Phantom of Manhattan, The.

by Frederick Forsyth.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

IN ATTEMPTING TO ENVISAGE THE CITY OF NEW York in the year 1906 I was given great help by both Professor Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia University and Mr Caleb Carr, whose books The Alienist The Alienist and and Angel of Darkness Angel of Darkness so vividly bring to life what it must have been like to live in Manhattan around the turn of the century. so vividly bring to life what it must have been like to live in Manhattan around the turn of the century.

For a detailed description of the origins and development of Coney Island and its funfairs at the same period my thanks are due to Mr John B. Manbeck, the Borough Historian of Brooklyn.

For all matters concerning grand opera and most notably the opening of the Manhattan Opera House on 3 December 1906, I had recourse to none other than Mr Frank Johnson, editor of the Spectator Spectator, who was unstinting in his helpfulness and has surely forgotten more about opera than I shall ever know.

The idea of even attempting to write a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera The Phantom of the Opera derives from a first conversation with Andrew Lloyd Webber himself. It was during further and intensive discussion that the basic outline emerged between us and I remain grateful for the benefit of his imagination and enthusiasm. derives from a first conversation with Andrew Lloyd Webber himself. It was during further and intensive discussion that the basic outline emerged between us and I remain grateful for the benefit of his imagination and enthusiasm.

PREFACE.

WHAT HAS NOW BECOME THE LEGEND OF THE Phantom of the Opera began in the year 1910 in the mind of a French author now almost completely forgotten.

As with Bram Stoker and Dracula, Mary Sh.e.l.ley and Frankenstein, Victor Hugo and Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Gaston Leroux chanced upon a vague folk-tale and saw within it the kernel of a truly tragic story. From this he spun his tale. But here the similarities must end.

The other three works became immediate popular successes and remain to this day legends known to every reader, cinema-goer and millions more besides. Around Dracula and Frankenstein entire industries have been built, with scores if not hundreds of reprints and re-creations on film. Leroux, alas, was no Victor Hugo. When his slim little book emerged in 1911 it caused a brief flutter in France and even received newspaper serialization before falling into virtual oblivion. Only a fluke eleven years later, five years before the author's death, brought his story back into prominence and set it on the road to immortality.

That fluke took the form of a very small and genial once-German Jew called Carl Laemmle who had emigrated to America as a boy and by 1922 had become president of Universal Motion Pictures of Hollywood. In that year he took a vacation in Paris. Leroux had by then started to dabble in the smaller French film industry and it was through this connection that the two men met.

In an otherwise desultory conversation the American film mogul mentioned to Leroux how impressed he had been by the vast Paris Opera House, still to this day the biggest in the world. Leroux responded by giving Laemmle a copy of his even-by-then disregarded book of 1911. The president of Universal Pictures read it through in a single night.

It just so happened that Carl Laemmle had both an opportunity and a problem on his mind. The opportunity was his recent discovery of a strange actor called Lon Chaney, a man with a face so mobile that it could a.s.sume almost any shape its owner wished. As a vehicle for Chaney, Universal had committed itself to making the first film of Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris Notre Dame de Paris, then already a cla.s.sic. Chaney would play the deformed and impressively ugly Quasimodo. The set was already under construction in Hollywood, a huge timber and plaster replica of medieval Paris with Notre Dame in the foreground.

Laemmle's problem was what vehicle to offer Chaney next, before he was stolen away by a rival studio. By dawn he thought he had his project. After the hunchback, Chaney would star as the equally disfigured and repulsive but essentially tragic Phantom of the (Paris) Opera. Like all good showmen, Laemmle knew that one way to pack audiences into cinemas was to frighten them out of their socks. The Phantom, he reckoned, ought to do that, and he was right.

He bought the rights, returned to Hollywood and ordered the construction of another set, this time of the Paris Opera House. Because it would have to support a cast of hundreds of extras, the Universal replica of the Opera became the first to be created with steel girders set in concrete. For that reason it was never dismantled, sits on Stage 28 at Universal Studios to this day, and has been reused many times over the years.

