A Song for Quiet, page 5
“Don’t hurt her,” Deacon manages, desperate, starting from his spot. His exhortation draws a laugh from Persons, the sound maddened, as he slopes an incredulous look at the bluesman.
“You’re either ignorant or stupid, I can’t tell which. Not sure if you noticed, but the wren’s the one threatening me. And before you start telling me she’s just a dame, you should know she’s a bit further along the process than you are, which means she’s—”
“That’s enough. We’re done. We’re leaving. And you’re not going to stop us.” Ana tilts her head to one side, one clockwork jerk. When she speaks again, it’s half a song, voice pitched supple and searing, three keys higher except for when she drops it, just for a beat, to snarl: “By the way, Mr. Persons, she says she remembers you.”
The world goes white.
* * *
Reality doesn’t break this time. Instead, it turns boneless, creamy. Like someone dug under the flesh and extracted all the calcium, flayed the skin, spun the collagen and meat into spools of taffy. Now thick and tractable, it is tugged by its unseen confectioner into its appointed place, the universe rearranging to the intermezzo of Ana’s clarion voice.
But that is what it feels like. What Deacon sees is more difficult to explain, his vision clacking through frames, like a movie played too slowly to trick the mind. Two worlds again, one superimposed over another, alternating back, forth, back, forth. Persons’s mouth going round with a scream, his hand outstretched; trees crowded thick as sins; branches raking at Deacon’s cheeks, his ankles sunk into cool mud.
Noise cuts in. A flutter of binaural entropy, no rhythm or purpose, bombards Deacon from every side. Before he can react, the sound—not Ana, not remotely close, guttural and off-key, as far from music as such things come—works its teeth into him and pulls. The world tumbles vertiginously sideways, color and sound bleeding together into one mess of muddy browns, like a child’s paints finger-smeared across the wall. It stops as quickly as it begins, the magic winking out, jarring in its exit.
And Deacon blinks and opens his eyes to—
Nothing.
No. Not nothing. True, it is only a featureless murk at first glance, as though Deacon had been plunged into the nadir of perdition. But as his eyes adjust, the landscape reveals itself to be teeming with nuance, the minutiae of which, Deacon decides, are more disquieting than the whole.
Something is wrong here. Yet, if someone were to ask Deacon to explain why he felt so uneasy, he’d be hard pressed to inventory the reasons. The flatness of the light, maybe, the way it renders the terrain into cartoonish binaries; black or white, no shade in between. The roots, perhaps, knotted and tendon-thick, and how they sometimes come together to resemble arms outstretched, an old man begging for salvation, or muscle unstitched over the earth. Or is it the wind, the not-quite-words exhaled by the dry, dead leaves? The way it seems to sigh his name.
He looks up.
No, none of that. It’s the heavens that are wrong. It is the moon and the myriad stars glaring down, each celestial orb bisected by a black pupil and filmed with gray, like a thousand cataracted eyes.
Chapter 6
“The stars, Ana.” The words are wheezed out. A hoarse whisper, because any other volume feels dangerous right now. “Mary, Joseph. What happened to the stars?”
“It’s okay.” Reassuring noises, crooned legato, Ana closing in on Deacon with both hands up and beseeching. “It’s okay.”
“Where are we, Ana?” The reversal of roles isn’t lost on Deacon and he barks a wretched laugh. A ponderous, slow-swinging beat shifts into place, his head spasming in tandem.
She shrugs hopelessly. “Here.”
Here, for all of its monosyllabic simplicity, proves weirdly sufficient, neatly encompassing both the breadth and the abnormality of their surroundings. A breeze sighs. It’s like someone told a lunatic to build this nowhere-place out of his gibberings, the bits and pieces of normal he keeps threaded between his ribs.
Deacon runs anxious fingers over his skull and finds the skin tender, swollen soft. His head aches; a pressure mounts behind his eye, throbbing. “Are you alright?” he says, quiet, already extending a hand, recalling that first triumphant conflict and the subsequent fall.
“I wanted to get us away—” Ana murmurs, her gaze hunting something in the treeline, a flickering contingent of bayonet flashes, patrolling the rim of sight. It takes one, two beats before she realizes what he’s asking and smiles, rueful, thumbing at the blood beneath her eyes. “I’m fine. But that might not be the case for long if we don’t get out of here. We need to go. Now.”
“How?” A part of Deacon rankles at his own passiveness, the sheer unmanliness of it all. Shouldn’t he be the mouthpiece of authority, the one to take control? Memory populates itself with sneering faces, wine-cheeked characters extolling the division between man and woman, clicking their teeth; full of scorn for anyone who’d bow his head so meekly to a girl. But as quickly as it arrives, that unfortunate conceit is doused. Deacon has never been one to garland himself with someone else’s insecurities, and he’s not about to start now.
“I’m not sure. But I’ll figure it out. Now, let’s move. We need to get—” A faltering of her voice. “We need to be somewhere that isn’t here.” Her small fingers clasp his and tug. He relents, weaving into lockstep behind the girl; their gaits matched in length, hers surer, his more hesitant.
Before long: “You were at the diner?”
“Yes.”
“You saved me?”
“Yes.”
“And that man. Persons. What was he talking about?”
A tick. “I don’t think you want to—”
“I do. Trust me. I’m tired of being in the dark.” The forest does not alter, no matter the distance they pace, and soon Deacon becomes convinced that if he were to look over his shoulder, he’d see himself sighting down the back of his own head.
“Okay, then,” Ana sighs, shoulders scissoring back. Her tongue protrudes between chipped and yellowed teeth, the barest tip, and is held there for a second before she expunges another breath of air, more gustily than before. “It’s simple. I can end the world and I’m going to.”
“Why?”
“I—if I had a choice, I wouldn’t end all of it. I’d keep . . . parts. I’d incinerate the ones that want to see the plantations full of black bodies again. The ones that expect us to say ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, ma’am’ and bow and scrape to them, their children, and their children’s children. The ones who look at us and wonder if we’re human or some species of ape. The ones that’d fuck an unwilling woman and sell her daughter to a god.” Her mouth twists. “I want those gone. But this deal of ours, it’s all or nothing.”
Her grief is a bullet in the hollow of Deacon’s throat, the taste of lead under his tongue. For the first time, he’s thinks: maybe, maybe this wouldn’t be such a terrible idea, to gather these folk like sheafs of corn, tie them with twine, and maybe—
“There’s nothing for us here,” she whispers, disrupting his musings. “This world. She’s shown me. All the timelines, all the separate outcomes. All the pain, Deacon. You have no idea. I’ve seen what’s coming. So, I figured: maybe none of this is worth keeping. Look—”
Her touch transmits a cavalcade of images. Of dead and dying men, women, children. Girls forgotten in trash bags, throats fingermarked; they’d been screaming for days. Teenage boys gunned down by men in uniform. Politicians murdered. An apartment gutted by laughing white teens, its windows shattered by fire and stone. So much death and all for what? Because they couldn’t deal with treating all people like equals. Because, because—
“I want it all gone. There’s no point to this.”
“Can we do that?”
We. Not you. Not she. We, this time. A countermelody of disembodied pleasure travels up his spine, like a woman’s taloned caress. Like this, Deacon? It teases. Is that how the mighty falls at last?
Ana doesn’t hesitate. “Yes. If we let her through the door, she’ll tear creation down.”
“And?”
“And nothing. There will be nothing. We’ll be gone. Maybe she’ll keep some of us, but, well, you’ve seen her dreams—”
“Yes.” The word slithers loose. “But do you think that’s right? Dooming all those futures? Don’t you think there’d be a time when—” When what, Deacon James, the silence seems to leer, chortling, confident in his corruption. Mine now, hisses the breeze. Mine, hisses this world and its staring eyes. “—all of this will be someone else’s bad dream?”
“You saw—I showed you.”
“Yes. And I saw people fighting, too. Isn’t that worth something? All those voices raised. All that courage. It can’t have come from nowhere. It has to be built on something. Don’t you think it’s worth finding out what that could be?”
Ana halts. “Do you?”
He thinks about it.
“With all my heart.”
The smile that he surprises from Ana is a little embarrassed, a little childlike, but mostly beatific, a dawn sieved from the fog, audaciously incandescent, like a vow that good things will come one day. Before she can articulate a companion statement to that expression, however, a spoiled-meat sweetness insinuates itself into the air.
Then:
The trees splinter into gracile limbs, a sheathing of membrane. They slowly disentangle, cohering into distinct bodies, each torso adorned with a multitude of legs and horns, drooling ink and nothingness. They grin blankly, the moonlight illuminating blunt molars. The things cluster closer, a prison of limbs. One leans down and Deacon sees himself reflected in its wet sinew.
The song washes in again, piping and slightly petulant, but still willing to make peace if Deacon will embrace it. And he says yes as the thing splits its mouth. Yes as it comes for him. Yes, if you give me this, Deacon thinks, shutting his eyes as the song claims him, orchestral pleasure.
Then the earth shifts, and time stops, and reality rests itself into Deacon’s palm, bright-burning power that he knows will eat him alive one day soon, but not today.
Today, it’s his.
“Run,” he tells Ana in the voice of the rails, the engine-roar, the howl; the chatter of the audience, the percussion of feet on wood, the honey-wine strut of big-city jazz and the booming cabaret, the desolate coyote-ache of the blues. All of the voices of a rambler who’s seen more grief than good.
She sings back a note, half a key higher; her voice effulgent, sharp as the end of innocence. A hawk-cry, wild. The world goes bang, muzzle-flash of brilliant warning, and they’re both running, shoulder to shoulder, trading improvisations. Each riff complicates their tracks a little further, every stanza ripples through creation, until the waves become a crush and there is only their strophic clamor, the pounding of their cresting voices, almost enough to smother the shrieks of the encroaching dark.
* * *
But then something—
No no no no no more lies no no no it ends it ends like this
* * *
Deacon opens his eyes to a rocky precipice; a thin jut of land cordoned by an ineffectual fence, the wood long rotted, and broken besides. Below, Arkham. From this distance, the city looks pathetic—a thread of twitching lights snaking across the shore, infinitesimally small beside the enormity of the woods, and smaller still when juxtaposed against the gulf below.
The sound of voices drags Deacon’s attention from the edge. Blinking owlishly, every thought viscous and slow, he angles an incurious look to his right. A monstrous moon crouches over the scene, limning the golden-brown sinuosity of a cello in silver. Where’d it come from? Deacon wonders. There’s something wrong here. The longer he stares, the more it unsettles, the wood bleeding into mist, barely real.
Ana, swaying beside the instrument, mouth salivating gore, doesn’t seem to notice. The air chitters with voices, words he can barely hear.
The bluesman smacks his lips, willing speech but finding his tongue clumsy instead, a slab of meat slightly too big for his jaw. No language emerges. He stands and staggers, falls as something lashes across his vision and spears his cheek. The taste of copper spumes across his tongue.
Ana, he realizes. Every voice, faceted and fragmented. They’re all hers.
Deacon hits the ground hard, his knees catching the worst of the impact. Villi, spongy and stretched to garrotes, extend to circle his throat and wrists, his knees and his ankles, his long musician fingers. They pull. But gently, so very gently. A tug here, a nudge there, compelling him onward. Deacon doesn’t fight, lets it walk him toward where Ana waits, her face haunted.
“Leave him alone,” she whispers to no one. Her eyes, sclera and pupil, are black and bloodied.
“Ana?” He swallows. “There’s no one here. You’re safe. You can put me down.”
In reply, she—Deacon senses it before he hears it: the word that’s pearling on her tongue, a high-pitched intonation of hateful, hideous power—discharges a scream, but Deacon never hears the downbeat. He shrieks instead, almost in time, the fugue obliterated as his skull is perforated, his throat gorged with filaments, tear ducts invaded. Choking, overwhelmed, he thrashes in place, swung up into the air by unseen arms.
Agony polyps; something maps out the whorls of his brain, parietal cortex and medulla oblongata, every fold parasitized. Mine, asserts a voice that Deacon’s learned to recognize as mother, maker, master. The electric rebuke jitters through his veins, and Deacon lets out another howl.
“Stop, stop, stop.” Ana’s voice, a broken-record loop. “I’ll play, I’ll play, I’ll play.”
