that a child who had despised his mother and the world had become a man who hated himself.

I couldn't let Alexandre harbor such demons. God willing he would never hate anyone the way I had loathed the human race.

I rose from the chair and sat beside him on the bench. "I cannot make you love her."

"I won't," he blurted out.

"Listen to me, Alex." He nodded and bowed his head. "I cannot make you love her, but I want you to try to forgive her."

"Why?"

"Because…because everyone, no matter what they have done, should be allowed to find forgiveness somewhere."

"She wanted that man to kill you. How can you forgive her?" Alexandre pressed.

"I don't want to be angry with her. I loved her very much; even when she was very ill and I didn't know it." I stared at the candle, at the wavering flame. "I was not well, either."

"Are you feeling better now?" he asked.

The concern in his eyes was almost unbearable. He didn't understand what I meant but he was alarmed by my condition. I nodded to quell his anxiety. "I think I am feeling better. I have you, Madeline, and Madame Seuratti to thank for that, and perhaps Madame and Monsieur Lowry as well."

The expression on his face changed. He was staring at the mask again. "How is your real face?"

A tinge of pain chilled my heart. There would never be a change in my appearance, not as I would have liked. "Quite bruised."

He started to reach up slowly, his movements hesitant. Alex had done this before and ended up dumped from my lap onto the study floor. I wondered if he remembered how I had punished him the way I remembered how my mother had punished me.

His eyes narrowed when his fingers touched the cool leather. Ours eyes no longer met. He kept his gaze carefully away from mine and pulled his hand back.

"Alex, the skin will never—"

"I don't really like the fake skin. It's cold."

He would clearly never let me finish a sentence again. Either I needed to speak faster or never even think of trying to voice a complete thought.

I nodded. I had no idea what to tell him.

"Do you like it better?" he asked.

"Sometimes."

"You're like a snake," he mumbled.

My eyes widened. It certainly didn't seem like a compliment. "I beg your pardon?"

"You're like a snake," he repeated. "You shed your skin."

Leave it to an eight and a half year-old boy to conjure up something suitable to compare to my likeness. A snake, of all things.

"The skin beneath the mask doesn't change though, Alex. It always looks the same."

"But the snake doesn't change that much, either. It grows, but it's still the same," he said. His tone was almost condescending and I looked at him sharply. His cheeks reddened. "Monsieur Lowry told me. He said we could go to the zoo one day and see one. What's underneath is always better." He paused nervously and strained to look me in the eye. "I like your real skin better than the fake skin. It's warmer."

He liked my real skin better. There could not have been a more sincere compliment than the one Alex had given me, as backhanded as it had sounded.

I turned away from him. How could this be? How could he possibly prefer my face of melted wax, of pale flesh and blue veins to a smooth, white outer shell?

"Father?" he asked once I said nothing in return.

"Yes, Alexandre?"

"Why do you like the fake skin?"

It sounded asinine to say I preferred to hide behind a mask. My pride would not allow such an answer.

"It's more aesthetically pleasing," I said. He still looked at me, and I thought he would ask me if I knew what the word meant. With a heavy sigh I turned away from him and slipped my fingers beneath the corner at my cheek. I pulled the mask off and set it on the table. "It was easier before."

"When you weren't feeling well?"

"Yes, when I wasn't feeling well."

"So now that you feel better….do you need it?"

I turned and faced him. "I suppose not."

Alexandre studied my face for only a moment. A smile crept onto his lips and made creases at the corner of his tired eyes. I felt his hand slip around my back as he leaned against my side and rested his head on my arm.

"I told her I wouldn't go to Egypt," he said. His voice had changed to something slow and drawling. He was starting to fall asleep. It had to be at least two in the morning, if not later. "She made me leave after that but I didn't care anymore."

I glanced over my shoulder and saw Julia and the vicomte standing in the doorway. Julia's candle had burned down to nothing.

With my anxiety over his well-being vanquished, I was starting to feel weary as well. It was time to go home. "Alex—"

"Father, will you punish me?"

"Yes, I believe I will in a few days."

"If I swear I will never run away again, may I come home with you?"

I kissed the top of his head. "The only place I ever wanted you was in my home."

He rose first and turned to see Julia. Instantly he turned back to me, his face pale and eyes wide. "That man followed us."