The Ghost Sonata

by Allison, Jennifer

  “It’s not a question about the toilet,” said Gilda. “I wondered if you’ve ever noticed anything unusual about this house—any evidence of a haunting?”

  “You’re asking if we have a ghost?” Mrs. Luard peered at her with slightly unfocused eyes that seemed dilated from medication.

  “My friend Wendy and I heard some strange noises, and I actually saw something in my room—something that looked like the ghost of a boy.”

  Mrs. Luard looked at her son. “Have you seen any ghost-boys in Wyntle House, Danny?” She seemed amused.

  Danny shook his head wryly.

  “No ghosts here, luv,” said Mrs. Luard.

  “We don’t do refunds for hauntings, neither,” Danny added.

  “I wasn’t going to ask for a refund.”

  “You want Danny to go check out your room for you, then? Make sure everything’s okay?”

  Gilda could tell that the last thing Danny wanted was to leave his television show to trudge up four flights of steps. That was fine with her: the last thing she needed was Danny glumly checking under her bed for ghosts.

  “Thanks anyway,” said Gilda. “Hauntings are an area of interest for me, so I thought I’d ask you about it before conducting my own investigation.”

  “Hauntings are an area of interest, eh?”

  “I’m a psychic investigator.” Gilda usually pursued her work in secret, but every now and then she felt compelled to blurt out the truth about herself—sometimes in blunt reaction to a dismissive remark. It was as if she needed to remind herself that her interests weren’t pointless and silly.

  Mrs. Luard peered at Gilda with clearer eyes, as if realizing for the first time that Gilda viewed ghosts as an enhancement to her stay at Wyntle House rather than a cause for customer complaint. “Well, there may be a ghost or two in this old house,” she said. “And there are lots of ghosts in Oxford, aren’t there, Danny?”

  “Sure,” said Danny, reaching for more crisps.

  “You’ve had enough crisps now, Danny,” said Mrs. Luard. “Isn’t there a beheaded ghost that kicks his head around the grounds of one of the colleges? St. John’s, I think it was.”

  “Could be.” Danny crunched his crisps as he spoke, as if making it clear that the topic of ghosts filled him with exquisite boredom. “There’s a bunch of headless spirits roaming ’round, I ’spect.”

  “And I’m sure you’ve heard about the ghost of Rosamund the Fair, who haunts Godstow Nunnery,” Mrs. Luard added.

  Gilda was intrigued; she hadn’t heard of Rosamund the Fair.

  “Everybody’s heard of her,” said Danny. “And you call yourself a psychic investigator?”

  “If you can call yourself a dab hand,” Gilda blurted, “I can call myself a psychic investigator.”

  “I never did call myself a dab hand; that’s what Mum calls me!”

  “Hush, Danny. We have to be polite to our guests.” Mrs. Luard regarded Gilda blearily. “Rosamund was the secret girlfriend of one of them kings of long ago—King Henry the second, I believe. The king kept her locked away in a secret garden, hidden deep in a maze so full of twists and turns, nobody could find her. In fact, in order to find his own way to Rosamund, the king had to tie one end of a very long piece of string to her finger and the other end of the string to a knight who stood outside the maze guarding her.

  “Well, as luck would have it, the king’s wife found out about Rosamund. She killed the knight, followed the string to Rosamund, and forced her to drink a glass of deadly poison. And ever since, Rosamund haunts the ruins of the nunnery here in Oxford.”

  “I thought she haunted the Trout Pub,” said Danny.

  “Maybe she haunts both.”

  Gilda couldn’t help wondering if everyone in Oxford had a ghost story to tell. Maybe ghosts are so abundant here, you can’t help but encounter them, she thought.

  “Well, thanks,” said Gilda. “That was an interesting story.”

  “Hope Danny and I didn’t scare you, luv.”

  “I don’t scare that easily,” said Gilda, turning to leave.

  “Someone left you a message today,” Danny blurted, delivering this non sequitur with what struck Gilda as a slightly sinister smile.

  “Who?”

  Danny shrugged. “Odd-looking bloke. A stranger.” He continued watching television without explaining himself further.

