Chapter 4: Beneath the Trap Door
During her musings about the Persian, Alice had taken a wrong turn. The corridor opened into an immense chamber, and she found herself among colorful stage sets and heavy props. Light poured in from the hallway, and a splendid sight stretched endlessly before her: Egyptian statues, towering ten feet tall, guarded the entrance through which she had passed; and throughout the cellar were gathers of life-like foliage. Each set demonstrated perfect beauty.
They reminded her of the murder which she was investigating—of a man found hanged next to a set piece from the opera Le Roi de Lahore. She began to look for such a setting.
A stairwell to the far right led deeper into the Opera's cellars.
Below she found more sets, more scenery. The light from the room above filtered down the stairwell, losing some of its brilliance. She admired the scenes from the rarer operas as she searched for any that could have decorated Le Roi.
Another stairwell.
With each isolated level she descended, the sets became more obscure, the light thinned, and the darkness grew more prevailing. The murmurs of conversation in the foyer above turned to a low hum, then to nothing as she stepped off another stairwell. The only sound now was the roaring in her own ears. She could barely see in the darkness.
Ahead, an impressive set piece loomed from the shadows. Alice could make out the silhouette of heavy vases spraying dusty bouquets of peacock feathers; bright, golden censors for incense; swooping silk canopies; and lavish "marble" pillars encrusted with frescoes of trellised geometrical designs.
The palace of Lahore.
In the darkness, she began to look for evidence of a 'ghost' behind the set. She knew that the Sûreté had already searched the area after the murder, but she still hoped to find something that they had overlooked, even without the use of a lantern! Yet behind the set were only a large flat and a pile of lumber. She found no footprints. Removing a few pieces of the lumber, she discovered nothing; the pile had not been placed there to hide an escape. Frustrated, she sat on one of the dislodged pieces of wood. If this were the wrong set piece, then she had no time to continue her search—the second act of Don Juan would begin soon, and her parents would notice her absence. Frowning, she bent to wipe the dust from her shoes—and became suddenly still, staring at the floor beside her foot.
A strange nail head poked up out of the floor, casting a long, eerie shadow across the uneven surface.
Alice removed her opera gloves and fingered the unusual hardware. Though quite small, the nail's rough, corroded exterior hid a strong core beneath it; it was not one of the cheap nails used in constructing sets. She tried to pull it out of the ground to look at it more closely, but it would not budge, even when she tried wiggling it to force its hold to yield. Frustrated, she pushed the nail—and gasped as it slid easily into the ground, nearly disturbing her balance.
Ancient gears hidden in the floor instantly groaned into motion.
In a moment, a piece of the cellar wall slid to the left on its own, revealing a dark, yawning crawl space. Her heart in her throat, Alice peered inside, and found another nail not far away on the floor in the crawl space. When she pushed on that one, a stone slab fell away from the floor, swinging back on a crafty hinge and inviting her down into a black abyss.
She was certain she had found the escape route used by Buquet's murderer.
There were no stairs to assist her descent. She would have to return another time with rope and a lantern in order to explore this secret passageway. And if the murderer had escaped this way, he might also return, rising from the darkness beneath the Opera like some black worm.
She would be defenseless.
Prying the nail head up again with her bare fingers, Alice watched the stone rise into place. The piece of wall likewise closed when she raised the nail behind the set piece from Lahore. Wasting no more time, she then gathered her opera gloves and hurried up the flights of stairs to join her family while dusting the grime from her shimmering gown and planning some excuse about having had to attend to "private, feminine toiletries."
Days passed before Alice could slip away to the Paris Opera to complete her exploration. She waited until she knew the Opera would be virtually deserted. One night, she slipped out of her family's apartment on the Rue Scribe and hurried down the street. Her pulse beat rapidly with anticipation—she, a young woman, would herself assist the Sûreté in capturing a murderer. Perhaps she would even solve the mystery of the Opera Ghost.
