Until the Curtain Falls
Chapter Three
Twisted every way…
The bright blade drew his gaze like iron filings to a magnet. It was long and heavy, and moving frighteningly quickly in the madman's pale hands. Dean ducked clumsily as it whipped out towards him with the speed and grace of a cat's slender tail. It missed him by a hair. As he straightened, a white fist lurched into view and he ducked again, awkwardly, sideways – not quick enough – the fist hit his shoulder with powerful and undeniably solid force. Dean was spun round, and he stumbled over part of a fallen gravestone as his feet struggled to catch up with the movement. He hit the hard frozen ground painfully with his out-flung wrists and cursed.
'I should have known he was too friggin' crazy to be a ghost…' he grumbled as he pushed himself laboriously upright.
Christine yelped from somewhere nearby, and Dean spun round in alarm, halfway to his feet, to see the long blade whipping out towards him again. He lurched away, and the tip caught his upper arm sharply. He took several long strides, putting distance between himself and his assailant, buying time while his frantic eyes searched the ground for something he could use to defend himself. He heard rapid footsteps keeping pace, close behind him.
He stooped and grabbed a half-frozen dead branch, and swung round in time to meet the sword's swing with the feeble weapon. The blade was slowed; it caught in the hardened wood. But the stick was made brittle, not strong, by the cold, and it promptly snapped. Dean sucked in breath nervously, throwing himself down behind a gravestone as the next blow fell mightily towards him from above. He watched dispassionately as the heavy metal clove through the space where his head had been and rang out dully as it hit the cold stone. Beneath the mask, a twisted mouth snarled down at Dean as he rolled away and scrambled to his feet, again searching desperately for a weapon.
Another yelp warned him just too late that the sword was heading his way again – he threw himself forwards onto the ground, but felt the sharp point tangle briefly in the skin of his back as he fell.
He landed heavily on his stomach, stretched full length on the freezing ground. He cursed himself, again, for coming out in the snow half dressed and unarmed, and winced as he lifted his head. Then his eyes went wide, and he snatched at the object lying in front of him, then rolled over and sat up in one movement, swinging his new weapon to meet the sword with a ringing crash.
It was a broken bar from the aged wrought-iron fence which surrounded a nearby grave. It seemed to have absorbed the cold so much that its jagged metal was almost painful against his hand, but it held against the Phantom's blow. It would do.
He got his feet under him and clumsily lurched upright, meeting another blow with his improvised weapon as he rose. Now that he finally had the means to fight back, the attack seemed to redouble; it took all he had to defend from one blow after another, coming at him in swift succession from every side.
He gave ground reluctantly until he found cold stone pressing against his back. He hissed air through his teeth nervously: sword fighting wasn't really his forte, and now he had nowhere to run.
His opponent's blade crashed down towards him again from above, and he met it with his fence-post, holding both ends of the bar to make an effective horizontal barrier. For a few moments, the combatants were still, growling at one another as each tried to push against the other's weapon. Dean was the first to run out of patience. Using the tomb behind him for leverage, he leant back and kicked out, propelling the madman away from him with his foot.
The Phantom tripped, and fell onto his back on the ground. Dean swiftly took advantage of his small victory, and pinned his assailant down with an iron bar in the throat. Breathing heavily, he gathered his strength for the final blow, grateful that he could save Christine from the obligation to sing Don Juan Triumphant that evening. As that thought struck him, her voice filtered into his consciousness.
'No…' she pleaded. 'Don't'
He glanced up at her in surprise.
'What? Why not?'
'He's… I lo..'
'No, you don't,' he cut her off before the words could leave her lips. He glared at her.
A remembered phrase echoed in his mind, this time in Sam's voice. We don't kill people. Dean would argue that calling this freak a person was a stretch, but he knew Sam's philosophy was nonnegotiable on the subject. He relaxed his grip on the iron bar and stepped back. Before the Phantom could move, he seized Christine by the arm and steered her rapidly away, out of the cemetery, and back to the opera house.
He knew he would regret this decision this evening, when the curtain fell on the new opera.
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Overture
Sam was only half awake when Dean traipsed wearily back into the small room. He blinked, surprised to see his brother, and slightly guilty for not having noticed he was missing until he returned. He sat up, rubbing his eyes.
