Queen of the Sea: part 3

Brianna watched the ballroom’s new sound system go up and tried not to think too much about the coffeeshop where she had sung on the open mic night for years. The difference was surreal and staggering.

She watched a trio of uniformed experts snake wire and do absolutely absurd, arcanely clever things to blend the speakers and equipment in with the historical décor. It was a pretty big step up from “there is now a rug over the wires, so no one trips and brings down the mic stand”.

Not that there was a problem with that. The rug had been a much-applauded innovation at the time. No one liked the mic stand falling off the stage.

‘Except that one asshole who did it on purpose,’ Brianna mused. ‘And then didn’t have the cash to pay for the sound equipment he broke.’ At least the tour guides kept listeners from pulling that kind of jackassery so far as she’d seen in the museum.

The workers might have been adding recording equipment at this point. She wasn’t an expert, but that was her best guess. She crossed her arms and stayed out of the way.

This job was a freakish stroke of luck. Other positions might be hard to fill in the museum, because it was so inconvenient and nearly impossible to be in touch with the rest of the world. But there was always a musician who was ready to leap into the fray for a chance at a career-building residency.

‘Or it might be that no one wanted to come here and this job is a career-killing move, because I can’t build an online presence when I have no access to tech,’ Brianna admitted. ‘I might be the only person stupid enough to take the job. The reason why you’d want a residency is to build a fan base and how can you do that when the listeners are different every day?’

Well. If the museum was serious about getting this evening entertainment package off of the ground, they might do that for her through advertising. They’d want to make it seem like their entertainment was more prestigious and interesting than she really was in order to draw in customers. That could make her career happen. And going it on her own hadn't really worked out smoothly, had it?

“I’m sorry about the wait.”

Brianna turned at Imile’s voice. She took the proffered papers without thinking or examining them. “It’s no problem,” she said automatically. Then she glanced down to see what she was actually holding. “Oh, this is a day earlier than I expected.”

“I was able to put a rush on it,” Imile said. She crossed her hands over her hips and cast a cool glance over the work being done. “There’s no use in standing about. We are going to arrange for other accompaniment later, but for the time I’ll assist you in learning these new pieces. I have already taken a look at the arrangement.”

“Oh.” Brianna composed herself. “I appreciate that very much, Imile. I know that your time is valuable.”

The older woman had really striking green eyes, but Imile wasn’t too intense to look at when they were wrinkling with a smile. “You’re kind to say so. I’m going to keep you forever, you know, if you keep saying such nice things.”

‘Did she just flirt with me? That was an insinuating tone if I have ever heard one in my life.’

Brianna laughed in a way that hopefully didn’t sound deranged, because she had no idea how to verbally respond to that. Was Imile really interested in a 23 year-old employee? Probably not. She was willing to bet that Imile’s monthly income had at least 2 more zeros than Brianna’s did. Imile had a doctorate in art history. She probably had a pet dog and a family doctor and went to the same hairdresser twice a month.

For point of comparison, Brianna had been functionally unemployed for two years when she’d only been able to find unpaid work, would be fielding daily calls from student loans personnel about her undergraduate degree if her phone had service, and had slept on more than one or two couches in her day.

In other words, they were not even vaguely in the same league. And it would be so bad to guess wrong, try flirting, and freak out her boss. Soooo bad.

The moment passed. They retired from the sounds of tech and interior decorating being arranged in rapid-fire Vietnamese. There was a nearby sound-proofed room with a piano where they worked on the three operettas that Imile had ordered scores for.

So far as rehearsals went, it wasn’t too bad. Brianna’s cold reading skills hadn’t gone down, since she was doing that nearly daily to expand her suitable vocal repertoire for the lounge area. Her high notes were going to need work, though. They pushed through hours trying to get a good, clear sound in the headrange she’d need for one of the pieces before calling it a day.

Imile click-clacked out, but Brianna found herself winding aimlessly back into the ballroom. It was dark and empty now, with work finished for the night. She walked the perimeter, imagining what it would be like full. The raised pavilion where she or a band might be was well-designed to carry sound and be visible throughout the room.

The lights were off, and the moon was waning. The room was dark. So she knew the instant that a soft rose glow flickered into being.

The Red Lady slowly walked the length of the room. Her steps were light and silent. She might as well have been floating, to watch her. It seemed perfectly appropriate and ghostly, except that she'd seen plenty of ghosts before. They stumbled and meandered and thumped around just like real, living people, because that was what they reflected. They were just people, not magic.

'Imile made an off-hand comment the first time I saw her,' Brianna mused. 'Didn't she say that the Red Lady dances?'

