I bring these to you in parts so I can keep in better contact while I do these very last pages. I want to have it all finished by September 1st, hopefully midnight, but that means I'll be staring at my computer screen quite a lot for the next ~28 hours!

So here is part 1 of chapter 51.

Sorry I haven't named this yet. I realized it was unnamed and I really can't make a decision last minute. I'm going to probably reread the part of the book that served as inspiration for some little something. For those of you who have read Leroux, I'm sure this chapter will invoke a VERY specific scene.

It was... quite insane to write. And yet I knew all along it would happen, even on those days Lily fell asleep on the attic rug after Erik brought her tea.



HE'S (@) THERE
Chapter 51 –

As soon as I closed my eyes, my head felt like it was floating away, and there were vibrations throughout my body as if I were projecting into the shadow realm. Gravity came on me very suddenly after that, plunging me into my senses. I heard a humming sound as if it were coming to me through a tube, my chin was shaking against the top of my chest, and when I dared to see, there was a night sky all around me with stars of different colors. The stars were moving together as if the sky were made up of plates, but to my side, something empty and black blocked out the lights.

When my vision sharpened, I realized Erik and I were in a car together, and I was slumped down in the passenger's seat, feeling the engine beneath me, and barely able to see the horizon. I didn't move, I just watched him. He didn't look himself anymore. There was no white face that caught the highway lights, only something veiled in torn black fabric. He focused on the road as the peaceful stars passed in silence, but his hands were sporadically jerking and I could feel the car swerve. He reminded me of someone just in that moment whom I recognized as the ride went along as Mr. Parker in our production, planning to kill Edgar...

That made me sit up a little. I regret that these were my first words, but I asked him very calmly “how's Westin?” His head faced me like a doll's turned at the neck. Nothing to say. “How's Westin?” He looked back to the road. Nothing to say.

Outside the window, signs with unfamiliar names passed in a blur. The cars in front of us in other lanes all fell behind. “Where are we going?” I asked, and by now I knew I wasn't where I should be, but my head was throbbing and running Three Bedroom House on merciless repeat.

Out, out, out
Time to get out, out, out,
Gotta just rip out this page, bend the bars of the cage,
And run free!
Free!
No one but Edgar, you and me
Gotta go find him and move on
And be gone before the dawn...

The words were helping me, however, even if I didn't know that my head needed the clouds dispelled. I was remembering where I had been, and how the last thing I had experienced was applause, which roared even into the darkness and hid the sounds of my stumbling backwards into an abyss.

I turned to my captor. “What are you doing?” I asked. “What did you do?” He wouldn't speak to me, but I didn't dare touch him. I knew that everything was wrong. I backed up as far as I could into my seat and tried to hug my knees but I was in nothing but Shelley's slip, coat, and shoes. I threw down my feet again and stepped into something white lying under the dashboard, but before I could wonder what, my hand flattened over the side of the door and I realized it was smothered with tape.

By now I had no instinct but to whimper, and that made his swerving a little more violent. Someone had to notice this, I thought. We were somewhere in between two groups of cars on the highway, and by now we had entered two walls of trees. With every shaky breath as I prayed for someone to come closer to us, I could hear his, too.

What about the three bedroom house?
The three bedroom house?
Who do you save when your house is on fire?
Your house is on fire?
Your house is on fire?

The moment stretched on far too long, and because the cars weren't catching up, as if they may have been a lost hope to me, I started panicking even more. With my face in my hands, I could feel blood on my forehead and a fresh pain from the pressure. How could this end? He was going to fucking kill me. He'd fucking kill me. I rocked back and forth, chanting “I want to go back, I want to go back,” until my fallen angel cut over me with deep gasps. Deep, and so angry.

“Shut up!” He ordered, but I couldn't stop. “I don't drive well under pressure, and this will not end well if you don't fucking shut up!” He ground under his breath, which continued past those words in a sharp cusp of something like anguish.

We were coming closer to some cars in front of us and Erik cut into the other lane sharply enough to jerk me toward him. I looked out the window and saw a man in the car coming up, and I tried to wave my arms, but his eyes laid dead before the road and he didn't see me. “You'll stop that. Or I'll pull over.”

“I want to go back! Take me back!”

“Chloroform will make you sick, and I don't want to use it twice. Shut up,” he plead without ever looking to me.

I didn't know what I could possibly do. I couldn't fight him in the car. I tamed my breath only once we came off an exit onto a road surrounded in even denser trees, enough to swallow us into a tunnel that blocked out the sky. I pressed myself flat against the seat and watched us travel God knows where. I tried to ask, as calmly as possible, “Why are you doing this?” When he didn't answer, I asked “Why do you have to do this?” “I have none of my things. Are you going to take me back?” “Can you at least tell me where you want to take me, what you want me to do?” “I don't want something horrible to happen to us. You can stop.” “You told me you want to be able to stop for me.”

