Erik sat stuck in traffic on the A13, heading from the heart of Paris to the wealthy suburb of Versailles, the engine of his black Audi A8 little more than a soft hum below the vivid strains of Verdi on the stereo. The music was soothing, but for the man sitting behind the wheel, there was no music on Earth powerful enough to calm his racing thoughts.
The traffic snarl was too intense. The other drivers were hemming him in on all sides, far too close. Close enough that all it would take would be a glimpse into the driver's window to get a look that would send a nearby driver digging in their purses or pockets for their goddamned mobile phones, to sneak a photo of his horror of a face without his consent, and he knew that the moment they stopped the car, his image would be plastered all over the internet, local papers, eventually all over televised news. A monstrosity in Paris! Horror! A horrific, repulsive, ugly thing existing in a city known for its graceful beauty, its romantic appeal! It would cause a sensation, he knew.
Erik knew, because he'd been through this. Oh, not for a few years now, thank the Fates, but it had happened before. Thankfully, the last time he'd been spotted through the window of the car, the people who had seen him had been a pair of pensioners who either didn't have a mobile phone at all or had not brought it with them that day, so he had escaped without having his disgusting face posted all over the internet or plastered all over the front page of the Paris newspapers. Instead, the pair in the car next to him had stared, slack jawed and wide eyed, and rear-ended the car ahead of them.
Served them right, he had thought, as he left them and the driver they'd hit to settle insurance info by themselves. That episode had left him shaken and paranoid, and he had tried to get the driver's window and windscreen tinted just as dark as the car's other windows. Unfortunately, it was illegal in France to have the driver's window and windscreen of any vehicle tinted, to allow police to see at least a bit of what a pulled-over driver might be doing. Public safety. That episode had caused him to stop driving for a few weeks, preferring to use the private, discreet car service he had used before to driving himself, but the sheer inconvenience had finally sent him back behind the wheel.
He usually wore his mask now, even when in the relative privacy of his car, but the day was stenchingly hot and humid, and even though he had the Audi's air conditioning up as high as it would go, the hot, humid day and his ever-present three-piece black suit were conspiring to make him miserable. It was just too muggy to wear the mask unless he had no other choice. He had left the dark wig, silvering at the temples, on despite the heat, but his white leather full-face mask sat on the passenger seat beside him, its empty eyes staring blankly out of the sleek car's sunroof.
One would think a car would be fairly private, he mused. Ordinarily, he was correct. Traffic usually moved at a good clip on the A roads. Even if a fellow road user caught a glimpse of him, they wouldn't have the chance to grab their mobile and take a picture before he got ahead of them and safely away.
But traffic snarls... totally different. With his car and those around him stuck crawling along, he could not escape. While mobile phones were convenient to others, he cursed them daily. Every bloody nosy goddamned rude moron was attached to a mobile phone, nowadays, and they thought nothing of taking a stranger's photo without his permission. What little freedom he used to have had been ended with the increasing ubiquity of the infernal little devices. He was now used to strangers running up to him as he walked to his car, did his grocery shopping.. any time he happened to be in a public place, really.. snapping pictures of the unusually tall, skeletally thin man in the white mask that exposed only a sliver of his upper lip, his lower lip, his pale, pointy chin. They never asked permission, and a few times, he had actually had to block their hands as they grabbed towards his mask.
Sometimes he felt like he was walking, talking performance art, the way people treated him when he ventured into public spaces. Depressing. No matter what, he was always on display, at some level.
He was lucky that he was so unusually strong, as his assailants were never alone. Lone people, even teens and young men, left him alone. He was a strange, unsettling, threatening presence, with his great height, his terrible gaunt physique, his horribly pale, transparent, yellowish skin, his strange amber-coloured eyes. Even without seeing the sickening ruin of his face, people did fear him, regardless of anything he said or did.
