Chapter One
Our story begins in a modest town, on a modest street lined with modest beige houses and modest yards of beige grass. In one of these modest houses, in a modest beige living room, was a girl on a modest beige couch, watching a not-quite modest masked man singing on her television screen.
1Nearby, on a modest wooden table, a telephone rang.
The girl growled.
"Hello?"
"Hi, Ally, sweetheart! Just calling to—"
"Check up on me for the ninth time since you left even though I'm eighteen and perfectly capable of taking care of myself," Ally interrupted.
Her mother sighed. "Well, if you want to be cynical, I guess you can put it that way. I take it you're fine?"
"Yes, mother." If her parents called to check on her one more time, she swore she would go out and pierce something out of pure spite.
"Well, alright. I'll talk to you later, dear."
"Bye, Mom." Ally hung up the phone and sighed, running her fingers through her dark blonde hair. Somehow they always managed to call just when she was to a key scene in the phantom movie she was watching. This time, they had managed to call right at the climax of the Final Lair sequence of the Gerry version.
Several minutes later, she had managed to get over her aggravation and was watching a decrepit Raoul leaving the creepy monkey box at Christine's grave. This was the last of her personal Phantom Phest that she had been having since her parents were gone. She had read both Leroux and Kay, and watched all three of the different versions of the movie that she owned; the 90's miniseries with Charles Dance, the silent Lon Chaney movie, and of course, the 2004 musical version.
That, as I'm sure you know, is a lot of Phantom to absorb in 48 hours, even for a diehard Phan. And unfortunately for her, it had an adverse effect on Ally.
She threw up.
Of course, it must be admitted that this might not have had any relationship to the Phantom whatsoever, as she had made the mistake of having greasy nachos and salsa for breakfast. But, after she got rid of said breakfast, the effects of the Phantom Phest did catch up with her, and a bitter, angry mood descended upon her like a metal claw lowering itself on a stuffed toy in an arcade game. Anger gave way to Rage, Rage gave way to Fury, Fury paused for a moment to go the bathroom, and then turned back into just plain Anger again.
"Everybody in this story is completely insane! I mean I always knew Erik was crazy, but even Christine and Raoul have serious issues! The whole lot of them should have been tossed into the looney bin!" Ally ranted, and as you can tell from the excessive use of exclamation points, she was pretty upset.
Finally Ally realized she was shouting to an empty house, and pacing her kitchen a bit dangerously. After all, she could walk right into the knife rack without noticing, in this agitated frame of mind. She took a deep breath, and tried to calm down.
It was then that Ally was struck by an Idea.
Actually, it was a large skillet hanging from the pot rack, but in the slightly concussed haze that being hit by the skillet produced, she had an Idea.
She grabbed some ice for the bruise and headed for her computer.
At first, Ally had the thought to write a long, dry essay on how the various incarnations of the Phantom had a mixture of different psychological issues. For instance, both Kay and Dance Erik suffered from Oedipus complexes, Leroux Raoul showed signs of being bipolar, and Teri Christine appeared to be a pathological liar.
Ally did some research, started getting into it, but then stopped. She realized that while her ideas were insightful, she needed a more interesting way of presenting them to her phellow phans. Thus, her story was born.
The Phantom of the Opera Therapy Group.
Ally, your run-of-the-mill phangirl, was fed up with the characters of the Phantom of the Opera. They were all crazy. So she rounded them up, brought them to her house for a group therapy session so that they could work out their problems. PG-ish. Comedy/Parody
Ally read it through again to proofread, then decided to upload it to a few minutes of her computer making weird noises, a little window appeared on the screen.
Your story has been successfully uploaded…and so much more…heh heh…Ally did a double take (that didn't sound like the usual confirmation message), but the box had already disappeared. She shrugged, and went to fix herself some lunch.
A few hours later, as she had moved on to her next obsession with an emotionally tortured older man and was settling in to read her much-loved Holmes, the doorbell rang.
Spammit! It had to be the Girl Scouts again.
They'd been to her house three times in the last week, simply because she was the only one on the block who refused to be conned into buying their awful cookies. Ally knew what was behind their sickeningly sweet smiles and refused to give in. That drove the girls nuts, and their animosity for Ally was starting to show. The last time they came they'd ever-so-politely suggested that if Ally didn't want to have her house egged, it would be oh-so-thoughtful of her to buy some cookies.
