The Doom of the Haunted Opera

by John Bellairs

  “Hmm,” mused Rose Rita, “I don’t know. That sounds pretty dull to me.” Her idea of an exciting topic was something that had to do with cannons and cavalry charges.

  “Well,” Lewis said, ready with the clincher to his argument, “Uncle Jonathan told me that your grandfather designed and built the theater. So what do you think now?”

  Rose Rita grinned. Her grandfather on her mother’s side was almost ninety years old, but he was active and smart, and she liked him immensely. Grandfather Albert Galway had been many things in his life: a surveyor, a sailor, an architect, and a building contractor, among others. Now he was retired and lived an independent life in a small cottage over on Sycamore Street. “No kidding?” asked Rose Rita. “He never told me that. Okay, Lewis, you’re on. What’s our first step?”

  Lewis was ready for that. “We can interview your grandfather. But I think before we do that, we should try to get a look at the theater. Want to go into town?”

  Rose Rita made a face. “It’s freezing out there.”

  “It isn’t like we’re going to the moon, you know,” said Lewis with a touch of exasperation. “We can bundle up, and if we hurry, we can be there in ten minutes. Come on, what do you say?”

  Rose Rita looked at her watch. It was a quarter to four. “All right,” she said with a sigh. “But if I catch pneumonia and die, I’m going to come back as a ghost and haunt you.”

  Lewis asked Mrs. Holtz for permission to go into town, and she gave it at once, as he knew she would. She was a kind and sweet old lady, but she had about a zillion grandchildren of her own, and she liked to be alone occasionally. Rose Rita and Lewis got into their coats and went outside. It was no longer sleeting, but the wind blew sharp and cold in their faces. They hurried down High Street toward town, their breath coming in frosty puffs and their eyes squinted against the frigid winter air.

  The Farmers’ Seed & Feed was a cavernous store that smelled of corn and leather and onions. Bins and barrels of seeds cluttered the floor space, while harnesses, bridles, and farm tools hung on the walls. Mr. Pfeiffer owned the feed store and the five-and-dime next door. He was a portly man with a bald head, a fringe of salt-and-pepper hair, and a big red nose that he kept squeezing, as if testing it for ripeness. Lewis and Rose Rita found him sitting in a straight-backed chair next to the store’s black potbellied stove, talking to a couple of his customers. The men had settled down for a long conversation, and Mr. Pfeiffer did not look as if he were about to get up.

  Lewis explained what he and Rose Rita wanted, and Mr. Pfeiffer squeezed his nose. “Why, sure,” he said. “I s’pose it wouldn’t hurt for the two of you to have a look around up there. But it’ll be awful cold. Tell you what—take a couple of flashlights with you. Get ’em from the shelf there. The electricity’s switched off upstairs, and I don’t feel like climbing halfway up them stairs just to turn it on.” He fumbled in his trouser pocket and found the key to the opera house. “Mind you lock up before you come back down here,” he warned them.

  With the flashlights in hand, Lewis and Rose Rita went outside, around the corner to Eagle Street, and up the dark flight of stairs that led to the old opera house. Rose Rita turned the key in the lock, and the weathered gray door swung open, groaning on its rusty hinges. Something about the sound made the hair prickle on the back of Lewis’s neck, and he clenched his teeth.

  He followed Rose Rita into a dim vestibule. Tall, narrow windows gave a little light, but they were cobwebby and dusty, and the cloudy day did little to brighten the place. A thick carpet was underfoot, but Lewis could not tell the color because of a heavy layer of gray dust that covered it. To their left was a counter and a ticket booth. “That must be where the ladies checked their furs,” said Rose Rita, flashing her light at the counter. “And where the gentlemen left their overcoats and top hats.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Lewis sarcastically. “I don’t think anybody in New Zebedee even owns a top hat.”

  “Well, they used to,” insisted Rose Rita. “Look, there are two doorways into the theater. Which one do you want to take?”

  “The closest one,” replied Lewis. “This dust is going to make me start sneezing in about half a minute.”