Lon Chaney duly starred in (first) The Hunchback of Notre Dame The Hunchback of Notre Dame and then and then The Phantom of the Opera The Phantom of the Opera. Both were great commercial successes and established Chaney as an immortal in that kind of role. But it was the Phantom who so frightened the audiences that women screamed and even fainted, and in a masterly PR coup smelling-salts were available free in the foyer!

It was the film rather than Leroux's overlooked and largely forgotten book that caught the imagination of the wider public and created the birth of the Phantom legend. Two years after its premiere Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer The Jazz Singer, the first talking picture, and the era of silent movies was over.

Since then there have been various representations of the Phantom of the Opera story but in most cases the tale was so altered as to be hardly recognizable and they made little impact. In 1943 Universal did a remake of their twenty-year-old property starring Claude Rains as the Phantom and in 1962 Hammer Films of London, specialists in horror movies, tried again, starring Herbert Lom in the t.i.tle role. A TV version in 1983 with Maximilian Sch.e.l.l succeeded a filmed 'rock' version by Brian de Palma in 1974. Then in 1984 a young British director produced a lively but very camp version of the story at a small theatre in east London - but as a stage musical. Among those who read the reviews and went to see it was Andrew Lloyd Webber. Unbeknown to himself, Monsieur Leroux's old story had just reached another turning-point in its career.

Lloyd Webber was actually working on something else at the time - the 'something else' would turn out to be Aspects of Love. Aspects of Love. But the story of the Phantom stayed in his mind and nine months later in a secondhand bookstore in New York he chanced upon an English translation of the original Leroux work. But the story of the Phantom stayed in his mind and nine months later in a secondhand bookstore in New York he chanced upon an English translation of the original Leroux work.

Like most perceptions of extreme acuteness, Lloyd Webber's judgement looks simple enough in hindsight but was destined to change the world's att.i.tude to this ill-used legend. He saw that it was not basically a horror story at all, nor one based on hatred and cruelty, but a truly tragic tale of obsessive but unrequited love between a desperately disfigured self-exile from the human race and a beautiful young opera singer who eventually prefers to give her love to a handsome aristocratic suitor.

So Andrew Lloyd Webber went back to the original story, pared away the unnecessary illogicalities and cruelties featured by Leroux and extracted the true essence of the tragedy. On this foundation he built what, over the twelve years since the curtain first went up, has proved to be the most popular and successful musical of all time. Over ten million people have now seen Phantom of the Opera Phantom of the Opera on stage, and if there exists a global perception of this story it derives today almost totally from the Lloyd Webber version. on stage, and if there exists a global perception of this story it derives today almost totally from the Lloyd Webber version.

But in order to understand the essential story of what really happened (or is supposed to have happened!) it will be worth spending a few moments examining the original three ingredients out of which the story was born. One of these must be the Paris Opera House itself, a building so amazing even to this day that the Phantom could not have existed in any other theatre in the world. The second element is Leroux himself and the third is that slim little volume he churned out in 1911.

The Paris Opera was conceived, like so many other great enterprises in life, because of a fluke. One evening in January 1858 Napoleon III, Emperor of France, went with his Empress to the opera in Paris, then situated in an old building in a narrow street, the rue le Peletier. Just ten years after a wave of revolution had swept Europe these were still troubled times, and an Italian anti-monarchist called Orsini chose that evening to throw three smoking bombs at the royal carriage. They all went off, causing more than 150 people to be killed or injured. The Emperor and Empress, protected by their heavy carriage, emerged shaken but unhurt and even insisted on attending the opera. But Napoleon III was not amused and decided Paris should have a new opera house with, among other things, a VIP entrance for people like himself, which could be guarded and remain reasonably bomb-proof.

The Prefect of the Seine was the city-planner of genius Baron Haussmann, creator of much of modern Paris, and he organized an open compet.i.tion among all of France's most prominent architects. There were 170 of them who submitted plans, but the contract went to an imaginative and avant-garde rising star, Charles Gamier. His project was going to be truly ma.s.sive and cost a very large fortune.

The site was chosen (where L'Opera stands today) and work began in 1861. Within weeks a major problem occurred. The first diggings revealed an underground stream running right through the area. As fast as they dug, the holes filled with water. In a more cost-conscious age the builders might have moved the project to more suitable ground, but Haussmann wanted his opera house just there and nowhere else. Gamier installed eight giant steam pumps which thumped away day and night for months to dry out the saturated soil. Then he built two enormous caisson walls round the whole site, filling the gap between with bitumen to impede seepage of water back into the work area. On these ma.s.sive foundation walls Gamier built his behemoth.

