Laying the Music to Rest

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  “Find anything?” Constance shouted from the bank. I turned around. Constance, Susan, and Steven were all watching us. Steven held the extra tank and looked as if he was about to jump into the water at any moment.

  “You hear that?” Fred shouted.

  “Hear what?” Constance shouted back.

  Fred swung around to face me, his mask pushed up on top of his head. “Jesus, they can’t hear the music.”

  I held my breath and listened closely. The music was a great deal fainter than it had been floating over the main street, but I couldn’t believe Constance couldn’t hear it either. Strange. Damn strange.

  “What do you want to do?” Fred asked.

  “Honestly,” I said, letting a little more air into my flotation vest, “I’d like to go have a drink and forget the whole thing. But I don’t think that’s going to help much.”

  Fred sighed. “What do you think she was doing?”

  “I imagine Steven will have an explanation. But I don’t have a clue.”

  We floated there in silence until Constance finally yelled to ask if something was wrong. Fred assured her it wasn’t. When he faced me again he had a little boy’s grin on his face. The same grin I had seen a hundred times, always right before he suggested that we do something really crazy. Carla used to say that she hated it when she saw that grin.

  “Shall we catch the end of the concert?” he said.

  “When you said that the water got colder.”

  “Where’s your sense of adventure?” He always used to say that, too. And it wasn’t until that moment that I realized how much over the last few years I had missed hearing it.

  I grinned back at him. “I hate it when you say that.”

  He laughed and swung around to tell Constance we were going back down. I watched him for a moment, then cleared out my mask and fitted it back on my head. Even though the music was still drifting up around my feet and my shoulders ached from the cold, I was smiling. A damn stupid smile.

  “We only got nineteen minutes,” Fred said as he fit his mask into place.

  I blew twice on my regulator to clear the water. “Let’s try to do this in ten.”

  He gave me a thumbs-up sign and I let enough air out of my vest to sink below the surface. The music was much louder, more intense, if that was possible.

  Fred and I swam at a steady speed toward the bottom. She still sat at the see-through piano, playing while looking intently at something directly in front of her. I motioned for Fred and we swam around behind her, making sure to keep a good distance away from the outer edge of where the old building had been.

  As we got behind her, I could see what she was looking at. A hand mirror rested at an angle on the music rack. She was staring into it. I pointed at it and Fred nodded. Maybe the mirror was our item. Or at least the real-world version of it. She sure seemed to be paying it a lot of attention.

  She played up to the last few bars of the song, the music getting louder and louder, as if calling frantically for someone to listen. And then, as the last notes faded into the water, so did the piano and the ghost.

  One moment she was there, the next she was gone and Fred and I were alone. Watching her fade shook me up as much as seeing her in the first place. My mind had accepted her walking around under all that water. It had accepted the music where no music was possible. But I hadn’t expected her to fade away like that.

  Fred touched my arm and I swore my heart was going to pound right out of the wet suit. I wanted to hit him for scaring me like that.

  He pointed at the place on the old foundation where she had sat, then started in that direction.

  I could see what he was after. There was a bump under the silt almost at the very spot where she had played. Careful to not stir up too much silt with the motion of our fins, we eased in and Fred dug a gloved hand down into the muck.

  A piece of the piano’s music stand appeared from the silt. He studied it for a moment and then dropped it, shaking his head while feeling carefully around in the cloud for anything else.

  I turned and scanned the smooth lake floor nearby. There were a number of lumps that were obviously things under the silt, but all of them seemed to be too big for a hand mirror.

  Fred dug into another of the small mounds and pulled up a bottle. I shook my head as he brushed it off and then tucked the bottle into a pocket of his wet suit. Fred always used to find something on our old dives. None of it had ever been worth anything.

  I drifted back about ten feet and let myself sink down so that I had my face right above the level of the silt. From that position I scanned back along the surface, looking for a smaller lump that would indicate the hand mirror.

  There were two possible targets. One was about two feet in front of me and the other was three feet to the side of the light cloud of silt Fred had kicked up when he pulled out the music stand.

  The one closest to Fred was the one I bet on. I moved up above it slowly, keeping the place marked in my mind. From above it was almost impossible to see. Being careful to not kick up too much silt, I stuck my hand down through the lake bottom.

  My fingers touched only wood, slick from the buildup of slime. But then my fingers nudged something hard and smooth. I grabbed it and pulled it out, letting the silt trail along behind like so many streamers.

  The hand mirror. It appeared to be the same one the ghost had been staring into during her playing. I held it up for Fred to see and he gave me the thumbs-up sign, then pointed upward.

  I was about to nod when behind him, at the edge of visibility, the ghost appeared, walking down the middle of the road toward the center of town as she had done a few minutes before. It looked as if we were about to get a repeat performance.

  I pointed and Fred swung around. He stared at her for a moment as she got closer. Then he turned and gestured upward. I wasn’t about to argue I didn’t want to be around when the ghost discovered we had her mirror any more than he did. Assuming she’d even notice.

  I tucked the mirror in the leg pocket of my wet suit and then followed Fred kicking for the surface.

