The Phantom of the Opera
that name of Erik did not point to his Scandinavian origin. He said
that he had no name and no country and that he had taken the name of
Erik by accident.
"After lunch, he rose and gave me the tips of his fingers, saying he
would like to show me over his flat; but I snatched away my hand and
gave a cry. What I had touched was cold and, at the same time, bony;
and I remembered that his hands smelt of death. 'Oh, forgive me!' he
moaned. And he opened a door before me. 'This is my bedroom, if you
care to see it. It is rather curious.' His manners, his words, his
attitude gave me confidence and I went in without hesitation. I felt
as if I were entering the room of a dead person. The walls were all
hung with black, but, instead of the white trimmings that usually set
off that funereal upholstery, there was an enormous stave of music with
the notes of the DIES IRAE, many times repeated. In the middle of the
room was a canopy, from which hung curtains of red brocaded stuff, and,
under the canopy, an open coffin. 'That is where I sleep,' said Erik.
'One has to get used to everything in life, even to eternity.' The
sight upset me so much that I turned away my head.
"Then I saw the keyboard of an organ which filled one whole side of the
walls. On the desk was a music-book covered with red notes. I asked
leave to look at it and read, 'Don Juan Triumphant.' 'Yes,' he said, 'I
compose sometimes.' I began that work twenty years ago. When I have
finished, I shall take it away with me in that coffin and never wake up
again.' 'You must work at it as seldom as you can,' I said. He
replied, 'I sometimes work at it for fourteen days and nights together,
during which I live on music only, and then I rest for years at a
time.' 'Will you play me something out of your Don Juan Triumphant?' I
asked, thinking to please him. 'You must never ask me that,' he said,
in a gloomy voice. 'I will play you Mozart, if you like, which will
only make you weep; but my Don Juan, Christine, burns; and yet he is
not struck by fire from Heaven.' Thereupon we returned to the
drawing-room. I noticed that there was no mirror in the whole
apartment. I was going to remark upon this, but Erik had already sat
down to the piano. He said, 'You see, Christine, there is some music
that is so terrible that it consumes all those who approach it.
Fortunately, you have not come to that music yet, for you would lose
all your pretty coloring and nobody would know you when you returned to
Paris. Let us sing something from the Opera, Christine Daae.' He spoke
these last words as though he were flinging an insult at me."
"What did you do?"
"I had no time to think about the meaning he put into his words. We at
once began the duet in Othello and already the catastrophe was upon us.
I sang Desdemona with a despair, a terror which I had never displayed
before. As for him, his voice thundered forth his revengeful soul at
every note. Love, jealousy, hatred, burst out around us in harrowing
cries. Erik's black mask made me think of the natural mask of the Moor
of Venice. He was Othello himself. Suddenly, I felt a need to see
beneath the mask. I wanted to know the FACE of the voice, and, with a
movement which I was utterly unable to control, swiftly my fingers tore
away the mask. Oh, horror, horror, horror!"
Christine stopped, at the thought of the vision that had scared her,
while the echoes of the night, which had repeated the name of Erik, now
thrice moaned the cry:
"Horror! ... Horror! ... Horror!"
Raoul and Christine, clasping each other closely, raised their eyes to
the stars that shone in a clear and peaceful sky. Raoul said:
"Strange, Christine, that this calm, soft night should be so full of
plaintive sounds. One would think that it was sorrowing with us."
"When you know the secret, Raoul, your ears, like mine, will be full of
lamentations."
She took Raoul's protecting hands in hers and, with a long shiver,
continued:
"Yes, if I lived to be a hundred, I should always hear the superhuman
cry of grief and rage which he uttered when the terrible sight appeared
before my eyes ... Raoul, you have seen death's heads, when they have
been dried and withered by the centuries, and, perhaps, if you were not
the victim of a nightmare, you saw HIS death's head at Perros. And
then you saw Red Death stalking about at the last masked ball. But all
those death's heads were motionless and their dumb horror was not
alive. But imagine, if you can, Red Death's mask suddenly coming to
life in order to express, with the four black holes of its eyes, its
nose, and its mouth, the extreme anger, the mighty fury of a demon; AND
NOT A RAY OF LIGHT FROM THE SOCKETS, for, as I learned later, you can
not see his blazing eyes except in the dark.
"I fell back against the wall and he came up to me, grinding his teeth,
and, as I fell upon my knees, he hissed mad, incoherent words and
curses at me. Leaning over me, he cried, 'Look! You want to see! See!
Feast your eyes, glut your soul on my cursed ugliness! Look at Erik's
face! Now you know the face of the voice! You were not content to
hear me, eh? You wanted to know what I looked like! Oh, you women are
so inquisitive! Well, are you satisfied? I'm a very good-looking
fellow, eh? ... When a woman has seen me, as you have, she belongs to
me. She loves me for ever. I am a kind of Don Juan, you know!' And,
drawing himself up to his full height, with his hand on his hip,
wagging the hideous thing that was his head on his shoulders, he
roared, 'Look at me! I AM DON JUAN TRIUMPHANT!' And, when I turned
away my head and begged for mercy, he drew it to him, brutally,
twisting his dead fingers into my hair."
"Enough! Enough!" cried Raoul. "I will kill him. In Heaven's name,
Christine, tell me where the dining-room on the lake is! I must kill
him!"
