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The Whole Truth

“The Persian alone knew the whole truth…”

                                                                    –Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

Erik is dead.  

That is how that scoundrel Leroux ended the final chapter of his retelling of the events that took place within the Palais Garnier all those years ago.  He claims Erik died alone, later to be found and buried by Christine Daaé, placed beside the little bubbling well where Erik had bathed her temples when she first came to her senses after passing through her dressing room mirror, where he had set her upon Cesar’s broad white back and continued their long descent into the cavernous basements deep below the opera house.

Perhaps scoundrel is too harsh.  Leroux was a creature of profligate imagination as well as a news reporter and what he could not discover through investigation he invented himself with that storyteller’s gift for those elements which make a good tale.  Reality is so haphazard at times; truth so much stranger and more often rough-hewn than fiction and fiction sometimes all the more compelling for that reason.  

I cannot deny that his novel has power, that the tale he has laid out in it is so captivating as to be told again and again over the years, evolving like a living thing, sentient and aware and taking on a life of its own.

But I was there. Though Leroux never graced me with my given name in his retelling, calling me only the Persian, still I was there, sometimes the sole witness to events so fantastical, so otherworldly that I myself omitted them from my report to the police, for fear they would think me a madman.

I was there – and Erik died in my arms. And his burial – his first burial, at which Christine Daaé was decidedly not present – confirmed a strange truth that I have never spoken of until now.

I can’t blame Leroux entirely for the errors in his tale, working as he was years later with dubious written testimonies and foggy incomplete recollections from those who played only a tiny part in the whole story, memories perhaps deliberately skewed by rational minds trying to elicit some logical sense out of what they had been part of.

Did he need to go so far though, as he did in his epilogue, manufacturing out of whole cloth that he had found and prayed over the skeleton of the Opera Ghost, when I know for a fact that that is impossible?  

I can tell you why, and I will in time, but it is easy, if you look, to discern the truth for yourself.  

The skeleton was said to be found by the little well where Christine first awoke, and she describes how it was here that Erik placed her atop Cesar for the remainder of their descent down into the depths below the opera house.  I know this to be factual – it is word for word from Christine’s own letters, which came to me just prior to Erik’s death, and which I passed on to Leroux, the intrepid reporter, many years later.

She very clearly details that they traveled from there down past the third cellar, which was lit in the distance by flames being tended by boilermen. And so on down two full more storeys to the fifth cellar, and thence across the black lake to Erik’s home between the walls.

Do you see it yet?  I will make it plain.  

Leroux says that it was Erik’s instruction to me to place the advertisement of Erik’s death in L’Epoque, and to summon Christine to carry out Erik’s final wishes, that she alone knew where to find his body, and she alone knew where he wished her to bury him.  And that at his request, she was to wear the little gold ring he gave her until that time, and return it to be entombed with him for eternity.

Imagine if you will, Christine Daaé, summoned to Erik’s home after his passing, somehow lifting the very dead weight of a many days deceased man, somehow loading him into a boat, flinging him atop a convenient horse once across the lake, traveling at least three storeys upwards to the place by the little well where she then somehow contrives to dig a grave there in the substructure of the opera house and lay Erik to his many days delayed rest.  

I know from first hand acquaintance that Christine Daaé is a woman strong in spirit, but capable of this feat?  Can you not see that it is impossible?  Even if her stolid helpmate Raoul de Chagny consented to assist her, it would be almost unbelievable that they could secretly accomplish such a task.

I do not know if workers did in fact find a skeleton when excavating near the well to create a place to store several sealed canisters of phonograph records, preserving them for future generations 100 years hence to open. But if they did, it certainly was not Erik’s skeleton, despite the sentimental detail Leroux included of the little gold ring found upon its finger.

For I alone know where Erik’s mortal remains lie.  I – and one other.  And that other is neither Christine Daaé nor Gaston Leroux. 

Yes, Gaston Leroux had a tremendous imagination and ironically where he failed in telling the full story of the Opera Ghost – the story of my friend, Erik – was in not stretching his imagination enough, not following up on strange angles, refusing to chase fey lights into the surrounding darkness.  If he had, he might well have uncovered a set of facts so unaligned with normal existence that the rational among us could not begin to comprehend an alternate reality in which these things took on some semblance of sense.  

