Phantom (48 page)

To steal her… to spirit her away…

What madness!

"Go away!" she said rudely to her dresser one evening.

"Mademoiselle!"

"Go away, go away, go
away
!"

Behind the mirror I stiffened in alarm as Christine flung into the room and threw herself down on the little stool at her dressing table. In all the weeks I had been watching her 1 had never guessed she could summon sufficient energy and emotion to have a prima donna's tantrum. Something had happened, something had roused her from her customary apathy and brought a flush to her pale face.

"
Beast
!" she exclaimed, when the dresser had left, obviously just as startled as I was. "That fat cow… that
mean
fat cow… I don't sing like a limping sparrow… I
don't
! I hope you get nodules on your cords, Carlotta… I hope that every time you open your mouth you croak like the horrid toad that you are!"

I was almost smiling at this splendid animation, governing an absurd impulse to cheer, when Christine suddenly put her head down on the dressing table and began to cry like a lost child.

"No, I don't wish that," she whispered brokenly. "I don't wish anything so wicked, God forgive me. I know it's true—I can't sing, I never could. Oh, Papa, why did you make promises you knew you couldn't keep? There's no Angel of Music waiting for me. There never was an Angel of Music. Why did you lie… why didn't you just
tell
me I'd never be any good?"

Behind the mirror my blood had begun to throb hotly, drumming intense excitement through my veins.

She wanted an Angel of Music—an angel who would make her believe in herself at last.

I'd been the Angel of Doom for the khanum. There was no reason in the world why I could not be the Angel of Music for Christine. I couldn't hope to be a man to her, I couldn't ever be a real, breathing, living man waking at her side and reaching out for her…

But I could be her angel.

My voice was my one beauty, my only power, my only hope; my voice would open a magic pathway into her life. I could not steal her body—but I could steal her voice and weld it irretrievably with mine; I could take it and mold it and make it mine forever, one little part of her that no other man should ever possess. All I had to do was break the silence that stood like a wall between us.

Softly at first, infinitely softly, I began to sing an old heathen, Romany song. The hollowed bricks carried the haunting melody relentlessly to her, permitted my voice to envelop her gently like a poisonous mist, seeping inexorably into her mind and staining her soul with darkness.

I watched the dawning awareness of her body. Like a snake responding instinctively to its charmer, she rose slowly and lifted her hand to my unseen presence. In her eyes I saw tremulous joy and bewildered recognition; it was as though she had been waiting all her life for this moment of revelation.

Before the huge mirror she knelt with a humility and reverence that stunned me momentarily into silence.

I knew then that there could be no turning back.

Wherever this shadowed path might lead, we were both irrevocably committed to follow it to the end.

From the journal of Christine Daae,

This isn't a diary, not in the accepted sense of the term.

I've no intention of sitting down dutifully each day to record tedious details of what I had for breakfast, which gown I ordered from my seamstress, and who said what to whom in the course of rehearsals. It's surely the height of vanity to assume anyone will want to read about your petty, unimportant little life a hundred years from now. I don't want anyone to read this document ever, for if they do I'll surely be locked up somewhere out of harm's way and people will go around shaking their heads and saying: "Poor Christine, such a shame, but of course I always had the suspicion she wasn't quite right in the head
—
never had her feet on the ground, you know, even as a young girl
."

No, this isn't a diary.

It's simply an attempt to prove to myself that I still retain my hold on sanity, that what has happened to me is real and not the product of an unstable mind and a wildly overactive imagination. The events of the last three months have been so strange, so bizarre, so wonderful, that I dare not speak of them except here on this paper.

I have heard the Angel of Music.

Oh, God
…
somehow I hoped it would look better

neatly written down in my orderly copperplate hand; but it doesn't. It just looks what it is
—mad!

I am not mad. I do not suffer from hallucinations, nor do I dream. I hear his voice inside my head as plainly as I hear anything else, but it is not a voice that belongs to this world; it is far, far too beautiful to be human.

Papa often spoke of the Angel of Music, but though I continued to listen to his stories with delight, I only really believed in the Angel when I was very young. It was just one of Papa's whimsical fancies, a bedtime tale that I hugged throughout my childhood and relinquished sadly when I reached the age of reason and disillusionment. I daresay I reached that age far later than most girls. Papa had a horror of my growing up and leaving him; he kept me a child until the day he died… and then suddenly I had to grow up overnight.

