No Return: A Contemporary Phantom Tale (31 page)

Erik stood behind the massive carved mahogany desk, a slender form in black, his profile outlined by the reddish glow of the fire. He said nothing as I approached, but merely waited until I finally paused, irresolute, at the edge of the Persian rug that fronted the desk.

Now that the moment was upon me, I found my mouth dry, my heart beginning again with its irrational pounding. Why wouldn’t he speak?

The silence grew too dreadful. Finally I said, “Thank God you said you would see me.”

A brief dismissive gesture. “I assure you, God had nothing to do with it.”

So he was going to be difficult. Well, what had I expected—that he would be overcome by my beauty and fling himself into my arms? “I know I did something for which there can be no apologies. But then again, so did you.”

“I did?”

His voice was beautiful even when being coldly dismissive, as now. How I wanted to go to him then, feel his arms around me, feel the touch of his lips against mine. But I knew I had to go about this with great care; one misstep, and he could be lost to me forever. “By kidnapping me, you did more than commit a crime. You took away my ability to choose you for yourself.” I took a step forward, then another. Now only a few feet separated us. I could feel the heat of the fire against my bare arms and neck. “Was it really so impossible, Erik? Did you really think that I couldn’t possibly want you for yourself?”

At that he did turn to face me, but I could read nothing of his expression beneath the mask. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, I think I do.” I looked him in his eyes, hoping he could see more of my soul than I could of his. “Didn’t you feel it, that first time we met? I did, even though I didn’t want to admit it to myself. When we danced, when you held me, couldn’t you sense the connection?”

To his credit, he held my gaze, although I could see the thin, mobile lips tighten. “You gave little evidence of it.”

“Well, what did you expect me to do? I had just met you—and I was seeing someone else at the time.” My next words came out in a rush. “Of course you couldn’t know that I felt your touch for hours afterward, that I heard your voice in my dreams that night. But I did. I still do.”

He made no reply, but I saw his hands clench into fists at his sides.

“That’s why I thought I had to run,” I continued. I knew that I couldn’t stop now. I had to lay everything before him, try to make him understand. “How could I let myself succumb to you? How could I give in to your plans? I thought that if I didn’t get away, I’d lose a piece of my soul forever.” For some reason I could feel tears start to my eyes, but I refused to let myself weep. “It wasn’t until you stopped me that I realized it was too late anyway. It wasn’t until I thought of how much I had hurt you that I realized I loved you.”

Silence then, a silence that lengthened until I felt as if the whole world had been stretched thin as blown glass, ready to shatter at the first ungentle touch. Erik stood absolutely still, but his eyes never left my face.

“I think I know why you felt compelled to kidnap me. I think I’ve finally understood why you’ve hidden in this house, behind the mask.” Again I paused to catch my breath, and for the first time I could see fear behind his eyes. “And I have to prove to you now that it doesn’t matter.”

And with that I reached across the gulf between us and lifted the mask from his face.

She didn’t scream. She didn’t faint. Her face went very pale, the stain on her lips looking almost like blood against the whiteness of her skin, but she stood her ground. The mask fell from her hand to the Persian rug.

Dear God, why wasn’t she backing away, fleeing in terror, or crumpling to the ground, overcome by horror? But she did none of those things. Instead, she stepped even closer. Her hair gleamed like mahogany flame in the reflected light from the fire. The sapphires around her throat seemed to glow with their own inner incandescence. He found himself suddenly mired in quicksand, as if the wooden floor beneath his feet had turned into a swamp, and he was powerless to move or react.

“Let me love you,” she said, and although her voice shook somewhat, she still looked steadily into his eyes. Before he knew what was happening, she had taken his ravaged face in her hands and brought her lips against his.

Nothing, no fevered dreams, no soul-twisting fantasies brought on by sexual deprivation, had ever matched this sensation. He had never allowed any of the women he had been with in his youth to touch his face or kiss him on the mouth, yet here was Christine doing both, unreservedly. The touch of her lips on his seemed to set his entire body on fire, as if every nerve ending had suddenly been sparked by a determined match. And now her mouth opened beneath his, and he could feel her tongue meeting his, every part of her opening to him.
 

