Unmasqued: An Erotic Novel of The Phantom of The Opera (19 page)

At last, Carlotta seemed to notice her. She turned, the pannier of her skirt bumping into Christine, and focused an angry look on her. Despite the fact that she was not a bit taller than the younger girl, the combination of her outraged expression and her towering hat made her seem gigantic.

“What you are doing, listening to my private conversations, little rat?”

“I was—I was merely trying to pass by,” Christine stammered, trying once again to slink past the obnoxious wire-framed skirt.

Carlotta thrust her face into Christine’s, her rouge- and powder-scented face, and rose-scented breath, overwhelming her. “Get out of my sight, you little rat! And you mind your own business!” The diva’s Spanish-flavored
r
sounds rolled and spit in Christine’s face. “You do not have any business with me!”

Christine fled. As she pushed her way down the hall, she heard the continued outrage from La Carlotta as she waxed angrily to the composer, and anyone who would listen, about “little rats who do not know their place” and other annoyances, at the top of her very capable lungs.

As she scuttled down the passageway, trying to hold back tears, Christine heard giggles and whispered comments and some outright
laughter. Instead of going back to her dormitory room, she turned blindly down the corridor that led to the small grotto used as a chapel. The place she prayed for her father’s soul, and the place where her
ange
had first spoken to her.

There, the tears of frustration and humiliation came, soaking the sleeve of her ratty practice costume, and dripping down onto the flimsy, floppy skirt in her lap.

She had not been there long when she heard his welcome voice. “Christine…”

“Angel,” she replied tearfully. Wiping her face and swallowing her tears, she looked up and round in the small cavelike chapel, lit only by seven candles in small alcoves in the wall.

“Do not trouble yourself with her, Christine,” he told her. “She is an undeserving woman, and she will get her own recompense.”

“I did nothing wrong,” Christine replied, sniffling. “She is a horrid cat.”

He chuckled, the tones of his laugh vibrant and warm. She felt better already. “A cat? You are not fond of felines, then, to put them in the same category as La Carlotta.”

“No, I do not like cats. They are sly and arrogant and barely deign to acknowledge one’s existence. And when they do, it is as if they are showing you great favor.”

She could still hear the humor in his voice when he replied, “Did you have a cat when you were younger, then, Christine? One that did not allow you to pet her?”

“How did you know that?” Her tears had dried.

“It was merely a guess.…For you to have such strong feelings about such an innocuous beast, I suspected as much. For what happens in our youth most often molds our maturity.” A trace of sadness hung in his voice now.

“Yes, when I was eight, Papa and I lived in Prague for nearly a
year. The mistress of our boardinghouse had a cat and she would not ever come to sit in my lap. I chased her and crawled under the furniture after her, dragging her out. She would scratch me when I held her. Then when I cried, she would run away again. She had such dark, soft fur. I wanted to hold her so badly.”

“Poor Christine,” the angel replied. “You needed to have something to hold, to comfort you.”

“Yes…I was very lonely.”

There was a silence, a hesitant pause before he spoke again. “And now…you are lonely still?”

“Not so much,” she replied honestly. “I have…you.”

“Is that why you came here when you were upset?”

“I hoped you would come to me here,
ange
, for this is the place you have come to me most often. And you make me feel…less lonely.”

“I am glad, Christine. I am glad.”

That day seemed to have been a turning point in their relationship. After that, her angel would remark about something that Carlotta, or one of the other dancers, had done that day, and they would laugh or talk about it. He even teased her about her dislike of cats, beasts that he admitted to finding quite intriguing.

He still remained a disembodied voice, and he still made her practice hard, and did not accept excuses. His presence always sent little snaking shivers down her neck and spine, and his voice still raged or soothed…but she felt as though he’d begun to reveal more of himself to her. He seemed to know everything about her; she was grateful for any drop of knowledge revealed about him.

