Best British Horror 2014

by Johnny Mains

  ‘Anyway, Ucci, I must go now. Ciao alia parte.’

  And the connection was no more.

  Well, Uccello told himself, pouring another ultra-strong coffee, whatever Folscyvio did with the weird violin, it would make them all lots of money. Sometimes he wished Folscyvio did not make so much money. Then it would be easier to let go of him, to escape from him. Forever.

  He had found the way to deal with her infuriating hair. Of course he could have cut it off or pulled it out. But it was so indigenous to her flamboyant grotesquerie he had decided to retain it if at all possible. In the end the coping strategy came clear. He drew all the hair up to the top of the wooden scalp, and there secured it firmly with a narrow titanium ring. This kept every fibre away from his hands, and the bow, once he had upended her and tossed the full cascade back over his left shoulder, well out of his way. Soon others, at his terse instruction, had covered the titanium in thick fake gold, smooth and non-irritant. Only then did he have made for her a bow. It was choice. What else, being for his use.

  As for the contact-point, it had been established thus: her right shoulder rested between his neck and jaw. Now he could control her, he might begin.

  By then she had been carefully checked, the strings found to be new and suitable and well-tended, resilient. He himself tuned them. To his momentary interest they had a sheer and dulcet sound, a little higher than expected, while from the inner body a feral resonance might be coaxed. She was so much better than Folscyvio had anticipated.

  After all this, he adapted to his normal routine when breaking in a novel piece.

  He rose early and took a swim in the villa pool, breakfasted on local delicacies, then set to work alone in the quartet of rooms maintained solely for the purpose. Here he worked until lunch, and after siesta resumed working in the evening.

  The house lay close to the sea, shut off from the town, an outpost of the city. In the dusk, as in the past, he would have gone down to the shore and taken a second swim in the water, blue as syrup of cobalt. But now he did not. However pleased with, or aggravated by the mermaid he might have become, at twilight he would always play her. He had not, it seemed, been entirely immune to the magical idea that she was a vio-sera, a violin of the Silver Hour.

  It was true. She did have a fascination for him. He had known this, he thought, from the moment he glimpsed her in the sordid little shop off the Via Silvia. He had become fascinated by instruments before in this manner, as, very occasionally, by girls. It happened less now, but was exciting, both in rediscovery, and its power. For as with all such affairs of his, involving music, or the romantic lusts of the body, he would be the only Master. And at the finish of the flirtation, the destroyer also.

  By night, after a light dinner, he slept consistently soundly.

  The Maestro dreamed.

  He was walking on the pale shore beside the sea, the waves black now and edged only by a thin sickle moon. At spaces along the beach, tall, gas-fired cressets burned, ostensibly to mimic Ancient Roma. Folscyvio was indifferently aware that, due to these things, he moved between the four elements: earth and water, fire and air.

  Then he grew conscious of a figure loitering at the sea’s border, not far from him.

  In waking life, Folscyvio would have kept clear of others on a solitary walk – which anyway, despite its wished-for aloneness, always saw, in a spot like this, one of his bodyguards trailing about twenty metres behind him. Now, however, no guard paced in tow. And an immediate interest in the loiterer made Folscyvio alter course. He idled down to the unraveling fringes of the tideless waves, and when the figure turned to him, it was as if this meeting had been planned for weeks.

  No greeting, even so, was exchanged.

  Aside from which, Folscyvio could not quite make out who – even, really, what – the figure was. Not very tall, either bowed or bundled down into a sort of dark hooded coat, the face hidden, perhaps even by some kind of webby veil. Most preposterously, none of this unnerved Folscyvio. Rather, it seemed all correct, exactly right, like recognizing, say, a building or tract of land never before visited, though often regarded in a book of pictures.

  Then the figure spoke. ‘Giavetti is dead.’

  ‘Ah, good. Yes, I was expecting that. Has the debt been recovered?’

  ‘No,’ said the figure.

  It was a gentle, ashy voice. Neither male nor female, just as the form of it seemed quite asexual.

