The Phantom of Oz, Installment #15
Plus Fun with Titles
Hello! As most of you know, I’m serializing The Phantom of Oz here in a bit of an experiment. Once a month, you’ll still receive the “regular” Slightly Silly News. If you missed earlier chapters of Phantom, you can find links to all of the earlier installments here.
You’ve probably noticed that the chapter titles in Phantom have a distinctly Edwardian flavor. I took them all from text in The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel (I did the same thing with chapter titles in Macdeath and Oliver Twisted.) The book is a fun read, and still pretty accessible for being over 100 years old. It’s full of of great quotes, too, like:
“I am an honest girl, M. le Vicomte de Chagny, and I don’t lock myself up in my dressing-room with men’s voices.”
“Tonight I gave you my soul and I am dead.”
“I’m sick and tired of having a forest and a torture chamber in my house… I want to have a nice quiet flat with ordinary doors and windows and a wife inside it, like anybody else!”
“Our lives are one masked ball.”
I found those quotes at writer Kat Devitt’s website, where you can find more of them and read a little about the original Phantom.
Deciding upon the chapter titles for The Phantom of Oz took quite a bit of close reading and puzzling, but it was great fun, and I found titles that work well for each chapter, I think, like our next installment, “Perplexed Me Most Terribly.”
Happy reading!
Chapter 11
Perplexed Me Most Terribly
The EMTs shooed me away too. After what seemed like forever, they deemed Candy stable enough be transported to Good Sam. “Don’t worry,” one of them said as they took her away on a stretcher. “We’ll take good care of her.”
Was Candy doing drugs? Ricky was right, coke seemed like a stretch, but maybe something else? Arghh. I wanted to do something, anything to help her. But what?
Maybe I could figure out what happened. “Does anything look different than usual?” I asked the stage manager, who had poked her head inside the bubbleship. “Or smell different than usual?” Maybe toxic fumes were the cause of Candy’s distress.
The stage manager sniffed the air. “No smell, and everything looks fine.”
I joined her at the spaceship’s door. Inside, the structure of the ship was obvious: a network of PVC pipes in the shape of a globe, like a round jungle gym covered with stretchy fabric. “How does Candy’s entrance work?” I asked. “What’s supposed to happen?”
“Candace crawls inside the ship while it’s in the fly space,” said the stage manager. “She hangs onto the inside of the structure—hands and feet on the piping—then pushes open this panel when she lands, and walks out as Glinda. It’s a pretty dynamic entrance. And—”
Whatever she was going to say next was drowned out by a babble of voices from the backstage door entrance. The sound rushed toward us like some freak high tide, Babette’s voice on the crest of the wave. “I thought it was me that the Lady in White was after,” she said, “but a few seconds after I made sure the munchkins were safe”—nice rewrite of history there—“I realized that the falling set piece was just a distraction.”
“Is it true you saw the ghost right beforehand?” asked the man with the hipster glasses I’d seen outside.
Babette frowned at the reporter who had interrupted her story— which I realized sounded a bit rehearsed. I also realized that the ghost light was off again. Huh. It had turned on right before Candy’s accident. Was it a signal? From who?
“Yes, several people including myself saw a white figure”—they did?— “And we heard footsteps, right before the house fell. In fact, that girl”—she pointed at me—“has photos of the ghost.”
I was suddenly surrounded by a throng of people. “Let’s see.”
“Is the picture clear?”
“Can you really see the ghost?”
But Babette was not about to let anyone steal her thunder. “As I said,” she said loudly, drawing attention back to herself, “that first accident was a distraction, disguising the ghost’s real intentions. Now I understand that the ghost isn’t after me. After all, why would she be?”
Everyone in the room could have answered that question, but no one wanted to do it in front of the national press.
“No, I believe the ghost is jealous,” Babette continued. “She was an actress after all, one who never made it big before killing herself.”
“The Lady in White,” said a reporter.
“Now I know for certain that I’ve got a sure winner, because the ghost is jealous. She just tried to kill my newest It Girl.”
What? She couldn’t mean...
“Candace Moon.”
Watch next week for Installment #16, Chapter 12: “So Frail a Creature.”
And if you haven’t read the first four books in the Agatha-nominated series:
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