Autopsy

When Erik came to collect Christine after the opera, he said not a word about her disappointing performance. In fact, he said nothing at all. And the longer Christine waited for him to voice the disapproval she knew must be brewing within him as he guided her along their lengthy journey to his home, the further she drew into herself to escape within thoughts of Elainie, and she lost complete track of cellars and lakes they passed.

Where had she come from? Had she lived near here? Did she have a family in a house nearby missing her? Was her mother weeping in that house at this very moment? How had she died? How had she come to Erik's lake?

Why wasn't she wearing a coat? How old was she?

"What color are her eyes?" she asked herself aloud without realizing she spoke the words as she entered Erik's house.

"Blue." Erik's voice came as if from nowhere. She did not even know he had been listening.

She looked up to him quickly. "How do you…" She gasped. "Did you…look?"

"No," he sighed with a hint of exasperation.

Her curiosity quickly overcame her tentativeness. "Then how do you know?"

He shrugged, turning away. "Because she is blonde-haired and fair-skinned and she..." He shook his head. "It would be logical."

"Oh…" Christine nodded and her gaze fell to the dark hearth for a moment of silent thought before she turned to watch him as he hung his hat. "When are you going to do it?"

He froze, his entire frame stiffening before he turned to her. "Later."

She wanted to object. He had promised he would find out tonight, he had promised after the opera he would tell her how Elainie died.

"Erik…"

"Go to bed," he said sharply, cutting her off.

"But…"

"You are tired. You have spent too much energy singing today. Go get your sleep, Christine."

"But…" She pressed her lips together. "You will wake me? When you know?"

He nodded without meeting her eyes.

"Erik," she whispered, and she began to approach him.

"I promise," he snapped. But then he looked to her where she had stopped in her tracks and his gaze softened. "If you are hungry later…"

Her eyes fell and she turned away. "Thank you," she murmured.

"Goodnight, Christine."

She said nothing as she made her way to her room. At least he had promised… She would be able to sleep. Perhaps she had sung too much with the stress upon her, but for all her weariness, sleep came most easily.

And then she must have been dreaming, for when she awoke suddenly in the night, she was already shaking with the chills of a cold sweat, and her heart had been fluttering so long in her throat, she felt ready to choke.

She pushed herself up in her bed, panting for breath. A nightmare? But she could remember nothing. How long had she been asleep? She passed a hand over her face and lifted her eyes. Something moved at the end of her bed. Christine ceased breathing altogether. Someone was down there. She could distinctly see the shape through the sheer cream of the Louis-Philippe bed curtains.

Erik! She wanted to call for Erik. But without breath, the words could not form in her throat. But it could not be Erik… Erik would not have been so white…pink and white. And Erik was not so small.

Again, the shape moved—turning, and blue eyes blinked out at Christine from a little white face under a soft mass of shimmering golden curls.

Christine began to shake again, and her fingers dug into the soft down of the comforter.

"Elaine," she gasped in a horse whisper.

The little girl at the end of the bed blinked again and curiously tilted her head, her hair falling lightly over one shoulder of the pale pink dress. And then she sighed a sigh Christine knew she had heard before.

Slowly, very slowly, Christine lifted a hand to the braided cord at the headboard to open the curtains.

The child's eyes followed the fluttering of the material as it parted about the canopy frame, and then she looked again to Christine.

"Am I dreaming?" Christine half-sobbed to herself, terrified to make much sound at all. She pressed a hand to her eyes again, but as she did, the silver charm of the miniature necklace wrapped about her wrist fell against her cheek. It was painfully cold. She gasped and jerked her hand away but only to see a frown crease the expression of the pale face that hovered just above the end of her bed.

"What do you want?" Christine pleaded, tears tracing down her cheeks.

The girl remained frozen for a moment, as if Christine's words had never existed, but then she lifted a finger to her rosy lips and laughed, though Christine heard no sound.

Christine said nothing then, obeying the small command, and they simply stared at each other for a lengthening, excruciating silence. Then unable to bear it a moment longer, Christine very slowly began to push away the comforter and shifted to rise.

Fear flashed across the child's face and she stepped back far enough for Christine to see her full shape beyond the bed. Christine saw then that she was wet, soaking wet and dripping all over the floor.

"No," Christine whispered.

The girl's head snapped back and forth, frantically looking around the room, and then she ran for the door.

"Don't go!" Christine scrambled out of her bed, but by the time she was standing, the girl was gone.

Instantly dizzy, she swayed on her feet, barely managing to catch herself on the nightstand before she could fall. She stayed that way for a moment, panting, and then lifted a shaky hand to turn up the dim flame in the lamp to its full power.

"Don't go," she repeated in a whisper to the silent room she dared not lift her eyes to see again. Focusing only on the warm glow of the lamp, she fingered the chain at her wrist as she sniffed back terrified tears for perpetual moments of the night.

Finally, after enough time to allow the vision to sink into the realm of memory, Christine straightened and lifted a still-trembling hand to pull a shawl from the drawer in the nightstand. And then with the deepest of breaths, she turned to face the room again. It was empty.

"Erik?" she called far too softly.

