A/N: Ha. It seems that I was slightly off in my calculations. Here's your trivia for the day then. The main chandelier of the Opera Populaire actually weighs seven tons. It was the chandelier prop made for the musical that was "only" three-quarter tons. Goody, this makes things all the more fun.
Note to Aine Deande: I curse ff.net a million times over for eating your extremely thoughtful review, but know I appreciate it immensely.
Note to you know who: Cat.
("I'm waiting," says Hannibal. "Here," says Erik, handing him the Punjab lasso, "Figure out how to use this. That should take up quite a bit of your time.")
Disclaimer: Same as usual, except this chapter contains one line semi-stolen from a song by Live.
Chapter 4Past the Point of No Return
Hannibal Lecter awoke at two in the morning to see his wife, fully clothed, drop face first onto the bed beside him and utter a low, drawn-out groan. She sat back upright almost immediately, cursing as she fumbled to undo the corset that had just jabbed her viciously in the stomach.
"Long day, my dear?" There wasn't a bit of anger in his tone, which instead seemed to be saturated with a dangerous amount of teasing.
Clarice gave him a look that could have pulverized rock.
He laughed at her obvious annoyance, leading her to twist her face into an even uglier scowl. "Forgive me. I was under the impression that nighttime was always your favorite time of day."
"You're treading on thin ice, darling."
Hannibal chuckled softly. "I wager that Miss Daae eluded you then?"
"What makes you say that?" Clarice stripped off the rest of her elegant but confining dress. "I could have been meeting a lover for all you know."
"If you were," said Hannibal, not missing a beat, "you would hardly have been so foolish as to return home at this hour and in such noisy fashion."
"Hmph."
"Besides, I never imagined that the Vicomte would be your type."
Clarice winced as she lay down and drew the covers over herself. "Gods, don't remind me. Four hours we searched the Opera House and surrounding grounds before he would consent to leave it till the morning. Needless to say, we found no trace of her. It was almost as if…" she paused, pondering her next words. She hardly noticed that Hannibal had grown perfectly still and was listening most attentively. "Well, there was that voice." She shot her husband a look. "I never knew you could sing like that."
Recognizing the closed expression on his face, Clarice sighed and buried her head in the pillow. "Good night, Hannibal," she said, her words muffled.
Hannibal Lecter lay awake long after her breathing had become steady and even with sleep; he stared silently into the darkness.
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Clarice awoke barely three hours afterwards. After dressing quickly, she made her way through the quiet predawn Parisian streets, ignoring the sleepy eyes that regarded her passing shadow from corners and alleyways. A light fog shrouding the road made her journey less noticeable. She shoved a handful of francs into the hands of a driver she had startled awake and held her breath as the carriage made its slow and uneven journey towards the Opera Populaire. She was determined that she would have a look around before Raoul arrived with half the police force.
Letting herself in the main entrance with Hannibal's key, Clarice took a moment to bask in the grand stillness of the building. The few candelabras that were lit threw the grand staircase into haunting relief. Nubile goddesses and muses raised their marble fingertips towards a ceiling lost in darkness. Shadows of arches and columns created an intricate web of night in which Clarice stood, spellbound.
The Opera House seemed to shrink around her, enclosing her in a cocoon of velvet blackness. Rather than making her feel claustrophobic, however, the enclosure felt like a mother's embrace rather than a constricting cage. This building, although still young, had already survived a war. The care and love and protection its builders had lavished upon it, the building now exuded from every stone.
For a moment, there were no dark secrets, no spilt blood, no ghosts. Empty of mortal men, the Opera House was nothing more or less than a symbol of love and art: the only glories of the human story.
The soft but steady sound of her own breathing gradually brought Clarice out of her state of semi-consciousness. She let her hand trail along the cool marble balustrade as she ascended the staircase.
She searched the maze of hallways of the Opera for half an hour before admitting defeat. Christine would not be found this way, and as she had left no clue as to where she had gone, it was as if she didn't want to be found. Or… The memory of the voice was still fresh in her mind. For a moment a veil of darkness was drawn over the enchanted atmosphere of the building.
Engrossed in her thoughts, Clarice nearly jumped from fright as a door burst open next to her and a troupe of giggling ballet girls ran past her in the direction of backstage. Shocked, she discovered that it was already past seven in the morning.
Having nothing better to do, she ignored her ringing ears and followed the dancers to emerge in the relative darkness of backstage. The main curtain was down. She shrank back into its shadow almost immediately after recognizing the people already present.
The ballet girls formed a semi-circle around a man that Clarice identified as the chief stagehand. What was his name again, Buquet…yes that was it. Besides his coarse, dingy workman's clothes, he was wearing a dirty piece of gray fabric around his neck (Clarice strongly suspected that it had been cut from an old piece of backdrop) and was holding a piece of rope tied in a rough noose in his left hand.
As she watched, Buquet settled the rope around his neck and thrust his hand between his neck and the noose before pulling the rope taut. He bowed overdramatically as the girls applauded. Clarice was too far away to hear his words properly as he spoke but caught the words "Phantom" and "magical lasso". Her snort of laughter nearly gave her away. So her brave and courteous guide was nothing more than a gossiping buffoon. She would not have been surprised if it had been he who had started all the Phantom paranoia in the first place. No sooner had the thought crossed her mind that she heard her own alias.
"I hear that the Vicomte de Chagny and the Duchesse de Londres were both looking for Christine for hours last night."
"Ah yes," Buquet's eyes lit up with a glow that made Clarice's insides crawl, and for a moment, she entertained the image of his head upon a silver platter. "The new patron and patroness. Tore apart the very bowels of the theater into the wee hours of the morning. Who knows whom they might have encountered down there? Or maybe they were quite content not to encounter anyone at all."
The shriek of the girls gasping and giggling simultaneously was too much for her. Clearing her throat, Clarice stepped out of the shadows of the curtain, freezing the laughter as efficiently as a midwinter blizzard. "So tell me, Monsieur Buquet," she said, arms crossed, "Does the Phantom really exist? Or is he as much a toy for your imagination as I am?"
The expression upon the man's face was priceless. Clarice savored it for a few seconds as she allowed her anger to consume her. She felt her hands twitching again and knew that her fingers ached desperately to wrap themselves around Buquet's fat neck; she reminded herself just in time that she was no longer in the States. Such an act would not be so easily overlooked here.
Damn propriety and social status to hell. She loathed having constantly to affix masks for the sake of society. Loathed it beyond imagination! She had married Hannibal to escape all of that, only to find that she had not escaped it at all but merely given the masquerade a purpose. For those precious moments that she was alone with him, when she could let down all her defenses, she would gladly endure the false smiles and bitten-off remarks of everyday life. To maintain their dearly bought peace, she would bow to expectations.
Clarice calmed her trembling fingers in time to avoid a scene but not in time to prevent Buquet from going white as a sheet. From the look on his face, her desires had been perfectly obvious.
"I was just…was just…" he gestured helplessly with his left hand, and the old and frayed noose still around his neck broke as easily as thread. He looked down embarrassingly at the limp piece of rope.
"Then again my activities the previous night must have been just as mysterious to you as the Phantom's," said Clarice, still walking forward. The ballet girls had long since disappeared. "I wasn't even aware that you knew of them, for I noticed that you never offered to help."
Buquet was fidgeting helplessly with the rope in his hand. "Madam, I…" His shoulders slumped in surrender. "I apologize, madam. You know ballet girls; there's nothing they like more than a bit of gossip, no matter how ridiculous it sounds. I meant no harm. I would never presume to know anything about you, madam."
"You might remember that the next time you open your mouth, monsieur. That is, if you value your livelihood." Clarice hadn't meant to sound quite so harsh, but she had not missed the furtive glances that Buquet shot her even as he was mumbling his apology. Harmless or not, this man savored gossip and scandal of any kind.
Buquet looked at the ground at her words, mumbling.
"You haven't answered my question, monsieur."
"Que-question? Oh, oh yes…well, madam, I don't know if you'll believe me after what you've just heard, but the Phantom isn't quite so much a figment of the Opera's imagination as I initially claimed. I have…seen him, madam."
Clarice saw the man's eyes light up again at his words, but this time she could tell that he wasn't being entirely untruthful. "Go on. And the theatrics are quite unnecessary."
"It was late at night, and I was clearing up backstage after a performance. You see that set of stairs over there? Well, those go down to the cellars, all five floors of them. I had been working on the catwalks and had dropped a wrench down into that stairwell. Afterwards, I went down to retrieve it and hadn't gone down more than a few steps when the Phantom appeared right in front of me walking up the stairs. We stared at each other for quite some time, and then he handed me my wrench and disappeared before my eyes!
"You should have seen him, madam. He was very tall and the black clothes and enormous cloak he wore made him seem to fairly tower over me in the darkness. A cloak like this one." He pointed to the ragged piece of fabric tied around his neck, and Clarice resisted her impulse to laugh yet again. "But it was his face that I remember most vividly. Gods, could I ever forget that face! It looked like it belonged on a corpse, madam. A freshly rotting corpse."
If Buquet had expected Clarice to react to his gruesome depiction, he did not receive quite what he expected. Clarice blinked; she pondered what Buquet had just told her and decided at that moment that the man had spent a little too much time alone. "I suppose you never touched him, did you? To see if he really was a ghost or not?"
"Er…"
"Well, did he look solid to you?"
"He looked…to tell the truth, madam, he looked as if he were made from the shadows themselves."
"Hmm, must have been a special kind of ghost then. A zombie, perhaps?"
"Believe what you will, madam. But he is here in this theater. I saw him come out of that stairwell."
On an impulse, Clarice turned towards the back of the theater to see the stairs he was referring to. That was why she nearly jumped out of her skin when the trapdoor opened in the floor three feet in front of her. Her cry of surprise froze in her throat as she beheld the sight before her.
Her first thought was that the darkness previously enclosed underneath the trapdoor was rising, man-shaped, to escape above the stage. It took her a while to realize that the figure really was a person and even then she wasn't quite sure. When he turned in her direction, she couldn't remember ever seeing him move. Her eyes were drawn instinctively to the brilliant white half-mask that covered the right side of his face, yet she also did not fail to notice the exposed cheek. Pale thought the skin was, there was no doubt that it belonged to a flesh-and-blood human.
Mystified, Clarice discovered that she could not budge, as the world appeared to roll to a stop. It was some time before she realized that the statue of darkness before her was moving. And not voluntarily. From where she stood, she could see that his gloved right hand, hovering above the open trapdoor, was trembling. This painfully human gesture nearly broke the spell. Clarice would have moved forward had she not seen the arm that rose through the trapdoor at that moment and placed its hand in the Phantom's. For Clarice had no doubts of who she was observing now, and as the arm rose and was followed by a familiar head of dark hair, several windows aligned in her mind.
The Phantom chose that moment to turn and look at her fully. His eyes were a deep, rich shade of amber: the color of the darkest honey. Her stomach lurched, and she felt as if she were drowning in a swamp of the viscous liquid. She swallowed hard even as the Phantom turned away, his long black cloak swirling around him impressively, and led a half-dazed Christine in the direction of her dressing room. He paused to sneer at Buquet's cloak.
Long after the sounds of their passage had faded away, Clarice and Buquet remained staring into space like mindless idiots. She was the first to recover, managing a small laugh that made her sound as if she was choking on something. "Well, M. Buquet, I'm afraid I will have to reserve judgment on the rest of your description until later. But for now, I'm willing to suspend disbelief."
A sound from the other side of the stage made them both whirl around like skittish children. Clarice recognized the old woman who had collected the black-haired dancer last night. The woman's hands covered her mouth and she looked very pale. "Ohh, Joseph, Joseph, you've really done it now. I've warned you so many times about that sort of gossip, and now look what has happened. Madam," she said, talking to Clarice now, "I am so terribly sorry that you had to see this. It is truly unfortunate."
"Unfortunate, madam? I'm afraid I don't quite understand you. I also don't believe we have been introduced. I am Cassandra Fell."
The woman nodded slightly, her eyes still staring fearfully down the corridor into which the Phantom and Christine had disappeared. "I know who you are, madam. The entire Opera staff knows who you are, and we are most grateful. I am Madame Giry, leader of the corps de ballet."
"Was that your daughter then, whom you collected last night?"
She looked mildly surprised at the question. "Yes, yes she was. Meg is a promising dancer, if she could only stop gossiping with the singers long enough to practice properly."
Clarice could tell that Giry said all this merely for the sake of hearing her own voice. She could see the ballet mistress' hands still shaking. Buquet had remained silent; his face still lacked some of its usual coloring.
"NOOOOO! Oh God, no!"
The tension was broken at once and all heads turned in the direction of Christine's dressing room. Buquet and Giry automatically stepped forward, but were cowed into stillness by Clarice's sharp glare.
"No, stay here," she said, staring pointedly at Buquet and hardly recognizing the authority that oozed from her lips. "The last thing we need is for Mlle. Daae to become subject of the newest bit of gossip."
"But, but, madam. You don't know what could be happening to her…" he grimaced.
"Trust me, monsieur. It will be much better for you if you do as I say." Clarice instinctively shifted her right leg as she said this, feeling the familiar weight against her thigh. Without another word, she whirled and fairly ran down the hallway, hardly noticing the huffing and puffing of Mme. Giry as she followed.
She had made her decision without thinking, but now as she neared her destination, her reason returned full force to assail her mind. What on earth has possessed you, to make you think that you can care for this girl you've known for barely a week? Well, she could answer that easily enough, and it had nothing to do with friendship. The young woman's scream was familiar to her ears: it was the same helpless, desperate cry that Clarice woke to on every single one of those nights when they, the lambs, plagued her dreams. The thought made her run even faster, cursing the constricting dress around her ankles.
The door to Christine's dressing room slammed against the wall as Clarice flung it open wide in her haste, and the flimsy wood shuddered from the impact. Christine herself was already sitting upright on the couch she had risen from, awakened by her own scream, and the door served only to make her shake even more violently.
"Mademoiselle Daae! Christine! Christine!" The young woman turned toward her, her mouth white around the edges and her eyes red-rimmed with tears. And then Clarice had stepped forward and enfolded the young woman in her arms, feeling Christine's rapidly beating heart through the fabric of her dress. "Shhh, it's alright, dear, I understand…"
Christine could not stop her shaking completely but found her hysteria easing in this woman's embrace. She was dimly aware of Madame Giry standing in the doorway, transfixed. "Oh madam, that face! I could see it in my dreams, that face!" She succumbed to sobbing again at this point, shedding tears of bitterness and frustration. "You must think me a beast, I certainly do. Why, why must that face haunt me so? My darling Angel of Music…how could I, how dare I?" She buried her face in her shaking hands.
Clarice placed her hands on Christine's shoulders and waited for the young woman to look at her. "Christine Daae, listen to me, do you have a home, somewhere you can be alone?"
The young woman looked at her, her jaw shaking slightly. She managed a small nod.
"Good. I want you to go, and I want you to stay there, do you understand?"
"But-but rehearsal…I have rehearsal at one today."
Clarice smiled as she heard this. Good, if she could still remember her job, the girl couldn't be traumatized too badly. "Don't worry about that. I will speak to the managers. Can I trust you to do as I say? Not to leave your house, I mean?"
"Yes, but…" Christine hiccupped slightly and made a half-hearted gesture toward the mirror in her room.
"I know, I know, girl. But not now."
