Had the specter of the ghostly author not been hovering over the audience, Don Juan Triumphant still would have disturbed those assembled.
From the dissonant opening chords the audience knew something strange was trying to overtake them. An unearthly melody filled the ears of the curious onlookers and socialites sitting staring and listening.
Peeking from behind the curtain, Meg ascertained throughout the overture expressions of bewilderment, disbelief, mockery, anger, and finally fear.
Though never suffering from stage fright before, Meg also felt a deep chill as her cue neared.
Yet once she started dancing, Meg found once again that the music – so jarring to everyone else – helped her evoke the saucy, tempting emotions her character represented. As she breathed in relief that she was able to perform so well under such conditions, her mother quietly despaired at how easily her daughter was able to tantalize onstage.
Once she returned backstage, Meg was keenly alert, spying the hidden marksmen, thinking of the hastily scribbled directions hidden under her pillow at home.
Meanwhile, Christine forced herself to focus only on what was needed for the show. Christine carried the greatest burden on her shoulders: everyone in the theater knew the Phantom wrote the show for her, was obsessed with her. Everyone believed her compliance was vital tonight to apprehend the madman; some even felt that this and only this would once and for all clear Christine Daae of any suspicion of acting as accomplice.
Because of this immense responsibility, Christine could not focus on every detail, every possible outcome like Meg did. If Christine dare think of every implication and the bigger picture of what she was doing she might go mad.
And so she stood vacant like an automaton between scenes. Instead of ruminating on where the Phantom might be hiding himself, how Raoul's plan might go wrong, or gauging the audience's reaction to the macabre opera, Christine limited herself to inwardly repeating the stage directions:
Wait for Carlotta's cadenza to finish, then sing your solo. Drop your handkerchief and then register surprise as Piangi returns it to you disguised as Passarino. The duet. Exit. Now wait for Piangi and Passarino to laugh. Then sing.
She'd watched without emotion the great banquet scene, Carlotta the flamboyant innkeeper madame filling the stage and leading the chorus with her pervasive vibrato (still brooding over the size of her part, Carlotta was determined to make the most of it anyway to spite the author). Christine watched with equal passivity her best friend run saucily out of the bedchamber, chased by Piangi's excessive Don Juan.
Nemesis and friend were but separate puzzle pieces to her today, along with all the others. She let herself study only the puzzle pieces dispassionately, not how they fit together as whole.
She saw Don Juan and Passarino scheme and then swap costumes. Piangi took Passarino's cowl and headed back behind the curtain hiding the bed. Piangi sang his line, "If I do not forget myself and laugh," then indulged in a last chuckle with his accomplice. Piangi disappeared, closing the curtains behind him.
At that, Christine sang in a heavenly pure voice from backstage the words Erik had written for her the first night he fell under her spell:
"No thoughts within her head but thoughts of joy.
No dreams within her heart
but dreams of love!"
She entered. So intense - and limited- was her focus that she felt no tingle of recognition when the eerie tenor whisper-sang from the curtain hiding the bed chamber just before Passarino exited:
"Passarino...go away for the trap is set and waits for its prey."
No one at first noticed the difference. It was a brief line, softly sung.
They did not notice the difference as he emerged from behind the curtains, careful not to open them too wide. His cowl hid his face. His arms, swallowed in the sleeves of his heavy black cloak, spread like bat wings before him as he approached the girl onstage.
But Meg froze the instant his voice soared as he sang to the lovely Aminta, as the girl tossed her apple in the air with lark-like carelessness.
You have come here
in pursuit of your deepest urge!
In pursuit of that wish which till now
has been silent...
Silent...
Meg's eyes sped first to Christine and then to the curtains that Piangi had disappeared behind...
She unconsciously edged closer to those curtains.
Christine was still so focused on the mechanics of the role – cast your eyes to the ground, look both innocent but longing at once, try to outmaneuver him but succumb to him by the end of his solo – that she still did not register any difference...
But by the end of his solo, she without consciously realizing it felt herself swayed by that tenor...so smooth, sensual...
Slowly she registered this was an interloper. He was a black figure, not of death, but of dark excitement that made her skin crawl but drew her in nonetheless. It may have seemed madness not to immediately realize once she knew it wasn't Piangi that it was in fact he, but when the human mind is in the midst of frenzy, it will instinctively cling to any other evidence than the truth.
It was not Piangi, and in Christine's frozen state of denial, the Phantom did not occur to her. Her head swam as she sang her verse, wondering who...
She stood behind him from where he now sat on the bench. She leisurely massaged his shoulders as she'd been directed to as she sang.
The moment those ice cold hands clutched hers and dragged them down his chest, reveling in her touch, she knew.
She knew.
Any temptation she felt, any intrigue at this almost feline masculine figure, vanished.
All that she had blocked out throughout the night flooded back. She briefly made eye contact with Raoul from where he waited in the wings.
He knew.
They all knew.
She was the last to know. Had terror not rooted itself so firmly within her, she would have laughed hysterically at the irony.
Through Raoul's fury and hissed commands to the firemen around him, he thought to himself that never had Christine been so courageous as she was now, eyes wide and fearful, chin trembling, but still singing, still singing.
She tried escaping the hooded figure as in a barely audible voice she sang the words, but he pursued.
The audience was too engrossed even to whisper amongst themselves.
