He stumbled from the house of horrors, with a stomach as riotous as the memories he was forced to witness and shelter within his own head. A woman's body, emptied of its spirit, lay crumpled and lifeless on the floor just feet away from where he opened his sorcerer's door. It was surprising he even had the strength to conjure one. It was an ungodly soul that he was forced to consume, black and twisted. It had left a bitter, filmy taste upon his tongue that wouldn't dissipate. Performing his duty always stripped him of his dignity, of his connection with humanity, if only for a moment–but this one, it was one of the harder of his calls for him to stomach. So many children…But he tossed his head about to shake off the memories that continued to fight for his attention, clawing at his mind like shadowy wraiths.
Some souls could leave him laid out for days afterward and he wanted nothing more at that very moment than to crawl into Christine's arms and sleep for a week.
Christine.
She had kissed him, and the memory served to sweeten his exhausted state. Still, he had a hundred questions. For one, he wanted to know why she had done what she had done. But also, did she enjoy it, brief as it was? In all of his little trysts in the past, he had never kissed another, he would never remove the mask to allow them to see him as he was.
There was one night, at a masked ball in the Garnier, when he had been had dressed as in his most outrageous and dramatic of costumes–Red Death. He had been a perfect actor, remaining in character all night long until a tempting female reveler had pushed him into an alcove, away from the party, and he, tipsy from a bottle of Tokay and the euphoria of Morphine, allowed this aggressive sexual advance. It was all quite divine and rapturous, until the woman, having removed her mask to expose the delicate beauty of her face–a face he recognized, as she was a dancer in the ballet troupe–stood on the tips of her toes towards his face and huskily said, "I want a kiss from Death." The seductive, wine-coated words shattered his little illusion. He refused her request by turning her from him, her throaty laughter loud in his ears while he finished the act with the words still burning in his heart. After it was done, filled with the heady effects of climax and shame, he left the woman–satisfied, giggling and oblivious to the horrid impact of her words as she likely moved on with the rest of her evening in ignorant bliss.
He found himself at Christine's door, his knuckles rapping upon the dented and chipped surface of it. For several minutes he stood there, knocking and waiting–twice he even pressed his ear against it to see if he could hear any whisper of a noise coming from inside. Once his patience wore out, he made the decision to rudely intrude through his own method, but when he peeked inside, the apartment was empty.
"Where did she go?" he grumbled to himself, still weak and queasy from his collection.
His mind was cluttered with so much ugliness that he decided it best to take a walk. The afternoon had grown late and evening was only a couple of hours away. With no need to worry for his own safety, he found himself walking through the gritty blocks of skid row. Occasionally feeling the angst, depression and anger of people he passed by. They glanced at him and their eyes would express the shock of him. He realized that he still did not wear the little daisy mask he was keeping in his pocket, but walked past the makeshift homes constructed crudely on the sidewalk with nothing but his face in the sunlight. He must have been quite the sight, Death in a new suit strolling down their desolate path.
After several blocks into the thick of the squaller, he felt it. There was the distinct resonance of Iris, it was a thrumming in his body he had grown to know so well over the past couple of months. There was something else, however, that nearly overpowered her signal. It was not a vibration, but a haunting drumming that landed in the back of his skull and did not relent its heavy and slow pounding. It made him feel even more queasy and something in him knew what this was. It felt like Iris described, 'like tragedy'.
Another Eater was near.
He paused. Unsure for a moment whether he ought to proceed, but he found within himself a genuine desire to speak with Iris, annoying as she was. His feet, knowing this desire before his brain, had already taken on a quick pace down the street and around the corner of a brick industrial building. Iris was there, but she was deep in some thought as she surveyed the scene of a dumpster-filled alley across the street from where she stood.
She turned to him, the breeze blowing her hair into her eyes which she shoved away in frustration.
"I wish I had died with a hair tie," she complained half-heartedly as he came to stand by her side. "What's up with you?" she asked flippantly. "You look like Ebenezer Scrooge—if the ghost of Christmas past took a shit in his living room."
"You read dickens?" he grumbled.
"Wow," she gave a slow, sarcastic applause. "Finally, a pop culture reference you recognize. And the answer is, hell nah—I watched the Muppets Christmas Carol every year. I heard Dickens was a huge dick."
"I know nothing of the man's genitals," he blandly replied, suppressing a smile that fought at his lips.
"I sure as shit hope that you are delivering some dry humor," she retorted. "But, knowing you, it's probably more of your anachronistic tendencies. It looks like you are having a bit of a day. What's got your face all screwed up?"
