Laying the Music to Rest

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  “Doc?”

  The sound of Fred’s loud whisper damn near sent me tumbling off the log and down the hill. My heart was pounding so hard, I swore they could hear it on the summit.

  “Christ! You scared me to death.” I grabbed the rifle and climbed the twenty steps back up to the side of the lodge where Fred stood.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t see you sitting down there. There’s five of them coming down the trail. One woman and four men. The woman looks to be in charge. They’re all carrying guns. You ready?”

  “No, but what the hell difference does that make?”

  Fred squeezed my arm. “Be careful,” he said.

  “You too.”

  He scrambled back up the dirt path around the south side of the lodge while I ducked in under the front deck and lay alongside a small fishing boat he had stored there. From that vantage point, I could see the main trail leading right up to the front steps of the lodge.

  I worked at taking slow, deep breaths to force myself to calm down. A long minute later I caught a glimpse of lights coming along the trail. The flashlight beams jerked through the trees as the people who carried them walked the rough trail. I could see five lights. Five of them. Five of us.

  At the point where the trail forked, one branch going down to the lake and the other up to the lodge, they paused and clicked the lights off. I could tell they were all wearing similar uniform-like clothes, but other than that, they were nothing more than five dark shapes whose white hair seemed to glow in the black night, just as Susan’s had done. They were her people. Again, Patrick had been right. At least about their hair.

  “Around back,” a woman’s voice said. I could see her point in Fred’s direction. She turned to another man. “Take a position in the front.”

  Two of the dark figures separated from the group. One climbed up the trail and around the lodge on the north side. I hoped Fred heard him coming. They had come prepared for a fight and were taking no chances.

  The other climbed up and took a position behind a tree, thirty feet to the north of the front steps. I could see that he carried what looked to be an assault rifle in ready position.

  The other three moved silently up the main trail to the front steps. They also carried assault rifles, but only one of the men had his in ready position. The woman and the other man carried their rifles on shoulder straps, slung around on their backs.

  Once they reached the stairs, they gave up all pretense of being silent. They climbed the stairs and went across the front porch, their boots clomping against the wood, echoing even louder under the porch.

  I crawled as silently as I could over near the stairs. If something happened, or Constance gave the signal, I wanted to be able to get inside as fast as possible.

  Without knocking, the woman shoved open the front door with a loud bang and went in, followed immediately by the two men.

  “Welcome,” I heard Constance say through the open front door, “What can I do for you?”

  “We’ve come for the mirror,” the woman said. Her voice was low and sounded very cold.

  “Mirror?” Constance said. “Oh, you mean the mirror on the fireplace. It’s not my mirror to give away. It’s hers, and I don’t think she wants you to have it.”

  I could hear the tension and the almost-laughter in Constance’s voice. Gretchen must have appeared again. She must have been standing in front of the mirror. I hoped she’d stay there for a moment.

  I caught a glimpse of movement near the guard. Steven had moved up behind the man near the tree and as I watched, hit him hard across the back of the head with a baseball-bat-sized stick. The impact made a loud smacking sound and the man crumpled to the ground like a drunk falling off a bar stool. One down and four to go. I hoped Steven hadn’t killed him.

  Steven gave me the okay sign and started to disarm the man as the woman inside said “Please move aside.”

  “I don’t think she’s going to,” Constance said.

  I chuckled. It sounded as if Gretchen was staying longer than her normal visit.

  “Move her aside,” the woman ordered.

  Steven finished tying the man’s arms behind his back and started toward the steps. I crawled out from under the porch.

  “I can’t get near her,” a man’s voice said from inside. “She’s too—”

  The sound of a shot exploded from inside the lodge. Constance! God, they couldn’t have shot Constance. They had no reason to. Please don’t let it be Constance.

  Steven beat me up the front steps and to the front door by a fraction of a second.

  “Drop the guns!” I heard Alex shout from the top of the stairs.

  There was another shot, followed instantly by the second, louder shot of the deer rifle.

  “No more!” Steven shouted as he and I charged into the front room of the lodge at the exact same moment that Fred crashed open the back door.

  One of the white-haired men lay sprawled on the floor, his head twisted sideways, a bloody hole in his chest. His rifle was half under the couch.

  To my right, Constance crouched behind the kitchen counter, pistol in firing position, aimed at the woman.

  The white-haired woman and the other man were in the process of swinging their guns up into firing position.

  I shot by instinct, not raising the rifle above my chest. Steven, Fred, and Constance also fired. The explosion of sound in the enclosed lodge was tremendous. My ears rang and my eyes stung. The strong smell of gunpowder filled the air in a blue smoke.

  Two of our four shots hit the woman in the chest, kicking her backward against the other soldier, knocking him off balance. In an instant, Steven and I both were on top of him, our combined weight and force driving him backward and to the floor. With Fred’s help, we had him disarmed and his hands tied in only a few seconds.

