Igenlode Wordsmith

Here -- for my proofreading purposes! -- is my "Writers Anonymous" challenge entry combined with the "Phantom's Haunting One-Shot" contest, which means the title and theme of the story have to be "Annoyance" (I think I slipped up rather on the intended theme...), plus it has to have 'spooky' or Hallowe'en content and be in the Horror, Supernatural, Sci-Fi, Suspense, or Mystery genres of FFnet. I haven't quite decided on the genre yet, but I'll probably go with Horror/Romance given the way that the story has turned out: I was planning for plain old Supernatural with a grumpy Erik, but then he went all creepily homicidal on me...

Annoyance

The dead won't leave Erik alone. But he truly can't understand why.

Erik sees faces, sometimes, in the dark.

He sees many things in the shadowed passageways of his home, the domain he has claimed for his own, and not all of them are real. Or not in the ways that one would think. He understands that better than anyone, being himself an unreal thing: the Phantom of the Opera.

The neat simplicity of that conclusion pleases him, and he chuckles out loud, as he often does in the silence when he is alone. The echo is not pleasant, but he is accustomed to that.

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Written for the Halloween Challenge at the Writers Anonymous forum on FFnet -- or, to be more honest, this is the scene I was planning to write as an in-fandom 'Halloween Special', and which I thought I might be able to shoehorn into the terms of the contest. I'm not really sure it will qualify (and certainly won't win on the stipulated grounds of 'how well the theme is incorporated'), since it's basically nothing to do with October or Halloween but just a retelling of the canonical graveyard scene from Leroux's book -- which, for some inscrutable reason, the author chose to present in the form of an after-the-fact police witness interview, thus stripping the Hammer Horror potential from the distinctly unnerving events actually implied to have taken place!

I have spent a good deal of effort on dithering as to whether I ought to take it up to the end of the chapter by including the last two scenes or not, or simply cut it off for better horror effect with the discovery of Raoul's apparently lifeless body as the finale. I was pretty much certain that the latter was the better course of action, but with the epilogue busy constructing itself in vivid impressions in my head, I made the mistake of deciding to write it out and then to ignore it. Unfortunately I enjoyed inventing Antoine far too much...

So I've more or less decided to enter the whole thing for the contest, which effectively constitutes a genre shift from pure horror to more of a focus on Raoul and Christine's relationship with one another and with her father. At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it :-p
Horror/Romance won't do as a category, because there really isn't any bar Raoul's remembered frustration, but I think Horror/Family can be made to fit if we consider the quasi-foster-sibling relationship they have at this point.

This Mask of Death

“...je ne sais point jusqu’où s’en fut mon imagination, ni où elle s’arrêta...”

It was a cloudless night, with the moon riding cold and distant above, and the world was in the grip of a hard frost. Snow had fallen to veil the barren ground, and the ancient granite slabs that kept their sentry-watch across the moor — like so many cairns piled by the hands of giants — wore wind-blown drifts of white between their stacked stones, as if korrigans dwelt within and had stopped up the draughts with handfuls of snow in lieu of heather. But the biting breeze that had sprung up at sunset had long since ebbed to silence, and the high heath lay frozen and unmoving beneath the moon. Only the waves tossed endlessly in the bay far below, hissing with age-old hunger against their pallid fringes of sand.

And in the graveyard at Perros-Guirec, where the hill ran down to the sea, a shadow moved amongst the dead.

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