waves to Martian Aries I'll try my best not to disappoint!
Disclaimer: you should all know by now, I'm stealing this from better minds. Or, as my cousin said, "Thou shalt not steal. Except when it's something cool. Then it's ok."
Of Knights and Dragons
Chapter III: Key Lamps
"Today, I had a dozen hands, I could write a dozen tales, strange wonderful tales, all at one time…"
(Sherwood Anderson)
When Erik returned to the hulking shelter of the burnt-out husk of the Opera Populaire, he shed his long cloak immediately. The fine fabric had soaked through completely in that infernal rain, despite the thin layer of oilcloth that usually did an admirable job of shedding the water. He folded the wet fabric over his arm, careful to keep it off the dusty ground.
The lantern was waiting where he had left it days ago, just inside the concealed entrance, its simple form dark but begging to be lit. He had not deigned to use it for some time—these underground corridors were as familiar to him as the melodic lines of his own compositions. Yet, this night, for some reason he reached for the little glow that the lantern would provide, and let it guide his eyes within the charred ruins.
Whatever the papers might say, the old Opera House was not changed greatly in the "famous disaster" the night of Don Juan three and a half years ago. The flames had spread quickly, decimating the stage proper, the fabric seats, and engulfing much of the wooden backstage, making it a veritable deathtrap. But the seven-storey Opera House was built in stone—albeit now charred stone, much of it dusty and some of it crumbling—but solid stone nonetheless. Besides, his lair was built on the lake, and no fire had touched it except the fire that lived within it.
The mob had been another matter, yet on his return Erik had acerbically noted that their destruction had been largely in passing, a random act, not the indiscriminate fury achieved by the mindless fire. Mankind, the Phantom thought, didn't have the heartlessness necessary to understand and initiate true destruction.
In the end, they had overturned a few candles, scattered and burned many of the papers, and destroyed much of his finer artwork. It was that last that had landed most heavily on him at his first return, when mind and soul were still shattered and only hesitantly reconstructed, held together by a feeble will after Christine had left him. He had fallen to his knees in anguish amidst their remnants—the ashes of paintings he had labored over, sketches that had occupied long hours of his days, perfect memories of Christine he had painstakingly rendered on the page, hesitantly committed to paper. The mob had torn them as mercilessly as Christine had utterly destroyed him that night.
Looking back, he was privately ashamed at his obvious weakness—shame that festered into anger. Now, removed from the event and coldly rational, he acknowledged that in fact the worst loss of the night had been the musical scores destroyed. And yet, he could always write, given a blank page and a space of silence.
Or so he told himself; but it did not explain why his organ had remained deathly silent, or the existence of the one surviving fragment of a page he had found, holding Christine's face, which even now had taken up residence in the inside pocket of his vest.
Erik draped the soaked cloak over the back of a wrought-iron chair to dry, pulled off his gloves, and ran a hand through his hair, somewhat irritated at the dampness of everything. He shed coat and vest as well, setting them to dry, and lit several candles. He called them 'key lamps'; as if by magic (but as he knew very well, having designed them, truly due to clever engineering), the other candles lit one by one of their own accord, until the entire space was a shimmering curtain of suspended lights, adding their tiny visual voices to a symphony dominated by darkness.
The place was as he had left it, of course, he thought as he doused the little lantern and set it aside. Dark and complete, dominated by the sure and silent presence of the organ glittering blackly in the center of its raised dais.
"Monsieur d'Halier," he said aloud, at last removing the black mask and replacing it with the white half-mask that his years at the Opera had made infamous. In his new life, the trappings of the old were unadvised. All of Paris knew of the Opera Ghost and his mask—he would be recognized on an instant; the Phantom was very much a hunted man. Yet the years had accustomed him to certain things, and he saw no reason to change them.
He had been careful to prevent a repetition of the past with his position as "Uriel". He had done nothing to suggest the name, but nothing to dispel it either. Being called the "Angel of Death" was… in a way… gratifying. He barely kept a bitter laugh in check.
Comfortably alone, now, he leaned back into the stone-carved chair—what Raoul, if he had known, disparagingly referred to as a throne—and rested his chin on the chair arm by way of palm, forearm, and elbow. "Monsieur d'Halier," he said again. He knew the name and the accompanying man, unusually enough. A former Opera patron, a regular actually, one of the lucky ones to escape the night of Don Juan. His had been a wildly successful business, Erik remembered, calling to mind the incessant chatter of the ballet rats, which had unintentionally kept him on the edge of Parisian gossip… when he cared to listen.
Halier had apparently attempted one risk too many, and won the interest of the French police in the process. Tomorrow would be his last day alive. Today, Erik corrected, when the small wall-mounted clock somewhere deeper within softly chimed the midnight hour.
His quiet rumination was interrupted by a rather louder, rather more insistent bell—the high-pitched, never-ending chime of the bell that warned of visitors across the lake. Erik's head snapped up from his hand at the sound, his whole body stiffening, eyes shifting to look out through the rough-hewn stone arch guarded by twin figures of Atlas, but he could not see far across the subterranean waters. No one had come to the shores of the lake in the time since his return.
No one had bothered—or perhaps more accurately, dared—to return, and discover if he still existed. Erik rose to his feet, eyes on the vibrating, tinkling bell.