The Phantom’s Epilogue

Editor’s Preface

In April 1920, it was reported that a reclusive tenant of Apartment 1203 at the Chatsworth Apartments in Manhattan, New York, had died in his bed. “The Chatsworth,” as it came to be known, was one of the most exclusive places to call home, with leases running up to $5,000 per year—an astronomical amount for the time. The notable Irving Berlin leased the apartment next door, No. 1205, the only other residence on that floor. The twelfth-floor corridor was secured by a heavy iron door, beyond which lay only the two apartments and the sun parlor, accessible by key alone.

Built in 1902 by architect John Scharsmith, the Chatsworth cost $1.1 million (roughly $18 million today) to construct. The sixty-six apartment building took two years to complete and became renowned for its splendor and modern conveniences, boasting a conservatory, billiard room, and even its own power and refrigeration plant.

The deceased occupant was known to the staff only as Mr. Garnier. The apartment manager had him listed as Eric Garnier and reported no issues with his tenancy. His caretakers, George and Mary Carpenter, told a different story. They refused to enter the apartment after his passing, claiming it was haunted. Mary explained that the bedchamber was dark and foreboding. The heavy black curtains were always drawn. Garnier demanded she not touch anything in his chamber, except to wash him, change his bandages, as well as his sheets, while he was still in the bed. In stark contrast to the rest of the apartment, dust was everywhere in the room – on his bureau, desk, bookshelves, and even his prized phonograph records.

They swore that the grand piano played itself on certain nights—“beautiful but dark compositions with no one at the keys.” George also reported hearing a woman’s sobbing drifting through the vents of the expansive rooms.

After the body was removed, a sealed envelope of the finest quality was found in a locked drawer of the deceased. The envelope bore a red wax seal stamped with the image of a mask. Inside was the following manuscript, written in a hand that was uneven and trembling, yet deliberate with bold strokes. The title page contained no name, only the words: To be opened upon my death.

The text is presented here as faithfully as possible. No attempt has been made to add verbiage or soften its tone. Whether it constitutes confession or hallucination is left to the judgment of the reader.

This transcription was prepared in June 2025.

The Testament of Erik Garnier

I am dying—this time, I believe, for real. The pain in my joints gnaws at me like the rats in the walls. My belly twists itself into knots, refusing food or drink, though I force down my gin elixir, if only to dull the hours. My flesh sags, my hands tremble, and each cough feels like the tearing of the heavy curtains in my bedchamber. The body collapses long before the mind, and I fear these ailments are my punishment for the life I have led – a karma, if you will.

My caretakers, George and Mary Carpenter, husband and wife, reside in the apartment two floors below, courtesy of my benevolence. I have not seen the two scoundrels in three days. Once they answered my every call and I paid them handsomely; now, they seem to have withdrawn, as though my death already whispers through the walls. They will pay for that indiscretion by being cast out of their fine apartment, and hopefully, onto the street.

Thus, I take pen to paper, to leave a record of what I have been and what I have done. This testament I will seal in an envelope, with instructions to be opened only upon my death.

My name is Erik Leroux, though here in the city of New York, I have lived under the alias Erik Garnier. If that name stirs some dim recollection, perhaps you have heard the stories whispered in hushed tones—the legends that cast me as the Phantom of the Opera, during my exile beneath the Palais Garnier in Paris.

Like a fool, or perhaps a man possessed, I came here to New York in pursuit of the lovely Christine Daaé, the only light ever to pierce the crevices of my decrepit soul. I have never forgotten the first time I saw Christine singing on stage at the Palais Garnier, as I watched from high up in the shadows. It was a minor part, but it stood out to me like a beacon from above, as if Almighty God Himself had bestowed her upon me to mock my deformities.

Christine seemed to glow, like a seraph, a single flame amongst the dim throng of actors and vocalists. It was not merely her youthful beauty – though her face was radiant enough to stop traffic – but her voice, my God, that voice. It struck me like an organ chord reverberating through the catacombs, rattling the very marrow in my bones. I drowned in it willingly, gasping for air and finding only her song. In that instant, I knew she had to be mine by destiny, as surely as she had been sent to me to complete my genius.

Tragically, she believed me dead in 1910 and fled with that imbecile, Raoul de Chagny. But from the ramblings of that old busybody Madame Valérius, pried loose with certain… persuasions, I learned their destination.

By the time I arrived in this vast city, it was too late. My beloved Christine had perished, taken by complications in childbirth of a daughter. After weeks of scouring nearly every graveyard in the city, I at last found her meager plot, a pitiful patch of earth capped with a cheap, listing headstone. My rage was boundless. Was this all that dastardly Chagny thought her worth? I had her exhumed under cover of night and placed within a private mausoleum at Trinity Church Cemetery, marble and iron befitting her vivacity. There I go when the loneliness crushes me. I lay roses at her crypt and draw my bow across the strings of my violin, the notes quivering in the stone vault like prayers unanswered.

Alas, Christine’s child did not live long either, taken by the Great Influenza of 1918 while lodged at the Franklin Orphanage, where Chagny had selfishly stashed her. I had been sending funds in secret for her education and to make sure she had enough to eat. Having no heirs, I have resolved to leave my fortune to that institution, that other forsaken children might know some comfort.

For an enormous fee, I had the child, named Annie, placed in the unmarked sepulcher beside her mother. The previous inhabitant of that vault now resides in the burial plot originally containing the remains of Christine, along with the body of the fiend who made the deal with me to shuffle the bodies. It will die forever upon my demise.

