The Ghost Sonata (16 page)

“Wow,” said Gilda. “It sounds different, doesn't it?”

Wendy nodded. “I don't know if Mrs. Mendelovich is going to like this interpretation, but I think it sounds better this way.”

“It sounds
great
,” said Gilda sincerely. “It's like you're telling a story—just like Professor Maddox said you should.”

“Okay,”
said Wendy's small voice from the tape recorder.
“You win.”

Wendy's face reddened and she quickly turned off the tape recorder.

“Wait a minute! Who were you talking to?”

“Nobody. I was just talking to myself.”

Gilda grinned. “So let's hear what you were saying!” When she was younger, in the days before she started keeping a diary, Gilda had often been caught having lively conversations with herself. It was very embarrassing to look up and find her parents giggling as they eavesdropped on her. Now it was her turn to tease Wendy.

“I wasn't saying anything,” Wendy insisted.

“Then why the big hurry to turn off the tape recorder?”

“No reason.”

Gilda reached past Wendy and turned the tape recorder on.

Wendy immediately turned it off.

“I bet you said something about me!”

“You're so self-centered.”

A small scuffle ensued, and Gilda managed to sit down on the piano bench, elbowing Wendy out of the way. Wendy retaliated by pushing Gilda off the piano bench and onto the floor. Gilda pulled herself back up, sat heavily on Wendy's lap, grabbed the tape recorder, and waved it just out of Wendy's reach. “I'm turning this on, Wendy, whether you like it or not!”

“You're squishing me! Get off!”

“Not until we listen to this, Wendy.” Gilda turned on the tape recorder.

There was a moment of fuzzy silence followed by the sounds of an unfamiliar melody.

Gilda couldn't help feeling disappointed. “I was hoping you were just about to launch into an embarrassingly personal monologue.”

“If I was going to do that, I wouldn't be dumb enough to leave the tape recorder on.”

Gilda and Wendy both fell silent, listening to the music.

“That's really pretty,” said Gilda quietly. “Kind of haunting. But it's not one of your competition pieces, is it?”

Wendy shook her head. She twirled a lock of hair and tapped her foot nervously.

“Who's the composer?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know?”

“I have
no idea
who the composer is.” Wendy met Gilda's eyes with an unusual fierceness, and Gilda immediately understood something.

“This is the music you heard last night in the house, isn't it?”

Wendy encircled her own neck with the palms of her hands, as if trying to protect herself from a vampire bite. “I think it is.” 1

Gilda stood up and began to pace back and forth like a tiger in a small cage. “This is
very interesting
.”

“Gilda—” Wendy looked close to tears. “I can't stop thinking about this music. Every time I try to practice my own pieces for the competition, that melody creeps into my mind instead.”

Gilda's mind churned with questions. Was the music caused by a genuine haunting? If so, what was the spirit trying to tell Wendy? And what was the connection between the tarot card under Wendy's door and the eerie piano music?

Wendy twirled a lock of hair nervously. “Do you think it's possible I'm losing my mind?”

Gilda held up three fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Gilda, I don't have a head injury, so that test doesn't really prove anything.”

“What country are we in right now?”

“Guatemala. Gilda, I'm serious.”

“Listen, Wendy, I saw a ghost last night, too, so either A) we're both crazy, or B) we've encountered a real haunting.”

“What if both are true?”

Gilda decided to ignore this question. “This music you keep hearing... I have a feeling it contains some kind of message.”

“Like what?”

Gilda rummaged through her bag and found her pen and notebook. “Why don't you play the melody again, and I'll write down the names of the notes?”

“Worth a try, I guess.” Wendy placed her right hand on the keyboard and began to call out the notes as she played, “A, B, C, D, C, B, C . . .”

“Wait—slow down.”

“. . . B, A, G, G, F, F, G, A . . .”

After Gilda took notes for several more phrases, the two girls sat on the piano bench, feeling baffled as they stared at the scribbled letters.

“If we look at these letters as an anagram,” Gilda suggested, “I can see the word
bag
.” Gilda wrote the word
bag
in the margin of her notebook. “I also see the word
cab.
”

“I've never heard of a ghost communicating with an anagram.”

“If a ghost can play an invisible piano, why shouldn't it create an anagram? Anyway, I thought you were supposed to be good at cracking codes. The world's greatest cryptographers are good at math.”

“It takes longer than three minutes to crack a code, Gilda. Besides, we don't even know if we're looking at a code here. What if it's just a
melody
?”

Gilda thought for a moment. “Okay, maybe you're right. Let's listen to the tape again to see if we notice any other clues.”

Wendy hit PLAY and the girls closed their eyes to listen carefully. The music had a simple, mournful quality, like a folk song sung by a single voice. As Wendy played, she had gradually added some dissonant harmony in the left hand.

Just then, a strange sound interrupted the tape—an electronic-sounding
voice
that didn't sound anything like Wendy.

“What was
that
?”

“I have no idea. Maybe some kind of interference?”

Gilda pushed REWIND and restarted the tape. Both girls leaned forward, listening.

As the melody began again, Gilda heard the distinct sound of a very high-pitched, reedy voice
speaking
on the tape.

Wendy shivered. “That's so creepy.”

“Wendy, is there any way that could be
you
making that sound?”

“It doesn't sound like me. Besides, I don't talk while I'm playing—at least, not that I'm aware of.”

