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Christine and Raoul consummated their wedding on the day of the ceremony at exactly 9:00 pm. At 9:05 pm, Raoul collapsed into Christine’s bosom in a sweaty daze of post-coital bliss. Christine stroked his hair. She was feeling quite satisfied herself. Madame Giry’s sex ed at the opera house consisted mostly of scaring girls off from it for as long as she could--words like ruinous and agonizing were used liberally. Christine had become in recent months quite intrigued by sex, but she still had braced herself for her first experience like it was a tooth pulling.
“That was amazing!” Raoul said reverently.
“That didn’t hurt at all!” Christine said, relieved.
Utterly exhausted by the decadent hedonism of the last 300 seconds, they passed out entwined in each other’s arms. They woke up even more deeply in love.
“Tell what you want for a wedding gift,” Raoul said. He touched Christine’s curls for the pleasure of being able to touch them. “Anything at all, and it’s yours.”
“Surely not anything ,” Christine laughed.
Raoul brought a lock of hair to his lips and kissed it as he held her gaze. “Anything,” he repeated. “Anything in the world for you.”
They stared at each other a while longer. Christine’s eyes, he thought not for the first time, really were quite remarkably big and wet. Raoul was planning who he would get to do their first official portrait together, but he already knew that the eyes were going to come out wrong. They were big and wet in a way that traditional Western art could never convey.
(Tragically due to the linear nature of time, the Viscount Raoul de Chagny would never in his life get to encounter the concept of big anime eyes. And yet nevertheless, here was his precious waifu.)
“Anything?” Christine asked, her voice as soft as the footsteps of someone on a frozen lake who is not sure how thick the ice is.
Both trauma and true love can seem at times to confer its sufferers with a connection that seems almost telepathic. This is because you cannot truly love someone without understanding them, and there is a connection formed by shared suffering that is impossible to explain to anyone who did not also suffer. Raoul and Christine were, at this point, a combination of giddy newlyweds and a bonded pair of rescue cats.
The point is, understanding came upon Raoul while his wife was still conceiving her thought. “Oh,” Raoul exhaled. Christine flushed and turned away in guilt and shame. He brushed her cheek as gentle as a landing butterfly.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry to ask this of you. It’s cruel, it’s selfish, I know,” Christine said softly. “But. I cannot simply…” His new wife looked at him, her face torn asunder by equal parts agony and hope.
God fucking damnit shit shit shit fuck god fuck christ GOD okay, Raoul thought. What he said aloud was, “I’m not installing an organ in the attic.”
Christine, who had been planning to ask Raoul to continue sending the Phantom money so he didn’t starve to death in the sewers, replied, “Pardon?”
“He can use the piano that’s already up there,” Raoul said firmly. A man must draw a line somewhere. “And you can’t be alone with him. It’s not safe.”
“I can’t…with…him?” Christine asked, her voice as confused as someone on a frozen lake had fallen through the surface only to discover that under the ice was actually an enormous pile of lemon custard.
Raoul frowned. “I think that’s more than fair.”
“Oh yes, yes, I agree,” said Christine slowly. “But why don’t you say what you think is fair aloud and in detail so we can agree to it together.”
Raoul nodded. It was important to be on the same page with this sort of thing that could become so damnedly complicated. His wife was so smart. “The Phantom can live in our attic, but when you have voice lessons with him, I insist upon being in the room with you.”
“Ah,” said Christine. “Yes. That was what I was going to say. That was. Something that occurred to me to request.”
“I don’t like it,” Raoul said. Sometimes he still felt the noose around his throat. “I don’t understand what about him compels you. It confuses me.” Christine stared at Raoul in a manner that a neutral party might describe as slack-jawed gawping. My beautiful perfect Lottie, Raoul thought tenderly. “But I don’t need to understand your pain for it to make me weep in response. If this is what will bring you the most happiness in our marriage, I will make it so.”
At many points recently in her life Christine had found herself beyond words. You’d think she’d be used to it by now.
“Great,” she said finally and performed the first modern usage of the thumb’s up.
After that, they did sex again. It was still pretty good.
The inception of this plan, which was very good and made a lot of sense, had come upon Raoul after a conversation he and Christine shared one afternoon in the quiet lead-up to their marriage. It had been so soon after the events with the Phantom that Raoul still had the bruises around his neck. He noticed how Christine couldn’t bear to look at them.
“I have something I must say before we are wed,” Christine announced to him. “I…I will not allow you to bind yourself forever to me ignorant of something that might matter deeply to you.”
“Of course.”
His fiancee took a while to assemble her thoughts, or perhaps to summon the courage to say them. The sunlight kissed her skin beautifully as her brow furrowed and lips pouted. Raoul prepared himself to say that it didn’t matter that she wasn’t a virgin, he loved her no matter what.