I remained in Manhattan after Christine’s death, settling in the spacious Chatsworth, not far from the Metropolitan Opera House. From my private box, I attended every performance the Met offered—Mona, Cyrano, Madeleine, Madame Sans-Gêne, Goyescas, The Canterbury Pilgrims, Shanewis, Il Trittico, The Legend, The Temple Dancer. These performances were somewhat enjoyable, but they paled beside what I had planned for Christine, had only we been allowed to finish.

Of all the performances at the Met, there was one that transfixed me above all: Walter Damrosch’s Cyrano. Each night, I leaned forward from my private box as the renowned soloist Frances Alda sang that haunting aria, “You Have Made Me Love.”  Her maturity did not alter that voice. Chandeliers glowed, the balconies glittered with jewels, and the audience wept openly. Yet I sat in darkness, invisible, but enthralled, so much so that at times my hands gripped the velvet rail. For those few moments, it seemed Christine breathed again through Alda’s voice. I returned each week, delivered by carriage to the discreet side entrance arranged by George, to live and die anew with every note.

Yes, nearly all of the stories attributed to me at the Palais Garnier are true. I learned construction from my father in Normandy, fled to Paris, and earned my living with the circus before being awarded the contract to repair the Opera. There I discovered both music and Christine.

For the record, I was the true author of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra in 1910 – not that thief, Gaston Leroux, who pilfered my tale. It was only a stroke of luck on his part that he did not meet his maker at my hands. After my failed and highly publicized attempt, I fled here to America.

Also, for the record, I did not set the rooftop fire that caused the chandelier to fall, which Leroux wrote into the story, blaming me. That was the act of stagehand Joseph Buquet. I hung him for it.

Christine… she called me her Angel of Music, for I trained her voice, and it was I who played violin by her father’s grave. But when she saw me without the mask, she recoiled in horror. Later, she pitied me. Pity is the cruelest form of love, is it not?

I demanded that the stage managers cast her as Marguerite in Faust and leave Box Five empty. The managers ignored my demands, instead casting the contemptible Carlotta, who had not a clue how to sing. Carlotta’s tragic and well-deserved fate was by my hand. Christine was then appointed to the role of Marguerite, which she masterfully fulfilled.  

But in the end, Christine betrayed her promise to me and wed Raoul. My rage consumed me, and I savagely unleashed it upon others, strangers in the streets of New York, their deaths dismissed as Mafioso quarrels and forgotten by the constabulary.

Some of those killings remain etched in my memory; others fade into mist. But Raoul’s death I recall with perfect clarity. His eyes widened in horror the instant he knew me. He stammered pitiful excuses for Christine’s fate, words spilling like spittle: “I did what was best…she was ill…you must understand—” I silenced him with my weapon. The dagger slid between his ribs as easily as a bow across strings, as I watched his eyes. He gasped once, whispering my name as I wrenched the blade free, and he crumpled to the pavement. George and I consigned his carcass to Dead Horse Bay, where the tide must still gnaw his bones to splinters.

There is one more truth I must confess, not from pride but from duty: the fate of Miss Dorothy Arnold, the society girl who vanished in December 1910.

It was a bitter December afternoon. Snow was heavy and fell in thick clumps, muffling the city’s roar, while carriage wheels hissed over the slush. Walking, I paused before a bookshop window on Fifth Avenue, and it was there that Miss Dorothy Arnold turned away from her companion and walked straight into where I had been standing. Our collision knocked my hat to the ground, my mask with it. For one instant, my countenance was laid bare. To my horror, she laughed. Not the nervous titter of a startled girl, but a cruel, ringing laugh, echoed by her smirking companion. Their laughter seared me more deeply than fire. My shame became fury.

A few blocks later, I seized upon my chance. With my hand over her mouth, I dragged her into a narrow alley, down into the shadows from which she would never emerge. George and I loaded her lifeless body into the carriage. Later, after dark, we brought her carcass up to my apartment, where she would disappear forever.

It was only later that I learned she was heiress to a cosmetics fortune. The newspapers shrieked daily about her disappearance, but the explanation was simple: Miss Arnold lies sealed within the very walls of my apartment. During renovations of my library, her dismembered remains were hidden behind fresh plaster and oak shelves containing hundreds of volumes of literature. There she rests still, bonnet and all, entombed within my shame.

Writing this has drained me, I fear, as my hand trembles. I must lay down my pen. If strength returns, I will endeavor to write again before the end.

An hour has passed. The light fails. My hand shakes. I can scarcely hold the pen anymore.

Christine… I hear her voice in the corridor, faint as the tolling of a bell across the Hudson, muffled by foghorns and the rattle of trolley cars below. A violin note threads through the air, though no bow draws it. The walls shudder. Miss Arnold stirs behind the plaster, her bonnet rustling like dry leaves. Raoul gurgles from the bay, his voice bloated and salt-soaked. And Christine calls me still—Angel of Music… Angel…

The chandeliers move, unseen as to why. Death climbs the stair with patient tread. Soon, he will be at my door.

If these words are my last, let them stand. I was a man who loved beyond all reason, and for that love, the world called me a monster.

“Christine…”

Editor’s Afterword

June 2025

The pen trailed into an indecipherable line, ink pooling where his hand fell silent. No further entries were recovered.

Police attempted to investigate Garnier’s claims regarding Miss Arnold’s body hidden within the walls, but found little—only a few scraps of a woman’s hat, chewed to ribbons by mice, and a ring the Arnold family could not positively identify. They were equally stymied at Dead Horse Bay, finding no trace of Raoul. As for the other murders Garnier confessed to, investigators preferred to attribute them to Mafia quarrels and leave the matter closed.

A year later, the Franklin Orphanage mysteriously received a vast sum of money, mailed from Paris with no return address. The funds built a new wing for abandoned children.

Whether Garnier’s testament was confession, delusion, or one last performance, it remains the only surviving document of the man some believed was the Phantom of the Opera.