“What’s the worst that could happen?” Dante asked.
It was a question I didn’t want answered.
But I let him drag me along, to the service stairs which, if I was to believe him, was the only stairs leading up to the attic. As opposed to the staircase we used to get to classes, this one looked as if it hadn’t been used for the better half of a century. It was little more than an enhanced ladder, with some of the steps missing. Instead of leading all the way down, the servant stairs started at the fifth floor and led to the attic, but according to Dante there was a similar staircase leading from the ground floor to the basement.
“Why would they have servant stairs to the attic?” I wondered aloud when we venture into the dark hallway.
Dante turned the light on, although the naked light bulb barely cast light on half of the area and shrugged. “Servants usually had their rooms on the attic. They slept there.”
“Oh.” I didn’t bother to ask how he knew all that.
He went up the first steps, and they squeaked dangerously under his weight. We should've brought a flashlight, and maybe some weapons. Even just a baseball bat would sound helpful right now.
I struggled to climb up the stairs, each step a small victory over my own mind that screamed to get out of there. But the stubborn part of me wanted to go on and find out what made the strange noise.
Dante took the lead and moved elegantly from step to step, even in the semi-darkness. The stairs went on forever. The noises from the fifth floor diminished the higher we went. In reality, it was probably only twenty steps—as many as with every other floor—but with the added fear of what was upstairs, it felt like the stairs lead into oblivion.
There was one single door up the stairs, as opposed to the regular double rooms. The door looked as ancient as the house itself. It obviously hadn’t been used in a very long time. Cobwebs gathered in the corners, and a large, pitch-black spider glared at me before it rushed off to a secret hiding spot.
“Nobody’s been here,” Dante stated obvious. “So, it couldn’t have been a teacher.”
If he was correct and this was the only way up the attic, then whatever was hiding up there, had been there for ages. This door couldn’t have been opened in the last three decades. If it’s not a teacher… then who or what is it?
Dante reached out to push the door open. The old wood squeaked but didn’t budge. He pushed against it with his shoulder, but to no avail.
“Locked.” He kicked the door and sighed. “Now we'll never know. Unless I get a chair and kick down the door.”
“Awesome idea. Definitely won't get us expelled,” I said sarcastically. “Listen, the door is locked, meaning that whatever it is, it’s confined to that space. It may not be a smart idea to let it out.”
“Fine.” Dante scoffed. “I won’t to pull some heroic Arnold Swarzenegger stunt and kick open the door combat-style. Too bad, because I've been practicing those movies for years.”
We rushed back down the stairs. The atmosphere grew less thick the further down we went, as if a heavy darkness lingered at the top of the stairs but stayed there.
“I have to tell you something,” Dante said once we were back in the safety of my room. The oppressing sense of moments ago had completely evaporated, and no noises came from the attic anymore, to my relief.
“What?” I asked, closing the door behind us.
“I’ve heard those noises for years,” Dante told me, his eyes fixed on an invisible spot on the floor. “The first time I heard them, I was studying with Cora in my room. She told me she couldn't hear anything and asked if I was playing a joke on her. We were both new, freshmen, and I shrugged it off, thinking maybe she was just too scared to hear. But as the years passed by, I kept on hearing them. Not every night, just every now and then. When I finally convinced myself they weren’t real, they started all over again.”
“There’s been someone, or something, up there for years?” I asked, surprised he hadn’t gone up to investigate sooner.
Dante shrugged his shoulders. “I thought it was all in my mind. Cora didn’t hear it, and neither did my neighbor, Jake, when I asked him about it. The noise was loud that evening, louder than tonight, and still he couldn’t hear anything.”
An eerie realization crept up on me, and my breath got stuck in my throat.
“What do you mean?” I asked, already dreading the answer.
“All this time, I thought the noises were in my head. That no one else could hear them—that is, no one but you.”
He looked at me as if I was the rarest object one can find in a national history museum. “It must mean something,” he mused, “that of all the people in the Academy, only the two of us can hear those noises.”
Of course, it meant something. Folie à deux. Shared insanity. My brain was playing tricks on me and playing along with his little fantasy.
At least, that would be the logical solution.
“For your sake,” Dante said, “you better keep quiet about the noises. People think I'm crazy because I started talking about them. I don’t mind if people think I'm insane, but you’re new, and you deserve a fair chance here.”
“Why do you think only the two of us can hear them?” I asked him.
“Maybe it’s a message only meant for us,” Dante suggested. “Something only we can solve. Like a riddle.”
“A riddle? A homicidal maniac gathering corpses on the attic is a riddle?”
“I highly doubt it's a homicidal maniac. We haven’t had any murdered students since Ronald Jonson murdered Richie Tyler for the school play four years ago. And yes, it was an act.”
“Stop trying to humor me. You just told me I'm hearing things no one else is,” I replied angrily.
“Not ‘no one else’. I hear them too.” Dante gave me a sympathetic smile that didn’t really help making me feel better.
“That means we’re both crazy.”
“Or we’re more receptive. Open to things others would brush off. Maybe they heard it too, but thought it was the wind, and never bothered to think about it.”
