A/N: This story surprised me when it sprang from my consciousness. I'm not usually one to write this sort of thing, but I'm always one to rise to a writing challenge. Unfortunately I didn't win any awards, but...there's always next year.
The girl was silent, brooding, breathing. A single candle lit the floor upon which she knelt, writing.
"Waiting for you, waiting, rescue, save me," she said out loud, though in a childlike whisper, and her lips were split in a horrible grin. Abruptly the grin vanished, and the bleary eyes cleared to lucidity. "Oh, I can't imagine…"
A step upon the doorframe caused her hand to halt, fingers deathly white and clammy. Her eyes glazed once more.
"Who is it?" she sing-sang in another whisper, though she already knew.
"I am here," he said, in a soft, melodic voice, tinged with hatred and despair. "I have come."
She shivered. "Yes," she said, wiping her hands of the ink and getting up off the floor. "You brook no treachery, do you, maestro?"
He flinched at the word-coldness, though his own frame was far colder.
"This corpse began it, and he will end it," he said. "Here. Now."
"Oh, please, do," she said, with a smile of rapture upon her lips, but a sigh of weariness nearly crippling her. "The single pleasure I can wish now is to die, monsieur."
The woman was in her room, weeping. "No word," she said. "They can't find a thing. Not a scrap of dress, not a ribbon, not a strand of hair, not a broken vase or overturned table to indicate a struggle. And yet I tell you I heard her scream a scream so powerful it shook the foundations of this house."
The husband was sitting calmly in a large chair, breathing deeply. His face was white, however, and the blood had long since forsaken his pinched lips.
"Will you say nothing?" she whispered.
"There is nothing I can say," he said in a strangled whisper. "I…might it be…him?"
"Who?" scoffed the woman. "Surely…" But her face had gone a shade paler, and her fingers had nearly torn a hole through her elegant robe.
"I told you to do it," he said. "You'd think it would have been the opposite. But you refused. You would not go back, you said, not even to keep a vow which was wet with tears from his own horrible eyes."
"It's been twenty years," she said. "He was my senior then by at least thirty. No, it cannot be he."
"Who else?" he whispered. "It is as I heard from our benefactor's lips, that he is a wizard, a cunning, crafty…"
"You do not have to tell me of his horrid talents for abduction," muttered the woman. "Believe me, darling, I know…"
"Who else? Who? A pupil, a follower? Did you know of any such?"
"Never," said the woman. "I can't imagine it."
"We…we must…" began the man, still hoarse from shock, and collapsed into his chair. "Anne," he said over and over again. "Anne."
"Anne," said the thing lovingly, oilily, "My Anne."
"Keep away," she said suddenly, a tear spilling upon her porcelain cheek.
"Never," he said.
"You are no man," she whispered.
"I never was, darling," he hissed sardonically. "And now…"
"I thought you would kill me," she said. "Won't you?"
"Oh, yes," he sighed, and she fought back the impulse to retch. Why, why now must she be in the confines of sanity? Why now could she not be in madness' grip? Why must she be forced to know what befell her, aware, alive, awake? Pourquoi, mon Dieu…
"You know…" he whispered conversationally, while tears kept falling from her alternately wide and tightly shut blue eyes—such crystal clear gems! Perhaps he would…no. Well…perhaps.
Yes. Perhaps.
He smiled. The girl shuddered in horror.
"Why do you torment me?' she whispered. She could not bear it. Her mind had awoken and cleared at the exact moment after her binding. There was another unbelievable cruelty.
And oh, to open her lucid eyes to the horror of his worshipful, hating, lustful hands, with their sickeningly long fingers, dancing lightly, like horrid dead fishes, upon her frame—which, in her madness, had been stripped by her own hands to the point of a corset and her dirtied white slippers before he had appeared in the previously blocked entryway.
"I told you," he sang, giggling a bit with a characteristic high pitch, "your mother is to blame. Your father, too. The sins of the parents will be answered upon the children's heads…"
"Why me?" she whispered, though she thought she knew. Revenge was sweetest when in its purest, blackest form.
"The more depraved, the better," she said out loud, though she hadn't meant to.
"Why, thank you, darling," he sighed. "It's so nice to see you coming around to my point of view…"
"Set me free," she pleaded.
"So changed, my little bird? A moment ago, you begged me on your knees for death. But I think you might fix your point upon the latter before the hour flies."
"Please," she begged. "I…"
She saw in his hand the curved and gleaming knife, and horror struck her dumb.
"Perhaps we might go down," she gasped, though the thought was like ice in her veins. Her mother's heart, however, beat fast and frantic, and begged her body to obey the wretched impulse.
"We must," her husband said. His eyes burned. He grabbed a gun. The will to murder had taken full precedence over any sort of old childish fear.
She grasped her husband's hand. "I will follow you."
"We may die."
"If it would save my daughter," she said flatly.
"Our," he said.
"Our," she repeated numbly, blindly, staring ahead of her as though through a dark glass.
They opened the door.
A cry of horror such as the sleepy French street had never heard in all its dull existence split the air with a piercing, rending, raw, screaming yell.
For there, upon the doorstep, was Anne. Both eyes were missing from her head, and her limbs were scored with streaming wounds. A gaping hole in her throat bespoke the fact that nothing short of mythical necromancy could save the sweet, departed life.
In the fifth cellar of the Opera House, Erik laughed and laughed, and cried at intervals. Two crystalline eyes were floating in a jar filled with formaldehyde, and the lovely stench of her blood had filled his house like sweet perfume.
"The corpse, the corpse," he sighed, and wept a bit. "Oh, dear Christine, do you wish you'd come to bury Erik now?"
Fin