Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  When he entered, he saw his work, the sheets of music he’d been composing, crumpled and torn and strewn about the living room. The piano bench had been toppled and shoved to a far corner, the piano itself dented and banged, its rich wood splintered and scuffed from the blows of the poker that lay upon it. A bottle of ink had been thrown against the far wall, leaving a blue smeary blossom upon the white paint and shards of glass upon the wood floor.

  David stood aghast. For how long he didn’t know. The clatter of his staff as it toppled from his hand brought him out of his shock.

  He limped to the center of the room, turned in circles, filled with panic, filled with fear, filled with rage. He was about to phone the police when an ugly thought struck him, making him flush, making his knees weak.

  He searched the house for signs of break-in. Who would break into a house in the middle of the woods? No forced windows, no broken glass, no splintered wood on the doors.

  David went to the ruined living room and sat, feeling his heart thud in his chest.

  He could have done this, himself. Made drunk by the disease that was killing him. Enraged that the degradation of his mind would not allow him to compose a legacy of music before his body destroyed itself. He had been frustrated, angry for most of the day, unable to focus on his work or to experimentally play musical phrases.

  He had no memory of what he’d done before he’d left the house . . . no memory of actually leaving. He could only recall a need to be outside, to feel wind and see the sky before he could resume composing.

  He could have done this.

  Not wanting to cry, feeling lancing pain in his gouty joints as he kneeled, David gathered the sheets off the floor, un-rumpled them, and placed them on the mantel. He righted the piano bench, and took the poker away from the scarred piano. He cleaned and tidied the room, but left the stain upon the wall, not wanting to make it worse by trying to wash it off.

  Afterward, he put on his favourite recording of Mozart’s “Requiem” and pressed a razor against the blue veins of his forearm.

  The hunt was on.

  His pursuers mocked him by signaling the chase with horns.

  The deposed commander of twenty-nine scattered legions ran through living muck that screamed and writhed under his monstrous footfall, then crossed a swampy river as a horse would ford churning waters, his head and neck craning and bobbing with the strokes of his shoulders and arms.

  As he surged through the stagnant channel, a new crash of horns came like a storm wind across the wailing marsh. He stopped swimming and listened, looking back the way he’d come for his pursuers. Through the thick, perpetual fog of that starless, sunless place, he saw signal fires flash atop a watchtower on the shore he had just left.

  Ahead, he saw answering fires atop the ramparts of the city of burning red iron on the shore before him.

  He wanted to bellow his rage, scream his fury, but he dared not give away his location. Then he thought to make his position known in a manner that could save him.

  He sounded the filthy, brackish water, warm as fresh blood yet laced with Death’s cold touch, and pulled from the corrupted slime at the bottom something ruined: something that had been breathing muck for the long centuries since it had breathed air.

  He broke the surface, and held aloft by one hand the screaming ghost he had pulled from below, hiding most of his own bulk under the water, yet keeping his gaze above the surface . . . watching through the low mist with the careful expectation of a predator.

  The debased soul, able at last to shriek the agony it had felt since it had dropped to this spiritual vomitorium, summoned the river’s guardian. Fast as an arrow freed from a bowstring, the guardian’s skiff skimmed the water. The twisted grey creature on board smiled gleefully, eyes alight with the color of ice as he poised his oar like a weapon at the screaming soul’s breast.

  “You are mine!” said the guardian.

  The hunted prince lashed out from the water, hurling the ruined soul aside. He crashed his head and his single, spiraling horn against the skiff’s prow, then gripped the prow in his claws. The guardian shrieked, raised his oar overhead, was about to bring it down on the prince’s claws when the prince hissed, “I’ll sink you!”

  The boatman froze, eyes burning with cold fire, teeth clenched.

  “I’ll sink you!” said the prince. “All your little charges will be on you, biting, gnashing and clawing. They’ll rise up for you from below, and the ones from the shallows will be on you like the water itself.”

  Again, the crash of horns came, this time from the shore, so close it made the air shudder. The twisted boatman smiled and set down his oar.

  “There’s no room in this ark for you, either.”

  The prince growled, then splintered the prow’s lip, rocked the skiff to and fro.

  The boatman stepped toward the prow, leaned forward to the prince’s equine face, and spoke calmly. “The boat cannot hold your royal weight. Were you to come aboard, it would sink beneath you as if you stood on a floating leaf. Rage away, Regulus. Rage away.”

  The prince lunged and gripped the boatman’s corded throat in one claw. The skiff tilted forward with his bulk, pressed into his belly, and began to fill with the river’s broth-thick water.

  The prince spoke in an intonation he had used in cold defiance against the Archangels: “Enough theatre. Take me to the safe shore.”

  He released the boatman’s throat, slid back into the water. Without a word, the boatman piloted the skiff along the shores of the city of burning red iron; the prince hidden, clinging to the skiff’s underside. In the shallows, far from the city’s ramparts and gate, the prince let go the skiff and waded ashore through water choked with rotted souls, slick as stalks of decayed kelp.

  Standing upon the bank, he pried several of these gurgling souls from his limbs, his chest, back and genitals. They were too corrupted to scream as his claws tore them.