Christine did not argue again. Instead, she wrapped her arms around her body and shivered from something other than fear. Clarice stood up and threw open the wardrobe in the room, rummaging around until she pulled out a warm traveling cloak. A long black cloak. Shit. She tied it around the young woman's shoulders anyway, braced for any immediate reaction. When Christine merely hugged the dark material more snugly around herself, Clarice relaxed.
Madam Giry still had not moved from her position in the doorway and was shocked to realize that Clarice had just spoken to her. "I'm sorry, madam, what did you say?"
"I asked if you knew where Mlle. Daae lives."
"Yes, I do. But—."
Clarice pressed several francs into the old woman's hand and shot her a look that silenced any more argument. "See that she gets there safely and that she gets some sleep." She watched silently as Mme. Giry helped Christine to her feet and led them both out the door.
Alone once more, Clarice sat down heavily upon the couch that Christine had vacated. She felt her breathing quicken as a delayed rush of emotions surged through her body. Glancing around, she saw the half-empty bottle of champagne that Raoul had left last night still resting atop the dresser. She strode over and dropped the bottle into the wastebasket. The flat champagne barely fizzed as it struck bottom with a loud clunk. Her eyes lingered upon the black-and-white photograph. Turning again, she strode toward the massive mirror on the other side of the room and caressed its frame lightly, feeling curiosity well up within her like a song.
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Erik stumbled down to his lair with uncharacteristic clumsiness after depositing Christine in her dressing room. His hands shook as he propelled himself across the lake. The oar caught upon an unseen snag in the depths of the dark water and the boat rocked violently as it tipped him into the subterranean lake. The water was even colder than he imagined it, and by the time he pulled himself shivering and trembling back into the boat, his bones felt as if they burned with icy fire.
His frosty bath in the lake had done nothing to penetrate the haze surrounding his mind. Even when he had been carrying Christine in his arms as he made his way up endless flights of stairs, his mind had been far away, battling vicious inner demons. He had hardly noticed the way her body laid limp and pliant in his arms or the warmth of her still form. In any other circumstances, he would have been struck dumb and fearful by the possibility of being this close to her. How, how could he have been so foolish? What on earth had possessed him to succumb to the daft scheme of bringing her down to his home? Especially after she had seen him that one time when he had crept into her dressing room as she slept…
Did you perhaps desire for her to get used to the surroundings? – sneered a familiar voice in his head – Thought she might like to stay didn't you? You twisted beast, have you learned nothing all these years?
"Shut up," he muttered at himself and wondered, not for the first time, whether he was really going mad. After all, he was talking to himself now.
The fury he felt at her for removing his mask had long since degenerated into black despair. He could never speak to her again, he knew it. She no longer thought of him as her Angel but as a…a…he didn't want to imagine what. That look on her face! He resisted the impulse to laugh out of sheer delirium as he eased the boat against the dock outside his house.
Well…I suppose it isn't a complete loss. You did manage to organize that gala after all. That thought lent enough steadiness to his hands to tie up the boat properly.
He knew even before laying a hand to undo the bolt on the wrought-iron gate leading to his house that he was not alone. Annoyance swelled up in his mind like a warm bubble of air, shoving aside his despair for the time being. He had already had his privacy invaded in the most terrible way this morning and was in no mood to tolerate another incursion. He observed only one set of footprints leading up to his front door and therefore was not alarmed. His hand crept toward a familiar pocket in his cloak. This intruder would pay dearly.
Erik made his way through the rooms of his house like a wisp of smoke, keeping to the shadows. A casual observer would have credited his presence to a figment of their imagination, so stealthy was his progress. The intruder was standing by the piano, reaching a hand towards one of the black candlesticks, his eyes filled with morbid fascination. Erik recognized the man at once, one of only two people at the Opera now who had ever seen his face.
"Monsieur Buquet, what an unexpected delight to find you here."
The candlestick, mercifully unlit, broke upon contact with the floor and its holder clattered noisily beside it as Buquet twisted around in surprise. The unbridled terror was pathetically obvious in his face, and Erik savored it for a moment, amused despite himself. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ayesha launch herself from the top of the piano to circle Buquet's feet, hissing and spitting.
