Not knowing how to deal with the closeness we were submitted to, having as the easiest option withdrawing into our own personal worlds again, we spent some time quiet, even though I was still soothing his unnatural tufts of hair. It was not until I felt his hand reaching for mine that my wanderings were interrupted, and I realized the minutes had been flying fast.
He took hold of my hand, rather awkwardly, his touch cold and sending chills into me, returning it to my lap, silently, not allowing me to stroke his hair anymore. His gesture was soft, but established a barrier between us again.
"Does it bother you?" I inquired.
He moved his head, and I couldn't tell whether it was a negative or an affirmative response.
"Why?" I insisted, a little nervous.
"The happiness you bring seems to only add to my tragedy," he confessed after a sigh.
"What do you mean?" Of course I knew what he meant.
"But don't you mind, my child. I never expected anything different."
Silence. He was such a frail man inside! So fearful, so hurt! I yearned to prove him wrong, to show him that perhaps there was something he could wish for, or to show him that at least he deserved happiness, and that the world was just infinitely cruel for not allowing him to his share of it! Oh, that situation drove me mad, I wished I could change things, I wished I didn't have to fear pity for him, and I wished I could only have feelings of admiration for his strong and genious side.
"You could be surprised, one of these days." I tried.
"Of course." His statemment was deprived of irony, just defeated, I thought.
"Erik, there is a lot more to life than what you can control and predict. Only God can tell what is to come in the future, what awaits..."
"There is not such a thing as 'God'," he informed coldly. "I've seen too much in this world, far too much, to assure me that there is no God."
"But Erik, if only you..."
"Don't you try to teach me how to live, Meg Giry," he ordered dryly.
I stopped to think for a minute, my words sounding silly as I repeated them in my head. He was right, it didn't matter how stubborn I insisted on being, how dreamy and optimistic. I knew that nice sounding words wouldn't change anything, and this was no fairy tale. But what else could I offer him, when he seemed to refuse everything I tried?
"Not you...who makes such a mess of your life that you don't have the least idea of where you are standing most of the time."
He chuckled in an uncharacteristic way, his words molded by a hidden scornful smile.
I lifted my head at his jest, watching him raising to his feet, holding his hat in his right hand. It was an unnecessarily rude remark, but I decided to look past it, considering he was not in his full state of mind anyway.
"Isn't it so, hum?" I returned displacently.
"Yes, you, you think you deceive everybody so well with this sweet, helpful, and determined face and attitude of yours!" He seemed oblivious to my reactions, to whether I was listening to him or not, more concerned with rambling about a subject - which I'd had the honor to be chosen as such. "While you act out your so-considered clever plans, to support your cunning activities, you only succeed in getting yourself further and further lost," he said softly, chuckling, not paying much attention to his philosophies about me, just willing to keep himself busy putting someone down. If this was what, in his opium fantasies, I represented to him, couldn't he just leave me alone? I felt greatly disappointed while he talked like that.
"You manage to deceive even yourself!" He laughed, mocking. "Considering yourself to be so daring and open-minded, and yet always afraid of stepping away from your mother's wings and her influences in the Opera; weak to the point of insisting on submitting yourself to the Ballet that never fullfilled you," he scoffed.
I didn't know how he was aware of things I didn't share with anybody. I only knew it definitely made me indignant that he was using them against me! What was the reason for this sudden need of attacking me, of relying his anger on me, of hating me instead of his life? I was not to blame for any unhappiness that had fallen upon him! And no opium, whatever large amount he had gotten, would serve as an excuse for me to allow him to do so!
"So that is why you wrote the letter to the managers, ordering them to cast me for a higher position and so, wasn't it? To test how weak I was? To help me to live in this falsehood even further? But who knows, perhaps you enjoy living lies too..." I leaned back against the column, in a nonchalant position, to increase the careless and ironic accent I was giving to my words.
He ignored me for the most, but my last remark caused him some discrete distress.
"You don't even know music..." he continued babbling, "Do you know anything, Meg Giry, or are you just as frivolous as the majority of the chorus and ballet girls of this place?"
Erik had made me awfully despondent. He had never treated me like a brainless dummy, very much the opposite. I raised to my feet too, enraged, placing my hands on my hips, and said sharply, adding some sensuality to my voice and movements to leave no doubts about what I was to imply, "Well, I would bet, without hesitating, that at least I know some certain things a lot better than you do. Such a pity, isnt't it?"
