by Noel Hynd
“Noise.”
That’s what Rabinowitz had called it when he played. Sometimes. There were moments when life had a terrible symmetry.
In his bed, Geiger twisted in anguish.
A third dream rose up:
He was standing on some sort of burial ground and it was night. Above him, the stars burned like a million tiny torches. The moon was pasted in the sky like a wafer. The wafer.
“Are you Catholic?” someone asked.
He cringed.
“I’m not anything anymore. I lost my religion long ago,” he answered. “Shed it the way a snake sheds its skin. Just crawled out of it one day. Happier without it, if you want to know.”
“Well, look at what you’ve done,” the someone continued. “You’ve killed the most precious thing you ever had.”
“My music?” Rolf asked aloud in his sleep.
“Your woman.”
In the dream, Rolf turned to the coffin. Simple pine. Like a spinet. The setting was the same as Rabinowitz’s funeral. But it was Diana who was in the coffin.
“You murdered her!” someone said.
Geiger screamed out in his sleep, “No!”
“Strangled her.”
“No!” He yelled out again.
He saw her in the coffin. Her skin was white as marble. A sleeping angel. Something from a churchyard on a winter evening.
Lifeless as ice.
Rolf turned to the speaker. It was Rabinowitz in the garb of a priest.
“Monsignor Kelly, where are you? Brother Matthew, I need you. Where is Sister Mary William? Someone help me!”
Rabinowitz smiled.
The music in the background was discordant. There was insane laugher taunting him. A hell of a nightmare from his youth, except…
“This will be real, Rolf.”
Geiger’s eyes flashed opened. A hell of a nightmare. He felt himself turn in bed, as if startled.
“Still here, Rolf!”
In the darkness, he tried to sit up. There was an inexplicable force upon his upper body. It was as if a strong man had placed two hands on Geiger’s shoulders and shaken him.
Geiger felt himself cry out, as in a nightmare. The unseen hands gripped him hard. He felt himself pulled off his bed and onto the floor, where he landed hard. Then the force was gone and he looked up.
“Oh, my God…Oh my God…!” He was certain that he saw a human form before him, hovering in the room. Something absolutely terrifying and not of this world. The image came and went. It was gone in an instant. Rolf raised his hand and found the light switch by his bedside. He clicked it on. As far as he could see, the room was empty of intruders. It contained only himself, awake, and Diana, sleeping, barely roused by the light.
He took several seconds to let his heart and nerves settle. His senses were on full alert, waiting for something unexpected. But the something didn’t come. Or at least it didn’t come now. Gradually, Rolf Geiger got to his feet. He walked to the door and looked into the hallway.
He put on the hall lights. Nothing there either.
He froze again as the music began again downstairs. The same beautiful but terrifying melodies he thought he had heard once before. They rose from his own Steinway.
Chopin. Technically impeccable. A polonaise expressed in a gorgeous tone.
“Oh, God above…,” Geiger whispered aloud with a trembling voice. He would recognize that technique, that touch, anywhere. A thousand years could pass and it would be equally unmistakable.
“Yes, Rolf. That’s true.”
“It’s Rabinowitz,” whispered Geiger. “He’s back.”
Geiger felt his forehead wet with perspiration. He felt one bead of sweat moving slowly down his left temple. He imagined that it could have been not just sweat, but a drop of blood.
“Come downstairs, Rolf. Come listen to your master. A special recital. Just for you.”
“No. I don’t want to,” Geiger said.
“Oh, but you must…unless you’re scared of your superior.”
His gaze drifted downstairs again. There was a light seeping out from underneath the door to his library again. The same as the other night when he had also though he heard a mezzanotte nocturne.
Rolf Geiger spoke bravely to whatever presence was there.
“Where are you?” Rolf Geiger demanded. “In my library? At my piano? If you’re there, I want to see you.”
A beat. Nothing happened. He waited.
“Not bloody likely. Until I’m ready.”
A moment of tension and anticipation dissolved into nothing. Aside from the music, the only sounds Rolf Geiger was aware of was the rhythmic thumping of his heart in his chest.
“Hey,” called a nearby female voice. “Tiger?” Diana. From the still-lit bedroom. He looked back toward her. She was sitting up in bed.
“What’s going on in that head of yours tonight?” she asked softly. “This is the second time you’ve been up.”
Downstairs, the music continued.
“You don’t hear anything?” Geiger asked.
“What?” She listened.
“Outside?” she asked. “From the street?”
“No. From downstairs in my library.” She shook her head.
“Did you leave something on?” she asked. “Radio? CD player?”
“Someone’s playing my piano,” he said. She listened again.
“Now?” she asked, mystified.
“Now.”
“You hear it now?” she asked. He nodded. He heard it.
“Rolf,” she said, “I don’t hear anything.”
“You must!” he said.
The music was resonating in his ears, the volume pumping up as if to irritate him. Geiger held a mental image of the old man aggressively pounding the keys.
“But I don’t,” she pleaded. “There’s nothing there.”
“It stopped,” Geiger said. Diana’s expression showed concern.
“Why don’t you climb into my side of the bed,” she said. “Come in and hold me, okay?”
