I would bake you guys things out of gratitude if I had any way of getting them to you. Really I would, cakes, cookies, cheesecakes, caramel sutra, and cinnamon buns as big as your head! Even if I haven't quite mastered Sunshine's art (I'm not Martha freaking Stewart), I do make damn good banana and pumpkins bread. So a) imagine you have all these things or b) go get them and spoil yourself while you read. You've earned some good karma for your kindness in reviewing.

If things are starting to make sense, I hope it is because I'm writing this well.

As we resume our story (which is hopefully beginning to gather momentum at last), Charlotte is bringing her father back inside, (I've mentioned this place is a bit shoddy as far as technology goes and Charlotte is really familiar with most everything about it, so that's my practical loophole you see…). I know that somewhere in the last chapter I mentioned her dad had a stroke, er, does it need more explaining than that? (Scratches head sheepishly.) I've been implying things rather then stating them again, so you'll have to forgive me. Twice actually, because while Erik is in this chapter, he's a bit invisible, er, not literally! Just, I mean…oh confound it; time to shut up.

(Self-explanatory)

Revelations

Les révélations

Scene XII

Focus: la Suédoise

Charlotte tugged one glove off her hand and rapidly punched the entry code on the lock pad. It beeped softly and in the stillness she heard the lock click.

Charlotte took care to wipe down any snow left on the wheelchair as soon as she had moved her father indoors. Then she assured herself that her father was comfortable and warm, safe back in his bed, and not in any danger of catching pneumonia, before returning it. Poor Sœur Monique was still snoring away beyond the nurses' station. Charlotte thought to herself that the woman was much too old to be on night duty, but they were understaffed. Taking vows didn't seem to be very appealing anymore.

It wasn't until she returned to the room made up for her that she realized her necklace was no longer around her neck. When she reached down to lift her sweater she felt something fall. When she found it on the floor she saw than it was a little less than half of the gold chain she normally wore.

Feeling sick, she methodically shook out all her clothing, the sheets and crawled across the narrow tile floor of the room. She traced her steps back to her father's room in disbelief. She could remember, when she came back from dinner she'd still had it because the worn crucifix had snagged on her scarf when she went to unwind it.

She muffled a groan as she looked at her sleeping father. How could she have lost it? It was nearly all she had left of her mother, and it was all her mother had left of her mother, who had never know her parents at all. It was her grandmother's only link to the family she'd lost and an incredibly valuable piece of family history. The thought of it somewhere out in all that snow made her nauseous.

Miserably, she stalked back her room for her coat and gloves.

—

Scene XII

Focus: le guardien galant

The snow glittered brilliantly in the moonlight and Ralph felt he had never seen anything more eerie then all those shadows cast by the gravestones and sarcophagi. Everything was so still and silent, it made him feel very small and mortal.

He dug his hands further into his pockets and trudged through the church gates not expecting what he'd see.

He came upon her unexpectedly before an above ground sarcophagus; in the snow there was no apparent difference from one to the next. In the strange lighting he almost mistook her for another shadow.

Charlotte's face displayed so much joy, it must have been painful to contain. Her mac fanned around her, tracing a path on the glittering snow. Buried in the snow her knees must have been freezing, but clearly she did not notice such things. Arms spread wide in ecstasy, her rapturous gaze fixed on an invisible glory.

Ralph paused in his approach and then froze in place. He now heard what Charlotte heard, and understood her behavior all too well.

The two of them held so still that it seemed the world had cease revolving beneath them.

A violinist was playing so enchantingly he might have convinced the dead all around them to rise from their permanent slumber. For a moment Ralph thought he was going mad, seeing Charlotte's Korrigans and all that other nonsense, or even dreaming! The shadows cast by gravestones and moonshine were bedazzling. But Ralph had never known shadows to move they way these were.

The music seemed almost to be its own living entity. Swirling through the silence of the cemetery, like an invisible fog, consuming and engulfing mercilessly.

It wove Ralph into such a trace that he scarcely noticed when the music ceased. Nor much when a seething blackness bubbled up from his feet to devour him.

Charlotte, still blind to the mundane, fell forward in the snow. She rested her forehead on her crossed forearms. Making a curious black shadow that occasionally trembled with weak sobs.

—

If you were paying fanatical attention to the Scene numbering you'd know that the placement of this next scene makes it a flashback. I'm not good enough yet to inspire fanatical attention, so hopefully that will clear things up a bit.

—

Scene X

Focus: la Suédoise

Numbed, Charlotte stared at her mug of tea. At least that is what it looked like to the scant regulars in the village's only diner, but for the most part they ignored her. They were more concerned with weather reports, it was hardly December and they'd already suffered two major storms. It was highly unusual weather and as most of them operated farms it immediately concerned their work and income. Normally, Charlotte would have easily mixed in among them. She wasn't an extremely outgoing girl, but she made an excellent listener and sympathized with anyone who had worries troubling their mind. Before her father's stroke they had led a very simple life and she knew all too well what it was like to struggle with monthly bills.

Charlotte had sat down and ordered, still preoccupied with the hazy overtones of her dream. She remembered her emotions more than what it had actually occurred in the dream.

