When the Curtain Rises

by Rachel Muller

  Nyssa’s eyes went wide. “You wished for a bike just like mine?” She closed her eyes and remained silent for the space of a few breaths. Then she shook her head. “No, Chloe. That’s just crazy. It was another coincidence, that’s all it was.”

  “It wasn’t a coincidence!” Chloe insisted. “It’s the way the rosewood box works. I read it in Dante’s letters.”

  “Where’s the box now?”

  “Back in the secret attic. I put it there last night.”

  Nyssa nodded. “Good. You should leave it there.”

  “Finally you believe me,” said Chloe.

  “I don’t believe the box is magic, but I do believe the idea of it is dangerous. Look how messed up you are right now. Forget about it. Focus on getting ready for the show.”

  “I told you, I don’t want to do the show.”

  Nyssa stared into her friend’s face for a few seconds before sighing. “Whatever else Dante was, he wasn’t a coward.”

  “Are you calling me a coward?” Chloe said angrily.

  “Well what do you call what you’re doing?”

  “I call it common sense, knowing my limits.”

  “My dad always says that the only limits you have are the ones you put on yourself,” said Nyssa. “Anyway, I’m being released this afternoon. I’ll be really disappointed if I don’t see you when the curtain rises tomorrow. Especially now that I can’t be in the show myself.”

  Chloe tried to outstare her friend. “That is so low!” she said after a few seconds. She folded her arms across her chest. “Fine. If it means so much to you, I’ll do it.”

  Abigail was waiting in the hallway to drive Chloe back to her great-aunts’ house. The center of town was packed, forcing Abigail to slow the car to a crawl as she navigated the narrow main street toward the bridge that led across the canal.

  “Good turnout for the festival,” Abigail said as she edged her hatchback past a line of parked cars on one side and a stream of pedestrians on the other. “Most of the festival’s shows are already sold out.”

  “How about the junior talent show?” Chloe asked, feeling her stomach flutter.

  “Oh, that’s been sold out for weeks,” Abigail said with a careless wave of her hand. “Good thing we got our tickets at the beginning of the summer. It’s quite a famous event here, you know. It’s launched a few careers. Young people send in their audition tapes six months in advance, just to get a spot on the program.”

  Chloe turned to stare at Abigail. “Audition tapes? I didn’t send in an audition tape.”

  “Yes, well, you’re the exception. Your great-aunts’ word was enough to convince Nyssa’s father. As the program director for the festival, he has pull.”

  The butterflies fluttering in Chloe’s stomach had suddenly become giant birds of prey. “I didn’t know this talent show was such a big deal,” she said in a strained voice.

  The housekeeper took her right hand off the steering wheel just long enough to pat Chloe’s leg. “Don’t worry. You’ll do fine. You’re a McBride, after all.”

  Chloe made her way to the piano in the sitting room immediately after lunch and began running through her scales. “Don’t think,” she told herself sternly as she adjusted the sheet music on the ledge. “Just play.”

  As much as she tried to block the talent show from her mind, thoughts of it kept creeping in. Chloe’s fingers felt like lead. They fell clumsily on the keys. “I know this,” she told herself angrily as she stumbled through the climactic passage of The Ballad of Petticoat Joe. She forced herself to slow down, to go through the music on the page note by note, measure by measure, until she had it right again. Her cheeks blazed even though she was alone.

  “You can’t do this,” a voice in her head insisted. “You’re going to crash.”

  “I have to do this,” she whispered fiercely. “And I’m not going to crash.”

  She took a deep breath and started again.

  Kitty laid her hand on Chloe’s forearm as the girl pushed her chair back from the table after dinner that evening. “Where are you off to now, my dear?”

  “Back to the piano,” Chloe said, lifting her napkin from her lap with her free hand. “I’ve still got a few more hours to put in before I go to bed.”

  “Give yourself a little rest tonight,” said Kitty. “You know your music already. Run through it again in the morning if you want to, but give yourself the evening off.”

  “But I’m not ready,” Chloe insisted, her voice strained. “I sound terrible!”

