The Phantom of the Opera had never been to London.
The Angel of Music, when he deserved the name, had never left Paris. The Devil's Child, dragged throughout Europe, little more than a prisoner, never went on mocking display in any town or city off the European mainland.
Erik Durham nee Destler didn't quite loathe London, but he wasn't quite sure if he enjoyed it. The sounds and colours and mannerisms of the modern city didn't quite fit, like a coat too short in the arms. But Erik shrugged London over his shoulders and straightened his spine and treated the city like the Opera House he missed; a place to explore and memorize, so when the time came, he could perform and hide as well as the rest of them. To make the city believe he belonged.
His little Illusionist would have been proud.
He hadn't known he was in London, not at first. Not in the moment when he stepped through the mirror and Kayla's hand evaporated in his as they walked into the shadows.
The shadows faded into a hallway, and when he looked around, Erik sat in a lineup of both men and women, many of whom looked much younger than he did, and more comfortingly just as nervous. Fingers tapped on black cases, sheaves of music scores rustled, toes tapped on gleaming tiles. The chair he sat in was much too small for him.
A petite young man across from him glanced up from his scuffed violin case. The young – boy, he was little more than a boy – man's eyes darted across Erik's face briefly, but he quickly met Erik's gaze again and smiled, his eyes crinkling before he looked back down at his instrument. Over the boy's head, Erik saw himself in the mirror.
His scarred face was uncovered.
Erik dropped his head and clamped his eyes shut.
No mask.
No protection.
No Kayla.
He shook that thought away like cobwebs. Breathe. In, two, three, four, hold for two, three, four, five, six, seven, exhale to eight. He pictured Kayla's magic box and the little square drawing rising and sinking inside it. Breathe. Repeat.
Erik opened his eyes back onto his lap. Sheets of music, too neat to have been handwritten, were stacked on top of his thighs. As he flipped through them, he recognized the composition; it was the curved marks were familiar, his own, but not in his handwriting. His pants, black, looked not unlike what he would have worn in Paris, but the cuffs of his shirt were a glossy, raven's wing black that caught the light, and pinned with tiny gold roses.
He cursed under his breath.
"Mood," muttered a voice.
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the woman next to him glance back, grinning down at the sheaves of messily annotated music in her own hands. She nodded at him. "Waiting before auditions is a mental shitshow. Pardon my French."
Her voice was smooth, relatively low, but cut with a lilting accent that Erik was only vaguely sure was Scottish. Accent or not, she had the voice of an alto, likely a talented one.
He didn't know exactly what she was referring to, but the tone was so like Kayla's complaints that he nodded back.
"Miss Emberley!" A lanky man appeared in the door at the end of the hallway. He consulted a thin tablet, presumably a device similar to Kayla's magic box, judging by the information he seemed to be reading off of it. "Anika Emberley, MA, viola."
The woman next to him rose, lifting her viola case off the ground by her feet. "Best 'a luck," she said, nodding at him again before she raised her hand and followed the lanky man through the door.
One by one, his inadvertent companions vanished from the hallway.
The young man across from him was the last to depart, to the summons of "Liam Yao, MFA, violin."
"Break a leg," he whispers, holding up two thumbs as he scurries down the hall towards the man with the tablet.
Erik, at the frantic insistence of the Phantom, almost fled. He was half out of the tiny, matchwood-like chair when the man stuck his head out one last time. "Erik Durham, PhD, piano and organ?" The young man's smile was wide, disarming, seemingly more relaxed and now as friendly as one of Kayla's many stage rats. He couldn't have been much older than her, either. His accent rolled, chipper, less musical than French, but not as staccato as British, nor as rumbling as the girl named Emberley. "Come on in, Mister Durham. Sorry about the wait. You're the last one."
Erik rose, the sheaf of music trembling slightly in his hands. He caught the briefest flash of dark hair in the mirror before he quickly averted his gaze and walked down the hall.
The man waited without even the slightest trace of fear or curiosity as he looked Erik dead in the face and beamed. "Not too many doctoral auditions today, and you're probably the most anticipated interview on the docket, if you don't mind me saying." He led Erik down a short passage, to a massive set of double doors with a glossy bronze plaque. Pushing the door open, the man poked his head in. "Mr. Durham for you, ladies and gentlemen." He held the door open for Erik. "Straight in. Good luck, Mr. Durham."
The door creaked shut behind him.
As Erik stepped cautiously further into the room, another selection of strangers surveyed him from a table by the window. Two men and two women shuffled through papers as Erik walked towards them.
A new man leapt up from his highbacked chair. "Mr. Durham, I presume?" His vocal intonations sounded like the poshest of British aristocracy, but his smile was gleeful as he bounced around the corner of the table, grabbing Erik's hand and shaking it vigorously. "Dr. Clarence Hornby. It's a genuine pleasure to meet you in person."
Erik had enough awareness to squeeze his hand and shake up, down, separate. "Thank you, sir." Erik's throat rasped, his voice broken to his own ears, like it was filled with sand.
"Please take a seat, Mr. Durham!" He gestured Erik into a chair as he hurried back behind the table. "These are my committee colleagues, Dr. Lisa Shu, Dr. Darian Patek, and Dr. Maeve O'Clair." Each stranger nodded as Hornby introduced them. "Now, Mr. Durham, we have all read your application and listened to your recordings. I really feel I must speak on behalf of the whole committee when I say that we were all quite impressed. Before we send you through to the audition, we just wanted to have a brief chat about the partnership you will be embarking on with us."
