Blessed Agony

A/N: Thanks to Jennie for pointing out Christine's taste in flowers, and GlovedHand for suggesting Erik's pharmacological propensities.

I had never been to Paris alone before. All the way on the long train ride, I twisted my handkerchief into strips until it shredded in my hand. Remorseful, I pulled out a needle and picked off the lace trim to save and use for another one. That kept me occupied for a short time, but then the thought of that great city loomed up over me, for at the center was a mausoleum, a tomb into which I would not go.

Oh, Raoul and I had traveled to Paris a few times, when the children were older. We admired the Tuileries gardens, enjoyed an excursion boat ride up and down the Seine, had coffee and pastries in the cafes across from the Bois de Boulognes, in short, took in all the sunny and legitimate pleasures the city had to offer. We even sampled a few of the duskier ones, visiting the Folies Bergère and laughing that we must have been the only married persons there. However, the "coffin of Paris," as Erik had called the wreck of the Tuileries Palace, had been yanked out of the city's mouth like a rotten tooth. Between Raoul and myself, the National Opera was never mentioned. When we passed that great sarcophagus, guilt seized me, because after all, a man who had loved me rested there, and not so much as a single hyacinth bloomed on his grave.

Once, when Raoul slept, I slipped from the hotel early in the morning. After I found a flower seller, I placed the little bouquet at the base of the grand granite steps leading up to the entrance, leaving like a thief afraid to be caught. Once I had a Mass said for Erik at the Madeleine. Before the priest would accept my Mass card and my contribution he asked, Had he died in the graces of the Church? I looked him full in the face and unwaveringly said, Yes. Once I saw an old man in evening clothes on the street, thin, a little twisted in the spine but still unusually tall, and in a convulsion of fear and unexpected joy thought, It's him, he managed to live somehow, and but memory played tricks on me, for I had felt his departing breaths and tended to his cooling, stiffening body.

Still that great green-roofed building throbbed like a bruise in the center of my soul every time Raoul and I went to Paris. Now, alone, I sat quietly in the floral-drenched obscenity of a respectable ladies' hotel. A knock on the door startled me, but, oh pleasure, a telegram from Philippe. He had left de Haan to meet his fellow doctors at the Paris Medical College, and would call for me at 8 PM to go to supper.

So later that evening, Philippe escorted me to dinner at his hotel, a sort of men's club across from the Paris Medical College and frequented by the doctors there, as well as their visiting colleagues. Apologetic, he explained that we were to have a private room, as those were the rules for entertaining guests who were ladies. The dining room was for men only.

Settled down with foie gras mousse and a glass of Cote-de-Rhone, I leaned over to Philippe. "So what's the great change of plans here? I thought you would still be in de Haan. Did you abandon Anki and the rest, to come down to Paris to look at a skeleton?"

He looked sheepish. "You know, Mother, that I sunburn terribly. When Anki saw how red and miserable I was, she gave me leave to go." For indeed Philippe's face looked burned and sore. " She and the children are taking the train back home in a few days."

"What about the children?" I asked.

"Martine's girls stayed under the umbrellas, or played in the bathing machines until people shooed them out. Johannes and the rest are a little darker than I naturally, and you should see them now, as they're brown as nuts. Oh, yes, and Genna put a crab down the back of Baby Roland's bathing dress, so you see, you should have been there." Then he grew thoughtful. "I also considered whether you might need me tomorrow, when you go to visit the solicitor."

"I don't think so," I answered. "All the permissions have been obtained, including Louvel's endorsement as partial inheritor. After tomorrow, the chateau will be sold."

"It's going to break Great-Aunt Martyniere's heart."

I sighed. Tomorrow, after concluding my legal business, I would lunch with Martyniere, and was looking forward to our meeting not at all. "She spent her whole childhood there, Philippe. I understand how sad she was to hear of the decision. Your grandfather sold the farm I grew up on, right out from under us, and we hadn't even gone bankrupt, although in fairness that was coming soon. But there's no possible way she can even live there now, so what can we do? I think she regrets signing away her share so long ago. If she'd kept it, she could have blocked the sale."

"It's not the sale that disturbs me, because I never saw the place when it was a living house. I'll tell you honestly, and not to speak ill of the dead, but that always rankled me, that as children we were never invited to that big old place in the country."

I nodded, knowing how it hurt our children, knowing how some hurts can't ever be mended or soothed away. He continued, "It's as if we were contaminated somehow, that for the longest time, and weren't invited until we had grown too old to care anymore. We were treated as if we were cousins bar sinister. So while it may be uncharitable, there seems a certain perverse justice in the old place disappearing altogether. But all the same, somehow it seems gruesome," he said, screwing up his long face, "to take a house apart and reassemble it bit by bit elsewhere. A house is like a body in so many ways, serving as a glorious temple, as an enclosure for all the life within it. Time and weather assault it, so that it becomes sick and breaks down, and ultimately it will tumble into ruin. I knew the chateau had to be sold, but to have it dismantled and reassembled somewhere else, it recalls that English novel, what's it called, Frankenstein?"

"I don't know it, not reading English. Is it a new novel?"

Philippe took a long drink of wine, which told me he was about to launch into an exposition. He was not a handsome man, with cheekbones a little too prominent. A receding hairline, coupled with the normally waxy dome of his forehead, now reddened and inflamed, made the top of his face too broad and bony. But when animated, especially by music or a subject that pleased him, he glowed. "Quite old, actually, almost a century now, and this is the most extraordinary part, it was written by a young girl, no more than eighteen or nineteen, I believe. A mad doctor tries to cheat death by assembling and animating bits of corpses, jolting them with electricity. His creation comes to life, but doesn't please him, for not only is he ugly to look upon, he also is stronger, swifter, and more enduring than ordinary men. Also, being fashioned complete in every regard makes him ardent in love, so he begs his creator to make for him a wife, and Frankenstein does. However, in his fevered imagination Frankenstein sees the creatures multiplying vigorously and ultimately crowding out humanity. Thus he destroys the female version he's just created, and the being becomes inflamed with sorrow and rage. From that point on, it's war between them."

