Free Phantom by Susan Kay

terrifying.
    "His name is Etienne," I found myself saying breathlessly. "Etienne Barye… he is a doctor. Now, let me pass, Erik. I will not be questioned in this tiresome and impertinent manner. I…"
    My voice wavered to a halt as he continued to stare at me coldly.
    "He is a friend," I stammered. "You must understand,
    Erik, that I have a perfect right to have friends like anyone else in the village."
    He made a movement toward me and instinctively I took a defensive step back.
    "I do not wish this friendship to continue," he told me inexorably.
    The eyes behind the mask were like gimlets; I had never seen him look at me like this before. I retreated down the hall until I felt my back against the front door, but still he advanced toward me with curious, unchildlike menace. I struck out at him, in sudden fear, but after that first hesitant blow, rage overwhelmed my apprehension at his unspoken threat.
    "You!" I screamed. "You do not wish? How dare you speak to me like this! You ruined my life the day you were born—ruined it…
ruined
it! I hate you, I hate the very sight and sound of you… your devil's face and your angel's voice! There are plenty of angels in hell, did you know that? I wish to God you were there with them, where you belong. I wish you were dead, do you hear me? I wish you were dead!"
    He seemed to shrink, almost to shrivel, in front of my eyes. Whatever he might have been a few seconds before, he was only a child now, recoiling in disbelief from a punishment beyond his worst imagination. It was as though all the ugly emotion that had been festering between us since his birth had erupted into a single, massive boil and finally burst, drowning us both in its poison. And I knew, as I looked at his crushed misery, that he would carry those words with him to his grave. Nothing I could say or do would ever wash their corrosive stain from his mind.
    As I hovered beside him, unable to express my grief and remorse, he suddenly took his hands away from the mask and stared at me with a wretchedness that was utterly beyond tears.
    "I hate you too," he said with slow, pained surprise, as though it was something that had only now been revealed to him. "I hate you too."
    And turning away from me, he groped his way slowly up the stairs like a blind child.
     
    Erik did not speak of "the man" again. From that time he displayed complete indifference to my increasing absences, not even bothering to look up when I returned to the house. He wrapped around himself a cloak of impenetrable silence and spent most of his time working alone in his room, with only Sasha for company.
    The dog was growing old and obese, entering that period of rapid decline which besets so many canines around their tenth year. Erik carried her patiently up and down the steep stairs that were now beyond her, bathed her rheumy eyes, and sometimes sat for an hour at a time feeding her by hand. But I was not convinced he understood that the inevitable moment of parting might be close at hand. And since it was not a thing I could comfortably discuss with him, I asked Father Mansart to raise the subject instead.
    Their quiet voices were only just audible to me in the next room, where 1 sat sewing. Yes, said Erik calmly, he knew that Sasha was old and would not live forever, might not perhaps live beyond the next year or so. But he understood that God would take her to live in heaven and they would not be separated forever.
    I felt, rather than heard, the priest's quick intake of breath, the breath he had taken to correct his pupil's childish but unacceptable error in doctrine. He asked Erik to understand that, though God had compassion for all His creatures, it was to man alone that He had granted an afterlife. Animals, said Father Mansart solemnly, have no souls…
    There was a heartbeat of silence and then, without warning, a scream of indescribable grief and rage, which seemed to rip my head apart. I rushed into the drawing room in time to see Erik