Chapter XVIII

We were in the middle of a little six-cornered room, the sides of which were covered with mirrors from top to bottom. I recognized the iron tree in the corner, the iron tree, with its iron branch, for the hanged men.

Suddenly, we heard a noise on our left. It sounded at first like a door opening and shutting in the next room; and then there was a dull moan. Then we distinctly heard these words:

“You must make your choice! The wedding mass or the requiem mass!”

I recognized the voice of the monster. There was another moan, followed by a long silence.

“Don Juan Triumphant is finished,” Erik’s voice continued, “and now I want to live like everybody else. I want to have a wife like everybody else. I have invented a mask that makes me look like anybody. People will not even turn round in the streets. You will be the happiest of women. You are crying! You are afraid of me! Love me and you will see! If you loved me I should be as gentle as a lamb.”

Suddenly, the silence in the next room was disturbed by the ringing of an electric bell.

“Somebody ringing! Walk in, please!”

A sinister chuckle.

“Who has come? Wait for me here. I am going to tell the siren to open the door”.

Steps moved away, a door closed. I had no time to think of the fresh horror that was preparing; I understood but one thing: Christine was alone behind the wall!

The Vicomte de Chagny was already calling to her:

“Christine! Christine!”

At last, a faint voice reached us.

“I am dreaming!” it said.

“Christine, Christine, it is I, Raoul!”

A silence.

“But answer me, Christine! In Heaven’s name, if you are alone, answer me!”

Then Christine’s voice whispered Raoul’s name.

“Yes! Yes! It is I! It is not a dream! Christine, trust me! We are here to save you! When you hear the monster, warn us!”

Then Christine told us in a few hurried words that Erik had gone quite mad with love and that he had decided to kill everybody and himself with everybody if she did not consent to become his wife. He had given her till eleven o’clock the next evening for reflection. She must choose, as he said, between the wedding mass and the requiem:

“Yes or no! If your answer is no, everybody will be dead and buried!”

“Can you tell us where Erik is?” I asked.

She replied that he must have left the house.

“But where are you?” asked Christine “I am fastened. There are only two doors in my room; a door through which Erik comes and goes, and another which he has never opened before me and which he has forbidden me ever to go through, because he says it is the most dangerous of the doors, the door of the torture-chamber!”

“Christine, that is where we are!”

“You are in the torture-chamber?”

“Yes, but we can not see the door.”

“I know where the key is,” she said. “But I am fastened so tight!”

And she gave a sob.

“Where is the key?” I asked, signing to M. de Chagny not to speak and to leave the business to me, for we had not a moment to lose.

“In the next room, near the organ, with another little bronze key, which he also forbade me to touch. They are both in a little leather bag which he calls the bag of life and death. Raoul! Raoul! Fly! Everything is mysterious and terrible here! Go back by the way you came.”

“Christine,” said the young man. “We will go from here together or die together!”

“Mademoiselle,” I declared, “the monster bound you—and he’ll unbind you. You have only to play the necessary part! Remember that he loves you!”

But Christine Daae said:

“Hush! I hear something. It is he! Go away! Go away! Go away!”

Heavy steps sounded slowly behind the wall. Next we heard Erik’s voice:

“Very strange. Why did he ring? Do I ask people who pass to tell me the time? He will never ask anybody the time again!”

“Why did you cry out, Christine?”

“Because I am in pain, Erik. Unloose my bonds. Am I not your prisoner?”

“After all, as we are to die together… Wait, don’t move, I will release you.”

Erik began to sing. He sang like the god of thunder. Suddenly, the voice ceased, and M. de Chagny sprang back, on the other side of the wall. And the voice, changed and transformed, distinctly said:

“What have you done with my bag?”

Chapter XIX

“What have you done with my bag? You asked me to release you just to take my bag!”

We heard hurried steps.

“Why are you running away?” asked the furious voice. “Give me back my bag, will you? Don’t you know that it is the bag of life and death? You know there are only two keys in it. What do you want to do?”

“I want to look at this room which I have never seen and which you have always kept from me. It’s woman’s curiosity!” she said, in a tone which she tried to render playful.