The bluesman is discarded. He lands, splayed across the earth, an ankle wrenched, an arm snapped. Bleeding, Deacon rises in time to see Ana seat herself on a stool, her small frame dwarfed by the instrument. A hand slides across the fingerboard, tenderly tracing the placement of a chord. Not quite touching, not yet. Her fingertips hover, waiting, barely grazing the strings. She rests a cheek against the cello’s throat, breathes in, and shuts her eyes before she sets the bow in motion.
A single glimmering note held in fermata—oaken, warm, more beautiful than it has any right to be, this coda of the universe, and if Deacon ever had any doubt she’d been the one at the diner, it’s gone now.
Then Ana begins to play, fingers gliding across the strings. The sonata that she constructs is nothing Deacon knows, no recognizable bassline, no pattern in creation. It wanders between movements, restless, metamorphosing between measures, entropy incarnated into an elaborate oratorio, praise for the void. First, legato: vivid stretches of quiet, almost mournful; then allegro, then madness. No form, no function. Noise inviolate.
The air fulgurates and thickens, syrupy with potential. A smell seeps through, a sizzling-pork odor married to something lush and rank, menstrual blood and rotting roses. Ana’s performance grows wilder, more hopeless. Every passage and phrase gouges. She gasps through each new note, her eyes rolled up, her face hallowed with pain.
The sky distends, aching under a terrible immensity. And just like that, it clicks. An understanding of what precisely Deacon is bearing witness to. Ana raises her head, blindly seeking, and the song that bleeds from her lips is both the beginning and the end of everything.
Chapter 7
“Ana.” Deacon finds his voice as Ana’s breaks.
As he watches, her hands go limp, falling from the cello. The girl, already so fragile, so breakable, sags against the instrument. Where did she find it, anyway? But she’s still singing somehow, and the air shivers with every numinous stanza, the notes amalgamating into a reality that’d allow for an indifferent god but not for a broken-hearted child.
“Ana,” he repeats, no other words remaining to him. Deacon starts to his feet and the world spasms, broken femur giving way. He drops with a crunch and begins to belly-crawl, ruined arm cradled to his chest, nauseous with pain on all fronts.
“Ana, stop—”
No answer, but for those pustulant sounds, smoothed now into this unctuous dirge. He can feel her fading, feel her diminish. The tenuous glow of her recedes, masticated and redistributed through the noise and the hurt. In desperation, Deacon whistles in parallel, half a beat behind each syllable that falls from between her teeth. Hoping, hoping it’d lead her back, a trail of pulped dreams.
The song skips, falters for a sliver of a second.
“Ana, sweetheart. You have to stop this. You have to stop this. You can’t keep singing. If you keep singing, you’re going to—stop. Ana. Please, please. You have to stop.” An outpouring of emotion, words jumbling, no lyricism or eloquence. Just terror laid bare.
“Deacon?”
He sobs at the sound of his own name, grateful for even that microscopic victory. “Yes. Yes, it’s me. Ana. You got to listen to me. We have to stop this. This world—she’s going to end this world. I know what you said. I know. But if we don’t give the place a chance, it’ll never be better. We gotta fight, Ana. We gotta try. We can’t let this happen. Please.”
He feels her slide out from between his fingers, her awareness deliquescing into the rising chorus. Deacon peals a note again, only to feel a hoof grind down on the back of his neck. Sing, the song demands.
And Deacon thinks, why not? Which is fortunate, because even if he’d not been willing, the song would have choked out of his lungs anyway: basal counterpoint to Ana’s silver, like a shadow chasing the sun. The song modulates into rumbling consonance, gaining momentum. Right above the seam of the foggy horizon, a storm stitches itself together.
As the music bites down, the bluesman does what he’s done ten thousand times before: he gives in, dives down into the heart of it. But this is no sacred communion between musician and music, no innocent invention of art. The song rips at him for his misconceptions, winnowing at his id until at last he learns the currency of this metaphorical country.
It is ravenous, that song. It’s always been. Starved for the things that make Deacon him. It tears out gobbets of his recollections, sucking them down, chewing. Morsels of his soul to feed whatever it is that’s growing inside.
