Summary: A monster is terrorising Paris, but when dancer Christine Daaé meets a stranger outside the Opéra Populaire, she finds more to him than meets the eye… Uses elements from 'A Monster in Paris'; not necessary to have seen it to understand the fic.

Disclaimer: The characters are not mine, they belong to Gaston Leroux. Some plot elements belong to 'A Monster in Paris', some belong to Phantom, all have been twisted and expanded to suit my own ideals! It is not necessary to have seen 'A Monster in Paris' to understand this, which is why I haven't flagged it as a crossover.

Note: I said I wouldn't post any new multi-chaptered fics until I finish my magnum opus. Open mouth, insert foot... But this idea would not go away and I wrote this chapter in about three hours flat, and because something coming into my head complete like that is quite rare, I posted it. Basically, I went to see 'A Monster in Paris' today and I was immediately struck with parallels to Phantom. Maybe it was just me, but the comparisons wouldn't go away. I thought: 'What if the 'monster' was not a giant insect, but in fact Erik?' And naturally, a downward spiral into plotting was thus begun…

A Phantom in Paris

One

Christine Daaé was enjoying a rare moment of respite in the dressing room she shared in the depths of the Opéra Populaire. It was unusual for her to have the room to herself, and although Meg was her best friend and she loved her dearly as such, it was nice to have a little peace and quiet from her almost constant chatter now and then. Both girls had come to the opera house at around the same time; Christine had had no other place to go after the death of her father, and the arts provided the only trade she knew, having been brought up in theatres around the continent where her father performed. Meg had arrived at the opera and taken her place amongst the ballerinas almost by proxy when her mother had begun working there. They had become firm friends and constant companions almost immediately, the bolder Meg acting as a self-appointed guide and guardian to the timid Christine, and they had found their feet and their niches together. Although both were dancers, it was obvious to the rest of the corps de ballet, and none more so than Meg, that Christine's true passion and talent lay in music. One day, she hoped, she would be the star soprano with her name in block capitals upon the posters that advertised the latest season's productions. One day, her voice would make her name and her fortune, but not today. She could practice in the confines of her dressing room as much as she was able, but to truly tap into the potential of her talents she needed something else, someone else. She needed someone to help unlock the full secrets that her voice held. Tutors were expensive, however, and Christine had not the courage to speak to the opera's resident vocal coach or to the singers themselves to ask for assistance. Every time she had tried in the past, they had never taken her seriously, seeing only a ballerina, and no prima ballerina either. They brushed aside her nervous and halting queries, but Christine could not brush away her dreams as easily, no matter how much resistance she came up against. Her optimism, however, had begun to wane. Perhaps the angel of music that her father had promised, on his deathbed, to send to her from beyond the grave, had got lost along the way. He was certainly taking a long time in coming.

The peace in the room was short-lived as the door swung open and Meg ran in, panting.

"I only just got back in before Maman realised I was gone," she said. "I'm going to go mad if she doesn't start trusting me soon!" She flopped onto the chair beside her friend to get her breath back and begin her preparations for the night's performance.

"It's not that she doesn't trust you; she's only concerned for your safety," Christine pointed out. Madame Giry was not a woman to be trifled with and indeed Christine had found her truly terrifying the first time that she had met her, but she had a kind heart beneath the stern exterior perpetually clad in mourning, and her daughter's welfare was her constant and only priority. "You know that they keep advising people not to go out alone after dark."

"I know, I know, but I just had to get the latest news!" Meg moaned. "We never hear anything shut up in the theatre all the time."

"And what is the latest news, as if I can't guess?" asked Christine. "They still haven't found it, then," she observed drily as Meg threw the evening newspaper down on her dressing table. The headline emblazoned in smudged newsprint across the front page read 'MONSTER SIGHTED AGAIN, WOMAN DIES OF FRIGHT'.

"Obviously not," replied Meg. "I simply can't believe that, considering how many people claim to have seen this terrifying beast, no-one has the faintest clue where he, she or it is hiding." She turned her head on one side and considered the densely packed text, full of hyperbolic adjectives that, as far as Christine could see, all appeared to be contradicting each other. "You know, I'm inclined to think that it's all a ruse. I mean, I'm fairly certain that the majority of these 'eyewitnesses' are only saying they've seen it to share in some of the fame. Part of me's convinced that there is no monster and it's all a joke by the papers to see how many people believe it and see how many people turn up saying that they've seen something that doesn't exist."