  “You sound much better than you think,” Bess told her from the other side of the table. “You can’t hear yourself objectively right now.”

  Kitty gave Chloe’s arm another pat. “Take a break. It’s the kindest thing you can do for yourself tonight.”

  Chloe let herself out through the back door. The sky was just visible through the leafy canopy above her. Clouds had gathered since the afternoon, obscuring the sun and blanketing the garden in shadow. The clearing at the center of the overgrown yard was still. Chloe listened intently as she stood beside one of the stone benches, but there was nothing, not the gentle drone of bees, not the soft burbling of the fountain, not even a whisper of wind.

  “The calm before the storm,” a quiet voice said behind her.

  Chloe spun around. “Mr. Dromnel! What are you doing here?” she stammered, her hands flying to her chest.

  The intruder stepped forward from the shadows at the edge of the clearing. “There’s a rusted gate on my side of the wall. I pushed it open just to see what was on the other side, and I found myself in this charming garden.”

  Chloe took a step backward, but her sandal caught the edge of the bench, and she stumbled slightly.

  “I’m sorry,” Mr. Dromnel said, holding up his palms. “I didn’t mean to alarm you. I imagine you have enough on your mind already, with tomorrow’s show.”

  “How do you know about the show?”

  Mr. Dromnel smiled. “Your great-aunts, of course. They’re quite proud of you. Although they did mention that the show is causing you some anxiety.”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Chloe.

  “Of course you will,” said Mr. Dromnel. “The trembling, the sweating, the nausea—they all pass in the end, don’t they?” There was a faint rumbling overhead, and he looked up. “It looks like the storm your aunt predicted is about to break over us. I suppose we’d both better return inside.”

  That was all the dismissal that Chloe needed. She was already on the path back to her great-aunts’ house as the first drops began to fall.

  “Good luck tomorrow,” she heard Lucas Dromnel call from somewhere behind her. She didn’t look back.

  Chapter Thirteen

  With a flash of lightning and a drumroll of thunder, the rain began to fall in earnest. Chloe was wet through to the skin by the time she reached the back door. She slipped her muddy sandals off before heading to her bedroom in search of dry clothes.

  At the threshold of her room, Chloe came to an abrupt stop. There was just enough light coming through the window to illuminate the rosewood box on her desk. “No,” she said, recoiling. “No!” She turned and stumbled down the hallway toward the light in the kitchen.

  “What is it, Chloe?” Abigail asked, her hands suspended above the sink.

  “There’s a wooden box on my desk,” Chloe said, her voice trembling. “It wasn’t there this morning. Did you put it there?”

  Abigail wiped her hands on her apron. “I haven’t been anywhere near your room today. You’ll have to ask your—”

  But Chloe was already across the hall, moving toward the sitting room.

  “Take a breath, dear,” Kitty said when Chloe appeared, white-faced, in the doorway. “You look like you’re about to collapse.”

  As if on cue, Chloe’s legs crumpled. Kitty and Bess rose in alarm, but Chloe had already steadied herself against the doorframe. She let the two elderly women lead her to the love seat on the other side of the room.

&n
bsp; “You’re soaking wet,” Kitty said when Chloe was seated. “We’ll have to get you into something dry.”

  “I’ve brought a towel and a nightie,” Abigail said from the doorway.

  Three pairs of hands peeled Chloe’s wet T-shirt and shorts from her shivering body and pulled the cotton nightgown over her head. There was a crash of thunder, and the lamp beside the love seat flickered and went out.

  “There goes the electricity,” said Abigail as she finished tucking a quilt in around Chloe’s legs. “I’ll get a fire going, and then I’ll gather up some candles before it’s too dark to see.”

  “Thank you, Abby,” Chloe heard Kitty say. “Get a kettle of water to hang over the fire too. We’ll make some chamomile tea, get something hot into her.”

  “What happened?” Bess asked when the housekeeper was gone.

  Chloe shook her head, too disturbed to talk.

