Plink... plink...plink...

There was that damn drip, at regular intervals, on the damp stone floor. I lie in the corner of the room where I had been for too long ... forgotten. I grinned. Isn't me who had, somehow, choose to end my days in that cell? This would be my grave, I knew it. Somewhere, upstairs, I could hear shrill cries. Oh! I knew how they wanted me dead! I smile. My time was up and I wouldn't give them the pleasure to kill me with their own hands. The morphine seeped in my body and everything began to feel numb.

I moved my fingers but they were sticky. Red and sticky. The ring she had given me was tarnished and I tried to remove it to put aside and clean it later. But it slipped between my filthy fingers and rolled into the shadows. I heard it clink and reverberate against metal and stone.

I got up and bowed, maybe a bit too far, to pick it up. Everything spun around me.. My finger brushed its metal but it was too far under the bed. I stretched my muscles painfully to reach it but was halted by the rustling of fabric.

She had come back.

She was there, in her once immaculate dress, with her hair disheveled, her face pale, looking at me in silence. I saw the bloodstains that had flowed from her wound on her forehead, crimson, on the shoulders of her incandescent white dress. She held me in her melancholy glance and took a step towards me, reaching out to my face.

Christine.

I stepped back, my throat tight, my hands held out, red with blood. Behind her, a handsome, fair haired-man took her arm, throwing me a last look, filled with bitterness and terror. De Chagny. Tears ran down my swollen cheeks and splashed on the floor

Plink... plink...plink…

That drip. That fucking drip. Or was it blood?

And before the lovers completely disappear into the darkness, I saw others come in strength and throw themselves on me.

A/N : Ghosts is a thriller and not a romantic story. This novel may be a little more a work of original fiction than a fanfiction.

To repeat a delightful expression that I have read here and which I adore: I have borrowed here Gaston Leroux's gentle characters: Christine Daaé, Raoul de Chagny, Phantom of the Opera, Faure, Comissaire Mifroid and The Persian (no, not the more human version of Kay, Nadir, but the Persian by Gaston Leroux) and others I may forget. And ... and I damaged them a bit, in the process. Not just a little, I think. It's a very dark version of all the characters you'll find here. I add characters of my own that become the main protagonists. And I repeat, it is not a romantic work. But a thriller.

After analyzing Leroux's work, with a view to building the basis of my story, I consciously changed a few details. Notably the theater where the original story takes place. I know that the fire of the theater of which I will speak coincides much with the end of the film of 2004. But Ghosts is not inspired by the work of Webber. While Leroux's work takes place at the Palais Garnier, Ghosts situates the drama between Christine, Raoul and "Érik" in the Théâtre Le Pelletier, the historic predecessor of the Palais Garnier, which burned to ground on 28 October 1873, while the majestic theater which Leroux tell us about was only a draft that had been abandoned in time of war, the time that Prussia withdraws from the game. The Palais Garnier opens its doors only two years later and it is already a little late For my story, for several reasons. I chose the Le Pelletier theater for two very simple reasons: I wanted Ghosts to be firmly anchored in reality, with truthful historical facts. Different narrative reasons explain my choice. I needed the premise of Ghosts to be in the early 1870s to coincide with the confusing dates given by Leroux in his book and to coincide, almost ten years later, with the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House , October 22, 1883. And I needed a major catastrophe - which did not occur at the Palais Garnier until at least 20 years after its opening (the fall of the candlestick really did not occur until 1896).

Because the fate of a murderer is always more nebulous, during a disaster where people lose their lives ...

Thanks to ChaosEmperorNex and to Mominator124 for beta-reading this prologue!

Also, I'm looking for a new title for this novel. While ''Ghosts'' describe pretty much what I have in mind, it's over-used, for a fandom like that. Any suggestions will be welcomed!