Phantom Of the Opera fanfiction (part 1)

NOTE TO READER:
This fan-fiction is written based ONLY on the recently released movie, ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera’.
Although I have read parts of the actual book written by Gaston Leroux, I did not find within it the bases of composing this pet-fiction of mine.
It was inspired completely by the movie, so if you have read the book, put it out of your head as you read this because it will only act to impede the idea of this story.



The following was all that could was extracted from a surviving copy of a letter sent by Meg Giry’s to an anonymous addressee.

Dear *********,

(The introduction suffered corruption of antiquity and could not be deciphered.)

Now this is my story, the story which has never been told.
I had never desired to write it before; I am a dancer, an actress, an adventuress, not a writer.
But when the account of the affair that was published reached me, I felt I could not in good conscience let such fictions be believed. At least not by you, no, not you my dearest friend.

So here I write to you of what really happened that night.
The night that the beautiful Christine made her difficult choice, the night the Phantom, her zealous lover gave her up to the one who she loved best, and the day that the Opera Populaire was ruined.
Many lives were altered then, some people disappeared, some lost their lives, and some dissolved into mystery.
Although my mother had me listed as vanished and possibly dead, I believe me writing this to you is proof enough that I am quite well and alive.
Though I suppose you could say I had vanished, but not against my will or by accident.

Here is my tale of what had happened to me that night, as faithfully as remembered:

When I held the snow white mask in my hands, bathed in that pale light of the dungeons, I knew that there was only one thing that I could do.
I would follow the urges of my most secret desires and darkest hopes.
When I glimpsed the mirrors, and recalled all that I had gleaned from my mother’s vague remarks about the Phantom’s extensive tunnels, I leapt for the only curtained mirror before the throng of my fellows reached my part the dungeons.
Thrusting the curtain aside I realized I had just made it in time for already unseen wheels were grinding and the stones threatening to close up the aperture as if it had never been.
Slipping through, a single torch in one hand, and the mask in the other, I raced down the narrow winding corridor.
Silently I thanked luck that the costume I wore was equipped with boots instead of slippers because I could feel the moisture in the air and beneath my feet.
Suddenly, the shadows on the walls danced and I came upon a figure that too moved hastily through the tunnels, but in an almost half aspirated way, so distraught that he seemed near ready to swoon.
Yet when I came upon him, he became alert, if only for a flicker of my torch light, and cried out in anguished tones, “You!? Go away! Go away and leave me alone!”
But there was no deterring me now.
Inching closer, I touched his arm, opposite the one that barred his face from my sight.
Yet even that was a half hearted effort for I could see glimpses of the aggravated distortion that grew so livid when he was distressed.
He attempted to push me away, but I persisted.
Yet as he tried to move forward, away from me, I succeeded in grabbing his arm and detaining him long enough to plead, “No wait! I’m not going any where, I can’t, please—at least…Erik?”
I knew I had uttered something that had a better effect then my pulling, for after a whispering breath or two of focused thought, an almost unnatural energy enlivened his bones and he grasped me by my shoulders and shook me.
“What do you think they’ll do to you if they find you here?! With me?! Do you know what maddened mobs are like?” he growled, eyes scorching and icy at the same time with glinting fury and scorn, though even that could not completely hide his truer feeling of despair.
He made no attempt to conceal his face from me now, and for a moment, although I had already seen it in the theater along with everyone else, I was rooted to the ground in silent horror.
Yet the determined part of me refused to let shock rule me, so swallowing a hasty breath I answered in a surprisingly firm and steady voice:
“No, I do not, and I’ve not wish to find out. So please, can we go?”
Question flitted through his fierce gaze for a moment, but I knew he understood almost instantly afterward.
“I cannot find my way out alone now,” I added gently, hoping to appeal to whatever better nature the might still be left within him after his sacrifice.

I had not been there when he let Christine go, but the look on his face and the lack of her presence gave me more then enough reason to conclude to the outcome of whatever trial occurred prior to my arrival.
“Allright,” he said abruptly, grasping my wrist and pulling me forward through the pitch black space.
Noting my torch, he took it from me and put it out by casting it into the dampness below.
“Follow me. Do not let go,” he hissed in the eternal, starless night.
Fright at this sudden extinguishment must have been bright on my face, but there was no one to see it there in the dark.
At the same instant, when I jerked with surprise at the instant black, I had pulled my arm back and my hand now rested in his grip instead of my wrist.
The pause and start at the sudden, intimate contact was almost imperceptible, being we were in quite a rush, but I had felt him tremor anyway.
As we dashed through the tunnels, the fate before me more uncertain then it had ever been in my life, I oddly did not wonder of what would meet us at the end of that damned tunnel, or even what was happening to everyone else still in the dungeons and the Opera house. That came later, when we were long gone from the place.
Instead, I could not help but think of one thing over and over, how I had never been envious of Christine in any respect except for one. Her relationship with and the devotion paid to her by this strange, mysterious and dark apparition.
All my life, and till this very moment, I loved Christine as a dear sister, and at first I too had been apprehensive and even frightened by the Phantom’s presence in the bones of the theater, my home.
But my curiosity and lust for the truth of the matter and the man had won over any earthly fears, and even before Christine’s first solo in Hannibal I had already been plunged into wonder about the Phantom.
I urged my mother to tell me his story, and little by little I had gotten the entirety of it, or at least all my mother was willing to reveal. And with all that happened after, and all that Christine confided in me later, I felt myself submerged in the darkness of this mystery.

I became obsessed, and although to the world I was sane, I felt myself slowly drowning, needing to know as much as I needed air to breath in my lungs.
And then I saw him! For only the briefest moment during the Il Muto ballet! He disappeared so fast but I had caught glimpse of him! I was not completely mad, he was a man! A man, of flesh and blood!
His murders, I will not lie, frightened me and brought me tears and anguish, but I was no stranger to foul affairs.
My mother protected me, shielded me, but we lived in an opera house after all and crossed paths with all manner of persons, some of which were not very honest or very virtuous.
I had seen more then one man die by the kiss of a dirty knife in the shadows of an inn we had frequented, another impaled on a sword in a gentleman’s duel, and countless wretched fights and tales of murder had passed before my eyes and ears that held such violence.
Life and the world was often bloody, especially were powerful men were concerned. Wars had been fought and terrible massacres committed over the most fragile, weak excuses and more feeble reasons then that of the Phantom of the Opera.
I knew the acts he committed were crimes, and I would never lift a finger to work such doings, but nor would I be the judge, jury and executor of a tortured, maddened man.
Especially the very same whose voice and stories of enchanted me so.

So I will revise. Perhaps I was not so much as jealous of Christine, for I knew that her heart lay with Raoul, but that I wanted to know the Phantom for myself.
It may have been curiosity at first, but it soon turned into a strong, strange need, something I could not deny myself if I ever really wanted to live.
I did not know how I knew this; I just knew it, from a feeling deep within my bosom and my bones.
And that night I took my chance.
I made my escape with the infamous Phantom of the Opera, a murderer, scorned and disfigured lover, a genius, an artist, a man named Erik.