Jonathan made the arrangements, and that same afternoon he and Mrs. Zimmermann set off in Mrs. Zimmermann’s bright purple 1950 Plymouth Cranbrook named Bessie. Mrs. Holtz moved into the guest room in the Barnavelt house on High Street, clucking and tutting about poor Mr. Mickleberry, whom she did not even know. Lewis supposed that Mrs. Holtz sympathized just on general principles.
By Monday afternoon Lewis and Rose Rita had yet to come up with something that might be worth researching. As they sat on the sofa with their notebooks on their laps, Lewis remembered that his uncle had once mentioned a forgotten theater right in the heart of New Zebedee. All the shops on Main Street were old and elaborately decorated, and most of them were two-storied. A few had small businesses like a photographer’s studio, an insurance broker, or an employment agency on the second floor. However, the building that housed the five-and-dime and the Farmers’ Feed & Seed Company was different. It was taller than all the other establishments on Main Street and took up half a block. And on the top two floors, Jonathan had once remarked, was the New Zebedee Opera House, which had been closed for ages. Lewis suggested this to Rose Rita as a topic they could research.
“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, or 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.