For all of little Meg Giry's crying, "He's not here - oh stop, don't do this!" the mob could not be deterred from their self-righteous destruction. Long after they had quit the cellars, they were present still in the flotsam they had left in their wake: crusted streams of wax from overturned candles; bits of fluff from shredded carpets; and ashes - everywhere a fine layer of ashes from the books and music, the hangings and furbelows and bits of finery which his home had once sported and which they had burned.

Erik himself heard and yet did not hear all that befell his fine belongings; he had been only inches away from their violence, safe behind the hidden door to Christine's private chamber, running his hands over her things like a man in a trance. Firmin pounded on the wall into which Meg claimed she had seen him disappear; but the sound was muffled in Erik's thoughts, which he had concentrated on memorizing her scent; it still clung to the gowns she had so recently hung in the mahogany wardrobe. The material slipping between his fingers shielded him from the sounds of smashing that wafted through the wall, of Carlotta's mingled sobs for Ubaldo Piangi and her vengeful cackles as his music was burned.

When silence finally descended, he did not notice it immediately. And when he emerged from Christine's room, the destruction to which he had been an aural witness came as something of a surprise.

And yet, he was surprisingly calm; he was now possessed of the unearthly peace of a dying man who has received extreme unction. At the moment when he was prepared to commit his most heinous crime - killing a man purely from hate, a man who had threatened him only with heartbreak - Christine's kiss had absolved him of his sin. He was washed as clean as a newly baptized child. Of course he still wanted her - he thought that he had almost felt love in her touch when she returned his ring - and if she had only fought a little harder against the pressure of the Vicomte's hand, he would have repulsed the weakling boy and kept his beloved with him. But these moments felt somehow ancient, like crumbling bas relief on ruined walls, like a million distant years ago.

Still and all, he might have lain down upon his pall-like bed and waited for the final sleep to come - had it not been for Ayesha. That stately lady, who had also managed by craft or chance to evade the mob, came to him in the bedroom and leapt at him, her claws catching the front of his jacket. Not wanting the fine cashmere marred - a surprisingly normal reaction, he mused wryly - he found a small pair of scissors and gently clipped her razor-sharp nails, then gathered her in his arms and held her close to calm her. The soft sleekness of her body affected him as well, and he pressed his cheek to the crown of her delicate head; though he knew it was likely because of the salty tears that had dried there, he allowed his heart to dance as she applied her warm rough tongue to his exposed face. For the second time in that hellish night, a beautiful lady for whom he would give his very soul had kissed his ravaged skin.

The Manager's Office was hardly the most pleasant place to be the following morning, despite its deceiving outward appearance - the attractive frosted glass and the expensive gold paint. Inside was certainly another matter, neither stately nor refined

"I want him dead!" shrieked Firmin, fairly tearing at his sparse hair. Andre, who was accustomed to being the hysterical member of this partnership, was beside himself.

"Please, Richard -" he kept repeating, pacing the office and wringing his hands. "Please, we must be calm ..."

"I cannot be calm, Gilles," Firmin responded, gesticulating wildly, his fingers clenched tightly together. "There is a madman loose somewhere in the bowels of our theatre. The singer he was apparently obsessed with is nowhere to be found - nor, I might add, is the Vicomte de Changy, her known admirer - and might I remind you, the backing behind much of our work!" He planted his palms heavily on the mahogany desktop. "We are ruined, Andre - ruined! And I am sorry, but I want the man dead!"

Poor Andre could not contain his bewilderment. "What are you suggesting, Richard?"

"I am suggesting," Firmin replied, suddenly dropping his voice, "that we call in an exterminator to deal with our pest situation."

Now Andre's pointy jaw was nearly brushing his chest; he was inexpressibly shocked. "Honestly," he stammered, "you cannot be serious."

"No?" his partner countered, his tone suddenly oily smooth, disturbing. "How much easier could it be, Gilles? All the fools in this place already think he's a ghost - who would mind him if he were really dead?"

"I - I - Firmin!" Andre finally managed.

"Oh, come off it, Andre," Firmin retorted, snipping the end off a cigar and puffing it afire, soothing himself in its dark flavor. "There’s no need for this righteous indignation. You were there, yourself, last night – surely you had no illusions concerning our purposes! My own goals are no different this morning than they were then. Are yours?"

Andre opened and shut his mouth uselessly several times; finally, with a nervous glance about the room that ascertained the two were quite alone, he relaxed visibly. "All right," he said grudgingly, rolling his eyes slightly. "But how is such a thing to be accomplished? - even if it were right, and I shan’t say it is."

Snickering quietly to himself, Firmin tapped his cigar over a crystal ashtray. "Of course not, dear Gilles. But since you find the matter so distasteful I’m sure you might be left out of the logistics altogether. I’m sure you know my acquaintance is far-reaching, Andre; it would be so easy to just ..." A careless half-wave of the empty hand while he took another puff of his cigar. "... to just put the word out."

Incredulous, Andre simply dropped into a nearby chair. "And as easy as that ...?"

Firmin too sat, at the large desk to begin writing a letter. "As easy as that."

The whole thing really was disconcertingly easy. Within a few short weeks of the initial conversation a letter, finely penned on thick paper, arrived from America.

"Ah, a fine Frenchman!" Firmin said, his jovial tone setting Andre’s teeth to chattering. "Listen to this, Gilles - Michele Delorme, family emigrated from Nice, he himself has never been here but seems to have a perfect grasp of our language. And he sounds ruthless. Perfect."

"Keep your voice down, Richard," Andre hissed nervously. "You never know but that he might be listening inside the walls."

"Don’t be ridiculous, Andre!" Firmin chuckled darkly. "He hasn’t been heard from in weeks. No doubt he’s hiding somewhere down below, breaking his heart over Mademoiselle Daaé."

Although Firmin’s remark was crass, it was not so far from the truth. At that moment Erik was sitting alone in the dark of his ruined home, caressing Ayesha, his mind on quite another brown-haired, blue-eyed lady.

Nadir had come that day, bringing a bottle of spirits in an awkward gesture of solidarity. He had been several times, beginning just a few days after the mob - and Christine's - departure. Glad yet somehow unsurprised to find Erik alive and well amongst the wreckage, he had asked Erik to come away with him, to stay at his flat on the Rue de Rivoli until he felt strong enough to ... Here Nadir had trailed off, but his tone had said "start again." Erik had waved off the offer, but assented to Nadir's request to come again. They both knew how very much the former Phantom craved the company of an old friend now.

He had been back at least twice more before that morning, each time stepping carefully about the topic of Erik's leaving the Opera - until today, when he broached the subject again. In the oppressive silence that had descended since Christine's disappearance, Erik had begun to think more and more of accepting Nadir's offer - but he felt moderately annoyed and indignant at his friend's persistence. He did not like to be pushed; but, finding himself no longer disposed to explosive anger, had simply put down his tumbler and sent Nadir and his brandy quietly away.

It is perhaps to Gerard Barraud’s credit that, despite his employment by the Opera managers, he was never quite able to like either of them. Monsieur Andre behaved far too much like a sniveling hysteric for his taste, and there was something insidious in Monsieur Firmin’s manner that disconcerted him - especially of late. However, their money lined his pockets; and when Firmin dispatched him that morning to Gar d’Est to retrieve a visitor arriving on the morning train from the coast, he nodded obediently.

"Be sure that M. Delorme receives your best attentions," Firmin had said brusquely to Gerard. "He is a very important person." Rolling his distaste for M. Firmin over his tongue, the aging valet had nevertheless set out promptly for the station.

The small sign he held, carefully lettered with the name ‘Delorme,’ went unnoticed by the passengers who descended the first two trains of the morning and passed him by. But just as Gerard was beginning to feel impatient and to cast his gaze curiously about the arrival platform, someone plucked at his elbow. Turning, he found himself face-to-face with a woman of middle years, dressed very finely in dark velvet and satin. In one hand she held a neat valise, and displayed conspicuously in the other a pair of luggage checks.

"May I be of service to you, Madame?" he asked politely, respectfully doffing his hat.

"Yes," she replied in impeccable French, although her accent betrayed she that was American and her tone that she was perhaps nearly as unpleasant as M. Firmin. "If you would be so kind as to see to these ..." With this she extended the claim checks.

Gerard was understandably confused. "I beg your pardon, Madame," he answered. "I am happy to help you to find a porter should you need assistance; but I myself am waiting to meet someone."

"I understand that," she said, giving him a look which was half quizzical and half condescending, and gesturing to his sign. "And since that is my surname you are holding, I am that ‘someone;’ so if you please ..."

The poor valet stared, now utterly thrown. "Excuse me," he protested weakly, "but I believe I was sent for a Monsieur Delorme ...?"

"That is impossible," was her curt reply. "There is no Monsieur Delorme. You are from the Opera, are you not?" Gerard could only nod, was he so confused. "Very well then," she bit off. "Let us not waste more time with this. I am to meet with Monsieur Firmin to see to my lodgings, and I am weary of traveling. Shall I order a hansom, or would you care to retrieve my trunks?"

Shaking himself mentally, Gerard did his best to regain his composure. "Forgive me, Madame," he replied. "Please, allow me to take your case." Accepting from her the valise and the claim checks, he showed her to the waiting carriage and gave orders to a porter as to the delivery of the trunks once he had secured them. The whole affair was puzzling indeed; but he determined himself not to worry over it. M. Firmin, who fancied himself so dreadfully important, was better suited to sorting out the confusion.

And confusion there was, upon their arrival at the Opera. Gerard deposited Madame Delorme in the managers’ office and then bowed his way out, his exit inconspicuous amongst all the exclamations crowding the air. Although initially the outbursts originated from Andre and Firmin’s lips, presently their guest chimed in.

"I regret your feeling as though I am a mistake, monsieurs," she said, caring little for the fact that neither manager had spoken more than a few words to her since her arrival; mostly they had been screaming at each other. "But I assure you I am fully capable of performing the task at hand."

"Holy Father!" cried Andre, looking for a moment as if he would fly at his partner. "You discussed your distasteful plans with a woman?"

"Would you shut up!?" Firmin responded in kind, running a distracted hand across his spartan scalp. "I had no idea I was writing to a woman."

"A fairly idiotic assumption, if you would permit me," Madame Delorme mused wryly, cocking her head and pursing her lips almost is if in jest. "My given name quite betrays it."

Firmin rounded on her suddenly, his face gone perfectly red minutes ago from shouting. "Madame, your humor is unacceptable. Surely you must know your name is decidedly masculine to French ears ..."

"But I am American," she interrupted glibly, "and am unaccustomed to considering myself a man - or a fraud, for that matter - simply because of my name. You French and your gendered words ... such foolishness."

Both managers stared at her as though she had suggested they send Gerard back to the station to retrieve her pet elephant. Finally, Andre attempted to smooth his ruffled feathers and began to address her in his most elegantly gilded tone.

"Madame, truly, we implore your forgiveness. This entire affair seems to have been dreadfully muddled by our own incompetence, which you have been so kind as to gently point out to us." Not seeming to register Michele Delorme’s facial reaction to his toadying, Andre pressed on. "We have every intention of making you whole for all of this dreadful inconvenience. You shall of course be put up in a very fine hotel until your return to America can be arranged ..."

"Oh, no," she interrupted again with a gesture of her kid-gloved hand. "I will not be returning to America without first serving out my commission."

Andre gaped for a moment, but recovered splendidly. "Madame, surely! We would never dream of demanding any service from you, especially one so ... nasty."

"Nasty or no, Monsieur Andre, it is for that purpose I have come; and furthermore, I am determined. I will not leave Paris without my fee."

Firmin, who had been shaking his head silently in the background, suddenly sprang into the conversation. "We shall certainly not give you any amount of money for a service never rendered!" he cried, already driven to distraction by thoughts of the cost of returning Michele Delorme to America far sooner than he had anticipated.

"You are quite right, Monsieur Firmin." Michele smiled faintly as she moved to the cushioned chair behind Firmin’s desk and settled herself comfortably in it. The rustling of her skirts as she moved was disconcerting, considering that the topic of conversation was murder. "So we are agreed - I shall complete the job I was commissioned for, and then I shall make a swift return to America at my own expense. There, does that sound amenable to you? Surely that small concession will make up for my not being a man."

Andre, completely undone by what he perceived to be the insanity of the situation, slumped into his own desk chair and buried his face in his handkerchief. Firmin, however, remained rooted to his spot on the carpet.

"You deliberately allowed me to think you were a man," he said in a low tone to the well-dressed woman seated at his desk, who again smiled that pert little smile and pressed her fingers together in a steeple.

"You never asked," she replied fliply; "and we both know that I am more than qualified to do this thing you want so desperately."

Flying towards where she sat, Firmin placed both palms squarely on his blotter and leaned over the desk to loom above her. "My dear, I cannot comprehend how that is possible," he sneered.

A moment later he found himself half crumpled on the floor, his back to the desk and his right arm pinioned to its top in a most uncomfortable fashion. Over his cries of, "Now, see here!," Madame Delorme’s quietly icy tone sliced through the air.

"I am not what I seem, Monsieur Firmin, and I seem so little of what I am. I told you in my letters of my …qualifications. I assure you that I am discreet, cunning, and positively determined." She released him as swiftly as she had brought him down, asking wryly, "Have I proven myself, or would you like further demonstration?"

Rubbing his wrist, Firmin regarded her with an expression of mingled indignation and defeat. From across the room, Andre’s glance held only astonishment. Finally the offended, but otherwise unhurt, Monsieur Firmin spoke.

"Madame, this man we would be rid of is a dangerous person. I cannot begin to explain to you all of the reasons you ought to allow me to find someone else for the job."

Another smile, this one chilling and cruel, curled Michele Delorme’s lips. She seemed to slither as she moved about the perimeter of the desk, saying, "And I assure you that all your explanations would only make me want the job more. I adore dangerous men; they are so much more ... thrilling … than the garden variety." Seating herself upon Firmin’s desk, she placed her deceptively dainty hands palms-down upon its top. "What you desire done would be a mere diversion for me. Let me prove myself. I promise you, you will not be disappointed."

One set of master keys and one exit of the very flustered Andre later, Michele was at work establishing herself in a remote, long-unused dressing room a long way from the stage. Andre’s melodramatic exit had immediately followed Michele’s rejection of an offer to find her hotel accommodations; she would much rather stay here at the Opera. Exasperated, bewildered and disgusted with the whole affair, Andre threw on his coat and stormed out of the office. Firmin was even seen to raise his abundant eyebrows; such behavior hardly became his milksoppish partner, however much the unusual Madame Delorme might incite it.

Nevertheless, the longer he spent in the company of this odd female, the more he became convinced that she was not the mistake they had initially feared her to be. It was in fact with a measure of confidence he left the theatre that night, and with a degree of satisfaction that he mulled over the thought of her silhouette, her cloak vaguely revealing her feminine form, slipping through the darkness of the labyrinth in search of her mysterious quarry.

Quite contrary to Firmin’s fanciful imaginings, Michele spent her first late night at the Opera reading through the newspapers’ accounts of the past few months and their bizarre happenings. Her interest piqued by the managers’ apparent respect for the dangerousness of this Phantom – which she wryly surmised meant that they were really afraid of him – she determined to map the character of this man whom she had been hired to … deal with.

Michele Delorme, nee D’Alceste, had always been calculating; her desire to know her target was founded in her own experience that a familiar spot is easy to spear. With at least two victories accomplished (there were possibly more, but she would only boast responsibility for two "accidents") she felt confident in her own judgments in these matters. Her continued personal liberty despite her responsibility for the deaths of her brother Louis and her husband attested to their soundness.

It had not been long after Michele reached the age of majority that she had realized her only route to independence – financial and physical – would be through blood. Her father, a descendant of French nobility who after finding himself penniless decided to pursue business ventures in America, had managed to amass a substantial fortune within a mere twenty years of his residence in that greatest of nations. But despite the prevailing progressivism of their times, old Monsieur D’Alceste remained extremely conservative in his views; determined that his daughter Michele was useless to the world with the exception of propagating descendants, he settled the entirety of his fortune upon his son and her brother, Louis. That young man, five years Michele’s senior and irrevocably impetuous, had always been their father’s favorite – perhaps because he had been born on French soil and she had not, perhaps because she had been the death of her mother due to a birthing complication, perhaps because old D’Alceste’s philandering and misogyny prevented him from loving even his own daughter.

Despite her wealthy widowed father’s attitude towards the gentler sex, Michele had never wanted for anything, and had been a dutiful and loving daughter. But just after her eighteenth birthday, the patriarch took ill; and calling his children to his bedside, he told them of his hopes and plans for their futures.

To Louis he imparted only a lukewarm warning. "Should you continue your wild ways, my son, your happiness will wane with your youth. I pray you will check yourself before you become too firmly entrenched in excess to ever liberate yourself," his once-full voice now creaked.

But his words for Michele cut far deeper. "My dear, I have always known your femininity would render you incapable of supporting yourself. I had hoped that I would live long enough for you to find some gentleman of means whom you could marry for love … but my time grows close, and I cannot leave this place in peace knowing you will be left alone. I have found a husband for you, child, in my young business partner Delorme."

The man himself stepped from the shadows, much to Michele’s horror and dismay. To think that he dared profane her father’s deathbed with his presence; to think that her father intended for her to marry such a creature! Though old D’Alceste called him "young" he was a full twenty years her elder, and moreover had always been the object of her extreme distaste ever since he had come into her father’s acquaintance. But worst of all, the fact that stung the most, was that while she was doomed to such an impossible marriage, it would always be for her brother to debauch, gamble and drink away the family’s money.

How she had burned to protest! But she was a sheltered girl without recourse – she had no friends or confidantes outside the confines of her family, all of whom urged her to obey her father. Louis marched her purposefully to the altar a mere month before her father’s passing; tears of anger and hatred had rolled down her cheeks during the ceremony. When her father finally died, the only regret she felt was that it had not been at her hand; for she had already formed a plan to free herself from this indentured servitude into which she had so cruelly been sold. All it required was bided time – it would never do for her brother to follow her father too quickly – and an opportunity.

The latter had been easily found just a few short years later, before Louis had managed to squander too much of his inheritance. He was such a lush that no one took much notice when he accidentally ingested a bit too much absinthe and was found days later sprawled on the carpet of his bedchamber, his clothes torn and his pocket picked, most likely by the prostitute who had been his final visitor. With no heir – of course there were a half-dozen women who named him as the father of their illegitimate children, but these bastards signified nothing – his fortune, the inheritance which had never been intended for her, nevertheless fell to Michele’s disposal.

