by Janis Ian
The fourth stretched out claws toward his guitar. "Not in this afterlife," Jimi said, pulling back hard. "Here, my shirt's silk. Feel."
The guardian felt, and purred. Jimi handed the shirt over with a little regret—it was a fine shirt, and silk wasn't common anywhere in hell, except in one of the lower levels of Malebolge, where the worms wove their cocoons in the mouths of princes.
There were still five to go. Libba took the lead in front of the fifth, offering her necklace of pearls, each one like a little moon. The sixth got her earrings, which had matched the necklace. She sighed when she gave them up. She'd had them from a lover, and memories went with them. The beast swallowed them whole and belched, and let us by.
The seventh guardian eyed us hungrily and made it clear that it would be happy to take one of us in toll. Libba unfastened her belt with its mother-of-pearl buckle and draped it over the scaly neck. The creature ground its fangs, but it couldn't keep us from going on. Its brother, the eighth guardian, took Libba's pretty red shoes with their Cuban heels.
The ninth was worst of all. It licked its lips as it looked at us, and its claws flexed on the baked tiles of the threshold. It wanted a human sacrifice, and Libba's dress just wasn't enough. Her body, now, dark and sweet ...
Jimi threw himself between them just as the creature reached for Libba. Libba wasn't making any move to stop it. Jimi thrust his guitar into those hungry talons, his big old D-18 with its sound that had been so deep, so sweet. "Take it," Jimi said. His voice cracked. "Take it! Let us go!"
Jimi without his D-18 was half a shade, but the guardian was satisfied. It opened the gate into the city's heart.
~~~~~
She coiled there in her snakiest form, the Lady whom we'd lost and all but forgotten. Chains wound around and around her. A smaller snake, bright as if made of gold, curled up against her. It raised its head and looked at us with Ay's gentle dark eyes.
There was a chair beyond them, and a woman sitting in it. She was naked, and she was an old-fashioned beauty, what people would call fat in my day, but Rubens would have figured for just about right. Her hair was black and thick and fell in waves over her shoulders and down along her breasts to her wide round hips and her solid haunches. Her face was wide in the cheeks and narrow in the chin, and her eyes were wide, round, and very, very angry. So angry that she could curse the music right out of the afterlives and keep it imprisoned here, chained inside the body of a large and gleaming cobra.
A hiss filled that low round hall. It did not come from the Lady. The dark woman sprang up from her throne and lunged at us.
She bowled Jimi over as if he hadn't even been there, and blew past Libba and me to fall on the silver-dollar man. He spun around and tried to run. She caught him by the arm and stopped him short. They whirled in a crazy dance, powered by his fear and her rage.
They stopped so suddenly his head snapped back. If he hadn't already been dead, his neck would have broken. He stood swaying while she gripped him hard. "You," she said. "You dared come here."
For the first time I heard him speak. "I came for the music," he said. "Who are you? What do you have against me?"
She threw him down. He sprawled on the patterned brick of the floor. "You don't know me?"
"Not in this afterlife," he said.
"I know you," she said, low and shaking with hate. "I know every face of you, from every age. Every song you sang. Every life you ruined. Every hurt you caused, to heart or soul or body. And every time—every time—you thought no price too high. Not if everyone else paid it, so that you could have your music."
"You never paid anything for me," he said.
"I was your lover," she said, "your wife, your child. When you drank, you beat me. When the music wouldn't come, or the gigs were few and far between, you took my money and left me to starve. When the itch was on you, no matter if I was your lover or your daughter, you took me as you pleased. It was the music, you said. It made you do this. It twisted you into a monster."
"Drugs killed me," Jimi said, "but I never thought about cursing them. Everybody's bad, lady. Everybody hurts everybody else. What's so bad that it's worth taking away the music?"
She turned on him. Her eyes glared green like an animal's. "No one thing," she said. "It's everything—all of you. Every cursed one. But this one ... he haunts every age. He wanders the afterlives, looking for a place to hide, because he knows that once I find him, I'll rend him in pieces."
"Tell us what he did to you," Libba said, more gentle than Jimi could ever be.
Words were not enough. The dark woman ripped open the fabric of the world and showed us.
We looked out as if through a window on a city newer than this one but much older than the ones I'd lived in when I was alive. He was young and smooth-skinned and dreamy with art. She was slimmer and taller than she seemed in this ancient afterlife, with an oval face and a long nose and long eyes that still, deep in them, told us who she was. They both had lived and lived again, together and apart, but this was the life that would make the difference.
Without anyone speaking them, I knew names. Inanna, Dumuzi. Astarte, Tammuz. Isis, Osiris. Eurydice, Orpheus. First he was a hunter, then a warrior, then a king. Then, fatefully and fatally, the music found him and possessed him.
He'd betrayed her before. She'd had him killed in one life, and seen him killed in others. He'd still loved her even when he handed her over to his enemies, and died saying the name she carried in that life.
In this life, he made songs about her. His music was dedicated to her. But the music was so strong and his soul so weak that he had to turn to wine to withstand it. Then he forgot that she was sitting at home waiting for him to bring their dinner, which he'd drunk away. When he did finally come home, at first she tried to be forbearing, then she broke down in tears, and finally, as the years went on, she told him what she thought of him. His music was better, more beautiful than ever, and people followed him and worshipped him, but every bit of it grew out of the rift between them.
He killed her. The story blamed it on snakebite, but it was a long night and too much wine and his voice breaking that did it. He couldn't sing. He drank himself half blind, and that barely numbed the shock. Then he went home and the house was empty and the lamps unlit. She'd told him that if he drank away one more night, he'd find exactly what he found.
He tracked her down. She hadn't gone far, only to a friend whose husband was slave to the music, too. He found them asleep and the husband gone, and he dragged her out without a word. By then his voice was not just broken, it was gone. The only music he could make was the percussion of fist on flesh and the snap of bone.
They said he went to Hades to find her, and made great sacrifices for her, but in the end he lost her. It was a nobler story than that hunt through the old Greek city at night, and the hell of pain he gave her, and death none too soon.
Her bloodied body lay in the street. He stood over it, gaping at it. Suddenly he dropped down to his knees. A raw howl ripped itself out of him, with nothing resembling music in it. It was her name, over and over: "Eurydice. Eurydice! Eurydice!"
~~~~~
In the oldest of the afterlives, the dark woman spoke through that remote and chilling sound. "Over and over," she said. "We lived it again and again. From life to life and age to age, the music broke me down and lifted you up. Whatever we had, it ruined. Whatever we did, it came between us. I was still your excuse, but the music was your mistress. You sang your love for me, even while you battered and betrayed me."
With a sweep of her hand, she made the window vanish. "Enough! I have had enough. The serpent that bit me, the music that destroyed me, is mine. I curse it. I silence it. I condemn it to oblivion."
"But, lady," Libba said in the silence after that great curse, "it's not the music's fault. You can't take it out of all the worlds, just because one man used it to ruin you."
"No?" said the dark woman. "Five thousand years. Lifetimes out of count. There will be no more. Mu
sic will not destroy me again."
"Then he'll find something else," Jimi said. "He's a junkie. He's hooked on bad karma. If he can't have music, he'll find another way to mess you up. And you'll let him, because you're as hooked as he is."
If I'd had any breath to hold, I would have held it. The dark woman was in deep denial. She had power, and she could blow him out of existence.
He didn't care. The music was gone because of her. Nothing she did to him could be worse than that.
The dark woman froze in place. She was so far gone in rage that she couldn't even move.
It was only a lull. I kept on what I'd been doing, which was to slide ever so slowly and ever so invisibly toward the Lady in her chains. I'd gone far enough to see that Ay was working away at them, tugging with his snaky jaws and pulling at one particular link. It had a weakness in it, a barely perceptible crack. The Lady had found it and cultivated it, expanding and contracting her body over and over until she must be one long aching muscle.
The dark woman was completely fixed on Jimi. I stopped by the Lady and hooked the toe of my boot in the weak link and started working at it. I was bigger and stronger than Ay, and I had more leverage. I could feel it gradually giving way.
The dark woman screamed. She was going to leap. Jimi bared all his teeth at her, daring her to do it. "Oh, you mad, you mad! You know that's the truth. It's not the music's fault. It's yours."
"You!" she shrieked. "You're another one of them! User, betrayer, destroyer of women. It's in you all, all tangled with the music."
"So," said Libba, still gently. "Where does that leave me? Men used me. They betrayed me. The music kept me alive. It saved me." She came around to face the dark woman, and just happened to stand between her and Jimi. "Music is what we make of it. We're what we are with or without it. It only makes us more of whatever it is."
"You, too," Jimi said. "It made you weaker. You couldn't stand up for yourself. He'd wreck your life, and you'd go on and start another one for him to wreck all over again."
"You tried to break the chain," Libba said, "but you did it by attacking the music. That won't solve anything. You can only change this by changing yourself. Maybe he won't change—he's as trapped as you've been—but you can. You can kick him aside and go on. Then you really will win. He really will lose you."
"The music is bigger than any of us," Jimi said. "You can use it just as much as he can. You can make or break him with it. You can keep it away from him—but don't punish the rest of us. We never did anything to you."
While they sang their chorus, I worked away at the Lady's chains. The link gave way almost too fast for me to catch it. Ay leaped on one of the broken ends and pulled. I helped him, and the Lady undulated her whole body.
The chains tightened, and I knew we'd made a terrible mistake. Then they snapped loose and dropped away.
The Lady rose up with her hood flared, taller and thicker than a man. Music flooded out of her, so strong and so pure that it knocked me flat.
I heard Jimi's jubilant wail and Libba's trill of joy—and the dark woman's scream, so dissonant that even that tide of music checked, appalled. The Lady struck like the cobra she seemed to be, but not at the dark woman.
She'd opened the window again, with the world of the living on the other side of it. She scooped up the dark woman and the fallen lover together and dropped them there.
They shrank into bubbles, floating in the air. She breathed on them. "Learn," she said. "Grow. Change. Remember—but forget wrath and vengeance. Be all new, and be clean."
The window closed. The dark woman and the silver-dollar man were gone. The room in this most ancient of places was eerily empty without them, but it was full of music.