Gilda rewound the tape once more and turned up the volume. The voice had a slightly mechanical, inhuman quality, but something also suggested the sound of a child speaking, as if the tape had picked up a young person playing and talking in another room.

Gilda and Wendy stared at the tape recorder warily, as if they had just realized that the machine was possessed by a sinister force.

“I've read about using tape recorders in psychic investigations,” Gilda whispered, “but I've never actually tried it before. In my
Psychic's Handbook
, Balthazar Frobenius says you're supposed to use an external microphone just like the one you're using. He also says that if you actually hear a ghost's voice on tape it probably won't sound human.”

“But why didn't I notice the voice while I was playing?”

“Because it's like the ghost has to use the tape recorder as a kind of mechanical voice box in order to be heard. You can't hear the ghost until you play back the tape.”

“If that's a ghost talking, I can't understand a word it's saying.”

Gilda had another idea: she slowed down the speed of the tape before playing it back. Now the piano music sounded low and warped.

Wendy wrinkled her nose. “Yuck—I hate hearing the music that way.”

“Just wait.”

Out of the murky piano music, a voice spoke very faintly. It sounded deeper now—more human.

“Fry wide,” the voice said, followed by something completely indistinguishable.

“Fry wide?” Wendy asked. “What does
that
mean?”

“Tea cull,” said the voice, followed by “fry wide” once more.

Gilda hurriedly scribbled “fry wide” and “tee cull” in her notebook, having no idea whether these sounds were actual words. One thing was for sure: they were listening to a real voice.

“For all we know, it could be speaking in another language,” Wendy pointed out.

They listened to the tape for a few more minutes, but the voice said nothing more.

“So what do we do now?”

The girls looked at each other, not wanting to admit that they both felt out of their depth. As far as they knew, it was the most direct encounter with the supernatural that either of them had ever experienced.

20

A Visit from a Stranger

 

While the guests of Wyntle House were away at the piano competition, Mrs. Luard made the mistake of perching precariously on a three-legged stool while peering up into her kitchen cabinets to search for a tin of chocolate-chip biscuits. She had hidden the biscuits on a high shelf to keep them from her son, Danny. Ever since the local GP had warned Mrs. Luard that her sixteen-year-old son had the circulatory system of a forty-year-old, she had been trying to help Danny by hiding the fat-filled snacks they had formerly shared.

“Drat him!” Mrs. Luard realized that the biscuits were gone; not only had Danny already discovered them, he had also hidden his own stash of jelly-roll snacks and potato crisps from
her.

Mrs. Luard reached even higher to grab the crisps that Danny had placed in a far corner of the cabinet when she suddenly lost her balance, causing the stool to topple over. A searing pain shot through her leg as she fell heavily to the ground.

Yapping with agitation, her little dog, Bunny, trotted into the room to investigate the crashing noise.

“Danny!” Mrs. Luard gasped. “Danny! My leg's broken because of you and your crisps!”

Bunny licked Mrs. Luard's leg helpfully.

“What you want, Mum?” Danny called from the next room.

“Danny!”

“I'm watching telly.”

“Get in here,
now
!”

Danny lumbered slowly to the door. He stared blankly at the heap of his mother on the floor. “Your leg looks wonky.”

“It's bloody broken!”

“What were you doing, then?”

“Never mind what I was doing. What did you do with them biscuits I had up in the cabinet?” Mrs. Luard was not about to let the shooting pain in her calf make her forget the true cause of her injury.

“Nothing.”

“You found them, and you ate them.” Mrs. Luard winced.

“No, I didn't.”

“You did.”

“We should get you to a doctor,” said Danny. “And I didn't.”

 

When Gilda returned to Wyntle House later that afternoon, she decided on impulse to knock on Mrs. Luard's door in hopes of questioning her about the strange occurrences in Wyntle House.

“Come in!” yelled Mrs. Luard without getting up. As always, Bunny jumped up and down in a frenzy of shrill barking.

Gilda found Mrs. Luard and Danny sitting on the couch with a large bag of crisps between them. Mrs. Luard's leg was set in a plaster cast and propped up on a pillow.

“As you can see, I've broken my leg,” said Mrs. Luard, “so you'll have to forgive me for not getting up, luv. Please come in. Have you met my son, Danny?”

“Nice to meet you.”

Danny mumbled a response and shot Gilda a sullen glance before returning to his television show, which appeared to be some kind of mystery featuring a grumpy middle-aged detective.

“How did you break your leg?”

“I had a battle with a footstool this morning. The footstool won.”

Gilda noticed Mrs. Luard's crutches leaning against the couch and an assortment of pills and liquid medications on a side table. In one corner of the room, there was an ominous contraption that resembled an oxygen tank, and the remnants of carryout containers cluttered a small coffee table. The room was dark and Gilda perceived the faint odor of feet. She watched as Danny stuffed a handful of crisps into his mouth.

“Danny helps me run the place, don't you, Danny?”

Danny nodded without looking at Gilda.

“He's a dab hand with the repairs and upkeep.”

“That's good to know,” said Gilda. “I think the shower upstairs is broken.” She couldn't help thinking that Danny didn't seem to be much of a “dab hand” with anything that didn't involve potato chips.

“Have to turn on the switch,” said Danny, still not looking at Gilda, as if actually looking at her while talking would be an admission of some defeat. “Americans always get that wrong. I had three people knocking on my door this morning with that same question.”