The Phantom of Manhattan Read Free Page B

through a peephole on the wretches dying in agony within them; a man who worked for years in the service of the equally sadistic 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 analyst 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