He was successful up to a point. The water was held at bay until he was finished at that level, but then crept back in to form an underground lake beneath the lowest of the layers of cellars.

A visitor even today can descend to these levels (a special permit is needed) and peer through gratings at the buried lake. Every two years the level is lowered so that engineers in flat-bottomed punts can pole around and inspect the foundations for possible damage.

Storey by storey Garnier's giant rose until he was back at ground level, then went onwards and upwards. In 1870 work came to a halt as yet another revolution swept France, triggered by the short but brutal Franco-Prussian War. Napoleon III was deposed, and died in exile. A new republic was declared but the Prussian army was at the gates of Paris. The French capital starved. The rich ate the elephants and giraffes from the zoo while the poor frica.s.seed dogs, cats and rats. Paris surrendered, and the working cla.s.s of the city was so enraged at what they had gone through that they rose in revolt.

The insurrectionists called their regime the Commune and themselves the Communards, with 100,000 men and cannon spread throughout the city. The civil government had quit in panic and the Civil Guard took over as a military junta, finally crushing the Communards. But during their time in charge the rebels had used the sh.e.l.l of Garnier's building with his labyrinth of cellars and storerooms as a base for weapons, powder ... and prisoners. Terrible tortures and executions took place in those vaults far below ground and buried skeletons were still being discovered many years later. Even today there is a deep chill there that never goes away. It was this underground world and the idea of a lonely disfigured hermit living down there in the darkness that fascinated Gaston Leroux forty years later and fired his imagination.

By 1872 normality had been restored and Garnier got on with his job. In January 1875, almost seventeen years to the day since Orsini had thrown his bombs, the opera house, whose conception his act had triggered, held its gala opening.

It covers almost three acres, or 118,500 square feet. It is seventeen storeys from deepest cellar to pinnacle of roof, but with only ten above ground and an amazing seven storeys underground. Surprisingly, its auditorium is quite small, seating only 2,156 opera-goers as opposed to 3,500 at the Scala in Milan and 3,700 at the New York Met. But backstage it is vast, with ample dressing-rooms for hundreds of performers, workshops, canteens, wardrobe departments and storage areas for complete theatrical backdrops so that entire sets fifty feet high and weighing many tons can be lowered and stored without being dismantled, then raised again to be installed when needed.

The point about the Paris Opera is that it was always designed as more than just a site for the performance of opera. Hence the relative smallness of the auditorium, for much of the non-working s.p.a.ce is taken up with reception halls, salons, sweeping staircases and areas fit to offer a glittering venue to great state occasions. It still has over 2,500 doors which take the resident firemen more than two hours to check before they go home. In Garnier's day it employed a permanent staff of 1,500 (about 1,000 today) and was illuminated by 900 gaslight globes fed by ten miles of copper pipe. It was converted to electricity in stages through the 1880s.

This was the intensely dramatic building that caught Gaston Leroux's vivid imagination when he visited in 1910 and first heard talk that once, years earlier, there had been a phantom living in the building; that things simply went missing; that unexplained accidents had occurred; and that a shadowy figure had occasionally been seen flitting from dark corners and always heading downwards to the catacombs where none dared follow. From these twenty-year-old rumours Leroux created his story.

Old Gaston seems to have been the sort of man with whom one would love to take a drink at some Parisian cafe if only the ninety interceding years could be breached. He was big, jovial, bluff and cheerful: a bon viveur bon viveur and generous host, wildly eccentric with a pair of pince-nez perched on his nose to compensate for poor eyesight. and generous host, wildly eccentric with a pair of pince-nez perched on his nose to compensate for poor eyesight.

He was born in 1868 and though from Normandy he actually arrived in the world during a train-change in Paris when his mother was caught short. He was bright at school and in the manner of clever boys in middle-cla.s.s France was destined to be a lawyer, being sent back to Paris to study law at the age of eighteen. It was a study he had no taste for at all. He was twenty-one when he graduated and the same year his father died, leaving him a million francs, which was a considerable fortune in those days. Hardly had Papa been popped below ground when young Gaston went on the town in quite a big way. Within six months he had got through the lot!