Groups of three or four teens or young men were the worst, though. They egged each other on, daring each other to grab the mask. That had happened so often that he stopped taking walks during the daytime, stopped using the Metro entirely, learned when the Carrefour grocery market nearest the Palais Garnier was the least busy. He had even gone so far as to break the arm of a boy who had tried again and again to grab the mask. The impossibly perfect-faced boy, 17 or 18, had been with three other friends, and they were cheering him on, jeering as Erik tried to defend himself.
Finally, Erik's temper flared, and he snapped the boy's arm as effortlessly as breaking a small dry twig. While the boy writhed on the ground, screaming in shocked agony, Erik had fled to the private safety of the Garnier's deep cellars. He should have killed the lot of them, he thought. Idiotic wastes of limited global resources, all four of them. He would have done the poor beleaguered planet a favour by exterminating those vermin.
It was exhausting, always having to be so vigilant. The only time he felt safe enough, usually, to remove his white leather shield from prying eyes, was when he was at home, deep below the opera house's public areas. Today, with the heat in the mid 40s, Celsius, and the humidity sitting at 99%, it was just too hot to withstand the mask's stifling pressure on his perspiring skin.
He had not wanted to leave the Garnier at all today, but an early morning phone call from the props manager of the Royal Versailles Opera had forced him out of his strange, hidden, underground home and out into the teeming, sweating crowds. The RVO was staging a version of La Boheme this season, setting it in the 1960s in San Francisco, and for a few of the scenes, Marcel Dagenais had wanted to use American handguns common in that part of the world at the time. The RVO didn't have nearly as large a collection of prop, replica, and real (though unable to fire) modern handguns as the Garnier had, so Erik was now on his way to Versailles with the rear seat and trunk of his car packed with foam-lined lockable aluminium cases full of handguns.
It would be a really, really bad day to be pulled over for speeding.
Erik sighed. Life kept getting harder. A masked man in Paris was a threatening thing now, after so many terrorism related attacks on tourists and locals, and the Yellow Vest thugs out vandalising and destroying centuries-old landmarks certainly did not help. They hid their traitorous faces with motorbike helmets, scarves, bandanas. His freedoms were increasingly constrained by the ugly actions of others, and it exhausted him, ate at his sanity, left him deeply melancholy.
Still, there was a need for stage handguns at the RVO, so Erik was stuck in traffic, on the edge of panic as he tried to keep his face safely in the shadows of the sleek black car.
Then it happened. A news van. It pulled up alongside Erik's Audi, slowed to a stop as that lane of traffic stopped ahead. The driver cast a look over in Erik's direction, perhaps hoping to catch the eye of a fellow frustrated motorist for a grin and a 'what can you do?' shrug. Common silent social connection over a shared frustrating situation.
Instead, the young man inside the van caught sight of something that looked like it would be far more at home in a horror movie. A skull-faced, noseless, gaunt, scarred, ruined horror of a face, craggy and sharp and terrible. The van braked hard, and the young man reached towards the passenger seat. Oh yes. Of course. The bloody paparazzi bastard had a camera. Of course he did. They all did!
Erik grabbed his mask and slid it on before the man could snap his photo. Erik lurched his car ahead, nearly touching the bumper of the red SUV ahead of him. That freed up just enough space for him to pull in ahead of the news van, preventing the man inside from being able to spy on him or take his photo. All the man could see now was the back of Erik's car, with its deeply tinted rear window preventing any look inside. Of course, that led the car's number plate to be visible, and Erik knew that the man would likely have a source in the police that would run the plate for his name and address, then come to his home.
Erik smiled grimly behind the mask, his terribly thin lips all but vanishing into a thin hard line, like a knife-slash where a mouth should be. If the man ran his number plate, it would come back as a fleet vehicle owned by a numbered corporation with a PO box instead of an actual address. 590148666 Ltd. Erik had many, many ways of ensuring his anonymity.
Finally, he saw his exit approaching, Exit 5 – Versailles Centre. He merged onto Boulevard de Jardy/D182. The news van merged in behind him.