  ‘Well, it hardly matters,’ said Folscyvio who, in the waking world, would have been extremely put out.

  ‘But the death,’ said the figure, ‘all deaths that have been deliberately caused, they do matter.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Folscyvio agreed, unconcerned yet amenable to the logic of it.

  ‘Even,’ said the figure, ‘the death of things.’

  Folscyvio was intrigued. ‘Truly? How diverting. Why?’

  ‘All things are constructed,’ the figure calmly said, and now, just for a second, there showed the most lucent and mellifluous gleam of eyes, ‘constructed, that is, from the same universal, partly psychic material. A tree, a man, a lion, a wall – we are all the same, in that way.’

  ‘I see,’ said Folscyvio, nodding. They were walking on together, over the shore, the waves melting in about their feet, and every so often a fiery cresset passing, as if it walked in the other direction, casting out splinters of volcanic tangerine glass on the wrinkles of the water.

  ‘You are an animist,’ said the figure. ‘You do not understand this in yourself, but you sense a life-force in every instrument on which you set your hands. And being sufficiently clever to recognize the superior life in them, you are jealous, envious and vengeful.’ There was no disapproval, no anger in the voice, despite what it had said, or now said. ‘To a human who is not a murderer, the destruction of life is crucially terrible, whether the life of a man, a woman, or a beast. To an animist these events are also terrible, but, too, the slaughter of so-called objects is equally a horror, an abomination – a tree, a wall – and especially those objects which can speak or sing. And worse still, which have spoken and sung – for the one who kills them. A piano. A violin.’

  ‘A violin,’ repeated Folscyvio, and a warm and stimulating pleasure surged up in him, reminiscent, though physically unlike, the sparkle of erotic arousal. ‘A violin.’

  Then he noticed they had reached the end of the shoreline. How strange: nothing lay beyond, only the gigantic sky, scattered with stars, and open as the sea had seemed to be moments before. Although the sea, evidently, had been contained by a horizon. As this was not.

  Folscyvio worked with the doll-mermaid-violin, mostly sticking to his routine, where departing from it then compensating with a fuller labour in the day or night which followed. (During this time he discovered no secret marks, Masonic or otherwise, on its surface. But of course, the shop-keeper had lied.)

  Three, then four months passed. The weather-control that operated along the coast maintained blissful weather, only permitting some rain now, at the evening hour of the Aperitivo.

  He ordered Uccello to cancel a single concert he had been due to give in the city. Uccello was appalled. ‘Oh never fear, they’ll forgive me. Change the venue of my next one, to make room for those worshipers who missed out.’ Folscyvio knew he would be forgiven. He was a genius. One must allow him room to act as he wished. Only those who hated and despised him ever muttered anything to the contrary. And they – and Folscyvio knew this also well – would be careful what they said, and where. It was well known, Folscyvio’s fanatics did not take kindly to his defamation.

  Without a doubt, beyond all question, he had mastered her. It was the beginning of the fifth month. He stood in front of a wide mirror (his habitual act prior to a performance) and put himself, in slow-motion, through his various flourishes, emotives, intensities, particularly those that were intrinsic to the new and extraordinary instrum
ent. Already he had formulated the plan for her deployment and display before he should – finally – and after prevarication – take hold of her. She was to preside, to start with, at the off-centre front stage. She would then be upright, that way the doll appearance of her would be the most obvious. Her hair would pour from the gold tiara, carefully arranged about and over her breasts, her face smooth and glowing from preparatory days of polishing, her emerald eyes, (also polished) shining and her pomegranate lips inviting. She would be standing on her aquatic tail, in which all the missing scales by now were replaced. The fan-tail base of it would balance on a velvet cushion of the darkest green. Magnetic beams would hold her infallibly in position. (The insurance paid for this, not to mention the threats issued, both legal and otherwise, would make certain all was well.)

  After posing and scrutinizing all his moves and postures, Folscyvio played to the mirror the selected pieces on the vio-sera, as he proposed to at the forthcoming concert now only two weeks away. Everything went faultlessly, of course.

