Costumes and Filigree: A Novel of the Phantom of the Opera Read online

  Please, Freya, she prayed, hoping the goddess would be sympathetic to her plea, please let it be the Angel!

  After the next night’s performance, Christine entered her dressing room with a mixture of fear and excitement whirling in her mind. What if, after all these years of waiting, the Angel finally appeared to her and continued her father’s teachings? The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. After all, what else could the Voice be, but an Angel? She confidently strode over to her vanity table and sat down, listening, waiting.

  But the Voice never came. After three hours of loitering, pretending to be preoccupied with rearranging the items on her dresser, combing through her hair, and making sure her costume was in perfect condition, she gave up. Sighing, she stared at her reflection in the vanity mirror.

  “Perhaps the stress just got to you,” Christine told her reflection wearily. “If there was an Angel, surely he would’ve come by now.” Defeated, she threw a patched shawl over her shoulders and started for the door.

  Christine barely touched her dinner, far too depressed over the Angel to pretend for Mamma’s sake that she enjoyed the cheap, bland food her guardian was able to afford. As if it hadn’t been a trying enough day—a terrible rehearsal, a chastisement from Madame Giry concerning her lack of dedication, and the continued nonappearance of the Angel—she still had to come home to a pathetically-tiny tenement and a small plate of beans and some old lettuce to remind her of the pathetic poverty in which she lived.

  She shifted her weight slightly, and the stained chair on which she was sitting tottered upon its uneven legs, an unwelcome reinforcement to the extent of her destitution.

  “Vot is ze matter, dearest?” asked Mamma Valerius in concern. Christine had been able to sense Mamma’s muted excitement for the past few days since Christine’s encounter with the mysterious Voice, expecting Christine at any moment to announce that she had spoken with the Voice again and that he was the Angel of Music, come to rescue them from their poverty and elevate Gustave Daaé’s talented daughter to the role of opera diva. All through dinner she had waited for Christine to speak, growing impatient with excitement.

  Christine knew it was unkind of her to keep Mamma in suspense as she was, but she couldn’t bring herself to say that the Voice had never spoken or made his presence known again; it was bad enough wondering within herself if it hadn’t been the Angel—if he had abandoned her—if he had even come at all—if the Angel even existed—without making her fears concrete by speaking them aloud. She drew a trail through the tiny mound of beans with her fork, growing more and more depressed as she wondered if the Angel would ever come.

  “’As ze Voice still not returned?” Mamma asked, trying to study Christine’s expression in the dim light.

  Christine sighed and set down her fork. “No.”

  “But it had to have been ze Angel!”

  “Or a stagehand pulling a prank,” she said gloomily, plucking wilted petals from the flowers resting in a cheap purple vase on the table. “Or my imagination.” She wanted the Angel to appear so badly that it was a depressing possibility that she had just dreamed up the whole thing.

  The part of her that needed to believe in the Angel protested at this thought, commanding her to stay strong in her belief of the Angel.

  Christine made a derisive sound and yanked a brown petal free with unnecessary force, causing it to disintegrate between her fingers. All her life, she had believed in the Angel so strongly that she had molded her speech, her actions, every comportment to be more pleasing to the Angel’s eye. And what had it gotten her? He had never appeared. She was tired of trying so hard, and tired of the ache of constant disappointment.

  “But it has to be a sign from God!” declared Mamma. Christine said nothing, and after a moment, Mamma put her hand on Christine’s comfortingly. “Ze Angel vill come.”

  Christine snatched her hand away. “What if he doesn’t?” she snapped. “What if he never comes? What if the Angel isn’t even real?”

  Mamma looked astonished. “But ov course he is real, mine child. Vot are you saying?”

  “I’ve been waiting my whole life for the Angel to appear, and I can’t stand to have my hopes quashed again! And if he was real, why hasn’t he appeared by now? Aren’t I good enough? What if—” She stopped suddenly and shoved her chair away from the table so that she could stand, causing the vase of wilted flowers to totter before Mamma caught it. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she declared.