  “It was your idea to come here,” Rose Rita reminded him. They padded across the dusty carpet, raising a little mildew-scented cloud as they went toward a wide archway that yawned into the darkness. Just a little farther away was an identical opening, which also led into the auditorium.

  Once they had stepped into the theater, Lewis switched on his flashlight too. There were no windows to shed any light in this place, and the faint glow from the vestibule died a few feet inside the doorways. Lewis whistled. “It’s bigger than I thought,” he said, shining his light this way and that.

  Row after row of seats stretched before them, divided into three different-size sections: narrow and wedge-shaped to the right and left sides, and a much wider one down the middle. Two broad, carpeted aisles ran down toward the stage. The seats were covered in plush red velvet, although dust and cobwebs had dulled their luster, and the frames were made of intricate curlicues and loops of wrought iron. The auditorium sloped gently downward from the rear to the front, so the back seats were somewhat higher than the ones closer to the stage. Overhead, in a horseshoe-shaped balcony, benches were arranged like church pews. “How many seats do you suppose?” asked Rose Rita.

  “About a thousand,” responded Lewis.

  Rose Rita snorted. “There aren’t that many people in New Zebedee who would go to an opera,” she said. “Let’s count.”

  Lewis’s teeth chattered. It was cold in the dark theater, and he could see his breath in the beam of his flashlight. “I don’t want to waste that much time,” he said.

  Rose Rita sounded amused. “Look, genius, we don’t have to count every single seat. All we have to do is count one row from each section and then multiply by the number of rows. You know Miss Fogarty’s always complaining that our compositions aren’t detailed enough.”

  “Some details are pretty stupid,” muttered Lewis, but just to avoid arguing, he agreed to help Rose Rita count the seats. As they neared the stage, they determined that the theater could hold 480 people, with room for maybe 120 more in the balcony. Lewis turned his flashlight toward the stage. Curtained arches opened on either side, with knee-high railings. The walls were a faded pink, with intricate designs in yellow and red framing the stage. In an oval to the left was the laughing mask of comedy, and to the right of the stage the grieving mask of tragedy, both done in faded gold.

  Lewis and Rose Rita came up to the very front. They leaned over the orchestra pit and shined their lights down on rusty music stands, an ancient banged-up grand piano, and a scattering of yellowed, mouse-chewed pages of sheet music.

  “Here’s the way up to the stage,” said Rose Rita. She climbed a few steps and walked to the middle of the stage. There she turned her flashlight on her face and struck a theatrical pose. “O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?” she exclaimed dramatically.

  With the flashlight in his hand, Lewis could not clap properly, so he slapped his leg a few times, like someone grudgingly applauding a very poor performer. “Now do the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils,’” he cried.

  Rose Rita stuck her tongue out at him. “There’s a curtain up here with ropes to work it,” she said. “I’m going to check out the backstage. Maybe there are dressing rooms or a prop room with swords and armor and stuff.”

  Lewis had found his way down into the orchestra pit. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll poke around out here.”

  The stage creaked faintly as Rose Rita walked away. Now that he was alone, Lewis began to feel a bit uneasy. The darkness seemed to close in all around him, and the cone of light from his flashlight appeared faint and feeble. Lewis began to breathe faster. He was not by nature a brave boy, and he was always imagining all sorts of terrible things that might happen to him. Right now, for instance. He could run into a big, desperate rat in the orchestra pit, o
r maybe a nest of poisonous snakes that had crept in to spend the winter. Or he might blunder into a creepy web full of venomous spiders—there were certainly enough cobwebs dangling and swaying all over the place. Or—

  Oh, get a grip, he told himself. He felt like climbing up out of the pit and finding Rose Rita, but she would know he had scared himself, and she probably would laugh at him. He hated when she did that. So he clenched his teeth and flashed his light over the discolored, uneven keys of the old piano. A wobbly-looking stool sat in front of it, its seat tilted to one side and covered with fuzzy dust. Lewis walked over to the instrument and used one finger to pick out a tune. He hummed to himself as he plunked out the notes of a catchy radio commercial:

  Pepsi-Cola hits the spot,

  Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot,

  Twice as much for a nickel, too,

  Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.

