The Hollow Men; Or, The Opera Ghost
a longish tale
I.
It begins in the autumn, when the mornings are bright and hard, softening into the incandescent afternoon sunlight which pools in corners, twisting crooked shadows about itself. When night comes people shiver for the first time in months and wonder where the warmth has gone, and in one of the long dark corridors of the Opera House, someone hands Martin a shining piece of chalk.
“Now your turn. Write something.”
Martin takes the piece of chalk and turns it over in his hand. The other boys crowd around him, smelling of sweat and dust. They have already drawn their pictures and written rude messages on the back of the scenery – a flimsy board whose still-wet front depicts a forest such as was never seen by human eyes, impossibly green, full of vines and shrubs and white statues that peer out from behind unreasonably regular trees.
James found the chalk under a floorboard – he is the one who always finds these things, and everybody wonders just how he does it, though none of them dare ask. In their eyes he is a sort of demigod combined with a priest, an adventurer continually escaping out from under the gorgon eyes of the opera house manager, whom he scorns as a charlatan. The chalk was perfectly new and whole when he found it, and they were all impressed, but even more impressed when he drew himself up and declared their next game: that everyone was to make his mark on the next production’s scenery. It is the hand of James that offers Martin the chalk now, and he holds it reverently.
He badly wants to impress James – to write (for he can write) something spectacularly clever and uproariously funny. But he cannot think of anything that fits while everyone is breathing on him, so he takes the chalk and scrawls a few words on the board.
Beware the Opera Ghost
“Beware the Opera Ghost,” James says in a lugubrious voice, and the other boys laugh. Martin smiles in relief.
James smiles too, and condescends to add an exclamation point to the end of the sentence, producing hitherto unmatched thrills somewhere between Martin’s mouth and heart.
Beware the Opera Ghost, the other boys whisper, and three of them giggle. But the thump of a cane makes them all start, and the rasping shout of Claudius the old stagehand scatters them in pursuit of their neglected duties, for tonight is opening night.
No amount of preparation is ever sufficient for opening night, but as always the performance will be dragged creaking and screaming into the glow of applause. Everyone will forget their tribulations, forget even why they came, to be carried away by the sounds and the smells and the breaths between the soprano’s crystalline notes. The critics will rave, the audience will stumble away in a daze, and everyone behind the curtains will breathe for another night.
October is a quiet month at the opera house. The first rains have begun to pool in the street, and the smell of returning damp (as yet, barely perceptible) sets in among the dancers’ skirts and the stage curtains. Chills are warded off by sweaters of eccentric contrivance, and fledgling head colds are smothered with scarves, while strings sag out of tune and horns squawk complainingly. Everyone’s tempers grow marginally shorter as the nights grow longer, and mounds of dank leaves fill gutters that must be cleaned.
There are fewer of them this time, only three, crouching on the ledge like small, bedraggled birds. The first one sniffles and wipes his nose on his soaking sleeve, which does him no good and the sleeve not much more. Martin has never bothered to find out his real name, nor has anyone else. They call him Sniffle, and he seems to accept it – or at any rate, he has never done anything other than sniffle.
The second boy is James. He has managed a waterproof which despite pooling around him in undignified swathes has the appearance of a priest’s ceremonial robes. He holds it closed with bluish fingers as he and Sniffle watch Martin push leaves out of the gutter.
Martin is wet, wet beyond wet. There is nothing left of him yet to be rained on, and he blinks the drops out of his eyes as he pushes the pole through the gutter. His eyelashes droop, his clothes sag, and his socks threaten to abdicate altogether. He pushes the pole without thinking, even of something warm. When the job is finished he pushes it a few more times, skeptically, and retires to the ledge. All three of the boys sit on it silently, legs dangling into the rain.
“I’m cold,” Martin murmurs.
“There’s a fire in Quintus’ room,” James says. Quintus is the day watchman, past forty, one-legged, and built like a siege engine. He pales only in comparison to the night watchman, Paul.
“I’m not stupid.”
“He sleeps and roasts his metal leg. All day.”
“Last time we switched up the sheet music – you remember that?”
“He never caught me,” James avows.
“No,” Martin says darkly, “he didn’t.”
Sniffle sniffles.
James leans back. “What was that thing you wrote on the scenery?”
“What?” Martin is perplexed for a moment, but then remembers. “Oh, beware the Opera ghost.”
James tosses Martin the piece of chalk, now worn down, and somehow dry. Martin wipes his hand on the inside of his jacket, then scrawls the words on the wall behind where they sit. His hand shakes as he does it, and the thrill of impressing James is quite worn away by the cold. He only does it because – well, he is not sure why.
“That’ll show the bastards,” James says, and leans back contentedly. Sniffles intimates, by a slightly increased dripping of the nose, that it will indeed show the bastards.
