Chapter has been updated :)

If you see anything that I got wrong, please let me know.

Disclaimer: I don't own Phantom of the Opera, the ink well, the quills, the ribbon, the ceramic figures, or the mask, but do own the little girl named Annabel, and her grandmother.

New York City, USA

Spring, 2000

11:30 PM

All lights were out in the simple New York apartment. Heavy curtains covered the windows, shutting out all sounds from outside. A door opened slowly as a small eight-year-old girl snuck out of her room. She tiptoed through the hall in her bare feet, careful not to make a sound, for fear of waking her grandmother. She crept into the living room. It was a plain area, with nothing more that a couch, a chair, a TV, a couple of small tables, and a cabinet. Inside the cabinet, a series of small items, which she was never allowed to touch. A black ribbon, a few ceramic figures, a rusted ink well, a few quills, and a white mask.

The girl opened the cabinet, then froze when the little door gave a loud creak. Clearly it hadn't been opened in a while. She reached forward, intending to pick up the mask, but she had hardly laid a finger on it when a voice rang out behind her.

“Annabel Christine Bentley! What do you think you’re doing?”

The girl turned around to see her grandmother, a wizened old woman in her eighties, switch on a light. They both squinted in the sudden brightness.

“I just wanted-”

“Just wanted to get your grubby little hands on my most prized possessions!” the old woman yelled, making the little girl, Anna, start to cry. “Oh, I’m sorry. Come here child.”

The woman embraced Anna for several minutes.

“Grandma”, she asked when she stopped crying, “Why do you keep a broken mask in the cabinet?”

“It’s not broken, it was made that way.”

Anna had asked this because the mask, when put on, would only cover one side of a person’s face. Her grandmother took up the mask from its place on the shelf and motioned for them both to sit down on the couch.

“I keep it because it has history.”

“What history?”

“Oh, I won’t tell you now. It’ll give you nightmares.”

“Please, Grandma, tell me!” she pleaded.

“Oh, all right. It starts almost a hundred and fifty years ago, with my grandmother, Anneliese Giry. She lived in Paris, France, and was studying to be a ballet dancer. When she was fourteen, she, and the other girls who were learning to dance, went to see a group of traveling entertainers. Fire-eaters, acrobats, people with strange abilities or appearances, just about everything you could think of. She enjoyed it all, and had so much fun, until she saw him.”

“Who?”

“Don’t interrupt.”

“Sorry.”

“The last thing she saw there was a boy, in a cage, who always hid his face. A man would go in there, and beat him, and force him to look at the crowd. ‘Devil's child’ he was called. People would laugh at him, call him names, and all sorts of rude things. Oh, the poor boy was only about your age. Anneliese felt sorry for him, so she broke him out of that cage, and led him away. She hid him inside the opera house. There were many tunnels underground. He loved it, and spent his whole life there.”

“What happened to him?”

“I’m getting there.”

“Oh.”

“Years went by as both the boy (whose name was Erik) and Anneliese grew up. All through those years, strange things happened in the opera house; people would be found strangled to death, mysterious notes from an ‘O.G.’ would be found, a voice would be heard upon occasion, that sort of thing.”

“Who was O.G.?”

“It meant ‘Opera Ghost’. It was one of the names the boy Erik went by in his life beneath the Opera Populaire (the name of the opera house).”

“What were the other names?”

“Phantom of the Opera, Angel of Music, Trapdoor Lover, even Angel of Death, upon occasion; those are the only ones I can remember. Uh, where was I?”

“They heard voices.”

“Ah, yes. Later, in the year 1870, the Phantom, as Erik liked to be called, became easier and easier to anger. This was because he had fallen in love with a young singer named Christine Daae. He wanted her to be a star, and nearly succeeded. He would have to, except the other performers in the opera house got angry. They were tired of the Phantom forcing them to do things, so they hunted him down. They never found him, though. He escaped. All they found were his possessions. These included a music box, a miniature stage and people, some of which are in the cabinet, and a white mask, which he left behind.”

“So that mask-”

“Yes, that was his.”

“And the other stuff-”

“Yes, those were his, to.”

“How did you get it?”

“Anneliese’s daughter, Meg Giry, took it the night the Phantom escaped.”

“What happened to him after that?” Anna asked.

“I don’t know. Most likely, he went into hiding elsewhere, but where, I can’t tell you. After that day, no one has seen him ever again.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Oh, no, of course not. No one can live for that long.”

Anna brushed a small hand over the mask, as if she wanted to meet the man who wore it so many years ago. Her grandmother stood up from the couch and walked over to the cabinet.

“Come here, child,” she said.

She got up and went over to her grandmother, who took the black ribbon and tied it around Anna’s skinny wrist.

“There,” the old woman said, “Now the Angel of Music will watch over you, to.”

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