Looking Glass

I never reproached myself for stupidity, never blamed myself for the naïve belief that a man of flesh and blood, as twisted and distorted as that flesh was, could be an "angel." I never blamed myself for believing that when a man offered something, that it was really his to give. For I believed in everything then.

There's no shame in belief. When I tell the grandchildren a story now of tomten or trolls, and see the same wonder and delight in their eyes that shone in mine as a child, I feel no remorse for telling them something that isn't true. Children believe; it's their nature. I believed, long past the point of childhood.

There's no reproach for me now in not believing. I have no interest in arguing the truth or falsehood of the conventional pieties. Blind belief is harder for me now, and heaven incomprehensible. All the same, I know Raoul is there, preparing a place for me. He waits, outside this tall-windowed room with the elm-filtered light that bathes me in soft light green as a gown while I write.

I know that life moves through all the forms of nature, like a new child stirring within the womb. Death moves through the earth as lava spews from the volcano, or as slowly as the turn of the worm. The earth moves under my pen, and the pen moves with it. Events get set in motion; they go on their course; the seed gets planted and comes to fruition, the leaf falls and turns to mulch under the winter snows, and in the thick muck of spring the new seed sprouts.

Belief or non-belief; angel or devil; man or monster - Erik, over thirty years dead, isn't for me to judge. Erik waits too, and he's free to emerge if he wishes, free to emerge after being buried inside me for so long, buried inside my heart as he once buried himself inside my body. He's free to come out, or not. If he does, I will greet him, without fear, without sentimentality, without remorse.

In fact, if he emerges, I welcome him. I spent so many decades pushing down every memory of him, only to have those recollections ripped from their grave every time Philippe played melancholy Borodin on the cello, or stood with hand on hip and head wagged to the side, his father's characteristic pose. Now the time has come to call him by his name and loosen the grip he has had on my life, on all our lives. I never knew his real one, true, but recounting his lacerating loves, his tender hatreds, his icy passions and flaming thoughts perhaps may serve as well as a name.

I put one foot over the edge, debating. Cold air rushes up at me from beneath, rich with the aroma of the grave. Why not fall? There's no one to catch me anyway. So down I fall, into the past. Down I fall, through the glass.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Don't fool yourself, I repeated silently as I looked around the silent and empty dressing room. You know this is no spirit whom you hear every morning except Sundays. No spirit would ask you so many questions about yourself, about Papa, about Raoul. No angel would sound so possessive, so jealous, so sad. An angel wouldn't need to ask these things. An angel would simply know. An angel would not be crushed by a falling chandelier.

Yet it was the voice of an angel that crept up stealthily around me, first from far away, then tenderly and intimately close, nearer than my ear, almost under my skin. That soft seductive voice spun my father's melody, with the sacred words, and as it approached it gathered strength and authority, singing,

I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.

Did I believe in him who called me thus? I never feared madness. That a spirit should come to me was only to be expected; I would have been disappointed had it not. That this spirit of silver melody could be a man, of flesh and bone and blood, of passions and rages and calm melancholy contemplation, passed my mind more than once before the great chandelier came crashing to the orchestra pit this very night.

And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?

The sliding, scraping noise, like stone moving over stone, came from the direction of my mirror. As I walked toward it, I saw the surface of the mirror growing misty, with a pale light not on it, exactly, but more behind it. The mirror itself seemed to soften, and I reached out to touch it, but felt only its cold hard surface. Behind the swirls of bluish mist I spied a vague dark shape, a man's shape, moving slowly toward the mirror so that it seemed to come directly at me, almost moving through the mirror itself.

The Master is come, and calleth for thee.

I put my hand out again, and this time instead of its cold silvered surface I felt first warm air, and then a wave of colder, damp air. I walked on, no longer fearing any bump into the glass. All through my stomach beat an incredible lightness, almost like dancing. The scraping noise behind me startled me back to my senses, and I found myself in a stone corridor, alone with a man all in black.

He stood before me tall and of a spectral slenderness. A black fabric mask embroidered with silver threads covered his entire face, and within the eyeholes of the mask, his ebony eyes faintly glowed in the center, as if two tiny golden candle flames shone from the back of his head. As he breathed, a little flutter of mesh at the mouth moved back and forth in time with his exhalations.

