Chapter Three:
Say the Words!
She opened her eyes, and stared blankly at the dull grey wall that sat opposite her, looking for all the world like some flat and expressionless, unhelpful and glum giant. Outside, she could hear the rain that still beat away at the windows and the roof. The sharp rattling cadence of the cold, watery deluge had gone unaltered that afternoon, and now the sky had steadily begun to grow darker. There was no sight of the sun—everything was cast in shadow…
It was all so ugly.
There was nothing new or surprising in the world, Christine thought, in a moment of unsettling and morbid revelation.
For most of her young life, she had lived in what anyone might have thought to be the most beautiful and exhilarating place in the universe, the Opéra Garnier…but it wasn't as beautiful as everyone thought. It wasn't so very extraordinary. It was a set of four walls and a roof, just like any other structure.
Certainly—it had been brushed over with tacky golden paint and stuck with bits of glass that were made to look like gems. It had been filled, from its beginning, with life and song.
But it was just another building, in the end: a simple gilded artifice constructed by clumsy human hands, filled to its brim with people who would never be anything but ignorant and foolish mortals. None of them were anything out of the ordinary. They all only cared for themselves…only for themselves…
How she hated it all!
"Christine!"
Small hands pounded—tentatively, at first, and then more insistently—on the door. Christine didn't even blink at the sound of little Meg's voice. Instead, her dark eyes remained focused on the wall, and what she imagined might lie beyond it…
What could wait, in the dark…?
"Please, please, Christine!" Meg begged.
Christine thought that the younger girl might be close to tears, by the sound of her voice. She said nothing, and did not move.
"Please…speak to me, Christine! Are you all right? Please, Christine—open the door, let me in—I only want to know that you are all right! Christine!"
"I am here, Meg," she replied, tonelessly.
She stood up, at last—
But her footsteps took her away from the door, instead of towards it.
Past the foremost stand of old costumes and props Christine glided: the hem of her dark woolen skirt brushing softly against the rough wooden floorboards. She thought that she heard a faint, sad little sniffling noise from the other side of the door.
The normal, agreeable and even-tempered Christine that she had been felt a pang in her heart at treating her dearest friend so harshly. But she was deeply entrenched in the darkness of her own thoughts now, and her mind held no thoughts of anything that was outside of that enormous, shadowy rooms, in which even the silence seemed to echo.
"Would you like to hear a story, Meg?" she asked.
She came to stand before an old, full-length mirror, and gazed morosely into its depths. Her reflection showed the image of a wraith-maiden: a deadly pale siren that a vampire prince might have chosen as his mistress. The cold and silvery light in the room glanced upon her delicately chiseled features—highlighting the perfect, curving cupid's bow of her claret-stained lips and the little dip that shadowed her chin below them, the fine symmetry of her cheekbones. Her eyes seemed dark now…so much darker than before…wide and smoldering with the fury and resentment of her world, a hatred that she had so barely contained…
Until now.
The flared ebony of her vibrantly, malignantly gleaming irises stood out against the incredible pallor of her face, and her skin was entirely devoid of colour, in this light…or perhaps it was not a trick of the light that made it seem so. Perhaps now her skin really did simply lack any colour at all. She felt so cold, and so…deadened…
It almost seemed if as anything, even that, could be entirely possible.
A wraith-queen, in her forgotten, decaying kingdom…
With this morbid little thought in her mind, Christine turned her face aside—leaving her contemplation of the mirror and the images held within it—and looked around herself. The attic was unaltered. It had not changed in the slightest since the day that she and the little ballet girls had first stepped through its door. And yet…today…she saw it in an entirely different light.
Or, perhaps…
An entirely different darkness…
She stepped across the creaking floorboards, moving towards one rack where many different costumes hung, quite forgotten by their former owners. Cold and unforgiving eyes scanned across the silk and velvet lines—
Then Christine reached out, and ran one hand down the sleeve of a once-magnificent white ball gown. Somehow, its silk had managed to maintain its colour, and it seemed to shine, with a stark and hopeless defiance, even in the grey light.
Christine pulled it from the rack, and went back to the mirror. She held the gown up against herself, gazing intently at her reflection in the silvery depths of the mirror. Then she spoke.
"I shall tell you a story, Meg…" she said.