He raised his hands to hold her finally, meeting the soft, slender flesh of her arms, the shocking openness of the back of her dress. She pressed her body against his, and suddenly he could smell the faint scent of roses rising once again from her hair, feel the curve of her breasts meeting his own chest, the unexpected height of her in the stiletto heels.
 

Surely this had to be a dream? Surely it couldn’t be Christine holding him, kissing him, letting her mouth move unreservedly from his lips to his maimed cheek. But no, she was still there, still clinging to him, her heart pounding so it could be felt even through his suit jacket.
 

After an eternity or so she finally drew away a little, her breathing ragged. But still she looked at him with no apparent revulsion, and then she smiled, the dimple flickering at the corner of her cheek.

“You haven’t said it,” she commented.

He could hardly focus on what she had just said. The feel of her mouth on his was still too vivid. And how could she possibly be looking at him and smiling? “Said what?”

“I’ve heard it’s what all women dread. Saying ‘I love you’ and not getting the same in return.”

Was that all? Suddenly those three words sounded so inconsequential, compared to the depth of his passion for her. How woefully inadequate. “I’ve loved you since the moment I saw you.” His own voice sounded shaken, the voice of a stranger. “And I’ve loved you more every day. Even when I thought you hated me.” There had been a time when he thought he would have died before revealing so much of himself. But that had been a lifetime ago. That had been before Christine kissed him.

Was it only the firelight that seemed to make her eyes glisten with unshed tears? “Erik, I’m so sorry for that. I know that may not be enough, but I am sorry.”

Not enough? When her kiss and unflinching regard had given him the first step toward healing a lifetime of pain? God, he should be begging her forgiveness for what he had done to her, stealing her from her life, hiding her here. But somehow, despite everything, she had still come to love him. She had found the strength to recognize the attraction between them and act upon it. If it hadn’t been for her resolve, he might never have known the feel of her lips upon his.
 

At last he said, “Christine always leaves the Phantom.”

With that she reached out and touched the scarred side of his face, brushing the tips of her fingers against the raised flesh there. Even after all these years, the nerve endings were still damaged; the feather’s-touch of her fingers against the injured tissue brought on a slight pins-and-needles sensation.
 

Holding his gaze, she said steadily, “That was their story, Erik. This is ours.”

And again she brought her mouth to his, the silk of her gown rustling against him as she held him tightly, almost as if she thought she could erase his pain by every touch, every caress. His arms tightened around her, and he let himself surrender to the flood of sensations that rushed once more over him. There was nothing in the world but her, nothing but the feel of her mouth on his, the press of her body against him. Over and over they kissed, until he thought he would surely drown in her, lose himself forever in the heat of their passion.

At length, though, they slowly drew apart, although he wasn’t sure whether it was he or Christine who finally ended the embrace. He suddenly realized how naked he felt without the mask, how vulnerable. So he bent and picked it up, then made a move to replace it.

“You don’t have to do that, you know,” Christine said. Her glossy curls were lying in a glorious tangle over one shoulder, and her mouth looked swollen from his fierce kisses. He thought she had never been so beautiful.

He turned the mask over in his hands for a moment, watching as the firelight caught the curves and hollows, glimmering over the smooth plastic. “I’ve worn this mask for almost twenty years,” he said. “It’s a part of me still. Even though I know you don’t need me to wear it, I feel as if I should.” And he lifted it to his face, settling the wire that held it in place so it was covered by his hair. He managed a smile. “Besides, I’d probably shock Jerome into retirement if I went out without it.”

That comment brought an answering smile to her face. “I understand, Erik. As long as you’re wearing it for yourself and not for me. Because for me it doesn’t matter.”

