“The vertical.”
“Right. They could only see what they were used to seeing.”
My hands played the opening notes of the friska.
Could one learn to think vertically?
Someone pounded on the door. “Elise! Elise!”
I pushed back the piano bench, walked across the polished floor and opened the door.
She stood in the hallway.
My blood ran hot, then cold, and I staggered against the wall.
I knew why the shadows had come.
* * *
Jane didn’t recognize me, of course.
Her red hair was shorter than I recalled. Faint lines tracked the skin at the edges of her eyes and mouth.
Her eyes held a new stillness. But her features were as fine as in my memories of her, her skin like the petals of an ivory orchid.
I’d made love to her on a night long ago. Duty had driven me forth to sire a half-mortal child and deliver it to the warring tribe of Faerie.
But I had fallen in love with Jane even as I convinced her to love me.
After our single night together, I’d stolen her memories and fled, putting as much distance between us as I could. When the Old Ones came after me, I didn’t want them to find her.
Deliver a child to war and darkness for all eternity?
What father could do that to the child of the woman he loved?
I abdicated my role as war minstrel. Defected to the world of mortals, leaving both love and hatred behind.
But Beethoven had been playing on the radio that night. Für Elise. I’d commented on it, whispered the name in her ear. She must have held that one memory against everything else and named the child Elise.
Now she barely gave me a glance before pushing past me into the apartment.
“Elise!”
Her voice was sharper than I remembered. What had become of my once-joyous Jane? Had my betrayal, still buried deep in her psyche, taken the heights from her?
Had I taught her to think horizontally?
Or was I giving myself too much credit?
My gaze drank in the graceful fall of her feet, the stir of her hair at the nape of her ivory neck, her straight, taut back.
A glimpse of gold at her throat showed me she still wore the necklace I’d left with her.
Oh, God. Jane.
Elise ran to her. “Mother!”
“Baby, why’d you leave me?” Jane set the girl away from her and frowned. “What made you go outside?”
“When I went through the lobby I heard music from outside. It was very pretty.”
Jane took Elise’s hand and faced me. “She’s always been like that. Can’t say no to any kind of song. The wind. The birds. Thank you so much for taking care of her.”
“My pleasure.”
Elise stopped at the door and tugged on her mother’s hand. “Mr. Smith, will you teach me to play the piano?”
* * *
That night I poured myself a giant snifter of brandy and prowled the apartment. I was surrounded by the flotsam of a life lived through possessions because I could allow myself nothing else. Persian rugs on the floor, Rembrandts on the wall. Wedgwood crystal and pewter plates and Chinese porcelain. The Steinway. I took them with me every time I fled, leaving behind friends and lovers.
I brushed my hands along the keys in the upper register, creating a delicate tinkle that wafted through the four-room suite.
Clowns. Despite the soreness of my heart, despite the longing for Jane that had arisen again when she stood at my door, I almost laughed.
Liszt, you rascal. How had I not managed to find your humor before? It was there in the tripping grace notes, the marked accents, the rapid staccato. You’d even written it in one place. Piano scherzando.
Tentatively, I played the opening measures of the friska. But the notes were weak rather than graceful, pale instead of sweet.
Commanding myself to be patient, I moved my hands to the bass keys, shaped my fingers for A-minor. I played the scale in the Russian pattern, and then the cadences, building myself for the composition I had begun after I left Jane.
My Opus No. 1.
Jane, Jane.
A-minor wouldn’t serve me. The melancholy notes moved past sorrow and into something darker. Suddenly I was playing a Requiem. Mozart’s, arranged for piano.
I slammed my hands on the keys, drawing forth a discordant sound, bringing a bitter, warmonger’s smile to my face. Another chord, and another, and a shape began to take form. Black shadows stretched across a battlefield. Bodies crumpled everywhere, bearing stricken faces, horrified eyes, and terrible, terrible wounds plucked at by carrion crows.
I pushed myself away from the Steinway and buried my face in my hands.
I had been raised to inspire the troops. To turn idle thoughts to war. To harden hearts and sharpen blades and strengthen fists. In the darkness of the Old Ones, I labored like Vulcan at his forge.
Seeding black flowers of war, blooms of disease, whole forests of misunderstanding.
But then I’d been sent forth to create a child. A child with my gift for music, but whose genes would add a mortal flair. After all, who better to compose the music of death than those who must—by their nature—die?
I tossed down the rest of the brandy and resumed my prowling. Outside, the shadows retreated. Waiting.
Gathering strength.
The Old Ones were on my trail, and for the first time in eight and a half years, I thought they might get me.
I drank more. I plunged into the kind of stupor I had not visited since I left Jane.
But through that stupor, one thought chased me like a hound of hell, demanding that I turn and face it, deal with it, live or die with it.
I was the only one who could save Elise.
* * *
Sunshine poured through the south-facing windows of my apartment.
The hammering of my heart separated itself from the beating in my head and revealed itself to be the sound of someone pounding at the door.
I rolled over, dragged myself to my knees.
The knocking continued. “Mr. Smith?”
