Ok, Ladies and Gents:
If you are overly fond of ALW/MC/SB and them being critizised causes you physical or emotional pain: take some pain killers or psychopharmazeutics before reading - or don't read at all.
And pretty please: don't pour out your rightful wrath over the poor poor review-function.
Re-read: 3-18-05
-Chapter Seven – A Night Out-
The next morning starts with terrible indecision.
On the one hand she wants to go to him, at least to see if he feels better again. On the other hand her pride wants him to come to her and apologize for chasing her away in such a shocking manner.
Finally her stomach decides that pride has not enough calories to keep a girl alive that had her last meal twentyfour hours ago.
While Carla eats her breakfast, Erik lies on the moist ground in a hidden cave not far from his house.
His long, pale fingers caress the earth under that her hand is buried.
"I cried so long for you." he whispers "A hundred years I cried for you... But two days ago Carla made me smile and... for the blink of an eye it didn't hurt anymore... Could it be that finally... I'm hearling? Could it be that... that... I start letting you go?"
He can feel that she smiles at him, but for the first time since he bedded her here it doesn't cause him to dig in the sensless hope of finding her down there, alive and well.
"She said it felt like being obsessed." he explains softly when Carla has taken a seat on her stool. "She was very susceptible to music... It was alright with her when feelings that weren't her own came to her clearly from the outside, and it was alright as well when her own emotions bursted out. But alien emotions that she evoked in herself by her own singing irritated her otherwisely well developed sense of identity.
She passed the auditions at the Conservatoir de Paris with great success. Her voice had enough feeling then to convince the jury that she had more potential than 'just' an instinctively nearly flawless technique. But when her father died unexpectedly half a year later, the shock of losing the most important person in her life, the only connection to her mother who died when Christine was four years old, deprived her voice of even the last hint of emotion.
The behaviour of her collegues first at the Conservatoir, later at the Opera, didn't do much to give her courage. She knew that she could sing better than all of them, yet they loughed at her, the 'ghost child' that lost all it's feelings when it died.
She was so ashamed..."
Carla sits there silently for a moment. Then she presses out a strangled: "Thank you for that! Now... uh... I'll be right back..." and hastens to her room.
She doesn't know why she cries. She should be happy, honoured by his sudden decision to trust her, but the silent tears keep running down her cheeks and there is an emptiness inside her that she can't explain. Perhaps it would make everything better if she would dare to embrace him.
When she returns to the library after a long while, Erik is gone. She searches every room that she knows of, but he is nowhere to be found.
"Why didn't you leave a note or something? It was just scary to be here without knowing where you are, when you'll be back or how one opens that stupid piece of wall that is your front door." she tells him the next morning with a slightly quivering voice "At least you could have said something when you returned."
"I'm sorry. I didn't think it would have such an impact on you to be here alone." he says with an obvious feeling of guilt "I came to your room when I returned but you were already asleep."
"And where have you been so long?"
"I was visiting someone..." he answers vaguely. But from the overtones Carla can tell that this someone is female and long since dead.
'Stop being jealous, darn!' she silently scolds herself 'Stop this whole madness right now!'
"I'd like to go for a walk." she suddenly announces. "I start getting claustrophobic in all this artificial light."
Erik hesitates for a moment, but then he agrees.
While Erik rows them across the lake, Carla marvels at the beauty of the endless dark succession of sculpted columns that support the ceiling above the lake.
"Will we leave the cellars through one of your secret passages and seemingly pop out of the wall in the Foyer de la Chante?" she suddenly asks with an adventurous tone.
"No."
Carla pulls a face.
"Why?"
"Time fields need a gateway and that's..."
"But I didn't have a gateway when I read your letter." Carla interrupts him.
"You had the letter."
"But it worked only once."
"I let the time field subside after you returned."
"Ok. But that doesn't answer my question. Can't we just visit the Opera in our current fast-forward state?"
Erik shakes his head.
"It's not a state of us, it's a state of the time field we're in. And, so to say, outside this field nothing exists for us."
"But when I read the letter there still was the city around."
"No, it wasn't. You just didn't perceive it. And when you looked up again you had already passed back into the 'normal' time field."
They've reached the kay and Erik carefully docks the boat and stabilizes it with the oar braced on the ground in the shallow water.
Gracefully Carla disembarks.
"How does such a field look?" she then asks.
"It's a slightly fluctuating ellipsoid whose longest axis is mostly parrallel to the surface on wich it's built up."
Carla frowns.
"Wouldn't a bubble be more stable and economic?"
"In the dimension of matter and space that would apply." Erik agrees "But in the dimension of time an ellipsoid is the optimal form."
"Ok... But how can an ellipsoid, a geometrical figure, exist when there is no space?"