Instead, Christine said, “I just wish he hadn’t murdered anyone.”
Raoul waited. When he realized that was the end, he said, “Oh. Yes. Quite agree.” He paused. “I don’t think you need to be ashamed of not liking murder?”
Christine blushed and looked away, while grabbing Raoul’s hand. “I mean--it would have been harder. For me. If everything else had been the same without…”
“The killing?”
“The multiple killings, yes. And threatening to kill you. I don’t know who I would have chosen.” She squeezed her eyes shut like she could not bear to see the reaction to her words. “Does that hurt you tremendously?”
“Strangely enough, ‘I might have loved another man if he hadn’t been fundamentally opposed to my morals,’ doesn’t provoke much jealousy,” Raoul said gently and honestly. “Christine, I knew from the moment I saw you on stage that I would have to fight off a thousand worthy suitors for your hand. If anything, I should feel ashamed, not you, for I cannot bring myself to wholly condemn his cruelty. If the Phantom had acted with any decency, I would have stood no chance.”
“That’s not true!” Christine said. “Raoul, I picked you. I love you.”
“And I love you. But who could have resisted the Phantom? His passion, his pain, his drama. It is a heady thing to be the center of someone’s worship.” Raoul shook his head and looked away. “I saw the swan bed, Christine. What do I have that could have competed?”
Christine made a watery little laugh. “What do you, a Viscount, have that could compete with a nice bed in the sewers?”
Raoul sighed at the inadequacy of his manor, position, and wealth in the face of that secret grotto festooned with candelabras. His properties were all getting required for electricity. Raoul barely had any candelabras. “And how handsome he was in his masquerade disguise,” he lamented. “I cursed him a thousand times for looking so--so--so dashing . And threatening. In a way any woman with eyes and a heart would find so terribly, terribly attractive. He did really know how to remove a cape.”
Christine, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, felt she had lost control of this delicate conversation about her abductor. She had not imagined in her wildest dreams that it would have gone this well, or that Raoul would have been this understanding. Really, very understanding. She tightened her grip on Raoul’s hand until he looked at her. “I find you terribly, terribly attractive,” she said. “So much so that I wish we were married right now.”
Raoul brought her hand to his lips and kissed each of her knuckles one by one. “I love you. I’m so hard. I wish you were touching my penis right now. I’d love to touch your situation. I don’t know if women can have an orgasm, but I will try every day and night to give you one. Word of the street is that there’s some interesting places a mouth can go. I heard pussy smells like fish, and sister, I’m a pescatarian.”
Those are all things he did not say because that would have been insane. Well. Except for the love declaration. They said that a lot. But overall, all that above was the gist of the sentiment he kissed against her hand. Christine caught enough of it to propose an earlier wedding date.
Raoul arrived at the opera unannounced and in what he called his sneaking clothes. The opera had not yet gotten around to properly closing off the tunnel that led to the Phantom’s lair. Instead, there were simply a few boards nailing the mirror in place. As the mirror slid open, this was less than successful. (When Raoul later with great disapproval brought this up to Firmin as a remarkable oversight, Firmin replied in a very reasonable voice of a man who had just been reviewing the accounts, “OH SORRY SIR FOR NOT BRICKING UP ONE OF THE SIX HUNDRED TUNNELS THAT BASTARD USED. LET ME GO USE ALL THE MONEY FROM OUR AMAZING SEASON TO FIX THAT.”
Against his best judgment, Raoul wrote the opera another cheque.)
He’d come alone to preserve the secrecy of his mission. Raoul did not want some servant ten years from now to get drunk at a pub and start babbling about the time he did a kidnapping with a Viscount. And yet the risk made his stomach twist. The Phantom and him had fought twice, with one victory each. Now Raoul was to once again confront him in his home ground. “Let me come with you,” Christine had pleaded, but Raoul slept in the same bed as her and frequently woke her from nightmares set in that baroque grotto. He would not inflict that on her. Besides, it seemed the height of arrogance to work so hard to get Christine out of those sewers only to then take her back.
Thankfully, it was easier to ambush the Phantom than it was to chase him down. If the boat was docked on the operahouse side, then the Phantom had to be out of his lair. The swim wasn’t pleasant, but Raoul made it without too much effort. It would have been harder if he’d needed to keep a pistol dry, but he hadn’t brought one. Raoul thought it best he not carry such a weapon if his intent was to take someone alive--shooting the monster would have been too tempting.
The broken mirrors provoked no sympathy in him as he hid amongst them. Nor did the piteous state of the monster when he finally came back to his lair. The Phantom evidently abandoned all attempts to maintain his appearance. Gone were the immaculate suit and the carefully combed hair. His shirt looked like it had been worn for days on end, and he sported the kind of raggedy beard you might expect an explorer to sport after spending six months in Antarctica. He’d evidently left for a grocery run and had returned with a bag of sturdy root vegetables and a still piping hot baguette. The bag was tossed carelessly on a bit of dry floor. He kept the baguette in hand and occasionally took bites from it as he wandered listlessly to his bed.
