For the third time in ten minutes, I irritably ceased my soft playing to
thrust away the intrusive kitten wandering across the heavy keys of
Father's organ. A sweet enough creature, I supposed, what with his patched
coat and eternally black-smudged nose, but never had I encountered a
creature so damnably distracting!
He was back within seconds, demanding my undivided attention by shoving his tiny, silky furred head against my hand, purring madly. This cat apparently never stopped purring!
I petted him at last, but not without acidic commentary. "If you don't stop interrupting me, I shall have to drop you off the roof of the Populaire. Then we shall see if cats truly do always land on their paws." I coughed softly into my other hand, swallowing against a dry, itching throat. The damp down here in the labrynths beneath the Paris Opera House, my home, always got to my lungs in the winter. It had been that way for as long as I could remember. But this was my home, and I refused to leave my father.
"Erik, you'd better get something into you for that cough, or you'll lose your voice." The man who drifted silently over to me and laid a cold, gloved hand on my shoulder, wore a gleaming white mask over features that had not been simply deformed at birth but so ruined as to leave him to resemble a living corpse. Throughout his entire life, his uncanny ugliness and frightening genius had made him the worst sort of outcast, never knowing love or gentleness from any quarter. I know very little about Father's early years, but in the late 1880's, perhaps twenty years ago now, I do know that he met and fell in love with one Christine Daaé, a beautiful young chorus girl with, he used to tell me fondly, the voice of an angel. She had been his very obsession, and so he had taken her on as a private vocal student – and she had become, as far as I know, his only love instead. When Father spoke of her – he very rarely did so now – his voice would still fill with regretful, terrible adoration.
But I hated her. In my private thoughts, she was a demoness, who had stolen my father's heart with her musical skill and beauty, and then, like the mystical Siren, had drowned him in her petty dislike for all things outwardly ugly. She had been his angel, his pride and joy for so long – and because of his physical ugliness, she had gone away from him. She had left him alone to be with that blustering drunkard, Raoul Du Chagney. She, in her childish love of all things beautiful and bright, had spurned my father for the outward ugliness he exuded, repelling my father's great love and care for her like some unwanted invasion of an enemy she hated simply because he did not look as she did.
She had broken him, taken away the last thing he had lived for – a reason for his music – and had left him weak and open for Maurissa.
I shuddered at even the thought of my mother's name, one hand reflexively tweitching towards the spare white half-mask lying beside me on the organ seat. The familiar, horrible memory croded into my mind, but I swallowed it down quickly like bitter medicine and gritted my teeth.
Perhaps a month or so after Christine's desertion of my father, he was preparing his affairs, meaning to die – even he had things to put in order, though he's never told me what they were – when a young blonde woman, marked heavily with the insane eyes of a fanatic, stumbled into his music room. Even now, the music room is the first chamber to go through to reach the rest of the house. Father had been straightening things within when he had glanced up at the sound of a skiff hitting the shore. He has never said so, but I know that for a terrible moment, he had remembered Christine, and had thought that she had come back to him after all. He has told me that he returned to his work, thinking nothing of the sound – though he probably went out to the shore.
At any rate, I believe him when he says Maurissa burst in on him then, babbling on about how she had finally found him 'after years of searching' and that she would 'simply die if he sent her away'. I don't like to think about it, but I know that from that day, she wormed her insidious little way into Father's heart, where only damnable Christine had been before.
Whenever I can bear to think about my mother, the image that comes to mind with those thoughts is of the serpent that bit famous Achilles' heel. Maurissa De La Mer had known my father very well, even before she had met him – and she knew his one weakness had been female love. In her own twisted, demented way, she had loved him, and she made sure he knew that.
Yes, she had loved him. She had loved him enough to destroy his only son. I sucked in a short, silent breath, steeling myself against the memories I knew were sure to come.
I had been no more than six or eight months old, a healthy, beautiful baby, or so Father always says, and he had finally taken leave of me to do some repairs on the single skiff he and Maurissa used to cross the subterranean lake. A bitter irony, for he was only doing it to ensure my safety in it – he was going to take me above ground, to show me the world of Paris. So he had left me that day in the care of my decidedly-unhappy and much-crazed mother. Father, of course, never suspected that she abhorred the very sight of me, her only son, because I had been born without a single scar or blemish to mar me. She hated me, Father once said, because I had not, to her, the essence of what she loved in my father – his scars. In that one infinitely important way, I did not resemble her idol and lifelong obsession.
She had been fooling with Father's pharmaceuticals for some time without his knowledge and had at long last managed to create a corrosive acid to replace my aberration with her ruinous concept of perfection.
She had poured the acid down half of my face.
These are the memories I do not have to take from Father's telling me; I recall them nearly perfectly myself. My screams had brought Father running into the house, and he had been fast enough to save at least one half of my face – Maurissa hadn't had the time to reach the other side of it – but it was too late for my left side.
The left side of my face is completely ruined. In some places, there is no skin left at all, merely the pitted, white bone of my skull beneath. She had been very careful to hit only the skin, and while that was missing, I am lucky enough to have retained my sight. Father had been swift enough – and wise enough, with his knowledge of medicines, - to save what little skin he could, and avoid massive amounts of skeletal damage. The acid hadn't had time to eat through more than the layers of skin (and tissue, in some places) covering my face, and I suppose I can consider myself very lucky.
Father refuses, even now that I am grown, to tell me what happened to my mother after that time, and I have the uneasy suspicion that he does not know. He and I both have our periods of dark despair, through which we find our only solace in music, but if I am correct, (though I cannot be certain, having only ever seen it in myself) we also share a black and volatile rage which can consume us in an instant. Usually, I cannot recall what it is I do in those dark hours, but the destruction left behind is often blatantly clear.
The last thing Father has ever told me about that time is that he recalls striding towards Maurissa, and that he had found himself hours later, holding me on the rooftop of the Paris Opera House, our home.
I felt his hand squeeze my shoulder, bringing me back to the present. "Erik? Are you all right?"
I blinked and nodded, turning to face him. His eyes, a soft amber with their concern, met my hauntingly-light green ones and seemed to shiver away for just an instant.
Whatever scars I bore on my face, I know that the worst reminder by far for either of us is my penetrating, light green eyes. The one physical feature I had been unlucky enough to inherit from my mother was my eyes. They seemed to gaze through even myself when I caught sight of my reflection, (something that happened rarely and only when I was masked) and could easily pierce into others' minds. I could sense others' feelings, thoughts, even their innermost desires and fears, simply by watching them.
"I'm fine, Father… Just woolgathering." I coughed, turning my unmasked face away from him as I raised my right fist to my lips in a vain effort to stop the paroxysm. Father held me by the shoulders gently until he felt me draw in a regular breath, only then moving away to a cabinet on the wall. Reaching behind him, he grasped a steaming mug that I had not seen him come in with before, and added to it a finger's length of some aromatic liquid that made me twitch slightly in distaste.
He smiled wryly behind the mask. "I've added honey to it this time. You know I don't like to."
"The honey isn't going to be what will harm my voice. The coughing will," I replied steadily, wincing at the rough sound of my already congested voice.
"Yes, and permanently if you don't keep quiet," he warned. "Do not talk more than necessary until you're better –"
"Or I could sacrifice my voice for good,, I know." I sighed, taking the cup and sipping carefully at the hot contents. It scalded my sore throat, but I held back the coughing spell until I had swallowed the astringent liquid.
The air rattled in my strained lungs as I tried to breathe deeply without causing another fit. "What did you heat this with?" I demanded hoarsely. "A burning coal?"
Father smiled and let his chilled fingers soothe my aching throat. "You're the one who refuses to drink anything cold." He lifted me gently to my feet. "Now stop talking." His voice turned slightly severe and I nodded, gripping his arm as lightheadedness swept me. Father merely tightened his grip on my arm and helped me gently down the hall to the darkly-masculine room I called my own.
On ever conceivable flat surface, there lay neat piles of composition paper, most marked with scores of melodies. Some stacks were blank, however, and I paused briefly by them to weigh them down, knowing the expensive paper I liked was hard to come by. The room itself was sparsely decorated, with nothing on the wall save a rich, dark paneling and the only furniture other than tables to hold paper, quills and ink was a sand-table for scribing notes on the frequent occasions I ran out of paper and ink, and the heavy four-poster bed my father had crafted for me when I had been very young.
Father was turning back the heavy covers of that bed now as I slowly made my way over to him, teeth chattering softly. He seated me gently on the bed and then pushed me down when I refused to let him remove my clothing, as they contained what little body heat I was still exuding.
"I'll be here all night, Erik, and I'll check on you every once in a while whether you like it or not," he added, knowing I would not. His voice was gentle and tender, his lips smiling faintly behind the stiff white mask he had worn for nearly sixty years. He stroked my thick black hair back softly, his powerful white fingers in stark contrast to the dark, shuddering weakness I felt. Those slim fingers continued their gentle caresses until I felt the bitter-tasting medicine settle into my body and begin to take effect. My sight blurred until I could barely see my father and for a moment, this frightened me.
