The Perfect Solution

An Alternate Universe – Phantom of the Opera Story

Nyasia A. Maire

© 2007

DISCLAIMER: I do not hold the rights nor did I create any characters found in The Phantom of the Opera or Phantom, nor have I received monetary compensation for writing this story.

Flame

Thou art that madness of supreme desire,
which lacking, beauty is but dross and clay.
Within thy veins is all the fire of day
and all the stars divinity of fire.
Thine are the lips and loins that never tire,
and thine the bliss that makes my soul dismay.
Upon thy breast what god at midnight lay,
to make thy flesh the music of his lyre?

Ah! Such alone should know thy loveliness!
Ah! Such alone should know thy full caress,
O goddess of intolerable delight!
I beg of Fate the guerdon and the grace,
far beyond death, to know in thine embrace
eternal rapture in eternal night.

Excerpt from "Poetica Erotica" By George Sterling, 1921

Chapter Twelve – Thou are that Madness

The man cried out and then bolted upright in his bed. His hand frantically covered the right side of his face. He sat there frozen in place as his ragged breathing and heaving chest calmed. He drew in a long calming breath through his nose and then slowly blew it out his mouth. The breathing exercise had not helped. Crumpling forward, he leaned his elbows on his thighs and placed his face into his hands. A wave of despair swept through the man and he began to weep in earnest.

"Why? Why would this dream not leave me alone? The life I dream about is not mine, so why do I weep? Why does this dream both haunt and horrify me? I hoped my meeting Christine would banish the dream, but no. The dream came tonight clearer than ever before and I can remember everything that happened in it. I never could do that before tonight. Meeting the angel of my dream did not rid me of them."

After carefully wiping away his tears with the palms of his hands, he lay down on his side and tightly clasped his pillow to his chest. He moaned into the pillow as he remembered the dream.

"That poor boy!" He lamented brokenly.

♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥

He was filthy dirty and disheveled. His lank hair crawled with lice and the burlap rags he used as clothes, infested with fleas. His body bore a multitude of flea bites and the marks, both old and recent, of a whip's lash. For a boy of about 12 years of age, he was extremely tall, close to six feet tall and due to the near starvation diet forced on him by his keeper, the boy was cadaverously thin. A cage of iron bars was the place he called his home and the place of his ultimate humiliation. He traveled with a band of gypsies as the main attraction in their carnival's sideshow. His keeper, a cruel, dark and ugly man named, Jaevert, had decided to call him, "The Devil's Child." They placed his deformity on display and charged townspeople for the privilege of gawking at him. Whenever the gypsies set up their camp, he knew he would have to suffer through four shows a day. They placed him in front of an audience and then Jaevert stripped him of his sack for the amusement and horror of paying customers.

Life with the gypsies had not been the boy's choice. The gypsies had found him unconscious, beaten and bloody in an alley when he was what he had guessed to be 9 years old. When he awoke, he found himself locked in a cage. He had no memory of his life before the gypsies and no hope of one away from them. So, he existed from town to town, show to show, in this hellish limbo. Yet, while he had no hope of escape, he was ever watchful of an opportunity to try. He made several attempts at escape over the years, but none succeeded in doing anything but infuriate Jaevert into beating him senseless.

Today's beating had been somewhat of a surprise. The boy sat in his cage and waited for the gypsy to enter his cage. This was the last show of the night and the final show in this town. The carnival's schedule called for them to move on to the next town in the morning. The boy sat hunkered down amidst the stinking straw lining the floor of his cage. He held his one possession in his hands. He played with a small stuffed animal in the form of an organ grinder's monkey rather apathetically. The monkey held a cymbal in each paw. The boy made the monkey's arms move, so the cymbals made a small clinking sound. When Jaevert entered the cage, the boy did not acknowledge his presence he simply continued to play with the monkey's cymbals. Jaevert began to extol the features of the boy's frightening countenance to the audience with his usual leering and eye rolling speech. When the man turned to the boy and saw him playing, a member of the audience made a disparaging remark.

"Hey! I thought this thing was supposed to be frightening! I paid good money to see a freak, not a child playing with his toy. You'd better make good on your boast or I want my money back!"

With those words, it seemed as if the entire audience had decided to complain. Jaevert feared he would have to refund the entire audience's money. He turned to the boy and backhanded the toy from his hands. Then grabbing his whip, he snapped it in the air above the boy's head. The boy remained where he was, not moving a muscle. Jaevert roughly grabbed the boy by the back of his neck and yanked the sack from his head. He turned the boy to face the audience and silence immediately fell. The man slowly turned the boy's face, so everyone in the tent would get the opportunity to stare to his or her heart's content.

