The Phantom Of Manhattan Part 6

Of course. Did you suspect another?

SHE.

After the monkey, no. To hear 'Masquerade' again ... It has been so long.

HE.

Thirteen long years. Have you thought of me?

SHE.

Of course, my Master of Music. But I thought ...

HE.

That I was dead? No, Christine my love, not me.

SHE.

My love? Do you still ... ?

HE.

Always and for ever, until I die. In spirit you are still mine, Christine. I made the singing star but could not keep her.

SHE.

When you vanished I thought you had gone for ever. I married Raoul ...

HE.

I know. I have followed every step, every move, every triumph.

SHE.

Has it been hard for you, Erik?

HE.

Hard enough. My road has always been harder than you will ever know.

SHE.

You brought me here? The opera, it is yours?

HE.

Yes. All mine, and more, much more. Wealth to buy half of France.

SHE.

Why, Erik, oh why did you do it? Could you not leave me be? What do you want of me?

HE.

Stay with me.

SHE.

I cannot.

HE.

Stay with me, Christine. Times have changed. I can offer you every opera house in the world. Everything you could ever ask for.

SHE.

I cannot. I love Raoul. Try to accept that. All you have ever done for me I remember and with grat.i.tude. But my heart lies elsewhere and always will. Can you not understand that? Can you not accept.

At this point there was a long pause as if the suitor who had been turned down was trying to recover from his grief. When he resumed there was a tremor in the voice.

HE.

Very well. Accept I must. Why not, my heart has been broken so many times. But there is one more thing. Leave me my boy.

SHE.

Your ... boy ... ?

HE.

My son, our son, Pierre.

The woman, whom I could still see, indeed reflected a dozen times, went white as a sheet and threw both her hands to cover her face. She rocked for several seconds and I feared she would faint. I was about to cry out, but my call died in my throat. I was a mute and helpless witness of something I could not understand. Finally she removed her hands and spoke in a whisper.

SHE.

Who told you?

HE.

Mme Giry.

SHE.

Why, oh why did she do it?

HE.

She was dying. She wanted to share the secret of so many years.

SHE.

She lied.

HE.

No. She tended Raoul after the shooting in the alley.

SHE.

He is a good, kind and gentle man. He has loved me and brought up Pierre as his own. Pierre does not know.

HE.

Raoul knows. You know. I know. Leave me my son.

SHE.

I cannot, Erik. He will soon be thirteen. In five years more, a man. Then I will tell him. You have my word, Erik. On his eighteenth birthday. Not yet, he is not ready. He needs me still. When he is told, he will choose.

HE.

I have your word, Christine? If I wait five years ...

SHE.

You will have your son. In five years. If you can win him.

HE.

Then I will wait. I have waited so long for one tiny fragment of the happiness most men can learn at their father's knee. Five years more ... I will wait.

SHE.

Thank you, Erik. In three days I will sing for you again. You will be there?

HE.

Of course. Closer than you can know.

SHE.

Then I will sing for you as I have never sung before.

Now at this point I saw something that almost caused me to fall out of my control booth. Somehow a second man had managed to creep into the hall. How he did it I will never know, but it was not through the only door known to me for that was right below me and had not been used. He must have slipped in by that secret entrance that only the designer of the place could ever know existed and which had never been revealed to anyone else. I thought at first I might be seeing a reflection of the speaker, but I recalled a swirl of cloak or cape, and this figure, also in black, wore no cape but a tight black frock-coat. He was in one of the inner pa.s.sages and I saw that he was crouched with his ear to the hairline crack separating two mirrors beside him. Beyond the crack was the inner mirror-room where the lady and her strange former lover had been talking.

He seemed to feel my eyes upon him, for he turned suddenly, stared all around and then glanced up. The tilted observation mirror revealed him to me and me to him. The hair was as black as his coat and his face as white as his s.h.i.+rt. It was the wretch who called himself Malta. Two blazing eyes fixed me for a second, then he was off, speeding through the corridors that others found so baffling. I came down from the booth at once in an attempt to stop him, let myself out and hastened round the building. He was well ahead of me, having escaped through his secret exit, and haring for the gate. In my great clumsy extra-long Funmaster's boots, running was out of the question.