Pierre Delorme was naturally more of a challenge. Early in their marriage he had made her life quite a horror using every trick within his power; he demeaned her, lorded his financial superiority over her, even struck her occasionally. But after Louis’ death he had suddenly turned over a new leaf – understandable considering the couple’s new net worth. Delorme had been extremely fortunate to fall in with Michele’s father when he did; he entered into the partnership just as the business was beginning to turn a tidy profit, and inherited sole possession of it in time to enjoy its greatest windfalls. With the balance of old D’Alceste’s money settling so conveniently on Michele, Pierre decided that making peace with her would be profitable to him.

To Pierre’s credit, he had also hoped that now that Michele was alone in the world, she might be brought to care for him after all. Although it hardly excused his earlier treatment of her, the majority of his frustration with Michele came from her coldness. In public she played the ideal demure wife, but behind closed doors she refused to even see him. She rarely left her private suite of rooms in their home and never invited him into her sanctuary. Had he not managed to forcibly extract from her occasional satisfaction, he might have neatly divorced her for failing to do her wifely duty.

Pierre’s financial aims never escaped Michele, and his new protestations of love never touched her heart. But the success in her dealings with Louis had given her confidence, and she had set her sights on the rest of the money which was rightfully hers – that which her husband had gained from her father’s business. Though it was disgusting to her, she feigned a growing affection for Pierre long enough for him to lose his long expression – his friends had long suspected his unhappiness in marriage, and this would never do in the case of an "accident."

She felt rather kind in the end. Their union had persisted for nearly six years in misery, but her affected regard had made the poor stupid man’s final six months a time of bliss. He was found stabbed to death on the side of the road one morning; she managed to weep when the gendarmes came. No, she had not seen him since the night before; they had been to the theatre, but at intermission he had given her the carriage to go home to bed with a sick headache. The poor kind darling must have decided to walk the scant mile home from the theatre and been set upon by thieves along the way. At his funeral, the devices of a Black Widow mingled with all the theatrics of a diva in her hysterics. How appropriate that her next adventure had brought her to the Paris Opera!

Since Pierre’s death she had been relatively comfortable, but her newfound freedom made her anxious to be doing something with her hands. Strictly for the excitement of it, she had sought out the characters that her genteel society deemed undesirable for their appreciation of dark pleasures. Nights on velvet sofas in smoke-filled rooms allured the elements of her blood she had shared with Louis. She soon found herself being watched with fear among the socialites who had adored her as the daughter and wife of rich men; her crimes were never punished but also never unsuspected. But the loss of the love of pseudo-aristocrats never troubled her much; the darker circles she begun to run in were infinitely more interesting to her. Among them the accusations trailing behind her brought notoriety; her biting humor and razor-sharp mind brought respect; and her half-malevolent, half-audacious smiles brought the admiration of dark-eyed, dangerous men. The daggers in their boots excited her almost as much as the tiny derringer she had taken to wearing against her thigh. She had taken many lovers since the passing of Pierre Delorme; a few of them had even disappeared mysteriously, but Michele would never admit responsibility for this. With a pert curl to her lips, she was often heard to remark that a new admirer was the best "solution" for a worn-out one.

It was through her dealings with the dishonest and the daring that she had come to hear of Monsieur Firmin of the Paris Opera, and the little chore he was seeking to have done. Intrigued, she had written a letter to the manager, and was more than a little surprised when he replied. Firmin had revealed the story of the Phantom in snippets; it had taken several letters before she had begun to assemble the cryptic words into an understanding of the story. Now that she was alone in the Opera – his Opera – and immersing herself in accounts of his recent doings, she allowed herself to own the truth.

She had persisted against the managers’ objections partly because she had come so far – that much was not untrue. But what had drawn her to make the trip in the first place was the mystery of this man who masqued as a ghost to court a woman with the voice of an angel. Secretly she had begun to paint a mental portrait of the Phantom; she pieced him together from all the dastardly, darkly charming men of her acquaintance.

For to Michele, there was no denying that this Phantom of the Opera had loved Christine Daaé; but no one could tell her what had passed between them. She had been neither seen nor heard from in weeks since she had disappeared in the very midst of an opera penned for her by her masked maestro. Nor had Raoul, the Vicomte de Changy, widely accepted as Christine’s secret lover.

"They’re likely dead, the both of them," Firmin had responded coarsely when Michele questioned him earlier. She had hoped to glean from the young couple some answers concerning the mystery that had unfolded around them in the Opera House, and from Christine especially a deeper understanding of her dark admirer; but the manager assured her that attempts to find them would be fruitless. "This Phantom, as he called himself, was obsessed with her," he grumbled, as if he had had to tell the tale too many times already and was vastly aggravated by retelling it yet again. "The madman fancied himself her teacher or some such rubbish, and believed everything about her sudden rise to fame was to his credit."

"Was it not?" Michele queried sweetly, one eyebrow arching.

Firmin bristled. "Of course not! I had no hand in it at the beginning – it was Andre who persuaded me to let her try to replace La Carlotta on the night of her grand debut. He knows more about music and other such foolishness than I do. But I knew enough about business to see that the sensation Daaé caused was not to be ignored. Of course we promoted her after that – her name was on the lips of all of Paris after just one performance! Even the staging of that wretched Don Juan Triumphant was our idea." He paused for a moment to take a breath. "Well …" he added finally, "perhaps it was more Raoul’s than ours. But he had our full support."

"Why was the Vicomte so interested in ending the Phantom’s career here?" was Michele’s next question.

"I can only assume it was to keep him away from Christine. He was quite taken with her, you know – enough to follow her to his death, poor fool."

"And how did she feel about him?"

Firmin started. "I beg your pardon, madam. Whatever would you ask that for?"

"Because her behavior seems so strange to me. I cannot account for her actions, if the story you have told me is true. Was she afraid of the Phantom?"

"She wept and nearly fainted in my office every time the Don Juan plot was spoken of," Firmin countered.

"And she loved the Vicomte?"

The manager seemed to be losing his patience. "I cannot vouch for Mademoiselle’s feelings, but she would have been a fool not to. He was handsome and rich, and was willing to bear the brunt of his family’s disapproval to marry her! She was seen to wear a diamond ring on a chain about her neck – a ring he had given her! To what can these questions tend, madame?"

Michele matched Firmin’s irritation with arms folded resolutely across her chest. "Then why did she return to the Opera when it reopened, Monsieur? Why did she not simply run away with your handsome, rich Vicomte? You tell me that Christine had spoken with, had seen the Phantom face to face long before the chandelier fell; and yet six months later she overcame her mortal fear to return and sing at his doorstep? I cannot believe this."

"Then believe what you will, madame," Firmin snapped with a rather rude wave of his hand, indicating that the interview was over. "I cannot understand myself how this line of inquiry is relevant to the task for which your services were commissioned. I want the man out of my theatre – whether the mystery is explained or not is beyond my concern."

His callousness surprised even the hardened Michele. "You mean to tell me that you are not even interested in what has happened to your wealthiest patron, or your most valuable songbird?"

"I have just told you what everyone else at the Opera already knows, my dear," he had replied from the doorway. "They are not to be found. They are murdered, as was Joseph Buquet and Ubaldo Piangi – their bodies are likely sunk to the bottom of that blasted lake in the cellars." And with that he had left her to seek her answers amongst piles of dusty newsprint.

Society columns from the time revealed much speculation about a secret attachment between the eligible young Vicomte do Chagny and the Opera’s new star, and accounts of disasters all included a requisite reference to the Phantom; but none seemed to connect the Phantom to Mademoiselle Daaé any further than Firmin had. But if it were true that Christine was dead, then so was this particular line of inquiry.

Somewhere nearby, a floorboard creaked; the cavernous Opera was a symphony of soft and originless sounds at night. But despite Firmin’s obvious attempts to instill the proper caution and respect into her understanding of his character, the Phantom failed to frighten Michele. Instead she hungered for more, and thrilled tangibly at the idea that perhaps there was one source remaining who could give her the answers she craved.

Michele Delorme had been at the Opera for less than two weeks when Erik awakened from his mental slumber.

Since the night Christine had departed, it was as if the Opera Ghost slept, roused only infrequently by the anxious companionship of the former Daroga of Mazanderan. Had Nadir not visited Erik would hardly have left his subterranean home, hardly have ate, hardly have moved in fact. As it was, when he did so it was only to satisfy Ayesha’s whims; that lady was now the center of his world, his best beloved whom he pampered in the absence of the true object of his affection.

But though they may have slept, Erik’s faculties had not diminished, and it had not taken him long to sense the presence of a stranger in his Opera.

His Opera. How long had it been since that phrase had crossed his mind? Since any thought had occurred to him, for that matter; for he had moved through his world without interaction with it since Christine went away. The darkness surrounding him in the labyrinth had paled in comparison to the darkness that now inhabited his heart and mind, the voluntary and self-inflicted blackout that crowded out the pain of her departure. But now his sixth sense trembled, dispelling momentarily the gloom that shrouded his thoughts.

There was someone moving about in the cellars – someone who was not Nadir.

Michele’s first task was to master the Opera’s massive network of above-ground corridors and subterranean passages – for though she heard tell of a huge mob that had ransacked the Phantom’s secret house beneath the theatre on the night of Christine Daaé’s disappearance, no member of the cast whom Michele questioned could now remember the way they had traveled. She soon found this forgetfulness easier to grant credence to, however; the tunnels were no easy task for anyone, for even the most seasoned fireman might lose his way within them if he were careless.

The paths that ran concealed behind the walls of the theatre creaked endlessly, and in the underground halls Michele often felt a draught across the back of her neck that made her heart hammer. More than once she was so certain of being followed that she whirled to confront an imaginary foe; at these moments she understood how easy it was to believe this place haunted. But as many dangers as she had known, she found herself filled with a delicious intrigue to know that the being who slipped through this gloom with matched certainty and stealth was a man of flesh and blood.

There was no denying that someone was snooping about the labyrinth. At first it was only Erik’s innate perception that told him so; but presently he had better cause to believe it. Hoping to dispel what he thought mere paranoia, he began to venture out into the passages again in search of the final proof that he had lost his mind along with Christine. What he found were signs of his perfect sanity.

The dust on the long-untrodden stone floors was disturbed; there were traces of wax that had dripped from a lantern – and later gouged away.

Not only was someone trespassing in his realm, but they were also trying to conceal their presence.

Of course they had not stopped coming; they would never stop, and he had been foolish to lie senseless in his misery so long. He might have placed himself into the hands of the management as neatly as a package tied with a ribbon! His various alarms no longer functioned; had his unbidden guest have tampered with them? There was no way to be certain … he could no longer remember whether he had severed the wires himself in one of his many desperate displays.

There must be some way to protect himself … some new trap he could set …

Without meaning to, the Phantom of the Opera had returned.

Michele was gaining ground. Before her first month was up, she had learned the labyrinth’s twists and turns well enough to navigate with a fair amount of certainty. This was reassuring, for her next goal was to learn it in the dark, with only a candle in her pocket for desperate moments.

She was aware that her initial forays into the tunnels had been amateurish, and that her attempts to wipe away traces of her trespass into the Phantom’s domain had been clumsy. It served a purpose, however.

Of course she had been contracted for a service. But she could not simply sneak up on such a man and dispatch him unceremoniously. It would be too vulgar, a profanation of the perfection which this Phantom clearly revered. And she wanted more than anything to, just once, come face to face with a man whose soul could contain such mingled passion and pain, such devotion to his art… She had managed to glean from the silly members of the corps d’ballet that the Phantom’s face was hideously ugly beneath his skull-like mask. Guessing that a lifetime of shame and rejection had banished him to dark, deep places, she began to fashion a portrait of the Opera Ghost as someone far more than the lunatic Firmin had described. But such theories were not enough; she wanted to know.

Although she schooled herself in the cellars, Michele had no intentions of scouring them for her quarry. She wanted to draw him out.

The days passed quickly as Erik immersed himself in the task of setting new triggers about his realm. He descended into his purpose with a zeal that surprised him. Nothing but his music had ever occupied him so wholly, until his change discovery of Christine had turned his world topsy-turvy; but his stiff muscles and his half-numbed brain were impatient to be employed again. He could not bring himself to even consider his music – to merely be in the same room as his demolished organ caused him intense pain – but mechanics had always amused his mind. Now, ironically, the devices he intended to protect him from intruders were saving his life in a different way: they were keeping him from atrophying, from petrifying in the darkness of a world without Christine.

He told himself, as often as he could bear to think it, that all he did was without Christine. That wound would never be cauterized; her loss could never be filled; but he would teach himself to bear the pain of it. How, where, he knew not – but he knew now that he wanted to live.

With the devices falling into place all about the labyrinth, Erik soon became aware of the movements of his newest visitor. He was all at once heartened and disturbed by what he learned: he had been right to concern himself with the presence of this stranger, but the dangerous fact was that they seemed to be systematically plumbing out the maze of tunnels. There could only be one purpose for such an undertaking, and though perhaps it lent a tiny bit of nourishment to his spirits, it did not add to his comfort to know that he was unforgotten.

At first, he thought of setting a trap or of creating an accident; but honing in on his guest’s day-to-day movements, he realized that such a course of action might be unwise at this time. The trippings of his various alarms were so regular as to suggest that this person must have an intimate connection to either the cast or the management; they were able to gain admittance to the bowels of the theatre on a daily basis, and were permitted to wander there for long periods of time unaccompanied. For he had once again begun to monitor the movements of the firemen and the Rat-Catcher through the cellars, and by accounting for their patterns was able to determine that this unknown person was quite alone each time they entered his domain. All of this brought Erik to the conclusion that it would be … inadvisable … for such a person to be too swiftly disposed of. Perhaps it was better to bide his time; it would certainly never do to bring down another avenging mob.

And besides, to toy with this intruder was – as much as he hated to admit it – entertaining in the same old way his role as "The Phantom" had been …

Nadir, however, was not diverted by Erik’s new project. He actually put down his chess piece and drew a breath to reprimand his friend.

But as soon as he did so, he thought better of it. Erik’s demeanor had undergone a noticeable change in the past few weeks, and he had at first believed this to be the result of gradual acceptance of the departure of Christine Daaé. Nadir had neither seen nor heard anything concerning the missing singer, but he accepted the common theory that placed her under the protective wing of the Vicomte de Chagny, comfortably concealed somewhere amongst the teeming crowds of Paris. He expected them to re-emerge as newlyweds any day soon, and had been afraid that the news of it would finish Erik’s spirit off.

But this newly revived energy had begun to give him hope that Erik might venture out into the world yet. Whatever its cause – and however much he might disapprove of even the slightest hint that Erik was returning to his old habits – he could not overlook the improvement in his friend since he had had this occupation for his mind. For this reason he repressed his urge to directly criticize Erik’s interest in the unknown intruder, and instead renewed his request that his friend come and stay with him for a while.

"Just think, Erik; the world holds so many other mysteries to be explored, and I am in a good position to help you …"

Immediately, the small note of enthusiasm that had been audible in Erik’s voice disappeared. "Make your move or surrender the match," he said crossly. "It is bad enough I must suffer your poor chess-playing; do not make me wait forever into the bargain."

Of course he should not have expected Nadir to understand his need to remain at the Opera … for it was a need now, where only days ago it had been a passing interest. He had fully intended, in the loneliness after Nadir’s last departure, to go away with him the next time he asked; the investigation he conducted was a diversion, but could hardly fill the cavernous silence of the endless night beneath the Opera. He had begun to crave the Daroga’s company once again, and to look forward to his visits. But this morning he had made a discovery that bound him, for hope or for despair, to see through his intentions towards his hitherto-nameless guest.

He had found a hairpin on the floor in a part of the labyrinth he knew for a fact had recently been entered by the intruder. And despite all of Erik’s attempts to retain his poise, images of Christine Daaé’s rich chestnut locks once again inhabited all his waking thoughts and restless dreams.

He had begun to sense a pattern in her movements that led him to believe he knew her next step; but the disapproval he sensed in Nadir’s tone silenced him on the subject of his discoveries, or his plans.

With each day that passed, Michele’s forays into the darkness of the labyrinth beneath the Opera lengthened; soon they became less forays than plunges, for what better word to describe such purposeful and thrilling descents into darkness? She knew much of the upper portions by heart now, and each day added by furlongs to the map of the tunnels she carried in her mind.

Repeatedly she assured herself she was making good progress. She ought not to expect to come face-to-face with the Phantom so soon! But as the end of her second month at the Opera neared, she began to sense impatience from the management. They seemed less willing with each week that passed to understand that, in delicate operations such as this, nothing was more essential than time.

So preoccupied was she that morning, however, that she was careless in her travels into the maze of darkness. Although she believed she knew her exact location, she suddenly stumbled down an unexpected slope in the stone floor and found herself utterly devoid of her bearing. Reaching out her hands to steady herself against the walls of the tunnel, she found her fingers met only with air. She groped blindly only to discover that this space was wider and more open than any tunnel she had ever traveled through before.

"I must have reached a cavern of some kind," she told herself. But the stillness was different here, somehow more resonant and fluid. She thought she felt a chill, as though some foolish wind had wriggled its way down through the tunnels and now could not find its way out.

She would not allow herself to admit fear; but she fumbled for her candle just the same. "I must see where I am if I am to find my way back," she thought.

The sound of the lighting match reverberated weirdly off the chisel-smoothed walls of the cavern, and the surface of the subterranean lake. She drew nearer to the water in awe – she had heard of the lake’s construction, but had never guessed at its precise location … or its size. Lifting her candle’s paltry light, she tried to peer through the darkness to the other side.

Another rogue gust of air brushed the exposed skin at her nape, but she paid it no mind this time … until she heard it speak.

A voice, a barely-audible whisper, seemed to come out of the very rock that formed the roof of the cavern. "Go," it breathed. Taken by surprise, she cast her glance upward - had she been imaging it, or had the empty air spoken to her? She strained to hear if it would come a second time.

It did – now the sound seemed to come from beneath the surface of the water, as if some guardian waited there to warn her away. Again she heard it, and again, as it grew more insistent. The sound – it wasa voice – was bouncing all about the cavern now, playing maddening games in her ears and her mind as she frantically tried to discern the origin of it. Whirling away from the lake, she felt surrounded by the sound; she felt an urge to flee back the way she came. Perhaps she had found that the ghost she had sought was a ghost, after all …

Suddenly, as she turned uselessly on the shore of the frigid lake, a flash of white caught her eye. The faint glow from her candle played across the contours of an object that seemed to float through the air at a man’s height … a face, or rather a half-face, like the fractured visage of an ancient skull …

Featureless and feelingless it drifted towards her as she stood, frozen with amazement at the edge of the lake. Would it threaten – do her harm? Would it speak?

It had no mouth to speak and yet it did, in the voice of the ghost she had momentarily believed in. "Leave this place," it whispered, menacing in the deliberateness of its motion.