  Clunk! The last note was a real clinker, dull and flat and unmusical. Lewis frowned and tapped more keys on the bass side of the keyboard. Several in a row made the same thunky noise. It sounded as if something were inside the piano, blocking the strings. Lewis went around to the side and raised the lid, then cast his light into the piano’s interior.

  No wonder the notes wouldn’t play. On the strings lay a thick sheaf of papers, curled at the edges and sallow in the gleam of Lewis’s flashlight. He reached for the papers and held them up. They felt brittle and flaky, like crumbling autumn leaves. Because the papers had been inside the piano, little dust had collected on them, and Lewis could read something written on the cover sheet in a spidery, old-fashioned handwriting:

  The Day of Doom

  An Opera in English

  By Immanuel Vanderhelm

  Lewis heard Rose Rita behind him. “Hey,” he said, “look at what I found. This must be really old—”

  He looked around and felt a sudden chill. The person standing next to him was not Rose Rita. It was a tall, thin man wearing a long black coat with fur lapels. An outmoded high collar came up to his chin, and the black cravat around his neck glittered with a flashing diamond stickpin. His gray hair was parted in the center, and gray muttonchop whiskers furred his bony cheeks. His horrible eyes were deeply set and staring, like cloudy blue-white marbles with no iris or pupil showing at all. His skin was a ghastly color, sickly white like the belly of a frog. The man’s gaping mouth revealed wrinkled black gums and long, snaggly teeth as yellow as the aged ivory keys of the piano. He looked like someone who had been dead for about a month.

  “Beware!” the man whispered in a hoarse croak. “Beware the doom of the haunted opera! He means to be King of the Dead!”

  Lewis felt frozen to the bone. The man was not standing on the floor but rather floating in the air, and Lewis could tell that his body was not solid but transparent. The flashlight’s beam penetrated him, and Lewis could see the edge of the stage right through the stranger’s thin chest. “Beware!” the man groaned again. Then with a horrible moan, the figure became a wisp of vapor and vanished like a dissolving puff of steam. For a second Lewis could only stare, paralyzed with shock.

  Then he screamed as loudly as he could.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Clutching the sheet music to his chest with his left hand, holding the flashlight in his right, Lewis scrambled out of the orchestra pit and fled toward the dim archway at the back of the auditorium. His running footsteps echoed, and he thought he heard the ghost right behind him. He was almost at the door when something grabbed his coat and yanked him backward. He screeched in terror.

  “Hey!” yelled Rose Rita. “Cut it out, Lewis, it’s only me.

  Lewis almost collapsed with relief. He wouldn’t stay in the auditorium, so the two of them went out into the vestibule, where Lewis stood next to one of the dirty windows as if ready to leap out. Then, still panting for breath, he tried to tell Rose Rita what he had seen and heard.

  She gave him a doubtful look. “A ghost?” she asked. “Are you sure?”

  Lewis nodded. “He looked horrible,” he said. “All gray and stiff, and he was as skinny as a board.”

  Rose Rita sighed. “Lewis, you know what an imagination you have.”

  Lewis glared at her. “I didn’t imagine it,” he insisted. “I saw him and I heard him. For Pete’s sake, Rose Rita, you’ve seen some pretty strange things too!” Lewis knew he had a good point. Since she had become friends with Lewis, Rose Rita had witnessed some amazing magical events, both benign and terrifying. Now she looked a little uncertain.

  “That’s true,” admitted Rose Rita with obvious reluctance. “But all of that happened at, well, spooky times and in spooky places. Not in the middle of an ordinary afternoon right in the center of New Zebedee.”

  “You think this isn’t a spooky place?” asked Lewis. “It’s big and dark and empty, and anything could be in there!”

  “I didn’t see anything scary,” said Rose Rita. “Just the old dressing rooms. And half of them are stuffed with junk from the Seed & Feed and boxes of Mounds and Almond Joys from the five-and-dime. I guess Mr. Pfeiffer uses the back rooms as a warehouse or something. What do you have there?”