In fairness, I must confess that I do not hold myself blameless for the skewed and half told story that Leroux set forth in his novel, for even all those years later in my interview with him, I still repeated the version of the story I had told to the police, one composed of facts that could exist in daylight hours, scientific and rational, keeping a larger truth very much to myself, lest they find a home for me in the Charenton asylum, amongst other poor unfortunates who speak of association with things that cannot possibly exist.

As it was, the detectives discounted the story I did tell entirely. Perhaps it was my accented French, my exotic origins, the color of my skin.  Perhaps they could not hear logic from someone who did not look like them.  Though Paris was quite cosmopolitan even those many years ago, it would not be the first time nor the last that I would encounter bigotry and distrust due to my heritage.  

But it is far more likely they did not believe my story because even the altered and stripped down version I gave them contained far too many improbable elements.  And for a singular reason:  Erik.  The presence of Erik himself within any tale is sufficient to stretch the credulity even of imaginative people.  These French detectives’ imaginations extended only to ordinary limits, mortal means and abilities. How could they hope to expand their minds enough to encompass the genius that was Erik?  

Or the truth that lurked in that offset world which they, like Leroux, were unable to perceive…

And so via Leroux, Erik became a trickster, an architect who had been there at the conception and birth of the Palais Garner, filling its walls with hidden passageways, secret entrances, handily placed trapdoors in the floors.  All blame was laid at the feet of Erik, for the death of Buquet, for the falling of the chandelier and all the carnage it caused, for the drowning of Comte Phillipe de Chagny.   

While I regretted not being able to tell the whole truth, regretted laying the blame for certain crimes at my friend’s feet, I said what I said to the police because Erik was guilty of his own set of crimes and I had no wish for him to have the time and the means to repeat them, perhaps drawing other innocents into a web far larger than anything Erik had designed.  But very shortly after, he fell ill and passed from the realm of the living, escaping entirely the world which had caused him so much torment. 

I maintained the expurgated version of the story years later to Leroux in part to prevent people from looking too closely, perhaps to become victims themselves of something which is beyond all our understanding.

How was it, you ask, that I, a product of the same times as these men, my contemporaries, was able to discern that which they could not fathom?

I believe it is in part because I was an outsider, in a country and milieu not my own.

The culture I was raised in believed in jinns, both good and evil, and in angels, all created by the hand of God and existing in an unseen world overlapping our own.  Ghosts were not officially part of the religion I followed, and while I understood the concept of a veil between the living and dead, awaiting a day of judgment, there is no official sanction in my faith for the notion of ghosts crossing that veil to wander the world of the living.  

But my home is a very ancient land, and I have seen many strange things. 

Perhaps it was because I was not raised to be only on the lookout for the unseen world at certain times of the year, such as All Hallow’s Eve, when the turning of the seasons and shortening of the days in northern climes makes it easy to believe that the dead may hold sway for an evening.

Perhaps because I was brought up to believe there is a world of unseen and unknowable things, existing side by side with us always, not confined solely to the night, but abroad in the daylight as well…perhaps that is why I was able to see things in a different way. For it was long past All Hallow’s Eve, heading into springtime, when events surrounding Erik and Christine began to turn decidedly unsettling and strange within the Palais Garnier.

And what things did I see that I did not see fit to share with the police at the time or Leroux those many years later?  

The truth about Buquet, for one.  I was a daroga in my former life, a chief of police in my native land.  I have investigated many murders, learned the art of searching for clues, using my mind, like Leroux, to put together unrelated bits of evidence into a coherent story.  So I do not blame the detectives for initially concluding that Buquet had hung himself.  And when I later became a guest in Erik’s torture chamber, and found the noose that had disappeared from the crime scene…I was able to put more pieces to the puzzle and concluded that Buquet had been a victim of the trap that Erik had set.

It was only later that I remembered – I had seen Buquet in situ where he was found hanged in the third cellar – Buquet’s lips were not parched, there was no evidence that he endured the extreme heat of the torture chamber that drives men to take their own life by hanging themselves from the solitary iron tree confined with them in that hellish mirrored enclosure.  It is possible that Buquet was spared the extreme heat, that he fell unnoticed into the chamber and succumbed by his own hand due to the hopelessness of ever being found.  Erik was very inconsistent in his habits and could have been away from his home for some time.