"I ate a soul," he replied.
"I would ask you more about that, but I'm afraid we don't have much time." She replied sympathetically. "Can you feel it too?" she then asked with some trepidation. Her eyes landed back on the alley across the street where he could now see a single man, gray and disheveled, pacing back and forth in a loud, incoherent conversation with himself.
"I do," he said, as the Eater's drum grew stronger.
"It's the craziest thing," Iris said, her typical care-free facade washed away to reveal a confused sort of stress. "I can see that man dying," she said as she pointed to the pacing, unkempt man, "But I can't see who murders him. That's never happened before."
The drumming in the back of his skull was growing louder, and it made him think of how often Iris had been subjected to the racket in her own head.
"It sounds terrible," he said, thinking that it would have been a fitting companion to his own agonizing composition of Don Juan–a score that was thankfully disintegrating in the cellars of the opera.
"You don't sound like this anymore," she replied, but her eyes stayed fixed on the man whom she had been called to claim. "You whistle now."
"I whistle?" He was stunned nearly to the point of laughter.
"Yeah," she softly chuckled, "You sound like the wind in the trees. I don't know what's up, but it's pretty cool."
He wanted to speculate this unusual change with her more fully, but another being had emerged on the opposite end of the alley. As though his appearance signaled some sort of switch, the pounding of invisible drums stopped. There wasn't anything that terribly distinct about him, aside from a scalp full of dark red hair that somehow suited the hunter green t-shirt he wore and the expression of pure rage corrupting the young features of his face. The awful scene before them played out quickly, but somehow in slow motion at the same time. The pacing, ranting man got in the way of Eater, who seemed to snap. He lunged at the poor fellow and shoved him against the wall of the alleyway. With several forceful blows, the man's skull was bashed into the brick of the building until life had slipped from the man's body, leaving nothing but a husk behind.
A confused soul now stood, looking at the Eater with a stunned expression while Iris crossed the street to offer him some semblance of comfort. The Eater glared at her, dropping the limp body and lunging forward to do the same to Iris. Together, they both tumbled to the ground in a ball of flailing limbs. He had managed to grasp the sides of her head as he began to hit her head into the pavement as he had the previous soul.
"Get off me, asshole!" Iris cried. "You can't fucking kill me!"
Erik had rushed to her aide, hoisting the Eater off Iris by the flimsy cotton of his shirt and slamming him onto the ground beside Iris.
"You fool!" Erik spat, he could feel the Eater's soul trying to interface with his, but refusing to latch. He was grateful, in that regard, that he would not be subjected to whatever horrors this man carried. "Didn't your mentor teach you anything?"
"She was an idiot!" The Eater cried, and his face contorted as that horrible consequence took hold of him and burned him from the inside out like invisible fires of hell. "It's all lies! They left us here to suffer in this shit stain world forever!"
"The only shit stain I see here is you," Iris said as she rose to her feet. She gestured to the man's soul who now stood staring in horror at his own dead and discarded body laying in a heap on the ground. "It's okay, Harvey. He can't hurt you anymore."
"I don't remember how I got here," Harvey replied. "I don't remember at all."
"Yeah," Iris replied kindly. "You were in a cloud for a long time, but it's okay now. You're whole." She gave Erik a nod of gratitude who still held the furious eater down on the pavement. "Thanks for taking care of Mister Asshat. I'll see you around, my friend." And with that she walked away, linking her arm with the man named Harvey and walking into a portal made of brilliant cerulean light.
Directing his attention back to the Eater he had pinned down like a wild jungle cat trying to pounce, Erik frowned. The Eater just stared back at him with an unhinged fury in his eyes. There was something that Erik recognized there, some former self that he recalled. It was like glimpsing a distant memory of an embarrassing former self.
"You ruined my plan," the Eater growled.
"Oh?" Erik asked with amusement. "Bashing an innocent man's brains was part of a sophisticated plan?"
"It wasn't the man I was after," the Eater fumed. "It was that reaper and her portal. I was going to force her to take me through and you fucked it up."
Erik chuckled to himself as he let go of the man and brushed off whatever ungodly filth had managed to adhere itself to the knees of his new pants. The Eater remained, curling up into a fetal position as the consequence took over and consumed him.
"It doesn't work," Erik briskly replied. "My mentor's predecessor already attempted such a feat. We are barred from entering. The only way out, I'm afraid, is to find redemption."
