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The Garnier opera house, Paris, after hours
scenario by Katherine Busby, age 21
Behold, the world! The Opera,
A myriad of curves
That lick left and right
Up, down, the eternal around.
Twisting stairs cloaked in heavy darks;
Sly chairs dotted here and there
Their thin curled legs, thick backs
Parked, arched in the shade
Eyeing an absent performance
Upon an empty stage.
It is an opera of ghosts;
Masks titter with a dancer's solitary laugh,
Here, where fidelity lies with death,
Lavish gloom and red velvet dress.
In post-war era, a young man travels to Paris to make his name as a serious playwright. But his scripts are rejected by publishers and penniless, he is forced to trawl the streets for work. Drawn to the city's opera house, he takes up a poorly-paid job as an usher.
His long nights at the opera leave him exhausted and he quickly takes to sleeping in the day. After a while he notices that it has been almost two months since he has seen the sun. Then, one night, after a performance, the crowd spills out of the auditorium and within the mêlée, he catches sight of a beautiful woman, in obvious distress. Captivated, he tries to follow her as she runs, not out of the grand doors, but curiously back towards the stage. Crushed by the crowd, he is stalled, and once he does emerge in the auditorium, it is empty, without a trace of the woman.
Having thought it a singular occurrence, he thinks nothing of it. But soon he begins to see the woman everywhere, sometimes running through corridors, other times calling for help. Yet each time he tries to assist her, she has already slipped through a door or simply disappeared. Having confided his strange sightings to his fellow ushers, they tell him of the opera house being full of ghosts, but the young man dismisses this as nonsense. Convinced that the woman is being held captive somewhere in the cellars of the opera, he takes it upon himself to uncover the mystery of her identity, and set her free.
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