Chapter 13: On Science

His golden eyes grew wide as he considered her suggestion. His two hands rose to touch the edges of his mask. Change his face? No soul had ever forwarded such a proposal, and he had never dared to hope for it! Wasn't that only possible in his best of dreams?

Indeed, even in his best of dreams, he had accepted the permanency of his hideous fate. God Himself had created this monster; how could mortal hands ever alter His will? And yet the suggestion rang pleasantly in Erik's mind. Could he really live as other men?

But what if her plan failed? Erik had already exhausted himself sustaining his hopes that Christine would return. His heart might not survive another exercise of faith!

He shook his head to clear his crowding thoughts.

"It could be from a disease. I—I've studied microbiology," Alice explained. "I can't say for certain, but maybe something can be done for you."

"No!" he snapped as he turned and sank into a worn chair. "Nothing can be done."

Alice watched him prop an elbow on the armrest and cover his masked eyes with his hand. She hadn't been thinking when she had suddenly offered to reverse his ugliness. In fact, she still was not sure why she hadn't run as soon as he had released her wrist. Perhaps it was the pain she had heard in his sublime voice when he had realized that his love would never be returned. Alice herself understood the feeling, the powerful yearning not only to be loved, but to have one's own love be treasured. Anyone with this desire must himself be capable of great love, to expect it from another. A heart that held such benign feelings did not deserve such sadness.

She followed the Phantom to his seat. "Let me see your face again, to know if I can help."

"What?" he cried, raising his head from his hand. "Erik shows his face to no one! You were not invited here! Leave me!"

"Monsieur Erik, there are diseases that attack the flesh, and although there is scarring, much of the cosmetic damage can be reversed with treatment."

"You came here to prosecute me!"

"But that was before I understood your condition and your love for Mlle. Daaé."

He coughed, struggling to stifle the grief that stung his eyes. "No handsome face will bring her back—not now."

"You don't have to live like this!"

He sighed. Her compassion made it difficult to refuse her request. "You forget your own reaction to the horror behind my mask."

"I'm prepared this time. I know what to expect."

He now knew better than to fight her tenacity. "If you run or faint this time, I'll throw you into the lake for the Siren to feed!" With this acid warning, he reached behind his head and loosened the chords of his black mask. Then he placed his trembling hands on either side of the mask and removed it ever so slowly, as if his apprehension had turned him into stone. When it was finished, when his face was entirely naked before her, he raised his eyes to her own.

She knelt in front of him as a wrinkle of concentration spread across her brow. A candelabrum burned on a table nearby, and she pulled it closer to increase the light. Her eyes wandered over his death's head while her mind sifted through the register of her knowledge. She stared at his mouth until she had memorized the thin, black lines of his cadaver's lips, and then focused on the absence of his nose.

As when she had examined the victim's corpse while at her father's side, her objective expertise did not eclipse her sympathetic heart. Unafraid while taking in every detail of his hideousness, she understood what the Persian had meant when he had warned her of the sad chapter in the Ghost's story, the "tears of human sorrow." Not only were some facial features disturbingly absent, but those that remained were thin and hollow, like the twisted face of a corpse sunken by the heavy weight of Time. His appearance conveyed his loneliness as clearly as if he had said the word with his own elegant voice.

The experience was quite different for her subject. This was not a laboratory sample but a living human being—one who had never been the focus of such scrutinizing examination before. Hardly noticing his increasing embarrassment, she turned her attention to his withered earlobes, then looked into his cavernous eyes. A strand of his hair had tumbled over his forehead as he'd removed his mask, and she calmly brushed it aside. He, however, was unable to control the shiver that climbed the back of his neck as her finger slid across his brow. He closed his eyes.

The movement alerted her to his discomfort, so she stood and redirected her gaze to the grandfather clock. He took the opportunity to replace his mask.

"I've never seen such an affliction, Monsieur," she said at last, breaking the awkward silence. "It doesn't correspond to any malady or chemical damage that I know. I could research, but I might not find anything. If I do learn something, how can I contact you?"

