Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  A hunger, a great famine for salvation moves over the countryside on unseeable wings.

  As evening comes, the people have quick, flashing dreams as they close their eyes. Dreams of glimpsing a creature white as bright noonday snow, with a horn glowing like a beacon toward deliverance and the resurrection of their tarnished souls.

  The hunger for salvation becomes a hunger for a hunt.

  Amduscias walked among the trees.

  Perhaps he should shove the little conjurer’s soul into one of these oaks, when he was done with it. Give it a home like the one it would have had if the conjurer had taken a few steps closer toward the bloody wood where the prince had heard his call. He’d use the spent soul as a conduit, a portal to this wood whenever he had need to escape the Abyss.

  Something came to the prince on the air.

  He walked to the edge of the wood and looked down at the conjurer’s home. He smelled in the ether the process of sickness, the touch of madness. The prince’s host from the night before was having another of his episodes.

  Splendid.

  He could never resist a dramatic entrance.

  The prince crouched down and waited for an opportune moment to invade David’s weakened mind, and so hopefully invade his soul.

  David fought the coming delirium with his music.

  As the room spun, as sickness and drunkenness and nausea turned the room the color of jaundiced skin and melted sharp angles to arcs and curves, he stumbled to the piano and grabbed hold of the day’s composition. He focused on the staff paper and read his music, heard his music. Grasped at the tranquillity, peace and beauty of the sound of snow.

  And the music surrounded him, filled him with joy and a sense of being healed. His requiem held him in a comforting embrace and flooded his reeling senses.

  The piano notes moved within his breast, his heart. The French horns called him to the sky. The movement unfolded . . . and his awareness unfolded as flutes joined the horns and then broke away from them.

  Suddenly, David could see clearly.

  His eyes showed him the hall of the great Regio Theatre of Parma: the place of his dreams. Where he had always hoped to have his music performed. He knew his vision showed him a lie. But he treasured the lie. For though he was hallucinating, he was still himself. Not transformed to a maddened, bestial state.

  The hall was empty, but his music resounded through the place, among the Baroque circular tiers of the box seats that reached the painted ceiling high above. He walked the center aisle toward the orchestra pit, his music held before him like an icon.

  And now the first guitar came in . . . weaving a swaying tapestry of notes like a soft flurry. The second guitar joined the other and . . .

  The music stopped.

  David had reached the end of what he had composed . . . not halfway through the first movement. He stood, terrified that without his music, the delirium would sweep him away to a place of demons and torment.

  Yet he was still in the opera house of Parma, not ten yards from the orchestra pit.

  “Bravo!”

  David spun around.

  And saw the towering abomination he knew as Amduscias walk the aisle toward him. It walked erect, with a shocking grace that belied the monstrosity of its form. Its grace offended David. Revolted him.

  “Bravo! You are touched with magnificence. I see in you the fire that has burned within the Greats! I hear it. I see it in your heart and your passion. And I treasure your greatness as no other can.”

  The demon stood only a few paces from David.

  It turned its animal head about, looking, seeing, with human intelligence.

  “I know this place,” it said. “Is this the hall of your secret wishes? The temple of your artistic desire? I should have guessed. There is a flair to your work unsuited for the halls of Vienna and Paris.”

  It looked at him and pulled its animal mouth into a smile.

  David looked away. Then spoke in a steady, even tone.

  “I banish you. I cast you out.”

  “Do you?”

  He looked back to the demon.

  “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name . . .”

  The demon cocked his head, as if David spoke a foreign tongue and it were trying to understand.

  “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done . . .”

  “On Earth as it is Heaven!!” said the demon. “But this is not Earth, and it is not Heaven. This is yourself. This is your dream, though you dream of a real place I know well.”

  It turned its gaze to the stage behind David. “Here, I once infused genius into a rather tired production of one of Verdi’s operas. I whispered a jealousy into a diva’s ear here, that drove her to betray a friend and so become the greatest voice of her day. This is a wonderful hall, with wonderful acoustics.”

