The Phantom of the Opera (Oxford World's Classics)

by Gaston Leroux

  It passed so close they could have touched it.

  They felt the warmth from his cloak on their faces.

  For they could now make the figure out clearly enough to see that the man was wearing a cloak which covered him from neck to feet. On his head he wore a soft felt hat.

  He moved off, brushing the walls at each side with his feet and at intervals poking a toe into a dark corner.

  ‘That was a close shave!… We were lucky to get away with it!… That shadow knows me… twice he’s caught me and taken me straight to the office of the Directors.’

  ‘Is he part of the theatre’s security service?’ asked Raoul.

  ‘He’s something worse than that!’ said the Persian, but did not explain further.1

  ‘Was it… him?’

  ‘Him?… No!… provided he doesn’t come at you from behind, you always see his yellow eyes!… It’s one advantage we have in the dark. But if he creeps up on us from behind… by stealth… we will die unless we keep our hands up, at eye level, as if we are about to shoot!…’

  The Persian had barely finished outlining once more why this mattered when a grotesque face suddenly appeared from nowhere and confronted both men.

  It was a whole face… not just a pair of glowing eyes… A complete, luminous face… an entire, unabbreviated, flaring face!… A fiery face which was coming towards them… at head height… but it had no body!…

  A face which blazed!…

  It appeared in the night like a flame in the shape of a man’s face!

  ‘Ah!’ said the Persian through gritted teeth. ‘This is the first time I’ve seen it!… So Papin, the fireman, wasn’t seeing things after all! He really did see it!… But what is this flame exactly? It’s not him!… but perhaps he sent it!… Be careful!… For God’s sake, keep your hand up, level with your eye… keep it up!’

  The flaming face which could have belonged to a devil from hell, a demon of fire and brimstone, was still bearing down on the two men at head height. It was unsupported by a body.

  ‘Maybe he made this face come at us from the front so that he can surprise us from behind!… or from the side!… you can never tell with him!… I thought I knew all his tricks!… But this one is new to me!… We must get away!… Can’t be too careful!… Remember: keep your hand well up!…’

  They turned and ran along the underground passage which unrolled before them.

  After a few seconds which seemed more like long, long minutes, they stopped.

  ‘It’s odd,’ said the Persian. ‘He doesn’t often come here! He’s not interested in this side of the building!… It doesn’t lead to the lake nor his house by the lake!… But perhaps he knows we are getting close!… although I did promise that I would let him alone in future and stay out of his business!…’

  And so saying, he turned round. Raoul followed suit.

  They could still see the blazing head behind them. It had followed them… and it must have run as fast or faster than them, for they had a feeling that it was closer now.

  At the same instant, they were aware of a sound which they were quite unable to identify. They simply registered the fact that the sound seemed to move and grow louder as the flame with a man’s face came nearer. It consisted of creaks or rather squeaks, as if a thousand fingernails were scratching at a blackboard. It was like the piercing skreek made by a piece of grit embedded in the stick of chalk as it writes on the board.

  They went on retreating, but the flaming face came on relentlessly and began to gain on them. They could make out its features very clearly now. The eyes were round and staring, the nose slightly crooked and the mouth large, with a pendulous lower lip. It was like the eyes, nose and lip of the moon when it is low and red, blood red.

  How could this moon float head high through the darkness, as it seemed, without visible support, without a body to hold it up? How did it move so fast, so unwaveringly, with eyes that looked neither right nor left? And what was the source of all the skreeking, creaking and squeaking which accompanied it?

  The Persian and Raoul suddenly found that they could retreat no further. They flattened themselves against the wall, not knowing what to expect from the inexplicable blazing head and, not least, from the noise which was now louder, more teeming, more alive and more myriad, for it was made up of hundreds of small sounds which swarmed in the shadows, under the fiery head.

  The head kept coming… getting closer and louder!… and then it was on them!…

  The two men, their backs pressed hard against the wall, felt their hair stand on end in terror, because now they knew what the pullulating noise was! In the darkness, it rode on the backs of countless rushing wavelets which rolled faster than the waves of an incoming tide race across the sands, little night-waves foaming in the moonlight, the light of a moon that was a flaming head!

  The wavelets lapped their shoes, rose up their legs, unstoppably. Raoul and the Persian could no longer hold back their terrified screams of shock, pain and horror.

  There was no way now that they could go on holding their hands at eye level—in the position required of duellists by the code of the time. They dropped their arms and started beating their legs to repulse small, gleaming, stinging clusters, innumerable bundles of legs and nails and claws and teeth.

  Raoul and the Persian were on the point of losing consciousness, like Papin the firefighter. But the blazing head stopped and turned when they started screaming. And now it spoke:

  ‘Don’t move!… Keep still!… And most partic’lar, don’t follow me!… I’m the rat-catcher!… Lemme pass with me rats!…’

  And the fiery head was gone, swallowed up by the darkness. But as it went, the passageway was lit by the way the rat-catcher was holding his dark lantern. To avoid scaring the rats in front of him, he had previously pointed the lantern at himself, lighting up his own head. But now, to make faster progress, he lit up the black tunnel ahead of him… He strode on, driving the tide of leaping, squeaking rats and their multifarious noise…

  Shaken but safe now, Raoul and the Persian breathed more freely.

  ‘I should have remembered,’ said the Persian. ‘Erik told me about the rat-catcher but he never said he looked like that… It’s odd that I never came across him myself.1

  He went on with a sigh:

  ‘I honestly thought it was one of the monster’s tricks!… But it couldn’t have been!… He never comes anywhere near here!’

  ‘Does that mean we’re still a long way from the lake?’ asked Raoul. ‘When are we going to get there?… Come on!… Let’s go!… When we reach the lake, we’ll call Christine’s name, we’ll shout, we’ll shake the walls!… She’ll hear us!… And so will he!… And since you’ve met him before, we’ll talk sense to him!’

  ‘Don’t be such a young fool!’ said the Persian. ‘We’ll never get inside his house from the lake!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because that’s where he’s placed all his defences!… Even I have never managed to get across to the bank on the other side!… where the house is!… First you must cross the lake, and it’s well guarded!… I’m afraid that more than one of the men—old stagehands and door-boys—who have disappeared and never been seen again were only trying to get across the lake!… It’s horrible!… I nearly got caught that way myself!… If the monster hadn’t recognized me in the nick of time… A word of advice, Viscount: don’t go near the lake!… And if you hear the Voice beneath the water, the Voice of the Siren, block up your ears!’

  ‘If that’s how it is,’ said Raoul, reacting with impatience and fury, ‘what on earth are we doing here?… If you can’t help Christine, you can at least let me die for her!’

  The Persian tried to calm the younger man.

  ‘Look, there’s only one way we can save Christine Daaé, take it from me; we have to get inside his house before the monster finds out.’

  ‘You reckon there’s a hope of that?’

  ‘Oh, if there wasn’t, I would never have come looking for
you.’

  ‘But how can we get into the house without crossing the lake?’

  ‘From the third level which we were unfortunately forced to leave… We’ll go back there now… I shall tell you where,’ said the Persian in a much altered voice, ‘I shall show you the exact place… It’s between a farmhouse and part of the scenery from Le Roi de Lahore… It’s the spot where Joseph Buquet died…’

  ‘You mean the chief stage-setter who was found hanged?’

  ‘Quite so!’ added the Persian in a strange voice. ‘And they never found the rope that hanged him!… But let’s be off!… Don’t forget, sir: spirits and defences up!… Now where are we exactly?’

  The Persian relit his dark lantern. He shone the beam along the length of two cavernous passages which crossed at right angles. The roof was lost in darkness.

  ‘We must’, he said, ‘be in the area where the water services are now situated… Those boilers don’t look as if they’re lit.’

  He went first, picking his way, stopping suddenly when he feared they might run into some hydraulician. At one point, they shrank back to shield themselves from the glare of an underground forge which was being put out by those same ‘demons’ half-glimpsed by Christine as she passed this way on day one of her first spell of captivity.

  In this way they eventually made their way back to the central area directly under the stage.

  By now they had to be at the lowest point of the catchment ‘basin’ and therefore very deep down, for it should be borne in mind that when the Opera House was built workers had dug out a vast cavity some fifty feet below the level of the water table in that part of town. All the water had been pumped out… So much was removed that to have some idea of the volume extracted by the pumps, you need to picture a cube the area of the square court of the Louvre and one and a half times as high as Notre-Dame. Despite this, there was no way of eliminating a lake.

  The Persian felt part of a wall and said:

  ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, this wall might well be part of the house by the lake!’

  He went on tapping one wall of the ‘basin’. Perhaps the reader might find it useful to know how the bottom and sides of this structure had been built.

  To prevent the water in which the foundations stood from permanent, direct contact with the walls which supported the levels containing the stage apparatus and equipment—all the timber, joinery, ironwork, painted scenery which had to be protected against damp—the architect had been obliged to build a separate skin all round it.

  It took a whole year to complete this ‘double skin’. The wall the Persian had tapped as he told Raoul about the house on the lake was the inner skin. To anyone familiar with the architecture of the building, the Persian’s action would have indicated that Erik’s mysterious house had been built inside the double skin which consisted of a watertight caisson lined by a wall of brick, a very substantial layer of cement and a third wall several metres thick.*

  Hearing what the Persian said, Raoul pressed one ear eagerly to the wall and listened.

  But he could hear nothing… nothing except the sound of footsteps on the wooden floors of the theatre above his head.

  The Persian darkened his lantern again.

  ‘Don’t forget!… Keep one hand up!… But now, no more talking!… We are going to make another attempt to get into his house.’

  He led the way to the flight of steps which they had recently come down. They went up them again, slowly, stopping at each step, concentrating on the darkness and the silence.

  And then they were on the third level.

  The Persian motioned Raoul to kneel and it was by crawling on both knees and one hand—the other held in the recommended position—that they reached the far wall. Against it leaned a huge, abandoned half-painted backdrop from the set of Le Roi de Lahore. Next to it was a flat. Between the backcloth and the flat, there was just enough room for a body… a body which had been found hanging there… the body of Joseph Buquet.

  The Persian, still on hand and knees, stopped and listened.

  For a moment, he seemed to hesitate. He glanced at Raoul, then his eyes moved up, over the younger man’s head, towards the second level above. The faint gleam of a lantern came through a crack in the floorboards.

  Evidently the Persian was bothered by it.

  Eventually, he shook his head and made up his mind.

  He squeezed between the backcloth and the flat from Le Roi de Lahore.

  Raoul was just behind.

  With his free hand the Persian felt the wall. Raoul saw him press hard on the wall exactly as he had pressed on the wallpaper in Christine’s dressing room…

  Then a block of stone turned…

  An opening appeared in the wall…

  The Persian took his pistol from his pocket and made a sign that Raoul was to do the same. He cocked the pistol.

  Resolutely he crawled, still on his knees, into the hole in the wall left by the stone as it turned.

  Raoul, who had wanted to go first, had to be content to follow.

  The hole was narrow. Almost at once, the Persian suddenly stopped. Raoul heard him feeling all around the stonework. Then he unshuttered his dark lantern again. He craned forward, examined something beneath him and then quickly closed the shutter. Raoul just caught what he whispered:

  ‘There’s a drop of a few metres. We mustn’t make a noise. Take your boots off.’

  The Persian was already starting to remove his own. These he passed to Raoul.

  ‘Put them further down the wall… We’ll retrieve them on the way out.’1

  Then the Persian inched his way forward. Still on his knees, he turned round until he was facing Raoul.

  ‘I shall hang by my hands from the edge of the stone,’ he said, ‘and I’ll let myself drop into his house. You must do exactly the same. Don’t be afraid. I’ll catch you.’

  The Persian proceeded to do what he said. From somewhere below him, Raoul soon heard a dull thud which was obviously made by the Persian as he landed. He experienced a momentary pang of fear: would the noise betray their presence?