But…I have very good reason to distinctly recall the loose gritty particles covering the floor of that same chamber.  And I knew there was none of the dusty residue present on his clothes or his shoes, or his hands as it would be if he had endured what I had, scrabbling on the floor in a desperate attempt to find a way out.  

If Joseph Buquet had not been in the torture chamber, then he had not hung himself.  Of course, you say, Erik himself was responsible, he must have caught Buquet and hung him right there in the third cellar.  And that may well be so.  But I have not laid before you the whole design yet, so you may see where I believe Buquet fits into the larger pattern.

Then there is the matter of the chandelier.

Well, you scoff, this is simple!  Erik loosed it down upon the unsuspecting crowds of people himself.

I have been to the room above the theater into which they draw the chandelier to maintain it.  I have seen the cables and chains used to suspend its mighty weight.  One man, even if that man is Erik…it would take a long time to cause that chandelier to fall.  And the odds that it would strike and kill the one person who was a threat to him, the woman brought in to take the job of his willing helper, Madame Giry?  Astronomical.  And I tell you, I have reason to believe that no matter where that poor creature was seated in the auditorium that night, the chandelier would have found her.

I was one of the first on the scene.  I stayed and helped as the many injured people were pried free from the twisted ruin of the theater seats.  I was there when the chandelier was lifted off and away, deposited upon the stage. And later heard tales of how attempts to remove the chandelier from the premises for repair kept failing miserably for varied and unaccountable reasons until finally the wreck of it was simply worked upon there backstage, in the workshops of the opera itself, the repairs then proceeding at an astonishing pace, like the miraculous healing of a wound.

But that day, the day the chandelier fell, I saw the confusion and consternation as different crews arrived to return the seats of the house to order, specifically a first crew, the very first crew to arrive who commented amongst themselves that someone must have sent them a miscommunication, that a cleaning crew must have already been there.

For upon their arrival, there was not a drop of blood to be found…

In the matter of Phillipe, I did not see his body myself, but I did speak to the policemen who found it.  He lay supine on the bank of the lake, completely out of the water.  I inquired as to footprints in the surrounding area, and one veteran gendarme offered that he had noticed there were none, neither wet footprints, nor impressions on the bank.

When I pressed as to whether it seemed likely that a drowning man could pull himself all the way upon the shore, so that his feet were clear of the water, turn himself over and then proceed to expire anyway, they had no answer for me.  The veteran gendarme who had spoken of the footprints volunteered that he was from a coastal region of France and that upon the shore, indeed rising up onto the wall in one area were marks that looked very like a tide had swept in and receded.  He spoke this in a very quiet voice, looking at the ground, and I did not even have to impress upon him that there are no tides on the underground lake below the opera, for I am sure he was well aware of it even as he spoke.  

You may have noticed that I have made a leap in my narrative, for the recovery of Phillipe’s body happened after my time in the torture chamber and my subsequent return to my apartment.  And indeed what happened in the torture chamber and after gave me very good reason to suspect what had happened to Phillipe, and how his body could be returned to the shore riding a wave high enough to leave a mark on the walls on a lake that was flat and smooth and unperturbed by tides.

Here it is well that I am writing this in the solitude of my own abode, with only Darius for company and I shall not allow even him, who has been closer to me than a brother in our exile, to read these words.

In the torture chamber, conditions became extreme indeed, and Raoul, who had a remarkably sensitive nature, was very quickly overcome and thrust fully into the world of illusion.  I myself, being older and more accustomed to hardships, as well as hailing from a more southerly clime and thus more tolerant of the rising heat, kept my wits about me much longer, which assertion you may rightfully question as you read further.

Leroux makes no mention of the gritty grey sand which covered the floor of the torture chamber and this is because he was never in the torture chamber as I was.  I described only a floor to him, a grooved floor in which I eventually found the small stub of a black nail that released a trapdoor in the floor.  

Odd how of the many horrific things I have seen in my life, first hand, that of them all the memory of the sand on that floor fills me with such a profound uncanny strangeness that my fingers tremble even now and I must set aside the pen and recognize that I am safe, I am no longer prostrate on that sandy floor watching a small daylit horror occur before my very eyes.

