A/N: ""It's the simplest trick you've ever seen," he said, "but it's very useful for breathing and singing underwater. I learned it from the pirates in Tonkin, who could stay submerged and hidden for hours in the riverbeds.""
That was what started me off! Seeing as Kay left that bit of Erik's life out in her novel, I became quite interested...
I set about poring through atlases to find out where the hell Tonkin was, and when I found it I began to research it quite a bit. It turns out that there were actually French colonies there, in Tonkin, during Leroux's time! I even found a picture of a French official interrogating a real Tonkin pirate (le gasp! :O I can send you the link to it if you like) And so I have decided to write down my thoughts about what Erik must have gotten up to in Vietnam when he went there...
Just to warn everyone in advance - posting may be extremely slow, because this year is my GCSE year, and I will be taking the exams in less than 95 days...(panic). I know it's a bit crazy to be writing a big story like this now of all times, when I'll be juggling essays and coursework and deadlines and revision, but this tale has been growing in my mind right from the beginning of the summer hols (when I went to the mountains in Bulgaria for one long, hellish month). I'll try my best!
Oh yes, and just in case anyone gets confused, during this particular time period Vietnam was no longer referred to as "Vietnam", but as the three areas of Cochinchina (the South bit), Annam (er...the middle bit) and Tonkin (the North bit), defined by the French. Vietnamese people were called Annamites, even if they weren't from the Annam part of Vietnam. Right, enough of the waffle, and let's get on with the show!
Please remember that although all the other characters in this fic are mine, I do not own Erik, nor am I at all fluent in Vietnamese. Enjoy!
I was, regrettably, in something of an impasse.
My hands were bound with painful tightness, and so were my feet. Rope, they had used - rope that made up for its age with its toughened strength. I could not struggle, nor could I use my voice to overpower my captors.
They had come in the night; every last one of them had come with their torches and lanterns and ghastly old ropes to bind the monster as he lay dormant and vulnerable in his bed. It almost made me laugh, in a cynical way, the fact that they had attacked on the very first night I had managed to sleep.
Trussed up like an animal - my mask dislodged from my face, my cries of outrage gagged by a strip of fabric and a small rock that held down my tongue - I was dragged by the crowd away from the small dwelling I had haunted, and unceremoniously trailed through the dirt as they marched up the dark, sandy track on the hillside. They were heading seaward, towards the coast, leaving the flickering lights of the village behind. Night though it was, the silvery crescent of the moon shed enough of a glimmer to illuminate the waves of the sea just beyond the next grassy hill. Would they be throwing me into the water, then? Casting my less-than-welcome body into the Tonkin Gulf? What a way to be ended...drowned like any criminal or freak needed to be disposed of quietly. Wouldn't the local fishermen of a Gulf island be surprised when my waterlogged corpse bobbed up in their nets!
Fighting my captors was useless, as I quickly learnt. I was being dragged along by two of the younger, stronger Annamite men who held me in a grip of iron. Although I, too, was more or less in my prime and quite a tall man, there was nothing I could do with my hands and feet bound and my voice muffled. And yet despite the fact that they knew I was well and truly incapacitated, I could smell the rancid, acrid scent of the men's sweat, sour over the sweetness of the night's sea-breeze. They were still afraid of me - still wary of the tall, thin man with the pale, cadaverous face and bewitching voice. Their collective fears were deep and primal: to them, I was a supernatural being, a creature of many wiles who could do most anything with his terrible "magic". What is unknown to man is feared, which therefore explains my most unfortunate predicament. Now that my mask was off, especially, - and I would miss that mask quite a bit - their wariness and disgust had doubled. In their eyes I was never simply a poor deformed man with the face of a corpse, but, because of the various talents they had seen me demonstrate, they regarded me as an odd creature with the powers of a demon. They believed, in fact, that I was a dead man raised from my eternal rest to entrance mortals with my voice, and then steal their souls, or such ideas along those lines. They had perversely delighted in formulating tales about me, satisfying their morbid need to explain my hideousness.
Now, it seemed, they had taken their decision, and decided that a musically talented, illusion-performing corpse of dubious origin was not welcome in their coastal town. I could only wonder what death they would choose to inflict upon me...
As I pondered the nature of my impending end, I suddenly became vividly aware of my surroundings, as if the world was taunting me with what I was about to lose. The sweet breeze caressed my blighted face and stirred my black, rumpled locks, and the stars above seemed to twinkle intensely. I could hear the chirping of the night-insects, the distant rush of the waves, the deep crackle of the torches held by my captors, torches that lit up the grass around us in a flickering, yellow glow while the large, dusky-winged moths fluttered wildly about. Quel cortège - what a procession! I became aware, too, of the unpleasant earthy taste of the rough rock that had been coarsely pushed into my mouth and secured by the gag. My arms were beginning to ache terribly from being held up by the two brawny youths, and my bare feet were sore and bleeding from being dragged across the long stretch of dirt path. No, no...why was I becoming more aware of my body when that body was about to be put to an end? It defied all logic; I despaired. Ventriloquistic skills would not save me now - even I needed to move at least part of my tongue to exert my will. And, truth be told, I was scared quite stiff.
I twisted my head to look up at one of the men that was dragging me along. Judging by his build, he must have been a sailor of some description, and his rough handling of me was quickly making me develop quite some ill feelings for sailor lads in general. This sailor lad in particular appeared thoroughly unsettled by my yellow-eyed, glimmering gaze, and refused to look at me. My heart was beginning to thump wildly in my chest as we approached the crest of the last hill. Oh, dear goodness...I had secured my own freedom in Persia and Constantinople only to be neatly disposed of in this far-off Asian country. To think it had all been for nothing...
The sea was only a stretch of field away. I wondered bitterly whether death would ever bring me peace -
Abruptly, the procession turned right, away from the coast. What were they doing? Were they going to set fire to me with their flaming bundles of straw instead? I began to wriggle slightly in my bonds; I had never really liked intense heat much. It would have been far more convenient if they had just consented to drop me into the sea...
Up ahead, I glimpsed a huge, round stone sitting in the middle of the flat plain. It was as large as a millstone, and looked quite odd, sitting on its own in the middle of the lush, long grass. I frowned in confusion. Was this some manner of sacrificial table? Would I be set fire to here? Apparently not, it seemed; the "table" was far too low for that. I watched curiously as the crowd drew to a stop, and a group of well-muscled, able men separated itself from my funereal procession. Before my intrigued gaze, they each took large, thick wooden staffs that they held and put them beneath the stone. Once it had been levered up slightly, they began to push it with all their might. Muscles shunting as they shoved, the stone began to slide to one side, revealing a large hole in the ground. My eyes widened; it appeared that the stone was a cover, a lid for some immense pit. Aha...I could envision their endeavour now.
My guesses proved to be right as I found myself being led towards the lip of the crevice by the agitated crowd -
My stomach turned and I almost retched at the awful stench that rose from that pit. It was the odour of decay, of rot, of death. The foul reek hung in a heady miasma about the newly-uncovered hole, and several of the men around me had covered their noses with their sleeves. What was in that dark, evil-smelling pit I suddenly did not want to know. Faced with death, I acquired an unexpected urge to live; I thrashed and I struggled against my captors, at the same time trying not to inhale the awful scent. One would think that not having a nose would be a useful asset here, but this was most regrettably not the case. I dug in the heels of my already raw feet, but as they pushed me closer to the pit my knees folded, weakened by the supreme stench. The rock in my mouth was truly making me gag now, my yellow eyes watering, stung by the vile smell.
My captors were unrelenting and entirely merciless, though, and forced me forwards. In vain I attempted to exert my will over them using my voice...the only sounds I could produce were muffled, distressed yelps, far from the powerful, commanding tones I had intended. The dark pit yawned wide and black before my feet. As my head spun with vertigo, I could easily have believed this was the very pit of Hell, judging by the way it made adrenalin pound in my veins as memories of my fears as a child came back. Yes, there had been a time when I was not as steeled against the world and the weakening emotions of men as I was now - as a young boy, I, too, had had my share of earthly fears. As I stared now in horror at the looming hole, I recalled my ancient, ancient fear of the darkness. I had been locked in many dark rooms as a child, left prey to nightmares and my own mind. One might even assume that it was not the darkness itself I feared, but the absence of visual distraction, which left me alone with my terrible thoughts. Those old fears rose up in me once more, unbidden, at the sight of that gaping abyss, and my limbs began to quiver. I detested this weakness in the face of the adrenalin-laced emotions rushing through me, while I vainly tried to fight off my captors. Suddenly, they pushed me forwards in one surge, their cries ringing in my ears -
I breathlessly teetered on the very edge of the crevice, bare white toes curling desperately around the earthy lip, and then one of the levering-staffs was slammed into my back, pitching me forwards and into the blackness.
My fall through the stinking darkness was terrible...my hands were tied and unable to brace me or balance my inexorable plummeting. The empty, festered air whistled about my ears in a high wind, and in the spiralling confusion the side of my hip glanced off the wall of the pit. I barely skimmed it, but I was nevertheless tossed uncontrollably, hitting the right side of my face against the wall - and since I was falling past it so quickly, it tore at my skin in a vicious burn. My cry of pain was snatched away by the wind, and as I tumbled head over heels, droplets of blood flying upwards, I caught wild glimpses of the night sky above me - quick flashes of the freedom that was falling away from me as I, too, toppled -
'Argh!'
Unexpectedly, I landed, and heard the sharp, dry crack of bones breaking echo about the pit's dark walls. For a moment I lay still and numb, warm blood flowing stickily down my face as I wondered why the hell I was still alive when I had most probably broken every last bone in my body. Was fate really quite so sadistic towards me?
After a moment, when I failed to die, I mustered the courage to shift slightly. To my extreme surprise and considerable relief, I found that the upper half of my body was still intact; from what I could see, no bones poked gruesomely through my skin or jutted through my garments. I shifted my legs, and discovered that they, too were not broken in any way. Odd...
'Ouch.' Gingerly touching the right side of my face proved to be not much of a good idea; it burned like hell and I briefly wondered whether I had left half of my face behind during my fall, judging by the pain and bleeding. The thick blood now dripping off my chin and onto my neck and shirt seemed to be mixed with various clumps of dirt and earth, no doubt picked up from my encounter with the wall. I needed to clean the wound properly, to get rid of all the loose dirt upon it, but there was little chance of finding any clean water down here. I sighed, blinking blood out of my eye and pushing a few unruly strands of hair back from where they hung over my injury. I was lucky I did not have my face turned more to the right when I fell; the speed I was going at could easily have torn an eye out as well as the quarter of my face it had also recently taken. However, I still felt rather resentful...were my features not hideous enough as they were? Did I really need some extra scarring and missing lumps of flesh? I decided the best thing to do for the moment would be to simply leave it alone. I had little to stem the bleeding with - but even if I did, I would probably work some stones and pieces of earth into the wounds and get them infected, which would certainly not be very aesthetically pleasing in the long term. Nevertheless, I dabbed painfully at the mess of my face with my shirt's hem.
The only other injury I could find was a mildly sprained left wrist, which I could tend to easily. Apart from that, the rest of my bones seemed to have been more jarred by my fall than broken. But if this was indeed true, then what had snapped when I had landed? This question almost made me swallow the rock still in my mouth - which, I might add, had nearly shattered my teeth on the way down here.
Remembering I was bound, I quickly tore at my gag and ejected the rock, then set about untying my hands and feet - taking extra care with the aching wrist I had landed on. When I was free, I sat up - and felt something shift sickeningly beneath me.
I stopped breathing, then touched the ground. It was firm, but not hard, and covered in some sort of...fabric? Perplexed and unsettled, I felt around and found my spidery fingers encountering something unpleasantly cold and clammy...when I touched something hard and covered with hair, I drew my hand away with a yelp of revulsion as I realised.
I was sitting on a dead body.
The realisation dawned on me slowly and awfully, like the sun rising on the morning of Judgement Day. I was not, as I had first presumed, sitting on the floor of the pit, but perched on top of a vast mound of corpses and skeletons at the bottom of a ghastly well!
I had wondered where the indigenous Annamite locals buried their dead, and it seemed I had found out - only not quite in the way I had hoped. The bones snapping when I landed...they had been the bones of the sorry chap who had broken my fall. Now I was surrounded by corpses either in sacks or simply tossed in as they were, completely alone and still alive.
It was obvious the locals had put two and two together and decided the best place for a living corpse would be with his fellow cadavers. I had been thrown into a well of the dead, where departed relatives slowly accumulated over the decades, like water in a hole. Fate was cruel indeed to make me survive my fall, my landing cushioned by a heap of dead bodies! Now I was doomed to wander about this pit, going slowly insane while I gradually perished from starvation and thirst, or else bled to death from my more or less open wound. I was a dead man, in all senses of the word but the literal one, which was not at all to my credit.
'Bordel!' I swore in my native French, getting painfully and shakily to my feet, scowling at the small crescent of light so far above me that was the mouth of the pit. To my shock, the crescent was growing thinner...I could hear the echoes of the crowd rejoicing as the stone was slowly sliding back into place over my new prison. In a matter of minutes, I was shut in complete and total darkness and silence, with only the dead for company.
The only positive side I could see of my predicament was that I was now more or less used to the stench of rotting bodies.
I blindly explored the area of the pit's floor, stumbling over the occasional corpse. I ran my spidery fingers over damp, earthy wall. In such a moist, dark environment, disease was probably rife. Who knew what was crawling all over those decomposing bodies...I would have to take care what I did down here, if I did not want to become victim to one of the terrible illnesses that bred on the cadavers. However, as my future was yet uncertain, I decided that it might not matter. But just in case, I tore a strip of fabric from my shirt, and tied it to cover the gaping, vulnerable hole of my nose, and my mouth, tugging it into a knot at the back of my head to firmly secure it. I was careful to bundle more material beneath the makeshift mask, to serve as a compress for my still-smarting wound. Another strip of my shirt was also duly used to tightly bind my sprained wrist. Once this was done, I set about calculating the size of the pit.
From my position by the wall, I put my back against it, spreading my arms out to get an idea of the curve. Once I had made sure my body was facing the right direction, I set off in a straight line at a right-angle to the pit's wall. I walked in carefully counted, even strides, stepping over skeletons and bodies until my toes touched the opposite wall. Eight strides, roughly...that made it quite a fair-sized pit, which was nevertheless rather well-filled with corpses.
I found the huge mound of piled bodies I had fallen on, and discovered that the areas further from it had less cadavers lying about. I proceeded to haul the littered bodies onto the larger heap, clearing a small area near the wall. Some of the corpses were heavy with rot and collected water, others withered away and light. Some were even just scraps of flesh still clinging onto bones. All of these I tossed or dragged away as best as I could, before the area I had cleared for myself was completely free of corpses.
My task done, I sat down with my back to the uneven wall, pondering my fate. What would become of me now? I ardently wished I had been burnt alive or tossed into the sea after all; sitting here in the dark with hundreds of corpses was no fun at all. The longer I sat, the colder I became, too; from the lack of exertion, and from the after-effects of adrenalin and shock, a chill was stealing over me. The humid night had been so much warmer above ground, but down here it was quite cold. The fact that I had torn so much fabric from my shirt meant that it gave me much less covering - I felt rather ridiculous, wearing a torn shirt that left half of my midriff bare. I got to my feet and wandered across to the pile of bodies, rubbing my pale forearms vigorously. I usually didn't feel the cold so much; in the harsh winter of Nijni-Novgorod I had fared relatively well, but it seemed my extensive stay in the comparitively more tropical climates of Turkey, Persia and India had habituated me more to the heat, despite never really warming my ever-cold hands and feet. My phalanges were so long that the blood didn't really seem to get to them...
After a short while of fumbling, I came upon what I was looking for. I reached down and, after untying a few knots here and there, pulled a funeral shroud away from a body. This I wrapped around myself for warmth, tucking the foul-smelling cloth about my skeletal limbs as I sat myself back down by the wall. What was there to do now but simply sit still and try to conserve energy and body heat?
When the sounds of my movements ceased, I became aware of other sounds in the pit; I could hear insects and scavengers that had somehow entered the well beginning to feed on the dead. I rocked back and forth gently, feeling quite alone - they weren't the best of company, in reality, these corpses. The chattering and clicking of the various creatures that had infiltrated this burial pit was becoming quite off-putting, too. I decided that this place was very much against my liking. I may have looked like a cadaver myself, but the important thing was that I was alive. Unfortunately, it appeared that this discrepancy had been overlooked and the townspeople had decided to cast me in this pit anyway. And there was me believing that the locals were only curious and welcoming towards strangers...