  Mamma set the vase back in its spot on the tiny, wooden table before replying. “My dear, vhy are you so vorried? It is ze Angel, I’m certain.”

  Christine stood furiously. “I said I didn’t want to talk about it!” she snapped, and stomped off to her room.

  She locked the door and slammed the window closed, but thoughts of the Angel, accompanied by pain, bitterness, and disillusionment, plagued her unceasingly through the night, preventing all chance of sleep.

  The following day she avoided the dressing room, dreading the terrible silence she would hear from its walls, confirming the nonexistence of the Angel and the end of all her dreams. But after Madame Giry put her foot down, refusing to permit Christine to practice in her street clothes, she was forced to enter the room anyway to fetch her ballet costume.

  When she entered the room, a foolish part of her half-expected the Angel to be there. But the room was dark and uninhabited, the only sound coming from the passersby in the hallway.

  After she had changed into the silky white tutu and ballet slippers—making as much noise as possible while doing so, to keep the crushing silence at bay—she ran a brush through her hair, out of habit, though it hardly mattered anymore; without the Angel to elevate her to divahood, she would remain a penniless ballet rat until she died.

  She moved to throw her dress into the pile overflowing from the shared closet, but then stopped suddenly, contemplating the dull, unadorned cloth, patched in numerous places, boring, ugly, and poor, promising her a future of the same material. She would never live up to her father’s dreams by herself. She would be doomed to a pathetic, undistinguished existence in a foreign country, scraping for every penny for the rest of her life.

  Tears rolled off her cheeks and stained the dress in her hands, turning it an even darker, more dismal grey. The Angel wasn’t coming. No one was coming.

  The loneliness and despair pressed in on her, as if the very room were shrinking, until she struggled to breathe. She couldn’t bear to believe that the Angel was real—to perpetuate the disappointment that clawed at her heart after so many years of waiting—but even worse was believing that he did not exist. The two sides warred within her, clawing, screaming within her chest, making her heart beat faster and faster and the malicious silence roar in her ears.

  “ANGEL!” she cried, falling to her knees. She shrieked his name over and over, so loudly that it made her throat burn, until her voice succumbed to hoarseness and was overpowered by her sobs. Still there was only silence, more deafening than any noise, damning her to poverty and failure….

  “Angel,” she said one last time, softly, knowing it was hopeless, and buried her red, burning face in the dress she held.

  And then, at long last, after she had given up all hope, she heard the Voice speak:

  “Christine.”

  His voice was low and tentative, as if he were unsure of himself. She scrambled to her feet, not bothering to wipe the tears from her eyes, forcing down all the faith and happiness that bubbled in her chest. She had to be in control. If it wasn’t the Angel, she would be crushed if she allowed herself to hope again. She had to be calm and practical. Just the same, she couldn’t keep a note of desperation from her voice as she asked,

  “Are…are you the Angel of Music?”

  There was a silence, a thousand times worse than the one moments before, tearing Christine’s heart apart with doubt, fear, and despair. Just when she could endure it no longer, the Voice spoke, hesitant,

  �
��Angel of Music?”

  His tone gave her the answer she had been dreading. A sob escaped her lips, and she hung her head, unable to bear the weight of such bitter disappointment.

  “Christine—”

  “Go away!” she cried, as the tears began flooding down her cheeks again, fast and scalding. She collapsed onto the floor, the jarring pain it brought to her knees accentuating her agony. “Go away and leave me to my misery!” The rough, old floorboards were driving splinters into her hands, but the pain was drowned out in her anguish. “Without the Angel I’ll never be anything! Just a stupid, penniless chorus rat who can’t do anything right and will never live up to her father’s dream!” She gasped for air as the sobs wracking her body intensified, pulling her hands away from her eyes and clutching her chest in an attempt to get enough air. “I might as well die here!” she sobbed, and prayed for the gods to strike her down where she knelt.

