The Angel of Music

by aeipathy.

Notes: I keep confusing myself with this new system of updating, thinking I've uploaded and then realizing that I haven't, so hopefully this is successful. Thank you again to all the wonderful people who read and review, and I hope that this story continues to be interesting to at least a couple of you out there. I really am trying.

Part Eight

"Have things changed much?"

Giry cringed, finding that the sound of her own voice was strangely hollow: it was vague, and indistinct. It was as though she were reading words off a sheet of paper, and it seemed that Celeste knew it, though she did nothing to call attention to it. For Celeste too was grieving, even now; the death of Briand, her own brother, had caused her to abandon her position in the Opera for two months so that she could mourn away her heartache, and although she had by now returned to the dance corps, there was still a certain changed quality in her posture. No longer were her shoulders straight and light – she seemed weighted down, now, as though her wings had been burdened with weights.

They sat on a settee in a dressing room on the first floor, where Celeste had chosen to take Giry so that others could not interrupt them. Giry had already made all the necessary arrangements with the managers of the Opera Populaire, and having walked in on the exchange, Celeste had spirited Giry away afterwards to discuss this bizarre decision with her. The two had maintained contact during Giry's marriage to Briand, but due to Celeste's constant obligation to the Opera and Giry's preoccupation with caring for her family, they had not seen as much of one another as they might have hoped.

Celeste held onto Giry's hand in her customary way, the fingers of both her own hands wrapped tightly around Giry's as though the two of them were the best of friends. It was not an insincere gesture; she was simply, Giry knew, uninformed.

"You could say they have," Celeste said, nodding her head. There were no rehearsals scheduled for that day – she was not dressed in her skirts and slippers, but in a respectable dark blue dress, and her pale hair was pulled away from her face to show the new lines around her eyes. "It's been five years since you've set foot inside this place, hasn't it? Some of the girls have gone, and others have come to take their places; there are new singers, new musicians, even new maids." She said, almost sympathetically, "Of course things wouldn't be quite as you left them."

Giry nodded and lowered her eyes. She knew that she, too, had developed a new severity to her features, a new sadness in the setting of her mouth.

The cane was leaning against the edge of the settee, and the hand of Giry's not gripped by Celeste was being held absently by Meg, who stood like a bored doll in her pale blue dress, her long hair in disarray, her toy lamb dangling from her other hand. She had never seen the Opera Populaire, save from the outside and from a distance, and while being inside it was quite an adventure, she did not much like being forced to stand in one room while her mother had a long and earnest talk with one of the adult dancers. If she had had things her way, Giry knew, Meg would be running in and out of every room, and poking her head into places she had no right to be in – despite all her exceptional qualities, Meg was still as curious as any other four-year-old girl.

Celeste gave Meg a pat on the head, as sorry for the little girl as she was for her mother, and for herself. "What are your plans for Marguerite?" she asked then, more quietly, as though somehow this would keep Meg from hearing. "If you wish to come and live in the Opera's apartments again – if you want to spend all your time helping the girls with their dancing – what will you do with her? Who will watch her?"

"She will be no trouble." Giry shook her head. "I have no intention of letting her run wild behind my back. She has expressed quite an interest in dancing," and at this the corners of her mouth turned down in unspoken displeasure, "so I will let her dance with the other girls, at least for the time being."

Celeste nodded, and put a smile on her face, her eyes brightening only slightly with a hope that she directed both at Meg and at Giry. "She's such a pretty little girl, and so graceful – I feel certain that she will be a lovely dancer, just as agile as ever you were." She lifted her eyes and saw the look on Giry's face, and her smile faded slightly. "You should not be so disapproving – she may well be a great talent, and you would do wrong to keep her from such a life because of the disaster that befell you."

Though the words may have been harsh spoken by another, they were gentle and honest coming from Celeste, and Giry exhaled tiredly, nodding her head in resignment. "We shall see," she only said. She looked down at Meg, and took her hand from her daughter's to stroke her hair briefly.

Celeste studied Giry. "Why," she began as though the question had just come to her, "Why have you decided to dispose of my brother's name?"

Again, the question was not harsh, but rather inquisitive and uncertain. Giry had already explained her intention to return to her original name, though she could comprehend Celeste's difficulty in comprehending it. Celeste, despite the fact that she was a dancer, was well-schooled in propriety, like Giry – but as they both knew, Giry often chose to diverge from what was considered done.