Martin shivers. The rain will wash the scrawl away if it comes down much harder, though for now it is safe below a slice of roof. Passers-by might see it from the street, perhaps, if they craned their necks and put away their umbrellas. But for now the bobbing black circles continue on their way, oblivious to the weather, thinking only of the one warm place they are returning to.
James rises, and Martin and Sniffle fall in silently behind him, in a solemn and drenched procession over the Opera House roof.
The message, which had been forgotten for weeks by even Martin himself, catches the imagination of the other boys. Those who can write spend their time copying it out on the back of scenery, under seats and in miniscule lettering on walls, where it could only be seen by someone bending over to tie their shoes. It appears in the box office, between the railings of the grand staircase, and in the dressing rooms. One of the boys even writes it on the curtains. The awkward curling letters in dressmaker’s chalk are the despair of the stagehands, who cannot reach them.
James takes to the prank with abandon, and his fingers are continually white with chalk. Somehow, he makes his way into Mlle. Susanna Sarate’s dressing room and uses her own rouge to write the message on the mirror. Her soprano screams (it is said) nearly deafen the assistant concertmaster, and the manager spends three hours consoling her, while the assistant concertmaster stalks the corridors with cotton wool in his assaulted ears.
Backstage is in shambles. The stagehands blame each other while the dancers stand about in small nervous groups. A few of the more superstitious musicians refuse to play at all, while singers lose their voice mid-aria, and at least three chorus members sing while tears run down their faces. The opera house’s assistant manager reportedly lies prostrate on his drawing room sofa. Even the audience are restless, not quite frightened, but who would not be agitated when the messages seem to appear between one thought and the next?
Martin loses interest very quickly, and watches the joke grow with alarm. James, meanwhile, is enjoying himself and has made a great friend of Martin, who is now privy to many more secrets of the opera house. From the very top of the stage, he has watched the corps in Rosaline, dressed in trailing white so that they seem to flicker and fade into one another. He has seen the subterranean caverns beneath the stage, and watched the water shine and stalk against the dark where his candle fails. He has stolen apples from the bowls on stage during Urtello, while the chorus sings of blood and the tenor promises lyrical revenge on his lady’s tormentor. And he has climbed to the top of the roof, where the bronze statue of the god of music converses with centaurs and a phoenix.
But sometimes, when the message appears on the walls in a hand he does not recognise (though it probably belongs to Charles, or Eric), he disbelieves the fact of his own invention. James laughs at him, though, and this satisfies him somewhat. There was a time when he would have given the world to be laughed at by James.
It all comes to an end when one night the curtain rises at the end of the overture and the conductor screams, and the violins scrape out into hard and painful silence. The message sprawls across the backdrop in obscenely large letters, leeching crimson across painted columns and pastoral landscapes, wet and red and raw and dripping: BEWARE THE OPERA GHOST!
The silence is pierced with holes through which filter the whispers of the audience. The dancers trickle out of the wings onto the stage, only to stand motionless and mute while their eyes devour the words, made horribly familiar by months of rumours and twitching, creeping, half-mad hints. The curtain comes down again, eventually, but it is far too late – nearly everyone backstage has come out to look at the words, standing inert as if in some parody of a modern play. If there was a secret it is out, and if there was a fear it is no longer a silent one – it screams aloud in blood-red paint.
Martin is up on the roof, digging leaves out from the crevices where they are caught, between the roof tiles. The first he hears of it is when Charles puts his head through the hatch and shouts something unintelligible. He calls back, but Charles’ head has disappeared, and the only thing he can do is pick his way back across the tiles.
Charles is waiting at the bottom of the ladder, his face screwed up into an incongruously solemn stare. He is not staring at Martin; rather, he is staring at something beyond him, as if he cannot bear to have his eyes rest on the real boy, but is made easier by looking at some phantasm behind him.
“What?” Martin asks, when Charles volunteers nothing.
“Manager’s office. Sent me. You’re to.”
Martin follows him, bemused. None of them have ever seen the manager, except from a distance. The opera house’s stagehands in training and errand boys are hired by the currently insensible assistant manager, or more properly, his assistant.
The door of the manager’s office is paneled wood, inlaid with something that is supposed to be figured marble but is peeling away in subtle flakes, speckling the stylised dancers and cheapening the flourishing of the conductors. Charles opens it carefully, cautious of touching the inlay, and does not come any further. Martin advances without him, up to the long high desk from behind which the manager’s face looms enquiringly. But the manager, too, is not looking at him – he looks at the space beyond Martin, and he frowns at whatever he sees there.
“Is that him?”
Martin opens his mouth, but another, far more familiar voice speaks first.
“Yes, sir.”
Martin looks at James, who stands in the corner behind the door, dwarfed as surely by the paneling as he refuses to be dwarfed by anything in the world outside. That expression on his face – is it humility? Fear? No priest submits to a foreign god in such a manner, and certainly not to a god he has frequently proclaimed a myth, an obsolete excrescence, or a nightmare to frighten the witless.