  “I hope you’re not coming down with something,” Kitty said, leaning over to feel Chloe’s forehead. “Poor dear. You’ve had a lot to deal with, haven’t you?”

  The rosewood box was still sitting on the desk when Chloe returned to her room with a candle in her hand. The box seemed almost to be vibrating in the flickering candlelight, its shadow dancing on the far wall. Chloe forced herself to move toward the desk. She put her candle down, took a breath and reached for the box. It felt strangely soft and warm under her fingers, as if it had come alive. Chloe drew back her hands in horror.

  She waited until her heart had slowed again before approaching the box a second time. With the aid of a pillow from her bed, she picked the box up and carried it quickly to the bedroom closet. Rain beat furiously against the windowpane as Chloe shoved the box into the darkest corner of the closet and slammed the door.

  Outside on the landing, just audible over the storm, Chloe heard the grandfather clock chime ten times. She made it across the room and collapsed on her bed, drawing the covers around her trembling body. The clock had barely struck the quarter hour when Chloe slipped from consciousness into a vivid dream.

  She was seated at a grand piano in the center of a large stage. There were lights trained on her, almost blinding in their intensity, but beyond the floodlights she could just make out tiers of seats—a huge auditorium that seemed to stretch on forever. The people in the auditorium cheered and called out her name as her fingers found the keys and the first bars of music rose from the piano.

  After that, everything fell away, and she heard nothing but the music itself. She was the music, the notes rising and falling like the tides, blending together, coming apart, spinning, dancing. There was no sense of time in her dream. She played on without pause, measure after measure, her fingers flying, her heart soaring.

  The music reached a final crescendo, and she became conscious of her body again. The audience was on its feet before she was even finished. She stood up and accepted the applause, let it pour over her and into her until she was close to bursting with it.

  “You could have this,” a soft voice whispered in her ear. “You could be the greatest concert pianist in the world.”

  She turned, startled. Lucas Dromnel stood beside her on the stage. “I don’t need to be the best,” she protested. “I just want to play.”

  “What you want is to be a concert pianist. That’s what you told your friend Nyssa, remember? The world’s great pianists don’t play in church basements and town auditoriums—they play at Carnegie Hall. That’s the secret you keep hidden, Chloe McBride. That’s what really frightens you—that you’ll never get there, that you don’t have what it takes. That’s why you shake and sweat and vomit before you perform.”

  The stage began to dissolve. Chloe heard Mr. Dromnel say something more, but the words were lost as she fought her way back up to the surface of consciousness.

  In the darkness outside Chloe’s bedroom, the clock on the landing chimed eleven times. Chloe was alert just long enough to register the clock, and then sleep pulled her under again.

  This time the stage was unlit. She could smell her own nervous sweat and hear people whispering and muttering in the darkness around her. She reached out to orient herself and found the outlines of the piano bench and piano of her earlier dream. As she sat down on the bench, the floodlights came on. Blinded by the sudden brilliance, her hands flew to her eyes. The audience laughed cruelly. She looked down and saw that she was naked.

  The piano keys glowed softly in front of her. As if she were a marionette controlled by invisible strings, her hands rose to the piano. But what her fingers produced was not music. It was noise, a discordant blend of notes that jarred and hurt her ears. There was no rhythm, no melody. There was only chaos, an angry child banging on an out-of-tune toy piano. Beyond the floodlights, the audience began to boo and hiss. The ugly sound rose around her like thunder, until there was no room for anything else. She wrenched her fingers from the keys.

  The stage beneath her began to turn, and then suddenly it was not a stage but a carousel populated by wolves and wild dogs and other dark beasts. They were fixed in place on the carousel, and yet somehow they were alive, roaring and howling as the carousel spun faster and faster through the darkness. The bench she’d been sitting on had become a vicious hound. It yapped and growled as she clung to its black fur in terror.

  Over the nightmarish music of the merry-go-round, over the roaring and howling of the angry dogs, she heard a new sound. It was a voice, calm and authoritative. She turned her head to the center of the carousel and saw Mr. Dromnel standing there, a half-smile on his lips. In his outstretched arms he held the rosewood box.

