Unmasked Read Online Free Page A

asked,
incredulous eyes searching mine for an answer.
    I looked into those amazing eyes, now
strangely vulnerable and pleading. "Because you let me."
    Of a sudden, his expression changed. He
blinked, as if a veil had been lifted and he could see clearly for
the first time. Something was being born in him, and he looked at
me through eyes that were filled with both wonder and surprise.
    "Thank you," he said, and I have never since
heard those words spoken with such heartfelt gratitude.
    My thoughts turned to that woman, the woman
he now referred to only as her , and I was infected with a
viral curiosity to learn what power she had to wound a man so. I
asked him to tell me about her.
    Her name was Christine Daaé , he said, and she was a young singer
whose voice and aspect he had found mesmerizing. He became her
teacher, training her voice until she was elevated from chorus girl
to lead soprano. His mentorship had blossomed into something more
intense, but she did not reciprocate his affections. One day, she
ripped off his mask, and then recoiled in horror at the sight of
his naked face.
    It was difficult for him to speak on this,
the feature that drove him to living behind a mask. Though I would
hear more of his deformity, he did not speak it.
    After that, she shrank back from him, and
sought refuge in the arms of a childhood sweetheart, a vicomte.
Despite her betrayals, he harbored a love for her that nothing she
did could alter.
    "That is why," he said with a sigh, "I never
caused her any harm. I visited my rage on those around her, but
never her."
    His puzzling statement brought to mind the
rumor I had heard. "Do you mean the chandelier?"
    He nodded. "When I saw her kiss de Chagny, I
became enraged that she could give of herself so freely to that
pampered fop. And I, who had nurtured her voice until the applause
shook the opera foundations, was an object of disgust from whom she
cringed." He began to tremble with rage.
    "What did you do?" I asked, an unshakable
apprehension gnawing at my belly.
    His voice, customarily deep and full, became
so cold and detached that I hardly recognized it. "I...cut the
cable that suspended the chandelier. It fell, crashing into the
seats below. The sounds of shattering glass seemed to last an
eternity. Then the screams came, loud and long. Screams of fear, of
anguish, floated up to me like prayers from hell. I heard them, but
all of them together could not drown out the screaming in my own
head."
    To see him thus, and hear his confession,
chilled me to my marrow. What kind of man murders for love?
    He turned to me, and seeing the expression on
my face, grinned jadedly. "I have learned much since those days,
chérie. I was unwilling to feel shame at my face, unable to accept
the powerlessness of it. Hate, anger…those are empowering emotions.
But they can be cruel masters, and when the blaze of the moment is
extinguished, you find that they have consumed everything in their
wake, even the things you care about. I shall have to live with
those anguished cries in my ears for the rest of my life. I have no
desire to add any more to my grief.”
    And yet this woman still grieves him. “And
what of Christine? Do you love her still?”
    He looked away, and I could sense, rather
than see, his discouragement. “Unrequited love is no love at all.
One might as well love the cold, stone walls.”
    Legends diminish in grandeur when you get up
close, and so, it seems, do monsters. Despite the blackness of his
past, I could not see a monster now. This was only a man, consumed
by grief for what he has lost and for what he never shall have.
Clearly he was at one point a man full of love to give, though no
one has ever accepted it of him. This, if nothing else, is the one
element he and I had in common.
    Instinctively, I leaned over and placed a
soft kiss on the cheek of his mask. The fact that I had done so
surprised even me. Perhaps it was the darkness that emboldened me,
or perhaps it was his shared