Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
Page 3
He could play it, and he would.
He might as well make himself comfortable, he decided despite his mounting excitement. He crossed back to the bed and lay back across it, as he had lain while listening to the musician play, with his head and shoulders braced up against the wall behind it. And put the instrument back to his mouth and played, this time not caring about volume. Certainly if neigh-bors heard, they’d think it was Otto, and they would be accustomed to hearing Otto play late at night.
He thought of some of the tunes he’d heard in the wine cellar, and his fingers played them. In ecstasy, he relaxed and played as he had never played a clarinet. Again, as when Otto had played, he was struck by the purity and richness of the tone, so like the chalumeau register of his own clarinet, but extending even to the highest notes.
He played, and a thousand sounds blended into one. Again the sweet melody of paradoxes, black and white blending into a beautiful radiant gray of haunting music.
And then, seemingly without transition, he found himself playing a strange tune, one he’d never heard before. But one that he knew instinctively belonged to this wonderful instrument. A calling, beckoning tune, as had been the music Otto had played when the girls, real or imaginary, had click-clicked their way to him, but different this—was it a sinister instead of a sensual feeling underlying it?
But it was beautiful and he couldn’t have stopped the dance of his fingers or stopped giving it life with his breath if he’d tried.
And then, over or under the music, he heard another sound. Not this time a click-click of high heels but a scraping, scrabbling sound, as of thousands of tiny clawed feet. And he saw them as they spilled suddenly out of many holes in the wood-work that he had not before noticed, and ran to the bed and jumped upon it. And with paralyzing suddenness the bits and pieces fell into place and by an effort that was to be the last of his life Dooley tore the accursed instrument from his mouth, and opened his mouth to scream. But they were all around him now, all over him: great ones, tawny ones, small ones, lean ones, black ones… And before he could scream out of his opened mouth the largest black rat, the one who led them, leaped up and closed its sharp teeth in the end of his tongue and held on, and the scream aborning gurgled into silence.
And the sound of feasting lasted far into the night in Hamelin town.
FB2 document info
Document ID: 99128a45-f5d4-4313-928c-b15698fc7cf0
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 08.04.2011
Created using: Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software
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Verdi1
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