DIVERTIMENTO A Vampire Chronicles/Phantom of the Opera Crossover by JoAnne Soper-Cook, 1995 jsoperco@morgan.ucs.mun.ca Well, I promised I would bring Erik back, and here he is, with a bang...I hope you enjoy him...Armand certainly did (!) (Disclaimer: this is a work of speculative fiction and is in no way intended as copyright infringement upon the works of Anne Rice; rather, it is intended as tribute and acknowledgement of the enormous impact her masterful writings have had on my life.) * * * The Paris Opera, Rue des Capuchines October, 1893 Erik: It is autumn outside, high above my silent tomb underneath the Opera. I am alone. I have no outside view from where I live, but I am certain that the myriad trees in the Bois are a blaze of multi-hued scarlets and golds, drifting down to carpet the footpaths, float gently upon the lake... I have never seen the park in daylight, but I venture often out at night: when the moon is hidden behind a frond of clouds, when the only lights are stars, then I call a carriage and venture forth, cloaked and hooded and masked, as ever I must be if I am to move among the world of men. I function here as the resident ghost, my highest calling yet; but at this juncture of my seemingly endless existence I find myself growing ever dissatisfied with my role. I was made for finer things, and yet I do not flatter myself with this assessment. For in my forty three years of existence I have been architect, master mason, magician, musician, composer and now, muse. I speak of course of Christine Daae, the little chorus girl that I have so lately taken 'under my wing' as it were. Hers is the only tutelage to which I have ever consented, and as it stood, there was no way on earth that I could have resisted the lure of her voice. And I saw that voice molded and shaped underneath the power of my hand, and now she stands each night upon the stage because of what I have wrought. I asked only that she tell no one. You think this a strange request? That I, the author and finisher of her fate (you will pardon me the Biblical pun; religion amuses me so enormously that I fear I could not resist!) would deny the acclaim of masses? I want nothing for myself: no fame or fortune on earth could ever give me recompense for what I have endured! I was born into this wretched shell and I will die in it, never having felt the heat of the sun on my face. No matter...I have freed the angel's voice that was within her, and it is enough. Besides...I am utterly and perfectly alone down here, and so I shall remain. To be discovered would be death to me. Her silence, granted out of her enormous gratitude, protects me. I am as safe here as a spider in his lair, free to observe and to fashion my fate by the power of my voice. But Christine is gone from me now...she needs me no longer, and I have heard that she is to be wed to the Vicompte de Chagny...a fitting match, according to the popular press, which swoons over him as if he were Prince Regent. As for my opinion in the matter, it counts little, but if it were my choice I would rather see her hanged than wed forever to that idle rich man's son.... I have become dangerously despondent of late. My mind turns to the inevitable choice that I needs must make at some future juncture...if I die, it will be at my own hand. I will not trust an event as important as my death to strangers. And now that Christine is secure, I must look to my own future... If there is no other voice for me to shape, I must needs put out the light. It is a feeble light at best, and casts little warmth...and there is no one who loves me, no one who needs me. Perhaps the time has come to slip the fragile bonds that hold me. Forty three is not too soon to die.... Armand: Louis has left me. The naked truth of it, when considered, ought to be shocking. Why am I not shocked, then? After four hundred years, I suppose I have lost the capacity for surprise. And I guess I'd seen it coming, after all. He slipped away from me slowly: first, his emerald eyes lost the intensity of their gaze, turning inward, as if he were listening, waiting for some inner call. And then, he began to hunt alone again, going off before I had arisen in the evening, to stalk the darkness like a tall, pale wraith. He would come home and walk the floor, pacing our suite of rooms in silence, his face blank except for that inward- turning gaze. "Louis," One morning as I was preparing for my sleep, I called to him. I listened as his measured tread drew him near to me. "Armand." His voice drifted to me from the doorway where he stood, one hand clasped around the lintel, his long pale fingernails digging into the wood. I had tried