#shout out to german coproduction

[kristhething-blog]

Historical fashion girlies would be seething if they saw central European fairy tales.

Feel free to admire our period-questionable costumes <3

[real-hidden]

Children in the cellar

A  little bit from my shameful WIP collection! It’s 1880s Erik vs. Faust CoProduction, for @evangelinelark

Show us your bits! (only if you want to!) @rienerose

Children. There were children in the cellar.

Erik clenched his fist around the chain of the lantern and darted back into the corridor, back pressed to the wall. He shuttered the lamp and carefully peered around the corner.

The trapdoors were open. Dull working light filtered down through the openings and between the floorboards. It landed below in squares and beams, illuminating the drifting dust motes... and the children. The boys and girls of the ballet. Hordes of them.

The light streamed down on their upturned faces, kissing their sweat-tousled hair, their over-long eyelashes and perfect little noses. They huddled together shuffling to keep their slippered feet within the bounds of the illuminated squares, not to cross the line into the surrounding darkness. They jostled each other and whispered furiously, pointing up at something they could see in the world above. Erik heard the occasional yelp, a taut string of barely-contained hysteria rising... rising...

They had obviously been told to behave and stay quiet,

but

they were children in a cellar.

They'd opened every trap door, cut off every easy route he could have taken ahead. He'd be obliged to go all the way back to the third cellar, if he didn't wish to crawl through the nearby shafts like a snake.

Erik heard more voices behind him- a handful of coryphees and young scene shifters. He dashed ahead and crouched low into an alcove, far too close to the nearest of the little girls.

If she saw him, if she screamed-

And then one of them did-

a shriek of delight

as a dark shape abruptly dropped through the floor and landed amidst them with with a 'whump' and a blast of dusty air

The little ones shouted and applauded, clamoured 'Me next, ME!'

"And so you see my dears, not the most soft landing, but not so terrible-" said a grown woman's voice. The Strange German-evidently the bundle that had fallen in amongst them- unfolded herself from the floor with a groan and shook out her skirts. "This is why we need our precision. And concentration." She darted to a nearby ladder. "And then we climb, yes? Next position."

Eager little boys broke ranks and surged forward. "Ah Ah Ah!" the woman scolded, stopping them with a single pointed finger. "Where are my disciplined young performers? Who listen?  You know this-  we will all take our turn. But first, we learn how. And where. And learn safely. And we go go go go- vite vite vite! BUT with our control. No pushing! In order. Oui? Think of your music. Position there three four, drop down three four, and walk two three four and climb,climb, climb-climb-climb

The children nodded gravely and split into three groups by size. As a mass, they scrambled up three ladders, the woman pushing up the smallest one's derrieres, nodding approvingly to the older girls, until only scraps of laughter and little eddies of dust were left behind.

The woman checked for wayward lambs one last time before disappearing herself- an ankle, a heel, and flash of black hems up through the trapdoor onto the stage above.

Erik ran to the safety of the next passage with dozens of little footfalls rumbling over his head like thunder

... He'd taken years, taken pains, training the brats to stay out of the cellars. Admittedly, he had made it difficult for himself from the outset, by trying to frighten them away with a ghost. It had worked most effectively on their elders- doors opening and closing, disembodied voices, items moving of their own accord. Adults knew well enough to stay away from hauntings. But children-had they all a death wish? They delighted in his illusions and sought out greater danger. They might be afraid of their own darkened bedrooms, at home, but once released into the theatre, and its land of costumes and paint, without Mother or Father near, they seemed to want nothing more than get themselves killed in the most deadly reaches of the Palais. They would steal onto the roof, dive into the water catchments, climb up Apollo to try and smack his golden backside. It was a miracle none of them broke their necks. They were drawn to the most morbid and awful things: hooting and shrieking and making blood chilling echoes in the dark tiled corridor to the laundries, holding hands and wailing like ghosts themselves, as they rushed along the forbidden catwalks.  A dead pigeon in the alley they could take turns poking with a stick.

If Erik had known then what he knew now, about children, he would have kept them away from the cellars with recitations of multiplications tables, threats of a sensible dinner and early bed. He would have sent disembodied brushes and wet flannels flying down the hall and threatening to comb their hair, wash their nasty little faces. He'd lost count of the number of little children who had stolen down as far as the third cellar, in very real danger of being turned around and perishing of ordinary, workaday exposure and dehydration, chasing rumours of the ghost and his collection of heads and his underground lake!

In the end, Erik had had to wait for evolution itself to intervene, for the danseuses who had begun as rats to become etoiles and tip from delighting in the terror of the Fantome to sensibly avoiding it. They had taken over the task for Erik, most effectively instilling the fear of murder and hellfire and dismemberment underground, with their own punishments to be meted out on any survivors here in the salon above,  into each little underfed child who came through the doors.

It had taken years to banish them from his realm. 

The German would undo everything. And he simply hadn't the energy to do it all again. She must be stopped.  

So.

He would stop her.