The Angel of the Opera

by Sam Siciliano

  My face grew hot. “I do not find that amusing.”

  “Do you not? Forgive me. I find the predictability of the sexes comical, but I should not have implied that your feelings for Michelle were less than genuine. What now, Monsieur Bossuet?”

  Next was the main costume room, where dresses, suits, coats, doublets, capes, and other unusual garments hung from rack after rack. Each costume was neatly labeled as to size, and the characters and operas for which it was used. To the rear of the room were shelves stacked with shoes and boots of every size and variety. Next door was an incredible armory stocked with swords, lances, halberds, helmets, breastplates, and chain mail.

  After that we visited several boxes, including the Phantom’s Box Five. Holmes spent a good half hour minutely examining it. He rapped at the walls and the massive gold column to one side, then he went down on his knees and peered closely at the carpet. Bossuet gave me an odd look, but I had seen Holmes as bloodhound before. Afterward he refused, of course, to tell us anything, but he did murmur, “Excellent.”

  That evening I was exhausted, my legs aching. I took a long hot bath in a room whose marble and bronze splendor recalled the Opera; this was understandable since Garnier had designed the Grand Hôtel before going on to his chef d’oeuvre, the Palais Garnier, the Paris Opera. Before I fell asleep I saw great architectural vistas of marble, gold, and velvet, then ropes, scenery, and heavy canvases, all coming together in a vast maze.

  Having visited the celestial realm, the next day we descended to the underworld, and worthy it would have been for any of the Stygian shades who confronted Virgil or Dante. Our main guide was an old-timer, a Monsieur Gris whose name seemed appropriate given the gray stubble of his beard. Gris was a silent, stoical type, but his youthful companion clearly grew more frightened as we went lower and lower. Holmes tried questioning Gris, but Gris told us one did not discuss le Fantôme in his domain.

  Beneath the stage, supporting girders of steel were everywhere; despite the Opera’s baroque, antiquated exterior, its “skeleton” was constructed of modern materials. Numerous ropes and winches were used to raise and lower platforms or other machinery. This level was well provided with gas lamps, and stagehands and carpenters bustled about.

  The next level down was darker, the walls formed of stone blocks. In the electric room were the batteries which provided power for the electric carbon-arc lights. There too were the tanks used to store oxygen and hydrogen for the limelights. Because of the quantities of chemicals involved, including sulfuric acid, the room had an acrid smell.

  In a large chamber next door, huge generators were being assembled which would provide electricity for the new bulb-lighting system. We also visited the “organ room.” Up through the floor came thick black pipes filled with gas; they split and divided, then split again before radiating out to every corner of the Opera. Turncocks and levers were used to adjust the gas flow; here the head gas man could raise the light to the footlights or to the battens at the sides of the stage.

  Gris had told us the Opera had five cellars, and the next ones lay mostly in darkness. A few scattered gas fixtures gave off a faintly bluish light, but they and our lanterns seemed feeble before such darkness. The air was cold and dank. Dust motes and gossamer webs floated gently in the beams of the lanterns. More than once when we entered a room, we heard the scurry of tiny feet. I have a horror of rats, and I asked Holmes if we need visit every filthy lower chamber of the Opera. Our two guides seemed to share my sentiments, but Holmes was resolute that he would go on. At that point Gris insisted that we keep one hand raised to the level of our eyes.

  “What on earth for?” I asked.

  Gris hesitated, his eyes glancing all about us. “The Punjab lasso,” he finally whispered gruffly.

  “The what?”

  Holmes frowned. “Do as he says.”

  This soon grew quite fatiguing, but Gris and Holmes both reprimanded me sternly whenever I lowered my arm.

  Gris had told us the Opera had twenty-five hundred doors; if so, I am certain the majority must have been below ground. We passed ancient pieces of scenery and piles of rolled-up canvas flats. One room was filled with replicas of pagan deities which were used in various operas; another was littered with armored dummies which represented fallen warriors in battle scenes.