No one saw Meg inch ever nearer to the stage near the bed.
The figure was very close to Christine now, she could feel his frosty breath against her face, and as they finished their song, she took a deep breath and threw his hood back.
The Phantom's white mask shone too bright, like a sail caught by the sun, riding a black wave just before a storm.
He turned away briefly from Christine. His shoulders were hunched, his fists clenched.
Christine stared helplessly at Raoul, who held out a hand stopping her: steady, steady.
His eyes said: You need only be brave for a few more moments, darling.
He knew Don Juan's character ended this song by gesturing toward the bedroom and then disappearing behind the curtain. Aminta sings one last solo debating whether she should follow before finally succumbing.
It was during this solo that Raoul would signal the firemen to descend on the Phantom from behind the curtain. Improvisation was dangerous, but what more could they do?
Yet one more twist revealed itself: the Phantom started speaking plainly to Christine.
His words were strangely quiet at first, sweet. He even adopted an almost childlike sing-song cadence. Raoul recognized words, phrases, that he himself had used when confessing his love to her. The Phantom turned back to Christine and there was naked yearning in the mismatched eyes staring out of the mask.
He pulled out the ring he'd snatched from her neck during Masquerade. He asked her in front of all of Paris to pledge her life to his. Then he slid the ring on her finger. "Christine, that's all I ask of you!"
A macabre proposal.
Raoul saw his ring on Christine's finger, given to her now by the Phantom – and then he saw red.
But it wasn't his fury that unleashed.
Her white face twisting like a wolf's descending on a rival predator, Christine ripped off the Phantom's mask.
The world went blank for Erik for a moment – white and then black and then all the colors again, all the shapes, too bright.
He heard the gasps. The audience was the sideshow crowd, they were the onlookers in Naser's court, his brother, his mother.
Her eyes were dark brown slits of hatred.
He stumbled under the weight, feeling stripped, hopeless.
His triumph was nothing but dust.
And then – of course, of course – he heard the scream. Bloodcurdling, awful.
Turning, he saw it came from Meg Giry. The ballet girl was now on stage with the two of them.
But unlike the rest of the theater, her eyes were not on his face. Her scream was not directed at him.
It was directed at Piangi's strangled corpse with the noose still around his neck. After Christine ripped away the Phantom's mask exposing his identity for true, a flash of lightning ran through Meg. Following instinct, she yanked the curtain's cord and revealed the dead tenor.
Meg's harrowing cry and Piangi's purple face and lifeless eyes brought the reality of the situation back to Erik. With a horrible cry of his own, he clutched Christine to him and stomped once on the designated spot. They both disappeared into the trapdoor as the marksman's shot rang out from the orchestra pit.
Carlotta's grief was all encompassing. At first she'd spent her anger beating on the managers' chests and blaming them, and then she flung herself over the body of her beloved.
While in word her actions were as exaggerated and operatic as usual, no one who saw them found her comical or wearying.
Certainly not Meg, who stared with stricken face at the normally upright and valiant diva, now collapsed and broken as she wailed into Piangi's lifeless neck.
"My god, my god," Andre repeated over and over.
"We're ruined, Andre, ruined!" Firmin's despairing cry might have seemed callous in the midst of Carlotta's hysterical mourning, but somehow Meg felt Firmin included everyone in the opera house in that statement – not just the managers and their career.
She could have stood with the other dancers, crying and dumbfounded as firemen swarmed around them. She could have clutched the sobbing girls' hands as the police tried to trigger the trapdoor to no avail, as they saw to Piangi's body, as they directed the audience out of the theater.
Instead, after one last look of pain at Carlotta's sobbing form over Piangi's, Meg immediately sought out her mother and Raoul, who were talking rapidly at the corner of the stage.
She knew whatever they were discussing was what was truly important now.
"Monsieur le Vicomte, come with me," her mother was saying. All pretense of impassivity was vanished from her face. Her expression was set and alert, eyes flashing fire. "Monsieur, I know where they are!"
Raoul's expression was the same as hers, with added urgency. "But can I trust you?"
Giry had to raise her voice over Carlotta's keening and the fire marshal's shouted commands to his subordinates. "You must! But remember, your hand at the level of your eyes!"
"But why?"
"Why? The Punjab lasso, monsieur! First Buquet and now Piangi!"
Without thinking, Meg was between them, holding up her hand. "Like this, monsieur. I'll come with you." She grabbed his wrist, ready to lead him.
But Madame Giry fiercely pulled her away, eyes wide and blazing. "No, Meg. No, you stay here." A quick hand through her daughter's bright hair. Then she returned her attention to the vicomte. "We must hurry, monsieur, or we may be too late!"
Raoul stared for one sharp moment into Madame Giry's eyes. He found trust there.
He followed her hastily retreating form without another word. The two disappeared into the crowd, leaving Meg alone as one could be surrounded by pandemonium.
Madame Giry obviously hadn't time to dwell on Meg's confidence in proposing to lead Raoul to the Phantom's lair.
And Meg was so full of the one plan circling her brain that she hadn't even time to feel a spike of pride and relief that at last her mother was using whatever her knowledge was to help instead of hinder.
No, instead Meg thought of one thing only.
The directions hidden under her pillow.
And without a moment's more hesitation, she whipped around and pushed through the throng and ran to her flat.