The Ghost Sonata

by Allison, Jennifer

  Gilda remembered how her father had encouraged her to pursue her passion for writing, how he had given her the gift of his lucky manual typewriter before he died. He had never said anything like, That’s not a very practical career, Gilda. You’d be better off pursuing plumbing. Of course, Gilda had no idea what her dad would have thought of her career as a psychic investigator. That interest had evolved only after his death.

  “It was my piano teacher who actually convinced my parents to let me come down here and compete,” Julian explained. “I’m staying with some of my teacher’s friends who live nearby. Oh, and I’ll definitely be beaten to death if any of my friends ever discover that I traveled to Oxford with Mr. Goodwin for a piano contest.”

  “There are some kids like that in my school, too. Only I’m not friends with them.”

  “In Crawling, you don’t get to pick your friends; you just fend off attacks.”

  Gilda laughed, but she sensed a conflict in Julian—a hidden sadness. “For what it’s worth, I think you could actually win this, Julian.”

  “Well, thanks for saying that.”

  “I shouldn’t be saying that because I’m really rooting for Wendy. We’ve got big plans for the prize money.”

  “Send some of it in my direction, then. Wendy’s quite good; the nerves got to her a bit, though.”

  “I know. I really should go try to find her and see how she’s doing.”

  But Gilda didn’t want to leave Julian. They passed a sea of student bicycles leaning against the stone walls of Lincoln College, then wandered into the Covered Market—an indoor market filled with flower stands, butcher shops, vegetable and fruit displays, bakeries, and small cafés. Outside the butcher shops, the smell of cold sausages permeated the air. Rabbits and pheasants hung from their feet with fur and feathers still intact. Julian pointed to a window display featuring THE WORLD’S OLDEST HAM!—a dried, shriveled piece of meat.

  “I’d fancy a posh lunch,” said Julian, staring at the dessicated ham.

  “Me, too,” said Gilda, suddenly realizing that she was very hungry. “I’m starved for something posh and gooey, like macaroni and cheese.”

  Julian laughed. “I was thinking more along the lines of something fancy and expensive. I’ve only got five quid at the moment, though, so I think we’ll have to settle for Brown’s Café here—unless you’re secretly loaded with cash like any self-respecting American.”

  “Sorry, I left my millions in the States.”

  The two wandered into Brown’s Café to order lunch. This is almost like a real date, Gilda thought, suddenly feeling self-conscious about the idea of eating with Julian. I’m actually on a date with an English boy!

  Gilda and Julian ordered sandwiches at the counter, then found a small table at the back of the café. A portly man plunked himself down at the table next to them and gobbled a plate of sausages while reading a book entitled A History of Gastronomy. He picked up a plastic container of mustard and squirted it loudly, then blew his nose into his napkin with a trumpeting sound. At the same moment, a shiny button burst from the waistband of the man’s trousers and skittered across the floor, drawing the attention of several diners. Red-faced, the man glared at the button, which now lay on the other side of the room. It isn’t that funny, Gilda told herself. Don’t laugh! Nevertheless, she snorted with glee as Julian grinned and kicked her under the table.

  “I bet he teaches at the university,” said Gilda, after the man hastily finished the rest of his sausages and left the café—not without giving Gilda and Julian a reprimanding glance.

  “My guess is that he works in a secondhand bookstore,” said Julian. “He wanted to go to school at Oxford, but he flunked his A levels. So he’s spent his years reading all the dusty gastronomy books in the store instead.”

  “And he eats sausages for lunch every day,” Gilda added.

  “Except Thursdays. On Thursdays he eats tripe.”

  “I take it you like people-watching as much as I do.”

  “People are ridiculous,” said Julian, “but at least they’re entertaining.”

  “They’re not always ridiculous.”

  “Believe me,” said Julian, “most of them are ridiculous.”