"What a terrible story." It never changes, the fear and hatred of what is ugly, what I carried inside of me for so long.

"A terrible story indeed, but a true one in so many aspects. This new being is incorrectly called 'the monster,' because everyone thinks of him as such, even though it is obvious who the real monster is. This poor creature wants only one thing, to join the sentient condition, the ensouled condition, and enjoy all that implies, including natural love."

A tear ran down my nose before I even knew it was there.

"Mother," Philippe said, and in his voice I heard the perfect echo of Raoul, all warmly masculine, "are you all right? Does this upset you?"

"Yes," I sniffed, "but I have to hear it. How does it end? Is it dreadful?"

He looked at me closely, a patient he was assessing. "Both die, the man and the being he brings into the world." I leaned my head onto the width of his sharp slender shoulder, and he embraced me, comforting. "I will tell you, Mother, I cried too when I first read it, and although my English could be better, the full weight of it pressed through the veil of language, and bore down upon me."

You have no idea, I thought, of the full heft of that story. "I'll be all right," I said as I dabbed my nose. "I've put aside mourning, but the tears still come."

"It's Father, isn't it? I should go to the lawyer with you. No doubt the administration of the estate arouses all those painful memories."

"Not as much as you might imagine," and I tried to smile a little for my son's sake. Even so, the cold horror of Philippe's tale still gripped me, and I wondered what sorrows that young woman had endured in life, to create such a lacerating story. Something like my own, perhaps? I envied her the ability to pour out her pain into prose, to redeem the horrors in her life by birthing something new. As for me, at her young age I had no creativity, unless the warblings of the canary be counted as such. It would have never occurred to me to write Erik's story, and yet this unknown girl had created something even stranger, if that were possible.

"If you're upset, perhaps I shouldn't tell you of the skeleton," he said, still giving me that careful scrutiny, choosing his words.

"No, it's fine. It's just sad, that's all, that a being who only wanted love should be denied it, and then die."

He squeezed my hand briefly in his long-fingered one, like his face normally white, but streaked with red burns. "As you know, it wasn't clear where the skeleton had been found, as the workers depositing the time capsules at first couldn't be located, and no one had kept any notes or records of the exhumation. There was a man, an attorney by day and a hopeful private investigator by night, who somehow insinuated himself into the situation, becoming a nuisance around the National Opera and always having to be escorted out of the building, so adamant he was to find the spot where the body had been laid. Finally they were glad of his annoying presence, though, because he did manage to track down two of the workers who originally found it. He exhausted his good graces quickly, though, because now he tells everyone that he was there when they found it, which of course is entirely untrue.

"We interviewed the two men, and none of them mentioned this amateur investigator being present. It would have terrified them more so than the bones. After all, where else other than in the National Opera, or any government building, would it require three laborers to bury a few boxes? Not only that, this persistent man believed that somehow this skeleton was tied in with some crimes, some kind of scandal there from a few decades ago. I already suspected a crime, so this seemed plausible to me, until he raved that somehow the authorities themselves were involved in whatever these heinous acts were, and conspired to keep it all hidden from sight.

"Well, our obsessed friend turned out to be half-right, which was unfortunate in a way, because these types, when they're right about one small thing, assume they're infallible in every other regard. In any event, the three of us, Gagnepain, Locard, and myself examined the skeleton closely, after recreating as accurately as possible where it had been found, in what position, and so on. It was deliberately concealed in a shallow grave near a small fountain at the bottom of a long staircase, in the second cellar. The clothes had been removed before death ... Are you sure you want me to go on? Here, a little more wine. The body had been rolled into a curled-up position, so the men said. They disturbed the remains, then hastily covered them up again, being superstitious types, although unfortunately not enough to leave the whole site alone entirely."

"Philippe, you sound so ... cold when you describe it. This was a person, someone who had a mother, a father, who loved." I almost said, and was loved, but held my tongue.

His face grew very soft. "I know that. If I sound cold, it's because I separate myself from these details, because they are indeed sad and shocking. We examined every bone, all the joints, and concluded that the skeleton had two broken wrists, not snapped all the way through, but of the greenstick variety of fracture. We knew they'd been fractured quite close to death, but not afterwards. From examination of the joint epiphyses, it was estimated the individual was fully grown, not an adolescent. You look white, are you sure I should go on?"

"Was there a ring?" I demanded, stricken with anxiety. "You said before that there was a ring."

"There was nothing unusual about it as a ring, plain gold bands like that abound everywhere. That the ring was there at all and not simply robbed from the victim, now, that's the unusual part. But the most interesting aspect was the pelvis. You know that Dr. Locard has been trying to apply scientific principles to forensic investigations. Being able to judge the sex of a skeleton would be of great use to detectives, and he thinks he can conclusively show it by taking measurements of the pelvic girdle. It's not exact, of course, given human variability. We couldn't agree on which measurements to take at first, between what condoyles and spines, but eventually we came to a consensus. She was a young woman, probably in her twenties. Someone had snapped both her wrists close to the time of her death, and buried her in a shallow grave with the gold ring upon her finger. She'd also had a child, but probably not that recently before her death."

"So she was a woman," I breathed out faintly. "But that there had been a child ... how on earth could you tell?"

He looked at me, proud in his new knowledge. "There's a fellow over at the Hospital St.-Antoine who uses those new Roentgen rays to look at bones within the body. He jumped at the chance to look inside the bones themselves. So we took the remains over there, and got a good look at all the joints, including the scarring on the pubis symphysis. We estimated it had been probably at least five years, perhaps more. She'd had the child at a relatively young age. Then the symphysis had re-healed, so we were safe in assuming she hadn't given birth recently, and anyway, no infant skeleton was found." Practically crowing with triumph, he said, "It was as I said earlier. There was nothing mysterious about this skeleton, instead, what we found was the victim of an ordinary crime, most likely a murder. There was no evidence of a head injury, no other broken bones, healed or otherwise. There had obviously been some kind of struggle, given the damage to her wrists. My guess would have been death by suffocation or strangulation. Of course, as the skeleton was moved, the tiny and fragile hyoid bone was lost. It's too bad we couldn't examine that, as it would tell us which of the two it was ..."