But as quickly as her fear had risen, it receded; her craftiness bolstered her resolve, and she stepped towards the face, extending her candle to spill light across it.

"I know you, Opera Ghost," her voice rang weirdly through the gloom, "and I know you for a living man …"

Erik paused briefly, his amazement mounting even higher than when seconds ago he had drawn in the breath that had made her shiver as if with cold. His own heart had been chilled at that moment; of course he had known it was foolish to expect, or even to hope … but somehow the idea had survived in him that Christine had returned to him. Now the death of that hope strengthened in him the old Phantom’s character, and he had sought to balm his pain by playing his well-worn vocal tricks on this strange woman – strange not only in that she was unknown to him, but strange also to the profile of her sex. The thought flickered at the back of his mind, as he drew the breath he used to startle her, that no normal woman would do what he knew she had done in these past weeks ...

Despite this vague knowledge that his opponent was not a woman like any he had ever known, her reaction – not simply one of panic or terror, but in fact one of defiance! – was utterly unexpected to him. He was unprepared … and ashamed at how he himself responded …

Turning swiftly on his heel, he fled through the gloom without a sound. To Michele, still lingering at the water’s edge, it seemed as though he had vanished into thin air; but she knew better. Her candle had exposed, for just a moment, the crisp linen of a dress-shirt and the furl of a cloak. She knew what she had seen.

Once she had recovered from the shock of her encounter with the Opera Ghost, Michele realized she would have to rethink her strategy. Surely, now that this man was aware of her presence, it would be difficult for her to come so close to him again. His retreat from her had proved that he would not be easily approached.

But – was she imagining it, or had it seemed as though he was waiting for her, playing foolish games with her … stretching his muscles after such a long sleep?

The sound of a creaking floorboard jerked her from her reverie. She had been here long enough that these small sounds had almost ceased to encroach upon her notice; but this time it had seemed to come from just behind her wall. The dressing room where Firmin had placed her was the perfect spot to nurture such nervous inclinations, though; it had an air of mystery about it. All its furnishings seemed stern and stoic, as if they kept some secret. She had noticed that most of the members of the Opera cast took especial care not to come down the corridor that housed this dressing-room, and that there had been quite a murmur when it was discovered that she had been placed there. A ballet-rat she had confronted had fluttered about its being haunted …

Michele shook herself. Lingering so long in a dusty old room had begun to make such foolish notions seem possible. There were no ghosts in the Opera, let alone this compartment which was now hers; but she could not deny the disturbing sensations that draped themselves over her when she entered this room. Maybe it was because of that huge mirror that took up the majority of the wall opposite the door – something about its size and its silence were unnatural.

She had been in this room too many nights. Perhaps she would go out … yes, to a den of smoke and absinthe she had visited a few times in her boredom. She began rifling through the drawers of the unsteady old furniture, looking for a daring sleek gown she had brought along for such dubious purposes.

But a drawer Michele had thought empty and had only opened absently thumped, indicating some undiscovered contents. She opened it again curiously, and pulled out a slim leatherbound book. Her interest was piqued now, and she drew back the cover expectantly. Across the flyleaf in an even hand was penned,

The significance of the name did not escape Michele, and her nerves jangled at the thought that she held in her hands a forgotten momento of the disappeared soprano. But as she turned the pages her eyes widened; as great as the find was, what she discovered between those leaves was priceless.

No one – not the press, not the few members of the cast she had spoken to, not even Firmin - had been able to tell Michele the story of what had happened between Christine and the Phantom of the Opera. Yet here, between Michele’s shaking palms, was the story in the missing singer’s own words! She flipped through the pages, discovering that, if her understanding of events was correct, the book spanned the entirety of Christine’s career at the Opera. The final entry was written just days before her disappearance.

But Michele had not been hired to find Christine Daaé, and she was disinterested at best in the young woman’s exact location. Now she scanned the journal’s beginning entries, seeking evidence of Daaé’s first contact with the Opera Ghost – the man she suspected was behind the name of "Erik." What she uncovered was the story of a young woman desperately committed to her art, the memory of her father – and hopelessly confused as to her feelings for a mysterious teacher who inspired her art and awakened her inexperienced passions.

The entry that supplied the proof Michele needed to believe the Opera Ghost and the mysterious "Erik" the same was the same where Christine recounted her own discovery of Erik’s double identity. Already Michele could see the entanglement in which the young woman was caught; her complex feelings for her teacher were evident in her hand-penned account.

At first she decried the stories to be untrue, but within pages began to lament that she had loved Raoul as a child and in her loneliness and confusion had turned to him for comfort. Michele understood immediately that her telling Raoul of Erik had only served to encourage the suit he seemed intent on pressing … though she had at first refused, he persuaded and cajoled and made love to her until she began to believe that going away with Raoul would help her forget Erik’s tears and the misery of his face. She seemed incapable of having anything but all or nothing – she could not restore Erik now to the Erik she had come so near to loving (for she lacked the experience and humility to prove herself to him), or to repair the hopes she had shattered in him when she allowed Raoul to embrace her on the roof of the theatre.

Yes, she returned to the Opera after it reopened with the intention of untangling the foolish mess she had created between her youthful foolishness and the two men who professed to love her. Michele could see that, though she seemed to try to intend to marry Raoul, she was unable to wear his ring upon her finger because she knew that Erik still possessed the part of her that ought to belong solely to her betrothed. And Michele suspected, that although Christine spoke shyly of Raoul’s romantic advances, that the childish songbird knew that with Erik she had shared an intimacy that was irreplaceable. That was why she returned; and that confusion was why, as the end of Christine’s handwritten account drew near, it also grew erratic. The copperplate hand that had been so fluid and free pages ago became hurried, distracted, as though the writer were constantly looking over her shoulder. It became clear that she no longer knew who to trust, for Raoul and the managers – yes, here were Messrs. Firmin and Andre in all their glory! – had shanghaied her into a plot to murder Erik; Erik himself had written an opera for her to sing to force her to say, just once, that she loved him!

Michele nearly felt sympathy for the child, but Christine’s utter inability to prevent herself from being manipulated forbade it. Recalling her own past, she knew how easily men can move women about like trinkets or currency; but that Christine’s response to this fact was to weep, and faint, and carry on hysterically, could not be forgiven. Surely Michele’s example was not one that every put-upon young woman was capable of following; but nevertheless, Mademoiselle Daaé was never as helpless as she seemed to believe herself. She had possessed Erik’s unswerving devotion! She could have swallowed her pride and returned to him … But shaking her head, Michele forced herself to acknowledge the importance of perspective. She herself, who had been acquainted with the world at a tender age, was perhaps better equipped to understand the advantages of Erik’s regard; Christine was painfully naïve and could not be expected to reach such a decision. And yet … stupid, headstrong child! How could she not know and follow her own heart?

At last Michele closed the journal and realized that dawn was approaching. But the sunrise did not interest her; what was heaviest on her mind was how she could ensnare such a man as Erik, whose passions were so intense that even the paper-flat whimperings of his unfaithful beloved could render them infectious. She slept fitfully into the afternoon, dreaming of a dark-cloaked man whose kid-gloved-fingers sent shivers through her limbs, but whose face was shrouded in shadows.

Back in his home, Erik paced the tattered carpet in the Louis-Phillipe room which still stood in shambles in mute testimony to what had happened the night Christine left it for the last time. Although he had been concerned about the intruder in the labyrinth, never since that night had Erik been driven to such distraction; he pressed his hands to his ears as he paced, trying to block out the pounding of his heart. He hardly knew what to do with himself, or what to make of the encounter he had just had on the shores of the subterranean lake.

Perhaps he could have stood the discovery that his shadow was not Christine. He had likely known it in the back of his mind the entire time … but there was something in the reality of the situation that had only just come to light which shook the very foundations of his composure.

He could not shut out the sound of her voice - there was nothing musical about it, but the sheer humanity of her words had seemed to reach out to him in the darkness. The image of her face, lit only dimly by her candle's flame, was impressed on his mind though he had only beheld it briefly. Who was this woman, who had torn aside his spectral façade so calmly and yet had almost dared him to come close to her?

Why was she here?

When she awoke, Michele's mind was refreshed and ready to put her new knowledge of the Phantom - Erik! - to use. Recalling the mention in Christine's diary of a mirror that concealed a door to the labyrinth below, she immediately turned to the huge reflective surface that dominated the back wall of the dressing room she had occupied for the past two months.

"This was Christine's room," she breathed to her mirror image. "How could I have missed it?"

Pressing herself to the glass, Michele felt all around the edges of the mirror, searching for the switch she knew must be concealed somewhere. Her nimble fingers located the appropriate spot soon enough, and with one press the glass swung aside on its invisible counterweights, revealing a stone passage that appeared to run parallel to the hallway along which the dressing room was situated. Within the time it took for her to find and light her candle, she was following that passage in the direction she believed the lake to lie; the mate to the hand that held aloft the light concealed Christine's forgotten journal amongst Michele's voluminous skirts.

For hours Erik was locked in his own thoughts, turning desperately over the decision before him. It was clear he must do something, for now that his shadow had seen him she would surely never stop coming. His normally cool thinking was unhinged by a disturbing impression he could not shake: that she had been reaching out to him in friendship on the lakeshore.

It could not be possible. Surely she was on some sort of collusion with the management … surely she was a threat to his safety …

The sound of her voice would not be driven from his mind. Over and over he heard her call out to him. "Opera Ghost …" she had said …

Suddenly a sound intruded on his distraction - a sound he had not heard in months. From the other side of the lake, whose waters lapped at his very doorstep, a woman's voice called his name.

Michele paced on the lakeshore, to which the passage behind the mirror had led her directly and without incident. Clutching Christine's journal in hands chilled by the dankness of the trapped underground air, she told herself the movement was to keep her warm. She would not admit the fingers of fear wrapping around her heart.

And what would she say if he were to respond, if he were to appear to her again? Only hours ago she had believed her search might have to continue for months before she could manage to see him a second time, such was her despair at her failure to engage him when they met at the edge of this water. But hours ago she would never have thought to simply stand at the lip of the lake and call his name.

From the opposite side of the water, Erik stood concealed in the shadows of an outcropping of stone. His keen eyes made her out clearly on the farther shore, and he was perplexed. Did she believe she could actually draw him out by such a simple method?

He himself could not believe that he was considering going to her.

She had been calling out his name long enough; surely he had heard her! Now to bait the hook …

"Erik, please!" she shouted into the gloom. "I must speak to you about Christine!"

Erik's light little craft had drawn him silently halfway across the nighttime waters when he heard Christine's name escape her lips.

He had thought to land some distance from where she stood, to bide his time and make his decision when it the last possible moment came. But all choice was robbed from him when this utter stranger spoke to him of Christine.

How she knew his name he could not fathom. But if she brought some news of his lost beloved, it was worth whatever else he risked to gain it.

How very strange the meeting might have seemed to any onlooker, as Erik rowed up to where Michele stood as easily as if they had been old acquaintances! How bizarre and yet appropriate the uncomfortable stiffness of his unnaturally beautiful voice as he made her a small bow!

"Madame," he said, "I beg your pardon; for although you seem to know me better than most, I cannot recall our ever having met."

She had to shake herself in order to focus on his words; without such a precaution she might have simply stood dumbly by, drinking in the sound of his voice. But she forced herself to hear, and comprehend, and to spread her most inviting smile across her lovely face as she replied, "Monsieur … it is I who must beg your pardon, for what I know of you I have found out by most dishonest means. Perhaps you will permit a more conventional introduction?" His eyes glittered in the dark, but he made no motion in response to her, and so she smiled more broadly. "You do seem a man of few words. How convenient, for I can be a woman of too many. I am Michele Delorme."

He considered but did not take her outstretched hand. "Yet you already know my name, Madame; and as it is not often used and has therefore become brittle, you will excuse my not repeating for fear that it may break." She seemed to smile at this wry comment, and he relaxed as much as such a strange situation permitted. "Please, Mme. Delorme," he said more earnestly and free of sarcasm, "you must tell me what you know of Christine."

Michele could not help but wonder at the seeming gentleness in the demeanor of the man who had been described by Firmin as a dangerous psychopath. But recalling what she had read in the diary, she reminded herself that Christine was Erik’s Achilles Heel; it was for her sake and her sake alone that he had deigned to come to her so like a normal man. It was heartbreaking in its display of his still-fierce devotion to his disappeared beloved, and yet as frustrating to Michele as Christine’s apparent foolishness. How could he still love a woman who had used him so cruelly and then left him to desiccate in a black basement?

But if Christine was her point of entry into Erik’s world, she would not shirk from using her to the best of her advantage. Feigning an expression of remorse, she replied gently, "Oh … Erik, I am sorry if you have misunderstood me. I know very little of Christine, and I have come to you to learn more. It is unlikely anyone in the world knows more of her than yourself …"

Immediately he seemed to pull back into himself the tentative emotion he had so timidly expressed. Michele could sense it in him as plainly as if he had suddenly transformed into a wall of iron … and it seemed he did, for even the tone of his voice was different as he spoke again.

"Why have you come here, Madame? Are you an emissary of my enemies, perhaps, sent to taunt me in my misery? That is quite unwise if it is the truth, for recall that you are standing in my domain now. I am not a man to be trifled with … but surely whoever sent you was good enough to tell you what a monster I am. Make yourself plain at once, or the results may be … unpleasant …"

How quickly he transitioned between the two identities by which Michele had come to know him! For the man who addressed her now, with a deliberate motion of his lithe hand, was surely the Phantom of Monsieur Firmin’s description: forbidding, dangerous, and – yes, she could hear the tiniest hint of enjoyment in his voice even as he threatened – positively enamored with his black reputation.

But only moments ago she had heard and seen Erik, a man encumbered by tragic circumstances and still laboring under the influence of his lost beloved! It was he to whom she appealed with her response:

"I assure you, Monsieur, I intend no harm – and although I have heard you are a monster, in my search for Christine I have discovered that this is quite untrue. I have come in the hopes you might supply me with the information I need to locate her … and as an offering of peace, I have brought you proof of my friendship."

She regarded him with ill-concealed interest as he considered the diary, which lay in her outstretched palm. Her lie passed his ears undetected, as his senses were fully engaged in the curiosity of the bait she offered.

"What is that?" he asked after a pause; although he endeavored to even his tone, she could hear distinctly the rasping traces of anxiety.

"See for yourself," she purred with self-satisfaction, turning over the cover to expose the fly-leaf.

Like a man in a trance, Erik reached for the book. The dim candle-light made him doubt his eyes, but once it was in his hands he could no longer deny that Christine’s name had been printed there by her own pen.

In his astonishment he did not seem to notice as Michele drew nearer and began to turn the pages for him. Dates that were burned onto his memory passed before his ravenous eye; his own name began to swim by in the sea of Christine’s words. "Where did you get this?" he breathed, so softly she barely heard him.

Raising her eyes and their fabricated appealing expression, she replied, "I have been looking for her for some time; there are others in the world who wonder where she has gone. Will you help me, Erik? If anyone knows where she may be found, it is surely you."

He shook his head vaguely, helplessly caught in the trap she had set for him. "I have not seen her in months …"

"But you saw her after she disappeared from the stage that night," she prompted.

He closed his eyes and seemed to bow his head a moment, then nodded in response. Too bewildering, the treasure she dangled before his eyes; too difficult to resist the prying questions which would have earned another a swift silencing!

"Then you are the last person to have seen her," she implored, daring to place a hand on his sleeve. The wrist beneath the cloth was sturdy, and the sensation of it on her fingertips was thrilling beyond her wildest expectations. And he was too engrossed in the book to pull away from her touch! It spurred her forward as she waxed dramatic. "You must tell me what happened between you, Erik. I have read what I can, here in her journal, but you are the only one who can tell me the story behind her words."

His composure seemed shattered; although the mask created an artificially blank expression, his eyes echoed much as they regarded the pages of the diary. "I … I cannot tell you here, or now … there is too much …"

Satisfied with her handiwork, Michele backed away from him. "Of course," she replied, her tone as smooth as silk. "I know how much you must want to read the book. I will leave you now, but I will come again tomorrow – will you meet me, and talk with me a while?"

When he did not answer, for he did not seem to hear her, she left him standing on the lakeshore. There was no need for a response; she smiled as she wound her way back through the darkness to the mirror-door, knowing now he would come whenever she called.

How eternal and painful and perfect and brief twenty-four hours can be!

If Erik ate, slept, moved at all from the chair where he collapsed to read Christine’s diary upon returning from his strange meeting with Michele Delorme, he could not recall it. The hours seemed both to flounder and fly as he consumed the journal’s contents over and over again. But as voraciously as he read, he turned the pages with equal gentleness – he could never bear to mar the paper, to damage on single fiber of this object that was his beloved’s thoughts made solid.

How he rejoiced in it – and how it wounded him! So much did it reveal, and so little did it change in his perception of what had passed between Christine and himself. Yes, at last here it was confirmed: she had wanted him! But along with that precious fact the book imparted others not so desirable: there had been times when he had frightened her, and actions he had committed that pushed her away. She had also wanted the Vicomte, for the comfort she felt assured he could offer. She had craved his normalcy, and his ability to take her away from the Opera, where the managers and a loving ghost had controlled her motions on the stage as though she were a puppet on a string …

The diary made him want to bellow with victorious laughter and put out his own eyes in despair. For an entire day and night he labored through the storm of emotions the diary had inspired; and only as the time of his appointed meeting with Michele Delorme did anyone or anything but the lost Christine occupy his mind.

The sounding of one of his newly created "doorbells" brought that mysterious woman back into his conscious thought. Who was she, and how did she know Christine? Where had she come across the diary, which he had never before known existed?

Could he really mean to tell her his story? No one other than Nadir had ever asked for his version of events, and he was used to that; his perspective was meaningless, the ravings of a madman and a murderer. He had accepted the unflagging arrogance and cruelty of the human race.

And yet this woman, who had dared to call him forth from his hiding-place, had reached out and touched him as casually as he had only ever seen one person touch another. Yes, he remembered now.

He was in danger; he knew this now. Even if this Michele had been truthful – and how he hoped against all imaginable hope that she did mean to find Christine, for he was driven to distraction for wanting to know that she was safe and happy – even if she were no threat to his person, he knew already that she was a threat to his solitude.

She had reached out to him in friendship, and already he could feel his walls tumbling down.

In the end it was anticlimactic, a strange facsimile of a normal meeting between old friends. He could think of no alternative to bringing her to his home, although that plan of action entailed handing her into the boat; this time it was not only Michele who was keenly aware of the contact of their fingers. Both marveled at the feel of the other’s hand through the protective barrier of two pairs of gloves.