  The rain had stopped by the time Gilda and Julian left the Covered Market. They wandered down busy Cornmarket Street, then to a narrow path that led into the private gardens of Merton College. Gilda was delighted to hear gloomy organ music from the college chapel intermingling with church bells in the distance.

  “There’s a shortcut here that leads to the Music Building,” Julian explained.

  Gilda followed him onto a straight walking path that divided a meadow with playing fields on one side from the college buildings on the other.

  “I think this is called Dead Man’s Walk,” said Julian. “My teacher said they used to have funeral processions here.”

  At the end of the path, Christ Church Cathedral loomed like a Gothic castle, its spires soaring under a mixture of dark and sunlit clouds. Gilda was instantly intrigued with Dead Man’s Walk: she had the sense that there must be hundreds of ghosts nearby—spirits that drifted silently down the streets and pathways, wandering to destinations that still existed from antiquity.

  Something about the quiet, moody atmosphere of Dead Man’s Walk made Gilda want to confide in Julian—to share something more meaningful about herself. “This probably sounds weird,” she ventured, “but I think the guesthouse where Wendy and I are staying might be haunted. In fact, I’m pretty sure I saw a ghost on our first night here.”

  Gilda half-expected Julian to respond with a joke, but instead he became thoughtful. “I saw a ghost once,” he said.

  “You did?”

  “I was never quite the same after that night.”

  As Gilda and Julian walked through Christ Church Meadow, Julian told his story.

  16

  The Wandering Children

  A couple years ago,” said Julian, “some of my mates bet me that I couldn’t spend the whole night in the cemetery, so I decided to prove them wrong.

  “We met in the center of town just before midnight. They handed me a flashlight and a blanket and vowed that they wouldn’t play any rotten tricks; it was going to be a completely fair bet. We trotted past the darkened shops and the drunkards wobbling home, then down an alleyway and toward the old churchyard. The church is away from the houses and shops, surrounded by a grove of trees that were creaking in the wind. As we walked under the trees, I kept remembering this old poem my grandfather used to recite to spook us when we were walking at dark:

  Ellum do grieve,

  Oak, he do hate;

  Willow do walk when ye travels late.

  “It’s a poem about how trees have their own spirits. Elm trees can die of grief if they see another tree being chopped down. Oak trees can be dangerous and mean. But it was the part about the willow tree that always gave me the shivers—the idea that if you’re walking alone at night, a willow tree might quietly uproot itself from the ground and tiptoe behind you. Every now and then you’ll hear a swish, swish, swish sound. Then, just as you look behind, the tree sinks its roots right back into the ground. When you start walking again, it follows you, and gradually this begins to drive you crazy with fear.

  “Anyway, in the dark, it all seemed quite plausible—trees tiptoeing around and such—but I had to put a brave face on, of course, and not share any of these thoughts.

  “My mates trotted away laughing, leaving me all alone in the cemetery, which was just crammed with rotting tombstones, and I sat down on the cold, damp ground. I couldn’t help thinking about how I was surrounded by dead bodies and bones—how all that separated me from them was a few feet of dirt. I nearly had a heart attack every time I heard the crackling of a twig or the hooting of an owl.

  “By now I was frozen, and wished I had about three more woolen blankets. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were just playing tricks, but all the shadowy tombstones were beginning to look like little p
eople standing all around me. I turned off my flashlight because I didn’t like seeing all the names on the tombstones, because knowing the names of all those corpses under the ground would make them too real, reminding me that they actually were people. I tried just sitting there with my eyes closed, but that was somehow scarier.

  “So my teeth were clacking and practically jumping out of my jaw, and my bones were chilled. Then it started to spit down rain, and that’s when I almost got up and left. But I remembered they had bet me twenty quid that I couldn’t stay there, and of course I didn’t want to lose that dosh. So I convinced myself to give it just another hour, thinking I would get used to everything and stop feeling scared.

  “And that’s when I saw it. Or—that’s when I saw him.

