Beneath Ceaseless Skies #65 Read online

“Forgive me. I must have missed your message.”

  Sophie’s words are missed notes in an already-mangled refrain. “If you missed the message, then why are you here?”

  I glance at the hostess’s daughter and damn myself in Sophie’s eyes.

  “It’s just a mistake,” I whisper urgently. “I had the wrong address. I’ve been all day running errands, and I must have given the driver yesterday’s address.” But every word I say is a nail in my coffin.

  Sophie reaches into her purse and hands me an envelope with Madame Geoffrin’s seal. My heart sinks.

  “Another assignation,” says Sophie.

  I slip the letter from its envelope. It reads, My inquiries returned negative.

  I want to show it to her, risk her jealousy and explain everything, but this is not the place. The glitter in her eye makes me wonder if she’s been taking belladonna.

  “Monsieur Durand, would you care for refreshment before you play?” the hostess says.

  Sweat trickles down my back. I loosen my cravat. “Water, please.”

  I cannot look at Sophie’s over-dilated eyes. I cannot look at the hostess’s daughter. I fix my attention on the hostess. There is no chair for me, only the armonica bench.

  I down the water and take my place. My body tenses. This time I know what I will see. Amarante hears what I play. Could it be she hears as I do, music from elsewhere caught on the wind? Does she hear it so strongly that it drowns out the sound of a team of horses, or crackle of fire or rush of the Seine? If that is true, every time I play, I put her life in danger.

  “I cannot do this.” My voice is harsh, even to my ears. Hoarse. Ragged.

  The daughter stiffens. Sophie’s cheeks redden.

  The hostess rises and extends her hand. “Come,” she says, when I remain transfixed.

  I push back the bench and hurry after her. We pause in the next room.

  “You are overtired,” she says. “You’ll burn out if you keep this pace.”

  I nod, and all I comprehend is gratitude. “Perhaps I can come next week and play a piano concert.”

  The hostess hesitates. “Didn’t Sophie tell you? Next week you’ll be gone. Joseph Haydn has invited you to Vienna.”

  Vienna. I press a hand to the wall to stop the world from tilting.

  “Sit down, dear boy!”

  “I have so much to do.” And then I remember. “I have to see Dr. Mesmer. Today, if possible. I had this house as his address. Do you know where he is?”

  “Why, he’s gone to see dear friends in Versailles. But he’ll be back tonight to collect his things. It’s possible he might have a moment for you then.”

  I almost cannot speak. “Please tell him it is urgent.”

  “Of course. And congratulations on Vienna.”

  But then I remember: I can never play again. Every song risks Amarante.

  I swallow a laugh before it swallows me.

  * * *

  That night I come to Mesmer’s rooms through air as thick as sable. A maid takes me in through the back door. It would be best if no one knew of my treatment.

  The room is bare except for the armonica. Mesmer’s eyes are bright with interest. It is impossible to say which gives me more unease.

  “They say it is possible for music to cross between worlds. Yours is the first case I will have the chance to study personally.” He takes my hand and bids me sit while he makes passes over my body. One hand hovers over my head, my chest, my abdomen. He transfers to a low stool and passes his hands down my arms and legs and feet.

  “I find no blockage,” he tells me. He makes a second pass. “You have very strong animal magnetism. Perhaps that is what draws the ghosts.”

  The hairs on my skin rise. “Ghosts? Not visions?”

  “The instrument has never induced visions.”

  I close my eyes. “But if what you say is true, I saw ghosts of myself.”

  He moves closer until his knees touch mine. “You do not think this is the only reality, this world we can see? Whole worlds emerge and collapse between one decision and the next.” He gazes deeply into my eyes. Pressure on my thumbs sends convulsions up my arms. “Just let it happen.”

  A peculiar sensation rises from the base of my thumbs. I do not want to believe that Amarante is a ghost. How can it be true? Every time I play, she listens as if her heart is breaking. Could it be it is not the music that moves her, but helplessness? And have I been risking her life? What if, like me, she is alive, even though I see her ghost?

  Mesmer moves his hands and my disorientation intensifies. Fluid moves beneath my skin. A tide rises up into my head and washes me cold. Mesmer’s hands drop away.

  “Now,” he says, “to the instrument.”

  My eyes snap open. “No, Doctor. Not that.”

  He holds up one finger. “To cure madness, we must first provoke it.”

  My hands shake. “You said they were ghosts.”

  He guides me to the water, the treadle, the rims. “Call them, and we will see.”

  The tremors intensify. “I can’t, I can’t.”

  He presses my fingers to the glass.

  We look up. I don’t know if he sees them: Amarante weeping; behind her, row upon row of men with my face. Some are barely whiskered. Others are gaunt, weathered. Rich clothes, workmen’s clothes, exotic clothes, rags. Face upon face, no two the same.

  A new death for each man. But only one Amarante.