He kissed her then, gently, on the cheek. “I know that now. And I thank you for it.” He offered her his hand, and she took it. “Come now. I have something I want to show you.”

“What’s that?”
 

The last of my secrets
, he thought, but only replied, “You’ll see.”

And with that he led her out of the room that had been the heart of his isolation for so many years and now, it seemed, had been the beginning of his redemption.
       

Chapter 23

Erik took the candelabra from its stand in the corner of the room and gestured for me to follow him. I thought I understood why he choose to light our way with its uncertain flame, rather than turn on the harsher electric lights. Wherever he was taking me, clearly it was important to him, and he did not want to break the evening’s spell with the prosaic intrusion of such modern-day inventions.

So I drifted after him in the dimly lit corridors, stumbling once on the carpet runner in those dratted stiletto heels—Erik was quick to reach out to steady me, his hand warm and strong on my bare arm. Once again the corridors slid past like something out of a Cocteau-inspired dream, but this time I was awake, and I at last knew the truth behind the mask.

In a way, I had been surprised by my own reaction, or lack thereof. Oh, I was no Victorian Christine, carefully sheltered from the ugliness of the world. If nothing else, I’d seen my share of horror movies and the elaborate excesses of today’s special-effects makeup.
 

More than that, though, I’d been forced at a very early age to see some of the ugliest this world had to offer. When my parents had been killed in the car accident when I was fifteen, I’d had to accompany my grandmother to identify the bodies, since she had advanced diabetes and glaucoma and was legally blind by then. So even though she had stood beside me and held my hand through the whole procedure, I was the one who had to look down at the shattered faces of my parents and tell the coroner who they were. It had been a head-on collision at forty or fifty miles an hour, and the physics at work had not been kind.
 

Compared to that, Erik’s deformity had been almost mild. Oh, there was no arguing that he had a very valid reason for hiding himself from the world, for concealing half his face behind a mask. I of course had no idea what congenital disfigurement or birth trauma he’d suffered, but the right side of his face was still crisscrossed by the scars left behind by surgeons who had obviously tried to correct those deformities. It appeared that his right eye socket had originally been located far lower down on his cheek than it was now; the skin high on his cheekbone was livid with scar tissue, and the eye socket itself was just as bad. He had no lashes on that eye, and a fine fretwork of scar tissue crossed his eyebrow and disappeared somewhere into his hairline on that side of his face. The scarring faded as it moved down toward his jaw line, and his mouth was not touched at all. To anyone else, his visage probably would have been horrific. But I knew him now, had come to realize the depth of his enormous talent and agile mind, and compared to those attributes, his scarred face was of little import.
 

I still felt his mouth on mine, the warmth of his breath on my cheek. I could sense the enormous pent-up passion within him. It should have frightened me, perhaps; after all, I had no real experience of men, had never gone any further with Randall than a few heated kisses. But again I was no cloistered Victorian girl, kept completely unaware of relations between the sexes. I knew exactly what Erik wanted from me, and I knew that I wanted it from him as well. The only real question lay in how long we both could wait before succumbing to our passions.

After we had descended the main staircase, Erik led me down the main corridor, on past the salon where we had once ventured out into a sunlit day—it seemed years ago now. We continued on, past a seemingly unending number of closed-off rooms, until he stopped at the very end of the corridor, where a set of carved double doors rose up before us.

He transferred the candelabra to his left hand and pulled a set of keys out of his coat pocket with his right. The key went into the lock, and he began to turn it, then said, “I don’t want this to disturb you—”

“Unless you’ve got the remains of your last seven wives in there, like Bluebeard, I doubt that whatever is in there will bother me too much,” I replied, taking care to keep my tone light.
 

“Nothing that bad, I assure you,” he said, and I was gratified to see that he was smiling.

“Well, then—”

And he turned the key in the lock and pushed the doors open, moving ahead of me into the dark space. At first I could see nothing, but he touched the candelabra he was carrying to a similar one by the door, and then more and more as he moved throughout the room.

It was the Phantom’s lair
.