'Where have you been?'
Dean glanced at him with tired eyes, and flopped down to sit on the edge of his bed.
'Prima Donna took a romantic stroll with her crazy stalker boyfriend at four in the morning,' he explained grumpily.
Sam blinked in confusion, trying to clear his head of sleep.
'What?' he asked blearily. Then he noticed the trace of scarlet on Dean's shirt, and was fully awake in seconds. 'Dean, what happened? Are you ok?' His brother was shivering violently.
'Just cold…' he muttered.
'You're bleeding,' Sam pointed out, almost accusingly.
Dean nodded placidly, seeming to miss the angry tone in his brother's voice. 'Bastard had a friggin' sword. In the 21st century, for Christ's sake…'
Sam frowned, and approached his brother, clucking over the red stains on his t-shirt like a mother hen. Dean shook him off.
'Sam, I'm fine. They're just scratches. 'Course, I'd be more fine if you'd let me kill the damn thing, then we wouldn't have to watch another opera tonight…'
Sam glared at his brother, irrationally annoyed with him for sneaking out unprepared for a sword fight in the snow. It turned out that Dean was right, though: they were just scratches.
'Why didn't you wake me up?'
'I wasn't really expecting…' Dean waved his hands in a vague gesture, not bothering to find the words. Sam nodded: maybe it was a brother thing – words weren't always necessary.
After a pause, Sam bit his lips and met his brother's eyes. 'So we still have to go to the opera tonight, huh?'
Dean nodded sadly. 'Yup.'
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Down Once More
Dean tapped his fingers tensely against the safety rail at the edge of box five, breathing in deeply as the lights dimmed and Firmin's nervous voice filled the auditorium, asking the audience to turn off their mobile phones.
Sam, beside him, scanned the audience once more as the disappeared into shadows. They seemed restless, as though they had picked up on the anticipation which gripped the cast, crew and staff of the theatre. As the lights went down, muttering broke out and quieted again. None of the assembled opera-lovers had ever heard of this Don Juan Triumphant, and they were intrigued. The composer's name was stated simply as O.G., with no date, or any other indication of the source of this new score. None of them knew what to expect.
Not even the cast.
The curtain swung up, and jarring, unfamiliar chords filled the theatre. The audience rustled disapprovingly in their seats. This wasn't what they'd come for.
The chorus sang briefly, and then Ubaldo Piangi stepped forth, cloaked and masked, as Don Juan. Contrary to the note's instructions, he had gained weight in the brief time that the opera had been in rehearsal, but his voice was rich and powerful. With a crescendo, he introduced 'Aminta,' the female lead, and then disappeared behind a curtain as Christine floated onto the stage with a lilting melody in her throat.
In box five, the Winchesters leaned forward. The ghost was nowhere to be seen. They perched on the edges of their seats, tensed for action. Sam was straining his eyes in the darkness, following the show's action in the script, in the hope that he would notice swiftly if anything went wrong.
Tonight, Christine's pure, strong voice was threaded with a delicate trembling. Her eyes were wide and uncertain. Turning slowly in a dramatic gesture, she sought Dean's eyes in the audience for reassurance, and he smiled encouragingly at her.
Don Juan re-entered from behind the curtain at the back of the stage. Sam tugged urgently at his brother's sleeve.
'What?' Dean hissed. In the next box, a middle aged woman turned her glare on the Winchesters. They ignored her.
'That's not the same person,' Sam whispered.
'So?'
'It's supposed to be the same character, you idiot. That's not… wide enough to be Piangi.'
Dean glanced at the stage. The cloaked and masked figure advanced on Christine, singing softly to a throbbing tango-beat. Christine's eyes were fixed on him adoringly. Either her acting was better than he had given her credit for, or –
'Let's go,' he murmured, slipping out of his seat and opening the door with great care. Sam followed him out into the stark lights of the corridor. Even out here, they could hear the powerful voice, raised triumphantly in duet with Christine.