“It was his idea,” the boy says, tonelessly. “He wrote it on the back of some scenery, and said it would be a great joke to do it everywhere in the opera house, until somebody noticed.”
“And did you?”
“Only once or twice. I didn’t like to do it. It scared me. The other boys liked it, but after a while they were scared too.”
Martin looks up into the face of the manager, half-hidden behind a fashionably large beard of the kind that makes most expressions clever and inscrutable. But the manager’s eyes still refuse to find him, and will not distinguish between his form and the door. There is nothing in that face for him – no thought of that glorious, petty, condescending mind can rest on something so insignificant: it would be a crime.
He looks to James, and yet before he does so he knows where those eyes will not go, and it is only then that he counts himself as truly lost, for if they will not see him, where else can he be perceived? They do not even look beyond him; they have found some spot in the floor, some hole, that is worth infinitely more than he. He is perfectly numb with the numbness of utter failure.
The manager is saying something to the air behind him, and he turns, stirred from his numbness to vague curiosity, but there is of course nothing to be seen. The tone of the manager’s voice is firm, disgusted, and distant, but there is fear in it, and the tang of money. Martin makes no reply. He still looks at James.
“Oh, take him out,” the manager says, and this is evidently addressed to James, for the boy stirs himself and opens the door. The intensity of his stare at the floor indicates that Martin should follow him, and the door closes behind them with more hollowness than its façade would suggest.
Once it is closed James stands there, and his gaze flickers briefly to Martin’s shoes.
“It was you or me,” he hisses in a rush. Then his eyes return to the floor.
“I don’t understand,” Martin says, failing to appreciate that this is what will pass for atonement. “The backdrop. How did you do it?”
“Get out,” James says, then adds in a louder tone that will filter through the door, “You understand what he told you. You must go away.”
“But –”
James turns his back and walks away down the corridor with a shuffling tread entirely alien to Martin and anyone else who has ever seen him on the roof of the opera house, crowning the centaur with Claudius’ hat to raucous applause. His footsteps, which they have never done before, fade into silence.
Martin is left alone, and he realises that he has left his coat on the roof, and he is very cold.
II.
M. Martin Wolfe has not been to an opera in the city of his birth once, though he, like anyone else, is a devotee abroad. His friends call him strange, his tailor, with a sort of pride, eccentric, and his fiancée impossible, but he is a man of strong mind, and will not go, and secretly they love him for it. When at home he goes to concerts in art galleries and private recitals and all manner of plays (sometimes in pursuit of business, sometimes not), and is a man of taste and discrimination despite all this, yet when anyone suggests the opera to him he smiles and refuses without ever giving a reason.
But tonight is the farewell performance of the renowned soprano Susanna Armes (nee Sarate), in Arturus Rex, the story of deceit and chivalry gone mad, and it is raining, and October, and he has a ticket for Box 7.
He joins the other patrons, with their umbrellas and programs and fine wet shoes, as they stream up the opera house steps. He spares a brief glance at the roof from beneath his own umbrella, but there is nothing to meet his eyes save the bronze god, somewhat greener than it once was.
Once inside, his wet coat is taken from him, his ticket gravely inspected by men who seem graver and paler than they did when he was a boy, and he is conducted to his seat with ceremony. He is seated alone in the box, a small mercy. As he takes his place the orchestra members are entering the pit, and the chaotic, sublime sound of their practicing pierces his ears. He does not mingle with the other patrons, but patiently bears their stares and confused greetings (he is M. Martin Wolfe, financier, patron of the arts, and possessor of a very fine pair of legs, who does not need to explain himself to the rest of the world, so he says nothing). He is relieved when the conductor mounts his stand and the overture begins. He does not wish to think about why he is here, nor even whether he knows at all (although he notices, in passing, that the patrons’ whispering ceases only halfway through the overture, and judging by their sober looks it is not gossip that so occupies them).
The music is well enough. The orchestra are superb, passionate and precise, the singers less so – Mme. Armes has lost much of her range, and the lead tenor is too weak-voiced and young not to be overawed by her; meanwhile the scenery is antiquated and the costumes garish. The audience’s attention wanes as the opera progresses, until the third act, when the dancers pass between rows of candles laid out on the floor of the stage. Their arms flicker in imitation of the tapers, to the sound of a single oboe and harp. The audience keeps a breathless silence till they have finished, at which point the applause is thunderous. M. Martin sees the ladies in the box next to him wipe away tears, under cover of their feathered fans.
But all this matters very little, for in the end, the patrons of the opera house have adored Mme. Armes for many years (a great many more than she would admit to), and no one would give her anything less than a standing ovation as the curtain falls. She makes her final bows with her arms full of roses, and M. Martin is near enough to the stage that he sees her carefully dabbing at her eyes between waves of applause.
