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A/N: Another change in canon has been made: Christine's father died a lot earlier in her life than LeRoux said. The reasons for this will be apparent later if they are not already. Certain verses have been taken from "Do not go gentle into that good night" written by Dylan Thomas.Kudos and major thanks to reviewers, especially Clariz, Fantome, and ginnymanytongues, for hanging in there this long. Plenty more fun waits ahead.
Alright then, straight to the new chapter. Erik is back and Raoul is not (well, not really). What more could you ask for? ;)
Chapter 8
Against the Dying of the Light
They arrived in Lainnon after the sun had breached the horizon and there was ample light to find a carriage that would take them to Perros. On the way, the horse threw a shoe and they were delayed for nearly half an hour. As the coachman tended to his animal, Clarice glanced at her companion.
Christine really had brought a rosary, and, as Clarice watched, she rolled it through her fingers quickly, with trembling fingers. Her nervousness and impatience were manifested by a tic in her forehead. She started with fright when the driver announced that they were ready to go.
They arrived in Perros at noon. After having a quick lunch at the inn, Clarice paid for two rooms, ignoring Christine's protests. The extra money did not concern her. She could tell that Christine needed her time alone.
However, after they had finished their meal, Christine settled the cloak around her shoulders once more, signaling her intention to depart right away. Clarice hesitated and then followed her.
The graveyard was a small one, clinging to the edge of the village proper and seemingly forgotten by its inhabitants. Although the grass was kept cut to a considerate height, the skeletons of wildflowers sprouted from the sides of gravestones and etchings upon the markers were worn and faded from the elements. Bare trees stood around the small square of green like a natural fence, their twisted limbs empty of all leaves. Clarice was sure that this place would have been beautiful in the spring, the blooming wildflowers and surrounding trees lending the place an air of dryad loveliness.
As it was, it was autumn, a season that was now rapidly dying away into winter. Clarice felt the chill winds blow in from the nearby ocean and buried her chin deeper into her scarf. A small church stood in the center of the graveyard, its entrance boarded up, and weeds stubborn enough to survive the frigid temperatures peeked from every visible crevice. The bell tower, gutted to its frame, shuddered weakly from each gust of cold wind.
Next to the church, in stark contrast to the humble gravestones, stood a towering mausoleum. It was in front of that solemn, cold structure that they now stopped, Clarice standing back a little ways, a sense of propriety not the only thing keeping her from getting too close to the tomb. A familiar feeling of nausea was invading her insides, the cause of which she knew only too well. She watched as Christine reached forward, almost timidly, to touch the side of the immense tomb. Upon the white marble was etched the name of the resident within. The letters were faded with time and a deep indentation in the stone made the first few letters illegible.
"Charles Daae."
Clarice looked up as she heard Christine speak, so softly she could hardly hear.
"It's been ten years now. My father has been dead for more of my life than alive. But I can never read this name and think of my father. Daddy had no name; he was simply my father. He was my everything. Nothing I could ever call him would encompass everything he was to me." She stroked the marble with sad, trembling fingers. "I keep dreaming that my daddy is still out there somewhere, that this is someone else buried here. That if I just dreamed…somehow, he would be here." She made a small, choking sound in her throat and wiped at her eyes, "I'm sorry, I must sound very foolish right now." She turned sheepishly to face Clarice.
The Duchess' appearance shocked her. The stately, proud woman seemed to tremble from a chill within her own body. Her body shriveled within her dress, and her eyes were glassy with barely-concealed pain.
"No, mademoiselle." Her voice, however, was as steadily soothing as ever. "Not at all."
Pause. A second passes, crawling by on little feet like ants, insistent and impulsive.
"My father…died, too, when I was very young."
Christine's head came up, her eyes wide.
Try as she might to hold back, the words spilled out of her mouth like water, a torrent of buried memories and refreshed pain. "I was not born into nobility, Christine. My father was a low-level police officer, a night watchman. One night, some burglars who didn't want to go to prison shot him through the heart." She took a deep shuddering breath. "The agency buried him in a pressboard coffin and took back his badge. They said it cost them seven dollars."
Why did she say such things? Why, now, were memories tucked away in permanent storage demanding to see light again?
Clarice felt another layer of something fall away from her body, and she shuddered. She knew then that she had damaged more than their relationship during the confrontation with Hannibal. She felt the jagged edges of her memory palace, originally smoothed by love, rear their ugly, distorted heads.
