Waiting in the Wings (Love Never Dies fanfic)

Elegy

5. Elegy

This was what insanity was like. Or perhaps Hell.

He was flotsam in the jostling tide of bodies; swept aimlessly and pitchforked aside by elbows and heels, dolls' heads and reticules, sticks and hoops and handles and jutting stays, in the hot garlic-sweat and acetylene flare of a crowd whose tides of purpose flung him to and fro without understanding. Sticky hands were over-intimate and voices shouted blankly in his face, wide red meaningless mouths that cursed or touted or propositioned in profanities from every language under the sun. And above the jabbering howl of humanity rose the squeal and roar of Coney Island like some great hydra-headed beast: mechanical mouths that brayed calliope-pipes or bellowed out the clatter and rush of wooden wheels and grinding gears or shrieked with the tongues of gongs and bells and whistles, and waving limbs that plucked and dived and circled watchfully above its peeling painted mass.

All around him, New York clutched greedily at its hours of leisure, drinking every cup of enjoyment to the dregs. An opulent woman in coquelicot stripes almost swamped her sharp-faced escort in his loud check jacket, reaching eagerly for the candy cane a stall-holder held out to him; her frills were torn and muddied and a mustard-stain smeared the straining front of her jacket, but the high colour in her cheeks owed nothing to cosmetics and she leaned in to the little man's paddling caress with a giggle of tipsy abandon. Behind the ill-matched couple her lap-dog yapped unheeded at the feet of the crowd, snapping at those who stumbled over it. Raoul flinched, lost his balance, and garnered angry shouts in his turn as a guy-rope twanged beneath his flailing grasp and the barber's booth beside him swayed and billowed violently. He plunged blindly back into the crowd, away from raised fists and the flash of a razor-blade.

The press of bodies in the Midway battered at him, merciless and single-minded in the face of hesitation or loss. He was thrust aside and elbowed out of the way, sent reeling against hard corners and hot brass, and cast up at last into a dank alleyway between two tents, where he bent double, gasping. The canvas walls breathed mildew and stale piss, and the greasy litter at his feet stank of worse things than decay. He was caught in a nightmare: a nightmare from which he could never awake.

He had to get out of this place. He checked his pockets, automatically; found them empty, watch and card-case and every dollar he'd had on him all gone, lost to light fingers that knew an easy mark abroad. The tickets to Cherbourg — the lifeline that was to have carried his little family home — lay torn and trampled somewhere far behind already where he'd let them fall like the mockery they were. He could have raised some money on those, perhaps... but it made no odds. He was broke now, broke in all the ways that mattered, and a little question of ready cash was nothing at all.

He had his baggage, back at the hotel, if he humbled himself to his rival. He could throw himself on their mercy at the Embassy, if it came to that. Have himself shipped home like a failed theatrical troupe whose trunks were under the confiscation of madame la concierge.

Home... to the debts that they— that he could not pay, and the whispers and stares of Society, and a life shorn of everything that had given it meaning since boyhood when first he'd heard her sing. An empty house he couldn't afford, and memories he couldn't face: and haunted eyes that looked back at him from the mirror.

Or he could trade the good coat on his back now for enough rot-gut liquor to buy a day and a night's oblivion. Sink back into a stupor like the dog that returns to his vomit — forget his own foulness amid the New World's rancid underbelly...

For a moment he wanted it so badly that he could see the coins shoved across the bar: see the smeared glass, and the bottle beyond. See that saturnine half-mask leering back at him—