The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

by Brian Stableford

  When the Chevalier eventually appeared, however, he definitely appeared to be alone, and the cloak of darkness shrouding the butte seemed preternaturally soundless and inert.

  When he came into the garret, having been admitted to the house and escorted up the stairs by the Englishman, he barely glanced at the boy before hurrying to where I sat, still perched on the stool beside the writing-desk. “Are you hurt, my friend?” he asked me.

  I rubbed my sore neck reflexively, but said: “No, I’m quite well—although the vase that the boy smashed over my head was a lumpen thing with far more substance than elegance. I should have had the good taste to prefer porcelain.”

  “I examined the scene,” Dupin told me, “and deduced what had happened. The Prefect has been busy all day at Palaiseau’s apartment and the Théâtre des Délassements-Comique, for two murders amounts to a scandal, especially in view of the cancellation of the play. Mr. Hood has come under suspicion, along with other members of the cast, but the fact that the boy is missing has only caused consternation thus far. No one suspects him; indeed, everyone swears that he is above suspicion. Tomorrow, things will be different.” He turned to the soprano as he pronounced the last sentence, and their gazes locked, as if embarking upon a contest of Mesmeric will-power.

  “He claims to be Erich Zann reincarnated,” I supplied, helpfully. “He has the violin. He wants you to play it—or, more strictly speaking, he wants it to play you—when he breaches the boundary for a second time.”

  Dupin took this information aboard without a flicker of surprise. “The author of the deposition was confused,” he remarked. “He thought that Zann continue to play the violin long after he was dead—but it would probably be more accurate to say that the violin continued to manipulate his corpse, like a marionette. I suspect that the greater fraction of Zann’s soul had migrated long before—but I would not have believed it possible for the remainder to infect a new-born babe.”

  “Infect?” the boy retorted. “It was not even a matter of possession, but a matter of becoming.”

  “How did you do it?” Dupin demanded.

  “It was a stormy night. The air was humid and the wind blew in capricious gusts. Sound can carry a long way in such conditions, if properly guided. The infant heard my music, and responded, with the innocent delight of which only babes in arms, uncorrupted by experience, are capable.”

  “You did not do that entirely by your own art,” Dupin said, coldly.

  “No,” the boy admitted. “I had help, from within the dream-dimensions. I made a pact, and was promised everything my heart desired. I have not been disappointed, thus far, although I needed time to awaken to my opportunities—and my responsibilities.”

  “Now the time has come for you to fulfill your part of the bargain,” Dupin said, not even bothering to phrase it as a question.

  “I shall have a lifetime to do that,” the boy replied, “and I shall require every minute—but that will not interfere with my heart’s desire. Quite the contrary.”

  “Heaven and Hell,” Dupin observed, mildly. “Simultaneous, inextricable and in harmony. Horror and bliss. Horror in bliss. The ultimate dream of Apollonius, made flesh.”

  “You have not forgotten the lessons you read to me all those years ago,” the child remarked. “That’s good. Have you brought my music with you?”

  “I burned it,” Dupin said. “When I realized what it was, already knowing what it might do, I had no alternative but to destroy it. If you wanted it played, you should not have divided your legacy—you should have left the whole of it to Palaiseau.”

  “I did not want it played,” the child said. “I wanted it kept safe, until I returned. I wanted it preserved—and who better to preserve it than an avid collector. I knew that I could trust Palaiseau to hoard the violin; I thought I could trust you to hoard the music with equal care. If the accounts of your present habits and condition that I have received are trustworthy, though, you burned more than my manuscript—you have burned a part of your own soul. You are only half a man now, although that half seems to have been exaggerated out of all proportion, into a grotesque caricature. You are ratiocination personified, according to your friend, a rigorous logician who has turned his back on music, on beauty and the sublime alike.”

  Dupin glanced at me. “My friend is too generous,” he said. “I have my flaws, like all men.”

  “I know,” the boy replied. “I’m relying on the fact. I know you too, remember. I know what you are, not merely what you pretend to be.”

  “But isn’t that irrelevant?” Dupin asked. “Since your music has not been preserved, in spite of your best efforts, you’ll now be unable to fulfill your part of the diabolical bargain, won’t you?” He was teasing; he knew why he had been brought here. He had guessed long before I had told him.

  “You know better than to call the bargain diabolical, my old friend,” the boy replied, “and you know that I have means of compensation. My fingers are too small to collaborate effectively with the violin, but yours are not—and even if you have not touched such an instrument in twenty years, your fingers will recall the positions they need to adopt. If you are not exactly a human Stradivarius...well, neither was Palaiseau. And if Bazailles is not an Erich Zann, or even a Giuseppe Tartini, he has a pliable mind, similarly equipped with all the necessary training.”

  So saying, the child removed the cloth that had been laid over the violin. Beside it on the polished sideboard, the bow lay across a manuscript: the sheet music for a capriccio, a sonata or a cantata. I did not doubt that the notes had been inscribed by Bazailles’ hand, and the orchestration guided by Bazailles’ intelligence, but nor did I doubt that its composition had been inspired, in the truest sense of the word.