Then he took my wrist and I jerked back with a loud cry. The hand which touched me reminded me of a dead man's. I gripped him back, trying to force his clutch from my arm. Horribly, when my fingers closed around it the icy skin yielded in that soft, sodden way of a corpse. I remembered that when my father died, Mama Valerius insisted I kiss him before the joiners came to lay him out in the coffin. I didn't want to, and I argued and cried, but she insisted that his soul would not rest without some gesture of affection from me. Sulking and terrified, I approached his body and brought my lips up to his sunken chin already bluish with the shadow of the hair that grows after death. It didn't feel like skin under my lips, but rather wax, congealed wax that smelled sickly-sweet with the corruption below.

The strange man's hand felt like that. But it was obvious that this was no spirit. This was a man whose icy grip pulled me firmly along the passage. The skin was rotten-soft, almost slippery, but the sinews and bone underneath were hard stems of steel.

"Who are you? Where is my teacher?" I demanded. He said nothing. So this was my so-called "angel of music." An angel of ice, I thought, with a hand that reaches up for me out of the grave. "Where are we going?" Only silence. I looked back towards the back of the mirror that hung silvered at the end of the corridor. I thought, if it opened so easily from out here, perhaps I can get back in, and call for help. Lunging toward the mirror, I felt his arms grip me so tightly I wailed in pain. He roughly hoisted me onto his shoulder, almost knocking off the loose wide hat pulled down low over his head, and terror overwhelmed me. Whoever this man was, he intended to carry me off. Screaming, I struggled and kicked as he pulled me around to the front of his body.

My knees gave way as he dragged me around towards him and pressed me up against his chest. Until now, the word "ravished" had been only a vague abstraction from an adventure story. He gripped me by the hair and forced my face into his front, near the pocket of his vest. He must have had some kind of kerchief there, because my face squashed up against soft fabric, and at once the most delightful smell floated up through my compressed nose.

It was a perfume, but had nothing of flowers in it. Now I would describe it as a chemical smell, entirely artificial. It reminded me of nothing in nature, neither musk, nor blossom, nor sweet oil. Immediately a langour suffused me, and if his hand had not wrapped itself around my back I would have fallen. All my limbs went soft, and while my mind stayed clear, it was as if all will left me, and all fear. He pulled my face away from his breast pocket and I stared calmly up at that silk-embroidered mask.

Drugged, trusting, I lifted my arms up to him, and he picked me up awkwardly in his own. Even in my languid state I shrank from the touch of his bare skin, so like my dead Papa's. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against that spare, hard chest, drifting like a caterpillar in its chrysalis, without time.

When I saw light again, we sat beside a little fountain carved out of the stone wall. A lascivious Pan face with two twisted horns and long curly locks grinned wickedly at me as water spurted from its mouth. On the shadowy man's hard knee I rested as he sponged my head with cold water from the fountain. He wiped my face with his kerchief, but the strange piercing smell was gone, replaced by another, softer one. It made me feel light and fluttery inside, almost giddy. I stood and did not fall, but my feet felt very far away. Laughter came from somewhere close by. It was mine, so I laughed some more until distracted by a nearby clopping noise.

Before my blurred eyes stood my best of horse friends, Cesar, the staunchest and most gentle of the Andalusians of the Opera stable. He was the horse upon which one could always rely never to step on someone's foot, never to start or shy, and the stablehands liked to brag that he was so refined he would never think of soiling the stage. When I had first begun to sing at the Opera; when no one would talk to me and the loneliness almost overcame me, I would go into the stables and put my face up against Cesar's warm flank, and feed him scraps of carrots from the market.

The man all in black stroked Cesar's shoulder gently. The horse nickered and nuzzled at him, and I began to trust the man a little. He has been kind to Cesar, I thought as my head swam. I reached out to pat the wet horse nose and he nuzzled my hand, investigating.

"No carrot for you, my friend. So sorry." I said.