It was journalism, not the law courts, that beckoned, so he got a job as a reporter with Echo de Paris Echo de Paris and later and later Le Matin. Le Matin. He found a love of theatre and did some drama criticism but it was his knowledge of the law that made him a star court reporter and required him to witness a number of executions by guillotine. This made him a lifelong opponent of capital punishment, a most unusual outlook in those days. He showed ingenuity and audacity in obtaining scoop after scoop over the compet.i.tion and secured hard-to-get interviews with celebrities. He found a love of theatre and did some drama criticism but it was his knowledge of the law that made him a star court reporter and required him to witness a number of executions by guillotine. This made him a lifelong opponent of capital punishment, a most unusual outlook in those days. He showed ingenuity and audacity in obtaining scoop after scoop over the compet.i.tion and secured hard-to-get interviews with celebrities. Le Matin Le Matin rewarded him with a commission as a wandering foreign correspondent. rewarded him with a commission as a wandering foreign correspondent.

These were the days when readers had no objection to a foreign correspondent having a pretty vivid imagination and it was not unknown for a journalist far from home, unable to garner the true facts of a story, simply to make it up. There is a glorious example of the American from Hearst Newspapers who arrived by train somewhere in the Balkans to cover a civil war. Unfortunately he overslept on the train and woke up in the next capital down the line, which happened to be rather quiet. Rather perplexed, he recalled he had been sent to cover a civil war so he had better do it. He duly filed a vigorous war report. The next morning this was read by the emba.s.sy in Washington who sent the report back to their masters at home. While the Hearst man slept on, the local government mobilized the militia. The peasants, fearing a pogrom, revolted. A civil war subsequently began. The journalist woke up to a telegram from New York congratulating him on a world scoop. Gaston Leroux took to this ethos like a duck to water.

But travel then was harder and more tiring than now. After ten years covering stories across Europe, Russia, Asia and Africa he had become a celebrity but was exhausted. In 1907, aged thirty-nine, he decided to settle down and write novels. None in fact was more than what we would today call a potboiler, which is probably why virtually nothing he wrote is easily available. Most of his stories were thrillers and for these he invented his own detective; but his creation never became Sherlock Holmes, his personal icon. Still, he made a good living, enjoyed every moment of it, spent his advances as fast as the publishers could produce them and churned out sixty-three books in his twenty years of professional writing. He died aged fifty-nine in 1927, just two years after Carl Laemmle's version of The Phantom of the Opera The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney received its premiere and went on to become a cla.s.sic. starring Lon Chaney received its premiere and went on to become a cla.s.sic.

Looking at his original text today, frankly one is in a quandary. The basic idea is there and it is brilliant, but the way poor Gaston tells it is a mess. He begins with an introduction, above his own name, claiming that every line and word is true. Now that is a very dangerous thing to do. To claim quite clearly that a work of fiction is absolutely true and therefore a historical record is to offer oneself as a hostage to fortune and to the sceptical reader, because from that moment on every single claim made that can be checked must be absolutely true. Leroux breaks this rule on almost every page.

An author can can start a story 'cold', seemingly recounting true history but without saying so, leaving the reader guessing as to whether what he is reading truly happened or not. Thus is created that blend of truth and invention now called 'faction'. A useful ploy in this methodology is to intersperse the fiction with genuinely true interludes that the reader can either recall or check out. Then the puzzlement in the reader's mind deepens but the author remains innocent of an outright lie. But there is a golden rule to this: everything you say must either by provably true or completely unprovable either way. For example, an author might write: start a story 'cold', seemingly recounting true history but without saying so, leaving the reader guessing as to whether what he is reading truly happened or not. Thus is created that blend of truth and invention now called 'faction'. A useful ploy in this methodology is to intersperse the fiction with genuinely true interludes that the reader can either recall or check out. Then the puzzlement in the reader's mind deepens but the author remains innocent of an outright lie. But there is a golden rule to this: everything you say must either by provably true or completely unprovable either way. For example, an author might write: 'At dawn on the morning of 1 September 1939, fifty divisions of Hitler's army invaded Poland. At that same hour a soft-spoken man with perfectly forged papers arrived from Switzerland at Berlin's main station and disappeared into the waking city.'