She wrapped the shawl about her shoulders and moved toward the door, but so slowly…it was so far away… She would make it if she only took it step by step. Step by step by step… Christine froze. The carpet was wet beneath her bare foot. Her toes curled, but she did not look down. Fresh tears exploded into her eyes with a sob.

"Erik!" she cried and ran to the door, wrenching it open and then immediately slamming it again behind her.

The drawing room was dark. Christine shivered and scrambled from the door, wiping at her face with the corner of the shawl. Where was he? She found the door to his room locked. She knocked softly and waited, but no answer did she receive. It was too dark here. And too cold. Her wet foot felt frozen. She glanced to the door of her room but could only shudder; she did not dare return there.

Elainie… What could she have wanted? Why did her laughter make no sound? Why did she tell Christine to be silent? It was as if a secret had been shared, but Christine did not know what it could be.

She was shivering uncontrollably then. Elainie had wanted something… Elainie had wanted her. Wanted her…

Christine was already moving in the direction of the laboratory.

When she touched the metal doorknob, its coldness nearly burned her fingers, but she did not release it.

Closing her hand around it, she turned it, slowly, and pushed the door open so silently she did not even know she had done it until the light from inside dazzled her eyes. She squinted, peeking in, but could see nothing of the majority of the room for the unit of shelves that blocked her view. Absolute silence. She pushed the door further to move inside. Elainie had wanted her to come to her. She had called Christine here.

She moved around the rack of shelves and saw her then on her steel table. But the girl was no longer flat on her back, face to heaven. She rested on her side now, and the false image of peacefulness in sleep was completely destroyed as matted clumps of hanging hair obscured her face and one arm was crushed uncomfortably under her little body while the other twisted awkwardly where it had fallen over her side to rest against the cold, hard table.

It took Christine a moment to recover from the surprise of seeing her in such a position before she was even more shocked to realize that the little pink dress seemed to be unfastened, though she could not tell for certain from her side of the room. It looked as if it were shrugged off from her shoulders beneath the flat golden curls that hid any clear signs. Abandoned… She looked so abandoned. Abandoned and… violated.

As Christine was about to take her first steps to the table, she suddenly heard a sound, and her eyes snapped to an open door in the wall behind the table she had not noticed before. She gasped and nearly dropped her shawl. At once pulling it tightly about her shivering bare arms left exposed by the sleeveless nightgown, she moved quickly to the door behind the shelves, but before she could make it back into the hall, she froze again at the distinct sound of soft footsteps and a sigh that could have only ever been Erik's.

She immediately ducked into the corner between the rack and the side wall where the shelves were so filled with books and papers that she remained completely hidden from sight on the other side.

Clasping both hands to her mouth, she managed to keep her wild breathing silent until it slowed. The sound of a door closing. Shakily but silently turning her head, she found herself almost exactly eye-level with the smallest of cracks between books that allowed her a superbly clear view of the room on the other side of the shelf. Elainie had called her here… She wanted Christine to see.

She could see Erik now. His hand was on the knob of the other door and he simply stood there, staring at the child on the table. He was not wearing his mask. Christine could not help shuddering as she looked at him, but found the response was brought much more from the touching solemnity and reluctance in his expression than the cadaverous face itself.

Neither was he wearing his evening jacket, waistcoat or tie, merely his white dress shirt, of which one of his sleeves was rolled above his elbow. If he knew Christine was there, he made no sign of it for his eyes that could not be seen in the brightness of the lights over the counters remained entirely fixed on Elainie even as he finally broke free of his stillness, shook out his head, and slowly approached the steel table.

"So," he spoke softly, and his tone was almost kind in its authority. "Christine wants to know how you died. And whatever Christine wants, Christine gets." He placed his hands on the edge of the table, looking at the girl from where her back was turned toward him. "We deny Christine nothing. And so, my little dear-" He took one of her shoulders gently and replaced her to lie on her back, then leaned over her ever so slightly, as he whispered the last of his sentence:

"We are going to cut you open and inspect you from the inside out."

A pause, then abruptly he straightened and moved as if to bring both hands to his face, but they halted in midair. And then he only turned and rolled up his second sleeve as he moved to the counter.

"You should feel honored," he spoke with his back to her now. "I've never done this before." He took up a pair of long, sharp scissors from a tray on the counter and turned back to the table. "You are my first child corpse."

He tilted his head, studying the tiny body before setting the scissors next to her head in order to take the table by its edge and pull it on its metal wheels closer to the counter. Then he moved to retrieve the scissors, but stopped before touching them and instead lifted his hand to Elainie's little round face and brushed her eyelids. After a moment of hesitation, very gently with two fingers, he opened her eye to glance at it briefly before he closed it again and said almost too softly to be heard:

"Well. Won't Christine be pleased."

He slipped his fingers through the scissors, and with his other hand, he lifted the bottom of the pink dress. But then once more pausing in mid-action, the focus of his gaze shifted thoughtfully to a distant point across the room.

If he had been looking anywhere near where Christine hid, she was certain at that moment she would have fainted dead away.

