Beneath the Porcelain Mask

Prologue: The Angel of Death.

From the perspective of the good Monsieur Pierre Desépines*

Known also as Monsieur Erik.

*legal surname at birth unknown.

St Martin de Boscherville, Rouen.
August, 1914.

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I remember Nikita de La Chance as if she was standing beside me only minutes ago. It's exceptionally difficult to forget such a person, even as time rushes on like a country stream, on and on through the years, chipping away at memories as it journeys through the fields of the human mind.

The memories that I have in fullness of her are the ones I treasure the most. To this day, as I lie in my sickbed, watching the birds in the trees outside my window, I can still hear her laughs and her scolds, her humming and her snapping.

Sometimes I like to pretend I can hear her fingers dancing across the ivory keys of the piano in the parlour downstairs, teaching and guiding my own little fingers until they played melodies of their own. If I can't wish myself back to those lessons, I think instead of Nikki teaching my son, Gustave. Now that was a time worth remembering.

I remember every part of her, from her haunting blue eyes to the cascades of chestnut hair falling down her back, and every inch of her face. If I had the strength and will to create, I'd draw her to perfection, with my Christine there beside her, and Jeremy at her other arm, equally as lifelike, breathing and laughing once more.

There is one time, however, that I have sworn never to remember: the time when Paris feared my name, feared the Phantom of the Opera.

I close my eyes and will those thoughts away. Those times caused only pain and grief for us, pain and grief that time had never seemed to heal, like a rift pushed between us that could never close, no matter how hard I tried.

I had always thought Nikki would be here at my side when I died. The thought of her death had never occurred to me until the day it came, the first of us four to pass on. My sweet, sweet Christine was the next to go; I held her hand as she passed on to join her friend. Not long afterwards, amid his heartbreak over Nikki's death, Jeremy fell asleep, clutching the only picture he owned of her and Christopher to his heart. My two children are now away tending to their own families, too busy to think of their dying father.

All too suddenly, I am alone in our house in Rouen without anyone to see me off. And it is only now I realise what loneliness truly feels like. To die with no one to care about you or bury you in love. That trumps living in an attic or a dungeon, I dare say, or listening to the news of the War on the wireless without anyone else to discuss it with.

The Angel of Music, the Angel of Forgiveness and the Angel of Hope have all gone on without me. Lastly, the Angel of Death will tag along after them.

It's so peculiar to think that of all four of us, I, the darkest and most evil, am the last to leave the world. Perhaps it's a punishment from God, to see my loved ones die as I have killed those of so many others.

And no coffin to die in? No underground Lair, or rats scurrying around? No rope around my neck in a hall of mirrors, or a complex trap squeezing me to death like my victims?

What a strange end for the Opera Ghost, I smile, closing my eyes and drifting off to sleep.