Chapter 31
She pulled me into a small room and, after giving the hall a long, sweeping look, shut the door behind us.
“Madame Giry,” I began, but she waved her hand and brought one finger up to her lips, warning me to silence.
I glanced uneasily around the small space. It was filled with stacks of unlabeled boxes and a series of velvet-covered rope stanchions. There were dozens of rolled posters from past productions propped in a corner and a few wrinkled programs littering the floor.
With a flick of her hand, one of the walls swung inward to reveal a narrow brick-lined passage.
“Come” was all she said before disappearing into its darkness.
I glanced back to the door we’d come through, knowing Raoul was somewhere out there, looking for me, searching and shouting. Did part of him wonder if I’d slipped away with Erik? Did he fear I was being held captive, a prisoner of a madman’s whims?
Part of me knew I should leave this room, leave it and all the answers it contained, and go after Raoul. I’d find him, and then we could leave the opera—leave it forever and never return. No one would blame me. No one would think me a coward.
I just needed to go to him.
But Madame Giry knew more about the Opera Ghost and Erik than she’d ever let on. I couldn’t give up the chance to learn, to uncover her part in all of this strange plot.
Decision made, I followed after her, allowing the darkness to swallow me whole.
She led me down a series of unlit hallways and up spiral staircases. I held tight to her shoulder so that I would know where to go, but more than once, I tripped on uneven stones in the floor.
Another door creaked open, and suddenly, there was light.
“This way,” she said, gesturing me into the space.
It was large, with lofty ceilings and an enormous slanted window, showing off a section of the Populaire’s roof. Pale shafts of moonlight lit the room, changing angles as clouds passed by.
It was an attic, but one I’d never had cause to be in. Thick gray dust coated the surface of everything I saw, ruining racks of old costumes and obscuring the titles of scores and stacks of sheet music.
“What is this place?”
Madame Giry stepped closer to the window, her silhouette a black smear against the snow-covered roof. “An old storage room, mostly forgotten. It’s too far from the stage to make it very useful. Not many today even know it’s here.”
“But you do,” I observed.
She nodded. “Back when I was a dancer, just starting out, I came across it. My ballet mistress needed some old props that had been stored here and sent me after them. It was out of the way and quiet. I took to using it as my own practice space. The afternoon light looks quite lovely, streaming through the windows.”
I took a step toward her. “Why did you bring me here now?”
Madame Giry sighed and looked away. “What you’re asking for is not easy. I’ve spent so many years much like this room: keeping quiet, letting all be forgotten.”
“But you know things,” I pressed. “You know him. Erik,” I added, and the sharp line of her back stiffened.
“I wasn’t aware you two were so well acquainted.” A careful edge crept into her voice, testing, prodding.
I stared at her, taking the moment to really study her face, noting all the ways it had changed.
She’d been like a second mother to me, a mentor, a taskmaster.
She’d watched me grow, both as an artist and as a person.
She’d opened her home to me, given me chance after chance.
Yet now, I felt as though I didn’t know her at all.
“I could say the same of you,” I pointed out, not unkindly.
She let out a rush of breath and turned from me, fixing her gaze out the window. “I know no more than anyone else.”
“That’s not entirely true, though, is it? You’re always the one who finds his notes. You’re always bringing missives from him. And I saw the way you went to him just now.”
In the reflection of the glass, I saw her eyebrows shift, knitting together in pain. “Please don’t ask me to explain it.”
I touched the blade of her shoulder. “Madame Giry, please. I’ve never felt so fearful in all my life…or so beguiled. There’s so much about him, about this situation, that I don’t understand, that I can’t comprehend. So much is at stake.”
She reached out and traced her fingertip across the window before her, drawing a line down her image to split her face in two.
She was still for so long that, despite the volume of my impassioned plea, I began to worry that she somehow hadn’t heard me. “Madame Gi—”
“There was a traveling fair,” she began, and her voice was hushed and distant, like a whispered echo crossing through time, into the past. “I was just a girl of sixteen, but I remember it as if it happened only yesterday. I was in training at the Conservatoire, a young woman far from home, in a city of wonders and enchantment. When the fair came, we all begged our instructors to allow us to attend.” She turned around to face me, offering a rueful smile.
“You’d never guess how strict they all could be. ”
Madame Giry gestured to a short stack of crates piled off to the side, indicating that we should sit.
“Tell me about the fair,” I prodded, once we’d settled in.
“It was unlike anything I’d ever witnessed.
Tumblers, conjurers. There was a bearded, tattooed woman who could tell fortunes just by holding your hand.
A woman who drove nails through her nose with a hammer.
Fire-eaters and stilt walkers. A magician who could escape from any knot you’d tie round him. And there were…others. Human oddities.”
“Erik?” I guessed, and a piece of my heart broke as she nodded.
