This chapter discusses the topic of suicide.


"Why does my heart beat? Why do I bleed?" Erik had asked Lucius one evening as they sat together on a Montmartre hill overlooking the sleeping Parisians, his voice had been laced with a thin thread of disgust, "If I'm not alive, why do I need such a trivial thing?"

Lucius merely shrugged and offered a blasé reply, "To remind you of your humanity."

"What humanity?!" Erik bit back with a caustic tongue.

Erik had been in a particularly vile mood that night. He had spent two days with Lucius in a daze as he was taught much of the foundational knowledge for his future position, but once the temporary stupor had faded, the panic set in and a plan was put into place.

He found himself in his bathing chamber with an elegant, jeweled dagger in the desperate claw of his hand. The weapon had never been used; it was a lovely memento from his days in Persia which he had deemed far too precious to soil with blood. It seemed only fair that he should die a second time by something so beautiful, poetic really.

Suicide would be his method of escaping his own spiritual atonement.

The expensive blade sliced through the flesh and sinew of his throat with no effort at all and, for a moment, Erik marveled at a knife's edge so sharp he could not feel the pain of it. He grinned at his cadaver face in the mirror of his bath—a mirror he had attached to the wall of that very room for his daily dose of self-flagellation—as blood poured from his gaping, pale throat, the crimson spreading across the front of his starched white dress shirt.

He bled and bled, awaiting the pain, awaiting the lightheadedness that comes from such blood loss, before the world fades to black and Death claims its son—but nothing happened. The pain never came, the bleeding staunched of its own accord, and the wound in his throat began to stitch itself together before his very eyes.

In a fury he drove the dagger into his own gut and, again, felt nothing. He repeated his mad attempts at self-injury, thrusting and slashing the blade at any inch of his body which got in the way, roaring and cursing with each painless lash until he heard Lucius standing behind him in bellowing laughter.

"I, myself, made the same attempts when I first found my calling, to no successful end," Lucius had said, his chiseled expression carried a wealth of pity and humor for the enraged skeleton sprawled on the bathroom floor in a pool of his own blood and covered in rapidly receding wounds.

As Erik stared over the glittering lights of the city, he was acutely aware of the heart beating within the scrawny cave of his chest. He had not bothered to change out of his bloodied and shredded clothing. He had surrendered entirely when Lucius pulled him from his inglorious position on the floor of his bath and escorted him through a portal to that hill on top of the world.

"Why do I not feel pain, if I am to be reminded of this supposed humanity you claim I possess?" He sputtered out each word as though it were a curse.

Lucius, usually dismissive of Erik's anger, turned to the unmasked man with a frown tipping downward the corners of his sculpted lips. "You cannot feel physical pain, but the pain in your mind will always be forever worse."

Erik scrubbed a hand over the paper-thin skin of his naked face. The lacerations he had placed there mere hours before had disappeared, leaving his disastrous skull just as it had been before the blade had cut the flesh upon it to ribbons. He had considered the wounds to be an improvement, for at the very least he looked like something that was living while blood had oozed from the wounds—corpses do not bleed, after all.

"I see," Erik replied in a cantankerous snarl, "I am to live this unnatural and unholy existence until my fantastical redemption. Tell me, my glorious mentor, exactly how does this redemption you speak of appear?"

Lucius leaned back in an indolent pose, his fingers trailing lazily through the blades of grass in which he sat, "Redemption looks differently for everyone, my brother. When you find it, you will know. Your soul will feel complete—at peace—and you will know it is your turn to move forward. At that time, you will meet your successor, just as I have you." He cocked his head in contemplation as he considered Erik, "You will make many mistakes on your way. You may even have your heart broken." At this he looked up to the stars, his voice melancholy "I have…but I'll not share that with you, nor will you be privy to that knowledge when it comes time for you to carry all the consciousness of the past. That is my memory to keep."

Erik snorted in disgust, "One must love to have their heart broken. How could you have been so foolish?"

Lucius gave a patient sigh, "Oh, my dear friend. You have much to learn. I greatly implore you to explore the world. Make a friend. Take a lover, take many lovers if you must, God only knows you could use it."

"Here you are, lecturing on redemption and you are encouraging me to sin?" Erik sneered, but his bite had receded.

Lucius let out a sharp yelp of a laugh, "Sex is not a sin, Erik, only the manner in which it is used."

"I've had lovers," Erik grumbled, his face pinching inward to form a gargoyle's scowl.

"No, my friend, you have not." Lucius softly replied, and his voice was filled with such patient pity it made Erik want to bury himself into the earth in which he sat and spend his eternity escaping a pathetic truth. "They were anonymous—you never even knew their names and they never truly saw you."

