7.
I had been accustomed to more deplorable sleeping conditions than the one I had forced Erik to bestow on me. So it was not the accommodations that disturbed my sleep that night, as I later led him to believe.
I had managed to become very comfortable—in relative terms of course—on the folded blankets over the antique settée. Tucked away in what would one day be a guest room—so he later told me—I had the strange sensation I was going to bed among graves. In the corner of a nearly empty, grey room underground, peering at the remnants of furniture covered in white sheets . . . every distant chair was swathed strangely until, in the dim light of one gas lamp that was left burning morosely, the chairs seemed to fill with inhabitants. Surely these were the ghosts of the victims dead above, veiled like darling brides in the depth of this tomb . . .
It was impossible, after witnessing so much carnage, not to be as sensitive to the shadows that night as I was. Fear overpowered a generally sérieuse disposition, and I clutched at the feeble covers in the darkness, unable to shut my eyes. As I tried to regain control, I reasoned: would you rather be above and nearer to the face of God, or here, perhaps near to the face of perdition, but safe? It was not only the depth that reassured me, but the company. Oh yes, a murderer, a drugged fiend—yet I was certain only the most protracted circumstances would cause him to even consider harming me. Whatever Erik might have been capable of—and I believed a great deal—a certain respect for femininity pervaded his attitude.
Only as I was causing my little heart to slow down its thundering so I might get some rest, terror began anew. I heard wicked, disturbingly mirthful laughter—the laughter of horror—sharp—derisive—devilish—insane—
I shuddered. I bolted up from the settée. Nothing would make that horrid laughter cease! My panic swelled. On and on the laughter of Satan himself rang through the empty house . . .
No, it was not empty, I remembered, practical reason slowly capping the outrageous terror I had been faced with fully. It was Erik's laughter, I realized, though the grating, preternatural sound resembled not at all his clear, exceedingly brilliant speaking voice. The morphine, I thought, placing my hand at the base of my throat in fear. It was the first wave of euphoria sweeping over him. Dear God, was it not as terrible to feed a sin as to indulge in one?
His laughter rose and soared maniacally from his chamber through wood and hallways, growing steadily more injurious and unnerving as staggered seconds went by. I clutched at my throat harder. The memories of men whose blood still stained my apron after repeated washings were difficult enough to forget. Could I live with the notion that I had caused, with my own hands, a deliberate death?
Abruptly, the laughter did stop, for at the height of the frenzied, breathless gaiety, the unfortunate man who had saved my life made a harsh choking sound and then was silent.
I was no more relieved than if he had continued on laughing like that for eternity. I felt my eyes and ears straining in the darkness for a hint that he might still be alive, and that shuddering spectacle of energy had not signaled the end of his tortured life. My hand crept up over my mouth, as if to prevent me from screaming, though I was as likely to make an outburst then as the Prussians were to retreat. Of course, there was the probably chance that the euphoria had been replaced by crippling apathy so common to morphine.
Still, I thought: what if I go in and he is dead? Will I be able to venture back and live as before? Where would I go and how would I support myself? Could I really stir a foot knowing I had killed him and let him die alone? His murder was equally the death of my prospects, for ludicrous as it had seemed, Erik held my life in his hands.
I can't think how it happened; I was sure the terror would have been more than ample to keep me awake until morning. But I must have fallen out of consciousness from exhaustion. For I was woken again, not by the terrible laughter of a brain gone mad on drugs, but something infinitely worse.
It was like a reversed reflection, cunning and horrific in its acuteness. For now, all the shuddering, chilling fright I had felt earlier that night came from him—spat back at me as if in derision—holding a substantial depth of desperate suffering and anguish. Cries of agony, interspersed with exclamations and jagged sobs. It was like the Hôtel-Dieu—the maddened shouts on the operating table, all that blood spurting—
I needed only hear it again to spur myself to pick up the oil lamp and take it with me as I careened in the uncaring night to his door. There I skidded to a halt. Were these the cries of the dying? At first I supposed he had knocked over a light in the hilarity of his injection and was perishing in the flames. But no—no light under the door, no smoke. Then how had he been harmed in such a way that would cause such a reserved, apathetic man to cry out in such shameless pain? Was the drug's effect turning sour?
But he was speaking, or rather shrieking, and the voice was his this time, only roughened by obvious discontent. "Oh dear God . . ." he cried. "Don't let—make it stop—keep them away!"
Them? I thought? Could it be Erik's victims were returning to torment him in mind—in that ever-vengeful prison of sleep—as my charges had so ruthlessly done before?
"No! No!" he shouted. "Let me die . . . please . . ."