He stared at her, the ticking of the grandfather clock the only sound. At last he rose from his chair and dumped the pistol into its secret chamber. He then reached into his waistcoat pocket and pushed something into her hand. Alice felt the cold iron of the key in her palm. He closed her fingers tightly, as if he feared that he would change his mind and take back the gift.

"I have faith in your abilities," he hissed, "but I'm distrustful of my fate. If you betray me, Mademoiselle—if you've falsely aroused what passes in my heart for hope, Heaven would never forgive you for the despair you would cause."

She shook her head. "Monsieur Erik, I might not find a cure—"

"I understand! All too well I understand. But why you should offer me your talents is still beyond my comprehension. I rather suspect some ruse to make your escape."

He lifted her chin with his gloved hand. The low candlelight cast a golden hue over her aquiline features, and her green eyes seemed to glow in the shadows.

"No," he sighed, "I can see that you are earnest." He walked towards the lake and lifted a top hat off of a hook by the door. "Come, Mademoiselle, I'll take you across Lake Averne to your home on the Rue Scribe."

She stiffened. "You know where I live?"

He laughed, an indescribably delicious sound that echoed through his modest house and melted her apprehensions like a spell. His voice was still dark with depression, and his mirth was colored with it like a black brocade; the decadent laughter rose like a crescendo and faded again all too soon. "Commissioner Mifroid is one of my more vexing opponents. I long ago thought it useful to discover where he lived." He covered his head with the hat and opened the door to the lake. "Don't worry—I have no intention of harming him."

"I left weeks ago."

"Indeed?"

"I'm studying under an elderly biologist, on the Rue M_."

Erik was silent for several minutes. She trusted him immensely, to reveal such information. At last he replied: "Then we would do better to take you to the Boulevard Haussmann, where you can get a cab discreetly. Follow me closely, and keep quiet!"

He took her onto the shore of his lake, and then to the left along the water's edge. Their footsteps were the only sound as they skirted the shore.

Erik stopped and turned to her. "It won't do, Mademoiselle. I see perfectly in the dark, and would know my way even if I couldn't see. But you wouldn't fair as well as I. Wait here, I think you left a lantern in my boat, didn't you?" Without waiting for an answer, he walked past her back to the dock and retrieved her lamp. He returned to her side and handed her the light. "You need it, Mademoiselle, not I."

She followed him into a dark corridor that she hadn't seen before. The ground beneath her feet was firm and paved with stone, and the air felt close. The hallway continued along the side of his apartment and ended at an iron corkscrew staircase that lead nowhere but to the ceiling. Erik had turned to Alice and was entertained by the confusion written on her face. He took the stairs with long strides—two stairs at a time—and stopped before his hat hit the ceiling. With his eyes still on her, he reached up and slightly to the right, touching a panel or pin that she could not see and causing a piece of the ceiling above the stairs to slide away.

Alice could not suppress her astonishment.

He led her up the stairs, which had her spinning up and up until she felt faint. At last they seemed to reach the top, and he signaled for her to wait. The walls had grown impossibly close, and the staircase itself had so narrowed that Alice had taken the last two turns sideways. The Phantom removed his top hat and placed his ear to one of the walls, listening.

"It seems practice has ended early again," he observed as he replaced his top hat. He pulled a lever on the banister of the iron staircase, and a piece of the wall beside them disappeared. She glanced through the wall after him: they were in Box Five.

They took a back staircase, keeping to the shadows. They saw no one. After passing through some rooms backstage, they reached the Haussmann exit. Erik pulled the brim of his hat low over his forehead, shrouding his masked face in its shadows as they stepped out of the Opera. He raised his hand for a cab and silently passed some francs to the driver who stopped. Without a word, he turned and disappeared into the shadows of the Garnier, leaving Alice to give her address to the driver.