Once upon a time there was a beautiful young woman—a princess, they say—who was kidnapped by a band of horrid thieves. And the thieves always made her stay home to mend their horrid stinking clothing, and tend to their horrid noisy brats. They were all stupid, and cruel, and wanted everything for themselves, and the young woman was practically their slave…
"Yes…" purred the Goblin King, his dual-toned eyes sparking with maleficent pleasure. He caressed his hand over the glowing orb, stroking the image of the beautiful dark-haired girl as anyone else might have stroked a cat.
He was so close…
"Yes…they have mistreated you, haven't they…? You hate them all…they have made you their hopeless Cinderella, and forced you to live upon their rancid ashes…you despise their foul and thoughtless world at the very core of your being. They are stupid…they are witless and ungrateful and undeserving of you, and you know it. Say the words, beloved…simply say the words, and the nightmare will be ended…"
The goblins heard all that was said.
And they shuddered, collectively.
Soon, their master would have his queen…
Falling silent for a moment—pausing in the narration of her story—Christine slowly drew the white silk gown onto her figure, lacing it over her simple dark wool skirt and linen blouse. She looked at herself in the mirror again.
Her hair fell down her back and over her shoulders: wild and unkempt in its masses of spiraling curls, and her skin nearly blended in shade with that of the gown. Its regal Elizabethan-make suited her, with its full long sleeves and wide skirt, its train pooling behind her on the floor.
She seemed to glow in the dull grey light.
They don't know anything, she thought, fiercely. I am nothing like they have ever known, and they will never understand it. I am alone in this world—yet I could be their princess. I could have all my dreams, if I wanted…
" 'But what no one knew was this…' " she whispered then, continuing so softly that Meg—crumpled on the other side of the door, in despair of her friend's cold and strange behavior—could scarcely hear her.
But what no one knew was this…
The King of the Goblins had fallen in love with the girl, and he had given her certain powers, as proof of his adoration of her.
In the castle, the sorcerer and his goblins listened, intensely.
The magical barrier between the worlds began to hiss and sizzle furiously: sparking with unimaginable energy, anticipating…
Then, one night, when her captors had been particularly nasty to her, the girl called on the goblins to help her. And they said to her, "Say your right words, and we shall take you away to the Goblin City, and then you will be free!"
But the girl knew that the King of the Goblins would wreak a bloody revenge on the thieves, and keep her in his castle forever and ever, away from the light of the sun and her own land.
And so she suffered in silence, through many a long month…until one night, when she was worn out by a day of slaving at housework, and hurt beyond measure by the harsh, ungrateful words of her jailers, she could bear it no longer…
Christine tossed her head, in mocking defiance: dramatically rolling her pretty eyes, as she said—
"No! No! I mustn't! I mustn't! I mustn't say…"
She paused.
"I wish…I wish…"
"Listen!" hissed one of the goblins.
"She's going to say it!" rasped another, yellow eyes glowing.
"Shush!"
A third goblin was straining to hear the girl.
"Listen! She is going to say the words!"
The enormous throne room was already empty: the last bit of movement within it being the swirl of its master's billowing cloak as he swept out the door, into the darkness. His determination left a sulfuric crackling in the air behind him…
"I can bear it no longer!" Christine avowed: her eyes shining furious and bright. The story was gone, and only her anger and loneliness remained, consuming her. Her next words were extracted from the core of her bleeding heart—
"Goblin King, Goblin King, wherever you may be—come and take this awful life of mine far away from me!"
The goblins looked at one another, and silence fell over the land.
"She didn't say the words…" one of them breathed.
But something was happening: a great power-storm was building in the air, and every last one of the goblins could feel it, vibrating around them with painful intensity—like lightning that was about to strike.
Something had been unleashed…
"Wait…!"
Christine bowed her head, and sank to the ground, the voluminous moonlight-coloured skirts of the gown billowing around her slender form like foaming white wave caps. She could hear Meg sobbing piteously on the other side of the door, and part of her wanted to get up, and end this charade—to simply give in, and admit that she was wrong to behave so childishly, that she hadn't been treated so badly, and that everything was really quite all right, and not wrong at all…
But everything was wrong.
She was lost.
A single tear edged out of her eye, and rolled like molten silver down her pristine cheek with the brushing lightness of a butterfly's wing. It splashed onto her hands, as she held them in her lap, uselessly.
"I wish the goblins would come and take me away…right now."
The air in the room was cold.
And then the lights went out.
The encroaching darkness stepped up, behind her and all around her, and swallowed her whole: gently gathering her into its velvet arms.
And in the silent comfort of oblivion…she knew no more of the world…