An invisible hand had torn away her last vestige of strength, as a scar is torn prematurely from a wound, leaving her raw and sore.
She looked up to see Christine staring at her with something akin to fright in her eyes. A dainty hand came up to cover her mouth. "Oh madam, I-I'm so sorry. You should not have come."
Clarice shook her head and lifted her shining eyes to face the cold air. "You have nothing for which to apologize. You have nothing for which to mourn. This town adored your father: they gave him the best they had." She stared hard at the young woman for a moment, seeing her pale skin, her fragile eyes. "Cherish his memory, Christine. Know that nothing can ever take that away from you. And let him go."
Christine's expression did not change: she continued to stare, slightly open-mouthed, at the woman standing beside her. The Duchess was someone who had comforted her when she wept. She was a strong woman in her eyes, immune to the weaknesses of the human spirit. The frailty that Christine saw now frightened her.
She was easily frightened when those she admired turned out to be very different from what she expected.
She turned away, unwilling that Clarice should see her fear. The duchess had been nothing but kind and good to her. Her eyes raced over every inch of her father's tomb, searching for something, anything that she could focus on and therefore forget her traitorous emotions. Her gaze alighted upon something white on the ground in front of the tomb.
Bending over, she picked up a white rosebud in her fingers. The flower was fresh and unbruised; a stranger had left it there no more than a few days ago. Bringing the flower to her face and breathing in the sweet aroma, Christine recalled her knowledge of the Victorian language of flowers.
Girlhood.
A heart innocent of love.
She nearly smiled at the appropriateness of the symbol and tucked the rosebud into the clasp of her cloak. "Sometimes Daddy would get flowers after performing on his violin," she said absent-mindedly. "He would put them in my hair when he did, saying that things so pretty belonged with his angel. Where is his angel nowww?" The last word distorted and her arms went around herself, her shoulders shuddering dangerously.
Clarice chose her next words carefully. "I will be waiting at the gate for you, Christine. Take as long as you need." And then she turned and walked away, unwilling to take part in this scene any longer.
For a time there was only the dull sound of her footsteps through the dead grass. Gradually her progress grew slower and slower, as if a hook were attached to her heart, slowing and finally stopping her in her tracks as the line pulled taut. She could not turn away now, she could not… She paused underneath an oak tree, her feet crunching the withered leaves. Even from this distance she heard as Christine began to sing. The words carried crystal-clear across the frozen air and made her want to weep. The words spoke of a time that comforted even as it tormented, a time unwilling to be forgotten, clinging to the mind like hair to a little girl's sticky face on a hot summer day.
Help me say goodbye…
Clarice saw Christine mouth the words before she heard them physically, the notes settling in her ear soft as down feathers.
She turned away when Christine fell to her knees before the tomb to bury her face in her hands. She focused her sight upon a withered oak tree, its bare branches polished smooth by years of wind and rain. The branches shuddered in the bitter wind that carried the sound of sobbing to her ears, however she attempted to ignore it. Clarice felt as if her heart were being twisted in a vise; the sobs rang in her ear, high-pitched and desperate like a child's. There was no sense of release in the young girl's tears: they were fraught with the disbelief and anguish of a fresh wound.
There was nothing in his mind except the music, the swirling miasma of melodies clamoring and fighting to be written down. The notes came so fast that he could hardly put them all on paper. He scrawled the final phrase upon the page and tore it from the stand so roughly that the paper's edge sliced open the side of his hand. His blood intermingled with the frenzied scrawl of notes upon the page in matching scarlet splashes.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight…learn, too late, they grieved it on its way…
Was it possible to love one's own tormentor? Erik thought so. The coffin that had served as his bed for many years rested a few feet away from the organ, looming in the shadows like a slumbering beast. In the flickering half-light of his kingdom a breath away from hell, he embraced and cursed the darkness that consumed his body. It seeped into every corner and dark recess of his mind, and he screamed like the damned at this invasion: clawing, caressing, weeping, laughing…and always, always writing. Into those blood-red patterns upon the pages were poured all the sadness, madness, and laughter of the world.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light…
Erik retrieved the sheet of music he had just set down atop the piano, droplets of his blood still clinging to the edges of the paper. With determined strokes, he crossed out a passage of tearful semi-tone phrases and replaced them with harder whole tones brimming with anger and wildness. There was no room for grief in his magnum opus. No room for anything except the fire he wrought within an angry and bitter soul. Anger towards his prison that he dared to call a home. Anger towards the light that had driven him here.
