A/N: Posting this as soon as I can, partly because I'm getting on a flight tomorrow and partly because we all need a bit of escapism after tonight's US election result. Deep breath, get comfy, and it's back to Erik...

Chapter 56 — In the Wilderness

Everything felt false: the rattle of his boots on the pavement as he ran, the lump in his throat, the heaviness in his ribs. Boulevards, crowds and buildings slid apart like scenery flats on a colossal stage, lighted unevenly by the setting sun. Lies, all of it! Every beautiful thing... Half-blind behind his own hands, Erik could not bear the air on his deformity that was smeared with a slick of salt tears and snot. People shied from him, vague shapes stumbling over each other in their haste to get away from the madman. He ducked into alleys and covered passages, pursued by the echo of his own ugly sobs, and by the dregs of humanity that lingered here.

"Five sous for you!" shrilled a girl from a doorway, brazen in her desperation. "You'll forget all about her, eh?" She made a grab at him as he passed, almost catching his coat. Erik booted her aside, shuddering in revulsion, and heard her hit the wall with a thud. She launched into a stream of obscenity behind him, but he only glanced back and prised his hands away from his face for a moment, and had the perverse satisfaction of hearing her shriek nonstop as he fled the alley.

This was his right, his birthright, his due. Better by far to be feared than pitied, better to be a spectre from a nightmare than whatever it was Christine had made of him.

She did not love him. She did not love him!

He was not a man she could marry, only a freak with the voice of an angel. It was the music she loved. And he had known it all along. He was not stupid, he had known, and still he had permitted himself the lie of their happiness, craved it, crafted it, seeking the fantasy the way Christine had once sought her Angel of Music. Damn her.

Damn it all, but he loved her still. Still, still. Always.

Oh, Christine...

The dilapidated rooftops of rue Fontenelle rose into view at last as he crested the hill, their edges tinted pink by the dying evening — and it was a little like returning home. The vice in his chest eased slightly, until he could breathe.

He stopped at the corner where the alley joined the street. The façades beneath the roofs were already in shadow, but it was not yet dark and the red coats of the soldiers were clearly visible.

Erik stilled.

Two of them in front of the store. Perhaps more within.

Apart from the soldiers, the street was ominously empty. There was no sign even of the usual children and beggars. What windows were not boarded up were curtained and shut; only the Gandons' storefront gaped dark, open but unattended. Stacks of newspapers occupied the counter, the sort of papers Jean would never dream of leaving out in full view when there was a chance of a police raid. Dozens of papers, hundreds.

The soldiers were chatting idly, with the air of men finishing a day's work. Another stranger in a clean National Guard uniform came out from the store and joined them: one of Trochu's men. He loitered near the counter, cigarette in hand, then picked up a paper from the nearest pile and began idly leafing through it. Erik could just make out the cover; it was a recent copy of Le Combat.

So. Their revolution was over.

Silently, Erik retraced his steps into the alley. He did not dare move too fast, but adopted the purposeful stride of a man out on urgent business, intent on some destination in the gathering darkness. Jean would no doubt be arrested, and Louise with him. What of it? The two of them had been through all this before in the Empire days, always together. He was alone.

Two streets on, Erik could stand the farce no longer. He ran.

It was not until he found himself clinging to the ironwork of the parapet on the rue Caulaincourt, blood pounding in his ears, that he saw where his feet had brought him. Beneath the causeway lay the jagged landscape of the cemetery, vast and black and dead.

He was alone. So be it.

He leapt up on the railing, lifted his arms clear, and dropped.

The granite edge of a tombstone slammed his feet with such force that Erik felt its jolt all the way along his spine to the base of his neck. Too high; the jump ought to have been lighter, but he had forgotten how to be a ghost. He was fortunate not to have cracked his backbone, or he might have remained there on the gravel path to freeze until morning. The irony of dying in the cemetery only annoyed him further.

A ferocious meowing met his ears, and the hissing of a dozen disturbed cats. The creatures were everywhere, darting between tombs and leaping sinuously from roof to roof, mangy black demons with eyes that glinted evilly in the moonlight. None came near; they must have learned to avoid hunters' slingshots and ropes by now and only glared at him from a distance.

Mercifully, the Angels' Garden seemed devoid of cats. Erik vaulted the low padlocked fence and scrambled through the leafless bushes by the side of the path, heading for the familiar tomb. The lichen-stained faces of the statues followed his progress with their sightless eyes, hideous in the near-darkness, as he mounted the stairs.

The grate over the tomb was unlocked but rusted, and gave reluctantly to his touch. Erik dragged it shut behind him. Within, out of the biting wind, the air was a little warmer, and the stonework smelled of damp earth and crumbling mortar: an old smell that woke memories of cellars. It was a place to be alone.