The first is a historical fact and the second cannot now be either proved or disproved. With a bit of luck the reader will believe both are true and read on. Leroux, however, begins by telling us that what he has in store is nothing but the truth and b.u.t.tresses this with claims of conversations with witnesses of the actual events, perusal of records and newly discovered (by him) diaries never seen before.

But his narration then hares off in all sorts of different directions, down blind alleys and back again, pa.s.sing by a host of unexplained mysteries, unsupported claims and factual howlers until one is seized by the urge to do what Andrew Lloyd Webber did. This is, take a large blue pencil and trim out the rather breathless diversions to haul the story back to what is, after all, an amazing but credible tale.

Having been so critical of Monsieur Leroux, it would be only right and proper to justify one's censures with a few examples. Quite early in his narrative he refers to the Phantom as Erik but without ever explaining how he learned this. The Phantom was hardly in the habit of small talk and was not accustomed to go about introducing himself. As it happens, Leroux was right and we can only surmise he learned this name from Madame Giry, of whom more anon.

Much more bewildering, Leroux tells his entire story without ever giving a date when it happened. For an investigative reporter, which he purports to be, this is a bizarre omission. The nearest clue is a single phrase in his own introduction. Here he says: 'The events do not date more than thirty years back.'

This has led some critics to subtract thirty years from the appearance of his book in 1911 and presume the year to be 1881. But 'not more than' can also mean considerably less than, and there are several small clues that indicate the date of his story was probably much later than 1881 and more likely around 1893. Chief among these clues is the affair of the complete power failure of the lights in both auditorium and stage area which lasted only a few seconds.

According to Leroux, the Phantom, outraged by his rejection by Christine, the girl he loved with an obsessive pa.s.sion, chose to abduct her. For maximum effect, the moment he selected was when she was on centre stage in a performance of Faust Faust. (In the musical Lloyd Webber has changed this to Don Juan Triumphant Don Juan Triumphant, an opera entirely composed by the Phantom himself.) The lights suddenly failed, plunging the theatre into pitch-darkness, and when they went up again, she was gone. Now this cannot be done with 900 gas globes.

True, a mysterious saboteur who knew his way around could pull the master lever shutting off the gas supply to this host of globes. But they would extinguish in sequence as the gas supply ran out and after much spluttering and popping. Worse, as automatic reignition was not known then, they could only be relit by someone going round with a taper. That was what the humble profession of lamplighter was all about. The only way to produce utter darkness at the pull of a switch, and illumination again in another millisecond is to operate the master control of a fully electric lighting system. This puts the date rather later than some would have it.

Leroux appears also to have made an error with the position, appearance and intelligence of Madame Giry, an error corrected in the Lloyd Webber musical. This lady appears in the original book as a half-witted cleaner. She was in fact the mistress of the chorus and the corps de ballet corps de ballet who hid behind the veneer of a starchy martinet (necessary to control a corps of excitable girls) a most courageous and compa.s.sionate nature. who hid behind the veneer of a starchy martinet (necessary to control a corps of excitable girls) a most courageous and compa.s.sionate nature.

One must forgive Leroux for this, for he was relying on human memory, that of his informants, and they were clearly describing another woman. But any policeman or court reporter will happily confirm that witnesses in court, honest and upright people, have some difficulty agreeing with each other and recalling with precision the events they witnessed last month, let alone eighteen years ago.

In a much more glaring error, Leroux describes a moment when the Phantom in another fit of pique causes the entire chandelier above the auditorium to crash down upon the audience, killing a single woman sitting beneath. That this lady turns out to be the woman hired to replace the Phantom's dismissed friend Mme Giry is a lovely storyteller's touch. But he then goes on to say that the chandelier weighed 200,000 kilograms. That happens to be 200 tonnes, enough to bring it and half the ceiling down every night. The chandelier weighs seven tonnes; it did when it went up, it is still there and it still does!

But far and away the most bizarre departure by Leroux from even the most basic rules of investigation and reporting is his end-of-book seduction by a mysterious character known only as 'the Persian'. This strange mountebank is briefly mentioned twice in the first two-thirds of the story, and in a most pa.s.sing manner. Yet after the abduction of the soprano from centre stage Leroux allows this man to take over the whole narrative and tell the entire story through his own eyes for the last third of the book. And what an implausible story it is.