  As we went on and on, further and further down, I grew colder, wearier, and more heartsick. My mouth felt dry, and I found myself talking senselessly just to break that dreadful, weighty silence all around us. At last a stairway passed through a tall doorway, and the light from a single bluish lamp glimmered faintly on a vast expanse of dark water. We heard it lap softly at the mossy stones. Our breath formed clouds of white vapor.

  “Good Lord,” I murmured. “What is this? The sewer?”

  “No, Monsieur. It is a lake,” Gris said.

  “A lake?” Holmes asked.

  “Oui, Monsieur. When they were excavating for the Opera, they struck water. Pumps were used to remove it temporarily; then when all was finished, the water was put back, forming this lake.”

  “Let me see your lantern.” Holmes shone the white light out across the black water. “How far does it go?”

  Gris shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “Some day I think I shall want to explore this lake.”

  “That, Monsieur Holmes, is a very bad idea.”

  Distantly I thought I heard a low sound like a moan. It raised the hair on the back of my neck and, along with the cold, set me convulsively shivering. “Did anyone hear that?” I asked.

  Gris’s youthful assistant appeared too frightened to speak, but the old man shrugged again. “Some say it is the sound of the traffic above on the Rue Scribe. Others tell stories about voices–la sirène-a woman calling.”

  “It is better not to speak of such things,” the younger man said.

  “Let us go, Sherlock,” I said. “Please.”

  “Very well.” We turned and started back up the stairs. “A lake. Who would ever have imagined...”

  It took a five-course meal (one for each cellar), half a bottle of red wine, and some pastries with coffee to revive my spirits. The noisy, brightly lit restaurant seemed the most wonderful place on earth, but Holmes was quiet and subdued. I asked what was troubling him.

  “It is too large, Henry, far too large, a world, a universe unto itself. We are outsiders, explorers, who have hardly touched its shores. Mapping it would take a year or two. A man–a phantom–who has dwelt there for many years would have countless hiding places and secret strongholds. You could employ an army down there for weeks looking for him. If we could lure him out... He need not be a spirit to rule over such a place, and if he were truly intelligent, an evil genius... Well, tomorrow we join the Viscount on his love-sick quest to Britanny. Perhaps we shall discover something there.”

  That night I took a much longer hot bath, but the cold and darkness of the underworld seemed to have seeped into my bones. My dreams were all of cobwebs, dim blue flames, dust, and death. Strange ghostly things floated over black waters, then pursued me as I fled through long stone tunnels and plodded up endless stairways, vainly seeking the surface of the earth and the wondrous light of the sun. I wanted to find Michelle, but I knew I had lost her forever.

  Four

  The next evening we left Paris from the Gare Montparnasse on the Brittany Express. We had hoped to depart that morning; but the Viscount was late because of a carriage accident; hence an annoying delay, which meant we would have to spend the night on the train.

  We gazed out the windows of our first-class compartment at the brightly lit streets of Paris, aptly named the City of Light, but before long we were into the darkened countryside. The Viscount appeared even more unsettled than before, and he had a habit of biting his nails, which was difficult because their ragged edges had been nibbled to the quick. Holmes had brought along his pipe and soon filled the compartment with a thick smoke. A large false mustache hid his mouth and swallowed up the pipe stem. />
  Not wanting anyone to recognize us (especially Christine Daaé), Sherlock had purchased some secondhand clothing for us both, pasted a goatee onto my chin, then added some gray coloring to it and my mustache. I also wore a pair of spectacles with thick lenses of plain glass. We were two obtuse English men on an oddly timed winter holiday. Despite my initial misgivings (I had not played dress-up games since my childhood), I found myself enjoying my role immensely, especially the opportunity to mutilate the French language when I spoke to the ticket collector. I doubt even Michelle would have recognized me.