Ally left her room and walked towards the front door warily, trying to come up with just the right threat for the little demons.
But it was not, in fact, a group of two-faced seven year olds peddling cardboard cookies at her door.
It was a man.
An extremely thin man, wearing a cape and mask, to be exact.
Oh crap.
Ally's mother had been right after all. Her occasionally innocent phangirl daydreams had given way to full-blown hallucinations.
Erik stared.
Ally stared.
Finally, he cleared his throat and said in his polished, angelic voice, "Erik would like to come in now. It looks like rain." Without waiting for her to respond, he started to move towards the open door.
Ally stepped in his way. "You're not coming in. I'm going to close the door, you're going to go away, and I'm going to cling to my fragile sanity like a life preserver and pretend that this whole hallucination thing never happened."
Erik took another step forward. "Erik is not a figment of your imagination," he said with an irritated hiss.
"Well, I'd hardly expect you to admit it," Ally retorted calmly.
Before she could blink, Erik's skeletal fingers were closed around her neck in an icy death grip.
Despite the immediate danger to her rather young life, Ally took this golden opportunity to once and for all answer the question that phangirls across the world had often pondered: Did Erik really smell like 'death', or was Christine just plain crazy?
Ally gave a delicate and thoughtful sniff. Well, he certainly didn't smell appealing, but death seemed to be an over—wait, a minute, was that...she sniffed again. It was! He smelled like a combination of Irish Spring soap and the nasty medicinal odor of dandruff shampoo. After setting aside the revelation that the famed Opera Ghost had a dander problem for later consideration, she came to the conclusion that, (as she had suspected) naive, emotional Christine had been overly dramatic about his unique pungency. After she came to this conclusion, she remembered the reason why he was close enough for her to smell and returned her full attention to the masked madman who was presently trying to strangle her.
"Could a hallucination do this?" he asked.
"I'm not really sure. Did you ever see that Russell Crowe film—" Ally's words were choked off as Erik tightened his grip even further.
Ally brought her hands close to her face and inspected them. She could feel Erik's hands, thin and cold, and which were now dangerously close to cutting off her last bit of air. Well, maybe she wasn't hallucinating…
She waved her arms wildly to get Erik to back off. "...I... believe...you..." she gasped.
Erik let go. "Good." He moved around her and silently slipped into the house.
Ally raised her hands to her very tender neck, and sucked in a large gulp of air. She hiccupped.
And hiccupped again. Ally went inside and closed the door, hiccupping every other step. She paused in the foyer. Where had the-Erik-who-was-not-a-hallucination gone off to? Ally got her answer moments later when a silky whisper chilled her right ear.
"Hello."
"Aaaaacccckkk!" She screamed, jumping into the air. She turned to look at Erik.
"Are you trying to scare ten years off of my life?" she asked angrily.
"No," he said, "Erik was trying to scare away your hiccups." He sounded pleased with himself. "And it worked!" He laughed, and clapped his hands together in childish glee.
Ally said nothing, just sighed and walked past him down the hallway into her family's great room. There was never a situation that called for a large aspirin more than the one she was in right now.
Instead of a separate living room, dining room, and kitchen, Ally's house had one huge room, with vaulted ceilings and several large windows, that was at the hub of the house. Erik's dark presence provided a sharp contrast to the whites and beiges of the large room, as he followed Ally to the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of water and reached for the medicine cupboard.
The doorbell rang.
Ally groaned.
She turned to Erik, who had perched himself on a barstool. "Would you mind getting that? I'm still recovering from the last time I answered the door."
To her surprise, he got up and walked towards the door. She hadn't expected him to actually listen to her so easily; he was the Phantom of the Opera, after all.
"If it's a bunch of little girls in green outfits, you can take off your mask and scare them away," she called after him.
Ally heard Erik open the door. There was a strange pause, a murmured conversation too low for her to hear, and then the sound of footsteps coming back into the house.
Two pairs of footsteps.
Ally turned around very slowly.
There, standing in her kitchen next to who she now realized was Leroux Erik, was another man in a mask. He looked a little less bony, his clothes were of finer quality and seemed to fit better, and he moved with a catlike grace, almost oozing with power and sensuality that made her want to grab him an—
"Excuse me," Kay Erik said, raising an invisible eyebrow behind his mask. "Why are you doing that?"
