Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  Yet the sound of snow maintained.

  And became louder.

  David wiped his eyes, listened like an animal hearing the tread of a hunter. A cold touch ran up his back, over his arms, across his chest.

  Strands of mist, like wisps of white hair, streamed from beneath the bowl, flowing into a smoky pool by the hearth.

  The wine glass vibrated, as if a tuning fork had been touched to it. David’s blood, its redness muted from the gauze, shook within, concentric ripples washing to the sides. The vibration of the glass, the movement of the blood, had a rhythm, a pattern. David knew the rhythm, felt it inside himself.

  He leaned forward, looked into the glass.

  The rhythm was that of David’s breath . . . as if the blood were still within his veins, pulsing with the other rhythms of his body. The blood had a voice.

  The sound of snow spoke from David’s blood.

  Winter filled David’s body, coursed in a February wind through his torso, his limbs, filling each capillary, collecting in an icy fist in his heart.

  He screamed. And the blood in the glass screamed with him; the sound of snow bellowed from the glass, reverberating through the room like the ring of a cathedral bell. The sound endured past David’s scream. He tried to stand and run into the cold November night. But the rotting joints of his legs gave way under him. He could not rise from his knees.

  More mist flowed from under the bowl. The pool of white smoke by the hearth now looked solid through David’s shrouded vision. A hump formed within the pool, as if it were a sheet and a man stood up from a crouch beneath it. The floorboards by the fireplace creaked loudly, as if suddenly taking on a heavy weight.

  The sound of snow was snuffed. The gauze before David’s eyes fell away; all within his vision shifted to clarity the way midnight shadows shift with the light of the moon.

  And a hunched abomination stood before David.

  “Yes?” it said.

  With that one word, the veil of sanity in David’s world was torn away.

  “I’m hallucinating,” David thought. “Be rational. This is nothing. This is a dream. This is a ghost. It comes from the sickness.”

  The thing rose to its full height, towering above him. Fine mist came off its heavily muscled body, off its chiseled legs, its arms, off the torso that looked as if it had been sculpted in marble. Up to its neck, its skin was white as bone. Coarse hair with the sheen of sea-foam grew over the throat and the bestial head was at once like that of a horse, and that of a deer and of a goat. A mane of human-like hair fell in foppish bangs around the great spiraling horn that grew from its brow and that glowed like mother of pearl in candlelight..

  “It’s not real. It can’t be. It’s a demon from one of Mother’s books. A demon. You saw its picture and you . . .”

  The monstrosity fixed David with eyes violet as the cusp of a January dawn. Again, it spoke.

  “Yes?”

  The square animal mouth moved, making human speech that didn’t vibrate as sound in the air but occurred in David’s mind, like a premonition given grammar and cogent thought. David tried to speak. His jaw trembled, as if from cold, and the beast cocked its long, equine head, as a man would cock his head trying to hear a faint sound, never taking its gaze from David’s.

  David clenched his trembling jaw, forced his gaze to the floor and then forced words from his lips.

  “You’re not real. I don’t believe in you.”

  He looked up, hoping, knowing, his words had banished the thing, driven it away with the other phantoms his sickness created. That this creature would . . .

  David was again held by the violet gaze.

  “But I believe in you.”

  David fought the urge to drown in the morning sky those eyes held and made himself speak.

  “You don’t exist.”

  “Oh, but I do.”

  “I didn’t call you. I didn’t summon you. You’re nothing. I’m dreaming you.”

  The demon glanced away, freeing David from its opiate stare. Then it leaned forward. Its horn lowered like a pike before David’s face; it reached down with its great lion-clawed hand and lifted the bowl from the floor as David would lift a teacup from a shelf. It turned the bowl over in its palm, then pointed with a claw of its free hand to the red inscriptions inside.