  Then I stood and turned around. Constance was kneeling beside the woman, checking her pulse. From the look of the two holes in her breast, she was dead. Even in death, her open, gray eyes held a cold, angry look.

  “Everyone all right?” I asked.

  Constance looked up at me and nodded. Her skin was flushed and she was breathing hard, but otherwise she looked fine.

  “There’s one of them tied up out back,” Fred said. “He’s going to have a headache for a while.” Fred also looked fine and in control. Much more than I felt at that moment. Over the last day I had seen more death than I had ever wanted to see.

  “Same with the one out front,” Steven said. “I hit him pretty hard. We should check him out.”

  “Where’s Alex?” I asked. Alex wasn’t standing with us. And Gretchen was gone from in front of the fireplace.

  I was the first one to the stairs. On the Titanic I had had trouble going down stairs fast, but I took those lodge stairs two at a time all the way to the top.

  Alex was slumped against the wall near the bathroom door. Gretchen was standing beside him, not looking down at him, but instead at a space to his left, as if he were standing there.

  I knelt beside Alex. Blood ran from a small round hole above his right eye in a stream down across his face and into his shirt. The back of his head was gone.

  I glanced up at Gretchen. She smiled at me and then faded.

  It seemed that Alex had finally joined her.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Roosevelt Lake, Idaho

  July 1, 1990

  I DANGLED MY feet in the cold water and let the icy drops work their way into my wet suit. Behind me, Fred adjusted his regulator, gave it two hard breath tests, and then moved over and sat down. Between us on the sand was a cloth deer bag with Alex’s body in it.

  “Be careful,” Constance said. Her voice was low and intense. Her grip was firm on my shoulder. She didn’t like the fact that we were making another dive. I didn’t like it much either. But all of us understood why we had to do it. We had to return Alex to the Inn.

  “We’ll be careful, don’t worry,” Fred said. “Follow us around the shoreline
with the spare tank. We’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Steven patted the spare tank. “Got it right here,” he said. “Good luck.”

  I checked the bag one more time to make sure it was tied securely shut, then pulled my mask down into place.

  “Ready,” I said.

  “After you,” Fred said.

  I pushed off into the cold water and floated over on my back, using my flotation vest to keep me up while I cleared the fog from my mask one last time. The ice water dripped slowly down my spine. The regulator in my mouth tasted faintly of rubber.

  As during the first dive, I felt an odd sense of being at home. I didn’t like where we were making this dive, but I liked the feeling of diving.

  Fred has his regulator in place and mask cleared. He gave me the thumbs-up sign as Steven slid Alex’s body out into the water. I grabbed a hold of one side of the bag while Fred grabbed the other. Then I let the air slowly out of my vest and sank below the surface.

  The sound of my own breathing filled the world around me and the feeling of freedom lifted my mood.

  A few feet below the surface, we turned around and started kicking slowly for the bottom. I let my ears clear as I went and kept my gaze focused ahead and down. Fred stayed even with me and we pulled Alex’s body slightly behind us. The bag seemed heavy in the water, almost as heavy as it had felt the night before.

  We had started this dive at the same place as the first dive, only this time we were angling for the main section of the town instead of going straight down and working our way along the bottom.

  The pleasant, weightless feeling of the slow descent relaxed me a little. I could feel some of the tension of the last few days floating toward the surface with my bubbles. But not anywhere near enough of it.

  It had been a hard, sleepless night and morning since the fight. Two of Susan’s people were dead, and the other three were our prisoners. We had taken Alex’s body, along with the other two bodies, and put them in deer bags in the fruit cellar to keep animals away from them.

  We had stripped the three prisoners, tied them up in the barn, and then covered them with blankets for warmth. We hid their clothes and guns in case they somehow managed to get free. Then the rest of the night we spent cleaning up the blood. By the time Fred cooked breakfast at eight, you couldn’t tell anything had happened.

  Except I knew where Alex had died. I had been the one to clean up the remains of the back of his head and scrub the blood drop by drop from the carpet and off the log wall. The leaders, the politicians in Susan and Patrick’s war, should be made to clean up after their own battles. After a few chunks of brain and a half dozen scraps of a friend’s skull bone, the stupidity of killing for an unknown cause would soon become crystal clear.

  But I cleaned it up instead. I had known Alex, if only for a short time. They hadn’t.

  At nine, Fred, Steven, and I had talked to the prisoners while trying to decide what we should do with them. The thought of being turned over to the state police seemed to absolutely terrify them. I figured it would. They were willing to agree to almost anything in exchange for our not doing that.

  Actually, that was what we wanted them to say. Susan’s people would be hard-pressed to explain their background. But the last thing Constance and Fred wanted was having their lodge known as the place of the great shoot-out. Besides, how would we explain Alex? All the way around, it was better that last night’s battle not go beyond the walls of Monumental Valley.

  The prisoners agreed.

  We made the three prisoners carry their two dead companions up the trail toward the Dewey Mine and then dig two graves above a stand of pine. We covered the graves with rocks and hid the remaining dirt. The graves would never be found.

  Our problem then was what to do with the three prisoners. We finally decided that tomorrow we’d haul them to Boise and put them, without money or identification, on a nonstop flight to New York City. We figured that wouldn’t hurt them, but it certainly would slow them down. We would take the mirror with us into Boise to let them think we were moving it to a safer hiding place. In exchange for our not turning them over to the police, the prisoners agreed to not cause trouble getting on the plane.

  That plan would give me time to get some other clothes and supplies from home and get back to the Titanic to see Marjorie again, to tell her I was all right. Make sure she was. And be a part of this “new beginning” Patrick and Susan had mentioned. I didn’t know exactly what that might mean, but thinking about it made me feel free and useful for the first time in years.

  As far as Alex was concerned, we decided to first return him to the place where Gretchen played her song, then bury his body in the old Roosevelt cemetery. We all wished we could bury Gretchen beside him.

  At forty feet we were swimming right over the old main street and could see the outlines of the old foundations. For some reason, I kept expecting to see Gretchen, walking along the old street. But she hadn’t appeared anywhere since that last moment in the hall. She was nowhere in sight now. For some reason the bottom of the lake felt even colder and darker without her.

  We swam straight to the place where we had seen her play. There were a few small holes in the silt where we had pulled things up and I had found the mirror. Nothing else had changed.

  We pushed Alex’s body down into the silt in front of where Gretchen had played, then both Fred and I moved back, as if expecting something to happen.

  The sound of my breathing seemed to get louder in my head. The water felt colder. The sun must have gone behind a cloud because it also seemed darker. We waited, but nothing happened.

  I do know that I was expecting something. So was Fred.

  After a moment I shrugged at Fred. He returned an arms-up question and then pointed at the surface. I nodded and we both swam and grabbed hold of Alex’s body sack. So the idea to bring him back down here had been stupid. They had left together last night, off to live in the next world. We were wasting our time. I suppose, as the old saying goes, it was the thought that counted.

  We turned and headed for the surface, pulling Alex’s body between us.

  We were almost twenty feet above the lake floor when the song started. It was full and rich and so loud that it pushed every other sense into the background.

  Both Fred and I turned and looked back. The piano was again there. Gretchen was sitting at it playing Alex’s favorite song.

  For a moment, she played alone as she had done for years, staring into the mirror on the music stand in front of her. Then suddenly, the water all around her started to shimmer. The very foundation of the old building seemed to come alive.

  The walls of the old Inn formed. Crystal walls. Ghost walls. Couples were dancing, the shelves were full of glasses and booze, men were standing at the bar. The music filled the room and the surrounding water with life.

  I glanced quickly at Fred. He was seeing the same thing I was. I could tell.

  I looked back at the scene and there, sitting at a table, the closest table to the piano, was Alex. He was leaning back in his chair, his legs crossed, sipping on a glass of brandy, and listening to the music.

  For the longest time, his gaze never left Gretchen. His concentration never left the song. But finally he turned, looked up over his shoulder at us, and smiled.

  With a slight wave of his hand, more of a thanks than a goodbye, he went back to watching Gretchen and sipping his drink.

  Gretchen never took her gaze away from Alex.

  I glanced over at Fred. He looked alien in his black wet suit and mask, bubbles floating from his regulator. We didn’t belong here. I knew deep inside that this was the last time Gretchen would play her song for Alex. He had returned to the Inn for her. We needed to leave and let them continue on alone.

  I nudged Fred and he looked over at me. I pointed up and he nodded. Even behind his mask, I could see that he was smiling.

  So was I.

  With one last look at the woman playing the piano and the man l
istening to her, we turned and started for the surface. Between us Alex’s body felt very light.

  We paused only once more to glance back at the music and the party. But we had climbed too far and could see nothing.

  Fred pointed up and I nodded.

  As we neared the surface, the last few chords of Gretchen’s song faded into silence.

  Be the first to know!

  Just sign up for the Dean Wesley Smith newsletter, and keep up with the latest news, releases and so much more—even the occasional giveaway.

  So, what are you waiting for? Click here to sign up or go to deanwesleysmith.com.

  But wait! There’s more. Sign up for the WMG Publishing newsletter, too, and get the latest news and releases from all of the WMG authors and lines, including Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kristine Grayson, Kris Nelscott, Fiction River: An Original Anthology Magazine, Smith’s Monthly, and so much more.

  Click here to sign up or go to wmgpublishing.com.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Considered one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, USA Today bestselling writer Dean Wesley Smith published far more than a hundred novels in forty years, and hundreds of short stories across many genres.

  At the moment he produces novels in four major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the Old West, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the urban fantasy Ghost of a Chance series, and a superhero series starring Poker Boy.