Phantom's Dance

  Our footsteps echoed throughout the concrete structure, as we traversed the lot and stopped in front of a door labeled Employees Only. Erik glanced around the vacant garage. Then he reached above the doorframe, where he retrieved a key. After unlocking the door, he returned the key to its hiding place and we entered the room.

  When he closed the door behind us and I heard the bolt click into place, I shuddered and started to tell him I would be more comfortable with the door open, but my surroundings caught my attention. Around us, fat white pipes and copper colored tubing formed lattice walls that made me think of a jail cell. And to one side were a couple of steel tanks, large enough for two people to stand in, and a wall covered with luminous gauges. Steampunk creepy.

  “Over here,” Erik said and pulled me along until we were at the rear of the dismal room. Reality hit me then. I’d had no idea how Erick truly lived. I mean I knew, but I didn’t know. I let my eyes rove, taking it all in. There was a pallet of old blankets on the floor in the corner, and a table and chair were against the wall across from it. To my surprise, a computer sat atop the table, along with several other electronic gadgets.

  “It’s here.” His breaths were short and rapid from the long walk.

  Releasing my hand, he gently propelled me toward the table and pointed to something on it. I blinked to adjust my sight in the dim light, and saw there were charcoal sketches, dozens of them, splayed across the tabletop. I picked one up. It was me. They were sketches of me, in street clothes, in costume and in various positions of dance.

  Lifting my gaze, I brandished a piece of paper before him. “What is this?”

  “It’s you.”

  “Yes, but why?”

  “Don’t you like them?”

  I stared at the sketch in my hand. Then I replaced it and shuffled through the others. There were so many. How long had it taken to create them? Hours—days—weeks?

  “I don’t understand,” I said, confused.

  “Wait, that’s not all.” He reached out and punched several keys on the computer keyboard. “Watch this.”

  Scrunching my eyes together, I struggled to focus on the screen. What was wrong with my vision?

  Through heavy lids, I stared at the monitor. The words For Christine materialized and the score to Giselle began to play. Then my graphite likeness appeared on the screen. Erik had made a stop-motion video of the sketches, and I was dancing to the musical score of Giselle.

  I watched in horror as the harmony progressed, and the graphics of me moved haltingly across the screen. It was terribly unsettling. It was wrong. So wrong.

  As I stood there, glued to the monitor, he moved close behind me.

  “Do you like my art?” he asked.

  I closed my eyes tightly and thought this is not art. This is an invasion of my privacy.

  Chapter Sixty

  Fog rolled across my brain, and I grew so dizzy I had to grab the back of the chair, while my digitized counterpart floated across the screen.

  “Erik,” I croaked. “What? Why?”

  “For you, ballerina.”

  My stomach lurched and I pressed my fist into it. “I don’t feel so good.”

  “Steady,” he murmured and gripped my elbow to keep me from swaying.

  “It must be the wine. I’m not used to drinking.”

  One hand still on the chair, I rubbed my eyelids and blinked several times. “I think I should go home, before it gets worse.”

  “Oh, no, I’m afraid that would be impossible.” He was close enough behind me now for his leg to bump against mine. “You have to stay.”

  “But this is not why I came here. I shouldn’t be here.”

  Casually, he placed his hand on my arm and grazed it up and down. “This is precisely why you’re here, Chrissy. You wouldn’t have come back if you didn’t want to be here.”

  Everything was so fuzzy. I needed to do something. To get out, to scream. Anything but stand there.

  Trailing his fingers up my arm and shoulder, he took the length of my hair in both hands and combed his fingers through it. On a breezy exhalation that vibrated beneath the mask, he let it cascade from one palm to the other. Then he leaned in, drew a handful near, and inhaled, and I stiffened and swallowed my rising fear.

  “Erik, what’s wrong with me? I’m so…disoriented.”

  “Don’t worry. It was only a little something to help you relax.”

  “You drugged me?”

  “Just a little. It was necessary.”

  Necessary for what? I thought, and alarms rang inside my head.