The curtain falls for the last time, and the audience streams out of the theatre. M. Martin waits a few moments for the crush to pass. Half-concealed, he watches the crowd pass before him, faces he knows, faces that know him. He is reluctant to mingle, to converse or even to advance into the sea of never-ending tongues, where there is always someone behind you, always looking, and wherever you turn some hungry invisible eye is upon you.
“Martin,” a voice says behind him, quietly.
He arranges his face into a smile and turns, but there is no one there. Of course no one is there, he tells himself, the box was perfectly empty before and has only the one entrance. It was some trick of the echoes in the theatre. Nonetheless, he is no longer disposed to stay, and he makes his way out into the crowd.
He is able to pass through it mostly with a nod, and a few words to those he cannot entirely avoid. At length he comes into the Long Gallery, where the most exclusive of patrons drink and socialise with musicians, dancers, and the occasional singer (Mme. Armes is to be glimpsed in a velvet chair, surrounded by an impromptu court, while M. Martin sees the concertmaster and the principal harpist ensconced in a corner clutching flutes of champagne like drowning men). He passes the manager, a small excitable man with thinning hair who has been swept up by a knot of gentlemen in spectacles and beards.
He hesitates again near the bar – he could drink, and happily, but there is always someone who sidles up to you without a drink of their own, and an obscure acquaintance to claim. He has only just decided to leave directly, when a voice calls out from behind him, “Martin!”
He does not make any sign at first, believing this to be another trick of the ear.
“Martin!” the voice says again. “By all the saints. How long has it been? Twenty years?”
Once more M. Martin fixes the smile on his face and turns, to see the manager there. The man positively beams. His mustache is waxed to perfection, his suit only slightly rumpled and a mere year out of fashion, and he looks at M. Martin as a man looks at his long-lost and dearest relative.
“Forgive me, I have not the advantage,” M. Martin says politely. “That is, I do not –”
“Surely you can’t have forgotten? But then, I suppose, it is twenty years.” The man’s mouth twists in a self-deprecating manner that is barely distasteful, while his smile only widens. He offers his hand. “James Lamond. James. We worked at the Opera House together for two years, do you remember?”
“Ah,” M. Martin says. “Yes. Yes, I do recall.”
“It has been a great many years.”
They shake hands. M. Martin finds no method of escape that comes easily to mind.
“Tell me,” the manager says eagerly, “what did you think of tonight?”
“It was an excellent performance,” M. Martin says diplomatically.
“Ah! You think so – I am very glad you do. Mme. Armes never gives anything less than her greatest. We shall be sorry to lose her, after all these years! And Antonelli – our new tenor – you heard him? He has always sung so well with her, and I have heard nothing to equal tonight. We were very lucky to get him – there were rumours, you know, that he had been offered a place at the Imperial Opera, but he elected to come here, instead. A great honour. And I may say that our terms were favourable, very favourable indeed. What did you think of the ballet?”
“It was very well-executed.”
“Very kind! The ballet-masters (we have two now, you know, very Northern types) are quite strict, but the quality of work we get from the dancers has improved almost beyond recognition! We are beginning to think of staging The Glass Rose at the beginning of December. You know, the Karevna. You must come.”
M. Martin smiles. He begins to think almost fondly of the wind and rain.
“I often think we were happier when we were young – so few cares, you know. What did we give for an audience, for the squabbles of the violins and the thoughts of the dancers? We gawped at the audience and pulled the dancers’ hair! But had we not consented to grow up and take our places, we would have been in a very different state, not to mention office.” He twists his moustache complacently. “I am grown quite fond of those doors. (I have repaired them properly, of course, and had them painted.) It seems strange to me that I once dreamed of sitting behind them, of having a fire to myself and people shown in to see me. Of course,” he adds, “you moved on to better things.”
“Indeed,” M. Martin says flatly.
“I have not seen you here before, I think?” the manager says.
“No. I do not attend the opera.”
“Ah, what a shame! You must, sir, you must! We are at the forefront of music in the city (might I say nation?), and I believe you are well known as a man of taste. Our new season is full of things that must delight you. There will be the ballet, of course, which I have already mentioned, and in the winter we will begin a run of The Raven’s Curse, with young Antonelli, naturally, and Mme. Frank, who has been performing in a series of Aurelius concerts but who has kindly consented to participate in the second half of the season, as we have lost Mme. Armes. Can I fetch you a drink?”
“No, thank you.”
“You’re certain? Very well. Ah, yes, and there is another soprano, very young, quite inexperienced, but I am assured that she shows great talent, and in time may come to occupy the place that once belonged to Mme. Armes. Not, I’m sure, that anyone ever could do justice to that lady (only once in a century is there such a woman!) but I am told that this young singer may in time ascend those heights which were so lately occupied by so remarkable a mountaineer. In a musical sense, naturally. Were she to have a patron, of course –”
There is a thud from the bar, following by the crash of a row of glasses shattering on the tiles. Shards spray across the room, all the way to M. Martin’s feet, and he looks over his shoulder. A drunken man hauls himself to his feet, his trouser legs soaked in red wine. An instrument case lies on the floor near him. Conversation throughout the room has entirely ceased – even the bartender stares at the mess. One of the ballet-girls shrieks, a violinist turns white, and judging by the gasps from the corner, Mme. Armes has artistically fainted.