Then to my astonishment, the man in black pulled a stump of carrot out of his pocket and silently handed it to me. I took the carrot wonderingly and broke it in half, giving him the other piece back. We fed Cesar half of the carrot each, and I continued to stroke his strong neck. Then I noticed the saddle. "It's beautiful," I said dreamily. "I've never seen anything like it. What is it?" Made of cloth instead of leather, it was beautifully embroidered in looping arabesque designs almost too faint to see in the dim light of the corridor. I reached out to touch it, and it felt like the softest wool.

He lifted me almost effortlessly and since I wore Siebel's tights and doublet, I straddled Cesar like a man. My abductor mounted behind me. How amusing, I thought, this saddle was meant for one, but now there are two. His body went up right against my back, and while his hands might have been cold, the rest of his body was warm like any other. He reached around me to use the reins, pulling me towards him. As Cesar started to walk, I began to struggle feebly, vaguely remembering that something should be wrong with a man's body moulded so closely to mine. Leaning back, I forgot why I struggled.

Against him I dreamily relaxed as we went down innumerable stairs at a slow walk. The big body of the horse moved between my legs, and the man's body behind me moved in rhythm with it, keeping me sandwiched in warmth. He let the reins go loose, and put one hand around my waist to keep me from slipping off. I could feel his breath on my hair and it was a struggle to keep from going to sleep. I giggled a little at the clatter of Cesar's hooves on the stone.

"So much noise … we'll wake everyone up, and then won't they be cross?"

I could not say how long we rode that way. At one point I found myself caressing the fine wool of the saddle, then reached up to stroke Cesar's long mane. The horse stopped, bringing us to the shore of a vast lake. A small rowboat lay on the shore, two oars sticking upward. I looked around at the cavernous room, and the bluish-silver water, and wondered how we had gotten there at first. Time seemed to move very slowly, or not at all.

Dizzy, I gripped Cesar's mane and would have fallen off had the man not already dismounted and hoisted me down. I yielded, almost falling into his arms, as my own limbs had not fully recovered their movement. He unsaddled Cesar and placed the saddle in the boat. I clung to the horse's neck, still disoriented, and the man waited patiently for me to hug the Andalusian.

I looked up like a child into his face, that through his tallness and my dazed state seemed impossibly high above me, almost out of reach. The man in black patted Cesar sharply on the rump and he ran off, hoofs clattering as he climbed the stairs the way we had come.

Then he lifted me again, closer to his chest and face this time, so that his breath, laced with a little stale wine, drifted over me from under his silvery-black mask. He set me in the boat as gently as if I were a china doll. Silently across the lake he rowed with movements regular and sure, and still he said nothing. With the water and the coolness came a revival of my consciousness, and the return of fear. I knew then that he had drugged me to secure my compliance and confuse my senses, so that even if I had escaped, I would not know the way back. I thought of jumping into the lake, but had no idea of its depth or what horrid creatures slithered beneath its murky surface. So I stayed where I was, still lethargic and drugged, and he rowed on without flagging.

Upon the far shore there was some sort of dock. When we moored, he reached for me but I shrank struggling away from him. Paying me no heed, he lifted me as effortlessly as he had raised me up on Cesar's back, swinging me from the boat to the shore. Then terror struck harder than before, for before he slung me over his shoulder, I saw our destination – a door built directly into the stone wall itself. He was carrying me into some kind of den, I knew not what, and once I went in, would I ever come out? One arm gripped my kicking legs mercilessly, holding them entirely immobile. The other pinioned my back. My beating fists against his body he ignored entirely. Screams echoed through the cavern, but there was no one to hear.

Firmly shutting my eyes against the horror, I imagined some filthy, rat-infested dungeon of vice with overturned bottles of spirits on the floor, filth spattered on the wall, a long table stained with blood on which rested silver knives. I opened them to no such thing. The small room in which I found myself deposited combined a dining room and parlor. A cheerful fire blazed under the Louis-Philippe styled mantelpiece, on which ticked an ornate Ormelu clock. Then a scraping came behind me, followed by a click. We were locked in, and the thick door had no handle, no keyhole, no locking mechanism.

I was a prisoner five cellars down from the street. No one knew where I was. And there was no ready means of escape.