“That sounds like a great conclusion,” I countered. “It was the wind. End of story.”
“You’re hilarious,” Dante replied sarcastically. “Anyway, I have to run. I need to write some more drafts and then go to bed for my beauty sleep. Which is much needed, by the way. Unexplained noises make me tired.”
Dante leant forward and gives me a quick kiss on the cheek. “Good night,” he said, before letting himself out.
I stood there, frozen, in the middle of my room, my hand reaching for the spot on my cheek where he had kissed me. My body felt ice cold, but that spot burned like hell.
No guy had ever kissed me before, besides relatives and they didn’t count.
Dazed, I took off my clothes and put some pajamas on. After I closed the curtains and got into bed, my hand still lingered on the spot where Dante had kissed me. Based on how boys had treated me in the past, I was convinced they were allergic to me. But I guessed I had found one that wasn’t.
I closed my eyes and fell asleep, dreaming blissfully about boys and kisses and wonderful symphonies that would make Apollo proud until, in the pitch-black darkness, I woke up to the sound of someone dragging a large, limb object from one side of the attic to the other.
I crawled under my blanket, pulling it up till right under my nose, and pretended the nightmare isn't real.
Chapter Seven
“You look like you travelled all the way to Egypt and back. By foot,” Cora told me the next morning, as soon as she saw me during breakfast. “Rough night?”
“Couldn’t get any worse.” I slumped down in my chair and rested my head on my shoulders. “I wish they’d just cancel all classes.”
“We could skip a few, if you’d like,” Cora offered. “Have you visited the school grounds yet? You need to go see our forest before it’s winter and the leaves fall off the trees. The forest has its own pond and everything.”
“
We can do it this afternoon,” I promised her, although I wanted nothing more than to crawl in my bed and sleep twenty-four hours straight. “But I’m not keen on missing classes this early in the year.”
“You’re so exemplary it sickens me,” Cora said with a smile. “How did your study night go with Dante? Any inspiration for your composition yet?”
“Not really, although he seems inspired.” I shrugged and let my eyes glide over the room. Nate wasn’t here. My mood dropped down another fifty degrees.
“Come on, grumpy,” Cora said. “Lighten up. The upside of having a day from hell is that it’s impossible to get worse.”
Two hours later, I figured out Cora was completely wrong with that statement. In Music Theory, the teacher, Mrs. Grey, who fit her name perfectly since everything about her from hair color to dress color was grey, decided it was time to give us all another assignment, possibly even more difficult than the ones we already got in Musical Composition.
“I want you to find me a piece of music that describes Allegro Academy,” she stated, her mouth thin and stern like everything else about her. She looked at all of us like we were morons and probably didn’t understand a word she said, so she threw her hands up theatrically and sighed exasperatedly. “When you think of Allegro Academy, what ideas do you come up with? What feelings do you have? What music could you use to describe the place—the buildings, the gardens? Then I want you to choose that music for me, play it with the necessary innuendo and write a short commentary on why you think this fits the academy.”
Cora rolled her eyes. “Stupid,” she mutters below her breath. “And an easy one.”
I raised my eyebrows because to me, that assignment sounded anything but easy. I wondered how I was going to come up with this, and with the composition assignment and still find time to exercise regularly. I had been fluking in the exercise department. Because of me staying up almost the entire night, I felt drained in the morning and couldn’t force myself to get up at six a.m. for my daily run. I was afraid to stand on the scale, because I knew the results of me dropping out of exercise wouldn’t be pretty.
“Hey Cora,” I said, in a sudden moment of bravery, “do you like running?” If she said yes, I planned to invite her to go along with me tomorrow morning. Then I had no choice but to get out of bed in time.
“Ew,” Cora replied. “I absolutely hate physical exercise. It makes me sweaty and tired.”
I looked at her slim, petite body and have trouble controlling my envy.
“Why do you ask?” she whispered back, trying to avoid Mrs. Grey catching us talking in class.
I shrugged. “No big deal.” And then I had the craziest idea ever. I could ask Nate. But that would mean ruining all my chances—not that I had any to begin with. If he saw me sweating like a farm horse plowing on the field, he would never be interested in me. But he had a girlfriend, so that train of thought was going nowhere, anyway. He didn’t care about me except maybe—and that was a big maybe—in a friend’s way, so there was no harm in asking.
The school grounds were vaster and more beautiful than I ever imagined. I had now officially concluded Allegro Academy was a safely secluded palace, and the surrounding forests were magical and protecting us from the outside world. With the millions of leaves turning a dozen different shades, it was a landscape any painter would call a masterpiece. The forests and gardens were filled with flowers and the occasional pond, and hand-crafted benches fit for a princess.
For some reason, Cora chose to drag Dante along on our little exploration trip into the grounds around Allegro Academy. I didn’t mind, except that every time I saw Dante, I was reminded of the eerie noises that kept me up for the better half of the night. Not to mention the kiss. So yes, it was a kiss on the cheek, and yes, that didn’t mean anything. In some countries, like France, it was actually just a ‘hello’ sign, and people kissed everyone. I had only kissed aunts and uncles and other family members, so to me, it is a big deal. Especially because it meant at least one male person my age wasn’t allergic to me or pretended to be.
