Chapter one

I know he's there

I grew up on dreams of love, dreams that never came true. As I walked through the opera I sang softly to myself, I had no family. I was all alone, always alone in the world. I have been told that I am very beautiful, but you see I cannot say that I am. But than again I cannot say that I am not. You see I am blind, and therefore cannot say much of anything as to the way of appearances. My other senses, although good can be troublesome sometimes for I hear and smell things that I know I should not.

These things that I sense, these things that I smell and hear have only increased my ability to feel. And dear god did I feel, such things I felt indeed! You see my inability to see has increased not only my functional senses, but also my emotions. I have tears in my eyes most of the time; sometimes they are the sweet tears of joy. Other times my eyes pour the bitter liquid of saddened tears, like that of a whine fountain spilling its bittersweet contents into its base. I also feel pain, Mon dieu the pain can be so intense that it has been rumored that my screams sound like that of him.

Who is he you ask? Well to be honest I do not know exactly, all I knew is the stories. I have heard many roomers of a ghost that haunts these halls, not that I am afraid. I have never feared for my own health, in all actuality I never really found horror stories to be that frightening. Growing up I spent most of my childhood in reclusive areas; in fact I hardly ever socialized preferring the peace; the gentleness of quiet solitude.

I as a child often enjoyed things that many of my childhood peers found awkward, or strange. I love to read and am quite well versed in four different languages. This list of my tongues includes, English, French, Spanish and Italian. I am fluent in all of them, and I was very proud of myself upon completion of all my courses. I never found ghost stories frightening, only vaguely entertaining, Horror fascinates, me, and romance enthralls me. So of course I am not afraid of this opera ghost, only intrigued and very anxious to discover his or hers true identity.

"Gabrielle!" Henrietta calls, I turned my head and I looked at her. Well turned my head in her direction anyways. Yes my name is Gabrielle I am as confused as you are as to why I was called this particular name at my birth. No doubt by my mother whose name was Gabriella and my father's name was Aaron but he had loved her very much and had only two children, two daughters. Ones name was Lilly and then there was me. Lilly died just a year after I was born. She was swimming you see and then slipped in the pool and drowned.

Then one day I grew sick, with flu but thankfully made a full recovery. Being born a blind child in what the people in this theater would call a, "poor man's world." I grew to love the creative arts, such as music and painting. For you do not need eyes for your hand to see. And my hands do see.

Oh yes they see so very, very well. And such vibrant things they see, such brilliant colors they see, such wonderful sound they make. I am a musician, an artist and have no interest in the folly of the other young girls here. I want to one day, sing of the beauty of this world. And what better place to do so, indeed there is no other way for me than this lavish theater. My world may be dark, my past solitary, but one day I believe that the world can be mine. I will move the minds of the souls of Paris with my voice, just like the characters of my mother's lullabies. It sadden me that I only remember the first verse of one of them, and vaguely.

"Gabrielle!" Henrietta calls again, and I continue to ignore her. She is so bloody demanding, my roommate. I just want her to leave me alone, so I can have a conversation with people without having her nose in my business. I just wanted to go into my room and hide form them all. I hated them, so why should I be around them? Well the real question is or should be how do I get away? You know being a blind costume maid did not give you much time to yourself, if it allowed you a few hours to sleep you were lucky.

I walked over to her and asked her what she wanted. She did not answer me, but instead kept chattering on about how her hair was a mess. I sighed, and reached up to feel her wig. I then began to laugh and told her that of course it was messed up because in was lopsided and falling off. I pulled her head down to my level as I carefully and gently repositioned it on the top of her head. She then snapped her fingers and said taking my wrist put in on her perfume bottle ordering me to spray it on for her.

I obeyed and mocked her inwardly; I did not like the airy tone in her voice. She had no right to order me around, she was no diva and I was not her maid. She was not the manager of the theater and had no right in anyway to order anyone around. Not that she was rude or unkind but she was very snobbish and I strongly disliked, no the phrase, "strongly dislike," was not the right word to express how I felt hated was better. I hated how very snobbish she was.

I helped her get ready for her minor role in Faust as Ce'belle and then went about my daily chores with ease. My job was simply to do the chores around the place. You know things such as scrubbing the curtains, and swabbing the stage, and sometimes cleaning the opera stables. All disgusting jobs in my personal opinion. Well the stage job wasn't that bad that is unless the stagehands had gotten too snookered and decided to vomit all over the place. I really mustn't complain though, it is out of the kindness of the managers that I did these things.

If I did not I would certainly not be here, in the past I have received no money for my work. But then again there are other rewards, such as getting to see each and every performance up close. The added bonus of free room and board is nothing for me to be complaining about. If it were not for the jobs and all the hard work that I do around this place I would be nothing. Nothing but a poor and homeless blind girl, crippled and shunned and begging the passersby for a few alms so that I could buy a crust of bread

So I do my work well and do my best to stay in the good graces of my superiors so they do not turn me out on the street. It seems to be working splendidly actually. As a matter of fact they have been so impressed as of late that they have started to pay me a total of five francs per hour. It is not much I know but it is good enough for me for sometimes I work for four or five hours and make twenty or twenty-five francs a day and I often buy new cloths or some more supplies.

Or sometimes I'll go to the only bookshop in town that is run by a blind store master and but a nice brail book. One of my favorite stories is Oliver Twist a touching story of an orphaned boy living with thieves in the London slums. I love the way that Charles Dickens describes the bonding between Fagan and Oliver and the last prayer that the twelve-year-old boy utters in the jail as the wretched, old, and loony Fagan pleads with him to help him escape his dark and lonely prison.

So I while thinking about the story that I have just described to you in the smallest of details I think of my dreams. All my life I listened to my mother's tales of seeing blue skies and green meadows, and my father's tales of fishing on a sunlit river in springtime. I will never see these things, but even so I can imagine them quite vividly. And in my mind's eye I see more vividly than the naked human eye for my vision is not obscured by the fog or blurred by the rain covered glass of a window.

Not unless I allow them to be, and often times when I am sad I picture these happy things to cheer myself up. The other workers do not understand why I am so bloody cheerful. You have nothing to be happy about. They say. On the contrary I believe that I have everything in the world to be happy and cheerful about. I am very optimistic, and as long as I have a roof over my head, my good health, and my imagination I am usually quite contented. Notice that I said 'usually' and not 'always', for lately I've been longing for something deeper. I've had deep feelings of loneliness and bereft. Nonetheless I am smiling for I live in a different world.

- At and after the performance-

I listened with a mixture of disgust and awe to the great and beautiful sounds of the music. Followed by the horrid sounds of Carlotta's voice. God I hated that woman, she sang horribly like a screech owl. She was a pain to dress in the mornings for rehearsals and even more of a pain to dress for the performances in the evening with her constant squawking and wailing god I hated it!

Once my shift was over which was during intermission I slipped away leaving Jane to take over. I slipped down the hall and turned the corner to an old abandoned dressing room. I took off my hairpin and slipped it into the keyhole. Once I had picked the lock I slipped inside the room and lit a stray candle I had found lying there on the table with a match I kept behind my ear in case the power went out and I could not find the costumes.

No reasons for this of course I am blind anyway but still the managers were insistent that all us costume workers do this. I began to search the room with my fingers and soon found what I had been searching for, my violin. You see I took this from the chorus master two years ago, he had deemed it broken and I had offered to fix it. He assented offering to pay me extra for my work. It had taken me three weeks to do but soon I had done it. I tried playing it to make sure it worked and grew to love it so much that I lied to the chorus master saying that I could not fix it so that I could keep it.

I took it put and began to play softly; I was glad that no one ever came in here. You see the other people in the theater said some Phantom had haunted this room's previous occupant four years before I had come to work here three years ago. I did not believe them and liked this room for the privacy it provided me. I began to sing softly a song that I made up in my head.

"Your eyes see but my shadow.

My heart is overflowing.

There's so much you could come to love!

You've got my heart glowing.

Tenderly you could see, my soul!"

(Disclaimer: Those are the lyrics to Erik's Opera from the 1989 version of POTO)

As I finished singing my silence was broken by a long wail of… "No!"