In the Louis-Philippe room, which he had only recently put to hurried rights, Erik brought out tea and settled himself anxiously in a stately wing chair. Michele’s eyes widened and roamed all over the room, taking in a surrounding of which she had read in Christine’s diary but which she had never drawn so lavishly in her own mind. Erik scrambled to maintain his composure, unable to decide whether his anxiety stemmed from the presence of a stranger in his sanctum or from the prospect of telling the story of his relationship with Christine in the room where he had had his last contact with her.

And yet the story came easy, because he had been telling it in his mind since the moment he had known Christine was gone … and since Michele had read the diary, and know so much already of Christine’s history, he found the pain and pressure somewhat less than he had feared.

"And so she went away with the Vicomte, and I have known nothing of her since."

Oh, she had known from the moment she read of him in the diary that Erik had not murdered Christine Daaé and the Vicomte! Even on paper, his character had insinuated itself to her as possessing the capacity to do great harm – but never to one as beloved as it was obvious Christine had been to him.

Greatly contrasting the picture painted of Erik by the management, he was more faithful to the sketch of a brooding deserted lover than a dangerous psychopath. To Michele’s ear, his story resonated like a great protracted sigh. Outwardly, he attempted to suggest calm and resignation; but she could hear the undercurrent of longing that rippled the surface of his voice. Abandoning for the time being her true and dark purpose, she moved forward in her chair – anything to be nearer to him!

"I would tell you that I am sorry, Erik," she said quietly, "but I know those words would be pale and meaningless, and I will not use them to cheapen this thing of great value that you have entrusted to me."

He shook his head, almost helplessly. "What value can such a foolish history claim?" he asked, "for I cannot see how it can give you any insight into where Christine has gone."

Michele nearly choked on her own self-condemnation. She had completely forgotten her pretense! Recovering her poise after but a moment of strangled silence, she replied smoothly, "Not into her exact location, no. But you have filled the gaps in her diary’s story, and sketched out clearly the vaguenesses in her character which had puzzled me until now. I believe I understand Christine far better now than I did only days ago … and I am most humbly grateful, not only for that knowledge, but for the great degree of personal sacrifice you have undertaken to impart it."

Her words roused him from the self-pity into which he had been slipping. He raised his eyes from his lap to study her features, enlivened by his tale and dramatically illuminated in the lamp- and fire-light. "What do you mean?"

Her crafty mind was already spiraling into the uncertain moments ahead, carefully laying the traps she felt sure would lure Erik into her arms – for she knew now that was what she wanted. More than the money offered to her by the managers, or even the satisfaction of foiling such a brilliant man, she wanted another satisfaction altogether … at least first …

"I mean that I know how difficult this must have been for you – to bring a complete stranger into your home! And then to tell the story of Christine and her cruelty …"

He seemed to bristle to hear his absent beloved thus defamed. "I beg your pardon, Madame; but Christine was never cruel to me. Thoughtless, perhaps even naïvely selfish – but never cruel. She was the very portrait of mildness …"

Shaking her head in feigned empathy, Michele replied, "Please, Erik, call me Michele. And do not feel that you must defend her to me! for I have studied her version of the story, and listened to yours; and from these two sources, I have gained an irreversible conviction about her character."

"And what is this conviction?" he queried, clearly discomfited by her words but nevertheless intrigued.

She smiled at how easily he took the hook! Could it be that the Phantom was really just another man? "Just this," she answered smoothly; "that she hid behind her innocence to take from you all that you offered without any other intentions whatever. Her wide-eyed simplicity was just the ace she clung to; and when the time came she played it. You mustn’t be ashamed at being taken in by it, Erik … it is clear to me that she did the same with everyone around her."

Erik made no attempt to conceal his incredulity now, nor his indignation at the implied insult of her remark. "What are you talking about?" he demanded, leaning forward in his chair as if to indicate the rising of his famous temper. His burgeoning anger thrilled her in a dangerous way.

Waving her hand dismissively, she replied, "I am talking about Christine: her comfortable naïveté and the non-commitment it allowed. Think of it, Erik! – she never accepted one iota of responsibility for anything that befell her in her time here at the Opera, nor did she ever made a single resolute decision! You can read it in the diary there, if you ever can stop clasping it to your heart as a memento of her – she weeps and bemoans how dreadfully she is used by all around her, and yet she cannot lift a finger to stop it! The management, yourself … even the Vicomte is a jailer whom she cannot bring herself to hate, or to pull away from."

"You are wrong, Madame," Erik cried, his eyes betraying a faltering in his own conviction. Her comment about his cherishing of the book had stung him. "She made a very important decision when she quitted the Opera for good."

"Call me Michele," she insisted; "and she did not. You said yourself, only moments ago, how it was you who placed her hand into de Chagny’s, and it was he who led her from the cellars. I would wager to guess that, had he not taken her by the arm, you three would be standing here yet awaiting her decision."

How Erik wanted to rage against Michele’s words – but he could not! She spoke of Christine’s behavior in a way he had never permitted himself to; for yes, he was painfully aware of how she shirked from difficult choices, how she seemed to prefer to drift like flotsam to wherever the tide of life would carry her. This had been her attitude after her father had died, through her entire time at conservatory, and from the beginning of her employ at the Opera … in short, as far back into her history as he knew, and certainly long before he had ever spoken to her.

But to hear this truth so plainly spoken of by a stranger seemed so crass, and it cut him to the quick to listen to it so brutally acknowledged. He wanted to protest, to defend his beloved; but the pain welled up within him, and he crumpled in upon himself with his hands clapped to his ears.

"But she loved me," he whispered, more to himself than to his companion. "I know she did …"

Michele rose from her chair to kneel before him. She was astonished at how speaking of Christine still affected him so violently; but it only served to strengthen her resolve. How could she resist turning the affections of a man whose passions ran so deep?

"Forgive me, Erik, if I have hurt you by talking so," she implored, once again boldly reaching to lay her hand upon his knee in reassurance; "but before I had even met you, I had begun to hate her for her selfishness, and her willful disregard of the value of your affections."

To her great surprise and satisfaction, he responded to her touch by enveloping her hand in both of his.

Shaking his head once again in a display of resignation, he exhaled deeply. "It is no fault of yours, Michele. I have tried to make myself own the very things you say, but it has been difficult." A pause, but then he spoke again in a voice oddly strained with uncertainty. "I am grateful for your words, and your gentleness … and I hope, if you intend to continue your quest here in Paris, that you will come again speak with me. I have … enjoyed your company."

He could barely believe he had managed to form such sentences; but he was glad he had said it. The combined joy and grief he had gleaned from Christine’s journal had left him vulnerable, and Michele’s concern for him seemed genuine. He wanted to learn to trust again …

Michele’s heart was flooded with the nectar of victory. "The pleasure would be all mine."

At first, Erik regretted the invitation he had made to Michele. In the emptiness in which he wallowed after she had quitted the labyrinth, he was certain she would never come again – these burrows were not made for any creature so fashioned for the light.

And yet he could not stop himself from hoping that she would come, for the ease with which they had spoken with each other was burned like an omen on his brain. Surely his innate sense was somehow satisfied that she could be trusted; and though Nadir remained in his perpetual place of long-suffering friend, the concept of a new connection reinvigorated Erik’s otherwise flagging spirits.

When she arrived at the lakeshore not a few days later, he willed himself to contain the urge to weep for joy. That she – that anyone but the hellishly stubborn daroga – would return to him seemed a boon from the Almighty, regardless of the capacity inhabited by the visitor. For Michele he felt a self-conscious interest; she was clearly investigating him as well as Christine, though whether for the purposes of locating the missing singer or for her own personal edification was unclear. Over tea, he broached the subject.

"Tell me, Michele," he began cautiously, betraying his nervousness by poking at his lemon slice with his teaspoon, "how you arrived at your efforts to find Christine."

She seemed ever-so-slightly unprepared – or was it uncomfortable? – for the question, but answered smoothly enough, "I cannot lie to you, Erik; it is out of no personal interest of my own. I have been hired to locate her."

"May I ask … by whom?" he ventured, sounding so like a little child in his tentativeness. She forced her smile to remain small.

"I am afraid I am not at liberty to divulge that. But it is of no one of any consequence to you, if you would permit my presumption."

With a vague nod, he changed his line of questioning. "Very well. Then perhaps you would be so good as to humor me this question: what did you mean by saying that this work is not of personal interest to you?"

"Oh, but to the contrary," she said almost coyly, "the things I have discovered, and the people I have met, in my search have been very interesting to me. I meant only that Christine herself does not impress upon me. I do not care for her."

"Not care for her?" He seemed genuinely surprised. "But you said you had never met her …"

"Nor must I," Michele retorted brightly, "to know how very much I should dislike her were we to someday come face to face. The more I learn of her, the more distasteful she becomes to me." She allowed her gaze to drop momentarily into her lap; then, in a calculated gesture, raised her eyes slowly to meet his. "Although, if I may be so frank, I am glad that she led me to you."

He seemed to be vaguely flustered by her compliment. "I am unworthy of such approval, Michele … and perhaps if you knew me better, you would not be so willing to bestow it. Although you have had Christine’s account of me, and my account of Christine, you have not had my own history in my own words."

His companion folded her hands primly before her. "I should very much like to hear it, though. Would you ever consider relating it?"

Each time Michele descended into the labyrinth, Erik felt as though he was rising towards the light. That it was possible to feel such gratitude for the attentions of another person felt so foreign to him, and he relished the tiny moments he spent listening to her laugh at some wry comment he had made, when he felt perfectly at ease with the world.

These thoughts made his mind return to others, thoughts of leaving his underground hiding-place and rejoining that world. Nadir’s invitations had become more insistent requests since he had confided in the daroga his new friendship with Michele.

"I am sure she is trustworthy, Erik," Nadir had blurted one evening over sherry; "but I have learned to be confident only in my own judgment in cases where you are concerned. I beg you will check yourself – you have only just begun to know this woman! – and come and stay with me. I have heard disconcerting rumors, my friend, and I am concerned for your safety …"

Erik waved away the final portion of Nadir’s remark as yet another poorly executed attempt by the daroga to persuade his mind. "I shall come, Nadir," he had replied, carefully turning the tiny liquor glass between his fingers, "when I am quite ready."

But perhaps the paranoid Persian was right – perhaps the time had come for new scenery. There had already been a change in the cast of characters.

With visit after visit, Michele insinuated herself into Erik’s life. Mapping out his past and learning the many tangled ways of his mind, she reinforced her conviction that she was beginning to know him quite well. He also seemed to be plumbing out her own character, and she glossed over what details she was not willing to concede. She told him nothing of her brother Louis, only that her father had sold her in marriage at a young age, and that death had been kind enough to release her from the tyrannical Pierre Delorme.

"So you see, I am quite alone in the world these days," she said as they strolled by his lantern-light at the edge of the lake’s midnight waters; "and therefore able to go where I like and make whatever friends I choose."

"I must admit I am glad you have come to Paris," came Erik’s soft and surprising reply, "and gladder still you have chosen to waste so much valuable time with me."

"Erik! How can you call our time together wasted?" she chided him, inwardly ecstatic to hear such a confession. Now that she possessed his trust, she was that much nearer to her goal of gaining his affections as well … "I own I have done little work over the past fortnight. Your company is far more interesting to me."

He seemed to smile in silent satisfaction. They had gone many paces before he spoke again. "You are interesting as well … and the only person in the world, save one, with whom I can feel at ease." He cast a sideways glance – she could feel its shyness! – at her as he began his next sentence. "I am glad we have become friends."

"And I as well, Erik," she replied with all the honesty her heart possessed. Whatever her purposes, she did take and had taken much pleasure from their growing camaraderie.

But his next words surprised her. "But I am better for it … for you have helped me to reach a decision, Michele." He walked on a few steps before continuing, "I think that I will be leaving this place."

She stopped in her tracks. "Erik!" she gasped, taken utterly aback. "Whatever inspired this?"

"I have been hiding too long," he replied, making a motion to encourage her to walk on at his side. "I have one other friend – the Daroga of Mazanderan, I have told you of him – who has been asking me to pay him a visit. I have been thinking perhaps I will do just that. If there are others in the world as kind as you …" He paused a moment, as if to underscore the gentle emotion of his words with silence; "then perhaps I shall be able to make my way in it after all."

For a moment, Michele was nearly undone. How could she hope to accomplish her plans for Erik – any of them – if he was to disappear from the Opera? And yet how could she ask him to stay there? There was no excuse she could grasp for that would not sound contrived, or that would not bring her near the danger of his discovering her true purpose here …

"I hope you will not go far," she managed to reply, her consternation lending to her tone a note something like that of sorrow, which was to her benefit. Upon hearing it, Erik felt wrapped in the comforting sensation of trust and friendship.

"Not far at all, in fact," he said. "Nadir keeps a home in Paris, only a small distance from here. And of course, we might still meet for these conversations. You might enjoy the daroga’s company … he is a rather somber but nevertheless amusing person. And think – you will need not bother with this maze, or the management’s permission to enter it, to visit …"

He trailed off, realizing suddenly that he had never had a decisive answer from her regarding how she was able to gain access to the labyrinth. His questions about her inquiries into Christine’s whereabouts had always been avoided. "I assume, of course, that they know you are here," he added, hoping she would explain herself now that their friendship seemed to be coalescing.

"Yes, I have had the displeasure of meeting Messrs. Firmin and Andre," she replied vaguely, lost in thought as to what her next actions would be. It was clear she had dallied too long in the pursuit of Erik’s friendship. Now that she was certain she possessed his trust, the time had long come to begin the real work she had contracted for … and her own personal goal of occupying his last moments as the object of his magnificent passions.

He had not missed the flatness in her voice; pausing and turning towards her, he asked, "Does something trouble you, Michele?"

The lantern, whose light was trapped between them by the angle of his arm and the folds of his cloak, cast weird shadows across the vague features of his mask. Her eye was drawn to the contrast between its smooth white edges and the hints of his deformity that adjoined them: here a puckering of skin, there the bright trace of a vein running too close to the surface. Something – whether it had been in the mask or in his voice she did not know – but it had deceived her, for she had forgotten in all these weeks of closeness to him that he was a mere man. He was not what her senses were begging her to believe him; he was not different, or special, or anything but what all men were. The time had come for the end of games. Something must set into motion the final descent into glorious passionate death.

Her expression as she looked into his face could not be misunderstood; he knew she was considering the mask. Christine had looked at him in much the same way at their last few partings before she had finally stripped away his cold white imitation of dignity. He drew ever so slightly away from her.

"Do not ask me, Michele," he implored, his beautiful voice no more than a hoarse whisper. "I cannot …"

She realized his misunderstanding of her silence, and she reached out to touch his wrist. "I will not ask you, Erik," she affirmed softly. "I was only thinking of how I shall miss what we have shared here, what must end if your circumstances are to change …"

Her words were strange and unexpected to him, and her touch was sudden and disconcerting. "What do you mean?" he asked, perplexed at the swift change in her and at the furious hammering of his own heart.

She cast down her gaze, as if what she was about to say were awkward; but then she stepped closer to him – closer than she had ever come before – and without breaking contact with his hand or his eyes, replied, "You can’t tell me you haven’t felt it, Erik – this … intimacy …"

He was shocked, shocked beyond all possible conception, shocked into stone and unable to respond or even move away from her. She could not possibly be suggesting …

She broke the contact, her mien becoming thoughtful and withdrawn. "I must go …" she said in a quiet and disturbing voice. "I am not feeling well … and I have been neglecting my work …"

Satisfied once again with her tangled web-weaving, Michele left him standing at the edge of the lake, troubled by the thought of what he was afraid was troubling her.

Shaken by Michele’s strange behavior at their parting, Erik’s normally-steady hands encountered some difficulty as they poled him back across the lake. They continued to tremble as he began to move about his house, gathering what belongings had escaped the mob together into a semblance of luggage. He was afflicted with a sudden urgency, precipitated by fear of what he had seen in Michele’s eyes.

Perhaps it had been a mistake to allow himself to trust her so implicitly. Yes, he could see now that perhaps he had been indiscreet, that he had thrown himself into an imprudent friendship in order to soothe his own pain, that it was likely that there was much he did not know of this darkness-shrouded woman who had penetrated his solitude and forced her way into his life. He rebuked himself mercilessly as his folly began to swim into focus. Never more than a passing detail about herself or her past … never any explanation of her search for Christine … and I have poured so much of my own history into her waiting ear!

Nadir had been right – he had been impetuous, and might very well have allowed a deceitful woman to prey upon him in his misery! All the tender gratitude and friendly regard he had felt for Michele just hours before now began to sour as he swept a critical eye over his apartments. If he were to finally leave the Opera for Nadir’s flat, it would need be forever. A sudden shifting sound from the floors above his head returned him vividly to the night of Christine’s departure, of the sounds of destruction that had barely intruded into his heartbroken catatonia. While the noise from above certainly posed no threat, he fairly cursed himself for growing so lax. At this very moment the management might be cooking up some plan to bring an end to his career … he was sure they were unsatisfied, since their initial destruction of his home had failed to leave him a twisted corpse among the wreckage.

Yes, he would take his final leave, he was determined now. But first he would pay Messrs. Andre and Firmin a final visit, to ensure they would always remember who was the true ruler of this gilded, velvet-curtained palace.

As a tragic hero, Erik’s flaw was indisputable; but a close second for that distinction was his flair for the dramatic. His insistence on staging his "Don Juan," the choice to which he had subjected Christine, and now his final visit to the Managers’ office all smacked of this propensity to enlarge upon a situation. Although it arguably placed him in a position of control, it often cost him more than it gained. Such was the case today, as he positioned himself behind a porous panel in the wall of Firmin and Andre’s office.

He had come planning such a grandiose farewell; he had hoped to reduce the blathering Andre to tears and the short-tempered Firmin to raving madness through the ingenuity of his famous tricks. He would show them who was master here!

But what he overheard from his hiding-place deflated his schemes, and gave him to know that, though circumstances had once been very different, the managers now held the upper hand.

"Nearly four months now, Madame!" Firmin was bellowing as Erik sidled up to the wall he had thinned for the purpose of eavesdropping on the management. Some interesting interview was occurring within, and he paused to learn the reason for it. "I do believe we have been more than fair, and I hope you will agree …"

"I will certainly do nothing of the sort," replied a voice whose memory made Erik’s blood run cold. The sound was unmistakable – he had come to hinge his faith in humankind upon it.

"I have accomplished far more than you two are willing to concede to me," Michele continued, clearly incensed at the Managers. "You have been nothing but impatient – and patronizing! – since the moment of my arrival here. Pray, is it because of that same old shortcoming – is it because I am a woman? If it is, you are nothing but fools; for no one but a woman could accomplish this task, and I believe you know it."