  “You did call me. And politely, I came. If you look closely here, you will see my name. You invoked it. Of course, if you look closely, you will also find the name of a very splendid Nazarene carpenter. I’m afraid He’s too busy knocking together cabinets and tables for his dear Tyrant of a Father to answer your call. I, however, am free this evening, and so accept your invitation.”

  “I . . . revoke my invitation.”

  “After I have come all this way? Why? Have I been rude? Of course I have. I have come empty-handed. Let me give you a gift.”

  It brought its horn down on David’s shoulder, as if the horn were a sword and the creature were knighting him. David was seized by cramps. His every muscle clenched, every tendon pulled tight. Still on his knees, he fell backward, paralyzed on the floor.

  The thing stood above him, its horn almost touching the ceiling. “There. Now I am a decent guest. But I’m sure there are other exchanges to be made between us. By the way, does this go here?”

  The thing held out the bowl to David, then turned partly to place it on the mantel. “Ah! You compose!” it said as it set down the bowl. It picked up the rumpled sheets and read. “Oh, this is splendid! You have a rare gift. I am a patron of composers. But you must have known that when you called me. Yes, I’m sure we can make an arrangement.”

  And David, gripped by nightmare paralysis, could not scream when he saw upon the thing’s back another atrocity that sent his mind reeling, that had him uttering silent prayers for the first time in many godless years.

  The thing turned its back away and faced David. It stepped forward, looked down at him and said: “I have helped composers for many years. I have stood invisible at the side of great maestros, guiding their batons. I have stood in cold, dusty garrets and revealed my secrets to composers whom you venerate. I have bestowed hidden musical voices to great cities.

  Woven melodies from their footsteps and from the clatter of wheels on their cobblestones, melodies that have touched the entire world. I would be happy to help you with this.” It held David’s rumpled compositions out to him, then it made a bow, like a courtier. “We must be introduced. I am Amduscias.” The demon stood upright. “I am pleased to . . .”

  The thing that had clung to the demon’s back fell wetly to the floor. David tried to look away as the spectral grey body of a young woman, torn in half, glistening translucently as frost, reached out to him on the floor. Her eyes held the pleading desperation of a drowning person as she tried to crawl toward him. She mouthed words, but all David heard were choking sounds.

  The thing that called itself “Amduscias” snatched the torn woman from the floor by her hair. “I’ve tracked mud into your home,” it said. “Forgive me.” The woman continued her wordless pleading; David could see the transparent organs of her opened torso as she raised her arms over her head, trying to free herself from the demon’s claws.

  Buzzing greyness filled the edges of David’s vision. He embraced the coming hallucination, the seizing of his mind by familiar sickness so it would blot out what he saw now. The light in the room changed, became dappled, like afternoon light in a deep forest.

  “Let me present to you an offer,” said the demon. “You said that I don’t exist. I won’t argue with you in your home. That would be impolite, and I have made one faux pas too many as your guest tonight.”

  It held the mauled ghost aloft, almost to the level of its head. In the dappled light of David’s hallucination, Amduscias looked like a poacher holding his catch in a wooded glen. The demon’s animal face gave the woman a sickeningly human look of contempt. Then it looked back to David.

  “Since
I do not exist, I am a product of your mind. Therefore, if you were to allow me to possess you, no harm could come of it. I would be one part of your mind returning home. A part of your mind you’ve lost touch with, that otherwise would help you create sweet music such as this.” The claw that did not hold the woman held forward David’s compositions, the sheets small as those from a notepad in the huge palm. “Allow me to demonstrate my musical ability.”

  It drew the sheets over its heart, and the room filled with snatches of music. David’s music. The bars, the sketches, the phrases he’d been working on performed faultlessly by invisible musicians. The air shimmered as if from the heat of a fire. The dappled forest-light glinted as if the very leaves above shook with the music’s resonance.

  Then the music stopped in a heartbeat.

  “Think what I could do in your mind. Think what I could liberate within you if you willingly took me back to your mind. You needn’t answer now. I know that you can’t. You will feel like a new man in the morning. In the meantime, I must find a way to make this little river leech pay for coming to your home uninvited.”

