The Ammonite Violin & Others

by Kiernan, Caitlín R

  7.

  When she wakes, the room is still dark, so either it’s not yet morning, or the snake has used its magic and the blood of a million murdered rats to steal away the daylight for good. She isn’t certain if she’s actually awake or just dreaming, because there’s only the sound of the wind and dry branches scraping against the walls of the redbrick building. The singing and drumming and shouting have stopped, though the air continues to reek of burning. She sits with her back to the plaster wall, counting heartbeats, and when she has reached one hundred, she gets slowly to her feet, ignoring the aches and cramps of stiff muscles, the numbness in her fingers and toes, the rumble in her belly. And, peering fearfully over the windowsill, she sees that the people from the city, exhausted by the murder they have done, by their celebration and the pilgrimage from the city, are all lying together asleep on the bridge. Some of their torches have been wedged into cracks in the masonry or tied to now-empty carts, and so there is still that wavering, wind-lashed light washing dimly across their sleeping faces. Why have they not come for me? she thinks. Why has the snake not sent someone to kill me and take the pennywhistle so the backwards song can be played? And then she wonders if maybe someone has already come, if one of them slipped in while she was asleep and discovered her secret hiding place beneath the loose floorboard. It may well be as simple as that, and the snake ordered them not to harm her, to leave her alive, the queen of the God of all Rats, that she will have to hear the backwards song and witness the end of all things. And then she scrambles across the freezing; floor and pulls up the loose board to find that the wooden box is still there where she left it; opening the lid and looking inside, she sees that the pennywhistle is still there, too. So it is only the snake’s arrogance that has spared her, believing he has won and now he can take the pennywhistle from her whenever he chooses, so there’s still plenty of time to sleep off his gluttony, time enough to savor the victory before he sends someone, or slides up from the river to take it for himself She glances over her shoulder at the window, and the clouds are still bloody with firelight. If the snake did promise the men and women that he would extinguish the fire in their city, he has lied to them. It occurs to her then that maybe they aren’t sleeping at all, that possibly the snake has killed them, just as they killed the rats. Perhaps they all died screaming with his venom blazing in their veins, because he had no more use of them. She crawls back to the window and looks out again, and she can’t believe that she ever found the river soothing, that it was ever anything but the black grave it has become. And then she sits down again and puts the pennywhistle to her lips. “Will you accept my gift?” the God of all Rats asked her all those many weeks ago, and she had. “And now,” she whispers, “will you accept mine?” And she begins to play, something that starts out low and mournful, remembering the time before time, acknowledging that age when there was only the void and the rats. But then her fingers warm and loosen with movement and the effort of playing the pennywhistle, and the song and the story tumble along, chasing one another, rushing ahead and spilling their wild magic into the night. With this old brass whistle, the rats created all that is, all that has ever been, and she knows that it still holds within it the power to create, to make something where there was before nothing at all. She has learned its ways and has wielded it to fashion the tales that have kept her company and given her joy and a few scraps of courage against the endless string of days and nights, against the yawning sky and the biting cold, against hunger and her fear of the men and women of the city. And so she plays a healing song, an awakening song, her gift to the God of all Rats, which is a song and a story that will call the murdered rats back from the murky prison of death. Come back to me, come back for me, come back to me, and without looking she knows that the water below the bridge has begun to seethe and roil, and already she can hear the angry, cheated howl of the snake as rat souls and mangled rat bodies slide free of his suffocating coils. She wants to look, to be sure, wants to see their resurrection with her own eyes, but then she might miss a note or only half a note, or the tune might fall flat, the story faltering as she fumbled some indispensable bit of the song. One mistake and the penny whistle’s magic could yet be defeated and undone. So she sits on the floor, and she plays. She plays as she has never played before, as she has never believed she could play. When her chapped lower lip splits open, her blood is blown out through the whistle and spatters on the floor, but she understands that this only makes the pennywhistle stronger. Outside the redbrick building, through the trees and weeds and down the street past sooty drifts of snow and dangling icicles and burnt-out, discarded torches, the river opens a second time, breached like clouds parting after a thunderstorm. The river splits wide, even as her lip has split, and it bleeds rats. And still she plays, because she has found a verse that will seal the snake away forever, snaring it in the waterlogged roots of a willow tree that fell and sank into the river years and years ago. She plays until there is no hope the snake will ever escape, and now she can hear the rats scrambling through the mud and muck and rushes and over cobblestones, flowing like a furious living wave across the bridge and the men and women and children whom she’d only imagined were dead. Because now they’ve begun to shriek and curse as the wet rats fall upon them, and still her fingers move, faster and faster, racing up and down the pennywhistle, as sure of herself as any god has ever been. Knowing now exactly how the story ends, she plays on and on and on, finishing what she’s started.

