They opened a new cabinet. Inside, they found tarnished lockets, a bronze ear wrapped up in a silk handkerchief, a silver bowl containing the corpse of a wolf spider, its legs curling in toward its abdomen. Vi recognized it as the one Mother Lark called the Harpist’s Hand and she didn’t want to touch it for fear of breaking it somehow.
“Here,” said Mel, “give it to me.” And while Vi picked up the silver bowl and polished it with a dish cloth, Mel held the Hand and plucked one strand of web at a time off of its legs (fingers?)—with each strand she moved, a snippet of harp song bloomed and faded through the room.
The sound of wind chimes glimmered outside. The rhythm of the spider silk and wind almost braided together into a recognizable tune—but not quite.
Vi knew that she and Mel were thinking the same thing: There used to be more Song. And more sisters to tend to it.
~
Childhood devotion had been different, easier and more painful all at once and by turns.
The sisters used to sit out in the garden all together, the ivy stirring in the breeze all around them. The sky turned teal around the edges and a deep blue overhead and the first stars came out. Mother Lark passed around bowls of figs and plums and they all ate as she spoke and sang. They would wipe sticky fingers off in the grass and lie on their stomachs and listen.
Sometimes, Vi would start to fall asleep and Mel would tug her hair—which meant that Vi had to stir and throw bits of grass at her. Mother Lark would scold them both, and Gale (Lark’s favorite) would laugh. Vi getting things wrong again. That was her way; she needed correction.
The brief interruption silenced, Lark sang of the Harpist:
When he played, the trees would uproot themselves and come listen to his tune. The spiders would weave harp strings between the trees’ branches, silk humming along to the Harpist’s rhythm. The Harpist could sing so sweetly as to alter the harmony of the spheres, and the world would shift around him.
Sometimes, Mother Lark would break her tune to speak, to whisper to her daughters:
“The Harpist had an enemy, a spirit—let us call the spirit Cacophony. Cacophony was envious of the Harpist’s control over the world’s music and would invade upon his domain, would inhabit the creatures in the Harpist’s garden and fray the strings of the cosmos until they broke and the Song fell apart, decayed, wrong notes filling the air as the world’s harmony died.”
The girls became grim. Vi stopped fidgeting.
Sometimes, after dark, Vi would lie awake in fear of Cacophony. She would watch the moonlit walls, and the spiders dangling against them looked like lost musical notes on a glowing page.
She would listen for the spiders’ melody—the Song her oldest sisters had already joined—and fail to hear it and she would hate herself for that; she knew that it should be much easier for her to hear it by now: a glowing and growing kind of noise. First low and strident whispers, an unseen orchestra tuning the web, then building fragments of a chant, and then a familiar Song …
Vi would clutch a necklace Lark had given her, a locket full of spider silk, and pray for the Harpist’s help, and then she would hear it—a wayward strand of music. Maybe it was just the breeze, maybe the wind chimes, but she thought not. She could hear the web radiating sound all around her.
And she would feel better and fall asleep, reassured that, somewhere, the Harpist was composing a Song that would include her one day, that she would be a part of things too.
~
This is how it goes, one of the very oldest stories:
One day, the Harpist found a woman with the loveliest voice that ever breathed or spoke or sang. He chose her as his Bride, and at their wedding the earth was strewn with dried lavender and foxglove. Birdsong echoed between the trees and the spiders’ threads quivered, their hymns reverberating through everything.
But the marriage torch sputtered more than it ought to, coughing out inauspicious signs.
Cacophony entered, unseen but omnipresent.
The Harpist played sweetly, but the ending of each and every tune he played went wrong. He adjusted the pegs on his harp, but his final note always went sour.
After the wedding, the Harpist’s Bride wandered barefoot through waves of grass to gather flowers.
And then Cacophony, who had watched their wedding jealously, fell among the spiders’ webs, entangled with their silk, and the Song went astray all around the Bride. It limped and stuttered.
The day darkened and the Bride found herself caught in a fog.
When the Harpist found his Bride, her bones had been picked clean by Cacophony, who had driven the spiders mad with the wrong kind of sound. They ate up the remains of the Bride’s voice.
The Harpist crafted a new harp with strings of spider silk in honor of her.
~
Some of the girls used to giggle to each other about the stories and songs. Cacophony was a weird word—that gave them fuel aplenty some nights. Vi said that it meant “shit-noise,” which made Mel and the others laugh (even though Gale had already explained wearily to them that the caco- part really just meant “bad” or “ugly”).
Vi could not sing as well as her sisters, but she had an ear for certain things—though not the right things. Mother Lark often reproved her for paying too much attention to how words sounded instead of the meaning behind them. Vi liked cacophony (the word, not the spirit) because the first bit sounded like it was breaking.
She was not supposed to enjoy that so much.
~
Mel’s ceremony. Vi helped weave the garland of foxglove for her hair. The drooping blossoms looked like bells, staring earthward, and Vi played with them instead of weaving them into the garland, shook them as though expecting sound to fall out, until Mother Lark told her to quit it.
Mel sat patiently and waited while they fretted over her hair, her dress. And then they took her by the hand and guided her outside.
Everyone assembled on the grass and faced the olive tree where the Harpist’s spirit would manifest. Only Mel would see him, but the rest of them would hear his music build around the edge of Mel’s union with him.
Mel drifted to the olive tree. She unfurled her scroll and held it out to read from it. She spoke, she sang. Vi could see sweat collect beneath the garland, dampening her bangs.
Vi would not remember Mel’s vows afterwards, but she would remember thinking that every word had been perfect, beautiful.
Then, as she used up the scroll, Mel looked around at her sisters, at the ivy clinging to the trees, at the too-vibrant blue sky.
When she collapsed upon the grass, she looked a little like a flower herself, in her pile of crumpled lace skirts. A crushed lily, used up by the summer heat.
Vi wanted to run to her, but Gale kept a hand on her shoulder, held her in place.
The moment stretched until the quiet of it became unbearable.
But then, at last, Mel stirred; she propped herself up on her elbows, rose shakily to her knees, her feet. She stood, wavered, and she went on singing, and they all sang with her and through her.
~
For days after her ceremony, Mel whistled as she worked in the kitchen, in the garden. Music fell from her whenever she opened her mouth. Mel trilled so beautifully and Vi wished she would not, since she wore away with every note that came loose. She grew thin and brittle, as though her skin had stopped being skin and had become something more like eggshell, ready to shatter and let Mel’s real substance out.
That was familiar; that was how it was supposed to go. And yet, Vi grew afraid that Mel would vanish when she wasn’t looking, and so she started barging into rooms in the hope of finding her, before she joined the Song. She prayed for Mel to stay and then she got mad at herself for praying for something like that. The wind slammed doors shut in her wake (which annoyed Lark to no end).
And then Vi found Mel sit
ting upon the floor beside her bed with a needle in hand. She was stitching up a tear in the fold of skin between her ear and her cheek, wet spilling out of her eyes while she worked with a shaking hand.
“It’s happening,” she said. “I’m falling apart.”
Her ear dangled loose like a door, wavering open and closed over a rift in her skin. There was no blood in the gap, just darkness—and black beads dripped slowly out, notes of spidery music flowing out of Mel. They scattered across her lap, across the floorboards, hid beneath their sisters’ beds.
Vi sat down beside her and wordlessly put out a hand for the needle and strand of silk. Mel passed them to her, and Vi did her best to sloppily stitch up the loose ear. Mel hissed as the needle dipped in and out of her skin. A few final drops of spider slipped out from beneath her flesh, singing softly as they descended on silver threads. They skittered away while Vi patched up their avenue of egress.
“Was it that terrible?” asked Vi. “Seeing him? A glimpse of him, anyway?”
She could still picture Mel’s collapse beneath the olive tree.
“Who?”
“Who? The Harpist.” Who else would she mean?
An acrid laugh fell out of Mel. “I didn’t see him,” she said. “I didn’t see anything.”
Vi knotted up the last of the thread and cut it loose. They sat in silence for a moment while Mel gingerly touched her repaired ear. A little golden hoop in her lobe glittered.
And then she said, “I don’t think there is a Harpist.”
A breeze stirred through the wind chimes just beyond the window.
Mel went on and on then. She said things she should not say:
The world may be a harp, but nobody’s ever been there to play it right. The Harpist is an absence. You think that we’re his creation, but, in fact, he is ours.
“So—why?” asked Vi. “Why do we do this?”
Mel did not know.
She thought for a moment, then said that perhaps it was all just an exercise in being loud. We have to tear ourselves to pieces because the tearing makes some noise, and that is one way, at least, of becoming a part of the world’s music.
~
Vi was good at ruining things, and Mother Lark had a whole lexicon uniquely deployed in description of her sometimes willful clumsiness:
Lark called Vi a “strepitous child!” when she sang poorly.
Lark called her “Vi the little earthquake” when she broke or knocked things over. Once Vi dropped a ceremonial plate a little on purpose, because in truth, she just liked how the word “earthquake” sounded; it seemed much bigger and more important than a soft monosyllable like “Vi.”
And then there were all the reminders not to slam doors, not to interrupt Lark’s stories and songs, reminders to listen and pay attention. Reminders to sing. Lark called her “our sweet and tuneful Viola” when she wanted to be cruel.
Sometimes Vi wanted to scream.
~
Interlude: a brief effort to leave the house.
Once, many sisters had been tasked with leaving, to find more Brides for the Harpist out in the world, whom they would bring back to the house and garden. But these leavings had started to create trouble in recent years, since the sisters who left tended to stay away as the world grew louder and distracted them and they could not find their way back into the web.
Lark never protested when one of her daughters asked to leave, though she did frown and tell them that it would become harder and harder to hear the Song the farther they went from the house.
Vi started listening for traffic. Airplanes passing overhead. Muffled, electronic pulses of non-song thudding through the dark.
And she left. She went to school. She drank too much and learned about architecture and words like “tympanum” and “clerestory” and studied dead languages. She met new people who said, “You’re one of those sisters—the crazy spider ladies? Didn’t know there were any of you left.” Vi felt like an exotic specimen and did not tell them about the spider silk in her locket. She wondered how they slept without any ability to hear the web’s Song, how they could avoid knowing that the world would fade around them if the music ever stuttered to a halt.
