Author Note: Pegasus, Erik (thanks to those who gave me his name! ), these characters are just too much fun to write... Maybe I should try Faust VIII from Shaman King next, neh? o. And if you haven't seen the musical, GO. NOW. Anyway, the results of my little experiment? If I originally wrote the story as a dialogue, it absolutely cannot go into traditional format... ah well.... Here's my attempt, anyway. I definitely need to learn more technical music terms. The reference is to Hamlet; if you haven't read Hamlet, READ IT. NOW. Oh, and the reason that I don't use his name in this version is because it seems like cheating until I read the book. I know it's weird, get over it. Tato
Encounter, Version II (Narration)
Silence slips through the opera house, seeps in every crack, rests heavy in every corner, whispers in every shadow, measures and measures of rests on a smoky, winding score. Outside, deepest night deals dreams and nightmares alike with her pale fingers of moonlight. A lone, caped figure watches from box five the rows of velvety seats, the sweeping buttresses, and the empty stage, a shadow amongst shadows, both creating them and created by them.
"I remember you, friend," growls a scratcy bass voice from behind.
"I'm most certain you do," replies the tenor shadow-man dismissively.
"Do you remember me?" asks the voice.
"Of course," the watcher says, his voice rising. "I remember you with that part of my myself that remembers the fire and the brimstone haunt. Begone, curse me no more with the memory."
"Quiet," comes the even-toned voice, "we must be quiet, I pray you. Who are you to call me a haunt, old friend? But silence, please, there are so many who wish you out of the opera house."
"Their fear keeps them in strings, little puppets dangling from my hands. We've nothing to fear from them." He wishes this visitor would leave.
"As you say. But yet you stay here, in the shadowed corners, in the falling dust and falling hands of the clock, biding your time--the Phantom of the Opera."
The Phantom's long, thin musician's fingers twitched, itching to erase the visitor's words, voice, memories from existence. "What do you want, serpent? Speak quickly."
The visitor laughed in harsh staccato bursts. "Or what? I'll taste the noose that has spilled so much blood?"
"Ah, what deeds men do to achieve their goals."
"And what is your goal, old friend? That strumpet, Christine?"
"Don't ever insult that girl in my hearing again,"says the Phantom, a dangerous edge in his whisper. How dare this stranger come and insult his fair angel?
"Think you to get your fair Ophelia? It will only end in madness, phantom! Christine will never love you."
Now the Phantom drops all pretense of silence as the barbed accusations of this monstrous visitor tear at the truth that he has spent so much effort burying in his mind. Now those dead thoughts, those dirge echoes, are trying to rise, rise at the command of the stranger, but he must bury them as fast as they dig upwards... "I'll make her love me. Once I work my magic in her sweet mind she'll be mine forever, I'll finally--I'll finally..." As his breath quickens with the effort of digging, pushing, blocking, his sentences bundle in malismatic thought.
"Ha! You think you can control her, but your tremulous voice proves your mind wrong. Best control your own heart before you go snatching away someone else's! 'Give me that man that is not passion's slave--'"
"Silence!" The Phantom's shout reverberates through the darkness.
"Listen to yourself," the visitor charges triumphantly, "a rat caught in a trap! Your voice shakes and runs away without you, your eyes burn like fire through the dark--yes, you claim to see all that goes on here, but you can't even see into your own damned, aching heart!"
"Begone, demon!" screams the Phantom, throat constricting in sympathy to the painful truth cutting around him, cutting closer and closer to his heart despite his increasingly frantic efforts to block it out...
"Like a wraith you watch from the shadows, slinking from desperate curtain to despairing box, but you forget! Wraiths, my friend, are simply haunts from children's tales, from infant's nightmares; they are as substantial as air, as solid as those white puffs, which scuttle across a fair day on the wind's whim. Why would she follow a nightmare, or yearn to embrace a cloud?"
The stranger is wrong. He has to be wrong. Terribly, horribly, wrong! Why can't he see, why, why, why? "Clouds hold mystery, demon. All young children yearn to touch those same entrancing 'puffs', as you call them! I shall draw her in with my own kind of lofty, uncatchable magic--"
"And she will find herself embracing nothing, and lose interest," shot back the stranger from the dark. "What do you have to offer her?"
Oh! Oh, oh! What he has to offer! His anger dissolves in an instant, lost in the fantasy of what will be. "Music!" he cries from the depths of his soul, "sweet, rich, dark, intoxicating melodies that will dance across her nerves and shake them, that will fill her heart and soul and head until she must let fly with an angel-song that will charge the air around us, sending us to another realm of rapturous, rapturous music! Music will lift us, send us soaring to the star-splashed heavens on feathered wings, spinning upward, upward above even the clear melodies of the coloratura--"
"Music, he says!" interrupts the stranger, his scornful laughter sending anger shooting back through the Phantom, already wound tight and winding tighter, straining, straining... the frantic arpeggios of constricting his heart so he can hardly bear it, and his fingers begin to twitch.
"Music, says the Phantom! Perhaps a man of shadows lives on music alone as a pixie lives on belief, but your dear Christine needs a more substantial bread: sunlight, structure, her own kind. All you'll ever have is an eternity of darkness and a handful of notes."
Notes? Notes! How dare he?! His tightly wound emotion squeezes tears from his heart to his eyes, squeezes tighter, he can't breathe, can't think, can't move for one black, hurricane second...
Snap. Lost in a red mist, the fool's words echoing in his head, beating out all else with their incessant ringing... She'll never love you, eternity of darkness, sunlight, structure, shadows, pixie, handful of notes-- STOP! Leave me in peace!
"I've warned you to leave, fool!" the Phantom roars, some other demon-will but his own spinning him around sharply to face the lying stranger. "You should have listened! Now descend to Hell from whence you came!"
Who's voice is that? Is that his own, screaming desperately, are those his own hands around the stranger's throat, squeezing tighter, squeezing the life from the stranger who squeezed the hope out of him? All he sees is Christine's face receding, all he feels is the rabid despair, all he hears are the stranger's words in his head, in his brain, in his heart, and Christine's face is falling away, away, away... Tighter, grip tighter, convince this stranger that he is wrong and it will be so! It will be so! They will see!
"What--no--rope?" rasps the stranger. "Ha--your hands---slick--with--doubt--She'll--never--love--"
"No, no, no, no!" His voice flies as if torn from a tortured, animal throat in a forced sfortzando, straining to drown out the stranger's lie. "You're wrong, wrong, demon! Devil! Descend, descend, descend into the fire of your error, and look up at me when I am triumphant, when the angel raptures me away--the Angel of Music! She'll love me, love me--love me, I'll make sure--she will! Now. Have you no--no answer... for that... no... answer..."
The mist begins to dissipate...
"She'll love me, she will, she'll love me for... for the music...
So silent is the hall, the only sound is his voice, yes, his voice, fading to hoarse whispers as the rabid dissonants of his mind decrescendo back to haunting, slow tri-tones, as the mist floats away...
"The music... yes...... yes....
"...yes....."
Under his fingers, yes, his fingers, the stranger has stopped moving.
But Christine is no closer to his arms, held back by an infinite fermata.
"...Yes...."