Title : Voices In the Dark
Chapter : Chapter One
Author : Marie Noire
Summary : This entire story takes place on the assumption that the legend of the Phantom of the Opera was never known. Everything was covered up in the name propriety. In present-day, Christine, Meg, and Raoul are friends on a backpacking trip through Europe… and they stumble across something rather strange at the old Paris Opera. Little do they know what they’re getting into.
Rating : As of right now, PG… but will likely take a turn into R later.
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"Hey Daae... you coming or what?" Meg pulled at her friend's sleeve, impatient to catch up with their tour group and hopefully leave. Twenty minutes and already, she was antsy. This theater bugged her to no end. It was like no other venue she'd ever been in before. Sure, some other places were big, like the Royal Opera and the Met. But neither of them had... the presence... of the Paris Opera Garnier.
Meg considered herself to be very sensitive to psychic vibrations; she could "feel" intense emotions from the past, as if they were soaked into the very soaked into the very floors and walls of a building. Indeed, she had even noticed that stone and wood structures tended to have... better-persevered vibrations. But she did not like it when they invaded her, as they tended to do in extreme cases. She'd nearly went into hysterics when they had visited the square where William Wallace had been executed. And she could not be convinced to go within a mile of the museum that had once been Auschwitz.
Here, at the Palais Garnier, one of the few stops on their European back-packing trip that had seemed tame... she felt nearly overwhelmed by the presence of something... wicked.
Not evil exactly... but sufficiently threatening to make her jumpy. The ruthless bloodlust of a man on his last thread of sanity. And yet... there was also such an air of sadness, such abject misery that it almost excused the threat.
"Daae... Chris, please can we go?" she pulled harder on Christine's sleeve. "The tour's already moved on and we'll be left behind. Chris? Oi, Christine!"
"Did you hear something?" he friend finally spoke, but did not move.
"Yeah, I heard myself telling you to get a move-on."
"No, not that." Christine shook her head, looking up at the painted ceilings. "A voice... I heard a voice. A man's voice singing."
"Um... Chris... this is an op-er-a." Meg reminded her, enunciating with great exaggeration. "Of course you are going to hear singing."
Christine shook her head again, strands of hair escaping her sloppy braid. "The Opera company is on holiday this week, remember?"
"Uh... they are?" Meg's brow furrowed.
"You weren't paying any attention on the tour, were you, Meg?" Christine finally looked at her friend. "The entire reason we're going to be able to see the auditorium is because there's no rehearsals."
"And we're not *going* to see the stage at this rate if we don't get going." Meg said, this time succeeding in pulling Meg along.
The girls ran after their tour, catching up just in time to enter the stage area. Ahead, the tour guide was extolling the virtues of the horseshoe shape and sheer size. Meg glanced up in an effort to see the mural on the ceiling by Chagall, but found herself repressing a shiver instead. Fear... there was fear here... wedged into the very gilding.
"Meg? Something wrong?" a male voice whispered right against her ear, making her whirl in surprise.
"Raoul! Don't sneak up on me like that!" she admonished him sotto voce.
The boy grinned. "Couldn't resist. But seriously, what is with you? You've been out-of-your skin since we got here. We're all artists, so what's the malfunction?"
Meg swallowed. "Something... something bad happened here." she shivered. "Out in the Foyer, I felt evil... and sorrow. Here, right here... I feel fear."
"Meg, come on. You're letting your imagination run off with you." Raoul sighed, never knowing what to think when Meg went spooky on them. Some part of him thought it could be a rather elaborate bid for attention. Being the daughter of a famous ballerina certainly seemed to be the perfect breeding ground for dramatics. But another part of him also saw these episodes as being truth.
Christine saw their faces and drew closer, far more forgiving of Meg's sensitivity. "Meg, luv, you feeling something?" she asked her school-chum.
Meg nodded, but any reply was cut off by the tour guide's heavily accented English. "And this is Box Five, above your heads. Interesting bit of trivia... it is never sold, even on gala night."
"Why not?" Meg suddenly demanded of the guide, her eyes piercing.
The guide looked quite startled that the bored English girl should so suddenly take an interest. "Well... because of the Opera Ghost." she said simply, as though the answer were perfectly obvious.
"Opera Ghost?" Christine, Meg, and Raoul all repeated, prompting for more.
Now the guide looked uncomfortable. "Oui... eh... there's a ghost. He's been here since the Opera opened in 1875... there's even a clause in the lease about him..."
"Haunted... this place is haunted?" Meg wondered aloud. "But the vibrations... and the voice...it might make sense."
"Voice?" Raoul whispered to Christine, who merely shook her head.
"Tell us more about this ghost." Meg was busy rounding on the poor tour guide.
The tour guide was progressing from discomfort to outright fear. "We are not supposed to talk about it." she said slowly, though the nervousness in her eyes was not borne of anxiety over her job.
"You brought it up. Who was he?" Raoul asked, knowing Meg had to be on to something here.
"No one knows. He’s just always been." she replied, sensing defeat. "Nothing's happened in over a century though."
