Maskerade

thing. And dead flowers, for some reason.”
    “ Dead flowers?”
    “Well, not flowers at all, as such. Just a bouquet of dead rose-stems with no roses on them. It’s something of a trademark of his. It’s considered lucky.”
    “Dead flowers are lucky?”
    “Possibly. Live flowers, certainly, are terribly bad luck on stage. Some singers won’t even have them in their dressing room. So…dead flowers are safe, you might say. Odd, but safe. And it didn’t worry people because everyone thought the Ghost was on their side. At least, they did. Until about six months ago.”
    Mr. Bucket shut his eyes again. “Tell me,” he said.
    “There have been…accidents.”
    “What kind of accidents?”
    “The kind of accidents that you prefer to call…accidents.”
    Mr. Bucket’s eyes stayed closed. “Like…the time when Reg Plenty and Fred Chiswell were working late one night up on the curdling vats and it turned out Reg had been seeing Fred’s wife and somehow”—Bucket swallowed—“somehow he must have tripped, Fred said, and fallen—”
    “I am not familiar with the gentlemen concerned but… that kind of accident. Yes.”
    Bucket sighed. “That was some of the finest Farmhouse Nutty we ever made.”
    “Do you want me to tell you about our accidents?”
    “I’m sure you’re going to.”
    “A seamstress stitched herself to the wall. A deputy stage manager was found stabbed with a prop sword. Oh, and you wouldn’t like me to tell you what happened to the man who worked the trapdoor. And all the lead mysteriously disappeared from the roof, although personally I don’t think that was the work of the Ghost.”
    “And everyone…calls these…accidents?”
    “Well, you wanted to sell your cheese, didn’t you? I can’t imagine anything that would depress the house like news that dead bodies are dropping like flies out of the flies.”
    He took an envelope out of his pocket and placed it on the table.
    “The Ghost likes to leave little messages,” he said. “There was one by the organ. A scenery painter spotted him and…nearly had an accident.”
    Bucket sniffed the envelope. It reeked of turpentine.
    The letter inside was on a sheet of the Opera House’s own note paper. In neat, copperplate writing, it said:
Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Aahahaha!
BEWARE!!!!!

Yrs sincerely
The Opera Ghost
    “What sort of person,” said Salzella patiently, “sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man. Look, at least let’s search the building. The cellars go on forever. I’ll need a boat—”
    “A boat ? In the cellar ?”
    “Oh. Didn’t they tell you about the sub-basement?”
    Bucket smiled the bright, crazed smile of a man who was nearing double exclamation marks himself.
    “No,” he said. “They didn’t tell me about the sub-basement. They were too busy not telling me that someone goes around killing the company. I don’t recall anyone saying ‘Oh, by the way, people are dying a lot, and incidentally there’s a touch of rising damp—’”
    “They’re flooded.”
    “Oh, good!” said Bucket. “What with? Buckets of blood?”
    “Didn’t you have a look?”
    “They said the cellars were fine!”
    “And you believed them?”
    “Well, there was rather a lot of champagne…”
    Salzella sighed.
    Bucket took offense at the sigh. “I happen to pride myself that I am a good judge of character,” he said. “Look a man deeply in the eye and give him a firm handshake and you know everything about him.”
    “Yes, indeed,” said Salzella.
    “Oh, blast…Señor Enrico Basilica will be here the day after tomorrow. Do you think something might happen to him?”
    “Oh, not much. Cut throat, perhaps.”
    “What? You think so?”
    “How should I know?”
    “What do you want me to do? Close the place? As far as I can see it doesn’t make any money as it is! Why hasn’t anyone told the Watch?”
    “That would be worse ,” said Salzella. “Big trolls in rusty chain mail tramping everywhere, getting in everyone’s way and asking stupid questions. They’d close us down.”
    Bucket swallowed. “Oh, we can’t have that,” he said. “Can’t have them…putting everyone on edge.”
    Salzella sat back. He seemed to relax a little. “On edge? Mr. Bucket,” he said, “this is opera. Everyone is always on edge. Have you ever heard of a catastrophe curve, Mr.