I heard your groans of anguish and the shattering of glass, but by the time I reached the room at the top of the stairs with the great swan bed, you had vanished. On the table lay your white mask.

I picked up your mask and looked at it for a moment in wonder. At first its shininess looked like ceramic, but it was actually glossy, polished leather. This was on your face, I thought, and I am going to see that face no matter what. Christine left with Raoul in the boat. That could mean only one thing, that she left you. But where did you go?

My head swam with possibilities, all tumbling one atop the other. I couldn't see you, but I knew you were there, in the same way I knew when you crept in the rafters. Where are you? I called out, silently. I could hear the shouts and curses of the mob. Oh help him, please, someone. Please help him.

Glass covered the stone floor. Why was there so much in front of that curtain, where there seemed to be no mirror? Something pulled me toward the thick red velvet drape. and I ran toward it. He's behind there, I thought, not knowing how I knew, but knowing I was right.

A sound came from behind the curtain, a curse, followed by one thump, then another, and then the sound of boots receding into the distance. I flung the curtain aside and peered into a long, dim tunnel lit by a few tiny blue gas flames. Then, like an arrow that flies straight into the heart, I ran down that murky corridor, kicking up shards as I went.

The black distance of tunnel seemed to be endless, and up ahead I heard the scrapes of stone upon stone. Faster I went through the dim light, until in surprise and frustration I came to a blind end, and you had gone.

My heart filled to bursting. To come all this way, only to lose you once more, to lose you like the shadow you were. There was some trap door, some secret passage somewhere, but where? In frustration, I pounded helplessly in all three directions around me.

Then strong arms grabbed me and pulled me through a crack in the wall that opened suddenly. It snapped shut with a click, and there stood before me with your face all on fire and wet with tears, your shirt sticking to you with sweat.

You leaned your head against the rough stone of the tiny, narrow corridor and hid your face with your hand. Gently I grasped your hand and lowered it, taking your hand tentatively in mind, waiting for you to snatch yours away. Your warm muscular hand pulled me down the corridor. Mine felt so small, clasped inside your rough, dry palm.

My boots clicked on the stone floor. Clicks changed to thuds as we crossed onto a wooden walkway. In places boards were broken or loose and I was grateful for that night's breech role, because in trousers and boots I could pick my way over the bad spots easily. The walkway turned into a narrow bridge, and and down beneath I noticed a deep gouged pit of three or four meters, full of broken pieces of stone. Suddenly I quailed, imagining being dashed to pieces on the stone below.

You turned to me with a look of anguish. I looked over the edge, resolutely, and then looked at your mask. Hateful thing of lies, I thought, and I threw it down into the rubble below. It bounced several times, then landed among the broken stones. I turned my face up to yours and flipped back my long hair, and with your hand in mine, we walked across the bridge.

When we reached the other side, you pulled a knife from your pocket, and a flicker of fear went through me. Were you going to cut me for throwing your mask away? Instead you cut the ropes of the walkway, and the bridge collapsed into the pit below.

You started to walk away quickly, and I followed as fast as I could. You linked your arm in mind and through a maze of tiny passages we slunk. Over and under, farther and farther down the passage went, until at last we came to a rough wall made of the natural stone under the earth. You climbed the wall, hooking your feet into the rough edges. When you had ascended about two meters you reached your hand down to me, and up I went as well.

We crept on a narrow ledge above until we came to a small cleft in the stone, and through it you squeezed into the darkness. Then your hand came through the opening, and I took it, feeling my way in entire blackness with only your hand pulling me through.

Cold air played over my face, and I heard you strike a match. The chamber filled with soft yellow light, and we found ourselves in a natural cave, fit with a cot, a cupboard, a few shelves, and candles. You lit one candle, and then another, until I could see you clearly, and then you sat on the cot and buried your head in your arms.

Slowly I came over to you, and sat down. I knew you could not send me away - how could I get back over the stone pit? Where would I go from here? In the eyes of the law you were a murderer, and by being with you, that made me a murderer too, or at least the helper of one. However, you did not send me away. I thought that over and over to myself, you did not send me away.

I put my arm around your shoulder, and you started to shake, slowly at first, and then more, until you sobbed. The sounds were terrible to hear. I thought that you would sit there locked inside yourself lamenting forever, but under the gentle pressure of my arms you unlocked yours, and lay your head upon my breast, still sobbing.

Your wet shirt and face soon soaked mine, and then my tears joined yours as you held me like a rocking, grieving child. I stroked the coarse unevenness of your hair, and you put your hands on my own hair and wiped your tears with it. Gradually your keening stopped, but you still pressed your face into my bosom.

If this cave collapsed on me in this instant, I could not be happier. It seemed dreadful in a way, to reap so much happiness from your bitter sorrow, but there it was. I held onto your head and soon you relaxed into me, leaning your weight against my whole body, as I rocked you on the narrow cot many meters under the earth.

