Phantom (11 page)

"I must bury her," he repeated, as though he had not heard a word I had spoken. He swayed to his feet, and though the red stain on his shirt spread alarmingly, I knew that I could not prevent him. Wounded and broken with grief, he was still stronger than I, still capable of throwing me across the room if I resisted his wild determination.

Lifting down a lantern, I lit his way into the orchard at the back of the house without another word.

I wept as I watched him struggling to dig a grave in the iron-hard soil. He would not permit me to help and I crouched on the grass beside Sasha's slowly stiffening body, stroking the matted fur and wincing at the labored sound of his every breath. Listening to the trembling notes of the Dies Irae, I closed my eyes and clung to the crucifix around my neck.

"Forgive him, Father… forgive him! He is only an angry child. He does not understand how he sins…"

When it was done, Erik stumbled back to the house and collapsed on the sofa in the drawing room. I ripped open the sodden shirt, but there was so much blood that I could not immediately locate the site of the wound and I felt panic closing in around me.

"Madeleine!" turned with relief to find Etienne standing in the open doorway, his hat in one hand and his bag in the other. In a single stride he seemed to be beside me, bending over the sofa in alarm.

"Who did this?" he demanded with cold fury.

"I don't know. There was a crowd… men, boys… They killed the dog. He struggled with them and then… Oh, God, Etienne, is it serious?"

He frowned as he probed the wound with expert fingers.

"It's missed the lung, he's been very lucky. Heat some water, would you, and bring some salt."

I did as I was told and returned to watch anxiously as Etienne worked on my son with deft efficiency. He was very calm and there was no indication in his manner that this patient differed in any respect from his others.

Erik lay very still, watching him with guarded hostility.

"Are you Doctor Barye?" he demanded warily.

Etienne smiled briefly in acknowledgment.

"Why are you helping me?"

"I am a doctor," said Etienne, with a gentle patience that quite took me by surprise. "It is my duty to help those who require my skills. You have been a very brave boy, Erik. I am going to give you something that will make you sleep now."

To my surprised relief Erik accepted the draught without a murmur of protest, and within a few minutes his breathing had become even and his eyes closed wearily.

Etienne closed up his bag and stared at the face on the cushion. Now that he was no longer hiding behind the barriers of his professional dignity, I could see the shocked pity and disbelief that had crept into his eyes. He reached out and took my hand absently.

"I have never seen anything like this before," he said slowly. "This is not a simple case of disfigurement… it's almost as though…" He fell silent, groping for words and ideas that were just beyond the reach of his sharp mind, and I sensed the deep frustration of a man whose moment of inner vision confronts the insurmountable boundaries of existing language and knowledge.

"Lamarck defined two laws governing the ascent of life to higher stages," I heard him mutter to himself. "Is it possible that there could be another determining factor—a spontaneous alteration of a life-form?"

His musings were beyond my comprehension, and after a moment he abandoned the vain struggle for expression and came to put his arms around me.

"I can't condone the behavior of the village, but at least I can understand it now. Madeleine, you can't possibly continue to keep him hidden away in this house; they'll never leave you in peace after this. For his own sake you must permit me to put him in a place of safety."

"An institution… an asylum for the insane?"

I covered my face with my hands, but Etienne pulled them gently away and forced me to look at him.

"You must face the truth, my darling. You can't contain him any longer within these four walls. I have heard enough to know that he is already quite beyond your control. Rightly or wrongly the village fears him, and wherever you try to take him it will be the same—hatred, persecution… violence. This time it was the dog, next time it could be you. You have to think about your own safety… your own sanity."

"Sanity?" I whispered uneasily.

He shook his head gravely. "Marie Perrault came to me this evening. She was very worried about you, Madeleine, she begged me to come and see you. Why else do you think I would have come here without invitation?"

I tried to turn away from him, but he caught my arm.

"I won't stand by and see you driven out of your mind for the sake of a freak accident of nature. I'm very sorry for the child, but there's nothing I can do for him except put him beyond the reach of the ignorant."

"Etienne—"

"No… listen to me, just listen! Let me make the arrangements and when it's done we'll go away from here, far away where no one knows you, to a place where you can begin to forget. I love you, Madeleine, and I know that you love me. There's no reason in the world why we should not make our life together once you are free of this monstrous burden."

Erik stirred on the sofa with a drowsy moan.

"Can he hear us?" I demanded anxiously.