I entered the Conservatoire to study voice, just as he had wished, but I knew at the end of the first week that I was never going to be able to fulfill his dreams. 1 was never going to be a great prima donna. Either I'd forgotten how to sing or I never knew how to do it in the first place; increasingly I came to believe the latter case was true. Papa was a wonderful musician, but he'd allowed fond parental bias to sway his judgment where I was concerned. He'd built me a castle of dreams and abandoned me there; and day after day I wandered farther from the beautiful rooms we had inhabited together, until I found myself locked in the dungeon of despair. That was a place Papa had never told me about. I didn't know it existed until I heard the heavy door clang shut behind me; but I knew I'd never get out again because I didn't have the key. And the Angel of Music would never find me now, even if he bothered to come

looking. I had lost the will to strive for perfection and the ability to dream; sometimes I felt I was only half alive.

And then, on the very night when I had finally decided to abandon my hopeless career altogether, suddenly the Angel of Music was there with me.

I can hardly describe what 1 felt when I first heard his voice. There was an enormous exultation, but also a terrible fear of my own unworthiness, an utter terror that he would leave me as suddenly and as mysteriously as he had come. Even now after three months' tuition and a progress that is astonishing in my own ears, I am still riddled by the fear that one day I shall fail to please him. He's so stern and exacting in his demand for perfection; he never praises me, even when I know I have done well. He remains aloof and cold in his timeless, imperishable wisdom and I know that the worship of a mortal heart can mean nothing to him.

But his voice is my inspiration and my reward. It lifts me from my earthly shell and carries me to the very edge of the universe, a wondrous flight of body and soul that leaves me utterly exhausted.

When he is gone I only wish to sleep, for I know that in my dreams I shall hear that voice again.

I am living in a dream.

There is no reality, no existence, beyond those fleeting hours in which I teach her. The time between her lessons is a meaningless void, and the nights when she does not come to the theater are one long, unending fever of anguished waiting. It seems to me that I do nothing now but sit staring at the clock, willing time away, so that once more I may be close to her. So near, so near… and yet so far away.

The calendar tells me three months have passed, but they could be three seconds or three centuries for all the difference it makes. I am intoxicated by my power over her voice. I have broken the chains of mediocrity with which the Conservatoire had bound her and set her free to explore the outer reaches of her own genius. Again and again I toss her to the sky like a young gerfalcon and each time she soars with greater confidence and strength before returning to the safety of her master's gloved hand. All she needed was belief and will and inspiration, and these things she has found in my voice.

She's ready now to face the world's acclaim, and nothing on this earth will prevent me from masterminding her career here at the Opera.

When I have drunk her success and gorged on her triumph, like a glutted spider, I shall surely appease the ravening hunger that consumes me from within.

In time the pain will lessen.

I have to believe that.

Before he left me tonight the Angel of Music told me the strangest thing. He said I must be prepared to sing Carlotta's role in the gala performance on Friday night," I asked him how that could be, for even if Carlotta should not appear, I'm not her understudy, no one's going to think of me.

"You will not ask questions," he said coldly. "Everything will be arranged according to my will, that is all you need to know."

I was frightened. I begged him not to do this to me, I said I was not ready to face such a challenge alone.

"You will not be alone, " he said more gently now. "I shall be with you all the time. As long as you believe in me, you will hear my voice in your mind and you will not be afraid to sing like an angel yourself. Trust me, child. Give

me your soul and in return I will give you the heart of Paris."

La Carlotta has been taken ill and so has her understudy. What a shame! Could it possibly be something they've eaten?

No one suspects the Opera Ghost this time, of course. Why should they? After all, these little things are sent to try us!

Desperation has seized the management, for they're new to this game and don't know how to handle last-minute alterations—and these alterations are extremely last minute, I've made quite sure of that. There's a full house tonight and both Richard and Moncharmin have an instinctive aversion to losing money that I suppose I really ought to commend. They're out of their minds at the thought of having to cancel. The answer is there on their desk, of course—all they have to do is listen to O.G.