This is why I shouldn't stay up so late after binging Yerik and Cherik. Enjoy!
(Ps, there might be a part two? I have a vague idea, but I'll really only be able to work on it when I finish Porcelain Mask and have that going on steady updates.)
(Pps, can we just appreciate Christopher Carl's voice and general Erikness?)
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The pranks had been harmless enough at first. A slight shadow on a wall here, the odd ballet shoe or tutu missing there, perhaps the odd trip in the corridors if he was feeling particularly bored, always creating a harmony of 'Listen to what the Ghost did to poor-', or 'It's the Opera Ghost again!', which floated down through the cellars and set him grinning, like music to his misshapen ears. But now, Erik stood back from his newest invention and pushed the straying curls back from his mask with an especially excited grin.
It was the most simple and childish of tricks, yet still a work he considered a stroke of genius. It didn't take an awful lot to scare the silly little girls in the corps de ballet, but his current play toy would be harder to fool. A harder case to tackle, maybe, but did he not jump at the chance of a challenge?
Indeed, he took delight in the fear he caused the girls, but it was always short lived. He'd become bored within hours and had developed terrible habits of pacing around his little house by the lake or crafting more masks than he could ever possibly wear. Over the past few weeks, the lack of activity had been driving him insane, like a collie dog chained up on a farmyard, with a flock of sheep in sight. Of course, he had never actually been to a farmyard, but he could imagine that his distress mirrored such a creature.
He slipped through the mirror and closed it behind him, slapping a hand over his mouth to stifle the chuckles that welled up within him.
La Carlotta bounced through her dressing room door, humming p, and occasionally wailing, the notes to the Air des Bijoux. Erik winced. She was four years older than he, an ancient twenty-three, but seemed to imagine her voice as much older, and used it as such. Knowing music as he did, he had been impressed with her confidence when she arrived almost a year ago from Italy and had offered to teach her further. Her confidence had ruined that chance.
Now, Erik lay a careful hand on the rope trigger he'd so cleverly set up to run behind the wall. A series of pulleys had been arranged in such a fashion that the haughty woman could not possibly see them, even if she somehow looked past her reflection in the vanity mirror, aptly named, he mused.
She took her seat at the little table, beaming at herself and letting out some higher notes. He shook his head; she had a powerful instrument, capable of so much, and it went to waste. Still, he'd been planning this for weeks, and couldn't simply let the opportunity slip by. The Daroga frequented this room to check for signs of his mischief, and Erik didn't know when he'd have another chance to strike while the man was out of the city.
Carlotta checked her eye makeup with loud, cocky declarations of her beauty. Quite unfitting, Erik thought, for the pious and lovely Marguerite, whom he'd accidentally found himself admiring before he scolded himself for feeling such things for a fictional character.
He shook all thoughts of Marguerite's long plaits and wonderful costumes from his mind and tugged lightly on the rope. A pulley overhead worked by an inch or two, but nothing major happened. Crossing his white-gloved fingers for luck, he pulled it that bit harder, working the lengths of rope through his hands.
Carlotta's notes turned to horrified screams. Avery nice transition, the young Ghost chuckled to himself. The vanity table she was sat up had levitated somewhat, just by a few inches. She stood from her seat and backed away, grabbing the stool and holding it before her in terror. Erik glanced for a moment through the mirror, hating how the same uncooperative curls always managed to find their way beneath his mask and into his eyes.
The rope was taut and a struggle to keep a firm hold of, but he dug his heels into the stone of his labyrinthine home and gritted his teeth and held it tight, working length by length through his gloves. Each time, the vanity table would rise by a few more inches, and Carlotta's voice a few more decibels and octaves.
He couldn't help but snicker loudly to himself at the sight of her already pale visage nearing transparency.
"Father Dumont!" she screamed, dropping the stool and making a break for the door. "Father Dumont! It's the Ghost! Father!"
And then she was gone, the door bouncing against its frame after her. Erik lowered the vanity table to the ground again, a strain to keep it from crashing altogether, and slipped through the mirror into the room. The priest was called almost every week to bless the Opera House, and every time Erik would double over with laughter at the sight of his exasperation as the girls of the corps de ballet clung to him in fear.
There was never anything to find; Erik was far too clever to leave his toys on the nursery floor. He always picked up after himself, as if he was never there. Honestly, he wasn't sure why his mother had rejected him. He had such good manners!
And so, he tidied away his pulleys and ropes and mirrors, wound and stacked them neatly away in the basket he'd brought with him from his home. By the time Carlotta arrived back with the tired Father Dumont, who looked fit to relocate to a different parish, there were no more ghosts to dispell.
Erik let himself have a good, long, hearty laugh in the fifth cellar. Carlotta had sung to raise a vanity table! A trick of light and manual labour granted, but she'd sung to bring it up!
And of course, what goes up must eventually come down, he grinned to himself, reclining on his divan with a purring street kitten he'd come to know as Marie-Antoinette on his stomach. Already, his ever conniving mind was whirring its cogs, oiling them with his unique creative flairs until they worked smoothly.
Ah, but what goes up must come down indeed. Perhaps one day, he would curate a far greater trick than making a simple vanity table rise by eight inches.