Journey Of The Mask
by Nancy Hill Pettengill
Category: Fiction

In The Phantom Of The Opera, Leroux gave us the tragic story of a lonely, disfigured man who was hopelessly drawn to a woman he could never have. In the end, he died of a broken heart. …Or did he? What really happened to him in the spring of 1882? Here is the rest of the story, taken from the papers of an indisputable source-Erik, the Phantom. Erik gives up his cellars and malicious games in favor of one last, desperate attempt to find the acceptance he has always sought and never found. No longer alone and with an unfamiliar sensitivity struggling to surface, his efforts to rejoin life above the ground appear successful until his own past threatens to throw him once more into the fires of hell. His journey to the edge of that hell and back, twisted and strewn with obstacles, tests him in ways he could never have anticipated. "I would finally be rewarded for all the years of humiliation and degradation that I had suffered. No one would stand in my way!" No one…but Erik himself.