  Sometimes he would be assisted, during a concert, by an accompanying band, comprising percussion, certain stringed instruments, a small horn section, and so on. All these accoutrements were robotic; he never employed human musicians. The Maestro himself always checked the ensemble over, tuned and – as a favourable critic had expressed it – ‘exalted’ them for a show. However, on this occasion, when he reached the moment that he accessed the vio-sirenalino, (the Mermaid, as she had been billed) the exquisite little robot band would fall quite silent. At which, being non-human, no flicker of envy would disturb any morsel of it.

  Then, and only then, at a signal from the Maestro, ultra protective rays would spin the mermaid violin, whirling her to her true position, upside down.

  Folscyvio, amid the crowd’s predicted applause and uproar, would lift her free. Like a heroine in some swooning novel of the nineteenth, twentieth, or early twenty-first Century, she would lie back upon his shoulder, her hair drifting in a single silken, burnt-sienna wing down his back (the hair had been refurbished, too). In this fainting and acquiescent subjection of hers he would hold her, and bring the slender bow to bear upon her uptilted, supine body, stroking, spangling, making love to her, breasts to tail.

  In the wide mirror he could see now, even if he had already known, the eroticism of this act. How gorgeously perverse. How sublime. How they would love it. And oh, the music she could make –

  For her tones were beautiful. They were – unique. And only he, master of his art, had brought her to this. Even that dolt Uccello, hearing a brief example, a shred of Couperin, a skein of Vivaldi, and of Strarobini, played, recorded and audioed through the speaker, had exclaimed, ‘But – Folscy-mio – never did I hear you play anything – with quite this vividity. What enchantment. Folscyvio, you have found your true voice at last!’ And at this, unseen since the viewer was not switched on, the Maestro had scornfully smiled.

  The concert was quite sold out. Beyond even the capacity of the concert stadium. Herds had paid, therefore, also to stand and listen in the gardens outside, where huge screens and vocalian were to be rigged. It was to be a night of nights, the Night of the Mermaid. And after that night? Well.

  She was a doll. A toy. An aberration and a game – which he had played and won.

  One night for her, then, the best night of her little wooden life. That would be enough. Live her dream. Who should aim at more?

  The venue for the concert was two miles inland of the city and the Laguna, up in the hills. This stadium was modern, a curious sounding-board of glazing, its supporting masonry embedded with acoustic speakers. The half-rings of seats hung gazing down to the hollow stage. They would be packed. Every place taken, the billionaire front rows to the craning upper roosts equipped with magnifying glasses. Amid the pines and cypresses outside, the huge screens clustered. Throughout the city too others would be peering at the Teleterra, watching, listening. And beyond the Laguna, the city, in many other regions all across the teeming and disassembled self-absorption of the planet, they too, whoever was able and had a mind to, they too glued to the relay of this performance.

  Unusually the concert was to begin rather early, the nineteenth hour of that light-enduring mechanically-extended summer night. Sunset would commence just before twenty-one. And the dusk, prolonged by aerial gadgets, would last nearly until the twenty-second hour.

  Almost everyone had learned about the new and special instrument – though not its nature. A mermaid? They could barely wait. Speculation had been rife in the media for weeks.

  So they entered the stadium. And when first they saw – it – during that vast in-gathering, startled curses and bouts of laughter ran round the hall. What was it? Was it hideous or divine, barbaric or obscene? Unplayable, how not. Some joke.

  Eventually the illumination sank and the general noise changed to that wild ovation always given the Maestro Folscyvio. And out he came, impeccably clad, his lush dark hair and handsome face, his slender, strong hands, looking at least a third of a metre taller than he was due to his lean elegance, and the lifts in his shoes.

  Hushing them benignly, he said only this, ‘Yes. As you see. But you must wait to hear. And now, we begin.’

  From the nineteenth almost to the twentieth hour, just as, muted and channeled through the venue’s glassy top, the sun westered, Folscyvio performed at his full pitch of stunningly brilliant (and heartless) mastery.