She tested the doors and soon found that an entrance on the Northeast side, used for the stagehands, had the easiest lock to pick. She set to work on it, but the darkness of the moonless night and her beginner's skills delayed her progress. At any moment, a patrolling policeman might discover her. She interrupted her struggle several times to hide from passers-by. After almost an hour, she gained entrance to the deserted opera house. Her path to the trapdoor was easier this time, with the entire company gone until morning. Her footsteps echoing in the vacant, tomb-like interior, she hurried past those colossal opera sets, carrying with her a length of heavy rope and a lantern she had taken unnoticed from the Commissioner's supply at home. Quickly she made her way to the set piece from Le Roi de Lahore and depressed the tiny nail head, then pressed the second one inside the crawl space. As the trapdoor creaked open, she tied one end of the rope to the lantern. Then she slowly lowered the lantern beneath the cellar's floor, reeling out about four meters of the rope before she felt it slacken as the lantern landed gently on solid ground. She then looked for a place to tie the other end of the rope, and lashed it awkwardly to a piece of lumber on the bottom of the woodpile behind the "palace." Bravely, she climbed down the rope into the dark depths of the pit.
Her careful descent took several minutes before she felt her feet safely touch the even ground. She raised the lantern's shade and looked around the room in which she had landed. An iron tree, with a single, grotesquely twisted branch, stretched out into the center of the room and was reflected by mirrors covering the walls, giving the illusion of a dark forest. Her lantern reflected a thousand-fold, like so many lanterns lighting a path in the night for her to follow.
She was in a hall of mirrors. Alice was unafraid and utterly intrigued.
The genius behind its architecture was apparent—she admired the craftsmanship of the precise angles of the mirrors and in the forethought of the drums attached at their base for rotating them. She raised her light upwards to admire the ceiling, and suddenly gasped in alarm. The trap door had closed by itself, and her rope was missing. She was completely cornered.
"But then," she thought silently as she tried to calm herself, "Certainly the murderer himself used this passage. There must be a means of opening another trap door for escape."
The mirrors were flawless flat surfaces and offered no nail heads. But after a quarter of an hour, she found what looked to be a pin in the stone floor under the twisted iron branch. Depressing it as she had pushed the nail head opened a hidden trap door in the floor. Confident she had found her passage, Alice followed the exposed stone steps down into another dark room, waving the lantern in front of her.
Innumerable barrels lined the walls of the small, dank room. The distant sound of dripping water echoed from the walls. One of the barrels had been opened, but its contents of grainy gun powder were damp and useless. Alice reasoned that this room must have been used by the communards, who had transformed the Opera into a prison in the last war and had stocked it with weapons. The only barrel to have been used seemed to be the one spilling open onto the floor. To be sure, she inspected the others, lightly rapping on each barrel with her knuckles to test if it its contents had been partially consumed. The third barrel on the right in the back corner rang strangely empty. It was the only empty barrel in the cellar. Had it held gun powder as well?
She pulled on the stopper to open it, and, as if that stopper were a door knob, the entire front of the barrel swung out like a door. The back of the barrel was a tunnel to another room.
In order to crawl through, she had to lie on the floor and stretch herself as thin as she could, with her arms straight ahead of her as if she were diving. The one who created this passageway must have had the mobility of a cat, she mused. Pushing the lantern in front of her, she passed through the barrel and the wall behind it. The passageway opened at a small landing.
At the top of a long and winding iron staircase to her right was an ordinary door.
Having just come from a hall of mirrors and a trap-door-in-a-barrel, Alice was struck by the door's commonplace façade. It towered over her like a portal promising to return her from the fantastic to the familiar. She rose slowly to her feet and took the stairs, approaching the door with the reverence with which one approaches a king. She turned the knob and found it locked.
At first she presumed that one would need a key, but she again found a nail head on the wall beside the door knob. She pushed it, but it would not go further into the wall.
Uncertain, she began to wonder if the mechanics had rusted and stiffened with age. But when she studied the shape of the nail head more closely, and found it bristled with spokes, she decided that it was not for pushing at all, but for turning! Turning it clockwise produced no effect—it was already turned as far as it would go—but turning it counterclockwise generated a click, and then the knob turned easily, as if she were entering her own room.
She walked cautiously through the door and into an unremarkable room with a Louise-Philippe chest of drawers, a chaise lounge, and a wide, mahogany bed. The furniture, though no doubt mundane in normal light, cast eerie shadows from the flickering light of her lamp. Fragile cobwebs, crusted with dust, draped the corners of the silent room. Alice was convinced that she had discovered the quarters of the murderer. The location was ideal for those who wish to hide. Yet the room's condition indicated a lack of use—she hoped for her own sake that the criminal had abandoned his apartment, but that some clues may have been left behind for her to find.