  The music subsided, and the carousel slowed enough for Chloe to escape her growling mount and jump down to the ground. She was confronted by a dark forest. Her head was still spinning, but she forced her legs to carry her through the trees, away from the hideous merry-go-round. Behind her she heard Mr. Dromnel call her name, and she moved faster, over roots that tugged at her feet, through branches that caught at her limbs. She saw a light flicker through the underbrush off to the right and veered toward it. As she drew closer, she saw that the light was a bonfire at the center of a clearing. Even by firelight, she recognized the semicircle of tents that surrounded the fire. She hesitated on the edge of the clearing for just a moment before a shadowy figure emerged from the nearest tent.

  “Chloe,” a man’s voice said as the figure drew nearer. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “You’re my—you’re Dante, aren’t you?” Chloe whispered as the man’s features became clearer.

  He nodded. “We don’t have much time. Hurry—you need to see something.”

  Chloe followed her great-grandfather past the tents, past a darkened stage and the bonfire to the other side of the clearing. And then suddenly there was nothing in front of them. No more ground, no more forest, no more starlit sky. It was as if they’d reached the edge of the world.

  “Where are we?” Chloe said fearfully, taking a step back.

  “Listen,” Dante said, his hand on Chloe’s arm. “You mustn’t make the same mistake I made. Don’t use the rosewood box. Destroy it!”

  “But—”

  “Quickly,” said Dante. “He’s coming!”

  Chloe looked over her shoulder and saw Mr. Dromnel and his beastly entourage entering the far side of the clearing. “Where do I go?” she cried, but Dante had disappeared. In desperation, Chloe tried to move forward, but it was like trying to swim through a thick cloud. She couldn’t see anything in the empty space ahead, couldn’t tell if she was making progress or just moving in place. Beneath the yelping and snarling coming from behind her, Chloe heard the faint ticking of a clock. The more she strained to push forward through the void, the louder it got. Vague shapes began to appear in front of her, as though she were looking at a scene through a gauze curtain. The shapes became clearer, resolving themselves into a scene that Chloe recognized. She was looking out at the dimly lit first-floor landing of her great-aunts’ house. And then, as if an invisible
curtain had fallen, the scene disappeared again.

  “You’re trapped,” a voice whispered in her ear. Not Dante this time, but Mr. Dromnel.

  “No,” Chloe shuddered, but it was true. She was trapped in the painting on the landing, just like Dante and the others. With nowhere left to go, Chloe closed her eyes.

  When Chloe opened her eyes again, she was back in her bed. She could feel her blankets and hear the rain, but the room seemed to be spinning, and she didn’t know whether she was asleep or awake. After a moment her dizziness passed, and she was able to sit up. In the darkness, she saw that the closet door across the bedroom was ajar. A strange soft light spilled from its interior. Mesmerized, she rose from her bed and went to the source of the light. It was the rosewood box, glowing softly as if it had been painted with a phosphorescent stain. She picked it up and carried it to her bed. The lid fell back as she got under the covers, leaving the interior of the glowing box exposed and a faint sweet fragrance in the air.

  “Look inside,” said a smooth voice.

  “I’m still dreaming,” Chloe told herself, squeezing her eyes shut. “That’s all it is, just a dream.”

  “Open your eyes, Chloe,” said Mr. Dromnel’s voice. “See what the box can give you.”

  Chloe’s eyes remained closed, but she couldn’t shut out the images that appeared on the inside of her eyelids. She saw herself standing on the dingy stage of her nightmare, paralyzed with fear, humiliated by her own insecurity. The scene changed. Now she stood in front of the cheering audience in the massive auditorium. They were giving her a standing ovation, crying out for an encore. Pride swelled her veins, radiated from every pore of her skin.

  “Whisper your wish into the box and turn the key,” said Mr. Dromnel.

  “What will it cost me?” Chloe asked.

  “What wouldn’t you pay to win tomorrow? What wouldn’t you sacrifice to keep winning all the way to a future of sold-out theaters and million-dollar recording contracts?”