"They were gone, all of them. In graves like the man in the cellar, silent like the monuments that would whither like the names they bespoke. Names of the past. Dead.
And I was one of them."
A "Phantom of the Opera" story with a twist. Updates will not be regular, but I am determined to finish this!
Haunted Chapter Thirteen by Muirin007, literature
Literature
Haunted Chapter Thirteen
I knew I was deliberately disobeying Antoinette. Though I couldn't work out why, I knew she had her reasons for wanting me to stay away from the bookstore. I knew she would be incensed when she found out I'd ignored her warning—and she would find out. She always did.
But anger and frustration smothered my guilt into temporary silence, and I stomped blindly ahead, my feet finding their way of their own accord to the antiquated sign hanging over the old storefront. I turned left past the sign, wound my way through the alley adjacent to the building, made another left and arrived at the back door. With a huff that would have put a walrus
Alessia Sorelli and Philippe de Chagny seemed genetically engineered to form the perfect couple.
They drew stares as they walked down the street—Alessia with her impossibly graceful balletic glide, Philippe with the confident stride of a man who had been blessed with infinite privilege and the opportunity that followed it. Physically, they couldn’t have been a more beautiful match. Philippe, like the rest of the men in his family, was classically handsome: tall, muscular, blonde and too charismatic for his own good. He was in his early thirties and boasted the beginnings of rugged fine lines around his eyes and his mouth. Like h
“Ghostbusters.”
“Aw, geez.”
“…Really, Raoul? Really?”
“Aw, come on, you guys, that was just begging to be said,” Raoul laughed as he plunged his hand into the bowl of popcorn that sat between us.
“What, kind of like how ‘Edgar Allan Bro’ is begging to be said whenever you see that picture of Poe wearing sunglasses?” I said, unable to suppress a smile.
“Exactly how ‘Edgar Allan Bro’ is begging to be said whenever I see that picture of Poe wearing sunglasses,” Raoul said with a smart tilt of his head. He leaned in closer to Meg and
Christine
I knew something was very wrong when Dr. Valerius canceled class that day.
He had never missed a single class. Not once in his thirty-plus years of teaching. He’d gained somewhat of a legendary reputation around the university for his dedication—he’d been known to come in with a fever, much to the administrators’ chagrin. But Dr. Valerius always said not showing up simply wasn’t an option. He thrived on music. He came alive in the classroom, pacing and gesturing and positively bouncing on the balls of his feet during his lectures, always with his viola at the ready to illustrate his point if need b
Nadir
The exterior of the house was suitably immaculate: perfectly trimmed beds of flowers lined the windowsills, the walkway leading to the front door appeared to have been recently scrubbed to an unnatural cleanliness, and even the old bricks did not betray a speck of muck. The front door, too, had been freshly painted, or at least so ruthlessly cleaned that it remained a pristine sharp white, gleaming smartly in the midday sun.
I moved to ring the doorbell, but before my finger could even press the button, the door swung open. The woman standing behind it had pressed her mouth into a thin, terse streak.
"Come in, come innone o
Erik
I spent the next several days lying in wait in the old warehouse, in what appeared to be a long-abandoned basement.
Fitting.
Despite the familiar comfort of a cellar, I could not tolerate the gray. The room in which I was obliged to sojourn was gray---impersonal, industrial, mechanistic, hideous gray, from the endless maze of pipes that wove across the low ceiling to the crumbling stones set into the wall to the stained concrete floor. Geometrics, stark, uninspired geometrics; not a flourish of art, not a hint beauty. All was graythe loose hospital garments, the low, rumbling sky, the shadows of the maskgray, gray, gray
Nadir
No one died.
They were bruised and bloodied, all, particularly the doctor who had been on the receiving end of his wrath, the one who had dared to try to touch the mask. He was sprawled inelegantly on the floor, his throat purple and inflamed from where it had been nearly crushed beneath skeletal fingers. He was silent but alive. They were all alive.
Perhaps that was attributable to his wasted condition. Or perhaps it was simply a miraclethat seemed more likely. He had never let little matters like health stand in the way of his bloodlust. It was a miracle.
I had telephoned the emergency personnel after I was sure he had
"He wants to marry her."
"No!"
Raoul rolled his eyes before taking a swig of cola.
"Yes. I'm not even kidding."
"You'd better be kidding."
"I'm not. Wish I was." He sighed, shaking his head and staring at the television blankly. "I don't get it. I just don't get it. Philippe's not an idiot--at least, I didn't think he was. He's usually the boring one. Mr. Sensible, right?"
"Maybe it's some sort of phase," I suggested, pulling the blanket more tightly around my shoulders. Raoul shook his head again.
"I don't think so. The guy doesn't shut up about her. It's always 'Alessia said this' or 'Alessia thinks that.' God, Christine, you have no
Antoinette gave me an indefinite amount of time off. Or, more accurately, demanded that I stay in bed until I caught up on years worth of missed sleep, and so help her, if I so much as stepped within fifty meters of the storefront, she would have Meg and Raoul forcibly remove me from the premises and strap me to that bed.
"I mean it," she said with extraordinary firmness. Her already thin mouth narrowed to near invisibility and her sharp brows arched in an austere warning. "No more of this, Christine. You're working too hard--too, too hard, and it's taking its toll."
Even I didn't believe my automatic, hollow assurance that I was perfect
It struck me as a terribly melodramatic thing to do, really.
I'd never fainted in my life. I'd thought it was something reserved for swooning damsels in distress, all of whom had perfected the art of fainting brilliantly and usually did so with finesse and grace. Delicately, with a hand placed to the forehead and a gentle sigh--and a plush couch or a gentleman to catch them.
Unfortunately, the same could not have been said for me.
"She banged her head pretty hard," said a voice from somewhere above me. "Just crumpled--you should have heard the cracking sound her head made. It was like, BOOM, just like that: BOOM! Check for blood. Make s