I turned to the man in black, who fidgeted nervously with his sleeves, alternately picking them and rubbing his hands across them. He hung his cloak on a peg near the door. Careful removal of his hat disclosed full black hair, but its unmoving and artificial texture suggested a wig. Those nervous hands flapped back and forth. It was clear that while he had me here, he didn't know quite what to do with me. Seeing his discomforture, I snapped out, "Are you mad? What game do you play here?"

Quietly he said, "Don't fear, Christine. I won't hurt you."

That was the first lie he told directly to my face, even if I didn't know it at the time. Never mind the previous lie, that he was a spirit sent by my father to develop my voice, to measure my dedication to my father by how diligently I did the angel's bidding. As I said, I believed in everything then.

It was also the first time I could link a voice with a body. "It can't be," I said with a throat raw from screaming. "My Voice was an angel. You are a kidnapper, and probably a rapist too."

He drew himself up to his full height, almost two heads above me. In black evening dress he filled the room, making me shrink back. Then with the supplicant aspect of a lover, he reached for me with outstretched hands. Filled with rage, I said, "Who are you, you coward? Let me see the face of my jailer before you ravish and kill me," and I rushed towards him, intent on ripping that samite veil right off of him. By the fineness of his bearing, I thought he was perhaps some debauched nobleman who kept an apartment under the Opera, the better to prey on girls, and who for the sake of society's good regard kept his face concealed.

I was so young then. It never occurred to me that any man who used a secret doorway into a girl's dressing room, lured her out with hypnotic music, then drugged her and carried her into his rooms for who knows what evil purpose, might not want his face revealed. The fierce impetuosity of youth disallowed the possibility that my kidnapper might kill me if I saw his face and could identify him.

Spinning me around like a top, he pulled me against his body and restrained my arms. Before I could kick his shins, he had slammed me down onto a chair and spun himself around from behind, pulling my arms up behind me so that I couldn't struggle. Up against my ear he whispered in the softest, sweetest voice imaginable words that soothed as well as threatened, "Never touch the mask, do you understand? I won't be responsible for what happens if you do. But never, do you understand, never touch the mask."

To show my understanding, I nodded and smiled as my first flush of anger gave way to calmer reason. His height, his speed, and the terrible length and power of his arms made me no match for him whatever. He could overpower me physically and do whatever he wanted. To survive, I would have to find out what he wanted, listen to him, humor him, and be ready to bolt for escape at first opportunity.

His exertions had warmed his hands, and they no longer felt clammy like a corpse's. "Please unhand me, Monsieur," I said quietly. "I won't fly at you again."

Gently his arms drifted off me, lingering just a little too long on my shoulders. Then what I suspected I came to know, for he came around and sat before me on the pouffe, his begging hands laid out before me but not touching. "I knew you weren't an angel even before I saw you," I said, trying not to cast my eyes too visibly around the apartment as I looked for other doors, any way out at all. "No angel asks whether or not I might have entertained men in my dressing room. Your too-personal questions and concerns gave it away."

He hung his head a little. "I'm surprised you believed it as long as you did. I'm only a man, a man who loves you. I am Erik."

"Well, Monsieur Erik, you already seem to know me, so I don't have to introduce myself. But I am terribly thirsty, which as a music teacher you should know ruins the voice." He looked hard at me through the eyeholes of his mask. "Where could I go?" I said, and so up he rose up with jerky spastic energy.

After he disappeared behind a brown velvet curtain, I swiftly surveyed the room. There were no fireplace tools, no poker I could grab with which to defend myself, and no apparent exits. There was the thick stone door through which we had come, two conventional doors to the right and left, and straight ahead the brown curtain through which he had gone.

The room was conventionally furnished, and save for the absence of windows, could have been found in any one of the flats in a respectable middle-class section of Paris. What set it apart were the rows of bookshelves that lined almost every available wall. On a stand in the corner sat a violin case. Then there were nooks, shelves, and more books. I quickly glanced over the titles but most were unfamiliar to me, with names like Nietzche, Marlowe, and Bruno. If I wanted to throw books at him one after the another, there would have been more than enough ammunition.

