Stories From the Plague Years (29 page)

The sounds of the forest were calming. They reminded the prince of the dark places where the newly-dead congregated, wandering like sleepwalkers, bewildered, whimpering because of the sudden loss of their bodies. In happier days, the prince would often run through this limbo, scooping up souls like bundles of wood to give as playthings to his followers.

The prince crouched low and rested, thinking of new strategies, new allies to find, new armies to rally, once he escaped the toadies of those who had deposed him.

His punishments, his vengeance, would be hailed as atrocities, legendary in their cruelty even in Hell. He would make of his enemies living standards, erect cathedrals to his own honour from their bones. He would create orchestrations of suffering that would make his enemies envy the damned they’d once had charge over.

But first he had to escape those who craved his blood and coveted his horn: the blessed mark of his power he wore upon his brow.

The cries from the trees closest to him quieted. The trail of lamentation from the scarlet path he’d beaten fell into the regular rhythms of the forest.

The prince absently etched his mark upon the trunk of a tree as he thought, making the soul inside cry softly in a tune he found soothing as he pressed his claws into the bark, nimbly as a violinist fingers the neck of his instrument. Perhaps he should enlist aid from the Master of Fraud, sound a clarion call while riding on his back as they flew in a gyre to the deepest part of the writhing abyss. If he could double back, the keeper of Hell’s gate would allow him to weave sundering music from the suspirations of the newly-dead that would . . .

A sound came from the way the prince had come, like a great wave crashing, the fabric of thunder meshed with the sound of a raging sea. And beneath those sounds came a brutal melange of suffering: the screams of thousands as a horde of what the prince knew to be his enemies crashed through the wood. The prince stood, and climbed the sobbing tree he had been scarring with the speed of a hunting cat.

In the distance, through the gloom, he saw hundreds of points of light spread out in a line just within the edge of the wood—the flames of torches held by those who hunted him, darting, curving in a wide ribbon among the bleeding trunks. Some points of light were too fast, too agile to be from torches; they were the burning faces of
yith
hounds, black hunting bitches maddened with the need to rend and tear and wound and . . .

The prince dropped to the ground. But did not run. He was a strategist. A tactician. Nothing he did now could be without thought. He could not afford the luxury of blind flight. He stifled the sound of his pursuers in his ears, reached out with his senses for
anything
in the ether that could help him. There was something. Something informed so slightly by the aura of this eternal place of suicide that, at any other time, he would not dare pursue it and face the oblivion of the journey to Materiality.

But now he had no choice. Now he answered the far call from one who hung near the spiritual death that fed this wood.

At the trunk of the tree he had climbed, he kneeled like one about to take Communion and forced his hands into his mark, pulling open within it a portal made by the dim invocation of his name. The blood of the tree screamed as loudly as the sound of the hunters behind him.

And in the void, he waited for the remote chance that the calling of his name would carry him to a place closer to the Heaven that had expelled him.

“
There are no such things as demons, Mother.
”

His mother had smiled when David had said those words to her.

“
Then you don’t believe in angels, either?
”

“
No. I don’t. There’s only us, Mother.
”

His mother had touched his face, then. Caressed his cheek as she said, “
When you’re older, you’ll see how little you know about the world. How much of it is a mystery. Then you’ll come to treasure the mystery.
”

David had not believed her. For, at that point, belief in magic and hidden things was behind him.
Once
, before, he had believed in unknowable powers that were partly revealed in the myths, epics and folklore he’d read as a boy. When he was young, he had known in his heart the
sidhe
lived in the woods nearby, that the War of the Ring had truly been waged, and that somewhere in the world, a dragon still lived.

But he had set those beliefs aside.

His mother had been partly right; David had come to treasure mysteries as he grew older. Not the mysteries of the world, or the wide, ethereal universe that she held dear. What he had come to treasure were the mysteries of the
mind
, the forces within that his mother had freed with her incantations and formulas to attain what she needed and desired.

Once, when the family had needed money, Mother had burned a dollar bill in a ritual, “giving it back to the Universe.” Within the week, Father had a new job. It was a wonderful thing. But no real magic was involved. The ritual had simply forced his parents to focus on Father’s job search with renewed intensity.

And now David, on his aching knees with his mother’s books before him, hoped to tap his own mind. To use ritual to lift the hateful fog his disease had imposed on his thoughts and creativity, and so liberate his music.

David read aloud the Latin incantations of the books, and also the Hebrew his mother had phonetically scribbled on sheets of yellow legal pad and inserted within the pages. Toward the end of his ritual, David took the wine glass that held his blood and poured a few drops in the center of the bowl, so they were surrounded by the concentric lines of script.

Then he turned the bowl over, and read a final Hebrew incantation.

And something quietly opened inside David’s mind. A flowering of images and sensations unfurling like a white rose. A vista of alabaster filled his sight, and a sound, distant as the step of a ghost, grew louder and more tangible in his ears.

It was the sound of snow.

A memory rose like mist from the shadows of his childhood . . . a memory of lying with closed eyes on the white blanket of a winter field. Even the wind had been silent. In that unreal, timeless quiet, deeper than any he’d known even while in dreamless sleep, he had heard the breath of the sky itself, the whisper of the dome of grey clouds above.

He had heard the voice of each crystalline feather of snow as it fell, as it alighted upon the earth, upon his lashes and face. He had heard the snow’s delicate poetry, but could not fathom its language, the key to the beautiful things it spoke. The language was more than one of sound; it was a language of sensation that touched him as the morning of the year’s first frost touched him, telling him of its presence the instant before he woke and opened his eyes.

He had wanted to know each secret thing the snow spoke. But after what seemed a very long time, he realized the snow’s words and poems would stay secret to him. He’d opened his eyes, and the dull winter sunshine behind the clouds seemed blinding. He’d heard then the thunder of his breath, the roar of his own heartbeat. He’d stood to wend his way home, and saw that the new snow had covered his track to where he’d laid himself down.

Each step he had taken marred the perfect, pure field, imprinting it with the mark of his passing, had drowned the voice of the falling snow with the ugly crush of his footfall.

It was the sound of snow
. . . . David remembered the sound, and remembered the person he had been when he had heard it: the boy who knew and believed in mysteries and magic hidden everywhere around him. The sound of snow, how it had touched him so deeply with a beauty he could not understand, was what he needed to give musical expression. This was the essence of what he had to compose, yet he had not been able to name it before. This was his trophy, his prize seized from the distant, shadowy part of his mind. Now he could touch this memory, hold it close and nurture it . . . set it to music to share it with others and grant it new life.

David wept, softly. With relief and joy and with pain. For the memory had been pulled from his deepest sense of self, drawn forcibly to the forepart of his mind.

The vista of whiteness filling his vision faded. The floor of the living room, the inverted bowl, became visible, but still shrouded, as if David were looking through gauze.

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.