“Nothing, gentlemen, it’s nothing!” The manager rushes forward to reassure the patrons, snapping his fingers at the aproned man who has appeared with a broom in hand. “Merely an accident. Merely – no, you there, bring a mop. Clean this up. Please, do not alarm yourselves. You,” this, spoken in a hiss, to the unfortunate musician, “go home. If I see your face again tonight, so help me God –”
Talk resumes, if more quietly than before. The sighs emanating from the crowd about Mme. Armes indicate that the lady is revived. The ballet girls whisper among themselves, and the pale violinist has disappeared altogether.
M. Martin stands indecisively where the manager has left him. He is minded to leave, but something troubles him, something he cannot quite grasp. He sees it in the eyes of the ballet-girls, who will not meet anyone else’s, in the hands of the musicians, who grip their glasses more tightly than they should. The man with the broom has gained a compatriot with a mop, and they have already swept much of the glass away. M. Martin moves aside for them politely, and as he does his shoe crunches on a piece of wine-stained glass, which might be in the shape of a B but equally a trick of the brain, confused by the noise and the heat.
As he stands ready to do neither one thing nor the other, the manager comes back to him, red-faced and smiling bravely.
“Where were we, then?”
“I can’t remember,” M. Martin says.
“Ah, what a pity.” Someone in the crowd coughs loudly. The manager’s smile slips for a moment, and he looks over his shoulder.
“Is something wrong?”
“What? Oh, not at all, not at all, I merely thought – that is, nothing, nothing at all. I say, what would you think of a tour backstage? Old times, you know. It hasn’t changed very much, but there are one or two little things – improvements, I daresay – that I should like you to see.”
“I’m –”
“Come, now, what’s there to be afraid of? And I’m sure there aren’t many men who would appreciate it as you would. You must see the rehearsal rooms. An entirely new concept –”
Martin pictures himself refusing, imagines himself at the doors of the opera house, opening his umbrella… yet to his horror finds himself being drawn further back into the foyer, the manager’s hand on his arm, and surely it is not some dream that the hand clutches at him, white and pale and trembling.
He tries to shake himself free. “I’m terribly sorry, I can’t stay, I –”
But the manager (James, he recalls, with difficulty, James, who was once upon a time the terror of the boys, and the stagehands too, the menace of the managers) does not seem to hear him; indeed, he is babbling something about the ceiling of the Opera House, and the chandelier, and his grip, for a man running to seed, is surprisingly strong. M. Martin gives up and is borne away back through the corridors.
Once they have entered the theatre the manager seems to calm somewhat. M. Martin only half-listens as he natters on about the seating, and the boxes, and something about Mme. Armes as they proceed down the centre aisle onto the stage itself, which is still set for the final scene of Arturus Rex. The backdrop is cliffs in a storm, the set a ruined castle, and M. Martin turns from this dismal sight for a moment to look back where they have come. Some of the lights in the theatre have not yet been doused; they linger on, slender threads of flame throwing their shadows across the vast swathe of red velvet seating. There is enough of the dark to make it seem as if they go on forever, and the ceiling is transformed into a vast cavern with the glimmer of the chandelier for some strange subterranean jewel.
Backstage is quiet now, save for a pair of old women with long brooms. They push them morosely along the boards, clearing up flowers and hairpins and long, false hairs. A stagehand holds open one of the doors for M. Martin and the manager to pass through.
“You may leave a light out for us, ah, er –” The manager waves his hands futilely.
“Theodore.”
“Quite. We shall return by this way.”
“Are you sure you ought to do that, sir? It’s late. The ghost doesn’t like it.”
“There is no ghost,” the manager snaps, and pushes past M. Martin.
An endless parade of green-rooms, wardrobes, and dressing-rooms blurs before their eyes. The manager is primed with endless details about performers, furnishings, and fabrics – the donations by this or that patron that paid for the gilded mirrors which hang in the dancers’ studios, the anecdote of the famous prima donna who sang in one concert five years ago yet was so enchanted by the painted tiles on the dressing-room wall that she returned to the Imperial Opera House and demanded that they provide her own room with the same. The corridors here are not quite silent – they never are, there is always someone with a hammer or a broom or a needle and thread, but the noises come from behind closed doors now. The tread of the ballet-girls as they rehearse is light and constant, but they do not laugh.
