Chapter Twenty-two

A mist hung above the ground, blanketing everything in an eerie fog. The dampness invaded everything, soaking through clothing to drench all it touched.

Erik lifted his head to watch the mist writhe before him. His eyes swam back and forth as he followed its dance macabrely. It reminded him of the bluish fog that would dance for him nightly above the lake beneath the Opera Garnier. Knees to chest, his cloak draped over him to protect his already cold frame from further assault, Erik laid his head back into the security of his arms. To any passerby, he was another tramp taking shelter beneath the train trestle.

Bracelets of blood had caked around his wrists. Every time he moved them the wounds stung. His body ached from being thrown around in the back of that carriage. But it was his mind that hurt the most. It bellowed with an awful severity. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the flames consume his life. Erik couldn’t escape the sounds of the fire-engulfed barn.

He didn’t care about anything anymore. His life had ended the moment he understood the profound power of grief.

Erik shifted to avoid the splattering mud as a carriage rumbled past. The offending matter deckled his already soiled cloak. He burrowed himself into the sanctuary of his knees and tried to close out the world. He had lived the life of the very wealthy and wasted away among the very poor. Now he existed in limbo.

Somewhere he heard a shout, then what sounded like pain followed by the groans of pleasure. The sounds were close and unrelenting. He lowered his face deeper into his knees and ignored it. Some pathetic human was seeking pleasure with another, far be it from him to interrupt.

Erik willed sleep to come. Inevitably running would be a must again. It would only be a matter of time until they found him. Yet why run at all? He had nothing to run toward. The sounds got louder, peppered with an occasional sharp crack or sudden wail. Erik tried to drown them out by focusing on the only memory keeping his demons locked away.

Blinking, he remembered the snap of a log that had sent orange sparks into the air. The evening had been warm as well. As the embers danced, he recalled waltzing with Anna, his voice providing the music and the woodland providing the hall. It was a happier time during a manhunt when he felt truly loved, before the memories set in and the past interrupted the present. The love that night was sweet and gentle. Its passion lingered long into the evening. It was all he ever dreamed for the first moment he would lay with a woman.

Erik’s eyes snapped open. His head shot up. The cries intensified and interrupted the sounds of ardor that had calmed his madness. Then he saw them on the other side of the trestle. There were two men engaged in pleasures with an obviously unwilling partner. Erik’s temperature rose and his eyes burned behind his mask. Reaching into the pocket of his cloak, he fingered this coil of silk rope. It was her cries he had heard—cries of pain. Like the pain Anna must have endured when flame hit flesh; like the pain she must have felt each time a man had used her.

Erik rose.

The man laughed and hit the girl again. Her head snapped sideways with the punch, as her body rocked from his needs. The filthy rat’s moans joined with laughter from the second man—the one who pinned her from behind. She couldn’t even struggle against the bizarre standing ménage.

Moving like liquid darkness, Erik became possessed by the thought of a woman in despair. A need unfurled inside of him, and he took no pity on who satisfied it. His nimble fingers caressed the length of silk. Murder was a companion one could never quite dismiss. The need would continually come back—uninvited—during the darkest moments. He watched the disgusting dance, his soul smoldering with repulsion. It awoke every perverse need in his body.

Laughter coated everything before the devil rose. Approaching them from behind, Erik projected his laughter around the trestle. It was so sharp and sudden of sound that neither man had time to react. Erik’s thin lasso snaked around the neck of one, neatly garroting him. With a savage jerk, he was yanked from his prize. Mud spattered as he hit the ground, near lifeless. The girl whimpered and struggled against the grip of her second tormentor. Controlling the man with the awesome power of his voice, Erik’s words cut through the tunnel. “Leave her for me. Now.”

The man froze in a trance-like stupor.