"What happened before that?" someone else in the tour asked, curiosity being contagious.
"Ah... what is the word...?" she mumbled, her grip on English slowly leaving. "Accidents?"
"Accidents?" Meg echoed. "What kinds of accidents?"
"Well... eh... the chandelier above you is not the original. The one Garnier actually commissioned was... dropped."
"Dropped."
"It... fell... during a performance. Many were injured... a few killed, I think. People say... eh, people *said* that it was the opera Ghost who did it." the tour guide whispered nervously, glancing at the non-original chandelier as though fearing to give it any ideas.
“Why would he do that?" Christine, ever the empathic one, asked.
"Anger." the guide replied. "The managers were new and did not heed the lease. Plus... rumour says... that the ghost requested a certain singer perform, but the regular diva played instead."
"Talk about an ego... all my ghosts ever do is bang on walls and turn on the radio." Raoul murmured, having insisted his own flat was haunted for some time.
"That explains the fear..." Meg whispered. "But how did this ghost come to be here? Who was he?"
"No one knows!" the guide practically wailed. "Let's move on please?" she said, now hustling the rest of the group along.
Meg held back, prompting Raoul and Christine to join her.
"Meg, you're getting scary... I mean, you were always spooky, but now you're *scary*."
"I can't help it, Raoul. I just *feel* these things." Meg sighed as they drifted back down towards the stage, letting the tour move on without them. "But there's more to this than she let on. There's no ghost."
"No ghost?" Christine was surprised. "But Meg... the voice? And the feelings?"
"Well, maybe there's a ghost now. But whoever he is, he was no ghost when that chandelier fell. I feel real emotions... and ghosts are just echoes." Meg explained. "Besides, what kind of ghost makes demands? And why isn't the story of haunted theater famous? It's gothic stuff, like Hunchback of Notre Dame... or Sherlock Holmes. Why's it so hush-hush?"
"Meg, you should be working for the RSS, not dancing for a living." Raoul attempted to lighten the mood to no avail.
"I think we need to have a séance." Meg nodded.
"What, now? Here?" Christine exclaimed.
"Yes..." meg closed her eyes. "I feel we should. Raoul, you know your way around a backstage... go find the lights. Christine, you and I will get the doors shut."
"I'm not sure I like this idea, Meg." Christine said as they wedged wooden triangles under the closed auditorium doors to keep them shut. "I'm positive this is a breach of national security or something."
Meg grinned slightly. "Don't you feel we're on to something? Something big? For God's sake, Christine, you're an opera singer! Have you no ambition for adventure?"
"Opera singer-in-training." Christine corrected. "None of us are professionals yet. And as for adventure, I'd rather live vicariously through the heroines I play."
"Boring." Meg sniffed. "OK, done! Got those lights yet, Raoul?"
"Yeah, I think so. I'm a designer, you know... not a lighting tech." he replied as the lit chandelier dimmed and the stage went almost completely black.
"Enough, I need to see what I'm doing!" Meg said, hauling Christine up onto the stage. Once there, she sat cross-legged on the floor and rummaged through her knapsack, withdrawing five white votive candles.
Raoul looked at her askance. "Meg... do you *always* carry candles and matches around with you?"
"Yes. Now sit down and shut up.” she instructed him while drawing a circle on the floor with a piece of chalk.
Christine and Raoul sat, giving Meg a little room to work. Soon, she had an intricate circle with a star inside of it, a candle at each apex. She handed her friends each a match and had them light the candles.
"Focus on that voice you heard, Chris." she said solemnly. "Raoul, just concentrate on the story the guide told us."
Raoul nodded, squinting when he got a whiff of candle smoke. "French vanilla?"
"Ok, so I have candles to ward off smelly restrooms. Shut up and focus." Meg sighed, picking up a hand from each of her friends. "Close your eyes and focus."
All three of them closed their eyes and Meg began to chant softly. “O great Anubis, lend an ear and grant us privacy in here. So those who look for us cannot see. Grant invisibility.” Three times, she chanted this, not one of them noticing the lights dim and go out completely. A chill seemed to envelope the room, their breath fogging in the air as though they were in a wintry storm, not inside a building on a spring day. Christine shivered and squeezed Raoul’s and Meg’s hands tightly, but she did not open her eyes or stop thinking about that voice.
Meg’s chant changed, her voice dropping low and soft. “I summon you, the spirit who lives within this palace of imagination, within this idol to music. We summon you to appear. Reveal yourself and speak from your soul.” She kept chanting, sometimes rhyming, more often not, simply pleading with whatever the growing presence was.
And it was growing. The room felt frigid now, alarming all three of them, though none stopped or raised a warning. It was as if they were transfixed, paralyzed. The voice was gaining volume and intensity in Christine’s mind, echoing clearly into Meg and Raoul’s as well, though no words were discernible. Meg kept chanting, her eyes suddenly opening wide in the darkness, a name whispered in her ear… just a name.
“Erik!”
Chapter Two