The reviews along with my personal writers block have caused me to take this story in a different angle. I love fantasy; to watch and read (LOTR and otherworld tales), but writing them is a whole different ballgame.
I have restructured the storyline and changed things about a bit. Chapter one remains the same, but I have reposted chapter 2 and taken the fantasy part out and redone some other things as well. ALSO, THE NAME OF THE FIC HAS CHANGED….THANKS
This will be an Erik/Original Woman work of fiction. Enjoy.
There is a price tag connected to every dream. The higher the honor, the higher the cost. From Robert Schuller's, Pearls of Power
I SURRENDER ALL
Once again, there is abuse in this chapter; you have been warned.
CHAPTER 2
Fall 1844, through spring, 1872
Marcel barricaded himself and Erik in the underground lab he had designed years ago. He knew the government officials that sought his death would not find him there. He would slip out at night and steal food from nearby gardens and would kill rabbits, opossum and other small animals and birds for meat. Marcel ate two times a day and barely fed Erik once a week.
Marcel "practiced" his experiments on Erik, subjecting the boy to numerous injections and physical tortures. He could not get enough of Erik's screams and anguished moaning; they provided him a sort of euphoria. One particular experiment involved chemical acid.
He strapped the struggling three-year to the table, noting in his fevered mind that the boy was unusually strong. Perhaps, the experiments with injections were giving the boy inhuman strength?
In Marcel's sick mind, what he was doing to Erik was for the sake of science; and therefore, was justified. Marcel had to admit that this experiment was just for fun. He had never seen the effects of acid on human skin, and he wanted to know.
No one heard the agonizing screams of pain, his mother had been dead for months; her body eternally ensconced in her room, having died of starvation and dehydration. The scars his father left him that night never healed and indelibly implanted themselves on his soul. One side of his face was forever handsome and the other resembled a rotting corpse, with mutilated flesh, exposed blood veins, muscle, and bone. Thankfully, the acid never made it to the hairline, nor did it fun into the boys ears.
Over the course of the next six years, Marcel sank deeper and deeper into madness. His body was a walking, festering cancer as the disease ate away his mind and flesh. He was almost unrecognizable.
In those years, he stole all inklings of humanity from Erik and conditioned him to act and react like a creature of instinct and kept notes in the journal of every injection and every experiment; interesting reading material for a sick mind.
He noted how long Erik could go without food before he would eat anything in sight; or how long being kept from water would take to cause hallucinations and other side effects. Marcel never once acknowledged Erik as human; let alone, his son.
Despite everything he was going through, Erik's intelligence surpassed that of his genius father. He quickly caught on to the fact that Marcel thrived on reaction; therefore, Erik refused to give any indication of pain or sensation of any sort. This threw Marcel into a fit of rage that resulted in inhumane beatings.
Marcel would whip Erik's tender skin with a leather whip. The ends would rip Erik's back and legs as it raked across the surface. The boy never winced or cried; instead, he escaped inside his own mind to a world where pain did not exist.
These games of the mind and body continued; until six years from the time Erik was confined, on a warm spring evening…justice paid a visit to the Clairvaux mansion.
The events leading up to Erik's rescue were set into motion by Camille. She had finally obtained the necessary papers to have the Clairvaux mansion and assets ceased, claiming that Sir Marcel Clairvaux had lost control of his faculties and having him declared legally insane. It had taken her almost seven years to get the courts to hear her case.
The raid had started at dusk and Marcel had taken out four policemen during the first two hours of the raid. The fire on the ground floors had exposed the entrance to the laboratory and a major showdown ensued. The fire that broke out practically engulfed the entire structure in flames.
Chemicals were flying through the air, and Marcel had been covered in the same chemical he had used on Erik's face; the diseased skin, blood vessels, degrading organs and muscles on his body literally melted, leaving only the bones.
OOOOOOOOOOOOO
Erik ran through the devastation, not caring that his feet were bare and there was broken glass cutting into every inch of his feet. His alert eyes scanned the smoke covered area with no remorse, apathetically surveying the destruction of the mansion.
He stepped on something that caught his attention…it was that journal. His curiosity kicked in and he bent his torn and abused body down and scooped it up in his arms; hugging it to his emaciated body as though it was his greatest treasure.
In a perfect world, Erik would have found his aunt Camille among the many onlookers observing the fire in the front of the mansion, but he scurried out the back, completely unnoticed. All he thought about at that moment was freedom.
No money and no possessions made Erik a very desperate boy, but he had used his wit and fortitude to survive this long, he would do it again. Over the next few months, he became adept at pick pocketing what he needed to survive and stealing from local merchants anything that he could get his hands on. They never heard him or saw him.
He lived in a cave he had discovered behind the small waterfall on the river just outside of town; it was all the space he needed in his little corner of the world.
Seven months after his rescue and escape from Clairvaux mansion, Erik pick pocketed the wrong person; Yves, leader of the band of gypsies that were camped only a mile from where Erik lived.
The hideous side of Erik's face caused Yves to form a plan in his mind. A plan that included using Erik as a money making scheme in the carnival which his clan hosted every year.
He tied a rope around Erik's wrists and tied the other end to his horse's saddle, causing Erik to have to run all the way to camp. Upon arrival, he was exhausted and filthy, even more so than he was to begin with.
