(There’s a clock on the wall of the theatre - old, vintage - like a round pale face that stares silently across the red velvet seats with their bullet-hole eyes, across the old stage that’s gray with dust beneath the chandelier that hangs at an angle, tilted, splintering the purple of the stage lights into fractals on the gold beaded ceiling.
The air conditioning whispers softly, hisses out the half-open door. The clock reads 11:59 p.m. The second hand ticks around in a steady circle, five, ten, fifteen.
She lifts her head, drinks in the taste of the air conditioning, the fragile thin flavor of the air. The bullet holes in the seats stare at her. The clock stares at her. The stage lights stare at her, and the broken chandelier, and the little golden beads on the ceiling - even the patterns on the rugs, heavy and oriental, draped against the walls, folded into curtains.
She sucks in a breath, lifts her head to stare at the clock again. 11:59, she reads, whispers it under her breath.
Twenty, twenty-five.
Her hands clench and unclench in her lap. No, she’s thinking. Please. No.
Thirty, the second hand whispers, halfway around. Thirty-five.
Stop. Please stop -
Her eyes are shut now, but these things are burned into her memory, will always be burnt into her memory: the clock ticks forty, forty-five, fifty, and she’s clenching her fists so tight her palms bleed, fifty-five, fifty-six, there’s a roar -
It’s like a heartbeat, rings in time with her pulse, thrums so loud it fills her up and she feels like she’s part of it, swallowed whole. And there’s only the sound of it, and the darkness behind her eyelids and the echo of the gunshots and the screams, so many screams, all of them voices she knows - and the spinning chandelier tilts from the ceiling, the red velvet seats swallow blood, the beaded dome glitters softly in the purple light - the music stops. Her eyes are dry. Her throat’s raw, but she doesn’t know why, the air tastes funny, artificial, she doesn’t want to open her eyes.
Please, she thinks, again, but the roaring sound is gone, and her heartbeat seems to be gone, too.)
Paris is painted cigarette smoke on a canvas of stone - all grays and browns, the gray of the rain, the brown of the mud, the gray of the people, the brown of the cobblestones, the gray of the sky. The people are like skeletons, dark-eyed and hollow-faced, fingers long and thin and bony, umbrellas swept upside down by the wind. There’s a taste in the air, damp and earthy and sodden, the kind of taste that lodges in your throat and stays there, sticky, clinging. Cloying. A wash of perfume, a hint of chocolate, but all of it outdated, stale, old. The sound of footsteps, the distant horns of groundcars, the rumble of air traffic making a million misty little lights that float through the clouds.
There’s a child standing on tiptoe, staring through a shop window, alone, gray rain jacket shimmering with raindrops. Staring at the things inside the window - a puppet dancing, side to side, miming with its hands; a painted horse nodding its head beneath a parasol; a miniature spaceship making circles near the ceiling. But when Shaheen stops to look, all she can see is her own reflection, the way it turns her face blurry and misty and even more gray than before, reflected in fragments in the glass.
She lights a cigarette, balances it gently between her fingers. Outdated, just like the rest of this city, living stubbornly in the past. It flickers in the window, oversized like a candle flame, and the smoke from her lips makes her into a human dragon breathing fire at the sky.
The child turns, looks, runs.
She smiles. The theatre feels long ago. Distant, like a memory. It was home, once, but far away in time, far away in space. The theatre - and Tunis. But now it’s gone, just like the roar of the airships, just like the sound of the gunshots. All of it gone, not just the theatre but the city too.
She bites the end of the cigarette with her teeth, curls her tongue around the ash.
“Shaheen.”
She doesn’t turn - just stares into the window, at the reflection standing next to her own. “You came.” She smiles, drops the cigarette and wedges it into the ground with the front of her stiletto, watching as the brightness of the flame flares and dies all at once. “I thought you weren’t going to, you know. Did you check the time?”
The girl curls her lip. “They kept me.”
“Just like I’m going to keep you?” There’s a silence there, long enough to listen to the tap-dancing of the rain on the stones, the rumble of the traffic (music, someone else might call it, but Shaheen is cynical), long enough to focus on the warm, heady smell of the boulangeries cutting through the dampness of the storm. “Tell me your name,” Shaheen says, and as she says it she turns, so she’s meeting the girl’s eyes face to face, not just in a misted windowpane.
“Ambrosine.”
“Ambrosine.” She laughs. It’s not a happy laugh, it’s bitter with irony - and a hint of melancholy, if you listen hard enough. “You don’t sound French.”
“Greek. I was born here, though.”
“Why’d you come back?” She reaches for another cigarette, languid, eyes drifting to focus on a place somewhere behind Ambrosine’s left shoulder, on the people with their umbrellas flaring against the rain and the shimmering groundcars crawling through the maze of old Paris. It’s one of the only cities left, she thinks, where the skyscrapers don’t touch the clouds, one of the only cities left where the buildings cower low to the ground, three stories, four or five at most. If you were at the top of the Tour d’Eiffel, the rest of the city would look like a million little dollhouses pushed together, but anywhere else the Tour d’Eiffel itself would seem small, short, stubby.
“I don’t know,” Ambrosine says, after a moment. “Why does it matter, why I came back? I’m here now.” She looks almost scared, keeps sneaking glances to either side as though she thinks someone’s out to get her. “What do you want, Shaheen? Why did you bring me here?” She jerks her chin at the shop with its dolls and painted toys. “This place -”
“I want you to dance for me.”
“Dance?”
“You’re a dancer, aren’t you?” Shaheen flicks her fingers idly, sending raindrops flying through the air. They hit the glass of the window behind her and explode, water everywhere. “Paris Opera? If I’ve got the wrong girl, tell me. I’m not interested in wasting my time here.”
“No, I - I dance at the Opera.” She tries to say opera like a French girl, but there’s something off about it, fluid in a rolling way that doesn’t sound quite French. “What do you need?”
“There’s a ghost at the Opera, isn’t there?”
Ambrosine shifts from foot to foot. In the rain, her hair tangles, dark, around her face, long curls caught in each other, and her eyes are even darker and grayer than before. A raindrop touches the bridge of her nose and runs down her skin, follows the slight hook at the tip and falls onto her lips, sits there silently until she licks it off. “That’s just a story,” she says, at last. “I didn’t come to talk about stories.”
“An old story.”
“Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“Doesn’t matter whether the story’s true. I only care that the story existed, that people listened to it.” Shaheen smiles the same way she laughs - knowing, bitter, and a hint of melancholy. “Would you like to become the ghost?”
“Become the…” Ambrosine stops, stares, turns away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Shaheen turns back to the shop window. Between the painted horse with its nodding head and a figurine of a faerie with purple wings stands a music box, dark wood, with a ballerina spinning slowly in the middle, arms over her head, tutu bristling as she moves. “A ghost. You’d come and dance with us. I’d pay you much more than the Opera pays you, and if you danced with me you’d be famous, actually famous, too.”
Ambrosine turns back.
“Fame and money,” Shaheen says, pressing her red-stained lips together, closing her eyes at the taste of berries. “All a girl needs.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“About which part?” With her eyes closed, the smell of the boulangerie is stronger, warmer, pain au chocolat aux amandes, memories of a childhood. “Let me put it this way, Ambrosine. You can have fame and money and revenge - revenge,” and in her mind she says it over and over and over again, revenge, revenge, revenge, and it’s like a song, like a lullaby. If she closes her eyes, she can see the gray of their uniforms, can hear the rough sound of their voices and the snap of the bullets.
“Revenge,” Ambrosine whispers. Doubtful.
“The sweetest song.” The ballerina in the music box stops spinning, stares up at Shaheen wistfully through the shop window, price tag dangling quietly from one long arm. She imagines the ballerina with Ambrosine’s face painted on instead, those long tangled curls, those huge gray eyes. “Tell me, Ambrosine, tell me you don’t hate what they did to you, these people. Tell me, honestly, that it doesn’t kill you a little bit inside, remembering what they did. Tell me you’d be okay with the world knowing your pretty little secrets.”
Ambrosine lifts her head. Those dark eyes of hers are darker than before, so dark they’re nearly black, so dark that looking into them is like staring into an inkwell. “Secrets,” she whispers, and the sound of her voice is made half of wonder and half of bitterness. It’s then that she sees, really sees, her eyes drift away from Shaheen’s face to the little painted ballerina in the music box in the shop window, spinning slowly round and round, and her lip curls, and she turns away.
“Ambrosine -”
“No.” The girl’s already walking away, out from under the overhang of the shop window, so the rain falls heavy onto her hair and straightens her curls against her shoulders. “I don’t want to be part of something if you’ve got to blackmail me to convince me.”
“I’m not blackmailing you. I’m telling you what will happen if you don’t do anything. It’s not anything I’m doing, it’s just what will happen if we don’t do something about it -” Shaheen turns away. She keeps her eyes focused on Ambrosine, but the little ballerina still twirls away in a corner of her mind, and the price tag with it. Everything has a price, nowadays. Even love.
“Nobody will know,” Ambrosine whispers.
“People already know.”
“They won’t -”
“They will, they will find out if you do nothing, a secret isn’t a secret if so many people know. Any one of them could betray you, Ambrosine. Any one of them could whisper a word, paint a picture - a fleur-de-lis, that’s all they’d need, she’s got one, and you’d be -”
“Stop,” Ambrosine says, her voice cracking sharply, turning so fast her curls fly out and raindrops snap into the air. “Stop. There’s nothing we can do. They know, we can’t stop them from knowing, I’ve lived this way for years and nobody’s said anything yet.”
“You’ve lived this way for years, but not under the gray flag. You don’t know what they’re planning -”
“We can’t stop them,” Ambrosine says between her teeth, like that’s the end of it, like somehow that makes it final.
“We can.”
“What are you going to do? Bribe them? You could be the richest man on Earth and once you’ve given them all their money, everything they say they’re due, they could still break the promise, they could still whisper.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know why you asked me to come here, I don’t know why you asked me to say yes. I’m sorry.”
Shaheen smiles - a crooked smile, one-lipped, one edge of her mouth pulling up more than the other. “Money doesn’t keep people from talking, you’re right. But a corpse -”
A corpse.
She stops, and the word hangs between them, heavy, hollow, jagged.
A corpse - Ambrosine’s caught on the word, frozen, Shaheen can see it in her eyes - and for a moment there’s nothing, just the quiet song of the rain, the tippity-tap-tap of stilettos against the cobblestones, the low hum of air traffic and the horns of the groundcars, a city split between centuries, a world split between eras, half of it antiquely vintage and half of it eccentrically futuristic - and the two of them caught between halves, Ambrosine staring at the music-box ballerina en pointe and Shaheen, tall, dark, red-lipped and knowing. And then the spell’s broken, the air between them seems to crack, the suspension breaks, Ambrosine bites her lip so hard it turns bright red. Her hands shake.
“You’re talking about killing people,” she says, hoarse.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t seen it before.”
“Murder, I - I ran away from that life. I didn’t join the Opera to go back, I joined it to leave all that behind, I can’t -” Her lip quivers and she shakes, trembles like a leaf tossed in a storm, she is dark and vibrant and pale-skinned against the gray and brown of Paris, she stands out like a portrait against a landscape painting. “I won’t -”
“How old are you, Ambrosine?”
She doesn’t look directly at Shaheen - doesn’t dare. When she speaks, it is almost a whisper, so soft Shaheen almost has to lean closer to hear her. “Twenty-four,” she says, soft. “My fleur-de-lis, I was sixteen, I -” She shakes her head, over and over. “I won’t.”
“Twenty-four.” It’s easy to pretend not to have heard the rest of what Ambrosine’s said, easy to pretend the rain drowned it all. “Only twenty-four. You have your whole life ahead of you. They can take it away with one word, one whisper -”
“There has to be another way -”
“Corpses don’t talk,” Shaheen whispers.
“No,” Ambrosine agrees, quivering still. “They don’t.” She’s biting her lip again, bad habit, and her fingers shake against the strap of her bag.
“Good. So it’s settled, then.” She smiles, lights another cigarette, breathes in the smell of the boulangeries.
(And that is how le théâtre de fantômes first begins.)
Her hands shake when she lights the cigarette this time, a roll of paper, a candle flame that flickers and trembles and shifts moodily from one side to the other (sometimes smiling, sometimes crying). The wallpaper is blue here, with little purple lavenders painted so delicately it’s impossible to believe it could’ve been done by human hands, but it’s all peeling off now, disintegrating, showing the dark wood underneath. Time is greedy, when it comes to making things disintegrate. People. Memories. Love.
The window pane is streaked with water, fogged over. Warm inside, cold on the outside. She touches it with her fingers, then with her hand, leaves her fingerprints clear in the glass, watches idly as the glass clouds them over again. The smoke billows from her lips and up towards the ceiling, a curtain across a mirror.
There’s a flag on the wall behind her, heavy, embroidered, gray. An upraised fist, a perfect cross, a laurel wreath. Shaheen curls her lip at it. She’d thought of burning it, before, but sometimes loyalty can be the best camouflage, even if it’s fake loyalty.
Long ago - the theatre feels so long ago, the ticking clock, the oriental rugs with their rich embroidery and the beaded dome. She misses it, sometimes, the sounds of the muezzin calling the city to prayer, the smells of the spices in the markets, the music and the perfumes. So much richer than Paris, so much more alive. But Gafsa is gone, they took it from her, these gray people with their gray flags, and they will make Gafsa into a gray-and-brown city, too, just like Paris. A city of smoke and rain and regret, and disintegration, disintegrating people and disintegrating memories and disintegrating love. She closes her fist so tight it hurts, and takes a long drag from her cigarette, closes her mouth like a trap and drinks the smoke like it’s fire.
11:59 - the dream always starts at 11:59. She’s lived it so many times she can live in it even when she’s awake - one single vivid memory that will never fade or disintegrate or die, one thing that will never be touched by time. She can feel the floor beneath her, see the purple of the stage lights, feel her heartbeat in her chest and hear her pulse like a drum in her ears, a throb throughout her whole body.
And the second hand, twenty, twenty-five, forty, fifty. The helplessness, knowing there’s nothing she can do, knowing that she can relive this dream a million times and never change the ending. Knowing a memory is a memory, and no dream can change reality.
The roar, the guns, bullets - bullet-hole eyes in red velvet seats -
She sucks in a breath, lets it out, pinches the cigarette between her fingers. In the light of the candle, her face is warmer than it should be, softer, as though she’s lost the scars that were born that night in a theatre hundreds of miles away. Beneath the mirror, the little ballerina spins slowly in her music box, and a song plays off-tune, nostalgic.
Ten years ago - it feels longer than that, further away than that. It all happened so fast, in the middle of the night - they said the war was won, Paris had claimed freedom for the world, but then the gunfire came and the aircraft came, too, and the next day the Tour d’Eiffel flew the gray flag and Gafsa was destroyed. It feels like it happened to someone else dozens of years ago, as though she watched a film of someone else’s life, and somehow that someone else had her face, her eyes, her hands, her voice. Herself, but a stranger.
She came here to forget, but all she could do was think of how helpless she was. How helpless she felt.
Paris, she whispers, watching the smoke billow with every new syllable. Paris. Such a pretty promise, but so fickle, so meaningless. She flicks the cigarette with her fingers and it lands on the floor, smoldering, and when she presses on it with her foot it burns, but she doesn’t care. She’s thinking of empty promises and Ambrosine, and the music-box ballerina below the mirror. She’s thinking of lists, and names, and all of the people who have been robbed by this skeleton city.
The idea came to her in the middle of the night, in the middle of this apartment. A theatre. A place where lines can be blurred, reality into unreality, dreams into wakefulness. The feeling of stepping out into the sun and blinking and wondering, is this really it? Is this real? And wishing you could slip back into the bliss of the theatre, that other universe, that alternate world. Perfect. Perfect in so many ways.
From there, putting the pieces together -
She twirls her fingers against one of the ballerina’s arms, watches the tutu ripple in the candlelight. One, she whispers, her lips barely moving, the word lost to her silhouette. But it doesn’t matter. One is enough, one is enough to start, one is something.
There’s a knock on her door - she jumps. The wood echoes. Her finger reaches for the music box, knocks against a switch; the ballerina stills, the music fades abruptly into silence.
“Come in,” she says, stepping on the cigarette again just to be sure. She can still taste the pain au chocolat aux amandes on her lips, can still hear the rain on the window, and she focuses on that, lets it fill her mind - details, details, they’re the only things that can distract her and ground her and hold her to this reality.
The latch clicks - old, everything here is old, outdated - and a girl steps in, red hair, green eyes.
“Virginia,” Shaheen says. Virginia - an old name for an old place. Fitting. “You’re early.”
The girl - girl, she’s hardly twenty - blinks quietly. “You got one of them,” she says, and her gaze shifts slowly to the music-box ballerina below the mirror. “The girl with the fleur-de-lis.” She smiles slightly as she says it, blinks again as though she’s proud of herself.
“I did. You did well.”
“You pay me well,” the girl says, moving forward so she’s leaning against the table, her fingers brushing the base of the music box. It’s like a sign, the little turning figurine of the ballerina - we’ve got one, we’ve got our first one - and Shaheen thinks she’ll keep the little twirling ballerina for a long time.
“You’re good at what you do. I pay you your worth.” Where she gets the money doesn’t matter, not for now, not as long as the girl still works for her, not as long as the job still gets done. “I need the others. One isn’t enough.”
“You’ve three already,” Virginia whispers, smiling, teeth flashing white in the dimness. “You, me, her.”
“Three isn’t enough.”
“I know.” She dips her head. “I know who’s next. I’ve already arranged it, just as you asked me to.” Her fingers move, and the ballerina begins to move, too. The music’s changed - slower, sadder, but still just as off-tune. “You have a short list.”
“A short list to start. A theatre only needs so many people.”
“So many ghosts,” Virginia says, smiling. Her Global is lovely, precise, exotic in a place where she doesn’t belong. “A theatre of ghosts. Magic.” When she looks at Shaheen it’s unnerving, as though she’s looking through Shaheen, as though she knows more than she’s letting on. Her fingers trace the ballerina’s tutu, head tilting gently in time with the music. “This is what I came to Paris for.”
No one comes to Paris for this, Shaheen thinks, but she doesn’t say it. It doesn’t matter. She only needs Virginia Aslow to get a job done, and as long as the job is done, it doesn’t matter what things Virginia says inside the walls of the apartment. Nobody is listening, nobody would care to listen, anyhow. “You said you’ve set up the next one on the list?”
Virginia doesn’t take her eyes off Shaheen when she nods. “Yes. I don’t understand why you want the third one, though.”
“But you understand the second?”
Virginia’s mouth doesn’t smile now, but her eyes still do. “Magic is powerful. So’s belief.”
“Mm.” She turns, takes Virginia’s hands in hers. “Virginia...I need you to trust me. I don’t care why you trust me, or how, I don’t care if you want my promise in words or if you only care for a promise made in money, but I need you to trust me. The people on that list are all on that list for a reason, and once you have brought them all to me, you will understand why. But until then -” she glances back at the ballerina, eternally spinning, and tries not to think of an infinitely spinning chandelier in a theatre ten years ago with purple stage lights - “until then you’ll just have to take my word for it. Or my money.”
That look again - the smile, the one that looks somehow jagged in the candlelight. “Money will do,” Virginia says, and lifts her hands from Shaheen’s.
When she leaves, the latch clicks shut behind her with a snap, and Shaheen is alone again - and the ballerina spins on soundlessly, the music box plays a lonely tune, the rain splashes softly against the panes, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because soon Shaheen won’t be alone anymore. Soon, the music-box ballerina won’t be the only one below the mirror.
Soon, Shaheen’s silhouette on the wall won’t be the only one the candle sees.
Because soon Shaheen will have her ghosts.
All of them.