The Winchesters ghosted through the deserted corridors until the velvet and gold plating faded to wood and grime. Mid-performance, the backstage area was a hive of utterly silent activity. Dancers practised, chorus members touched up their makeup; dressers seized passing singers to adjust their extravagant sequin-encrusted costumes. As there was no barrier between this area and the stage itself, the whole operation was completely soundless. It was bizarre, like a film played on mute. Dean and Sam dodged prima donnas as they wove through the mêlée to stand in the wings. This area, too, was crowded, but the silence here tasted of tension. They weren't the only ones to have noticed that Don Juan was no longer Piangi.
The Winchesters hovered uncertainly in the wings. Part of Dean wanted to rush out there and drag Christine away from the Phantom and his hypnotic singing, but another part of him was reluctant to run out in front of an audience who seemed unaware, so far, that anything was amiss. It might have been stage fright, or it might have been living in a theatre too long, and catching the contagious superstition that, whatever happens, the show must go on.
However, it seemed that the Phantom himself did not subscribe to that philosophy. The duet came to a rousing finish, and Christine's voice fell away. She watched, entranced, as he sang a few lines of a lilting melody which, Sam pointed out determinedly, were not in the score. As the madman's voice rose spectacularly to fill the theatre, Christine calmly stepped forwards and pulled the mask from his face.
The audience came alive with shocked gasps and screams. His face was white and hard and ridged like a skull, and the skin of one cheek was pulled tight by scars, lifting his upper lip and making his mouth asymmetrical. Even after a lifetime of spirits and demons, the distortion of this human face came as a shock to the Winchesters. For the audience, and the curious cast members hovering in the wings, he was frighteningly hideous.
Christine stared calmly up at him, and Dean remembered that she alone had seen this before. The monster seized her around the waist, and the next second, they were both gone. A second shockwave washed through the auditorium.
Shocks always come in threes. As the second wave broke, a young ballerina reached out and pulled the cord to release the backstage curtain. Unwittingly, she revealed the bloated body of Piangi, swinging gently on the end of a rope. Her scream pierced the eardrums of every person within two hundred yards of her.
Wincing, Sam turned to his brother. 'We've got to find them…' he muttered urgently, waving a hand at the stage to make it clear who he meant.
Dean nodded earnestly. 'You go round the back; I'll try under the stage… apparently he lives under the theatre, so we need to go down…'
Sam nodded, and Dean immediately turned and hurried away. He called after him, and Dean spun round impatiently.
'What?'
'Keep your hand at the level of your eyes,' he warned, pointing meaningfully at Piangi's swinging body.
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The Point of No Return
Ducking through a low doorway, Dean slipped into the dusty space underneath the stage. Panicked footsteps rushed about over his head, backed by the general rumbling of shocked opera goers fighting to vacate the auditorium.
The space was full of ropes and pulleys which evidently moved the scenery around, and in some places there were steps leading up to the stage – used frequently in certain gothic operas, when characters disappeared down from the stage, into 'hell'. Dean smirked: he ought to feel right at home, here in hell. Then his expression soured. He was disgusted by how much he now knew about opera, it was indecent.
He tried to concentrate, shaking these irrelevant thoughts out of his head. He came to the point which ought to correspond with the part of the stage which Christine and her captor had disappeared from. Sure enough, there was a trapdoor above his head. It seemed that nothing in the theatre was really supernatural – it was all smoke and mirrors and superstition.
Having solved the mystery of how they had left the stage, Dean realised that he still had no idea where they had gone next. They obviously weren't still here, and as far as he could tell, the only door was the one he'd come in through. He would have seen them rush out of there, so there had to be another door somewhere.
He remembered being told that the Phantom inhabited a lair in the catacombs under the theatre, and concluded that he was looking for a way to go further down. Still standing underneath the trapdoor, he looked all around, and found nothing in the dim light. He hung his head temporarily in frustration. Then he blinked.
There was another way out. He was standing on it.
Quickly, he heaved the second trapdoor open, and lowered himself down. Landing lightly on his feet, he found himself at the top of a long staircase, which curved downwards into the dark. He sighed, and raised his arm to the level of his eyes. He felt stupid, as though he were asking permission to speak in class. He bit his lip, and started descending.
As it turned out, the staircase didn't extend as far as it seemed to. Dean estimated that he had completed a full turn, so he was directly under the two trapdoors. Then he stumbled forwards, and tripped, falling to his knees in chilled, clammy water. He threw his hands out in front of him to keep his upper body out of the water.