Yet Leroux never attempts to cross-check his allegations. Although the young Vicomte Raoul de Chagny was supposed to have been present at every stage of the events described by the Persian, Leroux claims he could not find the vicomte later to check the story. Of course he could have!

We will never know why the Persian had such a loathing of the Phantom but he produced a character a.s.sa.s.sination of the man that blackened him to the very gates of h.e.l.l. Prior to the intervention of the Persian, Leroux the writer and most readers might have felt some human sympathy for the Phantom. Clearly he was monstrously disfigured in a society that too often equates ugliness with sin, but that was not his fault. He was evidently filled with hatred of society but, rejected and an exile, he must have had a truly appalling life. Until the Persian, we can see Erik as the Beast to the singer Christine's Beauty, but not intrinsically evil.

The Persian, however, paints him as a raging s.a.d.i.s.t; a serial killer and strangler for pleasure; one who delights in designing torture chambers and spying through a peephole on the wretches dying in agony within them; a man who worked for years in the service of the equally s.a.d.i.s.tic Empress of Persia, devising for her ever more revolting torments to inflict on her prisoners.

According to the Persian he and the young aristocrat, descending to the lowest cellars to try to recover the kidnapped Christine, were themselves captured, imprisoned in a torture room, almost fried alive, but then miraculously escaped, fainted and woke up safe and sound. So did Christine. It is a truly farcical story. Yet at the end of the book Leroux admits he harbours a certain sympathy for the Phantom, a sentiment utterly impossible if one believes the Persian. But in every other detail Leroux seems to have swallowed the Persian's farrago of lies hook, line and sinker.

Fortunately there is one flaw in the Persian's story so glaring as to permit us to disbelieve the whole lot. He claimed that Erik had had a long and fulfilling life before coming to dwell in the cellars beneath the opera house. According to the Persian, this grotesquely disfigured man had travelled widely through western, central and eastern Europe, far into Russia and down to the Persian Gulf. He then returned to Paris and became a contractor in the building of the Paris Opera under Gamier. This allegation has to be nonsense.

If the man had enjoyed such a life over so many years he would certainly have come to terms with his own disfigurement. To have been a contractor in the building of the Opera, he would have had to conduct many business meetings, confront commissioning architects, negotiate with subcontractors and workers. Why on earth should he then decide to flee into exile underground because he could not face other members of the human race? Such a man, with his astuteness and intelligence, would have made a tidy packet from his contracting work and then retired in comfort to a walled residence in the countryside to live out his days in self-willed isolation, attended perhaps by a house-servant immune to his ugliness.

The only logical step for a modern a.n.a.lyst to take, as Andrew Lloyd Webber has already done with the musical, is to discount the Persian's accounts and allegations in their totality, and never more so than in disbelieving both the Persian and Leroux that the Phantom died shortly after the events narrated. The sensible path to follow is to return to the basics and to those things we can actually know or presume on the basis of logic. And these are: That some time in the 1880s a desperately disfigured wretch, fleeing from contact with a society he felt loathed and reviled him, ran for sanctuary and took up residence in the labyrinth of cellars and storerooms beneath the Paris Opera. This is not so crazy a notion. Prisoners have survived many years in underground dungeons. But seven storeys spread over three acres is not exactly close confinement. Even the underground sections of the Opera (and when the building was completely vacated he could wander through the upper levels undisturbed) are like a small city, with everything needed to establish a life-support system.

That over the years rumours began to grow and develop among impressionable and gullible staff that too many things went missing, and that a shadowy figure had occasionally been surprised before fleeing into the darkness. Again, not so crazy. Such rumours usually abound in rather spooky buildings.

That in the year 1893 something strange happened which ended the Phantom's kingdom in the darkness. Peering from a closed box at the opera on stage, which he was wont to do, he spotted a lovely young understudy and fell hopelessly in love with her. Being self-taught after listening for years to the finest voices in Europe, he voice-coached the young woman until one night, taking over the role from the leading diva, she set all Paris by its ears through the clarity and purity of her singing. Again, nothing impossible here, for overnight stardom through the revelation of a blazing but hitherto unsuspected talent is the stuff of which show-business legends are made, and there are many.