Well, they had certainly been curious about me, and no mistake. My mask had garnered many stares, and my thin, long limbs and stark white skin made me stand out quite a bit against the locals. They had certainly been intrigued, too, to learn of my various talents. My reputation soon spread, and in time I was known by many as "Thày Phù Thuy" - the sorcerer. As nobody knew my true name - or, at least, the name I had assumed - due to the fact that I did not engage socially at all with the locals, Thày Phù Thuy became the only name I was known by. This did not bother me, to tell the truth; I had been given many diverse names during my travels...my earliest acquired one being, of course, "Le Mort Vivant" - the living corpse. That was back in my native country...I had never truly missed it to any extent, since it held such terrible memories for me. I had run away from France with the travelling gypsies, as one of their sideshows for the paying public. My face, of course, earned me that name, as well as my emaciated appearance. Life was never easy for me...but of course, why should it ever be, with a physiognomy like mine?
From Rouen I henceforth made my way through France and across Europe, trying to leave my past behind every step of the way. I grew up constantly moving, always travelling between the shows in which I was exhibited. Gradually, though, as my skills became almost more crowd-drawing than my features, I established my own sideshow, until I had more or less left the gypsies altogether. In Russia, I became known as "Beliya Prizrak", the White Ghost, and when I entered Persia I became the Trickster, the Trap-door Lover and, most importantly, the Angel of Doom. Those were dark days, but the little Sultana did so laugh at my clever torture devices...
In India, I had been dubbed the Silent Viper due to my exceptional skills with the Punjab lasso, and in Constantinople I was referred to as "Siyah Hayalet" - the Black Wraith. My names always changed with my location...for instance, on the boat to Vietnam I had assumed the name of "Erik" again - a perfectly ordinary name that had come to me by simple chance when passing out of France - purely for the sake of politeness to the captain. I also quite liked the name "Erik"...it was simple, easily remembered, and thankfully not a description of my appearance or behaviour. It was just a name...but of course, it was rare that I was given a chance to use it. I supposed none of the corpses here with me would care if I informed them that they could call me by the name of "Erik"...
The fear-driven people who had thrown me down here, and who had supposedly killed the terrible Thày Phù Thuy, had at first been curious, then surprised, then wary and afraid of what I could do. It was when they had seen my face, of course, that they had decided to take action...and so here I was, sitting wrapped in a borrowed funeral shroud, listening to the corpses decompose quietly around me. It was certainly not the ideal way to spend a Wednesday night, for sure...
Hours passed. Seconds were counted by the throbs of my aching wrist, bound by the strip of fabric, and of the steady trickle of blood seeping through the compress on my face. Sleep was beyond me; I fumbled absent-mindedly inside the pocket of my now-ragged shirt, and pulled out the old watch I kept on a chain. However, it was useless to me, for this darkness was as black as pitch, and even holding it to my ear did not help me for my fall had shaken the delicate mechanism of springs and cogs, silencing the ticking of the hands. All I could do was run the chain through my fingers and polish the smooth surface of the watch with my thumb. I truly hated this sensation of utter helplessness; I suddenly yearned for daylight - longed for it as I never had before. No chance of it, however: reaching the surface would entail a long, vertical climb, blocked by a heavy slab of stone that needed four strong men and considerable leverage to push aside.
I sat despondently, wrapped in the shroud, bleeding, and perfectly wretched. There were so many things I could be doing at the moment...this method of slow execution was not at all convenient with my plans. Any warning would have been nice; I would have liked to tie up my affairs. The villagers were bound to be rifling through my possessions at this very moment, clumsily handling my delicate inventions and ruining the interesting chemicals I stored for some of my illusions. No doubt they would burn all I owned, for fear of my evil having contaminated it...
At the moment, though, this was the least of my concerns. I had no way of getting out of this pit, and what was more, my spine was beginning to bruise - most colourfully, I imagined - from my fall into this hell-hole.
I was, as the delightful expression so aptly puts it, vraiment dans la merde.