Throughout the audience, flashes of yellow flickered like fireflies. Clusters of people here and there whispered to each other, looking up at the ceiling, pointing.
Could they be looking for ghosts?
“Our fliers,” I whispered.
Joan grinned at me. “Olivia, this might really work.”
I clamped down on the bubbly fluttering in my chest.
“We’ll see,” I said, and then applause, a little louder than usual, broke out as the Maestro took to his podium and bowed. Trying to count the number of heads in the audience, I kept getting too excited and losing my numbers, and finally just gave up. Instead I found Richard Ashley’s head in the orchestra and thought good-luck thoughts at him.
When the opening notes of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde Prelude began, I whispered to the ghosts, “It’s time. Go.”
My ghosts swooped away in three different directions—Jax to the east, Tillie to the west, and Mr. Worthington right down the middle of the orchestra floor. The others split up and followed them.
With the lights off, their smoky bodies blended in well with the shadows. Tillie slunk past Henry, who was leading a mother and her two children to their seats. As Tillie passed, she dragged her arm through theirs, but so fast that by the time they looked to see who was there, they couldn’t find anyone.
Except for the smallest kid, a blond boy. He watched Tillie float up onto the mezzanine with a smile on his face.
I found myself smiling too.
And Jax, over on the other side, settled in gently beside an older woman sitting alone. When he brushed a kiss against her cheek, the woman flinched and clapped a hand to her cheek.
But Jax was already gone.
And Mr. Worthington? He glided through the orchestra floor like an eel, snaking through people’s stomachs and then out through their mouths and ears, trickling softly like candlelight smoke. People shifted in their seats, putting hands to their stomachs, frowning.
“You okay?” I saw a man mouth to the woman beside him. She nodded, peering out into the dark aisle beside her, like she could find whatever had made her suddenly feel colder, nauseated, tingling with ice.
It was working—slowly, of course. If the ghosts did too much too fast, it could start a panic. We had been very specific with them about that. But it was working.
From down below, Henry flashed me a quick thumbs-up. I thought my heart would twist itself into permanent knots.
“Olivia?” Joan whispered after a long time. “Do you always watch concerts from up here?”
“Yeah. I mean, most of them, anyway. When I can stand it.”
Joan turned to me, her eyes wide and bright. “I don’t know how you do stand it. It’s so beautiful up here. I had no idea.”
“Beautiful?”
“With this tragic music playing, and the paintings on the ceiling. And the chandeliers, and the curtains draped everywhere, and, oh, Olivia. Just look at everyone down there.”
At first I just rolled my eyes. Joan could be so dramatic. But then I saw it.
Have you ever watched people when they don’t know you’re watching them? Like in a movie theater or a concert. When people get caught up in watching something, their faces change. The lines on their faces get softer, because whatever they’re watching has made them forget how they think they’re supposed to be looking. Instead, they just are—just sitting there, listening and watching and being real.
Goosebumps broke out on my skin. It was about four minutes into Romeo and Juliet, when those spooky notes start out low in the strings and then drift up high, and the harp floats right on top of it. The orchestra actually sounded decent for once. I don’t know why, or maybe I was just imagining things, but I think the audience heard it too.
“It is beautiful,” I whispered, and I meant it.
Joan clutched my hand. “Oh, Olivia, we have to save this place.”
“We’re working on it, Joan.”
“No, but we have to. Not just for the ghosts, but because . . . oh, never mind, it’s getting louder and I want to listen.”
And we did. I listened like I hadn’t ever listened before, and I got that soaring, bursting feeling in my chest like when Frederick had played his concerto. But it of course wasn’t Frederick doing it this time; it was an orchestra, led by the Maestro. And like it or not, we shared blood.
How strange, I thought, watching him wave his arms around onstage, sweat on his forehead; watching the musicians blow red-faced through their parts. Their eyes darted up every now and then to catch the Maestro’s movements. Invisible wires connected them, and the wires vibrated with electricity so thick that by the end of the piece, I had to remind myself to breathe. The Maestro lowered his arms. The audience clapped, yellow fliers forgotten in their seats.
Henry was clapping too, and the ghosts dashed up to wrap me in ice-cold hugs that left me feeling light-headed.
“It’s working!” Tillie squealed in my ear. “We were really messing with people. They were shivering and a couple of people had to go to the bathroom and get sick!”
Together, we peeked through the curtains. Instead of bolting out of the Hall like people usually did after a concert, the audience had stayed in their seats. They pointed up at the ceiling, some of them looking through binoculars. They read their programs, they read their fliers. Their whispering and chattering rose up to us in a low roar of excitement.
Henry ran out onto the catwalk, making it shake. “Look!” he said, yanking down his sleeve to show us tally marks scratched up and down his arm in black ink. I’d never seen him smile so big. It was like the sun; I couldn’t look directly at it.
“This is how many times I heard people talking about ghosts, or the fliers, or the petition. All the stuff we’ve been doing. It got to be so many, I stopped counting. But, Olivia.” He grabbed my arms and it was like there was no audience, no Joan, no ghosts. It was just me and Henry, and his sky-colored eyes, and all of our secrets that no one else knew.
