Chapter Text
Erik did not sleep.
He wondered if there was some exquisite punishment in the insomnia, if he had angered some ancient deity to earn such a punishment. That...plus the face, well. It was all a bit overkill, wasn’t it?
He bent over his papers in the office that sat above the world that he inhabited. Phantasma: occupying 75% of Coney Island's famous, historic boardwalk, it was a monument to his genius, according to the New York Times. It was also, according to himself, a monument to what he couldn’t do: sleep.
Below him, only a few lights twinkled; even the city that never slept had a bedtime, and it was far past it. Long gone were the ride operators, the visitors, the beachgoers, the sideshow barkers. He eyed the tattered sofa in the corner of the room. Perhaps if he sat, or lay down, it would be enough to lull his body into resting. He certainly wasn't going to get any composing done.
There it was again – a sound of metal hitting wall, or ground or....something. He crept up from his desk to peer out the window, as though seeing the pitch-black night would help him hear better.
A raccoon, then, if not rats tumbling the trash cans in the alley. They should have been chained together tighter...
Another smash – louder, harder. No, this would be no cat, not even a racoon; and the raccoons were dog-sized these days. Something bigger was loudly rifling through his park.
He reached for his worn jacket, the black half-mask that covered the more...unsightly side of his odd visage, and headed for the door. He tapped the pocket, ensuring his phone was still there, his keys jangling against his belt loop, the thousands of locks in the park ensuring he looked ridiculous whenever he carried the enormous keyring.
He left the light on. At the last moment, he turned and grabbed the old baseball bat he kept behind the door.
He plodded down the iron staircase to the ground floor of the aerie, hopeful that by the time he reached the door the disturbance would have already left. He would not call the police; he liked to maintain an unofficial border between the NYPD and his park as much as humanly possible. The macabre, the fanciful, the decadent, the experimental...all of these looked the same to the dull-witted people of the police force, which was: a threat. No, he had certainly been adequately harassed by them for the crime of wearing a mask enough to know they would not make this, or any, situation better.
His phone was for the flashlight, and he flicked it on before opening the door to the outside. The enormous April moon was vibrant enough, but still he pointed the light at the ground and carefully stepped to where he heard the commotion.
The Wonder Wheel creaked eerily in the distance, and he made a mental note to check it tomorrow. The park was silent, save for the tapping of rat feet scurrying away from his feet on uneven boardwalk planks. The looming clown-faced entrance to the fun house glowed in the moon, and he tried not to focus on how the shadows of the buildings made it seem more ominous as it was.
He had come here, once, as a child with his Aunt Marie on a rare day out, and had always loved the odd, vintage charm of the place. Of course, the park had burned down half a dozen times from when it had been built in the late-1800s, but some of the buildings seemed like they had always been there, some dark-minded Poseidon erecting them from the sands to serve as temples of joy. Tiny, maskless-for-the-day Erik had found himself at the top of the wheel, at the bottom of the haunted house, and through the oddly erotic sideshows. He clutched his aunt's hands as he looked up at the murals of two-headed twins, a mermaid, a giant...his aunt tried to pull him away from the freak shows, an odd relic of the old times, but he pulled her onward, insisted they pay their quarters to see. There was something comforting in knowing they had always been there, would always be there, that there was a history of people who knew what it was to be stared at, to be mocked. He had never seen so many usual things in one place, and when they returned uptown on the train, sticky with cotton candy, he made his plan known.
"I want to live there."
Several failed business ventures later, a music school dropout found himself with his mother's meager inheritance and the chance to stop the city from bulldozing the whole thing. That was the early 2000s, and now he sat on a park that threatened to turn a profit...any day now.
Only, of course, if people did not stop trying to break in.
"Oi!" Erik threw his voice, a trick from his clown school (also dropout) days. His own voice echoed back to him from the empty alleys. Perhaps it was no one. Perhaps they had already moved on, seeing the trash picked through already.
"Hello?" He called. "Show yourself. If you're hungry, there's food for you, just-"
A snarl from behind him told him his hunch was wrong. Not only was he not alone in the park, but it was not human.
He turned slowly, hands up.
An enormous...bigger than any cat, most dogs...was something...furry. A...bear? Were there even bears in the city? What did you do, for bears…was it to make yourself big, or to play dead? He cursed his city upbringing for not preparing him for this. His flashlight flickered in his hand on the thing, his body betraying him by shaking slightly.
Pull yourself together Erik.
It was...brown? Not black fur, that was certain. A tail...not a bear, then. It turned from where it ate at the overturned garbage cans.
Erik sucked in a breath as an enormous wolf snarled back at him.