  Lewis was still gripping the musical score tightly against his chest. He held it out and said, “I found this hidden inside the piano.”

  “Hidden, huh?” Rose Rita took the stack of dried-up paper and carefully looked through it. “Seems to be all handwritten. There’s music and lyrics and everything. Say, do you know who would love to see this?”

  “Who?” Lewis asked.

  “Miss White.”

  Miss White was the music teacher at the junior high school. She was always organizing recitals and performances, and she was always trying to interest her students in fine music. Miss White didn’t have much use for the kind of music most young people listened to. She called it bebop and jitterbugging, and with a sniff she would say, “Truly educated people have better taste than jitterbugs.”

  Lewis looked at the sheet music doubtfully. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “That’s what I was holding when I saw the ghost. Maybe they’re connected.”

  “Okay,” responded Rose Rita. She held the sheaf of papers out to him. “Here you are. Just take this back and leave it where you found it. I’ll wait here, and we’ll just forget that you ever looked inside that piano.”

  If looks could kill, Lewis’s glower would have wiped out half of New Zebedee. “Not me. If you want to hang onto that, it’s yours. I’m not going back in there, at least not as long as the electricity’s off and there’s no light.” Lewis had added the last part because he really hated being a coward, and Rose Rita was right about his overactive imagination. He read voraciously, and everything he read lived on very strongly in his imagination. Other kids might be afraid of movie monsters or of spooky radio shows like Lights Out, but Lewis populated his own nightmares with terrifying figures like Professor Moriarty, the insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, the evil Mr. Hyde, and other characters from books.

  For a few minutes the two friends stood quietly while Lewis got his breath back. Then, after Rose Rita had carefully locked the door, they went downstairs and gave the flashlights and key back to Mr. Pfeiffer, who was dozing in his chair near the stove while his friends droned on and on to each other about the weather. Once outside Lewis said, “Where to now?”

  “Let’s go see Grampa Galway,” replied Rose Rita. “He can tell us when the opera house was built, and maybe he even knows something about your ghost.”

  Lewis didn’t like the idea very much. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I don’t mind talking about stuff like that with Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann, because they understand apparitions and all. But your grandfather might think I’m loony.”

  “Okay,” Rose Rita said. “So we won’t tell him about the ghost. Maybe there’s another way to find out something about him. Anyway, let’s get moving, or I’m going to turn into an icicle.”

  It was after five, and the day was getting even colder. They walked dow
n Main Street toward the fountain, which the city fathers turned off when the temperature dropped below freezing. The marble columns surrounding it looked as if they had been carved from blocks of polar ice. Rose Rita took the lead, turning left onto Sycamore Street near the drugstore.

  Rose Rita’s grandfather lived at number 122, in a small one-story cottage. Mr. Galway liked to tinker and build things, and his front yard was crowded with a fish pond (frozen over now), a stone terrace with lawn furniture, and a bench swing hanging from a wooden frame. Lewis had visited here before, and he knew that the backyard was even more cluttered, with about a dozen odd little hand-carved windmills that did crazy things. One was a wooden juggler who tossed four balls in an endless circle. A little old man frantically tried to chop the head off a turkey, but the gobbler always yanked his neck back just in time. A sailing ship swung this way and that in the wind, while the miniature crew frantically moved their arms as if hauling on ropes. Lewis thought the commotion was exciting and fascinating, although Mr. Galway’s neighbors had been known to complain that it was all a nuisance.

  Rose Rita jumped up to the low front porch, with Lewis right behind her. There was an antiquated twist-type doorbell in the shape of a dog’s head with a bone in its mouth. When you grabbed the bone and turned the whole head, the bell made a growling sound. After a few moments Mr. Galway opened the door. He was a tall man with a bald head and bright blue eyes that glittered from behind rimless spectacles. “Well, well,” he said genially. “My favorite granddaughter and the Sherlock Holmes expert. Caught any crooks lately, Lewis?”