And she sent messages home, kept promising a return. The promises became self-deprecating jokes. You know me. I am the stray note in this tune. Probably won’t be back until it’s too late.
When Lark didn’t answer and Gale did instead, Vi stopped sending messages.
~
Nighttime in the world beyond the gate could get so strange. It never matched Vi’s internal picture of “night,” dusted with stars. Instead, buildings became monolithic shadows, darker than the strange sky which glowed livid shades of dusky orange, purple.
And the sounds: no birdsong, no thrumming web. Instead: car alarms, the occasional siren, some drunken hooting from the street below.
And then a different sound altogether: someone pounding at her door.
Vi rose, stumbled into wakefulness, peered through the peephole and saw Gale. A bedraggled Gale, hair in wan shreds, and she was shaking as though she had fallen out of a pocket of winter, even as summer heat choked the air.
“Vi?” said Gale. “Are you there?”
Vi opened the door and let her sister in.
Gale’s skin had become like eggshell—just like Mel’s—and Vi could see the stitches of silvery spider silk, marking the fault lines that ran all across her. Vi led her to the couch and started to brew some tea. But even as Gale wrapped herself up in a cocoon of blanket, she kept shivering.
“Music,” she said. “Please. I need to hear something at least a little like the Song.”
And so Vi sorted through her CD’s, found Edvard Grieg and loaded him into the stereo; Solveig’s Song mounted and a wave of harp and violin trembled and flooded through the room. Gale sighed and leaned back into the couch.
Vi did not dare ask about their sisters, for fear of what Gale would say. She asked about the house instead.
Gale frowned and said, “Why don’t you come home and see for yourself?”
“I will,” said Vi. “I’ve been meaning to for a while.”
“You have to,” said Gale.
And Vi heard what she would not say:
You have to become a part of the Song or it will run out of words, and we will be gone forever.
The next morning, when Vi awoke, she found a foggy gray craquelure of web had consumed the apartment. It looked a little like everything was made of glass, like the world was cracking apart around Vi. She found spiders here and there, legs twitching as they plucked feverishly at the web’s weave and yet no music came out.
Shreds of Gale’s voice cried out and then faded into silence.
~
When Vi returned, she found the old wooden gate overgrown, swallowed up by ferns and grasses and ivy. When she swept the ivy aside, looking for the latch, she found tangles of graffiti carved into the gate’s surface. Local teenagers, probably. They had cut caricatures of spiders and fanged harps into the woodgrain, then run away.
Glass crunched underfoot. Vi looked down and fragments of crushed beer bottle glittered at her.
Once there were fairy lights that glowed through the grass past the gate, drops of cheap amber brightness that would lead the way across a brick path. Now all was dark and the bricks unsettled by the moving and shifting earth and weeds.
Beyond the gate: the house. Home. The looming Victorian looked so familiar and strange all at once, its silhouette the same, but the white paint peeling off the clapboard walls was wrong—or had it always been like that? Tearing apart a little? Vi couldn’t remember now. She climbed up the narrow set of steps that led to the front door, then rattled the knob until it opened.
Vi flicked a light switch that did not respond.
But as she entered, she could still make ou
t myriad flecks of spider as they ascended strands of indiscernible silk—they looked like dark drops of water falling the wrong way.
It felt like a salute. A welcome home.
Or a warning. Perhaps she had come back too late. Perhaps they were not glad to see her.
Vi tried to listen for a trace of Mel’s voice as the spider silk hummed all around her. But she could not hear her. She could not hear the music of the house at all.
Just muttering noise, loud and quiet all at once.
~
Vi did not want to sleep in the room she used to share with Mel and the others. And so she found a bare spot on the floor of the dining room. She nestled into a thick quilt, unearthed from one of the closets.
She lay awake, afraid of what she might dream.
And then:
She stood quaking before her sisters—they were back, they had coalesced again out of the Song. But all they did was watch her in silence.
The lace skirt tangled around Vi’s legs felt wrong and heavy, an insistent cocoon that wanted to transmute her into something else—the right kind of Bride, maybe. One with a sweeter voice.
The scroll in her hand. She tried to twist apart the twine around it, to let it uncoil, but it resisted her. Vi reached for the words that were not there, words she had not assembled, thoughts she had neglected to think.
When she tore the scroll open at last, she faced an insistent blank—
Or was that the needling blank of moonlight that had crawled in through the window and draped itself across her, nudged her out of the dream.
Vi rose to draw the curtain so that she could sleep again—but something dark, a fat shadow, dangled at the edge of her vision. She turned to face it. Again, the fat shadow flickered in and out of sight. And then it squirmed and she felt a tickling beside her ear—
In spite of herself, Vi raked her fingers through her hair, felt something wriggling between her fingers and threw it.
A loud screech. An almost audible smack as the spider fell against the wall, then dropped to the floor.
Vi wondered if she had hurt it and waited, her breath become a heavy knot. She could almost hear the house’s reproof: You would crush these final leavings of your own sisters, selfish child? Haven’t you done enough already?
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