Chapter 22

Confinement made her bold and she began to ask if they could leave. Not merely up to the opera house, but far away. Where there was light and no more sadness. No doors, no locks. At first Erik ignored the requests, simply leaving the room when she brought it up. Then he became angry.

"Is Erik's home not good enough for Émilie?" he'd ask sneeringly. "She is so unsatisfied, just like her mother."

Mother had become a curse word.

After a few months, Erik grew deranged when she asked, wailing that she would leave him, that she hated it here. He would lock her in her room then. From the other side of the closed door, he would sob, "Émilie must never leave. Erik cannot live without her. You are my heart."

Émilie didn't mind being locked in her room. It was there same as being locked anywhere else in the house. Only here she could be sure of her privacy. Though she had promised she would not sing, she could not deny the music altogether. Without an instrument, she would stare at Erik's music for hours, hearing the melodies in her head and humming the notes. There was no other way to make it through the hours between Nadir's visits.

Even Nadir she did not tell about music. The more she learned, the more she was able to understand, if not actually play, of her father's music. And she began to understand why the room had been locked. When she read his compositions, she felt keenly the shame of breaking a rule, the threat of being caught and punished. Though she could not understand what was said, she knew the language his music spoke with was not for her ears.

She did not understand when it spoke of the shadows crawling ever closer along the walls. Of far away lands and the nights that Erik had forbidden Émilie to bother him and the ghost of her mother, then disappeared into the bedroom. Of jeering laughter and love and the comfort of a mask rubbing the flesh beneath raw, the way the stomach clenched unbearably when the mask was ripped away and flung across the room. Of hopelessness and the overwhelming pleasure of causing pain. Of watching a woman with a child in her arms. Of open doors and being unable to step through, but incapable of turning away. Of standing, immobile and unsure, on the threshold.

"Émilie."

She paused mid-sheet, mid-note, and did not look up.

"What is that you're reading?"

His voice was colder than the lake water that splashed her skin when they crossed in the gondola.

"Where did you get it?"

Normally the voice was pleasant, it wove through the air and beckoned to her, entreating her innocently to come nearer, to give in, to fall. It promised she would be caught.

Now it was flat and tight.

That was what music sounded like, she realized. Like her papa's voice. She only realized now that it had changed.

He was over her now, much too tall from her spot on the floor. Yet he swept down and picked up a page so gracefully that she did not register that he had moved until he was standing again.

For minutes, hours, a day, he stared at the paper before him while Émilie kept her head bowed. She knew which composition he was holding, though it had not been the one she was singing. No, she had been humming the piece entitled Christine because she liked the high notes that danced like wings, the painful slowness in the middle measures, the phantom feeling in her fingers of banging out the dark and deep chords until her hands bled. That was the song whose hummed notes still echoed like crystals through the stifling silence.

The quiet barely crackled when Erik whispered, "Émilie."

He wasn't talking to his daughter though. He was reading the title of the piece he held.

All the same, Émilie raised her head and looked right at him. He had his mask off for once and she gazed upon the sallow and distorted skin, the sunken eyes, the lipless mouth that was no longer used for kissing. He stared back and Émilie's hands twitched with the desire to cover her face and hide it from him. Even now, his empty expression was slowly morphing into one of disdainful revulsion as the past years built to their crescendo and began to break.

With deliberate indifference, Erik began to rip the parchment in his hands. One long, slow tear down the middle.

Émilie squeaked in protest. She had not loved the song. Every quick, bright melody was soon obliterated by discordant harmonies. Still, she did not want to see it destroyed and watched sadly as the two fragments landed on the floor.

When she looked up again, Erik's face was inches from hers. She threw her hands up to hide behind.

"Look, damn you!" he shouted. With too tight a grip, he drew her hands away from her face and pulled her to her feet by the wrists. "Can't you bear to? You swore it never bothered you before, but you're older now. Worldly. And now you can't bear my face. Look at me, girl! This is the face behind that music you sing! This face! Your mother died rather than live with this face. Wouldn't you rather leave than-"

"My mama died because she was sick. Uncle Nadir told me." Months of singing had prepared Émilie's voice admirably. The shouts of a seven-year-old drowned out Erik's. "She got an infection when she had me and that killed her!"

Erik dropped her wrists.

"That's right," he purred. "She got sick from bearing you. I had forgotten, but I remember now. It was you who killed my Christine. You who took away all I loved." Émilie drew back and Erik shouted, "You killed her!"

She fled the room and he followed, all the way into the parlor where the door to outside was still locked.

"But it was before that, wasn't it?" Erik continued, unnervingly calm again as he prowled the room behind her. "Erik lost her to you the moment you were born with your perfect face. How I wish you had been born hideous, cursed with my face. She never would have loved you then. She would have said she did, but she would not really. She never would have ignored Erik for Émilie if she looked like him."

He caught her then, roughly by the arms, and disregarded her shriek. "I watched you and her. She loved you because you were perfect. You were never mine. I knew it then, I know it now. Yes, Christine let Erik into her bed but you are not my child. You are too perfect." He dragged her, trembling and protesting behind him as he walked, moving slowly towards the kitchen. For the first time in years she was crying. "Perhaps I should have given you a mask, like my mother did for me. Then I wouldn't have had to see your face – your perfect face – mocking me."

The porcelain mask was on the table where he'd left it and now he picked it up, the glass slightly warmer than his chill skin.

"You have her face, you know, and no woman as beautiful as her could love a man as ugly as me…"

As he stared into the empty mask, his voice and grip softened. Émilie renewed her struggling then, but even the loosened hand was a vice on her tiny wrist.

"Her face," he murmured again. He seemed completely unaware that Émilie was anything other than a passive listener. "Christine's face, but nothing else. My voice, my music, my pain. My solitude, that is all you shall ever know! So why should you be blessed with such a face?"

He spun her about so that she faced away from him. The motion was so violent that she would have fallen if not for his hands placing the mask over her face to stop her. The thing was too big, but he tied it tightly enough to keep it on, even as she whimpered, "No, papa, stop. Please," and tried to claw it off of herself.

When he removed his hands, his fingers were tangled with her curly hair. He brushed them against his pants.

"Good," he said, circling her to admire her obscured face. Only the outer white corners of her eyes were visible through eyeholes placed too far apart. "Now you look like Erik. Now you are Erik's daughter."

Émilie reached her hands out toward his voice, but unable to see, she tripped as soon as she stepped forward. Now that she was safely on the floor, she curled up and threw her hands over her head.

"Papa!" she pleaded. "Papa, stop, please! You're scaring me."

"You're scared, you stupid child? What else would you expect from a monster?"

He picked her up by the collar and returned her to her feet.

"Now you shall see what it's like to have people be afraid of you. Maybe then you'll learn not to tremble and quake so. Scared, yes?" He left her standing in the middle of the room and went to open the front door, ready to banish her from his peaceful, dark home. "You wear that mask and see what it is to be feared," he called over his shoulder. "See how difficult it is to find someone to love you."

"Please stop! I'm scared! I can't see!"

Erik ignored her. "Now you'll see what is really behind that music you play so carelessly."

With a great wrenching, the door came open.

"Come, I will take you to the world you long to see." He stepped through the door onto the narrow ledge beside the lake, his face shadowed horribly as the water's reflection of a hundred candles at his back lit it from beneath. "Keep the mask on," he said, "and you shall really know fear. Now, mon cœur!"

There was a little boot step on the stone floor, a shriek, and the sound of porcelain shattering.

Then there was nothing.