Author's Note: A few years ago, I wrote a story which was originally called The MarySue of the Opera and later changed to The Conjuror's Masque when the story went in a different direction than I'd planned. What with one thing and another, I've never been entirely happy with the way the story turned out. There were some ideas that just didn't work as well on paper as they did in my head and a few things that seemed really cool but actually weren't. The story began as a joke, turned into something I really liked and, lately, it's been driving me crazy.
Reviews and feedback are tremendously appreciated. I wouldn't have finished the original story without all the encouragement from readers. I probably wouldn't be getting around to this revision if not for some helpful feedback and critique on the old version.
I can't promise to make everyone happy, but I'll try to tell a good story.
It was the day before the Paris Opera was to hold it gala, celebrating the retirement of the old managers, Debienne and Poligny- for us, a day that occurs within that nebulous space known as back-story. The reader would not join us until the night of the gala, when Christine Daaé would take my place and make her triumphant debut. However, like most novels, ours was based upon a series of events that must take place with any audience present. Somewhere in the basement of the opera house, Joseph Buquet was breathing his last, while Erik arranged for my inexplicable absence from the evening's entertainment.
That's business as usual at the Paris Opera. Of course, when you're trapped in a detective novel about a disfigured lunatic who falls in love with your understudy, usual is just another kind of strange. Luckily for us, the novel's plot didn't begin until the evening of the gala celebrating the retirement of the old managers, so for the moment we could enjoy some much needed peace.
We were having a rehearsal for the gala tomorrow night- a gala I would inexplicably fail to attend. No one really knows why I don't show up, but it's absolutely critical that I'm absent. I usually spend the evening having a nice long bath and reading a good book. Not this book of course. We've all had about as much of this book as we can stand.
Up until the gala evening, we are all at liberty to do as we please, provided it won't interfere with having the gala later on. We always rehearse the music beforehand, just to make sure that there won't be any problems other than my disappearance and subsequent replacement by Christine Daaé. I was in the middle of The Jewel Song- I've never really liked Faust- when it happened. A backdrop fell right down out of the wings and almost knocked me senseless mid-trill.
I crawled out from under the fallen scenery and Little Jammes helped me to my feet, as the ballet rats and half the opera chorus came running from the wings. This was also very odd, since the chorus is not involved in the gala at all, and the ballet had a dress rehearsal this morning. Most of the chorus had dressed themselves in outlandishly garish costumes and what may well be the ugliest wigs ever created. They looked like orange yarn. I think I had a scarf like that once, although I certainly never wore it in public.
"Does anyone know what's going on?" asked little Jammes, who is fifteen years old and more than a little precocious. The rest of the ballet rats were twittering and squealing in supposed consternation- completely feigned in some cases if you want my opinion. They seem to think that sort of nonsense is clever.
Christine Daaé emerged from the wings, looking flustered. Her hair was all in pins and her dress hadn't been buttoned properly. "I'm not supposed to be here, am I?" The conductor shrugged, as if to say "don't look at me."
"I'm not even Carlotta's understudy yet! You don't think Erik is responsible, do you?"
The voice of the angel of music floated up from the basement, "I've been down here making model boats all morning. Can someone please explain why I can hear everything that happens onstage through the vents? It's horrendously irritating. And who was down here gluing papers to my wall?"
I turned to Madame Giry but she had vanished completely. Luckily, the new managers had just arrived. They would surely know what was happening. They looked at me, and then looked at each other, "Carlotta? Aren't you supposed to be leaving in a huff?"
"Why on earth would I do that?" I asked. "If I leave in a huff now, then you'll have time to call some other diva to sing the gala, instead of having Christine Daaé make her debut."
Monsieur Montcharmin knit his brow for a moment, and then relaxed, "You're right! How silly of us. Quite a relief to know that you're here and everything is following the plan, as it were, ahem! I don't suppose you remember what our names are?"
"The last I checked, you were Armand Montcharmin and Firmin Richard." I told them, but they didn't look at all convinced.
"You see," said Monsieur Richard, "We've been calling one another Firmin and Andre all afternoon. We're not quite sure if those are our first names or our last names--"
"Or which one of us is which!" Montcharmin chimed in.
This bizarre revelation made me pause for thought. Clearly, something was very wrong. These changes were likely to undo the entire plot of The Phantom of the Opera, in which case what would become of all of us? Without our novel, we didn't exist, and it seemed that our plot was starting to fray at the edges.
"I think we'd better gather the principal characters and have a conference about this," I said. "But first, we should head over to the De Chagny estate to make sure Raoul and his brother are alright."
As I turned to leave, a voice piped up from the chorus, "Christine Daaé could sing it sir!"
It was a ballet girl that I didn't recognize, in a costume that made me blush several shades of scarlet. Even a prostitute has more modesty than that.
"Christine Daaé could sing what?" asked M. Montcharmin looking even more perplexed than usual. He never did learn a thing about opera.
"I don't know," admitted the new dancer, "I just needed to tell you that Christine Daaé could sing it. That's how it's supposed to happen, isn't it"
"Let her sing for you, monsieur!" cried someone else, "She has been well taught!"
M. Montcharmin was getting very upset indeed, "Well taught what and by who—"
"Whom," filled in M. Richard, forgetting that an editor could always fix the grammatical error at another time.