So I could only watch. There was a second carriage parked near the gate, a closed calash, and it was to this that the speeding figure ran, jumping inside then slamming the door as the carriage took off. It was evidently a private rig for such are not for public hire on Coney Island.

But before he reached it, he had to run past two people. The nearest to the Hall of Mirrors was the young reporter and as the figure in the frock-coat raced past he let out a sort of shout which I could not catch, the sound being borne away on the sea wind. The reporter looked up in surprise but made no move to stop the man.

Just before the gateway was the figure of the priest, who had taken the boy Pierre back to the coach, closed him inside and was walking back to find his employer. I saw the refugee stop dead for a second and stare at the priest, who stared back at him, then run on towards his rig.

By now my nerves were in a complete jangle. The odd search among the performing monkeys for a tune that none of them was able to play, the even odder behaviour of the man who called himself Malta in his interrogation of the harmless child, the hate-filled confrontation between Malta and the Catholic priest, and then the catastrophe of the Hall of Mirrors, with all the levers out of my control, the terrible confessions I had heard from the prima donna and a man who had clearly once been her lover and the father of her child, and finally the sight of Malta eavesdropping on them both ... It was all too much. In my perplexity I completely forgot that poor Mme de Chagny was still trapped inside the maze of mirrored walls.

When I remembered this, I rushed back to liberate her. All the controls were miraculously working again and soon she emerged, deathly pale and quiet, as well she might be. But she thanked me most politely for all my trouble, left a generous gratuity and boarded her brougham with the reporter, the priest and her son. I escorted her as far as the gate.

When I returned to the Hall of Mirrors for the last time I received the shock of my life. Standing in the lee of the building, staring after the carriage that bore away his son, was the man. I came round the corner of the building and there he was. No doubt about it; the swirling black cloak gave him away. The other player in the weird events that had taken place inside the maze. But it was his face that set my blood running cold. A ravaged face, three-quarters covered by a pale mask and behind the mask burned eyes that blazed with anger. This was a man who had been thwarted, a man not accustomed to being crossed and who had become dangerous. He did not seem to hear me for he muttered something in a low growl. 'Five years,' I heard him say, 'five years. Never. He's mine and I will have him with me.'

He turned and was gone, twisting between two stalls and a shuttered roundabout. Later I found a point in the fence on to Surf Avenue where three palisades had been removed. I never saw him after that, and I never saw the eavesdropper again.

I deliberated later if there was anything I should do. Should I alert the vicomtesse that the strange man seemed to have no intention of waiting five years for his son? Or would he calm down when his anger cooled? Whatever I had heard was a family matter and would no doubt be resolved. So I sought to tell myself. But there was not Celtic blood in my veins for nothing, and even as I write all those things that I saw and heard here yesterday, there hangs over me a sense of terrible foreboding.

13.

THE ECSTASY AND PRAYER OF JOSEPH KILFOYLE.

ST PATRICK'S CATHEDRAL, NEW YORK CITY, 2 DECEMBER 1906 'LORD HAVE MERCY, CHRIST HAVE MERCY. MANY times I have called upon You. More times than I can recall. In the heat of the sun and in the darkness of the night. In the high ma.s.s in Your house and in the privacy of my room. Sometimes I even thought You might reply, seemed to hear Your voice, seemed to feel Your guidance. Was it all foolishness, self-delusion? Do we really, in prayer, commune with You? Or are we listening to ourselves?

'Forgive my doubting, Lord. I try so hard for true faith. Hear me now, I beg You. For I am bewildered and frightened. It is not the scholar but the Irish farm-boy that I was born. Please listen and help me.'

'I am here, Joseph. What disturbs your peace of mind?'

'Lord, for the first time I think I am really frightened. I am afraid but I do not know why.'

'Fear? That is something of which I have personal knowledge.'