For some reason Lisa’s thoughts kept returning to the fortune cookie she’d had at lunch with her shrimp fried rice. The tiny pink slip of paper had an unusual proverb inscribed on it in a neat Courier font.
“Talent does what it can. Genius does what it must.”
Lisa chuckled as her entire body vibrated with music. She heard terrible sounds all around her, audible just below the tinkle of the keys. She began singing to drown them out.
Tonight was supposed to be the day of her recital with the New York Symphony Orchestra. She was to perform a solo of Beethoven’s Fifth. It was to be her moment in the spotlight, the crowning jewel in a year of success and good fortune. She’d already received a scholarship to Juliard and would be the youngest student ever to attend at 14 years old. They called her a prodigy, a musical genius, compared her to a young Mozart. They said she could hear things in the music that no one else could, that she could see the notes dancing before her eyes. They had no idea how right they were.
For her each composition was like a painting. She knew the hues and complexions of every note, the shape and density of every octave and the pictures they would create when assembled in a score. The music spoke to her. It was like an entire language and Lisa could hear the whispered secrets hidden in every note. She knew which doors each one could unlock. Juliard had recognized her special talent and now the rest of the musical world would recognize it as well when she played on stage tonight.
Earlier that day she had gone out with her mother to buy the pretty blue dress with the plunging neckline and open back that subtley flattered her burgeoning womanhood without making her look like she was for sale. She had picked it out of a Spiegel catalogue and after seeing the price-tag had been convinced that she would never own it. From the moment she saw it she had imagined herself wearing it as she performed in front of New York’s social elite. Still, she had been prepared to settle for a reasonable facsimile. It had been the happiest moment of her life when she tried the dress on in front of the mirror. But that was before the darkness came.
That was before the screams and the blood and the horrible sounds of ripping flesh and cracking bone.
Lisa changed from Beethoven to a mournful nocturne from Wagner. Her face darkened as the terrible memories wormed their way in past the music.
There had been no news flash warning them of the danger. No sirens went off and no public service announcement on the radio. All of a sudden they were simply everywhere. Her uncle had tried to fight them. He was old but he was strong and a great hunter. He was wearing his best suit, sitting in the living room with his wife and his brother, Lisa’s father, and her grandparents. All of them were there to hear her play at the symphony. It was only an hour before they were supposed to leave and Lisa was seated at the piano with her family all around her when the windows caved in and the darkness spilled into the room. There were dozens of them, perhaps even hundreds. Uncle Matt couldn’t fight them all. He’d left his guns in the trunk of his car and the chair he wielded at them turned to kindling after the first one he struck. Then the darkness was upon him and those awful ripping noises began.
Lisa watched as they latched onto his throat. He beat at them with his bare fists even as they tore his head off his shoulder. Lisa had looked into his eyes just before he was decapitated. It was the first time she’d ever seen him afraid. Her father went next and then both grandparents. Then Lisa had begun to play.
She had been thinking about the fortune cookie when they started going after her mother.
“Talent does what it can…”
So she had used the only talent she had, her music. The reaction was almost immediate. The creatures stopped in their tracks and turned towards Lisa in unison. She was sure that they were about to kill her. Still, she continued to play. At least it would give her mother time to escape. She had started with a Jazz tune. It was the only thing that had come to mind. She loved Jazz, but was forbidden to play it in the house. Her parents only allowed her to play classical. Jazz was the devil’s music. Her mother had told her that after she’d heard about a Jazz musician who’d claimed to have sold his soul to the devil. He claimed that he could evoke Satan with his music. Lisa had listened to her mother torn between skepticism and fascination. She’d always believed that music could be powerful, even magical.
“Had that old Jazz musician stumbled on to something?”
Lisa bought his album and learned each song. She studied each note and played them whenever her mother wasn’t around. She’d even altered them, spiced them up, added notes, layering melodies upon melodies until the songs had become even wilder and more chaotic. Playing the songs frightened and exhausted her. Yet they excited her beyond words. She quickly became addicted to them. She played them every chance she got, adding to them more and more, composing an entire symphony of songs that sounded like the screams of dying stars. She would often collapse sweating and hyperventilating after attempting one of the corybantic compositions. Sometimes the room would spin, sometimes she would see things, horrible things, like the things in the room with her now. The things eating her family.
So she had played Jazz for the devils and they had come to her, but they didn’t attack as she had thought they would. They sat and listened.
They filled the room, the yard, the street as far as she could see out the shattered window. They were legion. Evidence of their carnage was everywhere bleeding down into the storm drains. She could hear the screams of her neighbors echoing from all directions. Death was all around them. No escape anywhere. So Lisa played. She went from Jazz to ragtime to Beethoven and they sat swaying as if mesmerized.
The sky looked as if it were on fire. The clouds were black like coal smoke and the stratosphere was aflame with dark reds and brilliant oranges. The sun was nowhere to be seen and a black moon had replaced the normal silvery one. The smell of burnt flesh was overpowering yet Lisa could see no flames anywhere on the ground. The heavens were the only things burning. Lisa imagined she could hear angels screaming.
“What has happened?”
Lisa stared at that terrible sky for long moments as her fingers tickled a dirge from the ivory keys. She knew now what had happened. She was witnessing the end of days. Hell had come to earth.
Lisa’s mother tip-toed through the hypnotized beasts, through the puddles of blood and gore, over to the piano stool and sat down beside her.
“Keep playing,” she whispered in Lisa’s ear and so she did. She played Mozart. She played George Benson. She played Elton John. She played Carl Orf. Music flew from her fingertips and colored the air. It masked the scent of death, the sight of blood and bodies and the hideous fanged creatures with bellies full of her relative’s flesh and marrow. Lisa played until her fingers grew numb and her forearms cramped. She played until the pads of her fingertips cracked and bled.
She studied the demons’ features as they listened entranced by the music. Their eyes were large and went from the front of their faces all the way around to the sides like a pair of wrap-around sunglasses. Their skin was red and black like the turbulent sky above them and looked wet, but that may have been from the blood they had recently bathed in.
The creatures looked both human and reptilian, like a cross between an adolescent and a Salamander. Their mouths were full of yellowed fangs streaked with gore as if they’d brushed them with road-kill and their breath stank of fetid meat like an abattoir. The tallest one stood only five feet. Tusks, antlers, and horns that looked as if they’d been stolen from other animals and grafted on by a surgeon in some bizarre sort of body modification protruded from their faces and heads. Some of them even had extra limbs, human, animal, and other, that had also been surgically attached. Some even had extra heads…human heads that stared mournfully from their shoulders without saying a word or cursed and screamed in an endless diatribe of hate. Lisa shuddered trying to imagine what it would feel like to spend an eternity attached to one of those things. She had to keep playing.