Darkness Creeping (27 page)

The Magnus Conservatory of Music was on an estate in northern Vermont. It was a three-story mansion, completely hidden by the dense woods around it and far from the troubles of the big city. As he and his new teacher stepped out of Madame Magnus’s limousine, Lee took a good look at the sprawling stately structure. It seemed odd to Lee that something so huge and so finely crafted could be so far from civilization.

“The upper floor is where I live,” explained Madame Magnus. “The rest of it is filled with classrooms and lodgings for my students.” She smiled at her new pupil. “I have chosen forty-nine students to work with.
You
are the fiftieth.”

Another boy, perhaps a year or two older than Lee, with small, round glasses, came down the front steps to meet them.

“This is Wilhelm,” said Madame Magnus. “He is your room-mate. He is a star cellist who came all the way from Germany to study with me.”

Before heading into the conservatory, Lee turned to look through a patch of woods, where he saw another building hidden deep within the tall trees. “What’s out there?” he asked, pointing to the small wooden structure.

“The guesthouse,” replied Madame Magnus. She said nothing more about it, but at its mention, Lee could see Wilhelm, who was already quite pale, grow even paler.

The work at the conservatory was grueling—the hours long, the classes hard. Madame Magnus taught all the musical classes herself, and for the “lesser subjects,” as Madame Magnus called everything else, she had hired the finest instructors.

“Do you feel honored to be in my school?” she asked Lee after his first week.

Lee smiled slyly. “That depends,” he said. “Do you feel honored to have
me
here?”

The old woman smiled back. It was a fine thing for Lee to finally have a teacher who thought the way he did—who knew music the way he did. Now he knew that Madame Magnus was the greatest music teacher that ever was. Only she could show him that path to greatness he so desired.

Yes, Madame Magnus knew her music. In fact, she could teach every instrument and knew exactly what to say to her young musicians and composers to inspire them all to greatness. But her course of instruction for Lee was strange indeed. She would not let Lee play any of the pieces he knew, nor let him play anything he wrote himself. Instead, she set him to work on dull exercises—scales and fingering practice—terribly mundane exercises that he had outgrown the first week he’d picked up a violin.

Next she had him play musical pieces that seemed specifically designed to be emotionless. Lee was confused. She spoke to him of passionate music, and of achieving flawless control of his instrument, yet she specifically kept him from playing pieces that would inspire him. Lee complied with her wishes, and if he had been flawless before, these awful exercises made him beyond perfect.

Still, she kept his great musical abilities a secret from everyone else in the school, keeping him apart from the other students as if he were some kind of secret. Curious, Lee wondered what other secrets she kept.

Like the secret guesthouse.

More than once Lee had seen her personal butler go out there, and Lee began to feel a sort of kinship for the lonely little house kept separate from the rest of the school. For in a way, the guesthouse was like him, wasn’t it? Everything inside it was kept hidden and locked up by Madame Magnus, the same way his talents were kept locked and hidden by her firm rule.

Once a week Madame Magnus’s students gave her a personal concert, but Lee was not even allowed to play in these.

“You are only to watch,” the old woman had told him, “and to listen.”

Fuming, Lee would sit out in the audience with Madame Magnus, thinking of all the things he could do with the music that was being played.

I could bring forth flames or frost,
he mused.
I could fill the room with steam or snow. Perhaps I could even drain the very air from the room.

Could he do that? Lee would never really know as long as Madame Magnus refused to let him play.

During these weekly concerts he would watch the strange old woman. There was something unsettling about the way she listened—the way her ears perked up at every note she heard. It was as though she absorbed the sounds, as though they flowed into her ears like water rushing into a whirlpool. Week after week he observed his teacher practically sucking in the music. It reminded Lee of something, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“Have you noticed that when you stand behind Madame Magnus at a concert, the music suddenly doesn’t sound right?” Lee asked Wilhelm one day. “It’s as though somehow all the best notes have been sucked right out of it.”

“Everyone’s noticed it,” Wilhelm answered in his heavy accent. “The woman, she gives me the shivers. Still, she is the best teacher there is. She has told me that my playing will make me famous someday, and I believe her.”

Lee frowned. She had never said anything like that to him. That night, just as Lee fell asleep, it occurred to him just what Madame Magnus reminded him of. She was like a vampire . . . but one that lived on something other than blood.
Is that possible?
Lee wondered.
Can someone actually live on music?
But the thought was lost in a swift current of nightmarish dreams.

“Somebody lives there, you know,” whispered Wilhelm the next day during breakfast. “No one ever sees him come out, but he’s there. Everyone knows it.”

Wilhelm was talking about the guesthouse, of course. Through the window of their room, the two boys could see its blackened windows.

“The lights never go on,” said Wilhelm, “but one of Madame Magnus’s servants brings a large platter of food out there three times a day.” The thin, pale cellist leaned closer to Lee. “I think there’s a monster in there.”

Lee wondered about what Wilhelm had said, and that night he snuck out of the institute and crossed the distance through the woods to the mysterious little building. He just had to know if anyone or any
thing
lived there.

The guesthouse loomed in the woods, unpainted and covered with ivy. As Lee approached, its black windows seemed like dead eyes to him, and he began to wonder what nature of beast was kept there.

Making his way around the back of the sad-looking building, Lee pushed away the thorny bushes that surrounded it, bushes that seemed to be protecting the little house from trespassers. When he came across a broken window, his suspicions were confirmed—the windows weren’t just dark, they were painted over so that no light could get in . . .
or
get out.

Lee took a step closer, and just as he put his face near the broken glass to peer inside, a hand reached out and grabbed him by the shirt! It was an ancient, pasty hand, and it held him in a desperate grip.

“Leave this place,”
rattled a raspy voice attached to a body Lee could not see.
“Leave and don’t come back. Don’t you know what she is?”

Lee would have screamed if he hadn’t lost his voice in fear. Standing frozen in the grip of the bony hand, he now could see the eye of an old man through the hole in the window.

“Nero played his violin,”
the wrinkled figure said in a voice that seemed to come from the grave.
“He played his violin, and Rome burst into flames. From Nero’s flames she was born.”
The voice grew in intensity.
“And all the masters who died before their time—they did not die!”
Then, as quickly as it had shot out at Lee, the hand pulled back into the jagged hole and disappeared into the darkness.

His heart pounding, Lee ran back to the conservatory, raced to his room, and hid beneath his covers, as if mere sheets and blankets could possibly shut out what he had seen. “Nero was an emperor of Rome,” Wilhelm explained the next day in the library. He showed Lee a drawing in a history book. “He was powerful, arrogant, and legend has it that he played his violin while the entire city burned to the ground.”

Lee looked at the article Wilhelm referred to in the encyclopedia. “But it doesn’t say that Nero’s playing actually
started
the fire.”

Wilhelm shrugged. “Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. No one knows for sure.”

Lee wondered how great a musician would have to be to be able to set an entire city on fire with his music. How evil such a person would have to be. And then he remembered what the old man behind the broken window had said:
From Nero’s flames she was born
. Could he have meant Madame Magnus? Was
she
a creature born from those evil flames?

Lee closed the book and told Wilhelm what the old man had said about all the masters who had died before their time. “What do you think he meant by saying they didn’t die?” he asked.

Wilhelm took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, I’m going to find out,” said Lee. “If Madame Magnus wants me in this school, then she can’t keep secrets from me.”

Wilhelm shook his head. “I wish I could be like you.”

Lee looked at his friend.
But you can’t be,
he thought.
Because you can never be the musician that I am.

When Lee stormed up the stairs into Madame Magnus’s private residence, she didn’t seem shocked to see him, or even surprised. She only smiled that sly yellow-toothed smile of hers, then said, “To what do I owe this unexpected visit, young Master Tran?”

Lee got right to the point. “I want to know about the man in the guesthouse. Who is he, and why doesn’t he ever come out?”

Madame Magnus looked at Lee from her high-backed velvet chair. “You’ve only been here two months,” she said.

“What has that got to do with anything?” Lee demanded.

“Two months is a short time, but you are a fast learner. Perhaps you are ready.”

“Ready for what?” Lee demanded.

But Madame Magnus only smiled. “Would you like to meet him? The man in the guesthouse?”

Lee wasn’t expecting that. “Uh, sure,” he said hesitantly. “Yeah, sure, I’d like to meet him.”