The foundations of the Opera House groaned as the organ lifted its torturous melodies to the heavens: melodies that were then trapped, battling their way through cold stone.
Hannibal Lecter stood before his study window, watching his land go gently into the good night. Shadows moved across the dying meadows like wraiths, creeping up the brick façade of the house and pouring into the window to move across the carpeted floor.
She was gone. He did not know for how long.
He had time now. And so he continued to stand before the window, looking out into nothing. He did not know for how long.
The next morning, Christine exited her room wordlessly when Clarice knocked upon the door. Their things had been taken to the station the previous evening, and Christine had nothing with which to occupy her hands during the carriage ride. Clarice waited for her to start fidgeting again, waited for the childish impatience to reassert itself; anything to reassure her that something of Christine remained inside this hollow shell that sat before her now. The young woman did not move. She folded her hands in her lap and leaned against the side of the carriage, the traveling cloak draped over her shoulders like a funeral shroud. There was a hollow, empty gaze in her eyes that would have better befitted a corpse.
Her expression did not change as they boarded the train that would return them to Paris. The pale sun disappeared behind a gray cloudbank as the promise of a storm growled through the sky. The cold, metal train belched its fire into the heavens like a blasphemous sacrifice as it shrieked through the cold air, indifferent to the broken lives it carried within its belly.
The sensation of needles being driven into his forearm finally led him to shift his gaze from the music stand. He looked down to see Ayesha perched atop his arm, meowing most piteously and driving her claws into his flesh.
Erik cursed inwardly as he extricated the claws from his arm and lifted the cat in his hands. Good God. From the height of the still-burning candles, he realized that he must not have fed her for days. He closed his eyes in pain. Must he always hurt those around him?
Cradling the trembling cat in his arms, Erik slid off the organ bench to sit upon the carpeted floor littered with fallen leaves of music, the side of the coffin hard against his back…
The rest of the summer of 1863 passed in a blur of slow, mind-numbing days and exhilarating nights. Every evening after the workers had gone home, Erik would linger before making his way to the oak tree on the edge of the site where Dr. Fell would be waiting. And they would talk. Their conversation moved from topic to topic as smoothly as a novel moves from chapter to chapter. The doctor was well versed in art, literature, and medicine although he had not studied architecture as extensively as Erik, who helped him correct some minute errors in his sketches of the Opera House. The doctor also had never traveled further east than Prussia, and Erik found himself describing the wild, rich, and corrupt lands of Russia and the Orient, careful never to reveal his exact function in the Persian courts that he described in such vivid detail. In turn, Dr. Fell told him about America, its paradoxical balance of agriculture and industry swaying in the chaos of war. He had had no wish to become involved in the idiotic power struggle and had retreated to his residence in Florence the moment war had been imminent.
"The worst part of war will always be the lies they tell themselves to justify the mindless slaughter. This time, the common mantra is 'Free the slaves.' In truth, the Union could care less about Negroes toiling away in the Southern cotton fields. They care about bringing a delinquent group of states back into the Union; they believe their system of government is flawless, you see, and they can't stand the embarrassment of some of their own trying to escape the system. Wars, whether personal or national, have always been about pride."
No matter how engaging the particular conversation, Erik always behaved the same way during every one of their meetings. He would stand rigidly against the tree, pressing his body into the shadow and letting his hat cast his face into even deeper darkness. Although the doctor had shown himself to be quite disinterested in his mask, a lifetime of habit was hard to break. Tonight was no different. Erik's voice spoke from the shadows of the tree, his eyes two glittering pieces of obsidian: "I have always respected you as an intelligent man, Dr. Fell. Don't insult me with your cheap metaphors. If you have something to say to me, say it plainly."
"My words hold no more meaning than you give them credit for, Erik. Good night." And he was gone once again.
Christine gave Clarice directions to her residence in a monotone voice. When the carriage pulled up before the door to her flat, the young woman seemed to come alive for the first time that day. Yet her cheery voice that thanked Clarice for her kindness was as empty of emotion as her eyes: her bright blue gaze was stretched skin-tight over empty, sunken sockets, the clarity muted, swimming in darkness.
She watched her walk to the door. Her long black cloak trailed upon the ground behind her as she stumbled up the steps like an old crippled woman.
