He couldn't stop me, simply wasn't strong enough; his hand fluttered on top of mine, he couldn't. Haunt, specter, the violin's stronger than you!
"You've broken the veil," he swore. "I warn yo u. The thing you hold in your hands belongs to me and neither it nor I are of this world and you know it. To see it is one thing, to come with me is another."
"And what will I see when I come with you? Such pain that I will give it back?
You come in here, offering me desperation rather than despair, and you think I'll weep for you?"
He gnawed his lip, and he hesitated, not to cheapen what he meant to say.
"Yes, you will see that, you will see . . . what distinguishes pain . what, it's .
.they “
"And who were they? Who were they that were so terrible they could propel you right out of life with a shape and taking this violin with you so that you come to me, in the guise of comforter, and cast me down, to see those weeping faces, my Mother, oh, you, I hate you-my worst memories."
"You reveled in tormenting yourself, you made your own graveyard pictures and poems, you sang out for death with a greedy mouth. You think death is flowers? Give me my violin. Scream with your vocal cords, but give me my violin."
Mother in a dream two years after her death, "You saw flowers, my girl."
"You mean you're not dead?" I had cried out in the dream, but then I knew this woman was a fake, not her, I knew by the crooked smile, not my Mother, my Mother was really dead. This imposter was too cruel when she said, "The whole funeral was a sham," when she said, "You saw flowers."
"Get away from me," I whispered.
"It's mine."
"I did not invite you!"
"You did."
"I do not deserve you."
"You do."
"I made up prayers and fantasies, as you said. I laid the tributes on the grave, and they had petals, these tributes. I dug graves that were cut to my size. You took me back, you took me to the raw and the unframed, and you made my head sick with it.
You kicked the breath out of me! And now I can play, I can play this violin!"
I turned away from him and I played, the bow rising and falling with ever greater grace, song. My hands knew! Yes, they did.
"Only because it's mine, because it's not real, you shrew, give it up!"
I stepped back, playing the melody down deep and harsh, ignoring the repeated thrust of his desperate hands. Then I broke off, shivering.
The magical link was made between my mind and my hands, between intent and fingers, between will and skill; God be praised, it had happened.
"It's coming from my violin because it's mine!" he said.
"No. The fact that you can't snatch it back is clear enough. You try. You can't.
You can pass through walls. You can play it. You brought it with you into death, all right. But you can't get it away from me now. I'm stronger than you. I have it. It stays solid, look. Listen, it sings! What if it was destined somehow for me? Did you ever think of that, you evil predatory creature, did you ever love anyone before or after death yourself, enough to think that perhaps-"
"Outrageous," he said. "You are nothing, you are random, you are one in hundreds, you are the very epitome of the person who appreciates all and creates nothing, you are merely one-"
"Oh, you clever thing. You ma ke your face so full of pain, just like Lily, just like Mother."
"You do this to me," he whispered. "It's not right, I would have moved on, I would have gone if you had asked me. You tricked me!"
"But you didn't move on, you wanted me, you tormented me, you didn't go until it was too late and I needed you; how dare you tear at wounds that deep, and now I have this and I'm stronger than you! Something in me has claimed it and won't let it go. I can play it."
"No, it's part of me, as much as my face or my coat or my hands, or my hair.
We're ghosts, that thing and I, you can't begin to imagine what they did, you have no authority, you cannot come between me and that instrument, you don't begin to understand this perdition, and they..."
He bit his lip; his face gave the illusion of a man who might faint, so white it went, all the blood that wasn't blood rushing from it. He opened his mouth.
I couldn't bear to see him hurt. I couldn't. It seemed the final error, the ultimate wrong, the last defeat, to see him hurt, Stefan, whom I scarcely knew and had robbed.
But I would not give the violin back to him.
I let my eyes mist. I felt nothing, the great cool blankness of nothing. Nothing. I heard music in my mind, a replay of the music I'd made. I bowed my head and shut my eyes. Play again-.
"All right, then," he said. I waked from this blankness, and looked at him, and my hands tightened on the violin.
"You've made your choice," he said, eyebrows lifted, face full of wonder.
"What choice?"
Chapter 11
THE LIGHT dulled in the room; glossy leaves beyond the curtains lost their shape.
The smells of the room and the world weren't the same.
"What choice?"
"To come with me. You're in my realm now, you're with me! I have strengths and weaknesses, no power to strike you dead, but I can bind you with spells and plunge you into the true past as surely as an angel could do it, as surely as your own conscience can.
You drive me to this, you force me."
A stinging wind swept my hair back. The bed was gone. So were the walls. It was night and the trees loomed and then vanished. It was cold, bitter, biting cold, and there was a fire! Look, a great and lurid blaze against the clouds.
"Oh, God, you wouldn't take me there!" I said. "Not to that! Oh, God, that burni ng house, that fear, that old child fear of fire! Ah. I will smash this violin to tinder-"
People shouted, screamed. Bells rang. The whole night was alive with horses and carriages and people running to and fro and the fire, the fire was huge.
The fire was in a great long rectangular house five stories high, with all windows of the upper floor belching flames.
This was the crowd of a time past, women with their hair pinned up and in great flowing skirts that flared from beneath their breasts, and men in frock coats, and all in terror.
"Good God!" I cried. I was cold, and the wind lashed my face. The cinders flew over me, the sparks striking my dress. People ran with buckets of water. People screamed. I saw tiny figures in the window of the huge house; they threw things out to the dark crowds leaping below. A huge painting tumbled down like a dark postage stamp against the fire, as men ran to catch it.
The whole great square was filled with those who watched and cried and moaned and sought to help. Chairs were tossed from the high stories. A great tapestry was heavily flung out of one window in awkward heaps.
"Where are we? Tell me."
I looked at the clothes of those who ran past us. The soft flowing gowns of the last century before corsets had come , and the men, the men in big-pocketed coats, and look! Even the shirt of the filthy man who lay on the stretcher, burnt and covered with blood, it had great soft wrinkled ballooned sleeves.
Soldiers wore their hats big-brimmed, turned-up, and sideways. Big lumbering and creaky carriages pulled as close as they could to the very fire itself, and the doors flopped open and men jumped out to assist. It was an assault of common men and gentlemen.
A man near me removed his heavy coat and put it over the shoul ders of a sagging, weeping woman whose gown was like a long inverted lily of wilted silk, her bare neck looking so cold as the big coat came down to cover it.
"Don't you want to go inside!" Stefan said. He glared at me. He trembled. He wasn t immune to what he'd called up! He trembled but he was in a fury. I held the violin still, I would never let it go. "Come on, don't you want to! Look, you see?"