Hello, my lovelies. Thank you all for your kindness, warmth, and enthusiasm in following this mad little story for so long. It means so much. Now, one of my reviewers has very kindly said - thank you, by the way, Gatorade88 - that although they liked the story, they'd passed over it in the past because the summary is kind of lame. I concur. So, who can recommend a new one? 'Cause to be honest I need all the help I can get.

Back to your regularly scheduled angst.

Disclaimer: Oh, to own Phantom... to own Artemis Fowl... sounds like an awful lot of work to be honest, so I'm quite happy just to write about it instead.

Chapter Fifteen: What Horrors Wait For Me?

She had never known a sensation like this before. A close approximation would be to the death of her father, it was the same kind of soul-tearing pain, but somehow this was worse (and that made her feel even more terrible.) For this was her fault, and accompanying her grief was a twisting, grabbing, roiling mass of guilt that would not let her go. It had climbed inside her and started festering, collapsing in on itself like a monstrous black hole, sucking and sucking and getting ever denser. The guilt had begun somewhere in her chest and quickly spread to every corner of her body, a black, sucking thing that clung to her as determinedly as tar to the skin. She could not shake it loose. She wasn't even sure she wanted to.

Artemis since that night a week ago had been... well, were there words for it? For the phantasmic way he lurked around the house below the lake, his fevered eyes on her, watching - it defied description. She was reasonably sure he had placed a camera in her bedroom even, to watch her when she locked the door against his questing, demanding eyes. There was nowhere safe from Artemis, not anymore. She had ruined that. There was no more singing, no more lessons. No more tentative touches and clumsy compliments and stupid jokes. Oh, how could she have been so foolish as to take all of that for granted, to not even notice it. Now the absence of Artemis' attempts to win her rang out through the house like the chiming of a bleak bell, and the only sounds he made were the harsh rasps of his breathing and the soft scuffing of his shoes as he followed her from room to room, watching, always watching.

Poor, poor Artemis. So desperate to gain her favour, throwing his poor battered soul out into the open with every clumsy opening gambit, every attempt at a conversation. She had hated his persistence, but she now saw what it must have cost him to try and try again, not only her rebuffs but a lifetime of rejection by the rest of the world holding him back. Every hesitant touch and every long loving stare - the poor, poor, ugly man. Now just those terrible eyes. No more smiles now - not real ones, at least, just grimaces of artificial amusement behind the mask. The Artemis she had almost loved was gone, or at the least hidden deep behind this stranger with the tinny, mocking laugh and the madman's smile.

Sometimes he left her, and perhaps the absence of him was worse. Worse than his constant presence was the time when he was gone, leaving her to wonder where he was and what he was doing - and who he was killing, her subconscious would add, every time wracking shudders up her spine. She couldn't imagine what he was up to - and yet, she had some inkling. For music would issue from his chambers, music that made her want to weep and tear her hair out, or beat her fists against the stone walls and shriek by turns. He would repeat phrases and bars, going over and over a certain measure for hours, almost as if -

As if he was writing something. Writing something that was consuming him, day by day, dragging him down into the sea of his own tormented genius, sinking farther and farther away from the shore. She could not follow him there. She didn't even know if he wanted her to.

She had tried to tell him, tried to explain. How afraid and lost and furious she had been, how her imprisonment was a terrible thing for someone like her. He never answered, nor showed any sign of hearing her pleas. He hadn't even let her explain about the magic; he had let that slide in the face of her grandiose betrayal. He had been so fascinated by that before, like a curious child, she had seen it in his eyes. And now... nothing.

The guilt tormented her in waking hours, where she would replay every moment of their encounter and all of those before in her mind, wondering if there was even the slightest chance their course might have been changed. But for all the stress of those remembered horrors, it was worse in dreams, for there every half-thought and tense moment of that final confrontation could take flight into eerie, mad imaginings. Where he had killed her or she had killed him or, in the worst, he had buried his face in her shoulder and she had wrapped her legs around his waist and done -

Well. Done things she was reasonably certain could not be done between an elf and a Mud Man and anyway, she had never done them before so how would she know how to do them anyway? Damn Foaly and his romance novels.