He still wore the mask. God knew why, Raoul thought, there wasn’t even anyone down here to see. Raoul couldn’t even stand to keep on a cravat in private. Must get damned hot under that thing.
Generally speaking, head trauma is bad and you shouldn’t inflict it on people who are just innocently walking past the velvet curtain you are hiding behind. But there were always exceptional situations, Raoul thought as the Phantom crumpled to the ground. For example, it was also bad to be garroted by a man who hated you and whose lair you had broken into. Thankfully, Raoul and the Phantom existed in the strange demimonde of high gothic, where a blow to the back of the head is merely a temporary off switch.
Raoul had considered the idea that the Phantom might come willingly. On the other hand, Christine had stressed to Raoul intransigent irrationality of her angel of music when it came to him being wanted. (Raoul would argue that the Phantom feeling he was unwanted was entirely rational, but kept that to himself rather than upset Christine.) Raoul’s plan instead was underhanded, he wasn’t proud to admit that, but he doubted the Phantom was going to abide by Queensberry Rules.
When the Phantom woke up, wrapped nearly head to toe in his own rope, flung over the back of a beautiful white horse that Raoul had found (?) in the sewers (???), he was perfectly fine.
He was also very loud.
“What are you doing?? I surrendered her to your world of light and beauty!! I have condemned myself to the rats in the dark!! Leave me in hell where I belong!!!”
It must be acknowledged the Phantom had had precious little human connection in his life. His childhood contained few conversations that did not include insults or blows. That alone would have stunted his socialization, but then he had spent decades inside a theater, a building that has its own kind of radiation. And an opera house! Nothing but intrigue, violence, sex, betrayal, eternal vows and shocking revelations. And that was just backstage. You couldn’t be in a place like that for too long without lifetime consequences. To continue a metaphor Raoul would not have understood, the Phantom had spent most of his life living inside a nuclear reactor. One couldn’t blame him for being tumorous with *Drama*. He possessed the soul of an opera character and also the lung capacity.
“Shut up!” said Raoul, who was trying to steer a horse down some stairs to his carriage to abduct his attempted murderer on the behest of his wife. He was entitled to some crankiness. And then because he couldn’t resist it, he added, “Not very fun being kidnapped, is it?”
Raoul was shocked that the Phantom had the decency for a moment to look a little ashamed about that.
The moment didn’t last.
As the Phantom squirmed and shouted in his bonds, Raoul wondered wistfully of a version of the Phantom who had been skulking for decades in the shadows of a library. Or a university. Or one of those new clinics where you sit on a couch and tell a man about how your father called you girl names when he was mad at you. I should have gagged him while he was out, Raoul thought. These were the kind of mistakes you make when it’s your first time kidnapping.
At least no one in the opera house seemed to have noticed the noise.
(“I know the Ghost is gone,” one dancer whispered to the others in the quiet of their dormitory when everyone was supposed to be asleep. “But I swear, sometimes I still feel him hanging here, in the walls.”
“I know what you mean,” said another dancer. “They said he died, but no one ever found a body.”
“And his lair underneath the opera house was so extensive! A man could hide forever in those tunnels if he cared to.”
“Waiting to strike again!”
“Waiting to kill!”
“I can almost hear him shouting for his vengeance!”
“Me too!”
“Oh god!”
“Wait, I think I really do.”
“Do you think he’ll move on to a new chorus girl?”
“Do you think he works with altos?”
“Everyone, be quiet! Actually listen, right now!”
“...”
“Gasp! I hear it! A distant howl of pain!”
“He calls out for Christine!”
“How Gothic!”
“How Romantic!”
“His music of the night!”
“I think he’s calling someone an asshole.”
“He curses his enemies!”
“I also heard ‘dickhead.’”
The chorus girls swooned. They were amazing at swooning. It's a prerequisite for their job.)
It took a struggle in which Raoul nearly got his pinky bitten off, but the handkerchief he’d shoved in the Phantom’s mouth was at least keeping him quiet. Thus silenced, the Phantom had to settle for just glaring. He did it very well. The mask helped.
Raoul glared back as best he could and rapped on the top of the carriage. They set off, the Phantom immediately jostling hard he almost fell to the floor. Raoul couldn’t say if that was due to the restraints reducing his usual grace or, the thought suddenly occurred to him, that he might never have ridden in a carriage before.
Something that was not quite pity but maybe a cousin of the emotion almost curled in Raoul’s stomach until he remembered the whole carriage-jacking ride to the graveyard. The almost-pity dried up.