That the events moved to tragedy because the Phantom hoped that Christine might return his love. But she was courted by, and fell in love with, a handsome young vicomte, Raoul de Chagny. Driven to extremes by rage and jealousy, the Phantom abducted his young soprano from the very stage of the Opera in mid-performance and took her to his sanctuary at the seventh and deepest level of the catacombs by the edge of the buried lake.

And there something pa.s.sed between them, though we know not what. Then the young vicomte, driven beyond fear of the dark and the caves, appeared to rescue her. Given a choice, Christine chose her Adonis. The Phantom had the chance to kill them both but, as the vengeful mob from above with a hundred burning torches to illuminate the darkness began to appear, he spared the lovers and disappeared into the last remaining shadows.

But before he did so she returned to him a single golden ring that he had earlier given her as a token of his love. And he left behind, for his persecutors to find, a mocking memento: a musical box in the form of a monkey that played a tune called 'Masquerade'.

This is the story of the Lloyd Webber musical and it is the only one to make sense. The Phantom, broken and rejected once more, simply vanished and was never heard of again.

Or ... was he?

1.

THE CONFESSION OF ANTOINETTE GIRY.

HOSPICE OF THE SISTERS OF CHARITY OF THE ORDER OF ST-VINCENT-DE-PAUL, PARIS, SEPTEMBER 1906.

THERE IS A CRACK IN THE PLASTER OF THE CEILING far above my head and close to it a spider is creating a web. Strange to think this spider will outlive me, be here when I am gone, a few hours from now. Good luck, little spider, making a web to catch a fly to feed your babies.

How did it come to this? That I, Antoinette Giry, at the age of fifty-eight, am lying on my back in a hospice for the people of Paris, run by the good sisters, waiting to meet my Maker? I do not think I have been a very good person, not good like these sisters who clean up the endless mess, bound by their oath of poverty, chast.i.ty, humility and obedience. I could never have managed that. They have faith, you see. I was never able to have that faith. Is it time I learned it now? Probably. For I shall be gone before the night sky fills that small high window over there at the edge of my vision.

I am here, I suppose, because I simply ran out of money. Well, almost. There is a little bag under my pillow which no-one knows about. But that is for a special purpose. Forty years ago I was a ballerina, so slim and young and beautiful then. So they told me, the young men who came to the stage door. And handsome they were too, those clean, sweet-smelling hard young bodies that could give and take so much pleasure.

And the most beautiful was Lucien. All the chorus called him Lucien le Bel, with a face to make a girl's heart hammer like a tambour. He took me out one sunny Sunday to the Bois de Boulogne and proposed, on one knee as it should be done, and I accepted him. One year later he was killed by the Prussian guns at Sedan. Then I wanted no more of marriage for a long time, nearly five years while I danced at the ballet.

I was twenty-eight when it ended, the dancing career. For one thing I had met Jules and we married and I became heavy with little Meg. More to the point, I was losing my litheness. Senior dancer of the corps corps, fighting every day to stay slim and supple. But the Director was very good to me, a kind man. The Mistress of the Chorus was retiring; he said I had the experience and he did not wish to look outside the Opera for her successor. He appointed me. Maitresse du Corps de Ballet. Maitresse du Corps de Ballet. As soon as Meg was born and put with a wet-nurse I took up my duties. It was 1876, one year after the opening of Garnier's new and magnificent opera house. At last we were out of those cramped shoe-boxes in the rue le Peletier, the war was well over, the damage to my beloved Paris repaired and life was good. As soon as Meg was born and put with a wet-nurse I took up my duties. It was 1876, one year after the opening of Garnier's new and magnificent opera house. At last we were out of those cramped shoe-boxes in the rue le Peletier, the war was well over, the damage to my beloved Paris repaired and life was good.