Geiger withdrew slightly. He looked disappointed. “You didn’t hear anything?” he asked.
“No.” He sighed. He felt a tumbling sensation within him.
“Let me at least go down and turn the light off,” he said. “Then I’ll climb in with you.”
“It’s a deal,” she said. “Hurry back.”
Geiger left his bedroom and went again to the top of the stairs. No music played down below. But as he looked down, he could have sworn he saw the door to the library closing, as if someone had been in there, come out to the front hall to eavesdrop, then had returned.
The light still showed under the door. He felt himself age ten years on the spot.
‘Something’s there,” he told himself. “Something’s there.” Bravely, he started down the steps.
His own footfall was silent in the darkness. His hand glided on the banister as he descended. Halfway down. Then two steps from the bottom of the stairs. Then he was in the middle of the downstairs entrance hall and only a few feet from the closed door to his library.
The music commenced again. An étude.
It sent a shiver through Geiger. He recognized the piece. Aeolian Harp. This étude had been one of Rabinowitz’s favorite pieces. The old master had played it at their first meeting. Now Rolf was hearing it again.
The artistry staggered Geiger anew. He followed the wondrous melody, in the middle of which a tenor voice broke from the chords and joined the principal theme. It was rather like an undulation of the A flat major chord, brought out more resonantly here and there with Rabinowitz’s foot on the pedal.
“Rabinowitz’s foot?” What was he telling himself?
The thought distracted Geiger from the music and back to the reality in front of him. He wasn’t listening to his onetime teacher; he was listening to a ghost at his piano.
Yes, a ghost. That’s what was confronting him mow. Geiger accepted it. That was the new reality of what was opposing him.
Th
e ghost of Isador Rabinowitz was in his home.
The worst part about it was that now it all seemed so normal. Within the context of everything else that had transpired, it was so logical. The only explanation for what he was seeing, feeling, and hearing was a supernatural one.
Geiger, still standing in the half darkness, wondered how soon he would look directly at the specter. Would it be there when he pushed open the door to his library, busy at the keyboard?
Maybe.
Would it be ghastly white? Translucent? Indistinguishable from a living creature?
All three.
A moment passed. Perspiration burst again from Geiger’s forehead, this time as if someone had opened a thousand tiny faucets.
Rolf Geiger wasn’t able to speak. There remained a dreamlike, surreal quality to all of this. It reminded him of a bad dream in which one is riveted in place with a great evil approaching, but one is unable to move or scream. Rolf Geiger also felt as if something—some force—had wrapped its tentacles around him, much in the way a piece of music can capture a music hall.
Yet Rolf Geiger knew “this was real!”
The music resounded in his ears. Beauty and horror at the same time. It was as if his head were in a bell and a gigantic new clapper had gone berserk.
“Hell’s bells, Rolf. Just for you, my lad!”
Geiger could wait no longer. Whatever was waiting for him, whatever form Rabinowitz was in, Geiger was prepared for the confrontation.
He threw open the door to his piano room. Instantly the music stopped.
The lights went out. Quickly, Geiger reached for the light switch.
The lights along the ceiling fired bright beams in each direction.
He waited. His heart was racing again. He stared at his room and searched for movement.
There was none. For almost a full minute, Geiger stood in place. He felt himself a stranger in his own home. He waited anew for a movement or a sign that would not satisfy him in coming.
Then slowly, cautiously, Geiger crossed the room.
To his suspicious eyes, his Steinway seemed to have a strange aura around it, almost an extra glow. He drew back for a second and took a deep breath. Then he spent several seconds trying to convince himself that he had been imagining all of this.
He went to the keys of the piano. Somehow, music was still ringing in his ears. He put his hand on the piano, trying to sense any sort of vibration from having just been played.
“My God!” He thought he detected something. Someone had been playing here. Someone had just stopped. He reached into the well and placed his hands on the strings. Sure as hell. He thought he detected a vibration, be it ever so slight.
Then Rolf noticed something else.
When he looked at the score on the table beside his Steinway, he grimaced. Who the hell had been messing with his music?
Diana? Edythe Jamison? Had they dislodged things earlier in the day and he hadn’t noticed? Or had the music been rearranged after he had left the room at eleven that evening?
If so, by whom? He had no objection to either Diana or Mrs. Jamison going through any part of his home. But he wished that if either touched any scores, the music should be returned to exactly the same spot.
He had left things as he had for a reason. It vexed him that the music had been disturbed. It was the type of thing that Rabinowitz used to do with rivals—rearrange their music—just to distract them. Just so there would possibly be that little extra hitch in their performance.
He sighed. Whoever had arranged things had also placed a piece by Mussorgsky in the bow. He glanced at it. Pictures at an Exhibition.
Geiger shuddered anew. Coincidence or cruel joke. This was one of Rabinowitz’s signature pieces. In giving an informal performance, he would throw this one off with the Aeolian Harp étude and a polonaise.
Geiger stared at the music for several seconds. He felt an enormous shudder of fear. What was that doing out? Yes he had looked at it earlier in the evening, but he thought he had put it away. He thought he had buried it deeply, in fact.
