The Ghost Sonata

by Allison, Jennifer

  Gilda assumed Wendy had already left, but she nevertheless paused to rap on her door just in case. “Wendy? You in there?”

  Gilda was surprised to hear rustling from inside Wendy’s room, followed by the sound of objects clattering to the floor. She heard Wendy’s voice. “Crap! You’ve got to be kidding me!” Something else toppled over. “Ow!”

  “Wendy? What are you doing?”

  Wendy opened the door angrily, and Gilda was taken aback to see her standing in her pajamas with tousled hair and puffy eyes. One thing was for sure: she did not look like someone who was about to perform in an international piano competition.

  “It’s all over,” she said. “I’m completely doomed.”

  “Why aren’t you dressed? I thought you were supposed to be at Holywell Music Room by now!”

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “I overslept, that’s why. I thought you had already left!”

  “Well, I obviously overslept, too. I must have turned off my alarm in my sleep or something.” Wendy picked up a book of music and hurled it across the room as if she were an angry toddler. Then she sat down at the foot of her bed and covered her face with her hands.

  Gilda had never seen this side of Wendy, who was almost always in control of her emotions. Maybe Wendy’s big secret is that she throws a little tantrum before every one of her piano competitions, Gilda thought. Maybe her parents have to stuff her into the car kicking and screaming before her performances.

  “Look, Wendy, we have to get moving. You can still make it.”

  “No, I can’t!”

  “Now don’t your knickers in a twist, luv; we just need to find you a frock to wear and then we can shove off.” For some reason, Gilda felt that an approximation of a northern English accent was best suited to the stressful occasion.

  “Stop talking in that accent, please.”

  Gilda opened Wendy’s wardrobe and found all of her clothes neatly folded or hanging from hangers. “Hey, how about this little red number?”

  “Gilda, there’s no point. I knew I was jinxed!”

  Gilda turned to face Wendy with hands on hips. “Wendy, you flew across an ocean to play for these people, so there’s no way you’re going to miss this just because you’re running a little late this morning. Now—just throw on your clothes, curl your eyelashes, and get your butt down to the concert hall!”

  “You don’t understand. I can’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s this whole thing I’m supposed to do before I perform.”

  “Thing? What kind of thing?”

  “Just a bunch of stuff I do for luck. Kind of a ritual.”

  “You do a ritual?” Wendy had never mentioned this before. Maybe you never really know your friends until you travel to England with them and stay in a decaying, haunted house, Gilda thought. “So . . . what does this ritual involve?”

  “A bunch of things. It takes some time. I have to shampoo my hair and eat exactly a half a bowl of Cheerios . . .”

  “Why half a bowl of Cheerios?”

  “I don’t know why. It’s just something that works for me. See? I knew you would just think I’m weird.”

  Wendy’s ritual involved washing her hair in strawberry-scented shampoo while tapping the fingering of her piano music on her scalp, eating exactly half a bowl of Cheerios with her lucky spoon, brushing her hair twenty times on each side, then closing her eyes and visualizing her entire performance from beginning to end. She had carried out the ritual ever since she won her first competition. Objectively, she knew that winning a competition had nothing to do with the half bowl of Cheerios she had consumed that day or the strawberry scent of her long hair, but the repetition of as many of the details as possible of that first winning morning reassured and calmed her on the day of a performance. And the truth was, it did seem to bring a kind of luck; she had won many competitions since that day.

  “Wendy, I don’t think you’re weird at all. I just think you’re crazy.”

  “The thing I love about your jokes, Gilda, is that they’re so well-timed. It’s like you can tell I’m just sitting here wishing that someone would make fun of me as my entire life falls apart.”

  “Come on—my brother was just telling me about this baseball player who has a ritual of eating nothing but chicken on the day of a big game because he’s sure it helps him win.”

  “What happens if he doesn’t eat chicken?”

  “I don’t know. I guess he loses the game.”

  “That really helps me.”

  “Wendy, we both know your ritual is not what makes you able to play the piano brilliantly, okay?”

