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His tainted hands pulled the rusty chains willingly from the built-in compartment in the stone coping. Each tug ripped his flesh apart. The shedding of blood and the insufferable pain of torn tissue felt justified.
Once the cage, still bearing scraps of Christine's dress, had completely emerged he secured the cage into place with a final tug that enabled the holding lock. As steamy tears rolled down his neck he retrieved a set of keys from his pocket and opened the door of the algae painted prison. The moment weight was detected the cage would drop. He looked over his shoulder at his once everything. She was his once student, his once friend, his eventual companion, then lover, soulmate, and future bride. She was his nothing now. Just a hollow shell of what used to be.
They would find her soon. It would be a tragedy of the grandest proportion. And they would find him too wasting away in the waters of peril where he belonged. Sinking, sleeping, dead. What an ironic fate to be born into the dark waters of the womb of whom never loved him and dying in the arms of the body of water he was sentenced to the day his mother abandoned him in the dismal sanctuary of loneliness.
He readied himself; he took a few seconds to reflect on all of the memories flashing in his mind. The visions came quickly. They were snippets of the nights he would sing to her until she fell asleep. The first time she looked at him longingly. The smell of her alabaster skin gliding against his own. The tears flowing down as she accepted his proposal. And the last way he would remember her: terrified of him and then quiet with no expression at all.
He hated himself what a stupid, stupid, man he was. And so it was time. With one backward glance and a deep breath he forwarded. His foot hung in the air as a tightrope walker calculating the next move. He made the first step and then. He heard it. A sound, so earth-shatteringly pivotal that his bones charged with static as he lurched backward. The cage released upon pressure and he fell hard on his back against the slippery stone. He only cared to take one tiny second to acknowledge his pain before scrambling over to Christine who was coughing up water and blood.
"Christine! My God, you're alive! You're alive!" Erik took her petite body into his arms and helped her rid her lungs of leftover fluid. She threw up a couple of times before being able to inhale normally. Her eyes were looking everywhere before they landed on his face.
Where was she, she thought. And how did she get here? In the cellars beneath the Opera? Erik's haunted expression told her something horrible must have happened to her and her freezing wet underwear added to the strange equation.
"Eh-" she coughed loudly before managing, "Erik?"
"Christine! You're alive! I didn't kill you, thank God in heaven, you're alive!"
"Kill me? What happened? Why are we down here?"
Erik jumped as he heard thundering voices shouting from many levels above them.
