Set in a LND AU, this work takes the events of Beneath a Moonless Sky as canon, so if you're not a fan of that particular plot detail, you probably wont be too keen on this either. Intended to be a one shot, but it ran away with me! Story is fully completed and published on AO3 and I will be crossposting here regularly until I get it all uploaded.
Ten long years.
It was always worse at night, he thought. In the day he was taken up with his theatre, his staff, the show, his inventions. There were people to see, investors to charm (well, he thought with an ironic smile, perhaps not charm, perhaps to mystify, to tantalise, to dazzle and bamboozle) and business to do. No, in the daytime, it was possible, if a creature such has he should be allowed to make this allusion, to mistake Erik for a living man. A successful living man at that. One with an empire to run -allbiet an empire of freaks and misfits, but it was his nonetheless.
But at night, when time crawls by and darkness creeps, that had always been his time for music, when his muse would strike. Except that was then. For ten long years his muse, his Christine, had been dead, taken only nine months into her marriage during childbirth. Dead and lost and gone.
Ten long years of emptiness, of aching, of longing, of mourning, of sorrow. And yet, here he still was, still breathing, somehow, still living. He had tried not to, of course. When he first heard the news he had been sure that he himself would somehow cease to be in her absence. That the loss of her would somehow starve him of the oxygen he needed to survive.
He had experienced crushing darkness, of that there is no doubt. Darkness worse than anything he had experienced before in all his years of pain and torture and agony. But while that had been a torture of the flesh, this was a new torture, a torture to his very innermost soul, finding parts of him he had thought to be already dead, and ripping them apart anew. And yet, no matter how hard he had tried to shut himself off to the world, to close himself up, shut his eyes and simply cease to be, he could not.
She would not let him.
Each night, she would come to him. Torture him, needle him and prod him and beg at him to live, to move, to create, to be. The ghost of her dragged from him strange tortured symphonies, inspired his fevered hands to make strange fantastical creatures, begged him to go, find the beauty in the world and embrace it.
'It's in your soul that the true distortion lies'
For ten years he had lived with those words. They had settled and germinated within his heart that fateful night at the opera house, watered by Christine's generosity and kindness, and it had borne fruit later on that unforgettable night when she had come to him, and they had joined together, souls beared there in the darkness. That night, as he watched her sleeping he had realised that she had been right. He could not teather her pure soul to his warped and mangled one, no matter how his heart cried out for it. If he was ever truly to be worthy of her, then he had to free her. To stop once and for all this tortured dance they were trapped in and let her go. He had slipped away into the night, whispering a goodbye as his heart flew into pieces about him.
He read of her wedding the next day in all the papers. Heard of her triumph as she rose from simple opera girl to Viscountess, safe at last in her chateau with the boy who could give her everything that he could not. Days later, determined to give her the closure that they both needed, he had staged his own death. Allowed reports to circulate that the body of the fabled opera ghost had at last been found beneath the ruins of the opera house, and had slipped away into the darkness.
Only nine months later he read of her death. Hiding on the outskirts of Paris at the time, he had slunk back into the city to watch her funeral, his already shattered heart splintering anew at the realisation that his angel was no more. He watched the boy, pale faced and steely eyed scatter the dirt onto the coffin, and when all had left, he slipped down before the gravediggers could begin their work and added in a single red rose.
And then, when he discovered that it would not end, that he could not end, he had done the only thing he knew how. He had run. He had run, and run, fleeing until he reached the coast and could flee no further, then secreting himself onto a cargo ship, where he lived like a ghost in the bowels of the ship, sustaining himself on rats and brackish water, until at last he reached the new world.
Here, he vowed, he would start anew. He would build in himself a shrine to her, a shrine to all things beautiful and unearthly and strange - he would become the person she had so desperately wanted him to be.
Of course, it had not been quite as simple as that. He had some money, but not much, certainly not enough to set himself up in any respectable line of business. And so he had done the only thing he knew. The only thing he could, with a face such as his. He had returned to the sideshows, creating mysteries and illusions, and, when the occasion called for it and he had no other recourse, putting himself on display. But no more was he the living death. No more would he hurt and maim, and manipulate to get his way. Instead, he had worked hard to use his talents to make connections, to win favours, courted pity rather than scorn and fear though it sat bitterly on his tongue.
