An arm binds my waist from behind, stopping my descent with a jolt. Somewhere beyond the muffled swish of water filling my subconscious, that familiar violin song pricks at my eardrums—poignant, pure, and enticing—my maestro commanding me to fight. A spark, hot and charged, like a shock from an outlet, leaps from my rescuer’s body to mine, and I revive enough to start kicking again.
I’m dragged out and over the edge like a piece of luggage, hacking up the flavor of bile and soured water. My feet squish inside my waterlogged boots as I try to stand. The soles slide out from under me and I miss busting my head on the brick basin by inches when a pair of gloved hands catches me. They settle me to sit on the floor beside the well, raking away the slimy hair glued across my eyes before tilting my chin back as if inspecting me for bruises.
Coughing again, I jerk free and look up in the dimness, half expecting to see Grandma in my fevered state, half expecting her to finally offer some explanation for trying to drown me.
Instead, the looming silhouette takes a different shape: broad shoulders and a masculine build inside dark clothes. So intent on him, I barely notice that the rain has let up—that the clouds have started to thin and a gauzy gray light gilds the room. The figure standing over me comes into sharp focus before I’m even aware of it.
Thick curls of dark hair cascade across his forehead and drip water along the nose of his porcelain, white half-mask. Rivulets stream down the naked side of his face—some real, from the bath he encountered while fishing me out of the well, and others impressions, from the drizzling rain and jagged colors stamped onto his skin by light filtered through the stained-glass windows. I choke back a gasp of recognition.
It’s the gardener . . . the Phantom.
I haven’t been imagining things at all. They’re one and the same.
The description of his deformity from every incarnation of the story, what hides beneath the cover-up, taunts me: rotting yellow skin . . . no nose or upper lip . . . sunken forehead and eye. But my attention strays to the left side, and the features both symmetrical and sensuous. He’s his own foil—two polar opposites, squashed into place like mismatched halves of clay onto one man’s immaculate form.
“I knew it . . . ,” I mumble, my pulse shaking the words in my throat. “You’re real.” I’m not sure if I’m referring to him being the Phantom, or the maestro from my dreams.
The bared half of his full lips twitches, as if debating whether to respond.
“It was you all along,” I accuse. “The bleeding roses, the torn uniforms, the dead bird.” It’s my voice, but someone else must be talking through me, because where would I find the courage with so much fear pounding inside my chest? I don’t have the presence of mind to demand the reason he did those things . . . maybe to lead me here, so I’d find him. But why?
Then it hits me . . . the only reason he could want me to find him. And I want it, too. I want it so much, my blood burns.
“Please tell me you’re here to teach me. To help me release my song, like you did for Christine.” I realize too late that I say her name wrong. It slips out before I can stop it, before I can even hear how insane I sound. How insane this moment is. I’m not blind to the irony: that my need to feel normal has driven me to seek the counsel of the abnormal.
I stare up at him, waiting. His silence reaches as high as the cathedral ceiling, interminable. In spite of his impressive size, he folds himself effortlessly, crouching to stretch out an upturned hand. I flinch, horror-struck, my pulse thundering a warning through my ears.
An expression of sympathy and supplication deepens his brown, hawkish eyes, before they fluctuate to that shimmery, coppery gaze I saw in the garden upon my arrival. The gaze that’s always there to drag me from the water in my dreams, and now in my reality.
Drawn by their magnetic pull, I become the cricket, entranced by her eight-legged captor. Despite every instinct telling me to leap away as fast I can, I take his gloved palm and push myself up with his support, my hips propped against the basin’s edge so my face is level with his sternum.
My eyes drift up to his—my other senses attuned to every aspect of his realness: The strength of his leather-bound fingers wrapped around my palm, the steady rhythm of his breath only inches from my forehead . . . the scent of his warm skin, wet and earthy, like moss on a forest floor, bathed in sunlight and dew.
Dread and hope grapple for control inside my heart, threatening to implode the organ. As though absorbing my inner turmoil, a faint glimmer of light spreads at his sternum, beneath his dark clothes, reminiscent of how I glowed when I devoured Ben’s anxiety.
“What are you?” I murmur.