He returned with a blue stone bottle of ginger beer, uncorked. "I recognize some of your books," I said. "Didn't Goethe write Faust?"

"Yes, and with a happier ending than we see on our stage. You might say he wrote Faust Triumphant," and he gave a little chuckle.

"Faust Triumphant? How?" At the time I had no idea what he meant.

"Monsieur Gounod uses only the first half of the story, which ends when his Gretchen - our Marguerite - rises up to Heaven. In Goethe, Faust goes on to woo Helen of Troy and eventually finds salvation."

I frowned. "I can't imagine the opera twice as long as it is now."

He gave a short bark of laughter. "Come and sit," he said, but I continued to linger by the book-covered wall.

He came up to me far closer than a man in a drawing-room should, and gestured forcefully that I should sit down in a soft chair upholstered in some arabesque pattern. It occurred to me that the ginger drink might have been drugged, but if he wished to intoxicate me again, all he had to do was cover my face with his handkerchiefs. A few more breathfuls, and those powerful compounds would reduce me either to unconsciousness, or hysterical and helpless laughter. So I sat and drank the sharp fizzy concoction.

When I complimented him on it for not being too sweet, the praise pleased him more than it should have. From it he took encouragement. Sitting at my feet, pulling his long legs up to his chest like a praying mantis's, he watched me with an almost hungry expression. Then, clearing his throat nervously, he began to speak. As long as I live, that speech will remain with me.

"Christine," he began, in a voice wavering with emotion, "Erik has lied to you from the very beginning. There was no 'angel of music,' only Erik. Only Erik who saw you trembling and hesitant, so afraid at your first rehearsal with the National Opera. Only Erik watched you pass through the grand foyer to stare at the murals on the ceilings above. Only Erik saw you so proud of your new fur, who would have bought you one far better, far softer, for only the privilege of once in a while running his hands through the sleekness of your muff, or feeling your arm through his, to caress your sleeve."

He rose and paced in front of me, ignoring my shock. "How could I ever approach you? You would have run away in fear, left for another position, perhaps even departed for another city."

"You presume too much, Monsieur," I said with even voice.

"I presume nothing," he said with greater agitation, "I know women better than you, even. Do not protest that since you are one, you thus know women more thoroughly than I. That would be like the landscape pretending to describe its own geography. The cartographer must tromp over the land with his sextant and subdue its measurements under his objective eye. It's impossible for women to be objective about themselves, especially in matters of love."

He sighed heavily and wrung his hands, continuing with his speech. "Women run away from an outright declaration of love. Women love the man they cannot have, the one who threatens them, the one who takes a mistress and then throws her into their face. But you, now Erik has you where you cannot run away, where you will have to listen." Then he pointed his black silk face towards the vaulted ceiling and cried out, "I didn't want to do this! I didn't want to force her here! Oh, I am the foulest and most cursed of men, an ape masquerading as a man, no better than a brute who carries off his prey into the forest. I am a damned soul crawling up from the muck and daring to touch, daring to contaminate this exquisite beauty with my paws." As he said this he thrashed his body wildly back and forth.

It was a horrible to see and worse to hear. He grew more abasive, calling himself a cur and a wild thing, unfit for human society. I shrank to the back of the chair, thinking that if he was as depraved as he said, he would not hesitate to work his will with me. "You must let me go," I said. "If you feel towards me as I think you do, then please, I beg, please let me go."

His glittering insect eyes fixed on me. "Why should I let you go? You're here now, and you must listen to me. If I let you go, I will never see you again."

"That isn't so," I lied. The first cock had crowed, and now we were matched. "I could see you after performances. You could take me to supper. I have heard you on the violin, and you play exquisitely. We could perform together, perhaps."

The last set him to wailing, as if I had stabbed him or subjected him to electric shocks, his body quivered so terribly. "Oh, naïve girl, perform with you. In hell, perhaps, for that is the only place in which Erik would stand up before an audience and perform." He turned on me and put his face very close to mine as he sunk down before me on his knees. At that point I could have ripped both it and wig away, but I remembered his injunction. Also, if he conversed with me, as dreadfully wrenching as it was, he wasn't assaulting me.

