Gaston Leroux: The Phantom of the Opera

Chapter 25. The Scorpion or the Grasshopper: Which? (continued)

Ah, what was the time?...For, after all, eleven o'clock to-morrow evening might be now, might be this very moment! Who could tell us the time? We seemed to have been imprisoned in that hell for days and days...for years...since the beginning of the world. Perhaps we should be blown up then and there! Ah, a sound! A crack! "Did you hear that?...There, in the corner...good heavens!... Like a sound of machinery!...Again!...Oh, for a light!... Perhaps it's the machinery that is to blow everything up!... I tell you, a cracking sound: are you deaf?"

M. de Chagny and I began to yell like madmen. Fear spurred us on. We rushed up the treads of the staircase, stumbling as we went, anything to escape the dark, to return to the mortal light of the room of mirrors!

We found the trap-door still open, but it was now as dark in the room of mirrors as in the cellar which we had left. We dragged ourselves along the floor of the torture-chamber, the floor that separated us from the powder-magazine. What was the time? We shouted, we called: M. de Chagny to Christine, I to Erik. I reminded him that I had saved his life. But no answer, save that of our despair, of our madness: what was the time? We argued, we tried to calculate the time which we had spent there, but we were incapable of reasoning. If only we could see the face of a watch!... Mine had stopped, but M. de Chagny's was still going... He told me that he had wound it up before dressing for the Opera.... We had not a match upon us....And yet we must know.... M. de Chagny broke the glass of his watch and felt the two hands. ...He questioned the hands of the watch with his finger-tips, going by the position of the ring of the watch....Judging by the space between the hands, he thought it might be just eleven o'clock!

But perhaps it was not the eleven o'clock of which we stood in dread. Perhaps we had still twelve hours before us!

Suddenly, I exclaimed: "Hush!"

I seemed to hear footsteps in the next room. Some one tapped against the wall. Christine Daae's voice said: