For long moments after my son dropped into sleep, I knelt with him in my arms, silently weeping with shame – and wonder.

I had been so frightened upon entering his room a full twelve hours after giving him a sleeping draught meant to last no more than six and finding him still asleep, that I had very nearly lost my mind. He was all I had left in this world; he was the last person who did not judge me either for the terror of my past or for my horrible visage. I wondered now at the depths of his love for me – not doubting it, but rather awe-stricken over it! Even after twenty years, yes, nearly twenty years now, I still did not understand his reasons for loving me. I was simply not a being capable of accepting love. I had, or so I had thought, been weaned of the need to feel love at an early age in my long-past childhood, that evidence of it, or of it's companion, friendship, was utterly alien to me.

But he loved me. He, who could have been the veritable god I had often been described as in my youth, save for my face, he would do anything for me. His knowledge and thirst for learning matched, if not exceeded my own, and he was born without the one flaw I possess other than my ruined face, a sense of right and wrong. I had been an amoral monster all of my life, but he had never spilled blood or stolen a life. A chorus boy, unlucky enough to have seen us, had once called him a half-faced angel – and I had killed the impertinent child. But Erik, no, he had never laid a hand on anyone in violence.

He knew, also, that somewhere there was more to this world than the dank corridors of the lowest cellar in the famous Palais Garnier, and yet he stayed!

I lifted him gently into my arms and carried him down the long hall to my room, laying around his shaking, fevered body an array of blankets that had been warming by the fire. My movements, still dripping with the uncanny grace of a beautiful predatory cat, were nonetheless mechanical, as my eyes remained fixed on my son's sleeping face. My thoughts tonight seemed doomed to entertain self-loathing and disgust as their guests tonight. If only I were a little stronger… We could live above, he and I, if only I could put away my selfish, endless dislike of the human race … My own vanity- yes, isn't it laughable for a man without a face to have pride? – and inexplicable selfishness chains him down here in this dank, sewage laden excuse for a burial ground.

This tribute to living graveyards that my own filth ridden, sensually crazed hands had crafted was slowly going to swallow my son as it had swallowed me.

I clenched my teeth, which were still white and strong despite my age and deformity, until slivers of pain like long forgotten glass slivers ricocheted through my ruined jaws.

Tomorrow, I would take him from here.

Tomorrow, I would give my son the world.