to make him tell me what was wrong, but like so many things, I had missed the point entirely...there was nothing I could offer him anymore, and if he had heard that siren call, then I was doubly powerless to stop him from leaving me. And when I awoke that night, he was gone. I have been alone, it seems, since the beginning of time...and where I once praised the advent of night, I now curse the one who made me thus...I have been born to darkness, and I will exist forever within this preternatural shell. Perhaps it is time to go into the fire.... Erik: I wonder what they are performing this evening...if it is Faust, then perhaps I will listen for awhile...surely Christine will shine again as Marguerite, and my joy in her will be redoubled. I will do that, yes. It will benefit me to lay aside my musings for awhile, take solace in the music which is my only succour now. After all, Box Five is ever at my disposal, I have only to dress and go up. Christine will charm me as she has always done, and perhaps my incipient dread will be sufficiently mollified by this offering so as to provide me with a little peace. I will attend the Opera, I think. Armand: I must go out. First to hunt, yes! But then, I must go somewhere, anywhere... It is too keen an agony to stay here in this house. His coat he has left hanging in the hallway, and still the scent of him clings to it... Ah, Louis! Why must you return again and again to him, the one who ruined you so utterly! For he has ruined you for me: I know that while he lives and moves and has not gone to ground that he will have you... You can never be mine as long as the Marquis owns your soul. Damn the prancing brat! Damn his eternal soul to whatever Hell will have him... I will go to the Opera. My voice has been mute for centuries, stilled within my breast, as cold and dead as my own white skin. But I can listen to the music... ...and forget. Erik: This building is filled tonight, and the sight of so many preening fools creates in me a kind of grim amusement. They are packed into the seats, they fill the balconies and private boxes in a plethora of blinding colours, expensive silks and satins. So many bare white shoulders, so many soft white bosoms, and the unmistakeable signs of atropine in their unnaturally-widened eyes. The women, cinched into impossible corsetry and wedged between their men fan themselves against the rising tide of heat that emanates from the great banks of lights. Makeup melts like wax, exposed to the underside of my colossal chandelier, trickling down in faint beige runnelets to nestle between the cleavage of bourgeois bosoms. And always there is the impenetrable wall of chatter that rises like a steam from the rows of bodies, a low hum that drowns out the tentative sounds from the orchestra pit. I am invisible in darkness, sat so far back behind the velvet hangings that I cannot be seen. Perhaps someone might catch a faint glimmer of white, my shirt-front or my gloves, before I melt back again into the shadows... We have an arrangement, the management and I: as long as it is upheld I am content to confine my activities to mere mischief. Ah! There she is...Christine is taking the stage... I will nestle back into the comforting darkness and lose myself in the magic of her voice. Armand: I had a difficult time getting a seat, but managed finally with a little glamouring to get a box. It helps to have money, and money is a thing I am well-practiced at procuring. It is so very *easy* for us, you see! The Dark Gift works differently in each of us (a sentiment expressed by the Brat Prince, I do believe) and in my case the result is that I am endowed with the power to attract wealth. There is a capacity crowd tonight, the murmured hum of their voices rises to the rafters, sifts through the ceiling and out into the night... I will listen to the music and forget about Louis, lose myself in the magic of The Daae's voice...and for a time, the pain that is leaking out of my heart will lessen to a trickle. Erik: Christine was glorious tonight, as always, and the audience swept her out of the building on a tide of applause. I caught the upturned rapture of her face, the slight wave of her hand in my direction the only tribute she gives to her hidden Angel. But it is enough to know that I alone have created this triumph, this diva of soaring voice who can so easily raise us all to heights of ecstasy. A strange occurrence this evening...it troubles me, and yet I am not certain why...directly after the Opera had emptied, I had stayed behind, hidden in the darkness of my private box and safe within my musings. The afterglow of Christine's singing had wrapped me in a