Phantom Read Online Free PDF

and fear circled around me like carrion crows, spinning me wildly from one peak of emotion to another, until I hardly knew myself anymore when I looked into the solitary mirror that adorned my bedroom. I was thin and haggard, with a strange wild-eyed look, and though the contours of my beauty remained, I looked ten, fifteen years older than my twenty-three summers. It was as though all the harshness and cruelty which I was driven to show him etched itself, line by line, upon my face, a grim testimony to the endless circle of violence which characterized our life together.
    It was during that year that he began to explore the mysterious power of his voice. Sometimes, almost without my noticing, he would begin to sing softly, and the hypnotic sweetness would lure me from my tasks and draw me toward him, as though by an unseen chain. It was a game he played, and I came to fear it more than any other manifestation of his curious genius. I put away the operatic scores which we had studied together and refused to teach him anymore, for I had begun to be afraid of the manner in which his voice was manipulating me. It seemed evil somehow, almost… incestuous.
    Father Mansart now came regularly to celebrate Mass in my drawing room and spare me the ordeal of appearing every Sunday in church. And that first time he heard the child sing, I saw his eyes fill with tears.
    "If it were not blasphemy to think such a thing," he muttered slowly, "I would have said I had heard the voice of God here in this very room."
    In the tense, resonating silence that descended, I felt my own heartbeat thundering in my throat. I saw the eyes behind the mask meet mine and their glance was triumphant, somehow masterful. He had heard, and worse, he had understood. I dared not think what he might begin to fashion from that knowledge.
    I shivered as Father Mansart beckoned him forward and told him solemnly that he possessed a rare and wonderful gift. I wanted to scream, but I was silent. I knew the damage was already done.
    They walked together to the piano, the priest's hand resting on the child's bony shoulder.
    "I should like to hear you sing the Kyrie, Erik. You know the text, I believe."
    "Yes, Father."
    How meek he sounded, how innocent and vulnerable he looked, standing beside the heavily built priest. For a moment I doubted my own senses; I wondered if I was feeding on brain-sick fancies brewed by this penal solitude.
    Why had I come to fear the extraordinary bell-like purity of his childish treble?
    "Kyrie eleison… Christe eleison."
    Lord have mercy upon us… Christ have mercy upon us.
    Three times he sang the invocations to heaven, and with each phrase my will receded before a wave of aching longing that made me long to reach out and touch. Whatever spiritual ecstasy Father Mansart derived from those throbbing notes, my response was utterly and unequivocally physical.
    The words were for God; but the voice, the exquisite, irresistible voice, was for me and it pulled like a magnet somewhere deep and unseen inside my body.
    Before the next phrase took breath, I had slammed the lid down on the piano with a violence that narrowly missed trapping the priest's fingers. The sudden appalled silence was broken only by my hysterical sobbing. Father Mansart looked at me in amazement, but in Erik's eyes I saw fear and great misery.
    "You are overwrought," said the priest briskly, as he pressed me into a chair. "It is understandable. Great beauty is often perceived by human senses as pain."
    I shuddered. "He is not to sing again, Father… I will not permit it."
    "My dear child, I can't think that you mean that. Forbidding expression to such a gift would be positively unkind."
    I sat upright in the chair, staring beyond the priest to the child who now wept silently beside the piano.
    "His voice is a sin," I said grimly. "A mortal sin. No woman who hears it will ever die in a state of grace."
    As Father Mansart recoiled from me in horror, one hand strayed