So, this is how it is to be, he thought bitterly. His black-gloved hands, perspiring in their hot confines, gripped the steering wheel tightly. The Boulevard de Jardy became the D182, and as D roads were usually quite speedy, he made use of the evasive driving techniques he had learned in his other career. The one he had long left behind. The one that still made him scream his nightmares out into the cool stillness of his secret home – nightmares of murdered victims, innocent and guilty alike, their lives cut short by his treachery.
The bedamned news van tried valiantly to stay on his tail, but a risky race through a yellow light gave the masked spectre just enough space and freedom to race ahead, leaving his pursuer stuck at the red light. He pressed the accelerator hard, cutting in and out of slower traffic whenever he dared. He turned into side streets at random, determined to put space between himself and that thrice-damned photographer. Paris was full of those, and it had not been the first time he had been pursued. Bloody nosy, annoying, intrusive bastards.
Finally, he pulled into the parking area that served the staff of the RVO and gave him access to the Stage Door. He quickly parked and sent a text to Marcel Dagenais to let him know Erik had arrived with his much needed prop guns. The unsettled monster remained in the privacy of his car, waiting to see Marcel and his ever-present young intern emerge from the stage door with a props cart.
Finally, the man emerged, trailed by a young girl. A new girl. He wielded the cart, and she trotted obediently along after him. When they got to the car, Erik sighed, checked that his mask and dark wig were properly placed, and exited the car to assist his associate with the gun cases.
Marcel Dagenais was a middle-aged man with hair that was still mostly dark brown and fashionable wire framed glasses. His face was careworn and friendly, and he met Erik with a smile that was almost convincing. He tried, anyway. That was more than most did.
"Bonjour, Erik! Thanks so much for the use of the guns! You know, I really thought we had more than three older-model Colt handguns in our props warehouse! You're really saving us, here."
Erik nodded, and set to work unloading his car. Marcel joined in, and gestured to his trailing intern to get her to help. The girl stood transfixed, ignoring her boss's directions, staring openly and rudely at Erik's mask. Finally, Marcel elbowed the girl hard in the ribs and told her to go back indoors immediately. He sighed as she backed away, then turned and ran.
"I'm sorry, Erik. I really am. That should never happen. These brainless interns I'm forced to child-mind! They're so... so..." he trailed off with a frustrated, defeated shrug.
"Rude?", Erik supplied.
Marcel nodded. "I really am sorry, sir. I never intended..."
"I know," Erik replied, softly, his fatigue and frustration evident simply in his voice. "I know." They loaded the rest of the cases onto the cart in silence. Finally, Erik put the last case onto the cart. He turned, closed the trunk, and walked to the driver's door. Marcel's hand on his sleeve stopped him cold. It was highly unusual for anyone to touch him of their own volition.
"I'm really sorry, Erik. You do so much for the opera scene here in France. The classical scene in general. You really do. You don't deserve the way people act." Marcel looked disgusted, embarrassed, unsettled.
The much shorter man looked up at Erik. "She'll be disciplined for that. We can't have a staff member who would treat someone with a... um.. a disability... so badly."
The masked man shook his head. "Don't bother. It won't change anything, and she'll just resent it. Don't bother." He folded his long, bony form into the plush leather upholstery of the car, closing the door to block out any further apologies from Dagenais. He just wanted to go home. Back to the safety of the deep cellars. Back to the calm, still, private darkness that surrounded his hidden home.
The ride back was thankfully uneventful. Whatever had caused the traffic snarl was gone and the cars poured freely along the pavement. Erik's skeletal form was slouched in the driver's seat, doing his best to make himself less visible. Under the mask, a dribble of perspiration leaked into his eye, making it tear and sting uncomfortably, but he dared not remove the mask to mop at either the stinging rill of sweat or the tears flowing from his irritated eye. He sighed.
Damn it all. It just got ever harder.