I knew it was almost mean of me to say it, but at that moment I was really preocuppied in virtually looking inside his mind and making sure of what kind of role he had chosen for me in his wanderings. And I didn't like being the stupid one he apparently picked up on, for the very basic reason that that was not me. Besides, who knows, perhaps he could follow my suggestion just a little...
Without being the least affected by my implications, as I had imagined he would, Erik returned, calmly, disrespectfully, and regally, "Nobody ever risked affirming you were much of a lady anyway, right?"
That offended me! How could he, above all, say such a thing to me?! If I did escape the formal requirements of behavior for women lately, he was the main cause of it, and he and and his little complications were my even stronger encouragment! I was speechless. He changed subjects, perhaps knowing better than I at the time that this was an issue that could only bring harm to both of us.
"Oh, but I wouldn't make fun of your weakness, or lack of courage to assume that you make your living with something your really don't care for." He was being condescending, of course.
"I can perfectly realize the need of you, all of you, feeling useful and worthy, by saying you have to work on something that is, in fact, completely meaningless for you. It is just ironic that you may call it 'art'! It is very rare indeed to find someone now-a-days I would call an artist in this Opera."
"Yes, don't you worry either, the same here..." I tried to control my instinct of slapping him for that. "I don't blame you for living in a dark stinking cellar, like some sort of burrowing worm...it just amazes me that you, besides that, enjoy so much wearing a gentleman's clothes and acting Godlike." It was my turn to chuckle this time, with a sadistic pleasure of giving just the right answer he was begging for with that attitude of his. By this time, I didn't care if he was on opium or not, I just wouldn't submit myself to his little tantrums anymore.
He turned his back to me, placing his hat on his head in a noble but stiff gesture, and stepped away, indifferently - when finally escaped a clear and uncontrollable tension of his muscles and the clutching of his fists, furious for what I had said. Ah, but I was not finished! I was tired of playing this game!
"Don't you just slip away like the Phantom you wish you were. You started it, now finish it!" I yelled, with my finger pointed at him. "Isn't there anything else you would like to depreciate about me?" I provoked him, trying to make him lose his control and quit for once this stupid formality he always used with everybody, including me!
"Probably, but I wouldn't care for using my time to do so," he shrugged.
"Now that you mentioned your time...it reminded me to just let you know, dear, that I would have achieved that position even without your esoteric messages if I really wanted to."
"Oh, I just wanted to help," he said with the most amiable entonation. "And be glad, because I usually absolutely don't care for meddling with your affairs or other people's...this human kind of yours, and your trivial insignificant problems, your little desperations..! That just tires me, you see?"
"I see..." I tried to constrain my anger. "I see...and it must be because you are so strong and self-assured, because you really don't care about other people's thoughts...that must be why you are always so willing to show your face." I said this stressing my last words, feeling poison in my mouth as I used my hidden weapon. I couldn't say if I'd said that only out of fury and lack of control, or if I was, deep inside, looking to put an end to this barrier that had been dragging itself along for far too long.
He stopped right on the spot and didn't make a move. I felt terror filling me inside, of his reaction, and yet I would not take my words back.
"What...was it that you said?" His calmness worried me even more, for I knew that when he got this calm and controlled, he was in the very edge of letting his dark temper free once again. His figure was stiffened, his shoulders high, as if prepared for an attack.
"You understood perfectly well what I said."
"You are showing yourself to be quite a naughty child, Meg," he said after taking a long, deep breath. "I sincerely advise you to stop, before Erik forgets about your ridiculous good intentions, and his own ridiculous conscience." He seemed somewhat amazed in stating that he posessed any conscience at all, "Before Erik doesn't answer for his actions any longer." He was threatening, feeling himself threatened too.
"Take the damn mask off." It was my turn to order, in a teasing and cruel intonation.
He turned around in a fiercely quick movement and walked towards me.
"Perhaps, perhaps I should. You wish me to take this thing off?" he asked sardonically, tartly, bending to light the lantern and to pick up the pipe he had left behind, just before placing himself where his face was awfully close to mine, and from where I could already see, under the edges of the mask, the scaling aspect of his skin.
I looked instead in his eyes. Oh, I hadn't forgotten what they looked like - that cold light blue, so transparent, that told me at once he was bluffing. He wanted to scare me, but he revealed too much about himself through those meaningful eyes, always so filled with hatred and fear, an innate fear he would never get rid of.
