And Erik had then uttered a phrase which Christine did not quite
understand: "Yes or no! If your answer is no, everybody will be dead AND BURIED!"
But I understood the sentence perfectly, for it corresponded in a
terrible manner with my own dreadful thought.
"Can you tell us where Erik is?" I asked.
She replied that he must have left the house.
"Could you make sure?"
"No. I am fastened. I can not stir a limb."
When we heard this, M. de Chagny and I gave a yell of fury. Our
safety, the safety of all three of us, depended on the girl's liberty
of movement.
"But where are you?" asked Christine. "There are only two doors in my
room, the Louis-Philippe room of which I told you, Raoul; a door
through which Erik comes and goes, and another which he has never
opened before me and which he has forbidden me ever to go through,
because he says it is the most dangerous of the doors, the door of the
torture-chamber!"
"Christine, that is where we are!"
"You are in the torture-chamber?"
"Yes, but we can not see the door."
"Oh, if I could only drag myself so far! I would knock at the door and
that would tell you where it is."
"Is it a door with a lock to it?" I asked.
"Yes, with a lock."
"Mademoiselle," I said, "it is absolutely necessary, that you should
open that door to us!"
"But how?" asked the poor girl tearfully.
We heard her straining, trying to free herself from the bonds that held
her.
"I know where the key is," she said, in a voice that seemed exhausted
by the effort she had made. "But I am fastened so tight ... Oh, the
wretch!"
And she gave a sob.
"Where is the key?" I asked, signing to M. de Chagny not to speak and
to leave the business to me, for we had not a moment to lose.
"In the next room, near the organ, with another little bronze key,
which he also forbade me to touch. They are both in a little leather
bag which he calls the bag of life and death... Raoul! Raoul! Fly!
Everything is mysterious and terrible here, and Erik will soon have
gone quite mad, and you are in the torture-chamber! ... Go back by the
way you came. There must be a reason why the room is called by that
name!"