The Phantom of Stage 16

The first picture I ever made was called One Glance. It was the story of a man who falls hopelessly in love with a girl after catching just one glimpse of her in a crowded train station. He didn’t know her name or anything else about her. All he’d caught was a fleeting look at her face and a brief echo of her voice, but he knew he couldn’t live without her. The movie followed his ten-year journey to find her again without knowing a thing about her. I’d always thought that the story was sappy and preposterous. I never believed that someone could truly fall in love so quickly, until the day she wandered onto Stage 16.

Why did it only take one look? Just one brief glance at that face was all I needed. It wasn’t that remarkable of a face. Certainly, she was very pretty, even beautiful, but I had seen beautiful women before. Dozens of beautiful girls passed through this studio every year. I’d spent the last sixteen years of my life in that metropolis of beautiful faces known as a movie studio. Why was this girl special? She shouldn’t have been different from any of the others. I should have merely frightened her away and forgotten her like I had the others who stumbled across Stage 16.

I should have forgotten her, but I didn’t. Even after she was gone, her face was burned in my mind’s eye, and her voice rang in my ears. I’d had dozens of women in love with me, and I’d been engaged five times, but I’d never known anything like this. Was this what they called love? Was this what I’d pledged to so many actresses in so many movies? I had never expected it to be like this. This was torture. This was something eating away at me from inside. It consumed what little was left of my mind and my heart. It wouldn’t have been torture before, and I knew it. Six years ago, it would have been wonderful. I would have charmed her off her feet in a moment. A starstruck girl from somewhere wanting to be an actress. She would have swooned at the thought that the very king of Hollywood was interested in her. Now, I didn’t even dare to approach her. I had become something low and loathsome. I, the great star of a bygone era, couldn’t even stand face to face with a nobody like her.

I shouldn’t have wanted it. For six years I hadn’t wanted to see anyone or have anyone see me. Now I longed more than anything else to be with another person, talk to another person, and actually be regarded as a fellow human being. I didn’t care that I wasn’t a star. I wouldn’t want her to know me as a star. I wanted her to see me and get to know me as just a man. I didn’t know how it happened so quickly, but from the moment I laid eyes on her, I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her. Not in front of a camera for thousands of adoring fans, but just because I was hopelessly in love. I didn’t know anything about her, not even her name, but I was hers completely.

Of course, I’d frightened her away as I had the others. Keeping myself hidden was the most important thing in my life. I would never again let the world see this face that had once been so famous. It wasn’t a fit sight for any eyes now. A mirror had now become a hated thing to me, as had all my great movies. There was only one film I would watch, the film that I wouldn’t allow anyone else to see. The great epic film that had ruined me, Faust. Through some strange wish to torture myself, I watched that film over and over, just looking at that face that used to be mine. Sometimes I would just play the opening scene over and over and watch as my aged face transformed into a young and handsome one, even though I knew that it never did. Oh, the editing department had done a very good job of making the sequence smooth without the use of a final shot of my perfect physiognomy, but I knew why the camera suddenly cut to a shot of me standing up and looking in the mirror. They had to film it that way, because they couldn’t achieve the final shot they needed. The long-awaited look at the striking face of a virile young man after a week of it being concealed under the mask of a decrepit old scholar was never achieved. That shot was never taken, nor would it ever be taken, because that face was gone. That face had been stripped away along with all those false faces that had been layered on top of it to achieve a perfect transformation sequence. My face, my career, and my fortune had been taken away from me just to achieve a bit of sensationalism, and they wondered why the makeup artists had disappeared shortly after the accident.

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Hello, everyone! I unfortunately haven't even written a full second chapter for this story, but I'm going to try and get back to writing it! In the meantime, here's all that's left of what I've written! Please let me know what you think!