Next, I follow him deep beneath the ground, but not here—not the opera house. It’s an earlier, hazier time. He shares a cage with other children I can’t quite see; I’m blind to his face still, maybe because now I’m looking through his eyes. They’re treated like animals, but it’s different for him, because he’s different. His appearance forces his tormentors to isolate him, and to steal away something so precious, it leaves him incomplete, humiliated, and lost. To the point he wants to die.
My heart sinks inside my chest—an anchor dredging the depths of his despair. I break free and surface within another memory. A warmer time, before his loss. I can feel his intense hunger; he goes without food often. Seated at a dusty table, he asks an innocent question, and I hear a Frenchwoman’s sweet voice, chiding him. It’s his mother. “You don’t want that kind of love,” she says. “It isn’t love at all. It’s dark, and it’s evil. Just like the devil and the witch in your favorite story, who treated Jean and Jeanette like possessions, to be eaten like fatted calves. But children are powerful, and clever. They should be treated as gifts from the heavens.”
A devil and a witch . . . Jean and Jeanette . . . the fairy tale from my childhood: Les Enfants Perdus. His mother used to tell him the same fable that my dad read to me.
In that blink of recognition, the vision slips away. I’m in the foyer, standing inside the academy in my soggy clothes and wearing a man’s glove. That’s where the intuition stops.
I need more. I need the Phantom’s history. I need everything. Because somehow, my present, and even parts of my past, are interwoven with his.
I walk, fingers wiggling in his oversize leather glove, led by spectral footprints I can sense but not see. I wind my way through the corridors toward the renovated theater—the Phantom’s deadly playground. My wet, stockinged feet grow colder with each step. Other than my dripping clothes, the journey is quiet. It’s the absence of sound that leads me onward . . . a silence that breathes and beckons.
As I shove open the heavy, elaborate double doors, my breath catches, lungs stuffed with sawdust, fresh paint, and the sterility of furniture polish. I prop the doors open, allowing light from the corridor to seep across uncountable tiers of seats like a dusky nebula. It’s the first time I’ve been here. I’m not sure where any of the power switches are, so sparse illumination is all I have.
I consider the plays and operas that were performed here centuries earlier, before the top three floors caught fire, before smoke and soot forced the designers to stain the wooden décor black. Tainting the edges of those moments are the murders the Phantom was rumored to have committed in an opera house much like this one. I wonder if anyone ever really knew what happened. Anyone other than the object of his obsession.
He seemed sincere when he said he would help me. Maybe that’s what he wanted with Christine . . . Christina . . . in the beginning: to be her friend. To help her. Until he fell hopelessly in love with his own creation.
If the stories are true, he’s dangerous. But what if they’re embellished, or completely wrong?
I descend the slanted aisle. Mister Jippetto’s half-finished props sit on canvas tarps, in preparation for the upcoming opera. They clutter my path and I edge around them. On the night of the performance, all it will take is a flick of the wrists, and prismatic spotlights will line the rafters, mirroring the rainbow palette I see when I sing—the one that always ends up staining my mind with splashes of bloody red in that moment when the last note is ripped from my soul.
The dark, gaping maw of the stage waits below. One side of the red velvet curtains folds open—the tongue of a rabid wolf, slavering to devour my song and leave me gutted and drained.
For so long music has bled me dry, but today, something changed. When the Phantom touched me, when his eyes held mine, I felt it. And I still feel it now.
There’s a new compulsion burning inside. Not a serpentine aria coiling around my heart and squeezing, demanding to be purged so the toxin can strike me down. Determination and confidence are driving me now.
I want to sing Renata’s aria, while everyone’s out, to prove to myself I can perform it to the end without getting sick, but also on the chance my maestro is in the farthest corners of this theater, up in box five, waiting . . . expectant. I lift his glove to my nose, inhaling the leathery scent. I want to please him, because it would bring pleasure to me. We’re mirror images, somehow. My desires are his.
My gaze flicks from the pitch-black balcony to the highest point in the ceiling where a gargantuan chandelier glistens in the dim light: thousands of miniature crystals, eager to reflect my humiliation or triumph.
Climbing the steps to the stage, I pause as something rustles in the orchestra pit, followed by a soft thump and a clack. I glance down at the impenetrable velvet darkness. Silence overtakes again, and I continue up the stairs. What do I have to fear? The Phantom is in every corner of this opera house. He won’t let anything get in my way.
He wants to hear me sing . . . to hear me triumph.