As if sensing this, he began to sing softly, his voice no less powerful than it had been twenty years before, when he had used the hypnotic sound to lure his only love to the only home he had ever known. But the familiar sound of the song, and the soothing cadence of his voice, soon reassured me, and I closed my eyes, quickly falling asleep.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
He was back within seconds, demanding my undivided attention by shoving his tiny, silky furred head against my hand, purring madly. This cat apparently never stopped purring!
I petted him at last, but not without acidic commentary. "If you don't stop interrupting me, I shall have to drop you off the roof of the Populaire. Then we shall see if cats truly do always land on their paws." I coughed softly into my other hand, swallowing against a dry, itching throat. The damp down here in the labrynths beneath the Paris Opera House, my home, always got to my lungs in the winter. It had been that way for as long as I could remember. But this was my home, and I refused to leave my father.
"Erik, you'd better get something into you for that cough, or you'll lose your voice." The man who drifted silently over to me and laid a cold, gloved hand on my shoulder, wore a gleaming white mask over features that had not been simply deformed at birth but so ruined as to leave him to resemble a living corpse. Throughout his entire life, his uncanny ugliness and frightening genius had made him the worst sort of outcast, never knowing love or gentleness from any quarter. I know very little about Father's early years, but in the late 1880's, perhaps twenty years ago now, I do know that he met and fell in love with one Christine Daaé, a beautiful young chorus girl with, he used to tell me fondly, the voice of an angel. She had been his very obsession, and so he had taken her on as a private vocal student – and she had become, as far as I know, his only love instead. When Father spoke of her – he very rarely did so now – his voice would still fill with regretful, terrible adoration.
But I hated her. In my private thoughts, she was a demoness, who had stolen my father's heart with her musical skill and beauty, and then, like the mystical Siren, had drowned him in her petty dislike for all things outwardly ugly. She had been his angel, his pride and joy for so long – and because of his physical ugliness, she had gone away from him. She had left him alone to be with that blustering drunkard, Raoul Du Chagney. She, in her childish love of all things beautiful and bright, had spurned my father for the outward ugliness he exuded, repelling my father's great love and care for her like some unwanted invasion of an enemy she hated simply because he did not look as she did.
She had broken him, taken away the last thing he had lived for – a reason for his music – and had left him weak and open for Maurissa.
I shuddered at even the thought of my mother's name, one hand reflexively tweitching towards the spare white half-mask lying beside me on the organ seat. The familiar, horrible memory croded into my mind, but I swallowed it down quickly like bitter medicine and gritted my teeth.
Perhaps a month or so after Christine's desertion of my father, he was preparing his affairs, meaning to die – even he had things to put in order, though he's never told me what they were – when a young blonde woman, marked heavily with the insane eyes of a fanatic, stumbled into his music room. Even now, the music room is the first chamber to go through to reach the rest of the house. Father had been straightening things within when he had glanced up at the sound of a skiff hitting the shore. He has never said so, but I know that for a terrible moment, he had remembered Christine, and had thought that she had come back to him after all. He has told me that he returned to his work, thinking nothing of the sound – though he probably went out to the shore.
At any rate, I believe him when he says Maurissa burst in on him then, babbling on about how she had finally found him 'after years of searching' and that she would 'simply die if he sent her away'. I don't like to think about it, but I know that from that day, she wormed her insidious little way into Father's heart, where only damnable Christine had been before.
Whenever I can bear to think about my mother, the image that comes to mind with those thoughts is of the serpent that bit famous Achilles' heel. Maurissa De La Mer had known my father very well, even before she had met him – and she knew his one weakness had been female love. In her own twisted, demented way, she had loved him, and she made sure he knew that.
Yes, she had loved him. She had loved him enough to destroy his only son. I sucked in a short, silent breath, steeling myself against the memories I knew were sure to come.
I had been no more than six or eight months old, a healthy, beautiful baby, or so Father always says, and he had finally taken leave of me to do some repairs on the single skiff he and Maurissa used to cross the subterranean lake. A bitter irony, for he was only doing it to ensure my safety in it – he was going to take me above ground, to show me the world of Paris. So he had left me that day in the care of my decidedly-unhappy and much-crazed mother. Father, of course, never suspected that she abhorred the very sight of me, her only son, because I had been born without a single scar or blemish to mar me. She hated me, Father once said, because I had not, to her, the essence of what she loved in my father – his scars. In that one infinitely important way, I did not resemble her idol and lifelong obsession.
She had been fooling with Father's pharmaceuticals for some time without his knowledge and had at long last managed to create a corrosive acid to replace my aberration with her ruinous concept of perfection.
She had poured the acid down half of my face.
These are the memories I do not have to take from Father's telling me; I recall them nearly perfectly myself. My screams had brought Father running into the house, and he had been fast enough to save at least one half of my face – Maurissa hadn't had the time to reach the other side of it – but it was too late for my left side.
