"Ah! There she is," Cecile said to Adele, jabbing the girl with her elbow. Cecile pointed to Meg, who was walking with absent steps in the opposite direction. She was leaving Christine's dressing room. Again.
Cecile and Adele, plus Nynette clutching to their skirts as they scurried quietly down the hall, headed toward the petite figure.
Meg remained lost in thought, not hearing their approach.
The clownish side of her personality coming to the forefront, Adele sneaked up to Meg with muffled steps and poked her in the rib.
She whirled around shrieking. After a burst of laughter, the girls felt a flash of guilt and surprise at the terror – yet fight – gleaming in Meg's wide eyes.
They all quickly regained their composure. Adele giggled and leapt back as Meg swatted at her. "Boor!" Meg mock-scolded. "You frightened me half to death."
"That was the plan," the freckled young Adele replied, curtseying with a devilish grin on her face.
"Are you all right, Meg?" Nynette asked uneasily. "Did something happen? You looked so afraid!"
Meg bit her bottom lip for a moment, thoughtful. "It's...it's Christine. She still can't be found."
The three girls collectively bit their tongues. The story quickly spread around the opera house that the dashing young vicomte was seen heading to her quarters alone after the opera, and that Christine had subsequently disappeared, and still wasn't back the next day. Putting two and two together, most people in the Opera Populaire came to the same conclusion regarding Christine's whereabouts.
Even the ballet girls, who'd come to accept and even like Christine, were inclined to agree. They passed no judgment. They'd all seen Raoul, heard his deep, masculine voice. They understood.
Yet Cecile, knowing of Meg's love and high opinion of Christine, and being the most sensitive of the ballet girls after Meg and Christine, insisted on their silence. She kicked Adele now, halting her giggle. Still, Cecile privately wished Meg wasn't so naive.
"Oh, I'm sure she's all right, Meg," Cecile said. "You know how solitary Christine is. She's probably resting after such an ordeal."
"Yes, but where? Poor Madame Valerius is worried to death! She hasn't seen her since before the debut! And Christine was so queer after the performance! She" – No, Meg, she chided herself. Christine spoke to you in confidence. Until you know more, don't start talking your fool head off to the first people you meet about everything.
"Well, enough of that," Cecile announced, taking Meg's hand. She felt it wise to take Meg's mind off the matter. "Come on! The girls are gathering by the prop room. Old Buquet's telling stories about you-know-who."
"Oh, I don't know if I'm in the mood," Meg said warily. She usually looked forward to Buquet's stories with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. She yearned to learn all she could about the opera ghost, but from Joseph Buquet of all people – so leering, so off-kilter – so inclined toward revealing what Meg feared was too much – the whole thing made her uncomfortable. Plus, with Christine's disappearance, the Phantom was no longer a dim shadow at the regions of Meg's consciousness but now an active threat to someone she loved.
Yet the three ballet girls gave her no choice. They pulled at her and whined at her, until Meg found herself practically dragged to the designated spot.
Buquet sat like a lumpen giant in the center of the graceful figures dressed in frilly white, the girls huddled on the floor around him. As Meg and the others approached, he was showing off the grim plaster-cast heads lining the prop room shelves.
Meg was tentatively optimistic. Hopefully Buquet was too distracted showing off his prowess with these grisly props to want to gossip about the phantom.
The girls all shivered and squealed at the way he made the heads distort themselves, the white eyes open and close. Meg, however, had forced herself in her youth to study closely these hideous, leprous visages, determined to tackle any fear of them head on. She'd been successful. She was used to them now.
She felt a surge of annoyance as Buquet's eyes lit up upon seeing her. She recognized that look. Meg knew now there would be no getting away from hearing about the Phantom.
Joseph Buquet had some sort of fix on Meg. He maintained an antagonistic relationship with what he considered her nag of a mother, who disapproved of his drinking and his loose tongue. Because he couldn't openly defy the forbidding ballet mistress, he settled instead for frightening her impressionable daughter with tales of the ghost.
And he wouldn't lie to himself. He was also noticing what a fine-looking girl she'd become: strawberry blonde mane, wide clear eyes, inviting curves blossoming on her delicate frame. He often imagined pulling the innocent white ribbon from her luxurious hair, and watching as her cheeks reddened, her form trembling...
Meg trembled now, inching toward Cecile and looping her arm through hers. Joseph's pasty face stretched into a smirk more ghoulish than any expression he could maneuver out of the plaster-cast heads.
He quickly put the prop aside and took out the lasso again.
His glee increased as he saw Meg recoil while the girls around her clapped.
"Forget those heads, children," he said in his raspy voice. "Gruesome as they are, they are nothing compared to the Phantom's face."
"What's he look like?" Jeanne blurted out.
Usually at this point Buquet would smile darkly and then change the subject, expounding instead on another rumor about the Phantom's mischief. However, Buquet noticed Meg seemed distracted and nervous, and the rum he'd just drunk made him more anxious than usual for her undivided attention. So for the first time, the chief of the flies dared describe in detail the Phantom's face.
"Like yellow parchment is his skin," he began in a voice more ominous than usual. He started playing with the lasso, trapping and freeing his hand to brief smatterings of applause. "A great black hole in the center of his face – for you see, he has no nose! One never grew!" He swayed on his stool, his knuckles brushing against a nearby girl's skirt. "His head is like a skeleton's – a true death's head!"
Joseph Buquet, in truth, did not remember much of his momentary encounter with the opera ghost some five years past. He'd already been a bit of a surly drunk then, but competent and serious in his duties. He'd only gone down to the cellars to seek out that old fool Lajos, as the rats had been at the backdrops again.
He was a devout atheist, a skeptic. He'd forced himself not to bite the heads off fools who spoke seriously of a phantom in front of him. Nonsense. Idiotic nonsense.
But on that night he was lost in the cellars, having taken too many downward turns in his haste, in the dark. His temper rising, he stumbled and cried out, falling a good foot or so. He swore as the light in his lantern snuffed out. When he finally managed to light it again, he discovered he'd fallen through a trap door into a small circular room...surrounded by mirrors.
"What..." he started to ask himself. Then he heard a slight shuffling sound. He turned around.
The figure in the corner froze like a cat caught in a street light.
Buquet only saw him for a split second through the dim glow of the lantern.
The unexpected presence, the disorienting location, and the rum buzzing in his temples obscured his view. All that penetrated his mind was the side of Erik's face he could see – the patches of dry yellow and the wide nostril that looked like a gaping hole that, in Buquet's feverish imagination, took the place of a nose.
What he remembered most of all was that ice-blue eye and its slitted pupil suddenly blazing like something unearthly, with malice, as the figure slowly leaned toward Buquet.
With a scream like a bellows, Buquet dropped the lantern and crashed through one of the mirrors. He was suddenly somewhere cool and bluish-dark. He ran. He ran and he ran. He ran as the shards of glass scraped his skin, as he tripped over rats, as his feet slipped in puddles.
A night watchman found him just outside the opening at the rue bridge, sobbing and hysterical. The young man escorted Buquet through the back door of the opera house, through the upper floors of the cellar, until Madame Giry found them in the corridor outside the ballet dormitories.
The watchman looked at her questioningly. She only stared numbly at the large man kneeling on the floor, wailing like a half-starved baby.
The competence, the assured attitude, the no-nonsense work ethic disappeared after that night. He became a blithering drunk who took a grim triumph over the pathetic power he held over the ballet girls.
"You must be careful," he warned them now, snickering. "Or else he'll catch you! With this! His magical lasso!" Once more he stuck his head through the makeshift noose, howling with laughter.
You fool, Meg thought with pity.
Then she seized, staring up with her breath caught in her throat. She pointed and screamed along with the others.
For a trap door in the distance had opened, and cast over the scene was the large, all en-compassing silhouette of a man's face. The long brim of his fedora extended toward them like a ghostly arm.
A flurry of graceful, frightened sheep, the ballet girls leapt up and ran in unison. "This way!" Meg called, leading them toward their dressing room.
She stumbled and slipped over the interlocked feet and hands reaching for her. She was a shepherdess leading her frightened flock away from the wolf.
Once they reached the door, Meg turned back.
Cecile grabbed at her hand. "Wait! Where are you going?"
Meg's pale eyes gleamed like candles lit too bright. "The Phantom. Christine. I have to save her"-
"Meg Giry, you fool!" – But it was too late. Meg wrenched herself from Cecile's grasp and barreled back from where she'd run.
Her heart was jumping in her chest like a caged rabbit's, her cheeks burning. She was ill with fright, but if she could just catch up with them, see Christine alive and well –
She cried out as she collided with something tall and black.
Instinctively covering her face, she felt the hard hands gripping her arms soften. "Come, Meg, come. It's all right, darling," came that familiar voice that was soothing only ever for Meg.