  “Well—what was the message from this mysterious stranger?” Gilda found it difficult to refrain from rushing across the room and giving the chubby boy a good hard shake.

  Danny shrugged. “I left it outside your door.”

  What ‘odd-looking bloke’ could have left her a message? Something about the slight smirk on Danny’s face made Gilda feel suspicious.

  “Fine,” said Gilda. “I’ll go see what it says.”

  Propped against the door to Gilda’s room was a folded piece of stationery. She opened the tissue-thin paper with a feeling of anticipation. Maybe it’s from Julian, she thought hopefully.

  As she began to read the fountain-pen handwriting, she was stunned. The note was from Professor Sabertash.

  21

  Professor Sabertash

  Gilda arrived at Professor Sabertash’s rooms in Merton College just as an undergraduate was leaving her tutorial in tears.

  “How could anyone be so brutal?” the girl sniffed, digging into a large shoulder bag for a tissue. Smudges of mascara and eyeliner rimmed her red eyes. Her puffy tulip skirt and flat, pointy shoes reminded Gilda of an elf ’s costume. “I worked and worked on that essay, and that Sabertash—he wasn’t satisfied until every single one of my points was completely and utterly destroyed!”

  “That’s terrible.” Gilda wasn’t sure what to say. She had half a mind to turn and run back down the stairs. If Professor Sabertash routinely drove his college students to tears, how on earth would he receive a fourteen-year-old posing as a serious scholar?

  But it was too late to turn back: as the tearful girl fled, Professor Sabertash thrust open the door and beamed at Gilda quizzically through thick, cloudy glasses. “Dame Gilda, I presume?”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Professor Sabertash.” Gilda nervously extended her gloved hand. Tufts of unruly hair sprouted from the professor’s nose, ears, and eyebrows. A bit of elastic from his underwear peeked out over his pants and shirt, and a few splotches of mustard from a high table lunch decorated his lapel.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” said Professor Sabertash, shaking her hand and squinting into her face. “I’m nearly blind as a mole!”

  Gilda couldn’t believe her luck. As far as she could tell, Professor Sabertash was too near-sighted to see that she was considerably younger than her letter had implied.

  “Please, do come in! I do hope my last tutorial of the day didn’t pester you with her tears.”

  “In my view, it isn’t a proper lesson if someone isn’t sobbing.” Gilda did her best to play the role of a self-assured dame of the British Empire as she followed Professor Sabertash into a large, square room complete with a fireplace, several plush couches and armchairs, and a table stocked with china teacups, wineglasses, and bottles of sherry and port. The entire circumference of the room was lined floor-to-ceiling with overstuffed bookshelves.

  “I’m opening a bottle of sherry in honor of your visit,” said Professor Sabertash. “I hope you’ll join me?” Professor Sabertash held a small wineglass in the air.

  “Of course.” Gilda hoped that “sherry” referred to either a very girlish drink with whipped cream or something akin to a Slurpee. “I’ll have a tiny umbrella and a cherry in mine,” she added.

  Professor Sabertash laughed uproariously as he held a wineglass toward Gilda.

  “On second thought, I think I’ll pass,” said Gilda. “I like to keep my wits about me when I’m involved in an investigation.”

  “As you wish, Dame Gilda.” Professor Sabertash swirled his glass and gestured for Gilda to take a seat in one of the armchairs. “Now before
we begin discussing your intriguing findings, I must confess, Dame Gilda, that I am curious. You say you are American, on a visit here to supervise a young concert pianist, yet you speak with a most unusual regional English accent. Furthermore, Queen Elizabeth has made you a dame for your scholarly contributions to the field of paranormal studies, and as we know being granted what is essentially a knighthood is a most rare achievement for an American woman. Indeed, I suspect you have had a most interesting life.”

  “I have had an interesting life, indeed,” said Gilda, realizing that impulsively giving herself the title “dame” in her letter to the professor now required an elaborate fabrication if she was to maintain her inflated identity. “My life has been so utterly over whelmed with sordid intrigue and complications, I couldn’t begin to explain it all to you, Professor Sabertash.”

  “Oh, but that makes me all the more curious, Dame Gilda!” Professor Sabertash raised a finger in the air. “First, I am guessing you were born here in England but are a dual citizen of the U.S. and U.K., no?”

  “Yes, that’s correct,” Gilda fibbed, thinking it was easier to simply let Professor Sabertash stitch together a plausible life story than to make one up herself.

  “And I can hear a hint of the American Midwest in your speech, no?”

  “Right again. Much of my recent work has taken place in the city of Detroit—or Daytwah as the French say.”

  “Yes, yes. I have a good ear, you see, the better to make up for my failing eyesight. When the senses are blunted in one aspect they become stronger in another, don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “But this—this Midwestern twang in your voice is intertwined with an accent that is from a part of England that, I must confess, eludes me. Tell me—where did you grow up in England?”

  “Oh, it was a place you’ve never heard of, and hopefully will never visit,” said Gilda. “A quite dreary village called—called Piddle Itchington.”

  “That must be in the north.”

  “It’s actually in the east,” said Gilda, feeling by now that she had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. “But I’d prefer not to go into that part of my life, if you don’t mind.”

  “I understand. You came here to talk about more important matters. Matters of research into the tarot!”

  “I was hoping you could shed some light on a little mystery I’ve stumbled into here in Oxford.”

  Professor Sabertash leaned forward eagerly. “I am at your service, Dame Gilda.”

  Gilda took a deep breath and told Professor Sabertash about the strange events that followed her arrival in Oxford: the vision of a boy’s face in her room, the voice on Wendy’s tape recorder, the music Wendy heard in the night, the disturbing tarot card that turned up in Wendy’s room without explanation.

  “Wonderful! I just knew you would bring some interesting tidbits to whet my appetite, Dame Gilda. Now, may I take a peek at the tarot card that appeared so mysteriously under young Gwendolyn’s door?”

  Gilda showed him the Nine of Swords, and Professor Sabertash peered at it through a magnifying glass.

  “Ah yes. This card is from the Gill deck of tarot cards—a deck that uses symbolism from Kabbalistic numerology. As you see, the back of the card has an image of the tree of life—a tree made up of ten spheres. This tree represents a map of the universe and the human psyche. From a scholarly perspective, I myself do not prefer this deck of cards, as I feel there is no true connection between the Kabbalah and the tarot. . . .”

  Gilda hated to admit it, but she was already feeling slightly baffled. “But Professor Sabertash—what do you think receiving this version of the Nine of Swords means?”

  “As I’m sure you know, Dame Gilda, the number nine in this deck may represent the realm of the subconscious mind, things that are hidden and not completely obvious. It is supposed to suggest deeply buried anxieties, secret agendas—things of that nature. We see in the picture that this person stands alone upon an empty plane and that nine swords are thrust into the ground around him or her. This could symbolize pain, or some injury to the self. If there is a message in this card, I would describe it as: look for what is hidden. And perhaps—look for what is hidden in yourself.”

  Gilda thought about how, ever since they had arrived in England, Wendy had seemed different—as if constantly disturbed and preoccupied by something Gilda couldn’t perceive or understand. But what secret could Wendy be hiding? And what did this have to do with a haunting?

  “Professor Sabertash, this might sound odd, but I’m wondering if a ghost might have left this tarot card as a kind of message for Wendy. There’s been evidence of a haunting in Wyntle House.”

  “Certainly that is possible.” Professor Sabertash drained his glass of sherry. “You also mentioned that your young friend has been hearing music in the night. Some might view this as evidence that she’s discovering some clairaudient abilities. Maybe these experiences are related in some way.”

  For a moment, Gilda almost felt jealous that Wendy might be developing such a valuable psychic skill. “You think Wendy can hear spirits?”

  “As I said, some would suggest this explanation, particularly for a sensitive pianist who most likely has very acute hearing.”

  I bet Wendy wouldn’t even want to be clairaudient, Gilda thought. While Wendy shared Gilda’s psychic interests, she always preferred to operate in the realm of logical reasoning.

  “Now, having said this, I must acknowledge, Dame Gilda, that particularly where young people are involved, my natural skepticism becomes yet more skeptical, if you follow me.”