Yves passed Erik's keeping on to a mountain of a man named Pascal. Pascal was a trainer…of sorts. His responsibility was to condition Erik for his "debut" as "The Devil's Child", his clan's newest and most fascinating freak.
Erik's home became an eight-foot by four-foot cage during the business days and an even smaller cell inside the tent at night.
The tribes "holy man" convinced Erik that he was little more than an animal with a face like that and he was to be treated as such. He was given little food and water and minimal contact. The boy never once questioned that he was worthy of anything else…the formative years of his life had been spent in captivity and now, he would return to it.
He endured many things at the hand of Yves. His son, Serge, used Erik for his own sick pleasure. Daily floggings and sporadic nights of ritual object rape were some of the ways that Serge exercised his authority. Erik escaped into himself during the abuse, to a world where all obeyed his demands; a world where Erik was feared and respected for the power he possessed.
Every night, the crowds were the same; curious, cruel, and cold. Every night, his face scared women, children and grown men into screams and whimpers. Up and to this point, Erik had never even seen his own face.
One night in particular, when Erik was ten-years-old, a woman dropped her mirror on the ground in front of Erik's cage and a piece was perched just right, and Erik caught a glimpse of himself…and he cried for days. His face was a prison from which he could not escape…loneliness and solitude loomed down upon him.
How did he get this way? Was he born hideous…spewed from the mouth of Satan? Why couldn't he remember? He did not even look human…no wonder his mother had abandoned him and his father had abused him.
Erik, now eleven years old, loathed himself more than anything and longed to end his existence by whatever means he could…but thankfully, common sense and survival took over, and Erik became determined to become better than what his face said he could be.
From that day on, Erik seldom smiled and never laughed. The once joyful two-year-old had become nothing but a cadaver; breathing but not living.
Once again, providence stepped in…it stepped in, in the form of a ballet rat named Audrey Giry. She was different from all the other attendees to the carnival. Erik saw compassion in her eyes and not once did she laugh at his pain and mistreatment, nor did she scream at his hideous face.
That was the night that Erik had had enough. He took the rope that Pascal used to subdue and whip him, wrapped it around Pascal's dirty, sweaty neck, and pulled until every drop of air escaped his lungs. Erik had killed a man for the first time, at the age of twelve.
Instead of calling the police, Audrey helped Erik escape to the giant opera house and gave him refuge in its deep underground riverbeds. He hid in the catacombs and relied on her for his nourishment and company. Audrey would bring him a vast supply of books from which Erik literally drank in knowledge. He did not remember learning to read, but he knew that he could.
He developed skills and powers that no one ever imagined he could while he resided there. He studied and studied for hours upon hours, determined to make up in mind what he lost in appearance. His knowledge of every possible subject was vast and he taught himself music, math, reading, science, history…and more.
He studied and practiced the art of the Ninja and how to be neither seen nor heard. He mastered the art of sword fighting and learned how to become one with the weapon. His mid-teens were his awakening to the power his body possessed and the skills he could master to be able to use his body as a weapon.
Never once, in all the years since his escape, had Erik dared to look at the book he had taken from the burning laboratory all those years ago. He had watched every entry his father had made and felt every effect of every experiment that was performed on him; he avoided that book as if it was the Black Death.
At fourteen, Erik left the opera house and took two years to travel to the Middle East where he studied the art of torture; he developed skills that would allow him to kill a man without leaving any visible marks on him. By the age of eighteen, Erik had become a force to be reckoned with.
Although the lasso was his weapon of choice and his skill with it was unsurpassed, Erik was also a sharpshooter, a master swordsman, and a skilled knife thrower and whip wielder.
Shortly after completing his studies in the Middle East, Erik moved back to France. He used his excellent skills as an architect to redesign the Opera house and sold the designs to a wealthy nobleman interested in the arts and watched as his design came to life. Erik designed and built his lair beneath the opera house on the underground, fresh water lake that rested there. He was now just shy of his twentieth birthday.
The only joy that Erik ever experienced was writing and making music. Music was his passion and he put everything he had into every song and opera he wrote. He kept busy as the Opera Ghost, better known as The Phantom of the Opera, by tormenting the managers and performers; he never did anything life threatening, just bothersome.
He really had no desire to put to use the skills he had acquired in torture and weaponry. He had learned them for self-preservation, not manipulation. He found he preferred to remain unseen and unknown.
His musical compositions and operas cost the managers 20,000 francs a month and Erik provided them with detailed costume designs, set construction and design, lyrics, speaking parts and all the music; he would even recommend casting choices.
Erik had not resided in the opera house for very long when he happened upon a young girl of the age of seven. She needed someone so desperately. She had just lost her father, whom she had loved dearly, and she begged the Angel of Music to comfort her.
Erik became that Angel; she was seven and he was barely twenty-one. He watched her grow and he taught her to use her voice as an instrument of passion and joy. She went from an unknown ballet rat to Diva of the Opera Populaire, all because of his teaching and instruction.
She developed from a scrawny, squeaky voiced nuisance, to a powerfully gifted, extremely lovely, very talented young woman at sixteen. At this point; Erik, three months shy of his thirtieth birthday, found himself in love for the first time – and he had no idea how to deal with it.
To Be Continued…