  As ever, the audience were stirred, shaken, opened out like fans – actual fans, not fanatics gasping, weeping, tranced slaves caught in the blinding blitzkrieg of his glare; they slumped or sat rigid until the interval. And after it, fueled by drink, legal drugs, and chat, they slunk back nearly bonelessly for another heavenly beating.

  And Folscyvio played on, assisted by his little robot orchestra. He took to him a piano, a mandolino. But all the while, the mermaid doll stood upright on her green cushion, with her green tail, her green eyes, her smallness – dumb. Obscure and . . . waiting.

  Some twenty minutes before twenty-one, the sunset swelled, then faded. The ghostly dusk ashed down. It was the Silver Hour, when the shadows fell. And tonight, here, it would last an hour.

  The penultimate acts of the show were done. The orchestra stopped like a clock. Folscyvio put aside the mandolin. Then, stepping forward quite briskly, he gave the signal, and the mermaid was whirled upside-down – whereupon he seized her. And as the crowd faintly mooed in suspense he settled her, in a few well-practiced moves, her head upon his shoulder, the hair flowing down his back like a wing. He lifted the bow out of its sword-like sheath, which until then had been hidden in a cleverly-spun chiascuro.

  Silences had occurred in history. The city knew silences. This silence however was thicker than amalgamating concrete. In a solid silver block it cased the concert hall.

  Folscyvio played to them, within this case, the mermaid violin.

  High and burningly sweet, the tone of the strings. Pelt-deep and throbbing with contralto darkness, the tone of the strings. A vibrato like lava under the earth, a supreme up-draught like a flying nightingale. A bitter pulsing, amber.

  A platinum upper register that pierced – a needle to conjure an inner note, some sound known only at the dawn of time, or at its ending. Consoling sorrow, aching agony of joy.

  Never, never had they heard, nor anyone ever conceivably, such music. Even they could not miss it. Even he – even Folscyvio – could not.

  He had not mastered the instrument. It had mastered him. It played him. And somehow, far within the clotted blindness and deafness of his costive ego – he knew. The Maestro, mastered.

  Perhaps he had dubiously guessed when practising, when planning out this ultimate scene upon his rostrum of pride. Or perhaps even, at that watershed, he had managed to conceal the facts from himself. For truth did not always set men free. Truth could imprison, too. Truth could kill.

  On and on. Passing fro
m one perfect piece to the next, seamless as cloth-of-Paradise, Folscyvio the faultless instrument, and the violin played him. All through that Silver Hour. Until the shadows had closed together and not a mote of light was left, except where he still poised, the violin gleaming in his grip, the bow fluttering and swooping, a bird of prey, a descending angel.

  But all-light melted away and all-quiet came back. The recital was over.

  How empty, that place. – As though the world had sunk below the horizon as already the sun’s orb had done.

  The artificial lights returned like fireflies.

  There he stood, straight and motionless, frowning as if he did not, for a second or so, grasp where he was, let alone where he had been during the previous hour.

  But the audience, trained and dutiful, stumbled to its feet. And then, as if recollecting what must come next, began to screech and bellow applause, stamping, hurling jewels down on to the stage. (It had happened before. Folscyvio had even, in the past, graciously kept some of them; the more valuable ones.)

  After the bliss of the music, this acclaiming sound was quite disgusting. A stampede of trampling, trumpeting things – that had glimpsed the Infinite, and could neither make head nor tail of it, nor see what should be done to honour it.

  Seemingly unceasing, this crescendo. Until it wore itself out upon itself. The hands scalded from clapping, the voices cracked with over-use. Back into their seats they crumbled, abruptly old, even the youngest among them. Drained. Mistaken. Baffled.

  Inevitably, afterwards, there would be talk of a drug – illegal and pernicious – infiltrated into the stadium, affecting everyone there. But that rumour was for later, blown in like a dead leaf on the dying sigh of a hurricane.

  Probably Folscyvio did suspect he was not quite himself. Some minor ailment, perhaps. A virus, flimsy and unimportant. Nevertheless he felt irritated, dissatisfied, although realizing he had played superbly. But then, – he always did. Nothing had changed.