I fully expected to perish dramatically that night. There was simply no imagining a day to come after- to come after Christine. After that earth shattering, sense shattering moment. A kiss to destroy all the lines between what was real and what couldn't possibly be. Tears to bring from their deepest wells all the hidden and glorious sorrow of my heart. Truly my spirit wanted nothing more than to curl up and wait for death in that strange and melancholic ecstasy.
I had had her. For one magnificent day I had had a beautiful, living wife at my side. My Christine. But by the same token that I had won her, I knew she was not mine to keep. I had allowed her to leave, with her precious viscount. Why had I done it? I still ask myself that question. She was mine! Mine I tell you! She'd have stayed with me all my life had I asked her! She would have! She would have…
God, would she have?
Something, something in her love broke me that night, just past the stroke of eleven. Until that time I'd been perfectly happy to keep her chained to me, even as Von Rothbart kept Odette. But she gave her love to me freely. She loved me for myself. How could I force her to spend her life with a monster? And worst of all, I wondered in my mind how long it would last, before she loathed me once more, for all the misery I had caused her.
No, better to let her go then and cement in my mind the dream that she'd have loved me all my life, than to watch that love waste away into bitterness. Better to grant her my rare mercy, and die with the touch of her lips still in my mind. For I knew without her I surely would die.
And yet there was another part of myself, fierce and resilient, that made its will to survive known. The Opera Ghost would die with dignity at the very least, or not at all. Christine had promised to return to me, when I was dead, but there were a few affairs that had to be looked to before I could rest. So it was with a heart heavy with every emotion that I rose; casting once again my dark shadow in the soft candlelight.
There were many exits from my house on the lake, and I took the one that was closest, and the one that was the best hidden. It led through deep, catacomb-like sewers, pitch black and rather damp. It was not the darkness that blinded me, as I have eyes like a cat. It was instead raw emotion that upset my usual grace, and I am sorry to say, I stumbled somewhat as I made my way.
I am not certain how long it was that I spent there, beneath the streets, or whether it was the same night or the next one, when I finally arrived on the surface again, in a cemetery near the bank of the Seine. The sight of it, still and peaceful, made me long for my own coffin, if only for a few moments of the sleep that I so rarely allowed myself. But I knew that if I allowed myself to do so, I would not awaken, and Christine would not come. That was why I had fled.
I stood beneath the branches of an ash tree on the hill of Montmartre cemetery. It was raining, cold, but hardly more than a mist, really. A gentle breeze tugged the cloak that hung on my shoulders. I didn't know why I was there, or what I had hoped to achieve by leaving my home in the first place. I was fragmented; I was undone. It took so little it seemed, to break an Opera Ghost, in the end.
I didn't sit, so much as I collapsed, there beside the grave of someone I didn't know. Or maybe I did know them. Maybe I had killed them. What did I know? So much, and then? Nothing whatsoever.
I was a man spent by a life of hide and seek, I could manage it no longer. I leaned my head back, staring at the gray-blue clouds behind which there must have been a full moon. I wore no mask. Had anyone been in the cemetery that night, they'd have seen a ghoul raised from his grave. Leroux exaggerated very little in his description if my figure, there were some horrors in my tale that needed only slight embellishment, it seems.
Mirrors have never been my friends, but I have chanced upon them unguarded enough times to have my distorted visage etched forever on the back of my eyelids. Shall I tell you then? Shall I delight and disgust you with the details, just as the patrons of the gypsy fair once begged to see? Will men retch? Will ladies need smelling salts? I'll go on then. However, I shall certainly not think the less of you, should you chose to skip the next paragraph.
I am as gaunt as a skeleton. My hands are unnaturally long, and talon-like. My skin is tight and sallow. Little hair grows on my piebald skull, and what does is coarse and white. But, as you've no doubt heard, it is my face that strikes terror in the hearts of mortal men. If you saw me from the left you might think me merely extremely ugly, with lean, wizened cheeks, yellow skin, painfully thin lips, a overdone forehead, and lines of what would seem to be scar tissue intruding across my understated nose and jaw. The rest of my face though, is truly monstrous. Bluish 'scars' consume most of my visage, the major veins all-apparent through my porcelain thin hide, skin sagging flaccidly beneath my eye, which is sunken deeply, almost cavernously, into my skull. My lips are grossly twisted into a permanent grimace, where the flesh is puckered around my jaw. Truly my face is a tale with which to frighten small children, and grown men alike. A living corpse, part of me only dead, the rest completely rotted. like the Norse Loki's daughter Hel.
Still with me, dear readers? Or have you tossed this book half across the room in fright and revulsion? I wouldn't blame you. I've tossed myself across the room in abhorrence more times than I might care to count. I've very nearly thrown myself into the river, so deep is my loathing for the monster I am. As I said, anyone in the cemetery might have come upon me that night, and might have done my work for me with a blade or a pistol. But then the thought did not cause me undue disquiet, and I rested there, in peace that was relative to the turmoil in my mind. Exhaustion, physical and mental crept up upon me, and I was overtaken by a fitful slumber.
If there is a reason, beyond obsession with my work, that I allow myself so little sleep, then it is the dreams. I do not have pleasant dreams, and if I did what mockery they would seem in the cold morning light! Better to forget them. I rarely have nightmares. What more nightmare than that life which I already possess? But Iremember, and that is bad enough.
That night my sleeping mind recalled an incident that occurred in the eighth year of my life. I recalled that stuffy little windowless room which had once been my only firsthand knowledge of the world…