There were times, oh, so many times, when his fingers had itched for the noose, and he had been tempted to return to his old ways. The blood boiled within his veins and his withered heart beat in protest at the indignitions that some of his fellow freaks endured. And then one day he had realised. He didn't need to resort to violence against his enemies to beat them. He could, quite simply, remove them from the equation by doing it better than them. By creating a world more fantastical, more magnificent, more beautiful than any that they could imagine, and by peopling it with such strangeness, such illusion, such splendour that all could not fail to be drawn in, he could win. And so, Mister Y and his amazing Phantasma were born. He rounded up his fellow freaks and oddities, and took his show on the road, dazzling audiences across America, before settling at last in Cony Island to build his empire.
This was his realm, where music, and artifice and illusion, but most of all, beauty, strange, magnificent and terrible beauty were king.
On this particular night, Erik was haunted by more than just the ghost of Christine. Within his ayrie he paced back and forth, his mind racing, his heart confused.
Little more than a month ago, word had begun to spread of a singer, lately arrived in Manhattan with the voice of an angel. Erik was not particularly interested in the singer. Once upon a time he might have gone to listen, in a desperate search for a voice which would fill the gaping void in his soul. One that might make his music live again. But he had heard enough voices now to know that the title 'voice of an angel' was an empty mockery, applied all too liberally to any songbird with the ability to hold a note or two, even more so if they were blessed with the ability to flutter their eyelashes and flash a little flesh to keep the vulgar herd entertained.
True, it was said that this particular 'angel' refused to show her face on stage, always wearing mourning, and keeping her face covered with a veil. Perhaps her face was not able to match her voice? Erik was no stranger to the use of disguise to create mystery and illusion. He could not begrudge her that.
No, what interested Erik in this particular songstress were the rumours which swirled around her. Rumours about a cursed child.
Singers with bastard children were not unusual. Such relationships often went with the territory, and Erik had seen many a young coquette training at it's mother's knee. The stories about this child were something quite different.
He had heard it first from one of his circus freaks. Over the last five years, since he had opened Phantasma, Erik's park had become something of a magnet for freaks and oddities. It was said that Mr Y provided a safe haven for the grotesque and bizarre - his mask an icon and talisman for the downtrodden and abused. The irony of his becoming an object of veneration, a shining beacon of safety for society's outcasts did not escape Erik. That he should have lived to be considered safe, to be thought of as kind was nothing short of fantastic. And yet so it was, and he held it as a sort of balm to his fractured soul. Proof, perhaps, that he had at last exorcised the monster within.
On this occasion, a pair, a tattooed strongman, and an acrobatic midget had told him of their encounter with the mysterious singer during their time on the Vaudeville circuit. Indeed, they said, her voice was heavenly, but that was nothing to the haunting music which had been heard coming from her quarters backstage. Music played by a hideous, cursed child.
The child went everywhere with her, they said. She would only let it out of her sight while she performed, when she would leave it locked securely in her dressing room. It was even rumoured that the child had composed some of the arias she sang. Beautiful, haunting melodies, so diametrically opposed with the child's own appearance - hideous, demonic. A deformed face, so bloated and rotten in appearance, so that all that saw it were forced to avert their eyes and turn away.
The story had been like a dagger to Erik's withered heart. Was this not his story too? A child, blessed with the ability to create beauty, but cursed with the appearance of the very devil himself. He told himself it was merely professional curiosity that drove him to seek the child out. If indeed the child was so very talented, perhaps it may be an asset to his show? He avoided making contact with the mother. By all accounts, she was fiercely protective of the child, and he did not want to appear as an opportunist, seeking to take advantage of him. No, best that he see it alone, to determine the truth of the rumours first, then he could decide what to do.
He had not been prepared for the feeling of aching sadness that had hit him when he first saw it. Finding the child had been simple enough. He knew where the mother was playing, and was adept enough at concealing himself backstage in theatres to be able to locate it in the dressing room without being discovered himself.
He had seen the mother, dressed head to foot in black just as he was told, bending to whisper in the boys ear, a kiss to the top of it's head, hands gently teasing it's side, heard the child giggle, and then she had stood, and Erik had to stifle an involuntary gasp. It was like looking into a mirror, and yet, it was not.
The mother had hovered momentarily. Her veiled gaze appeared to shift in the direction of his hiding place, and Erik had been overcome with a sudden, strong and strange urge to reveal himself immediately to them both. Then just as suddenly, she shook her head, turned and left, and Erik was alone with the child.
