Note: My firmest apologies if any of you got an alert yesterday evening for this chapter. I had a mild technical snafu with the site, as you do. I hope this chapter makes up for it.
Christine could hardly be pressed to call it a mistake, even if the memory still made her burn with shame. It was simple—Alejo was handsome, he was discreet, and he knew music.
Her daily walk to Rue Saint-Cécile had always been a struggle, even before Papa's death. Inasmuch as the Conservatoire had become a second home to her in her waxing adulthood, for every successful lesson, for every minor triumph she found in her voice, there were eyes everywhere—and after his death, she felt their gaze on on her like a hairshirt. The looming derision from the other students in her diction classes, the tired smiles from her professors when they realized there would be no revelation, let alone course correcting of her flaws, found in their struggle with her instrument. Christine saw what they all did, every time she passed through the heavy doors and caught a wayward rolling eye: her own increasing mediocrity.
And then there was Alejo, feckless and handsome in a way Christine could not compare against any other man she had ever known, be it Papa, Professor Valerius, or the golden boy from her Breton summers. Deep chestnut curls, a fashionable thin mustache, short of stature but finely muscled under his cheap twill suits. He sported a constant set of under-eye circles that gave him the air of a pugilist, even if he was only an exhausted student, and they repulsed her as much as it fascinated her.
They never spoke, and why should they have? She was a good girl and was quick to mind her own business, never mind that the young man was enough of a savant in his pedagogy program for his name to have come up more than once. The entire foundation of their friendship was the easy smile he gave her every time she passed him in the hallway or leaving through the building exit on Rue Bergère, where he was often found smoking alone and leafing through sheet music.
"Have a nice afternoon, miss," he'd call out around a drag of a cigarette, the Aragonese lilt of his scratchy voice devoid of ridicule, the smoke still curling out of his mouth like a demon. The only response she could give him was a faint blush and a nod underneath the veil of her fascinator.
That would have been the entirety of their relationship—if it hadn't been for one particularly awful afternoon of required piano study, the bane of her existence. Pride floated her peers in vocal studies through the obligation: the collective laughing at the baseness of the material, about how they didn't need scolding in basic harmonics to sing. She'd try to smirk with them, and yet that particular afternoon, her stubby, stiff fingers were blocks of lead on the worn keys of the practice piano. Papa had often called her a natural, had said that music was as easy to her as flight to a robin—but there was nothing natural about the discordant plonking and the way her professor sighed under his breath at every other note jarring the studio.
"Mademoiselle," her professor said, fingers drumming on his thighs, his voice oily, "While I am discouraged by your lack of progress, I hope you know that many of the greatest artists to have crossed the stage couldn't tell a C-sharp from a D if it were played to them. Your voice is wonderful—I just wish that I could ground it in something more practical."
Christine left the lesson in limbo, furious at the eccentries of her father's tutelage which prepared her for nothing, tears streaking down her wan face as she thrust her way into the Parisian heyday—and there Alejo was, twiddling a small leaf of rolling paper between his stained fingers, the same gentle grin of his face.
They loped the short walk to the Folies Bergère and laughed at the mockery of talent on display, and in that moment, she believed in the righteousness, the sheer divinity of her dreams. He treated her to orange cordial and his delicate kisses, and she returned it with more of the same, however shyly or inelegantly.
When Christine returned to her apartment that night, she was met by the poor anxious Agathe and an equally vexed Mama. But to Christine's surprise, the lie that came next was upsettingly easy—that some of the young ladies at the Conservatoire had finally taken a liking to her and wasn't it thoughtful of them to include her in a little late-night gossip? If Agathe raised a suspicious eyebrow at the ruse, it had gone unnoticed by Mama, who beamed for her poor little Christine, eyes wet with happy—if overzealous—tears.
And there she was, heart pounding, trying to repress a smile as she excused herself and hurried to bed, the memory of Alejo's mouth brushing against the height of her cheekbone, the way his hand had mapped out little happinesses on her corseted body. She had not sullied herself—no, no, never, not in the way where she couldn't bear to look at herself the next day—but the memory of his hands fighting to touch her through her petticoats was enough to have her unknowingly recreate the situation in her most private moments.
The next day, they resumed their usual patterns and quiet pleasantries and went their separate ways—as far as Christine knew, Alejo was off in Granada teaching music to rich children, another woman on his arm. There had been a little sadness in her heart, initially, but what surprised Christine was the sheer relief. There was no man begging her for more, demanding pragmatic things like marriage or a more sordid regular coupling. They had met and parted, and the memory of the whole affair was one of the few things to bring a smile to her lips, until the then-happy day she was accepted into the chorus at the Opera. And even that had been a short-lived joy, for it was much the same as it had been at the Conservatoire: the snickering, the gossip, the all-encompassing sense that she was an outcast amongst her peers.
When the Voice finally came to Christine, it conjured up that same tight feeling the ghost of Alejo's memory did—the abandonment into pleasure, a coiling in her abdomen that could only be undone by her fingertips. Certainly, it had taken a few weeks for her to put a name to that emotion, and the mortification of regarding an angel in such a fashion had almost put her to shame.
But time and time again, Christine was learning that she was not a woman to be ground in practicality. And she had to briefly suppose that was how she ended up seven stories below the earth with a corpse's hand between her thighs, one hand beating against his chest as his fingers clumsily circled the growing dampness, the queer viscosity of his touch making her pant and tremble.
Hateful man. Awful man.
His ragged breath rang in her ears, louder and more unpleasant than any of his music.
When the wretch finally pulled away, it was with humiliating traces of her on his leather gloves. His burnished eyes stared down at her desire in a fleeting moment of wonder, and then went right back up to hers.
"Perhaps Christine isn't the little liar Erik thought her," he sneered, and in that moment, she felt on the edge of death. When he lifted his hand to the edge of his mask and slid it between what was little of his lips she could see, his eyes never leaving hers, Christine nearly fainted. She felt the shudder than ran through his body like it was her own, and was sure the pitiful moan that left his throat was the same one tumbling out of hers.
She was only lifted from her swooning when he grabbed the offending fist and pinned it against the wall, just above her shaking shoulders.
"Is that so, Christine," Erik spat. "Are you a good, honest girl?"
The rough anger in his voice would have been enough to reduce her to loud sobs, if the monster hadn't suddenly pushed the tips of his fingers between her own mouth, gagging her with her own arousal and his spit.
They stood like this at length, suspended in their own squalor—his hand slick against the velvet of her mouth, his finger tips running over her tongue with a timid reverence that would have touched her had it been anyone but the mockery of a man before her. But there was little warmth in the way Christine's free hand clawed numbly at the monster's shirt front, in the muffled cries leaking out of her as she drooled.
After a seeming eternity of this debasement, Erik removed himself from her mouth and collapsed against her, pinning her tiny body further against the damask wall—and against an alien but unmistakeable hardness that almost made her scream, were she not so breathless. Instead, Christine screwed her eyes shut, images of the Vicomte and Alejo flashing before her like insults. The two men had been as different as night and day, and yet they had both treated her gently enough, like something made of glass—but Erik's fetid breath bristling the top of her scalp and the smack of tannin on her tongue made her feel positively filthy, her earlier bath rendered pointless for the stench between her legs. She found a strange, unexpected courage in that feeling and wriggled under Erik's weight; the sensation of her breast against him running through her like lightning.
"Get off me," Christine gasped into ruin of his ear.
He responded with a greasy chuckle, the bass undercurrent setting her damp hair prickling.
"No," he murmured simply, flicking a long finger against a nipple, which, to Christine's horror, had noticeably pebbled under her dressing gown.
The mask was finally ripped off before Erik had time to repeat this particular cruelty; she was unsure if it was his beastly state or the shock on his face that somehow made him even uglier—or perhaps it was the sheer proximity of that horrible face as he bent in closer, the bloated upper lip so close that it ghosted her sweating forehead.
"If that's how Christine wants to play this little game, then Erik shall have to reciprocate," he rasped, the silkiness in his voice having given way to genuinely frightening darkness. In one fluid and impossibly quick gesture, the corpse released her pinioned limbs and wrenched off her dressing gown.
The unhappy, younger Christine at the Conservatoire came to her in a vision; how did that stupid girl lie in bed night after night, wondering if the throbbing in her chest as she circled her core was shame or a prelude to something too base and instinctual to confront.
As the dead man's mouth suckled wildly at her, like it was the most natural progression of the nightmare before her, Christine realized that she had been mistaken in believing it was only one or the other.
It was both.