"And I believe," Firmin bit back sharply, allowing to survive only briefly Erik’s assumption that they discussed Michele’s efforts to locate Christine, "that no one but a woman would spend the time you do in the cellars, wandering about mooning over the romance of this creature’s history! I believe that is what you are doing, Madame, and I hope you will forgive my candor; but I must repeat yet again that you have made no discernable progress, and can offer us no testament to the fact that the matter is any closer to being resolved today as it was upon the day of your arrival!"

"P-p-please, Madame," Andre ventured timidly, obviously and typically cowed by his partner’s anger, yet also clearly holding a similar opinion, "we do not wish to seem rude; but, can you see our perspective? It seems to us that you have been here over three months and yet nothing has been accomplished …"

"Then you are fools, as I have often suspected," Michele replied coldly, so much so that Erik might have laughed had his heart not been in his throat; "for I would have told you long ago, had you allowed me to get a word in, that much has been accomplished. I am closer now than I have ever been to locating your Phantom."

Erik was nearly rent in two by the sound of her double-crossing so clearly acknowledged. Betrayal! Oh, anything for his old powder-kegs – he would have blown the whole building to pieces to visit the full strength of his fury upon them!

Though his anger paled in comparison to what was simultaneously transpiring behind his very office wall, Firmin bristled at Michele’s words. "I wish you would be good enough to substantiate that claim, Madame," he hissed.

Michele’s voice was equally cold. "I have seen him."

Inside the room, Firmin threw up his hands and made an exasperated turn about the room, leaving Andre to toady to the silently fuming Mme. Delorme. "Seen him, Madame? When?"

"Who cares when she has seen him?" roared Firmin. "Everyone in this blasted theatre has seen him, or heard him, or sensed him sometime in their tenure! This is insupportable!" Leveling an accusatory finger at Michele, he sneered, "We ought to have packed you back off to America the moment you arrived, you … you … fraud is what you are!"

Michele had never stirred since assuming her place before M. Firmin’s desk; she had followed his blustering circuit around the room with her eyes only, the rest of her body seeming carved in stone. Her unnatural calm helped her to elevate herself above the grey-haired manager, whom she fixed with a gaze of her most utter disdain as she responded to accusation.

"Monsieur Firmin, if you will forgive my candor, you are as wrong as you are stupid. Once again you have failed to allow me an opportunity to report my progress to you; once again you have insulted me and my efforts without basis, and I would be quite within my rights were I to leave at once without sharing with you any of my discoveries. Of course it has taken me over three months to progress this far; neither you, nor your insipid partner here, nor any of the imbeciles under your employ have been able to give me any assistance. I should very much like to know how you expected me to instantly locate this Phantom’s concealed house without a scrap of help from anyone here at the Opera."

Firmin only glared at her, but Andre ventured, "Please, Madame, we explained … there was far too much confusion that night, and we were guided by the Vicomte, who seemed to know the way …"

"Then how did you get out again, I should wonder," Michele snapped, out of patience, "when you have told me repeatedly that the Vicomte disappeared before you even gained entrance to that house? When he is presumed dead at the Phantom’s hand, how did you ever emerge from those tunnels without knowing the way?" No answer from the stony Firmin or the stupefied Andre. "As I suspected," she continued; "you have absolutely no conception of what lies below; you have no idea what an undertaking it has been to map out the labyrinth in my mind. I assure you I have done just that, in the absence of any physical map from you; and I also assure you I have seen him. Not just a shadow in a dark corner, or a tingle at the back of my neck as I slept in that dreadful dusty room where you have placed me; but I have seen him standing before me, and I have spoken with him – in his own house."

Poor Andre was beside himself with this revelation, and was only able to stare with his mouth open; Firmin, though his anger seemed to have subsided, still seemed nonplused. "If that is true, Madame," he asked, "then how is it that you come to tell us that he still lives? Why did you not do the job for which you contracted as you stood and conversed with this man who you were brought here to exterminate?"

If Erik had been furious before, he was livid now; that the Managers would be such cowards as to hire an assassin to do away with him, as if he were a common pest! That such an assassin would come in such a form, and would arm herself with intimate knowledge of his heart! He had heard all he needed – his pride was wounded beyond repair, and he was furious … with, of all people, Nadir. Of course the Daroga would be right … damn him, he always was …

Trembling as he was in the throes of his rage, Erik managed to slip away without a sound. His thoughts of Nadir drew him through the door on the Rue Scribe, out into the sun for the first time in years; he blinked back the momentary blindness caused by its crippling light, pulled his hat brim down low over his brow, and set off toward the Rue de Rivoli without so much as a parcel under his arm. Not knowing if or where in the Opera’s cellars there was safety for him, he was gone to that sanctuary into which he had never even set foot long before the conversation in the Managers’ office ended.

"I can only tell you that I am close," Michele concluded. She had told the Managers what she felt necessary to secure their continued support; but it was clear to her that Firmin’s patience was already paper-thin. Under other circumstances, she would have cared nothing for Firmin or his opinion; but if it were true that Erik himself was undergoing a change of mind, she would have no choice but to draw her mission to a swift conclusion. "I will not need much longer now – a matter of a few weeks."

"What on earth for?" Firmin cried in the final vestiges of indignation and aggravation. "If you know where he is …"

"My dear sir," she almost chuckled, folding her arms across her chest, "you obviously have little experience with this man. You cannot simply come up behind him and tap him on the shoulder. There is much to be done … he must be drawn out."

"Draw him out then," Firmin snapped crossly; "bring him into the open and we can have the gendarmes complete the task, if it is distasteful to you."

"Oh, but Monsieur," she purred, lowering her eyelids and sending uninvited thrills up the overly-proper manager’s arm with a light touch of her gloved hand, "I must insist that it is not. In fact, it is the last thing I shall ask from you – allow me to see this through. It would be … my pleasure."

At Nadir’s flat, the bewildered Daroga sat by staring most ineffectually as Erik paced his parlour, relating in hurried phrases all that had occurred since he last spoke with his friend.

"I am beside myself, Nadir … every time I plant my trust, the ground crumbles from beneath me …"

The Persian finally rose from his chair and stayed his friend with a hand placed cautiously on his shoulder. "Please, Erik," he said quietly, hardly knowing himself what to make of this sudden turn in events; all he hoped was that some affirmation would calm his distracted companion. "Know that you always have my friendship, no matter what has occurred."

It was enough to see Erik’s blackness and white – his dark hair and clothing contrasting so sharply with the severe color of the mask – waver for a moment, give up ever so briefly their rigidity. He relaxed for a fraction of a moment, enough to give a cursory nod of acquiescence; he knew Nadir was his friend. Though the very galaxy would tip – though it seemed it had! – he knew he could never make himself doubt that. It was too essential now to his will to live, this strange – and often strained – yet always constant friendship with the Daroga.

A moment passed where Nadir grasped for something more to say; but his attempts at eloquence could only achieve the following prolific statement:

"You must not go back there, Erik."

The former Phantom shook his head vaguely and resumed his pacing, though his mien was now something less agitated and something more thoughtful than before. Nadir watched his motions with anxiety, fearful that his friend might be about to commit one of his acts of perpetual willfulness, about to ignore his advice and do exactly the opposite of what he had advised … But then he reminded himself wryly who his friend was. Erik never asked for advice, and anyone who ever tried to offer it was forced to learn, by one method or another, that he kept his own counsel. To think that Erik would simply agree with his assertions was ludicrous, and he almost smiled to himself as he shook his own head.

"What will you do?" he asked finally, as if he had never offered up any solution.

"I don’t know," Erik almost whispered, flexing his empty hands nervously. "If I am to stay here, I am at a loss … I have come without bag and baggage. But if I were to return …"

"It would be at your own peril." Nadir completed the thought that Erik had allowed to trail off. Stubborn as his friend was, perhaps a dire reminder might persuade his mind.

"But how can I not return?" Erik mused, more to himself than to the Daroga. "I have left my entire life behind me …"

"There is nothing that cannot be replaced, Erik. Your money is safe within all those secret accounts I know you keep; there is nothing valuable enough to risk returning for," Nadir implored him; but Erik’s mind rose up immediately in opposition to that claim, recalling the place where he had secreted Christine’s precious diary. That such a treasure should come from such a hand! he wondered even as his friend spoke on. "For all you know she is there now, lying in wait for you like a spider."

Their eyes met, and Erik replied, "I cannot believe I allowed her to take me in."

Nadir set his jaw. "You must not blame yourself, my friend. Her actions were deliberately deceitful."

But the momentary humility receded from Erik’s manner like a wave from the shore, once again revealing the churning of his wounded pride. "But I cannot just slink away from her like a defeated animal. I must at least have her know I have found her out!"

"She will kill you if you return, Erik," Nadir interjected, taking his friend by the elbow and staying him in what appeared to be his coiling to spring for the door. "Not even your pride can be worth that price."

Something in what he had said broke in upon Erik’s thoughts; his mind snapped like the steel trap it was in response to Nadir’s words. Turning back towards his friend and settling his hat once more upon his head, he resigned himself once more to that propensity for the dramatic. "Au contraire, my friend," he answered grimly; "my pride is all I have left."

What a figure I must cut, Erik mused wryly to himself as he sped back towards the Opera in the falling twilight; a patch of midnight escaped and dashing about just after sunset! It was true that he caught more than one idle eye as he hurried through the streets of Paris, but his speed and grace carried him out of sight before the perplexed onlookers could blink and look again.

He hardly knew his purpose as he slipped back through the door on the Rue Scribe and back down into the welcoming darkness; he was inclined to do as she had once done, to stand at the edge of the lake and bellow her name until she answered to him. But he had no way of locating her – she knew his whereabouts quite well, but he had no inkling of hers. Damned trust! he swore under his breath, wishing he were truly the monster he was believed, instead of an unfortunate angel cursed with a human heart.

Yet in the end, there was no need for searching; for when he stepped across the threshold to his home he sensed her presence. Again he swore to himself, for he had hoped to collect his belongings and prepare himself for leaving before coming face-to-face with her, that he might simply turn his back on her and the Opera in one swift motion. Luck was not with him, but his presence of mind was; and when he found her sitting primly in the Louis-Phillipe room, he greeted her with all the malevolence with which he could infuse his voice and still maintain a controlled volume.

"Michele," he said darkly, the angry spark in his eyes surprising her in the dimness, "I might have known I would find you here."

Unaware as she was that he had overheard her interview with the managers, she was taken aback by this portrait of the furious Phantom that had replaced the only Erik she had hitherto known. There was danger in his voice, and it thrilled her much more than it inspired the fear he had intended. "Erik," she replied with the barest hint of a smile, "you were not here when I arrived for tea. I have never known you to do such a thing - is something wrong?"

The tautness in his movements reminded her of a caged jaguar she had seen at a menagerie as a child; his every motion emanated that same tightly-reigned power and wrath. "I know everything," was his low and rumbling reply, and quite to the opposite of the desired effect, it send delicious tremors down her spine.

She had to force herself back from the edge of swooning before she could speak; for it would never do for the temptress to succumb to her quarry. But the meaning of his cryptic words – could he really have discovered her? "I cannot think what you mean," she replied, rising from her chair and beginning a metered pace towards where he stood.

There was a discernible change in her demeanor, a smoothness he mistrusted even as it attempted to distract him. She seemed to be the same Michele he had come to know, but converted somehow into liquid; every word, every motion now was fluid, and began to seep into his senses despite his attempts to wall himself off from her. What is this power she seems to have over me? he found his inner voice decrying; for though he wished to hurt her, to insult and debase her as the discovery of her betrayal had done him, he could not muster the will to see it through.

"No more lies," he managed to choke out. "I know why you have come here – I know the pact you have made with Firmin and Andre – and I know the true purpose behind your feigned friendship. Firmin was right, far more than his feeble brain will ever comprehend – you are a fraud."

This stone caused a ripple on her smooth surface; but it cleared almost instantly, despite the import of his words. "You overheard my conversation with the managers."

It was not a question that she asked, and so he offered her no answer. "I might have known you for a liar – it is to my own discredit that you were able to keep up your ruse so long. Have you come here now to kill me?" His inherent sense of drama flared momentarily, and he inclined his chin, casting menacing shadows across his mask in the light of the candles she had lit. "I assure you, I am no longer a hapless victim, and may therefore be more trouble than you bargained for …"

She laughed outright, throwing back her head and exposing a gleaming set of lovely teeth. "Do you honestly believe I would so underestimate you, Erik? Hear me out – for it is because of the service I contracted for that I have pursued our … acquaintance. You are a mystery, my friend, and if you will forgive me a bit of arrogance, I counted myself worthy to try and solve that mystery before …" She trailed off, and her turn of voice became almost coy; "…completing my work."

For a moment he simply stared at her in stony silence. Finally he spoke: "You make no attempt to deny the truth of it, then."

A dismissive gesture with her dainty hand, and she suddenly began to wax persuasive, businesslike. "Of course not," she replied, "for how, if I were to tell you any more lies, could I ever make you consider a compromise?"

Now he was utterly taken aback! He wanted to rage against her, but the absurdity of her words made him want to laugh as well. "A compromise?" he sneered. "With you, now knowing what I know? This must be rich, my dear. Please, do tell me what sort of bargain you would strike with a man to be condemned at your own hand – provided, of course, that you could accomplish it."

Her expression shifted slightly, betraying a hint of indignation. "You ought not to discount my abilities, Erik. There is much about me you do not know … but there is something I would share with you."

When he made no response, a wicked little smile crept across her face; half-turning from him in the candlelight, she trailed her fingers along the gleaming mahogany of the sofa-back, the scrolled edge of the occasional table, all the surfaces she could touch as she turned a small circuit around the room. "I am deeply aware of your musical genius, Erik; nor have your phenomenal wit and intelligence escaped me in our brief friendship. But I have caught a glimpse of something else, too – of a deep capacity for feeling, and a sensitivity not possessed by many in the world. I would make that our bargaining chip, my dear …" Her voice chilled him to the core as it repeated his own words in concert with a burning expression in the eyes with which she fixed him. "I would sooner destroy a work of priceless art than a man with your potential."

He folded his arms across his chest, forming a protective barrier against the spell of words she was gradually weaving over his senses. The coals of anger that had fueled his coming here were all but ashes now, despite his every attempt to fan them. He felt what had once been fury twisting within him, coiling itself into a tightness that bespoke … what? Anxiety? Perhaps … but it was tainted with something more ... "Make yourself plain, Michele," he snapped, his uneasiness passing neatly, he thought, for impatience.

Again that soft and treacherous smile of hers … "Very well then," she answered almost saucily. "My offer is this: I shall relinquish my claim on your blood in exchange for what you once offered to Christine."

The words coursed through Erik’s brain like lightning through the limbs and body of an unfortunate tree. To hear Christine’s name invoked flooded him with sensations of pain and vanquished love, mingling with the strangled vestiges of his aborted friendship with Michele, the anger he had experienced at the discovery of her betrayal – and now the sudden and nearly frightening realization of her charms. For she was beautiful, watching him from beneath lowered eyelids in the darkness of his rich house; the firelight threw deep shadows into her heavy golden hair and against the contours of her splendidly shaped face. He had seen it before now, had been surprised by it at unexpected moments, but never had he so struck by its full force – as now, when she parted her lovely lips to speak to him of his own murder! He wanted to shut his ears and eyes from the confusion of it all; but instead he shrouded himself in comfortable sarcasm, replying, "Music lessons? I hardly see the point … your voice seems to me to be utterly untrainable."

"You know I am not interested in your music, Erik," she shot back, her voice becoming at once impassioned, alluring in a way he could never have defined. "Must I spell it out so plain? Very well, for I am not possessed of Mademoiselle Daaé’s various and foundless fears of speaking passionate truths … I want to own you, as you would have had her do!" She reached out towards him, a gesture seeming as impassioned and reckless as her words. "Why dwell on the memory of a woman who did not want you, Erik, when one who does stands before you?"

He could barely conceive of what she was saying. Her words passed through his mind like a sudden gust of air, displacing and scattering thoughts, interpretations, retorts. Shaking himself mentally, he fought to maintain some front of calm. "You would have me believe this," came his biting reply, "when you have only just confessed what brought you here to begin with?"

"What brought me here were hints of you, Erik," she said, her voice attempting a sincerity which tasted foreign in her mouth. "Yes, I have contracted for a service, but – surely we can reach some mutually satisfactory agreement."

In that moment he saw Michele for the dangerous seductress she was, only as he felt himself trapped within her tangled web. His voice struggled to express what he had understood, as if to do so would free himself and all she had captured – mind, body, sanity – from her traps. "You would have me purchase …"

"Don’t say it that way, Erik," Michele shot back as if she had expected such a sentiment. She was smiling now, cocking her chin slightly, almost flirtatiously. "Don’t make it sound … cheap, or unattractive! Have you forgotten our closeness over these past weeks? I know that you are angry now … but think what such depth of feeling could add … and I know you have wanted me, whether it came upon you all at once or by degrees, or simply in brief moments where you wrestled with and managed to put down the truth."

She smiled, satisfied with the turmoil she could see on his face. His mind was filled with the tiniest details of her: the rustling of her skirts as she moved ever so slightly closer to him, the slant of her jaw and the press of her eyelashes against the delicate skin below her brows. "I believe you might find it rather pleasant," she breathed.

The words struck him as if she had shouted them. "I cannot consent to such a ridiculous bargain, Michele," he finally scoffed, empowered by a suddenly-welling secret anger - that the only protestation of desire he would ever hear was to come from such a source! While he had spent so many months drowning in his doomed love for Christine, Michele was everything she was not – calculating, chillingly shrewd! And yet, where Christine’s beauty had lain in her universal sweetness and charm, there was sensuality in Michele that was simultaneously discomforting and magnetic …

"Why? Because I am not her?"

Suddenly Michele drew so near to him that he could sense her invading his every pore. The electricity sparking off her was tangible now, and her eyes glittered in the darkness, lit from within by mingling fascination with her companion and determined purpose towards her end. As he watched her coyly tip her chin, he found himself hoping desperately that she would not touch him.

"Have you ever had a woman, Erik?" A cruel smirk hovered at the corner of her mouth. "Oh, I know you are forever thinking of your darling angelic Christine; but dream as you might, you must know she could never have given you what you need." Her eyelids lowered and her expression became crafty, serpentine. "I could."

"You could not," Erik countered; her nearness, her awareness and exploitation of her physical charms were disconcerting, and his voice was dry as sawdust in his mouth. "What I need is her."