  The second concert of the day started before we reached the surface. And by the time we got to the shore, we could no longer hear it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Monumental Lodge

  June 27, 1990

  I DIDN’T PULL the mirror out of my wet suit pocket until we had made the climb back up to the lodge and were taking off the suits in front of the blazing fire Steven had built. I doubted I would ever be warm again. Most of the chill was from the drain of body heat through the suit. But part of it was from the music and the feeling that comes when you finish something that’s scaring the hell out of you. Not at all like a cold chill. A post fear chill starts right in the middle of your back and makes you shake.

  Both Fred and I were shaking so much that Constance and Steven had to help us out of the suits. Of course, Susan, Constance, and Steven weren’t in the best of shape either. They had had to stand on the bank, not knowing what was going on. Steven said at one point he thought Constance was about to strip down and go into the water after us.

  I didn’t expect anything to happen when I pulled the mirror out of my pocket. I was only getting it out of the suit so I could finish peeling the cold rubber off my skin. I laid it on the coffee table in front of the couch.

  The mirror felt very heavy out of the water. It seemed to be made of some sort of ivory, with carved patterns on the back and on parts of the handle. The glass was very clean and clear for being under water that long. An antique hand mirror. A nice find, but nothing that unusual.

  But as I laid it on the table, it became obvious that I had found no regular hand mirror.

  Steven reacted first. He had been standing near one end of the couch sipping on a drink and laughing at something Fred was doing in trying to free himself from one leg of his tight wet suit. As I set the mirror on the table, Steven’s eyes went very wide. He let out a small gasp, took three steps backward, and tripped
over a small rug, ending up seated in the middle of the floor staring at the mirror.

  “What the—”

  “You’ve got it!” Susan shouted. She jumped up from the overstuffed chair across from the fireplace and yanked a device that looked like a calculator from her pocket. She touched it and the calculator started beeping like a watch alarm going off.

  She scrambled over in front of the mirror, punched a few buttons on the calculator, then pointed it at the mirror. It beeped wildly.

  “You got it! I can’t believe it.” She turned, and without a glance at anyone, dashed out the front door, headed in the direction of her cabin.

  I stood there with my mouth open, staring out the front door at the running woman. Constance moved over and knelt beside Steven. I don’t think he had taken his gaze from the mirror for a moment. Not even with Susan’s wild display.

  “You all right?” Constance asked Steven as she helped him to his feet.

  Steven nodded and Constance led him toward the kitchen table. I watched for a moment and then looked over at Fred. His mouth was also wide open. “I guess they like our find.”

  “By God, I think you’re right.”

  ***

  Fred beat me to the shower and by the time I was dressed and had made it downstairs, he was at the liquor cabinet fixing himself a second drink. Susan had returned and was seated in a chair facing the mirror, her full backpack beside her and her coat draped over the arm of the chair. She was fidgeting as if she were a small child waiting for her mother.

  Steven sat with Constance at the kitchen table, sipping on a cup of hot chocolate. He looked pale and almost in shock.

  “Need something here, barkeep?” Fred asked.

  “Same as whatever you’re having. Only stronger.”

  Fred nodded and I went over and sat on the couch in front of the coffee table. In the ten minutes I had stood under the hot water of the shower, I hadn’t been able to make heads or tails out of the dive or what had happened afterwards. I kept coming back to how lucky I felt to be alive. Real lucky.

  Steven’s and Susan’s reactions to the mirror made no sense, if you considered the mirror a normal, framed piece of glass. But this was no ordinary mirror. The simple fact that a ghost paid it so much attention made it more. She had a reason. Who the hell knew what it was. But she clearly had a reason.

  Fred slid the drink over in front of me on the coffee table and sat down on the other couch in the semicircle of furniture around the fireplace. Constance and Steven moved over from the dining table. Constance sat beside Fred and Steven pulled a chair up at the farthest point away from the mirror. As we had promised on the walk back up from the lake, Fred and I then spent the next fifteen minutes going back over what had happened, what we had seen and how we had found the mirror.

  After we finished, I turned to Steven, even though I really wanted to know what the hell Susan was talking about. For some reason it seemed logical to start with Steven.

  “What do you think that mirror is?” I asked. “You had quite a reaction to seeing it.”

  Steven nodded and looked over at where the mirror still lay on the coffee table, glass up, looking polished after eighty years under water.

  “It’s something of vast power,” he said slowly. “I don’t know exactly what, but my guess is it’s a focus. Or, the focus of Gretchen’s energies. I would say without much doubt that the mirror is the main reason she has not left this plane of existence.”

  “She just let us take it,” Fred said. “Why would she do that?”

  “Maybe the only mirror she sees is the one on her piano,” Steven said. “The actual mirror is beyond her time and may well be—”

  His voice broke off as right in front of me, and directly in the center of the coffee table, the air started to shimmer and the ghost appeared. So much for that theory.

  Now it was my turn to move quickly. I climbed right over the back of the couch and damn near ended up on my face on the hardwood floor. Again I thought my heart was going to come pounding right out of my chest. This just couldn’t be healthy.