“Olivia, I think it’s going to be okay. I think we’re going to be okay.”
Then he hugged me. And I held on for what felt like forever.
EVERY DAY, WHENEVER we had a spare second, Henry, Joan, and I flew around town pinning up new fliers and replacing old ones. Joan got her dad to come see the Hall, and we gave him a tour. He was this towering, skinny guy with really good skin, and he loved the Hall, our petition, the whole thing. He thought it was charming and quaint and a treasure. Romantic. Noble.
I could see where Joan got her dramatics. But Mr. Dawson could be dramatic all he wanted, as long as he kept bringing reporters.
Yeah. Reporters.
They started coming to concerts—quick, speedy people with tape recorders and notepads, photographers with flashing cameras. People the Maestro had been trying to get to concerts for months, to write reviews and take photos.
Now, they were crowding him for interviews after concerts like he was some sort of sports star. I watched from a distance as the lights flashed, as reporters and news crews hovered around him.
“Maestro Stellatella,” they would say, “tell us about the ghosts! People are saying it’s the hoax of the century!”
“Maestro! Is it true the orchestra is in danger of bankruptcy?”
The Maestro fumbled over his answers, but the reporters didn’t seem to mind. They loved him. They loved this—the ghosts, a haunted music hall, a struggling maestro overwhelmed by something he didn’t understand.
All I could think was how the camera flashes lit up the Maestro’s pale, sweaty face. It made him look old and frail, like Nonnie.
One night, the reporters dragged me into these interviews, musicians and audience members all jammed into the lobby with us.
“Maestro! This is your daughter, huh? The marketing whiz? What’s her name?”
“What’s your name, kid?”
I searched frantically through the crowd for Henry, for my ghosts. Camera flashes blinded me. Sweating, smiling faces hovered whereve
r I turned.
The Maestro put his arm around my shoulders. “Her name is Olivia,” he said, “and if you touch her again, you’ll regret it.”
I shoved him away, blushing. “I’m not a baby, okay?”
The reporters just laughed. “That’s great, that’s just great. Dad and daughter, the dynamic duo.”
“No way,” I said before I could think about it. “We’re not a duo. It’s just biology.”
The reporters kept laughing, but the sound didn’t make me feel good. The Maestro’s arm slid off my shoulders, and I hurried away before I had to look at him.
During concerts, the ghosts kept making their appearances. Each night, they skulked and drifted and slunk around. Each night, I looked out for shades, but they were nowhere to be found.
That made me more nervous than if they had outright attacked.
Meanwhile, the audience grew. And grew. And grew. Henry and I camped out in the box office during intermissions, watching Mrs. Bloomfeld tally up all the receipts.
The first night of the second February series, she finished counting and threw up her hands with a choking sound.
Henry immediately started thumping her back. “Are you dying? I know CPR.”
“No, sweetie.” Mrs. Bloomfeld smiled at us, her eyes shining. “Ticket sales are up four hundred percent. Can you believe it?”
“You know what this means?” Henry said as we hurried back to the catwalk for the second part of the concert. “It means we’ve only got a six-hundred-percent increase to go!”
I shoved him. “Thanks, genius. I can do some math, you know.”
“We can do that in a week and a half, no problem. Have you seen how crazy people are for this ghost stuff? You’re a genius. Joan’s a genius. We’re all geniuses.” Then he took my hands and spun me around in a circle. I couldn’t stop giggling, no matter how hard I tried.
In that moment, it felt like nothing could ever go wrong. We were on top of the world. We had fought fate and won.
Then, as it tends to do when you start thinking things like that, disaster struck.
It was the first night of the second February series, and there were 1,032 people in the audience.
Let that sink in for a second, before I talk about the disaster.
1,032. That was 800 more people in the audience than at our most popular holiday concert. That means the Hall was almost precisely halfway full. Still pretty pathetic, but less so than before.
Maybe it was how glorious this made us feel—me, Henry, and Joan, up on the catwalk, toasting each other with peanut butter sandwiches and tap water in paper cups—or maybe it was that we were doing just a little too well for the shades to feel comfortable with what was happening.
Whatever the reason was, about halfway through Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, two awful things happened.
First, one of the three huge chandeliers that hung over the main part of the Hall began to swing back and forth.
“It’s a shade,” Henry whispered. “There, see it? Riding right there in the middle. Tugging on the chains.”
He was right. A shade straddled the chandelier with eight legs, one for each of the chandelier’s prongs, an enormous black spider creature. Eight sets of long fingers wound around the gold wiring holding the chandelier in place.
Two lightbulbs shattered and rained down onto the audience.
The orchestra faltered for a moment—a couple of cracked notes, a screech in the second violins—but the Maestro didn’t seem to have noticed anything. He waved them furiously onward.
Then, before either we or the audience could figure out how to react to the swinging chandelier, someone screamed from the back of the Hall.
The orchestra abruptly stopped playing. The solo pianist covered her mouth with her hands. The Maestro whirled around, peering into the blackness.
“What the devil?” Ed murmured, pushing aside the curtains from the lighting control station.
It was a little girl, running into the Hall from one of the west side doors and screaming something about a demon, or a ghost, maybe, she didn’t know—and then she found her father and dissolved into tears.