But I would not let him die. Clutching the lamp with one hand, the handle of the door with the other, I let myself in, utterly grateful, though somewhat surprised, that the door was unlocked.
The light was already trembling unreliably in my hand, and upon greeting the scene that now assailed my so-wearied senses, the lamp sailed wildly on the wall. Phantasmagoric shapes proceeded to pounce in and out of the darkness and the flickering realm of the light, giving rise to more fear. Surely no morphine, no nightmare could produce an effect like this, the mercurial shapes of what appeared to be several hundred demons assailing this one man.
Pressing one frightened hand to my breast and somehow endeavoring to hold the light steadier, I found my religious and moral imaginations to be getting the better of me, for there was only one man on that bed. His writhings were so fierce and desperate it was conceivable how an impressionable mind could have observed the death struggle between man and monster . . .
His shuddering body convulsions did nothing to dim my fear, only causing my hand to bend at such an angle that before long, hot oil was dripping upon his new, certainly expensive carpeting. It was surely habit that prompted the fall to my knees to amend the burning mess, and there I knelt, huddled over the thin rays of light as the figure tossed and turned while uttering savage cries.
Oh, you are really the compassionate nurse, my conscience derided. You shirk from responsibility when mercy is to be extended to all human beings, no matter how profane or misformed! My hand was clutching at my lips in terror and shame, because I could not make myself inch further.
At length I forced myself to move closer and ere long, I stopped again in the most difficult struggle of my life. For laying in my path was not only the discarded vial containing his sought-after drug, not only the needle and tourniquet—there beside the instruments of his destruction and mine, was his black papier-mâché mask.
My hand rose to my mouth, and I absently bit at the flesh. I wept for the first time in all those months of horror and revulsion. For memory is a strange capricious thing, and I was just now regaining mine.
I had been eleven years old. Fairs came infrequently to Saumur, it was such a small town then. So, like any rural child desirous of entertainment, I was anxious to extract my yearly exposure. Children are easily amused. The jugglers with their colorful pins and the dogs yapping on raggedy scarves were quickly absorbed as harmless fun. But children are also easily frightened. A babe will shriek at almost any disturbance and this will reflect in panic in all the younger children.
That is why the true monstrosities of the traveling fairs are reserved for adults. Adults care not for the suffering of one so removed as a bearded woman or a red-eyed albino. Adults are only glad to be reminded that, whatever shortcomings that they may suffer from, they will always be above the freak in a cage, the deformed and the dangerous whose only purpose is to thrill and advertise for smelling salts.
I tell you this because my own poor mother perpetrated the collective derision of the crowd. Lord save us, she was not beautiful either, but the little entertainment available to a factory worker was, though coarse, as satisfying as any to be had in her life. So she paid a dirty sou out of her conventional black lace mitts and, balancing my young brother on one hip and holding carefully to mine with the other, we waded past the grimy carpets and tents to observe that summer's fair.
It was true—what could the performers in the fairs do to earn their lives but exploit themselves? So they stood like looming trees of primeval forests, gloomy and silent to me while my mother only perceived the showman's façade these desperate and unloved people put on to garner payment for a few of those pleasures we are afforded in life.
My brother, the young and infinitely sage, could see beyond the carnival colors and gleaming lights, past the superficial look of pride the South Sea Indian wore while flexing his strangely tattooed skin for the wondering crowds; past the fake girlish giggles of the little dwarf woman as she paraded in dolls' clothes. My brother began to cry, almost immediately, despite my embarrassed mother, she nervously smiling at the other patrons who were trying to enjoy the spectacle. "Come along, Jean," she mumbled, dragging me by the hand as she hoisted my brother on her hip and we proceeded onward to a cage, like the kind they would one day have in the Zoo in the Bois. The bars were thick, hardened iron, and the space only large enough for a lion to pace grimly in, forever reflecting on his isolation: for there was room for only one.
"Listen, Jean," my mother crooned, exasperated, "listen to that beautiful violin. Doesn't that sound nice?" And the violin, I could see now, came from inside the cage. A man was inside the cage. A man was inside the cage, playing this instrument with an obvious skill. I was too young to really appreciate fine music, but I know it must have been exquisite.
My mother gasped suddenly, reeling back from the cage in distaste so obvious I was sure she had seen something unspeakable. My mother did not pale easily, and she had blanched the color of coffin linings. Her hand rose to her mouth in shock; she was clearly petrified, but, like so many of our unfortunate species when presented with a horror, was unable to turn away.
Jean cried on, and the music of the violin stopped. I saw the man in the cage glance up briefly, eyeing my mother's disbelief with little care. He resumed, back to diligently, mechanically, contemptuously playing the fine wood instrument in his bony hands.