  The monster threw its head back and sang with many voices snatches of an “Ave” with impossible pitch and clarity, as if an angelic choir found outlet in its throat.

  David dropped his music, pressed his hands over his ears to shut out the blasphemy. But the demon’s lilting voices still rang in his mind.

  Then suddenly it stopped singing.

  David slowly dropped his hands from his ears.

  “Forgive me,” it said. “I simply can’t resist songs of innocence.”

  “What do you want of me?”

  “I want what you want. I want to be returned to you. I want to help you with your great work.”

  “You can’t have my soul.”

  “Why not? You share your soul through your music. Let me return to your mind. Let me free what’s inside your soul so it can touch the souls of others. So your music can be shared with the world.”

  “And what do you gain from this?”

  “Joined with you, I’d be a heavenly creature again. I would be pure and splendid. Able to sleep again on the laps of maidens and heal the sick. Able to resurrect kings and foretell the birth of prophets.” It raised its powerful arms and turned joyfully. “You would not wish to deny me salvation, would you? I have healed you, have I not? At least partly? Imagine what I could do within you, what healing powers I could liberate. I might be able to save your life.”

  “You don’t exist.”

  The demon growled, looked at David as it had looked at the torn woman that had writhed at its feet.

  It strode toward David, made a slow fist with its clawed hand before his face.

  “Then what have you to lose?”

  David stepped backward, slowly, toward the pit.

  “What you have to gain.”

  The demon reached for his throat.

  But the beast looked up, startled, as a sound reverberated through the hall. Then it turned and was gone, parting the substance of the hall as if it walked through a sheet of rain. The sound came again, closer this time.

  The hall dissolved in a wave, became a dizzy landscape of swirls like the grain of wood as David realized he had heard the sound of hunting horns.

  They each wandered the countryside, wordless, in the night. Sadness, emptiness, despair drew them out of their homes. As they met one another on the road, in the woods and in the fields, they silently joined and wandered together. One came to walk with two. Two with five. Five with seven. Twelve with twenty.

  Until at last, near midnight, more than forty people stood milling in the darkened wood. A calling touched each of them, and all of them as one turned toward a hill crowned with a grove of oaks that was touched by the setting moon.

  Salvation awaited them there.

  No longer themselves, filled with and guided by denizens of a world no living person has seen, they ran toward the hill and toward the sacred beast of their dreams whose blood and horn could save them.

  The hunt was on.

  The prince, Amduscias, pulled himself from the conjurer’s mind, stood, and looked down from the hill he had claimed for himself.

  Scrambling up the
hill from the west were the human puppets of his pursuers. He could see pressed around their fleshy bodies the shadowy forms of those who had hunted him across vistas of damnation.

  The sound of horns crashed through the ether.

  And Amduscias ran, the thunder of many footfalls behind him.

  David stumbled as the swirls faded and became the solid contours of the scarred piano. Hazily, he picked up his sheets of music from the floor. He thought absently that he should try to play part of the piece, now. Get his mind working on the fine points so he could focus and . . .

  The entryway door burst open.

  Amduscias forced his towering bulk through.

  David bellowed, picked up the piano bench and hurled it at the monster.

  “ENOUGH! GOD-DAMN YOU! ENOUGH! I BANISH YOU! I EXILE YOU! YOU’RE NOTHING! YOU’RE . . .”

  David was seized in the thing’s claws, lifted, pressed against the cold plaster of the wall, just above the ink stain. The spiraling lance on the demon’s brow hovered inches from his breast.

  “Enough theatre!” it said. “Do you hear them? Listen! They’ll be at the door. The barrier I evoked will not hold them. They are my enemies. They will destroy us both unless you admit me to your soul. I can’t ward them off without you.”

  “No.”

  The demon pulled him from the wall and smashed him against it.

  “You don’t know what’s at stake!”

  “This isn’t real! You don’t . . .”

