2. Auditioning and Meeting the Opera Ghost

Letter from Katherine Pryde, Hotel de, Paris, France, to Auroré Munro, Xavier House, Yorkshire, England.

Dear Auroré;

I am here in Paris, in my hotel, but tomorrow I will be hunting for lodgings, because...I passed the audition! I had nothing interesting to write to you beforeâ€"just traveling, and checking in. I am having no trouble at all getting along in French. Professor Xavier's telepathic lessons completed what my conventional French lessons began.

But I must tell you all about today. I arrived bright and early with my letter of introduction in my hand and my dance shoes and practice clothes in my carpetbag. You will have to imagine me in the Managers' office. in a chair, on one side of a wide desk that was polished to a glassy shine, and two mustachioed Opera managers on the other side of it, poring over my letter. Sir Erich's letter was powerful enough to allow me to bypass a lot of hurdles that stand in the way of most ballet hopefuls, but it only got me in the door, so to speak. If I am to stay, it will have to be on my own merits. I wouldn't want it any other way.

Back to the managers. One is named André and the other is Firmin. One of them is short and the other is tall. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out which name applies to which man. I suppose I'll have to learn, and learn soon. They glanced up from the letter to give me the once-over. I could read their minds as clearly as if I were Professor Xavierâ€"they were thinking, "Do you suppose she's Sir Erich's mistress?"

I wondered for a moment if they'd be more likely, or less likely, to give me an audition if that were the case. I don't think I could have carried off that pretence convincingly, so I sat there and tried to look as graceful as I could.

"How long have you been studying dance, M'mselle Pryde?" asked the shorter one. His tone was so patronizing that I wanted to kick him. I remembered I had on my nice new kid boots, and controlled myself.

"Since I was four, m'sieu." I answered.

"Yet you have never danced professionally. You've never even auditioned before?"

"No, m'sieu." I gave him the reason. "When I was thirteenâ€"well, for some years, it was thought that I would be marryingâ€"." My throat closed up. I did not cry again, Auroré, I swallowed it. I was being good.

"This marriage would have precluded your career as a dancer?" asked the taller.

I nodded.

"And you are nowâ€"how old?"

"Seventeen. Almost eighteen."

"So, you have come to us. May I askâ€"," he rubbed his chin. "Why Paris and not London? Or, for that matter, America? This does say you were born in America."

"I've lived in England for several years, and I went to school there. I wanted to make a change."

The managers exchanged looks. "I see", said the shorter. "How is it that you know Sir Erich?"

"He is a patron of the school I went to. Besides that, he knowsâ€"knewâ€"my grandfather, before my family emigrated to America."

"Ah." The 'Is she his mistress?' look went away. One of them tugged on a bell pull. An office boy answered. "Ask Madame Giry if she will join us."

A few minutes later, the most alarmingly Parisian woman I have ever seen came in. She was wearing a very smartly cut black dress, and her strawberry-blonde hair was elegantly dressed in a chignon. (I'm not sure the color wasn't 'aided', though!)

"Madam Giry. This is Mademoiselle Katherine Pryde, who has been recommended to us by Baron Ware." said the taller.

"And who is Baron Ware, that he should be making recommendations?"

"Ahhâ€"He's our banker."

"I see!" She made it sound as if they were caught sneaking candy before supper, while she looked me over. Her eyebrows went up. I was wearing my navy blue dress, which may look very sharp in a Yorkshire village, but which in Paris looks about five years out of date, if not more. At least I had the dignity of full length skirts. If I were still wearing school-girl-short skirts, I think I would have shriveled up.

"Indeed?" she asked, of no one in particular. "Stand up and walk for me, child. To the door and back."

I did.

"Now make a révérence, as though to an audience."

I obeyed.

"Yes. I will see her audition. Follow me," she commanded, and so I followed her out of the office, down the corridor, and then through a door to a flight of utilitarian stairs. I was being let behind the scenes, into the parts of the Opera house that are like petticoats and crinolines and such are to an outfitâ€"not what shows to the public, but is absolutely necessary all the same. It was full of odd bits and pieces, (some of them human), theater infrastructure, scenery and machinery. She led me to the ballet corps' changing room, where I put on my practice clothes under the interested side glances of a dozen other girls.

Then I went with Madame Giry into a sort of public practice hall, with mirrored walls, where the operaâ€"going gentlemen could ogle the girls as they were put through their paces. I saw the two managers immediatelyâ€"they were going to watch.

