Disclaimer:
I do not own Leroux's Phantom, nor do I own ALW's Phantom
Movie-based
For DanicaEnjolras
I sit here in the dark, alone with my thoughts. He is dead now, and I don't know whether to think of it as a joyous or sorrowful occasion (for him, not myself). I do not matter; I never did, not without him.
There was even a time when I had been with him and still did not matter. When she had been there, that sweet voice. Before her, he sang to me. His music was mine. From the moment he'd returned from watching the corps de ballet auditions all those years ago there was something different about him. Something I could never place, not even to this day. I began to see new things come into our home, beautiful things…things unlike him or me.
Before she came I was his companion, he sang to me alone. He had played his organ with a fervor that could only be his own…for me. He would practice his "magic" day and night with me as his only witness. I watched him improve in skill with his playthings, his favorite being a noose, but he preferred to call it a lasso. Of all the objects he toyed with, this he would spend hours at a time on, sometimes he even spent days straight practicing techniques until he perfected them. He would speak to me often of his journeys through the opera house (for he stopped taking me with him as he grew older) and of the tricks he played on the resident Prima Donna and the numerous ballet rats. When he did occasionally sleep, I was the one beside him to give him comfort. I had been there.
I had been at the carnival; I was his only friend. Often, I was tossed around…beaten because he was needed and I was unnecessary. Then there came a day when everything changed for the better. We were in a new place and I was no longer tossed about, Erik cared for me. We were alone, still, most of the time (for the lady who brought us there did not stay with us but cared for us) but we were together. We still had each other.
He began to disappear more often on his excursions into the world of the opera house. He neglected me more to work on his opera Don Juan Triumphant. The music was crude and brilliant. His music reflected him.
In the next package of beautiful trinkets he received from the lady who brought us to the opera there was a music box Erik came fast to adore. His adoration for this piece of polished wood with a monkey on the top grew and swelled until I began to realize that his idolization was for far more than simply the music box and its sweet tone. Next I knew I was thrust into darkness, often hearing a loud tune in my ear, and other times the distant sound of Erik playing his organ with more fervor and passion than ever writing his opera, (I can only assume). Occasionally, while I was there in that confined oblivion, I would hear a sweet voice singing. It was the voice of a woman…or a girl, perhaps. But I can only recount now few times that I ever had heard her.
There was nights (at least I think they were nights, one tends to lose track of time living in constant darkness) that all I could hear through the loud, familiar but implacable song that (constantly rang through my ears) was the sounds of Erik's melancholy sobs. I cannot understand even now why he would not allow me out to comfort him. I had always been his source of comfort before the blackness. Next I heard he was back to his work of Don Juan Triumphant but I was no longer his great audience.
When my night of freedom came at last it was anything but pleasant to hear. The girl's voice was back, but not ever so sweet as I'd remembered it. There was another voice, too…another man's other than Erik's that I could not place. There was yelling, and screams from the girl. I couldn't understand what was said. I could never (not even from the beginning) make out words perfectly from my abyss. There was a final, cold, clear shout from Erik and this time I could make out the words. He was telling the faceless voices (that's all they ever were to me, at least) to leave.
I do not know how long I had been in that dark prison (I know now that it was the music box Erik had taken such a glow to, a sort of coffin for me) days, weeks, months, years, even. I simply know that that was the night that Erik allowed me to return to him. He grabbed me up from my living grave and we left the opera house, and the mask he had hidden behind for so long forever. We moved to the cemetery…into a crypt near a tomb that he would leave me for each day to pray.
Years passed, gravediggers and burial parties came and went and we were left unnoticed. Erik never sang to me again, nor do I imagine that he would have played another instrument were he offered the opportunity.
We lived for the years on the small fortune Erik had accumulated at the opera house. He never spoke to me of the girl with the sweet voice, or that night that I regained my freedom. I never asked, either. I never had asked Erik questions. Only one person ever knew of our existence at the cemetery – the only daughter of the lady who'd taken care of us at the opera house. She would bring us food and blankets, and sometimes little trinkets she had picked up, but he would never accept anything more than he needed and he'd always insist on paying her double for her small services to us.
There was one burial that affected Erik to an extent I did not (and still do not) understand. He'd begun to sob as I'd seen him do directly after we'd left the opera. He sobbed in this manner nearly every day for the next two years, putting on his formally normal, passable façade only when the daughter came to see us. He grew weaker, and one day left the cemetery…something he'd never done before. When he returned, he held in his hands a single red rose tied with a black silk ribbon. There were fresh tears on his cheeks that renewed themselves as he recounted to me the story of his first adventure into the world since the carnival. People had seen him and turned away in disgust and repugnance. The florist refused to look at him; telling him to take what he wanted and leave, never to return or else the prefect would be contacted. People had run from him, shielded their children's eyes and wailed in horror. While he recounted to me his dreadful experience he took a ring off the chain he always wore around his neck and slipped it onto the stem of the rose. He disappeared again, returning hours later without the rose or ring.
When he came back to me that night and went to sleep but this time he never woke again. He died, and left his pain and me all alone.
That's the true story of the so-called "Phantom of the Opera" from the friend who may have known him the best and if not the best, the longest. He was never quite so glamorous to me, but what would I know? I'm only a stuffed monkey.