From Shadows to Starlight

A Voice for the Centuries

Chapter Ten

I am the voice in the wind and the pouring rain, I am the voice of your hunger and pain, I am the voice that always is calling you, I am the voice, I will remain. --Celtic Woman

A Voice for the Centuries

It was unfortunate that he had so little time to see the sights of Rouen that night, the Phantom thought. He’d had to make a slight detour to the dress shop across the street from the hotel. Alana needed some new clothes after their encounter with those dreadful thieves, and the sign marked “Closed” and the locked front door was not enough to deter him. He always carried lock picks with him wherever he went, and even when he encountered doors that wouldn’t respond to the lock pick, he knew they would respond to the right amounts of pressure in the right places. In this instance, he opened the lock easily with the pick and quickly entered the building, closing the door behind him. It was dark inside, but he found a gas lamp and lit it, and proceeded to look through the empty store like any normal human being would do during shop hours. Once he had found two nice-looking dresses that he knew would fit Alana, he pulled out a few hundred francs and placed them on the abandoned front desk for the shop workers to discover that morning. They were expensive dresses on their own, but he always liked to leave a little more than the items he took were worth. Besides, he had far more money than he knew what to do with. Erik found some boxes intended to put the dresses in, so he boxed them up as the workers would have, and left the store, leaving the lamp burning but locking the door behind him again.

He moved as quickly as he could through the city streets, trying not to limp from his injuries. His body and his head still ached painfully, but his newfound energy kept him going. Carrying the boxes with him and staying in the shadows, he made his way to the sight he wanted to see most of all before he left Rouen. Soon he was standing directly beneath the Rouen Cathedral, which looked spectacular and menacing in the darkness. It towered above him and the entire city, and he longed to enter the cathedral and see the beauty on the inside, but there wasn’t time for that. He had to keep moving if he wanted to see anything else before the sun came up. He took a final, lingering look at the tallest building in all of France, one that he had always wanted to see, and continued on his way.

As he walked, he saw many wonderful buildings and admired their sometimes stunning, sometimes quaint architecture. He realized, with an odd feeling he hadn’t gotten used to, that he was enjoying himself. He’d felt this feeling before, when he heard an exceptional piece of music, whenever he’d been with Christine and especially when he’d taken her to his lair for the first time, and also when Alana had called him her friend. Usually he only felt these pleasant feelings when he was deep in his world of music, but as he gazed at the charming city around him and remembered how he’d felt when Alana had said those words, he realized, perhaps for the first time, that the outside world wasn’t always terrible. Sometimes it could be beautiful, too.

Of course, music still reigned supreme in his mind. Nothing on the planet could compare to the power music held over him. What joy, sorrow, pleasure, rage, and contentment it could instill in him! At times he could feel all of human emotion wrapped up into a piece of music, experiencing each one as it seemed he left the earth for a little while, entering another, special place. Without music, he was nothing. Music was the one thing that had kept him alive in all his miserable, lonely years. For him, music made the unbearable bearable.

Now he found himself standing before Rouen’s own opera house. It was a magnificent building, but nothing compared to the one he had once called home, the one he had a faint hope of returning to someday. His thoughts drifted away…he longed to walk the familiar, sparkling halls, and the corridors of the catacombs, to spend countless hours playing his old organ and composing, to amuse himself by frightening the opera house’s inhabitants into believing the place was haunted, to sit in his normal seat, Box Five, and to enjoy an opera being performed, be it a classic or one he had penned especially for the Opera Populaire under a false name. But, he thought bitterly, he couldn’t do any of that anymore. The opera house had burned. He had burned it himself, destroying the one place he had grown to love.