Nevertheless the manager blithers on about the installation of six new boxes, including one for visiting dignitaries decorated solely in the colours from a production of Fata Morgana a decade ago, which was reviewed in nearly every domestic paper and six foreign ones. M. Martin, even if he cared to, cannot keep his mind from wandering to the one thing that first unsettled, and now disturbs him.
“What did he mean, about a ghost?” he says abruptly.
“Oh – oh, nothing. Some prank, that’s all,” the manager says in a rush. “I tell them the chandelier is perfectly safe, but they won’t listen to me. As I was saying –”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Oh, very well. We have had,” with visible reluctance, “some… incidents. Pranks. Jokes. People gone missing, instruments destroyed, costumes ripped. Everyone insists on calling it a ghost. There is, of course, no such thing.”
Of course.
“And the patrons, naturally… well, er, that is, I don’t mind telling you, because we were, as you might say, ‘young together’, but the patrons are not informed of the daily, ah, goings-on backstage, whatever those might be… so if you would, kindly, er –”
“Keep your dark secrets?”
“Er, yes.” The manager looks vaguely uneasy, but brightens as they turn a corner. “Now here, we have the new rehearsal rooms, for the dancers. They are not quite finished yet.”
M. Martin reaches out to touch a magnificently gilded mirror frame, covered in swarming lions and foxes so cunningly fashioned they seem to move.
“I shouldn’t –” the manger begins.
There is a spark, and M. Martin snatches his hand away.
“What is that?”
“Oh… presumably some sort of electrical current present in the wall. We do not know quite what – several workmen were burned hanging them up. Some of the ballet-girls say” – he laughs nervously – “that it is because the ghost writes on them so often. But of course there’s no such thing.”
“Of course,” M. Martin says reassuringly. Curious, he asks, “What is the ghost supposed to write?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Really?”
“Ah, well, er, perhaps you remember… there was a sort of message we would write on the walls when we were young,” the manager says, very quietly and almost too quickly to understand.
“Message?”
Do you not remember?
M. Martin frowns. “I am afraid not.”
“Of course, of course. We thought it, I suppose, a mere fancy. You were the first to write it.”
“I cannot recall,” M. Martin says thoughtfully.
“Beware the Opera Ghost. That was it.”
M. Martin remembers it, dimly, and he laughs. The sound is unnervingly loud. “That silly thing!”
“No, sir,” the manager says with feeling, “not a silly thing – that is, I –”
“What?”
The manager looks confused, and at last, ashamed, mutters “Nothing.”
They advance deeper into the opera house, past vast workshops and sewing rooms bursting with costumes. The intervals between the gas lamps grow longer, and the shadows of the flames lengthen out across the hall. The manager’s commentary is infrequent and far less assured, with M. Martin replying only rarely. They meet no one, and the silence seems to spread ever deeper around them.
When the manager pauses, M. Martin nearly falls over him. The manager kneels beside a faded piece of scenery, examining the bottom where the date is written. M. Martin looks about him to find that they have reached the end of the corridor. Old pieces of scenery crowd up against the wall on one side, and on the other is a railing, wearing to grey. Stairs lead down to the cellars, fading into the darkness below.
“This is it,” the manager says.
M. Martin turns. And though he has been many years forgetting, he remembers the scenery.
“Saints, I’d no idea you’d have kept it.”
“Oh, we never throw out anything. That is to say – they won’t give up the costumes, props, and such things. In case they might be useful.”
“Is it still there?”
“I suppose so,” the manager says, but he makes no move to ascertain it. He sighs. “If only we’d known…”
One of the gas lamps splutters. The manager looks over his shoulder.
“Did you hear someone?”
“Only the lamp.”
“I thought I heard someone speak… Never mind. I… I still think of those letters on the stage that last night, you know. Still dripping. I dream about them sometimes.”
“How did you do it?” M. Martin asks.
“How did I –” The manager looks bewildered. “I thought you did it. I could never understand how.”
“I didn’t.”
“Nor did I.”
There is a brief silence, in which the only sound is the humming of the lamps. As if following a tacit accord the manager slowly rotates the piece of scenery, which groans on its wavering wheels. The messages written so long ago are still there, the caricatures and the illiterate marks, the banal profanity illustrated with a few lines crudely drawn. And there, in one corner, is the message.
Beware the Opera Ghost!
The manager lifts a hand as if to wipe away the words, but it falls to his side. “We were so young then, he says as if in a dream. “I don’t think we understood, not any of it.”
“Why did you bring me here?” M. Martin asks at last, as though it has taken him until now to realise that there is no earthly reason to be here, and that, indeed, he never meant to be.
“I’m not sure.” The manager’s brow furrows, but only for a second. “But perhaps, now that you have seen the magnitude of what I – we have accomplished, you might be willing to take a more active role –
“Why?”
“Well – the generosity of our patrons enables us to do what we have done for so long, and to improve upon it. I’ve shown you the fruit of that, well, charity, I suppose you might call it, if you were so inclined, as we do give back to the city in our own way, I fancy. The kindness –”
“What kindness,” M. Martin says slowly, “have you ever done me?
