Chapter Fourteen
No Ghost Here!
The man had brought tools with him to pry open a window, so he was surprised to find that the windows weren't locked. He lifted the sash easily and climbed through snickering to himself and leaving his tools on the ground outside. Maybe she wasn't as clever as she seemed.
Once he had gotten in and stood up he had to stop and blink. He had climbed from the outside of a house in a small town outside Paris into a deep jungle in the dead of night. He stood for a moment, staring at his surroundings. The trees seemed to go on forever into the darkness and he could hear the rain falling around him. Suddenly he heard the lion roaring behind him and he ran, panicked, toward a dim light shining from between the trees.
As soon as he passed beneath the first branches, the jungle disintegrated into an asymmetrical hallway that seemed to join five rooms and a staircase. Each of the five doors were made of the same wood, intrinsically carved with dancing elves and unicorns. He tried each of them and found them all to be locked. He turned back toward the room he had come from, but he couldn't distinguish which of the doors it was. At any rate, they were all locked now. It seemed that the house was herding him up the stairs. The man twisted and turned from the stairs to the direction he thought he had come from and tried to collect his bearings. When he had entered the hallway he had counted five doors. Five doors plus the one he used to escape the jungle. By all laws of nature there ought to be six doors now. He stood in the center of the hall and starting at the staircase, counted the doors. One, two, three, four, five. It occurred to him that a door had disappeared and this upset him so much that he hurried up the stairs before anymore of them vanished.
When he got to the hallway at the top of the stairs he shut his eyes and rushed franticly for the nearest door, crashing through before it could disappear on him. When he opened his eyes, he saw that he was in a bedroom. He eyed the furniture suspiciously, as if it might jump up suddenly and grab him. A plain, small bed, a chest of drawers, an armoire, and a desk. He lifted his gaze and saw that someone had written a pattern of notes all around the wall of the room, a few inches from the ceiling. This disturbed him, but he ventured further into the room and toward the desk.
The moonlight shone through the window and he could read the papers on the desk. The first thing he saw was a news article, most likely from one of the 'ghost's magazines', about a singer who was performing that night in Paris. The article wasn't about that night's performance, but about one that had occurred several years earlier, during which the young diva had been abducted from the stage mid-performance when the entire theater was plunged into darkness. The article blamed the mysterious event on the Paris opera ghost. Needless to say, the girl had refused any and all invitations to return to the Paris opera house until that very night. He laughed out loud. Another ghost? Suzette must have gone to Paris to make friends with him too! The man dug further through the things on the desk until he found the letters from Suzette's father and uncle. He scanned the first and found nothing useful. He read the later and quickly turned back to the new article, and then back to the letter. He howled in anger and continued rereading the article and the letter, and then he scanned the first letter again and whirled around and out into the hallway.
He ran toward the stairs, but stopped cold before a floor length mirror which stood in the hallway and which he hadn't noticed before. He couldn't see his own reflection in the glass, but instead he seemed to see through it. He shuddered as he saw two yellow eyes appear in the darkness, at least a head lower than where his ought to have been. The eyes seemed to glare right through him. They froze him in place and burned him from the inside out. The stood shivering as he thought of the boy Benoit, who had left this place and returned to the world screaming about eyes in the darkness. The man drew a few deep breaths and began the shout.
"Suzette!" he screamed, " I know it's you! I know you're here!" As he spoke he confronted the mirror, drawing closer and closer.
"How stupid do you think I am? Do you think that you can fabricate a ghost to protect you? You'll see! I'm going to find you! I'm going to find her too! Do you hear?" He rushed the mirror with all his strength and it fell to the floor and shattered.
"Ha! There's no ghost here, Suzette! No! Just you and me and her! And I will get you both! Do you hear me! Your ghost can't protect you from me!" Here he stopped and listened. The house was empty and silent. He turned and left the house by the bedroom window.