  It shook the woman as a sadistic child would shake a cat held by the scruff of the neck. Bits of cloudy, dust-coloured flesh dropped to the floor.

  The demon came down to one knee. “There must be blood here somewhere, for you to have called me. If it’s fresh, I can make a gift of her. A little aid to help with your composing. Ah! just so.”

  It set David’s sheets down and lifted the wine glass. The dappled light grew dimmer as the demon held the glass to its eye. “I’ll do what I am able with this. But watch! Watch what is possible when two agents meet to create something new and wonderful. Watch what could happen if you and I were to join.”

  It set the woman like a broken doll on its knee, and with one claw forced her mouth open. It poured the blood from the glass down the woman’s throat.

  David watched the blood flow through her like streams of red candle wax. Her flesh shrank, took on the texture of a wet scab. Then the demon began sculpting her, molding her as if she were red clay. “She will be of great use to you. For how long I can’t say. We’ll make the best of . . .”

  Welcome hallucination suffocated David’s senses, eclipsed the violation of sanity before him. He floated, as if the floor were water. The room warped as if it were an image painted on a flapping sheet. David could move. He felt his body as a weight he knew only from its sudden absence. He walked, and despite his weightlessness, the ground gave way under him like loose sand. He followed a red snake that floated in his vision like noon sun streaming through his eyelids. It took him to a place he knew was safe.

  Dreams moved like föhn winds through the ether, carrying seeds of madness and obsession in the night the way summer winds carry milk-weed strands over green meadows.

  The whisper of damnation touched sleeping minds, and people dreamed of a magnificent white beast, the embodiment of purity and strength of redemption. They coursed the beast, running joyously with neighbours and lovers and friends through dark woods until they caught the animal, felled it, and were made clean, whole and redeemed by its blood, and by the power of its glowing, divine horn.

  Morning brought to them a heavy sadness, and a vague memory of salvation and innocence they had lost.

  David woke to the smell of urine.

  He was curled in a foetal ball in the house’s entryway, beneath the line of hooks that had once held his family’s winter coats, but now looked so barren with only his coat hanging on one of them. The smell came from him, from his jeans. He was relieved, in a way he could not fully understand, that he didn’t care.

  David stood, went out to the yard, and crawled on his belly through dead November leaves, smelling, tasting, feeling them, rubbing them on his face, drinking in the sanity they represented, their naturalness. He sobbed. Whimpered. Then turned over on his back and looked at the glory, the sanity, the God-decreed order of an autumn morning sky.

  “I’m losing my mind,” he thought. “I’m going crazy. Demented. My blood’s rotting my brain. Beethoven must have felt like this, going deaf. Losing his music bit by bit. But he had his sanity. He didn’t face this. I don’t have much time.”

  He stood and looked down at himself.

  “God. What am I becoming?”

  He thought of the homeless men he’d seen in so many cities, suffering from AIDS dementia and from hepatic conditions like his own, because they had destroyed their livers with drink. They stank of piss. They were dirty. They were covered with leaves from the parks they slept in.

  He went in the house to wash. To work. To escape the meaningless, brutal fate of mumbling, premature senility that awaited him.

  Amduscias the Prince settled in a wooded hill that overlooked the home of the little conjurer who had called him. The place was special to the conjurer; he could smell the man’s spirit invested among the oaks.

  His pursuers could not reach him here, in the Living World. Not unless they were called. But they would find him, eventually, and continue their chase as avatars moving through the bodies of others, unless he found safe harbour within a willing human soul.

  The little conjurer had a ripe soul. Fragrant. Full of vibrancy and poetic insight. The prince could use it as a shield and as a weapon, create within it a fortified tower from which he could attack. He would cleave to and cleave through the man’s soul, make it a source of elán to face those who hunted him and crush them for their arrogance in taking arms against him. He would descend upon them as the Great Archangel who routed him and his followers had descended, just before The Expulsion.