“Kindness? I don’t understand.”
The blind fool, some part of Martin’s mind whispers to him, and the words enrage him.
“You accused me of a wrong I had no thought of committing. Because of you I was thrown out with nothing to my name. Do you know how long that winter was? Do you know how many days I looked for food? Do you know where I slept, and what I meant to do when I could not?”
“But the cold –” the man stammers.
“Was not so bad that winter? You might have spared a thought for me. I had no fire, not even one in the watchman’s room.”
“It was –”
“Only one of us could have stayed. You knew I would say nothing, and so that was enough. You made your choice. I think it was a game, to you; you knew I would never say anything against you. None of us would have. God help us, we almost thought you were some sort of deity.”
A madman and a mechanical fool.
“I never had anything against you, Martin,” the manager says, in an unsteady voice. “I do hope you know that. I never meant –”
“I hated you even then. I didn’t want to understand it, nor think about it. I forgot, for a long time, because it was easier, but there was nothing on earth that could make me forget entirely.” M. Martin’s stomach turns, and he almost retches. “And here we are. No wonder I kept away so long – my god, your face sickens me. I could have been you one day, if I’d stayed.”
“I don’t – I don’t – I – what is it you want to hear?” the manager stammers, bewildered. “I did my best. I did what was asked, I – did my job, I… what do you want to hear?”
“Hear? I’d rather tear out your tongue, than hear you speak another word. You were blind then, I would have you blind for all eternity –” but the words are not his, not Martin’s, and they taste like bitter ashes. He blinks, and they are up against the railing, the manager arching backwards, crushed beneath him, almost wetting himself with fear. Martin can taste the fear, rotten and sweet.
“You made me what I am,” he says, gently. “Don’t think that I’m not grateful; I assure you I am. But I have never hated anyone else so much as I hated you.”
The manager’s eyes dilate with a terror he does not understand; too paralysed to struggle, he has only refuge in words, but their power is spent and they cannot defend him.
“I had no choice!” he gabbles. “You know I had none, I –”
It was me or you.
“I know,” Martin says. “Believe me, I do know.”
He dimly hears, before he turns away, the wail of the desperate James Lamond as he falls into darkness, and the ghastly crunch as the man discovers that the darkness is not at all forgiving. Then, at last, nothing.
Martin makes his way back through the dim, silent corridors. The shadows seem to reach out from the walls, each grasping for its other half, but Martin walks between them and sees nothing. There is no sound, no sign of any living being, not even a breath – the flaking paint and chipped panelling stretch on and on before him, and all the doors are shut.
Martin.
So named, he stops and turns. Yet as before, he is alone.
Distracted, he wipes his hand on his trousers, to rid himself of the last trace of – what? Yes, of course, the manager. James Lamond. The boy who thought he was a god. Martin continues on, and when his name is called again he does not stop, for he already knows that no one is there.
When he sees the writing he believes it is only a smear on the wall, distorted by the shadows. He blames the darkness for the spot that mimics his hand, writ so small as to be nearly invisible.
But as he continues down the corridors and the light grows, he sees it again and again, in ink and charcoal and dust, sprawling in elegant script across the walls, in crude slashes on the floor. The soles of his shoes are covered in chalk, and behind him trails a long line of blurred letters. The letters form themselves as he watches, invisible hands wielding invisible pens, invisible sleeves smudging awkwardly-formed characters. Wherever he walks, they follow him – the corridors behind him are an unintelligible mass of words, and yet as he watches they fill the space ahead of him. He brushes his hand against one ink-smeared wall, and it comes away black.
He walks faster, as if he could outrun the letters, but the invisible hands are faster by far. The words seem to hover in the air in front of him; when he turns they hang behind him. They are written on the glass of the lamps, and their shadows propel themselves at him. The world is filled only with the sound of his gasping breaths, and not another living soul is present.
At last he bursts into the green-room, only to drag himself to a halt. The walls of the room are dripping, crawling with ink. It spreads across the floor in trickles, the words written and subsumed just as quickly by the black tide.
“No,” he says. “No no no.”
As he watches, the words are scrawled, slowly and with intimately familiar hesitation, across one wall. The white chalk glows against the swarming ink, in letters white as a midnight moon:
Beware the Opera Ghost
He flees, blindly, before the current reaches him, convinced that if the ink so much as touches him he will be found guilty of some sin, found out for something he can no longer conceal. He stumbles into the corridor, up against the stage door, which swings open silently at his touch. The wings are before him, immense hangings that stir gently, covered in luminescent writing. The scenery has been cleared away, and only the footlights illuminate the stage. The great chandelier is dark, and the theatre deserted.
Martin bends over to catch his breath in the middle of the stage. The words spread out from under his feet, in ever-widening circles about him.
