Three Days After the Phone Call
Visitors...Erik never had any visitors. Who was there to visit him? He didn't mind, though. There was no person he wanted to see...Or have see him. He would have truly preferred to simply disappear from sight from the entire human race. He had always been so good at disappearing...But these days, apathetic depression was the prime element that directed his thoughts. Currently accompanying it was the cursedly masochistic perusal of his being to continue to exist. However, in the long run, he could be, or he could not be. He just didn't care anymore...There was nothing left.
But, despite all this, he did have a visitor today. Or, at least, the guard had mentioned something along those lines when he had come to retrieve Erik from his cell. Erik hadn't really been paying attention and was only annoyed at being interrupted. He put on the mask when it was handed to him and allowed the handcuffs to be placed around his wrists. He didn't bother to wonder who it might be that had come to see him.
Erik followed the guard out to an area he had never seen before and entered a room when instructed to do so as the guard told him to wait there until he returned for him. Erik hoped this wouldn't take too long. The guard left and locked the door behind.
"Hey man, what's with the mask?"
Erik turned to see the only other occupant in the inner part of the room: a short, polluted looking man standing near the wall behind him. "What?"
"The mask, yo, why you wearin' a mask?" In an uncouth fashion, the man lifted his handcuffed wrists and pointed to Erik's face. He wore the same attire as every other prisoner, and Erik deduced that he was in this room waiting for the very reason that he was. Erik also thought that this man would do better to learn to not ask dangerous questions. But be entertaining.
Erik's eyes stayed perfectly level with the stranger's as he gave him a flat answer. "Because I am so extraordinarily and maddeningly good-looking that, when people see my face, they are instantly so utterly enamored with my god-like physical aspects of perfect beauty that they immediately fall into an absolutely euphoric, quasi-comatose state and cannot function normally for great lengths of time thereafter."
The man seemed stunned for a moment and tried to process Erik's very long sentence, but then eventually gave up, the task too far beyond his mental capacity. "Ha, right, man. So what you in for?"
"In for?" The inmate's despicable prepositional phrasing only added another element to Erik's disgust for this prime specimen of the base pool of humanity.
"Yeah, what you do? They got me for car jacking, man. A motherload of 'em; Beamers and Vettes and shit. I was big-time, man. Mainstream. I didn't work for nobody. But they can't prove it was me. They got nothin' on me."
"Impressive." Erik's sarcasm was dryer than sun-bleached camel bones lost in the eternally parched desert sands of the Sahara.
"Yeah, so what you do?" the man asked again, becoming curious by Erik's disinterest in sharing.
He answered in a casual, conversational tone. "Innumerable acts of grotesquely torturous and sadistically ritualistic murder."
The prisoner's eyes widened in disbelieving shock. "Damn, you serious?"
"Yes. I like to tie up my naked victims with cords wound of their own entrails that I lace through the holes I pierce in the backs of their necks with hot irons, and then I pull off each of their body parts one by one."
The prisoner looked something that was amid revolted, uncertain, and morbidly curious. "You screwing with me, man."
"Not at all." Erik continued in perfect sedation, "I start with their fingers and then work my way down. I eventually get to everything and dispose of each part Bit...By...Bit...But I always keep the fingers" He then eyed the man slowly from top to bottom, and the gesture sent a tremor of disgusted horror across inmate's previously callous and now slightly gleaming skin.
Erik went on. He was enjoying the results. "I like to peel apart all different types of people. Varity makes it all the more interesting, you know. And," he added, the haunting echo of his voice working its way into the other man's brain and plucking at each rising thread of fear, "Sometimes, if I can't get the skin to tear with my bare hands, I'll use some sort of apparatus." Erik moved a few steps forward and the other man moved just as many steps backward.
"I like to be creative," Erik continued as the man perceived him to be growing continually more excited with the recollections of his attested pre-prison actions. "And I have different themes."
By this point, the man's skin had paled at least five shades. Erik moved in for six. "When they finally apprehended me, I was in a phase where I was using only my vast array of home-made replicas of authentic torture devices from the Middle Ages. You do know how delightfully wicked the Middle Ages were, don't you? No? Perhaps I ought to elucidate..." His eye came to rest on the man's bound hands. "You have beautiful fingers."