Madame Giry began by drilling me on the basics, once I'd stretched and warmed up. "Position One!" she thumped her cane. "Position Two! Now pliéâ€"." And so on. Then a tired looking pianist played "Titania's Dance" from Berlioz's Midsummer Night's Dream, and I danced as Mme. Giry called the figures. Only half-a-dozen people were present when I began, but more trickled in as my audition went along.

And now I must confess. I did something the Professor might not approve of. Please don't scold, Auroré. Please don't tell, either.

I used my powers during the audition. I can make myself insubstantial enough to walk on airâ€"or dance on it. I used it very selectivelyâ€"I made my grand jetés last a second longer, made my penchés that much deeper, accomplished an extra crossing or two during the entrechat. I did not cheat. I performed to the best of my physical abilitiesâ€"and then went a little bit further. I am good. I wasn't covering up my deficiencies, but displaying my capabilities, and not to their fullest, either. I was careful not to do the impossibleâ€"just the improbable.

The room had filled in around the edges by the time Mme. Giry said "Stop!" The music stopped. I stopped. Everyone in the room stopped talking. That woman has presence! She made a thoughtful sound, then requested, "Another grand jeté, if you please."

I leapt again, phasing so that I hung in the air a split second longer than I would otherwise have done.

"Very prettily done," commented the shorter manager.

"Yes, very graceful," agreed the taller.

"No!" said Madame Giry. "Not 'very pretty'. Not 'very graceful'. Remarkable. Almostâ€"extraordinary. And I am not easily impressed. Which is not to say that there is not ample room for improvement. Perform another entrechat, Mademoiselle."

I did.

"Yesâ€"," she drew out the word. "You are accepted, Katherine Pryde." It seemed as if the whole room had been holding its breath, and let it out all at once. A few people even clapped. For the most part, they just went back to whatever they had been doing. Which was for the bestâ€"I don't want to stand out as a freak of any kind, even if I might be freakishly good.

After that, the rest of my day was spent touring the Opera house and getting introduced and measured and told what the rules and regulations are and when payday is (and which of the stagehands to avoidâ€"apparently I should never let Joseph Buquet back me into a cornerâ€"not that I couldn't fight him off even then!) Madame Giry has a daughter in the ballet corps, and her nameâ€"her daughter's name, that is, is Meg. She seems nice. I think she's not quite part of the group because her mother is the ballet mistress. The rest seem a little empty-headed to me, but I don't really know them yet.

Agnes Sorelli is the prima ballerina, I learned, and Carlotta Guidicelli is the prima donna. And I learned a lot of other names as wellâ€"it will take me some time to sort them all out.

Oh, and this is funnyâ€"the Opera has a resident ghost. There's a role I could really understudy. When it comes to walking through walls, who could be more qualified than me?

Also, please find enclosed a snippet of ribbon. It's for Illyana. I have found out for her what color eau de Nil is, and that's it. It is, as you can see, a beautiful light blue-green, and not mud colored at all. I don't know why they call that shade "Nile Water" when every time I ever saw the Nile, it was thick with mud.

I will finish this letter here, and post it. Please share it with Kurt, and tell him the next one will be for him.

With love to all, from

Your Kitten (purr!)

Ps... Should you hear from Peter, will you let me know how he is? Please. I need to hear about him, now and then.

Dear Kurt;

Well, Fuzzy-Elf, I have been in the Ballet corps less than a week, and already I am getting into trouble. Not that I was the one who started it! I'm sure this comes as no surprise to you.

The Opera house is haunted, you see, by a very unghostly phantom who insists that the Opera Populaire is his, in the physical, artistic and metaphoric senses of the word. Because of this, he harasses everybodyâ€"beginning with those who don't give performances to his liking. (I'm not sure what I mean by the metaphoric sense, but it sounds good.)

He starts by sending notes, and escalates to pranks, which get increasingly serious if his advice is ignored. He also praises people who do give performances he approves of, with notes, and sometimes flowers or chocolates, if he thinks the performance has been truly exceptional.

He continually plagues the management with messages about how operas are to be cast and staged, and annoys the maintenance staff by informing them that a trapdoor needs repair or that a flywheel needs replacing. He helps himself to whatever he wants around the entire building, and no one can do a thing about it.

He also terrorizes the Ballet corpsâ€"with the exception of yours truly! I think that's more of a hobby for him, because it's too easy to do. It's not real work.