  Still clutching my hair in one hand, he fingered the clasp of my necklace with the other. “You know you can’t wear this anymore. You can’t wear something that belongs to him when you’re with me.”

  His voice sounded like he was in a tunnel, and every word grew more edgy, menacing, until I grasped the tiny, silver slippers and muttered, “Raoul.”

  Swiftly, he released my hair to snake his arm around my waist and jerk me back against his chest. Then he clamped his other hand over mine, squeezing it tightly so that the charm beneath it bit into the skin of my palm.

  Pushing his head close to mine, he growled and the sound vibrated beneath the mask. “Do not say his name to me.” He shoved my hand away then and seized Raoul’s necklace. “What a gaudy bauble—probably came from a vending machine.” Forcefully, he wrapped the chain around his fist, winding it tighter up my throat. “Do you have any idea how much the locket I gave you cost? The trouble I went through to get it for you? And you wear this cheap piece of shit.” He ripped the necklace from me then, and launched it across the room. In a quick swoop, his hand was back at my throat where he slipped his fingers around my neck and, tightening his grip, he forced my head up at an angle.

  “Say my name,” he whispered. When I didn’t respond, he squeezed tighter and brought his head around so that the mask pressed into my ear. “Say my name,” he demanded.

  Tears started to roll down my cheeks and with my head tilted awkwardly, they pooled in my ears. “E—Erik,” I choked, and immediately he freed me. I gasped and sputtered to get a full breath as I rubbed the chafed skin on my neck.

  “Never say his name again. You belong to me.”

  “I want to go home,” I sobbed.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. After all those texts you sent, begging and pleading for my forgiveness. You said you’d do anything to make it up to me. Remember?”

  I whipped my head from side to side in denial. “I only wanted to be your friend, Erik.”

  His arm was still lassoed tightly around my middle, pinning me tightly to him. And ignoring my protests, he took a strand of my hair again and rolled it between two fingers. “Stay with me, Giselle,” he implored. “Stay and dance with me all night that I might live.”

  Gulping back tears, I struggled to understand his meaning. Things were happening so fast, coming at me quicker than I could process. My mind felt numb as I remembered the night he’d stepped from behind the curtain, when he’d first worn the mask, and we’d danced the grand pas de deux. Did he want to dance the piece again?

  Suddenly, he turned me loose and moved away, and for a moment, I thought I’d gotten through to him, that he was allowing me leave.

  Gazing back through the room’s pipes, tanks, and humming engines, the door seemed so far away now, and I wondered if I could make it. My body was heavy, cumbersome, so I used the desk to balance and maneuver myself about. With his back to me, this was my chance to get away. I had to try.

  With all my strength, I shoved off the desk and lunged forward. It was a pathetic, futile attempt. All I did was stumble into Erik’s back.

  He caught me, sharply digging his long, slender feelings into my arm. “Knock off the melodramatics, Christine. You’re not going anywhere.”

  Then locking onto my shoulders, he hauled me close, and hobbled us to his makeshift bed, where he lowered me to the floor. After propping me against the wall, he went to his knees beside me. I squin
ted into the mask’s abysmal eye sockets trying to see him, and flinched when he unexpectedly raised the back of his hand to my face.

  “Don’t be afraid, Chrissy,” he cooed, gingerly stroking his knuckles over my cheek. “You said yourself there’s no need for us to be uncomfortable together.”

  Panic shot through me like flare guns firing, while my heart pounded and every breath seemed coated in sludge.

  “Erik, I—I’m scared.” My tongue was thick and my voice slurred. “I wanna go home.”

  With unnerving familiarity, he swept my hair off my neck. “You don’t really mean that. You wanted to come here. Remember? You are the only one to see past this.” He gestured to the mask. “You wanted to be with me.”

  In my head, I was screaming no, yet nothing but throaty groans came out. Frustrated, I mustered what strength I had and threw my hand out to grab the headpiece and jerk it off, slinging it to the floor beside me.

