Page 15 of Angel's Kiss
“Is there something else wrong?”
“The chorus is due at rehearsal at noon,” Christine replied. “It feels like half a lifetime since I’ve been to one.”
“You know all the music.”
Christine gave him a crooked scowl. “I’m more frightened of the people.”
“Oh, well, that I can sympathize with.”
“So, living underground with ghosts doesn’t scare you, but people do?”
“Why do you think I live underground with the ghosts? The living do far more harm than the dead.”
Christine’s eyes lingered on him long enough to remind Erik of certain such harms, the ones he had been victim to and ones he had caused, and he turned away from her. “Would you like to practice anyway?”
“Perhaps we can enjoy the breakfast you’ve forgotten about first.”
Erik cringed again. It would take a while to get used to sharing his home with someone who ate at regular intervals like a normal person. “Of course,” Erik nodded, and Christine smiled.
For a while, they were normal as could be. Erik fetched their food, made their tea, and smiled back at her. It took seven minutes, give or take, before his fear returned and he flinched away from her when she reached for a piece of fruit from their tray. But it had been nice to savor the quiet before the storm.
––––––––
Christine tried herbest to pay better attention on the journey back up to the world of the living, but every dark corridor looked like another to her. Unlike the other times Erik had led her through his labyrinth, he was not holding her hand to guide her.
He had put on his elegant black gloves while Christine had donned the dark hooded cloak he had provided, but he had not offered a hand as he escorted her from his home, nor when she fumbled her way into the boat for their journey across the lake. Now, as the walls transitioned from wood to stone, the free hand Erik maintained while he held his lantern in front of them remained resolutely at his side.
Christine wanted to mention it, but, swathed in the black of his cape and hat, only his mask visible in the dark, Erik was once again the terrifying Phantom rather than the strange, captivating man who had hosted her for the last two days. She far preferred Erik to the ghost who had paused in front of her.
“Here we are,” her guide declared. Christine tried to discern what was special about the narrow corridor where they had stopped. The wooden walls were rough and crusted with dust and cobwebs, gas pipes snaking along their seams. But one section of the wall was smooth as glass, like a window from the ceiling to the floor. The dim light of Erik’s lantern barely penetrated the chamber on the other side, but Christine was not surprised to see it was her dressing room. The glass was the mirror from which the Angel of Music’s voice had come for months.
“I installed this particular door during the war, at the end of the commune’s days, to conceal the most direct road down to the lake.”
“I wouldn’t call that route direct,” Christine muttered, hoping to earn a scowl of a smile from the currently inscrutable ghost beside her. Nothing.
“I will show you how to work the mechanism to open it.”
Christine watched as Erik reached up high on the right side of the mirror to a sort of latch which he pulled. The glass slid aside without a sound and Erik indicated it was safe for her to step through, back into another world as she crossed the threshold. The last time she had been in this room her life had been so different. She retrieved her matches from the vanity and moved to ignite the gaslights. She had only made it to one before she realized Erik had not moved from the dark passage beyond the mirror.
“You won’t come in?”
“I’m not overly fond of mirrors,” Erik replied, cool and smooth as ever, but there was something sincere and tense in his tone. “And I should leave you to some privacy to prepare for rehearsal.”
“Will you be observing?”
“Eventually. I have to attend to some managerial duties first, I’ve been far too lax with Moncharmin and Richard lately, given my distraction.”
Christine swallowed. So she was a distraction? Or was it an obligation? Did he feel he owed something to the girl whose life he had saved and destroyed? Or did he do this out of the love he claimed for her? Love he had not mentioned since the morning she had unmasked him.
Christine startled as Erik moved without a word and triggered the mirror to close, leaving her gaping at her own bewildered face. “Where will I go after rehearsal? Shall I come back here?” she asked the emptiness.
“You may come here, or head into the cellars,” Erik’s voice replied, and suddenly he was an angel again with nothing but the entrancing sound of his words to indicate her presence. “Wherever you go, do not worry, I will find you. Good day, Christine.”
She closed her eyes and shivered at the way he said her name and the promise that could so easily be a threat. She felt it the instant he was gone from behind the mirror, like the sun going behind a cloud, and reopened her eyes.
Did she look different? Would the friends and colleagues who had not seen her since her debut inFaustand what followed notice a change? She did not want to contemplate that. Add that to the ever-lengthening list of things she did not want to think about, including all the debauched things she had done in this room at the encouragement of her angel. She removed her cloak and avoided the blush in her reflection as she retreated from the dressing room where she had exposed herself to Erik’s eyes so many times.
Today’s rehearsal was set for the main stage, one of several full run-throughs of the newRigolettobefore the orchestra joined them for theSitzprobeand final runs next week before the premiere. What part would she be playing in that premiere? Ostensibly she was Adèle’s understudy for all her roles, so she knew Adèle’s part of Magdalena the whore in the final act. But Erik had been preparing her for Gilda for weeks as if the part were hers, and after her triumph as Marguerite, she couldn’t simply be relegated to the chorus. Carlotta had no understudy and had barely been to the rehearsals, wasn’t it logical that Christine step in?