The prisoner backed away as far as the wall would let him and blinked back the ribbons of cold sweat that were flowing down through his thick, black eyebrows. Speaking was an effort, but he managed it as if he knew these words would be the last he would ever utter. "You one sick freak, man. You're a freakin' twisted psycho..."
Behind the mask, Erik was smiling. "Thank you."
Another guard came just then for the prisoner, and the man rushed and stumbled out of the room so quickly that the scent of his fear still lingered a few moments behind.
Once alone, Erik learned against the wall and laughed a very strangely normal laugh before closing his eyes and reentering the secure, dark place inside his own mind.
A few minutes later, Christine Daaé took a seat at her designated booth inside the prison's visiting room. She set her small purse to the side of the narrow ledge in front of her and could vaguely see the actions mirrored in the bulletproof glass between her and the empty seat on the other side.
Her eyes roved around the empty space beyond the window, but she couldn't see much for the blinding barriers on either side of the booth. Her heart was racing as she thought about the unpredictable possibilities of the next fifteen minutes. He would be there, filling that empty space, in no time at all. She wasn't entirely sure what to expect from him...She hadn't seen him since that fateful night. At a loss for occupation, she resorted to messing with a lock of her hair as she waited for his arrival.
He saw her before she saw him. He stopped walking for a moment, too shocked to move. He hadn't known whom to expect, but this was astonishing. The guard who had retrieved him from the room pushed Erik roughly against the shoulder to continue and then shoved him just as tersely into the empty chair. Erik was too stunned to object.
He just sat there and looked at her through the glass as she brushed at the end of her curl in meaningless concentration. It fell from her fingers when she saw him and though he was there in whole, her clear, blue eyes only seemed able to take him in in parts. First the cuffs on his wrists that bound those hands which had always been so full of magic...And then the absurd, bright orange clothing which they forced him to wear that was so far from his former elegance...And then the mask...The very same mask...And then his eyes. And there she stopped, locked in place. She whispered his name beneath her breath having somehow forgotten that he could not hear her through the glass.
And though he couldn't hear her, he recognized his own name on her lips. He was so astounded that she was there...That she was actually existing in space at that very moment in that very place...But it was not shock enough to keep away the joy he felt to see her again...And to think that he might hear her again. And yet...Between these tangled feelings, Erik felt shame. Shame that she had to see him like this...
It took him a long time before he had regained his faculties and he spoke to her, his numinous voice easily passing through the glass and meeting her on the other side.
"Christine...Why have you come here?"
She could hear him so easily above all the other voices in the room, even despite the crowded volume of each visitor trying to be heard over the others as they spoke into the telephones that connected them to the prisoners on the other side.
She picked up the receiver from the wall of the booth without taking her eyes away from his. He did the same and had to hold it with both hands because of the cuffs. His question, though simple, was suddenly extremely difficult to for her to answer at that moment, and she hesitated as long as her voice would let her before it worked its way free. "I...I've come because...Well, I'm sure you've heard that I...am on the opposite side..."
He listened, his eyes closed, and her voice, small and wavering, came to him through the line. To hear her again...He imagined that she wasn't only a few inches away, just there on the other side of the glass, so close, and yet so far...Such a torturous paradox...He imagined she only spoke to him on the phone from any other location as she would have with any other person. But what she said...About being on the opposite side of the case...He had heard and hadn't really been surprised...What else could he have expected? He wasn't foolish enough to hold the same hopes his lawyers did where Christine was concerned. He answered her, speaking into the phone normally, "Yes..."
She looked down for a second to gather her nerves and then back into his eyes, which he had opened again in order to cherish every aspect of her visit. She then said what she sought to say. "I just wanted you to know, Erik...That it is against my will that I am testifying against you...They served me a subpoena...And I have no choice."
"I know..." he answered. Of course he knew. Regardless of what she had wanted to do, they would have done the same. "You wanted nothing to do with any of this at all, but you really had no choice from the start...It's my fault...You shouldn't have to be a part of this..."
She shook her head a little as she watched him. "I just don't want you to have to stay here the rest of your life...Your lawyers came to me and asked me to help. I said yes in your favor, but then, well...Raoul wasn't fond of that..."