He swept his arm across his body as if he wanted to annihilate everything, to wipe it away utterly. "I am not interested in your supper clubs, in your parties, in performing like a monkey for the dregs of Paris high society. Before you I lay something far greater, something which drowns the fleshpots of Paris in its marvellous and terrible shadow. Before you I place something I have presented to no woman before, for no woman has been as pure, as exquisite, as sublime an artist as you. Before you, Christine Daae, I rip from my breast my heart, and rest it at your feet."

Then he really did lay himself at my feet, in the position of a Mohammedan in prayer. Through the soft fabric of my shoes pressed up against his mask, his muffled words went on, "For months I have wanted to speak to you as a man does to a woman, and for months my faint heart has betrayed me. But now you are here, and I beg you to stay with me, I beg you, please."

"Monsieur Erik. You know this is impossible. For one thing, I'm a girl with an honest reputation. You mentioned mistresses. If you have watched me for months as you say, then you know I am no man's mistress and will not be one. You cannot demand that I stay with you in your apartments, with no chaperone."

Ragged and sarcastic, he laughed, "Oh, you have a chaperone indeed. Erik will be your chaperone."

Perhaps another bid for freedom would succeed. Accordingly I rose, "I'm afraid I don't find that amusing, Monsieur. If you love me as you say you do, then you will permit me to return to my home, and you will call upon on me as any other suitor."

"You have other suitors? Others beside that mama's boy in uniform, whose milk-fed face looks like he belongs at a tea party, served up next to the watercress sandwiches?" His breath came in harsh gasps.

"No, of course not," I retreated. "Nor is Raoul my suitor," and I thought, the cock has crowed for the second time, has it not?

He turned abruptly and crossed his arms across his chest. "What made you think I would keep you here against your will? Didn't I tell you that as long as you left the mask alone, you were perfectly safe? I'll show you the way out immediately. Foolish girl, thinking I would force you stay overnight with a man you barely know, or at least do not know face to face," and he gave again that horrible ragged laugh. Then tenderly he beseeched, "But you won't forget your Erik, will you? You won't forget to come and see him again? You won't turn him away when he comes begging to your dressing room for another music lesson, another chance?"

Confused, I stood up shakily. "So I am free to go? You'll take me back now?"

"Of course. Just let me clear away this bottle. Unless you would like some more, perhaps?"

I sat down again. He wished to test me, very well, I would test him in return. If he truly intended to give me my freedom, another half hour would not hurt, or so I thought. I cringe as I put these words on the page. Across the decades I call to that girl, that slim young blonde with no more brains than the horse which carried her downward, get out while you can. But instead my younger self sat on the plush chair and calmly accepted another ginger beer.

"It's very good," he said, "from a small brewery in London. It's the perfect refreshment for one's lady guests as it is not too sweet, not too intoxicating."

"So you entertain ladies here often, Monsieur Erik?"

"Not here," he said quietly. "Never here. You are the first," and he looked away, his shoulders furtively hunched as if he had said too much.

With honest reflection, I, the faded woman that used to be Christine Daae, celebrated singer of Paris, know with the certainty of death that had I walked out that door that evening, he would not have stopped me. So much destiny was laid that night upon the shoulders of a young woman, sheltered and vain and self-centered. So many lives changed. Who would have lived? Certainly Raoul's brother, and all the children of his loins. Who would have never been, never set foot on this earth to play or dream or wonder or love? My dark iris Philippe, rogue blossom wild in my garden, my baby, my own. It's the wisdom of God that we have no power to choose, and no power to see ahead to exercise that choice.

He drew up a harp, exquisitely carved, and sang Desdemona's willow ballad from Rossini's Otello. Within it swirled arabesques and inventions of his own, little spirals of sound that wrapped me in their coils. His voice was almost as high as an alto in the upper ranges, but he kept his volume low, scarcely above a whisper. Hearing his voice projected through a wall compared in no way to the rich, caressing sound produced an arm's length from me. His capability astonished me, because it is far more difficult to sing softly than to bellow out at one's full volume.