  It was a simple matter of time before the little conjurer capitulated, before he invited the prince to transmigrate into the chamber of his soul where his music was born, into the realm of his spirit where the prince would have complete dominion. Forced possession would shatter his soul, make it useless.

  Soon the sickness of the conjurer, or the desperation it inspired, would vaporize the rich metal of his will. All just a matter of time.

  Rather than stay idle as he waited, the prince summoned a cruel and early spring to the wood, calling forth new buds from the dead trees and drawing new shoots from the hard soil. From another grove of oaks to the south, he summoned the welcoming and comforting sounds of a brook. He waited for migrating birds to come settle here, unable to resist the new and vibrant green of the wood and the stolen music of the brook, unable to leave a place they would know as their journey’s end.

  And in the coming nights, he’d take great pleasure watching them freeze to death.

  David’s fountain pen glided over the staff paper.

  The requiem’s first movement would be carried by the piano, creating a foundation for the sound of snow translated as music. Wagner’s Das Rheingold was his model; he would invoke sky and snow as acoustic collage the way Wagner had invoked the slow, deep power of a river. The piano would build a layer of sound echoing the heartbeat and breath of the person hearing the snow. Slow heartbeat, quiet breath . . .

  David had found the pen on the living room floor, beside a stack of freshly transcribed notations: copies of the sheets he had destroyed.

  . . . breath that is soon joined with the breath of the sky, articulated by a French horn . . .

  Several steps away, he’d found a moist, thick bloodstain.

  . . . and the breath of the sky would fall in harmony with the steady notes of a flute . . .

  The bloodstain had the vague outline of a small human body.

  (“She’ll be of great use to you.”)

  . . . and the flute would change, creating a counterpoint to the piano and the French horn . . .

  (“A little aid to help with your composing.”)

  . . . a counterpoint that would parallel the opening of the senses of the person hearing the snow . . .

  David undid his stiff, brown bandage, to see if his cut could have produced enough blood to make a stain that size.

 
(“Watch what is possible when two agents meet to create something new and wonderful.”)

  . . . and then soft notes of a guitar would paint the movement of snow-flakes falling through still air . . .

  The wound was closed.

  (“Let me give you a gift.”)

  . . . soon joined by another guitar to suggest layers of snow . . .

  And the joints of David’s legs no longer ached.

  (“You will feel like a new man in the morning.”)

  David’s hand jerked; the nub of the pen cut through the staff paper.

  “It didn’t happen,” he said out loud. He paced as dusk filled the room, made arguments to himself that what he had experienced was delirium. When he had convinced himself, he sat down to work again.

  But could not focus.

  The feelings of guilt and unfulfilled obligation were too great for him to bear. He went to the trash and fished out the soaked, bloody rags with which he’d cleaned away the stain. He buried them in the yard, straining with the shovel to break the hard soil.

  The pleading eyes of the torn woman stayed with him though, well into the night.

  A mother looks at her beautiful child, and wonders how she could ever be worthy to care for her.

  A man laments the death of his sister ten years before, bemoaning the injustice that she had died in the car wreck that had spared him.

  Despair and a sense of worthlessness spread like contagion. All who live within ten miles of the hilly grove resurrected by the prince feel it . . . some fleetingly, some for long, heavy hours.

  A farmer feels an accusing guilt for killing a fox that had been preying on his chickens; the farmer’s son wishes he’d never been born, and had become such a burden to his parents. The boy’s mother hates herself for placing her father in a nursing home.

  Whisperings are carried to the shadow regions of their minds by creatures of a deeper shadow than they could ever know. And with these whisperings come a hint of redemption, pulled from the rich landscapes hidden within their minds. Landscapes they have known in dreams, or glimpsed with the mind’s eye in stories they’d been told when they had been very small.