"The hyoid bone?"

"It's a tiny, U-shaped bone at the base of the throat, held in place entirely by muscles, as no joint articulates it to any other bone in that region. Upon strangulation it's often cracked or sometimes even fractured altogether. But since those dolts moved the body, then finished the time capsule burial, it was most likely lost. I recommended that we go down, exhume the time capsules, and sift through the dirt, but was mocked as mad. 'All that effort,' I heard, 'for some girl of easy virtue?' But that was ridiculous, she wasn't of easy virtue..."

"Why do you say that?" I interrupted. "Because of the ring? Could it not as well have been a man's ring a loose woman might have stolen?"

"No, because taking into account the padding of flesh, it was sized for a woman's hand, and would have fit snugly behind her knuckle. Most likely it was her own ring. In any event, a probable scenario is that they wandered down into the bowels of the Opera, the woman and her assailant, who was very likely known to her, perhaps even an intimate. They had some kind of quarrel, a struggle ensued, and she was killed by a means that left no mark on her bones, or at least not that we could see. Further, it must have been someone known to her, for a chance robber would have taken the ring. Whoever killed her wanted her to have it, wanted it buried with her."

"You amaze me," I whispered. "All that, from one poor abandoned skeleton," and Philippe beamed, the same bright smile I'd seen so rarely on his father's face. Inside my thoughts raced and churned. A woman, I thought. A young woman, who wore a gold band. Erik had mentioned "the others," had said "When a woman sees my face, she is mine forever." Was she one of them, his forever in death? "What's going to happen to her?"

"I've talked to Father Durant at the Père Lachaise abbey. The three of us agreed, we have bought her a burial plot, a simple one on the outskirts of the cemetery. She'll have a funeral Mass, a cross, and on it will read, 'L'Inconnue de l'Opéra.' "

"The unknown of the Opera," I mused. "It sounds familiar."

"It should," he replied. "There was a girl found drowned in the Seine, of whom it was said that her beauty was so powerful, even in death she could compel. A morgue worker fell in love with her visage, and made a death-mask of her features. They kept her on display for the longest time in the Paris morgue, but no one could identify her, or whether she was murdered, or a suicide, so they called her 'L'Inconnue de la Seine.' "

"At least this one you laid to rest."

"It's the least we could do," Philippe said.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Exhausted from having run almost all the way from the top tier of auditorium boxes down to my dressing room, I locked the door of my loge and leaned against it, breathing heavily. The clocks had already finished striking, the bells had already rung calling the guests to supper, but Erik wasn't here to fetch me. Not that I expected him to wait inside the room itself, for he had never entered it when I was present. Suddenly a great emptiness opened up inside me, the horrifying vacuum of Erik's absence. I'll stay in here, I thought. No one will look for me. I won't have to face vulgar men or Raoul's sarcasm.

The mask made my skin itch, so I tossed it onto a chair, not looking where it landed. Minute after passing minute ground me between the gear-wheels of boredom. I thought of changing. This ruffly dress was a bit too long, but otherwise felt like a morning wrap, so soft and well-made it was. It never occurred to me that had Erik noticed a red-and-black Spanish dancer running through the halls followed by a white Pierrot, he would have known at once who that was.

I sat down at my desk and absently undid my hair from its tight confines, brushing it out and luxuriating in its long straight silkiness. That day in the garden at Perros came to mind, that day when Papa smiled at Raoul and then left us alone to talk, that day Raoul ran his lips over my fingers and palms while I quivered with delight, when he then dashed like a hart up the stony tree-arched road. After that, when I brushed my hair I used to imagine Raoul's fingers parting the strands. Out of habit that old fancy sprang to mind, but I angrily pushed it down.

It was cave-cold in the small room. From the armoire I took a black shawl appliquéd with knitted red roses, one Mama Valerius had made when she could still remember to count stitches. I sat, and waited, and waited more. My watch had stopped again. Then, sick with loneliness, impatience – for what to happen? desire – for what? I pulled out some paper from my desk, uncapped the ink bottle, and put pen to paper in a way I hadn't since the first year after Papa died.

I used to write my father letters, long rambling incoherencies into which I poured all my grief and anger and loneliness. Once I filled an entire page with "You left me you bastard why did you do that how could you leave me how could you stay with me and not help me you bastard you bastard you bastard..." As soon as I wrote them, I threw them into the coal grate or the fireplace. Then I'd go to confession and weep out my sins to the bored and impatient priests, until, when I began studying at the National Conservatory, I forswore confession altogether.

In the lonely crevice of this night I wasn't angry any longer at Papa. It was myself I lashed, because as dreadful as the scene with Raoul had been, it had brought the blood to my cheeks and neck. Anger roused me to desire. I thought of the man with the red face who had made as if to chase me, and with head in hands I merged him with Raoul and Erik, his sweaty torso joining with Raoul's head, and over it all Erik forcing me down onto the carpet, his body pressing me into the hard floor beneath, screaming into my face.

I started to write, almost automatically. Weeks later I looked all over Erik's apartments for those pages, my suicide notes, a few letters I'd started to Raoul and then abandoned, but none of them were there. Perhaps Erik took them. Some of it went a little like this:

Tonight I saw a man about to mount a woman, and I didn't look away. Tonight I come to the mouth of the cave that leads to the underworld, but no snake-tailed dog bars my path. Good bye my friend, my sweet friend with the soft lips who would not take me with you, goodbye, because tonight I die. Tonight I'm dying. If I die before I wake. What does it feel like to die? Never, never to know what will happen. Always waiting to see what will happen. Does Erik know? He knows more about me than I know myself. I don't need to think, I just need to let him move me from right to left, up to down, in to out. Out to in. Inside, shut up, then the seal on the jar broken and the warm spiced liquid poured out onto the dust of the ground, the shattered fragments smashed underfoot. Erik knew this. He always knew. I don't need to think when I am around him, as he knows my thoughts. Sometimes he seems to read them, but that can't happen, can it? Yet without me he seems to have no thoughts, just movement and instincts, like a great cat who brings death in his jaws. He says he will enlarge the coffin, with its snap-shut lid of death. What am I doing here? He will take me in his jaws and crush me. I will make him sing to me first. Why am I cursed with this love? I didn't ask for it. If he didn't love me, we could be friends. He could teach me. We could talk. Perhaps i could lure him out. Perhaps he could play the violin on stage. But this kind of love crushes me like bricks. It paralyzes me...