Erik shook his head again as if to clear a fog from his mind, and he looked down to the little girl, speaking softly though more distinctly, "But I feel much better now."

Then with abrupt surgical precision, the scissors sliced away the little pink dress and its petticoats all at once. Moving the body as little as needed, he set the cloth aside and Elainie was left wearing nothing more than her little black boots and woolen winter leggings-her thin, pale, white chest quite completely exposed to the cold.

Erik took his time to put the scissors away before returning to look at her again.

"So young…" He shook his head slowly. "So small…"

He lifted her gently then with his bare hands and carefully inspected her newly-exposed flesh.

"Only one bruise," he said the way any ordinary doctor might have spoken to a living child as he returned her to lie on her back. "Did you fall?"

He brushed off his hands and stepped backward toward the counter.

"Christine does not believe that you drowned." He turned to his tray. "And it is usually quite simple to get Christine to believe what we want her to believe, isn't it?"

Christine's hands over her mouth relaxed and she lowered them slowly. Her anticipation remained great, but the continuing conversational tone of Erik's unanswered words had a strangely comforting effect on her, even considering to whom they were addressed. And for a few moments the only sounds were the faint clinks of metal objects on the tray she could not see.

Then he turned back to the table again and every light in the room suddenly reflected fiercely off the steel of the surgical knife he held.

Christine's comfort vanished.

"You are very small," he said to the child. "And so I am going to use a very small scalpel. Don't worry. You won't feel a thing."

And then turning the knife in his hand, he leaned over the body, inserted it into girl's flesh and cleanly slit her open from collar to stomach just above the waistband of her woolens.

Christine's entire body spasmed and her hands gripped more violently than ever over her mouth and nose to keep the sobs that ached to join her breaths at bay-but she dared not look away!

After making crosswise cuts in the girl's tiny torso, Erik put the bloodied scalpel aside and used his bare hands to slowly open up Elainie's little ribcage.

From her lowered angle and due to the narrowness of her field of vision, Christine could see nothing of what Erik observed within the opened cavern of the child's body. But the dark blood that stained his hands conjured more graphic images than she could have ever happened to observe in any medical representation. She was certain her shaking should have rattled the shelves, but she became so numbly frozen, the safety of her stillness could only mock at her in its irony of her lack of ability to escape the sights.

"Now let us see if you did indeed drown." Erik wiped his hands with a towel. "And perhaps all this business will be over before we know it."

He took a different knife from his tray and returned to the opened corpse. Christine did not know what he could possibly be doing in there with such slight movements of his wrist, but just as quickly as he had descended, she saw his fingers lift again, just enough for her to make out the shape he held. A pale and sticky red organ, small in the white spider of his hand—one of the child's lungs. It was visible to her only with his slight movements, there one moment, then out of sight the next, then back again. He lifted the knife to it, slicing it open slowly. That was the last she saw of it. Her frozen fingers had finally, finally managed to creep their way to cover her eyes with the edges of her shawl.

She heard him speak again, but it sounded so much further away:

"Interesting…" A soft sigh. "What then, my dear?" Metal touched metal. "We need an answer."

Christine choked and her hands returned to cover her mouth. Her eyes open again, she could so suddenly clearly see, through that tiniest of cracks between the books and from all the way across the room, Erik was staring directly at her. It did not last long. Not long at all before his eyes returned to his project, but it was long enough. She was shaking again and if the shelves did not soon begin to rattle, she was certain he would clearly hear the crashing pounding of her heart.

"The heart," he said simply.

Christine jumped. She knew she made a sound, but Erik did not look to her and he continued to speak. She saw him lift his knife again.

"It is full of answers."

And then with a swift, deliberate motion of the blade, Elainie's heart was in his hand. He set it gently in a metal tray and took up the towel again.

He said nothing for a long silence that screamed in Christine's ears as he simply stared at the little red and black organ on the cold, silver tray. Then he shook his head again an put the towel aside. "So small."

He went to the door near him. Christine did not know why and did not want know why he would go back into that second room, what device it could possibly contain that he would need to examine a child's heart, but the moment he passed through the door, she was on her feet and groping along the wall until she escaped into the hall on completely numbed bare feet, chills devouring the bare flesh of her arms. She managed only just barely to close the laboratory door behind her before she could contain her gagging sobs no longer. Scrambling through the dark, she raced back to her own room.

She shut the door, she turned down the lamp, she got in bed, but she could not sleep. She gasped deeply into her pillows for what must have been ten minutes, shivering in frozen cold, curled under the heavy down of her comforter. She had only just begun to calm when she heard the sound of the turning of the handle of her door.

Christine ceased to breathe. Freezing completely, her eyes squeezed shut where her face was ihdden between comforter and pillows.

Silence… Silence… Silence… She heard the door close again.

She exhaled slowly, as quietly as possible, but still she waited—Oh, how long she waited. Her stillness eventually became trembling again, but she did not sleep. And after longer silence than she could ever withstand, her eyes slowly pried themselves open, and she managed the strength to turn her face to take in the room. He was not there.

Nothing was there.

Except for her shawl, which had been folded neatly and left for her on the nightstand under the soft glow of the lamp.