“I don’t like curious women,” Eric retorted, “and you had better remember the story of Blue-Beard and be careful. Come, give me back my bag! Leave the key alone!”

And he chuckled, while Christine gave a cry of pain. Erik had evidently recovered the bag from her. At that moment, the viscount uttered an exclamation of impotent rage.

“Why, what’s that?” said the monster. “Did you hear, Christine?”

“No, no,” replied the poor girl. “I heard nothing.”

“I thought I heard a cry.”

“A cry! In this house? Are you going mad, Erik? I cried out, because you hurt me! I heard nothing.”

“You’re trembling. You’re quite excited. You’re lying! That was a cry, there was a cry! There is some one in the torture-chamber!”

“There is no one there, Erik!”

“The man you want to marry, perhaps!”

“I don’t want to marry anybody, you know I don’t.”

“Well, it won’t take long to find out. Christine, my love, we need not open the door to see what is happening in the torture-chamber. We need only draw the black curtain and put out the light in here. There, that’s it. Let’s put out the light!”

And we were suddenly flooded with light! Yes, on our side of the wall, everything seemed aglow. And the angry voice roared:

“I told you there was some one! Do you see the lighted window now? The man behind the wall!”

I have said that the room in which M. le Vicomte de Chagny and I were imprisoned was a regular hexagon. The walls of this strange room were simply furnished with thick mirrors.

There was no furniture. An ingenious system of electric heating allowed the temperature of the walls and room to be increased at will.

When the ceiling lit up, the viscount’s stupefaction was immense. He passed his hands over his forehead; his eyes blinked.

I gave up the idea of returning to the passage that had brought us to that accursed chamber. We had dropped from too great a height into the torture-chamber; there was no furniture to help us reach that passage; not even the branch of the iron tree. There was only one possible outlet, that opening into the room in which Erik and Christine Daae were. We must therefore try to open the door without even knowing where it was.

But I had first to calm M. de Chagny, who was already walking about like a madman, uttering incoherent cries. The scorching heat was beginning to make the perspiration stream down his temples. He shouted Christine’s name, knocked his forehead against the glass.

“We are in a room, a little room. And we shall leave the room as soon as we have found the door,” I said

And I promised him that, if he let me act, without disturbing me by shouting and walking up and down, I would discover the trick of the door in less than an hour’s time.

I tackled a glass panel and began to finger it in every direction, hunting for the weak point on which to press in order to turn the door in accordance with Erik’s system of pivots. This weak point might be a mere speck on the glass, no larger than a pea, under which the spring lay hidden. I hunted and hunted. Erik was about the same height as myself and I thought that he would not have placed the spring high.

I was feeling more and more overcome with the heat and we were literally roasting in that room.

“I am stifling,” M. de Chagny said. “All those mirrors are sending out an infernal heat! Do you think you will find that spring soon? We shall be roasted alive! Erik’s mass can serve for all of us!”

I was still making a moral resistance, but M. de Chagny seemed to me quite “gone.”

“Oh, how thirsty I am!” he cried.

I too was thirsty. My throat was on fire. And, yet, squatting on the floor, I went on hunting, hunting, hunting for the spring of the invisible door. We were beginning literally to die of heat, hunger and thirst… of thirst especially. At last, at the foot of the iron tree, in a groove in the floor, I saw a black-headed nail of which I knew the use. At last I had discovered the spring! The black-headed nail yielded to my pressure, and then we saw a cellar-flap released in the floor. Cool air came up to us from the black hole below. What could there be in that cellar which opened before us? Water? Water to drink?

I thrust my arm into the darkness and came upon a stone and another stone… a staircase… a dark staircase leading into the cellar.

The staircase was a winding one and led down into pitchy darkness. We soon reached the bottom. Our eyes distinguished circular shapes around us. Barrels!

We were in Erik’s cellar: it was here that he must keep his wine and perhaps his drinking-water. I knew that Erik was a great lover of good wine. M. de Chagny patted the round shapes and kept on saying:

“Barrels! Barrels! What a lot of barrels!”

I was astonished, too.

“But what’s this?” cried the viscount. “This isn’t water!”