"It would remind me too much of him," she said briefly. "If I am to begin my life again, I feel I can only do so if I leave behind everything tying me to the life I attempted to lead."

Celeste asked softly, "Is that why you've come?"

Giry didn't answer.

"I thought —" Celeste began, and then fell silent. A moment later, she continued, and now her voice was even softer than before, "I thought you wanted never to see this place again."

"I can only wish it were as simple as that," Giry said smiling, but her smile was sad, and bitter. "You would be the first to admit, Celeste, that Briand was never wealthy, and that I always had to endure secondhand clothing from the older dancers; together we were not much better than apart. And now that Briand is gone, I fear for Meg. I fear that without a father, and with me able to do nothing more than sew and cook and clean – I fear that if something were to happen to me, she would have absolutely nothing in the world to fall back upon. At least if we remain here, under the shelter of the Opera, she is to have some security in her life."

Celeste took a long breath, and nodded. "I see." She chose her words carefully, eyeing Giry sideways. "I can see the reasoning in your decision, and I respect your desire to make certain that Meg is looked after – but what about you?"

"What about me?" Giry repeated, turning away, for she knew Celeste's purpose.

"You could scarcely look any of us in the eye, after your accident. You dragged yourself to the rehearsals for a while and each time you looked about to break into a thousand pieces. And now," Celeste said softly, "you expect to be able to teach the younger dancers? To be reminded constantly of your own misfortune?"

Giry spoke firmly. "I will swallow my pride, for Meg's sake."

Celeste opened her mouth to respond, her brows furrowed, but at that moment there was a long, low creak that seemed to come not from the hallway or the ceiling above them, but from somewhere inside the wall to their backs. Both fell silent and turned around suddenly, and when Giry looked back at Celeste she saw a petrified expression on her friend's face.

She smiled, a genuine smile of amusement. "Celeste, you look as though you've seen a ghost! It must only be someone in the next room."

Celeste turned to her and smiled weakly in return, but still looked rattled, and her hands gripped Giry's more tightly than before. "I find it funny that you say such a thing. You know, rumors have begun to circulate among the dancers of just that very thing."

"Of what? A ghost?" Giry shook her head. "That is another reason I find myself so hesitant to let Meg dance – it seems that dancers somehow inherit a frivolity that accompanies them both on the stage and off it."

"Oh, it isn't frivolity," Celeste said solemnly. "If I were not a few years older than the smaller girls I would be inclined to join them in their gossip. You were not here to see any of it – it began at least a year after you left, I feel sure – but every once in a while something strange will happen, someone will trip on stage in the middle of a grand performance when there is nothing to trip over, or things will go mysteriously missing from the dressing rooms."

Giry looked at her wide-eyed, incredulous at her friend's gullibility. "Even skilled dancers may be clumsy over their own feet," she said, "and I would not put petty theft above some of the maids that these managers hire."

"You don't understand."

Giry frowned slightly at her, bemused by the fervor in her voice.

Celeste's face had gone a shade paler, and she shook her head again. "Everyone else thought to blame it simply on the maids, on clumsiness – we were all quick to say it was nothing. But when Anton went missing –"

"Anton?"

"One of the stage men, you know, the one so thin you could see all the veins in his arms, his hair so greasy you could scarcely see through it to his face. He went missing one night and was never seen again." Before Giry could interrupt her, she went on, "And no one could say he ran off – he went missing inside the Opera. The little dancer, Alise – she saw him go down into the rope cellar during the aria, but no one ever saw him come out again. It's too far down for windows, and there are no other exits from the rope cellar."

Giry considered this, and though she was unwilling to mention it, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck begin to rise. Something about this story gave her the worst feeling in her stomach. "Not even a body was ever found?"

"Not even a body." Celeste shook her head grimly.

Unable to think of anything more to offer, Giry fell silent. She turned the tale over and over again in her mind, and for the first time since entering the Opera Populaire that day allowed herself to think of Erik's name. Could it be possible that – but no, she would not think that, even if she would let herself think his name. It couldn't be possible, she told herself. It couldn't be.

In the corner of her mind, despite the gravity of the moment, Giry thought to herself that a shockingly inquisitive child like Meg would normally have loved such a story, and how strange it was that her daughter had said nothing in response to Celeste's account of it. She lifted her eyes from her friend's face, and looked around.

Besides the two of them, the dressing room was suddenly empty.

"Meg?" Giry called into the hallway, forgetting that she had left her cane near the settee on the other end of the room until Celeste hurried up behind her and handed it to her. "Marguerite!"

