Truly Mine

Disclaimer: the Phantom of the Opera belongs to Gaston Leroux. His work is, alas, no longer under copyright protection in North America.

It was all too easy. What fools they were, these little bourgeois men with their minds hemmed in by rules and expectations.

All it required was that I master my patience sufficiently to wait until Christine had fulfilled her last duty to me. That she did, with the simple-minded trust that had, from the beginning, made her such an irresistible target. She ventured, all a-tremble, into that netherworld beneath the opera house. There she found the poor, pitiful remains she believed to be mine—and why did she believe it? Because, poor foolish child, I had told her that when she crossed the lake the corpse that she found there would be my own. She cried when she found it, and she slipped the gold ring that I had given her onto its mouldering finger. Even had my own obsession not dictated her fate, that would have been her undoing, that one gesture, for however obedient she was in following my instructions to discover the corpse and bury it in secret, I could not have forgiven her for her failure to cherish the ring as a memento of our time together. Did I mean so little to her that she could walk away into her new life and leave all memory of me behind?

I vowed that it would not be so, and executed my plan with renewed strength of will. I left the corpse there, wearing my ring, so that when that meddling daroga predictably returned he, too, would believe me dead. Filled with the pity that comes so easily to kind-hearted fools, he had willingly swallowed my claim that he was dying, and that Christine had departed with her Raoul to "go and look for a priest in some lonely spot where they could hide their happiness." Such a pretty, sentimental ending: no wonder he believed it, when it was what he wanted to believe. Ha! Even as I spun that lie, making his heart bleed with pity for me, Christine was concealed in Paris, her own heart breaking with loneliness and confusion.

When I left the daroga's apartment that night, I dropped all pretence that I was ill or dying, and strode easily to the hotel where Christine waited in vain for Raoul to return to her. It had been simplicity itself to forge his hand and send her the letter convincing her that he had, overcome with fear that he was to be charged with his brother's murder, fled Paris without her, and promising to return for her. I heard her sobbing in the nights, now, in bewildered anguish at his failure to return or to send any further word. He could never return, of that I had made sure.

Now all that was left was to reclaim my angel.