When Raoul headed to Perros to find Christine, he left behind in her dressing room a pent-up ball of worry, frustration, and an unfocused determination in the figure of Meg Giry.
The petite girl wrapped her lace shawl around herself like a child does a favored blanket. She shivered not only from the cold but from the fear and disorientation left over from the morning's events. Beneath the fright there simmered an indignant fury. How dare whoever this figure was drug her – manipulate her and the rest of the company! And worst of all, her mother!
Meg brought her tiny fist down in anger on Christine's vanity and immediately yelped as it landed on something sharp. She rubbed her smarting hand. She looked down at what had hurt her: one of Christine's hairpins.
Meg morosely picked it up. Christine, please be all right!
She absently fiddled with the hairpin. Her thoughts were in Perros-Guirec, which she'd never seen in person but felt like she knew intimately from Christine's ecstatic descriptions. Vaguely Meg felt the hard little hairpin in her hand, the grooves on the side. As she clutched it, something nagged at the corner of her mind, slowly growing.
Then her bright eyes widened mistily as a memory came to her. She stared dumbstruck at the hairpin.
She was a young girl, about twelve. She'd been giddy for days, ever since her mother told her she was to appear in the ball scene for the first time in Il Muto – as a lady, an actual lady with a fan and a beautiful dress, and a lightweight but still beautifully styled powdered wig! In this memory, she was anxiously and eagerly bouncing on the balls of her feet in front of an old black door backstage, staring wistfully at the lock. Behind this door were the wigs for the show, including the very wig she herself would wear.
Pauline and Reyer were possessively protective of the wigs. It was rumored some were made out of real human hair. They were kept far away from the eyes and busy hands of stagestruck little ballet rats. Trying her luck anyhow after looking this way and that, Meg gave the doorknob a jiggle.
Drat. Nothing. It was locked.
She fumed silently. Then she felt a quick tap on her shoulder.
With a frightened shriek she whirled around, expecting –
But no. She had not expected this person at all.
Lajos the ratcatcher stared at her with friendly eyes and a gap-toothed smile. His black-gray hair looked like a crow's nest from where it erupted out of his flat cap. He wore a moth-eaten brown coat with patches on the elbow that smelled of damp earth. His trousers were too long, the cuffs drenched in black mud. His skin was a dark yellow where it was not smudged with dust and ash.
Meg felt her heart skip; not from any instinctive fear of Lajos himself, mind. No, as she looked at the spacy but nevertheless good-natured face of the lanky old man before her, Meg did not feel threatened.
However, he was part of the underground cellars almost as much as the Phantom was. She'd only had quick glimpses of Lajos over the years from where he lurked beneath trapdoors, as her mother emerged after admonishing him for allowing rats to get into the tutus. Seeing him in person above ground was akin to the Phantom casually approaching you and tilting his hat in greeting.
Meg swallowed the inappropriate giggle that image conjured and curtseyed politely. "Bonjour, monsieur!" This was the first time she'd ever spoken to him.
A laugh deeper than the cellars below answered her. His eyes were kind but unfocused, and his benevolent smile widened. He pointed to the door she'd moments before been trying to enter. "You want in there, eh?"
Hands clasped guiltily behind her, Meg smiled a small kitten's grin and nodded shyly. "It's locked, though," she whispered.
Another wheezing and booming laugh. He very briefly pat her head as though she really were an erring kitten. Then he waved her over to the doorknob confidentially. Again feeling no fear of this odd, friendly figure, Meg obeyed and followed behind, echoing his quiet air.
He reached into one of his deep pockets (that emitted a moldy scent Meg tried to ignore) and presented a surprisingly clean hairpin.
"Sometimes," he said with eyes twinkling, "When I come up here for a brief little walk, I find things like this on the floor. I collect them." He nodded congenially, as if agreeing with the wisdom of his own hobby.
Meg also nodded, pretending to understand. She was on the verge of concluding he was a bit mad and that this tangent had nothing really to do with the locked door, when his surprisingly deft hands snapped the hairpin in half where it bended. He held up the part of the pin that curved into wavy bumps. "You will need only this part," he rasped.
