Under Studies
by Walda Cameron

Karyn walked to the footlights and bowed to an imaginary audience. "Bravo! Bravo!" they cheered. In her dream she was ten hours ahead of real time and had just completed her premier performance as Cio-Cio-San, a.k.a. Madama Butterfly. How she had sparkled! Joan Sutherland, Beverly Sills, Maria Callas--all those magnificent voices housed in one spectacular set of vocal chords. Tonight’s performance would launch her career, culminate twenty years of scale running, controlled breathing, ear training. Tonight she would cease to be Lynne Moore’s understudy. Never again would she function as a mere "chorus girl."
Pity about Lynne’s broken leg. But, last night, as Karyn tied that wire across the dark stage steps, she’d known that orchestrating Lynne’s fall was as important a career move as finding the right voice coach and opera company.
Karyn blinked and returned to the present. She looked out at empty seats and dancing dust motes, at faded, half-drawn velvet drapes and floral bas-reliefs. Her eyes were drawn, as always, to the huge chandelier looming over the orchestra pit, a glittery specter wrapped with chains of glass and heavy with bulbs and clumps of crystal. Located a scant six feet in front of center stage, it captured the few beams of light filtering through the drapes and directed them downward to the dozens of multi-prismed drop pins that dangled from its base.
Karyn’s trained ears picked up a small, shuffling sound from the orchestra pit.
"Who’s there?" she called.
A shadow rose from behind one of the seats in the violin section.
"It’s Melinda Graystone. Your new understudy."
A tall, slender figure walked to stand in front of Karyn, under the chandelier.
"Mel. You frightened me. I guess I’m a little nervous about tonight’s show." Karyn laughed uneasily.
"You needn’t be. I’ll be singing the part of Butterfly. You’ll be...well, you’ ll be singing with the angels. Maybe. You don’t get angel wings for deliberately crippling someone to further your own ambition."
"Whatever are you talking about, Mel?"
"The wire, Karyn. I saw you string it across the steps. I saw you remove it after Lynne’s fall."
Karyn smirked. "Come on, Mel, you know how competitive this business is. We must create our own opportunities."
"I agree. In fact, my approach is similar, only more direct, dependable...durable."
Karyn watched, horror stricken, as Mel raised a gun from behind her long skirt and pointed it at center stage.
"Wait! I only hurt Lynne," Karyn protested. "I didn’t kill her. And she performed thirty-five times with me as her understudy before I did anything."
"I can’t let you perform, Karyn. You’re too good. I’d be panned if I tried to replace you after you’d sung."
She was right. Karyn’s voice ranged six octaves. She could fine-tune volume and pitch with the accuracy and virtuosity of a Heifetz. She had everything required to become an international sensation-everything except opportunity. And now she would be deprived of that. Forever.
"People will hear the shot and come running," she said. "You’ll be caught red-handed. I’ll be dead, you’ll be conducting convict choruses for the rest of your life."
Mel glanced at the gun. "Note the silencer, Karyn. I know guns. I’m a crack shot. By the time they discover your mortal remains, I’ll be home resting for this evening’s performance. The gun will be at the bottom of Crane Pond."
Karyn’s mind raced through her limited options. She could turn and run from the stage—and take a bullet in the back. She could leap from the stage and try to land on top of Mel—and take a bullet in mid-air. She could scream, a perfectly pitched, resonant cry for help that would no doubt be cut short by a well-placed bullet.
Karyn’s eyes darted desperately around the theater. All the doors were tightly closed. Had Mel seen to that?
"How did you know I’d come on stage now, at mid-day?"
"I didn’t. I only knew that, in your position, I too would elect to savor an anticipatory moment. We’re really quite similar, Karyn, especially in the dark ways. We are both ambitious opportunists with egos to die for." Mel giggled and took aim.
Terror turned Karyn’s knees to water and filled her ears with a drum-roll of panic. Her eyes slid upward. Her gaze rested on the chandelier.
Mel’s voice sounded far away, in a distant dimension, when she said: "Let’s get on with this then."
Karyn decided to go down screaming. One ear- splitting, glass-shattering scream.
Glass shattering. If Caruso could break a wineglass for fun, surely Karyn-on-adrenaline could manage a chandelier. She knew that a sustained note at the proper frequency would start the crystal molecules vibrating faster and faster until the whole structure fell apart along predetermined stress lines. It wouldn’t exactly shatter. It would split and drop, right onto Mel’s head.
Karyn held up her hand to stay Mel’s impatience as she searched the chandelier’s pendulous drops for a clue, an engraved message, like: shatterpoint: 8 kHz.
"I’ve already given you enough time to make your peace, Karyn."
"Wait, Mel. Let me sing one last time. Cio-Cio-San’s final lament. Appropriate, wouldn’t you agree?"
Mel nodded slowly. "It has a certain dramatic flair. Anyone within earshot will assume you’re rehearsing. But keep it pianissimo and keep it brief."
Karyn began very softly, concentrating on pitch. As she drew out the notes, she studied the chandelier, praying with all her heart that she might perceive the slightest, tiniest shudder.
Seconds ticked by. She slid her silken voice around note after note, but the chandelier remained still. She glanced at Mel and saw that her understudy’s shooting arm had stiffened. For the first time in memory, Karyn lost control of her magnificent voice. It slid upward, C4, C5, C6. The pin drops at the base of the chandelier began to quiver.
Mel, too, looked up at the chandelier. Her eyes fixed on the play of light within the trembling prisms. She grew very still, hypnotized by the sparkling shards.
Please, Karyn prayed as she intensified the note, just a few more seconds. She forced the last bit of air through her vocal chords, forced them to vibrate on the same frequency as the chandelier. The whole theater seemed to vibrate with this, her final effort. The last sounds Karyn heard as she sank to the stage floor were a series of peculiar popping noises--glass popping and gun popping.
She wakened to find several members of the stage crew hovering above her. They were in quite a state, gesturing, moving their lips frenetically, speaking words Karyn could not hear. Later, after she was admitted to the hospital and resting comfortably in her private room, Lynne came to visit. She wore a cast on her ankle and carried a pencil and notepad.
"I am so sorry to tell you that Melanie is dead," Lynne wrote. "It was quick. The crystal shards penetrated her skull."
Karyn took the pencil and wrote: "She tried to kill me. She deserved to die. When will my hearing return?"
Lynne hesitated before taking the proffered pencil. "You have suffered an acoustic trauma," she wrote slowly. "The doctors think your hearing mechanism is permanently disabled. I am so sorry."
The scrawled words turned wavy as tears flooded Karyn’s eyes. Her cold fingers plucked at the pilled hospital blanket, her spine stiffened. Such a simple phrase: Your hearing mechanism is permanently disabled. Half-a-dozen everyday words that made her past an exercise in futility, her future a nightmare of what might have been. She had become Tantalus. Music, the food of her soul, surrounded her, yet she was denied nourishment. Already hunger clawed at the edges of her sanity. She wished with all her heart one of Mel’ s bullets had found her on that darkened stage.
Karyn opened her mouth wide. For the second time that day a scream tore through her throat, a cry of pure rage. Lynne covered her ears and hobbled from the room. Karyn held the note she could not hear and watched from her silent, empty world as the hospital windows began to vibrate.

Walda Cameron has published short mystery fiction in Sleuth Journal, FUTURES Magazine, and, on-line, at about.com. Her romantic short fiction has appeared in Woman's World. She is currently working on an historical romance novel set in New York City in 1876.