  The old, rusty music stand that had lain unheeded in the corner of the room for so many years was not so corroded that it could not be unfolded and erected. Hood set it up, in response to a flick of the child’s forefinger, and placed the music on it before returning to his armchair.

  “Don’t get up,” the boy said to me. “I can turn the pages myself.” Then he picked up the Stradivarius, and handed it to Dupin.

  Dupin took it meekly, but not because he was entranced.

  “You can remember how to read music, I take it?” the soprano said, his tone mocking as well as challenging.

  “I’m sure than any hesitations and mistakes my mind might commit will be corrected,” Dupin replied. “I don’t doubt that the instrument knows its own art well enough.”

  The monster wearing the appearance of a child laughed, as if spontaneously and sincerely. It was beautiful, sparkling laughter, like the breath of Heaven, but it chilled me to the bone and made my flesh creep.

  Six church clocks chimed ten, not quite simultaneously, but with just sufficient distance between the strokes to impart a strange vibrato to the frosty air. The dull cloud covering the sky had finally begun to release clustered snowflakes—the first snow of the winter—which drifted idly down to Earth, those closest to the roof of the strange high house illuminated by the candlelight in the garret.

  The boy went to the window and opened the casement, drawing it into the room as far as it would go. The shutters were still thrown back to their full extent. There was no sudden blast of cold air into the room, though; the cold air outside was like a soft, still cushion supporting the bloated snowflakes.

  Feathers from the angels’ wings, I thought, in English, recalling an old American saw. I wondered whether Mr. Hood had ever heard it, in his own homeland.

  “Play,” commanded the infernal child. Evidently, he was too impatient to wait for the propitious midnight hour.

  Dupin obediently raised his bow, and applied it to the strings of the Stradivarius.

  I recognized the chords of the piece that Palaiseau had been playing, night after night for several weeks, in the climax of La Cantate du Diable, during the crucial dream-sequence. I wondered whether the Devil had been slightly out of breath on the night when he ha
d had to race back to the theater after killing Clamart, in time to make his entrance through the vamp-trap.

  Then the soprano began to sing—but I recognized, with equal ease, that these were not Frédéric Soulié’s words. Indeed, I was not absolutely convinced that they were words at all. They were not French, nor Italian, nor German, and I was morally certain that they did not belong to any other Earthly language. They were unearthly in more ways than one. They were beautiful in the extreme—more beautiful than any words that I had ever heard or read.

  For once, I was grateful for the flaw that left me relatively unmoved by everyday music. I could not remain unmoved by this music, but at least I was not moved to the extent that I might have been, had I been a more sensitive individual. I pitied the placid Mr, Hood, and the fellow-tenant of Zann’s previous incarnation, who had never recovered from his ordeal.

  The external cold began to creep into the room then, insinuating itself more by conduction than convection in the windless space. It reached out insidiously, like an eerie caress, to envelop me, as it was doubtless enveloping Hood, Dupin and the reincarnate genius of Erich Zann. I was already chilled to the bone, but this was a new chill, more terrifying still.

  The music feinted in the direction of the pleasurably paradisal to begin with, but that did not last long; the violin, it seemed, was as impatient to retune itself as the marvelous boy was to come into his inheritance. The instrument had been waiting a long time for this moment, forced by circumstance to be patient, and it was thirsty now to reach the extremes of beauty and sublimity, where delight fused with terror, and beauty with horror, and the boundaries drawn by the heroic human mind between reality and dream began to shift and break down.

  Outside the window, something stirred, although the illuminated snowflakes continue to drift with the same entrance indolence as before. It was not the molecules of the air that were stirring, impelled by any material wind, but the very fabric of the space containing that air. The snowflakes did not begin to dash and whirl about, as they would have done in a capricious wind, but they did began to tremble, flicker and sparkle. Their distribution in the sky was evidently random, but within that randomness emerged the suggestion of a form: a form outside space, which space was not contrived to accommodate.

  I did not suppose that the nascent individual was Nyarlathotep itself, or even an avatar thereof, but I was morally certain that it participated in the essential nature and quality of that ultimate chaos, that ultimate defiance of everything ordered...including—and perhaps especially—the fragile and futile order of the conscious, waking human mind. It was quintessentially unwholesome—and yet, by the elementary nature of its contradiction, it seemed to confirm the holistic nature of reality, the identity of all the opposites that human consciousness endeavored to identify and separate, for its rational convenience.

  It seemed to confirm that nature, together with the conclusion that even a man like Auguste Dupin could not deny or defy it—but I clung to hope, entranced as I was. Dupin’s very meekness, his polite acceptance of his role, promised that he was not yet done with, that he had a trick up his slightly threadbare sleeve.

  Even so, the voice and the accompanying notes of the retuned violin began to crawl into my heart and soul, filling them with ecstasy—not the false ecstasy of human hopes and loving desires, which attempted to abandon fear and pain and sorrow and horror in search of some idyllic purification, but the true ecstasy that embraced and embodied fear and pain and sorrow and horror, and restored the wholeness of experience and perfection, mundanity and vision, reality and dream, life and death.