  The train hurtled forward into the night at a tremendous speed approaching fifty miles an hour, transporting us away from that greatest metropolis of nineteenth-century Europe toward remote Brittany, the westernmost part of France. Brittany’s peninsula thrusts itself into the Atlantic like the face of some open-mouthed, big-nosed dragon. Our journey seemed to transport us through time as well as space: gas lighting, central heating, and modern plumbing were little known outside of Paris; and the people of Brittany were another race, an ancient one. The name of their country, Brittany, or “land of the Britons,” said it all. They were Celts, not Gauls, and for much of their history had been closer in touch with Cornwall and Wales than Paris. Some years past, inspired by Flaubert’s example, I had taken a walking tour of Brittany. Many of the inhabitants still spoke their Celtic language, which was close to Welsh, and the landscape itself recalled Wales, the same cold gray gloom on overcast days.

  I slept fitfully that night. The young Viscount turned out to be a frightful snorer. His tonsils and adenoids must have been huge; that would also explain his frail, sickly appearance. Whenever I awoke, in the dim light of the swaying, rumbling car I saw Holmes’s weary eyes staring at me. The Opera, especially its cellars, had made quite an impression on him, and for the past day he had been melancholy.

  At one point I saw him staring out the window. I blinked my sleepy eyes, noticing that the gray-white light seemed somehow brighter, and then I recognized the white flecks blurring past the window.

  “Snow?” I murmured.

  “Yes. We are well past Normandy and into Brittany. Go back to sleep, Henry. Dawn is still a long way away.”

  When I woke again, the light from the white sky filled our compartment. Snow covered the land, only a few trees and small farmhouses breaking the long white curves. I thought of our recent journey to Wales, of Susan Lowell and her father. This falling snow was another bond between Wales and Brittany, and I wondered if we would again encounter death. The memory of the Major’s corpse twisting slightly in that dark room full of wind and snow filled me with apprehension. I drew a blanket about me. Holmes appeared wearier than ever, his eyes half open. The Viscount continued to snore with amazing gusto.

  We reached Lannion shortly after dawn, and again I had the impression of having traveled backward in time, Paris miles and years away. The diligence which took us to Perros was the type that had prevailed throughout England and the Continent before the railroad; young David Copperfield would have ridden in such a vehicle. The driver mentioned that he had taken a young Parisienne to the inn the night before.

  The Inn of the Setting Sun lay on a rise before a long beach, the sand hidden by an inch or two of snow, much less than at Lannion, which was further inland. The wind was very cold, but the snowflakes had ceased falling. The inn must have been a hundred years old. From the edge not covered by snow, I could tell that the roof was constructed of the blue-gray slate common to the region, and the walls were made of stone. Inside was an enormous fireplace with a good blaze going. Thick rafter beams spanned the room, hams hanging from hooks near the kitchen. The innkeeper had blue eyes and white hair and spoke French with a heavy accent. If I spoke any Gaelic or Welsh, he would no doubt have understood me.

  As we had agreed between ourselves earlier, Sherlock and I pretended not to know the Viscount. I was just asking the innkeeper about the local sights in very bad French, when I heard a woman exclaim, “Raoul!” then more softly, “Monsieur le Vicomte.”

  It was Sunday morning; and Christine Daaé, having just come from Mass, still had her missal and rosary in hand. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold, her green eyes bright, and she was very pretty. She wore a blue dress, a coat with a fur collar, and a tiny hat. Her apparel was certainly more chic and expensive than the green dress she had worn at the Opera; it set her apart from the other women at the inn, Parisian high couture clearly unknown at Perros in the dead of winter. She and the Viscount spoke briefly. Finally she shook her head, touched his arm lightly, then swept past Holmes and me without appearing to see us. Our disguises were a success!

  Holmes, the Viscount, and I stood before the fireplace warming ourselves. “She will see me late this afternoon,” the Viscount said, “at dusk in the cemetery where her father is buried.”

  Holmes nodded. “We shall meet you here at four p.m.”

  We spent most of the day in our room, and after the Grand Hôtel the Inn of the Setting Sun seemed only slightly superior to a penitential establishment. The beds were plain and hard, the room sparsely furnished. The innovation of a large glass window did overlook the broad expanse of the beach, the sky, and the ocean, but it made the room even colder. The stove was much too small and feeble to heat the chamber. By midafternoon the sun came out, touching the breakers with highlights of white fire and setting the blue-green waters of the Atlantic all aglow. We heard the dull roar of the ocean, a very soothing music. Blankets wrapped about him, Holmes fell asleep in a chair near the window and slept for three or four hours. I finally had to wake him so we could go to meet the Viscount.

