“It wasn’t nonsense. It was all quite true, you know. Absolutely true.” Then, softly, he said, “Break the machinery.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t cause any more trouble for you. I’ll go, now. I can’t tell you how foolish I feel, haranguing you like that. A dumb little puritan, puffed up with pride in her own art. Telling you that you don’t measure up to my ideals. When I—”
“You didn’t hear me. I asked you to break the machinery.”
She looked at him in a new way, slightly out of focus. “What are you talking about?”
“To stop me. I want to be gone. Is that so hard to understand? You, of all people, should understand that. What you say is true, very very true. Can you put yourself where I am? A thing, not alive, not dead, just a thing, a tool, an implement that, unfortunately, thinks and remembers and wishes for release. Yes, a player piano. My life stopped and my art stopped, and I have nothing to belong to now, not even the art. For it’s always the same. Always the same tones, the same reaches, the same heights. Pretending to make music, as you say. Pretending.”
“But I can’t—”
“Of course you can. Come, sit down, we’ll discuss it. And you’ll play for me.”
“Play for you?”
He reached out his hand and she started to take it, then drew her hand back. “You’ll have to play for me,” he said quietly. “I can’t let just anyone end me. That’s a big, important thing, you see. Not just anyone. So you’ll play for me.” He got heavily to his feet. Thinking of Lisbeth, Sharon, Dorothea. Gone, all gone now. Only he, Bekh, left behind, some of him left behind, old bones, dried meat. Breath as stale as Egypt. Blood the color of pumice. Sounds devoid of tears and laughter. Just sounds.
He led the way, and she followed him, out onto the stage, where the console still stood uncrated. He gave her his gloves, saying, “I know they aren’t yours. I’ll take that into account. Do the best you can.” She drew them on slowly, smoothing them.
She sat down at the console. He saw the fear in her face, and the ecstasy, also. Her fingers hovering over the keys. Pouncing. God, Timi’s Ninth! The tones swelling and rising, and the fear going from her face. Yes. Yes. He would not have played it that way, but yes, just so. Timi’s notes filtered through her soul. A striking interpretation. Perhaps she falters a little, but why not? The wrong gloves, no preparation, strange circumstances. And how beautifully she plays. The hall fills with sound. He ceases to listen as a critic might; he becomes part of the music. His own fingers moving, his muscles quivering, reaching for pedals and stops, activating the pressors. As if he plays through her. She goes on, soaring higher, losing the last of her nervousness. In full command. Not yet a finished artist, but so good, so wonderfully good! Making the mighty instrument sing. Draining its full resources. Underscoring this, making that more lean. Oh, yes! He is in the music. It engulfs him. Can he cry? Do the tearducts still function? He can hardly bear it, it is so beautiful. He has forgotten, in all these years. He has not heard anyone else play for so long. Seven hundred four days. Out of the tomb. Bound up in his own meaningless performances. And now this. The rebirth of music. It was once like this all the time, the union of composer and instrument and performer, soul-wrenching, all-encompassing. For him. No longer. Eyes closed, he plays the movement through to its close by way of her body, her hands, her soul. When the sound dies away, he feels the good exhaustion that comes from total submission to the art.
“That’s fine,” he said, when the last silence was gone. “That was very lovely.” A catch in his voice. His hands were still trembling; he was afraid to applaud.
He reached for her, and this time she took his hand. For a moment he held her cool fingers. Then he tugged gently, and she followed him back into the dressing room, and he laid down on the sofa, and he told her which mechanisms to break, after she turned him off, so he would feel no pain. Then he closed his eyes and waited.
“You’ll just—go?” she asked.
“Quickly. Peacefully.”
“I’m afraid. It’s like murder.”
“I’m dead,” he said. “But not dead enough. You won’t be killing anything. Do you remember how my playing sounded to you? Do you remember why I came here? Is there life in me?”
“I’m still afraid.”
“I’ve earned my rest,” he said. He opened his eyes and smiled. “It’s all right. I like you.” And, as she moved toward him, he said, “Thank you.”
Then he closed his eyes again.
She turned him off. Then she did as he had instructed her.
Picking her way past the wreckage of the sustaining chamber, she left the dressing room. She found her way out of the Music Center—out onto the glass landscape, under the singing stars, and she was crying for him.
Laddy. She wanted very much to find Laddy now. To talk to him. To tell him he was almost right about what he’d told her. Not entirely, but more than she had believed… before. She went away from there. Smoothly, with songs yet to be sung.
And behind her, a great peace had settled. Unfinished, at last the symphony had wrung its last measure of strength and sorrow.
It did not matter what Weatherex said was the proper time for mist or rain or fog. Night, the stars, the songs were forever.
PASSION PLAY
by Nancy Holder
Nancy Holder is the author of more than eighty novels, including Pretty Little Devils, Daughter of the Flames, and Dead in the Water, which won the Bram Stoker Award for best novel. She’s also written a number of media tie-in novels, for properties such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Highlander, and Smallville. Writing as Chris P. Flesh, Holder is the author of the Pretty Freekin Scary series of books for children. A new paranormal romance novel, Son of the Shadows, was released in August. Holder’s short fiction—which has appeared in anthologies such as Borderlands, Confederacy of the Dead, Love in Vein, and The Mammoth Book of Dracula—has won her the Stoker Award three times.
Holder says this story was inspired by the Oberammergau Passion Play, which originated in 1634, during the Thirty Years’ War. “Bubonic plague had spread all over Bavaria. The citizens of Oberammergau begged God to spare them,” she says. “In return, they would put on a play about the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus every ten years. The ravages of the plague ceased, and the Oberammergauers kept their vow. They still perform the play, most recently in 2000.”
It was a chilly May morning, and Cardinal Schonbrun’s knees cracked as he took his seat beside Father Meyer in the Passionspielhaus. Father Meyer heard the noise very clearly; he was acutely aware of every sound, smell, and sight around him: of the splinters in the planks of the large, open-air stage before them, the smell of dew, the dampness of his palms. The murmurs of anticipation of the assembling crowd, and those of speculation—and derision—when his own people, scattered among the thousands, caught sight of him. He was aware that he looked like a prisoner, wedged between his friend Hans Ahrenkiel, the bishop of Munich, and his nemesis, the cardinal. He was aware that his life as a priest would be over that day.
The cardinal scowled at Father Meyer and said, “Is it true what I’ve just heard?”