Some leered, some jeered. Some cried out and turned away. Others swooned, while others laughed. The entire audience gazed upon the face placed on exhibit before them, but none of them saw the human behind the face. No one, but her. The boy noticed a beautiful woman standing pressed near the bars. She was a small woman with long, dark brown hair, which fell in a mass of ringlets to her waist. She looked into the boy's eyes with an emotion he had never seen before. It was not pity or horror. He simply did not know what it was, but he found it made him feel different. There was sorrow in her eyes, but no pity. There was outrage, but she was not angry with him. Her deep brown eyes gave him hope that there might be a day when he could find a way to be free. And, then he did something that he could not remember ever doing since he awakened in his cage. He smiled. She gave the boy a slight nod and returned his smile.

Then she was gone.

The boy found himself in the dark and discovered it was because he covered his face with his hands. Lowering his hands, he realized he was lying face down on the bottom of his cage. His back burned with the welts raised by Jaevert's latest use of his whip. He pushed himself up and looked around to find he was alone. Seeing the sack he used to cover his face on the floor near the door of his cage, the boy half-crawled, half-dragged himself to retrieve it. Taking it up in his shaking hands, he shook the straw from it and quickly pulled it over his head. He arranged the sack so he could see through the eye holes and exhausted closed his eyes.

He lay on the floor completely spent from the effort of moving to recover his mask. He floated in a state of semi-consciousness only vaguely aware of his surroundings. He felt he would remain in that state permanently until his mind began to sense something. It was a gradual realization that he could hear someone singing. It was not a gypsy song, not rough and raucous. This song was soft and lyrical. It was a woman's voice. Her voice rising and falling with a purity of tone that it made the boy think of angels. To the boy's mind, her lovely voice seemed angelic. He continued to lay on the floor, not caring about anything at all, allowing the perfect bliss and beauty of her voice to wash over and through him. All too soon, the song ended.

He opened his eyes.

The boy gazed up into the woman's eyes. The same deep brown eyes he had seen that night in the tent of the carnival's sideshow. The woman appeared exactly the same as that long ago night, yet the boy found he was no longer a boy. He glanced down at his body and saw the form of a well-dressed man. Surprised at the sudden change, but pleased that he was now of an age with the woman, he lifted a hand to caress her cheek. She took a step back, away from him and shook her head sadly. He then took note of the tears flowing down her cheeks and felt a similar wetness on his own cheeks as well. He raised his anguished eyes to meet hers once more.

"Christine, I love you!"

The words escaped his lips before he could think to stop them. His voice weak and tremulous, he attempted to smile reassuringly at the woman, but knew he had failed miserably. She took a step closer to him and he felt his heart leap.

"Perhaps, there is still room for hope in my heart."

No sooner had the words formed inside his mind than she took the action that would forever prove to him that he would never find love in this lifetime. She raised her left hand and slid something from her finger. She placed the thing in the center of his palm, a single tear rolled down her cheek as she rolled his fingers over it, then she turned and hurried away from him. The painful silence lasted for only a few moments before her voice filled the eerie quiet. The voice he had so carefully nurtured and trained for so many years was floating away. He ran out of the room he knew must be his bedroom and into a large cavern. She stood upon the deck of a black gondola, her arms draped around a slender man. She sang of love and spending a lifetime in the daylight with that love, yet she looked not at the man poling the gondola. Her face … her eyes … her voice … she sang only for him. She loved him, but she could not stay with him. She saved him from the gypsies only to kill him with her love. Her eyes never left his until the bend in the canal severed their stare.

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And, it was always at this point in the dream that Erik would awaken with a feeling of such utter hopelessness and loss that he sometimes considered sitting in a bath of beautifully warm water and opening his veins. In the past, he reined in those feelings, but lately the desire to end his miserable existence had been growing more and more attractive. He was uncertain how much longer he would have survived if he had not met his angel last night. He took some small comfort in the fact that when he had least expected it he had been granted the miracle of meeting his angel.

"She is eternally both my savior and my executioner! What more does a monster require?"

He released his pillow from his tight embrace and placed it once more under his head. He smoothed his bed sheets and blankets over his lanky body. His eyes sagged with weariness, both physical and mental.

"I need to try and get some rest for my outing with Christine."

He closed his eyes and attempted to clear his mind of all thought. And, after what seemed to him to be a very long while, he finally drifted into an untroubled and dreamless sleep.

Author's Note: Sorry for making everyone wait another chapter for the story of Erik and Christine's outing, but my muse demanded that I report the details of Erik's dream. Okay, Muse? I reported it ... Now on with the show ...