Chapter 42 #5
“You know my secrets,” he whispered, pained.
“All the secrets of the Angel in Hell.” A single tear tracked down his face, and then, as the blasts of chaos and destruction came closer and closer—they were so close—Erik screwed his face up and let out an animalistic cry of rage and sorrow. “Go now! Go now and leave me!”
I could not move. I’d become like one of his automatons, still and lifeless and as good as dead without their master’s attention.
Raoul snapped to action. He dragged me down the passage, promising he would keep me safe.
“But Erik—” I started feebly, unable to stop the wheels that had been set in motion. Raoul had picked up too much speed, too much momentum. I was powerless against his valor.
“No, Christine,” Raoul insisted. “You didn’t see all the things he’s done. Piangi…and another stagehand, they’re…they’re dead.” He sighed. “Let them find him. Let them bring him to justice.”
I’d known something dreadful had befallen Ubaldo the second Erik had stepped onto stage wearing his cape. But I’d never dreamed him dead, merely assumed him hindered and detained, locked in a dressing room, coughing up great croaks as Carlotta had.
Trying to merge every facet of Erik’s personality—the genius of his mind, the passion with which he attacked everything he did, his capacity for cruelty, his self-loathing, his tenderness—made my head ache.
I could not reconcile the individual pieces, I could only look past the faults.
For now. I’d sort through my conflicting emotions later.
Once we were safe. Once we were free. But first…
“I didn’t say goodbye. I need to…” I held out my hand to show him the finger Erik had shoved his engagement ring upon. The rubies in the death’s head’s eyes winked at us in the dim light. “Let me give it back to him. Let me end it between us. Once and for all.”
Raoul studied me with a look of confusion and disgust. “Throw the damned thing into the lake. He’s a monster, Christine. He does not deserve your pity.”
It was not pity that moved me, but that was something I could never tell Raoul, not if there was to be even a chance for us to have that simple, wonderful, halcyon life together.
“I’ll be right back,” I swore, squeezing his hand in a tight promise.
I heard him cry out in objection, but I was gone before he could stop me.
When I returned to the music room, slipping through the shadows, fearful of what I would find, Erik was on the ground, his knees brought up to his chest, hugging them like a frightened child.
The monkey music box was playing its wistful melody as it moved its cymbals in a garish display of blithe frivolity.
Erik mimicked its clapping, a sad echo. Before I’d entered, he’d been singing along with the creature’s music, but I only caught the last of his refrain.
“Hide your face so the world will never find you.”
I’d seen the working diagrams of exactly how the music box operated, including the lyrics Erik had hoped would one day accompany the idiophone. These words were part of its song. But here and now, it also felt like an ominous portent, a set of instructions he would take all too well to heart.
I wasn’t aware I’d made a sound, but he startled suddenly and whipped around with a flinch, as if expecting the mob. When he saw it was me, his shoulders relaxed, and a pained expression of regret overcame him.
Carefully, he pushed himself from the rug, abandoning the monkey, and crept toward me.
I offered out the ring. It lay in the center of my palm. My hand shook so badly I feared I would drop it, but then Erik was beside me, stilling me, strengthening me.
He took the ring, slipping it onto his hand, and I mourned the loss of it, of what it could have come to represent.
“Christine, I love you.”
His words broke the last remaining bit of control I had within me, and I began to weep. I knew this was the end. I knew I would never see him again.
He was giving me the greatest gifts he could: freedom and the chance to be loved with an untainted ardor, the chance to live in that sunlight.
I was grateful. I’d once wanted nothing but that.
And yet…
He started to turn away, but I snatched his hand, stalling him, to press one final fervent kiss to his palm, wetting it with my tears. I was shaking all over, unable to move, unable to express the thousand things I wanted to tell him.
His fingers tightened around mine, reassuring me that he already knew.
And then Raoul was at my side once more, tugging me toward the start of our new lives.
Lives far from the opera.
Lives uncomplicated by this disaster of a night.
“It’s all right,” he promised, leading me down the passage to a second dock and helping me into a plain and unadorned rowboat. “It’s over.”
There was another explosion, and I heard the portcullis crash to the ground, raining shards of metal.
Erik’s voice rose over the cacophony, an eerie echo of Raoul’s words. “It’s over now,” he cried out, his voice echoing up and down the passageways of the basement, and causing the whole of the opera to tremble against the force of his words. “It’s over now, the music of the night!”