  Metamorphosis A

  Though she asked, and though she asked me three times, no, I would not go down with her. I would not follow, tagging along like Orpheus or Dante or Hermod or some other dumb son of a bitch walking into Hell. Not down those slick black November side streets and the narrow alleys and empty warehouses and steep, winding stairwells leading never up, but always and only down, through oases of incandescent glare, through dust and musty vales of shadow; warped doors hanging loose on bent and rusted hinges—if there were ever any doors at all—opening at last into basements and subbasements, cellars waiting above sub-cellars, a mile or so of old train tunnel, various abandoned excavations, sewers gone dry and littered with a century or two of mummified shit and rat carcasses, caverns constructed by the hand of man three or four hundred years ago. All of those forgotten, barren places beneath our feet that would serve as the necessary stations of her crucifixion.

  She was gone a long time. Longer than I’d expected. I just sat at the window and watched a dirigible burning above the river, smoking cigarettes and wondering if that was the last I’d ever see of her, the last of us, too. The dirigible seemed to take hours to fall, which can’t be right, and it drifted like a wounded demon, dripping liquid fire and wreckage and charred bodies. I might have felt guilt, that I’d allowed her to go alone. But it might have only been disgust at myself, and maybe apprehension, maybe dread. I know I am a coward, and I know that she’s insane. It’s not a good combination, and by the time the dirigible finally gave up the ghost and fell like a broken, battle-weary angel, by then I’d begun to think it would be better for us both, and perhaps a few other people, if she didn’t come back.

  Which is not the same thing as not caring what had happened to her, or wishing she were dead. It’s not the same thing at all.

  And then I heard footsteps in the hallway, your key rattling in the lock, and so I lit another cigarette and kept my eyes on the window. Another hour or so and it would finally be dawn, and I was no more prepared for that cold morning light than I was for the sight of whatever the descent and the long, long climb back up to the world had made of you.

  You don’t say a word to me, which, I suppose is more than I deserve. I sit and smoke my cigarette and listen to you doing something in the kitchen. I think that I hear silverware and the refrigerator door open and shut. I look at the clock for the first time since you left, and it seems impossible that only a little more than six hours have passed. I think that I might hear you crying, a very brittle sound I’d rather
not be hearing, and I get up and go to the bathroom because I have to piss, and I don’t want to be sitting here listening to you sobbing in the fucking kitchen. I don’t want to sit here trying to figure out what I’ll say when you walk through the bedroom door, or what I’ll see, or what you’ll say to me. In the bathroom, I run cold water in the sink and splash it on my face. I look like shit. I might have shaved two days ago. There are circles beneath my eyes the color of bruised apples. My lips are so chapped they’ve been bleeding. There’s a speck of dried blood on my chin.

  I flush the toilet, and for a few seconds there’s only the urine-stained water swirling round and round the rust-stained porcelain, convenient gravity and PVC plumbing there to take away my body’s waste and spit it out somewhere faraway or far below where I’ll never have to look at it again.

  I keep waiting for you to call my name.

  I keep waiting.

  I finish my cigarette and drop the butt into the toilet, where it hisses briefly before I flush again.

  When I give up and open the bathroom door, you’re lying naked on the bed. You’ve pushed all the blankets off onto the floor, so there’s just the pillows and dingy white sheets that hardly ever get washed or changed, and you’re lying there on your back, staring up at the ceiling. You don’t say a word, and you don’t turn your head to look, at me, either. Your long legs are spread so I can see your cunt, your knees bent, your feet braced flat against the sheet, all of it to make me think of a pregnant woman trying to push out something wet and helpless and squalling, something parasitic that’s been carried for nine months, but enough’s enough.

  I don’t need you to tell me I’ve got it all backwards. But then L always have.

  “Does it hurt?” I ask, because I can’t stand the silence any longer, and for a moment or two I think you’re not going to answer me.

  “No,” you say, and there’s nothing the least bit different about your voice. I’d thought that there would be, that surely it would have changed somehow, but it’s only your voice. You sound tired. You sound like you’ve been crying. And that’s when I notice the aluminum canister lying on the bed beside you. It’s not muck larger than a thermos. There are runes or some sort of Egyptian hieroglyphics etched into it, and droplets of condensation have formed on the metal.

