Page 13 of The Muse (Beautiful Magic 1)
“If they do, they’re probably looking for the loo.” I point across the hall. “Just send them that way.”
Lucy tries to get a glimpse into the room as I open the door the rest of the way. “What is it you’ll be doing in there? Can’t you tell us?”
“Research. Art research,” I say, quietly closing the door. “Tell Simon about your favorite cheeseburgers.”
She laughs, pointing at me. “I like him.”
Through the door, I hear Simon say, “Me too. Which is why I put up with his crazy.”
I don’t waste the window of opportunity, and take a quick look around the room. Nothing has changed since the day I was here, including the drawing on the trapdoor. I slide back the latch and pull it open as soundlessly as before. Below, the stairs corkscrew down into the bedrock of the hill where the house perches. In the dark, there’s no telling how far down they go.
I take out my phone and use the flashlight as I descend the spiraling steps. After six or seven rounds, the air feels mustier, heavier. Even with the light, I can only see one stair below, and I seem to circle forever.
I’m dizzy by the time I finally reach the bottom. I step away from the security of the stairs, and my footfalls on the stone echo back to me, giving me a sense of the enclosed space. I point the light on the floor until I reach a wall, then sweep it up over the featureless stone. The other walls are bare too.
Cellars are always a bit creepy somehow, but the emptiness of this one, added to the long trek down and the mystery of its existence, makes it almost unnerving. “Cellar” might not even be the right word, since the space doesn’t seem to have any purpose that I can see. It’s impractical for storing anything, except perhaps a vampire or maybe the man in the iron mask.
I regret the thought immediately, but it’s too late. Now I’m remembering that the door latches from the outside and that all this stone makes the place utterly soundproof. Even with the trapdoor open, I can hear nothing from the world upstairs.
At least, I don’t think I do.
I stand still and listen again.
There it is—the faint sound of voices. The quality is too soft and the cadence too melodic to be noise from the party. And it’s not coming from above.
The sound rises from below.
From where there’s nothing but stone and earth and bedrock.
It’s illogical, and I feel ridiculous even as I do it, but still I kneel and press my ear to the floor. Impossible, irrational, whatever you want to call it—I definitely make out women’s voices.
Their words are indistinct, but there’s a lilt to them, like poetry, like someone’s speaking in sonnets. Or maybe it’s that the sound makes me feel the way a sonnet does. I want to lie on the floor, one ear pressed against the cold stone, and listen all night to this siren song.
I want that with a yearning that makes little sense. A nostalgia for something I’ve never experienced before.
This is impossible. Even if the sounds could travel through stone, the way the house is built on the hill, there can be nothing under this floor but dirt and bedrock. I cannot be hearing people speaking below.
And yet there they are—soft, gliding words. It’s the sound of snowflakes drifting from a gaslit sky. Then comes laughter, like a bell, pure and bright.
I jump up, rejecting the madness. I pace as far as I can until the wall stops me, and then I turn and stare searchingly into the empty space.
Am I going mad? From the cat stepping out from its painting, to ballerinas turned loose in the Musée d’Orsay, to orchestra music playing in the square . . . and now these impossible voices. It doesn’t seem possible that hallucinations could feel so real.
I catch my runaway thoughts and surprise myself with a laugh. Too real to be all in my mind—that’s just what a madman would say, isn’t it?
All right. I’m here and the voices aren’t going away, so it seems like a chance to find a possible explanation. Maybe I’ve misjudged the house’s position on the hill. Maybe there’s a crack in the stone, or some trick of acoustics.
I’m staring at the floor from an angle, which is how I see it—a rectangular outline in some kind of silver dust. I’ve seen something like it recently. Then I remember—it was in the calf Remy gave me.
Crouching for a closer look, I see the dust fills a crevice, and I blow on it, trying to clear a space and see if there’s a slot of some kind. A latch, maybe, or a keyhole?
All I manage to do, though, is blow the outline out of existence and fill the beam from the flashlight on my phone with a dancing cloud of sparkles—pretty, but useless for my mission.