Clarice felt something swelling inside of her, pushing painfully against the walls of her chest. She swallowed and tasted bitter bile. Observing the young woman's stony face and looking into her dead eyes, she felt as if part of her spirit had died along with Christine's. A life wasted, a vibrant young spirit condemned to linger forever amidst ghosts of the past. Her throat made a strangled sob as she whipped the horses into a furious gait and just as quickly made her decision.
The world will not be this way within the reach of my arm.
Because of Hannibal's bloody exploit, her reach had grown quite long indeed. Emerging upon the main road, Clarice turned the horses in the opposite direction of home, aiming her vehicle like Apollo's fiery chariot towards his distant lyre perched deftly atop the building where her future awaited with bated breath.
"You have seen the Villa Medici?"
Dr. Fell looked up for the briefest moment and then lowered his eyes back to the sketch in question. "Yes…I have."
"In an official capacity?"
The pencil moved lazily over the sketch, lightly shading in the inside of an arch. "You speak of the Prix de Rome? The greatest honor that can be bestowed upon a young composer? Perhaps. I am familiar with the competition. Hordes of hopeful young men are locked into tiny rooms for the period of a month and obligated to compose cantatas about rosy dawns and heavenly sunsets. The most agreeable piece is chosen and the lucky composer is presented with a medal of gold and the adulation of the public before he is locked away in the Villa Medici for the next two years, where he is expected to create more agreeable pieces for the public."
Erik laughed softly. "There is a bitter tone about your words, monsieur."
"Truly?" Dr. Fell's laugh was just as soft as Erik's and twice as cold. "Nothing is more bitter than the truth."
"Did you participate in the competition?"
Dr. Fell shut his sketchbook firmly and stood. His hands trembled slightly at his sides. "I was no Frenchman, monsieur. Nor was I highborn, and nor would the judges have cared for any of my work. Good night."
It was the most the doctor ever revealed to him about his past.
Andre was shocked when the Duchesse de Londres burst into his office, looking up from his perusal of his late partner's bottle of scotch when he heard her loud knock. He rubbed furiously at something at the corner of his eye, well aware of his haggard, unshaven appearance.
"What do you want?" Andre asked, too weary and confused to remember his manners.
"To assist you, monsieur," said Clarice in a hard-edged voice. "I heard about the tragedy. My husband and I have put too much effort into the Opera to have it fail now."
Andre blinked as he attempted to process the words being shouted at him. "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," he said at last.
"Nonsense, monsieur. My husband tells me that you are talking of closing the theater!" She knew that Hannibal had told her nothing of the sort. She also knew that Andre was definitely too blind drunk at the moment to remember otherwise.
Andre got up from his chair heavily and took a step towards her. He swayed upon his feet and grabbed the edge of his desk, settling back into a sitting position. "He was…a good man, madam. Coarse in his manner and he gambled too freely but…he never meant anyone any harm." He looked up at her with red-rimmed eyes. "Who would do something like thi—"
Clarice made a disapproving sound low in her throat. "Enough of that talk, monsieur. Leave that to the police. You have a business to run now."
"I can't…not by myself, I can't."
"As I said, monsieur. I am here to assist you."
Andre lifted his eyes to her again, the bewildered look back in his gaze.
IIt was a game, a game in which talked of everything and nothing. It was a contest to see which of them was the greatest mystery. They ran themselves ragged within the twisted labyrinths of each other's minds, seeking no goal, knowing there was no goal to be found. It was not a game of winners and losers. It was a contest of wills and the wills derived joy from knowing that, for the first time, they locked horns with an equal.Such a game can never be finished; whether by chance or by its own nature, an open invitation is extended to fate. And then fate does what it does best./i
Clarice Starling closed and locked the door behind her, scanning the small, worn dressing room with a practiced gaze.
She found the switch that operated the counterweight behind the mirror in less than half an hour.
She stared, awestruck, as the enormous pane of glass swung on its pivot, throwing facets of brilliant light upon the peeling walls. The glass turned and Clarice saw, for the briefest moment, the dark mouth of a hallway before the glass swung back into place. Stepping down from the stool, she made a mental mark of the place in the wallpaper pattern to press to activate the mirror.
Monsieur le Fantome, what are these games you play? These games so remarkably intricate and sophisticated in their construction yet nothing more than child's play in their purpose.