The backdrop of the willow song is a thick and coming storm, but he sang it gently and more softly with each repetition, so that as I closed my eyes momentarily, I could almost see a breeze moving the long leaves of a solitary willow at twilight.

Then he left Desdemona's song for a time and went off further into his own invention, then returned to it again. I felt myself growing sleepy, as the theme ebbed and flowed over me. He stopped playing to cover me with a deep magenta wool shawl of good thickness and softness, then resumed precisely where he had left off. I lay back on the pillow and closed my eyes, and the softness of his playing and his singing covered me like the wool in a caressing blanket of warmth.

When I woke, the gaslights were turned very low. I was cold and incredibly stiff, with that sticky, revolting feeling that comes from sleeping in your clothes. Close around me pressed the walls of a small bedroom room I had never seen, which looked like nothing I expected. The elaborate Arabic music had stimulated my imagination before kissing my eyelids with sleep, and I half thought to find myself in some richly appointed seraglio of cushions and embroidered curtains.

Instead, the furniture was plain but beautiful, made of a brown wood that glowed with red highlights, as if a flame played constantly on it. I opened the wardrobe, and discovered several garments hanging on pegs, as well as several pairs of boots neatly arranged underneath. An embroidered coverlet that looked Turkish or Moorish, with curves and loops in blue and yellow covered the sleigh bed.

The bed was undisturbed, as was my person, which I confirmed with a frantic check of all my clothing. If he had wanted to abuse or ravish me, he could have easily done it last night, when I fell asleep on the chaise. Obviously he had carried me to the couch but left me otherwise unmolested. As stiff and scratchy as I felt, it was better than a freezing midnight walk back to a chill flat. Then there was the remarkable beauty of his voice, which until now I had only heard through the walls of my dressing room. In person it had so much more luxuriance, embellished by the movements of his head and arms, which conveyed similar richness of feeling. I wanted to hear that rejuvenated voice again and again, and then the overwhelming thought occurred to me - not only would I hear it again if I stayed. I could sing with him as well.

He had removed my short soft boots and laid them neatly at the foot of the chaise lounge. The clock on the shelf said 1:10, but there was no way to tell how long I had slept, or whether it was night or morning. I went to explore my bedroom, and in the vanity table drawer I found a little wrapped sewing kit with a small but exceedingly sharp pair of scissors. Through a little door I saw the bath, and gasped in pleasure. The clawfoot tub appeared to be twice the size of the one in our flat. I turned on the water, and almost cried out. Hot and cold water both! The luxury of the gleaming white tile, the cheerful brass fittings, the glowing cut-glass lamps, and a Turkish towel of cushiony softness all invited me in. All the room lacked was a mirror. I laughed a little to myself, braver now over my adventure. I knew women could be seduced by flattery, and appealing eyes, a mobile firm mouth which dropped kisses, but had never heard of the use of a bath. Was Erik to seduce me with a bath?

I almost ran to my bedroom door, curious to see if he had already woken. The handle moved in my grip, but the door did not open. I twisted it to the left, then the right, thinking it was stuck, perhaps due to the damp. The door itself never budged, no matter how I twisted the brass fixture, or pulled, or pounded my hand along the doorjam to unstick it. I cried out, I hammered on the door, I hit it with my boot, leaving long black marks. Despite the effort, the door remained firmly stuck.

A red rage filled me. I picked up one of the footstools and pounded the door with it, crying out now, "Erik! Where are you? Let me out, you liar, you foul scoundrel." One of the stool's legs broke off and flew across the room, but the door remained unscathed, as it was made of thick, solid oak.

Oh, the liar, I thought, fighting down the panic. The filthy liar, telling me I was free to go. On my own head I heaped reproaches. I should have left last night, when it seemed that freedom really was within my grasp. Panic won the struggle, making me pant with terror. It was no consolation that he had left my clothes and person unscathed the night before. Doubtless he had some more elaborate seduction planned, some more refined tableau of sensuality prepared, one that required time and reflection.

And a victim, I thought. Pulling on the door as if it might have magically unlocked of its own accord, and finding it as firmly secured as ever, I sank to the floor weeping in shame and terror.

(continued...)