  Soon he was running again, the hoof beats of creatures both two-and four-legged thundering behind him.

  The razor broke David’s skin as the voices of the chorus gave earthly expression to the sound of Heaven.

  Blood ran down David’s wrist, baptizing his hand in red warmth, when he stopped the razor’s path through his flesh.

  “If I survive this, I won’t be able to play,” he thought. His riot of emotions fell quiet; grief and anger and despair calmed within him like a breaking tempest. “The tendons will be cut, then I’ll have nothing left. Nothing. Not able to play or compose. Or I’ll be put in a ward somewhere, not allowed anything as sharp as a pen to compose with on scrap paper. . . .”

  Leaning over the deep kitchen basin, watching red drops make sudden blossom on the white porcelain, he knew he would not survive the opening of his veins. No one knew where he was. No one would look for him. No ambulance could reach him in time if he phoned, bleeding, for help.

  His own sister didn’t know what continent he was on. He was hiding from people who would want to hospitalize him, who would keep him bedridden in the name of caring for him, who would not allow him to exhaust himself while composing his legacy, while he gave meaning to his last months in this world.

  And if he died now, there would be no meaning to his life. Nothing left behind. A few minor compositions already performed that his teachers and a few critics had said showed the potential for greatness. But nothing of lasting value. Nothing that would endure as a testament to the sacrifices his parents had made for him and his music.

  He, and his music, would not survive this.

  He set down the razor and inspected the wound.

  It was minor. No vein had been opened. He flexed his fingers. No tendon had been cut. He washed the wound under warm water, and watched currents of red flow within the stream of water.

  “If only I could clean my blood. Wash out the enzymes my liver is leaking into it. I wouldn’t be in this fog. My music wouldn’t be hidden away in my head, all nestled in co
tton wool. I’m drowning in my own mind.”

  A thought struck him as he watched bloody water swirl down the drain and the “Requiem” played itself out. David took a wine glass from the cabinet beside the sink and let his blood flow into it, making a fist around a dish towel as he did so.

  He made a tight bandage around his forearm with gauze, and carried the glass to the living room. He took from the shelves there the books bound in dusty leather that had belonged to his mother, and that he could not bear to sell to collectors after she had died. He took from the mantel the large clay bowl his mother had had made at great expense by an artisan who lived near Jerusalem. Dust covered the vermilion lines of concentric lettering inside the bowl: lettering in Hebrew and Aramaic and other languages David did not know.

  David wiped away the dust and set the bowl in the center of the room. His joints felt full of sand as he kneeled over the books and began to read.

  The prince ran through a forest of those who had, in life, made a gibbet of their existences, and had ripped their souls from out of their bodies so that they dropped here and germinated to twisted, black trees. Knotted branches inlaid with tendons and veins quivered with unreleased suffering. Blood spurted from the branches that he broke as he ran, and the blood wept, vibrating softly as if each drop were a tiny throat pressed upon his skin.

  The prince stopped, listened for his enemies. He did not hear them above the steady cries that hung thick in the forest’s air. Harpies, perched in the upper branches, pecked at the trees, taking communion in small bites from the ruined souls, from their unreal flesh transubstantiated to twisted wood. The wounds the harpies caused gave ruby outlets to the pain of the suicides; their droppings, in turn, nourished the soil that fed the souls that had been so wretchedly starved in life.

  The sounds of the forest were calming. They reminded the prince of the dark places where the newly-dead congregated, wandering like sleepwalkers, bewildered, whimpering because of the sudden loss of their bodies. In happier days, the prince would often run through this limbo, scooping up souls like bundles of wood to give as playthings to his followers.

  The prince crouched low and rested, thinking of new strategies, new allies to find, new armies to rally, once he escaped the toadies of those who had deposed him.

  His punishments, his vengeance, would be hailed as atrocities, legendary in their cruelty even in Hell. He would make of his enemies living standards, erect cathedrals to his own honour from their bones. He would create orchestrations of suffering that would make his enemies envy the damned they’d once had charge over.

  But first he had to escape those who craved his blood and coveted his horn: the blessed mark of his power he wore upon his brow.

  The cries from the trees closest to him quieted. The trail of lamentation from the scarlet path he’d beaten fell into the regular rhythms of the forest.

  The prince absently etched his mark upon the trunk of a tree as he thought, making the soul inside cry softly in a tune he found soothing as he pressed his claws into the bark, nimbly as a violinist fingers the neck of his instrument. Perhaps he should enlist aid from the Master of Fraud, sound a clarion call while riding on his back as they flew in a gyre to the deepest part of the writhing abyss. If he could double back, the keeper of Hell’s gate would allow him to weave sundering music from the suspirations of the newly-dead that would . . .

  A sound came from the way the prince had come, like a great wave crashing, the fabric of thunder meshed with the sound of a raging sea. And beneath those sounds came a brutal melange of suffering: the screams of thousands as a horde of what the prince knew to be his enemies crashed through the wood. The prince stood, and climbed the sobbing tree he had been scarring with the speed of a hunting cat.