Then with an even greater delicacy of movement, he carefully picked up her little hand and pressed the pin into her palm, guiding her to insert it into the lock as you'd slide a wrench into a door jamb.
"Now," he said, his low voice calm and patient, suddenly an oasis of sanity. "You treat it like you would any other key. Which way would you turn the real key here?"
Meg scrambled to remember from the times she'd followed Pauline on her rounds. "To the...right!"
He bowed his head in assent and Meg felt an irrational spike of pride that she knew such things.
His hand very light on hers, he helped her turn the hairpin in that direction. "Keep it steady with your thumb," he advised her.
Ever a quick learner, she applied the appropriate pressure. Her cheeks reddened as the lock still wouldn't give. "It's not working, though!"
His voice only grew more calm and soothing. "Try pushing it in a bit further, then. Sometimes all it takes is a little repositioning."
Concentrating, Meg did as she was told, and then she gasped happily as she felt it click with something. "I think that's it!"
"Try turning it again."
Meg jumped up and down cheering as the most beautiful sound in the world reached her ears: the door unlocking! "Oh, monsieur, thank you!"
Serene expression ever unchanging, Lajos simply opened the door and walked into the long, narrow closet. He surveyed the hundreds of wigs lined up on their mannequin heads. Then he said, "Ah!" He pulled off a lovely pearl-colored one. It was not nearly as monstrously tall as the Countess's; this one was small enough to fit Meg's head. Yet it was lovely, with plentiful curls stacked in the back.
Meg clapped ecstatically. This was the one she would wear in the show, she just knew.
With the proud gravity of one crowning a queen, Lajos placed the wig on her head.
There was a tall mirror on the inside of the door. Meg approached it and studied her reflection. Staring back at her was a young girl with red cheeks, large staring eyes, and an "oh"-shaped open mouth, her head peeking out from beneath this elegant relic of the past. However, at the moment what she saw wasn't a child but a beautiful little lady, graceful and sophisticated in her powdered wig. She straightened her posture and tried to keep a straight face, intoxicated by the pretty image there. Then she fell again to giggling.
"Oh, monsieur! I thank you again! I thank you so" – She turned around and then frowned.
Lajos was gone.
This long-forgotten memory came back to her in Christine Daae's dressing room as though it had happened yesterday.
As Meg held Christine's hairpin and remembered, she saw something else in her mind's eye quite clearly:
The cupboard in the flat.
The cupboard with her mother's letters.
And in a rush came Buquet's body, the chandelier's fall, the drugging, Christine's terrified face.
She studied the hairpin again.
Much like the one from almost six years past, this had a side that curved into a perfect wrench.
"I've been so stupid!"
She clutched it tightly in her fist and fled the dressing room.
"Hey, there!" Adele called after Meg as she flew past her and Cecile.
Adele's impish grin as Meg skidded to a halt turned quizzical at the unnaturally bright fire that lit up the girl's flushed face. "Where are you off to, poppet?"
Meg stammered only a little. "Oh, um, Mother wanted me to grab some extra toe bandages from our quarters, and I plum forgot about them until now. She's not around, is she?"
Cecile smiled gently. "No, dear. She's in the manager's office discussing what happened during rehearsal. Were you all really drugged?"
But Meg was already a white blur hurrying away. "I'm afraid I can't talk now!" She threw over her shoulder.
Adele snorted, shaking a few of her russet curls. "Always in a rush, our Meg!"
Cecile's look was more speculative. "Hm," she said as she gazed after the dancer. Then lightly shrugging, she accompanied Adele to the stage.
Meg panted, both from nerves and from her brisk run.
She stood now in front of the cupboard. Her head pounded.
She held up Christine's hairpin.
She promised herself she'd gift Christine with a whole new set as she snapped it in half.
Methodically she retraced the steps kindly Lajos taught her those years ago.
The lock to the cupboard was smaller than the one to the wig room. Biting her lower lip, Meg exerted all her strength as she squeezed it in.