"I never had you down as such a cynic, Meg," said Christine. She picked up the paper and scanned the story. "You can't really deny a woman dying of fright, though."

"She was seventy-three," said Meg, wrinkling her nose in criticism of the evidence. "Anything could have killed her at that age."

Meg was obviously not going to be convinced easily, and Christine felt it better to give up prematurely than get into another pointless discussion about a theme that she could not evade however much she might wish to. The rumours of a mysterious monster loose in the streets of Paris had started a couple of weeks previously, and whilst they had begun as a whisper passed from mouth to mouth, now they were all over the press, the only topic of conversation, with every day and every printing unearthing new details that only served to make the entire affair more complicated. Although the monster was described as extremely dangerous, no-one had any evidence of its attacking anyone; there had been no bodies discovered, no grim trail of murder and destruction left in its wake – today's elderly lady and her heart attack notwithstanding. No two witnesses seemed to be able to describe the creature in the same way: some held it as over seven feet high with glowing red eyes, others gave it a hunchbacked stature and a deathly pale skin, others gave it the appearance of death itself, its head shrunken like a skull with only a hole where the nose should have been. No-one knew where it had come from or why; suddenly it was in Paris and causing chaos for no apparent reason. It's going to murder us all in our beds, screamed the papers, lock up your children and your wives and the best silver! Although, like Meg, Christine had her moments of scepticism, especially in the face of so many conflicting reports, she was certain that there had to be an element of truth in them somewhere, and the thought frightened her. She was inordinately glad that she resided within the safety of the theatre's old and sturdy walls and she rarely had cause to leave them, especially at night.

There was a sharp pre-emptory knock at the door before it opened.

"Christine, Meg… Marguerite Giry!" Meg's mother had entered and had tailed off her initial speech on seeing the evening paper in Christine's hands. "How many times have I told you not to leave the theatre unsupervised?"

"I…" Meg began. Her mother's anger was the only thing that could render the usually loquacious girl speechless.

"It's all right, Mame, I brought the young ladies the paper." Bouquet passed by the open dressing room door on his way to the fly floor and winked at Meg over the top of Madame Giry's head. The tiny ballerina and the huge stagehand made for a comical pair of partners in crime, but they were often found teaming up against Meg's mother when her overprotectiveness became too much for the girl. "I thought they might want to keep up with the latest… developments."

Madame spun on her heel and put her hands on her hips with the air of contained exasperation of one who wished to chastise thoroughly and had been cheated of the opportunity.

"You shouldn't go putting ideas into their heads, Joseph," she said, irritably. "You know how impressionable they are. Women dying of fright indeed."

Bouquet shrugged apologetically.

"It's bad business, Madame, bad business. Someone's got to catch it soon or there'll be riots, you mark my words. Heads will roll."

"Really, Joseph, you are insufferable. Shouldn't you be at your post?"

Bouquet nodded deferentially and moved along down the corridor before Madame could become any more vehement and he outstayed his limited welcome. She threw her hands up in despair before returning her attention to the two girls in whose dressing room she stood. The flyman's interruption had caused her to lose her thread and she wrung her hands for a moment as she tried to remember what it was that she had come in to tell them, before giving it up as a bad job and making to leave the room.

"Twenty minutes to curtain-up, girls," she said. "And Meg…"

"Yes, Maman?"

"If I even suspect that you've been sneaking out…"

Madame Giry left the room, the untold threat hanging ominously in the doorway. Meg rolled her eyes and continued to do her make-up, concentrating in silence for a moment before speaking to Christine once more.

"Do you really think that there's something out there?" she asked. "I mean, we can say it's not real, and we can have a bit of a laugh about it, but then again, we're shut up in here in the opera house, nice and safe. We're not out there with it."

"I don't know," said Christine honestly. "I just don't know what to believe."

"Well, at any rate, I don't think we'll have any problems here." The confidence in Meg's voice was betraying the slightest hint of unease. Christine would not have picked up on it had she not known her friend so well. "La Carlotta's singing would scare off any half-sentient being within a four mile radius. I'm going to stuff my ears with cotton during the cadenza tonight; I swear that they were bleeding yesterday."

Christine laughed and shook her head, taking the lipstick that Meg held out to her. Monsters or no monsters, people still came to the opera, albeit in slightly reduced numbers than was usual for that time of the year, and people still expected them to perform despite the fear that was rife in the streets outside. "You will still perform," Madame Giry had told the chorus girls and the dancers when the monster stories had first begun to break. "Even if there is just one person in the audience, you will still perform for them. If they are not scared of shadows, then neither should you be." The show must always go on, thought Christine, although La Carlotta had been threatening to walk out on them for the past few days. Presently they heard her voice carrying through the upper parts of the theatre; she had evidently seen the evening news as well. How could she be expected to concentrate on her art with this unspeakable hysteria in the city? It was terrible for her nerves, her voice would suffer…

"We'll suffer under her voice, more like," muttered Meg darkly. "Oh, Christine, you could sing Margareta better than her any day. One of these days we're going to have to concoct a way to get Firmin and André to hear you, and they'll sack Carlotta and promote you on the spot. You're made of finer stuff, Christine. Everyone knows that."

Christine shrugged.

"Perhaps once the furore has died down," she said.

"Perhaps," Meg agreed. She seemed to know not to push the subject any further, and she returned to the more pressing task of make-up and the more mundane topics of theatre gossip, of which there seemed to be no end. Did Christine know that everyone was saying that Hélène Dubois was in the family way, and it was the second clarinet who'd got her that way?

"Meg, if everyone's saying it, why would it cross your mind that I didn't know?"

"Well, sometimes you wander around the place with your head in the clouds," said Meg matter-of-factly. "I think it's perfectly reasonable that what's common knowledge to the rest of us comes as a complete shock to you."

"Common knowledge or conjecture?" asked Christine.

"Common knowledge," affirmed Christine. "Joseph caught them together on the fly floor last month. That's proof enough for me. What will Maman say when she finds out, do you think?"

"Meg, I don't know, and I'm not sure that I care, either."

"But…"

At that point the five minute warning bell sounded throughout the theatre and the girls were swept up into the final preparations that the performance required, the other dancers moving in and out of each others' dressing rooms for last minute hair-pins and solutions to wardrobe emergencies. Hélène was heard complaining that one of her seams had split and Meg gave Christine a knowing look.

"Honestly, a girl gains a little weight and everyone automatically assumes that she's in trouble."

"Christine Daaé, there are times when you are too innocent for your own good." Meg stood and went to the door, ready to leave for the wings and their imminent entrance onto the stage. "Are you coming or not?"

"Give me a moment; I'll be there."

Meg nodded and left their dressing room. Christine put the final adjustments to her hair arrangement and leaned on the windowsill, pushing the sash upwards to allow a little cool air into the room, which was rapidly becoming stuffy. Gazing out into the darkness of the alley that their dressing room looked out onto, she thought of the evening's headlines and gave a shiver unrelated to the cold breeze. Something out there on the streets of Paris, something unfriendly roaming around… Even the thought of it was enough to make her want to bar the doors and close the curtains, despite Meg's determination to disbelieve.

Something caught the corner of her eye and she started, before peering out the window to try and establish the cause. There was no sign of anything. Perhaps a cat, they moved swiftly and silently, a black cat melting into the darkness. She scolded herself for her folly and cast an annoyed glance back at the paper that was lying blamelessly on the dressing table where she had left it. All this talk of monsters was making her jump at shadows. All the same… She closed the window and locked it, pulling the curtains closed tightly to shut out the sight and the sickening temptation to look again. Christine made her way out of the dressing room with a sense of unease. Had there been something there, or had she just imagined it?

"Are you all right?" asked Meg as she took up her position beside her in the wings. Her face was concerned. "You look as if you've seen a ghost."

"I'm fine," Christine replied shortly, but she could not shake the memory from her head. As she moved her way through the performance, her dancing static and distracted, her imagination was taking her mind far away from the present, grotesque forms and phantoms springing up in her head and haunting the alley outside her dressing room; sometimes huge, sometimes bent, sometimes distorted and snarling, but all with the same constant feature, a feature that she was sure she had seen in the darkness. All with the same burning yellow eyes…

Note2: Well, I hope you enjoyed the beginning of a rather alternate Phantom! I'll update when I can but I have learned from experience never to promise when new chapters will come.