  “Maybe not, but it makes me believe that I can play.”

  Gilda thought for a moment. “Look, maybe you can do part of your lucky ritual. There isn’t time to wash your hair and all that, but why don’t I run downstairs and fix you a bowl of cereal while you get dressed? I bet Mrs. Luard has some English cereal like Weetabix or Shredded Hedgehog Crisp, or something.”

  “What about my hair?”

  “Just brush it.”

  “I’m supposed to wash it!”

  With a surge of frustration, Gilda grabbed Wendy’s strawberry shampoo from its perch on the wardrobe and thrust it in Wendy’s face. “Wendy, stop acting like a spoiled child star. This bottle of pink chemicals does not hold the key to your piano performance, okay? It makes you smell like a cough drop anyway.”

  “It smells like strawberries.”

  “Well, today you’re going to pretend you’re English royalty, and go without bathing or shampooing.”

  “I bet Prince William takes showers.”

  “I’m talking about the queens of the olden days,” said Gilda, absentmindedly sticking Wendy’s bottle of strawberry shampoo into her shoulder bag. “We’ll just squirt some perfume on you like they did during the Elizabethan era when nobody bathed.” Gilda remembered reading in a history book that Queen Elizabeth I used to bathe once a year with a stick of butter. “Now—I’m going to head downstairs to get your cereal. When I come back, I expect you to be dressed. Okay?”

  Wendy sighed. “Okay.”

  As she turned to leave Wendy’s room, Gilda noticed something unusual on the floor. She stooped to pick it up, and when she flipped it over, she felt an icy sensation in her stomach. She stared at the object for a minute, trying to absorb its significance. It was a tarot card—the Nine of Swords. The frightening thing about the presence of the card on Wendy’s floor was that it was from a completely different deck of cards than the one Gilda owned. The image on this version of the Nine of Swords featured the enormous numeral 9 and the word despair looming over a darkened landscape. A lone, shadowy figure walked amid nine swords piercing the dry earth. The picture had a moody, nightmarish quality. It was as if some phantom had read Wendy’s future during the night, leaving behind a cryptic, bleak verdict.

  “Wendy,” said Gilda cautiously, “you didn’t buy a deck of tarot cards yesterday, did you?”

  “When would I have time to buy tarot cards?” Wendy grabbed a wool sweater from her wardrobe and hurriedly pulled it over her head.

  “Just wondered . . .” Gilda didn’t want Wendy to see the card before her performance, but it was too late because Wendy was already peering over her shoulder.

  “Where did that come from?”

  “I just found it here on your floor. It seems like someone slipped it under the door.”

  Gilda and Wendy contemplated the mysterious card. Worse than the gloomy picture on the Nine of Swords was the realization that someone had purposefully placed it under Wendy’s door with the hope that she would discover it on the first morning of the competition.

  “It seems like a warning of some kind,” said Gilda.

  Wendy nodded and grew very pale, remembering the music she had heard in the middle of the night. For some reason, she didn’t want to tell Gilda about it yet. She still hoped it had all been an unusually vivid dream.

 
“Don’t worry about this now, Wendy.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “I’ll figure out what this means. You just finish getting dressed, and I’ll run downstairs and grab a couple muffins or something to take with us.”

  Outside the door to Wendy’s room, Gilda pulled out her journal and quickly scribbled some notes to herself:

  12

  The Holywell Music Room

  Holding their umbrellas to shield themselves from a steady, monotonous drizzle, Gilda and Wendy walked quickly through Gloucester Green, past rows of buses, an assortment of pizza and kebab shops, and a handful of touristy pubs. They made their way to Broad Street, where Gilda felt compelled to pause and peer up at a row of giant sculpted heads that perched on the semicircular gate surrounding the Sheldonian Theater. With square beards and wide eyes shaped like giant olives, they seemed to gaze above the street as if they were gods who could see some distant future event.

  “I think they’re supposed to be Roman emperors,” Wendy said, remembering something she had read in a guidebook.

  “They kind of look like those guys we used to see when my dad took us to the Harley-Davidson convention in Detroit.”

  “Gilda, come on! I’m late enough as it is!”

  The girls hurried on to Holywell Street, where the narrow road was lined with terraced houses painted a variety of pastel colors—white, blue, lime green, pale pink. Just ahead were the high, stone walls of New College. Weary-looking students emerged from an arched doorway that reminded Gilda of the entrance to a castle. They pulled on backpacks, jumped on bicycles, and sped down the street, presumably in search of coffee at one of the cafés.

  Gilda and Wendy stood on the sidewalk in front of the Holywell Music Room—a simple white building with two arched windows that seemed to peer at the girls with a surprised expression.

  Wendy suddenly wished she could make herself much smaller—the size of a mouse that could scurry away in the gutter or hide in a corner of the building until the competition was over.

  “We made it!” Gilda glanced at her watch, relieved that Wendy still had fifteen minutes before her performance time. Then she realized that Wendy seemed paralyzed by the sight of the Holywell Music Room.

  “I can’t do it,” Wendy whispered.

  “Wendy, what is your deal? This isn’t like you at all.”

  “Did you know this place is like one of the oldest concert halls in the whole world?”

  “It is?” To Gilda’s eye, the building looked less antiquated than the medieval architecture of many of the college buildings.

  “I mean, it’s one of the first places ever built just for performing music—with no other purpose.”

  “Well, your purpose is to play music. So let’s go, okay?”

  “What business do I have playing in the Holywell Music Room, where so many great musicians have performed? I’m just a kid from Detroit who can’t even wake up on time.”

  “Should I get out my violin, or do you want to have your self-pity party without music?”

  “Without music.”

  “Wendy, first of all, you’ve practiced just as hard as those people of olden times did—probably harder, since they had to spend so much time powdering their wigs. For another thing, you’re unshowered and heavily perfumed, just like they were. Besides, they were all drunk or insane in those days anyway.”

  “They were not all drunk or insane.”

  “Come on, Wendy. Just picture everyone in there naked and wearing eighteenth-century wigs, and you’ll be fine.”

  Gilda grabbed Wendy’s hand and practically dragged her up the steps leading to the building entrance. As they walked through the door, Wendy heard the sound of familiar music—the Chopin Ballade No. 3—a happy, horsey-sounding piece that, in the current performance, sounded frantic. “That’s Gary playing,” Wendy whispered.

  Mrs. Mendelovich rushed toward them from a backstage hallway. “Windy! Thank God!”

  A young woman who was handing out brochures at the entrance to the concert hall shot Mrs. Mendelovich a warning glance, pressing her finger to her lips.

  “I was worried you got lost,” Mrs. Mendelovich said in a slightly lower voice. “Thank God you are here.”

  Professor Heslop appeared. “Is this number nine?”

  “This is Windy Choy—one of my stars.”

  “And she is performer number nine, is she?”

  “I’m number nine,” said Wendy.

  “Numbered score for the judges?”

  Wendy handed Professor Heslop photocopies of the music she would play. Each bar of music was marked with a number in case the judges wanted to point to a specific phrase in their comments.

  “Yes, well, I’m afraid Wendy won’t have time to practice on the warm-up piano. You’ll have to go straight to the backstage waiting room, Wendy.”

  “But she must warm up!”

  “Mrs. Mendelovich, I’m afraid there just isn’t time. Wendy is late. Follow me, please, Wendy.”

  Mrs. Mendelovich grabbed Wendy’s hands and pressed them in a prayer position between her own. “Windy, I know you weell make me ploud. You are champion.”

  “I’ll try,” said Wendy meekly.

  Gilda wondered if Wendy was going to need someone to give her a shove onto the stage after the events of the morning. “Professor Heslop,” she said, “is it okay if I wait backstage with Wendy?”

  “The backstage waiting area is only for performers,” Professor Heslop replied curtly.