“I’m coming, dammit.” I found the couch, hauled myself upright, and staggered to the door.
Jane wore blue jeans and a black turtleneck and a determined expression.
“I’m sorry, did I wake you?”
“No, no, I was just—” I waved a hand airily toward the piano, “composing. Come in.”
I pointed her toward a chair near the windows, where the sunshine could lie at her feet. I scooped up the brandy snifter and hurried into the kitchen.
“Coffee?”
“No, thank you, Mr. Smith. It’s about Elise.”
Her tone warned me that I might not like what followed. Abandoning my own need for coffee, I took a chair across from her. “She’s a lovely girl.”
“She is. Talented. Smart. And—” Her eyes finally met mine. “And she’s dying.”
“Dear God.”
“She’s in the hospital. She’s been sick for months. Early this morning she collapsed. Last night’s excitement was too much for her.”
“But there must be something they can do!”
“They’ve tried everything.”
Jane must have seen the horror on my face. Where I should have been comforting her, she suddenly reached across and took my hand. “She has time, still. Months! Perhaps as much as two years.”
* * *
After Jane left, I found the footprint in the magic dust I’d scattered on my balcony. Leaning over, I saw the same immense prints on the faerie dust sprinkling Elise’s balcony. In front of each pad, a deep impression of a claw.
The Old Ones had no need to rip me into pieces like Orpheus mourning his Eurydice. They’d done a much more exquisite job by luring Elise into my path and then ensuring I would never see her grow. They were the cause of Elise’s cancer. They were the bad thing in her blood.
There were two ways to save her. Send her into Faerie, where her d
isease would stop its fatal destruction.
Cure her by letting them take her into the darkness, as Hades took Eurydice.
Or I could bargain with them. Go in Elise’s stead.
Once they had me, they would make me play again.
And there would be war.
* * *
In the late afternoon, Elise came home.
I stood at my window and watched Jane wheel her from the taxi into the apartment building. I watched to make sure no shadows leaped.
Just before she disappeared beneath the awning, she glanced up. She couldn’t see me, but she waved anyway. I clenched the curtain.
* * *
Later, I sat at the piano, frowning at the keys.
What arrogance, to think that I could escape my fate. That I was destined for good, rather than evil.
Did that make me evil, or merely Evil’s instrument?
I rose and drew on my coat, prepared to make the rounds yet again to see that my charms still held. If Elise had months—maybe years!—then I would make sure she got them. I didn’t dare leave her now. She was exposed, innocent, ripe for the taking. But I would give them a greater battle than they thought possible.
As I reached for the doorknob, I heard a tremendous crash in the hallway, followed by a scream.
I threw the door open and raced outside.
Jane lay huddled on the floor just outside the elevator.
Beside her, one of the immense black urns had shattered into pieces.
I hurried down to her, but as I neared, I drew back in horror.
She lay curled into herself. Still alive, her left hand clutching feebly at the rug, her right hand pressed to her throat. Blood seeped through her fingers. She looked at me with dull gray eyes.
In the spilled dirt from the urn, I saw a vast paw print.
For a moment I couldn’t move. Ice crystallized around my heart, and my mind became a thing detached.
“Mr. Smith,” she croaked.
I sped forward and dropped to my knees beside her, pressing my handkerchief to her throat.
“Ah, Jane. What have I done?”
Her eyes showed more worry than fear. “Elise . . .”
“I won’t let anything happen to her. I swear it.”
The blood soaked through the cloth and poured onto my hands. It ran past and drenched my coat. It puddled in vast sheets on the floor around me, crawled in viscous streams toward the elevator.
Enchanted. They’d enchanted her blood to pour like a river through her wound. Even as I watched, she grew pale and luminous as a tropical orchid. The blood diminished to a drip, then stopped altogether.
She died in my arms.
In the distance, sirens wailed.
The elevator door opened and Elise stepped out.
“Mother!”
“Elise, turn around. Go down to your apartment and stay there. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”
I’d placed my strongest charms around Elise’s door and windows. If she were to be safe anywhere, it would be in her own apartment.
“But—”
“Trust me, Elise. You’ll be safe there, but only there.”
“Mother!”
“It’s what your mother would want you to do.”
Trembling, Elise turned her back but made no move toward the elevator. Her thin shoulders shook with her sobs.
“Aren’t there good tribes?” she whispered. “There must be good tribes. I’ve dreamed about them. You’ve got to learn to play for the good faeries.”
“There aren’t any good faeries anymore. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I can’t play music that way. I’ve tried.”
“It’s like the kittens. Remember? You have to think differently.”
* * *
The police took me down to the local station in handcuffs.
I couldn’t blame them. I’d been found holding Jane’s dead body, my clothes covered with her blood.
In my grief, I’d had no time to magick myself with a manifestation of innocence.
They put me in a small, green-painted room with a mirror which I guessed was actually two-way glass, and a metal table with two chairs. The room smelled of sweat and hormones. A detective came in and introduced himself, asked me a lot of questions. It was clearly his role to convince me I couldn’t escape my guilt.