"I'd be most astonished if he could. I gave him enough laudanum to make him sleep the clock around."

Even so I was uneasy. Picking up his bag and hat, I drew him out into the hall and closed the door; and once we were there, I handed him his belongings and asked him to go.

"Madeleine"—he sighed—"you haven't listened to a word I've said."

"Oh, yes, I've listened," I said sadly. "I've listened and I've understood… and I've made up my mind. If I did as you suggest I know that I should only come to hate myself—and in time I should begin to hate you. Go away from Boscherville, Etienne… go right away and forget you ever saw me. That's all you can do now, because I won't abandon my child. Not even for you."

He looked at me with despair.

"The midwife had no right to let him live," he said darkly. "If I had attended his birth he would never have drawn a single breath."

I smiled faintly and touched his hand.

"You would not have done that, Etienne. You would have saved him then, just as you have saved him now. You are a good Catholic."

"But I'm a bad doctor!" he said grimly. "A bad doctor, and a very great fool."

I said nothing. He put on his hat with dignity and opened the front door.

"I'm going back to Paris at the end of the month," he told me steadily. "If you change your mind in the meantime you know where to find me."

"I won't change my mind."

He reached out and touched my cheek gently.

"No," he said sadly, "I know that you won't."

A moment more he looked at me with regret, and then he was gone, striding away down the path between the swaying beech trees, without a backward glance.

There were tears in my eyes as I locked the door, but my movements had a new purpose and steadiness; I was no longer operating like a sleepwalker in a trance. The dream was gone, I was awake now.

Returning to the drawing room I covered Erik with a blanket; he did not move and I judged him to be deeply asleep. A strange calm came over me as I looked down on him, a curious sense of resignation. For the first time since his birth I felt at peace with myself.

I lifted the figure of the shepherd boy from the chair where I had dropped it in the panic of the moment and placed it, without emotion, upon the mantelpiece, where it belonged. It had no power to move me now, I was no longer its mindless slave.

I had only one child. One child, whose mind I had warped and twisted, whose affection I had spurned, and whose heart I had repeatedly broken. But I did not want him dead and I did not want him shut away.

I did not want these things because I loved him.

More than fetienne; and now at, at last, more than myself.

When I looked in the mirror in my room, I no longer saw a spoiled, inadequate child, brooding bitterly on the cruelty of her fate. For the first time I saw a grown woman in her place.

It could not be too late to repair the harm that I had done. I would not let it be too late. Tomorrow, while he watched, I would gather all the masks together and throw them on the fire.

The sun woke me, stealing over my face like a warm caress.

Sitting up with a start, I glanced at the clock and saw with concern that it was already late morning. I had tumbled into bed the night before, like a spent swimmer who has struggled to a far-off shore, and slept like the dead for almost twelve hours. Flinging a wrapper around my shoulders, I hurried downstairs to the drawing room, where the heavy curtains were still closed.

Even in the dim gloom I saw at once that the room was empty.

"Erik?"

My voice echoed eerily in the gloomy silence and my slippered footsteps seemed unnaturally loud as I ran back up the stairs.

"Erik, where are you?"

When I threw open the door of his room, shafts of harsh, brilliant light struck me full in the face and forced me to shield my dazzled eyes with a gasp. It was a few moments before I was able to focus on the source of these cruel rays, and then I saw that his odd collection of mirrors had been set out at angles around the broken remains of the shepherd boy, to reflect a maze of macabre images that took my breath away with shock.

I knelt in the sunlight beside the high altar of a child's imagination and stared dumbly at a message so plain, so unequivocal, that it might have been written across the glass in blood. I could see now that the figure had not been smashed in anger, but carefully severed by a glass cutter with a ritual precision that left the head and limbs recognizably intact. I was looking at the remains of an execution, staring down upon a dismembered body that asked nothing more of me in this world except burial.

I continued to kneel on the floor, surrounded by his few treasures… my father's architectural library, a cupboard full of musical scores, a chest stuffed with a weird collection of magical devices. The violin that I had given him when he was three lay abandoned and forgotten at the foot of his bed. I could see that he had taken nothing with him in his headlong flight from the house; and I knew, without looking, that my purse remained untouched on the chest of drawers in my room.

This grim gesture of childish sacrifice showed me every painful thought which had led him to this final act of despair.

I had given him life, but now he chose to take no more from me. And in the tomb-like silence of this sunlit room, his last, unspoken words rang in my ears like the tolling of a passing bell.

Forget me…