Large light-board and special-effects layouts filled the area. Matching installments were set up at the back of the “house.” I wanted under, not up, so I scrabbled around in the dark until I found a set of narrow, steep steps down to the subbasement.
Before I descended, I turned on the pinpoint light and punched the button on one of two dozen labeled sound and visual effects: lightning, thunder, parade … there! Just what I needed. Wedding processional.
Sansouci was right. I was making the ultimate sacrifice to pursue this case.
Glad for my flat-heeled shoes, I backed down the ladderlike steps into the dark. Above, I heard the house above fill with the thrilling notes of “Here Comes the Bride,” aka Wagner’s operatic Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin .
The music was ponderous, slow, churchy organ music. I’d never expected to waltz down the aisle to this famous, formal organ music, but it was crazy appropriate for the past and the present I needed to meld into one big postmortem family reunion to end the haunting of the Gehenna and put restless human spirits and silver-screen stars to bed in Lullaby Land. I hoped it would conjure the most famous monster of all.
And, with the vibrations of that thunderous march shaking the stone roots of the subbasement, I stopped and listened for the thin soprano trill that never stopped.
Yes! Faint, but still discernible.
I stepped forward to the march’s beat, clasped my hands at my demure Audrey Hepburn waist, and mouthed the words “Here comes the bride, all dressed and wide.” Well, those were the lyrics we had used at Our Lady of the Lake Convent School.
“Beautiful,” a thrumming male voice added to the cacophony.
A face from a nightmare leapt in front of me. “You? You, girl. You sing like a chorus of angels emerging from one throat. I’ll teach you, shape you, make you even more magnificent.”
I simpered at the grotesque face with the eyes circled in black paint and the blackened and ragged teeth. I couldn’t sing, but I could hear, and I mouthed along with the distant siren, while the Phantom of the Opera closed his lids over those mad, blasted eyes and swayed to the song echoing above.… “Think of Me,” as it is sung at the Las Vegas Venetian Resort Hotel Casino performance of The Phantom of the Opera every night, by Christine, the beautiful soprano the Phantom loves and longs for.
Finally, the female phantom of the Gehenna finished a long, sustained phrase, and … stopped.
The automatic organ melody had died even earlier.
I stood alone in the darkened silence with the Phantom of the Opera, 1927-style, Lon Chaney’s greatest transformation.
“My love. My Christine,” the Phantom said, words Chaney had mouthed on the 1925 silent-film screen. He’d never uttered an audible word until his last film in 1930, and, dying, this son of deaf-mutes had not been able to speak at all. “Only you can sing my soul to rest.”
Yes, that was true. To accomplish that, I had to lead him on a merry chase.
Up the stairs I sprang on my brand-new leopard-skin rose-toed flats, feeling the CinSim clutch at my ragged taffeta hem.
Onto the stage and up the aisles to the bright artificial light of the concourse I flew like Cinderella eluding her Prince. Tourists paused to observe and ooh and chuckle. Just part of the performing mimes Vegas hotels are famed for. Then I ducked into the carefully landscaped wooded area and hoped my high-pitched screams befitted a frightened girl fleeing a werewolf.
Larry Talbot, now fully furred and fanged, rose from the underbrush, growling, determined to stop my pursuer.
I stepped aside like a bit player trying to save her acting wardrobe as monster met monster.
*
The Phantom ruled his understage world, but he was an emotional and intellectual monster.
The Wolf Man bared his fangs and his wild, white-eyed look and pounced on the disfigured maniac opera buff.
I couldn’t have the Immortality Mob’s property tearing each other gray limb from black limb, so I jumped between them.