Phantom (38 page)

Had I been satisfied with my house, our relationship would no doubt have terminated with the placing of the last stone; but long before we reached roof level I was disillusioned with my design. Jules, instructed to handle the sale on completion of the building, was immediately besieged with half a dozen truly ridiculous offers.

"Perhaps you might think of contracting, sir," he suggested tentatively.

My first impulse was to laugh… and then I paused.

Why not?

I was still young… I badly needed occupation, even if I no longer needed money, something to take my mind from a composition which was consuming me steadily, from within, like a cancer.
Don Juan Triumphant
was eating me alive. I needed to lock the score away in a chest now and forget all the dangerous and unthinkable things it represented to me.

Five years later Jules—then a married man with three small children tumbling around his modest rented quarters —was running a thriving business for me. The service I offered was unique in many ways. It was customary for an architect to arrange contracts, not to build himself. It was also customary for an architect to meet his clients, but this I steadfastly refused to do. My terms were so eccentric, it is a wonder the business survived at all, but Jules revealed an unexpected capacity for smoothing the feathers of ruffled customers. It became fashionable to have a house designed and built by the mysterious, elusive architect who merely signed his plans
Erik;
who had been known to refuse a commission rather than grant a personal consultation. In short, I was, yet again, a very successful novelty, for which the wealthy were prepared to pay quite handsomely.

After five years of this existence I discovered that I was bored to tears building glorified boxes to house fat, complacent businessman and their even fatter and more complacent wives. A terrible restlessness was growing steadily upon me, a restlessness that seemed to be compounded partly by frustration and partly by an emotion I simply could not fathom… an urge to return to the land of my birth, which was as primitive and inexplicable as the instinct which drives a salmon to return to its native stream.

"I'm going away for a while," I told Jules abruptly one morning. "There is nothing here you can't handle, is there?"

"No, monsieur," he said nervously—even after all this time he was not at ease in my presence. "Will you be away for long?"

"I cannot say."

I would have left the mason's yard without another word, but he suddenly ran after me, almost with panic.

"Monsieur… at least tell me where you may be reached—I may need you!"

No one in this world needs me
…
no one ever will
…

"You will manage," I said quietly. "I trust your competence, and it's in your interest to keep this business solvent in my absence. Tell me… have you engaged a tutor for your eldest son yet?"

"Monsieur," he protested, "it is beyond my means."

"You have access to the accounts," I said irritably. "Why haven't you taken what you needed? The child is intelligent and deserves to be educated. He should be old enough now to learn to read and write. See to it without delay!"

He stared at me in bewilderment.

"I—I would never steal from you," he stammered.

"Then you are a fool," I said. "You have a fine family. Take whatever you require for their welfare and there will be no questions asked of you."

He was silent for a moment, his long, thin, rather anxious features set into puzzled lines. Again 1 made to leave and a second time he prevented me.

"Where are you going?" he demanded with a sudden touch of fear.

I stared past him into the dark street, with unseeing eyes.

"I'm going to Boscherville," I said.

I stood at last outside the garden gate of the old house, staring… remembering…

So many times, in my imagination, had I razed this building to the ground, that I was shocked to find it still standing.

How dare it stand there in all its quaint, old-worldly charm, housing a family who lived happily unaware of the grief I had suffered behind those ivy-covered walls. The tears I had shed in that attic bedroom! The lonely terror and fear of being shut away from the world forever!
I hated this house
! I wanted to blow it and all its attendant memories from the face of the earth!

I knew now why I had come back to Boscherville—it was to remove this abominable desecration from the landscape of Normandy forever.

There was a light burning in an upstairs window, annoying evidence of peaceful occupation. I could not simply set fire to this building without rousing the wretched inhabitants from their beds. No more murders, I had promised Nadir; and even had I not promised, it would still have seemed a mean and shameful wickedness to kill innocent children sleeping in their beds.

As I thought of the children, my hand closed around a wad of thousand-franc notes. These people would be homeless once I had gratified my morbid urge for destruction— and no one knew better than I the fate that awaited the destitute and the homeless. I would drive no French child down the dark paths of decadence which had swallowed my own youth. I was willing to pay generously for this satisfaction. Let them go away and talk for the rest of their lives of the madman who had paid for the privilege of burning their house to the ground…

I tethered my white mare to a tree on the opposite side of the road, and she whickered her indignation at finding herself bound. She had carried me across the plains of Asia without a single night spent under such restraint, and for me to deny her freedom now was to abuse the perfect trust that lay between us. Her eyes reproached me for the insult, but I dared not leave her to wander free this time. Fire is the greatest terror in the world to a horse, and a bolt of panic from her now would almost certainly cost me my life.

Talcing a pistol from my cloak, I hammered three times on the front door and waited beneath the wooden canopy, secure in the knowledge that I could not be seen from the bedroom windows above. Anyone wishing to satisfy his curiosity would be obliged to open the door. And since there was not a man on this earth that I could not overpower with my freak strength and my singular knowledge of armed combat, I waited with a calm that was almost indifference. There was a tub of flowers growing by the front door and I reached down absently to remove a few strangling weeds that had gained a hold. It always annoyed me to see a fragile bloom struggling for space…

A light showed suddenly beneath the door and I heard the familiar sound of the old bolt sliding back. A rash and foolhardy householder this, who really deserved to die for his stupidity… I stood back in the shadows as the door opened, curious to see how far this incredible recklessness was going to extend. Small wonder the world is full of rogues such as myself when idiots like this invite villainy every day!

A candle wavered out over the step and I froze in horror to find that this careless, ill-advised occupant was a woman I would have recognized anywhere, in spite of the gulf of years that lay between us.

And when she turned to look at me with wide, staring eyes and one hand stealing defensively to her throat, her look of aghast recognition was also unmistakable.