The girl looked up with relief, seeing her mother's pale drawn face through the tears in her jade eyes. "M-mother! The ghost! He" –
"Never mind, child," Giry interrupted, smoothing her curls. "I've put that fool Buquet in his place. And now there's something far more important to attend to."
Taking her daughter's hand, Madame Giry led her to their flat. Already her mother's strong, invincible presence was calming her daughter. Meg's cheeks were still red and tears still stood in her eyes, but now only from embarrassment and relief, not fear.
Then she whitened completely when her mother opened the door to Meg's bedroom. "Christine!"
The young diva lay prostrate on Meg's bed, her dark mass of hair covering her face from where she hid it in Meg's pillow. She was still in her dressing gown from the night before. She was so still Meg for a quick, delirious moment thought she was dead.
Then Christine lifted her head, and Meg gasped at the change in her friend.
All color was drained from the already pale complexion, and she wore an expression of utter despair and exhaustion. She looked like the ghost of herself until those vacant dark eyes met Meg's.
Then the doe-like vulnerability reappeared, and her voice came out in a long, pleading whine. "Meg..."
The ballerina flew to her side, sitting beside her, cradling her head in her lap.
"Christine, Christine!...What...what happened to you? Where did you go?"
A groan was her only answer. Christine shivered as she clutched the girl's tutu with increasing urgency.
Images flew with dart-like clarity through the singer's mind.
The boat...
The lake...
The man.
The monster.
The night in the lair began like every dark fantasy she'd ever nourished. The man before her, tall, powerful, and lithe, hypnotized her with his gestures, with that soaring, ethereal voice. The candlelight and the mist...
Perhaps...perhaps this was what the Angel meant by love...maybe...he was Raoul and a spirit from Heaven combined into one...
Then sharp moments of lucidity and no no this was the Phantom NO –
His voice...
She was lulled, she was lost in the dark eye gazing at her...
But she couldn't clearly see the other. It was too heavily shaded by the mask...
A mask, why a mask?
Because the Phantom the Phantom THE PHANTOM HE'S HERE MEG YOU WERE RIGHT –
But gently now, gently. He knew the right notes to sing, the right darkness to tap into, as if he knew her soul's secrets.
And she followed.
Followed to the mirror in his lair, covered by a sheet.
Then the sheet was gone. She saw herself standing encircled by the jagged shards of glass.
Saw her own self standing before her, dressed as a bride.
She was dead.
The figure staring at her was herself dead, still and white, eyes wide and unseeing.
Horror gripped Christine more firmly than ever before. She was a captive, there was no Angel, and this –
Just as she approached the apparition, it lunged at her with arms outstretched.
This was Hell.
She felt and heard nothing more, only vaguely sensing him catch her as she fainted.
When she awoke, he – .
When she awoke.
Christine groaned aloud again, wrestling with the memories now tossing mercilessly and incoherently in her head.
The monkey woke her, the only genuine article of warmth and humanity in the lair. She'd briefly traced the velvet lining with her finger as the monkey played the jaunty little tune from the masquerade ball on his cymbals.
Yet the memory of the monkey's face distorted. Distorted into –
An angel from hell.
His back to her at the organ. Her slow walk to him. One quick swipe of the white mask.
Then horror.
Horror.
As he crawled, oozed on his belly toward her like a snake, he confessed his deceit and obsession. Every shadow in the lair, every glimmer of candlelight threw some new hideous angle on that grotesque facade.
"Oh, Christine..."
She sobbed now on Meg's bed, reaching for the only tangible landline she could find. She pressed Meg's hand violently, desperately.
And Meg turned wondering eyes upward to her mother.
Madame Giry stood grim and stoic. Only her daughter could have deciphered the painful look of compassion and pity in those mystifying dark eyes as they gazed down at Christine.
Drugged, maybe, Giry thought. But no, more than likely Erik had been using the mirror to mesmerize the girl, employing the same black art that eluded even the masters in Persia.
Oh, God or Gods, whoever or whatever you are or are comprised of, what's to be done?
She placed a soft hand on her daughter's shoulder. "Come. Let us take her home to Madame Carina."
A/N: Did pervy Buquet skeeve you out? What a creep. Stay away from Meg, you! Get outta town! Oh, wait...he does sorta leave the scene in a little bit here...
My next update probably won't be for another week at least, sorry! Be back soon!