  “At first glance, it looked like a completely real, ordinary child who was just standing there in the drizzle. But the thing was—I knew he wasn’t supposed to be there. I knew in my bones that this was not a normal little boy who just happened to climb out of bed and wander from the village into the cemetery in the middle of a rainy night.

  “‘Are you lost?’ I called, just in case he really was a lost child. ‘Where’s your mum?’

  “He didn’t answer. Then I noticed that his clothes looked odd, somehow old-fashioned. He looked at me as if he recognized me—that gave me the chills—and then the strangest part happened. He vanished right into thin air.

  “So I did what you would expect. I ran. Because I suddenly knew what I had seen. They say that all across England—probably even all over the world—there are ghosts of children who were murdered. They’re called ‘Wandering Children.’”

  Gilda felt her scalp tingle at the spookiness of Julian’s story. She also had to squelch an urge to pull out her Master Psychic’s Handbook to see whether Wandering Children appeared in the index. “So what did you do next?” she asked.

  “I went home and had a bath and a cup of tea.”

  “But—didn’t you want to find out that ghost-boy’s identity, maybe figure out what happened to him in the past? I mean, maybe there was a reason he materialized in front of you. Maybe he was trying to send you a message!”

  “He was trying to scare the pants off me.”

  “Ghosts don’t really set out to frighten anyone, Julian. People just get scared because they’re dealing with something they don’t understand.”

  Julian looked annoyed. “Leave it to an American to spoil a good ghost story.”

  “Leave it to an English boy to go home and have tea after seeing a ghost.”

  “Leave it to an American girl to feel pointlessly superior to tea.”

  “Look, Julian, I didn’t realize you were just telling me a ghost story. I thought you said this really happened to you.”

  “It did happen.”

  “Well, that’s why I’m curious about the details.” I can’t believe we’re already getting in a fight when we haven’t even had a chance to become boyfriend and girlfriend, Gilda thought. I guess I asked too many questions. Clearly I was just supposed to listen and giggle and not offer my own opinions.

  “Listen,” said Julian, “my piano teacher is probably looking for me, and he’ll give me a hiding if I don’t get to the practice rooms at some point today. Pointless as that may be when Waldgrave is one of the judges, of course.”

  “Oh, sure.” Gilda felt a twinge of regret that Julian appeared to be in a sudden hurry to extricate himself from spending more time with her. “I need to go do some research anyway.”

  “What kind of research?”

  “Oh, just some homework for school. Nothing that would interest you.” At the moment, she no longer wanted to tell him about her work as a psychic investigator.

  After Julian left, Gilda sat on a bench at the edge of Dead Man’s Walk. She considered heading to the Music Faculty Building to find Wendy, but she didn’t want Julian to suspect that she was following him.

  A feeling of homesickness came over her, and she felt compelled to write a letter. She knew her mother and her older brother, Stephen, would be expecting a postcard, but she felt the need to write a note to her dad instead.

  Gilda saw that rain clouds were again gathering overhead. Thinking of Julian’s story about the Wandering Children, she decided to head toward Blackwell’s Bookshop to do some research on English ghosts.

  17

  The Haunted Melody

  The sign outside Wendy’s practice room door announced: THIS IS ONE OF TWO SOUNDPROOF PRACTICE ROOMS AT THE MUSIC FACULTY BUILDING. TWO-HOUR TIME LIMIT PLEASE! Inside, the tiny practice room reeked of microwave popcorn, cigarette smoke, and the cedarlike scent of rosin used for stringed instruments.

  As she set up the tape-recording equipment she had borrowed from the Music Building, Wendy perceived a distinct patch of cold air near the piano. It reminded her of a feeling she had experienced once while treading water in a northern lake in Michigan—the sensation of moving over a spring of freezing-cold water that bubbled up from the ground. Gilda would probably say that’s a sign of “spirit activity,” she thought, blowing on her fingers to warm them up.