“No,” he murmurs, over and over. “No, no, no, there is no ghost.”
“What, then, am I, I wonder?”
He looks up to see what appears to be a fold in the air, but as he looks, it undulates and changes, resolving itself into the shape of Martin himself, in perfectly correct evening dress and hat and cane.
“What are you?” Martin echoes the question, dully.
The thing smiles, its mouth distending a fraction too much. “The ghost, my dear man, the ghost. Or to be more precise, the Opera Ghost. But I would have expected you to know.”
“No,” Martin says.
“I am afraid so.”
The thing – the ghost – takes a step towards him, and Martin stumbles back, involuntarily. It takes another step, and he notices that its eyes are closed; even as it speaks they do not open.
“I thought you would have recognised me,” the ghost says lightly. “Indeed, I thought you would have returned before now. Not very sporting, is it, to make a ghost and then abandon it? I expected better of a man like you.”
“What do you want?”
“Oh come, now, let’s not be so abrupt about it. I’ve waited for years. Do you know how long it took to even persuade the… dear me, I am sorry, I’m rambling.”
“Your voice,” Martin says. “You spoke to me. Earlier. In the box, in the… corridor, that was you.”
“How clever of you to notice. Yes, it was. It took a very long time for you to hear it, you know, I thought I should go quite hoarse. You were not particularly content to return to this place.”
“Why should I be?”
“Temper, temper. I don’t mind, though. You were very unhappy here, poor boy.” The ghost sighs. “But you’ve arrived at last! The conquering hero, if you’ll permit. And now your old tormentor is dead. Your troubles are behind you!”
“I didn’t mean to kill him!” Martin bursts out. “I never hated him that much!”
“Ah!” The ghost raises its eyebrows knowingly. “Now if you didn’t, who did? A curious question, that.”
“I don’t know what came over me, I… I never would have… he was a petty tyrant then, and I, I don’t know…”
“I know,” the ghost says.
Martin takes in a deep, shuddering breath, and at last, his mind is clear.
“Yes,” he says. “I should think you do know.”
The ghost shrugs and smiles.
“What are you, really?”
“I would have thought you’d know the answer to that, far better than I. One minute I was not, and the next minute I was… and it was not a comfortable sort of being, I can tell you that, not at first. But you were so insistent on my being, it was quite refreshing. After a while I could write the words myself.”
Martin has a vision of those great red words the manager dreamt about, writ in paint – or was it blood?
“You are nothing, then,” he reasons. “Nothing corporeal. Thought only – mere words. If you are nothing, you can – I can –” His lips stutter into silence.
“Well,” the ghost says slowly. “That’s very interesting. What would I be, after all, if you had not made me? Still nothing. Is it your mind to destroy me, then? Purge the remnants?”
“You killed a man.”
“You did, not I.”
“If there were a knife you would have held it.”
“I don’t think you quite comprehend,” the ghost says. “You and I, we are the same. I am – well, you might say, ghost of your flesh. There is no separating us. You might even say, in a way, that I am you. You cannot destroy me entirely.”
“Then I will do what I can. I’ll leave. If there is no separating us, I will never return. That should do it.”
For the first time the closed eyes flicker, and a note of panic creeps into the ghost’s voice. “You don’t understand. It’s been so long. I can’t – not another twenty years. I nearly starved, I almost faded to nothing. You can’t leave me. I need you. I –”
“To feed on? If I cannot destroy you any other way, I have no alternative.”
“And what of the man you killed?” The ghost’s voice rises. “You cannot say a ghost pushed him.”
Martin is silent.
“Stay. I’ve no need of food – not now. I know you, you see – almost as well as you know yourself.”
“No,” Martin says finally. “I am not trapped. I can go where I like. I can leave the country if I need to. And no one will find his body for hours, perhaps even days. I’ve no reason to stay.”
“Am I nothing to you?”
“You were never anything at all to begin with.”
“Very well,” the ghost says coldly. “Witness that I did give you a choice.”
“I’ve had enough of your jabber,” Martin says. “I’m leaving.”
“Oh, don’t go!” the ghost says cajolingly. “Stay a little longer.” It opens its eyes.
Martin tries to move his legs, his hands, his eyelids, but he cannot. He is perfectly paralysed, still as a stone. He hears and thinks of nothing but the ghost’s gently amused voice in his ear, and the empty hell-depths of its eyes.
“Yes. That’s it. That’s all right.” The ghost strikes an elegant pose, cane in hand, arms spread out to an imaginary audience.
Martin finds that the only thing that moves is his mouth. He opens it, only to find, in horror, that the only sound he is capable of is a wail.
“You’re nearly as bad as him,” the ghost says, “always talking. Saints, I’m glad he’s dead.”
Martin cannot speak, cannot think. His wail grows louder, yet he cannot stop it.
“Do you know,” the ghost confides, “I think this is going to be rather a lot of fun.”
Don’t you?