  Fred and Constance both scurried around behind the couch they had been sitting on and Susan and Steven stayed where they were.

  As the ghost finished shimmering into what looked like a solid woman, the room temperature dropped as if we were suddenly in a meat locker. I shivered and resisted the impulse to move over to the fire. No way was I going to walk behind that ghost.

  She looked exactly the same as she had an hour before. Only this time far less frightening. It was something about her being in our world instead of under forty feet of water that I think made the difference.

  She seemed even smaller and frailer than I had first thought. Her blue dress was ripped in at least three places and had brown mud stains around the hem. Her skin was pure white, like fine china. I half expected to see water dripping from her, or to smell a damp smell. But there was no water on her and no smell around her. But did she ever suck the heat from the room. I couldn’t imagine getting any closer to her. Not that I would ever want to.

  The ghost stood and gazed at the mirror. I glanced over at Steven. His eyes now were glassy and his body rigid.

  That did it. I wanted to go home. It was going to take me the rest of the summer to recover from this one day. Not counting the fact that I was still sore from the stupid horse ride in here, today I had been scared so many times my heart was starting to believe two hundred beats minute was normal. I had built up enough excitement to last me through five years of boring teaching or bartending.

  The ghost stood over the mirror for a few moments, then shimmered and was gone. That simple. The complete silence in the room seemed to smother everyone’s breathing. I’m not sure I was breathing.

  Constance was the first one to recover from the sudden appearance and vanishing act. She knelt beside Steven and lightly touched his arm. He groaned.

  “This happened to him down by the lake the second day he was here,” Fred said. “It was how he learned the ghost’s name.”

  Damn tough way to talk to someone.

  Constance helped Steven sit more upright in the chair and then held his drink while he took a very slow sip. I stood and stared at the mirror. Whatever it was, it sure seemed to draw people and things to it.

  “Alex is very far from here,” Steven said after a moment. His voice sounded very weak and tired. “Very far. That was his mirror. We need to help him find his way back here.”

  “We could search old folk’s homes,” I said.

  “Did she tell you how?” Constance asked, after helping him take another drink.

  Steven shook his head. “It has something to do with the mirror.”

  “Did she say how he used the mirror?” Susan asked.

  “Used the mirror for what?”

  Susan ignored my question. Steven didn’t. He looked startled and suddenly distant. “Yes, I had a sense that Alex used the mirror to propose marriage to Gretchen.”

  Susan glanced around the room, her eyes cold and serious. “Anyone have any idea how he might have done that? How could the mirror have anything to do with a marriage proposal?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe—”

  “No,” Constance said. “Marriage and mirrors used to go together. In fact, my grandfather proposed to my grandmother with a mirror.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “How?” Susan asked. “Exactly how was it done?”

  Constance shrugged. “Back before the turn of the century, there was a custom that if a man wanted a woman’s hand in marriage, he would take a hand mirror, look into it, and then hand it to her. If she looked into it and thereby joined her image with his, she said yes. If she didn’t, and turned the mirror over and laid it face down, she said no. Or, as we call it today, she turned him down. I thought the custom had pretty well died out by the turn of the century, though.”

  “Then that’s what triggered it,” Susan said softly to herself. She stood there a
moment and stared at the mirror, everyone else watching her. Finally, she looked over at me. “I have an idea. Can I touch the mirror?”

  My immediate reaction was to say no. But damned if I could figure out why. She certainly wasn’t going to get far with it if she tried hotfooting it back up the trail. And damned if I could think of another reason to say no. In fact, at that point, I couldn’t see any good reasons for half of the stuff I had seen today. So I shrugged, “Why not?”

  She picked the mirror up and studied it, handling it as if it were a fine jewel. After a full minute of inspection, she laid it on the coffee table, pulled her chair closer to the coffee table and sat down. She pulled her backpack over beside her and made sure it was within easy reach.

  Then she picked up the mirror again, looked into it so that it caught her full reflection, and laid it face up on the table.

  It appeared she was waiting for something to happen. Maybe, from the expression on her face, something to blow up. Nothing did. After a moment, she sighed and picked up the mirror again.

  The silence in the room was too much. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I took the mirror from her hands before she had a chance to protest.

  “Now, would you please tell us what you were trying to do?”

  She sighed and leaned back in her chair. “I’m trying to trigger the mirror.”

  “Trigger the mirror? What is it? A new type of gun?”

  “What do you think the mirror is?” Fred asked Susan.

  She glanced over at Constance, then around the room. Then she sat up and held out her hand for the mirror. “May I?”

  “If you tell us what you think is going on here,” I said as I handed it back to her.

  “I guess it wouldn’t matter if I told you some of it.” She had the pained expression of someone going against the rules. Which rules, I had no idea. But I had seen the same look hundreds of times while teaching.

  She held the mirror up reverently. “This is a transportation device. It’s what I came here hoping to find. It’s a very old device that I think took that ghost’s lover. I would like to trigger it so that it will take me to the same place he went.”