Author's note: And now I present you with the first chapter of my retelling, in which several characters introduce themselves. This is somewhat my own take on the meeting of Christine Daae and her Angel of Music, although I very much adore the way that Kay's Phantom arranged it. However, since I desire to be at least fairly original with this, and it is a bit necessary to put it this way, I have slightly altered the scene…
Disclaimer: *scowls* No, I don't own Phantom or anyone/anything belonging to it. The world flaunts this single cruel fact in my face, and much as I would like to Punjab whoever is responsible for this being true, I can't. And won't. To commence!
Chapter One –
The Beauty, the Voice, and the Promise
Paris, 1879. From the viewpoint of a young ballet dancer…
Backstage, in the strangely attentive, stifling shadows that encompassed the space that ran behind the curtains and the wings, all was silent. It was a dark, foreboding, and still place: full of inky blackness into which sliced vague hints of what might have been called light, which came from somewhere infinitely far above the floor. The quiet was almost tangible, so thick that it could almost be cut with a knife.
And yet, then, suddenly, there came a single sound to break the quiet – the muffled, small sobs of a very young, very lonely girl.
That girl was me.
I was sitting in a rumpled, limp heap of sorts on the floor in an obscure, black corner: my thick, dark hair streaming, wild and unkempt, over my shoulders, my soft white ballet costume wrinkled. I sobbed on and on, unheeded. Perhaps, to most of what we may call 'compassionate' hearts, it might have seemed unfair to leave a child in such a state – alone, with nothing but the darkness to hear her sobs, and nothing but the dust on the floor to catch her tears.
However, I must explain, for this is an important fact, that the place that I inhabited at the moment was the Paris Opéra Populaire: the crowning, glorious, imposing work of that great architect, Garnier.
It was a truly awe-inspiring place; being much greater than any other theatre in the world, the Opéra Populaire was something that, once seen, no one ever forgot. It had been commissioned by royalty, visited by the masses, and was run by virtually every class known to man. The aristocracy, the merchants, the working class, the peasants – everyone. It was too gigantic for words to express: having more than a thousand souls employed within its structure. There were ballrooms in it, huge halls used for conferences of royalty and state, salons, and the cavernous depths of the cellars which reached, with clinging, hard fingers, into the earth, far below the surface. There was even a stables within in it, to provide a living quarters for the number of horses – all white, all purebred, all aristocrats in their own way – that were occasionally used in the performances that the opera house put on. The productions themselves were more than magnanimous, more than dazzling: they were otherworldly, intricate, elaborate, realistic, and exorbitant.
The scores of actors, actresses, dancers, stagehands, and others within it were almost too many to count, all scrabbling for better positions and fighting for power. Of course, with all of this, no one had time for each other, for their families, or friends. They were only concerned with getting all that they could out of life – "Allez ou morte!" was the phrase to describe their sort of wanton obsession with the work that they did. Emotions were things of scarce to no value, compassion was part of the flawed past, and love was almost unheard of.
No one could have cared if I lived or died.
"I only wanted to sing." I whispered to myself, my breath strangling me, choking in my tightened throat. "I only wanted to sing."
And I started crying again.
I couldn't see through the haze of my tears. If my own mother had stood before me, I would have had no way of knowing that she was there. My emotions were so dulled because of my weeping that I had no sense of anything but the reason why I had been hurt – why I was crying.
Then, something in the air around me was not right. The shadows around me were suddenly, poignantly, alive, and it felt as if the air had just become colder. Suddenly, a voice came to me, a voice like none that I had ever heard before. It was a smooth, enticing tenor, icy and cool and yet somehow rich: vibrant and expressive as that of a well-trained actor, cultured to perfection, and incredibly, inescapably, strangely hypnotic. The voice of a man.
"Why are you crying, mon petite?"
I looked up, startled, breathless and trembling.
"They wouldn't let me sing."
It was silent for a moment after I had spoken. I was as still as one of the statues that crowned the theatre's roof, wondering just who and what I was speaking to. Finally, grimly and seriously, "Oh really?" A pause. "Why not?"
"She told them not to." I whispered.
"Ah, La Carlotta?" the voice guessed, knowingly.
I nodded, gazing at my hands in my lap. Silence came into the air again and I remained quiet. And then, the voice came again. "Don't worry, little one. Someday, you will sing, and no one will stand to bar you then…no one. You will sing and be greater than any other diva that ever lived…and I will make you so."
He, whomever he happened to be, was leaving.
"Wait!" I cried.
But I was alone again.
I shivered, and then realized that I was not in the darkness alone. The voice came to me again, and, once again, it was close to me, more reassuring than raindrops pattering on a roof, warmer than the sun's gentle rays, more gentle than a lover's caress. "You will become a great singer, mon petite. I promise you."
"But how will I know?" I asked, my blue eyes searching the darkness for my strange, invisible protector.
"You will know…for I shall be there with you."
The last vestiges of the voice died away into the darkness and I stood motionless, wondering what and whom I had just seen. Then, I bit my lip and forced the memory into the back of my mind, to an endless, black space where I would always remember it. I brushed my skirts back into order and attempted to tidy my mussed, dark hair.
Then I, Christine Daae, ran back to the stage.
* * * * * *
As we waited for our instructor to return to the backstage ballet barre, thirteen-year-old Meg Giry and I watched a very Italian, very brassy, and very red-haired Carlotta Guidicelli as she strutted like a vain, self-centered hen across the glossy wooden floorboards of the stage during a full-scale rehearsal.
Meg made a face: her petite, pretty nose wrinkling, as she commented, "C'est incroyable comme ânerie runs libérer ici."
She shook her head.
"Carlotta Guidicelli – she looks so ridiculous, non? Can you believe that she thinks that she looks good in that get-up?"
My friend addressed this last to me, and then she turned back to watching the soprano. I shrugged and replied, carelessly, "I think that she'll think whatever she wants to about herself whether anyone else cares or not."
Meg shot me a look with a raised eyebrow.
"That meaning?"
I didn't reply – I couldn't. Instead, I grabbed her arm and pulled her away, saying quickly, "Come along, Meg Giry. Your mother is going to be back any moment and we'll both be in trouble if she catches us out here."
Meg snorted expressively to that as we ran along the backstage hallway, both of us attempting not to trip on our long pointe shoes and said, "My mother thinks that any dreams outside of ballet are useless and futile. She says that the opera is a waste of time and that it wouldn't be worth anything without the ballet!"
I thought about that for a moment. "Oh really? Well, perhaps she's right."
My little friend stopped in her tracks, her small mouth making the shape of an O, her jaw dropping dramatically in a show of extreme shock and consternation. I kept myself from smiling a wicked grin on seeing that my tactic had worked. "Christine Daae!" Meg reprimanded, as if I was a naughty child and she was my mother. "How can you say such a thing? I thought that you lived for singing!"
At that, I frowned and cocked my head. "No, I never said that."
"But—"
"Oh will you come along, you nonsensical child? We are going to be late!" With that, I reached out and grabbed hold of Meg's arm once more and, this time, I succeeded in dragging her into the ballet practice area.
Fortuitously, we made it to their positions and were gracefully stretching our legs at the barre just as Mme. Giry, Meg's mother and the ballet mistress of the Opéra Populaire, walked in and began the lesson again. Before the next two hours of grueling practice for the upcoming performance began, I shot Meg a look that told her not to tell anyone where we had been on pain of death. Meg looked offended, almost hurt, because she knew quite clearly that she wasn't to tell; however, she nodded her agreement.
And it was thus that the practice went on as our group of young girls who made up the ballet corps filled the spaces around the bar – Mme. Giry beating time on the wooden floorboards with her ebony-handled cane.
But we were being watched.
And I knew it.
* * * * * *
In an ornate, beautiful ball gown of pure white, she danced in strange, arching circles in an endless, black space that seemed to be void of gravity. A candelabrum and a huge, glossy black piano floated near her, but no matter what she did, she could never quite reach it. Music played from somewhere far-off from her: in a distant quarter, made by hands of a musician that she couldn't see.
Suddenly, the seemingly peaceful, dreamlike scene exploded into a horrible nightmare. She felt herself dropping out of midair and falling down. She landed on a floor that hadn't been there before and looked up to see the piano as it came crashing down towards her.
But it wasn't a piano anymore.
It was a chandelier…exactly like the one that hung above the audience's heads in the Opéra Populaire.
She realized almost too late that it was heading directly for her and dived to the side to avoid being crushed. A split second later, the chandelier crashed onto the ground beside her and the sound of cracking brass and jarred cut-crystals filled the air. She slowly stood, unable to take her eyes away from it. Then, she heard a voice.
"Christine!" it called, and it sounded as if it were far-off and weak.
She turned towards it, not knowing where to go but desperate to find its owner, and finally caught sight of a doorway: large, Gothic-shaped, and lit by pale, eerie light. Without a moment's hesitation, she gathered her skirts, which had suddenly become torn, dirty, chafing, and incredibly heavy, into her hands and ran towards it.
"Erik!" she called, lifting her hand to the side of her mouth so that her voice would carry further. Her voice sounding muffled and she seemed to move in slow motion, but her slippers made echoing, hollow sounds on the floor.
"Christine!" the voice echoed back to her and this time it sounded even further away. "Don't leave me!" she cried and kept running. She sped down the hallway, making turns and following the corridor as if she knew exactly where she was going, but it never seemed to be any shorter. It was as if she could never reach her destination…and the voice kept on getting further and further away.
Finally, she glimpsed a faint glimmer of light from far down the hallway and ran faster. Her breath echoed in the silence as she kept on running, desperately, as if she couldn't stop and the ruined, tattered remnants of her gown slithered around her, one of the sleeves slipping down and exposing her shoulder. She ignored all this.
After what seemed an eternity of running, she finally reached the door and yanked it open. Her hands bled as if the handle had been made of daggers, but she ignored it and dashed into the golden light before her.
Suddenly, something hit her and she couldn't run any further.
A horrible, mocking laugh filled the space around her and she clapped her hands to her ears to keep the sound out. It grew stronger and stronger, however, and she couldn't keep herself from hearing. Overcome, she felt herself dropping to her knees and was unable to stand up again.
"Christine, why didn't you come?" whispered the first voice.
She tried to reply, but her lips were heavy and she could form the words. Finally, she forced herself to say, "I tried…I tried, Erik."
And then, everything around her went black and she was plunged into darkness.
With a cry, I awoke, gasping raggedly for breath.
For a moment, the room around me seemed to spin and I quickly held my hands to my head to steady myself. When it had become still again, I opened my eyes and stared ahead of myself. Sitting up, I looked around at the familiar surroundings of my boarding house room, and tried to calm the wild beating of my heart; then I gazed at the wall that was across the room from me and began to think…to know…to remember. The nightmare that I had just seen hadn't been the first of its kind.
It had begun only a few scant months ago.
My dream of an urgent, seemingly terrified passage through the dark interior of some forbidden realm had interrupted my sleep with cold, gripping fear for the first time on the night that followed the day in which had come a turning point in my life.
The day when I had been introduced to a strange, invisible protector who had sworn to be mine.
Mine and only mine.
Suddenly restless, I folded the covers of the bed back from myself and stood, rubbing my arms to get my blood to circulate again.
The last several years of my life had been strange compared to that of other girls. My father had died, leaving me alone in the world, and I had been taken to Paris from my home in Sweden, my father's home country. My traveling companions had been Mme. Giry and her daughter Meg, who was my best friend in the world. Upon our arrival to France, Mme. Giry had agreed to look after me and let me dance with the Opéra Populaire's ballet corps. I would sew and repair costumes to pay for my room and board. Mme. Giry would have gladly paid for it herself, but unfortunately, she was not wealthy and her husband had just died, leaving her and her young daughter without a home and almost penniless, which was why she had come to the Opéra Populaire in the first place.
As the years had gone on, I had risen in rank in the ballet corps, along with Meg, and we were soon known as some of the best ballet dancers in the Opéra. But when I had tried to become part of the chorus – well, it wasn't a memory worth thinking about. But what had happened immediately after that unfortunate episode…
That occurrence was still a mystery to me and had yet to be explained.
As I gazed out the window, up through the narrow space between the roof of the boarding house that I lived in and the building next to it, I suddenly glimpsed the pale, comforting, pearl-like moon as it shone down upon me.
I smiled at it.
For some very odd reason, I had always felt akin to the moon and nighttime. It was almost more welcoming than the day. Thinking of the moon, however, reminded me of my dreams. I shuddered, pulling the curtain closed and shutting out the light from outside. Then I turned around and folded my arms, feeling the soft warmth of my white cotton nightgown.
The dreams were always the same. From the beginning to the end, they always followed the same pattern. I was continually running down an endless hallway, searching for someone who was calling to me. And that name. The name that I had wept myself to sleep over so many times before.
"Erik."
The name surfaced on my lips before I had even time to realize it. I felt a thrill of strange, unexpected, and almost unnerving excitement and anticipation race up my back, across my scalp, and down the backs of my hands.
"Erik."
* * * * *
Author's note: Well, mes amies, do you like it? Hate it? Please, do let me know of your opinions, which I hold in the greatest respect. (Just be kind if you don't like it, s'il vous plait…) Also, I know that my French may be a bit flawed – I'm taking it as a second language, but I'm not fluent yet. If you have any corrections to make as to my errors, please feel free to let me know. In the meantime, r&r, and the next chapter will arrive soon.