Angel Hands

Angel Hands

By: Cait Reynolds

Copyright ©

Cait Reynolds, Author

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by means mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events or persons, living or dead are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names or featured names are assumed to be the property of their respective owners and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used. Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this book in whole or in part, mechanically or electronically, constitutes a copyright violation.

Published in the United States of America in February 2016; Copyright 2016 by Cait Reynolds. The right of the Authors Name to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by them in accordance with The Copyright, Designs and Patent Act of 1988.

Published by Cait Reynolds

Cover Design by Lourdes Blazek

Interior formatting and design by Toni Michelle

Editing by Toni Michelle

Copyright 2016 © Cait Reynolds

Language: English

ISBN:

Dedication

To all those who write fan fiction in their heads, their hearts, and their dreams.
 

A Note from the Opera Ghost

Chers Mesdames et Messieurs,

It is a curious thing to be a legend in one’s own lifetime, or perhaps more accurately, a lifetime in one’s own legend.

As with all lives and legends, certain things about my story are quite true, while others have been exaggerated to the point of farce. Perhaps one of the worst of these offenders has been M. Gaston Leroux himself with his ridiculous pulp penny dreadful. Allow me to state here once and definitively that I have never referred to myself in the third person. Nor do I have the ability to breathe, sing, and swim at the same time. Nor did I possess a torture chamber in my house. Good heavens, who would think of such a thing?

M. Lon Cheney in the 1920’s cinematographic presentation of my story did not help matters much. Both he and M. Leroux seem to have taken an extraordinary delight in greatly exaggerating my deformities. That is not to say that I did not possess a face that…well, not even my mother could love my face. It is also true that I wore a mask.

However, let me assure you that my eyes are not yellow, nor do they glow in the dark. I have a fully-formed nose. I do not have jaundice, nor do I smell like rotting flesh.  I was never skeletally thin—except for that brief, unhappy period of my life when I traveled with the gypsies and lived off little more than sips of water and regular beatings. In point of fact, my ‘work’ about the opera house kept me quite fit, and I never lacked for food with the opera house kitchens so conveniently located next to one of my secret passages.

Ah, yes. The secret passages and infamous mirror. There, I will admit to the truth of it all. My opera house was riddled with passages and trapdoors of my own invention. The mirror was my particular triumph, and
non
, I regretfully inform you that I will not share the secret of how I achieved it.

But the Opéra de Paris—oh, I beg your pardon. This is another misconception I must clear up. M. Leroux would have it that I was a great architect who had been responsible for the entire design of the Palais Garnier, which enabled me to build my ‘lair.’ Please tell me that you, dear readers, are not so foolish as to assume that one man could design an entire opera house? Charles Garnier had a veritable army of draftsmen, clerks, and engineers working with him to design his Third Republic monstrosity.

No, I inhabited an older—but only a little smaller—opera house known as the Opéra de Paris, situated in a
quartier
not far north of where the Garnier would eventually be. Eventually, it was torn down—a casualty of Haussmann’s mania. It has been forgotten about, along with so much of the Paris I knew.

But, change is inevitable,
n’est-ce pas
? Even I, who thought my existence to be a single life sentence of isolation and darkness, found that people and circumstances combined to render my life far more interesting and varied than I have ever anticipated.

This brings me to the more modern incarnations of my tale. M. Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote a musical production on a scale that is somewhere between the Opera Garnier and Le Lapin Agile in terms of both music and spectacle. However, he did get certain aspects of my story surprisingly correct.

I did fall in love with a young opera singer and had my heart broken by her. I also did set fire to my opera house—though, I did not do it by crashing the chandelier onto the stage, nor did I ignite barrels of gunpowder (per M. Leroux’s fantastical ideas—I mean, come on, man! Where would I be able to purchase such large quantities of gunpowder and keep it dry while storing it in a damp cellar by an underground lake!).

I digress.

In truth, the ‘love story’ of the singer and her valiant suitor is mostly correct. I loved her. She loved him, and he loved her. I went mad with love, and there were those who stood in my way and paid the ultimate price for it. In the end, I was redeemed from madness by her compassion. She and the boy left me, a shell of a man with a broken heart skulking about the shell of an opera house with ash for a stage.

There was no Persian police chief involved in any way, shape, or form.

What nonsense.

I have never been to Persia in my life.

Ah. I digress again.

The world thought my story ended that lonely, smoky night when my love left me. In point of fact, however, one could say that was actually when my story truly began.

It is now my great pleasure to set the record straight and hopefully restore my legend to merely a lifetime.

Your most obedient servant,

O.G.

Postscript: I have used the actual names of all persons involved. Except my own. It would not do to have one of those pesky ‘cease and desist’ letters find me.

1. Of Spinsters and Spiders

Mireille Dubienne was a spinster.

There was simply no denying that she was a pushy, sour-faced, and unfortunately, educated spinster of twenty-seven.