He stood, cursing under his breath, and started walking. The further he went, the darker it became, until there was nothing but spots of light reflected off the water, illuminating nothing other than the glassy surface of the shallow underground lake. Dean's boots filled with water and weighed him down; his feet squelched in them uncomfortably. His jeans soaked up dampness, leaving a tidemark halfway up his thighs, although the lake only reached to his knees. He had no way of knowing whether he was going the right way.
His mind was plagued with horrible images of what the Phantom might be doing to Christine. He reproached himself for having such a vivid imagination for all the sick possibilities.
The spots of light on the surface of the lake seemed to multiply, until there was a whole rash of them, and, up ahead, an ethereal glow seeped into the darkness. As he drew closer, he realised he was looking at thousands of candles, filtered through the square holes of a sort of grill. A portcullis, in fact, like the ones guarding the entrances of castles in swashbuckling movies.
Behind the grill, a bank rose out of the lake, bearing hundreds of candles and the extravagant debris of an artist's home. Among the clutter (which mostly seemed to have been stolen from the theatre, bearing the telling scarlet and gold colour scheme of the opera house), Christine and her captor were standing, several feet apart, glaring at each other, and arguing. Or, more accurately, singing at each other.
Dean gaped at them as he splashed up to the portcullis and leaned against it wearily. Then they noticed him. Christine's eyes went wide with a mixture of surprise, mixture and concern. Dean was relieved to see that she didn't seem to be in the trance-like state which his singing had sent her into before. The Phantom's glare was one of hatred and fury, condensed by his grotesque features into a nightmarish image. Dean met his eyes squarely.
'Let her go,' he said quietly.
A snarl twisted the madman's already curled lips, but he didn't react to Dean's words. He reached over and yanked a lever back. To Dean's surprise, the grill in front of him trundled upwards, allowing him to step warily under it. He swallowed nervously when it crunched back down behind him.
He turned briefly to glance at the spiked bottom of the grate sinking down into the lake, and the Phantom came up behind him, catlike and silent. Just as he was turning back to face the lair, he felt a coarse rope fall around his throat, and a soft, intense voice singing, 'Keep your hand at the level of your eyes,' to a haunting tune. He was only dimly aware of this, because his whole attention was swiftly engaged with the struggle for air as the Punjab lasso pulled tight.
He clawed at the rope, and struggled wildly, splashing in the shallow water. He was half aware of Christine's protests in the background, high-pitched and strangely tuneful. But thought was dimming as his lungs began to burn. Seconds later, he found himself lashed to the cold metal of the portcullis, with the lasso looped around a rung above his head, and the other end of the rope hanging ominously in the Phantom's long white hands. The pressure on his throat diminished enough to allow him a thin thread of air, but it wasn't enough to allow the huge gasp his lungs were pleading for.
He could hardly believe how easily he had been quelled, and by a simple human being, not even a supernatural creature. It was embarrassing. Christine was staring at him with horror and despair in her eyes. He pulled uselessly against the restraining ropes, and the noose tightened on his throat.
He heard splashing behind him, and a familiar voice calling out his name. He didn't have to turn his head to know that it was Sam.
'Dean,' Sam's voice called again, but softer this time, as though he was uncertain of the situation. He was close behind now, and Dean thought he felt his brother's fingers plucking at the ropes holding him, but then the noose jerked again, and for several seconds he could only see white light in front of his eyes, and he could even concentrate on that because he was gasping for oxygen.
'Sam, get back…' Christine's terrified voice warned, and Sam withdrew. Without turning his head, Dean couldn't be sure, but he thought his brother was still nearby.
'Let him go, you freak.' Sam's voice again, directed fiercely at the Phantom. 'He never did anything to you…'
'Sam, it's no good…' Christine again. It struck Dean as odd that the Phantom, who seemed to have control of the entire situation, was so silent.
'What do you want from us?' Sam demanded angrily, ignoring the soprano and again directing his anger straight at the Phantom.
'Sam, he can't hear you…'
'What?' Sam's anger was directed at her, now. Dean could hear him shifting nervously, somewhere close by.