  Violently, he recoiled, cursing and ducking his head away from me. Beastly grunting noises emitted from his chest as he threw an arm over his head to shield himself from my view. For a moment, his shoulders rose and fell with his labored breathing, and every exhalation sizzled and hissed like droplets of water in a hot pan.

  Unwilling to turn where I could see him, he groped about, blindly trying to lay hands on the headpiece. When he couldn’t find it, he gave up and bellowed, “Why did you do that?”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and struggled to speak. “I…have a right to see.”

  The droning of the machinery around us closed in on me and synchronized with my nausea, ebbing and flowing with the horrible whirring.

  “Very well,” he snarled and hammered his fist vigorously on the floor. “If that’s what you want. Then you shall have it!” And he whipped about for me to see.

  For a split second, I was six years old, running a raging fever, nestled in my father’s arms in the middle of an ER waiting room. Like then, the face before me appeared to have melted. Maybe it, too, was from the fever. But I didn’t have a fever now. I wasn’t in a hospital. So I waited for the face to return to normal, just like the nurse’s had. But this face, with its molten skin and jagged scars, remained a lumpy, wax-like figure.

  “Now, are you happy?” he demanded.

  “Erik,” I muttered and whirled away as something tightened in my chest.

  With a strong hand, he gripped my chin and forced me to look at him again. “This is your leather-face,” he spat. “This is what you wanted to see.”

  I wanted to close my eyes, to not see anymore. At the same time, I couldn’t help staring at the phantom in front of me. Like a relief map, lines and crags of pallid, gray flesh covered the left side of Erik’s face. A concave segment at the top of his skull held my attention until I followed a blistery fissure from it to his eye—his opaque, lifeless eye. Something sour in my stomach worked its way up my throat and I gagged.

  “That’s what I thought,” he growled and pushed my face away.

  Whatever he’d drugged me with was quickly sucking me under. My vision swam and my mouth went dry. Unable to hold my eyes open, I closed them for a second, just a second, and then forced them open again. If I surrendered to the blackness tugging at my senses, I’d never get out of there. Feebly, I clutched his gray sweatshirt in both fists. “Please—I want to go home.”

  Without a word, he pulled my hands away and eased me down onto the pallet, crushing the pink dahlia in my hair.

  “What are you doing?” I croaked. “Erik, I don’t want to…”

  “It’s okay, Chrissy, I love you. And you love me.”

  Chapter Sixty One

  Standing on the corner across the street from the Wakefield Center, I couldn’t remember leaving the underground garage. Orange rays of sunlight peeked over the city skyline, and I wondered what time it was. My clothes were wrinkled, so I brushed out some of the creases and noticed my reflection in a storefront window. My hair was a wreck, so I raked my fingers through it, and when I pulled my hand away, there was a single, tiny, pink dahlia petal on one of my fingertips. Suddenly, I became nauseated and knew I needed to get home before I got sick right there on the street.

  Since it was early on a Saturday morning, there was little traffic, which was a good thing because I was oblivious to crosswalk signs and red lights. In a zombie-like state, I just wanted to be home.

  On the ride up in the elevator, I prayed it wouldn’t stop on the third floor. I didn’t want Raoul to be visiting his father and see me in my present state.

  There was a dull thud in my head that simply walking intensified, and I held my breath with every other step to numb the pain. When I got off the elevator and slipped into the apartment, Mom was there waiting for me.

  “Christine Alysse Dadey, where the hell have you been? I was worried sick. I called Jenna and she said you were probably with some guy named Erik.”

  I stared at her as she ranted, unable to respond because my head was about to explode. “Mom,” I croaked, “I need something for a headache.” I walked past her into the kitchen where I poured myself a glass of water and pulled the aspirin bottle from the cabinet.

  “Here,” she fussed, snatching the bottle from my hand when I couldn’t open it. “Let me do it.” She waited until I’d had time to swallow the pill before starting on me again. “I want to know where you’ve been.”

  “Can I sit down?” I asked.

  She pressed her lips into a white line. Then she whirled about and led the way to the living room, where we sat on the sofa.

  “Well?” she prodded.