comfortable haze, and I was loath to leave Box Five and descend again to the depths. I decided that a stroll around my building might be worth the risk, and as it was very late and everyone had gone, I crept down onto the main concourse and made my silent way around this, my monument to music. I made this place, with my own hands, did I tell you that? In my mind as it went up: storey after glorious storey, the massive stonework outside, the sumptuous gorgeousness inside. All of it is mine, I own it, and in return for my soul it has granted me a haven in its depths, where I am safe.... There was someone on the stage. A young man... I drew near, but stayed well within the shadows. I did not recognise him as a regular patron, but he was dressed well enough to be one of the borgeoisie and I wondered what he was doing here, lurking about the stage long after the lights had been extinguished and everyone had gone home. He was young...not more than eighteen, if that...but his expression was one of inestimable weariness, the attitude of a soul who has seen everything in its time...he was slightly-built, but muscular, and moved with an animal grace on long, dancer's legs...his hair was auburn, shot through with streaks of gold, and it curled about his temples and his neck. But his eyes...they made me shudder, and draw back involuntarily into the darkness...eyes of haunted darkness, as eloquent in their pain as an ancient shadow...velvet brown, deep and fathomless. To look into them would have been like looking into a private well of pain.... And then he began to sing.... I recognised the medieval madrigals of Hildegarde von Bingen, but I had never heard it sung like this: absolutely pure in tone and clarity, faultless in the bottom registers, utterly dizzying in the top end... Listening to him sing, I fancied that I heard the dying cry of a damned angel, a second Lucifer, burned by his own ambition to a cinder and plummeting mercilessly down from Heaven... I did not even realise I was weeping until I felt the wetness on my collar, soaking into the front of my evening shirt. What this boy was doing couldn't even be called *singing*; it was some ritual of private desecration, the purging flame. I must find out who he is...to be allowed the priviledge of shaping that voice would see my triumph with Christine pale in sad comparison. I stepped out of the shadows. Armand: I cannot say why I lingered until everyone had gone, but the seats and stalls were emptied and still I remained... It was so very beautiful here, more so when it was empty. It reminded me of the vast cathedrals of my mortal youth, when I first stood, a stripling boy, and gawked in feckless wonder at the towering panels of stained glass, the ceiling frescoes. The vast dome of the main auditorium, punctuated with that chandelier, recalled the final breath of music that had drifted up this evening and lingered, unseen. Such monuments as mortals make to their gods: churches that captured the eternal capacity for wonder, for awe, the eternal power of music... I cast a quick look around me and ascertained that everyone had left...I had not sung in such a long time, and for this debut I wished to be alone. It was so very easy to open my lungs and let the melody drift up out of me, the aching of a preternatural soul captured in the music of a 10th century nun, my own pain caught between the staves.... I let my own voice carry me, and intoxicated by my own power, felt my agony melt away.... I was not aware that I had been watched until he stepped from the shadows, and the first thing that I noticed about him was not the mystery of the mask, but the uncompromising intelligence of his aquamarine eyes... He stood tall, even taller than Louis, and held himself with a mastery that is the province of both the very powerful and the very dangerous. I had no doubt that he was both. "I heard you singing," he said quietly in French, and the music of his voice washed over me, a wave of warmth. The mask he wore covered the upper two-thirds of his face, but left his mouth and chin bare, and both were incongruously beautiful: the mouth was wide and full-lipped, sensuously curved, and his chin was square and strong, indented with a dimple. He was dressed in evening clothes of exquisite cut and style, surmounted with the sweeping expanse of a black cashmere cloak. "Who are you, Monsieur? And why are you still here, after everyone has left?" I stepped closer to him, my footsteps echoing on the empty boards. He stood below me, in the orchestra pit, waiting. "My name is Erik. That is all you need to know." He said this coolly, as if immune to my preternatural powers. "I...you have a...