  “I don’t follow you, Professor Sabertash.”

  Professor Sabertash stood up and accidentally knocked over several glasses as he attempted to pour himself another helping of sherry. “Oh, bother!” He stooped to pick up the glasses. “While I am always open-minded and open to the possibility of a true haunting—and indeed, have encountered a sparse handful of cases that have no other known explanation—we both know the fundamental difference between you and me in our researches, Dame Gilda.”

  “What’s that, Professor Sabertash?”

  “In most cases, I don’t actually believe in this sort of thing, of course.”

  “You don’t?” Gilda couldn’t help feeling shocked. She had assumed that anybody who would take the time to write books about the tarot and other occult subjects must believe they had some validity.

  Professor Sabertash sat down, crossed his legs, and twiddled his foot as if using it to direct a miniature orchestra. “I merely find it interesting that others believed these things years ago and still continue to believe these things today. I like to understand why people believe things. Most often, it has to do with the manifestation of human fear.”

  Gilda couldn’t help feeling disappointed. She had hoped Professor Sabertash might do a tarot card reading for her or demonstrate some new technique for conducting séances. Instead, he was sipping sherry and telling her that he was skeptical about the whole concept of ghosts.

  “Now, I must say—it was an entirely different story for a quite brilliant graduate school colleague of mine whose studies led him to a great conviction that ghosts are absolutely real, that spirits roam the earth, and that the mind has vast, untapped potential to know things that can’t be observed. He was an American, but it was at Oxford that he realized he was a true psychic—and a quite convincing one, too, despite the scoffing of his college tutors. Following a series of formal spring balls where he dressed in some absolutely garish costumes, he disappeared entirely—simply left town and never returned to finish his degree. The last I heard, he was on a journey throughout the world in search of paranormal activity. I recall that he had begun to call himself something quite outlandish . . . Balthazar Frobenius, I believe it was . . .”

  Professor Sabertash looked startled because Gilda suddenly jumped to her feet, as if ready to salute someone. “Balthazar Frobenius is my hero!”

  “So you’ve met h
im.”

  “Well, no. But I’d love to meet him someday. I carry his Master Psychic’s Handbook with me everywhere! Do you know where I could find him these days?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Professor Sabertash. “He keeps a very low profile and certainly has never returned to Oxford to visit his old haunts, so to speak—at least not to my knowledge.”

  “Oh.” Gilda sat down. “I wish I could ask him some questions.”

  “He would be touched to have such an accomplished follower of his works,” said Sabertash. “Now, Dame Gilda, I hate to cut our delightful conversation short, but if you’ll excuse me, I must head to high table for the dinner hour.”

  “Oh—okay. I should be going, too.” Gilda paused at the doorway. Their interview seemed incomplete; she had been hoping to find answers that still eluded her.

  “Something else I can assist you with, Dame Gilda?”

  “Professor Sabertash, I’m sure something very strange is going on at this piano competition, but it’s hard to know how to go about investigating it.”

  Professor Sabertash made a tent with his hands, pressing his two index fingers against his mouth. “Keep your mind attuned to the signs that speak to you, Dame Gilda, and they will lead you to the source of the mystery.”

  “I’ll do my best,” said Gilda, nodding.

  Professor Sabertash chuckled. “That was actually something Balthazar Frobenius used to say. My response to him was, ‘Keep looking for ghosts, and you will surely find them.’”

  22

  The Clue in the Bookshelf

  When Gilda returned to Wyntle House, something on the small bookshelf next to her bed caught her attention. The spine of one of the clothbound books protruded noticeably from the bookshelf, as if someone had pulled it out as a reading suggestion for her. As if someone WANTED me to look at it, Gilda thought. She noticed a distinct tickle in her left ear as she pulled the book from the shelf and read the title, Alice in Wonderland. As a child, Gilda had been intrigued by the idea of a girl who falls down a rabbit hole and finds herself trapped in a nonsensical underground world where animals and even playing cards talk—a place where snacking on little cakes could make a person as tall as a tree or as small as a caterpillar. The fact that none of her friends had actually read the story (they had only seen the Disney movie) made its strangeness all the more appealing.