Erik opened his mouth to offer a wounded retort, but the words failed to come.

He opened his mouth again and the familiar scene he sat within stretched and pulled around him. A humming filled his bones, resonating through his body like an organic tuning fork. Erik had only begun to register the note as an A0, the lowest note on a standard piano, before he felt the rush and pull of some other force calling him to wake.

With a gasp, his eyes flew open to exit the dream.

The humming was still there and, now awake, he knew what it was which thrummed through his body with such aggressive force. It was not the same irresistible pull he felt at each summoning, no, Death was coming to this street.

He was feeling the calling card of another reaper.

Scrambling from his makeshift bed upon the floor of his crumbling little apartment, he hastened to peer outside the window. His thoughts flew to Christine's father, a man who was clearly positioned on the precarious precipice of death with only a subtle breeze of ill-health required to send him tumbling over. Erik felt an unusual fit of terror at the thought and just as quickly wondered at his attachment for the father-daughter duo.

He had been correct in his precursory assessment of Christine; she was broken, but her melancholy had roots in deeper places. He thought he could see a more beautiful, less monstrous version of himself hiding in her dreamy depths. When his fingers met hers the previous night, he finally saw it all in a glorious cascade of thoughts and feelings and memory. He had filled near to bursting at the seams with her fears and daydreams and secret hopes.

Erik knew immediately that he wanted her in a way he had never wanted anything else in his miserable existence, which is why he had fled as though he were a frightened little child.

But that was how it had been his entire life, had it not? He was always afraid. He crawled through his entire life saturated in the fear of everything. He had been too terrified to fail, to succeed, to love, to lose, that he had given it all up entirely. You could avoid vulnerability if you enshrouded yourself in spines and let loose poison from your tongue. Just keep the whole world at a distance and a man could be safe from pain. He could hide in his indigence and direct his spite to the outside for putting him in a prison of his own making, because, you see, self-accountability was also a prominent item on his list of Fears.

I want her so badly, it scares me.

He couldn't consider that now, however. Not with this incessant vibration running up and down the craggy bones of his spine and this concern for Papa Daaé giving chase to his heart. There was a more pressing matter to contend with at present and it currently stood on the sidewalk below him.

When he had made it out the room, down the dilapidated set of stairs and out the missing front door of the long-condemned building, he approached the cause of his thrumming. As he drew nearer to her, the hum began to recede. The young woman in a non-descript black t-shirt and torn-kneed denim pants was already staring at him, her thin dark eyebrows nearly to her hairline in surprise.

Driven by worry for the elder Daaé and a perverse sense of loneliness, he had come to engage with this reaper.

"You have been summoned here to claim a soul?" He asked with a false tone of authority.

Her coffee brown eyes were still the size of small moons as she took him in, and she quickly nodded. "Yeah," she replied, then with a gushing sort of enthusiasm she continued, "There's gonna be a murder here. But, dude, I don't believe it! I mean, there are stories you know. Other reapers whisper about the ones who are…" throwing her voice into a terrible Vincent Price impression, she continued, "Cursed more than us…" She dropped the failed impersonation and chuckled foolishly to herself, "You're like a cryptid! It's like meeting the Chupacabra or…or…the Loveland Frogman!" This set off a few more giggles.

"How do you know I'm not just another reaper?" He asked, hoping to alter the absurd tone of the conversation immediately and move onto the important heart of the matter, namely whom she was here to claim.

"You feel...different. It's like I could recognize you before I saw you, not you personally, but what you are." Her tone had dropped its levity now. "This is probably a crap thing to say, but you feel like tragedy."

"Like tragedy," he lowly repeated to himself as he looked tiredly away and out into the distance. He could almost see each of his life's moments playing out simultaneously in secret response.

Her face scrunched up into a childish sort of puzzlement.

"So, what's with the mask? It's not as if you can get sick."

"Mortals can see me."

"Oh…damn, dude. I thought that part was just a rumor. They say you keep the same body you die with." She informally cocked her head "So what, did your face get mangled when you died or something? God, that would hella suck!"

Erik's attention was drawn to a haggard man across the street who had just walked down the block and was entering the partially collapsed tent of a slumbering homeless mortal. A piercing, blood chilling scream abruptly cut through the quiet morning and was silenced just as fast. The tent shook and quivered with unseen action which was punctuated by an occasional pained moan or grunt.