In exchange for these valuable services, he extortsâ€"I mean, asks forâ€"only 20,000 francs a month! And Box Five. Box Five is one of the expensive boxes on the main tier. If he does not get both, he sulks and makes trouble. The managers are almost as new as I am, and thus far have refused to pay him.

As a result, he has dropped scenery, jammed a row of foot lights so the gas won't flow, broken a treadmill, swiped three cases of vintage champagne, and escalated his note-sending to the point where his envelopes with red seals drift about like autumn leaves. Monsieur André even found one tucked in his inner pocketâ€"while he was wearing the jacket!

Of course this ghost is no ghost, any more than I am, or he would need neither francs nor champagne. The ghost is flesh and blood, and... but I am getting ahead of myself. I have to tell you about MY encounter with the Opera Ghost, before I tell you my deductions about him.

I was accepted into the Ballet corps, but I soon found out that I wasn't really one of themâ€"and couldn't be, until I was initiated. Two days after I started, during a post-practice cool-down, Cecilé pretty, silly, and nervous, said, "But Kitty hasn't written her name on the wall yet!"

"Oh, that's right!" and, "She hasn't!"â€" chimed in a couple of the others, with glee, as we filed in to the dressing room and bent over to undo our slippers and change our clothes.

"What wall?" I asked as I untied a difficult knot.

"The far wall of the big storage room in the second sub-basement!"

"Why do I need to do that?" I straightened, and reached for my street clothes.

"To be one of us!"

"You're not really one of us until you doâ€"."

"Come on! I've got the chalk."

They pushed and pulled and coaxed me out the door and down the stairs to the landing on the second sub-basement level, where one girl produced a battered candelabrum with three half-burnt candles in it. Another girl pulled out a box of matches, and lit the candles with all the solemnity of a ritual. Cecile pressed the candle holder into my left hand, while another girl gave me a lump of chalk and the box of matches to hold in my other hand. "In case your candles go out." she told me.

"What do I have to do?" I wanted to be part of the group, but not at the cost of losing my place in the corps or breaking a bone.

"Just walk across to the far side and write your nameâ€"even your initials will doâ€"on the far wall. One of us will go to the landing on the other side, so she'll witness for us."

"Then you have to walk back and come out this side. All. By. Your. Self." emphasized Janine.

"With just the candles to light your way." finished Cecile.

"Why is this such a big deal? Would we get fired if I get caught?"

"Oh, no. Nobody'd care." answered Meg.

"It's the ghost, you see. He haunts the whole Opera House, but especially down here." continued Janine.

"He might blow out your candlesâ€"," interjected Marie.

It could be some draft that blows them out, I thought cynically.

"He might speak to you."

"Or try to kill you!"

"You might even see him!"

"What does he look like?" I asked, and they fell all over themselves to tell me.

"He hasn't got a noseâ€"."

"slimy grey drippingâ€","

"writhingâ€","

I was overloaded with outrageous and repulsive descriptions, and there were far too many of them. "Come on!" I pleaded. "Some of you are contradicting yourselves. Have any of you actually seen him?"

"Ohâ€"well, no. I haven't anyway." admitted Cecile.

"I have." said Meg, quietly. "He's tall, and he has dark hair. He looks just like any other gentleman in an evening suit, until he turns around."

"What do you see then?" I asked. Her description sounded more likely than any of the othersâ€"and more frightening.

"His face is a white skull. No flesh."

"It sounds like he's wearing a mask."

"It's what's under it!" shrieked Marie.

"That's enough." said Janine. "So, Kitty, are you ready to try?"

"Sure." I said, and why not? I wasn't afraid. "Is there anything else I need to know?"

"Yes! Keep one hand up, like this. At the level of your eyes." Cecile demonstrated.

"Why?" I asked.

"So if he throws a noose around your neck, you can get free and he won't choke you to death!"

"Does he do that a lot?" That sounded bad to me. "And I mean, do you know the names of people he did that to? Recently? For certain?"

"Noâ€"but everybody says that's what he does!"

"My mother might know." said Meg.

Since nobody knew any details, I wasn't about to believe there was a mad strangler loose in the Opera house. I opened the door.

"I'm ready." I said.

"Waitâ€"let me go up and run over to the other landing." cried Cecile, and I got to cool my heels until she called, "All right!" from the other side.