“How did you even learn how to drive?” Raoul muttered.
The Phantom continued to glare. If anything, he glared harder.
They rode together in silence as the streets of Paris passed by outside the window. It was mentioned before that Raoul had embarked on this mission alone, without anyone else’s knowledge, and that was completely true, except for the driver who Raoul was paying double his normal rates. But Louis was a good sort, he’d been the family for ages and never made a fuss, so having him here didn’t really count. And Raoul had also told his valet about the plan, but you couldn’t have expected him to pick out sneaking clothes without Aubert’s expertise! And yes, he’d mentioned something of the matter to Madame Leroy who ran all practical affairs of the house and got very irritated when you sprung guests on her without warning. But other than that! Raoul patted himself on the back for having done this dark deed entirely alone and in perfect secrecy. He could reward himself soon with the special lunch Cook had made for him, to “keep the spirits up while you go get your wife’s friend.”
The handkerchief hit the floor of the carriage with a splat. The rope that had been holding it in place lay loose around the Phantom’s neck.
“Did you untie that with your mouth?” Raoul marveled. “Your gagged mouth?”
“You are vindictive, petty, and cruel,” said the Phantom venomously, his voice raw from shouting. “I should have expected a man like you could never allow a man like me to be free.”
“You did murder,” Raoul couldn’t help but say. “Most people wouldn’t tolerate that.”
The Phantom sneered. How is he also amazing at sneering ? Raoul lamented. When Raoul tried to sneer, he looked constipated. “People die everyday in pursuit of goals far cruder and crueler than mine. Starved, beaten, abandoned. Withered away to nothing. I granted my victims a kinder and quicker death than awaits most of us.”
“I’m sure Piangi’s last thoughts were ones of gratitude.”
“And you are, of course, here in his name.”
Raoul thought about how much he disliked this man and tried to show it on his face. The Phantom didn’t look impressed. Raoul would workshop the expression. “I am here for Christine. My wife ,” he added spitefully, just to watch the Phantom flinch. “And for everyone else at the opera house. You can’t just live down there. It’s creepy. It’s creepy and weird.”
“God forbid a creature like me enjoy any freedom.” A joyless laugh, too tired to be called hysterical. “A public trial, this horrible face on the front page of papers selling grotesque joys to gawkers. You will make a spectacle of me, then shove me back into a cage for the crowds to jeer at.”
“I’m not taking you to jail.”
“To my death then. You might have accomplished it easily enough in the opera house, but I suppose you have something more elaborate in mind. Buried alive in the graveyard perhaps? Or dropped restrained as I am into the Seine? Perhaps you will cut off my hands and leave me bleeding in the wilderness. What dark fantasy will you enact upon me?”
“Stop brainstorming your murder,” Raoul said.
“Will you tell Christine what you have done? Shall you present my disfigured, disgusting head to her like a hero of old who has slain a dragon? Or will this be our secret? Shall I be now your ghost and haunt your steps until the blood on your hands drives you mad?”
“If I wanted you dead, you would be dead,” Raoul said pretty convincingly for a guy who’d never actually killed anyone. “I don’t want you dead.”
“Suffering then. Locked in your private dungeons--”
“I’m taking you to our house!” Raoul snapped. “We’re getting a room ready in the attic. It’s a normal room, with no torture devices or traps or elaborate candelabra that light themselves.” Raoul added, a touch petulantly, “If you want an enormous swan bed, you’ve got to get it yourself.”
The Phantom snorted. “You mock me.”
“I think your whole persona is a bit much. See, that’s mocking you. This --” Raoul pointed between them, kidnapper and kidnappee, “--this is a wedding gift. Christine misses you.” Raoul thought of his wife and smiled, then thought of the Phantom and scowled. “Do you want to see Christine again or not?”
The Phantom stared at him. Raoul was not aware the man could be startled silent.
“There,” Raoul said, firmly. He leaned back and folded his arms in a manner one could squint and call sternly. “Now we can all behave--”
Reasonably was the word that was going to finish the sentence, except Raoul got kicked in the jaw first before the Phantom launched himself out the door of the moving carriage.
Those citizens of Paris out and about around midnight should have been more alarmed when a man wrapped in so much rope he looked like a mummy started furiously jumping down the street while another man, bleeding profusely from his face, chased after him. But that’s city life for you. By the time someone intervened, the pursuer had recaptured his furious quarry and was attempting to shove him back into an unusually fine carriage. It was a very athletic screaming match. The Good Samaritan in question wandered over to the carriage dressed only in his night clothes and a hastily thrown-on pair of boots. He’d been asleep until about two minutes ago, when directly underneath his window passed one man carrying the other on his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, both screaming at the top of their lungs.