Then you lifted your head, and looked me full in the face. I had only seen your disfigurement from a distance, back on the stage in the moment before you and Christine disappeared into the trap door of fire. I put my hand on your blighted side and you winced, but I softly stroked your face and made shusshing noises. Then you let me touch it, and my fingers went over it again and again, the red and ravaged hairless skin; the ragged and uneven hair; the ear bent and malformed; the twisted flesh around your eye.

You looked at me with sadness almost too deep to bear, and there was nothing to do but fold you all in my arms, and place my face next to the side of yours, the side that caused you such pain.

You trembled less than before, because no one can cry forever. You lay down on the cot, and I could feel the exhaustion in the muscles of your back and arms. I drew you to me, and once again, your face rested on my breast, your arms enclosed my back and shoulders. Slowly I rubbed your shoulders the way my mother used to ease the cramping and burning from my legs, when they pained from too much exertion.

One of the candles burned down, and you slept.

But not I. I watched the candlelight play over the cave walls and thought, I can never sleep again. If I do, I will lose some of this moment, because there is no guarantee that any more moments will be there to follow it. There is just this one, and it is almost beyond my belief, beyond my ability to believe. Yet here you are, asleep in my arms, your chest rising and falling against my stomach, your head nestled between my breasts and your arms close around me, your head resting on my arm. Each moment you slept bestowed upon me another minute with you, and another, and I clung to you until at last I too fell into darkness.

When I awoke, the second candle had burned out entirely, and it was like blindness, because there was nothing at all in front of my eyes but utter and entire black. Nevertheless, in my arms you rested warm and strong, and I could feel from your small movements that you were awake. We shifted a little, and then your hand came up to the side of my face, and drew me toward you blindly. I felt your mouth on my eye, then my nose and cheek, and then down to where it brushed over mine in the dark.

"Thank you," you said in a soft hoarse whisper.

In answer, I kissed you full on the mouth. I was a virgin, not only down below but up above as well, and at seventeen had never been kissed by man or boy. If he pulls away, I thought, don't let me die. Please don't let me die of sorrow right here, because he may not want me; he still loves Christine, and a thousand similar demons stabbed my heart. If he pulls away, I still have had the gift of his sleep in my arms.

But then your mouth moved over mine in a hesitant round of gentle exploration, and so we went, back and forth, forming a circle dance of kissing, now straight ahead, now circling around, now straight ahead again, but always coming back to that sweet center.

When I watched you sing on stage in the bridge scene of Don Juan Triumphant, I thought I could be no fuller of heat than that, but I had much to learn in that unrelenting darkness as your rough thick hands went over my body. Then you stopped kissing me, and lay quietly for a few moments in the darkness that veiled your expression. I could feel your thoughts, as if they seeped through your skin into mine.

He's deciding, I knew at once. He is not going to take me simply for pleasure. If he does take me, it will be for good, and there will be no turning back. Once he sets his mind to something, he does it, for good or ill.

Finally, you spoke, and your words came out low and a little harsh in the darkness. "Is this what you want, Meg? I don't what will become of us. Are you sure?"

I put my hand on your chest, and could not tell the difference between the pounding of my own heart, and the massive movements of that great one within the edifice of your muscle and flesh and bone.

Then I breathed my swan song, one word, "Yes," and everything that I had known, everything I had been up until that point died on a narrow cot in the bowels of Paris, under the pressing weight of the earth, of the darkness, and of the fierce wild strength of the body of the man, my man.

o

Forty-nine years after the great fire of 1871, a cold wind whips around the outside of the Opera Populaire, its vast stone edifice now shuttered and littered with debris. In late 1872 it was rebuilt and rebounded somewhat, until the Great War. Now it remains a decrepit hulk, empty and neglected, awaiting the day of the auction and its final demolition.

"He's sleeping," says the Moroccan manservant, Yasim, as he carefully arranges the covers around your quiet form, the form of a very old man lying still in the bed. When Yasim leaves the room I pull the neatly arranged covers back, take off my wrap, and slip into bed with you. Blind now, your hands reach out and find my face. "Meg," you breathe into my neck.

You still have the strength to roll over, and so you rest your face against my breast, your chest against my belly, but your great heart is no longer strong and steady in the collapse of your chest. It flutters like a bird in a cage, waiting for the day the door will open and it will fly loose and free into the blue, to where I cannot tell and where I cannot follow.

I stroke your face with my hand and remark to myself that nature's humor consists mostly of bitter irony. In the general ruin of age it is impossible to tell that you, who fifty years ago men feared as the "Phantom of the Opera," ever had any facial blight or deformity at all.

My own face is lined and worn too, though my dancer's body has carried me well through sixty-six years. There is almost no remnant of your beauty, unless it be in the strong line of your jaw covered with pouched flesh. Underneath, the line is still beautiful, still discernible after all your eighty-two years.

We kiss gently and then you ask, "Is everything ready?" It is, it has been ever since the auction was announced some weeks earlier. I look at you carefully as I always do before I leave the house, because it is perhaps the last time I will see your face so beloved to me.