Her eyes fell on a door on the far wall. To her surprise and great relief, it opened without any tricks. Yet it led only to a lavish bath. There wasn't even a mirror. Hanging on a hook on the back of the door was a man's dressing gown in an art nouveau print the color of brown mustard, with lapels and a sash of burgundy satin. It had an earthy smell to it, like the forest after a fresh rain. Alice found it an apt reminder that criminals engage in the same everyday behaviors as the rest of humanity.
She returned to the dismal bedroom in order to find another method of escape. Searching the floor in the dim lamplight for nail heads to open another trap door, she was startled to see a faint path of dirty footprints leading from the door of the room of mirrors to a space on the right wall. The prints vanished against the wall as if someone had walked right across the floor and through the wall. Well, ghosts might walk through walls, but men certainly cannot! And Alice was certain that it was a man, not a ghost, who had walked through this room. She set her lantern on the chest of drawers and stared at the mysterious wall, as if she could will the wall to open with her mind.
On the wall beside the chest of drawers was a yellowed gas lamp. Guessing that it was some sort of mechanism like the nail heads, she turned the lamp's key as if to give it gas. With a click, a piece of the wall swung away and opened for her to a cozy drawing room.
What use a solitary killer had for a drawing room, she had no idea. Surely he did not regularly entertain guests. Nevertheless, in the corner nearest to her, a regular sofa with quaint upholstery sat beside a tall grandfather clock. Across the room, a dining table and a single chair communed next to a magnificent harp. To the left of these was another ordinary door.
She casually opened the door without any tricks, but stifled a cry of shock when she beheld what could only have been the room of a madman. Black drapes hung lifelessly from the high ceiling, around which a staff of musical notes repeated endlessly, circling the room in strange, scratchy handwriting. A massive pipe organ occupied the entire far wall, its disquietingly pallid cylinders ascending to the high ceiling like the emaciated souls of the damned reaching for salvation from Hell. But the very center of the room held the most disturbing vision: a polished coffin shrouded by a red brocade canopy suspended grimly from the ceiling like an executioner's noose.
What psychological game did this man play, in first directing her through a fanciful room of mirrors, then returning her to the familiar, and yet again disorienting her? Appalled by the evil scene (she was, after all, a young lady and not herself a commissioner of the Sûreté), she quickly returned to the homely and more ordinary drawing room. Across from the door to the horrible death chamber, she spied another smaller door partially covered by a curtain.
Beyond this door, she discovered the most fantastic sight of all: an immense cavern yawned so wide and so tall that she could hardly see its sides or ceiling, and stretching across the floor of the cavern was a whimsical subterranean lake! Its surreal waters, an unusual silky ripple of green and purple hues, reflected the light of her lantern in dancing patterns in the darkness. The soothing sound of the waves gently caressing the banks broke the silence. A damp and musty odor pervaded the stale air.
Docked at Alice's feet was an aged boat. She had no way of knowing where the lake would lead her, but she certainly could not leave the house the same way that she had entered. Hoping that the cavern would lead to open air, she stepped carefully into the boat, released the mooring, and rowed clumsily into the dark cavern, trusting Providence to guide her.
The somber residence under the Paris Opera faded into the shadows, and the darkness reduced her world to the enveloping light of her tiny lantern. The rhythmic splashing of her strokes tolled the passage of time. Alice feared that she had become lost in the gloom, when at last she noticed a steep staircase cut into the cavern's ragged wall.
She docked the boat and tied it to an iron ring protruding from the rock, then thrust her lantern in front of her and climbed the winding stairs. At the top was a grille door exactly like an iron sewer gate. It opened easily with a latch from the inside, but once out, Alice was dismayed to discover that opening the gate from the outside would require an actual key, and no means of picking the lock would force the gate to yield. Turning about, however, she recognized her own Rue Scribe and realized that her path had taken her nearly to her front doorstep! She entered her house with such careful stealth that not even Heloise was roused.
Only a lone shadow, watching from the corner of the street, knew of her nocturnal adventure into the cellars of the opera and beneath the secret trap door of the Opera Ghost.
a/n: This chapter was longer than the others and came a bit tardy. I hope it was worth the wait! :)