“Not so you can leave me,” he finally answered. “Not so you can forget about me!”

“Just because I can't be with you doesn't mean I want to forget about you. I don't want to forget about you. You know how important you are.” As I said it, we both heard my phone beep. I didn't even remember I had it on me, but before I could do anything Erik dug into my pocket. He read whatever the message was and I heard the vitriol in his breath before he rolled down his window and tossed the phone out.

A lump started growing in my throat. We came to an intersection and the headlights of another car were in his face, which between that shredded material was a palette of flesh-colored bandages. His eyes were red and glazed; I knew he'd been crying the entire time, then, but he was collected, and he said very suddenly: “It's still cold at night, Christine, and you have never worn the dress I gave you.” He pointed to the floor at the light shape at my feet, but all I did was shake my head. I repeatedly reminded him how much I had loved him, how much I was sorry, but his response was nearly the same every time. “You'll be cold, Christine.” “You'll be cold where we go.” “If you want to start placating, put on the dress I gave you and be quiet. I'll tell you when you can talk to me.”

The words were enough to return me to my trembling, and I sat in the seat beginning to cry silently, but he reminded me once more, and I gathered up the dress. I took off my coat, zipped down the latch, and put my legs inside. I pulled the sleeves over my shoulder and drew the zipper up, but while I was doing so a tear hit my lap. Erik never made any further acknowledgment of it.

Then, we came from trees to rusty, ivy-covered buildings seen in the car's headlights. We seemed to have entered a city of no one but he and I. In the distance was a water tower, which I fixed my gaze on in hope that I wouldn't lose my focus from tears. He pulled over before I expected him to, stopped the car, and immediately turned off the lights. “You'll come with me.”

“Let's just stay in the car. Please. Let's talk here. I want to talk to you.”

“We're not staying here. Get out.”

“But you didn't tell me where you're--” He reached forward and took my wrist, and I fought him before he knelt on the driver's seat and managed to drag me across the center and through the door. I screamed for help before his hand covered my mouth and I tripped over myself in our resulting struggle, grating my knee against the pavement.

He took me out into the weeds between two buildings in shadow. I was tripping again and again in his grasp, pressed against him, winded by his arm which repeatedly hooked me around my stomach to correct my path. He took us through an open door into a structure plagued with gaps and screenless windows which let the dim glow of the moon and the streetlights fall atop our heads. The most disturbing reality hit me when I saw that there were several people here, in the corners of that vast room, watching Erik force me through. They never stopped him. We descended a stairwell in plain sight, a well which seemed to descend into flickering blue flames, but no one did a thing. No one stood up.

That realization made me fall to my knees and Erik's grip to catch me forced out all my breath into a wail of terrified confusion. Under the faltering florescent light, encased in webs and infested with dead insects, Erik hung over me, and beyond my understanding he was looking on me as if I were a great tragedy. As if he witnessed a victim to a predator that he could not recognize as himself. He could see where the floorboards had hit me on the head. And it seemed to be with reluctance that he took my wrist and tried to tug me further, before I screamed “You're hurting me!” He heard the pain in my voice and loosened his hand, but took both of mine and lead me backwards, through lukewarm water leaking through the wall, and into a pitch black room where nothing waited but our echoes.

* * *

I always wished I had been stronger, more athletic, less afraid of a little pain. I wanted to be a threat if anybody should ever try to hurt me. I forgot about this desire as soon as I started to find pleasure in being protected by my Angel. I picked Erik like the noble type. The kind who never hurt anyone unless they tried to hurt me. I could recognize that he was powerful, and agile, very calm, and very quiet, and thought that all of these things would forever be for my protection, and my attraction.

Nothing naturally does anything, Erik said once. Too much of anything will destroy something more important. We can all fall into insanity and must be very careful to keep ourselves in check.

He knew his way around the dark and tied me to a chair. My arms were above my head and strung hard against a beam right behind me with something cold and denser than rope, something I knew was draining the blood out of my hands and wearing away at the skin on my wrists.

Then I heard him fall against the door in broken moans, his body given over to tremors. I kept trying to breathe, to keep a clear mind even throughout this stunning testament of my own perpetrator's pain, but the air I took in was thick with the stench of wet wood. Rotten wood. I wanted a scarf to cover my face. I wanted my hands back. But all I could do was listen to his cries, and it would prove I had nothing to argue for when Erik finally spoke to me, telling me he knew he had surrendered to his own desperation.

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry!” He shouted at me even while he couldn't see me, and for a while I just listened before he forced the lights on me very suddenly, chasing the darkness off a storage room vaster than I'd imagined with towers of crates and cardboard. The circuitry was so poor that I saw Erik crawling toward me as if through cold, murky water. He threw his arms around my leg and hugged me at the knees. “This isn't what I want to do to you. Everything I've been doing, I don't want any of it!”

I remained stony-faced, staring at the ceiling, even as my tears fell and he brushed against the cuts on my knee, which he recognized amidst his apology and kissed despite my squirming. “Please, just listen to me: there was nowhere else I could take you. You were going to run away from me. You were going to tell me to go away again. I'm not safe anywhere, not even here, but at least here I can have another moment with you.”

My eyes fell upon his ragged hair, growing dark brown at the roots, mixed between black shreds which spun around his head and fell on his shoulders. While he faced the floor, I squeezed my right hand against my bonds, but they were too tight to budge. “You be right; you don't love me. If you did, this would make sense to you. You would know why I have to have you. You don't have to come with me. I can run away and come back, as long as I know you're waiting. You offered to wait for me, and I didn't take it, but I take it now! ...Why aren't you answering me?!”

Although we met eyes for a short moment, my gaze seemed to terrify him, and he looked down on my feet as I said “you took me unwillingly.”

While brushing away the dirt from my feet and ankles, he answered “I didn't want to do this!”

“I'm not going to forgive you for this,” I said to the ceiling, as I tried to ignore the sensation of his touch. “This isn't love...” I told him, before those gentle hands gripped me at the calves, and he hovered over my lap.

“Don't tell me what love is!”

“Whatever it is to you, I never wish to have it.”

To this, he grew considerably quiet before growling to my face: “Well now I wish the same!”

I turned my face away, but he got up to pace the room, and when he came somewhere behind me and I couldn't see him anymore, I squinted my eyes and tried to stop my tears from blocking my vision. “That's what you have been this entire time – another form of agony, the kind I tried and tried to turn backward on itself, to justify, to adore, and God, do I adore you... I have never before appreciated being so goddamn tortured...”

He heard me sniveling and charged into view again. “Just stop that. Let me think.” I cast my face to my lap and tried to swallow my trembling voice. “I'm going to fix this. I'm going to make you want me again.”

“We can't solve this, Erik... I can't argue with you... You don't listen to me, Erik...”

“I'll listen to you. I've got nothing to do now but listen to you. I can hear you. Speak to me... Speak to me, Christine, speak to me,” he said, pacing back to where I couldn't see, but his voice could travel right through me in this room. I had no choice but to let my first thought be extracted under this tack.

“You never told me you were schizophrenic,” I said. I took a deep breath again and could taste the wood.

“What did you say?” He asked, though he seemed to have heard the most important word.

“You never told me you were... schizophrenic.”

“And you think that means something.” It did if he'd hidden it from me, but I went no further with that thought. I didn't want to provoke him. I knew I had already. “Suddenly something about Erik makes sense. We know how to treat him, now. We have to be careful. He's not really there.”

“I never said that.”

“Do you think I'm an idiot, now? Do you think everything I have ever felt was nothing?”

“No. I know you're very intelligent, and you've a right to your feelings. I'm the one who's- who's a-an idiot.”

“Being careful with Erik, now. I don't like it when you're afraid of me! You've been hurt but it was an accident! I would never hurt you! I love you more than anyone will ever love you.”

“If you keep me like this, there is one thing I'll know for certain about you, Erik, one thing you'll never be able to hide: that you don't love m-m-”

“STOP TELLING ME WHETHER OR NOT I LOVE YOU!” He cut over me, resounding and thunderous.

A considerable amount of effort had taken me this far without growing hysterical, but now I regretted so intensely ever bringing this up that I was sobbing, choking on the air, and my head was pulsating around the area where I had been smacked. He was ordering me to stop, but my sobs turned into screams for help. I wouldn't believe that this could happen below sentient human beings who had seen that I was taken against my will.

“Do you know how many homeless schizophrenics scream their heads off around here? Ah, you wouldn't, but there are enough, trust me. I change my mind; I'd like to hear this. Try to sound different from them.” He rose his hand above his head and tried to seem quite grand even through my loudest, more ear-splitting pleas. “No, I'm sorry, but that sounds just the same. You sound very confused, like you're afraid of things in your imagination, because you don't have the ability or the desire to control what you hear,” he said, backing into the wall, slumping down with his hand over his stomach, losing his voice. “You let all the voices meld together,” he tried to assert with new strength, but he had none left. “You're living in a world of noise just like when I found you; anything sways you; anything makes you scared. I can't believe I've had no effect on you.”