Dean flicked his eyes towards Christine. Her eyes were glinting. His blurry vision and the flickering lights made it difficult to tell whether she was crying or not. 'Sam… he, uh, he can't hear you. You have to sing.'
'I have to what?'
'He's grown up under this opera house… he doesn't know anything else… you have to sing…'
Dean didn't need to see Sam's face to know what it looked like. He had always taken great pleasure in provoking the stunned-dormouse expression which his brother did so well.
'Sing… anything in particular?' he asked, shakily.
Christine shrugged. 'If you want him to understand you…'
Dean heard Sam huffing agitatedly. Despite the situation, he wanted to laugh so badly that it hurt.
'I… um… can you tell him…'
Luckily for Sam, it was at that moment that the Phantom ran out of patience. Unfortunately, he chose to express this by yanking on the rope so hard that Dean wondered if the freak was trying to pull his head right off.
The Phantom let rip, directing his tirade at Christine, in the throbbing tango-beat tune to which they had duet-ed on stage. There was a pleading note to his voice, and it occurred to Dean, for the first time, that the lonely ghost was in love with her. His actions were misguided, but his motives were the purest known to man. He was begging her to stay with him, to share his theatrical, gothic existence, hiding in the vaults of a gold-plate and red-velvet opera house. His whole existence was a shadow of a fake, and she alone could make it real for him. His main mistake was the way he made his request with an accompanying threat… Dean choked as the rope tightened again.
The madman's passionate singing fell silent, and for several seconds nobody moved. Christine's voice trembled slightly as she began her reply. The improvised singing seemed to come less naturally to her than to her mentor, but still, Dean was impressed. He wasn't sure, but he thought she was using the tune from a song which had been a single for Cliff Richard and Sarah Brightman in the eighties. Then, absently, he wondered why he knew that.
Then all thought was suddenly extinguished from his mind. She had walked up to the madman who had kidnapped her, the same madman who wanted very much to strangle Dean to death and who was doing quite well so far. She walked up to him, seized his deformed face between her hands and kissed him, full and passionately on the lips.
When she finally pulled away, there was another moment of shocked silence. She stared at the Phantom, and her eyes spoke of concern, with a hint of that intoxicated look which she had worn in the graveyard. He stared back at her, unreadable, and the Winchesters stared at the pair of them. The silence was broken by the Phantom's anguished sob. He dropped the rope, and raised both hands to his face, turning away.
Christine watched him, and her eyes welled up with pity. After a moment, she took a loud, steady breath, and hurried over to Dean.
'I'm so sorry you got pulled into this…' she murmured in his ear, yanking frantically at the ropes binding him. Dean swallowed air like a diver surfacing. He shook the remaining ropes off.
'That's ok,' he replied hoarsely. 'I'm sorry I was so useless…'
She tilted her head as if to silently agree that he had been useless and accept the apology. Then she smiled. Dean turned wearily, to see Sam leaning against the grate, relief written across his face.
Christine cast a wary glance back, to where the Phantom sat, carefully pulling back the lever which would lift the portcullis. His devastated, ashamed eyes met Christine's for a second. 'Go,' he whispered.
She and Dean ducked under the grate in silence, and waded away, towards the stairs, with Sam in tow.
'At least I wasn't as useless as Sam,' Dean muttered in her ear.
'I'd say about even,' Christine replied, grinning at the younger Winchester's indignant expression. 'It's a shame, though. I wanted to hear him sing…'
'Yeah, me too… I'm not sure I've ever heard…'
'You're not going to, Dean!'
'Why not? You can't be that bad… Just sing…'
'No! No way…'
'Sam… please? For me? Ignore him, pretend he's not here…'
'Hey!'
'No. You can't make me…'
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I think I'll leave it there. It's a very silly story, but I hope you enjoyed it. I was going to have another scene, but I felt that that was a good place to leave it. I don't think we've ever heard Sam sing on the show, though Dean has a few times…
I used the swordfight from the film version of Phantom of the Opera, because I think the version of events from the show is too inherently theatrical to work on film, or in writing. And I suppose the ending was a bit more like the film as well. But I left the chandelier crash in the middle!! Because although the film is good, nothing comes close to Phantom on stage. Nothing!
xxx