"Poor Erik," I sighed, putting down my pen. "Poor miserable Erik." Then I hid my face in my hands and whispered, muffled, "Poor me, as well."

I felt him approach before I heard him. It might have been the shifting of a trap, or the groaning low movement of air in a narrow passage. But I think it was Erik, who with his clear pure voice could make a tone so low as to make the air shake silently with anticipation at his approach. The delicate crystals that hung from my little desk lamp shivered but didn't tinkle.

Then, as if very far away, echoed a song of passion so piercing no heart could have remained unmoved. The old illusion returned, that he was some kind of enchanted prince hiding his face not under a mask of iron as M. Dumas described, but under a mask of silver-embroidered silk. On the run from his enemies, hidden in a deep underground fastness, waiting for rescue, he would carry away the princess, throw off the disguise and restore the kingdom.

"Nuit d'hyménée!
Ô douce nuit d'amour!
La destinée
M'enchaîne à toi sans retour..."

That secret place between my thighs that I had been taught to ignore first tingled, then burst into warmth as he sang. In he washed on the waves of that pagan hymn to the joys of married flesh, of Romeo and Juliet rocking together in an unimaginable dance beneath the sheets. As a child I knew the ins and outs of the barnyard, but he sang of the passions of the gods, and I wanted to taste those passions for myself.

Through the mirror I saw him, beckoning. "À toi, toujours à toi!" he sang, yours, forever yours. Like an automaton I walked towards him, ready to turn to one side or other blindly if I bumped, but instead of meeting cold glass I passed through to where he stood in the dim, dusty hall. He continued to sing and the stones of the walls themselves danced under the heat of kisses of flame, their senses ravished by that voice, "Ta voix ravit mes sens!" No longer was he dressed as the Red Death, but instead looked like a prince from the ancien regime. Wiped clean was his ghoul-pale face, and it flushed pink with desire. Gloved in the softest grey leather, he took my hand, and I gripped his tightly without freezing.

The last time I had made this passage, it was half-drugged, much of it on the back of an Opera horse. He was done with the last "Yours, forever yours," though they still rang in my ears, and simply said, "We go a shorter route." He led me down two cellars below to a narrow passage cut into the wall, hidden behind a set piece for a dreadful opera about the Hindoo of Lahore that no one bothered to perform anymore. Its vistas of pagodas and palm trees made it unusable for much else, so it mouldered down here, abandoned. The passage led to a tunnel that slid downwards, but he held me from behind firmly by the hips, so that I wouldn't fall. Then he pulled me abruptly as if to say, stop! and a trapdoor opened at my feet as if set to do so automatically. Around me he slid, and fell right through the hole. A sharp thump! on the floor below lured me to look through the hole into a dim, red-lit room, and his black-clad arms reached up for me through the opening.

"Let yourself fall, Christine," he ordered, and so I dropped into his arms. He held me for a moment too long up against his chest, but I looked away, so sighing he set me down in what was a most peculiar little room. All the walls were hung with carmine silks, similar to the blood-red membrane that I recall draped around his bed. They were full of strange reflections, as if they covered something shiny. We had fallen through a narrow little square in the ceiling, which he pulled shut with a wire. Some kind of massive construction, a frame of some kind that reached almost to the ceiling, stood in the middle of the room, and it too was covered with another large drape of red silk. I tried to pull aside one of those eerie drapes and see what was behind them, but as crisply as he ordered, "Stop! Don't touch those!" my hand froze in midair, more obedient to Erik's commands than my own.

"What is this room?" I whispered.

"My waiting room," he laughed, "for when unexpected guests arrive." He opened a red-draped panel, and gently pushed me through.

We walked into my own bedroom, in his apartments under the earth. I turned, astonished, to look one final time at the weird red-draped room from when I'd come, but he'd already slipped stealthily behind me and fastened the door. It was where he'd come through on that first morning, laden with packages from Au Printemps. The gaslights blazed high in my room, making it bright and warm. In the hot glare he looked me over critically. "Your costume doesn't fit right," he complained. "It's too loose."

"I took it in as far as it would go."

"You've lost flesh," he remarked. "You won't have the strength for what lies ahead."

"If I've lost flesh," I retorted, "it's because I stayed with you for two weeks, and we barely ate. Half the time I scarcely slept. You may be able to get by without those things, but I cannot."

He twisted his long fingers around each other, then muttered anxiously, "You're right, you're right, Erik doesn't pay attention to food or sleep when he's working, and he doesn't think of anything else then. I've taken poor care of you, Christine, and yet you came back to Erik after all." Then he looked around, as if understanding something for the first time. "You've saved Erik's life." He moved as if to take me into his arms, but I dodged him, moving away into the drawing room. Like a little dog he trotted behind me into the well-lit, bright room with the fire that never stopped.

He had filled his drawing room with flowers, remembering how I'd sneered at the commonplace boredom of cut roses stuck in florists' clay. Asphodels, daisies, sweetpea and Asiatic lilies, obtained in winter at what expense I could not imagine, rolled over each other out of bowls and vases in a riot of springtime color, and their scents filled the room with light, fresh sweetness. I pulled a red tiger lily covered with yellow spots out of a vase and inserted it into my hair. Intently he stared. The half-naked man in the box was willing to draw me into the circle of his arms, even with another woman there, but neither of the men who loved me then, neither Raoul nor Erik, would approach me and simply wrap their arms around me. It would have been so much simpler if they had.

He poured some very fine champagne, probably pilfered from the party that was to follow the Masque, and covered his desire with refinement of manners. Again I almost forgot that in weeks past he had rolled before me on the floor, called himself a dog and me a lying deceitful bitch, but his own bitch nonetheless, or writhed on his belly howling, or had forced my nails to bloody the sad twisted flesh of his cheeks, or had sliced a rubber simulation of a face to ribbons before my eyes.

A cold supper was laid out on the table. I rolled up some sliced Italian beef coated with pepper around a piece of Gorgonzola cheese, and rapidly polished off everything he'd put before me. I thought that if I spoke about him, it would keep his attention away from where I'd been, from what I'd done earlier this evening. "You surprised everyone with your entrance," I remarked. "Wherever did you get that idea?"

"From classical Athens," he answered, pleased to be asked, still preening a little over his dramatic costume. "There was a war, a civil war, although to them at the time a war between city-states was like the French fighting the Prussians in 1870. Athens and Sparta locked themselves in bitter combat, and the Athenians huddled behind the walls of their city, thinking it would save them from the more vigorous Spartan invaders. But the body politic of Athens, that gleaming host to rationalism elevated above the less worthy and more prosaic tribes of the Peleponessian peninsula, began to drip blood. But it was not a miracle, oh no, instead that body hemorrhaged, it stank, it rotted, and at the same time the people continued to deceive themselves, until half their number were dead and lies no longer sufficed."

I shook my head, I didn't understand.

"Hiding behind their walls the Athenians died, the blood flowing from their mouths and nostrils and eyes. The body of Greece was broken and blood dripped from it, so much, and then after all the death that could be passed around had been distributed, the fragments remained, endlessly multiplied on the ground, but none were left to carry them away in baskets. That will be Paris, Christine. Someday that will be Paris, awash in blood, rotting from the inside, invaded from without. I am not that plague, but only its messenger. The plague is coming. First it will be turned aside, but then the flood will wash up under the Arc de Triomphe itself." Then he laughed a little, as if the thought pleased him, and placed a few slices of beef from his plate onto mine.

"Don't you want that?" I asked, looking at the antipasto with hungry eyes.

"I don't need it," he remarked. "You do, you're a little scarecrow."

"I'll take the olives, too, those green ones." He spooned plump olives from his plate onto mine. They'd been pitted, stuffed with almonds. "Just out of curiosity, why were you late?"

"It's not important," he said, shifting a little and starting to drum his fingers against the tablecloth.

I said nothing, insisting silently.

"Very well," he said after a time. "That river of blood almost washed over a small part of Paris tonight, but instead, you were in your dressing room when I came for you."

"Erik," I said, "all this talk of suicide bores me."

"It didn't bore you when you wrote those notes."

I dropped my olive onto the plate. "You ... read those. Yet you act unsurprised."

"They were left on your desk, so what did you expect? You will never kill yourself, Christine, not while you are in my house, in the house that very soon will be yours as well. I'll do everything I can to prevent that."

"So what are you doing to prevent your own?" I asked, cresting lightly on the champagne, unaware of the sharks circling beneath the foamy surface.

"You are the one who is preventing it," he whispered, leaning over to me. "You are here, and you still wear Erik's ring." On my plate he placed the remaining few slices of celeriac and Andouille sausage. A great deal of champagne had gone into Erik, but almost none of the antipasto tray.

I leaned back, thinking that with Erik it was either feast or famine, towering joy or the pits of despair. Tonight, though, he seemed suffused with equanimity, wittily remarking about so many of the people at the party upstairs, and seemed to know who each one was, even under their disguises, as well as every sort of embarrassing and sordid detail about their personal affairs. Lulled by the full meal, the champagne, the warm gas fire, and the soothing caress of his voice, I laughed freely and tossed around my long loose hair. The red lily fell to the floor. Off came my shawl, and then, bare-armed as a valkyrie, with my hair falling down in sheets over my shoulders, I sprawled out in his leather chair, the one he favored. Laughing, I held up my hand, the thick gold ring forcing the two fingers apart like a wedge. Everything faded into the distance, the fire, the table, the wine, everything except the ring coiled in my hand like the serpent that eats its tail, and the two skull-holes that bored into me with all the force of their will unleashed.

He poured more champagne to the brim, and insisted we toast our betrothal. "Drink," he said in a cool and ominous tone, "because you are going to need it." Then he raised his glass, and motioned me to do the same. "To the union of ape and angel."

"How dreadful can it be?" I joked, genuinely drunk now. He watched me insistently as I drained the large fluted glass like a child made to drink some noxious remedy. The glass was very full, and when I hesitated, he put his hand on mine and pushed the glass upwards, so it flowed down my throat like a stream.

He brought figs sliced open and some kind of creamy white cheese for which I had no appetite, but he insisted I eat it anyway. My head spun, but he poured a liqueur into tiny crystal glasses. It smelled of almonds, and then I was genuinely dizzy. "If I drink more, I shall faint," I slurred, and his lips twisted into a peculiarly horrifying grimace like a smile, but it didn't frighten me, for his grin came from far across the room, and I began to laugh. He stood up roughly and a little twitch of fear pierced the the fog, but his look wasn't angry, far from it. He looked at me as if I were a sweet that would slide down his throat in a second.

"I can give you something," he said, and I came back to myself a little at the anguished urgency in his voice. "Something to make you insensate, so that you won't even know it's happened."

"Erik, you're spouting nonsense. I have no idea what you're talking about. Take those figs out of here, I'm already stuffed as a goose. Or do you plan to nail my feet to the floor and get the funnel?" and I laughed wildly again. Then, after so many days of eating virtually nothing, my stomach lurched, almost sick. I thought of standing, but gave the idea up as too much effort.

"Go prepare yourself in your bedroom," he said, looming. The smooth symmetry of his tall black silhouette thrilled me. From shoulders like beams fell arms longer than most men's, though thin. "I'll come to you tonight, as there isn't enough room for two in that coffin I call a bed." His laugh was small and desperate.

Then I did try to stand, but swayed wildly and almost fell over. In his arms he took me, cradling me against the flat hard strength of his chest, wiry steel embedded in his arms so deceptively slender. I fell in exhaustion against him. Everything moved very slowly. Trembling, he let me linger against his chest momentarily before carrying me into my bedroom. I breathed in his faint smell but nothing reminded me of corruption, only clothes stored in the damp and dark too long, laced with sweetish, pungent sweat. A slow thought bubbled up to the surface and cut through the thick crust of exhausted intoxication, what is his skin like under those clothes? Dizziness overcame me entirely. The room spun around and faded.

When I again opened my eyes, I lay in my chemise on my bed in the Louis-Phillipe bedroom. The gaslights had been extinguished and only one candle burned. I burned too, but with shame. While I lay dazed and half-conscious, long fingers had walked over me like spiders, undoing buttons and hooks, leaving me naked under a scrap of silk. Then I burned hotter, for fear that I had not imagined the cool, investigating hands that ran over the silk. Someone had whispered, So beautiful, beautiful as a dead woman, so still she lies. Someone shifted my breasts slowly from side to side, their scanty flesh filling large hands that tested their weight and pliability. Those hands slid back and forth over my belly and hips, searching for the softest and roundest spots, so to linger there. Someone gently kneaded the soft flesh at the top of my thighs, almost pressing them apart as I lay unmoving, but that someone stopped, sighing heavily. Then, in movements that filled me with a sweet ache, someone lightly rubbed over my triangle of short, curly hair, just lightly enough for silk to slide over the soft curls, back and forth, and then the sighs turned to a deep, low groan not of sorrow but of desire. Remembering that groan again, remembering that hand, swelled that nether spot between my thighs with new rich blood full and almost uncomfortable. The room buzzed softly and my limbs were fixed to the bed with lead, so heavy and unmoving they were. Languorously I drifted.

A little cough, a faint shift of fabric on restless limbs, and there he stood by my bed, eyes all over me like hands. He wore a dressing gown of some rich brown satin embroidered with paisleys and arabesques, and a nightshirt that shimmered like silk. As he approached the bed slowly, circling around it warily, his smell wafted to me from across the bed, and it wasn't death, but sweat, the sweat of male lust. With dampened fingers he suddenly pinched the candle out.

The room was plunged into the immediate and impenetrable darkness of burial alive. I gave a small shriek of surprised fear, and he whispered, "You aren't afraid, are you? You aren't afraid of your husband?" Without the gaslights, the room was chill, and I started to shake. There was a slight thud as his dressing gown hit the floor.

The heat rolling off of his body warmed the gelid air. When he reached for my chemise I gasped, for his hand wasn't cold and clammy, but hot and dry. He pulled my chemise aside, not roughly, but misjudged either the strength of the stitching or the power of his hand, for the seam ripped with a sharp slicing sound, and I moaned a little. A slither, as his nightshirt went up. He's raising it, I thought. Oh, my God, what's under there? My thighs were bathed with the heat of his body, and they parted on their own. I didn't need to see him to feel his approach.

All at once he was on top of me, holding my arms down at the wrists, his fevered anxious breath on my throat. He pressed his weight between my thighs and something stabbed aimlessly, something long and firm and hotter even than his skin, a little wet with moisture at its scalding tip. Trying dryly to enter, he murmured my name, saying he loved me, let Erik in, please let him in, please, in a whining, begging tone.

His inflamed body burned like fire, and when he almost accidentally found the crevice he sought and pressed hard into it, scalding fear erupted through the cracks of my composure. He scraped me painfully and I squirmed to get away from the hard insistent thrust of his body. My small frantic movements gave him another tiny advance in his hard steady progress, and he groaned deep and low with pleasure. Some slight moisture down below had gained him a little more entrance into that body which fought so hard to keep him out, and he pressed harder into his captive target. He had passed the threshold but had not yet gained full entry. I gritted my teeth against the dull tearing strain and thought, if it doesn't get any worse, I can stand this. Oh God, make it over soon. Women are always complaining that it's over too soon. Not soon enough, to my mind.

He held himself still like an enemy tired of sieging the gates, who after a moment of thought has decided to batter them down. The uncomfortable bundle of his nightshirt gathered up around my stomach, and he held me securely against the bed. When he rested his weight on my chest and poor squashed breasts, I stopped struggling and lay trapped, pinned, still as a corpse. Still he balanced himself patiently on the plump tip of his firm springy lust. Then, with no warning, he pushed himself fully up inside me in one fluid swipe. A long flaming pole of agony split my innocence in two and impaled me between the hips. With no shame whatever, I screamed loudly and freely. Incredibly, it gave him no pause, but instead spurred him on.

He slid back and forth, pulling almost entirely out of me so that I thought, hope against hope, that he would withdraw and be done, only to fling his full weight forward to spear me once more. A nightmare sensation choked me, of being trapped forever underneath him. He pounded ferociously, sliding in and out of that opening that I never thought of, to which I paid no attention unless monthly necessity demanded. In panic I seriously struggled then, trying vainly to lift my legs or twist my hips out from under his hard taut weight. My legs clawed aimlessly against the rough corrugated skin of his thighs, but he ignored my movements altogether, never stopping that slow, rhythmic thrusting.

Exhausted, I stopped struggling, but strangely, my passivity deeply roused him. With horror I felt him swell inside me even larger. He grew hot as the shame I felt. His long, low ululations sounded weirdly beautiful, if he were being flayed by pleasure. Then a shiver started between his shoulders and worked his way twitching and pulsing down the spine to his hips, until what felt like a river of magma poured between my useless legs. Giving a final choked cry, he lay gasping and spent on me. Slack, satisfied breath whistled through the teeth resting on my neck, teeth that pressed through thin skin that passed for lips. I thought he might bite me or tear out my throat at any moment.

Instead, he let his limp hard weight fall like an iron meteor to earth. Great cooling breaths annihilated me a little more with each one. It was over, but he didn't move. Then he slid with rubbery motion out of me, dragging a trail of wetness across my numb, aching leg as he released my arms and rolled over onto his side. He didn't touch me. It was over.

I started to sniffle, then without restraint I cried out in harsh racking sobs. Out of the blind darkness came his hoarse repeated whisper, "I'm sorry, so sorry, men are vile, and Erik is no different." The human thing to do, the kind thing, would have been to touch his face and soothe, tell him it was all right, murmur all the other endearments which withered on my lips. But no one stroked my cheek or whispered comforting words as hot fluid dripped from between my legs to the bed beneath, and thus there was no kindness for him in me, only the residue of painful humiliation. So in silence I reached blindly for my chemise and stuffed it between my legs to staunch the flow, rolling over so that the pillow hid my face. Good, I thought, as a creaking shift of weight told me he had left the bed, but his heavy breathing still filled the impenetrable dark. He picked up his robe and the cords swished as he tied it. "I'll light a candle," he said, and I cried out, no, I can't bear it, no, and he knew I wasn't referring to his face, but to that hot abhorrent horn between his legs.

"If I don't light one," he replied, all reason now, with no hint of the grunting, thrusting animal he had been only moments before, "you will trip and hurt yourself. Look, Erik is dressed now and will go," he said. "Try to rest," and a little candlelight peeped blood-red between my tightly clenched lids as he slipped out of the room. I didn't open them until sure that he had gone.

I'll never sleep again, I thought, but tears and terror kicked me into a black, acid torpor. When I awoke, I stumbled to the bathroom and was sick, heaving up bitter yellow bile that left me with a burning mouth and pounding headache. From between my legs I retrieved the ruin of my chemise. There were only a few streaks of blood on it, nothing like the flood which I'd felt. Then I knew that it wasn't the hot flow of blood that had washed over me, but he himself, the slime men make with their bodies, and I crawled sobbing to the bath. He had left a lavender soap for me, and its smoky pungent scent calmed me down enough to scrub and rub until I was raw, until every particle of him was off my body.

From Raoul I later learned full well what pleasures the marriage bed could bring, when the cry changes from a weary "When will this be over? to long wordless warblings of satiation. Then, however, I hid in the tub, ignoring the scrapings, the taps on the door, the tentative whispers of "Christine, are you all right?" I wondered how any children got born at all, for no woman in her right mind would repeat this horror.

Once I heard a sermon delivered by a visiting priest, a squashy Dominican with a pale shaved head who railed against the immorality of the Pigalle and the Montmartre areas, and who blamed it all on women who "denied their husbands their marital rights." I asked Mama Valerius afterwards what he meant, and she smiled vaguely, saying " I'll tell you when you're older, dear." She never did, though. Having just had those "rights" exercised energetically on my sore and aching body, I laughed cynically at my new knowledge, at my new flesh.

He had provided a beautiful dress for me of pearl-colored silk, with glass buttons and delicate lacework, the finest I'd ever seen. I spent the next hour preparing my toilette, drawing it out as long as possible. If shame could kill, I would have expired right there on the Aubusson carpet. Then a dreadful thought seized me. Erik was old, but everyone knew it was the age of the dam that mattered, not the sire. I could become with child. A great column of sickness and terror pushed its way up from my already-rancid stomach to my throbbing head.

Then I thought, that's good. If there's a child, he'll have to leave me alone. I remembered when Professor Valerius gave lessons at home in Goteburg. I must have been eleven or twelve, my hair still in ribboned braids, my skirts right below my knee, covered with a crisp white apron hemmed with Mama Valerius's lace. The mothers would bring their children and sit in the parlor, where the maid served them tea but no cakes or buns. Mostly each woman sat alone, reading, or staring into the fire or aimlessly at nothing at all, but once a week a trio came to rehearse. The mothers would talk, and out came rolls for them thick with currants. I was strictly forbidden to go into the parlor then. Instead my tea and brown bread were served at the long worn kitchen table. One grey drizzly afternoon, though, I crept in and hid behind the drawing-room drapes to listen to their chatter.

One student's mother was expecting, but at first she didn't want to admit it until her friends' teasing made her break down and tell them. She was tired of having to stay home during her confinements, she confessed, it was so tedious, so the longer she could conceal it, the more freely she could go about on these little outings, and they all laughed appreciably. Then one said to the expectant mother, you must be so relieved.

Why? she answered.

It gets him to leave you alone, doesn't it?

I don't understand.

Oh, come now. It gets so tiresome when they always bother you.

But you have five children, the expectant one said to her friend, shifting uncomfortably in her chair.

Yes, five children, and just about as many incidents of annoyance, the other woman said. Thank God. The rest laughed a little, but then looked nervously away, as if this subject bit too deeply.

That's why I feed my own, the third woman chimed in. They say if your husband pesters you during that time, it weakens the milk and makes the child sickly. Once I went three years, all through the confinement and the weaning besides.

Appreciative chuckles went around the room, but the first woman looked musingly into her teacup and said nothing.

Back in my bedroom in Erik's apartment, I smoothed my dress and hair. If there's a child, I thought, I'll make sure Erik won't touch me again for ever so long. He's lived without a wife up till now, and it won't kill him. But there can't be a child. I won't think of it. It was only one time. It's not possible, and I shoved the thought down where I didn't have to look at it. Pale and wan at finally having to face him, with a deep breath I opened the door.

The rich smell of brewing coffee made me gag. Erik stood before the table set for breakfast, shifting back and forth. I couldn't look at him, not because of his face, which had no power to frighten me any longer, but because of what lived beneath his trousers. This was terrible knowledge to have, to look at a man and know that something lurked undercover that could poke out and overwhelm and hurt. I had always hated it when men made remarks to me on the street, more because it annoyed and shamed me than because I feared anything in particular from them. But now I thought, They have the power to do this to me if they wanted, if they wanted to risk getting caught. And if a man did it to his wife, no one would stop him. After all, it was his "right." All at once I thought of Raoul, he has this within him too, this beast of hot horn, this grunting appetite.

"You look terrible," Erik remarked.

It had burned when I relieved myself that morning, and my head was compressed in some infernal vise. "Thor smashed my head with his hammer, and his goats left their droppings all over the inside of my mouth," I said. "Oh, please, take that coffee away, or I'll be sick again."

"I have what you need," he said, and withdrew to the kitchen. From the sound of it, he was brewing some kind of tea. Shortly afterwards he placed the thick, almost gelatinous liquid in front of me. I couldn't imagine what it was. It looked like something you would find in your handkerchief, and it made me sick to look at it. "It's boiled milk thistle seeds and ginger," he announced. "Drink it all before it cools."

The slimy, gingery mass slid down, and a few moments later I managed to eat croissants with strawberry jam, each berry suspended full and perfect in its clear red gel. He buttered one croissant after another for me, thick yellow butter topped with the round beautiful berries, and to please him I accepted some of his coffee. Surprisingly, it pleased me as well.

"Wonderful," I said, and he ventured a small smile that wavered a bit around the edges.

"I didn't think you would speak to Erik again after last night," he said tremulously. "You were very brave."

I looked away embarrassed, wishing he wouldn't have referred to it at all. Then he was before me, and there was something in his hand, something he wanted to present to me. I took it, feeling the familiar carved weight of cold iron, and the wry little Pan face mocked me. "The Rue Scribe key. The châtelaine is the one who gets the keys. All the keys?" I asked.

"There are two others, but those you do not want, I can assure you. Pray you never see them or hold them in your small hand. Those keys you will see only if you betray Erik and try to leave him, because those keys open the doors to life and death," and his voice chilled me so deeply I did not ask any further what he meant.

"A key is useless if one can't get to the lock," I said. "I still can't open your front door." So he walked me over to it, and it was actually simple, just a movement to the right of the latch, then the left, and when activated, the counterweight swung the massive stone door open as easily as a child opens the door to her doll house. He offered to show me how to work the door to his workroom, but I hesitated, not wanting to see those blank eerie faces so close to a living person's, but yet so dead and cold, so without soul. "Not now," I said, and he looked relieved.

He swept his arm around the apartment. "I bequeath all of this to you. Now I can take you around, and show you the secrets of my Opera."

"Why not before?" I asked.

Seriously he said, "Because you weren't mine, but now you are," and a little shudder started down in my loins, the fear of his possession, the echo of hot thrusts that reached deep into my body. "This afternoon you are going home. Don't look so shocked, you knew I would send you back for a time. Remember, that is part of our arrangement, until we can live together as husband and wife above. You're mine in every way now, but while I'm working, it's just more convenient to have you at the apartment. When I am at a good stopping point, I will let you know, and you will come back to me. I have to finish my opera and our nuptial Mass. Just remember, until I can wed you before the altar at the Madeleine, this marriage is a secret."

He explained to me that nothing was to be revealed until he could make "all the arrangements." I was to wear his ring at all times, "if I was to be safe and protected from Erik," and should feel free to go anywhere I liked, as long as I remained within the confines of the Opera Garnier, or the apartment on the Rue-de-Notre-Dame-des-Victoires.

"For I know you still have obligations to your guardian, and Erik will not interfere with those," he remarked.

"I've told her we're betrothed."

"Good, then she knows that you are bound to me, and that you can't marry anyone else. I won't have your position at the Opera interfered with or compromised. But nothing else, I warn you, especially to those gossiping girls upstairs, always in and out of each other's pockets."

"So I'm free to come and go," I said, still shocked.

"Not entirely," he smiled without humor, lips stretched tight over massive teeth. "I want you either here with me, or in the Opera itself, or at Mme. Valerius's apartment, where Margot will continue as both your housekeeper and Madame's nurse. Don't think you can fool Erik, as Erik will know everywhere you go, all your movements."

"You said you'd give me my privacy in my room here, and in my dressing room."

"That's right. Your dressing room, your room here are yours."

"The managers wrote me, by the way. They want me to sing Rachel in La Juive. Rehearsals start later this week. Faust follows soon after that, but I haven't been offered that role." Then I remembered. "With your permission."

"Rachel is a splendid role, and very challenging. Don't worry about being offered the lead in Faust, I can assure you that you will," he answered. "These are my strict requirements if you are to sing that role, and have something left over for Marguerite besides. You go to rehearsals, you go to bed early and sleep in late. I will give you some teas if you wish, to calm your mind and help you sleep. You let Margot care for you as she cares for Madame Valerius, and do as she says, being as obedient as a little child. If you are not, I will hear about it. I mean this seriously, Christine, you go nowhere else. If you do, Erik will know. Take cabs to and from her apartment when you go to rehearsals, as I do not want your voice chilled or strained. I haven't decided about your little friend yet. Perhaps you can help me with that."

"My ... little friend?" I gulped.

"Surely you didn't think you went unnoticed at the ball?" and he laughed a bit nastily. He stalked over to me with spastic movements, a lean predator with a face as blasted as the surface of the moon, whose jaws and teeth could crush me. "I don't think you will betray me," he said softly, "at least not with him. Were it his older brother, oh, that would be a different story. That one I would just have to kill outright, as he would be a truly formidable rival. Fortunately he's besotted with his long lovely ballerina, although he doesn't know what treachery she has in store for him," and I remembered Sorelli with the tall red-headed man at the Bal Masque. "So you may entertain the little wolf cub, Christine, for I know now with certainty when his ship leaves. Besides, he is timid and no threat to me. Feel free to visit with him at Madame Valerius's apartment, as long as Margot is there to chaperone you. Or entertain him in your dressing room, for that matter, anywhere in the Opera. For remember, the walls and floors and traps are mine, everything but the roof. I do not go to the roof.

"It will be a good experience for him, to learn the particular kind of exquisite unhappiness that comes when you love a woman beyond all reason, and she can never be yours. It's a greatly broadening experience, and he will benefit from it. Perhaps he will even thank me for deepening his education. I, on the other hand, will finish my opera, the one I have sworn to take with me into the grave. You will secure two splendid performances, two triumphs. Isn't that nice, Christine? Everyone wins."

He said this so calmly, so rationally, and yet underneath his voice thrummed a ragged edge I had never heard before, not when he dragged me by my hair, not even when he waved his silver slicing knife. All I could manage was a silent nod, swallowing hard against the dry, terrified lump in my throat.

"Good," he said. "It is always best when a husband and wife understand each other. Since you do not have to return for several hours, I thought I would show you some of the peculiar and fascinating sights under the Opera. Shall we start with the Communard dungeons?"

(continued...)