Erik paused long enough to release his length of rope from the other man’s neck. He discretely pressed two fingers to his pulse long enough to be check that he still had a pulse. Garroting was a fine art. Erik only needed to apply slightly more pressure to the rope to kill—if he wanted to. Instead, he coiled it and tucked it out of sight. It just took a lift of his inhuman eyes and a glimpse of his mask to send the man’s still shocked companion running. Erik watched him trip and slide down the road before looking at the man at his feet. He stepped over his body and turned toward the woman at his side.

His gaze slid from her feet to her mousy hair. The child was no more than fifteen he surmised. She leaned against the wall of the tunnel, trembling as she cringed. Her face was a mess of bloody bruises. She wiped at her lip with a filthy sleeve and nodded in the direction of the fleeing man. Bravery tried to color her voice, but her youth defied her.

“They were paying customers.” She licked her bloodied lip. Pulling herself up straighter and smoothing out her bunched-up skirts, she pushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “You cost me my meal.” Erik stared at her as her voice shook. “Are you going to hurt me?”

He cocked his head. The girl had pressed herself flat against the wall of the tunnel. Her bosom heaved as she tried to breath steady.

The back of her hand shook as she wiped her upper lip again. “What do you want from me?” Sniffling loudly, she shoved off of the wall. “You’ll have to pay double to make up for both of them. I’ll do anything you ask, so long as you have the coin. I’m hungry.”

Erik stood motionless as she daringly stepped close to him. She reached beneath his cloak to fumble with the buttons of his trousers. Erik regarded her, locking his eyes on her face. All emotion left him at the moment. He willed the thought of the woman he loved and lost from his mind. Anna too had been young—young, bold, defiant and desirable.

Erik dipped his skeletal fingers into his pocket. He withdrew the only remaining coin he had. He lifted them before her eyes before pressing them into her eager palm. The girl smiled and tucked them into the pocket of her dress. Her hands continued to shake as she worked to undo his trousers.

“What do you fancy, Monsieur?”

“Find a room in town.”

“A man of refinement!” She succeeded in freeing a button. “Then what do you desire of me?”

Erik shot his head to the side and clamped down on his teeth. He stepped out of her reach. “Locate a physician to tend to your wounds then take a meal and hot bath.” The girl’s face twisted. “Spring is damp. Spend the night in comfort.” Erik pulled his cloak closer around him and backed himself into the shadows. “Come morning locate a loaf and enough food to last you through the day.”

He left the girl dumbstruck and started down the road.

“Monsieur?”

Erik heard her footsteps pound against the muddy ground as she tried to catch up to him. When he stopped short, so did she. Erik turned.

“God bless you,” she said.

She was clutching the money close to her breast, her eyes no longer filled with fear. Erik nodded. “Where is the closest camp?”

The girl swallowed hard and pointed. “Tramps find haven west, down the tracks.”

Erik turned in the indicated direction. The sound of muddy footsteps echoed again as she ran to catch up a second time. She grabbed a corner of his cloak.

“Please, Monsieur, let me repay you. Share the meal perhaps?”

Erik snapped, yanking his cloak free from the grip as he turned. “Leave, damn you before I change my mind!” The girl stumbled backward; she opened her mouth to reply. “Leave while you still have your life and your last shred of innocence, because I can and will destroy them both! Speak of me to know one, do you hear? No one! I was never here.” He took two strides into her and raised a gnarled finger to her face. “If I find I am followed or betrayed, I will know why and I assure you, the result I will befall on you will not bring as much pleasure for you as it will for me.” When she trembled, Erik pointed back toward the town. He lowered his voice to the coo of a dove and took a deep breath, regretting his tone. “Go. You bleed, tend to your needs.”

He ignored the throb of his wounds and left her standing in the darkness. He heard her cry echo then fade away as she fled.

“You’re my angel!”

Was he angel, Phantom, lover or father? Erik no longer knew. The only distinctions he understood were that of life versus death, joy versus sorrow, lust versus love and of man battling madman.

Retreating once more to the only memory that was slowing the rising noise in his mind, Erik pushed on into the night, one foot in front of the other, a dance he performed alone.

