Father Adolph found Sebastian sitting on the steps in front of the Inn and staring back up the mountain. "He will come to you, Sebastian, as he said he would. There is nothing you can do to change what has already happened."
"I know, and yet I feel as if I have somehow failed him. He was the focus of everything I've worked for, of my dreams. He dragged me out of my comfortable life, away from my comfortable music, and he showed me the world. Everything I am, the very nature of my life, I owe to Klaus.
"Now he faces something that I can't even begin to conceive the implications of, and I am powerless to help. Somewhere up on that mountain, he is in pain, and all I can do is wonder, What will happen to me? I feel like I'm betraying him, even as I sit here."
"You will do well at whatever you choose to do," Father Adolph said, "and you will be able to thank the strength that you have gained through your association with your friend. You still have friends, very good, strong, and talented friends, and you will be fine. There is so much to be experienced in the present," he concluded, turning to follow Sebastian's gaze up the mountain, "why would you waste your moments in brooding over things that are only tomorrow's dreams?"
Sebastian didn't answer, but he rose and joined the old priest as he returned to the celebration. Things had died down somewhat, and most of those who remained upright and awake were gathered around a large bonfire. Damon was playing his guitar and Claudia was attempting to sing along, though she knew few of the lyrics. Men and women alike were clapping and laughing and urging them on and Sebastian moved quickly to join them. If nothing else could help his mood, the music could.
They played and sang late into the night, and one by one the villagers drifted away, back into their own simple worlds and lives and loves. In the end, Sebastian, Damon, Peyton, Father Adolph, Claudia and her parents, and two other die-hard drunks who held bottles still half-filled with wine were the only ones who remained. The dawn was not far off, and Sebastian was beginning to wonder if the night would pass with no word from Klaus.
They all heard the sound at once, and fell silent as if by mutual consensus. It was very faint from where they sat, and the comfortable buzz of the wine fogging their senses made it even harder to distinguish from the sounds of the surrounding night. It was music, and deep inside, they knew who was making it.
Sebastian rose, and the others followed. They wound their way through the village streets, past the old chapel, and on into the valley at the mountain's foot. Above them, illuminated by the nearly full moon, loomed the stage, the place where the horror had all begun. On that stage, his parents flanking him stood Klaus.
He held an ancient, large-bodied guitar in his hands, and his head was thrown back so that his eyes glared at the heavens. His mother held a lute, and his father merely stood there, staring out over the small audience in brooding silence.
Sebastian didn't recognize the melody Klaus was playing. In that place, at that moment, it was mesmerizing. He wasn't singing, but there was an air of anticipation in the air that made it clear that he planned to.
They probably should have run. What stood above them wasn't really Klaus, not completely. His veins ran with borrowed blood, and his parents, standing at his side, had been somewhat more and less than human for decades. Their kinship was through the music, and they shared in it only through Klaus. Ignoring the danger, Sebastian and the others sat down, like adoring children at the feet of a master storyteller, and listened, waiting to hear what destiny would place before them. It was a moment of magic.
Klaus lowered his gaze to take them all in with a sardonic grin. Then he spoke.
"I had always hoped my final performance would be to a packed house," he said slowly, his voice ringing out with incredible volume over such a distance. The echoing acoustics of the mountainside aided him, but still the effect was eerie.
"I came here with vague hopes of finding the answers to my past. I wanted to make my peace with this place, with the memory of my parents. I wanted to be free.
"All of that, and more, I have done." As he spoke, his fingers continued to dance in intricate patterns across the strings, accompanying his words – accentuating them. "I have traveled many years and many miles to reach this point," he continued. "Not all of them were easy, but there are those among you who have done what you could to make them bearable.
"Sebastian. You have been a friend beyond what I deserved. You have taken my moods and my abuses, and you have brought my focus back time and again to the music. In all of this, with all that has happened, it comes down to that. The music has been my life – and you have kept that life true."
Tears filled Sebastian's eyes, but he kept his silence.
"Damon. Nobody but you ever truly understood my desire for perfection. Nobody but you has felt the intensity of the challenge, the impossibility of reaching that one glorious moment when nothing could be improved. With all the near-magical ability I have gained in this new state of existence, still I cannot match your performance, not the emotion or the purity. You are an artist, and I will perhaps miss that as much as the music itself.
"Peyton. There has never been a more solid, impossible to hate mass of good spirits walking this earth. When life seemed unbearable, when there seemed no reason to go on, you could bring our spirits back to that level of fun and harmony that makes living worthwhile.
"Your life is like your music. You have moments of pounding, boisterous bravado and subtle rhythms that are hard to trace. Every time we thought you didn't understand, or that you were not being serious, you would demonstrate that you were actually beyond our own thoughts and into the beat of the next. I am glad to see that you have at last found a happiness that is less fleeting than those moments we've found on the road.
"I am happy for you all. I've tried to give something of myself in return over these years, as selfish as I have been. To Sebastian, I gave the world, the freedom to explore new things and the self-confidence to enjoy them. To Damon, I've given challenges to feed the flame that keeps him going, new levels to strive for. To Peyton, I've given the balance to his free spirits that has kept him on an even keel until now. I see that that balance point is now filled by another, and I am glad.
"This village has lived too long under a shadow of evil, and this mountain has too long been the subject of bad dreams and fireside horror tales.