"Do so." I challenged again. I confess I dreaded pushing him too far over the edge, but at the same time I was amused by the thought that he probably expected quite a reaction from me, seeing his face. If only he knew it better...I had been looking forward to revealing to him that I had already seen his face a long time ago, I just didn't know how to bring up the subject...
Everything became deadly quiet. His chest was heavy, his gestures paralyzed, while my last words still rang in the air, "Take it off...do so!"
"No." He said lightly.
"Coward!" I said in my mind, outraged. "You are not a pitiful being, but an arrogant one, who only knows hostility."
"No," he repeated, back to that steadiness that worried me, and continued very softly, "When one is as handsome as I am, he just can't allow any damsel to go on seeing him, you see? Even though I think you are hardly one." His voice was wretched, emotional, with a hint of madness.
"Meg, don't encourage his ravings any further," I told myself, restraining a good reply.
"Otherwise she will belong to me forever." he said it with such a strong remark of evil and doom, that I didn't know if it was a proposition or a threat. He certainly did mean it to be the last.
"I wonder what that would feel like." It was said, there was nothing I could do about it.
His eyes grew bright, not with surprise, or satisfaction, but again allowing that evil and immense hurt to shine, the sadistic expression that I coudn't quite understand, almost remindescent of the one I saw in his eyes before he had killed in front of me. Would he find his revenge against life towards me?
"You do?" He used a feigned amazement, filled with sarcasm and revolt. He looked again in my eyes and repeated, "You do?"
Mixed, intense feelings he offered me in those now golden looking peculiar eyes, not particularly scary, not particularly beautiful... just a mirror of his troubled, drowned soul.
"Come to me, Meg," he ordered, powerfully.
Without taking my eyes from his, I paced toward him, some excitement and fear stirring inside me. I couldn't disobey him all the sudden.
As I approached, he whispered his soft beckoning with a touch of supernatural, "Closer."
He stretched out his arm, dropping the pipe on the floor without care, and in a slow movement, his long skeleton fingers laid on the side of my face, coldly, still, tracing my cheek bones. I closed my eyes at his touch, with an unreasonable intuition that something was not quite alright, but willing to savor the moment.
His other hand traced my frame in the air, a few inches away from my body, in a tempting allure to an undone caress. I didn't dare open my eyes. I could feel him so close to me, as he said, lightly but eagerly, the smell of the drug impregnated on his breath, "You don't know what you are doing, do you? It will be too late when you have found out..."
His threat was yet bewildering. Without a notice, he seized me awfully brutally, forcing me to open my eyes as I felt the pain of his grip around my upper arms. I understood his look now. He hated and despised himself so much as a man that he simply couldn't allow me to disagree. And he was ready to prove to me how wrong I had been about his worthiness.
With his overwhelming strength, unbelieveble to exist in such a gaunt frame such as his, he pulled me against his body, forcing me to kneel first, himself kneeling in front of me, staring eagerly at my face. His breathing was disturbed, uneasy, showing he was barely able to control what had taken over his mind and body so completely. He reached out for my hair, passing his fingers through it, first lightly, becoming more and more violent, his bony fingers and long sharp nails hurting me as he furiously moved his hands in a both scary and lustful avidity. I didn't dare to say a word.
From my hair he switched his dead hands to my upper arm again, letting his fingers slide down tensely, scratching and pressing against my skin. Intense fear joined unexpected excitement, filling me with its nauseating totality, stealing all my capacity of thinking properly or moving.
And suddenly it started. He yanked me by my waist, impulsionated by the wanting of a lifetime, and tossed me down in such a brusque and sudden movement that I cried aloud in pain and terror, having the cold hard floor underneath me to not deny my vulnurable position, my head clouded after bouncing on the floor rather hardly.
"You said you wanted to belong to me! It was your choice! I hope you will be satisfied!" He spat, vomited the words, totally out of his mind, his voice high and out of pitch, ugly for the first time with such an inhuman hatred.
"Erik, stop! You are hurting me!" I struggled with all my strength, kicking him several times and hitting him with my fists, but my fight was such an insignificant obstacle before his determination!
I never meant to have it happening in this way! I screamed, and screamed and cried, and he kept screaming back at me, "It was your choice, you wretched girl! What, you are not liking! Oh, but you must! You chose so!"
And I could still smell the opium scent on his warm breath as that horrid voice threatened me along with his actions. Was he really intending to do it?!
My answer was having Erik tear off my pettit coat in one single wild grip, its fine fabric ripping off, as I felt tears of shame and horror falling down on my face, listening to his panting. He spun the cloth in the air, as I had seen him doing with his cape so many times, and had thought it so attractive by then.
"You will see how you will like it, how you will love this corpse that wants you so badly!"
He screamed, torn by both great desire and wrath, looking at me in a horrifying way, climbing on top of me, while holding my wrists against the floor. My bare back, only covered by a thin summer dress now, scratched against the stone floor, adding to the pain.
I cried for help so many times, and the only answer I got was him laughing once, for it was obvious there was no one down there to hear my pleas!
And when he had laid with almost all of his weight upon me I realized his cadaverical appearance wasn't restrained to his hands and face, I realized the truth of his last words. His whole body was made of death, he was unnaturally thin and his bones hurt me badly, his protruding ribs compressing my breasts as he grunted, his eyes closed. I was suffocated - I didn't have strength to cry anymore.
How could I have overlooked the fact that he was a man, after all, with all of male desires, combined with a total lack of commitment to right or wrong?
Erik started to rub himself against me, in a violent way that made him outburst his relishing in sounds hard to attribute to him into any other situation, and made me fight with the distress it raised in me, for having very controversial sensations stirring inside of me.
But his brutality, always present, as he repeatedly hit my wrists agaist the floor, forcing me to look at him, or as he shouted nonsense at me, while I felt that hard pressure between my thighs, made me just forget whatever sensation had passed through me and hate him with my whole heart, as I wept quietly. Finally I closed my eyes and let go of my body, knowing it would be useless struggling, just wishing it would be fast and not too unbearably hurtful.
My eyelids offered me the same scary darkness the reality did, and I felt every muscle of my body tense, despair taking over me, knowing what awaited me.
Yet soon - there was nothing.
There was no growling, no hard breathing, no pain, no touch. Only blankness. I thought I had lost counsciousness and yet I started to feel my body again - and it was free! No animalesc grip on my wrists, no forcing, nothing.
Feeling the last figment of sanity running away from me, I slowly opened my eyes, to find Erik in front of me, on his knees, no contact at all with me, with his whole body bent over the floor, his hands over his head, grasping the thin locks of hair that were left to him.
Incredulously, but instinctively, I crawled away a few feet and kept observing, as I passed my hand over my damp face, trembling.
The only sound I could hear was his weeping. Without a second thought, I reached out for the lantern, with hands that hardly obeyed me, and brought it close to me. He seemed to not even mind the light.
He raised his head from the floor, apathetically, still not able to look at me, and whispered, in an inhuman sob, "Forgive me."
It was so full of regret, sincerity, self hatred, that I felt a sharp pinch in my heart. And he continued, trembling too, with his face down and his voice muffled by the weeping and the mask, "Oh, my God, forgive me, I beg you, forgive me, Meg!"
Erik actually shook in despair, woe, remorse, self-disgust - but so did I, slowly crawling further and further away from him.
And in a heartbreaking cry, he exploded in a whining, clutching his fists, and looking above, perhaps hoping there was actually a God who could redeem him now, "I only brought ruin for both of us!!"
I was so scared by all that was happening that I was totally speechless.
Slowly, extremely slowly, he dropped his head, so afraid, until he finally looked at my face for the first time. With the light on, I could see easily his mask slightly out of place, and his eyes reddened, tears flowing, as he begged over and over for my forgiveness and cursed himself, always keeping distance between us.
Nervously, I covered my mouth with my hand, biting my lower lip in desperation, and only managed to mumble,
"It....is...alright...Erik..."
But it was not alright. The only reason why I hadn't run away from him yet was that I was so overwhelmed with fear, that I felt myself nailed to the floor. And yet he pleaded, "Go away, Meg, stay away from me. I'll only bring destruction to you!" And he wept so much, and I wept together listening to his words, the words of a forever damned man.
"Forgive me! I always told you to stay away, I don't know what I was doing, what I was thinking...! I can't bring any good to anybody, I never did! I just thought you might have...that you could...nevermind! Leave this place! Leave me alone!"
At once, with clumsy steps, I stood up, and tried to adjust my clothes, unable to unbound my eyes from him. I started to pace backwards, awkwardly, watching him drop his head all the way to the floor, silent at last, besides a few sobs.
And suddenly I regained my strength and ran, ran as fast as my legs allowed me, to never come back to that grave, to leave all that behind.
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