Fond of that...He tried not to put too much thought into what those words meant. He didn't want her to feel upset about this and replied softly. "Don't let it worry you...I never expected it of you to help me."
"But I want to..." she insisted, just as softly, her voice penetrating into the phone through the noises of the room. It was such a tearing feeling! She wanted to, but she couldn't...Even if it hadn't been because of her loyalty to her fiancé, they had hooked her now. "I just don't know what I can do..."
He shook his head in the same way she had, dismissing her concern as he gazed at her through the window. "You have already done more for me than I could have ever asked of you..."
She just looked at him, wordlessly for a moment and subconsciously pressed the phone a little more closely to her ear. "Erik...No, its not good enough...I don't want you to be here...I want you to be free like you used to be. This is because of me."
"No, Christine." He would not have her blaming herself for his misfortune. "Don't ever think that. There is a lot more to this...A lot more to it than anything you could have done..."
She sighed softly and was silent. She knew he had always thought too highly of her. Her only protest was a weak "Erik..."
He could hear it. She felt guilty for what had become of him...She held herself responsible...He was not going to let her agonize. He would do enough that for the both of them. "Besides, it is fitting this way..." he began as he lifted only one hand away from the phone, the cuff apparently no longer around that wrist, and gently touched the surface of the window. "This is how it began, and it seems it should end the very same way...You and I...Separated by a pane of glass..." Such a fragile thing as glass...And yet it had always provided such a barrier. It was a shield and an obstacle at the same time...Just as it had always been...Back in those days gone by when he could only watch her through the mirror in her dressing room. Such similar panes of glass...And such similar pains of memory.
Christine did not notice the second cuff hanging from the first on his hand that still held the phone. She only watched the other, thin and pale, as it lay against the glass. At the same time, deliberately and automatically, she slowly reached up and pressed her own hand against the glass where his lay. "It won't end..." she whispered into the phone. "Not like this..."
Erik didn't move his hand. When he spoke, Christine couldn't grasp the mysterious sadness in his voice. "No...It will end a very different way, won't it?"
Suddenly, she looked as though she would cry, and her fingers curled slightly against the cool surface. "No...! I won't let that happen to you!"
Erik wondered if it was guilt, pity, or suppressed emotion as his eyes took in every detail of her expression. "You have already saved me once, Christine...That is more than enough for me..."
"It's not enough for me!" She was starting to feel desperate. "Erik you have to try to win! Please don't give up hope! If you do, then there's no way you can win...I wouldn't ever live happily again if I knew that was going to be your fate..."
His fingers gently traced her hand on the opposite side of the window. She wouldn't ever live happily...Because of him. Unconsciously, his voice slipped from the phone back to the other side to be by her. It was as if even his involuntary actions knew that it was the only way he would ever be by her again. He outlined every curve of her small hand with his fingertips. "No, Christine, you will live very happily...And you won't ever worry about Erik again..." He allowed himself to look at their hands, separated by inches of glass, for one more moment before letting his slide back down to the little ledge below the window. Then only hers remained and, as he watched it, the absence of a wedding ring confirmed his previous suspicions. "Why aren't you married yet?"
She looked so saddened by his earlier words and was too upset to answer his question. Or was it that she was avoiding the answer? "I will worry about you! I always will! No matter what happens..."
Always...Erik couldn't help but think that always was a very long time. He had wanted her to be happy...He had let her go...But how had it ended? Let her go, only to continue to always hold her prisoner in worry and concern. No matter what happens.
He was too upset to look at her and put down the phone to fix his handcuffs as he began to speak to her again on the other side of the glass. "As long as I live..." He stopped and finished the thought only mentally and said no more words. As long as he would live, she would worry, then...His memory would continue to keep her a prisoner in life as much as he was in this place. She hadn't even been able to marry yet because of all this...And he had wanted so much for her to find the happiness he could never possess... "I'm so sorry, Christine..."
She hung up her phone when he put his down; she knew it would serve her no use and he would not be able to hear her voice through the glass. She shook her head in denial, staring at him in silence as he replaced the handcuff just in time before the guard came and pulled him out of his chair. She knew there was no way he could hear her, but she spoke anyway. Softly. "Don't be sorry...I am the one who is sorry..."
As he was led away and before she was out of sight, Erik looked back at Christine, so sadly, one last time.