Raoul and I were no longer a threat to Erik. Indeed Raoul had put a gun to his temple and I was contemplating an end to my life hanging from the iron tree as I lay in the sparkling coarse grey sand.  Grey like the walls that surrounded the underground lake…and then, the sand began to move.  Of its own accord it writhed away from my outstretched hand, behaving for all the world as though it obeyed physical laws, mounding into ridges and ripples as it moved outward in all directions, as sand blown by the wind will do.

There was no wind in the torture chamber. There was no vibration, no force, no tipping or inclination of the floor that could cause the sand to skitter away from me, revealing the planks of the floor beneath and laying bare the black-headed nail that ultimately opened a way out.

I was too stunned to move, held in place by sheer terror of the unknown that was there with us in that room. For that was part of it. There was a presence in that room, unseen, only felt, and it…was angry. Not at us. I cannot convey how I knew this. But it was a palpable sense of anger and disappointment and bittersweetness and it was aimed not at us, but at Erik.

I told Leroux I pressed the black stud in the floor, but the truth is, it too moved of its own accord, causing the trapdoor to swing open. The eerie sand shifted again, away from the entire outline of the trapdoor, for all the world as if it wished to avoid falling down the stairs that were now revealed, leading to the vast storeroom below.  

Still shivering with the import of what I had seen, and desirous of being away from the living sand and the torture chamber both, I gathered up Raoul.  We proceeded down the steps once we were revived by the draft of cool air released from the open trapdoor into our prison and there below discovered hundreds of barrels of gunpowder.

Leroux tells the story quite well here, of Erik tormenting Christine with the decision to turn the scorpion or the grasshopper, the scorpion to release water to drown the gunpowder and serve as her promise to marry him, and the grasshopper, if she declined the horrific fate of matrimony, to blow the opera house and a good deal of Paris sky high.

She made the only choice she could make; the scorpion was turned and the torture chamber to which we had returned upon divining Erik’s plans began to fill with water.  

Leroux makes much of the guggle, guggle of the water filling our ears as the vicomte and I were swept up in its rising tide, to the very top of the torture chamber, pressed against a grey sparkling ceiling of stone, part of the very foundations of the Palais Garnier which extended deep into the earth, between the walls of which Erik had made his home.  Pressed against that domed roof, breathing the air trapped there, I felt the stone warm against my skin.

And while I told Leroux that we struggled, drowning, while the water whirled and spoke – guggle, guggle – and that I seemed to hear a voice saying nonsensical things about barrels for sale – what truly transpired is that Raoul and I were held there, pressed gently by the water against the air in the pocket at the ceiling, and the water said:  breathe .  And it said:  you will be safe .  And it said:  only leave and all will be well .   

I did lose consciousness for a time, and woke as Leroux says, in the Louis-Phillipe room on the bed, with the vicomte fast asleep on the sofa.  But many of the particulars that then occurred I did not tell to Leroux.  Erik did disappear for a time, and Christine and I did speak, not at length, but enough to establish another uncanny matter beyond any doubt.  You will recall Christine had previously tried to end her life, by hitting her head against the wall.  And from what I had seen of her, she had the force and the will to accomplish anything she set her mind to.  But upon her forehead was only the tiniest bit of bruising, and a very small cut, too small to even need a bandage, at her hairline.  

She flushed when she saw me examining her face and I asked her to help me rise, to lead me to the bathroom.  Upon exiting, I asked her precisely where she had struck her head against the walls and she indicated at the end of the hallway, against the grey stone that composed the wall there. She must have seen something on my face, for she said “With God as my witness, I tried, as hard as I could – I felt, God forgive me, that I had no other way out!  But though this may sound like I am raving, the wall yielded with each strike and I was utterly unable to inflict more than the damage you see here!”

Upon the pretense of stretching my legs, and imploring her to keep watch over Raoul, I made my way down the hall to the grey stone at its end.  There was no blood there, no indication that anything untoward had occurred, and on a sudden mad whim I struck my fist as hard as I could, knuckles first into that wall, only to feel it give way before my momentum, curling round my fingers and the back of my hand.  When I drew my fist away, I saw that I had scraped my hand, and there upon the unmarred wall was a drop of my dark red blood which disappeared into the stone like water upon arid ground…

I took again to my bed, just in time for Erik to return and proffer me a draft, which I was able to take into my mouth and subtly drain into the pillow as I turned onto my side.  Feigning sleep, I lay for some time as Erik first fetched Raoul away, and then came back for me.

Carrying me easily in his arms with his enormous strength, he settled me into the boat.  And for this next, I implore you to remember…I took none of the draft.  My senses were clear.  I would not blame you did you think otherwise when you read what is to come.

For the long pole and indeed a set of oars were shipped right next to where I lay, and Erik made no move toward them.  And yet…the boat began to move.  Between slitted eyelids, I saw Erik standing tall in the stern, and a wake forming behind the boat as it skimmed across the water of its own volition, silent and swift.  The horror of the sand moving away from my hands rose again in my mind; this was of the same ilk, uncanny impossible things that made reality tilt to such a degree I almost did fall into a swoon.

Erik stepped lightly out of the boat at the far shore, securing it to the embankment, and said the strangest thing:  “Thank you,”  delivered with a small nod to the surface of the water.

I had no time to puzzle it out, because we then embarked on an equally strange journey, him lifting me out of the boat, settled in his arms, as he ascended the stairs.  Now Erik is strong, but I had no notion of how even he would be able to carry me all the way to the surface.  As I was puzzling out what to do, he came to a landing.  I had lost all sense of orientation, but Erik seemed clear on where he wanted to go, straight ahead into a solid wall.

And I tell you, by all I hold dear and holy, on the memory of my wife, on the memory of my son, the wall…opened.  Not as a door might, nor even as a hidden turning entrance like that behind the mirror in Christine’s dressing room. No. The stone rippled and flowed and slit open from floor to well above Erik’s head, widening obligingly as he stepped through with no hesitation, as though he and everyone in the world did this every day.

And there began the strangest journey I have ever taken, as Erik made his way through walls, as floors rose to lift him many feet in the air, until before I knew it we stepped through the last wall onto the street. He bundled me into a cab that arrived a short while later, gave instructions to the driver to deliver me bodily to my door, and watched the cab as it drove away.

Maybe I had absorbed some of the draft, maybe some of it had trickled down my throat before I could expel it. For when Darius helped me inside, I could only make my way to my bed and fall into a deep sleep, encased in slumber as though it were a stone wall that rippled and flowed and formed itself around me, holding me dreadfully and completely still.

It took me a day or two to recover my strength, not helped by my frantic need to somehow alert the police being thwarted by my body’s response to the shocks it had been through.  My story, as I have said, was dismissed by the police, and I set at once to work on writing a very revised account of what had come to pass and what my suspicions were, hopeful to enlist the press in my cause.  

As Leroux recounts, I had just finished this task when who should arrive at my door but Erik himself, looking wan and unaccountably frail.  He was dying, he said, and as much as his unsettling energy emanated from him as it always had, there was a shortness of breath as he spoke, and a weariness to him that concerned me. 

But Erik had always been given to hyperbole and embellishment…and truth be told, as always where my friend was concerned, I was conflicted.  He had committed crimes that warranted death many times over, and yet I could not bring myself to imagine a world without him in it.  I dismissed the gasping breathing as a product of emotion, accounted for the weariness as due to his many recent exertions and attributed his repeated claims that he was dying as unsubtle attempts to play upon my sympathy.

Erik, tearful and trembling, shared with me the story of what had passed between him and Christine after he had returned from seeing me to the surface. What Leroux has written in his book came directly from my recounting, as full and true and complete as I could remember, for it was a tale of an astonishing redemption, a return to the man I had known, before he had been quite so cruelly used and in turn learned to cruelly use others.  

Indeed my retelling to Leroux was probably too complete, as I was swept up once again by the high emotion of that recitation. There were phrases that Erik used, odd references to Christine as his living wife, his living bride, that spoke directly to the wild theory that even then was forming in my mind. Those many years later, in speaking to Leroux, I should have left those strange words out, as I had left out or altered other things that simply did not align with the world as we perceive it to be.

But even then, so many years after Erik’s last visit to my home, I was caught up in that extraordinary moment when my friend revealed he had experienced what it was to love and to be loved. It seemed wrong somehow to leave out any of those rare words that demonstrated his capacity for good. I suppose I wanted the world, through Leroux, to catch at least a glimpse of the man Erik could have become, the man I had seen in his youth before events conspired to twist his soul to match his face. 

The man who I always saw, through my biased eyes.