The west side. Tillie’s territory. But I could see her, way down by the stage.
“Wasn’t me,” she mouthed, shaking her head up at me.
“Henry, you stay here with Joan,” I said, and rushed for the stairs before he could start arguing with me. I had to talk to the girl myself; it was my responsibility, whatever had happened to her. Please let it not be what I think it is, I thought, bounding down the utility stairs two steps at a time.
In the confusion, it took me a while to get to the girl. Everyone wanted to speak to her. The reporters were pushing through from the back of the Hall, their photographers’ cameras flashing. The Maestro was yelling something onstage about this deplorable breach in concert protocol.
I thought to myself, be a shadow, be ombralina, and turned quiet and small enough to slink my way through.
The little girl clung to her father’s side. Everyone was trying to get a closer look at her and talk to her father.
“Is she okay?”
“Was it really a ghost?”
“Is she hurt or anything?”
My stomach turned to ice. If she had encountered a shade, and if the shade had burned her, then this wouldn’t just be fun and games anymore. That was evidence you couldn’t just ignore.
It was like the girl read my thoughts. On the other side of her father, hidden by the press of people surrounding us, she caught my eye and mouthed: “I saw one.”
I mouthed back: “A ghost?”
She sniffled and shook her head. “Something else.”
“What is the meaning of this?” The Maestro had arrived in the midst of the crowd, flourishing his baton like he was trying to conduct everyone back into order. Behind him stood Mr. Rue and Mayor Pitter.
I hid between some excited college kids snapping photographs.
“Can you not control your child, sir? We are in the middle of a concert!”
Something over our heads sizzled. Crackled. Exploded.
The lights went out.
Sparks showered off the chandelier. The smell of burning and electricity filled the air.
The lights came back on, flickered off, and came on again, and off again, and finally they stayed on.
The chandelier had stopped swinging. It now hung by a mere thread, a single golden chain.
Around the room, the shadows churned with shades, and I’d never been more afraid in my life.
“Out of the way, everyone back up!” I found myself screaming, waving my arms around. I didn’t care if the Maestro saw me. Audience members getting creamed by a falling chandelier was not part of the plan. “Move, people, get out of the way!”
Once everyone had backed up sufficiently, I sank into the nearest chair, my knees shaking. This was getting serious.
But not to the audience, apparently. Because there was a strange sound drifting to me through my retreating panic: applause. They were applauding whatever had just happened—the screaming girl, the exploding chandelier, the interrupted concert. Some people whistled. Others hollered, “Encore!”
The Maestro looked like someone had just told him he had somehow transformed into a cow overnight. Mayor Pitter just looked confused. Mr. Rue found one of my fliers on the ground. He picked it up, read it, and scratched his head, frowning.
“Fantastic effects,” I heard someone say.
“How did they do that?”
“Better than a haunted house.”
“That poor kid. Must have been a great costume, to scare her like that.”
“Are you kidding? Kids eat that kind of stuff up.”
“Hold on, I gotta go call my sister. She loves freaky things like this.”
“Dude,” I heard one of the college kids declare solemnly to his friend, “I didn’t think coming to the symphony could be so fun.”
I glared at him. This isn’t the sympho
ny, I thought. The symphony is the music you were listening to. Idiot.
“Olivia,” Henry whispered, pulling me out of the crowd. Joan hovered behind him, wringing her hands, mumbling, “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.”
“What do we do?” Henry said. “That was close. Too close.”
“Tell me about it. That girl saw a shade.”
“What?”
“She told me.”
Henry teetered, off balance. “If it touched her . . .”
“It didn’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“Even if it did and she tells someone, who’ll believe her?”
“What do we do? If this happens again . . .”
“We just keep going as planned. Nothing changes. The ghosts keep doing their thing, and we keep doing ours.”
“But what if the chandelier actually falls next time? Or something even worse?”
I clenched my fists. “That’s just a risk we’ll have to take. And . . .” I glanced behind him, at Tillie, Jax, and Mr. Worthington. I caught Mr. Worthington’s eye, and he nodded.
“And we have to find Tillie’s and Jax’s anchors. Fast.”
Henry buried his face in his hands. “Are we gonna have to die again? I don’t want to blow up anymore.”
I didn’t either. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that future place, the war that reminded Henry about his dad, with everything gray and dead and shriveled—
Like that tree. The giant, shriveled tree in Jax’s hiding spot.
“Say that again, Henry,” I whispered. If I moved a muscle or spoke too loud, I’d lose the careful thought burrowing its way out of my brain.
“I. Don’t. Want. To. Blow up. Anymore.”
“Technically, you should say, you don’t want to blow up again,” said Tillie. “You’ve only done it the one time.”
“That tree. The . . . future . . . Oh. Oh my—It’s not planted yet. Because it’s in the future.” I started jumping up and down. I grabbed Joan’s hands and pulled her along with me.
“Olivia, why are we bouncing?”
“Henry. Listen. The tree. It was in the future, and this is in the now, so maybe the reason why we can’t find their bracelet tree is because—”
The Year of Shadows Page 21