The left side of my face is completely ruined. In some places, there is no skin left at all, merely the pitted, white bone of my skull beneath. She had been very careful to hit only the skin, and while that was missing, I am lucky enough to have retained my sight. Father had been swift enough – and wise enough, with his knowledge of medicines, - to save what little skin he could, and avoid massive amounts of skeletal damage. The acid hadn't had time to eat through more than the layers of skin (and tissue, in some places) covering my face, and I suppose I can consider myself very lucky.
Father refuses, even now that I am grown, to tell me what happened to my mother after that time, and I have the uneasy suspicion that he does not know. He and I both have our periods of dark despair, through which we find our only solace in music, but if I am correct, (though I cannot be certain, having only ever seen it in myself) we also share a black and volatile rage which can consume us in an instant. Usually, I cannot recall what it is I do in those dark hours, but the destruction left behind is often blatantly clear.
The last thing Father has ever told me about that time is that he recalls striding towards Maurissa, and that he had found himself hours later, holding me on the rooftop of the Paris Opera House, our home.
I felt his hand squeeze my shoulder, bringing me back to the present. "Erik? Are you all right?"
I blinked and nodded, turning to face him. His eyes, a soft amber with their concern, met my hauntingly-light green ones and seemed to shiver away for just an instant.
Whatever scars I bore on my face, I know that the worst reminder by far for either of us is my penetrating, light green eyes. The one physical feature I had been unlucky enough to inherit from my mother was my eyes. They seemed to gaze through even myself when I caught sight of my reflection, (something that happened rarely and only when I was masked) and could easily pierce into others' minds. I could sense others' feelings, thoughts, even their innermost desires and fears, simply by watching them.
"I'm fine, Father… Just woolgathering." I coughed, turning my unmasked face away from him as I raised my right fist to my lips in a vain effort to stop the paroxysm. Father held me by the shoulders gently until he felt me draw in a regular breath, only then moving away to a cabinet on the wall. Reaching behind him, he grasped a steaming mug that I had not seen him come in with before, and added to it a finger's length of some aromatic liquid that made me twitch slightly in distaste.
He smiled wryly behind the mask. "I've added honey to it this time. You know I don't like to."
"The honey isn't going to be what will harm my voice. The coughing will," I replied steadily, wincing at the rough sound of my already congested voice.
"Yes, and permanently if you don't keep quiet," he warned. "Do not talk more than necessary until you're better –"
"Or I could sacrifice my voice for good,, I know." I sighed, taking the cup and sipping carefully at the hot contents. It scalded my sore throat, but I held back the coughing spell until I had swallowed the astringent liquid.
The air rattled in my strained lungs as I tried to breathe deeply without causing another fit. "What did you heat this with?" I demanded hoarsely. "A burning coal?"
Father smiled and let his chilled fingers soothe my aching throat. "You're the one who refuses to drink anything cold." He lifted me gently to my feet. "Now stop talking." His voice turned slightly severe and I nodded, gripping his arm as lightheadedness swept me. Father merely tightened his grip on my arm and helped me gently down the hall to the darkly-masculine room I called my own.
On ever conceivable flat surface, there lay neat piles of composition paper, most marked with scores of melodies. Some stacks were blank, however, and I paused briefly by them to weigh them down, knowing the expensive paper I liked was hard to come by. The room itself was sparsely decorated, with nothing on the wall save a rich, dark paneling and the only furniture other than tables to hold paper, quills and ink was a sand-table for scribing notes on the frequent occasions I ran out of paper and ink, and the heavy four-poster bed my father had crafted for me when I had been very young.
Father was turning back the heavy covers of that bed now as I slowly made my way over to him, teeth chattering softly. He seated me gently on the bed and then pushed me down when I refused to let him remove my clothing, as they contained what little body heat I was still exuding.
"I'll be here all night, Erik, and I'll check on you every once in a while whether you like it or not," he added, knowing I would not. His voice was gentle and tender, his lips smiling faintly behind the stiff white mask he had worn for nearly sixty years. He stroked my thick black hair back softly, his powerful white fingers in stark contrast to the dark, shuddering weakness I felt. Those slim fingers continued their gentle caresses until I felt the bitter-tasting medicine settle into my body and begin to take effect. My sight blurred until I could barely see my father and for a moment, this frightened me.
As if sensing this, he began to sing softly, his voice no less powerful than it had been twenty years before, when he had used the hypnotic sound to lure his only love to the only home he had ever known. But the familiar sound of the song, and the soothing cadence of his voice, soon reassured me, and I closed my eyes, quickly falling asleep.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *