Disclaimer: The phantom of the opera does not belong to me.

He had a bad case of soundtrack tinnitus

He had a bad case of soundtrack tinnitus. Famous film and television tunes flashed through his mind, but he welcomed it as it kept him from thinking too hard. The language lay in ruins. He had a profound, archaic, deep, lurking, obnoxious fear welling inside of him and he gave it every adjective his suffering brain could come up with to keep the language working. There was no knowing what would happen if words failed him. Perhaps that is what happened to Hamlet. He should have stayed at the psychiatrist's. It was easier when there was somebody to talk to. He had resolved on not involving his daughter more than necessary, so he could not turn to her. He felt he owed it to his self-esteem. That is why he ignored that she was currently in the cellar chatting away with an ever so cheery she-phantom and her male counterpart. It would not do to feel guilty for that too. Neither did he fancy confessing everything to son belle femme, who had her French evening sitting and talking broken francais with all her posh matronly lady friends. He felt there was a certain humour in the fact that they were chatting away on the lair of a madman, but it was too tragic for a hearty laugh and too funny for a gloomy stare so he settled on carefully banging his head against the wall, so that he would not hurt himself. After some time he stopped. It was not comme il faut.

He looked at the wall. He counted. Emilia came in at 245 and her eyes scanned him disapprovingly so he tried to sit up and assume a cheerful smile but failing miserably with his mind still reeling.

"There is no time to be idle. Our affairs are in a terrible state." Her queer choice of words grounded him to some extend and he spoke at last, feeling guilty.

"You should not be taking care of all this."

She nodded. "Somebody, surely, has to. But I need your help now, as Christine has got this silly notion to come and see you to thank you. I could not convince her to wait a bit and I cannot even be sure if she is not running through the house unaccompanied this very moment. However" she said cheering up. "Mama is dressed as Madame Pompadour and they are too busy discussing her affair with the king to notice much at all. It is all quite garish."

He took a minute to gather his wits about him, dusting them of to restore some of their former glory.

"I will then..." he started. "…go and shoot him?"

"Whom?" she asked, taken aback.

"The king." A little revolutionary inside of him cheered. Oh yes, those were golden times.

Emilia sighed. "No. You will go and either meet Christine, or distract Madame Pompadour. But I have to warn you: If you keep talking like this maman will want to call the police."

He had managed to swallow an aspirin (Aspirin does NOT belong to me, by the way) and shook himself like an old dog. There was nothing as maddening as two hours of restless rest.

"Ha!" he said with renewed vigour. "Who will not be likely to give much for the word of an 18th century bird of paradise!" Emilia smiled faintly and opened the door for him.

Submissively he tumbled to the stairs, feeling as if he was suffering from a cold. From below he could hear the inhabitants of Vanity Fair chatting freely. Tea was consumed, he mused, gossip exchanged, and he was surely made fun of. But perhaps it was preferable to talking to a fiction. He heard rather than saw Emilia close the door and slip into her own room. Before he had made up his mind about what to do next a young woman in a white dress floated through the hall. Seeing him she gave a sweet smile that he could only answer with a rather sour one. She had big brown eyes and a radiant, cheery countenance at which he could but marvel, as she was now to reside in a wet cellar. In that thin, revealing dress she would surely catch a cold.

The prospect of living in a cellar was, to him, more sickening than anything but she greeted him with an angelic voice: "Are you the man I must thank for our beautiful new home? I had so wished to go to England, but Erik is not very sociable." She uttered this with a small sigh.

"I thought as much." He replied, trying to shake of the returning confusion. A few moments silence was spent thinking of something to say. But she was obviously not quite through thanking him.

"You cannot imagine what it means for me to be able to live here with him. Paris was becoming too full of memories…" Her eyes looked troubled. As he still kept his mouth tightly shut she went on: "And you have a lovely daughter! She helped us settling in. The bags with our things have of course not yet arrived but once we had cleared the rooms from…" she blushed "your laundry, it became quite comfortable. I would ask you to join us for dinner but Erik and I need some time for ourselves now, you do surely understand?"

He gave her a wry smile. "I will survive the mortification, Miss. There are however some things I need to make clear" he said. "My wife must never see either of you. She had been quite upset with Hamlet already and I cannot bring her into it. It is bad enough that Emilia is partaking in my struggles for sanity."

She only stared at him in a friendly yet blank way.

"You see, there is the distinct possibility that you are the product of my overactive imagination. My psychologist said so, although we were both a bit confused about everything at the end. But perhaps that was my imagination, too?" Sunny had closed down her office for the day and announced that she would consult some books about this matter.

Christine cocked her head, obviously oblivious as to what he was trying to tell her.

"Are you mad?" she asked in her dove-like way. "My fiancée knows a lot about that affliction. He is struggling to overcome it so hard, the poor pet."

"I noticed the former, too, though I cannot agree about the last part."

"He really does!" she cried earnestly. "Otherwise I would never have agreed to marry him! You will see if you only get to know him better."

He suppressed a nervous shudder. "I am sure I will." Perhaps it was not a bad idea. Facing the abyss inside oneself, and all that. But he tried to remember what he wanted to do in the first place.

"Would you now please go back downstairs? You must be tired, and my wife is not to see you under any circumstances." He wanted to turn away but a small hand on his arm kept him.

"There is one thing, kind sir; I wanted to ask you about." Christine whispered confidingly.

Harry closed his eyes and waited for the next blow. It came anon.

"My Erik has written an opera on our moving away to a new live and all…"

"No! Not in my cellar!" he cried bluntly. "My wife…"

"Of course we cannot have an opera in you cellar it is not even furnished yet!" she laughed as if it was a very silly notion. "I only wanted to know if you had any contact to theatres or opera houses in the area."

He calmed. "Oh. Well, I have actually. I will see what I can do." He knew that was a lie, but he could concern himself with that later on. What mattered now was that he shut that pair up in the cellar and found a way to regain his balance. "Is there anything else? Then I would strongly advise you to rest."

She beamed at him again and kissed his cheek in a display of French manners. He wished all his new friends were as beautiful when they returned to plague the inventor. He mentally revised that sentence. He was not even the inventor. He had other people's creatures harassing him. His own characters had never been preposterous enough to attempt top live in his cellar.

"You have not by any chance met the prince of Denmark?" he asked her hopefully, but she denied. "Right then, I wish you a good…"

At this point he was disturbed by a shriek. He turned to find an immensely decadent lady with an expensive gown gaping at the sight of Christine. It took him a second to realize that she was not another fictional character but one of his wife's friends who had gone in search of the bathroom. Before he could say anything she shrieked again, expanding said shriek to let it end in a full-blown scream that brought the rest of the brigade to the scene immediately, so that the hall was packed with shrieking ladies and fine gowns. Christine smiled at them shyly. Harry groaned. He was not unrealistic. He knew it would get worse. And indeed the little crowd parted to reveal the finest gown of them all and in it Madame Pompadour, with a look that would have suited an enraged lioness. Surveying the scene to see what had interrupted her party her eyes suddenly lit up with anger when she laid eyes on the young woman beside him. She brandished a champagne glass as if she would have done with a sword. That surprised him. He saw why she would be angry with him, but he had not expected the Spanish Inquisition. But then again, who did? The mystery was solved when she pointed the glass at Christine who smiled on, undaunted by the angry glare.

"How dare you?" she screamed. Her round table muttered approvingly. "How dare you insult me so? And in front of all my friends!" Tears of humiliation and rage sprung to her eyes and a light bulb went on in his head.

"Oh dear, you are entirely mistaken!" he began and made a hasty step away from Christine who looked at him questioningly. "She…"

That was when the glass hit him, sending drops of champagne flying through the air and him to the floor.