Truly Mine

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

So few understand the nature of obsession, particularly of obsessive love. It is not merely that they fail to comprehend the exquisite pain and pleasure that comes when all your drive and desire and longing find a single focus. No, they also mistakenly assume that when one loves, and loves obsessively, all the qualities of the loved object must be elevated and admired.

That is, simply, untrue. Granted, certain particular qualities must be present if the object is to be suitable to light that spark. I could not, certainly, have loved Christine if she had not possessed that beauty, that purity, and above all that voice. Had she not had the potential to be trained as a suitable instrument, she would not have had my attention.

But anyone who believed that I could honestly admire or exalt her paltry education, her willing malleability, or her inadequate ideas about love, would be in error. Oh, I used those qualities; I suppose one could say that I needed them. Without her simplicity and her pliancy I might not have so easily bent her to my will, in those early days at the Opera House when I attempted to enact a romantic fantasy. Still, though, my caged bird was less than I desired.

And yet, perhaps she could be more. She had, however it infuriated me to acknowledge it, had a strong enough will to bestow her love upon that pretty boy. She had, however inadequately, resisted; she had not passively fallen in with my romantic tale, but had stubbornly woven her own, composed of childhood love and remembered happiness. That, that I could admire—not the silly love story, but the insistence.

And with my grudging admiration, dark-tinted by anger and resentment that I was not the one so chosen, came the new fantasy. It was not enough to hold in my sway a pure, sweet-voiced puppet, capable only of winning the love and accolades of audiences of fools. It was not enough to have her tangled, sentimental love, a mix of peasant religiosity and a child's love for a parent. If she could, indeed, choose to love, then I would be the one she chose, and I wanted the woman's love, not the child's inadequate dreamings.

Filled with a new energy and determination, I began to plan. That bourgeois conception of marriage I'd spun for the daroga was not for me—how laughable that he'd ever believed it was! Was respectable, ordinary life really so desirable that an otherwise-intelligent man could so readily assume that I, Erik, would want such boredom? Did anyone really think that I could abandon the darkness, and the music, and the fever-dreams bestowed by art, for the dubious pleasure of a stroll in the Jardin des Tuileries with a tame songbird on my arm?

Let them believe it, then, and further believe that I could die, lovesick and broken for want of such a thing.

Masked, I collected the key from the front desk and let myself into my hotel room, and listened at the wall. The girl's despair was like the tuning of an orchestra, pleasing only because it hints at future pleasure. I sat at my desk, where a pile of news-papers, representative of several of Europe's great cities, awaited my attention.

I do admire the minds responsible for gossip columns. They hint at so much, while saying nothing at all. It is a skill like that of gypsy fortune-tellers, who have long since seen that, to those desperate to hear some particular message, the merest hint will sound as certain as though it were etched in stone. It amused me, now, to search for sightings of unnamed blond gentlemen cavorting at far-flung soirees and opening nights. I knew that the anonymity the gossip-writers scrupulously bestowed on these nameless gallants would, to Christine's credulous eyes, be so many proofs that Raoul was alive, and well, and yet inexplicably distant, showing no eagerness to return to her side.

I laughed quietly, for joy, as I clipped each cryptic column, placing them in an envelope to be delivered to her the next day. Please, do not find in my laughter further reason to condemn me: it was not the readying pain at which I laughed, but the future delights which would arise from it. Each cruel lash of fate—for did I not control her fate? —was a necessary blow, for I would be the one to comfort her, and teach her to love the discipline I bestowed upon her.

All I required was that she relinquish her childish notions of love, and learn to make me the focus of her adoration and her need. "Tonight, I gave you my soul," she had told me, back on the night of her triumph as Marguerite. I intended to make that pretty falsehood true. I would take her soul—and more.