Author's note: Greetings, fellow phans. It is I – Kates, O.G.'s Scribe, and I have returned with a new, edited and improved (ha! Hopefully…) version of my retelling of this beautiful tale of love, jealousy, danger, mystery, and truth. I wasn't quite happy with my earlier version of it, so now after having removed the Phantom of the Opera, Retold, I have changed a few things. So please, enjoy and tell me what you thought of it. Just please be kind…
Disclaimer: I don't own Phantom in any form, except for my ideas presented here on how it should have gone. The characters, places, and storyline belong to Gaston Leroux, Susan Kay, Mssrs. Yeston/Kopit, and Sir Andrew Llord Webber. I am merely a devoted phan who wishes to express her love for all things Phantom. And now, "let the audience in – let my opera begin!"
– Prologue –
It all began as a story.
A simple story, and nothing more.
Only a wraith.
Little more than a legend, or the vain workings of some young ballet dancer's imagination, the words 'Opera Ghost' made no difference in the minds of those who heard them, inspired no awe or fascination…brought about no fear. For as long as anyone could remember, the leviathan block of stone, iron, and finery that was known as the Opéra Populaire – Paris's crowning gem, its greatest work and life's obsession – had been only that: a fantastic, cowing structure where the musical works of the world's best composers and choreographers were performed. A place where the French people, if they could, went to immerse themselves in its beauty and blunt, unafraid, no-holds-barred self-importance. It had been built, it had been and was used, and it – in all likeliness – would stand in the centuries that even the current generation's children's children's children's children would not see.
And then came the rumor.
The rumor of a dark shape lurking in the blackest shadows of the opera house.
It first came to light, breathed out of the terrified, almost inaudible whispers of the youngest and most insecure of the ballet chorus girls as they began to tell stories – the stories of a black, ghost-like form seen in the darkness behind the stages. No one paid attention to them or heeded their desperate pleas for light and safety.
Until one of the wardrobe mistresses saw something.
It had the form of a man, the stories said – tall and entirely cloaked in black, with a pale, terrifying slash of white showing out of a draping hood, like a death's head. When spoken to, if anyone who saw it dared to do so, the shadowy figure would pause, hearing their words but completely ignoring them as if they were no more than the gentle blustering of the wind outside a glass window. Then, it would turn its head – if indeed a head it had – and a glint of bright, demonically foreboding yellow would show where the eyes of the creature might have been. And without a word then, it would be gone.
As if it had never been there, save in spirit only.
As if it was a ghost.
The rumors continued to grow and spread, in spite of the authorities of the Opéra Populaire's attempts to stop them, to restore order and efficiency as practices and performances were becoming interrupted more and more often by sightings of the so-called ghost, the specter…the Phantom. The stagehands found strange objects, such as ropes, stolen props, ruined backdrops, and other sorts of property belonging to the Opéra in odd places, and articles that the principal and secondary, even background actors had once owned were reported missing.
And still, the ghost was sighted almost on regular intervals, and everyone in the Opéra Populaire was becoming more and more frightened.
There was speculation on how it had come, the ghost. Some people said that it was the spirit of a deceased actor who had been killed in the Opéra's early days by a jealous rival and was therefore doomed to wander the halls of the theater forever. Others spun tales of a construction worker who had lost himself far below the Opéra's surface and died a horrible death underneath the earth: drowned in the vast lake that everyone knew to exist, even though hardly anyone had seen it. Then there were intrigues saying that the figure was the owner of another opera house in competition with the Parisian Opéra Populaire, or that it was simply a prankster attempting a stunt to attract the attention of one of the divas with whom he was madly in love.
But whatever the case, no one ever discovered exactly who and what the ghost was, or if it was truly even there…and no one ever caught it.
And so an infamous figure, never to be forgotten, came to be.
The Phantom of the Opera.