As if a switch had been flipped, the energy emanating from her was abruptly cut off. Her voice came again. "Men do not refuse me," she said, a dangerous edge of indignation exposed.

"You forget, my dear," he replied, grasping to render his voice careless, "that I am not like most men."

A moment - then she laughed, a soft chilling rumble in her throat like machinery. "You are not," she agreed, "or else you would know what a fool you are to reject me."

"Are you implying I ought to be afraid of you, Michele?" he inquired coolly.

A quick motion and her knife was at his throat. "You would do well to," she purred. "I could kill you now."

They froze briefly in this gruesome tableau, two well-dressed figures in the gloom, the small but deadly instrument held almost coyly in her gloved hand. Erik was amazed by the sudden change in her; but he had learned many times over to conceal his true feelings of betrayal and disillusionment behind violence and cruelty, purpose and calculated risk. She seemed schooled in the dangerous and crafty – but so was he.

Drawing a breath and delving deep into her eyes with his own, Erik slowly lifted his lithe fingers to Michele’s wrist. She resisted at first, but he felt her pulse quiver at his touch; banking on that barely perceptible tremor, he stepped closer to her, inclined his head to parallel her own upturned face. Her blade still at his throat, he moved as if he would kiss her; and when she became convinced that his ruse was truth, her guard descended.

He felt the relaxation in her arm and, just as swiftly as she had drawn her weapon, he pinioned her wrists behind her back. For a moment he simply held her, a prisoner in his arms. "But would you?" he asked tauntingly. "I think you would not. I may be worth more gold to you dead, Michele; but I am not so unschooled in the world to think that your object in this affair is money ."

"Is that so?" she spat venomously, still as stone. She did not struggle or even move, but lay in wait for chance or cunning to free her. "Then tell me, my dark genius, what it is that I want."

She was strong; he could feel it in the tension of her muscles. But he was stronger, and he found himself filled with the desire to gloat - to turn against her the sensual offers she had made, to wreak cruel retribution upon her for her arrogance.

Pulling her roughly to him, he felt her breathing quicken as he pressed her to his chest. He brought his face so close to hers that, although it never touched her, she could sense the hardness of the mask. His lips advanced and retreated, taunting her with their soft closeness, and the warmth of his breath gusted cool across her flushing cheek. "You want this," he growled. "You want to think me a rough beast whom you can incite to violence. And you think that you can master me, bring me to my knees - and then leash me, lead me to my death. I assure you, you cannot."

Then, just as abruptly as he had embraced her, he threw her from him; she stumbled several paces backward across the carpet before she regained her footing, and when she did, she found him rooted to the same spot, looking at her with the same contempt.

"Kill me if you must, Michele," he said coldly; "but you will receive no other satisfaction from me."

She regarded him for a moment, seeming to waver between action and laughter; the conflict in her eyes finally resolved itself into an unpleasant half-smile. "You are amusing, Erik," she purred finally, withdrawing into the darkness. "Think on it, then … and be assured that we will meet again."

He ought not to have let her go; he knew it the moment he realized that she had slipped out of his earshot. But as strongly as he had resisted her, how could he have made her stay without guaranteeing her victory?

How long he lingered in the darkness of his tomb-like house he did not know; but Michele’s departure had left it simultaneously silent and unsafe. Finally he managed to amass what possessions he would require for a life away from the Opera, and after transporting them carefully to the Rue Scribe, hailed a brougham and supplied the driver with Nadir’s address to deliver the load. He himself would follow on foot – for before he left his longtime home forever, he knew there were places within its walls that he must honor with one last visit.

The auditorium was hung in off-performance-night emptiness, in cavernous and plush-cushioned splendor as he stood before the rail of Box Five overlooking the sea of seats that broke from the orchestra pit. His hidden door in the hollow column had admitted him as easily as it had the first night he had beheld Christine, standing alone and silent at the lip of the stage with tears slipping down her face …

This room had been a place of pilgrimage for him – here he had worshipped at the feet of Music, however abysmally the company of the Opera Garnier had reproduced it – but it had been something of the same to Christine. She had come here to inhabit in mediocrity the stage for which her dead father had believed her destined. When he first saw her she was posed at the edge of the stage like a penitent before the statue of the crucified Christ; with silent tears she had begged her father’s spirit to forgive her weakness, and the lack of passion that seemed to have doomed her dreams of greatness. Yes, he admitted to himself even as he turned away, this theatre is the cathedral where I worshipped her, the very temple of impossible love. Of all the tragic romances that had been played out on the boards below, the opera in which they two had played in this place seemed to him the greatest and most wounding of all time.

He could not linger there for the pain that washed back from the stage to engulf him, and he had other places to bid farewell to: the statue atop the Opera itself, Apollo’s Lyre which had once rung with the notes of Christine’s betrayal and his own despair; the crush-room where, emboldened by the merciful anonymity of a masquerade, he had been for a few glorious hours his beloved’s escort. He walked deliberately amongst the places that still cried out her name to him, and wept silent tears of leave-taking each time he left one of these memory-tombs behind. The dearest of all he saved for last – her dressing-room – and he approached it from his preferred passage that ran silently behind the vast mirror.

How vividly he could still recall the beating of his heart in his throat the night he first spoke to her, and the precious, fragile tremor in her voice when she lifted it in reply! The flushing of her cheek as he, as her Maestro, inspired her to exert the passion he knew she possessed in the training of her vocal instrument; the tears that welled in her eyes as she begged him – no, as she begged the Angel of Music – to reveal himself to her; the first shocking touch of her hand as he drew her through the mirror towards him … all of these memories were seared onto his brain, each forming a separate scar and flaming to life with renewed pain as he approached his old vantage-point. I will not enter her room, he bargained with himself, almost afraid that he could not bear to go there again; I shall simply bid it ‘Adieu’ …

But as if the mirror were eager to perform its old tricks once more, he found himself staring through it into a space cozily cluttered with human inhabitancy and lit almost cheerily by a gas lamp. Shocked to find Christine’s dressing-room in such a state, when he had expected to find it hung with cobwebs and obvious signs of abandonment, he would not at first believe his eyes. I am dreaming, he thought, or mad …

He nearly wept to see the lamp-light spilling across the familiar furniture, which was strewn with discarded gowns and various other feminine accouterments; the dressing-table and its delicious treasures of rouge and jewelry; the tiny corner-table where Christine had written letters – and probably poured her heart into her journal! – overflowing with papers. Erik’s breath caught in his throat at the illusion that she somehow still visited this room … and stopped altogether when the vision elaborated, for he suddenly discerned what seemed to be a sleeping form upon the sofa where Christine had spent many a despondent night before she could afford rent on a little flat of her own. It was as if she lay there sleeping still, waiting for an Angel to wake her …

For the first time in ages, he found himself whispering the words of a prayer he had learned as a child. Please, he thought even as his lips labored over the long-forgotten words that beseeched the favor of the God from whom he had turned years ago, for all my sins and transgressions … please allow me this one moment of perfection … do not let the dream break …

Although he could barely summon the courage to believe the vision real, his limbs had begun to move of their own accord; swiftly his fingers reached to touch the spring that drew the mirror back upon its hidden counterweights, and he stepped into the room with all the stealth he possessed. His entrance was seamless and silent at it had always been, for he had come here many times to brush a strand of hair from her face or turn down a lamp she had left burning as she slept, to leave a gift of roses or hand-penned music once she had opened to the idea of his love. It was as if he had been afforded one last midnight visit, to stand over her sleeping form and let fall to her cherubic face one last phantom kiss.

Drawing nearer to where she lay, he felt as though he were moving through water, all his movements weighed with some unseen resistance. He felt somehow giddy, not understanding or caring to understand how such an opportunity had been bestowed upon him …

But mere inches from the sofa, the lamplight spilling over her revealed not Christine’s cascade of burnished mahogany curls, but locks of gold. And even as his surprise took hold of him, Michele stirred from her light slumber.

He was gone as soon as her eyes fluttered open, borne away on the waves of his horror; but she too took to her feet and was able to slip through the mirror before it swung closed behind her. Following her mental map of the labyrinth downward, she felt certain without knowing exactly why that she would find him at the shores of the lake.

Winded from such a hard run, Erik paused at the lakeshore to curse his long period of inactivity. Had he maintained his secret shortcuts as he always had before Christine’s departure, he might have dashed across the lake on his hidden catwalk and disappeared through the door on the Rue Scribe in mere moments. But the catwalk had long ago fallen from its hangings into the water, and his panic had disoriented him so that for the space of a few heartbeats he could not locate the spot where he had moored his boat. Knowing Michele was likely in hot pursuit of him, he wanted more than anything to continue his flight; but he was so exhausted, physically and spiritually, from the events of the past few minutes that he could no longer contain himself. The effort of the running ceased, he sank to a rough bench he had once carved from the lakeside’s stone and hung his head into his hands, practically prepared to surrender himself to her designs. It was thus that Michele found him only moments later when she reached the lake and lit the stub of a candle she still carried in her pocket.

"Erik," she greeted him smoothly, "I am all astonishment at your behavior today. First you keep me waiting for tea, and now you make me chase you through these infernal tunnels. Come," she almost smiled, drawing near as if she wished to seat herself beside him; "once we used to tell each other of our troubles. I am as much your friend as I ever was, despite recent events. Won’t you unburden yourself to me?"

How he wanted to lash out at her! The horror of finding her profaning Christine’s dressing room with her presence – the knowledge that Firmin and Andre had probably housed here there all these months without him ever realizing it was too much of an indignity to bear! Rising and re-assuming his comfortable stony manner, he seethed, "You want to take her place? – in her dressing-room, in these tunnels and at my side – is that it?"

The implications of his remark sounded in Michele’s mind like a bell, and she allowed herself a small, almost mocking laugh. "I see, then, what you were about," she murmured. "Honestly, a grown man - haunting the places some foolish little girl used to be. Was it all some sort of farewell gesture? Really, Erik; you are letting her kill you, and it is quite disappointing."

"Of course - you covet that distinction as well," he growled around clenched teeth, hoping to repulse her with his tone as he could not do with action. Though he turned his back to her, every nerve in him tensed at her nearness.

As if she could feel those nerves pulled taut, Michele drew cruelly closer and placed a hand upon his arm, just above the elbow. The sensation of her delicate, deadly hand rushed through his veins like wildfire, almost obliterating the sounds of the words she spoke next. "You are wrong, Erik," she smiled wryly. "I like you much more alive - you are a better Ghost for it."

"Do not touch me, Michele," was his only response, his voice a dry hiss of air that was foreign against his personal grace and unpleasant to the ear. She recognized it as a sound of success.

Moving quickly, she skirted his frozen form and stood face to face with him, never breaking their contact. Once she had captured his eyes in hers she allowed her hand to migrate down his arm, past the margin of black cashmere and the starched whiteness of his cuff to the bare spot peeking from beneath his glove; the thin flesh stretching over the visible blue vein sent shocks of sensation jangling through him at the touch of her fingers. He struggled to rein himself mentally, to remain inert to her; but she was pulling him to her now, her insistent grip on his wrist guiding his hand to her waist, and he was pliant and unable to defy her.

"Tell me why I mustn’t," she replied in a dark whisper. "Are you afraid you’ll finally lose that precious control of yours, that you’ll give in and ravish me?" She laughed, tipping her head back to expose pearly teeth in her pert mouth. "Do it, Erik," she dared him, a saucy smile curling the corners of her mouth. "I know you want to."

For one blazing moment he closed his eyes and imagined sinking into the swirling pool of sensation to whose edge Michele had so cruelly led him. He would surely never emerge alive - she would kill him the moment she had finished toying with him, as any Black Widow’s instincts instruct. But what last moments could he claim with this woman, this siren whose wish was as passionate and whose past was as tainted as his own?

Standing thus at the precipice, he drew as sudden breath to clear his head and goad him back from the edge. He could not take that leap, as certainly as it might lead to a pale and meaningless gratification. Much as he thirsted for some final sweet relief, pale and meaningless would never do - could never take the stage after even the shadow of his beloved Christine had quitted it, could never cheapen the love he still tended for her even in her absence. Wrenching himself from Michele's deliberately salacious grasp, he locked one gloved hand about her throat.

"This is why you mustn’t," he seethed, all the strange sensations she had wakened in him knotting and sinking within him like lead. "I may very well be a monster, Michele - but I am not an animal, to be manipulated in such primitive ways. I will never bend my will to your hand - never, do you hear? I would kill you first. Now go. I am gone from the Opera this night, so your continued presence will no longer be required." As suddenly as his hand had been there, it was gone; and he turned from her as though she were nothing more than a pesky child.

Indignant as she was, she tripped away, her pride impeding her from allowing him to see the large tears that were slipping down her cheeks. She had come so close this time - it was almost too much disappointment to bear.

The Daroga of Mazanderan was jerked from a deep and restful sleep by a pounding on his door, but upon discovering the identity of his visitor was as polite and obliging as he could be under the circumstances. With Erik, one ought never to question the hour of his arrival or grumble about the amount of his luggage; and for Nadir, the relief that his friend had finally come to his senses completely overshadowed whatever personal inconvenience it might cause him.

Meanwhile, Michele was unable to find repose that night, and mere hours after she had fled from Erik’s rejection she was back on the midnight waters of the subterranean lake, poling across to his house. She had called to him but was unsurprised when he did not answer; and when she observed the condition of his home, she finally realized the truth of his last words to her. It was stripped of most of its remaining finery, and furniture was alternately shrouded against dust and overturned. He had finally quitted the place, and had done so in a hurry.

Biting her lip, Michele refused to allow herself to feel defeated. Instead she began a merciless search through his remaining effects, seeking some clue as to the address of the friend he had spoken of; his distinctive Persian name stuck out in her memory. There was no doubt in her mind that that was to whom Erik had turned for sanctuary; and he may have gone, but she would find him again. She would bring him back to the Opera and into her arms, to meet whatever fate she designed for him. A plan had begun to hatch in her brain as to how it might be accomplished.

A scrap of a letter to Nadir that Erik had once begun but then discontinued and crumpled yielded the precious information she had sought. It was dated only weeks ago, and had the strangest few lines penned upon it … she almost laughed.

Folding the paper and concealing it carefully about her person, she departed his house without a backward glance. She felt absolutely certain, now her next actions were clear to her, that she would be seeing it again very soon.

Some after-hours reading in the managers’ office led Michele rather quickly to the name and business-address of the Vicomte de Chagny’s solicitor, a rather short and pompous man who kept an office in one of the better districts of Paris. The next morning brought Madame Delorme to this place of business, and the elaborate tale she had concocted rendered her interesting enough to Monsieur Souris that he agreed to see her without an appointment.

"Good morning, Monsieur," she said firmly upon gaining admittance to his office; "I am aware you are a busy man, and so I will endeavor not to take up too much of your time. I am sure your secretary has told you that I have come to inquire about the estate of Raoul, the Vicomte de Chagny."

"He has, Madame," replied the pudgy, middle-aged lawyer, taken ever-so-slightly aback by her brusque manner. But, it was to be expected – although her French was flawless, her accent gave her away as an American. "But I must confess myself perplexed by your errand, and by your rather startling and candid interest in the Vicomte’s affairs."

It was Michele’s turn to look surprised. "I beg your pardon, sir," she retorted. "Surely you expected someone to come – surely Raoul disclosed to you that, although he had no heir of his own, he did have some relations in America who might benefit from his estate when Fate befell him. His death …" Here Michele removed a handkerchief from her sleeve and, after dabbing at her eyes, began to gesticulate with it. "… His death has been a blow to us all, to be sure; but grief aside, I have come to discuss his affairs with you. I believe my young son is the nearest surviving male heir …"

Monsieur Souris rose from his chair and placed his hands palms-down upon his blotter. "I am sorry to interrupt you, Madame, but I am without words to express my confusion. You speak to me of the death of the Vicomte de Chagny – an event of which I have heard nothing whatever – and with such an attitude as to suggest that it has been months since his decease! For such news to travel to America, and for you to travel to Paris in return, must have taken weeks – I beg you, Madame, to tell me from whence you were given reason to believe that the Vicomte has died."

"Hasn’t he?" she cried with all her might, allowing her lips to tremble in a display of greed ill-concealed beneath shock.

"I have no reason to believe he is other than alive and well," the solicitor replied. "I have not had a letter from him these two or three weeks at least, but surely I have had communication with him within the past month to suggest that he has not ‘shuffled off this mortal coil’ quite yet."

"This is impossible!" Michele exclaimed, rising from her chair too and scattering clippings acquired from the obliging files of Firmin and Andre across the lawyer’s desk: clippings from l’Epoque dating from the weeks following Christine Daaé’s mysterious disappearance and the surmised double-murder of the young star and her lover, Raoul de Chagny. "Are you telling me that the newspapers have been spreading lies?"

Gingerly examining the bits of paper she had flung towards him, Monsieur Souris shook his head. "I am sorry, Madame," he replied, "that you were unfortunate enough to see these. I would advise you to consider finding a new French news correspondent; whoever send you these articles did so with an absolute lack of discretion. The Vicomte has certainly not dead."

"What has happened, then?" she fairly set upon the poor man in her feigned hysteria. "Where is Raoul now?"

"All I can tell you is that the papers were far too quick to pronounce the Vicomte murdered after the whole affair at the Opera. It is true that he removed himself from public view immediately following the entire mess; and although I am not privy to his personal affairs, it seems he has kept his own counsel about informing the papers of his current whereabouts. I know nothing of the oft-mentioned Mademoiselle Daaé, unfortunately; but I can tell you that the Vicomte is quite well, and has retired to a new country home since the scandals harried him out of Paris."

"Tell me where he is at once," she cried, snatching M. Souris’s hand impetuously. "I must go to him!"

He hesitated. "I do not know that he would wish me to give out his address, Madame. I pray you will pardon me."

"No, pardon me," she retorted, giving his hand a vicious little pinch. "I am furious at my cousin the Vicomte for failing to write and assure me of his safety – how could he have expected these news not to reach me, far away as I am? When I am the mother of his nearest male blood? When the blood of France and the de Chagny family courses through my own veins? Sir, I demand that you tell me where Raoul is, that I may scold him as he deserves; for if you do not, I shall be forced to unburden myself entirely to you, so that you may deliver the message on my behalf."

Having noticed that M. Souris wore no wedding-ring upon her arrival, Michele had banked upon her guess that he might be intimidated by feminine stubbornness and emotion. That bet paid off, as he immediately began to rifle through his desk in search of his account ledger. "In that case, Madame," he stammered as he scribbled an address onto a slip of paper, which he then handed her, "I pray you will permit me a bit of cowardice. I never did relish becoming involved in family disputes. Please do give my best to the Vicomte when you see him."

