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Christine cornered him alone after rehearsals.
Erik was always willing for Christine to corner him alone after rehearsals.
She was to play Doña Ana in Don Juan Triumphant, and he’d fought hard with Richard and Moncharmin to get her cast as lead soprano instead of Carlotta.
Erik had eventually won, not only because Christine was genuinely the better singer and actress, but also because Richard and Moncharmin were consistently intimidated by Erik. Wearing a black mask at all times had few advantages; intimidation was one of them.
Like everyone else, Christine had also been intimidated at first, when they began working together. But she was used to the mask now, and they’d grown closer.
Not as close as Erik would have liked, but as close as he could reasonably expect; even if Christine had been single, she would never have wanted to date Erik. Nobody could want a man with his face.
And here they were, Christine cornering him alone after rehearsals.
“So,” she said.
“Hello, Christine.”
“Would you like to get dinner?”
Erik froze. Wracked his brains to remember if Christine and Raoul had broken up. As far as he knew, they were still together. As far as he could tell, he wasn’t dreaming, nor had he died and ended up in one of the nicer afterlives.
“Dinner?”
“With me and Raoul. We’ve been talking. We thought it might be nice to take you on a date. We were going to ask you together, only Raoul’s car broke down so he couldn’t get here in time.”
“… Christine, I can’t.”
She frowned. “You’re not single?”
“No, I am, but –”
“Then – then you just don’t want to date us.”
“No, not that either.” Erik swallowed. He hadn’t imagined confessing his feelings at all, let alone like this. “I wear the mask for a reason, Christine. It’s – a birth defect. My own mother couldn’t stand the sight of me. I can’t go to dinner with you – with either of you. I’m sorry.”
He turned away from her, but she caught his arm. Erik froze as if he’d been branded. “What about something else then? Not dinner? You could keep the mask on, if that helps you stay comfortable.”
You wouldn’t want me with this mask off, Erik thought. He counted to five, slowly, in his head, in an attempt to calm himself.
“A date,” he said.
“Yes.”
He was flushed under the mask. It fit him perfectly, but all of a sudden it was too tight, too hot. “And the mask stays on.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“I’m – I’m free Saturday.”
*
They went to the park early. Early enough that they could keep their distance from the occasional dog walker or jogger. Early enough to have their solitude.
Aside from his mask, Erik had dressed impeccably in a shirt and waistcoat, as if that could make up for the rest of him.
Christine and Raoul were more casual. When you looked like Raoul de Chagny, it didn’t matter whether you tucked your shirt in.
They walked and talked, the three of them side by side. Every so often, one of them would manage to capture his hand and hold it for a time as they strolled.
They walked laps of the lake, Erik allowing himself to be calmed by the presence of the still water, even as Christine and Raoul’s presence filled him with nerves. His first date, ever, in his whole life. It wasn’t even going badly.
After Christine had asked him out, he’d gone home, sat down, and stared and stared in the mirror, trying to figure out why.
There must have been something they saw in him. Something of worth.
There were no kisses at the end of the date – the mask stayed on – but they each pressed his hand, and afterwards, to Erik, it seemed as if the hand was tingling.
He shut the front door of his house and leaned back against it, sighing, smiling giddily behind his mask, drunk on casual affection.
He’d loved it, today. He’d loved it.
And them.
*
Carlotta had been furious not to be cast as Doña Ana, and had spread poison about Christine for weeks afterwards as revenge.
The day before Don Juan’s first performance, she was apparently turning her ire on Erik. Or at least, that was what Christine could gather from the shouts echoing down the corridor.
Christine left her dressing room, and took the corridors and turns through backstage, following the voices.
She wasn’t the first to find them; they had acquired a small audience of half a dozen ballerinas. Christine recognised Meg Giry among them.
Carlotta was screaming at Erik – Doña Ana had belonged to her, but she didn’t get the role, and it was all his fault. Erik gave as good as he got: Carlotta was a hack, a diva with a half-decent voice, but half-decent was not good enough. You couldn’t talk your way into a leading role with bitchy comments.
Which was when Carlotta did the awful thing.
She pulled off Erik’s mask and threw it down.
One of the ballerinas gave a small scream.
Erik whirled to face away from the crowd, breathing hard, one hand raised to cover his face, but it was too late; they had seen, they had all seen, Christine too. Erik knelt and groped blindly behind himself, his free hand searching for the mask. Christine shoved past Carlotta, picked up the mask, and pressed it into Erik’s roving hand.
The strap was broken. He had to hold it in front of his face.