Was this how Kayla felt? Being in an unfamiliar environment, out of time, out of place, where no one can now who you truly are and where you came from?
A scream danced on the back of Erik's tongue. He swallowed it, burrowing deep into years of putting on a demanding, mysterious façade. He let his lips curl. "Yes, of course, Mr. Hornby."
They had questions for him, certainly. They also had information on him, on whomever they thought he was. Erik Durham, thirty-five. French but raised in Scotland. The Devil's Child had been illiterate; the Opera Ghost had learnt everything himself. Erik Durham had a university degree.
"Can you speak to your musical experience, Mr. Durham? Your composition degree, references, and assessment results from the University of Aberdeen are impressive, certainly. I was hoping you could speak to your background before that." He flipped through the pages scattered on the tabletop. "Your education up to your attendance at Aberdeen seems… unstructured, if not non-existent. I assume you were self-taught?"
Self taught in archaic methods from a universe over a hundred years in the past. Thank you, monsieur, for your enquiry.
The Phantom spoke. "I was quite… isolated, as a child. My family was, too be delicate, unpleasant when I was young. When I was removed from those circumstances, my new guardians were extremely artistically talented and encouraging of my budding interests. I was unprepared to access formal education. Children can be cruel, you understand." Lies crafted from truth. "My guardians were willing to allow me to pursue my own investigations in the years before university. I was able to develop my affinity for music, and had the resources available to attain mastery."
"And why the Royal Academy?" Dr. O'Clair leant across the table, steepling her narrow fingers. "Why pursue a doctorate?"
The Phantom paused.
Erik took over.
"I am no master. I can recognize that I have ability, and I can recognize that I have a wealth of knowledge that I would like to share." He pulled the edge of his vest down, briefly noting the swirls of ebony thread embroidered through the midnight black. He sighed inwardly but held Dr. O'Clair's stare. "I have more I must learn. I will likely never be satisfied with my own abilities, but I need to obtain enough knowledge and experience to help my students be satisfied with theirs."
Silence floated over the room like gossamer. It popped like a bubble when Dr. Hornby pushed back his chair and stretched across the table to wring Erik's hand again. "An absolute pleasure speaking with you, Mr. Durham."
"The audition is blind," Dr. Patek informed him. "We will not be assessing you, but we will be discussing your interview with the musical assessors before we formalize your acceptance."
Dr. O'Clair tapped her papers on the edge of the desk, straightening out the file labelled with Erik's new name. "Do you have any questions for us before your audition, Mr. Durham?"
Erik inhaled. "I do not. Thank you, Doctor." Erik rose and inclined his head. He forced his voice low, soothing, letting pleasantries flow from his lips like dark caramel, the soft, persuasive tone the Angel of Music perfected with Christine. "Doctor Hornby. Doctor Shu. Doctor O'Clair. Dr. Patek. I thank you for your time."
Doctor Patek sat up a little straighter, a little flush in his cheeks. Doctor Shu rose to shake his hand, and Doctor O'Clair returned his nod.
The lanky assistant appeared in a second doorway on the far side of the room.
Erik straightened his shoulders and walked.
When the young assistant shut the second door behind him, Erik gave himself nineteen seconds to breathe – in for four, hold for seven, out for eight – before he adjusted his music under his arm and stepped forward. He followed the path of dark burgundy carpet across the floorboards to the grand piano. To his left, a screen shielded the other side of the room.
Ah. His audience. Like justice, blind.
Erik pulled out the bench and sat gingerly, setting the sheets he knew for a fact he wouldn't need on the stand in front of him.
"You may begin," said a voice from behind the screen.
This was not his organ. A tiny flare of panic sparked to life in his chest.
He spread his fingers across the ivory keys and thought of Kayla's grin.
Liquid melodies flooded from the piano's lid, pooling around his ankles and lapping across the floor. Weaving up his calves and up his spine and across his scarred cheek. The sound reverberated off the walls, the notes rising like the steeples of Notre Dame, the steeples he'd only ever seen as a distant glow of candlelight and stained glass, beautiful but unreachable, like
But not like the young soprano who'd kissed him, reached him, spared him –
But it was not her face that shimmered at the edge of his vision, but the stage manager's –
Triumph and hope dripped through his fingertips, the melodies of his opera that no one had ever heard, that he thought no one would hear, save an angel and a magician. Music rippled through his hands and spread across the keys. His eyes shut, the sounds engulfing him in waves. Pouring out of his chest, the melody of Don Juan Triumphant grew soft, gentle, beneath the smooth caresses of his hands.
As the waves slowed, the final notes drifting through the air, Erik opened his eyes, blinking against the droplets dancing on his eyelids. The final bars faded into oblivion, and he lifted his hands from the keys.
"Thank you," said the voice.
On the opposite side of the room, another door opened, and the assistant stuck his head in and waved.
Erik bowed silently to the screen, picked up his music, and followed the path of dusky carpet to the open door.
"Welcome back." The red haired Ms. Emberley patted the chair next to her as he found himself in a new hallway with the same group of musicians. He smiled gingerly and sat down.
They sat there in silence for an extraordinary amount of time before the lanky assistant appeared and started calling names again.
When it was his turn, he walked into another office, where Dr. O'Clair and another new woman waited. Dr. O'Clair held out her hand. "Congratulations, Mr. Durham. Welcome to the Royal Academy."
Long time, no see, lads. For all you lovely humans still leaving reviews on The Dangers of Buying Birthday Presents, thank you. It means a lot.
More to come.
love Tierney