Erik had kissed Christine’s  forehead, he said, with her complicity, and become so overwhelmed with love for her, by her allowing her tears to mingle with his own in a cleansing shower of compassion, that he had at once set aside his selfish urges and wished only for her true and complete happiness. That happiness, he knew, which she could only find with Raoul by her side.  And so he freed them both, asking her only to promise to come to him when he had died, and return the little gold ring he gave her to wear while he still yet lived.

And here is where my recounting diverged from that long ago reality…ironically because the reality was so unbelievable.  I told Leroux that Erik made known only to Christine where to find his body when he had died, and where he wished to be buried.  And that I had asked no questions, accepting Erik’s instructions that upon receipt of a package of Christine’s effects, to be sent by him when he felt the end was near, I would notify the young couple of Erik’s death, and place an announcement in L’Epoque.

It is true that I asked no questions, for Darius, loyal friend and often disobedient servant due to that loyalty, would not leave the apartment as I requested. There was no way for me to even broach the supernatural subject matter that I so longed to address. I needed to know though, to put those questions to Erik, and soon, in case his premonition of his own impending death turned out to be true.

Leroux goes far astray here, led by my own hand…my last sight of Erik was not in a cab bound for the opera house, nor were the last words I heard from him instructions to the driver to go to the opera.  For when Erik later sent me the package of Christine’s things, her papers, a set of dainty gloves, a shoe-buckle, two pocket handkerchiefs, holy relics of the woman he loved better than he had loved anyone or anything …I did not send for Christine and Raoul at once, as I told Leroux had been agreed upon.  

Erik in truth had never told Christine where to find his body and where to bury it – he would never have burdened her with such distressing tasks. Those things, he said, would fall to me.  And when I received the package I was to make my way to him post haste, to hear his final instructions, and to make him ready, after his death, to be seen by Christine when she came to return his ring.

Summoning all my courage, and armed only with a bag into which Darius had packed enough easy and nourishing foods for a small army, I made my way immediately to the opera house. I was known there; it was easy for me to slip back to Christine’s dressing room, which was not in use. I made short work of the lock – as any current or former policeman will tell you, we acquire any number of the skills of those we are in opposition to – and stood before the mirror. I was in a hurry, yes, but I needed to test a hypothesis.

And I did, sliding the mirror away from the wall, revealing that the turning mechanism that had used to be in place there, that I had in fact used myself to enter the Communist’s Road hidden behind it when I ventured down to Erik’s domain with Raoul, sadly ending with our imprisonment in the torture chamber…was no longer in evidence. The mirror was now just a mirror and the wall a wall. The way was sealed, as though it had always been sealed.  

Slipping the mirror back into place, I pondered whether I was brave enough or foolish enough or deluded enough to attempt what was on my mind. I did not ponder long; there was too much at stake.  

Taking up Darius’s bag of provisions, I faced the mirror.  And spoke aloud.  

“Can you let me pass? You know I mean him no harm.”

And the mirror shivered, and ran in streams of silver light, parting like water, revealing the wall behind it rippling and moving, easing open.  And for love of Erik, for the man I knew and the man he had become again, I stepped through.

I did not know the way as well as Erik; I dared not use the supernatural route he had taken me upon before. Though the walls themselves beckoned me, I politely demurred and made my slow way by conventional means down to the shores of the black lake. Blue glowing mist lay heavily on the surface of the water and the boat waited for me. I stepped in, and slipped the chain from the mooring, and suddenly somehow unafraid, I sat in the boat, making not a move toward pole or paddles, and though it was astonishing, exhilarating, and wholly uncanny, I was not surprised at all when the lake itself took the boat in hand and propelled it through the blue mist to the farther shore.

I had no concern for gaining entrance to Erik’s home; as I suspected, the walls themselves parted to let me pass.

I found him in the Louis-Phillipe room, in a bad way, stretched upon the bed.  God was kind, and he was still alive, and he rallied for a bit under my care, the two of us spending many hours in quiet conversation, making our peace each with the other, speaking of everything with the ease of old friends and with the spectre of Death making no topic off limits.

At last, Erik sensed his time was drawing to a close – he had forbidden me to fetch a doctor, saying there was nothing that could be done. His heart had been hurt too many times, and its labor was near done.  