  Soon the three of us were trudging along a snow-covered path. It was bitter cold outside, the wind sweeping in off the sea, biting. Holmes and I wore heavy overcoats, round-topped bowler hats, leather gloves, and woolen scarves. The Viscount was bareheaded, his overcoat cut with fashion more in mind than warmth. The sun was a red-gold brilliance to our left, far too bright to look at.

  “I remember this path well.” The Viscount seemed to speak more to himself than to us. “It was not so cold in summer. We came here at dusk. The hill above the cemetery is a good place to watch the sea, and there is the tree...”

  Ahead of us on a hill was the black silhouette of an enormous oak, its gnarled barren limbs clawing at the yellow sky. Our breath formed clouds of vapor, and I thrust my hands into my pockets, clenching and unclenching my fingers. The path led uphill to the oak.

  The trunk of the oak must have been a good six feet across. Downhill away from the sea was a graveyard and a small stone church. However, far more striking was the tree’s companion, a giant menhir, the slab of granite some twenty feet tall. It stood just far enough downhill that you could not see it until you reached the hilltop. It must have dated back to Neolithic times thousands of years past, forming a part of the same mysterious lost culture that had built Stonehenge and the other megaliths scattered about Britain and Europe.

  “That’s one of the largest menhirs I have seen,” I said. “If I did not know better, I would say the tree was equally old, but of course that is impossible. Still, this may have been the site of some ancient Celtic rituals.”

  The Viscount stared out at the sea. Earlier there had been white-caps, but now it was still, the blood-red orb of the sun hovering above its vast, flat expanse. “We came here to watch the korrigans dance in the moonlight.”

  “Korrigans?” I asked.

  “The fairy people of the Bretons, small sprites. I could never see anything, but Christine claimed she saw them.”

  We walked downhill toward the church. One or two people had been here earlier, their solitary footprints in the snow winding about the graves. The small tombstones were made from the Breton granite, names and dates chiseled into the hard rock. A few graves had large crosses with ornamental flourishes. The site had an aura of great age and gloom, and I thought it must have been a graveyard for centuries. When I glanced at the church, my supposition was verified. At
the back, on either side of the sacristy door, bones were piled in an ossuary typical of Brittany. Those earlier occupants had lost their places in the frozen ground.

  Holmes walked toward the stacked skulls, femurs, ribs, and vertebrae, then reached out with his walking stick and scooped up a skull with the tip. He took the skull in his left hand. The mandible and many of the upper teeth were gone, the bone yellowish and brittle.

  “‘Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio,’” Holmes said. “My favorite speech in Hamlet, Henry. It is wise not to forget that we all come to this end, even the great Sherlock Holmes.” He raised the skull in his gloved hand and held it alongside his own head. It made his nose appear enormous. His lips twitched, then he hurled the skull away. It struck the stone wall of the church and shattered. He winced. “Sorry, old fellow, old Yorick.” He stared at the pieces lying on the ground, then turned over a fragment with his stick.

  The entire hillside, including much of the church, was in blue shadow, and I felt cold. “You are in a morbid mood.”

  He pointed with his stick at the bones. “Can you blame me? Could there be a more morbid setting than this ossuary? The frozen earth vomits forth its dead, and here the remnants lie neatly arranged. Note the small femur there, Henry. A child of approximately ten or eleven. Your medical background may allow you to trace past history, those afflictions and diseases which led to death. However, if someone there met a violent end, then I can determine how it happened.”

  I shook my head. “I am no pathologist, and my practice has been limited to the living. All the same...” I picked up a small skull, part of its right side gone. “This disintegration on one side was probably caused by mastitis, an infection of the middle ear spreading into the surrounding bone.”

  “Excellent, Henry. Excellent. Another child, too.” His lips formed that characteristic smile, but his voice had such an undercurrent of despair that I seized his arm.