Christine realized now, as she lazed in the massive bed positioned in Erik’s bedchamber, that those months of sharing their music and conversation had been the stepping-stones to what she felt now. Not just a physical relationship, but a deep, abiding connection
that transcended what his hands and lips did to her, that made her feel more than a passion…that made her feel as if she knew him, understood him. As if he was the most important thing in her life.

She realized that she’d found what the beautiful woman she’d admired must have had: love and happiness, and no loneliness. But she wasn’t wearing a beautiful gown. And she wasn’t standing onstage in front of a roaring audience, bathed in the limelight.

She was underground, in the darkness, with her
ange.
And she loved him.

Over the next week, Christine and Erik lived together in his small house by the underground lake, like any other man and woman in love. Erik worked on
Don Juan Triumphant
, the opera he had been composing in stretches for years, and Christine sang when he asked her to.

She loved to look at his writing, the pages of melodic composition: scrawled black notes, in oblong shapes as if they’d been dashed on the paper with little thought. Barely legible lyrics, scratched on the large foolscap, lined up under the notes. He wrote in pulses: frenzied jotting and scratching, and then slow, arrogant, and easy printing.

They laughed and talked and ate; she cooked and washed and cleaned. She learned that, along with his arrogance and mysterious demeanor, Erik had a dry wit and a range of strong opinions on everything from women’s fashion to the management of the Opera House. He was well-read and a brilliant engineer who had created a luxurious, if cloistered, living space for himself.

As the week went by, Christine’s life at the Opera House was pushed away into the deepest corner of her mind. It became like
the memory of a completely different life—competitive, crowded, loud, and superficial. The life embodied by the beautiful lady.

A life to which she was not eager to return.

The only mar on her days was the black mask that Erik refused to remove. She did not know if he even took it off when he slept, for he disappeared after they made love and returned before Christine awoke in the morning.

She did not understand it. She had seen every other part of his body, and it was as perfect as a man’s figure could be. Long and lean, muscular without being bulky, golden, and dusted with the right amount of rich black hair in just the right places. What could be so terrible on such a model of perfection that he had to hide it from her?

The one time she attempted to raise the subject, Erik responded with such deep, cold anger and stormed out of the room in such a violent manner that Christine became even more confused and curious. “You can never understand,” he snarled, and then locked himself in the music room for the rest of the day and night.

The rabid scratching of his pen over paper followed by discordant clashes and mournful chords came from the room well into the night, and continued when Christine awoke the next day.

Yet, she would not forget it. She could not bear to have something as simple as a tooled piece of leather between them.

And so, when, on the seventh day after he had brought her there, she awoke early in the morning and found him dozing on a chaise in the music room, she knew she at last had the opportunity. Her plan was to carefully lift the mask to see what was beneath, and to show him that it had no effect on her feelings for him. Surely, once the mask was removed and he saw that she still loved him, any annoyance he might harbor would dissolve.

She knew how to turn his attention to more pleasurable things.

Christine approached him quietly, noticing as she always did the way the broad sprinkling of hair dusted his square, molded chest, and trailed into a slender line into his trousers. The column of his neck, wide and long, curved above his throat’s tender hollow…one area on his sleek body that was as vulnerable as her own.

She reached, lifted the mask, and pulled it off quickly and smoothly.

What she saw was horrible—
horrible!
—and she screamed as his eyes flew open and he launched himself off the chaise.

“Damn you, Christine! Damn you!”
he cried, covering his horrid, disfigured face, scrabbling for the mask that still dangled from her fingers as she stared in terrified shock.
“How could you?”
he shouted, snatching at the mask and jamming it back on his face, grabbing her arm and throwing her to the chaise.

She stumbled, fell, crying as he raged and shouted, shoving papers off the piano, sending them cascading over the floor. He was crying, shaking, clutching at his middle as though he’d taken a bullet there, even as he shouted obscenities at her, his eyes wild and wide, his mouth curled in an irate red twist.