Erik crushed his hat under his head for a pillow, stretched out along one of the narrow stone ledges that lined the walls, and rolled into his coat as he had seen men do in the streets. The corner of something flat in his pocket dug into his ribs. He cursed, and yanked it out. Of course: the marriage documents and the valuation of Christine's ring.

He stuffed the papers under his head, turned to the wall, and at length descended into a heavy, unsettled sleep. Several times he thought he heard Christine call out to him, but it was only some night bird calling, or the wind among the monuments. Once, he clearly saw two yellow eyes watching him from beyond the grate. Just a cat, come to reclaim its dry corner. Erik groped for a stray pebble on the floor, and flung it at the eyes. There was a squeal, and a scrabble of claws, and then all went quiet. The eyes vanished.

He wondered if Christine was playing her music tonight. His soul and his body stirred at the thought; there was nothing to be done for it. In the darkness beyond the walls of the tomb, the night sang with her voice. He pressed his jaws together and refused to sing with her.

The light was grey when he opened his eyes, and broken by the bars on the door.

Erik sprang to his feet, struck his bare head on the low roof, and flew back against the rear wall. A cage!

For a moment all was confusion. Why was he bare-faced? Where was the sack to hide the head of the Devil's Child, and how did he get here?

No.

He groped for the rough stone behind him with fingers gone numb with cold. There was a layer of frost on his coat. Puffs of his breath clouded the air. Not a cage, a tomb. There was his ruined hat, and the papers…

And he was no longer alone.

"Do not be long, darling," a young baritone pleaded with somebody outside, past the bottom of the stairs. "You'll catch a chill! Think of your voice."

"Si, si, my voice. Go wait for me outside, Federico. Dio caro! Look at all those rocks, does nobody sweep around here? Just look at this, my poor Ubaldo…"

Erik sank back onto the ledge and fought the hysterical urge to laugh. A pink hat of spectacular proportions was just visible through the bars, far below. Carlotta! Here to mourn her beloved Piangi, in the company of what looked to be his younger and slimmer replacement.

He stole to the bars and looked out again, keeping himself out of view. Sure enough, there was the pink hat and the cloud of silk flowers at Piangi's grave, and Carlotta bending down to brush aside the pathetic pebble memorial he had not long ago constructed there.

He could not look away from the cursed woman. What did she care for poor Ubaldo, when her new lover was so valiantly freezing his young larynx just outside the fence? This one was surely no more a husband than Piangi had been. Another toy, like her poodle, trained to fetch the fur coat. And yet, she mourned him still…

Carlotta finished fluffing up the bouquet and stood a moment in a fair imitation of pious Catholic contemplation. Erik almost expected her to sing a requiem, but she only sighed deeply and, pulling off an immaculate white glove, kissed her fingers and touched them to the granite where Piangi's name was engraved.

Erik watched her go.

Outside, early visitors were already milling about several of the graves, all clad in black and carrying handkerchiefs and wreaths. Others were only just arriving. Why were there so many?

In the next breath, it hit him: this was the start of November, All Saints' Day. The day of the dead.

Perfect. Just perfect. Erik swept his useless papers and crushed hat onto the floor and resisted the temptation to kick the lot into a corner. How fitting that he should seek refuge in the one peaceful place in Paris — only to wake to find he had managed to come here on the busiest day of the year. He might have done better to sleep at the horseflesh market. In an hour, the cemetery would be overrun with mourners, and he would not have the slightest chance of leaving it unseen.

He grabbed his hat, knocked it back into a semblance of its former shape, and contemplated simply walking out bare-faced as he was, a walking cadaver in a graveyard to put the fear of ghosts into all their hearts. But the idea neither amused nor repelled him. He felt nothing. His chest seemed to have been hollowed out in the place where his heart ought to be. He was nobody. Just another hungry and filthy beggar hiding from the world, with nothing to call his own, no music, no architecture, no future, no home to go to… no Christine.

"Christine!" came a cry below.

o o o

"Wait, Christine, wait. Permit me, please." Raoul took hold of her arm, and somehow contrived to help her out of Guyon's carriage without dropping his crutches into the mud. This gesture of basic courtesy, once effortless, was so clumsily executed that Christine had to support his weight rather than lean on him, but at last it was accomplished and they stood by the side of the path. Unsteady from the effort, Raoul was relieved to see that Guyon's man had already helped Madame Giry and Meg to alight from the other door, before retreating to his box. Christine gave him a worried look from under the black netting of her mourner's veil, noting his creased forehead, but did not embarrass him with questions.

Madame Giry had no such consideration for his sensibilities.

"Out of the question." She extended an arm to stop him when he turned himself toward the steps. "Monsieur, that climb is not for you."

"I would pay my respects," Raoul objected, "Monsieur Daaé—"

"Will still be here next year." She relented a little, "It does you credit to remember him. But it would be a poor memorial to Gustave to have his daughter's friend lose a leg on these icy stairs. Monsieur, please. Wait for us here, we shall not be long."

Christine was already extricating herself gently to move away to where Meg was waiting, so Raoul could do nothing but bow to the three of them, defeated. "As you say. I shall wait here."

Christine smiled at him, promising to say a few words on his behalf, and Raoul sighed and resolved to await their return with as much patience as he could muster. Not much, he feared. If convalescing in the ambulance had been akin to living at the zoo, then staggering around Guyon's apartment was, if anything, even worse a confinement. Guyon was a generous if absent-minded host, prone to long disappearances and vague explanations that did little to keep Raoul abreast of the news. Take last night's revolution, for one: how did the government, collection of gasbags that it was, succeed in negotiating its way out of the mess at the Hôtel de Ville? Or was the feared spectre rouge just as incompetent a rabble as the caricatures painted it? This morning all was talk of a "peaceful settlement" and flowery protestations of love for Liberty, but what did that mean? The people at Andersson's hearing may have been coarse but their frustration was real enough, and he could not imagine that they would be easily placated.

Raoul sighed and readjusted his crutches, awkward on the uneven, partially frozen ground. At the top of the steps, the three slight black figures of Christine and the Girys were busy clearing leaves around the tomb and arranging the wreath of evergreens that he and Christine had bought at the cemetery gates. He would have liked to lay a flower of his own there — less in Gustave Daaé's name than in memory of the childhood summers he once shared with Christine, and the love that could have grown so easily but for her father's early death. He vaguely remembered Daaé as a gentle, soft-spoken man, a thoughtful presence at the edges of their playing. More vividly, he remembered Daaé's violin and young Christine's love for it, the way her face shone with pride and joy when he played. How brightly she shone! He had been a good father, Raoul supposed, and not to blame for Christine's pain. Too good a father, for in leaving her, he took his daughter's whole world to the grave with him. Nobody should become that to another person. That kind of love was too cruel a burden, and left too terrible a shadow.

"Ugh!" Raoul gave a startled cry as a crutch was suddenly kicked from under him by someone behind. He overbalanced in trying to turn on the other, lost the crutch, and landed square on his crippled hip. The pain snatched his breath away. He could scarcely gasp.

"Vicomte," said a black figure towering over him.

"Christ…"

"Hardly," Erik Andersson said dryly. "Though I did just rise from the tomb. A damnably uncomfortable resting place." He was unmasked, red-eyed, filthy beyond anything Raoul had seen since Bazeilles, and stank so foully of cat urine that for a moment Raoul gagged. He did not stand steadily but seemed to sway a little from side to side.

"And what brings the heroic Lieutenant de Chagny here, hmm? Enjoying the view?" Andersson made a broad gesture in the direction of the tomb, where Christine stood with her back to them, her hands on the grate.

"Christ almighty," Raoul repeated, struggling to grab hold of a crutch. "Are you drunk? Stand back!"

"Why? Worried someone might see you conversing with a tramp? A certain lady perhaps, who has been freed from all obligations?"

"You maggot!" At last Raoul succeeded in regaining his feet and balanced as best he could on one crutch. He was numb, shaking with outrage. "You really are scum, aren't you. You have the nerve to follow her — to stand here and show your face after what you did to her — after all she did for you — and speak of obligations? Obligations to you! I heard your little show yesterday. Christine was in tears in the street. Because of you. You! You, you! Always it was you, but that is not enough, you will not rest easy until you have destroyed her utterly, her and everyone around her. Haven't you caused her enough pain?"

Raoul advanced, swinging the crutch forward, but Andersson merely stepped back with a hideous, deformed grin that exposed all his teeth on one side.

"What the devil do you know about pain, Vicomte?"

Raoul had a vivid, vicious impulse to drive the crutch straight into that sneering monstrosity. How could this be the same man who had dragged him bleeding through the bullets in Bazeilles, who had stood on the edge of that stage in Montmartre? He kept his voice low with the greatest effort.

"What do I know of pain? Nothing. I have lost my country, my fiancée, my family's respect, my future, everything — do you understand? — and gained this for a reminder." Raoul jabbed at his throbbing hip. "But it's nothing compared to her. Why don't you ask Christine about pain?"

He wrestled his rising voice back down to little more than a whisper. Andersson had gone still as death, listening.

"You think the world owes you something… everything. You think it's only fair I should plead with all Montmartre for your worthless hide, and Christine should be your wife because that is how it goes. Your suffering must be rewarded. The world owes you nothing, Andersson. No more than it owes me, or Christine or anyone else. We get the cards we get, and do what we can with the hand we're dealt. You think Christine deserves to have you for a husband? Her protector, her lover, the father of her children! Look at yourself. Better yet, smell yourself!" He lurched forward.

