Read Chapter 7: A Voice from Beyond

The theater at night had its own breath. Élodie had grown used to it in the weeks since her audition—the slow creak of settling timber, the whisper of dust drifting from the rafters, the way the dark swallowed sound whole. But tonight, something else moved in the air. A current, faint as a held note, pulling at the hairs on her arms.

She stood center stage, music stand before her, the score to *Carmen* open to the Habanera. The understudy rehearsal had gone badly that afternoon—her voice had cracked on the high C, and Delacroix had made her repeat the phrase eleven times until the edges bled raw. Practice now was penance. And company.

She sang a single line, soft, testing the acoustics. Her voice curled up into the empty house and vanished like smoke.

Then another voice answered.

Not from the wings. Not from the pit. From the back of the hall, near the grand doors—a woman's whisper, dry as old paper, yet clear as glass through water.

*Leave before the closing.*

Élodie's throat closed. The words had not come from any human throat. She knew that the way she knew her own heartbeat. The phantom had spoken to her before through song, through music, through the mournful tide of a century-old rehearsal. But never in words. Never like this.

The whisper came again, closer now, as if the speaker had drifted halfway up the aisle.

*You will be caught in the fall.*

A draft swept across the stage. Cold, impossibly so, and carrying a scent she'd learned to associate with the ghost: beeswax and orange flower, the perfume of another age. The music stand rattled. Élodie gripped its edges to steady it.

"Who are you?" she asked.

Silence. The theater's breath held.

But then, from the orchestra pit, came the softest sound—a music box melody, the same lullaby that had nearly pulled her into the dark weeks ago. It played four bars, then stopped, as if waiting.

"Céleste," Élodie breathed.

The stage lights above her flickered. One by one, in sequence, like a hand running down the spine of a piano. Then, with a crack that made her jump, the heavy frame light at the first wing position sheared from its cable and crashed onto the stage floor, throwing glass like shrapnel.

Élodie threw her arms over her head, dropped to a crouch. The impact still rang through the floorboards when she dared to look up. The light lay crumpled where she had been standing two seconds before—her open score was pinned beneath it, the Habanera bleeding into the splinters.

The music box melody had stopped.

But she heard it still, felt it in her teeth—and above it, a raw, strangled sob from somewhere in the flies. A sound of pure grief, so human it made her chest ache.

She rose on shaking legs.

"Show me," she said, her voice steadier than she felt. "Show me what you need."

The whisper did not return. But the ghost's presence pulled—a thread of cold air drawing her toward the stage right wing, then along the dusty corridor that led behind the proscenium. Élodie followed. She had learned to trust the pull, even when her nerves screamed caution.

The corridor dead-ended at the iron door to the old fly rail room. Rusted chains hung from the ceiling like frozen snakes. Élodie had been here only once, on Julien's tour, when he'd called it "the skeleton of the house."

The pull stopped.

At her feet lay a scrap of paper, yellowed, curled at the edges, as if it had been slipped beneath the iron door. Élodie crouched and picked it up. Handwritten script, faded sepia ink, wavering as though the writer's hand had trembled:

*They will close the house and bury me again. Find me before the last light.*

Below the words, a single line of musical notation. Five notes, descending. Élodie's ear caught them instantly—it was the opening phrase of an aria she knew from an old recording Vautour had played her, a rarity never staged in the modern repertoire. *L'ultimo respiro.* The Last Breath.

The ghost wanted to be found.

"Before the last light," Élodie repeated. The demolition. Three months.

She folded the paper carefully into the pocket of her rehearsal dress. That was when she heard the footsteps in the house.

She retraced her path to the wings, staying to the shadows. Julien stood at the edge of the pit, flashlight in hand, staring at the shattered stage light. He looked up as she emerged.

"You're still here." His voice carried the careful neutrality she'd come to distrust.

"Practice ran long." She stepped onto the stage, pointedly not looking at the crash site. "A light fell."

"I heard." He swept the beam across the debris. "That's a two-hundred-pound frame. Cable's been checked every week by the city inspectors. It shouldn't—" He cut himself off.

"Shouldn't what?"

He looked at her, and for a moment the careful mask slipped. "Shouldn't be possible without help."

Élodie pulled the paper from her pocket. She held it out. Julien took it, read it by flashlight, his jaw tightening.

"Where did you find this?"

"Someone left it for me." She watched his face closely. "Or something."

He turned the paper over, examined the edges. "This paper is pre-1920. Acid-free stock, expensive even then." He looked up, eyes sharp. "Whoever wrote this paid for quality. It's a document meant to survive."

"Like the letter in your notebook," Élodie said quietly.

Julien stilled.

"The one with the same handwriting," she pressed. "I saw it when you dropped it in the wings last week. Pages of notes on Céleste Aubry, dates, observations. You say you're only here for the restoration, but you've been hunting her too."

For a long moment, he said nothing. Then he folded the paper with a precise crease and handed it back.

"My grandmother was in the audience the night Céleste vanished."

Élodie felt the floor drop out of her stomach.

"She never spoke of it—not once. But she kept a scrapbook. Ticket stubs, programs. And one photograph, which she'd hidden behind a picture of my grandfather." He paused. "She'd drawn a circle around a man in the audience. A man in Box One. And she'd written beside it, in ink so faded I almost missed it: *The one who took her.*"

Élodie's pulse hammered. "You knew the man in Box One was the key. That's why you took this job."

"I took this job because the theater is going to die." Julien's voice cracked—the first crack she'd ever heard. "And because I thought, if I could find out what happened to Céleste, my grandmother might finally—" He stopped. "She died last winter. Never got her answer."

They stood in the ruined dark, the shattered light between them like a warning.

"Élodie," Julien said, "whoever took Céleste Aubry is still woven through this place. They left records that don't add up. They made sure her mystery was buried. And now—" He gestured at the fallen glass. "The ghost is trying to protect you, or warn you, or both. But if she brought that light down, she's not in control. She's fading."

Élodie looked down at the paper in her hand. *Find me before the last light.*

"If she's fading," she said slowly, "then we're running out of time to give her what she wants. I don't care if the ghost is protecting me or warning me. I came here to sing, and I'm not leaving until this theater tells the truth."

Julien's eyes met hers. For the first time since they'd met, there was no mask between them.

"Then we'd better start with the records nobody's allowed to see," he said.