  “Are you going to watch?” you ask me, but you’re still staring at the ceiling. Your eyes are far away, and I think maybe they’re still down there somewhere, that, possibly, whatever it was you saw at the end of all those stairs and cellars and tunnels, it wasn’t the sort of thing you can ever stop seeing.

  “Is that what you want?” I ask.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. But you watch, if you want. I’m not afraid to be alone, but if you want to watch, it won’t make any difference.”

  Your bare feet are black with soot or dirt or whatever filth, you’ve tracked back up from the deep places below the city. There are long scrapes on your legs, like maybe you ran into a patch of brambles along the way. And then I notice the welt beneath your chin, flesh gone puffy and purple and already turning necrotic.

  I might think it was only a bad spider bite, if I didn’t know better. If I didn’t know about the stingers and the venom, the kiss of Athena to switch off your immune system. To make you receptive to what’s still to come.

  “My throat’s sore,” you tell me. “That’s all. I’m tired, and my throat’s a little sore.”

  “I could call an ambulance,” I say, taking one hesitant step nearer the bed. “There might still be time.”

  And then you do turn your head, and you look straight look at me, and I know that it’s much, much too late for ambulances and doctors and whatever they can or cannot do. Too late for intervention. I think your eyes must have drowned down there; I think this is only a corpse that has floated back up to me.

  “You may watch,” you tell me again, your voice turned hard and sharp as ice. I pretend that’s not your voice at all (though it is), that they’ve already hollowed you out, and this thing on our bed is hardly more than a puppet, a crumpled marionette of flesh and papier-mâché with your face and your drowned blue eyes.

  “I’ll just sit by the window,” I reply. “If you need anything, I’ll do what I can.”

  You nod and then go back to staring at the ceiling, but your expression, your puppet’s sneer is there to say so much more, to remind me that I’ve missed my chance, so fuck me. I let you go down to the abyss alone, down to those hungry, patient whisperers huddled in places where it is never anything but night. I waited up here and stared out a goddamn window it the city lights and the night sky and a burning dirigible. I cant help you, not now, and I deserve to see everything that’s coming. I deserve to sit here in my chair and watch and know that there’s absolutely nothing I can do to help.

  I know what to expect, more or less, like almost anyone these days would know what to expect. I sat through one of those interminable films the WHO or CDC or whoever it is that thinks they’re monitoring this mess keeps cranking out. That was months ago, because it was still summer. It was summer, a hundred plus in the shade but not a tree in sight, and I’d only gone into the theater because I thought it would be air-conditioned, but then it wasn’t. No luck, buddy. The AC’s busted, on the fritz, kaput, been busted for weeks now; so I sat there in the muggy darkness with half a dozen or so strangers and watched the screen through the grey haze of other people’s cigarette smoke. I had a warm bottle of beer from the concession stand, and so ’ sipped my beer and tried to ignore some guy one row in front of me and a few seats to my left who started masturbating as soon as the lights went down. Everyone else ignored him, too.

  The film was narrated by someone pretty. I can’t even recall if it was a man or a woman, just that they were clean and well-dressed and didn’t look sick or hungry or scared. I suppose the world must still be filled with people like that, even if I never see them anymore.

  The masturbating man kept whispering to himself or his dick or someone that he only imagined was there, someone only he could see. A woman a few rows farther down turned around twice and told him to shut up, but I don’t think he heard her. I don’t think he was listening.

  I remember thinking how much the warm beer tasted like a mixture of soda water and cornflakes and then wondering how long it had been since I’d last eaten a bowl of cornflakes.

  Up on the screen, the pretty, clean, healthy, well-dressed person was sitting at a table with a black man in a white lab coat, a very nervous-looking man whom I could tell didn’t want to be sitting there answering the questions he was being asked, saying the things that he was saying, most of which were probably lies, anyway. He talked about the gold mines in South Africa and Siberia, the biology of extremophiles, endoliths, and cryptoendoliths, contaminated core samples, virulence, infectivity, and on and on and on. He said something like, “Epidemiology is concerned with the incidence of disease in a given population or populations, but it doesn’t address questions of the cause of any particular individual’s disease.” Talking smaller and smaller circles round himself, as though words could form some protective mandala. The pretty narrator smiled a lot. The man in the lab coat never even smiled once.