In the weeks she'd been working, that hadn't happened. But it was easy to believe that the ghost had been an athlete in life. Brianna crossed her arms and just watched the ghost approach.

Her head was high, and her posture utterly above it all. She looked like she had never been 23 and mostly useless. And she was presumably just wandering around in the dead of the night on a cruise ship? Like. This was what she’d looked like on a 3am search for a snack or something.

Brianna sort of wished she looked half that composed in her daily life, but she really doubted it.

The Red Lady stopped in the middle of the room, close enough for some of the details of her face to be visible. And she took a seat directly in front of the platform. She sat a handbag down on the table and curled her hand around the shadow of a wine glass.

Brianna felt her eyebrows creeping upward.

Now that was odd. Why would you come and stare at a stage in the middle of the night? There was just no way a performance had been starting at this time.

‘Maybe not. She was probably restless, up late, and came here to think,’ Brianna reasoned. ‘Imile did say that the Lady likes this room best. She must have found it comforting or something.’

She wasn’t exactly certain what compelled her to do it, but Brianna found herself crossing the room and stepping up to fill the gap in the scene. There was no microphone, no accompaniment, and no audience. She should have felt really stupid.

But it wouldn’t hurt to practice what she’d done earlier, she reasoned. And see how it sounded with the high-ceiling and wide open space in this room, as compared to the tight walls of her practice space.

So she took the center spot, cast her eyes back toward the practice room, and tried an Italian-language Mozart piece. It felt right to stretch the tempo out, turning the notes long and sweet instead of leaping pertly from bar to bar.

Directly in front of her, the Red Lady tilted her head slightly. Her lips were pursed, her dark eyes hard to read.

Brianna knew she was being heard. It wasn't just the angle of the Lady's face, or the fact that her wine sat untouched throughout the first song and into the next. She could feel the attention catch and hold. The weight of something old and ephemeral was sinking into her bones. She could have been frightened but it felt natural.

She finished singing. The room fell quiet.

'Her eyes were brown.'

She'd thought earlier that the Red Lady was just shadows and an unusually warm, strong manifestation of red light. But her eyes were brown.

Clink. The Lady sat her wine glass down. She glanced at it and then made eye contact. Pointedly, she set three fingers on the rim of her glass. Then she dragged them down, making a mark in the condensation.

'That's what she did on my water glass weeks ago. And she wants me to know that?'

Brianna blinked.

She was alone.

She took a moment to reorient. The room was darker, now, but it wasn't creepy. It was just a big, beautiful old room. The light coming in the windows wasn't cold. The only sound was her breathing and the wind outside and it was peaceful.

Her boots made quiet clicks as she stepped off the stage. She picked up the abandoned glass by the stem, as the Lady had at first. Brianna tilted it to see the three lines made by fingertips.

The condensation was quickly fleeing. The glass was empty, so that made sense. It was weirder that it had been possible to make the marks in the first place. A ghost's hands had made marks in the real water on a real glass filled with ghostly liquid? That all just seemed so unnecessary.

“Huh.” Brianna felt her hair tumble out of the pins when she moved her head. “Interesting.” She looked up and around. The room was visibly empty, but.... “Goodnight.”

She left the wineglass on the kitchen counter on her way out, because it was a legit glass and she didn't know what else to do with it. She kept looking up as though someone was going to be there, but she was always alone. She went back to her room, had a long, luxurious bath, and read before going to sleep. Definitely alone. She opened one eye to check at 4 am, at 5:30, and at 5:41, but the room was dark and the only sound was Miho's breathing.

That all seemed like a relatively reasonable reaction until she woke up the next afternoon to waaaay too much sunlight streaming in the windows. Her literal first thought when she opened her eyes was, 'That ghost definitely saw me. Science is wrong.'

It broke her brain a little bit. She spent way too long looking up at the ceiling and wondering if this was what madness felt like. Because she felt perfectly normal and healthy. The only warning sign was that she'd made soulful eye contact with a dead woman last night and it had felt right.

…It didn't bode that well.

Brianna scrambled to get dressed and to the dining hall before the lunch hours closed. She took her tray through the buffet lines and eyed the people around her. The employee dining room looked just like a university cafeteria, except with less panicked studying and no third-rate pizza. There was no obvious sign that anyone else suspected that they were living in a place that broke the well-established laws of the natural order.

She chewed over the problem and rice pilaf.

Option one: she said something about it. That presented two possibilities:

1- no one believed her. She would be the community joke conspiracy theorist, her peers would avoid her, and possibly she would be asked to leave her employment because most people didn't want to employ people who said very weird, disruptive things about how all the relevant science of the past thousand years was based on fundamental inaccuracies.

2- people believed her. The museum would have to host experts to document the ongoing phenomena and prove that the dead were behaving in an atypical way. In that case, she would probably also lose her job. The only upside was that she would feel vindicated about having proved a point that she wasn't, like, super invested in.

So, uh. She didn't really like option one. That left options two: The Great Departing, wherein she got the hell out of town, and option three:

Keep

1. (that Feeling Real Quiet)
2. (Your Job).

'I don't feel like I'm in danger here.' Brianna turned her fork on the side to cut her food into ridiculously tiny pieces. Then she pushed them around the plate. 'But is that a useful indicator? I don't know shit. I am very small and hopeless in the world.'

Resigned, nervous ignorance was the attitude she took with her into the start of her day. But it was also not an unusual thing for her to declare in the morning. so Brianna felt fairly philosophical about it. Things were not that bad, right?

Someone would probably have said something if a significant percentage of employees died in mysterious wine-glass related incidents. Ergo, she was probably not going to be murdered by a ghost who liked singing. And fuck, if she was, she wouldn't have to pay back her student loans.

'So, y'know, there are probably worse fates. I bet that if a ghost kills you, you get to be a ghost too. And then you can just wander around for eternity, drinking someone else's wine. Fantastic. It's not the worst option I've heard of for planning for your afterlife.'

She wondered what that was like. Ghosts were supposed to be fragments, remnants acting out what they'd done before. Right? It hadn't been a special interest area of hers before or anything, but Brianna knew that off hand. And she vaguely understood from reading information packets in the museum that there was a lot of debate about their level of consciousness.

'I guess I could look it up. I have some time. I can read some academic articles and see what fits what I've seen.'

She put her tray on the metal shelf and wandered out, lost in thought.

Everyone else was in the middle of their day, so she didn't have company in the breakroom downstairs. Brianna stretched out on a couch and read with her phone above her face until her arms got tired and she rolled onto her side to read some more.

The simplest theory was that ghosts were just echoes. Whatever energy had powered them in life hadn't gone entirely where it should have. Ghosts occurred when due to a sudden, traumatic death, or as a result of over-attachment, a dead person didn't accept their passing and agreeably go where they ought. The chips of existence that split off in this process were unaware that they had died. They were unaware in general.

That was the divergent point in the theory- If you accepted that ghosts were unaware that they were dead, then it pretty well explained why they acted the way they did. They didn't interact with the living. It was a fundamental truth.

'Except it is not true. What the hell.'

The only question was whether they were blissfully unaware that the world was changing around them and only interacted with things that happened to be what they expected to see, or if they existed in a state of general confusion as to why the physical world changed and objects moved spookily when the living were using them.

Brianna sort of hoped for the first option, because it sounded unpleasant to be trapped in one place for eternity, see it decay, and not understand why or what was happening. What a nightmare.

An alert message stole her attention. “How is my battery at 20%?” Irritated, Brianna whapped the phone into the couch cushion. “Garbage. Traitor. I charged you.” She shifted onto her back again and let her phone rest on her stomach. “The worst things in life happen to me, unexpectedly. Just because I used this for literal hours, it treats me in this disrespectful manner.”

...She might have adapted some of Brendan's speaking habits, Brianna registered. Hmm.

Whatever.

'None of what I was reading fits.' She blew out a steady stream of air and watched dust motes fidget. 'The Red Lady definitely saw me and reacted to me. So any theory predicated on ghosts being completely unaware of the living doesn't make sense.'

Except.. like. The behavior of every other ghost she had ever seen did fit that pattern. Did ghosts pinky-promise to mess with the living by ignoring them? That seemed like a really long, complicated joke to commit to, for absolutely no benefit. And that would be really hard to do, besides.

Every single day, someone tried to put their hand through the ghosts in the lounge. It was what humans did- they poked and prodded and tried to sneak a shot on their cellphone, despite it being well-known that ghosts were only visible by the living eye. How could you be so steely about not reacting to that kind of irritation for years on end? Was it probable at all that pretty much every ghost was capable of that? Because Brianna felt like a fairly standard human, and she would probably at least scowl at any asshat who tried to wiggle their hand through her head. And ghosts were just a random sample of humans, right? So there was no reason to think they were both particularly patient people and good actors.

'So... They could be selectively aware of the living, or there could be different kinds of ghosts?' Brianna felt herself frowning.

What would selective awareness look like? Would it depend on the ghost or on the living person involved?

'I'm hesitant to adapt any theory that claims I'm more special than the vast majority of the living populace. So that leaves the possibilities that some ghosts are special and can perceive the living, or that all ghosts can sometimes see the living under certain, unknown circumstances.'

The Red Lady was special. She just was, that had to be it. Brianna didn't know how or why, but she could feel it.