  “Christine, please,” cried the Voice desperately, “please don’t cry! You’re not stupid, or worthless, or anything you just said!”

  “Leave me alone!” she wailed. “Without the Angel, there is nothing! No point, no purpose, no chance! Leave me to die!”

  “But Christine, I—I am the Angel!”

  She sniffed and didn’t bother to look up. “Oh, right, sure,” she said dully, too worn out from her outburst to yell. “Then why did you sound so confused when I asked if you were him?”

  “Because I—wished to test your faith in the Angel,” he said, his voice growing stronger and more certain as he continued. “I have come to serve as your instructor, dear Christine, and to help you fulfill your father’s dream. Please don’t cry anymore.”

  A small, final tear made its way down her cheek as she, stunned, tried to process this abrupt change in her fortune. “You—you’re really the Angel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why have you not come before?”

  “I was aiding another deserving artist, Christine. I came as quickly as I could.”

  “And…you’ll really help me to become a diva?”

  “If that is your wish, then I shall work night and day to see it fulfilled,” he said, in a voice so strong, so sincere, so devoted, that she was forced to smile as his warmth filled her.

  She was silent for a long moment, clasping her hands and thanking the gods for answering her prayers, as her heart’s wild, rapid beats slowly calmed. Finally she raised her head and asked, “When do we start?”

  “Whenever you wish,” he replied.

  “Now, Angel—let’s start now!” For a moment she heard no reply, and said hurriedly, “Or do you wish me to call you something else? Father also called you the Skrípi av Songr—that’s Norse for your title—should I call you that instead?”

  “No…no, ‘Angel’ will do just fine.”

  “All right.” She waited again, then prompted, her excitement making her rather impatient, “Well? Aren’t we starting now?”

  “Very…very well, Christine…but don’t you have ballet practice a few minutes from now?”

  Her ecstatic smile turned into a pout. “I don’t want to be a ballet rat one moment longer! I want to be a diva right now!”

  “That will take time,” said the Angel.

  “Hmpf.” She considered it for a moment. She had waited years for the Angel to come—she supposed, now that he was here, that she could wait a little while longer to be the diva of the Opera Garnier. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Go to practice, then, Christine—we’ll begin your lessons tonight.”

  As Christine skipped out of the dressing room and down the hall, happy and smiling once more, Erik leaned heavily against the wall of passageway, uncaring as the cold bricks sapped the warmth from his body, and covered his face with his hands. How could he have done something so utterly stupid? Now she believed that he was an angel! How could he have lied to her so cruelly?

  The porcelain mask chilled his fingers, and he yanked his hand away and cursed as remembrance of his deformity made his situation seem even more awful. He—such a disgusting creature—shouldn’t be speaking to anyone as beautiful and pure as Christine Daaé, not even through a wall. If she found out that the so-called angel who had promised to teach her was really a monster….

  He sank down to his knees, unable to take the weight of the guilt he had brought upon himself. But he hadn’t had a choice. He hadn’t been able to stand listening to her cry. Singing to her two days ago had been the only way he had been able to think of to alleviate her despair.

  After a few minutes of cursing himself, Erik sighed and stood. There was nothing he could do about it now. And perhaps—just perhaps—he would be able to help her achieve her dreams while he dealt with his mistake.

  Readjusting his mask, he started the trek back down to his caverns. If he was going to play the part of an angel, he needed to find a Bible as quickly as possible.

  Chapitre Trois: Le Enseignement du Ange

  Weeks passed, and Christine’s talent grew vastly under the Angel’s instruction. She could never remember being happier. She never saw him—not even a spark of ethereal light—but his voice, so deep, so strong, so beautiful, guided her on to levels of vocal mastery she had never even hoped to achieve. She was dying to know what he looked like and had asked him more than once, even refusing to continue their lesson until he replied satisfactorily, but his answers were always vague and reticent, with some ridiculous statement or another about how appearances didn’t matter.