He knew nothing of true guilt.
I waived my Miranda rights, and after a time he tired of my protests of innocence and stomped from the room.
Impatient, I paced. What was happening to Elise while I was caught here? If the Old Ones had breached my outer charms, how much longer would the inner spells hold?
If I could have saved Elise by confessing, I would gladly have gone to jail. But to send her into the darkness while I slowly died in the light? Impossible.
I could not condemn Elise even to save her life.
When the detective returned, he was much subdued.
He said my neighbors had corroborated my story and that I was free to go.
“Just don’t go far, Mr. Smith.”
“No.”
Only to the depths of hell.
* * *
The charms still held, but they had weakened in the time I’d been with the police. I knew it was only a matter of minutes—perhaps as much as an hour— before they failed.
I lit all the candles and turned off the lights. In the warm glow, I opened the windows and door and released the last of the charms protecting my apartment.
I sat at the piano and began to play. Opus No. 1, the composer’s first—and last—composition.
But it wasn’t the Old Ones who arrived. It was Elise.
“Keep playing,” she commanded from inside the door. “For me and my mother.”
My fingers kept moving. “Go back downstairs, Elise! They’re coming.”
“They’ll come for me no matter where I am.”
I touched on A-minor, the melancholy key. Always my favorite. I glided through a cadenza, the notes glimmering like pearls strung along the keys.
“That’s too sad,” she said.
In the corners, the shadows rustled.
“All the minor keys are sad.”
“Then play another kind.”
She sat next to me on the bench, her feet swinging free. She was too small to reach the pedals.
From A-minor, up four half-steps to its related Major, C.
“That’s better,” Elise said. “But it isn’t right.”
The dominant tone, then. Onto G-Major. I played a few notes from Bach’s fugue. Without knowing I’d done it, I went back to the minor key.
Forms loomed inside the door, tall and sinister.
Cold like a breath from the dead soul of winter.
“Stop it!” Elise cried to me. “I saw you at the concert. I looked up and saw you in your box. You were smiling. You were happy.”
“I was.”
“Then play what that man was playing.”
So I played Chopin’s Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor.
A composition by a man who knew that the sorrow of night could be balanced by the sweet taste of moonlight.
I played the sad tones with a richness and warmth that surprised me. Tenerezza. Tenderness.
The creature by the door stepped forward and blew, hard and sharp and long like the wind off a glacier.
The candles sputtered and went out.
Elise’s hand pressed against my arm.
I kept playing. Into the brief animato, I captured a touch of abandon.
But the darkness crept closer.
“The clowns, Mr. Smith,” Elise whispered.
On to the friska. Light and gentle. Up, then down along the full range of the keyboard. Faster and faster.
Every bit of concentration to keep my fingers from tripping over each other.
Beside me, Elise clapped her hands and laughed.
“Those are the clowns. Can’t you see them?”
“Yes. Yes!”
I segued into my own compositi
on. My Opus No. 1.
This time in E-Major.
Basso, then swelling upward, a sparkling sound that reached toward the stars. A noise like a chorus of birds, the wind in the trees, the rumble of waves, pale moonlight resting on the river bank.
A man in love.
The candelabra on the floor beside me burst into flame. In its gleam, I watched my hands in the reflection on the fall board, dancing, dancing.
I played for hours while outside, the world turned gray. I played through fear and past exhaustion, driving back the darkness, composing for my lost love.
And for our child.
The shadows shattered like ice. Gold and silver ribbons of light swirled across the floor and tossed the shards into the air. Slivers of darkness vaporized in the sudden breeze that made the draperies dance.
Elise jumped to her feet.
The room filled with a hundred winged figures, tall and slender. They smiled on us, and the air vibrated with their song.
“You’ve done it,” Elise whispered, as sunlight streamed through the windows.
The light surrounding her blossomed as I took her hand.
REGENCY SPRITE
Dave Freer
“PSST!”
Either I was being attacked by a leaky gasbag, or someone was trying to attract my attention from the dark alley to my left. A sinister alley, you might say, in every sense of the word. Perhaps it was a snake with a speech impediment! At this time of night, it seemed likely, or at least to anyone who had had a passing-through acquaintance with as many pints of strong ale as I had had.
It could, of course, be someone who wished me to step into a place even darker than the vague lamplight of the mist-swirled street to relieve me of my moneybag.
Tch. There are people with hopeless delusions everywhere, even in sinister alleys that smell like urinals.
How could I so dishearten a fellow creature? If I’d had any more money I would never have left that purveyor of my refuge from the vile duplicity of all the female race. I would have stayed on until I passed into happy oblivion. I lurched peacefully on.
“Psst!” The leak in the gasmain was more voluble now, as if trying to convey a sense of urgency.
I ignored it.
And then, by low cunning, an uneven paving stone made a totally unprovoked attack on my toes (the cowardly things will do this, but only when you have drunk more than sixteen pints of strong ale and fair amount of blue ruin). I sprawled into the gutter, which was a good thing, as I felt at home there these days.
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