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While the mob destroyed the ghost's lair, Meg hurried home to the flat she shared with her mother in the Rue St. Just, still dressed in the boy's clothes she had borrowed in haste from the wardrobe mistress's copious stores. With her hair tucked hastily under her cap and the brim pulled low over her eyes, she looked like an errand boy, and would not be accosted.
The porcelain mask burned beneath her jacket. She quickened her steps, and tried not to think of the chaos she had left behind in the opera house. She had to get home before her mother did. That was the chief thought in her mind, that she had to get home before Mother. If he was there—
Meg had no memory of her father. Jules Giry had died when his only child was barely a year old. Her mother, a former dancer herself, had chosen to return to the Opera Populaire to work rather than to remarry, and as far as Meg knew, there had never been any offers. Who would wish to have her mother, stern and authoritative in the black stuff dress that she had put on the day of Father's death and never left off, when the girls of the chorus flocked around her like so many bright songbirds around a beady-eyed raven? There was no lover in Marguerite Giry's life, of that, Meg was certain.
But there was a man. The strange ugly man from her earliest dreams and memories whose name she had never known, but assumed he was a relation, because Mother insisted that Meg call him 'Uncle.' When Meg had been very young, he had lived with them, and tended to her while her mother was at work. She remembered how he had never taken her outside to play, not even on the nicest of days. Instead, her uncle had played marvelous games, told incredible stories, coaxed music from their battered little piano, and watched as Meg took her first clumsy dance steps.
As Meg burst through the front door of her building and bolted up the stairs, she tried to remember when her uncle had left, and couldn't. He had stopped living with them at some point after Meg had begun going to school, but there were other memories... Of waking in the middle of the night to a light under her bedroom door, and pressing her ear to the keyhole to hear her mother and uncle talking late into the night, though of what, she could never make out. She remembered how agitated her mother had sounded at whatever Uncle was saying.
Knowing what she knew now, Meg was no longer surprised.
She came to the door of the flat and stopped with her hand on the brass knob. The key was in her other hand, but a gentle test of the knob told her it would not be needed. She took a moment to catch her breath, then slipped the key back into her pocket and gingerly eased the door open, keeping one hand raised to the level of her eyes.
It was dark in the flat, and the air was utterly still. For one brief second, she thought she had been mistaken, that perhaps she or Mother had simply forgotten to lock the door that morning. Then, the barest rustle of fabric.
"Close the door, Meg," said a man's voice softly, familiar in its quiet sadness. "Please," he added, when she had not moved, and with a hint of urgency. "You've never been afraid to be alone with me before. You needn't be now."
I've never needed to be afraid before now, she thought, eyes focused on the darkest of the parlour's shadowy corners, where she was sure he was standing. One hand slipped into her jacket as she took a step forward, leaving the door ajar.
A second later, the door thudded shut behind her, plunging the room into darkness, and she realized her mistake: 'Uncle' could throw his voice. "It's you," she whispered, cold fingers of fear skittering across her skin like spiders. "The Phantom of the Opera."
He let out a low moan, and to Meg's surprise, he turned on the lights. The gas jets yawned slowly to life, bringing his figure into view: a disheveled, disfigured, exhausted man. "When did you realize? That the ghost and I were one and the same?"
"Only tonight," Meg admitted, feeling like a little fool. "When you were onstage and Christine..." A grimace flashed across his gnarled face. "I ought to have discovered it sooner, but Mother—"
She stopped short, and the Phantom nodded. "Yes," he sighed, sinking into a brown velvet chair. "Madame Giry did all she could to keep your thoughts focused on your dancing, and not upon the Opera Ghost. She thought it was safer."
Meg felt a curious tight feeling in her chest. "Then she knew it was you. All this time..."
He chuckled wearily, and ran a hand over his sparse graying hair, trying to smooth it into a semblance of respectability. "That I was the Opera Ghost? Eventually. Not at first, of course, but... well, she figured it out." He pressed a hand to the uneven side of his face. "She's always been a one for figuring." He was still chuckling as Meg came closer, but it sounded odd and forced, and as she knelt down beside the chair, she realized why: he was weeping. Great tears oozed between his fingers and dripped down his torn shirtfront.
"Here," said Meg, belatedly fumbling inside her boy's jacket for the mask. "I found this when the mob came. I saved it for you."
The Phantom's tear-filled eyes looked at her with pitiful gratitude, but though he took the mask, he made no attempt to put it on. Meg thought she understood... After all, he had never worn it around her when she was a child... She crouched there for a long time, listening to the Opera Ghost cry and unsure of what else she should do. She supposed she ought to call the police. He had murdered two people in full view of the entire theatre, and she didn't know what had happened to Christine and the Vicomte...
"Who are you?" she asked instead, some time later, when he seemed to have run out of tears to shed. "I only know you as my uncle..."
He let out a humorless little huff of a laugh. "Your uncle... I only wish I was so, in truth. Were I some brother of your parents, or even a cousin, I would have fared far better in my life... No, Meg. Your mother... found me. Never mind where. But... she saved my life."
"If that is so," the girl said sternly to the ghost, "you have done a fine job of repaying her." It suddenly struck her how long she had been at the flat, how late it was, and that her mother was not yet home. "The managers believe she's your accomplice–if anything has happened to my mother because of you—"
But the Phantom was clasping her hands gently, patting them, a comforting gesture that he seemed to not know how to do correctly, and Meg remembered all the times when, as a little girl, she had run to him to be picked up or cuddled, and he hadn't known how. "It's all right," he promised vaguely. "All she did was pass the messages for me. She knows nothing."