  “Professor Heslop,” Mrs. Mendelovich interjected, “Geelda is our page-turner, and I would like her to wait with Windy.”

  “I suppose I can make an exception for you, Mrs. Mendelovich.” Professor Heslop eyed Gilda’s hat with disapproval and then turned to lead Gilda and Wendy to the backstage waiting room.

  “Just don’t distract me, okay?” Wendy whispered. “My concentration is completely off as it is.”

  “How could I distract you? I’m here to help you concentrate, Wendy.”

  They entered a small backstage rehearsal room filled with music stands, a harpsichord, and an upright piano. Two other competitors waited there—Ming Fong and a boy who observed Gilda and Wendy with frank interest as he tilted back precariously on two legs of his chair, bracing himself against the harpsichord with one hand to keep from toppling over. He wore a white T-shirt and a worn leather jacket and jeans, as if affecting the style of a very young Marlon Brando. His black hair was disheveled, and he had none of the usual accessories of a young classical pianist waiting backstage for a performance—no marked-up music score in his lap, no mittens on his hands. Gilda felt certain that she recognized him from somewhere. Then she realized it was the boy who had observed her from across the room during the drawing of numbers. For some reason, she felt herself blushing under his gaze.

  Ming Fong turned to give Wendy a prim little smile, then glanced up at a large clock on the wall with eyebrows raised as if saying: You’re late!

  She almost seems happy that Wendy’s late, Gilda thought suspiciously.

  Both Wendy and Gilda took note of Ming Fong’s girlish dress trimmed with lace, and with a broad sash that tied behind her back in a giant bow. It looked like the kind of dress an antique doll might wear. As a final touch, she positioned a large red silk flower in her hair that matched the enormous crimson mittens she wore on her hands to keep her fingers warm.

  “She looks like Alice in Wonderland,” Gilda whispered cattily, wanting to distract Wendy, who seemed to be oddly fixated on the flower in Ming Fong’s hair.

  Wendy nodded, but she was actually wondering why the red flower in Ming Fong’s hair bothered her so intensely. Somehow the flower seemed to be mocking her—declaring victory in advance.

  Secretly, Gilda had to give Ming Fong some credit for dressing with what she could only hope was a competitive strategy: the childish dress was ridiculous but memorable: it made her look much younger than her fourteen years. Either she’s completely clueless, Gilda thought
, or she’s trying to give the judges the impression that they’re watching a child prodigy.

  Gilda glanced at Wendy and found herself wishing that she had at least brought a feather boa to drape around Wendy’s neck to add some color to the drab, black skirt and gray woolen sweater she had hastily selected. Then Gilda remembered the pair of arm-length pink gloves she had stuffed in her bag.

  “Here, Wendy.” Gilda pulled the gloves from her bag. “Put these on to keep your hands warm.”

  Wendy eyed the hot-pink gloves. “Thanks, but I’m not going to the prom right now.”

  “But these look nicer than those boxing mitts you’re wearing. You need some color.”

  “Shush!” Professor Heslop gave the girls a warning glance, and the boy who was watching the two of them grinned.

  Wendy opened the music for her Bach French Suite, turned her back to Gilda, and began tapping the fingering of the notes inside her mittens.

  Gilda decided to observe Ming Fong, who sat with a collection of Chopin compositions opened on her lap and a pair of headphones on her ears. Burning to ask Ming Fong about the tarot card Wendy had received, Gilda impulsively tapped her on the shoulder. Ming Fong turned to peer at Gilda with distant eyes, as if she had just been called out of a daydream. She reluctantly removed her headphones.

  “Hey, Ming Fong,” Gilda whispered. “Does this look familiar to you?”

  She handed Ming Fong the tarot card she had discovered on Wendy’s floor and watched her expressionless face closely.

  “One of your tarot cards?”

  “It isn’t mine,” said Gilda. “This one is different.”

  “Scary picture,” said Ming Fong. “Spooky.”

  “Have you seen this before?”

  Ming Fong shook her head.

  “Are you sure? Someone left it under Wendy’s door.”