“TEARING HER AWAY FROM ME WASN’T ENOUGH FOR YOU, I SEE. YOU MUST HUMILIATE AND DEGRADE ME AS WELL. YOU MUST REMIND HER OF THE MONSTER THAT ALMOST DESTROYED HER.”
“STOP KICKING ME.”
“OR PERHAPS THIS IS FOR YOUR OWN SICK DESIRES. DO YOU ENJOY THE CIRCUS, BOY? DID YOU WANT YOUR OWN FREAK SHOW?”
“STOP KICKING!!”
“Excuse me, sirs,” said the bystander who had until two minutes ago been soundly asleep in bed. The two men--one being shoved into a carriage, the other shoving--startled to see a third person enter their scene. “Is everything alright?”
“YES,” Raoul shouted as the Phantom spat, “NO.”
The carriage driver leaned over apologetically. “Sorry about this,” he said sheepishly. “I’ll get them right on out of here.” ‘
“Monsieur, this is clearly an abduction. I cannot stand by while such a crime occurs.”
Raoul tackled the Phantom. They both went sprawling into the carriage, with Raoul scrambling up quickly to shut the door behind them. Before it shut, he reached into his pocket and tossed out whatever was in there.
What was in there was quite a lot of cash.
“You gentlemen have a good evening then,” said the Parisian as he scooped up his prize.
“DAMN ALL OF YOU TO HELL!!”
“Of course, monsieur. Apologies for waking you up. ” the driver said and snapped his reins.
The screaming match continued for the whole drive out of the city. Louis, the driver, shoved some scraps of rag in his ear to muffle the din. The Phantom at no point lost steam and at no point stopped trying to kick. Raoul kept out of reach and hoped Christine at least was having a better time.
“Okay so, there’s the hole in the back, right? And we both know what that one is for.” Meg gestured vaguely at her ass and waited for Christine to nod before she continued. “And there’s, you know, the front bit where you pee. But get this, there’s a third hole--”
“I know about the holes!” Christine said. “Your mother was…very explicit.” She clutched a pillow and blushed on her marital bed. Meg had been lying beside her, but the scant information Christine had whispered about her wedding night had got Meg up and pacing.
“Does Raoul know about the holes?” Meg asked earnestly.
“He must ,” said Christine.
“And that the penis goes into them?”
Christine tossed her pillow at Meg, who dodged effortlessly. “Stop it.”
“Because it sounds like he’s fucking your thighs.”
Christine opened her mouth to say something. Closed her mouth. Opened it again and said, “Is that something people…do?”
Meg was not honestly sure how someone who had worked this long at an opera house could still be so innocent. Sex happened at the opera house more than opera did. Meg’d fingered about half the ballerinas and once had given an earnest if hapless handjob to a dark, brooding, silent visiting actor who turned out to be a mime. Honestly, the real trick was working there and not touching someone’s genitals. That was even without taking the Phantom business into account. Meg was beyond relieved to learn that there had been no actual ravishing. Christine was a lovely girl, really, but she didn’t have the fortitude to be ravished.
(Meg was wrong.)
(And a little jealous of that whole situation.)
(And yes, Meg felt very guilty about that. Obviously Meg knew her best friend getting stalked and kidnapped by an obsessive fan who lived in their walls was bad. It was bad! Shouldn’t have happened. But also, and here’s where the guilt started to creep in, Meg had only been sexually menaced in the normal way by normal men who didn’t wear extremely tight red trousers. No one’d ever written an opera to feel her up. They usually bumped into her and said, whoopsie, honk honk, nice tits. If she’d been kidnapped half as often as Christine, Meg could guarantee she would have been ravished at least once, hopefully twice, and preferably while the Phantom had been wearing his masquerade costume.)
The two women lounged in bed together, each lost in their own thoughts.
Christine broke the silence. “Is that why it felt nice? Instead of really, really, really, really painful?”
Meg shrugged. “I suppose. A battering ram isn’t going to do any damage if it misses the door.” Christine hummed thoughtfully. Meg nudged her. “Did you actually enjoy yourself? Or were you just glad it didn’t hurt.”
Christine rolled over and grasped Meg’s hands fervently. “Your mother told me all about the holes,” she said, “but did she ever tell you about the bump ?”
“The bump? Oh, the bump ,” Meg said. “Found out about that when I was thirteen and couldn’t get enough of it. Drove Mom crazy. She told me if she walked in on me diddling myself one more time, I wouldn’t be allowed to have pillows again until I was married.”
“Well. Raoul was the pillow.”
“Lucky,” Meg said warmly and meant it. “I hate washing the pillowcase.”
It had been a wonderful night, really, one of the best Meg had enjoyed in a while. The simple pleasure of talking with her friend made her comfortable enough to ask the question that she’d been contemplating all night. “Where is your husband, by the way? I can’t believe he abandoned his bride a week after your wedding.”