He walked until his legs threatened to buckle underneath him. Erik’s fingers were numb as he traced the horizontal lines carved in the trunk of the tree. It had become commonplace for Erik to look for those symbols, a sign throughout France that an area was friendly to tramps. He spotted a camp off in the distance. Hood up, he headed toward the promise of shelter, in need of rest and freedom and from bars closing in around his mind.

Roamers filled the old mine. Erik kept his head down and scanned the space. There were no signs of gendarmes or hounds. Loup had been cunning since Erik fled Chaumont. On more than one occasion, he found himself slipping away from a waiting ambush.

The cracking fires herded people from all walks of life. Somewhere, a melancholy tune played on a mouth organ. Erik wove his way through the masses, ignoring the salutations extended to him. The people he dodged didn’t care about his appearance or his current state. And vagabonds rarely made mention of his mask.

The desolate pay no mind to difference Erik, only indifference.

He shredded the memory of Anna’s voice until it no longer existed. Recalling it was too painful. Two young boys dodged in front of him in an enthusiastic game of tag, bringing Erik up short. It made him have to fight off the images that chased him around—flashes of the Philippe he gave life to, and the one he killed. He was sure now that he killed them both.

Didn’t he?

Erik found a secluded spot. Completely sacked, he slumped to the ground too tired to move. His fingers pounded with pain the instant he attempted to flex warmth into them. Infection was imminent. The motions he made to assure his fingers still obeyed him cracked the dried blood on his wrists and caused fresh blood to pool into his palms. He rubbed his palms frantically against his cloak. He couldn’t have blood on his hands if his hands hadn’t killed anyone.

The tune on the mouth organ shifted to an overly upbeat one making the camp explode with loud whoops of jubilation. Erik tore his eyes from the litter-strewn ground to watch the gaiety around him. Wanderers of all ages and sizes took to their feet, dancing merry reels and clapping enthusiastically to the tune. They eventually blurred before him. He blinked back tears and carried on a silent argument with the demons in his mind. I am not mad. I am just a man.

“You’re bleeding.”

Erik looked up. A smiling young man stood beside him and laid a bundle at his feet.

“I’m not much for dancing myself,” the boy said. “It’s cornbread. We’ve plenty.” He indicated Erik’s hands. “You should tend your wounds. You need to take care of yourself if you’re hurt. Infection could set in, and you can’t wander if you’re ill.” The youth knelt. A kerchief appeared from a pocket as he reached for Erik’s wrists.

Erik yanked his hands out of his reach. “Stay away from me! I am a madman.”

The boy was not deterred. “You’re not mad. You’re a wanderer. We all think this life is madness at some point.”

With an incoherent cry, Erik knocked the youth off balance, sprawling him onto his back. Erik’s hands shot forward and clamped tightly around his throat as he pinned him to ground. Erik’s voice tightened as he spoke. “I am a madman! My hands do not even have to touch someone to kill any longer.”

That was logical, wasn’t it? His madness was screaming that he had killed Philippe de Chagny even though his memories swore he hadn’t.

Erik shook his head, fighting for sanity. He dug fingers into the boy’s neck only to feel the sensation that he still had a grip on something. A bubbling cry gargled out the boy’s lips as Erik watched a sick terror dawned in his eyes. His struggles were just loud enough to screech the music to a halt and send numerous wanderers racing across the mine.

“Stay away from me!” Erik wailed to the approaching mob. Inadvertently, enough slack came off the boy’s neck to permit him to speak.

“I’m all right,” he hoarsely declared. His voice shook as he spoke up at Erik. “She said you’d be unstable. She said to stay calm if you went crazy because that means you’re only vulnerable. You don’t intend to harm anyone.”

“Who said I do not intend harm?”

“The little Austrian.” A voice cried from the crowd.

Erik’s grip on the boy beneath him lessened even more as he searched the crowd. “What little Austrian?”