She was certain if she stayed with Artemis much longer, in this house of marvels below the lake, that she would go mad, that her sanity would wander away one morning with the escaping darkness and not return. He consumed her every thought, and to stay in the twisted world of his creation was to court disaster. Yet she was equally certain that to leave him would be to unseat her completely, yank away the moorings that had kept her tethered to reality these past few weeks. And she ruminated on what might happen when she returned home to the Lower Elements - if she could ever return to the Lower Elements. Was she tainted by the love of this Mud Man, by the mortal music that for a few blissful hours on stage had imbued every fibre of her body, saturated her in its glory?

She did a lot of thinking. There was precious little else to do. Not for the first time she wondered where the old Holly Short had gone. Holly Short that didn't fear anything, didn't bend to anyone's will. She felt terribly old in comparison to that other Holly, although surely it hadn't been so long? She hardly know the passage of time, for there were no clocks in the house below the lake and there were no windows. They were not necessary so far beneath the earth. Night was all she had; endless, bleak night, and it did not matter when she slept or when she ate or when she read for the world was all the same regardless.

The old Holly Short would have bludgeoned a wall down by now. She did not know - could not know if she had been improved by Artemis' tutelage, by his lunatic love. She had been changed, that much was certain. Layers of cynicism and world-weariness had been peeled away, to reveal the wide-eyed child underneath, still willing to believe in angels and the marvellous beauty of her own voice. And that lead to ever more wondering. Why had she trusted him so quickly and implicitly, why had his Voice set up reverberations in hollow places in her she had no idea even existed? He played her like the finest, rarest music instrument, not even needing his hands on her to coax her into life.

He was gone now, and there was no music issuing from his rooms to assure her of his presence somewhere in the house at least. Perhaps he was sleeping, although she doubted it. He had been sleeping less and less of late, running on fumes and Earl Grey. She resolved to wait for him to come home, to try once more to talk to him. Maybe, this time, he would listen.

Except that doing nothing at all can be a very taxing task and eventually she dozed off on the sofa, feet tucked up beneath her, curled into a ball. Her sleep was distracted and restless, half-visions tempting her out from the black only to vanish when she pursued them. Typical of late. She woke to the sight of a pair of very polished shoes, and then a pair of perfectly pressed black trousers, and then all of Artemis from feet to glinting mask, more than six feet of skeletal, hovering darkness. She bolted upright in pure shock, nearly tipping off of the sofa as her legs tangled in the blanket gently draped over her. She didn't remember putting that blanket on...

Oh, Artemis.

"Holly," he said, his Voice a howling shriek of itself. It was as though none of the agony he allowed himself to feel was being expressed through his throat, and oh, the sound made Holly long to clap her hands to his ears and scream to drown him out. That would not be productive, though, it would serve no purpose. So she merely remained still and silent as he shoved a folder of music into her hands. She opened it, sight-reading by habit, and nearly shrieked.

"What's this?" she managed to ask instead, hesitance blown away in the wake of the music she could already hear prickling awake inside her skull. Mad music, insane music - Artemis' music.

"My opera," he replied, and that was all that was needed. The opera of years of compressed desire and loneliness, the opera written by a man whose genius had gone unnoticed and unadmired, left to rot down in the darkness below the Opera with the rats and the memories. Well, not anymore. Now it would be sung to the sky, to bring to mankind a little of the music of heaven.

Or perhaps hell.

"How?" she asked, leafing through the pages. "The managers - they would never approve this."

She had the impression that underneath his mask, he was smiling. It made her glad he was wearing it; not because she feared his face, but because his smiles of late were demented, horrific baring of the teeth, no more a smile than the wide-yawning lips of a scream of horror. Perhaps it was. Perhaps he was as horrified as she was at what he had become, at the road they were inextricably bound together on, the blind leading the blind down a passageway of dimness and monstrosity - oh, perish the thought - !

Yes. She was going mad.

"The managers have agreed," he murmured in that awful Voice, the one that was her angel all bent out of shape, the devil in disguise. "Now all that remains is you. Holly..." His gloved hand caressed her face; she reined in her shudder with the greatest of restraint. "I will not beg! Not for your love, and not for this. You will sing for me. If you will not love me, then at the least, you will sing for me." It was not a question and she did not bother replying to it as if it were one. They had crossed the point of no return now, and she would sing whether the Mud People or the LEP themselves tried to stop them.

It was his will.

"Come," he said, electric eyes implacable. "We begin now."