Behind them both, Carlotta began to have hysterics. “How horrible,” she was saying, “How horrible.”
Which was when Meg Giry stepped forward and stared up into her face. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” the little ballerina hissed. “Why would you do that? Why would you ever do that? Then you have the fucking audacity to do it and ACT AS IF YOU’RE THE VICTIM.”
Erik held his mask in front of his face, but did not make any other move. He was frozen, Christine realised, right hand holding the mask tight against his face.
She grabbed his left wrist and hauled him up, pulling him through the twists and turns of backstage until they reached a door he’d shown her once, a door that led to the car park.
Erik slumped against the wall, breathing hard. He had not spoken a word since Carlotta unmasked him.
“I need your car keys,” said Christine.
“What?”
He did not seem to have heard her.
“You need to get out of here, and you’re in no state to drive.”
Erik fished in his pocket with his left hand, pulled out a set of keys, and pressed them into her hand.
Erik’s car was a well-preserved black Mercedes. Christine waited for Erik to buckle himself into the passenger seat before she threw it into gear. At least it was the middle of the day; no rush-hour traffic. Erik gave occasional directions in a hoarse voice, so much weaker than his usual commanding tenor.
Eventually, they arrived at his house. It was an architect’s house, classical and understated, yet the closer you looked at the layout, the stranger it seemed. Christine noted that the windows had been treated to be one-way glass. Impossible to see in from the street.
Erik’s hand kept shaking on the house keys, so Christine took them from him gently and opened the front door.
Once they were inside, Erik half-dropped, half-fell to his knees in the hallway. He was hyperventilating; Christine was sure that he was crying under the mask.
“Erik?”
“Yes?” he rasped.
“Ah… how do we get to the rest of the house?”
There seemed no way out of the hallway other than the corridor.
“There’s a catch at the side of the mirror at the end. Up on the right.”
“Do you have spare masks anywhere? Or string so that we can fix that one?”
“Spare masks – there’s one on the dressing table. Once you’re through the mirror, take the stairs. My bedroom is the second door on the right.”
“Will – will you be alright if I leave you here to go and get it?” He was a tall man, but he was crumpled on the floor like a puppet with its strings cut, one hand clamped over the mask, keeping it in place.
“I’m not going anywhere, Christine.”
She found the catch at the side of the mirror, and it swung inwards on well-balanced hinges. Beyond it, the house seemed normal. A middle-class home of a man with taste.
Up the stairs, she paused by Erik’s bedroom, because it was his bedroom.
Inside, she found the walls a solemn dark grey, aside from one where a musical stave had been painted in a pale cream-gold. She recognised the tune: Dies Irae.
His bed was narrow and plain. Not a bed that he would ever have shared with another.
One the dressing table, she found the mask. Black, almost identical to the other except it showed no wear on it. Erik’s spare.
She picked it up and went back downstairs. As she walked back along the hallway, she fished a packet of tissues out of her purse and set them down beside Erik along with the spare mask. Erik didn’t move.
“Christine?”
“Yes?”
“Look the other way.”
“Oh – of course. I’m sorry.” She should have said she was sorry earlier, instead of just dragging him home.
Christine stood and turned, walking a few paces down the hall, giving him space. She took out her phone and texted Raoul, giving him a brief summary of what had happened, along with Erik’s address so he could come over and help her with Erik, and take her home once they were sure Erik was alright to be left alone.
She had eight texts from Meg Giry. The girl had done her best to dissuade the other ballerinas from gossiping about Erik’s face, but Jammes had blabbed, and the news of Erik and Carlotta’s standoff would be all over the opera house by the time the day was out.
Christine risked turning around; Erik was wearing the spare mask, and was holding the broken one in his lap. There were a few discarded tissues on the floor next to him.
She went to kneel by him. “Let’s go to the living room. A sofa will be more comfortable than the floor.”
“Christine…” His head was bowed. He couldn’t look at her. “You saw my face.”
She took a breath. “I did.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“I can’t leave you like this.”
Christine took him by the arm and lifted him onto his feet. He was at least six foot tall, but so thin that lifting him took little effort. His normally flawless shirt and waistcoat were creased.
Erik let her lead him through the ground floor until she found his living room, then guided him onto the sofa. His hand was shaking where she held it.
“Raoul should be over soon,” she told him.
“What?”
“We don’t want you to be alone right now. Not after what Carlotta did.”
Raoul turned up not long after that. He must have been in the neighbourhood when Christine texted. She let him in at the front, then led him through the house to the living room, and they sat on the sofa, one either side of where Erik had curled up, Christine holding Erik’s slender hand, Raoul’s hand on the small of Erik’s back.
It was quiet for a long time, until Erik said, “I look like a dead thing.”
The worst part was that Christine couldn’t even deny it.
“I look like a thing somebody dug up from a graveyard. The two of you went on a date with a corpse. You know that now, yet you’re still here. And you are both so – alive.”
Raoul met Christine’s eyes. “We’re not leaving you,” he said. “You’re in a state.”
“You have to,” said Erik. “You will, once you’ve dwelt upon my appearance a little longer. But you especially have to leave tonight. It’s the opening night tomorrow. Christine should be resting – she needs to prepare…”
“I’ll feel all the better if I can know you’re on the way to being alright,” said Christine. “If it’s the opening night you’re worried about, then think of how bad it would be for me to leave you alone and spend the rest of the night fretting.”
“Then call Daroga. He can – can keep an eye on me.”
Erik gave them the number, and Raoul made the call. When he told Daroga what had happened, he swore in Farsi and said he’d be over as soon as possible.
It turned out that Daroga actually had keys to Erik’s house. He let himself in, and found the three of them in the living room. Erik raised his head just a little. “Tell them that they can go,” he said miserably. “Christine needs to be able to perform tomorrow.”
With a last look back at where Erik sat and trembled, Daroga led Raoul and Christine to the door.
“It was a good thing you did, staying with him like that,” Daroga said. “Erik is – more vulnerable than most people realise. Bleeding heart, not that most can ever tell from how he is usually.”
“Look after him,” said Christine. “Please.”
“I will. He certainly won’t be looking after himself. There’s a guest bedroom, I can stay the night.”
*
“What did he look like?” asked Raoul, later that night. “Under the mask?”
“Like Erik said,” Christine told him, “He looked like a dead man that could still move, still make expressions. But he was still Erik, Raoul. And his eyes… They were yellow and shadowed, except where the light caught them, they seemed almost gold, like a cat’s.”
“You never can see his eyes,” mused Raoul, “When he’s wearing the mask.” Abruptly, he took out his phone. “I’m going to text Daroga. Ask for updates on how he’s doing.”
What Erik turned out to be doing was sitting at the organ in his music room, hammering his way through Don Juan Triumphant like a man possessed. He had barely spoken a single coherent sentence to Daroga. Christine and Raoul weren’t sure if this was better or worse than the weeping.
*
Christine had just been checking the finishing touches on her makeup when there was a knock at her door.
“Come in.”
It turned out to be M. Richard. “Christine. I just wanted to check on you, before you went onstage. It’s a big night.”
“I know. I can do it.”
“Good. Good! Good to know that you’re calm and collected, especially after yesterday. I know it must have been difficult.”
Christine opened her mouth to say that she’d heard Erik was just about alright this morning, but she wasn’t sure if he’d turn up to the performance, when Richard continued.
“Must have been a terrible shock for you, to see that. That kind of unsettlement can be awful for a person’s concentration. I’m glad to see that you’re keeping focused on what’s important.”
Christine pursed her lips on a retort, then said, carefully. “I’m holding it together just fine.”
When Richard left her, she clenched her fists. Christine had heard the whispers of the gossip about Erik all day, had even had a few people pry at her, digging for more, juicier details. She hadn’t given them anything.
Everyone cared about the way Erik looked; nobody seemed to care about Erik.
*
Christine had been telling the truth when she said she was holding it together.
She was keeping it together through bloody-minded determination.
Raoul would be up in the audience, watching her.
Erik, as the composer, was supposed to occupy an honoured seat in Box Five. Please let him be there. The brightness of the stage lights would make it impossible for her to see if he had turned up. He hadn’t replied to either her or Raoul’s messages in the past day.
But whether Erik was there or not, this was Erik’s opera, and Christine’s first leading role, and she was determined to make it a success. For the two of them, she would be sublime.
On her cue, Christine stepped out onto the stage, drew in a breath, and gave her voice everything.
*
Since it was the opening night, once the opera was over, the cast and crew gathered in one of the larger backstage rooms. Richard and Moncharmin had even splashed out on a glass of passable champagne for everyone.
There had been a few speeches from each of the managers that nobody had really listened to, and Christine found herself off to one side with Raoul, trying to sip at her champagne slowly and make it last.
Then Raoul’s eyes widened at something over Christine’s shoulder and he murmured “Holy fuck.”
Christine turned. As she did so, others turned too, a ripple across the room as people took notice of a man standing by a nondescript door that nobody ever used.
Erik had turned up after all.