His face—it was indeed horrible, there was no other way to describe it. The skull, the empty eyes and nonexistent nose, the ashen pallor—it was terrible to behold, but I did not cry as my brother did, only stared—and stared. I conjectured in my young mind his approximate age: he was perhaps twenty, though his remarkably thin build made it nebulous. He was seated cross-legged in the lion cage, and, as I peered closer, I saw each arm and leg was manacled with irons and chained to the bars of the cage. Walking closer, despite my mother's silent, intangible warning, I saw that the manacles were heavy, almost comically large on his thin frame, under which were masses of dirty grey clothing, thick with grease and—well, it looked like blood. Fascinated, my brother howling in the background, I proved entirely too reckless for a child and wandered all the way up to the bars.
Of course I was almost too small to be seen, but the corpse-like creature must have sensed the eyes my mother had often struck me for, eyes with a gaze too intense for a child. He looked up again, and a strange sort of fear and hesitancy crossed his face. His white, pinched lips began trembling. I was only a child so I can't remember what exactly I saw in his face, but I can conjecture now that it must have been shame, dread, desperation.
Abruptly he stopped playing the violin. All the misanthropic displacement was gone, all the cold, grave superiority and dignity that might have set apart this man of obvious skill from a mindless freak. I was impassive. In reflection, it was fear that made the corpse-body twist away from me in his tiny cage, fear that I would condemn him like all the rest.
He began straining at the manacles on his limbs to pull away from the bars, but alas his efforts were in vain. He was making little grunts of effort, pulling against the chains and every so often gazing back at me with terror. The perspiration on his white forehead clouded in little beads and as he untucked himself from his position, I could see his bare feet, caked with black dirt.
I saw that he was reaching for something in the corner of his cage. He stretched with his long pale fingers for it, but he couldn't quite grasp it. Like tortured Tantalus, he could never reach that which was closest to him yet ever so far away. The twisting of his body became wild, and I saw the back of his shirt was flayed with wide, red gaps, oozing with dark, drying blood.
"Manon Lapaine!" my mother scolded shrilly, grabbing my arm fiercely and pulling me away from the cage.
Jean was still crying.
"But Mama," I asked, "why was that one in a cage?"
"Probably more dangerous than the rest of them, I daresay," was her curt reply.
How correct she proved to be!
But twisting my head back as we looked away, I could see the corpse had not received his reward yet, only slumped in defeat.
And what he had been reaching for, of course, was a black papier-mâché mask.
So I had met Erik three times. And I had seen his face, all those years ago. "Oh, forgive me," I whispered aloud, imagining how much pain he had suffered. There was no denying that he could have only gotten uglier as time went on, but now accustomed to the horrors of war—why, his face was no worse than a shelling victim's bloody gashes.
The oil lamp sputtered for a moment, then dimmed. "Don't hurt me," the figure on the bed muttered, and for a moment I thought he had regained his lucidity. His body had calmed its errant convulsions, and he had sprawled himself in exhaustion face-down on his bed.
The tousled bedclothes reminded me of a ruffled bird's feathers, or more evocatively, of the scraps of clothing he had been wearing twenty years before in his cage. Did he remember me? I suddenly wondered with a wry smile. Perhaps. He had been an unforgettable sight, and while he no doubt entertained many staring spectators without ever taking notice of them, I had the conceit to think perhaps he did remember me; perhaps it was more than just the promise of morphine that had caused him to come back again and again.
He muttered something into the sheets again, and now, trembling only a little, I rose to my feet and carefully approached. I was feeling now the full effect of what was a very cold night. It seemed very strange for someone as susceptible to cold as Erik was to live five levels below the ground, but it did give him privacy.
He was shivering slightly, his hands still clutching every so often in fists over the scattered covers as if a new wave of unbearable pain was sweeping over him for a moment, and then no more. As I hovered over him with the probing eyes of the child I was once, one of his hands shot out unknowingly and grabbed mine. I gasped out of reflex as that cold, pinching flesh grasped my wrist. I feared that he would hear my shock, and rage would take over. But he was still in his daze and murmured quietly as his frozen fingers interlaced between mine. "Don't leave me," he whispered in a tiny, fragile voice. "I didn't mean to be ugly—I didn't mean to scare you."
He half rose off of his pallet, staring at me with open—though glassy—eyes. The sudden reacquaintance with the death's-head startled me. I jumped back, and he gripped me tighter. I forced myself to focus on the runny liquid swirling around in his non-sentient, pale gold eyes, steadying the natural revulsion. Yes, he was weeping out of the deep sockets where his tiny, piteous eyes resided.
I pressed back on his hand gingerly and slowly sank to my knees beside the bed. I noticed then what had come of his earlier violent thrashings. His well-made white shirt had multiple torn holes in it, wide and horrible, revealing his thin and pale back. Reminded at once of the stain of blood I had seen on him years before, I was shocked but not surprised to see particularly vicious and visible scars striping his skin. But there were more appalling scars, these ones newly inflicted, the blood still flowing. Releasing my hand from his, I found his small fingernails bloody, and semi-circles of iron red in his white palms.
"Oh dear God," I whispered. I tore at the hem of my petticoat. I carefully began to lift the remnants of his shirt from his back. He winced and shuddered, "It hurts . . . it hurts!" His pleas were so pathetic I almost stopped, but I did not and slowly removed the fabric from his pale skin. It was mass of bloody treads, his back; a testament to years of physical abuse. I trembled as I tried to smooth out the surprisingly deep cuts his nails had inflicted.
Every scar I traced with reverent fingers, imagining each lash of the whip and how he must have suffered on this earth. I wiped his body clean of the welling blood, growing more certain that I had been meant to see this sight—meant to, by some force—so one person at least might understand the plight the nameless Erik. So one might appreciate why he was building an underground haven beneath all of humanity.
The scars were painful merely to gaze at, but the rest of his flesh was smooth and marble over prominent bone. The lamp was burning low, flickering on his slowly using and falling spine. I suddenly thought to laugh at the impropriety of the situation and imagined what might transpire if he awoke to find me, Manon Lapaine, the nurse touching his naked flesh. So I rose to my feet to leave him.
No one was more bewildered than I when the hand I had dropped rose up again and landed authoritatively on my thigh. Immediately this fifth cellar did not seem so cold anymore! I am sure I never blushed more brightly in my life than at that moment. Not only conventional decorum dictated this was improper; because it was me, I was flustered and feeling ill. I, the unmarried spinster who would never bear children and therefore would never know a man . . .
"Oh God," he murmured in his daze, "just this once let me believe that it's true . . ." And his hand moved slowly up my skirt, with the careful dexterity of those hands that coaxed charming melodies from the unyielding strings of violins. I gasped, my stomach turning in shock, embarrassment, disgust, and—and a little pleasure. I sank down to the floor again, biting my lip hard, telling myself this was improper and disgusting. What did it matter that I had been inexorably attracted to the masked man who had played the violin through the partition of my room? This ugly, ugly man, who beyond his many vices was a brilliant mind and soul—who had saved my life? He would never know I had wept over his suffering as a merciful woman should and wanted to assuage his pain.
"To . . . know," he muttered nonsensically, "to know what all men know—" He gritted his teeth savagely. His breaths were short and unhappy, and one little sob shook his entire frame. "I could have been good," he whispered, "if a woman had . . ." He fell back into silent, tear-soaked reverie, shuddering and pawing at the bedding in aggregate despair.
I had no choice; the nurse could not bear this much suffering; and the woman could not leave someone she admired to the hell of his loneliness. Fully understanding in his drugged state he would no memory of this, I placed my hand on top of his, hoping to spread my warmth to his cold fingers.
He gasped and shook a bit, as if unable to believe, even in his dreams, that someone might want to touch him. Wordless murmurs escaped his lips and the glaze upon his eyes now suggested more than a little pleasure. He took my hand and, trembling, turned himself over, now lying on his back. He resettled my hand in the center of his chest and then was still. His eyes closed. I saw the jungle of blue-green veins popping up underneath his milky, translucent skin. There were scars on his chest, too—the deep remains of lashings crossed onto his rounded shoulders. There were deeper, lighter scars that looked almost like knife wounds—not serious, almost like surgical scars. They made me think of the soft, light lines spread out over both his knuckles and the fingers that, I had decided, had all once been broken. There was one of these scars that began on his low stomach and went on beyond his trousers.
His body was cold, so cold, and his face was as ugly as might be imagined. And yet, it was not such a hardship to leave my hand in the center of his chest, if it kept him from suffering more that night. Was I not duty-bound to bring comfort to this man, the duty of repaid debt as well as that of the nurse—one caught up, against her will, in the strange background of this fiend named Erik? The sputtering oil lamp in my hand, I bent down cautiously over the bed.
Had I in that moment resolved to kiss him? Part of me surely wanted to, if only on the forehead of that death-mask. At the last moment, though, it was the smell of death that repelled me, and I settled for patting my hand once more on his chest. Soon the oil of the lamp finally sloshed over the flame, and it was in sudden darkness that told my beating heart that this was the end. I had seen what I had been meant to see. So it was off once more, imagining the new cuts of morphine-induced fob would scab over soon and leave only scars to tell the tale of this night.