"You're eating up that bullshit too?" the Eater whined as he clutched his arms around himself to writhe about like a worm caught in the sun. It reminded Erik of the time when, having been lost to the frenetic energy of composing, that he had made the unfortunate mistake of forgetting to increase his morphine supply while his man was in town and found himself in the storm of withdrawal. It was an agonizing week and he was certain he would stay on the other side of those gates of sobriety once he had fully cleared them, but his newfound determination was as fragile as a soap bubble. A week later he was back on the floor, needle in arm, the powerful drug feeling like salvation in his veins, as he cried and laughed at the same time.
In a moment, the memory of that past life dissolved and was replaced by another–of a different man panting and groaning as he slowly died in the oven-hot mirrored room of torture that Erik himself had constructed for the amusement of others. How many lives had it claimed before its owners had grown bored? But more importantly, how long had he held onto the guilt of that crime to humanity?
Again, the memory seemed transfigured once more and he saw himself again. Tiny, frail, sweating and wailing on the floor of his attic bedroom on the night his mother, having finally allowed her resentment to conquer her staunch fear of God, had tried to poison him to no success–he had fled his home that night. He was only ten. It had taken the unspeakable act of attempted murder on his mothers part to finally rid him of the hope of her love. She would have rather killed him than love him. He had once been a victim, then he grew to be a victimizer of others and an abuser to himself. It suddenly occurred to Erik that his life was not singular, but rather a parade of lives with separate identities. All the things he had ever been were still within him, they had carved him into who he was–what he was–and they each held their own weight of regret and shame. That weight was tied to his ankles, dragging him down through the swampy muck of his own despair, and just above, out of reach, lay the fresh air of life beyond his reach.
"What choice do we have?" Erik replied with a weary sigh. It all suddenly seemed to make him so unbearably tired. "We can't go on as we did. Evolution dictates that we move, adapt or die. And since we certainly cannot die, and we only carry our despicable selves wherever we travel, that leaves only one option–adapt. We must change. Though I can't begin to tell you how that happens–I'm only now beginning to grapple with this knowledge myself." He didn't want to continue this conversation any longer. There was still the mystery of Christine's whereabouts pinned at the forefront of his thoughts.
The Eater began to holler and laugh in an uncomfortable display of madness as the consequence grew in intensity and Erik gave a rare nod of empathy to the lost and troubled man. He knew where that man was now, in both mind and spirit, and he was grateful that he had somehow managed to cross the bridge that spanned the distance between that hell and where he was now, this enlightened state he had discovered. As if some inner compass had sprung to life, he turned his back to the Eater and took to leave.
"Where are you going?" The Eater grunted with fury behind him. "We aren't–" but that last thought was cut off by whatever inner turmoil had taken over.
Erik paused and glanced over his shoulder at the writhing man.
"I'm going to find something good in this world," he replied.
"Fucking idiot," the Eater grunted,
But Erik couldn't agree with the sentiment anymore. For once, he had something to live for that didn't make him feel as though he were wading through the moral sludge. Still, as he picked up his pace in search of Christine, he couldn't help but think that he hoped the Eater would find something good in his existence too–and what a novel thing to wish goodness for another who is so clearly undeserving. Empathy could be a damned complicated thing.
I was him once, he reminded himself. Who he was now, he could not say, but something had shifted inside him, some erosion and softening of those hard calloused places of his being. It had happened so silently that he didn't know it was occurring. It had started sometime between his very first conversation with Iris and his visit to Nadir's grave. The regrets still clung to him like that metaphorical collection of lead weights, but he had shaken some of them off and he could see the light above him now, faint, but there–a glowing amber that promised something pure and good. There were still many details of his past that seemed impossible to reconcile but he had made peace with the worst, and with that came a lightening of his deeply ingrained shame.
There was a new feeling in his being, now. A measure of happiness. The emotion had been clawing its way from the cage to which it had long ago been sequestered out of self-preservation–for Erik had equated happiness with disappointment from the very tender years of his childhood. The feeling of joy had been kept locked away and denied free reign for so long that it had become a docile and tame thing resigned to its prison cell in the bowels of Erik's fortress heart. Then Christine kissed him and it came tearing out of its dark, damp little cave to come to the surface and Erik didn't want to fight it, despite knowing that this could only lead to pain. Regardless of what was to come, he wouldn't let himself regret loving her, just as he could no longer regret loving Nadir or the life that led him here.
With this fresh resolve, he opened his portal to the place he knew she would most likely be and stepped through.