  For a second, or perhaps two—though they seemed to stretch far beyond the confines of Earthly time—I believed that I understood the effect that the music of Erich Zann had been reaching for, of its own accord, and in defiance, in the first climax of Zann’s life, of its own composer and player. I understood how very unfortunate, and how perversely fortunate, Zann had been in having been deprived of a voice in his previous incarnation.

  He was not deprived of a voice now; his music had moved beyond the confines of the Stradivarius violin, and the unfettered human imagination.

  Then the monsters came in earnest, threatening to invade the human world through the window of that absurdly-perched garret, in fulfillment of the pact that Erich Zann had made. They came to bring a flood of horror into the world, with all the corollary delight implied by the fullness of the term. No human could imagine why they had to do it, but I understood that they were acting under compulsion.

  At that point in a similar séance, fifteen years before, Erich Zann’s flesh had rebelled against the enormity of his own daring, and he had tried to play the violin that had been playing him. He had entered into a contest that had killed him, but he had kept the monsters at bay. He had lost the fight, and won it. The violin had continued to play him even after he was dead, but the music had been futile, unaccompanied.

  This time, Zann reborn had no intention of doing any such thing, and no capacity even to attempt it. This time however, Auguste Dupin was plying the bow and pressing the strings of the Stradivarius. This time, he was the one who rebelled, and set out, heroically, to seize control of the educated, bewitched, accursed, ensouled Stradivarius.

  Whether he knew it or not—and I firmly believe that he had always known it, if only on some occult but not-entirely-subconscious level—the Chevalier had been preparing for this moment for fifteen years. He had been very scrupulous in letting musical instruments alone, and extremely scrupulous in retuning his own self. The running scordatura that he attempted now was quite unprecedented, but it was utterly logical, rational and analytical, and in that sense, he had practiced it a million times before.

  Apollonius of Tyana, the self-styled Abbé Apollonius and Erich Zann might have insisted that human beings were fundamentally undivided, and that the unending battle fought between reason and emotion, will and appetite, demonstrated by its very inconclusiveness that no such division could ever truly be effected, but Auguste Dupin did not admit that and would not admit it now. His somnimusicality was not ecstatic at all, but purely physiological, and he brought all of his mental and moral resources to bear on the contest in which he engaged against his would-be possessor.

  Dupin launched an attack, with all his inner might, against the Stradivarius. Refusing any longer to be played, he insisted on becoming the player—the determinant not only of the notes the instrument was playing, but of the uncanny song that the reincarnate, fully articulate Erich Zann was singing.

  He had no music of his own to play, but he did not need any; the point was not to play a melody but to interrupt and shatter one.

  Auguste Dupin was, not merely by training but by nature, a disentangler, a man possessed of acumen. He attacked the play of the violin not as an item of music, a question of aesthetics, but as a conundrum, a puzzle to be solved. He set out to fulfill the true mission of the human mind, which was not to seek the horrific fulfillment of bliss but to analyze and separate, not by way of cultivating unwholesomeness, after the fashion of the Crawling Chaos, but to contrive a neat and orderly division. He set out, in his attack, to undo the knot that had been contrived in the weft of fate by Erich Zann’s music and Erich Zann’s reincarnation: to smooth out the boundary between the real world and the unruly dimensions of dream.

  For a moment, everything hung in the balance. The snowflakes drifting outside the window seemed to stop in the course of their eldritch evolution: to stop falling; to stop shimmering; to stop sparkling.

  The cold was so deeply enmeshed in my soul and my bones that I was afraid that Dupin had left it too late, that he had not solved the puzzle in time. I was terrified that the monsters had got through. It was a truly beautiful fear, a truly sublime terror; I almost contrived to experience the combination as Erich Zann yearned to experience it.

  Then the boy’s divine and demonic soprano voice broke.

  On one level, that was all that happened; his voice broke, as the vo
ices of adolescents routinely do. The incredible note that he was sounding turned into an all-too-credible croak, and Erich Zann’s magical cantata abruptly turned into a farce.

  The window, of its own accord, slammed shut.

  The individual who no longer even seemed to be a child clutched his throat, and collapsed.

  Hood leapt to his feet, and screamed.

  Dupin stopped playing. He bent down, and set the violin down on the floor, as reverently as it deserved. It was, after all, a Stradivarius.

  Then he turned to me, and simply said, without any preamble or particular emphasis: “Run for your life.”

  I ran—or, at least, my legs ran. I bounded down five flights of stairs, taking them four at a time, without even looking round to check that Dupin was hard on my heels. He was, though; as I burst out of the door of the house, grateful that its lock had been excised and that it was incapable of offering any material resistance, I tried to stop and turn, and the Chevalier cannoned into the back of me, rendered helpless by mere momentum.

  We fell into a horribly ungainly heap, with our limbs entangled, and had to scramble along the frozen ground like a pair of broken-legged crabs in order to get clear of the vast cascade of rubble that the house had suddenly become.