  There was a crash in the entryway, and David saw, over the demon’s shoulder, his neighbours, people from town, old teachers and classmates press into the room.

  For an instant, David thought he was saved.

  The monster that held him in its claws looked toward the people piling into the room, then back at David.

  Rage burned like diamond-fire in those violet eyes.

  It bellowed and pulled David onto its horn.

  David screamed, back arched, arms flailing at his sides. He felt the horn pass through his flesh, his lung, his heart, his back. A fire coursed through him. He began to die as the horn that was killing him cleansed his blood.

  His mind was freed from the sickness as his lungs filled with blood. He tried to cry out to the people below.

  The demon’s claws gripped David, its voice echoed in his mind.

  “Give me your soul! You will live! We will live!”

  The people in the room snarled like dogs and leapt upon the demon, rending and biting and tearing.

  David fought the demon, joined to it by its horn, its mind groping, lunging, trying to cleave to his soul as its horn had cleaved through his flesh. The horn kept him in his body. His soul did not rise. He felt his being change as he and his enemy fell to the floor under the crush of bodies.

  “Yes! Give me your soul! I can spare you this!”

  Hands were upon David, pulling, ripping.

  The demon pressed into David’s spirit through his sundered heart, through the strength of its will and David’s longing for the agony to end.

  David felt the atrocity of the thing’s mind within his own mind. With his last act of will as his body tore, David reached out with his soul, pleading for salvation. Before his dimming eyes, he saw the red serpent—the guardian of change and benevolent passage. David embraced it with his spirit as his arms were pulled from him.

  Between life and death, David joined with the demon. The serpent moved through him, and he knew it was a thing of his own creation, part of his own mind given form, his own strength given tangible shape.

  He put the demon down as his existence ended. The serpent’s red glow burned away what he had been, cleansing the demon’s contamination of his spirit.

  In an unnameable limbo, he knew the quiet of snowfall . . . and the dead ethereal form of his enemy.

  He made them both his own as he heard the cries of tortured living souls around him.

  A November sunrise, burning with secret fire and the rich amber of autumnal light, touched the faces of more than forty people as they drifted across the countryside, covered with blood, covered with flesh, covered with scraps of skin and torn clothing.

  And as the songs of larks echo across a wooded valley at dawn, so did their screams, cries, and sobs reverberate among the fields. Some of the wanderers fell to their knees, some tore their hair, some curled into foetal balls upon the cold, hard ground.

  Their souls had been mauled, made sick and withered by the things that had possessed them and filled them with a passionate, blind lust for blood.

  Blood of their prey that was absorbed through them, that gave rebirth and empowerment to the demons inside them . . . as had the horn that crumbled to dust in their hands while they groped and clawed and worried at it.

  Grey clouds drifted from the west, towering in the sky like cliffs of granite, dimming the sun’s light. The cold, bitter rains brought by the clouds drove the people home like slow-moving animals. The anointment of the rain did not wash away the filth that clung to their spirits.

  What happened among them was kept secret, in the way witch hunts and midnight lynchings are. The house where the torn flesh of their prey lay piled thick on the floor was burned several nights later, as was part of the fields around it.

  The fire’s glow brought a false dawn to the moonless sky; the clouds of smoke carried with them the ghostly scent of sulphur and rot, of burned hair and sickness.

  A spiritual plague hung like choking fog over the countryside. A plague that would have warped and killed the soul of all whom it touched.

  Had it not been for the visitation in dreams of a magnificent snow-white beast that came to each of them, that touched their hearts and souls with the healing light of its horn at the moment when the burning clouds of sunset had hung upon them a great serpent the rich color of cinnabar.

  The beast came to them atop a hill crowned with a grove of oaks that was held by the eternal rebirth of spring. The coming of the creature was heralded by music. Sweet music, reminiscent of the sound of snow falling on quiet winter fields, of the breath of the sky, and the voice of each crystalline feather as it alights upon the earth.

  SHIBBOLETH

  A mirror of steel is oddly silent.