  After adjusting the bench and running some scales and arpeggios, Wendy turned on the tape recorder and took a deep breath before beginning the Mozart Fantasy in D Minor. I know this piece backward and forward, she told herself. Why did I get lost?

  She played through the music from beginning to end, then began once more. As she played, she began to question her interpretation of the music.

  “Try to tell a story with the music,” Professor Maddox had urged.

  “Play the piece the way Mozart would want it played,” Professor Waldgrave had argued.

  But what is the story? Wendy wondered. And how should I know how Mozart would play it?

  Wendy stopped playing for a moment and stared into a shaft of sunlight that streamed through a tiny, dirty window, illuminating flecks of lint floating languidly in the air. An answer came to her: Mozart is telling you about something he dreads. He’s telling you he knows he’s going to die.

  Wendy had no idea how this answer popped into her mind, but she began to play the piece again, and this time, she heard the somber tolling of a bell and the echo of a funeral march from within the piano music. She understood now that the bright, major sections of this piece were just memories of happy times—ghosts of laughter and dancing that would soon vanish. She remembered that Mozart had died young, struck down by illness. Had he experienced a premonition of his own death? As she played, she had a heightened awareness of the fragility of her own life—a sense of the many fleeting memories that had already disappeared.

  When she reached the end of the music, Wendy sat very still, listening to the overtones that hovered in the air for a moment, like a rainbow of sound. That’s it, she thought. That’s what the judges wanted.

  Goose bumps ran down her arms and legs as she felt the soft touch of a hand on the back of her neck. It was as if someone else in the room was offering a tiny gesture of approval.

  Wendy quickly turned to look behind her, but she was alone in the room. Did that really just happen, or am I going crazy?

  She suddenly remembered reading about a boy who developed schizophrenia—a disease that made him hear voices and see things that weren’t really there. But I can’t be schizophrenic, Wendy told herself. I’m Wendy Choy—a smart, rational person who’s in control of her life.

  As if mocking her, the melody in A minor entered her mind again, interrupting her thoughts with maddening persistence.

  “Okay,” Wendy said aloud to whomever might be listening. “You win.”

  Wendy slowly placed her right hand on the keyboard and began to sound out the notes of the melody that haunted her. She was beginning to feel convinced that somebody desperately wanted her to play this music.

  18

  Professor Sabertash and the Tarot

  Gilda walked down Broad Street and into Blackwell’s Bookshop, where she immediately began perusing texts devoted to ghosts and English
hauntings. As she scanned the shelves, Gilda noticed a book that caught her interest entitled The Oxford Guide to the Tarot by Alphonse Sabertash. She opened the book and began to read:

  Tarot cards find their beginnings as a mere card game during the Renaissance in Italy. It was only later—during the eighteenth century in particular—that the tarot became known as a powerful, and potentially even dangerous, tool for divination or “fortune-telling.”

  While the supposed “mystical origins” of tarot cards may be overblown, the magical properties of the tarot are nevertheless very real. This is because the ability of tarot cards to tap into the most intuitive and even psychic potentials of the human mind is a function of the cards’ deep-rooted symbolism.

  Images on the cards reveal ideas from ancient religions, mythology, fairy tales, and numerology. Even in modern society, where the original sources of this symbolism have been forgotten or ignored by a culture of amnesia, the symbols retain a vital power to tap into the unconscious regions of the mind.

  Gilda flipped through several more chapters until she found an image of the card Wendy had received—the Nine of Swords. She saw that it was from a deck of cards created by the artist Elizabeth Gill.

  The Nine of Swords is commonly viewed as “the nightmare card.” The card indicates anguish, despair, anxiety, and worry. It may be a signal of cruelty that people inflict on one another, an emotionally intense conflict, or simply of the battle to gain control of one’s own mind—the ghosts and demons that may be conjured by fear of the future or a “dark night of the soul.”

  Intrigued, Gilda flipped to the end of the book in search of some information about the book’s author.