Her father held back a sigh as he watched her adjust the thin spectacles on the bridge of her nose and stir a precise amount of sugar—one-and-a-half spoons—into her demitasse of coffee.

If only she had been a boy. Well, no. If she had been a boy, she would have been the next Napoleon, and France already had experience of two of them. On the other hand, she might have had a better life, one that she deserved.

Jean-Paul Dubienne hid his frown behind the pages of
Le Figaro
. He really did try his best to keep her occupied, using her as a kind of private secretary. She had proved quite competent, and to be completely frank, had saved several of his less wise investments from complete disaster. At times, he even caught himself thinking of her in the way he would have thought of a son—a man of affairs with a keen mind and an unshakable sense of honor.

It didn’t bother him that his pragmatic, detail-oriented, and persistent daughter was unmarried. It was that she seemed unhappy, though never confessing it. The shadow of melancholia had come upon her suddenly. One day, she was one of the most brilliant debutantes of the spring of 1869, with all of Paris at her feet. Then, the next day, she withdrew completely from society. Her smiles disappeared, and the light in her eyes became hard. 

Even now, had Mireille wanted, Jean-Paul believed that she could have eminently eligible men seeking her hand. She was not unattractive, thankfully taking after her mother with honey-colored hair and hazel eyes. She might not have been a great beauty, but she was certainly pleasant enough to look at.

He put his newspaper down and sipped his coffee, wondering for the millionth time what had caused his sweet daughter to dissolve into the impenetrable mists of some dark, quiet woman who had forsworn love and all the
coquetteries
that accompanied it.

“Shall I order the carriage for ten o’clock?” Mireille asked, not looking up from the stack of business letters she was perusing. “Carcasonne will be there by eleven, but I should like to have a look around without him breathing down our necks first.”

"
Eh bien
,
ma chérie
, you really think that this is a good idea?" Jean-Paul asked.

"It's a sound investment," Mireille replied. "It will all depend on managing the reconstruction to budget and some clever promoting for the grand reopening. But, that is not hard to do well. I have an idea that will fill every seat on opening night and hopefully many nights after that."

"Oh dear, Mireille," Jean-Paul laughed. "You know how I worry when you begin to talk like that. You are so frightfully..."

"Competent?"

"Exactly!" the older man chuckled. "So, shall I go ahead and sign the papers tomorrow, if we like what we see today?"

"Please do," Mireille replied evenly. "November is only two months away. I will need to get started as soon as possible if we are to have a production ready for the start of the season."

"So frightfully..."

"Competent?"

"Frightfully competent,
ma chérie
," Jean-Paul said with a sad smile. "Have you ever thought of being a little less...?"

"No."

He sighed. "I didn't think so."

***

He had truly tried to end his life as the Opera Ghost and begin a new one as just a man. The quest for redemption and a normal life had lasted all of three months. It wasn't that Kristin Dahlèn's kiss had dimmed in his memory or that its effect had diminished. The holy fervor he felt when he recalled her touch still made him weak in the knees and clutch at his throat in an agony of ecstatic adoration and pain.

It was simply that certain practicalities of life had not changed, even if he had. One of those practicalities, unfortunately, was the fact that half of Paris'
gendarmerie
was out for his blood.

This complicated things quite a bit.

He had plenty of money in his bank account. A fat lot of good it did him when he couldn't walk into a bank to withdraw it, or couldn't rent a flat without meeting the well-meaning and suspicious concierge, or any one of a million things that a man with a whole face could do without a second thought.

Without the ballet mistress Madame Giry as his agent, he was a prince disguised as a pauper, reduced to alley shadows and petty thievery, despite the millions of francs in the name of Monsieur de la Persie in the vaults of Credit Lyonnais.

In the end, he had slunk back to the burned out hulk of the opera house, taking refuge in the ruined cellar he had once called home. It had taken him the better part of three years to make the place habitable again and to rig up certain basic functions within the opera house so that he could have some comfort.

He still had to forage for food and clothing, burgling shops far enough afield from the opera house that no one would suspect the return of the Opera Ghost.

The one advantage he had—meager and measly compared to all that he had to once again endure—was now that the opera house was empty, he could climb to the roof and bask in the warmth of the sunlight without fearing to be seen. But that was small consolation for the crushing loneliness of actually being a ghost in one’s own lifetime.

All this was beginning to settle the routine of his days, which he hoped were numbered before he went mad from grief and solitude. Then...then, there came that damn, blasted day when his own private tomb was invaded! He watched from the flies as two older gentlemen and a young woman picked their way across the charred, dusty debris that still lay strewn about the stage.

"I say, Dubienne," quavered the fat older man, removing his top hat to brush some dust off the top of it—immediately, he shifted on the flies so that more dust drifted down. "What about that ghost fellow? You think he's going to mind having some new managers?"

"Carcasonne, you are an unmitigated chump," the second older man chuckled. "Do you honestly think that the fellow would stay here? This place is like a tomb—cold enough to freeze a dog's balls off."