I did not even mind when Jules met his fat Belgian and ran off to the Ardennes. Good riddance. At least I had a job, which was more than he could ever say. Enough to keep my small apartment, raise Meg and nightly watch my girls delighting every crowned head in Europe. I wonder what happened to Jules? Too late to start enquiring now. And Meg? A ballet dancer and chorus girl like her mama - I could at least do that for her - until the awful fall ten years ago which left the right knee stiff for ever. Even then she was lucky, with a bit of help from me. Dresser and personal maid to the greatest diva in Europe, Christine de Chagny. Well, if you discount that uncouth Australian Melba, which I do. I wonder where Meg is now? Milan, Rome, Madrid perhaps? Where the diva is singing. And to think I once used to shout at the Vicomtesse de Chagny to pay attention and stay in line!

So what am I doing here, waiting for a too-early grave? Well, there was retirement eight years ago, on my fiftieth birthday. They were very nice about it. The usual plat.i.tudes. And a generous bonus for my twenty-two years as Mistress. Enough to live on. Plus a little private coaching for the incredibly clumsy daughters of the rich. Not much but enough, and a little put by. Until last spring.

That was when the pains began, not many at first but sharp and sudden, deep in the lower stomach. They gave me bis.m.u.th for indigestion and charged a small fortune. I did not know then that the steel crab was in me, driving his great claws into me and always growing as he fed. Not until July. Then it was too late. So I lie here, trying not to scream with the pain, waiting for the next spoonful of the white G.o.ddess, the powder that comes from the poppies of the East.

Not long to wait now for the final sleep. I am not even afraid any more. Perhaps He will be merciful? I hope so, but surely He will take away the pain. I try to concentrate on something else. I look back and think of all the girls I trained, and my pretty young Meg with her stiff knee waiting to find her man - I hope she finds a good one. And of course I think of my boys, my two lovely tragic boys. I think of them most of all.

'Madame, Monsieur l'Abbe is here.'

'Thank you, Sister. I cannot see too well. Where is he?'

'I am here, my child, Father Sebastien. By your side. Do you feel my hand on your arm?'

'Yes, Father.'

'You should make your peace with G.o.d, ma fille ma fille. I am ready to take your confession.'

'It is time. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.'

'Tell me, my child. Keep nothing back.'

'There was a time, long ago, in the year 1882, when I did something that changed many lives. I did not know then what would happen. I acted on impulse and for motives I thought to be good. I was thirty-four, the Mistress of the Corps de Ballet at the Paris Opera. I was married but my husband had deserted me and run off with another woman.'

'You must forgive them, my child. Forgiveness is a part of penitence.'

'Oh, I do, Father. Long since. But I had a daughter, Meg, then six years old. There was a fair out at Neuilly and I took her one Sunday. There were calliopes and carousels, steam engines and performing monkeys who collected centimes for the hurdy-gurdy man. Meg had never seen a funfair before. But there was also a show of freaks. A line of tents with notices advertising the world's strongest man, the acrobat dwarves, a man so covered in tattoos that one could not see his skin, a black man with a bone through his nose and pointed teeth, a lady with a beard.

'At the end of the line was a sort of cage on wheels, with bars s.p.a.ced almost a foot apart, and filthy reeking straw on the floor. It was bright in the sun but dark in the cage so I peered in to see what animal it contained. I heard the clank of chains and saw something lying huddled in the straw. Just then a man came up.

'He was big and beefy, with a red, crude face. He carried a tray on a sash round his neck. It contained lumps of horse manure collected from where the ponies were tethered, and pieces of rotten fruit. "Have a go, lady," he said, "see if you can pelt the monster. One centime a throw." Then he turned to the cage and shouted, "Come on, come near the front or you know what you'll get." The chains clanked again, and something more animal than human shuffled into the light, nearer to the bars.

'I could see that it was indeed human, though hardly so. A male in rags, crusted with filth, gnawing on an old piece of apple. Apparently he had to live on what people threw over him. Ordure and faeces clung to his thin body. There were manacles on his wrists and ankles and the steel had bitten into the flesh to leave open wounds where maggots writhed. But it was the face and head that caused Meg to burst into tears.

'The skull and face were hideously deformed, the former displaying only a few tufts of filthy hair. The face was distorted down one side as if struck long ago by a monstrous hammer and the flesh of this visage was raw and shapeless like molten candle wax. The eyes were deep-set in sockets puckered and misshapen. Only half of the mouth and a section of jaw on one side had escaped the deformation and looked like a normal human face.