Yasim and his brother Ahmed drive me to the cemetery. There I find a small tombstone not so elaborate as the others, but that's understandable, as it was erected during the Great War when we all suffered such terrible privations.

I place on the side of her gravestone a single red rose. A black velvet ribbon fixes to it a blue-stoned ring. This is what you, my husband, have asked me to do. I know the ring well - it is the very one you ripped off a slender white neck during the Bal Masque on New Year's Eve, in the foyer of the Opera Populaire.

It is Christine de Chagny's tomb which you have asked me to visit.

I place my burden down on the cold stone, and a great burden it has been. I reproached you only once for keeping it and thereafter held my peace. Considerately you hid it out of my sight, but the bitter taste persisted all these years.

Your instructions are strange. I am to place the ring on the gravesite, and Ahmed will guard it. Then I am to go to the auction and bet on the music box, the little Persian monkey with the clapping cymbals. I am not to win it, about this you are most adamant. Ahmed positions himself behind a large Grecian tomb as I climb into the carriage.

I don't understand this plan that you conceived on the very day you heard of the auction. As death comes closer to you, I can't follow you or follow what you know, or how you know it. It's as if a veil has come off between you and some other woman, as if one of those great twisting statues at the Opera Populaire has suddenly taken the covering off her face and taught you a tune no one else can hear.

Yasim drops me off at the Plaza, and my heart almost stops in my breast when Raoul de Chagny arrives. Crippled and shaking, he is carried by his servants into the ruined Opera. He does not speak, but his shocked look suggests to me that he has momentarily mistaken me for my mother. His watery, unfocused eyes keep returning to me, and when the auctioneer addresses me by my professional name, "Madame Giry," he peeks at me as if the ghost of my mother herself had appeared to carry him back all those years, to snap him across the back of the hand with her stick.

The Vicomte wants the music box and I let him outbid me. He holds it tight to his chest like a child at Christmas who has finally obtained the toy he longed for all year. I follow him out onto the Plaza, and in a flash of light I know where he is going, what he plans to do with that music box, and what you, my husband, already know.

Raoul nods to me as he leaves, and I briefly nod back. His befuddled look tells me that he is probably somewhat senile and still confuses me with my mother even in the harsh winter light. A mix of gratitude and pity wash over me. I feel pity because his life has been bitter, as the girl he risked so much for turned sad and pallid, whose children fled her cold home as soon as they could. I feel gratitude, because without his intervention you would not lie in my arms every night, with my hand under your neck.

I return home and sit down by your bed as I have for the past five years of your long illness. You ask how it went, as if you need to. I kiss your sightless eyes and feel your heart through your nightshirt, and its wild irregular flutter fills me with anxiety. You know every flick of my every muscle. Gently you stroke my face and consolingly you whisper as if I were the child, or the old man needing comfort in his last days.

There comes a knock and Ahmed enters. He places on the bedside table the very music box upon which I had bid earlier in the day. You raise yourself a little - what effort that requires! and say to Ahmed, "The ring is gone?"

"Yes, the Vicomte took it as you said he would," he replies, and winds up the music box before slipping out of the room.

As the little tune plays, your sightless eyes fill with tears. I place the music box on the bed between us until your recollecting hand reaches out to feel it and play over it. This small effort exhausts you, so you rest your white head back on the pillow.

I straighten the room and draw the worn curtains against the afternoon sun, but you protest. You want to feel the warmth as it plays across your face. Then I hear you call, "Come lie with me," so at once I turn around, and in a moment I'm down to my chemise and in your arms with your head nestled into my neck, your hands on my breasts.

You've wet yourself a little, but I don't care. Yasim can change the sheets later. For now, it matters not to me. Tears, semen, water, blood, anything from you I will take, because when I look at your drawn face, whiter and looser than ever, I know that too soon the time will come when the dust that's left of you will make no more wetness of any kind.

A little light plays around you, perhaps from the afternoon sun going behind the building across the street. Then I am not so sure from whence that light comes, for the music box behind me on the table starts to play, but more softly and slowly than it should. You struggle for breath and I cling to you, my face wet with tears, my chemise wet with your sweat. You have made a little water too, but it's as harmless and innocuous as that of a child, the child I never bore you, and that sorrow comes up again and I sob.

You hold me, stroking me through my quiet cries, like I held you seven times seven years ago. I say to you, "Tell me that you love me," and then you, my great and beautiful trumpeter swan, give back to me your own strong swan's cry, "Yes," and you become very quiet. After awhile you lie trembling in my arms, unconscious.

Then the music stops.

I don't move, or call out for Yasim, or send for the doctor. Gradually the light fades as the life slips out of you, as the great bird of your heart gives up the struggle in the cage of your chest. Then that great cage opens and you are set free forever, flown to where I cannot follow until the day I fly through the sky of my own death, flown soaring up into a blue where there are no shadows, no veils, and no tears to fall behind them.