On a normal day, I'd know it was in vein, and that another tactic was my next hope, but I could no longer think straight and I continue to cry until Erik covered his ears and then kicked a stack of crates clear across the floor. The look I received petrified me to stone, tore me straight down the middle. So little was between us.

But no, fighting a possession by the fire in his eyes, he came to the power board, shut off all the lights, and slammed the door. I heard the lock turn from across the way and saw the shadow vanish from beneath the door.

* * *

Deep space, where my echoes did all seem to be in my head: that's where I resided then. Static covered my vision now that my head had been subject to so much pain. I wanted to mash my hands against my forehead, but my hands were so tightly bound they were now tingling when I twitched even a finger.

There was someone strong enough to break these bonds. I wished I wasn't thinking it, I worried Erik could see right through me, but I wanted Westin to be here to save me. I would be with no one from hereon, but I missed his face already after a few hours. And the worst part was I felt like a horrible person for feeling at peace when we kissed safely inside the world of the play.

My true terror was here in the dark.

* * *

There was no way to tell how much time passed when the lock turned and the door was opened carefully. He breathed deeply each time, closed the door, and suddenly delivered an anger-tinged train of thought just barely audible to me.

“You will never be able to appreciate what a horrible thing you have done in taking away my control. I had to earn my control, put in more work than any normal person would ever have to. It was my pride, my gift. I gave my blood for it. I ruined everything just to have even a piece of control, and for you.”

No matter what he said, I resolved not to speak anymore.

“I turned down a different future for you. I took a job under someone it makes me sick to be around. I dropped below the radar for you. The places you take for granted are entirely inaccessible to me now. I can't go to a doctor. I had to learn to treat my own wounds. I stole for you, I betrayed my own father for you. I stole from my father. I lied to everyone. I did favors for people I despised so you could have a ride to wherever you wanted. I had to run away from my crimes for as long as it was possible while accommodating your every whim. I had to sleep in the cold, in the dirt, feeling worthless. Just because you couldn't tell doesn't make it any less true! Just because we were together didn't mean sometimes I didn't want to slice my own wrists for the last time! You make me feel like all this pain was for nothing. There is virtually nothing more you could do to ruin my life.”

My head pulsated as every word was grated at me. If my wrists were bound any longer, I worried the pain was going to make me sick.

“I don't want to be here anymore,” he continued. “It's not only a checkmate – I've lost my resolve.”

He waited, but the silence was his only response, and it didn't seem anymore like he could believe his own words. “Don't tell me you don't love me! I know you don't love me! Just tell me it was worth it. Tell me you loved to be around me.” I took a deep breath again and felt my tears, even hotter now, rolling down my cheeks. “Please, just tell me that.”

“I-I loved to be with you, Erik.”

“Now have me do what you want. What do you want me to do?”

“Turn the lights on, Erik. Just turn the lights on. I just want to be able to see again.”

He thought it over, and then I could see, and he could too. He looked upon me like an awful discovery and came to stand right over me. “I want to know you meant it. You look so unhappy right now, and I can't stand it.”

“It's just the rope. I promise I meant it. My wrists just hurt so badly.” He gaze me a wide stare and then took my hands. He knew the knot he'd done and looked ready to free me, all in a moment, but he stopped.

“You can't leave me yet.”

“I won't leave you,” I said. He came close to me and the torn fabric around his face touched my chest. He wouldn't choose to do it unless he could see through me, and see that I meant it. Slowly, he undid his work and took both my wrists in his hands, caressing them with his thumbs. I could hear him crying again at the damage he had done, but he tried not to let me see and hid his face by resting against me.

“Oh God...” He let go of my wrists and knelt there, saying nothing more, but trembling. I knew that he was scared like a little boy, and for just a moment, I was almost ready to take on Christine's saintly charity. I was almost going to let him have me; to surrender to a tide which kept slamming and disorienting me in hopes I could tame the ocean. “Lily...”

I wanted to be a savior, I had accepted his warnings over and over again, but now I needed the strength to disown it all: to admit I was not a stormcatcher, I was not his angel. My hand fell on his back and tried to calm the tremors as I stared ahead. This had to be my last tear, and it fell from my chin and dropped to Erik's face.

I thought for a moment the tear had undone a spell of rage, but he withdrew himself without ever setting eyes on me again. It was like he was blocking me out, and couldn't forgive me, and had some place to go, although he was almost fighting with himself on the way across the room. “Erik...” I started. He stepped through the threshold, blind to me. “Erik!” I couldn't free myself before he closed the door gently and turned the lock again.