“We don’t know her name, Monsieur. We’ve met her on these trails before—she and the old man.”

Erik blinked. An Austrian and an old man? It couldn’t be. They burned!

“She said you’d come looking for them,” the boy below him lisped.

Erik leaned down inches from his face. “She? A baby? Did she have a baby?”

“She had an infant, Monsieur,” confirmed a man in the crowd.

Erik straightened as if those words were a shot to his spine. He twirled in a frantic circle, scattering the crowd that had gathered. “An infant? My son! Did you see my son?”

Erik’s eyes pinned on one man who was nodding rapidly. “He was fine,” the man blurted. “She and the infant were fine.”

Erik grabbed him by the back of his neck and yanked him close. “You lie.” He shoved the man backward and crouched low into his pain as he growled to the crowd. “You all lie!” Why should such an exquisite miracle be applied to his life? Erik straightened up, as the crowd blurred around him. The noise in his head drowned out any sense of reason. He puffed out his chest. “All I have is death. See? Death walks! Death talks! I am built of Death.” Erik backed himself away from the camp. Anna and his son were dead. They were all too stupid to realize it. “You all lie!”

“She said to tell you they were heading to Dieppe,” a voice called out.

The words kicked him in the chest.

“They left two days ago,” another echoed.

The power of such an idea knocked him sideways. Before he thought he could be beaten no worse by the words, a third person replied.

“She said they tried to wait for you, many times, but it was too dangerous.”

Blood pounded loudly in his ears. Erik’s low moan vibrated the air. “No. I watched them burn. I killed them.”

The circle of misfits around him was nodding, trying to convince him of the truth. They were all fools.

“They said to find them in Dieppe.”

Erik pushed those words off from him as he backed away. As long as he lived, he lived in vain. There is nothing their words that could penetrate a mind existing on infinite darkness. He’d not be played the fool. Erik’s reign was in a kingdom that no woman or child could ever comprehend. The camp became suffocating, and the eyes on him too much to bear.

Erik pushed his way through the crowd desperate to evade the pressure building in his chest but stopped before he got a few paces away. Something came over him, what, he couldn’t decipher. It pulled him back toward the boy he had assaulted. Looking down on where the boy lay; Erik saw the confusion playing openly on the youth’s face. Erik extended a hand down to help him up. Once on his feet, the boy looked at the blood that had transferred from Erik’s open wounds into his palm.

Erik swallowed around the rock embedded in his throat. He backed away. “All hope extinguished when she left me.”

He wished he wasn’t a man and wished he didn’t believe he was mad. It hurt too much to be vulnerable. In darkness Erik was born, into darkness he would die. As he hastened away from the camp and the lies they had told him, his sadness floated with him into the night.

Raoul needed to leave Chagny.

The air around him pebbled his skin. The entire room stood stoic and dark. Not even the dim light from the glowing stained glass windows provided any comfort or warmth. Raoul stared across the tiny box in front of him to the doors leading to the chapel. Yes, it would be good to leave Chagny for a time. His return to his ancestral home had been laced with too much emotion over the last year. A small gathering of those near and dear to his heart stood waiting in the pews to share in Chagny’s sorrow when they had expected a celebration.

Raoul reached out and laid a hand on the coffin in front of him. His fingers traced the ridges of the Chagny coat on its surface. The colors stood out against the stark whiteness of the box. Never had the coat ever been carved so small. It should be a sin for such boxes to be made so tiny. Raoul blinked back tears.

He knew. The moment Christine called their daughter her Angel of Music; he knew he was second in her heart. The image Loup planted of his wife’s lips around another man made sense now. Christine’s unsteady passion for finding Erik one moment and her desire to lock him away the next seemed logical.

She didn’t know who she loved, and Raoul feared he did.

His palm spread across the cold wood. Every day since he knew of this child he had awoken with joy and anticipation of her life. He wanted to be angry and vengeful over the idea of his wife’s intimacies toward Phantom. He wanted to scream out his rage for Christine’s betrayal of their sacred vows. But Raoul couldn’t, not as long as this tiny victim lay before him.