“Help me choreograph our next love making,” Christine blurted out.
Meg blinked, trying to recover from the whiplash. “Choreo--”
Christine said earnestly, almost desperately, “I’ll tell you all about his penis.”
Meg knew a distraction when she heard one. That didn’t mean the distraction didn’t work.
There’d been a negotiation of sorts on the road out of town. The result was that Raoul was currently shaving the Phantom’s ratty depression beard with a razor borrowed from an innkeeper who, keeping with the pattern of the night, asked disturbingly few questions about what was happening in the carriage in front of his establishment. In exchange for getting tidied up, the Phantom took a break from kicking. He wouldn’t, however, stop talking.
“Has Christine tired of you so quickly, boy? Does she only want you when she remembers the hideous monster who almost had her instead?”
“I’ll nick you,” Raoul muttered.
The Phantom did successfully keep his mouth shut while Raoul worked around his mouth. After this, Raoul was going to comb his hair. It turned out the Phantom’s desire to punt Raoul out of his own carriage was outweighed by the desire to not look completely pathetic in front of Christine. If the Phantom kept this up, Raoul’d untie him enough to change his shirt.
The temporary truce had not, however, made the Phantom docile. As Raoul brought the razor to the throat, the Phantom mused, “Does your worth lie only in comparison? Would you have stood a chance without me playing villain to your hero?”
“Hopefully. Maybe or maybe not.” Raoul took a moment to relish the razor scraping over the Phantom’s neck. “At least, not if you were just creeping and stalking. She’d go for that.”
“You lie for cruelty’s sake. Christine would--”
“Christine is a freak,” Raoul said and swiped with the straight razor. “The only thing she reads are Gothic novels. Wuthering Heights, The Vampyre, Turn of the Screw, Poe, this really dog-earred one that she won’t let me see. She loves having a good shudder. The entire time we read Frankenstein together as children, she was convinced that the story would end with the monster kidnapping Frankenstein to be his unwilling bride. She was so devastated by the actual ending that she made us playact her version of the story.”
(The memory strikes Raoul like a bullet--Lottie as Dr. Frankenstein crumpled on the ground before him, begging for mercy. She begged, “Please! You cannot mean to wed me! It is unnatural!”
And there was Raoul dutifully, growling his line from her script: “Now you care about the natural order? I will show you what nature is.”
Christine was supposed to swoon at this point. Instead she frowned. “Is that a good line? I liked it when I wrote it, but it seems a bit simple now.”
“It’s fine,” said Raoul.
Christine pulled out their script. “It doesn’t feel right,” she muttered under her breath.
“Maybe the monster can force Frankenstein to make children for them. That’s important for marriage,” Raoul suggested. “Maybe--I don’t know, I’m just thinking aloud, but maybe the monster realizes that he can make Frankenstein modify his body so the monster can get pregnant, and then the monster forces Frankenstein to, erm, do whatever it is that gets a baby in your belly.” Raoul was still working that bit out. “Then Frankenstein has to take responsibility for his children and is forced to marry his creation. Maybe? I don’t know.”
Raoul had been oh so casually looking away, determined to say all of this like it only just occurred to him this moment instead of in the middle of the night two weeks ago. Raoul suspected this was not the kind of thought that gentlemen were supposed to linger on. He wasn’t at all ready when she grabbed his arm and spun him around. “ Raoul .” He’d always remember the way she said his name. “That’s perfect.”
“Is it?” he breathed.
“Completely perfect. The exact right ending. It’s what Mary Shelley would have wanted!”
Raoul could not hide either his grin or his blush. “It was just a thought.”
“A perfect thought,” Christine said. “Let’s get you pregnant.”
Raoul would also always remember the way she said that .)
“You were so close,” Raoul mused, running his thumb over the freshly shaved skin to feel for any missed patches. He watched goosebumps rise on the Phantom’s skin. His Adam’s apple bobbed under Raoul’s thumb. The Phantom made a choked off noise in his throat. When Raoul was satisfied with his work, he stepped back. The Phantom stared at him, his asymmetric and odd eyes both widened in what Raoul decided must be shock at what a good shave he’d just received.
“If you behave, I’ll give you your shoes back,” Raoul said. “Polished and everything.”
For some reason, the Phantom suddenly had no response.
“The most important part of sex,” Christine was saying to Meg as she started writing a second draft of the Sex Script that Raoul would be presented with, “is the plot and characterization. I think we have a weak Act Two.”
Meg replied, “I have to insist we go back to your thoughts on Frankenstein .”