"Oh, be quiet, Raoul, if you want to know!"
"Yes, I want to know how and why you went back; I must know! ... But,
in any case, I will kill him!"
"Oh, Raoul, listen, listen! ... He dragged me by my hair and then ...
and then ... Oh, it is too horrible!"
"Well, what? Out with it!" exclaimed Raoul fiercely. "Out with it,
quick!"
"Then he hissed at me. 'Ah, I frighten you, do I? ... I dare say! ...
Perhaps you think that I have another mask, eh, and that this ... this
... my head is a mask? Well,' he roared, 'tear it off as you did the
other! Come! Come along! I insist! Your hands! Your hands! Give
me your hands!' And he seized my hands and dug them into his awful
face. He tore his flesh with my nails, tore his terrible dead flesh
with my nails! ... 'Know,' he shouted, while his throat throbbed and
panted like a furnace, 'know that I am built up of death from head to
foot and that it is a corpse that loves you and adores you and will
never, never leave you! ... Look, I am not laughing now, I am crying,
crying for you, Christine, who have torn off my mask and who therefore
can never leave me again! ... As long as you thought me handsome, you
could have come back, I know you would have come back ... but, now that
you know my hideousness, you would run away for good... So I shall keep
you here! ... Why did you want to see me? Oh, mad Christine, who
wanted to see me! ... When my own father never saw me and when my
mother, so as not to see me, made me a present of my first mask!'
"He had let go of me at last and was dragging himself about on the
floor, uttering terrible sobs. And then he crawled away like a snake,
went into his room, closed the door and left me alone to my
reflections. Presently I heard the sound of the organ; and then I
began to understand Erik's contemptuous phrase when he spoke about
Opera music. What I now heard was utterly different from what I had
heard up to then. His Don Juan Triumphant (for I had not a doubt but
that he had rushed to his masterpiece to forget the horror of the
moment) seemed to me at first one long, awful, magnificent sob. But,
little by little, it expressed every emotion, every suffering of which
mankind is capable. It intoxicated me; and I opened the door that
separated us. Erik rose, as I entered, BUT DARED NOT TURN IN MY
DIRECTION. 'Erik,' I cried, 'show me your face without fear! I swear
that you are the most unhappy and sublime of men; and, if ever again I
shiver when I look at you, it will be because I am thinking of the
splendor of your genius!' Then Erik turned round, for he believed me,
and I also had faith in myself. He fell at my feet, with words of love
... with words of love in his dead mouth ... and the music had ceased
... He kissed the hem of my dress and did not see that I closed my
eyes.
"What more can I tell you, dear? You now know the tragedy. It went on
for a fortnight--a fortnight during which I lied to him. My lies were
as hideous as the monster who inspired them; but they were the price of
my liberty. I burned his mask; and I managed so well that, even when
he was not singing, he tried to catch my eye, like a dog sitting by its
master. He was my faithful slave and paid me endless little
attentions. Gradually, I gave him such confidence that he ventured to
take me walking on the banks of the lake and to row me in the boat on
its leaden waters; toward the end of my captivity he let me out through
the gates that closed the underground passages in the Rue Scribe. Here
a carriage awaited us and took us to the Bois. The night when we met
you was nearly fatal to me, for he is terribly jealous of you and I had
to tell him that you were soon going away ... Then, at last, after a
fortnight of that horrible captivity, during which I was filled with
pity, enthusiasm, despair and horror by turns, he believed me when I
said, 'I WILL COME BACK!'"
"And you went back, Christine," groaned Raoul.
"Yes, dear, and I must tell you that it was not his frightful threats
when setting me free that helped me to keep my word, but the harrowing
sob which he gave on the threshold of the tomb. ... That sob attached
me to the unfortunate man more than I myself suspected when saying
good-by to him. Poor Erik! Poor Erik!"
"Christine," said Raoul, rising, "you tell me that you love me; but you
had recovered your liberty hardly a few hours before you returned to
Erik! Remember the masked ball!"
"Yes; and do you remember those hours which I passed with you, Raoul
... to the great danger of both of us?"
"I doubted your love for me, during those hours."
"Do you doubt it still, Raoul? ... Then know that each of my visits to
Erik increased my horror of him; for each of those visits, instead of
calming him, as I hoped, made him mad with love! And I am so
frightened, so frightened! ..."
"You are frightened ... but do you love me? If Erik were good-looking,
would you love me, Christine?"
She rose in her turn, put her two trembling arms round the young man's
neck and said:
"Oh, my betrothed of a day, if I did not love you, I would not give you
my lips! Take them, for the first time and the last."
He kissed her lips; but the night that surrounded them was rent
asunder, they fled as at the approach of a storm and their eyes, filled
with dread of Erik, showed them, before they disappeared, high up above
them, an immense night-bird that stared at them with its blazing eyes
and seemed to cling to the string of Apollo's lyre.
Chapter XIII A Master-Stroke of the Trap-Door Lover
Raoul and Christine ran, eager to escape from the roof and the blazing
eyes that showed only in the dark; and they did not stop before they
came to the eighth floor on the way down.
There was no performance at the Opera that night and the passages were
empty. Suddenly, a queer-looking form stood before them and blocked
the road: