Chapter One

Alison Taylor was watching Phantom of the Opera for the hundredth time. Literally, the hundredth time. She had watched the 2004 movie on her birthday last year and immediately loved it. So she watched it again. And again. And again. After the thirtieth time, she had actually started to keep track. She loved all of it, but there was one thing she watched it for more than anything else. She watched it to see the Phantom.

There was just something about him that caught and kept her attention. He was just so amazing! It seemed to her like he was good at everything he did (with the exception of wooing women). He was a composer and an artist and an architect. He seemed so mature and, at the same time, sensitive, unlike most of the guys she knew from college. That included her boyfriend, Patrick.

He didn't seem to understand her fixation with Phantom of the Opera. "It's just a musical like any other," he would always say. "Not to mention that the title character is seriously creepy."

That always upset her. Patrick was seeing the Phantom through the eyes of all of the blind people who only looked at the outside, not the inside. Whenever she tried to point this out, he would laugh and change the topic. She had stopped arguing with him about it after a while. Neither of them ever conceded anything and so she had just stopped talking about it.

But she hadn't stopped thinking about it. Which was why she was watching it again. She had gotten to the part that always frustrated her, All I Ask of You. She didn't deny that Emmy Rossum and Patrick Wilson looked kind of cute together as Christine and Raoul, but their almost willful blindness bothered her. It's so obvious that the Phantom is RIGHT THERE! she thought, as she had a hundred times before. If you just turned your heads a little bit you would be able to see him. Why shouldn't he be there? It's his opera house. He knows everything that goes on in it. And most obviously, he is seriously in love with Christine. OF COURSE he would be watching her, especially if she ran out to be alone with her childhood sweetheart. The scene always made her sad. She could see the Phantom's utter heartbreak in his face and she felt such sympathy for him. He had been stuck in the opera house alone for most of his life and when he finally found someone he could love, she utterly rejected him! Why Christine had done that had never made sense to Alison.

Finally, the scene came to an end. Christine and Raoul ran off together, happy and in love. Then the camera showed the red rose that Christine had dropped. A black clad figure stooped to pick it up. His pain showed in his eyes. "I gave you my music, made your song take wing, and now, now you've repaid me, denied me and betrayed me." Alison felt the familiar lump in her throat. It was so unfair that a man like this would be rejected so harshly. "He was bound to love you, when he heard you sing." The Phantom whispered Christine's name in a voice heavy with sorrow.

She felt tears starting in her eyes to match those in his. She longed with all her heart to comfort him, to tell him that everything was going to be all right, but she knew that would never happen. He was just a character in a musical and she would never be able to talk to him. Full of compassion and pity, she reached out to touch his face on the computer.

She immediately felt silly for touching an image with such feeling. It was only a picture, after all. Alison went to pull her hand back, but found that she couldn't. It almost looked like her fingers had sunk into the computer. She pulled again. No luck. Her hand was moving into the computer in a way that shouldn't have been possible according to all the laws of science, slowly at first but then faster. Her arm followed, then her shoulder. Her shock at what was happening turned to horror only quickly enough for her to scream once before she had vanished completely into the computer. When her roommate Kylie came to investigate the scream, all she found was the Phantom of the Opera still playing from Alison's computer into an empty room.