The prize she had sought won, Michele turned smartly on her heel and allowed herself a private smirk once her back was turned to the spineless lawyer. Stepping towards the door, she threw one last lie over her shoulder. "I certainly shall."

Although it cost her a considerable sum, before the afternoon began to wane Michele was well en route to the French countryside to seek out the Vicomte de Changy’s new abode. She had no interest whatever in the young man, and hoped she might circumvent him entirely in her efforts to find Christine. However, as she fingered the tiny bottle of chloroform inside her muff, she acknowledged the possibility that she was no longer with him. That the solicitor knew nothing of her nagged at her mind, and Michele found it somehow easy to imagine that the former diva might have cruelly taken what she could from the Vicomte and abandoned him, much as she had done to Erik. These possibilities explored, she knew she might ultimately be forced to question Raoul as the last remaining source of information concerning Mademoiselle Daaé.

Still, she intended to get as far as she could without him. A handsome, rich and by all accounts rather stupid young aristocrat was the last distraction her long-denied hungers needed.

Much as she had hoped, she arrived at the nearest station to the Vicomte’s new home just as the social evening was commencing. As she was driven from town and toward the country manor by her hired rig, she passed many a rich carriage overflowing with well-dressed passengers off to from whence she had just come, in search of soirees and dances, of good food, good drink and good cheer. She breathed a wistful sigh; the society she had enjoyed in America, although entertaining in its sometimes bawdy, sometimes insidious way, was a far cry from the old-fashioned gentility she had discovered since coming to France. She knew that such diversion was to be found at home; perhaps, when she returned there, she would make an effort to seek it out …

Once within a comfortable walking distance of her destination, she had the driver put her off at the side of the road; she wanted to give the Vicomte – and Christine, were still with him – ample time to leave their dwelling for the evening before she presented herself at the door. She was banking on their absence, for she knew that if she were to find them at home she would never be able to play the trick she had planned. The de Chagny house-servants, however, were less likely to know their new mistress’s history, and therefore more likely to believe her ruse. She had so successfully carried off the role of a distant relative that morning that she had decided to put it to further use.

"Is Madame le Vicomtesse at home?" she inquired with her prettiest manners of the plump housekeeper who answered her ring at the door. Any dolt with any sense would have seen that master and mistress had both quitted the house for the evening, for apart from the foyer chandelier and the oil lamp this woman carried, the only lights that burned were in the back of the house, where the kitchen and servants’ quarters likely were. But of course she could not give the impression of knowing too much, since she had come here to glean what information she could.

The housekeeper, however, seemed to know no answer for her – or perhaps not understand her line of inquiry. "I beg your pardon, Madame," she replied, frowning, "but I believe you are mistaken. This house has no mistress."

"But its master is Raoul, the Vicomte de Chagny, is that not true?" Michele countered with feigned perplexity, concealing as best she could the conclusions to which her mind was jumping.

"Oui, Madame," the woman said, bobbing her head, "but I hope you will excuse me, I do not understand your questions. This house belongs to the Vicomte, but there is no Vicomtesse."

"Oh … I see …" Michele responded, assuming an expression of mingled worry and discomfort. "But perhaps … perhaps you do know of a Mademoiselle Christine Daaé?"

The housekeeper’s face fell immediately, and her gaze began to betray doubt. "May I ask who you are, Madame?" she whispered with a hint of suspicion.

"Forgive me … I suppose I oughtn’t to have come!" Michele’s eyes now began to well with theatrical tears. "Christine is my cousin, but I have not seen her these fifteen years at least – oh, since she was just a child! I am from America, you see, and news travels so slowly … I have only just learned of her father’s – my dear uncle’s – death, and I came as quickly as I could to condole with her! But when I arrived in Paris, I was told she had eloped – oh, so romantic, the story I was told! – that she had run away with the Vicomte de Chagny. I came straight away … I did not write, for I was so enchanted with the idea of surprising her … please, Madame," she concluded, seizing the older woman’s hand impetuously, "please tell me that you know where I can find her. Is it untrue, then, what I was told? Have she and the Vicomte not married? Oh, I am so sorry to have trespassed upon you …" So wrapped up was she in her ruse, that Michele ultimately dropped her face into her hands and wept stormily, and thereby cemented the housekeeper’s belief of her tale.

"You poor child," she replied, holding up her lamp and wrapping her free arm about Michele’s shoulders, "pray come inside. I shall fix you a cup of tea, for you look quite worn out; and I shall tell you what I know. Please forgive me coldness – the Vicomte moved his home here to escape gossip, but even this country neighborhood is not free of busybodies, and I have grown tired of them. Come inside."

Thus Michele was escorted to the kitchen, where the housekeeper told her a tale that made her secretly yearn to throw back her head and howl with laughter.

"I have been working for the de Chagny family since Raoul was but a child," the older woman began, "and I have loved him like my own son, especially since his dear father’s death a few years ago. When he first spoke to me of Christine Daaé – for he looked to me quite as a mother, as well; his own Mama died when he was just a wee thing – but I digress, my dear. When Raoul first spoke to me of Christine, of course I was concerned; they knew each other as children, you know, and he had always carried a bit of a torch for her ever since they parted when he was fifteen.

"Suddenly in Paris he saw her again, and I was afraid he was being too impetuous, that he would break his heart over her – or worse, that she would have been spoiled by the life of a performer, and might use the dear Vicomte for selfish gain. But as time passed, we began to believe that Christine’s heart was pure, and that they might marry happily if she might only be removed from the company of actors and vagrants. Raoul was quite convinced that these people exerted far too much influence over her thinking, and that her gentleness had made her the target of manipulation and, as a result, of scandal. Though the society columns portrayed Christine as a common climber, there was much talk under our roof of the poor child being put upon; she was quite alone in the world at that time, and vulnerable. There were several people whose interests in her the Vicomte mistrusted.

"I could not tell you exactly what happened then; but late one evening he came bursting into our home in Paris after having attended the Opera, with his clothes all disheveled and Christine in tow. He called to me to rouse the entire staff, as we must leave the city at once – it could not even wait until morning. Christine looked as though she had been weeping, and looked around her as blankly as a person in a trance, and though I tried to convince Raoul that she appeared exhausted, he refused to even allow me to help her off with her cloak. Instead he had me bring blankets and other things to make her comfortable, and he bundled her back into the carriage and set off at once for a house he owned in the country.

"We were at that house scarcely a month before he informed us that, to secure our privacy, he had sold it; we would be opening a new house – this one, to shorten the entire tale. Christine moved with us wherever we went, and though at first we believed her to simply be our guest, one night after we arrived here the dear Vicomte informed me that she was to become his wife.

"I was pleased for him and had already become attached to Christine, but I was also concerned for the young woman – her behavior was strange and had been ever since we left Paris. Although Raoul claimed that he had been captivated by her sweetness and brightness, she barely spoke a word to anyone, and soon would not leave her room without much coaxing. It seemed that she was suffering from the deprivation of her former friends; however dangerous their company might have been to her virtue, it seemed she was genuinely attached to them and felt the severing of ties with them keenly. One morning I went to wake her and found her prostrate with tears, and that day I told the Vicomte that something must be done about her. This depressed state was sure to harm her should it continue much longer.

"The two had many animated and intense conversations after that, so often behind closed doors that I am unaware of their subjects. Finally Christine’s spirits seemed to improve, but her manner was much different from that of the sweet, demure girl Raoul had always described to me. In fact, she seemed to be growing restless and peevish; but we all lived in relative tranquillity until perhaps a month ago. That was when Christine suddenly announced that she must leave and return to Paris.

"Naturally the Vicomte was distraught; the wedding had been postponed while she was so out of spirits, but since she had been rallying the plans had begun to move forward again. It was to take place only a few weeks from now." Dabbing at her eyes with a nearly voluminous handkerchief, the housekeeper continued, "I know little of Christine’s precise reasons for departing, but she seemed to begrudge Raoul his transplanting her from the city, and to imply he had done this without her consent. I would have scolded her had it been my place, for she had clearly not been rational when we took her from Paris, and had been well taken care of since coming under our roof. I was angry, and I believe the Vicomte was too – I heard him tell her she was ungrateful and headstrong. Nevertheless, she took her leave over three weeks ago, and has not been back since. And as for the wedding, my dear … I know not when or whether it will take place, although the Vicomte stubbornly insists that Christine only needs time to prepare herself. He assures me with tears in his eyes that she will come back; but whether he is right, I cannot speculate."

Michele pressed to her nose and mouth the handkerchief the housekeeper handed to her, in the hopes of concealing her smile. It seemed to her Christine was ever up to her old tricks. "Where is my cousin now?" she asked weakly, an after-effect of suppressed satisfaction.

"As far as I know, she has returned to the flat she used to keep in Paris. Apparently she had been sending a portion of the allowance the Vicomte had given her to her former landlady, requesting that the flat be maintained in her absence. She has gone back there to live, and perhaps has returned to the Opera as well. Perhaps you will think me cruel – but I pray she will see that the friends she loved so dearly there have all but forgotten her, so she will realize who her real friends are and come back to us. I hope, mademoiselle," the housekeeper added, placing her work-worn hand upon Michele’s, "that you will do what you can to convince your cousin to come home. This is the best place for her."

"I am sure of that, Madame," Michele replied, nodding. "I am so thankful Christine has been so well cared for since the death of her father. Surely she must know that, or may be brought to realize it … and I sincerely hope I may be able to witness her wedding to the Vicomte ere I return to America." The housekeeper smiled and patted her hand; feeling suddenly guilty for telling such lies to such a kindly woman, Michele rose. "But pray, excuse me – I must return to Paris at once to see Christine. Not a moment must be lost if she is to be prevented from throwing away all her good fortune."

The housekeeper protested at first, saying that the Vicomte would be home from the evening’s social gatherings presently and would certainly delight in meeting such a long-lost relative of his beloved; but Michele insisted, knowing her ruse could never withstand the Vicomte’s certain and intimate knowledge of Christine’s family – what was left of it. She further pressed the woman not to tell Raoul of her visit, saying it would be such a happy surprise for him to make her acquaintance at the moment of his reunion with Christine. Having extracted this promise from the housekeeper, Michele departed on foot and met with her hired carriage at a distance from the house. She congratulated herself on the efficiency of her success as they drove back in the direction of the town and the train; she had asked the driver to return for her in two hours, and he had assured her she had not kept him waiting long.

On the late train to Paris, Michele lounged in the first-class car and was presently lulled to sleep by the motion of the coach. But even in her dreams she smiled over her victory and the simplicity of it all – to think that the flown canary should have returned home to roost!

The next morning Michele paid a street-child a heavy gold coin to carry a message to Nadir’s address. The note was nothing more than one piece of paper folded over its brief contents:

She could hear Christine’s skirts rustling as she hurried to the door. "Please, Raoul," came her breathy voice through the cracks, "I told you that I wanted to be left alone …"

"My apologies, mademoiselle," Michele answered with a cruel smile as she seized the smaller woman the moment the door drew back; "but I am afraid I must inconvenience you with my company … at least for the time being." She pressed her handkerchief to Christine’s nose, and through the merciless workings of chloroform the reappeared soprano knew no more.

Nadir was properly puzzled when a knocking at his door revealed a saucy child dressed in rags.

"If you please, Monsieur," crowed the miniature urchin – who could not have been much older than seven – "but I have a letter for M. Erik."

"Have you?" Nadir inquired, curious. "Let us have it then."

The child jerked the bit of folded paper away from Nadir’s reaching fingers. "Are you M. Erik?" he challenged.

Nadir was caught somewhere between irritation and amusement. In Persia such impudence would never have been permitted to develop in a child … but perhaps this one had had no real rearing to speak of. His tattered clothing and the dirt ground unto his unruly hair suggested many months out-of-doors. But still … perhaps a bit of a shock would teach him some needed humility.

"I beg your pardon, petite Monsieur," Nadir responded with a slight bow. "Allow me to fetch Erik so you may deliver your message in person."

Turning his back to the child, he caught Erik’s eye; the subject of conversation had been seated just inside the parlour the entire time, watching the exchange from over his lowered newspaper. Nadir beckoned him with a slight jerk of the chin, and Erik understood the twinkle in the Daroga’s eye.

Stepping heavily across the room, Erik flung the door back just as Nadir slipped away from it to smother his laughter in a corner. "What is all this about?" he bellowed into the hallway, pretending not to see the child. "Who has asked for me?"

The change in the little boy was immediate and almost pitiful. "I … I …" he stammered.

Erik feigned surprise when he cast his gaze downward and beheld the child. "Ho! Here we have a tiny little man! You are rather impudent, sir, to demand an audience with Erik!"

As much as the child’s eyes boggled as they took in the mask that loomed over him, it seemed his young pride was more important. He puffed out his little chest and retorted with all his strength, "And you are rather foolish, Monsieur, to scare away the messenger!" He took a step backward and raised his hand, in which he held a tiny folded-over sheet. "You will have to make it worth my while, sir, if you want your letter now!"

Erik could not contain himself; he threw his head back and roared with laughter. "You drive a hard bargain, my lad!" he grinned, reaching into his pockets and retrieving a handful of coins. "Will this be enough to purchase from you what is rightly mine?"

The child’s eyes widened again, but this time because Erik’s palm contained more money than he had ever seen. But his bravery had served him as far as it would go; without a word he snatched the coins and dashed off down the hallway, leaving the letter to fall to the floor as he fled.

Still laughing, Erik bent to the boards to retrieve the tiny messenger’s cargo; but his mirth was abruptly cut off when he beheld its contents. Nadir drew closer to his friend, who stood as if turned to stone in the doorjamb. "What is it, Erik?" he asked, placing a hand on his arm.

"I must go," was the hurried response as Erik turned and, in one swift motion, took his cloak from where it hung beside the door and threw it around his shoulders. He left Nadir standing in the door shouting after him with only a "There is no time to explain!" to answer the Daroga’s questions.

Nadir grabbed his own coat and made as if to follow his friend; but Erik must have taken the steps five at a time, for by the time Nadir reached the street Erik was not visible in any direction. Quite as would the Phantom he remembered, Erik had simply disappeared. For a moment the Persian considered assuming him gone to the Opera; but instead he returned to the apartment defeated, hoping against hope that Erik had dropped the note and left behind a clue. There was nothing there but his absence, however, and no course of action for the Daroga but to remain there, and wait.

It was the stuff of Erik’s most horrific fears that awaited him at the Opera.

It had been nearing dusk when the little messenger had discharged his duty; Michele had instructed him to wait until the sun was setting before delivering the note, and he had done as he had been told. Erik had no way of knowing, although it was hardly the "tonight" Michele’s note had hinted at, that she was already waiting for him in his abandoned house.

He threw caution to the wind the moment he was at the lakeside, and bellowed her name loudly enough to wake the ghosts of the scores of poor souls who had died in the construction of the theatre. She did not answer him, but a light suspended from the end of the pier that served as a front step to his home gave him to know she was there. He hurried through the gloom to the door, which gave easily at the pressure of his hand …

And there, in the still-grand ruins of the Louis-Phillipe room, stood the very Devil with an angel in her arms. Michele’s left arm was clasped tightly around Christine’s small ribcage, and her right hand held a deceptively tiny pistol against the younger woman’s throat.

"Bienvenue, Erik," she purred as though nothing were amiss. "How good of you to come."

Instinctually, Erik extended his hand and moved towards them. "Michele, let her go," he commanded, although his heart was hammering so that he was afraid his voice might betray his words for the plea they were.

But instead of complying, Michele moved the derringer for a moment – and leveled it straight at Erik’s heart. "Not another step, if you please," she smiled cruelly.

"No!" Christine shrieked as she observed the motion out of the corner of her eye.

"Hush, my beauty," Michele hissed into her ear even as she returned the muzzle of the weapon to just beneath her jaw. "You don’t really think I would visit your sins upon him? I shall not hurt him – of course, provided he stays still. That’s right," she continued, glancing up to ascertain that he had frozen mid-step.

"Michele," Erik began again in the calmest tone he could muster – for here at last was his disappeared Christine, still beautiful and now more vulnerable than ever! and how his feelings warred within him – "there can be no reason for this desperate display. You said yourself you had no interest in Christine." How easily her name formed on his lips, and how steadily fear helped him to speak it! "Whatever you would say, you may say to me – but let her go. She has no part in this."

The subject of his speech, meanwhile, stared helplessly at the figure of her former Maestro as her eyes were able to discern him in the gloom. Like a flood the images and feelings of their last meeting came upon her, and her lips trembled even as did the rest of her body, though not from fear as was the case with the latter. He was as magnetic as ever – his voice as affective, his presence as commanding and somehow soothing to her, almost a promise of safety despite the danger in which she now dangled … but there was something wanting. He seemed thin, his voice somehow worn, as though he had been sleepless, or grieved. But her musings on this subject were not to go on long undirected, for Michele spoke again.

"Oh, but you are wrong, Erik; for she has every bit as much a part in this as you or I, and you know it to be true. I have brought her here for one purpose, one alone: there are things you must say to her if you are ever to purge her from your heart." Although Christine could not see Michele’s face, Erik could; and it shaped itself slowly into an evil smile. "You know you have wanted to do so ever since I came to the Opera, Erik – ever since I lay her words into your hands; and ever since I began to speak to you I have known it for myself. I have done this as a favor to you, to bring you the healing and the vengeance you deserve. Come now – aren’t you pleased with your present?"

"You are mad, Michele," he breathed through clenched teeth, wishing desperately that her words did not affect him. But as she called upon the conversations they had had, he remembered keenly the anger she had stirred in his heart – the indignation she had taught him to feel towards Christine. He wanted to love and pity her at this moment, so endangered by Michele’s expertly lethal hands; but something within him hesitated, almost wanted her to suffer as he thought of the many long months he had passed, alone and half-dead in these basements, wasting away for the loss of her.

"Am I?" Michele inquired, cocking her head. "Tell me, then, that you have not learned to despise her in the time since she abandoned you. Lie to me, Erik! – tell me you did not swear to me yourself that you have tried to accept that she never loved you! Tell me you did not speak these words in this very room, although you cradled her own account of her selfish motivations in your hands! Where is the book, Erik? Did you burn it, as should always be done with the stories of cowards and thieves – or do you treasure it still, keep it safe somewhere wrapped in a forgotten prop-scarf or amongst mouldering rose petals? Tell me truly … it is of intense interest to me …"

Christine choked as her captor’s grip on her tightened; the stronger woman’s arm exerted a great amount of pressure on her throat, and though she wanted desperately to speak she was fighting for every breath she drew. But her mind still worked, and despaired to listen to the exchange between Erik and this murderess – her diary! She knew there could be no other meaning to their conversation. She had left it behind intentionally, hoping that writing could explain her actions better than she could ever do herself. She had intended it to assure Erik that she had loved him, but that fear and manipulation and youth and so many other forces had been too strong for her to fight. But now it seemed that the journal had not been discovered by Erik as she had hoped, but that it had fallen first to Michele, who was now using it to poison her beloved teacher against her!

