Thanks to my reviewers!
MonMaskedAnge: Thank you for leaving a review! I'm glad you like the story. I try to write a chapter every day, so please don't Punjab me! Thanks for answering my questions about the musicals. I really need to go see those… And, as you'll see in this chapter, the voice isn't Erik. You're right – if it was his voice, I would have made a bigger deal of it, like that whole beginning in Chapter 1. It takes a good phan to notice that. Thanks again, and I love your username!
I must have jumped ten feet in the air when I heard that voice. I mean, it came out of nowhere! I had a right to be freaked out by it! I spun around, tripping over my own feet in my hurry to see what had startled me. Luckily, I didn't hit the harp as I flailed about.
A young man, probably young enough to still be in high school, was standing just behind me. His face was innocent, honest, and – at the moment – nervous. He was watching me with a sort of apprehensive fear.
"Please," he said, "don't touch the harp."
I relaxed a little. After all, how afraid could I be? He was just a teenager like me!
"Why not?" I shot back, curious.
The guy's eyes widened a little. "It's his," he said in a meaningful voice.
I didn't get it. "What do you mean? Who is 'he'?"
"He'll be angry if you touch his harp," the strange guy said, not answering my question. His eyes flicked to the harp and then back up to me. "He's always angry when someone touches his harp."
"Well, can you touch it?" I asked.
He nodded eagerly. "Yes, sometimes he lets me play it. When he's in a bad mood, though, I don't even try to go near it. He does terrible things when he's angry." The boy shuddered.
"Who is he?" I asked again.
Hewalked past me and gazed down at the harp. There was a strange look in his eye, one that I had always imagined being in the Phantom's eye – love. Love for an instrument. It was the kind of love that surpassed the love of family, of friends, of lovers. It was understanding, above all else.
"Who are you?" I asked, giving up on trying to find out who 'he' was.
"I am no one."
I rolled my eyes. "Well, I can't be talking to no one."
"You are."
Man, talk about not knowing when to give up. "Look, I was in the theater and I saw someone walking along the turrets at the top. Whoever it was, they fell off. I came down here because I thought they might have gotten hurt. Do you know who it was?"
"Oh," the boy said with a shrug, "that was him."
"Is he all right?"
"He's fine. He's always up there, climbing around, watching the shows. Sometimes he lets me watch them, but I'm usually too afraid of being up so high. I don't like heights."
"Uh-huh," I said slowly. "Does… he live down here?"
"Yes," the boy said sadly, nodding. "Yes, we both do. There isn't anywhere else we can go. There isn't anywhere else that we could live. Yes, we live down here. We have lived down here for a very long time, he and I." The boy got a wistful look in his eyes. "It gets lonely sometimes, but whenever I want to go up, he reminds me that there is nowhere for us there… no one, nowhere, nothing…"
"Well, I'm someone," I pointed out.
He smiled slightly. "I know." His smile disappeared and he grew serious all of a sudden. "He would be angry if he saw you here. You have to go, before he finds you. He doesn't like people. He always knows when I try to speak to them – and he's right, I can't, there is nobody out there for us…"
Suddenly he had taken my arm and was leading me back into the room with the trapdoor.
"Hey!" I struggled furiously in his grasp. "Quit it! You can't just throw me back out!"
"This is our home," he said, turning to look at me, "and you are here without his permission."
"Can you not talk about him for just two seconds?" I said furiously.
The boy sighed and let go of me. I think he figured it was too much trouble trying to get me to leave. Smart of him. I rubbed my arm and took another good look at him now that he had pulled us closer to a light.
He was tall and sort of rugged-looking. In fact, now that I took the time to look, he was actually not bad looking, either. Kind of hot in a lost, creepy sort of way. After all, the guy did live underground in a cave with some dude he wouldn't say the name of, but who he was mortally afraid of.
M curiosity got the better of me again. "Why are you so afraid of him?"
"Because I don't understand him," the boy said quietly. He motioned for me to sit and I did so. It didn't even occur to me, preoccupied as I was, that the bus had probably already left without me.
I stared at the boy. "That whole 'mankind fears what it doesn't understand' crap?"
He looked at me like I was insane. I let it drop and asked another question. My mind couldn't seem to come up with enough of them. "So… how long have you been haunting the Fox?"
"Haunting," he said with a slight laugh. "I like that. It makes us sound like the Phantom."
"You know about the Phantom of the Opera?" I asked, excited.
He looked at me, again, like I was insane. "They perform the musical right outside my living room every other week. Of course I know about the Phantom of the Opera."
Right. Duh.
"Sorry," I said sheepishly. "Well, yeah, it looks to me like you and the Phantom have a lot in common. I mean, you both live underneath playhouses, even if yours is the Fox and his was an opera house in Paris two hundred years ago."
"A hundred and thirty years ago," he corrected me.
Ouch. A phan, corrected on a phact. That stung.
"Right," I said, feeling stupid.
He grinned at me, and I realized he had been teasing. I rolled my eyes at him to cover my embarrassment. Then I remembered what I had thought of before. "Hey," I said, and grinned back at him, "that makes you the Phantom of the Fox, right?"
He chuckled. "I guess."
"Well, you don't have a name, so I have to call you something," I pointed out.