Andersson gave a low bark of laughter and retreated easily out of reach. "You mean to fight me? You can barely walk."

"For you, I'll learn."

"What's it to be then? Pistols at dawn? Come, Chagny, I'll give you a handicap. Ten paces, twenty? Come along, let us have a rematch!"

"Be silent." Raoul remained where he was, refusing to be goaded another step. He could not lose his head, not here, not now. It had gone much too far already.

Andersson reached the edge of the path and stood now in the white frosty leaves, crunching them underfoot, breathing heavily. He had risen onto the balls of his feet, Raoul realised, poised to run at any moment.

"You're not a man." Raoul bent to retrieve the crutch Andersson had kicked from his hand, and stood up straight between the crutches. "You're a mask. No, an... onion. Skin after skin, mask after mask, and nothing underneath but more masks. I will not demean Christine by humouring you. I almost mistook you for a man of honour a while ago, but I see now the resemblance was passing." He shrugged. "My mistake."

Unexpectedly, this seemed to puncture Andersson's composure. In the instant before he did run, Raoul caught a glimpse of real fear in that malformed face, and something cringing, like shame. It was hideous and yet so raw that Raoul could not help an answering stab of pity.

He glanced behind him, and to his dismay found Guyon's man watching with an expression of utter bemusement. Raoul cursed himself inwardly and hobbled over to the carriage, choosing to say nothing.

He was still wound up and buzzing with nervous energy when Christine returned with Madame Giry and Meg. They were all contemplative and quiet; even Meg opposite him was subdued and barely spoke, leaning against her mother's arm. Madame Giry seemed content just to sit in silence, and Raoul was grateful to have been spared the need for polite conversation. He knew Christine assumed that he too was remembering her father.

When at last they cleared the queue of waiting mourners and left the cemetery behind, Christine drew her gloves off slowly, and laid her hands in her lap. Raoul saw the gleam of the gold band on her ring finger, and knew she had intended for him to see it.

"He was at the cemetery," Raoul admitted under his breath.

Christine nodded. "I thought I saw him leave."

Another block of half-abandoned buildings floated past, ghostly in the misted-up window. Maurice was a cautious driver and guided the horse through the uncertain morning fog at barely a walking pace. The white and red flags that marked ambulances seemed to hang from every other building.

"I must start rehearsing tomorrow," Christine murmured, drawing absently on the glass with her finger. A stave, Raoul saw, a handful of notes. Christine wiped her palm over it. "I have never done anything like this. A concert, and in that theatre… Perhaps it is a mistake."

Raoul glanced over at her, struck by an unwelcome memory of the eve of another performance, but Christine did not seem to be thinking of that. She was gazing out through the patch of glass she had cleared, and there was no dread in her voice, only wonder and a touch of sadness. Raoul knew that expression. She was listening to something, a music only she could hear.

"What of the ban on spectacles?" he asked. "You will need a permit of some sort. Are you confident this Ballard knows the right people?"

"Concerts are allowed now," Meg put in, overhearing, "As long as the program is 'suitable', that is. Serious."

"God help us all," Madame Giry sighed. "Serious music. They will yet turn Paris into a province of Prussia without any help from Bismarck."

Christine smiled a little. "Don't worry. I will not be playing Beethoven."

They reached the apartment building without incident, but as Maurice brought the horse to a halt, Raoul knew a moment of the deepest anxiety. An officer was waiting by the front door, in full uniform and pacing the pavement. Raoul swiped the window clear with his glove and to his immense relief recognised none other than Henri Guyon.

"Chagny! There you are," Guyon was upon them almost before the carriage stopped. He flung the door wide, helping the ladies dismount with almost unseemly haste, his gaze all the while fixed on Raoul. "What are you doing promenading after what happened last night? Have you heard nothing?"

"About what?"

"The Reds of course, what else! Did you not just go to Montmartre? Get your head out if the sand. There's arrests from here to La Villette."

"What arrests?"

"The doddering fools in the Hôtel de Ville swore there'd be no reprisals but here we are. No, don't bother getting out. Maurice!" Guyon shouted to the driver. "Let's go, man, let's go. Forgive us," he added to Madame Giry, "call of duty."

"Of course," she said graciously, guiding Meg and Christine ahead of her to the doors of the building. Christine raised her hand in a wave and Raoul watched helplessly as she vanished behind the door.

Guyon landed with a thump on the seat opposite as the carriage took off with all possible speed, axles creaking.

"They have no idea," Guyon was saying. "None at all." He sounded frightened.