Erik labored over Michele’s words, and his hands began to tremble despite his herculean efforts to curb both his anger and his fear. "I never made any professions of any kind to you, Michele – if lies are present here they come from your lips."

"Oh, but I beg to differ, my dear," came her insidious and nearly flirtatious response. "You told me you have tried to teach yourself to admit the things I have told you countless times: that this beloved of yours never cared for you a jot, that she took from you what she could, and that when you ceased to be useful she discarded you for a wealthier – and, I might add, handsomer – patron. Tell him, why don’t you?" she hissed into Christine’s ear. "Tell him the truth for once!"

"You say these things intentionally to provoke me, Michele," Erik replied, as if insensible of her remark to her prisoner; his tone was evened by sheer will. "All I have ever asserted to that end was that I know Christine loved me once … and you need not remind me that she left me. I am aware of these facts, but am also quite assured that they need not prevent each other." For the first time he allowed his eyes to meet with Christine’s, although he could not discern any one ruling emotion in them – they were a churning pool of terror and bewilderment. Her lips trembled, and he wondered for a moment what she wanted to say – whether she would confirm or deny Michele’s accusations. But what would motivate her declaration, whichever she chose to make? He glanced away. "Love may leave without proving it was never true."

"Come now, Erik," Michele scoffed, half-amused. "Don’t tell me you mean to wax poetic on the nature of love! Are we to debate whether it is dictated or chosen? For, tell me truly, did she return your regard by fate or by design – was there not something to gain in a few harmless assertions of affection that need never be substantiated? Or perhaps we may argue whether it can exist and yet elude – for how better to describe your pursuit of her? It was a hunt, was it not, always skulking in the shadows and attempting to bring her in by strategy or force … and did you ever possess her, Erik? Wholly and truly? Her declaration and her touch all at once?" An evil smirk spread itself across her saucy mouth. "Don’t trouble yourself, for I know the answer; for as much as you offered her choices, she presented one of her own. It was always either body or soul, Erik; the language or the kiss, but never both together."

To Christine’s horror, she could see that the madwoman’s words were beginning to seep into Erik’s mind. As she spoke he struggled visibly against her; but finally he could stand no more, and clapped his hands over his ears. "Enough!" he cried, tears beginning to stream down the skin left exposed by the mask. "What can you hope to accomplish with this cruelty?"

"Only to help you see who the real enemy is," she responded in kind, her own heart leaping to life in her chest. "Do not fight me, Erik – lash out against her, who truly deserves your anger!"

Michele’s determination had finally accomplished its aim. When Erik opened his eyes it was as if the lens through which he had observed Christine was shattered, and he beheld her as she truly was. How could she stand so silently and hear herself thus defamed without an attempt at clearing her name? She had listened to Michele’s derision without protest, and the fear and helpless indecision in her eyes gave him all the evidence he needed. For a moment it mattered not that Michele’s words were poison poured deliberately into his ear; for a moment he saw nothing but Christine’s stricken expression, her rigid posture … and the diamond ring that gleamed ever so faintly on the fourth finger of her left hand.

"Christine …" he began, his voice hollow and disbelieving at first, but gradually rising to a violent pitch. "I cannot understand you. I offered you everything you could ever have wanted – the career you so desperately needed, the voice to please your notions of your father’s wishes, and all the love I could muster from the heart that knew only misery before it beheld you! Was that not enough? – am I to be blamed for what I am? For you I would have done anything – I could have ventured into the sun again, brave in the knowledge that you loved me! And you told me, Christine! – or you gave me the reason to believe it, if you never said as much. When we spoke, when we touched as we sang – you allowed me to believe in it … to believe in you … and that is as much a lie as if you had shouted it from the rooftops! But all you ever pledged on a rooftop was how you feared me … and now you stand here, beseeching me with your eyes while the Vicomte’s ring stands guard on your finger! And to think, you left telling me your hand was never to be given! Must I learn this way, Christine, that it was rather your heart that could not be touched? Cruel, selfish child! When the Devil played his song for you and asked only your trifling affection in return!"

Christine recoiled from Erik’s anger as she had learned to do as his pupil; but the closeness with Michele was distasteful to her and she straightened her spine, to bear the scourge of his words as best as her slight form was able. But as his tirade escalated and his words became increasingly painful to her, indignation began to rise in her own throat. Perhaps she had been wrong to submit so numbly that night as he shooed her into Raoul’s arms and out of the Opera – and surely he was unaware of all that had transpired since, how she had missed him despite her efforts to forget, how she had run from Raoul to try and sort out her tangled feelings! But even still, how could he allow this horrid woman to poison him against her and pollute the memories of their tender moments with her false assessments? And how could she protest without further angering him – how could she escape certain murder without his aid?

"Erik, please!" she finally gasped, as a drowning woman choking for air. "I cannot listen to what you are saying – I cannot reflect upon our dealings in this fashion! Surely we have misunderstood each other most horribly … and that thought is as abhorrent to me as the charges you lay before me now. I beg you …" She made as if she would struggle, but Michele jerked her back roughly and tears began to form in the captive’s eyes. " … please! Let us talk together – talk to me alone – if you loved me as you say you did, save me from this madwoman, and I swear to you I shall do whatever is within my power to put things to rights between us ... there are so many things I must say to you …"

Michele had hoped for such an outburst, and as Christine broke into tears she held her derringer still closer to the captive’s throat. "That’s enough from you, my sweet," she purred in a silky, serpentine tone. "Don’t let her manipulate you, Erik – you know that’s what she’s doing, don’t you? Calling on the ghost of a love that died before it was born! You know she didn’t love you; it’s only her miserable neck she’s worried about now." Chuckling darkly, she fixed Erik with eyes that burned. "I know there have been times in the darkness of your grief, Erik, that you wished you’d never laid eyes on this young chit. Let me give you your wish – let me free you from her power."

So steeped was he in misery that Erik turned his face away from the gruesome tableau before him: Michele with her deadly instrument poised so near to Christine’s trembling throat. How familiar that tiny detail – how ashamed he felt that the last time he had seen her, too, her eyes had brimmed with tears and her entire frame had shuddered with hysteria and fear! It had all been at his hand! And yet the truth in Michele’s words once again goaded him … how could he believe a word Christine uttered when it had taken a kidnapper’s will to bring her into his presence again?

"And why would you do me that favor, Michele?" he asked grimly, trying to sound lofty and scornful, but instead sounding only miserable and indifferent. Christine’s eyes widened. Had she so wounded Erik that he no longer cared whether she lived or died? Would he truly allow her to perish at the hands of this lunatic?

Michele’s voice again, as smooth as cream and black as sin. "You will never be free to live or love again until this ungrateful wench is … dealt with. She is nothing more than a siren; she has bewitched you and taken from you all she could use. Let me give you your heart back, Erik." A silence, punctuated by Christine’s panicked breathing. "Only then can you learn to love again."

These words poured like concrete over the leaden fear already causing Christine’s stomach to sink. Despite Erik’s heartbroken anger and the strangled confusion and sorrow it inspired in her, she had hoped he would somehow save her from the murderess’s grasp. She had been in earnest in her plea – this was the first time she had seen this side of him, the first time he had ever given voice to any emotion other than adoration or jealousy. It reminded her keenly that he was not an angel or the monstrous Phantom she had been persuaded to believe him, but a man of flesh with a vulnerable heart. His accusations stung her, not because she felt them unjust, but because she feared that in her childish carelessness she had actually committed without realizing the wrongs which he now lay at her feet. Had she hurt him, she would have been profoundly sorry – did he think her so unfeeling? Oh, if only given the chance to work out these tangled knots with him … for this emotion revealed something new and different of him, something she wanted to explore and speak to and see more of. But now …

Could he really love this woman? Despite his mottled past, she had always sensed kindness in him – but Michele clearly reveled in her wickedness and cruelty. Erik could never love someone like that … could he?

How could he love anyone but me?

She was engaged to Raoul de Changy – but being once again so near to Erik she realized that the reason she could never entirely say "yes" to Raoul was because the last "yes" she had spoken had been in this room, directed not to her now-fiancé but to her then-maestro. Why he had sent her away? – why she had not refused to go? – these were all questions too confused for answers! All she knew was that she wanted to tell him she was sorry … but she was prevented by the presence of an unfeeling stranger, and by the cold barrel of that stranger’s gun pressed so close to her vulnerable throat …

Erik’s attention had been deflected from Christine’s expression by Michele’s words; otherwise her countenance could not have gone unnoticed. He was, however, far busier staring with incredulity at the woman who stood behind her. Under any other circumstance, he would have laughed away Michele’s suggestion. He had, in fact, repeatedly repulsed her advances. She could not really believe that he wanted her … But these were not words he could speak; tonight, Michele’s humiliation would be at his beloved Christine’s peril.

His beloved Christine. Yes, in his thoughts he had acknowledged it – despite his cruel words to her earlier, he did love her. He had never stopped; though she had led him through dismal landscapes of inconceivable pain, he still loved her and always would. And though Michele had ignited momentary sparks in him, he knew she had only done so through her own stubborn and insurmountable will. The manipulation of which she accused Christine was in fact her crime – she had wanted him and sought to extract from him some measure of deranged pleasure before heartlessly casting him into the pit. Even still this was what she wanted.

Erik suddenly became aware of what he must do.

He had gone toe-to-toe with Michele before, matched taunt for taunt and violence for violence. To escape the web she had woven over all he held dear – his life, his freedom, his Christine – he must now match her manipulation.

He had lived his life in darkness, torment and sin. To bargain with the Devil would hardly be a far cry from consistency.

She had watched his face in the silence since she had spoken, cursing the mask for its concealment of his expressions. It mattered not one iota to her how ugly he was; she longed to rip away all his barriers and behold for herself, just once, all the passions of which she knew his soul was capable. How beautiful he would be in his final moments, a phoenix rising from his own ashes.

Of course she still meant to do what she had contracted for. But she saw no reason why Erik, like Pierre Delorme, should be denied some small amount of happiness before his final exit …

She thought she saw him stir. Squinting through the gloom, she tried to discern movement; damn this darkness! No, again, the tiniest motion of the luminous white mask – he was coming to life again from the frozen stupor into which the realization of her purpose had thrown him. Yes, Erik, she thought as their eyes met fiercely in the dark, I will kill her. And then you will be mine …

Motion again, this time more determined; he was stepping towards her! What is he doing? Her muscles stiffened, her derringer’s muzzle pressing cruelly into Christine’s soft throat. The trembling soprano whimpered. "Silence, you!" Michele breathed menacingly into her ear. "Erik! Stay where you are!"

Christine nearly swooned at the sensation of his voice, slicing so carnally through the darkness – but this time … oh! This time it was not meant for her!

"Michele," he breathed. "Let her go."

The tone of his voice could not be mistaken – it was for such sensual intonations that his voice had been intended. It skimmed over Michele’s senses like a deft lover’s touch. She shook herself, trying to free herself from its allure. "Erik, you know that’s an absurd request," she scoffed, but it sounded halfhearted, even forced. Her eyes never left his.

He was closer now, just slightly farther than an arm’s breadth away. "It is not a request," he replied in that same delicious manner; "it is a bargain. Let her go …"

To Christine’s great surprise, he skirted her completely and opened his arms to her would-be murderess. Though she could not see the other woman’s face, she heard her breathing quicken ever so slightly as he spoke. "… and I am yours, for whatever purpose you would wish."

Michele tossed her head proudly, still struggling against the power of his voice. "Don’t lie to me, Erik. We’ve been across this ground before. We both know that while she lives - " here she gave Christine a vicious little shake - "you will never give yourself to anyone, least of all me."

He inched closer. "Michele," he murmured, a sound much like the sensation of a hand smoothing silk. "I swear to you that my offer is honest."

The muzzle of the derringer, though still poised near Christine’s throat, began to falter. "You’re using your voice against me, Erik," she protested weakly.

The exposed corner of his mouth twitched, indicating an expression similar to a normal man’s smile. As the entire world seemed to hold its breath in anticipation of what might happen next, Erik reached one gloved hand out and – ever so faintly – trailed his fingers across Michele’s cheek. "Then let me prove it in other ways," he whispered.

Michele’s eyes closed, and Erik could see her instincts warring in her face. A single tear drifted down her flushing cheek, and he wondered for a moment whether what he was about to do was cruel. Recalling the moment of choice he had forced upon Christine not so many months ago, for a moment he debated what he would have rather had: the lingering bittersweetness of a kiss that felt purchased, or the guilt he now knew would have accompanied the alternative. But watching Michele waver between wanting desperately to believe him and being violently consumed by jealousy for Christine, he saw Michele’s arm tighten ever so slightly about his beloved’s shoulders. He reminded himself that Michele would feel no guilt if she were to pull the trigger; and he felt no guilt as he cupped his hand over her cheek, feathering his fingers back along her jawbone.

"Michele," he implored her once more, "let her go, and come to me."

The arm that pinioned Christine in place suddenly became unsteady, and as it loosed its grip she slipped out of it and dashed away. But once free of the madwoman’s hold, something made Christine turn and look.

No sooner than Christine was safely out of reach did Erik gather Michele in his arms and pull her gently towards him. The astounded Mademoiselle Daaé watched her former maestro gently tip her would-be assassin’s chin up towards his lips and lean in close to kiss her lips. The incredulity in Michele’s face dissipated as Erik’s left arm wove its way about her waist; one of her hands drifted to his shoulder, the other to his exposed cheek. He did not pull away, and her eyes finally closed, accepting his pledge of honesty and falling into his kiss.

Erik kissed Michele with all his paltry expertise, knowing full well that he had likely sealed his own fate by pressing his lips to hers. But he did it for love of Christine, who lingered nearby, most likely in shock and disbelief at what her eyes beheld. For a moment he almost thought he sensed sorrow in her mien – but of course that was foolish. He had never denied her kisses; she could have had another and another and all the rest he had to offer that night she returned his ring to him, here in this very room. But he tried to put those thoughts from his mind. What he did now was for the love he would always feel for her, for his desire for her to live long and happy far out of the clutches of Michele. Should this gesture spell his doom he would accept it, knowing at the least that she was safe. And think of what an exit it will be, with all of Michele’s offers … Grimly, he dismissed this final thought.

Moments or lifetimes passed before they parted; when they did the eyes that Michele lifted to meet Erik’s were wet with tears. "You love her still," she whispered.

Trying not to let her words jar him or deter him from his purpose, he smoothed back a few stray hairs that had worked loose at her temple. He tightened his hold on her waist. "I choose you, Michele," he insisted quietly, bending to kiss her again.

But she placed her palms on his chest and held him back. "No," she said in a small, strange but firm voice. "I know you do not love me."

Never lifting his eyes from hers, he replied, "Your conditions were not my love, Michele. They were my consent, and you have that."

Somehow she extricated herself from his arms and stood before him, lips trembling like those of a child about to have a tantrum. "And all for what, Erik? To save her life?"

"To save her life," he repeated simply. A terrible silence yawned between them; nearby, Christine hardly breathed for fear of what might happen next.

Suddenly, Michele raised her hand – too late her audience realized she still held her derringer. "Michele!" Erik cried, lunging for the weapon; but she sidestepped him neatly, and replied in a terrible voice,

"If I can never topple your devotion, Erik – it is best left standing …"

The gunshot resonated through the subterranean house like thunder through the heavens. Though Erik dropped immediately to his knees beside Michele’s prone form, it was clear there was nothing to be done; her lovely golden hair was streaked with blood at her temple, and at the back of her head where the bullet had exited.

Time seemed to stand still as Erik knelt over the body of the woman who would have been their murderess. Despite the intimate embrace he had so recently shared with her, he seemed remarkably unmoved by Michele’s sudden act of grief and wounded pride. Finally, Christine broke the silence with a murmured, "Erik?"

In the space between the gunshot and that one word, the parallel between this and a not-so-long-ago scene did not escape either of them. Turning towards her eyes that burned, Erik replied,

"I understand now, Christine, what it is to accept the touch of a monster to save the one you whom you truly love."

Christine was without words, and even without tears; she had always known that such aching moments of realization and love ought to be accompanied by tears, but she could not will them to come. And by the time words began to solidify in her mind, he had turned sharply on his heel and walked away.

Not knowing what to say, it had been easier for him to simply leave; but he felt her loss keenly. He reeled from having been so close to her once more, but smarted under the knowledge that it would be the last time. The Vicomte would keep a sleepless watch over her now, and he wanted nothing more than to cut off his love for her like an offending limb. It would serve no purpose to remember her watching him with eyes wide in the darkness, the torchlight throwing shadows in the folds of her gown and glowing vermilion in her curls … it would serve no purpose …

So distraught was Erik as he staggered through the door on the Rue Scribe and began to make his way towards Nadir’s flat, that he did not notice the blue-cloaked form that lagged behind at a conservative distance; nor did he pay attention to the hansom that was hailed almost at Nadir’s very door once his shadow had noted the address.

The story related, Erik was bundled into bed by the Daroga, whom experience had taught to never be too surprised at his friend’s sudden comings and goings. Erik’s tale robbed Nadir himself of the will to sleep, and he stood at the window until dawn, slowly smoking one after another of his long hand-wrapped cigarettes.

It was strange for them both to be together once more after so long; but difficult conversations and chess games and brandy brought the two friends round to each other again. Before the end of his second day in the Nadir’s flat, Erik had the Daroga’s open-ended invitation to stay as long as he liked. And he did like the idea of staying as long as they both could stand it; but he knew he ought not to. He was not sure he wanted to remain in Paris now, but was unable to work up the immediate desire to leave.

It was several weeks into his sojourn on the Rue de Rivoli when Erik sat with his feet on the parlour table, reading the morning newspaper, and a cream-colored envelope slipped under the door.

"Nadir?" he called into the other room; but presently he remembered that Nadir had gone out on one of his many mysterious errands, and that he was quite alone in the flat. Feeling somewhat apprehensive for no reason he could explain, he approached the door and retrieved the envelope from the carpet.

His name was penned delicately across the crisp paper in a copperplate hand his heart jumped to recognize.

Erik creased the letter, its unwritten question nevertheless resounding in his mind. The terms were completely his - all that remained now was, would he come?

He tucked the folded paper carefully amongst his entablature, his most precious personal treasures. Surely he could afford a few more weeks with Nadir before it became necessary to take it out again, to show his friend that there was in fact some reason for hope, that he was running to and not away from what remained in life for him.