The Phantom of the Fox shrugged. "You can call me that if you want. I kind of like it. But if anyone is a Phantom of the Fox, it's him, not me. He is the one who moves around like a shadow. He is the one you saw lurking up there in the theater, not me. You should be calling him that."
There was a silence for a second. I was wondering (yet again) who exactly 'he' was, but I knew I shouldn't bother asking, since this guy wouldn't answer.
"Well," he said after a moment, "it was good of you to stop by to see if everyone was okay, but you should really be going. You'll be in enough trouble with him now, even though you didn't touch his harp." He gestured to the trapdoor. "Can you find your way back up?"
"Yeah," I said, nodding. "I'll be fine. Just one more question, if you don't mind me asking…"
"Go ahead," he said.
I hesitated. "Um… why exactly do you live under the Fox?"
His eyes grew sad. I felt bad for asking, and for a minute I wondered if he was going to answer or just leave. I was debating whether or not to apologize and get out of there when he replied.
"Everywhere else has shunned us," he said quietly, "and we have nowhere else to go. We are safe here."
"Safe?" I repeated. "Living by yourself under a theater? What about your family? Didn't you ever have a home―?"
"This is my home," he cut in, giving me a sorrowful smile. "Goodbye, stranger."
I stared at him, but his tone had left no opportunity for further argument.
And it was about then that I remembered my bus.
"Crap!" I yelped all of a sudden, turning and dashing for the trapdoor. The last thing I saw was the confused face of the boy behind me as I jumped up and down, trying to reach the edge of the trapdoor. When I'd come in, I'd forgotten that it was too far a jump to get back out as easily.
The weird guy came up behind me and held me still, grasping my waist so he could lift me up to the edge of the trapdoor. I blinked in surprise and grabbed the edges, pulling myself up and being careful not to kick him in the face. I looked back down at him and gave him a smile of thanks.
"Goodbye," he said again, looking sad to see me go. No wonder, too. He probably never has company.
"Bye," I replied, shutting the trapdoor behind me and dashing off down the dark hallway towards the exit.
Sure enough, the bus was just pulling away. I waved my arms frantically above my head, shouting for it to stop. People leaving the theater stopped and stared at me. The driver saw me and groaned in exasperation before stopping the bus and opening the door. I raced towards it, sprinting as fast as I could, thanking whatever merciful deity had helped me out―
And tripped headfirst into a puddle.
I lay there for a second, one foot out of the water and both hands still raised as though I was running, in an extremely comical position. I think the bus driver forgave my tardiness because I amused her so much with that stunt of mine.
I got to my feet, grumbling under my breath, and jogged onto the bus. Everyone was trying not to laugh. Jenny was doing the worst job out of them all. Paul gave her a look that told her now wasn't the time. As always, she listened to him, and her laughs died away, though she let loose an occasional giggle at the sight of my clothes, which were now officially drenched.
"Gee, thanks," I muttered, sitting down in my own seat and scrunching up.
"Sorry," she said apologetically, "but you have to admit that was funny."
I grumbled and didn't answer.
"Where were you?" Paul asked, leaning forward in his seat so he could look me in the eye. "Jenny said you went to the bathroom early so you could miss the lines, and you were still the last one out of the theater."
I raced to come up with an excuse. They would only think me insane if I told them about the weirdo I'd met down in the cellars. "I was helping one of the ushers find a lost kid," I made up on the dot. Great story. It made me sound like a hero and gave me an excuse at the same time.
"Really," Jenny said skeptically. I could tell she didn't believe me.
I shrugged and turned to look out the window.
My mind was racing. It needed a minute to catch up with things. So there was a guy living underneath the Fox. Two guys, actually. One of them had fallen off the archway above the theater, and the other was a cute, nice guy who played the harp and was afraid of the first guy.
Confusing much?
And why did he keep saying there was noplace for him to go, that no one would take him in? I might believe that of a dirty little orphan with a scrubby face or a deformed child (my mind always loops back to the Phantom), but not a good-looking, healthy young teenager like him. My mind struggled to recall a mental picture of him. He had been wearing dark blue jeans and a black shirt that weren't easy to see in the dark, but from what I could remember, they hadn't been too dirty or mangy. All things considered, he looked pretty much like an average teenager.
If I was an adult looking to adopt somebody, I'd adopt him. Of course, that might be my hormones talking, since he is pretty cute, and I'm a teenager too…
Anyway, my point is that if he wanted a home, he could probably get one. Why live under the Fox?
Well, one thing was for sure – I was going to find out just who these two strangers were, why they lived underneath the theater, of all places, and what their deal was.
Of course, that meant I was going to have to work out a way to get into the cellars of the Fox again, seeing as I wasn't about to go buy another ticket just so I could talk to them. You kidding? The tickets to the Fox are too expensive for that kind of thing! I would have to find a way to sneak in.
And I'd need an excuse. That part was easy. There was a shop close to there that I liked. I could get my parents to drop me off there and then I'd slip away to the Fox and be back before they returned to pick me up.
I knew it sounded easier than it would actually be.
Well, until I think of a plan, I thought to myself as I watched the buildings go buy (there aren't any trees in that part of Atlanta), I'm going to start that story with the Phantom and the harp.
My mind groaned at itself again.