"Now I'm faced with yet another challenge. There is one last performance to make, and as a family." He let the guitar hang loosely on the strap that held it around his neck and pulled his parents close on either side. "We will meet that challenge together.
"We have had to do a lot of catching up in a single evening, but there are things best communicated in silence and closeness, and we have made our peace. None of us wishes to be like the one who created us, a burden and a nightmare on our living friends, or a shadow to cloud their children's futures.
"My mother has spoken to me of simple things, hearth and home, her own family, her friends long dead and buried. My father has wished for the sun. Just once, after all these years, to see the sun a final time. They are simple wishes, it would seem, and so impossible to fill that it makes my heart scream.
"For myself, I wanted only to sing and to play again, to feel the music flow through me and to feel the eyes of an audience as my message finds its way across space and thought to change their lives. That is what the music has always been about. It must be memorable, important to audience and musician alike, or it has failed.
"I have written a farewell song. It is a song of daylight, to friends and home, to history and the peace of a future at rest. There are no words. My mother will join me, and my father will, as always, stand beside us and be our strength. Farewell, my friends, and thank you for my life."
They began to play. At first Sebastian couldn't concentrate on the music. His tears ran freely, and he swayed slowly back and forth as sobs racked his thin frame. He didn't know what to expect from the next few moments. He felt the initial warmth of the rising sun cree
p over the trees behind them, but Klaus didn't stop, not for a second.
The music was breathtaking. Every ounce of what Sebastian remembered about his friend poured forth through his dancing fingers, and his mother's dreams, for her son, her family, and herself blended in. Visions shot through Sebastian's mind, plucked from memory by the cascading notes and flung to the morning sky in tribute. None of them could move. No word was spoken. If they could have stilled their breath in that moment, they would have.
Klaus and his parents stood on the small plateau, shaded by the overhanging rock of the mountain below. The sun began its slow, creeping progress across the field where they sat, finding first Peyton and Claudia, then the others, and finally stealing across Sebastian's shoulders and warming his scalp. His heart almost stopped as Klaus' fingers faltered, just for a second. He shivered, as if in great pain, and his smile gave way to a grimace of sheer concentration.
His fingers returned to the strings, and he finished with a flourish, forcing his hands to the task though it was obvious that his very being was fighting him, screaming for escape, for salvation. Perhaps that was what he planned to give it.
Before any of them realized what the three on the state were going to do, moving as one unit, Klaus and his mother dropped their instruments and clasped hands. His father took each of their free hands in his own. The three embraced then, holding on so tightly that Sebastian was afraid they might crush one another, and they leaped.
Just like that, they leaped from the cliff into the bright, shining light of the sun. Those below sat entranced, gazes locked on their hurtling forms. In a spontaneous explosion of white-hot flame, they plummeted to the earth. There was no sound, not even screams, at first. When they did come, they came from those who remained. Klaus and his family were gone.
The ground where they had landed blazed momentarily, like wood soaked in gasoline, and then there was nothing. Only a pile of ash remained, a small crater, the grave of a meteor the world had known as Klaus.
Sebastian knelt at the side of what little remained, his head bowed and tears streaming down his face, and Father Adolph joined him, one hand laid softly on the young musician's shoulder.
Damon was the only one who seemed able to remain upright. He staggered to his feet, pushed away from Melissa softly and walked away around the side of the mountain. They saw him a moment later, silhouetted in the final shadowed moments of darkness on the ledge above. He picked up the guitar that Klaus had dropped, and he turned to face the sun. His eyes were such a wash of sadness and of tragic loss that what was left of Sebastian's heart melted.
Damon slipped the strap over his shoulder, placed his fingers on the frets of the ancient instrument, and played.
It wasn't the beautiful, transcendent melody that Klaus had left ingrained in their minds, but a flow of raw emotion, transmitted straight from his heart to his fingers.
The rest of them, each in his or her way, returned to their mourning. There would be time enough, soon, to sort out the remnants of their lives. It was a moment for tribute , and for remembrance.
In the end, it wasn't the star that Klaus aspired to, as they had known deep down from the start. It was the meteor. He was beautiful when he burned.
About the Author
David Niall Wilson has been writing and publishing horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction since the mid-eighties. An ordained minister, once President of the Horror Writer's Association and multiple recipient of the Bram Stoker Award, his novels include Maelstrom, The Mote in Andrea's Eye, Deep Blue, the Grails Covenant Trilogy, Star Trek Voyager: Chrysalis, Except You Go Through Shadow, This is My Blood, Ancient Eyes, On the Third Day, The Orffyreus Wheel, and Vintage Soul – Book One of the DeChance Chronicles. The Stargate Atlantis novel “Brimstone,” written with Patricia Lee Macomber is due in of 2010. He has over 150 short stories published in anthologies, magazines, and five collections, the most recent of which were "Defining Moments" published in 2007 by WFC Award winning Sarob Press, and the currently available “Ennui & Other States of Madness,” from Dark Regions Press. His work has appeared in and is due out in various anthologies and magazines. David lives and loves with Patricia Lee Macomber in the historic William R. White House in Hertford, NC with their children, Billy, Zach, Zane, and Katie, and occasionally their genius college daughter Stephanie.
You can find more about David and his work at his website:
Glimpes Into An Overactive Mind
You can find more of David's work on Kindle and other e-Readers, as well as audiobooks at: Crossroad Press
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