*powerful* voice." I hopped down off the stage and into the pit. "It is a voice," I said flatly, "nothing more." I moved to go past him, but he restrained me. "I would like to continue, if I might." He spoke in tones of gentle reproach, but with an underlying threat that must have proven somewhat influential, for I remained. "I am something of an...*impresario*...I would like to teach you." I was stunned into silence for a moment. Teach me??? Teach me what, exactly? "It was I who trained Mlle. Daae---" "Christine Daae?" I stared at his masked face. "You?" What I had heard of her voice this evening had utterly unhinged me. "Yes." He inclined his head. "I would ask for the privilege of also training you, provided you are willing." He glanced over me, his eyes flickering everywhere. "However, this tuition would have to take place at night...I am...*busy* by day." I stared at him, trying to ascertain whether he was one of our kind or not...likely, he was just some eccentric who slept during the day and awoke in time for the evening's performance. Such creatures were not unknown in artistic circles. And whatever possessed me, I found myself assenting to his request... It might help me forget about Louis, and this pain he has so unwittingly inflicted. Erik: His name is Amadeo...he gave me no last name, no address...he says I am to meet him in the orchestra pit, and that I am to tell no one of his presence here. Impudent pup! As if his presence here were of interest to anyone...there are dozens of costume girls and scene shifters who move in and out of here nightly...the Opera is rarely ever deserted... Still, if this is what he wishes, I will wait for him here, although he had better be swift about it, for I cannot risk discovery...I am little more than legend in this theatre, and I would prefer to remain an insubstantial ghost, for the time being. If they find me and force me from my lair, there is nowhere on earth for me to hide... Ah! he is here, the young Adonis...how very beautiful he is, I had not noticed...or perhaps it is because of the uncommonly warm evening, his opened shirt-front, and the coat over his arm... He moves with such savage grace, drawn forward on those eager limbs...that shoulder-length auburn hair, those eyes... I did not think I was privy to desires such as these, yet he stirs me, young Amadeo! The pale, proud beauty of him... I must needs take him below. Armand: What fantasy is this, I wonder? He takes me below, to some surrealistic world, and draws me in his boat across a mirrored lake... If my senses deceive me, I must have taken bad blood this night...but this place! Such a lair as any vampire would desire, this, hidden from the dangerous glow of sunlight.... I am reminded of Les Innocents, the cover of darkness, cool ground.... "I would like you to sing for me, Amadeo...." He is moving about this fantastic house, taking off his cloak, his coat, standing before me in his shirt and vest... "Why are you wearing that mask?" I am drawn near to him, want to exist suddenly within the sphere of his influence, his power, his charisma. Is he one of our kind, to exert such covert magic? "Because I am ugly." The words fall from his sculpted lips, wrapped in the seduction of his voice, but still they impale me on a spike of pain. "No..." Already I am being drawn into this spell, already I sink into his influence as into a vat of warm water... My hand is drifting to his forearm, sliding up his shoulder...we find mortals irresistibly beautiful, unbelievably seductive... "Amadeo..." He sways towards me, and the scent of him stirs me, a hot pulse in my groin, beating in my belly. I catch his masked face in my hands and open my mouth over his, capture those sculpted lips with mine... He is warmth: a muscular package of heat and sex, and his arms around me ease the pain. Oddly, I do not think of taking him, not yet...and if I do, it will surely only be a little drink... I want him close to me, closer even than this...and this is the secret: the Dark Gift takes as much as it gives, but even the ancient blood cannot take this... I tried to tell Lestat, teach Lestat the many ways in which he could love me, possess me...and Louis I pleasured often. "What are you?" he whispers, and I silence him again, taking his mouth roughly. His lips taste of blood and spices, his tongue wrestles bluntly with my own. "Vampyr," I whisper, drowning in the taste, the smell of him, blind with lust. I trickle gutter language into the curved cup of his ear: "Let me fuck you." He whimpers in my grasp, and we fall blindly onto the sofa, my legs around his waist...my fingers cup the hardness that strains against his trousers, and he bucks against me. "Yes." "Slowly..." I am throbbing with unsated lust, and yet, this is not to be rushed, but savoured... There is a large marble bath in the other room, and running water, and I trickle scented oils into it, fill it with hot water...he is waiting for me, and I am filled with a tenderness of trusting, and I want to undress him slowly. He is a lean length of sculpted muscle...dark hairs curl upon his naked chest, run in a line down to where his turgid sex nestles, waiting for me.... This I know so well, this I can do, this will ease the ache inside me... I tug his trousers down and off his legs, take him into my mouth, gently....my tongue reminds me of the contours of him, the smooth saltiness, the satiny skin...when he groans, I almost release my passion right there, but not yet! "The bath," I whisper, and take him by the hand. We step into the water and the heat closes around us both...I am watching him through a haze of lust. I want him to touch me. Erik: I cannot believe that I actually exist within this heady dream; my senses must deceive me, I cannot be here, in the bath, with this young god... So very beautiful...and so cold! His pale skin like marble, hairless...the beauty of him carved in stone...He nestles into me, lying with his back against my chest, his auburn head brushing my chin, the water covering us both...He is a satin length of whiteness, and when I peer down at his moist, opened mouth, I see the feral gleam of fangs. He kneels in front of me, turning to face me, his hands on my shoulders. "Please take off the mask..." "You have asked me the one thing I cannot grant." I trace the outline of his lips with my thumb, dip briefly into the warm cavern of his mouth. "Please...do not ask it again." "Come into the bedroom..." He steps lithely out of the tub, water streaming in rivulets down his marble chest, his legs, glistening in the dark auburn hair around his sex.... "Yes." My bed is large, clad entirely in white: fine linen sheets and sumptuous pillows. He bids me lie down, and he lies on top of me, and we are clasped together like two halves of one person... His kisses are insistent, almost brutal, and his busy mouth excites me so that I fear I cannot last...his lips close around me, tugging, sucking; his busy tongue swirling aroung the swollen head, his strong young hands cupping my buttocks, lifting my hips up to his mouth... I hear the animal groaning, realise I am making those sounds, realise that I am trapped in this delicious dream of lust and frenzy, and then... ...time pauses, and we are frozen in this tableau, he and I, while the force inside my body gathers momentum... ...his wise mouth tugs, and his tongue swirls one more time, and a roaring wave bursts over me, and I collapse down into a single point of truncated lust, and a deep groan of release is wrenched from me as I thrust up into his mouth, driving myself down his throat, pounding against him, driving his head back with the force of my thrusts, exploding into him.... I quiver for a long time, my body shaking with myriad aftershocks, and he lies beside me, his head of auburn hair against my belly. When at last my delirium resolves and I can speak, it is to utter his name: "Amadeo." He raises his head, gazes at me with his angel's eyes..."Love me," he whispers, and my hands are pressing him flat against the bed, and I am re-creating that same act, the tableau in reverse, my mouth closing around his hardened shaft, my tongue flickering around the satiny tip of his erection. His voice is compacted by this act into a breathy whisper, and his eyes are closed, forehead furrowed as I drive him deeper and deeper into the well of pleasure. One long-fingered hand is buried in the back of my neck, fingers tangled in the mask strings; the other clutches a handful of the sheets...he pants in time with the motions of my head: "ah-ah-ah-ah-ah" and his slender, boyish hips are rotating against me, my hands underneath him, clutching his tight buttocks to me, mirroring the marvelous thing he had done. And I raise my head to look at him, to revel in the sculptured expanse of bone-white flesh, and as I do, his chest expands with one enormous breath, and his upper lip pulls back from the feral fangs as his shuddering climax rips through him and warm liquid splatters over me, my chest, the sheets, the bed.... I surrender to him again, feel his teeth go into my neck, see the preternatural power dance behind my eyelids. He does not take enough to harm me, just a 'little drink' and the pulsing pressure of his mouth against my skin creates the lust in me anew.... My Amadeo...how I love to hear you sing.... THE END.