Chapter 3 - The Music of the Night (from The Phantom of the Opera)
Night time sharpens, heightens each sensation
Darkness stirs and wakes imagination ...
Turn your face away from the garish light of day
Turn your thoughts away from cold, unfeeling light
And listen to the music of the night.
The next day I woke up feeling refreshed. After dressing, I hurried down to the common room to wait for the prefect who had promised to take us down to breakfast. I doubted I could find the way back to the great hall on my own. It took me a moment to realize that I had woken up far earlier than everyone else. I checked the large grandfather clock in the corner and realized it was still nearly two hours until breakfast. I resigned myself to a wait.
For the first time, I actually took the time to take in the Ravenclaw common room. There were books everywhere. Although the students had only been here a since yesterday evening, reference books of all kinds were stacked in piles on all of the small tables, which were scattered throughout the room. The room was round and very tall - it must have been in a tower - and a spiral staircase wound up around the outside, going up at least five levels of balconies. Each balcony wrapped around the inside perimeter of the tower, and the walls of each of these levels were completely covered with bookshelves, all of which were stuffed to overflowing with books of every kind. The bottom floor, where I was standing, was littered with large, comfy armchairs, each with a small table nearby. On one end of the room was a huge fireplace, at least as tall as I was. On the other was a small wet bar, which looked to have little but coffees, and a few flavours of Italian soda. I wasn't a coffee drinker, but I decided to make myself a raspberry soda.
A few people - mostly sixth or seventh years who seemed to know exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it - drifted in and out of the room as I drank. Just as I was finishing, Remus Lupin came down he stairs that led to the boys' wing. He was on the small side - not really thin, but definitely not tall - and had dark-brown hair that he apparently hadn't bothered to comb.
"Morning, Lily," he said groggily. Without glancing at me again, he quickly made and gulped down an espresso. "That's a little better," he said, not sounding quite as sleepy. He glanced at the clock. "Dang, still an hour and a half till breakfast? Why the heck did I get up so early? I'd go back to bed if I hadn't just pumped my brain full of caffeine." He plopped himself down into an armchair right across from mine, then immediately jumped back up. "Come on, Lily. I'm not waiting around here for an hour and a half. Let's go explore the castle. It can't be too hard to find your way around."
"Yeah, right. We'll be lost in five minutes." But he ignored my remark, and I followed him out the secret door anyway, sliding the large section of bookshelf back into the wall until it clicked, then following Remus out of the library. I was wrong...it didn't take five minutes for us to get lost. It took two. After we realized we didn't know our way back to the library and the Ravenclaw house, we wandered around pretty aimlessly looking for the library, the great hall, or someone who could point us the right way.
We became more lost by the minute. It was when we were walking down what I later learned to be the south fourth-level corridor, past a row of classrooms that seemed mostly empty, that I heard it. At first I thought it might be the wind coming through the window, but before long, I realized it was some kind of music. The lilting melody was unlike anything I'd ever heard before, as was the instrument. I was spellbound. I'd never known before how music could pierce your senses and stir your emotions like that. I could tell Remus heard it, although it wasn't having the same effect on him.
It didn't take long to find out where the music was coming from. We stopped outside a classroom door that looked just like all the others in the corridor, except for a plaque hanging above it that announced "Professor Rhys-Davies" and then in smaller letter, 'music teacher'. Light streamed from under the door, and it was from inside that the music came. The song sounded like wind - I don't know how that popped into my head, but when I played the song later, I always thought of it as a song about a soft wind slightly stirring the surface of the green ocean.
Without thinking to knock, I swung the door open. An old Irish woman with the whitest hair I'd ever seen was seated in the middle of a very large room playing on what looked to be a small pipe. She stopped, startled, and looked over at me, and smiled. "Good morning, dear. May I help you?"
~
Over the next two weeks, I met with Professor Rhys-Daives (who didn't actually teach a class, except an elective for seventh-years only; mostly she did private lessons) every day. At first she worked with me on my voice and the harpsichord, and I was ashamed at how terrible both sounded. But she insisted I had real talent ("You'll be a stunning mezzo-soprano, dear. Your voice has such clarity."), and I practiced hard. I ignored most of my other classes and didn't bother with homework. Every spare moment, I went up to my dorm to practice singing with breath concentration in my lower abdomen ("oh, my dear, your breath is so high! You'll never get any kind of pressure that way!") and going to one of the three small harpsichord practice rooms ("you must hold your hands higher above the keyboard, Lily dear. They look squashed. Pretend you're holding a bubble." ).
At the end of two weeks, Remus pointed out to me that while all the other first-years were making lots of friends, I'd hardly talked to any students but him; and I'd hardly even spoken to him over the past week. Also, I knew that at this rate I would be getting failing grades in transfiguration. So I toned my amounts of music practice down a little - but I had discovered an obsession that I would carry for the rest of my life.