"Here I goâ€"," I went through the door. The candles flickered as the girls shut the door behind me, but they stayed lit, and bobbed normally as I walked across the room. I was carrying the only source of light in the huge space, and it was spooky. I had to remind myself that Logan taught me how to fight, and Prof. X taught me how to use my powers. If there was anything or anyone in that room, they ought to be afraid of me, and not the other way around. That helped.

I went around a big coil of rope, past heaps of rolled-up back drops, sidestepped a small landslide of old scores, and scuffed up dust, which made my nose itch. I let my hand drop back down by my sideâ€"if I were suddenly lassoed, I would go intangible, and the rope would fall right through my neck to the ground. Besides, it was very uncomfortable to keep one hand up like that.

It seemed to take forever to cross the room, but it was probably less than five minutes, and soon I was writing "Katherine Pryde was here." in big letters on the wall. Nothing strange or untoward happened. I knocked on the door to the stairs, and Cecile opened it. "You made it!" she squeaked. "And there's your name. Now all you have to do is go back."

"All right." I said.

"Did anything happen?"

"Not a thing."

"Were you scared?" she inquired.

"Not really." I told her.

"Oh!" she said, surprised. "Well, it's not as if you'd trained here, and came up knowing about the ghost. I'll leave this door open. That way, even if your candles do go out, there'll be a little light. I'm going back to the others now."

She left, and I turned around to begin the return leg of my journey. I had gone about a quarter of the way, more or less, when the door she had left open suddenly closed. I stopped walking. "Cecile?" I asked.

"No," said a man's voice, directly into my right ear. I looked over my shoulder. Of course there was no one there. If he were that close, I would have felt his presence, felt his breathâ€"almost felt his lips! The voice was that close...

"I'm not scared, and I'm not impressed." I said out loud to whoever was listening, but I made myself intangible, just in case, as I continued, "I can think of five ways to close that door without touching it, and I know about ventriloquism."

The voice chuckled in my other ear. "Really?" it, or he, inquired lazily. "Then, what aboutâ€"this?" One of the candles went out with a little hiss, as if someone had licked his fingers and pinched it out.

"I've seen that done as well," I answered, truthfully, and started walking again. I wasn't about to hurry, but I wasn't going to stand around either. I didn't want to have to reveal my power. Being phased, I walked right through a crate that was in my way, by accident, though. If he noticed, he didn't say anything.

"So.," he said. "You're the new girl. The one they say dances like a feather on the breeze." The voice was keeping up with me as I walked, as if he were walking right by my side.

"That's a nice compliment." I said. "Thank you."

"I'm just repeating what I've overheard. You know, I've heard that English blood runs cold, but I didn't think it was meant in this way..."

Another candle was snuffed out, just like the first.

"I'm American, actually." I told him.

"I beg your pardon..." he returned.

I could see what was coming, and I decided to forestall him. I stopped. "Let me spare you the trouble." I said. I blew out the last candle myself, and put the holder down by my feet. Then I quickly stuck my fingers in my ears. I had noticed something about his voice, and to test my theory I needed to block my ear canals.

I was rewarded by a startled laugh. "Brava, Mademoiselle," he said, "I applaud your spirit." The candles flamed back into life of their own accord. "You may continue. I shan't trouble you any furtherâ€"tonight."

I unplugged my ears and picked up the candlestick. "You were no trouble. In fact, thank you for escorting me. Otherwise, I might have been scared."

That made him laugh again. His laugh faded in the distance as I made my way back over to the door where I had originally entered, where the girls greeted me and asked about my return walk. I told them what had happened, but they thought I was making it upâ€"all except for Meg.

As for the 'trouble' I mentioned at the beginning of this letter, I have called the Ghost's attention to myself, which could well mean trouble. Perhaps I should have screamed and trembled like a good little 'petite rat', as they call us Ballet corps girls.

But what, you may ask, was I trying to find out by jamming my fingers in my ears? What had I noticed about his voice?

After I had blocked my ears, his voice had sounded as clear and distinct as if my fingers weren't there. Fingers can't block sound out completely, but they do muffle and distort it. The reason his voice sounded unchanged to me, was that it wasn't arriving in my head by way of my ears. He was speaking to me mind-to-mind.

The Opera Ghost is a telepathâ€"and either telekinetic or pyrokinetic, possibly both, because of the tricks he played with the candles.

He is one of us. He is an Evolved.

Would you be so kind as to share this with the Professor? I'll be writing to him soon, and I'm sure I'll have more to tell by then.

Love,

Kitty

PS: Have you had a letter from Peter? How is he?