“He was nothing but a boy then, maybe nine or ten. But already, you could tell he was…special. A prodigy. The barker said he was always tinkering, always drawing and creating…composing. He excelled at everything he tried his hand at, mastering it all. But they…they threw a burlap sack over his head. They locked him in a cage. They called him a freak, the son of the Devil, more monster than man.”
“Because of his face?”
Madame Giry nodded. “His poster read ‘Dame Nature’s One True Blunder.’ His own mother couldn’t stand the sight of him. She gave him to the carnival with nothing but a note begging him to forget her.”
I couldn’t help my gasp of pained sympathy.
“When I saw him…it was all too terrible. The taunts, the jeers. I didn’t understand why no one else could see what I did. There, in the midst of that dank tent and filthy straw, surrounded by such hatred and violence, was the purest soul I’d ever seen.”
She wiped at the corner of her eye with the back of her hand. It was disconcerting to see Madame Giry, normally so stoic and resolute, moved to emotion.
“What happened next?” I asked as gently as I could.
“When the barker began to sell moldy oranges to throw, our instructors made us go. But I…I lingered behind, hiding away in the shadows. I didn’t want to leave him there, alone with so many cruel strangers.
During all the…excitement…our eyes met, and…
” She sighed. “I would have done anything to make those eyes less miserable, to bring him any amount of relief. After the crowds had left and the barker was busy counting his coins, the boy gestured to one of the ropes holding back the tent’s flaps.
I untied it, letting it fall into his cage.
I didn’t know he’d move so fast. I didn’t know all he’d learned from the carnival’s magician. ”
“Rope tricks,” I guessed.
She nodded. “Knots and nooses. The Punjab Lasso…The barker was dead before I could even cry out. The boy used the keys to free himself, and together, we raced into the night, running as fast as we could from the fair before anyone noticed what had happened. I brought him back to the only safe place I could think of. The Conservatoire was too crowded—someone would surely have seen him—but here…in this attic…I offered him what comforts I could: food I pilfered from the kitchens, a cloak to ward off the chilled night air, a mask…”
Her gaze drifted toward a pile of old props, then a rack of dusty costumes, and I could so easily imagine how that moment had played out, here in this very room.
“It was a volto mask,” she went on, bringing her hands to her cheeks and pantomiming the way the commedia mask would fully cover a face. “I thought it would put him at ease.” She let out a soft laugh that tinged the air around us bitter. “Perhaps it was only for my own comfort…”
She looked so lost. I wasn’t sure what to say, wasn’t sure how to bring her back to the story. “I’m sure…I’m sure he appreciated everything you did.”
Another laugh, twisting doubtful. “He remained here for four days, while the carnival folk searched for him. But eventually, everyone gave up. They thought him dead, waylaid by a band of thieves, murdered and thrown into the Seine. And he slipped away then, leaving in the dark of the night.”
“Did he tell you where he would go? What he planned to do?”
Madame Giry shook her head. “He left no note, no word, only a broken mirror and the shattered shards of the volto mask.” Again, she put both hands to her face before letting the left fall. With just her right hand remaining, she was an eerie echo of Erik’s half mask.
I frowned, picturing him as a boy, running through the dark streets of Paris with his cape flared out behind him, wholly untethered to anyone. Unwanted and unbound.
“Oh, Erik,” I whispered.
“The world forgot him, but I never could. I thought of him often, wondering whatever came of him. He was too special to just disappear. I knew that somehow, in some way, he would make his mark.”
“But he returned to the opera? Eventually?”
“Three years ago. I don’t know any more than that.
He was just…here. Things began to go missing: old scenic pieces and costumes, even the pipe organ from La Juive.
Just…gone. And I knew he’d come back and was setting up house.
Somewhere. I think this is one of the only places in the world that has ever given him peace. And of course, the music…”
“But what about—”
Rustling came from a darkened corner, sounding like scuttling rats. The opera was full of them, as well as dozens of cats which were allowed to prowl the grounds to keep the rodents’ numbers in check.
But Madame Giry froze, her face pinched and bloodless. She grabbed my hand and yanked me to my feet. “We must go.”
“What’s the mat—”
“I’ve said too much,” she hissed.
“But—”
She wrenched my arm, silencing me. “I think perhaps the danger downstairs has passed,” she announced, her words loud and overly enunciated.
I peered into the corner but couldn’t see anything but shrouded shadows.
Was Erik there now, watching us, listening to every word we said?
I imagined him not as he was now, a grown man, but as the little boy Madame Giry had saved, frail and shivering against the world’s cruelty.
I thought of the instant just before the wall of fire had separated us, when I’d caught the glint of his eyes.
“It is best you go home now, Christine Daaé,” she went on, pulling me out to the hallway, not the hidden passage by which we’d earlier come. “It’s nearly midnight, and there will be such work ahead of us in this bright new year.”