'When exactly did I fall asleep?' she pondered. She remembered sitting down in the chair and beginning to read lucidly. The opening lines of the chapter, "The next day he saw her at the opera. She was still wearing the plain gold ring1," seemed to set multiple tumblers and gears in her memory spinning rapidly to life. Charlotte became quite certain she had fallen asleep rapidly. As her soup grew colder and colder, she found herself wishing more and more emphatically that she had not remembered at all…

"They played at hearts as other children play at ball; only, as it was really their two hearts that they flung to and fro, they had to be very, very handy to catch them, each time, without hurting them.2" Conjured strange visions in her mind's eye. Yet in her dream, she returned to the book as they dissolved.

"One day, about a week after the game began, Raoul's heart was badly hurt and he stopped playing and uttered these wild words:

"I shan't go to the North Pole!3"

Dizzily, she observed a young man before her with an awful resemblance to Ralph, but she returned to her reading and he faded away without her noticing.

If she hadn't been dreaming before, she must have fallen asleep within the next passage because it included Mama Valérius, by name! And had she not just completed a study of La Juive's libretto last spring? But what of this 'Erik'? It was the first time he'd been mentioned. It meant nothing to her, which was stranger yet, because everything she'd read so far was brimming with foreign emotions. With an inexplicable fear she had looked back at the page.

"But those two days of absence had broken the charm of their delightful make-believe. They looked at each other, in the dressing-room, with their sad eyes, without exchanging a word. Raoul had to restrain himself from crying out:

"I am jealous! I am jealous! I am jealous!"

But she heard him all the same. Then she said:

"Come for a walk, dear. The air will do you good.4"

Charlotte's hand had flown to her throat, for as she read it, it seemed that she, and not Christine, had spoken aloud. Yet all she felt was her own ragged breathing. Her frightened fascination dragged her back down into the printed words.

When she remembered how it spoke of Christine and Raoul playing tag and chase among the bridges, pulleys, and ropes above the stage, it was more like watching a student film, where the camera bounced and moved erratically, than reading a book.

Sitting motionless at her table, Charlotte got a terrifying urge to go back to the Garnier and see just how familiar she was with the upper grids of the stage. Shakily, she raised her mug to her mouth without even noticing that her tea was stone cold; the dream had not finished yet. There was more…

She could see the faces of the little ballet brats, knew the names of the craftsmen and old couples, M. Dauphin, le forgeron principal the chief blacksmith, M. Chaumont et ses fils, les charpentiers and his sons, the carpenters, les ingénieurs the engineers, les couturiers the dressmakers, les cordonniers the shoemakers. She knew them all, and had only to look in the opera's renowned library to find the records.

Charlotte laughed at herself nervously.

'A dream! A silly foolish dream! It's just a coincidence; that way the subconscious has of reworking things that really happened. It's meaningless. No one takes dreams seriously…The trap-door, mon Dieu, the trap-door!' she thought wildly.

"One fact was certain, that Christine, who until then had shown herself the stronger of the two, became suddenly inexpressibly nervous. When on their expeditions, she would start running without reason or else suddenly stop; and her hand, turning ice-cold in a moment, would hold the young man back. Sometimes her eyes seemed to pursue imaginary shadows. She cried, "This way," and "This way," and "This way," laughing a breathless laugh that often ended in tears. Then Raoul tried to speak, to question her, in spite of his promises. But, even before he had worded his question, she answered feverishly:

"Nothing…I swear it is nothing."

Once, when they were passing before an open trap-door on the stage, Raoul stopped over the dark cavity.

"You have shown me the upper part of your empire, Christine, but there are strange stories told of the lower part. Shall we go down?"

She caught him in her arms, as though she feared to see him disappear down the black hole, and, in a trembling voice whispered:

"Never!…I will not have you go there!…Besides, it's not mine…everything that is underground belongs to him!"

Raoul looked her in the eyes and said roughly:

"So he lives down there does he?"

"I never said so…Who told you such a thing like that? Come away! I sometimes wonder if you are quite sane, Raoul…You always take things in such an impossible way…Come along! Come!"

And she literally dragged him away, for he was obstinate and wanted to remain by the trap-door; that hole attracted him.

Suddenly, the trap-door was closed and so quickly that they did not even see the hand that worked it (…)5"

The parallel was so undeniably clear that she dropped the mug heedlessly on the table with a clatter (where fortunately it only slopped over the sides a bit) and took her head in her hands. What terrible tricks her subconscious was playing on her, Charlotte thought, weaving her experiences into her dreams. It was stress, or perhaps sheer madness! Nevertheless, for all she sought to convince herself, she was no less distressed.

Although she could not remember reading anything else, asleep or awake, an orphan passage echoed through her thoughts persistently.

"No, of course not…Why, you love him! Your fear, your terror, all of that is just love and love of the most exquisite kind, the kind which people do not admit even to themselves (…)6"

'Him'? Who was 'him'?

She knew there was one clear way for her to resolve her fears.

Why did she feel as though she already knew all the answers?

—

Boom baby! I think I'm back.

All quotes respectfully taken from:

Leroux, Gaston. Phantom of the Opera, The.

Warner Books, NY, NY. 1986.

1 Pg. 103

2 Pg. 104

3 Pg. 104-5

4 Pg. 106

5 Pg. 108

6 Pg. 121