Disclaimer: Not mine. Belongs to Leroux and whoever wrote Hair, which is not nearly as happy a thing as the dancing hippies would have you believe.
We starve, look at one another
Short of breath, walking proudly in our winter coats
Wearing smells from laboratories
Facing a dying nation
Of moving paper fantasy
Listening for the new-told lies
With supreme visions of lonely tunes
- "The Flesh Failures," Hair
The crowd has been gathering all morning in the Place de Grève, waiting. The scaffolding has already been erected; Madame Guillotine's blade shines bright in the early summer morning, reflecting a piercepoint of light into the eyes of the convict.
He is, of course, infamous. He had expected nothing less. To be feared, hated – that is his lot. He has come to understand in the past few weeks that God creates all things for a purpose, and his is to be hated.
He had not expected the strange and sudden outpouring of sympathy (but only because they had heard his Don Juan, his scream, his pain) but it was not enough to knock him off-balance, because after all, it had done nothing.
He is a monster.
Monsters must be destroyed. For the good of society.
He looks at the faces of the crowd and wonders what they see. He had not been allowed a private execution, and knew that this, also, was the way things should be. The monster has to die publicly. There could be no more questions, no more illusions.
No more masks.
Yes. He has to die, and take with him their fears and their rages and their own petty screams of impotence at the world, because only a few had the kind of scream that resonated down into the bone and drew the dark places out with ritual and sacrifice; but without bloodshed. Artists, musicians, writers, creators – more like forgotten priests, worshipping abandoned dusty alters in their garrets and their studios and their packed concert halls. Alone; always alone, with their screams.
He is not allowed to be one of them.
He is a symbol. Not allowed to be human; not allowed to love, except a kind of warped twisted half-love obsession wrung through with pain and guilt. He has to die because he is a monster, because monsters have to die, because monsters are evil.
Because if monsters can love, if monsters can create beauty, if monsters can long to leave behind their monstrousness and live as any other man, then questions must be asked, and conclusions must be drawn that each man is at best only a few brief steps from the monsters they condemn.
And if every man is only a few steps away from monstrousness, but every man is not a monster, then when is a monster but the other side of man? Two sides, one coin; one metal binding them together.
And if monsters are men reflected, then what is a man but a monster reflected? Not a divine creation, not beloved of any god; simply themselves.
And that, of course, cannot be. So the monster must die, because the monster cannot be human.
Or if the monster is human (so think the pitying ones who heard his scream, his Don Juan, and listened) then it must stand to reason that it is only a human with a funny sort of costume on; that underneath the fleshmask there is, of course, a human. Not really a monster, just a misunderstood man, who needs only love and friendship to redeem himself.
This, also, is a lie.
He is not a monster, nor a man, nor an angel, nor a ghost. He is Erik.
And he wants to shout this, scream it, grab the nearest person and force them to hear it, but no one would even if he could. Because he is a symbol now; either a monster, or a man in monster's clothing.
Not himself.
And he will die now, because otherwise there might be questions with uncomfortable answers.
He walks silently across the cobblestones out of years of habit, then thinks again and concentrates on making a distinct click with every step as the ropes chafe his wrists. They are tied too tightly, but that hardly matters now. The rough prison uniform shifts and moves in strange roughened ways around him and smells of straw and stone. His mask – they had granted him that one mercy more for themselves than him – was slick with sweat on the underside and slid against his skin, the edges digging in and under, and he welcomes the pain.
It would be gone soon, after all.
The sun is almost at its zenith now, glaring down and casting the shadows into sharp relief. The crowd murmurs and rustles and occasionally shouts something, short and derisive and laced with bitter fear, but he ignores the rumblings of the beast.
The wooden steps are poorly built and shake under the weight of his guards.
And then he is at the top of the scaffolding, staring out at the crowd. He thinks he sees her at the edge of the crowd, or perhaps only someone who looks like her – no, it is her, because there is the boy. Hadn't they fled? She is looking at him with those wide eyes, eyes as blue as the deep waters of her homeland, and as fathomless…
Now she is reaching out a hand – no. The boy catches it and draws it back, and she lowers her head. Does she weep, then, for her fallen angel? For her father?
Or does he dare to hope she weeps for Erik?
Now the boy is leading her away, and he approves. At least the boy loves her, and will care for her.
It is time.
There are already stories about him. One way or another the truth, or something near enough to it, has begun to be ferreted out. Sooner or later someone will grasp the shape of his life and show it to the world, and then the questions will begin – because his death can only stop them for a little while – but because he will be dead, the questions will be less heated, less… important. Because it's over. The darkness is cracked open; the sun shines through. He is dead – this is the most important truth.
Erik dies today, and therefore Erik will never be the source of questions.
What lives on, however, will be.
The guards make a show of forcing him to lie on the wooden bed, but the truth is that he does not struggle; he does not fight the bonds. He does nothing except sigh a little, and close his eyes as it slides forward, opening them when he feels his neck positioned in the rough wooden cradle. He can smell dried blood and panic.
He stares at the crowd again, and this time sees no one. He had thought the daroga might come, but no; the daroga is, in his own way, showing respect.
The sun is bright and beautiful, so he turns his eyes heavenward in his last moments, staring into it, and screams internally his new understanding of his purpose.
He must die so the sun might live, might continue to shine. He must die so that the children he saw clinging to their mothers as the adult crowd presses forward eager for the smell and spray of blood can grow up without questions, in a simple world where there is only right and wrong.
If he lives, then the moral and philosophical crises he represents – the dread questions he embodies – can remain questions for philosophers and the great machine of society can continue to roll onwards towards whatever heights or depths it might attain.
He dies for their fear.
He dies for their anger.
He dies for their ignorance.
He dies for their pain.
He dies for their confusion.
He dies for the one child who might come of age with memories of him, and question, and through that questioning undo one more of the threads that binds the human race from understanding, pry open the darkness just a little more.
He dies to let the sun shine in.
The lever is pulled – a wooshing hiss – a thump both felt and heard and then a terrible feeling of dislocation searing pain and he tries to scream but he has no vocal cords and he falls over and over and sees the weave of the basket and realize that his head still lives and with his last moment of sentience he screams again inside throwing his mind to any who might catch it –
Erik is dead; the Phantom of the Opera lives on.
And somewhere in the crowd, a child is brushed by the side of his fleeing mind, and begins to question.