“I want to know why.”

She plugged her phone in and locked it inside her personal storage cubby. She didn't have much time left at that point, so she left the breakroom. The thought kept bothering her, though. Brianna returned some reading materials to the archives, checked in with the costumer and did a fitting for a performance outfit, and made her way to rehearsal without letting the thought drop.

Maybe she could ask Imile? If anyone had been around long enough to notice something was weird, it would be her. Imile had grown up in and out of the museum, she'd collected most of the artwork and overseen restorations, and she was still there on a daily basis to oversee operations. She had to know just about everything there was to know.

When Imile fluttered in dressed in yellow, Brianna opened her mouth to ask something subtle enough to not sound crazy. But nerves stopped the words. She had a pretty damn good reason not to say anything when they were going over songs again and again and again, but it wouldn't have hurt to bring it up during one of the three times they stopped for a water break. Her temptation to prod for information warred with trepidation and apparently, she was just a little bit more cautious than she was curious. The words were on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn't push them off before Imile folded shut her music and left it on the piano.

The door shut. The sound of heels faded away. Brianna tilted her head back and groaned. She just sat there for a while, feeling lethargic and frustrated.

'Five hours. I just spent five hours with a woman who could answer just about any question I have, and I just...'

Well. Be kind to yourself, she decided. She'd been professional and done her job and continued working on making a good impression on someone who could help her career.

The Red Lady was really interesting, yeah. Brianna wanted to know more. She wanted to figure out why that one ghost was different from the others. But it wasn't her passion. In the long run, it would bring her a lot more happiness to reach a point where she could make a decent living performing her art.

'It's better not to ask,' Brianna decided. 'I can be curious, and maybe I can try to figure it out on my own. But I'm not going to risk looking weird just to satisfy my curiosity.'

Thinking it through helped her feel better, or maybe it was the comforting silence in the museum area. She walked back slowly, and realized for the first time that it was a little weird that management trusted her so much alone with the exhibit. The front way was locked, but she had the passcode for the employee entrance- she could come and go at any time that she liked. Imile didn't even seem to think twice about striding out while Brianna was still packing up her empty water bottles and pulling on a sweater.

Wasn't that overly trusting?

'What if I was the kind of person who would steal stuff and sell it?' Brianna frowned at a silver candlestick set. 'I'm not, but you hear about that kind of thing happening at museums.'

It would be nice to think that Imile had just judged her character as being upstanding, but that wasn't the way a person ran a successful business that cycled hundreds of employees through the doors.

Well. Maybe it was less that that anyone had trust in her morality, and more that management had faith in their precautions. Multiple tour guides went through dozens of times a day and might spot a missing item. Even if they didn't notice right away, any thieving employee would either have to make a break for it by leaving unexpectedly, which they could only do by going through security who would be aware that the trip was unscheduled, or they would have to settle down and wait for the next vacation they already had scheduled. At the very least, it would mean there was a short list of suspects to speak with when the theft was discovered.

'This is an unproductive train of thought. Unless my subconscious is looking for a way to pull off a heist, I'm just wasting my time.'

She lingered and read plaques and kept an eye on the ballroom but eventually Brianna had to admit that she wasn't going to see the Red Lady that night. She went to bed disappointed.

The next day, she did the same thing. This time, Imile did give her a long look when once again, Brianna was slow to leave after rehearsal. Was she looking suspicious? Should she come up with some kind of excuse? Somehow she hadn't thought that she might have to justify her behavior. But Imile didn't say anything, in the end. Brianna gave her a weak smile and a wave and settled in to wait.

She'd almost given up around 2am when she saw the red glow from behind. Brianna turned to see that the Red Lady was standing in front of the stage, hands crossed delicately over her hips.

“Hello,” Brianna said. Wait, was that too modern? “Good evening. Can you- you can hear me,” she changed the question to a statement. Her voice sounded young and high and annoying even to her ears, but she couldn't stop the words from bubbling out. “What's your name? Do you have a favorite song?”

The Red Lady turned her head just a little to look at her. Her lips curled up. Brianna watched, transfixed, as the ghost touched her fingertips to her throat and shook her head once. Then she looked back at the stage.

Oh.

'She wants me to sing again. Why? Is she just bored? And she can't talk? She won't talk? Forever, or is she saying that maybe she will if I sing for her again?'

The other night... she'd made that pointed little gesture with the wineglass after Brianna had finished singing. Fingerprints on a wineglass didn't really mean much of anything, except that Brianna hadn't imagined the original incident. It meant that the Red Lady had been watching her, maybe even following her.

So maybe that was her pattern- after she got what she wanted, she'd share something?