  But more alarming for Raoul than this muffled thud was the complete absence of any other sound. How was it possible? According to the Persian, they were now inside the walls of the house by the lake, and he could not hear any sign of Christine!… not a cry!… not a call for help!… not a groan!… Ye Gods! Had they come too late?…

  Then it was Raoul’s turn. Scraping his knees on the wall and clinging to the stone with nervous fingers, he let himself fall.

  Immediately, he was grabbed by a pair of arms.

  ‘It’s me!’ whispered the Persian. ‘Don’t say a word!’

  They stood where they were, with ears straining.

  Never had the darkness surrounding them seemed more thick and impenetrable.

  Raoul dug his nails into his lips to stop himself crying out: ‘Christine!… It’s me!… Answer me, Christine, are you still alive?’

  Again the Persian opened the shutter of his lantern. He shone the beam above their heads, over the walls, looking for the opening through which they had come and not finding it…

  ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘The stone closed by itself.’

  Then the beam of light slid down the wall until it reached the ground.

  The Persian bent down and picked something up, a length of thin cord of some description which he examined closely for a brief moment before throwing it down in horror.

  ‘The Punjabi bowstring!’*

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It is very likely’, said the Persian with a shudder, ‘what everyone’s been looking for: the cord with which Joseph Buquet was hanged!’

  Then, seized by a sudden surge of anxiety, he shone the small red circle from his lantern all over the walls… only to reveal a bizarre sight, the trunk of a tree complete with leaves which seemed to be alive… its branches rose up the wall and vanished into the darkness of the ceiling.

  The narrowness of the beam made it
difficult to make out the shapes of things… they saw part of a branch… a leaf… another leaf… and next to it, nothing at all… nothing except a beam of light which seemed to be a reflection of the lantern itself… Raoul reached out his hand for the ‘nothing at all’, for the reflected light…

  ‘Hello!’ he said. ‘This isn’t a wall, it’s a mirror!’

  ‘Correct!’ said the Persian, in a voice filled with dread. He clasped the hand which held his pistol to his head on which a cold sweat had broken out.

  Then he added:

  ‘We’ve landed in his torture chamber!’

  CHAPTER 22

  Concerning the interesting and instructive ordeals undergone by the Persian in the belly of the Opera

  The Persian’s Tale

  THE PERSIAN has left his own account of how he had tried, always in vain until that night, to get into the house by crossing the lake; how he discovered the back way in from the third level; and, finally, how he and the Viscount de Chagny were pitted against the Phantom’s hellish imagination in the torture chamber. We here print his chronicle in full, as it was written (in circumstances which will be made clear later). I reproduce it in extenso because I do not believe it would be right to ignore the personal trials of the Daroga1 in his investigation of the house by the lake before he and Raoul—literally—fell into it. If, briefly at the outset, the preamble, however fascinating, seems to take us away from the torture chamber, we will quickly return to it, and with advantage, for we will have had vital matters explained to us together with insights into the attitudes and methods of the Persian which might otherwise have seemed highly unusual.

  It was the first time I had ever been inside the house by the lake (wrote the Persian). Several times I had asked the King of Traps—that was the name by which we, in Persia, knew Erik—to open its dark doors to me. He always refused. I whose job it was to discover all I could about his stratagems and contrivances had finally to resort to furtive methods to break in. Ever since I traced Erik to the Opera, where he seemed to have taken up permanent residence, I had often caught sight of him in the corridors of the theatre, in the passages underground and even, when he thought he was alone, on the bank of the lake when he would get into a small boat and row himself directly to the wall opposite. But the darkness in which he seemed perpetually wrapped was always too dense for me to see the exact spot where he operated a secret door in the wall. Curiosity plus an awful presentiment which stemmed from certain things the monster had told me, led me one day when I too thought I was unobserved, to get into the boat and head for the part of the wall through which I had seen Erik vanish. It was then that I first encountered the Siren who guarded the approach to his house. The spell she cast on me proved to be almost my undoing in circumstances which I shall now relate.