"That man just stabbed that woman in her tent, but she isn't dead yet. We still have some time to chat." The female reaper continued in a casually conservational tone, turning back to him as one would an old friend. "So how did you die? It must have been pretty violent to ruin your face."

"My heart stopped beating of its own volition. An unfortunate symptom of my lifestyle," he lazily replied, "My face is merely an unfortunate symptom of my conception and subsequent birth."

"Oh…" She dumbly replied, staring at his face with wide eyes as though she could suddenly see the truth of what lay beneath his mask. She cleared her throat and continued with her nonchalant tone, as she refused to acknowledge the callousness of her previous comments, but her narrowed gaze remained on his mask. "You have a really sexy voice though, that must count for something, right? And you know what they say, 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder'…Surely you had one or two beholders in your life, right?"

He did not acknowledge her questions, instead he coolly asked, "How did your demise come about?"

She blinked at him, the briefest display of pity flashing across her features, before she resumed her casual demeanor and replied, "I did something truly idiotic. I jumped off a thirty-story building on purpose. Obviously, I achieved my goal, but I landed on a woman in the process—

right in front of her four-year-old son. So, I get to serve two sentences for that. Two natural lifetimes. Good thing they give us new bodies though. Can you imagine how terrified the souls I escort would be if they woke up to see a splattered version of me?" She paused briefly and shrugged, her eyes drifting to the tent on the other side of the street where the man who had entered was emerging with a paranoid, panicked expression on his face, "But you don't need to worry about sparing the feelings of your souls…after all, you guys kill'em and eat'em...I just escort them, like, 'Welcome to Death, blah blah blah…I'm here to shepherd your soul, yada yada yada…" She continued to watch as the man across the street pulled out a plastic bottle of lighter fluid and proceeded to set cheap fabric of the tent on fire. "I wonder if there are splattered soul eaters…"

He let out a humorless snort, "There is only one who serves this position at a time."

She looked at him with sudden surprise, "Do you get summoned often?"

"Rarely."

"That must get lonely. I'm at this several times a day, because people seem to get a kick out of murdering each other. We each have our own little departments you know." She sighed as the man lit the fuel soaked tent with a lighter, giving birth to flames, "I envy the ones who get the quiet, peaceful deaths, lucky bastards…" She turned to him again. "You're a really good listener, do you know that? What's your name?"

"Erik," he softly replied as the flames grew to enormous size, beautiful in orange hue as they swallowed the shabby tent and spewed dark smoke high in the air.

"That name suits you, just a vibe I get." She replied sweetly, "I'm Iris."

Both their gazes were drawn to the woman who was now emerging from the flames of the tent. Her form was thinner and slightly distorted, her energy felt lost and frantic.

"That's my cue, Erik." Iris cheerfully announced, "I hope we see each other again. I get a sense that you have a lot of wild stories to tell."

And with that, she was off across the street to assist the disoriented woman.

He watched as Iris approached the confused woman and presumably broke the news of her death.

The door to Christine's building opened and the pajama-clad object of his affection came running out with a cellphone in hand. She took a few moments to take in the sight of the fire which had increased in size as it caught fire to a neighboring open dumpster piled high with refuse and abandoned mattresses. Punching a number into her phone, she had just lifted the receiver to her ear when she made eye contact with him.

He could practically read the long list of questions on her face and—oh!—how desperately he ached to walk up to her as any man and give all the answers she sought.

"There's a fire on my block," he heard her urgently say into the phone, her wide, wary eyes never left his as she gave the details of her address to someone on the line. She did not mention a murder; she must not have known of the violence that had just taken place, or why would she have even come out of the safety of her apartment? Did she not hear the scream?

He wanted to yell at her, 'Do you not know there was a murderer on your street!?' And then he nearly cackled because there had always been a murderer on her street and that killer was most likely falling in a sad sort of love with her.

She continued to stare at him like a hiker confronting a wild predator on a trail, as though she feared that if she took her eyes off him he would charge her. His heart was pleading with him to cross the street, to assuage her fears. If he could just allow for some vulnerability, he could introduce himself like mortals do every day. There need not be any more of this creeping around, no more stalking the poor girl and spying on her unawares.

Just go up to her and say, 'Hello. I am Erik. I live in that rat-infested slum across the street and my face lives within your most primal nightmares. Please, do go inside now for there has been a vicious murder committed moments ago, but fear not, I did not commit it—I have not murdered in well over a century.'

It was pointless. He had nothing moving in his favor. Fear and self-hatred would forever bog him down. So, as the sirens of approaching firetrucks echoed against the buildings, he cut his connection to her cautious gaze and scampered back into his building like the unwanted rat that he was.