“You cannot make me do this,” the Phantom hissed as Raoul dragged him forth from the carriage. The amount of rope needed to subdue the man had decreased over the trip, but it still required more rope than none. They’d argued back and forth about the best way to restrain him, with the end result being the Phantom’s wrists tied together behind him and a loose loop of rope around his neck that Raoul kept a grip on. It was sort of like a leash, he thought, if the dog and master had both mutually agreed that the dog would voluntarily remain nearby and the master would voluntarily never pull.
Raoul pulled. Just enough that the Phantom stumbled before Raoul caught him with a hand on his chest. “I am making you do this,” Raoul said. “If I have to force you, you’ll get disheveled again.” It hadn’t been easy fixing him back up. They’d had a delay so Raoul could swing by a tailor. The Phantom had lamented the off-the-rack nature of his new suit. Raoul was still not sure where he used to get his old bespoke ones.
The Phantom scowled at him but kept walking enough that the leash stayed slack. For the millionth time this morning, his arms jerked like he’d been trying to reach up to his face before he remembered that he couldn’t. Raoul rolled his eyes. “The mask is in place. It’s fine. It’s on your face. It’s covering everything. Even if it wasn’t covering everything, it’d be fine because Christine told me she didn’t even think it looked that bad. It just startled her the first time she saw it, maybe because you immediately began screaming.”
“I don’t need your pity lies,” said the Phantom.
“Why would I lie to make you feel better? I hate you,” Raoul said cheerfully. He knocked on the front door of his own house. He could never remember to bring his keys.
“Honestly, and I don’t want to overstep,” Raoul said as they stood on the doorstep, his hands running over the Phantom as he made last minute adjustments, “but I think at this point the person most afraid of your face is you. I’m not going to tell you that your face is utterly unremarkable, we both know that’s not true, but it shouldn’t prevent you from participating in society. The repeated trauma of past experiences have made you hypersensitive to being perceived because that’s always led to pain for you, but ultimately that reaction will keep you from forming meaningful relationships or a meaningful life.” Raoul licked his thumb and rubbed a little schmutz off the Phantom’s cheek. “You should work on that. Sometimes, there’s a man who listens to you while you lie on a couch, and it’s fairly helpful. Especially if you’ve got issues with your parents. Have you got issues with your parents?”
“Mother,” the Phantom managed.
“The couch man will love you.”
Then the door opened.
It should have been a servant who opened the door. Even the Phantom was dimly aware of that, despite his lack of ever calling on anyone, ever. However, one newlywed had dearly missed the other and had sprinted downstairs when she saw the carriage come up the road. So it was Christine who opened the door to find her husband and her Phantom frozen in place. Raoul’s hands were still on the Phantom’s lapels. He appeared to be straightening them.
“Angel.” The word slipped out of Christine’s mouth involuntarily and soft as a prayer. There was starlight in her eyes. Raoul felt the smug satisfaction of a gift-giver who knows that he has nailed it.
The Phantom bolted.
Turned out Raoul did not have as good a grip on the leash as he thought. The Phantom made it almost all the way to the hedges before Raoul tackled him. “Get off me, get off me,” the Phantom panted as he tried to squirm out from underneath Raoul. “I shouldn’t--I can’t--not here--with her--”
The Phantom had strength and panic on his side, but Raoul had both arms available and the burning desire to not look like an idiot in front of his wife. “Your mask is coming loose,” Raoul said. The Phantom froze. Raoul pinned him harder. “The mask is fine, sorry about that.” He pulled the leash taut. “I know that’s a sensitive matter for you. Don’t make me tie your legs again.”
Having in the last twenty-four hours experienced his full range of emotions plus a couple exciting and confusing new ones, the Phantom stared up at the boy pinning him and made a noise and expression best transcribed as “?????????????” His heart was torn asunder in equal parts embarrassment, fury, fear, hope, and a rope-based feeling he couldn’t name but was demanding quite a lot of his attention. The result was near complete freezing, at which point Christine caught up with them.
Raoul looked sheepish as he wrapped the long end of the leash tighter around his hand. “I promise, we barely needed the rope on the way here, I don’t know what got into him.” This was, of course, a lie, but he thought the Phantom, who was beginning to shake underneath him, could use a little bolstering at this moment.
Christine made a few valiant attempts to start a sentence. Unfortunately, the sight of her husband straddling and restraining her angel who looked up at her with what appeared to be awe turned out to be somewhat beyond her language capacities at the moment. She thought numbly, I’ll have to rewrite the entire third act to account for this.
“It’s odd seeing you in the sunlight, and from such an angle,” was what came out of her mouth. She spoke as if in a slight daze. That was the way she’d almost always spoken with the Phantom. Like their conversations existed somewhere outside reality, in the realm of dreams and ghosts. And yet here he was, sprawled and pinned in her new front yard. “I remember. I’ve seen you this way before. When I fled to my father’s grave for some respite from my thoughts, and wouldn’t allow even that bit of peace. Raoul beat you then as well.”
