It took only a few notes for him to know that this one was scary.
“Is it?” Ken asked again.
Elmer Zook gave a little shrug. “Yeah. I think so anyway.”
“Well, we’ll be the judge of that,” Ken said with a laugh as he went to sit down. “Take it away, Elmer!”
Elmer raised his fiddle to his chin, then flexed his bowing arm twice. He took a deep breath, and let the bow rest on the retuned strings. In his mind he saw the black, handwritten notes on the brittle old paper, and he began to play.
When the first notes tore into the fabric of the air, a change came over the attitudes of the listeners. The slouchers began to straighten up, and the heads of those already sitting straight began to lift like hounds on scent. Their gazes, initially fixed on Elmer, slowly rose until they were focused on something just above his head, something that wavered in the suddenly thick air of the room, shimmered in strands of red and gold and silver and black, and, as one phrase led to the next, the black began to predominate, subsuming the other, brighter colors, and finally taking even the deep, dark red into it, like blood turning black in starlight.
The boy continued to play in the privacy of his bedroom, in the solitude of the empty house. This will work, he thought. This will be perfect. Damn, but it was weird. It was beyond just minor key, though it had that quality to it. There were scoops and leaps and jagged staccato passages that were enormously challenging, yet he was somehow able to negotiate the demanding maze of notes. His sudden ability surprised him. He knew he was good, but he hadn’t realized he was this good.
But as the torrent of tones surged out of his violin, he saw on the page a flashing, shimmering light, and he thought, oh no, not again. He’d been troubled with ocular migraines since eighth grade, painless but bothersome neurological illusions in both eyes at once, visions of a jagged-edged oval, as though something in his brain had shattered a glass sheet spread across his vision and shards glimmered across the landscape of his sight. It was annoying, but always went away within a half hour.
However, he soon realized that this ocular migraine was different from the dozens he’d had before. The area around the torn edges, showing the real world he had always continued to see during even the worst of these events, was changing, was becoming filled with bizarre colors merging with a lack of color, and the jagged oval at the center of his vision was different too. Never before had anything begun to come through it.
Elmer played on, as if unable to stop. His eyes seemed to have rolled up so that the pupils were hidden behind his eyelids, showing only the whites, but his right arm continued to saw at the strings, and his left held the fiddle under his chin, while his fingers raced and spasmed on the black fingerboard.
Except for the shrieking fiddle, the only sounds heard in the room were soft moans, whimpers, and deep, ragged sighs. Nearly everyone was looking into the space in the air above Elmer’s head. Nearly everyone was seeing the same thing there, but each saw something different as well, something meaningful to him or her alone, something terrifying, something heartbreaking, something fearsome.
Midge Butler saw her father looming over her late at night.
Perry Crawford saw his mother on the bathroom floor, her head half gone, her pink .45 caliber handgun still clenched in her fist.
Eight-year-old Tim Keebler held his cat Pluff in his arms, panicked as to why she wasn’t moving, why her hind legs just hung there as if there were no bones in them.
Abe Peters shivered over an open grave deep in his cornfield, a shovel in his hands, the body of his wife Esther at his feet, her neck twisted so that she was looking over her right shoulder, up at the stars.
And Esther Peters saw her best meat knife sliding in and out of her husband’s stomach, just below his breastbone, over and over, her hand with her late mother’s signet ring, the only piece of jewelry she owned, holding it with white knuckles. And she heard him grunt with every shove, and heard her own terrified breaths whistling in and out of her tight throat.
Everyone who heard saw something, events real, events imagined, things that still might be and things that never would. They saw these terrors in the space in the air over Elmer Zook’s head, that space to which the music rose and then spread out over them all like a dark blanket of sound. They sobbed and trembled and wailed at what they heard and what they saw, and the boy continued to play. It was not music. It was not a tune. It was a surge of sound that gave them all a glimpse of a world they had not imagined, a world where fear and terror ruled, where there was no light nor joy nor love, only loss and pain and savagery, and they could do nothing to make it stop.
Ken Groff tried. He was the closest to Elmer, and he pushed himself to his feet, where he wavered for a moment before a flood of repeated, falling triplets drove him to his knees, and he grabbed his head in his hands and wept. And Elmer played on.
The boy played on, all alone, in his bedroom. He wanted to stop, but he couldn’t. Even as more and more of those unformed, shapeless creatures undulated through the gap that had been torn in his vision, he knew he had to stop. He was beginning to have thoughts, bad ones, far worse than even the darkest fantasies he’d ever imagined in the blackness of midnight.
He began to cry, and thought he could feel his bladder start to empty itself in panic, wet heat like blood trickling down his thigh. He was gasping, barely able to breathe, thinking that soon, soon, he must surely pass out, fall unconscious while those creatures continued to pour into his sight, his room, his mind, and then—
Something took the bow from his hand, wrenched it away, and his right arm dropped, and the sound ceased all at once, the roar subsiding, his vision clearing, and standing there in front of him was his younger brother, looking at him in confusion and disgust, the plastic buds in his ears blaring hip-hop so loudly that the boy could hear it.
“What the hell are you doing?” his brother asked him, gesturing with the bow he was holding toward the growing dark, wet spot on the front of the boy’s jeans.
“An accident,” the boy said huskily. “Don’t say anything to Mom and Dad about this,” he added, with as threatening a look as he could muster under the circumstances. “Or I’ll tell them you’re listening to that hardcore crap.” The threat, along with the fact that he was a head taller than his brother, seemed to be sufficient, as the younger boy nodded, handed back the bow, and left the room.
The boy changed his jeans and underwear, and washed the soiled ones, hoping they would dry before his parents got home. Then he sat on his bed and looked at the music that had affected him so strongly and unpredictably. If the music had had such an effect on him when he played it, what might it do to those who listened? Even if he managed to stay sane, the listeners to such musical blasphemy might never forgive him…
He thought some more. He thought about what he might do with the tune. Despite its power, and because of it, there was no way he could play it in the Halloween contest.
But it might be just right for someone else.
It had gone on long enough. The effect the tune had produced was far more than he had intended. The music had to stop now.