As M. Montcharmin sputtered and M. Richard quietly began to consult The Elements of Style – which he always had on his person- one of the ballet girls stepped forward. She clearly was in no way ashamed of her shockingly bare stomach. She stepped to the very front of the stage. I had never seen her before in my life and she couldn't have been much older than 16 and looked to be in desperate need of a meal.
"Let's begin from the aria, shall we?" said our conductor, who is nameless. Then he glanced down at his score and made a face. "Wait a minute, where is the aria? I thought this was Faust! All I have here is a sort of overwritten music hall ballad with limited range and a highly uninventive cadenza at the end." He and the concertmaster compared scores.
"This is the most horrible music I have ever seen," said the concertmaster (another unnamed character), "And yet I feel compelled to start playing it … on the piano, not the violin." With that, he got up, walked over to the rehearsal piano and began to play.
The strange girl began to sing in a voice that was both inaudible and terribly under pitch. Somewhere under the opera house, I could hear Erik groaning in agony. The higher the notes, the more painful they were to the ear. I don't think there was any vibrato or tone to speak of at all.
"Oh dear God, it's horrifying. The audience won't be able to hear her and when they do hear her, they will riot and kill us all. Yet, I am compelled to star her in the gala, singing this very song in a costume that has nothing to do with any actual opera that ever existed." moaned M. Richard.
M. Montcharmin raised his hands in a gesture of supplication, "Please Erik, you must help us. If Christine Daaé doesn't sing tomorrow, we're doomed! We'll be lynched by enraged Parisian opera patrons! Drop another backdrop and hurry!!!"
"But," said the strange girl, "I am Christine Daaé!"
"That's impossible!" cried Meg. "The real Christine is right here!" Meg turned around and uttered a piercing scream.
Christine Daaé was lying on the floor, dead as a doornail, with a Punjab lasso around her neck, a dagger in her heart, blood spattered all over her left temple and strange footprints all over her clothes. The heroine of our novel had been murdered and murdered repeatedly and then the murderer has stomped on her… or possibly danced on her corpse, it was hard to tell.
A note was pinned to Christine's blonde hair. As Meg fell fainting into her mother's arms, I pushed my way through the crowd and knelt beside the body. The note read:
OMG I totally did it because I am bad artistocrat rapist and evil boring and she totally loved Eric and I wear pink panties and stuff OMG! –signed, Raul, the Visconter of Change
There was a general murmur of "OMG??? What does OMG mean???" until at last little Jammes yelled over the din, "It must be Opera Ghost!" This seemed to satisfy the crowd until someone with slightly better observational skills pointed out that Jammes had missed out the M.
"I've got it!" said Montcharmin or possibly Richard, "OMG means Opera Monsieur Ghost."
"Pardon me," I interrupted, "But wouldn't that be stupid… and redundant… and in flagrant disregard of actual French grammar?"
"We could be in an English translation … a horrendously inept English translation." Richard suggested, or was it Montcharmin? It was getting a little confusing. All the same, he had a point… well almost. Whatever he had, it was spelled properly, which is more than we can say for the murderer's note.
"Well, whatever OMG actually means, it's clear from this note that Raoul, the Vicomte de Chagny has murdered Christine Daaé several times over, probably because she found out about his pink panties and functional illiteracy. Let's get some torches and track down this murderer. He must be found!" the other manager, whichever one he was, concluded.
I put my hand to my head. The stupidity was giving me a headache. What was happening to everyone? Had they quite lost their minds?
"Who are we tracking down? I've got pistols and I can put my hand at the level of my eyes!" said a heroic voice from stage right. It was none other than our hero, Raoul de Chagny. His entrance was heroic, but his timing was less than stellar.
"It's him!!!!!" screamed the mob, in a frenzy that could not be expressed properly without an excess of punctuation. "Get him!!!!!!!!"
"No!!" I cried, rushing to place myself between the innocent Vicomte de Chagny and the angry ballerinas, "You can't lynch the hero … At least not until the book is over!"
"Fine," said one of the scene shifters, "We'll just lock him up somewhere until the book is over and then we'll lynch him." How could we continue the story with the heroine dead and the hero locked up? Why don't we elect Erik emperor and dance round the maypole while we're at it. It would do about as much good.
Is it just me, or is Madame Giry a lot younger then she used to be?
"Will someone please tell me what's going on?" begged Raoul, cowering behind me and looking kind of like the sort of person who might actually have pink panties stashed away in his closet. You never know.
"Well," I said, regaining my composure, "Christine has been brutally murdered several times. The killer left a note and signed your name. Well, it might have been your name. I mean, it wasn't entirely unlike your name. So, anyways…" I looked around and then…
"Oh my God it's the Opera Ghost!" I screamed pointing into the rafters.
"The Ghost??? Where's the ghost?? Do you see the ghost??" said the crowd, every last one of them looking straight up into the rafters. Well, opera singers have never been all that bright, you know.
With the crowd conveniently distracted by their one-dimensional stupidity, I gave Raoul a push towards the exit and shouted, "Make a run for it!"
As the crowd turned back towards me, I realized that I probably should have whispered that last line.
"She's helping him! She's in on it!" said one of the dancers.
"Get her!!" The mob cried in unison. How do people do that?
I turned and ran into the wings in the direction of my dressing room. I wasn't exactly sure what to do once I got there, but at least the door had a lock.
In retrospect, I probably should have run towards the exit.