"You really should study physics when you're through with archaeology." he suggests with an acknowledging look to Carla "If you like I will show you my theories when we're back at the house."
She gives him a wide-eyed stare.
'Archaeology, physics, and why not architecture and medicine, hah? Oh, face it, Erik, you're a nerd.'
But then she smiles.
"I'd very much like to see that theories, thank you."
When they have passed the gate, Carla irritatedly looks up at the dark sky.
"Didn't you say it was morning when you took me to the boat? You lied to me..."
Erik strikes back one side of his cloak, feeling warm in the midsummer air.
"Would you have preferred to hear that I will keep you, no matter what you want?"
Carla hesitates for a moment, considering the grave meaning these words could have; but when she looks testingly into Erik's eyes, she sees nothing alarming.
"At least that would have been honest." she finally states.
Erik gives an elegant shrug.
"In some situations, lies are the more gentle way."
"Nah, you!" Carla groans, while some butterflies play seek-and-hide in her stomach. She suddenly feels very stupid.
"What do you think about phans?" Carla asks with an adventurous tone, while they drive towards the Bois de Boulogne in the carriage that waited for them right outside the gate.
"Well... I follow the development of that community with some interest, but I try not to identify with all this. It would be far too painful."
"Painful?" Carla lifts her eyebrows.
"Imagine being analyzed, interpreted and buried under compassion and sympathy by thousands of strangers who project all their needs and wishes either on the alienated image that you created of yourself to keep them all away, or on the fantasies some other people had, based on that image.
No, the only good phandom did me is the realization that the percentage of people who would faint or run screaming at the sight of my naked face has decreased since I was born."
Not knowing how to react on the topic of his face, she gives him a faint smile.
"Now... Webber, Crawford and Brightman..."
"Oh my. The queen of phan topics."
"Yes. Tell me what you think about them! And, by the way, I have heard not a single sung note from your mouth yet; that must change. We're approaching the perfect setting for a life performance of 'Music of the Night'."
"Carla..."
"Don't argue! I deserve revenge for my neckerchief!"
"Can't I simply buy you a new one?"
"Oh, you can. But that's not sufficient."
Erik gives a deep sigh.
"Webber is not as creative as most people think, Crawford's timbre belongs into an Opera Buffo and his vibrato is overdone and Brightman..."
"She acts and sings like a sedated hamster, right?" Carla interjects.
Erik gives a tiny amused loughter.
"A hamster, yes, that fits."
"Yah! I knew it!" Carla performs a sitting version of the classical 'strike' pose. "Phans all over the world will hate you for that."
"I know." He opens the door of the carriage that has come to a halt before the gates of the Bois de Boulogne. "So let's hope that there are no phans around..."
"They mostly look like normal people but..." she jumps onto the pavement "Exept the driver we are alone, so... Oh, hehe, imagine someone stood in sight contact with the gate tonight!" she giggles "He must think he's gone crazy!"
"Luckily at this time of the day only drunkards come near the Opera House."
"Hey. I am no drunkard!"
"Only drunkards and beautiful women." Erik corrects himself, making a not so earnest apologetic little bow into Carla's direction.
Against her will Carla blushes and hastily turns her face towards the big lake that they're approaching.
But he has seen her darkened cheeks and it causes an odd feeling in his stomach. With a mixture of guilt and helplessness he gropes for the picture frame in his pocket and takes it out to caress it, hidden in his hand.
Carla sees his movement from the corner of her eye.
'It's strange.' she thinks 'He seems so strong and... majestetic, and yet he is so fragile and utterly dependent when it comes to her.' But somehow she is quite sure that it wasn't like this when Christine was still alive.
She clears her throat.
"To make things easier for you, I will start." Crawford-like she strikes her hair back with both hands; then she clears her throat again and begins to sing in a warm, dark, shaky voice: "Nighttime sharpens, hightens each sensation..." She gives Erik an asking look "Oh come on, at least you know the melody and can hum it!... Darkness stirs and wakes imaginations... Please, Erik, just for the fun of it!"
"No, Carla..." he softly refuses. "Not yet. But you can sing on. You have a nice timbre."
"Really?" she helplessly blushes again "Nah, I bet you're just flattering to avoid singing yourself. Perhaps you have a horrible voice... Ten bucks that you croak like a toad!"
With the hint of a smile in his eyes he shakes his head.
"Come." He starts to amble along the bank of the lake "It was you who wanted to go for a walk."
"Then it will be my mission tonight to make you sing." she runs a few steps to catch up with him "Ten bucks, that's a lot of chocolate."
"Don't you want to know how the story of Christine and myself goes on?"
Carla sighs
"Oh well, you got me. Angel of Music, speak, I listen..."