Buquet was opening and closing his mouth soundlessly like a goldfish as Erik glided across the floor toward him. And I'm even wearing the mask. The man hadn't been nearly as terrified the time he saw me without it, Erik thought. But then again, there was something different about encountering the Ghost in his own lair. For a moment, Erik considered how he must appear to the man right now. A looming, sinister figure with water running down his clothes like blood.
Ah yes…the Phantom, merciless as well, and devoid of all emotion and morality, that was him.
Erik felt the sharklike grin forming on his twisted lips of its own accord as he continued to advance on the man. Buquet stepped back instinctively, stumbling on the fallen candlestick and clutching the arm of a sofa to steady himself.
Christine had sat in that sofa the previous night, leaning on the same arm in open-mouthed delight as he had played his compositions for her on the organ.
Erik sneered at the trembling Buquet, feeling the insane, uncontrollable desire for murder rising inside him like a raging wildfire. This time he didn't even bother trying to suppress it.
"My dear stagehand, however did you come to be here? Surely you know that it is terribly rude to invade another's home."
"The th-th-third cellar…I leaned against something and followed the pa-pathway."
"Hmm, I suppose I'll have to fix that then. Can't have my entrances being discovered so haphazardly."
"You-you really are insane." His face grew even whiter as he said this but he continued to speak, obviously realizing the hopelessness of the situation and determined to go with a shred of dignity. "This place," he waved his hand toward the black tapestries hanging upon the walls, knocking a few sheets of music from the piano to the floor as he did so. "You really are nothing more than the demented gh-ghost I make you out to be."
"I daresay you will be able to confirm the accuracy of that statement soon enough," Erik said coldly. "It seems as if the Opera will house another ghost in the immediate future."
He struck like lightning. The Punjab lasso settled itself neatly around Buquet's neck before the man had a chance to blink. With his extraordinarily disciplined reflexes, Erik drew the noose tight, just short of breaking the man's neck, and reeled him close like a thrashing carp.
Erik watched Buquet's eyes bulge as he clawed frantically at the thin rope around his neck. "Your hand at the level of your eye, monsieur. You should have learned to take your own advice," he hissed at the man. Buquet's face was turning a curious mixture of blue and purple and his mouth twisted itself into a grotesque shape. Erik continued watching the dying man with cold detachment. "If you continue carrying on this way, I do believe you will share a physical likeness to this Ghost in the end, monsieur." But it was too late for Buquet to hear. A rasping gurgle arose in his throat and with a shudder he fell still.
Erik removed the noose from the man's neck with ease and shoved the corpse from him roughly. Buquet landed heavily upon his back, his dead eyes staring at the ceiling in blank desperation. Erik stowed the lasso in its normal pocket in his cloak and stumbled back from the body in numb exhaustion.
Ayesha leaped from the floor to land on the keyboard of the piano. The third E above middle C rang shrilly through the heavy air, and Erik found his lips moving in a soundless melody in time with his thudding heart.
That note had been the highest he had allowed Christine to vocalize up to. He could tell that she could have managed more. Her face had been flushed with excitement and the brilliant red tinge of her cheeks had crept up to her sparkling eyes. She had turned those eyes upon him then and the sheer magnitude of her emotion had hit him like a hammerblow. He was quite breathless as they gazed at each other for the better part of a minute, his fingers frozen over the forgotten keyboard…
Erik sat down heavily upon the piano bench. The desire for murder was no longer devouring his insides and he could feel a terrible emptiness growing to take its place. It had been nearly thirty years since he had last killed a man. Yet his hands had accomplished the deed so efficiently, his hands…that had created such beautiful music for Christine had not forgotten their speed, their mindless joy over killing… Ayesha leaped into his lap, and he clutched the cat's body so tightly that she wriggled free a few seconds later, glaring at him as she disappeared into the shadows.
He continued to stare at Buquet's body, not really seeing it, his breath coming in short gasps. Then, turning back towards the piano, he covered his eyes with one hand as he began to weep.