What was visible of the Phantom’s face was very pale. It was unclear to the newlyweds whether that was due to the emotions of the current situation or a few decades without sunlight.
“Were you trying to run?” she asked, still in that dreamlike tone. And then, “Were you really trying to run? ” The second sentence was decidedly less dreamy. “Why? Is being abducted not very fun?”
“I surrendered you to your garish world of light,” the Phantom said. This was decidedly not an answer of the emotions his abduction had provoked.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “You didn’t really want me at all.”
“No!” the Phantom protested.
“Yes!” Christine stepped forward and loomed over him. She felt flushed with--something. Probably indignation. “You let me go last time, and this time you won’t even come inside for drinks!”
The Phantom in the throes of his obsessive love had imagined and scripted a million conversations that he and Christine might have had. He’d worked very hard on it. He’d practiced variations with his mannequin. He’d made sure the timing was right with his candelabras. He had precious little experience with conversation, he’d mapped out what he would say in any eventuality.
This current conversation was so far from any of his prep work that a horrible shyness struck him mute.
“I promise, he’s very nervous about seeing you.” Raoul of course hated the Phantom and had no positive feelings towards him whatsoever, but he felt decency required Raoul at least vouch for the man’s sincerity. “He wouldn’t stop making a fuss until I let him get cleaned up and presentable.” Raoul leaned forward conspiratorially. “I think it’s a self-esteem thing.”
The Phantom looked as if it would have been kinder if Raoul had just shot him. Raoul was pleased anew that he’d forgone the gun.
“That’s no excuse!” Christine said. “He didn’t ask me if I was feeling my best when he seduced me with his sex opera! That’s the point of abductions! You don’t get to schedule your ravishment for when it’s convenient or when you’re feeling your best.”
“You never have been considerate of anyone else’s schedules,” Raoul said to the Phantom. “You absolutely ruined the masquerade ball. Even before you arrived, Christine didn’t even think she could wear her engagement ring without you spoiling everything.”
“Which you did!” Christine exclaimed. “And now--now you can’t even--even--I wore my best bodice!” Christine gestured to her outfit, which was very gossamer and supremely rippable.
“You look lovely,” Raoul said.
“Thank you, darling,” Christine replied. “I’ve been working on a Mysteries of Udolpho adaptation I thought we could rehearse for tonight.” She glowered at the Phantom. “I suppose you’re too good for the role of Montoni?”
“A brooding and cruel father figure,” Raoul muttered helpfully.
“I’ve read Udolpho ,” the Phantom snapped.
“Oh, so on that matter and that matter alone you will defend yourself!” Christine looked furious. Her fury involved a lot of bosom heaving and a very flushed face. Raoul and the Phantom both felt themselves react accordingly, and then pretended very, very hard that they hadn’t noticed the other.
“Well, you don’t get to leave,” Christine said. “I guess you’re more noble than me, because I don’t care what’s best for you. You’re our prisoner! You’re not here willingly, you’re our prisoner! We have kidnapped you and we’re going to lock you in our attic. Like Bertha!”
“Bertha in the book didn’t get kidnapped,” the Phantom said numbly. Christine pointed furiously at him. The Phantom’s mouth snapped shut.
“Attic wife!” she pronounced like it was a magic spell. “And, and, and if you escape? We’ll track you down and drag you back! With--chains! And ropes! And, and, and--Raoul, what else?”
“Horses? Chase you down with horses?”
“Yes! Horses! And hunting dogs that we’ll train to learn your scent! There is nowhere in the world you can go that we will not find you.” A vicious mania shone in Christine’s eye. The big, wet eyes! I didn’t know they could look scary! Raoul marveled. The look made both men shudder in a manner that a fan of Gothicism might call deliciously.
God, Christine loved a good shudder.
Completely oblivious to any psychosexual self-discoveries that had happened in the yard this morning, Meg woke up alone in Christine’s opulent marital bed. The luxury didn’t make her seethingly jealous of her beloved best friend so much as it made her determined to move in like a spinster aunt who paid for nothing and was great with the children once her dancing career was done. As for today, she’d slept in so deliciously late it was nearly lunch, which Meg incorrectly assumed would be very normal and completely legal. (Downstairs, Christine and Raoul debated over the Phantom’s head if he was allowed to have his hands free to eat or if they would simply have to feed him. When the Phantom started to weigh in, Raoul reminded him of the handkerchief.)
Meg will be successful in this endeavor. By the time she moves in several years from now, Christine and Raoul will have an even more opulent bed, almost indecently large, and Meg will have the wonderfully outfitted attic entirely to herself. Before she moves in, though, she will insist on the removal of the bars from all the windows and the heavy locks on all the doors in and out. The manacles in the bedroom, however, she allows to stay.