"She knows about you . She could be arrested, Uncle–Uncle–Uncle what? My god, I don't even know your name!"
"Neither does she," said the Phantom, very softly. "Try not to worry."
Meg rose slowly, withdrawing her hands from his grasp. "You killed a man tonight," she choked out. "You killed Piangi. And before that, Joseph Buquet."
"...Yes."
" Why ? Why them ?"
He looked down at his hands, now empty. "I don't know," he said, in a pathetically small voice. There was a ring on his right ring finger, Meg saw. A wedding band? "In the moment, it felt necessary, but now..." A shudder passed through him, and then he buried his face in his hands as his body was wracked with sobs. "Oh, Christine..."
Meg stared at him in bewilderment, her confusion warring with her indignation, both of them rising with each passing second. Her fear was mounting as well, but it was fear for her mother, not for this shell of the Opera Ghost. "If I leave to look for my mother," she asked, "what will you do?"
"Nothing," he choked out.
"You must have some plan! You came here!"
"Meg, you don't understand: I have nowhere else to go."
The night's events jumbled together in her mind with her memories of her childhood, and those late-night visits to her mother that she wasn't meant to know about. Perhaps, like Christine, the Phantom had some hold over her mother, something that he had used against her—perhaps he had threatened her somehow, and now he was expecting something in return for his silence. "I can't stay here," she told him, "and you mustn't be found here. Mother keeps some money in the coffee tin. I will get it for you, and then you must go, Monsieur."
His tears ceased abruptly. "You've never called me that before," said the Phantom. He sounded almost afraid. "Am I no longer to be your uncle?"
Meg opened her mouth to shout at him that he was never her uncle, never her friend, never the man she had believed him to be—but she never got the chance. At that moment, she heard three light taps at the front door, and then the key was in the lock.
"Marguerite," the Phantom sighed. "Thank Christ."
"You should instead thank M. Martin, the stable master," said Madame Giry dryly. "It was he who got me away from the Opera Populaire." She gave her daughter a practiced, all-encompassing glance. "Are you alright, Meg?"
"Yes, Mother, but—"
"Now is not the time for questions, my dear." Madame Giry touched her daughter's face lightly and then hurried away, towards her own bedroom. In seconds she was back. "Go in," she told the Phantom. "Go and make ready."
Meg watched him disappear into her mother's bedroom and close the door. "Mother, please, you must tell me. Who is he? What hold does this man have over you?"
Madame Giry sighed. "Meg, my darling, you do not understand. I am not Christine. Ours is a very different bond."
"He told me that you saved his life."
"And so I did, long ago... I helped him escape from a traveling fair that was holding him in a cage like a performing bear. I hid him, gave him a place to live until he could get back on his feet, which he did, in time—though I little suspected how, at first. And he saved my life in return, yours and mine." With a rueful smile, her mother gestured at the flat around them, at the fine fixtures and comfortable furniture. "A ballet mistress's salary is not so much that I could have afforded all this, frugal as I am, without some help. He owed me, you see," she continued, "and I owed him. And though some debts have been repaid... others are lifelong."
"But... Christine? You knew, you helped him—"
"I knew he was teaching her, yes. And I knew he had fallen in love with her. And... I had hoped he would come to his senses. I wanted him to reveal himself to her, and court her honorably. He promised me he would." The stern ballet mistress pinched the bridge of her nose in exasperation. "He has always had his own way of doing things."
"Like kidnapping? And murder?"
Madame Giry closed her eyes in pain. "He is a murderer, yes. But he is also my friend. And whatever punishment God has in store for him will be less awful and more just than what the mob would have meted out."
"But what has become of Christine and the Vi—"
The man her mother had stolen away reappeared, a black cloak draped over his arm. His clothing had been refreshed and his wig restored, and he was carrying a dark carpet bag that Meg had glimpsed once or twice before, shoved into the very back of her mother's wardrobe. "Christine and her vicomte are safe and well," he told Meg. She held out the mask again, and this time, he put it on. A change seemed to come over him, once his face was covered. The visible corner of his mouth twitched into an odd little smile. "I... came to my senses."
Madame Giry hurried to the long window at the end of the flat, where the fire escape was. "The coach is waiting below," she told him. "There is money in the lining of the carpetbag--"
"I know, I found it already." The Phantom put on a soft black felt hat and swirled the cloak about his shoulders. "Marguerite. Thank you."
Her mouth tightened, and she waved off his gratitude impatiently. "Find some way to tell me when you are safe," she ordered. "That is all the thanks I desire. And now that you've come to them, see that you keep your senses."
"Yes, madame." He looked at Meg and made her a little bow, and she wondered how this dashing gentleman could have been the sobbing wretch she had found in her parlour only a few hours before. This was the Opera Ghost. The other...
"Goodbye, uncle," she said softly.
His dark eyes shone at her for a moment, as confused and wounded as she felt, but warm and wistful, too. Together, she and her mother watched him slip through the casement and slither down the iron railings to the carriage below.
"Come, my dear," said Madame Giry, latching the window securely. "I think we could both do with some wine."