She turned it to the right. Nothing.
Pushed it in further. Nothing again. If she turned it any farther, she feared the pin might break.
One more time –
Nothing.
Meg exhaled a frustrated huff, her green-gray eyes darting this way and that as she thought.
Then they brightened.
She inserted the pin again.
She turned it to the left.
And stamped her foot as nothing.
Her heart and head beat in unison, the blood hot in her cheeks.
"All right," she told herself in a small but decided voice. "Just one more try."
Closing her eyes, she slipped the pin in just a bit more and turned –
That elation from six years past flooded her again as she felt that slight hitch, that connection.
It worked.
As if in a dream, she very slowly pulled the cupboard doors open just a mite.
Then with a dart-like move she glanced fretfully behind her.
Was that – ?
No. She hadn't heard anything.
Meg stared back at the cupboard and simply looked at it for a moment.
She felt guilty. If someone walked in right now, she'd look worse than a criminal – she'd look downright juvenile, standing there with a makeshift key made out of a hairpin, picketing a lock like a child sneaks a cookie out of a jar.
But stronger than the guilt and fear of looking foolish was that brave, fierce, reckless curiosity that always swallowed Meg up in an inferno she couldn't control.
All at once she opened up the cupboard wide.
The first thing she saw was her father's faded eyes staring at her with dreamy directness from his portrait.
It humbled and spooked her.
She couldn't even lift up a hand to delicately touch the frame as her mother had. Instead she meekly bowed her head and looked away.
Away to the slat where the papers were stacked.
She bit her lip again as she pulled them out. Well, now that she had them, where should she start? Her mother couldn't stay in conference with the managers and see to the theater indefinitely. She must return sometime.
As Meg weighed her options, feeling the letters in her hands – three, no, five huge bundles tied up with black ribbons – her eye caught something else in the slat, something at the bottom.
Meg bent down to better see.
It looked like a long sort of scroll, yellowed a little from where it lay hidden in the shadows beneath the other papers, buried for perhaps decades.
Meg felt an ominous stab at the sight of it. She shivered. But where another gentle soul might have taken the prophetic feeling as a sign to depart, Meg instead grabbed the rolled up paper with increased haste.
The scroll was quite long, and she had to blow off a thick layer of dust before she even dared open it. She absently brushed the dust off her tutu. I'll have to remember to sweep a little when I'm done here.
Then she unrolled it.
And a thousand fireworks went off inside her mind.
It was a map of the cellars underground, written in beautiful, clear calligraphy.
But it was more than that, much more –
Trapdoors Meg never knew existed, a tunnel through the first and second cellar Meg was sure no one else was privy to, a labyrinthine maze, a...a lake, and –
Meg's heart practically stopped.
There, at the bottom of the map, each chamber clearly marked: "My Abode."
Meg emitted a delighted little laugh. Then she trembled.
She was sure now who the author of this map was. A tingling thrill and nausea made the room spin for a moment before she steadied, and her naturally sharp mind refocused.
She was especially drawn to the markings for the portcullis just outside the lair, and the three different passageways one could access from there...
She jumped as she thought she heard footsteps. She listened for a few moments.
Nothing.
But it was enough to make her take action.
She had to copy it, but to something smaller, more pliable...oh! That stationary Mother got her for Christmas! She could just jot down the bare bones directions without any of the artistic flourish the map's creator apparently couldn't help employing, and she could even use multiple sheets...
When Madame Giry returned in the evening, she found not a speck of dust, not a hint that anything in the home had been hampered with.
She found Meg in the kitchen, frying ham and eggs for dinner. Meg willingly cooking was a rare sight: a sight so rare it usually yielded less than stellar results when it came time to consume her offerings.
Still, after the day's events Madame Giry found a particular serene joy from the warm smile that effused her daughter's face.
As perceptive as Antoinette Giry was, she could not see the maze of trapdoors and adventures behind that bright smile. She could not see how close her daughter had come to opening the stack of letters that held the names "Julien" and "Anahid", before her eyes fell on that fifteen-year-old map.