Today, Dante was cheerful and talkative, not a trace of last night’s events showing in his features. He was talking about Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, Autumn in particular, and about the composition he was working on about me.
“You look gloomy,” Dante decided suddenly, his eyes fixed on mine. He chose to dress casually this afternoon, just a white shirt and black pants. He seemed so carefree, so different from the way he was last night.
“I’m not,” I insisted. “I love the gardens.”
“This arboretum,” Cora told us, “was first planted in the eighteenth century. Some of the trees still date back from that era. Others are younger, like those small ones at the front. It's said that Amelia Gray, one of the first owners of the estate, loved strolling through the arboretum. She occasionally had a rendezvous here with various gentlemen. As in, men who weren’t her husband.”
“A true heartbreaker, that one,” Dante muses. “One of her great loves was Mendelssohn. At least, that’s what the gossiping papers said.”
“How come you guys know all this?” I asked both of them, startled by their apparent knowledge of the house and its history.
“We dug up some dirt a few years back,” Cora replied, “when Dante grew convinced, he could see glimpses of the past. We checked to see if they were true.”
“And where they?” I asked, thinking back of how I felt during dance class. It seemed as if our reality and the past had blended together, a whirlwind of emotions clashing, time moving not linear but in all different directions, colliding.
“Nope,” Nora replied. She looked at Dante as if asking for his permission to continue, but he was fixated on a small flower garden in front of us. “I think it was his imagination. We artists tend to be a creative lot.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t confident all of this was truly thanks to our imagination.
“We ought to show her,” Dante said suddenly, tearing away from the flower garden. “The cemetery.”
“What cemetery?” I inquired. No sooner than he had spoken the words, an unearthly cold wrapped around me, chilling me to the bone.
“There’s an old cemetery on the grounds,” Cora explained. “It’s the family cemetery of the people who used to live here. I think it’s a beautiful place: quiet and mysterious, but peaceful all the same.”
Dante gave her a calculating look, as if he wasn’t at all convinced the cemetery she was referring to was peaceful. “You should see for yourself,” he said, looking at me directly.
“All right,” I agreed, despite feeling like I just dug my own grave. “Show me.”
At the end of the arboretum, Cora turned to the left, following a rocky stone path to a clearing, and a graveyard surrounded by iron fences. A small sign indicated this was the Gray cemetery, the final resting place of a long line of Gray men and women. The temperature grew increasingly colder the closer we get to the cemetery, and the shadows cast by the large oak trees surrounding the places were long and dark, almost threatening. I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering. Cora, still in her short-sleeved shirt, didn’t seem to notice.
Dante looked at me curiously but didn’t breathe a word. Meanwhile, Cora opened the cemetery fence to let us in. The graveyard was abandoned. It was so quiet here I didn’t even hear birds, as if the whole world came to an end and the only place left was this small, green lot.
“I used to come here to draw,” Cora confessed. “This place gave me lots of inspiration.” She put a step aside so I could look at the graveyard more closely. Four rows of graves stood proudly next to each other. Some were simple headstones with an elegant marking of whom sleeps there for all eternity. Others were elaborately decorated, Barokesque in style, with large Angel statues on top and swirly frames going down on both sides. The clash of styles, some dating from centuries ago, others obviously younger, gave for an odd, otherworldly appearance.
“This place gives me the creeps,” I blurted out. �
�How could you stand being here all on your own?”
“Stop being such a wuss,” Cora said. “This is nothing compared to the mausoleum. Even I have to admit the mausoleum could come directly from a horror movie.”
I bent through my knees and peeked curiously at the name engraved in the first grave in front of us. Martin Gray, loving father and beloved brother, it said. There was a small picture of this Martin fellow on the top left of the gravestone. He looked no older than thirty on the picture, a charming, handsome man. A shiver ran down my spine, and I averted my eyes from the small grave.
Cora walked down the aisles of graves, seemingly undisturbed by the sheer creepiness of this place, the sense of desolation and hopelessness.
“Are you all right?” Dante asked. He had materialized behind me, his hand resting on my lower back. Even though I was wearing a hoodie, I could feel the warmth of his hand through the thick material.
“Yes,” I replied. “I just didn’t expect Allegro Academy to have its own veritable graveyard. It’s eerie.”
“All these people belonged to the family inhabiting Allegro Academy before it actually became a school. The Grays. This used to be called Gray House, and not just because that was the family’s name, but also because the atmosphere used to be gloomy around here. Let’s say the Gray men had a habit of not being too faithful to their spouses, and some of the women benefited from this trait as well.”
“Some cheating spouses hardly sound ghastly,” I said, “although it does make for a grim living, I suppose.”
“Ah, but cheating sometimes ends in someone getting murdered,” Dante said.
“You mean someone was murdered? In the Academy?” I frowned at him.
“Hundreds of years ago. A man named William Gray. You can find his resting place here as well, toward the back. He wasn’t a very nice fellow, so I doubt many people cared. His murderer was never found.”
Academy of Magic Collection Page 174