“Damn you!”
he cried over and over.
“Damn…you…Christine.”

He collapsed on the floor with great, jerking sobs that came from somewhere so deep they were nearly inaudible. But his entire folded body wrenched with each ruptured breath, and when he raised his flat blue eyes to stare at her at last, Christine knew she’d done the unforgivable.

C
hristine Daaé had disappeared more than seven days earlier and Maude knew Erik had taken her to where he might introduce her to more…personal tutelage. She smiled at the thought of the pleasure Christine was to receive from Erik’s strong body.

Since then, Carlotta had returned to grace the stage with her impossibly high, trilling arias, and the Opera House managers jumped at every shadow or every loud noise.

Maude felt it was her duty to find ways to help alleviate their tension.

She’d been anticipating her own pleasure when she finally got Monsieur Firmin Richard alone and at her mercy, but the moment never seemed to materialize. The man was always surrounded by people—stage managers, singers, dancers, musicians, even patrons. Maude had no choice but to take drastic measures.

It was the seventh night after Christine had disappeared, and the production of
Faust
was in full swell, with music filling the chamber and the dancers swirling about the stage. The Opera House was crowded to bursting—whether it was due to curiosity about the Opera Ghost and his abduction of the ingenuous singer, or desire to see the performance, no one was certain.

Maude wondered if anyone other than Carlotta had realized that, along with Christine’s disappearance, the Opera Ghost seemed to have gone away as well.

She stood in the shadows of the backstage area, between two of the five black curtains that hung parallel to one another on each side of the stage, from the front to the back wall. Each curtain was wider than the one in front of it, giving the stage a triangular appearance and affording various passageways where the cast might exit or enter from the performance area.

Beyond the black curtains, off to the side of the stage and beyond the sight of the audience, were the props and scenery from the production. And standing just in front of the large papier-mâché and wood construction that represented Hell was Maude’s target.

Firmin Richard was tall and lean, with an equine face, long fingers, narrow wrists, a long bony nose, large, narrow feet…and the promise that this tendency would be repeated elsewhere. Maude’s quim moistened at the mere thought of what his trousers must hide.

She worked her way between the curtains until she stood in the shadows behind Richard. His attention was focused on the performers, and he stood with his hands clasped at the back of his waist, his elegant foot tapping in off time with the music.

Maude moved closer to him, hiding in the folds of the black curtain carefully so that it wouldn’t move and attract the attention of the audience, and so that she could remain out of his sight for
the moment. She wanted the element of surprise on her side. Thus, stepping just behind him, she walked right into his clasped hands, aiming her opening right where his fingers twiddled.

When her crotch brushed up against Richard, he fairly jumped forward, and would have blundered into the craggy Hell scenery if she had not grabbed his coattails.

“Now, now, Firmin, you know you have been waiting for this for many weeks,” she whispered boldly into his ear, holding him in place, back against her. She tipped her hips toward his ass and felt, to her satisfaction, his fingers take up twiddling again just where she needed it the most. Despite the fact that the little twitching motions were on the other side of three layers of fabric, Maude’s nib lifted and stretched there as she pressed forward.

“Now, let us see what you have here…,” she murmured into his ear, and slid her hands from behind under his coattails and jacket, and into the front trouser pockets. To her delight, the right one had a hole in it, and it was no large task to force her fingers through the fraying seam and onto the warm, hairy flesh of his thigh.

Richard jumped again when she touched him, and craned his long neck to see behind him. Maude pressed her breasts into his back and slid her hand through the opening of his drawers and found what she was looking for.

Oui, tout à fait!

She smiled, and smiled more as her fingers closed around his slender, pulsing length…and slid longer, and longer, and…
mon Dieu
, longer!

“
Oui
,” she murmured, tears of joy springing to her eyes as her sex throbbed. “
Oui!
”

No one could see Maude and Firmin. Hell stood between them and the audience, and the performers were all in front of the massive set structure.