He wished to ensure that I understood his last instructions.“You are to take me from here, Daroga,” he said, “and lay me on the shore, near the wall.  She will be along to fetch me. Not Christine,” he hastily added, though I had no doubt it was not Christine he referred to.  

“Yes,” he said, “I call her she, in the manner of ships and boats and all the inanimate things that men come to love, in their own way. I know you were awake for part of our journey home, Daroga. I know that you have seen. I know that you have heard her.”  His eyes gleamed with what looked like mirth.  “I have kept her a very great secret for years. You are the only one who knows. She was very angry with me for a time, Daroga – the gunpowder, don’t you know – and to that you owe her your life, for it was she who saved you and the vicomte, when I was consumed by my terrible love for Christine. She has forgiven me. She understands. She wants only my happiness, and for a time, she believed as I did, that I would find it with Christine.”

He closed his eyes, those yellow eyes, now covered by fluttering lids. He had ceased wearing the mask, and I no longer found his face a horror to look upon. It was open, and honest, and that leant him an odd sort of beauty all his own.

“She loves me, in her own terrible way, Daroga. You cannot blame her. She dealt with threats to me as she saw fit, and I was unable to stop her. You and I will share the pleasant fiction that if I had the means to stop her, I would have.” He laughed, trailing off into a cough.

“When I have passed, Daroga, lay me by the wall, and she will come and claim me. But if you would, my good fellow, my dear fellow, when Christine comes –” and I had no heart to contradict him though I had my doubts – ”when Christine comes to return my ring to me, please ask her to let me go, won’t you?  This is a secret that you and I alone will share.  Have her let me go, and lay me out nicely for Christine’s visit. She has let me know that Raoul may accompany Christine, just this once for both of them and then they must not return below again.”

I squeezed his hand, indicating I would comply with his wishes.

“I know you must have many questions, and I have very few answers. I do not know what she is. I do not know how she came to be. ‘When’ was sometime during construction, and believe me, I thought I was going quite mad at first. It took her a long time to convince me she was real.”

Real enough, I thought to myself, and caring enough for my friend that he had made that curious and deliberate distinction of Christine as his living wife. Caring enough for him to let him have this, even if it meant losing him altogether. 

As much a contradiction as my friend Erik, able to turn from dealing death to the highest reaches of selfless love, all in an instant.

“And she says to tell you, Daroga, to tell you that you are welcome anywhere herein as long as you may live, but my house will be sealed, so take from it what you wish when you leave, dear fellow.”

And with this, we turned to other things, and spoke pleasantly for a while, and then his breath came shallower and shallower until it came no more.  

What the last words we shared were I keep for myself.  

I cleaned him and dressed him, arrayed him in his mask. I filled Darius’s bag with some few mementos, and some things that Erik had specifically asked that I take away with me, and went through the door to the outside in a traditional manner to set the bag on the shore.  

Erik was as light as a feather when I lifted him, as though the passion that animated him and now had fled had contained all his weight. I went and set him by the stone wall a way down from his door, which sealed shut and without a trace in the stone wall behind me. I held his hands, and spoke a few words in my native tongue, and I kissed him on the forehead, my friend, my dear friend, who was no more.

And sat back upon my knees as the wall opened, and the bank rose up and she took him into her firm embrace and the wall closed over him, shutting him away from my sight as the blue mist rose around me.

When Christine arrived several days later – and oh what I felt when I realized she intended to keep her promise to him, for all that could have been between them had Erik simply known another way – Raoul waited for her outside her dressing room, and she closed her eyes as I asked so she could not see the mirror open. We made a conventional journey below, she and I; I poled the boat across myself.  

She had returned Erik to me prior to my trip up to fetch Christine below, looking the same as when she had taken him into herself, and I had laid him on the shore with a pillow from the boat beneath his head.  I gave Christine her privacy and all the time she wished for to sit with him, talk with him, pour her tears upon him.

When she called for me to return, I saw that Erik now wore a little gold ring and I don’t doubt from the position of his mask that she had anointed his forehead with a final kiss.  

When I returned from delivering her above, he was gone.  

Only the pillow remained on the shore.

So now you see the great truth that I have kept hidden and that Leroux despite his earnest investigation was not open enough to see.

His ending, and much of his story, was correct.

Erik was dead.

But the Palais Garnier…

The Palais Garnier was alive.