The viscount put his two full hands close to me. What I had seen in M. de Chagny’s hands was gun-powder! We now knew all that the monster meant to convey when he said to Christine Daae:

“Yes or no! If your answer is no, everybody will be dead and buried!”

Yes, buried under the ruins of the Paris Grand Opera!

M. de Chagny and I began to yell like madmen. Fear spurred us on. We found the trap-door still open, but it was now as dark in the room of mirrors as in the cellar which we had left. We dragged ourselves along the floor of the torture-chamber, the floor that separated us from the powder-magazine. We shouted, we called: M. de Chagny to Christine, I to Erik. I reminded him that I had saved his life.

Suddenly, I exclaimed: “Hush!”

I seemed to hear footsteps in the next room. Some one tapped against the wall. Christine Daae’s voice said:

“Raoul! Raoul!”

We were now all talking at once, on either side of the wall. Christine sobbed; she was not sure that she would find M. de Chagny alive. The monster had been waiting for her to give him the “yes” which she refused. And yet she had promised him that “yes,” if he would take her to the torture-chamber.

“Raoul, he is terrible! He is quite mad: he tore off his mask and his yellow eyes shot flames! He did nothing but laugh! ‘Here,’ he said, taking a key from the little bag of life and death, ‘here is the little bronze key that opens the two ebony caskets on the mantelpiece in the room. In one of the caskets, you will find a scorpion, in the other, a grasshopper: they will say yes or no for you. If you turn the scorpion round, that will mean to me, when I return, that you have said yes. The grasshopper will mean no.’ And he laughed like a drunken demon. I did nothing but beg and entreat him to give me the key of the torture-chamber, promising to be his wife if he granted me that request. But he told me that there was no future need for that key and that he was going to throw it into the lake! And he again laughed like a drunken demon and left me. Oh, his last words were, ‘The grasshopper! Be careful of the grasshopper! A grasshopper does not only turn: it hops! It hops! And it hops jolly high!’”

M. de Chagny told her to turn the scorpion at once.

There was a pause.

“Christine,” I cried, “where are you?”

“By the scorpion.”

“Don’t touch it!”

The idea had come to me—for I knew my Erik—that the monster had perhaps deceived the girl once more. Perhaps it was the scorpion that would blow everything up. After all, why wasn’t he there? Perhaps he had taken shelter and was waiting for the explosion! Why had he not returned? “Don’t touch the scorpion!” I said.

“Here he comes!” cried Christine. “I hear him! Here he is!”

We heard his steps approaching the room. He came up to Christine, but did not speak. Then I raised my voice:

“Erik! It is I! Do you know me?”

With extraordinary calmness, he at once replied:

“So you are not dead in there?”

I tried to speak, but he said coldly:

“Not a word, daroga, or I shall blow everything up.” And he added, “Mademoiselle has not touched the scorpion, mademoiselle has not touched the grasshopper, but it is not too late to do the right thing. If you turn the grasshopper, mademoiselle, we shall all be blown up. If you turn the scorpion, mademoiselle, all that powder will be soaked and drowned. Mademoiselle, to celebrate our wedding, you will make a very handsome present to a few hundred Parisians who are at this moment applauding a masterpiece. You will make them a present of their lives. And merrily, merrily, we will be married!”

“Erik,” cried Christine.

“Enough!”

I was crying out in concert with Christine. M. de Chagny was still on his knees, praying.

“Erik! I have turned the scorpion!”

It came softly, at first, then louder, then very loud. But it was not the hiss of fire. It was more like the hiss of water. The water rose in the cellar, above the powder-barrels. The water came out of the cellar with us and spread over the floor of the room. The floor of the torture-chamber had itself become a little lake. Surely Erik must turn off the tap!

“Erik! Erik! That is water enough for the gunpowder! Turn off the tap! Turn off the scorpion!”

But Erik did not reply.

“Christine!” cried M. de Chagny. “Christine! The water is up to our knees!”

But Christine did not reply. By this time, we were spinning round in the water, carried away by an irresistible whirl. Were we to die here, drowned in the torture-chamber?

“Erik! Erik!” I cried. “I saved your life! Remember! You were sentenced to death!… Erik!”