  I took a sip from the glass of water again and set it on the table, mostly to give myself time to think. I couldn’t remember what had happened. I’d gone to meet Erik to apologize for accusing him of hurting Van, and I remember there’d been a picnic of fruit and cheese, but I couldn’t recall much beyond that.

  “Christine, were you with this boy Jenna told me about?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  She released a pent-up breath and fell back on the sofa with a disappointed grunt. Shutting her eyes, she pinched the bridge of her nose. “Help me understand. I thought you were dating Raoul, but now you’re sneaking out to see someone else. How long have you been doing this?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know—maybe a month.”

  “A month!” She bolted upright again. “You’ve been sneaking out for a month?”

  “Mom, please don’t shout. My head is killing me.”

  “So you’re going out with two boys at the same time, and one of them you’ve been sneaking out of the house to see?”

  I shook my head—big mistake—then I squeezed my temple between the heels of my palms. “No, I’m not dating Erik.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  Bone tired, I couldn’t track well, so I got to my feet. “I’m going to bed. I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

  “You don’t want to talk about this right now!” she screeched and jumped up. “Well, too damn bad. You don’t have a choice. Now sit down.”

  Gingerly, so as not to jostle my brain, I did as she said and she joined me.

  “Tell me who this Erik is.”

  “He’s a dancer—was a dancer—and I’ve been taking lessons from him. He’s been helping me with my acting—characterization and affectations.”

  “Helping you? Is this something Ms. Zaborov initiated? Why is it in the middle of the night?”

  “Ms. Zaborov doesn’t know. No one does.”

  “Then where did you meet him?”

  “At the theater. When I went to see Romeo and Juliet.”

  “So this has nothing to do with school? Is he a member of the main company then?”

  “No, he’s not a member of any company anymore.”

  “So let me get this straight. You’ve been leaving here at night to meet some guy you claim is teaching you acting, yet you’ve told no one. You realize how that sounds don’t you. And if I think it’s suspicious, how do
you think it would look to your teachers, or even Mr. Darby, if it were to get back to them?”

  Hot anger pulsed behind my eyes, and I pulled up to the edge of the sofa to stare at her. “That’s where you want to go with this? The how-will-it-freaking-look thing? Is that seriously all you care about? Well, I don’t give a crap how it looks, Mom, because I’m done.”

  Inhaling sharply, she snapped her head as if I’d thrown ice water in her face. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve spent more of my life in ballet slippers than sneakers, and I'm sick to death of it. I'm through trying to please everybody. I am finished with Erik, the Rousseau Academy, and with ballet. As soon as I can, I’m moving to Norway with Dad.”

  Chapter Sixty Two

  Surprisingly, Mom didn’t follow me to my room. I think she was too stunned. Wearily, I turned down the bed, slipped out of my shoes and jeans, and crawled in as I was. Dead tired, I sensed I should be doing something, sorting things out, but my brain felt too large for my skull and thinking hurt. All I wanted to do was sleep, and I was out by the time my head hit the pillow.

  My dreams were fretful, filled with shadowy images and unsettling emotions. By the time I awoke later, those images and emotions had coalesced into a truth I hadn’t been sure of before—I had been with Erik. And although parts of the night remained a blur, I had no doubt now that Erik and I’d had sex.

  Disgust and shame swept through me, and I didn’t want to think about what had happened, so I tunneled under my covers, rolled over, and went back to sleep, where I didn’t have to deal with it now.

  Hours later, a knock on my bedroom door roused me. I lay there thinking if I pretended to be asleep, Mom might go away. I was surprised to learn it wasn’t her.

  “Chris, can I come in?”

  It was Jenna.

  Tossing back the covers, I shimmied into my jeans and went to the door. When I opened it, Jenna stood there, eyes wide with unspoken questions.

  “Come in.” I stepped aside for her to enter, and we went to my bed and sat down together. As I gazed across the room at a spot on the wallpaper, I sensed her eyes on me. Finally, I attempted a smile.

  “What the hell, Christine? You look like shit.”

  “Thanks.”