All I See Is Your Face
Disclaimer: I own nothing that does not reside in my own imagination . . . Gaston Leroux created the tale of the Phantom Of The Opera. Many writers have taken that tale and given a piece of themselves to it, I merely do the same.
Premise: A short POV piece inspired by a reviewer (Thank you angelofnight!). In Susan Kay's Phantom we met Father Mansart, a kindly man who lent his name to our hero. We all know the man could not have lived forever, but what would have been his dying thoughts?
Feedback: Of course, all gushing praise and constructive criticism readily accepted. Flames? I have a bag of marshmallows sitting by my desk at the ready.
@}-----,----- *~*~* -----'-----{@
I often wondered just how wrong I was in my past, yet now that my life seems to be coming to an end, I wonder if it's all moot.
Surely I have lived as good a life as I could, spent in service of my Lord, and I certainly consider myself a good man. And yet can one mistake be the one that will cost me everlasting life in heaven?
His face has floated through my mind for the past ten years now. Every time Madeleine Laramie walks into the church, I am reminded of my failing. That day of the exorcism still rings sound through the recesses of my memory.
As do the horrors of his face, a face that I believed to mean he would also have unmentionable horrors of the soul.
The pain knifes through my chest again, and I know it will not be long before my questions are answered. His face wavers once again in front of mine, yet it is no longer the face of a deformed child, he is a young man now.
Within a few hours, I will be gone from this earth. I will be gone, and yet the sun will still rise, and the wind will still blow through the trees outside my bedroom.
And somewhere on this earth will still walk a monster partly of my own making.
Was I wrong to condemn him to live? Was I wrong in my teachings of his young soul?
Or was it all moot to begin with, was he eternally damned from the start?
Blasphemy and I know it, the boy did have a soul, in fact until the day I informed him that animals have no souls, he was a dutiful little Catholic. Until that day, I thought I was doing everything right.
The light is brightening before my eyes now, and I know it's no longer a matter of hours, but now minutes. I do not fear what I will find on the other side of that light any longer, but I fear for what I've left behind. For even out of the corner of my eye, I can see that sweeping form, the tall, graceful body, and the yellow eyes glowing from behind the mask. He is turning from my window, as if he can not bear to watch these last moments.
Turning from God.
And in the light, once again, he is there as he once was, a quiet infant with an untarnished soul. A devil's face and an angel's voice. I hear his requiem playing to spirit my soul to God, his final act of mercy upon me. I walk into the light and watch as the angels weep at the sound I hear in my head.
@}-----,----- *~*~* -----'-----{@
"It is done," the mousy woman with the shock of red hair, still untouched by gray, says as she holds his hand in hers.
"It's a mercy, Marie," the other woman, hiding in the shadows, whispers. "He suffered so much since . . . since Erik left, with all the sicknesses, and then the turn his heart took."
"Yes, it is a mercy, Madeleine," Marie answered as she took the sheet and covered the old priest's head. The two women stood in the silence for a moment longer, before leaving the room in which the body would lay.
Outside the window, the stranger who watched the proceedings also turns away.
@}-----,----- *~*~* -----'-----{@
Finit