Usually his clothing was dark, restrained. Three-piece suits in shades of charcoal and grey and black.
Tonight, he wore red. The three-piece was scarlet, tailored with exactitude to his thin frame. The shirt was the red-black of spilled wine. The tie could have been fresh blood. A small gold skull-shaped tie pin held it in place.
His mask was gold too, a burnished gold with subtle impressions on it which traced out the design of a skull.
He stood out like a drop of blood on concrete, like a fresh red rose in a cemetery, like a gold ring glimmering on the dark shore of a lake.
Richard and Moncharmin forced smiles onto their faces as Erik approached them where they stood beside the drinks table. The crowd parted before him.
“Erik!” exclaimed Moncharmin. “So good to see you could make it. Wasn’t tonight splendid?”
Moncharmin clapped a hand on Erik’s shoulder in a display of feigned camaraderie.
Erik pushed the hand off his shoulder very pointedly and looked down at Moncharmin. “I agree. A triumph.”
Erik picked up one of the remaining glasses of champagne and removed his mask in a fluid motion. He took a long sip of the champagne, draining half the glass without breaking eye contact with Moncharmin.
Everyone could see. Everyone could see the sunken cheeks, the hole where the nose should be, the hollow eye sockets and the yellow eyes. He had no lips, but once he had lowered the glass, one side of the gash that was his mouth turned upwards slightly, into something that might have been a smile.
“Still,” Erik continued, “You could have sprung for better champagne.”
He replaced the mask, set the half-drunk glass down on the table, and left through the main door.
*
Trying to get across the room was maddening. Too many people wanted to talk to her about her performance, and about what Erik had just done.
Christine wanted none of it. From the moment Erik had entered the room, she had felt too hot. A hand pressed against her ribs could do nothing for her pounding heart. Beside her, Raoul was flushed too, as they skirted and slipped their way around the room’s perimeter, towards the door Erik had left through.
It took too long.
Out in the corridor, Raoul untied his black bow tie and undid the top button of his tuxedo’s shirt.
“Where could he be?” he asked Christine.
“Anywhere,” she replied. She had half a mind to check Box Five, but there was no guarantee that he’d return there now that the performance was over.
She decided to take a gamble and check her dressing room first. That was where Erik might be, if he wanted to see her.
He was there, standing by the back wall, gold mask reflecting the light.
“Are you tired?” Erik asked, such a commonplace question after what he had just done. Christine could sense the nerves in him.
“I gave it my everything,” replied Christine.
“I know,” he said. “Thank you. Your performance was beautiful. The angels wept tonight.”
Christine took a few paces forward. “Take off the mask,” she breathed.
“Why?”
“Please, Erik. I swear I have a reason.”
His movements were nowhere near as practiced and easy as they had been earlier, but he raised a hand, pulled off the mask, and set it on Christine’s dressing table, where it shone as if it were real gold.
His eyes kept flicking between Raoul and Christine; he did not know what was coming next.
What he’d done earlier had been the product of anger. Taking his condition and throwing it into the faces of the gossips who’d been feeding off the story of his unmasking since yesterday. A reclamation of himself.
But he did not know what to do in the face of Christine’s calm request. He did not know what it could mean.
Not until Christine took the final step forward, grabbed him by the lapels and kissed him.
She felt his surprise against her lips, felt his mouth open under hers in shock. When she moved away, Raoul took her place, pressing his mouth to Erik’s, one hand splayed at Erik’s distractingly slender waist. In that moment, Christine could look at them like a snapshot, a painting, and she thought what a fine pair they made, Raoul in black and white and Erik in red.
Raoul kissed her as well, kissed her smiling, because they had done it. They turned back to Erik, who was leaning against Christine’s dressing table for support. He brushed a few salt drops away from his startled yellow eyes.
“I have never –” he said, “Never before… I did not know how sweet it could feel… how good it could be… that it would be soft… that it could be warm, I –”
His shoulders trembled like a leaf in a storm. They could hear the soft sounds of his breathing.
“I am too happy,” he murmured, gasping for breath. “It is too much… it is too much… I have been yours, both of yours, since I first saw you…”
Raoul moved forward and slipped an arm around Erik, supporting him. Christine did the same on Erik’s other side. Christine and Raoul clasped their free hands.
Erik was still blinking back tears, but Christine could not stop smiling, because she could see the future, the future for all of them. Erik and Raoul in Box Five, looking down at her onstage. Raoul coming to find her in her dressing room, Erik playing the violin for her in the evenings.
She could see all of it. She was ready for it to happen, and she knew the others were too.