  There’s a depth to your reflection missing in polished metal . . . the impossibility of an echo. You can speak your thoughts in silvered glass and know that you’re heard.

  The last dressing room I shared with Justine had steel mirrors, made of bulkheads from a dead country’s navy. It was part of the glut of such steel that flooded markets while warships loaded with corpses were scuttled as tomb-reefs that pressed pearls of eyes, coral of bones. Steel desks, benches and chairs crowded out wood furnishings . . . the grain of which was scarred by winters made harsh by ash-clouds of the dead and by the rings of trees that marked not just years, but tons of human soot held in the sky. Justine and I had sat beside each other, applying our make-up in the steel’s gaze, dumb as we harlequinned ourselves with the simple lines we’d devised for our Cymbeline. We were startled by our not speaking to each other’s reflection as we usually did, when streaming chatter replaced the dream cycles lost over days of rough travel. Our gazes twined in the mirror, and as one, laughing, we touched the un-whispering steel as if to shake it from its deafness.

  Alone, farther from Justine than I’ve ever been and standing more than a year from when our gazes could next touch, I now looked at myself in a steel mirror and heard its silence in a new way. The flooring hummed against my naked feet as I shifted and bobbed, trying without knowing why to mime the tilt and roll that the train I rode would have if it moved on metal rails on solid ground. If I pushed the mirror from its silence, I’d feel the roar of the train’s engine, conducted by porcelain walls at a frequency that, if I could hear it in the anaemic air, might sicken me with vertigo. The steel was treated to not fog, and the steam I breathed in that coffin-space that doubled as basin and shower held an emptiness compounded by the s
team’s inability to clear the allergy-like congestion behind my eyes, or ease the swelling in my face that made me look like a mountaineer healing after a brutal climb. The steam looked like what folktales say a sleeping dragon’s breath is like in a vale, hanging as threads far thicker than it could at sea-level, in droplets too large for the pull of an earthly ground to allow.

  Steam can be silent, just as it can speak. In a free zone of Palestine, my oldest friend Jim and I had breathed the steam of a bathhouse that had been in operation eight hundred years. The bathhouse stood, and might stand eight centuries more, near a graveyard of the land that had drunk nations of blood since Caleb had first stepped there. The proprietor had let his hens peck among the sun-cracked stones, so that even the boiled eggs he offered as a parting courtesy were flecked with death. The herb-scented steam of that place, which once held the breath of Crusaders, had felt heavy and present in our lungs. Ripe with the taste of the past . . . in a way that the quarantine baths Jim and I had shared during the Dying couldn’t have been. Those baths burned with tinctures that left us unable to stand the touch of the softest towels and with fumes that scalded our lungs. Jim lived the past, breathed the past. And now, as he chipped the bones of giants from the Gobi and tasted the dust of dead strata, he was less remote from home than I was . . . because he was camped near trade routes and would be able to post letters. When I return home, I’ll taste the same dust, drifting from creases in the letters he’ll have sent while I was gone.

  Breathing out steam born of water so young it had been drunk or passed by none of God’s creatures but Man, I stood before my mute double and worked foam from fine glycerine soap that had been liquefied and re-poured around a magnetized disc in case the train’s turbines stopped spinning and made the soap drift as lazily as the bubbles it made. I lathered my swollen face, and knew the steam I breathed wasn’t silent because it misted from distilled water. Such steam could yield hymns from all it touched—as the perfume my mother pressed from sheets in the violet of winter afternoons, and as the mist that combed a fresh-turned-soil scent from the dust of centuries-old dressing rooms . . . a scent joined in my mind with the flurry of costumes being pressed, the flinging open of make-up kits and the whir of hand-held sewing machines. The steam I now breathed smelled only of the tungsten coils that heated it and the plastic pipes that carried it. My lungs full of the steam’s absence, I placed the soap unmoving on the steel mirror, raised the glass shard I’d brought from my compartment and ran it up against my throat.