  In the distance, through the gloom, he saw hundreds of points of light spread out in a line just within the edge of the wood—the flames of torches held by those who hunted him, darting, curving in a wide ribbon among the bleeding trunks. Some points of light were too fast, too agile to be from torches; they were the burning faces of yith hounds, black hunting bitches maddened with the need to rend and tear and wound and . . .

  The prince dropped to the ground. But did not run. He was a strategist. A tactician. Nothing he did now could be without thought. He could not afford the luxury of blind flight. He stifled the sound of his pursuers in his ears, reached out with his senses for anything in the ether that could help him. There was something. Something informed so slightly by the aura of this eternal place of suicide that, at any other time, he would not dare pursue it and face the oblivion of the journey to Materiality.

  But now he had no choice. Now he answered the far call from one who hung near the spiritual death that fed this wood.

  At the trunk of the tree he had climbed, he kneeled like one about to take Communion and forced his hands into his mark, pulling open within it a portal made by the dim invocation of his name. The blood of the tree screamed as loudly as the sound of the hunters behind him.

  And in the void, he waited for the remote chance that the calling of his name would carry him to a place closer to the Heaven that had expelled him.

  “There are no such things as demons, Mother.”

  His mother had smiled when David had said those words to her.

  “Then you don’t believe in angels, either?”

  “No. I don’t. There’s only us, Mother.”

  His mother had touched his face, then. Caressed his cheek as she said, “When you’re older, you’ll see how little you know about the world. How much of it is a mystery. Then you’ll come to treasure the mystery.”

  David had not believed her. For, at that point, belief in magic and hidden things was behind him. Once, before, he had believed in unknowable powers that were partly revealed in the myths, epics and folklore he’d read as a boy. When he was young, he had known in his heart the sidhe lived in the woods nearby, that the War of the Ring had truly been waged, and that somewhere in the world, a dragon still lived.

  But he had set those beliefs aside.

  His mother had been partly right; David had come to treasure mysteries as he grew older. Not the mysteries of the world, or the wide, ethereal universe that she held dear. What he had come to treasure were the mysteries of the mind, the forces within that his mother had freed with her incantations and formulas to attain what she needed and desired.

  Once, when the family had needed money, Mother had burned a dollar bill in a ritual, “giving it back to the Universe.” Within the week, Father had a new job. It was a wonderful thing. But no real magic was involved. The ritual had simply forced his parents to focus on Father’s job search with renewed intensity.

  And now David, on his aching knees with his mother’s books before him, hoped to tap his own mind. To use ritual to lift the hateful fog his disease had imposed on his thoughts and creativity, and so liberate his music.

  David read aloud the Latin incantations of the books, and also the Hebrew his mother had phonetically scribbled on sheets of yellow legal pad and inserted within the pages. Toward the end of his ritual, David took the wine glass that held his blood and poured a few drops in the center of the bowl, so they were surrounded by the concentric lines of script.

  Then he turned the bowl over, and read a final Hebrew incantation.

  And something quietly opened inside David’s mind. A flowering of images and sensations unfurling like a white rose. A vista of alabaster filled his sight, and a sound, distant as the step of a ghost, grew louder and more tangible in his ears.

  It was the sound of snow.

  A memory rose like mist from the shadows of his childhood . . . a memory of lying with closed eyes on the white blanket of a winter field. Even the wind had been silent. In that unreal, timeless quiet, deeper than any he’d known even while in dreamless sleep, he had heard the breath of the sky itself, the whisper of the dome of grey clouds above.

  He had heard the voice of each crystalline feather of
snow as it fell, as it alighted upon the earth, upon his lashes and face. He had heard the snow’s delicate poetry, but could not fathom its language, the key to the beautiful things it spoke. The language was more than one of sound; it was a language of sensation that touched him as the morning of the year’s first frost touched him, telling him of its presence the instant before he woke and opened his eyes.

  He had wanted to know each secret thing the snow spoke. But after what seemed a very long time, he realized the snow’s words and poems would stay secret to him. He’d opened his eyes, and the dull winter sunshine behind the clouds seemed blinding. He’d heard then the thunder of his breath, the roar of his own heartbeat. He’d stood to wend his way home, and saw that the new snow had covered his track to where he’d laid himself down.

  Each step he had taken marred the perfect, pure field, imprinting it with the mark of his passing, had drowned the voice of the falling snow with the ugly crush of his footfall.

  It was the sound of snow. . . . David remembered the sound, and remembered the person he had been when he had heard it: the boy who knew and believed in mysteries and magic hidden everywhere around him. The sound of snow, how it had touched him so deeply with a beauty he could not understand, was what he needed to give musical expression. This was the essence of what he had to compose, yet he had not been able to name it before. This was his trophy, his prize seized from the distant, shadowy part of his mind. Now he could touch this memory, hold it close and nurture it . . . set it to music to share it with others and grant it new life.

  David wept, softly. With relief and joy and with pain. For the memory had been pulled from his deepest sense of self, drawn forcibly to the forepart of his mind.

  The vista of whiteness filling his vision faded. The floor of the living room, the inverted bowl, became visible, but still shrouded, as if David were looking through gauze.