Ally looked at him from where she had her head in the kitchen sink, an icy jet stream pouring over her head. She turned it off.
"It's very refreshing. You should try it some time," she replied with as much dignity as she could manage, as she started to dry her hair with a towel. Kay Erik watched with obvious amusement, his arms folded gracefully across his chest.
Ally suddenly felt very foolish and juvenile in her black tank top that said, "Real men wear masks" and her "I Love My Angel of Music" sweatpants. (She was just glad they couldn't see her I Heart O.G. panties underneath.) When she'd purchased them she'd never imagined that she'd be wearing them in the presence of an actual Erik, let alone two. Ally wanted to go change, but she still had a headache to take care of.
She reached for the aspirin bottle.
The doorbell rang.
Ally snatched her hand back like it had been bitten, waited a few seconds, and then slowly reached for the bottle again.
The doorbell rang again.
"Nooo," Ally moaned, clutching her soggy head in her hands. She pointed at the Eriks, who were looking on with bewilderment (Leroux) and sardonic amusement (Kay). "One of you get the door, while I go change and dry my hair." Ally turned and walked away.
As she quickly dressed Ally tried to ignore the chorus of doorbells and the ever-increasing murmur of voices that were coming from down the hall.
Ally brushed her long hair into a neat ponytail, and took a last appraising look in the mirror. The whole effect wasn't too bad, actually. Her sky blue shirt and dark blue camisole brought out her greenish-blue eyes and…other things as well. Ally hurriedly applied some lip-gloss and mascara, while trying to remind herself that she was here to bring Erik and Christine together, not seduce him for herself. Still, it couldn't hurt to look her best.
Ally walked into the living room and was greeted by the most ghastly thing she had ever seen, mangled body parts everywhere, scattered entrails, blood dripping from the—I'm so sorry, someone in the next room is watching a slasher film; I'll do my best to ignore them. Let's try part that again.
Ally walked into the living room and was greeted by the sight of over a dozen Eriks, Christines and Raouls. Phandemonium and chaos reigned, as the Eriks tried to Punjab the Raoul appropriate to their version, and the Christines all watched and pleaded like the helpless little dingdongs they were.
Not really in the mood to watch a mass-murder of the Vicomtes de Chagny (although there had been times when in this situation she would have gladly cheered the Eriks on), Ally ran off to the garage and returned with her father's air horn. She held down the button and watched with satisfaction as everyone jumped a foot into the air, even the supposedly imperturbable Kay Erik.
Swallowing back a wicked grin (and this was not easy, because wicked grins taste very bitter going back down), she cleared her throat and spoke. "Now that I have your attention, what in the name of all-things-sexy-and-Crawford are you doing here!"
"You mean you don't know?" Kay Erik asked with a definite hint of smirking in his voice. "You're the one who requested it; we're simply doing what is written." He pulled out a piece of paper seemingly from nowhere, as did all the others, and handed it to Ally.
Her eyes quickly scanned the page, and she squeaked in disbelief. This may seem like a strange reaction to you, but I assure you, it was completely understandable. On that piece of paper was Ally's story.
"Well I've heard people say that words are powerful, but this is ridiculous," she muttered.
The collection of fictional characters in front of her looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to say something just a bit more intelligent than that. She opened her mouth to speak, but the only sound anyone heard was...
...the doorbell.
Ally frowned and counted all the characters thoughtfully. Let's see, five Eriks, five Christines, one-two-three-four-five Raouls...yes, everyone was accounted for. That left only one guess as to the identity of the doorbell-ringer.
The Girl Scouts.
Ally looked at the Eriks. "Who'd like the opportunity to scare some evil cookie-selling children for me?" Chaney Erik immediately raised his hand, jumping up and down with excitement. This was no surprise; Chaney Erik is arguably the most frightening and off-balanced Phantom there is.
Ally nodded. "Okay, just go answer the door for me and scare the little imps away. In return, I'll bake you some cookies."
That was all the encouragement he needed apparently, because the next sound anyone heard was Chaney Erik opening the door and the terrified screams of the Girl Scouts.
Ally grinned. Justice was sweet, but it was even sweeter when it was being dished out by a Phantom.