• "Let me go!" I cried, but my words went unanswered. Erik dragged me farther and farther through a hellish maze of tunnels, twisting my arm cruelly in his anger. Why oh why did I rip off his mask...?

    I had started to fear this man's anger even more than I had feared my mother's hard hand. Physical pain was nothing new to me; I could merely shut myself down emotionally and confront the pain later. But his fear? This horrible, irrational fear consumed me. My mind worked faster and faster as my breathing came shorter and shorter.

    "Erik, please!" I cried, my voice cracking an octave. This recieved a reply of a glance, one so horrible and venomous that I felt my spirit wither. Erik tugged me forward again, making me stumble, and continued his near-sprinting pace.

    "You stupid, stupid woman!" I heard him hiss after awhile. "You really think that you could stand the sight of this monstrosity?" He turned violently and faced me, and though I wanted to deny my fear, I could only repress a shudder of horror.

    "Let me go!" I cried again, squirming and wriggling until I wormed my way out of his grasp. I didn't wait for him to try and reclaim me; I raised my hand and struck him across his face.

    And then I ran.

    My heart pounded in my chest, the noise blocking off any other sound I could have heard. If he had been angry at me before for exposing his face, how would he act when he registered the fact that I had struck his naked flesh?

    I turned, again, and again, now this way, now that; I had entered a labyrinth of tunnels.

    "... a labyrinth from which no man has escaped alive."

    Erik's words wrapped themselves around my brain, intesifying my fear to a new degree. Suddenly, I could hear footsteps behind me, racing to catch up. Oh God! It was him! It was the Opera Ghost!

    I put on an extra burst of sped and found myself in a room full of mirrors, angled in such a way so that there were not two, but tow dozen of me! I turned round and round, searching for and exit, but in my searouch, I yeilded none, and in turn lost the path I entered in! I was trapped!

    And then I heard the music.

    The voice--the song--started out angry and scalding at first, which made me act instinctively by walking backwards into a mirror. Or rather, the edge of a mirror. I felt a shap stig as glass sliced through my shirtsleeve and my skin. The pain rising up my arm impeccably reflected the pain in the music.

    As the blood started to run down my arm and wrist, the music changed. It filled my mind and my soul with a curiousity, and then a concern. The latter emotion started to sooth the fire in my flesh, unknotting my tension. My body slid down the mirror slowly--painfully, in fact, for now the glass had cut my wrist.

    But the music! Oh, what was pain to this? My eyes closed in ecstacy as the sound filled my soul. I could feel something warm and sticky on my hand; that was irrelevant. All that mattered was the music.

    I don't know how long I sat there, drinking in the music, before the sound stopped. I don't know how long it was before I heard a voice say, "Stupid, stupid Gemma." But I do know this: when my eyes fluttered open, very weakly, it seemed I say a pair of black, intelligent eyes, like illighted tunnels, staring at me before my vision swam and went dark.

    Part One