  All of them, all of them, listening.

  The door slams open behind us, and I hear the unmistakable sound of a pistol cocking.

  We turn, the doctor and I. The moment holds the slowness of movement underwater.

  Sophie holds the gun at arm’s length as if she is afraid of it. It wavers in her two-handed grip. Her face is blotched, her eyes puffed. She steps forward and trains the barrel on me.

  Mesmer raises both hands. “My dear, you are overwrought. Please, sit down.”

  “You made me look a fool,” she says. “I gave you Vienna.”

  I look into her haunted eyes. Madness. Ah, yes. The instrument causes madness. I see my death reflected a thousand times.

  The bullet buries itself in my heart.

  * * *

  Like starlight on waves, the softest melody slides into my awareness. I rise and push through a throng of men with my face. I am bodiless. We are bodiless. The room holds the dim light of a study, but the air clings to my skin with the reek of an abattoir.

  Hair rises along my scalp. So many deaths. What have I done? I slip through them as through a minefield. I feel their eyes, but each is naught but a fleeting brush.

  My body tingles like a phantom limb. Even in death, I hear the haunting armonica music. I whisper a prayer in my mother’s dialect and push through the shades of men I have killed to whatever lies at center.

  I stop in confusion. An armonica.

  A living man hunches over it. Matted hair and beard obscure his face. Water glasses filled to varying levels crowd every surface; dusty bottles of wine spill over drifts of sheet music; candles in waterfalls of wax flicker around the instrument and the unshaved man, all of them burned nearly out.

  He sees me, the man who plays. Desolation waits in his eyes.

  A strange, creeping recognition closes over me. I am he. He and I are shadows of the same life, variations on a theme. All around us are other shadows, other variations, choices we did not make. We all hear the music.

  I do not understand, and then his song turns to the bittersweet melody that floated on the wind. Here is the composer. Here is the source of the music that drew me, must have drawn all of us, to the instrument.

  Across the room, I see the man with powder-burned lips listening with closed eyes. Was it the composer’s music that put the gun to his lips, or was it mine? How many of us play? How many of us loosed our songs upon the world and tranced each other into madness?

  No, not all. Not all went mad. Some of us called ghosts.

  The melody changes. Sorrow so fresh
and sharp I can scarcely bear it breaks across some of the other faces. I realize then that all of the others stare, not at the composer but at something behind the instrument.

  Emptiness stares back from the composer’s eyes.

  A thought electrifies me. If we are here, where is Amarante?

  I come slowly to see what lies beyond the composer. The smell of roses wafts over the scent of decay. A white coffin. Inside, a carmine dress and auburn hair caught up with combs of amber. Her face is transported stillness. A ring glimmers on her finger. Beneath her dress, the smallest, saddest swelling.

  I feel myself scream, but if my voice makes a sound, it is not in this world. I fall to my knees beside her. She is real, in this world. Her cheek, so fresh—

  When had I played? That first night I saw her fall, could that have been...?

  The abyss opens inside me.

  Through the emptiness of that moment, a thought percolates. The instrument causes death and madness, but I am not the only one who plays.

  My eyes turn to the composer.

  Bodiless, I cannot feel hate, but envy sinks down where my heart would be. She loved him. He loved her. But I am he, we are all of us one soul. One life, one shattered mirror.

  In all possible worlds, I love her.

  I press my head to her coffin.

  Another man with my face pushes in beside me. His face is shocked confusion. A newcomer. The composer glances at him, and then down at Amarante. Across the composer’s face, I see the hope of a thousand possible worlds shatter into inescapable self-condemnation. Something like a sob tears from his chest, but he never misses a note. He plays as if his heart would stop with the song.

  The candles burn down.

  Would I have made the choice he made? Knowing, as he must know, that every song takes a life?

  What would I risk for one more moment?

  I understand the man who reeves every world in search of what he lost.

  He plays for Amarante.

  Copyright © 2011 A.B. Treadwell

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  A.B. Treadwell is a nomadic wordsmith who has hailed from Moore, Oklahoma, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Fairmont, West Virginia, and that’s just in the last two years. Her stories have been published in Flash Fiction Online, Bards and Sages Quarterly, and the Triangulation anthologies. She is also on staff at the Alpha Teen Writing Workshop. Her website is www.abtreadwell.com.

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  COVER ART

  “Into the Unknown,” by Kerem Beyit

  Kerem Beyit is a freelance artist born in Ankara, Turkey. He started drawing in his early childhood with the influence of comic books, and he trained himself from great fantasy artists like Frank Frazetta and Gerald Brom. He has won Master and Excellence Awards from Exposé 7, and his artwork has been used for covers of European editions of fantasy novels by Tad Williams and George R.R. Martin. Visit his website and gallery at www.theartofkerembeyit.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1046

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2011 Firkin Press

  This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.