He caught her by the waist and pulled her back down beside him.
"When you know everything, Helene, you will leave me."
"You think so, Erik? You tried to kill me the day we met. And, still, I came back to you."
He sighed, but the sound was lost in the wind and he wrapped the cape around her once again.
"Very well, Helene. But, if you hate me for hearing these things…"
"I promise you, Erik, I will not. Only tell me now."
"I have no memory of his father. I never saw him, never knew his name. My mother…my mother would not look at me unless my face was covered. She hated me…I am sure she did. One day…I don't know how old I was…she took me outside. I had never left the house before…I had never seen the sky except through a tiny window."
He stared up at the dull, cold sky and remembered the first time he'd felt the harsh spring sunlight on his skin as his mother walked briskly, almost dragging him along behind her.
"I stumbled once because she was walking too fast. She yanked me to my feet and hit me so hard my mask was knocked from my face. It was the first time I had been struck…and it would not…be the last!"
He grasped her hand as he spoke, his fingers tightening painfully around hers.
"I tried to pick up the mask because I knew she would be angry if she saw my face. But she pulled me along and said…and I cannot forget the spite in her voice…that I wouldn't need it anymore. Then a man met us. He was a huge man with a horrid beard and gold rings in his ears. He took me away…I never saw my mother again."
The pressure of his hand increased around hers.
"I don't know how many years I was with the traveling fair. I remember the beatings, the taunts from the children in the camp…the dirty cage."
A cage…
Those words chilled her from the heart out. She looked up at the unmasked side of his face in profile against the dull twilight.
"Yes, I was nothing but a freak in a carnival. A little more than an animal, but not nearly human. And, most of all, the thing I remember…the faces of the people when the man exhibited me. Some laughed, some just looked away. Most of them screamed. They screamed at the Devil's Child."
"Oh, Erik, Erik," she said, muffling her grief against his shoulder.
"One night, the fair came to Paris. I didn't earn as much as usual that evening and my owner began to hit me with a heavy club. There was a bit of rope caught on the edge of my cage. Somehow I managed to wrap it around his fat, filthy neck. And I killed him."
He held up his free hand and looked at it in the fading light.
"Yes, Helene, the hands that have touched you have taken many lives…many, many lives."