  He had somehow used his divine magic to secure her a dressing room of her own (the other chorus girls were insanely jealous), and she had wasted a large number of hours sitting in her own room enjoying the privacy and comfort. It was a small room, poorly lit and sparsely furnished, but to her it felt like a palace. She had her own vanity, her own window (albeit a small one), and her own closet (which she promptly filled with the mass of papers and trinkets that the chorus girls were always complaining about). There was a full-length silver mirror bolted to the wall across from the door, seemly oddly out-of-place in the tiny room. The mirror constituted a sort of mystery to Christine, because when she had asked Monsieur Debienne, one of the managers, why it was taking so long for her to be transferred to her new room, he had replied (looking even more stressed and timorous than usual) that the Phantom had demanded certain specifications concerning her room—specifications that had something to do with the mirror. Though Christine pressed the subject—very interested in these modifications and in the Angel’s decision to mask his request as a demand of the dreaded Phantom—she got no further answers. The Angel was even less helpful, refusing to speak about the Phantom, just as he had refused to speak about most everything else she had asked him about himself and his operations.

  He was really quite mysterious; every day when she entered her dressing room, she found new sheet music placed neatly in a little box designated for its especial use (procured for her by the Angel after she had lost the first batch of music). No matter how long she waited, hiding in various corners of the room, or whatever absurd hour she burst in, she could never catch him placing the sheet music in the room. It was quite unfair.

  Since he so absurdly refused to give her a picture, she felt herself entitled to make up whatever image of him that struck her fancy—the picture she settled on, based solely from his voice, was very close to her picture of the ideal man: tall, thin but muscular, with divinely-beautiful features and eyes so gorgeous and limitless that she could get lost in them. Her ideal man was blonde, of course, but for some reason, she couldn’t picture her Angel with anything but dark hair. It was his voice—she couldn’t really explain it. She had finally given up on attempts to modify this image; it took too much brainpower.

  All she really knew about him was that he was very, very musically talented (vocally and with a variety of instruments) and that his powers were limited to the scope of her dressing room. She’d figured out the latter portion after a rather embarrassing conversation with Mamma and some p
eople from the neighboring tenements, with whom Mamma had been sharing Christine’s miraculous interaction with the divine; Christine had laughed at their disbelief, and, arms melodramatically raised to the heavens, had commanded the Angel to appear in her apartment. She had been so humiliated and angered when he did not appear—leaving her to be snickered at and belittled by the neighbors—that she had refused to speak to the Angel for two whole days before telling him why she was so furious. He had explained that he was a rather minor angel with only a small amount of power, and, regrettably, could not manifest anywhere outside of the Garnier as long as he was assigned to her. It was a shame, really—she would have liked to practice at home where she could lounge on her bed and make runs to the kitchen for snacks—but in the end she supposed it really wasn’t the Angel’s fault, and forgave him.

  He seemed to know all of her weak points already, a wondrous prescience that Christine could only marvel at. He didn’t seem to know much about her father or the instruction he had given Christine before his death, a point on which Christine questioned her heavenly benefactor.

  “I only spoke with him once, mademoiselle, before hastening to your side,” was his reply. “You see, I was aiding others during the years he had been residing in Heaven—”

  “You mean Niflheim?” she interjected.

  There was a long pause. “Yes, it is also called that,” he said finally. “But to return to my explanation, which is also the reason for my inexcusable lateness in aiding you, I was helping other aspiring artists. When I returned to Heaven—”

  “But don’t you live in Asgard with the gods?”

  “…Yes,” he said again, with a strange reluctance.

  “Then you shouldn’t use ‘Heaven’ for both Asgard and Niflheim—it confuses me.”

  “I apologize, Christine—I am not very familiar with the terms mortals use.”