She could hear the panic in her own voice and it only served to frighten her further. There was no reason to be frightened – the Opera was large, but it was full of people, and surely someone would notice a small girl and do something to detain her until her mother found her. At the same time, behind these thoughts, Giry knew with bleak certainty that Meg was not on the ground floor of the Opera, nor on the second floor, nor anywhere else above the surface of the ground.

And the moment she found the opportunity, she pointed Celeste down the other side of the main hallway and asked her to check the dressing rooms on the west wing of the Opera. When Celeste disappeared around the corner, she turned around, her knuckles whitening around the knob of her cane, and headed immediately for the nearest entrance into the cellars.

The moment she shut the door behind her and disappeared into the cavernous stairwell, she felt assaulted by the cool, dank air. The darkness swarmed around her, swallowed up everything she could see and licked even at her feet; the light of the candle she had stolen from the hallway table seemed wilted and defeated in such a darkness.

"Meg?" she called out as she reached the bottom of the stairs, her voice wavering in a way that displeased her.

All she could hear was the sound of water dripping from the ceiling and into the puddles on the stone. Her cane and shoes interrupted periodically, clicking loudly against the rock and kicking away the pebbles, but even louder than all those things was the silence that surrounded her from every angle. She knew the way, she had walked it a thousand times, but never before had it frightened her, and not only because Meg was lost now in its depths.

The labyrinth seemed to go on forever, even longer than she remembered it. She almost lost her balance a number of times, and due to her own carelessness she repeatedly slipped on the stones and had to lean against the cold, damp wall to regain herself. The candle was burning further and further down, and it was because of this decreasing light that she remembered suddenly about Erik's candles – when she had come to see him each night, years ago now, he had kept all the passages to his chambers illuminated with strings of candles and torches. Now, every corridor was dark and left unlit.

At the end of that eternity of stumbling and turning watery corners, she saw a distant glow at the end of the blackness. There were the candles, she realized – all the candles, all the torches and lamps from all over the catacombs had been brought to one location, the one set of rooms that Erik had chosen for his home. As she approached, she could begin to separate the huge conglomeration of light into an impossible number of tiny dots, each dot a single flame.

She burst into the open of his large sitting room just as her candle burned down to a nub, and she dropped the misshapen lump of wax into the puddle by her feet as her eyes took in her surroundings incredulously.

The furniture – not only had he saved all the pitiful furniture she had managed to salvage for him, the chipped desks and three-legged chairs, but he had added pieces of his own, the origin of which she could not begin to guess. He had added stones to the walls to straighten them, to give them more of the semblance of a real home, and as she looked around she realized that, if she didn't know better, she would think she were in a normal above-ground room. The sofa and chairs were sumptuously upholstered, the table lacquered, and hanging on the stone wall was a number of mismatched paintings and portraits. The large oval rug that began several inches in front of her toes was beautifully woven, full of colors that she wouldn't have thought able to survive this far below the light of the sun.

Giry's eyes were drawn to a spot of pale fuzz on the sofa across from her, and her heart froze in her chest when she realized it was Meg's toy lamb.

The fingers gripping the cane began to hurt, and she whirled around, looking wildly into the darkness, into the other visible rooms, anywhere, for any sign of him. "Erik!" she called hoarsely. It wasn't rage behind her voice, nor was it rage that formed the knot in her chest – only shock, the shock of betrayal.

When she turned around again, looking back into the sitting room, she saw Erik seated calmly on the sofa beside the toy lamb.

He was older than she remembered him, and thinner; his dark hair, as well, was longer, and despite his elegant appearance (the clothes he wore were refined, and unfamiliar to her) it straggled unkempt around his chin. He sat with one leg crossed elegantly over the other, his hands folded in his lap – he sat with complete disregard for her presence, though he looked her in the face. He was wearing a mask, but it was not the mask she had helped him make, the mask that had begun to yellow with age – this mask, curving perfectly to the contours of what his face should have looked like, was black, and the eyes that looked at her from behind it were as strange to her as his clothing, as his newfound furnishings. Those eyes, she thought, were not Erik's – or, if they were, they had changed so drastically that she barely recognized them. These eyes no longer had any visible fear in them.

"Erik?" she said, as though refusing to believe that it could truly be Erik.

He smiled at her, but his smile was very small, and very cold, and it disappeared in only a moment. He nodded as though to acknowledge her arrival. "Welcome back at last, mademoiselle."

To be continued.

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