As new assistant manager of the Opera Garnier, Clarice Starling had a key that would open every door in the theater. And those entrances not appearing in the blueprints, she thought, staring once again at the innocent face of the mirror, she would find. She would discover the secrets of the Phantom of the Opera, so that when she finally sought him out, she would be prepared. She would find out what dark hold he had over Christine's mind.
And she would determine whether to hinder or to aid him when she did.
All she needed was time and time she had in abundance. Andre estimated six months before the Opera would be fit to open again.
When the summer of 1866 arrived, Erik found, despite himself, that he was eagerly anticipating Dr. Fell's arrival. The war in the States was over, and the doctor had returned home, promising to return to Paris for the summer. But when he approached the tree, he could tell that the doctor was not there. By the end of July, he had still failed to appear. Inquiries to Garnier got him nowhere. It was as if he had simply vanished from the face of the earth.
Then came the day he found the copy of an international newspaper lying in a wastebasket. He would have ignored it had he not seen the photograph and its accompanying headlines.
Hannibal the Cannibal...
In her flat, Christine Daae lay in a fetal position upon her bed, clutching Raoul's ring where it hung about her neck with her right hand. In her sweaty left hand, she gripped the stem of the white rosebud she had found at her father's grave. Tracks of dried tears were still visible upon her face. A sliver of light from the setting sun peeked through the drawn curtains and she wriggled away from it, screwing up her eyes against the unwelcome brightness.
She wanted to see Raoul now more than ever. Wanted to see his bright smile and hear his laughter; he was a memory of her childhood, of stories told in the attic and a red scarf floating upon the gentle sea. But she could not marry him, not yet, she wasn't ready. She would tell Raoul so the next morning. She needed time to think, a few months perhaps. Yes, a few months would be enough.
Hannibal Lecter sat at the piano bench within his darkened study, gazing over the music stand through the window at the dying light barely visible on the horizon. He touched the keys lightly, his fingers finding the chords that his eyes could not. The song that he played was very old, written in 1510 by King Henry VIII. It was an elegy of love written with his mistress Anne Boleyn in mind, years before he had her beheaded.
If love now reigned as it hath been and were rewarded as it hath since…
His fingers froze over the keyboard, refusing to play anymore and eventually he curled them into his palms, withdrawing them into his lap.
What a maudlin image he must present, he thought wryly.
He needed time to think.
Ayesha lay asleep, well-fed and curled contentedly atop a stack of sheet music on the organ.
Erik, who had sated his hunger in a different way, sat at the bench, gazing blissfully at the feline's sleeping form. His breathing had slowed to a comfortably lethargic rate and a pleasant tingling sensation radiated through his skin from the throbbing mass of collapsed veins in the crook of his right elbow. His pupils had contracted to the tiniest points of darkness, enclosing himself within the world of his own night far kinder than that of the damp Parisian cellars.
There had been so much anger, so many angry notes bleeding through his eyes…but now – his gaze drifted up to Ayesha's sleeping form – he did not wish to wake her. Reaching up, he buried his hand into the Siamese cat's soft fur and rubbed her back. He felt his trembling fingers calming against the rhythm of her contented purr. With his other hand, he picked out the first few bars of a haunting lullaby.
"Thank you, ma petite."
The cat stirred drowsily in her sleep and rolled onto her side, completely ignoring him. Erik smiled as he reached forward to record the passage he had just played.
It was nearly done now. His magnum opus, transcribing music from the very heights of human happiness to the bottomless pits of its despair and lurking everywhere, peeking around the dissonant chords and hanging upon each suspension was the cursed, desired, and dreaded wraith that was hope. When the piece was finished, it would shake the Opera House to its foundations.
The games we've played till now are at an end…
All he needed were a few months more. Yes, just a few months more and he would be ready. With a light breath, he blew out the candles surrounding the organ and settled into the coffin, resigning himself to the whims of Morpheus, king of dreams, whose namesake was even now coursing its dark, soothing path through his veins.
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A/N: Well then, now that we've got all the characters interacting and into place nicely, it's time to have some fun. Will Hannibal and Clarice ever make up? What will happen at the first performance of Erik's masterpiece? Will Christine still make the same choice? In a fight between Clarice and Erik, who would win? (Yes, I want bets placed. :-D) That being said, this will be the last update for awhile, and by awhile, I mean at least a month. I'll be leaving for vacation tomorrow and will come back after two weeks to waiting exams. Fun, fun. Until then, adieu, adieu, and many thanks again to my reviewers!