Such a child!
He had stayed hidden that first time, watching in wonder, as the child sat rapt at a small piano, his fingers moving rhythmically over the keys, his eyes glassy, unfocussed, fixed on a point somewhere beyond him, or perhaps it was within him, as the music poured fourth.
'This child, this boy, he plays like me!' - he thought with wonder. 'He looks like me!'.
And it was true - the boy's face was his own face. Different, somehow softened, the large brown eyes more mellow, and holding more wonder than pain, but yet the same. There was the same puffy, distorted lip, the same papery thin skin, the same stringy hair, and unnatural lumping of flesh, the same purpling on one side of the face, contrasting the smoothness of the other. Only the visible skull was missing - lending the child a melted and distorted, rather than truly rotten look.
He had watched, transfixed, until he heard the distant sound of footsteps returning to the door. The lock turned, the child looked up, and seeing someone - his mother? - through the gap in the door his sunken eyes had lit with joy, puffy lips spread into a twisted smile, and he had lept from the piano and scampered away through the door, leaving Erik alone, hiding in the darkness, to release a breath he had not realised he had been holding.
He had fled then, returned to his Ayrie to pace the floor again and again. To say he had not slept would be a truism. Erik hardly ever slept anyway. And yet he was seized with a strange kind of frantic energy which left him feeling both drained and invigorated. He had to see the boy again. For what purpose he did not yet know, but he felt compelled to know more, to see more, to somehow connect himself with this strange, unexpected kindred spirit.
Perhaps, if he had taken time to think, he would have recognised that the feeling which drove him on was, for perhaps the first time in his life, a sense of belonging. A tantalising, heady possibility that the child was something akin to him. That he somehow knew what it was like to be him. That perhaps he was not entirely alone after all. He told himself, however, that it was the music. That he had a chance, nay, even a responsibility to nurture this child's talent, to develop it, perhaps even to find an outlet for it, if he could.
The first time he revealed himself to the boy he had hardly known how to behave. Gone where the days where he could lurk behind mirrors, luring children in with his voice. No, he would not go there again. If this was to happen, it must be between him, Erik, the man, and the boy alone. No smoke, no mirrors, no deception.
He had waited, until the mother had left for the stage, as usual, and then, he simply taken a deep breath and stepped into the dressing room.
He had expected the boy at least to startle. Probably to scream for his Mama, possibly just to run away. Instead, the boy simply looked up, eyebrows slightly raised and said 'Oh, Hello'.
For a moment Erik had stood, frozen and wordless, unsure of how to proceed. Then tentatively, he took a step forward, and said 'Hello' back.
'My name is Erik,' he said simply. He wasn't sure why he had said Erik, and not Mr Y, as he tended to do with everybody else, but somehow it seemed to be important that with this boy, at least, he was nobody but himself. 'I heard you play, and I wondered…' he gestured to the piano. 'May I?'.
The boys eyes brightened and he smiled up at Erik eagerly. 'Oh! Do you play too? Would you play for me monsieur?'
And so it passed that Erik spent the next forty five minutes playing the piano with this strange, yet achingly familiar boy. He hardly knew why, or how, but as they played the child spoke, and told him of the music that lived in his head, of how he and his Mama had travelled from theatre to theatre, of the people he had seen, the music he had heard, the songs he had written, and the ones he could not quite coax from his head to his fingers.
Numbly, almost mechanically at first, Erik had corrected the boy on his fingering, suggested improvements to phrasing and technique, and solutions to more challenging passages. By the time he came to leave he was promising wholeheartedly that he would come again, somehow entranced by the child and feeling more alive than he had done in, oh!, so many years.
Of course, he had had to extract a promise from the child that he would not reveal his presence to his mother. While the boy had not reacted to his rather unexpected presence ('Well, he is the child of a music hall singer', he reasoned, 'perhaps the child is used to finding strange men in his mother's dressing room. It would not be unheard of.'), he could not expect the mother to be so sanguine when he heard that a strange masked man had chosen to spend time playing the piano with her child, and yet had fled before she returned. No, better leave that conversation for another day. First, he must, nay, he needed, to understand this child. To work out why, and how they seemed to be kindred souls. Once he understood that, then, he felt sure, he would be able to persuade the mother. Persuade her what, he did not yet know, but somehow he knew that he could not let this child vanish into the night.