She arrived at Dr. Mechnikov's residence with her mind preoccupied. She was trying to think of a way to request the microbiologist's help in reversing Erik's appearance without revealing too much about their strange patient. As she opened the front door, however, she found a new predicament.

As soon as she crossed the threshold, she knew that something was amiss: the nostalgic Austrian shades in the parlor were drawn against the cheerful sunlight outside, and the entire house was silent. She knocked softly on the professor's bedroom door.

"Enter," came the weak reply.

She obeyed, and found Mechnikov lying in bed covered in many blankets. His thinning white hair was matted with sweat. He had managed to gather a bowl of water and a washcloth to ease his fever, but she could see that he had grown too exhausted to change the cloth.

"My God! What happened?" she cried as she hurried to his side and rinsed the cloth for him in the bowl beside his bed. That morning she had seen him in the pink of health.

His dry lips parted, and he answered with a rasp that was barely a whisper, "It was my own doing many years ago. My wife had passed before my eyes, suffering from an infection that perhaps I could have treated—if I had only known more about the disease! For months thereafter, I retreated to my laboratory to distract my mind… But of course, I could not forget her pain and my loneliness… In an effort to take my own life and join her, I pierced my veins with a syringe containing a relapsing fever, and injected myself with the virus." He closed his glassy eyes as she replaced the cloth on his forehead. "But Fate! I, who wanted to die, still live, and recurrences such as these happen almost seasonally. She, who wanted to live, had died—of microbes! What use am I, a scientist, if I cannot save the ones I love! My lonely years in the laboratory were for nothing!"

"Maybe you couldn't save her, but your research has saved others."

"But I loved her. I loved her, and then she was gone! In the end, I was the more miserable for having shared her companionship; it made her absence all the more painful. The loneliest of places are those where our memories together were once dearest. Daily I sit across from her empty chair. If only I had never loved!"

"Calm yourself, Monsieur, you need to rest."

"It will pass in a week or so."

"All the same," she replied, adjusting the old man's pillows.

But the fever had made him philosophical. "I was wrong about thanatology! There's more to death than merely wishing to be dead. All of our science is useless against the hand of God! Water!" he cried suddenly. "I'm terribly thirsty."

Alice returned with a pitcher of water and a glass. She held the glass to his lips as he drank, and much of the water ran into his beard instead of into his mouth. He took a deep breath when he was finished, then moaned, "Yes. Too much of my time is wasted in fighting God." He closed his eyes and fell asleep.

For the remainder of the day, Alice kept a careful watch over her ward. His fever recalled all of the unhappy memories of his wife's death, and the poor old man alternately cursed Fate then science as he tossed and turned in his bed.

When he slept, Alice tiptoed into his library and scanned the shelves for volumes mentioning disfigurement, hoping to find something useful for her new project. For several hours at a time, she curled up into one of the leather chairs beside the shelves and read. Five days passed in this manner, spent nursing Mechnikov's love for his dead wife or pondering Erik's love for Christine Daaé. And what of Alice's own beloved barrister? Alice, too, was lonely, for she also had loved and lost. And the three of them, she knew, were all hopeless. The barrister had left Paris long ago, and Mme. Mechnikov had left the world. And what good would it do to change Erik's appearance? Alone in the library, with only the musty tomes with which to share her musings, she would consider this question. A handsome face would not win him love from the woman he wanted. And rather, to a woman who loved him truly, his ugliness wouldn't matter at all. Love must be for something much more, for one's talents and ambitions… Erik had these in abundance. Her exploration of his house had revealed his expressive creativity and clever engineering. A woman should rather love him for these.

True, she had only met him once, briefly. But her mind had been fixated on the Opera Ghost for more than a month before meeting the man at last, and by then his eccentricity already intrigued her. What had seemed to her to be insanity weeks ago was now understood—and she feared that he would again try to take his own life. She continued reading in earnest, searching for a cure that would help him to live as other men. She made these efforts not because she wanted him to be handsome, but because she badly wanted him to be happy.