And now that he thought of it, this was exactly the Chopin that he thought he had heard playing. “How in hell did that get there?” he mumbled aloud.
“What?” an invisible voice asked.
“I said, ‘How the hell…?’”
“That’s what I thought you said.”
A heavy momentary silence came across the room and enveloped Geiger. A complete stillness, almost like a picture freezing on a movie screen.
He shook himself. He still must be half-asleep, he told himself. Because he was having this conversation with himself.
“It all seems logical,” he told himself. There was logic to everything.
Geiger reached to the music and folded it carefully, placing it back in its folder. The funny thing was, he thought he remembered doing this already.
He calmed slightly. He looked around the room and tried to attach himself to his old concept of sanity and rationality. Moments earlier he had been thinking in terms of confronting a ghost. Now all he had before him was some disturbed sheets of music and an empty room.
Of course no ghost was in here, he told himself bravely. There was no way to leave other than the window and the door. He glanced to each. The window remains locked and the door was in front of me. No one passed through it.
The light, he decided, had been some sort of optical illusion. The music had been an overworked imagination. He wanted to be rational. Ghosts didn’t exist.
He rose from the piano, put everything away, and walked across the room to leave. For a moment, he thought he was aware of something at the edge of his senses. But then he dismissed that, too. He stood in the doorway, fidgeted slightly, waited and scanned the room.
Nothing.
He turned the light off. He walked through the dark hall. He found the steps that would lead him back upstairs.
Then a horrible feeling was upon him as his foot found the bottom step of the staircase. The mood of the darkness around him had palpably turned against him. No longer was it friendly cozy or comforting. It felt malevolent and oppressive. It felt like something unspeakable had turned against him.
He stopped. From deep within him came the overwhelming feeling that he should not climb the stairs. Something horrible would happen if he did. But he took another step upward. Then a second one.
One step at a time. Each step higher than the next.
He was as frightened as he had ever been in his adult life. Subliminally, deep down, he thought he heard something resembling a low snarling sound. Like an animal. A wolf or dog, warning not to approach.
He broke into another sweat. He felt as if he had a foot in each of two worlds, both of them fraught with terror. One world that he understood, another that he could barely comprehend. And the two worlds were rushing together right here, on the staircase, with a horrifying, gripping confluence.
“Oh God…God protect me!” he thought. Empty words. He hadn’t prayed for years. Why look for protection or salvation here?
He took a third step upward. Then a fourth. Only seven more, he knew, to the landing of the second floor. Only seven more and he already knew he would never make them.
He knew because there was a force upon him now. Those invisible hands again. Hands. Leaning down in the dark. Pressing hard on his shoulders, forcing him back. And a coldness enveloped him, too. He felt as if a window had just been opened onto one of those icy gray winter mornings in the West Virginia of his childhood.
“No! Leave me alone! No!” he cried out.
“Impudent!” came the response. “You said you wanted to see me!”
“No!” Geiger answered aloud. “I’ve changed my mind. Stay dead!”
“I can’t!”
In the darkness, Geiger forged upward. The fifth step. The sixth.
Then he felt himself break free. The force was no longer pushing downward upon him. He had his mobility back. His feet moved nimbly for the final steps. He reached
the landing of the second floor.
He drew a huge sigh. Whatever presence had been there, whatever aspect of his onetime mentor, Geiger had escaped it.
He steadied himself and took one step toward the bedroom.
Then he noticed that there was a figure outlined against a window at the end of the hall. The human figure of an aged man. A man who was dead and whom Geiger had buried.
Geiger felt the disbelief sweep away from him. The figure moved toward him in the dark.
“Maestro…?” he asked in horror.
The one word response was spoken clearly. Rolf wasn’t imagining. He heard an actual voice.
“Yes,” the visitor said.
The frigid cold returned and the figure came at him in a rush, traveling several feet in less than a second. In the dark, Geiger felt the dead man’s body whack up against his own with a tremendous force.
The limbs flailed and the knees moved and the body of Rabinowitz was as icy as one would have expected from being in the cold ground for weeks.
Geiger screamed like a man being murdered.
His eyes came wide open and the face took shape right in front of him. Rabinowitz’s face. Inches from his own. Back from the dead. Malevolence written all over it and eye sockets as hollow and horrible as they were in nightmare.
The force of the impact registered upon Geiger, driving him backward until he tumbled against the wall, screaming.
He screamed so loud that it could have raised any other souls that were walking that night. He hit the wall hard and slumped low and screamed again.
There was no precedent for what he had seen and experienced.
A collision with a ghost. Icy cold impact. A head-on collision with a dead man’s spirit.
Geiger slumped low to the floor and his screams repeated themselves. He looked up again and saw the figure rushing toward him again, and then the hands landed on his arms.
Shaking him. Calling his name. Rolf screamed and he screamed and he screamed until the hands left him and the lights flashed on again and then the hands found him a second time.
“Rolf! Rolf! Rolf…!”
The voice called his name. It was the harsh voice of Rabinowitz until magically, it changed into a female voice. He managed to open his eyes again. He was still slumped against the wall of the second-floor hallway. But it was Diana who was upon him, holding him and trying to bring him to rationality.