"Holy Virgin!" she gasped. "
Erik
!"

It is strange how the deeply etched habits of childhood emerge from the mind in moments of shock. I found myself automatically giving a stiff little bow, and saying with cool formality, just as I had been taught to say all those years ago: "Good evening, Mademoiselle Perrault, I hope I find you well."

Both hands flew to her mouth now. She gave a strangled little sob and burst into tears as she gestured wildly for me to follow her into the house.

I went with slow, leaden-hearted dread into the drawing room, but was spared the meeting I now feared above all else. Apart from ourselves the room was empty. The relief was so immense, the disappointment so acute, that I had to sink into the fireside chair for fear of falling. My heart was pounding so wildly, I was afraid she must hear it, and I glanced at the brandy decanter on the chiffonier with intense longing. But she was too harassed to see my need and I could not bring myself to commit the gross incivility of asking a lady for spirits. It was bad enough to have sat without invitation in her presence. I gripped my hands on the wooden arms of my chair and struggled for composure.

"Where is my mother?" I asked uneasily.

She began to cry harder than ever.

"You must know where she lives now," I persisted. "You need not be afraid, I shall not go there… but I should like to know."

Again the wildly fluttering hands brushing ineffectually at the graying, carroty hair, the familiar quivering lips set in a face that always reminded me of a startled rabbit's.

"Oh, God," she whispered, "I thought you knew… I thought that was why you had come back. Erik… your mother died three days ago."

Still I sat there gripping the chair and willing away the threatening veil of darkness. Months I had spent trying to suppress that inexplicably fierce impulse to return here! Drawn by the need to set fire to this house, had I come home, driven by a primitive intuition, merely to put a torch to my mother's funeral pyre?

She was here in this house and she was dead.

And all I could think of was the fact that I should now be able to kiss her cold cheek at last… that she would never be able to shrink from my touch again.

"Perhaps you would like to see her," Marie suggested nervously.

I ignored a suggestion which rocked the foundations of my questionable sanity and continued to stare into the fire.

"Why did she come back?" I demanded. "She hated this house as much as I did… Why did she come back here, of all places? Did he die… was that it… did he die?"

Marie looked at me with confusion.

"Erik… your mother never left this house."

I clenched my fists on the chair.

"Are you telling me that they lived here openly together —that they dared to raise more children beneath this godforsaken roof? They were to go away, I heard him say that! After the marriage they were to go away where no one knew her…"

I was shouting now and Marie's face puckered into folds of extreme distress, but I could not be calm. The thought that I might have half brothers or sisters here in the very village which had driven me away all those years ago hurt more than I could ever have imagined possible. I could not bear to think what cruel children would have told them of their monstrous sibling; I could not bear to think of their shame and anger . . brothers and sisters, who had never seen me, and yet must have wished me unborn every day of their taunted lives.
How dared they stay here
!

"How dared they!" The roar of my voice seemed to rattle the old oak beams in the ceiling, and Marie shrank back in terror.

"There was no marriage, Erik," she stammered. "Dr. Barye went back to Paris a few weeks after you disappeared and your mother never saw him again. She never remarried.

She lived here in this house alone, until the last few months of her life, when I came to nurse her."

I was silenced, numbed and made utterly hopeless by this terrible revelation.

I suddenly saw it had all been for nothing—my flight from this house and all the horrors that followed, as I floundered deeper and deeper into a quagmire of unending, self-perpetuating wickedness. God wanted nothing from the abomination he had created in some careless moment of aberration… even that childish act of sacrifice was now reduced to a bitter mockery. There was nothing left to separate my soul from those of the eternally damned.

And the siblings I had conjured up in panic were just illusions… just illusions. I had no brother after all; I was quite alone in this empty, echoing world now… there was no remembered tie of blood… nothing! Nothing!

In silence I rose and went upstairs to my mother's room.

Candles burned on either side of the old beeswaxed mahogany bedstead, the flames leaping and flickering in the draft from the open window. This, then, was the light I had seen from the road outside… a light shining in the darkness to lead me home at last.

Slowly, very slowly, I turned back the sheet that covered her and stared incredulously, for the waxen face revealed on the pillow was the face of a stranger, old and altered beyond belief.

Time ravages beauty and preserves plainness. I would have known Marie Perrault in any crowd, but this withered woman on the bed I would have passed in the street without any recognition.

Death had made her ugly, shriveled the flesh from her cheekbones and sunk her eyes so deeply beneath her brow that there was now, by some last, bitter twist of fate, a real physical resemblance between us.

And as I looked at her, I suddenly understood her revulsion at last—because now I shared it!

I felt no anger or grief as I looked down upon her… nothing except a disgust which enabled me to forgive every act of cruelty that she had ever shown me.

Yes… I forgave her everything in that moment; but I turned away without touching the hands that lay stiffly folded on her breast.

I did not kiss her, now that I had the opportunity.

I knew that she would not have wished it.

And I no longer felt any desire to do so.

Returning to the drawing room, I found Mademoiselle Perrault sitting by the fire with a little sewing lying unattended on her lap. I had made the cruel assumption that
mademoiselle

was the still the correct form of address and nothing in her sad, dowdy form suggested that I had been mistaken. She got up hurriedly when I entered the room, clutching the material against her withered breast, as though it were some kind of shield against my presence; I found I could only admire the noble effort she was making to control her old instinctive terror of me.

Even as a small child I had been aware that she was afraid of me—it used to amuse me to see her twitch with nervousness whenever I came near. And yet in spite of her timidity she had always shown me kindness. I remembered her picking slivers of glass from my fingers on the evening of my fifth birthday… and once a long time before that, I remembered her arguing with my mother, on my behalf…