The box blurred and warped as a tear fell over the brim of his eye. Try as he may, Raoul couldn’t understand the connection between a mother and child. The physical and emotional link as two hearts beat as one for month after month had to have been extraordinary. How was he to understand the grief, guilt, and failure that must come when that life is taken too soon?

But he understood his pain, and how much it hurt to be touching unfeeling wood and not the warm, laughter-blushed cheek of his little girl.

Raoul tried to turn away from that box numerous times, but he was drawn to it as if touching its surface would somehow bring back the sweet life inside. Every time he turned his eyes away, the tears stung and whipped him worse than forty lashes. His mind wailed over and over: I want her back! But he could never get her back and he never had the chance to know her.

Raoul clenched his teeth to maintain his composure, but composure at a time like this was impossible. As if heavenly arms were forcing him down, his forehead fell against the cold wood, as his hands draped across it in a final embrace. What he would not pay to understand the injustice of it all.

Breath dragged into his lungs in a staggering cry. Perhaps he should have allowed Christine to hold her? No. His fingers rubbed the side of the box as if caressing the golden curls that might have been. The dimmed light in her eyes as he held her in his arms had devastated the image of her angelic face. He couldn’t have allowed his wife to see that vacant stare. It would plague him enough as is. Numbness began to wash over him as he heard the door behind him clicked open.

“Is she here?” Raoul turned around to see Legard solemnly shake his head.

So Christine wouldn’t attend the funeral? He didn’t blame her. She was weak and in pain in more ways than one. The hours she spent staring catatonically out into space had locked her in a prison no worse than his. It was probably best they handle this separately.

“Jules,” Raoul bravely smiled through the tears he dared to show, but it wasn’t a warm smile. “She was to have petticoats and frilly things. I would have put flowers in her room every day. I would have given her silks for her hair. One silk for every day, of every week, of every year she was mine. Anything she wanted, she would have had. I would have wiped her tears and laughed with her and danced at her wedding.” Raoul stroked the coffin his blurry eyes stinging with each second. “Christine called her the Angel of Music. She’s in love with Erik.” The confession slipped Legard mouth open. “No one is to know. Is that understood?”

“Loup’s statement in Chaumont?” Legard muttered. Raoul nodded. “Raoul, what are you going to do?”

“I’m true to my vows, Jules. I’ll find my way to deal with the pain this has brought me. I love Christine. She needs me. I can’t face this infidelity right now.”

Raoul cleared his throat and searched the ceiling. He had his faith and knew what he had to do to abide by it, but forgiving didn’t mean forgetting. He jabbed a finger in Legard’s face, shocked at his sudden passion in the wake of his grief.

“But you can. You find him. No matter how long this takes, another year, another ten—you tell Loup to find him. Erik has broken my family. He took my brother. He took my wife.” Raoul spread his palm out across the crest. “Erik has broken my heart for the last time.” Raoul scrubbed his face trying to twist away from the pain of his next confession. “The doctor says Christine can’t bear any more children. The damage during delivery was too severe. My dreams of having Chagny filled with children are gone. Erik is to blame!”

“Raoul, you don’t know-–”

“Erik took that from me! Children are not supposed to be hurt by all this. They’re supposed to show us the way in life, not lead the way to our Father before us.”

Music poured softly through the chapel doors. Somberly turning from Legard, Raoul swiped his eye with the sleeve of his waistcoat and knelt before the tiny box on its stand. Raoul positioned it in his arms. Legard rushed to help, but Raoul sternly shook his head. He stood, his daughter at long last perched on his shoulder.

“Christine carried her for seven months. Let me carry her now.”

“You are a stronger and a more forgiving man of her than I could ever be, Raoul.”

Raoul kept his gaze on the doors but wasn’t able to keep the crack out of his voice. “Forgive, and you will be forgiven.”