We looked at each other. I still wasn't any more of a musician than I'd been, but my heart was full. Music needed listeners, too, people to hear it and love it and be moved by it. Libba and Jimi were singing together, not even bothering with words, just jamming with their voices.
Ay wore his more familiar shape again, the little brown man with the brush and palette. The Lady was still the queen of cobras. She grew until she was wide enough and long enough to carry us all. We climbed onto her back, gripping the glossy silver scales. She slipped right out of that afterlife and into another one altogether, where the sky was cloudless blue and the bluffs were blood red, and the Motel Six baked in the desert sun.
I could have got off on my green isle, or stopped by Ay's immortal Egypt. I didn't do either. The music had trapped me again. My feet were stuck in it, and I couldn't make myself want to unstick them.
The pool was full. The dead had their substance back again, and if a few were missing, their songs were still alive, still throbbing in the air. They sang for the red-haired woman, they sang for Sippie. They even sang for silver-dollar man, old Orpheus, Osiris, Tammuz, who would be born again, and maybe this time he'd get it right.
The sun set over the dry land. The old motel was rocking. Good food, good wine, and the best music in any world. I fell in the pool, and handsome Charlie fished me out, barely missing a beat.
I stood in the dusk under the stars, dripping music, and finally admitted it. This was my afterlife. I didn't choose it, it chose me, but I'd fought for it and saved it. I wouldn't get any parades for it, and maybe not a song in my honor, either, but I didn't care. It was an honor that I really couldn't refuse.
Jimi had scored himself another big old guitar, and he was wringing sounds out of it that I wouldn't have believed possible. "Welcome!" he sang in a high and melodic howl. It sucked us with it; we couldn't stop ourselves. We had to join in. "Welcome! Welcome! Welcome to Acousticville!"
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Hopper Painting
Diane Duane
I’m the one in the photograph
you painted yesterday
A cool reflection
of your promises and pain…
~ from Hopper Painting by Janis Ian
He turned toward the window for the millionth time, hoping to see something go by outside, anything; anything from the outside world. But the street was bleak and empty, and as dark as it had ever been; the lighting inside was too harsh and insistent for him to see anything but his reflection in the window—his face, with empty eyes. They were almost a relief; at least the Other wasn’t looking out of them.
At least the coffee was always hot.
He ducked his head over the cup and watched the steam rising. Anywhere else, that would have been a comfort. Anywhere else, that would have been a miracle: coffee that never got cold. Of course, it never really cooled enough to drink, either. Or not comfortably. It always burned.
She turned to him, and said, "Sugar?"
As always, he had to stop to work out whether this was an endearment or a request for sweetener. Her red blouse burned itself to green afterimages in the fierce fluorescent light; her eyes, when he once more looked hopefully into them, were empty of any endearment. He sighed.
"Yes," he said, and pushed his cup a quarter inch toward her.
She looked at him curiously for a moment, then pushed the sugar dispenser toward him. "Your place or mine?" she said.
But she always said that. And there was never any lessening of the sense of something out in the dark, something alien and chilly, watching her say it; as if bloodless things turned to one another, rustling out there in the dry cold dark, and whispered one to the other in coldly amused reaction.
"Why are we here?" he said.
She looked blankly at him. "For coffee," she said.
How can she be so dumb? the back of his brain screamed. How can anyone be so witless? It was beyond him how any other human being could fail to feel the emptiness that lay beyond those windows, beating against them like the vacuum of space: unfriendly, dry and cold, seeking to suck all the life out of whatever lay on this side of the glass, in whatever passed for warmth.
Passed for it.
He had to try one more time. "What about us?" he said.
"Well, of course we have to find a nice place…" she said. "My mama would kick up such a stink if we moved into any place too small. It has to be at least two bedrooms. Three would be better."
"We don’t need three," he said: but he knew she wouldn’t hear him. For them to ever need three, they would have to get out of here…find a quiet place…and do…
But doing that meant change. And where they were, trapped in this water-clear amber, change was the last thing to be expected.
He glanced toward the glass again, flinching as he did it, like someone expecting a blow. It was always better to steel yourself for what you might see, just in case. Once again past the form hunched between him and the window he saw only his eyes, dark and empty-looking in the reflection, and let out the breath he’d been holding.
"And then we can get some nice furniture," she said. She started going on about davenports and hassocks, and he looked away from the window, down at the table. She can’t help it, he thought. There’s nothing left in her any more but the talking, the empty sound that means she’s not quite dead. If there’s any consciousness in there at all, any more, it’s doing what I do when I keep looking out and hoping I’ll see something. Something besides… But he didn’t want to even think the name of the thing. It had heard him do that, once or twice before, and had answered to the calling; he’d been sorry for days afterwards. Or what felt like days…for it was always four AM here, and never dawn.
He glanced down and in front of him at the guy behind the counter, who was standing there getting something out from underneath, or putting something away. It was a wonder how he never saw either of those actions actually happen, though something of the kind was always in train.
He’s as stuck as we are, he thought, watching the counter guy. More so, maybe. But who knows what’s going on in his head? He never says anything but ‘Refill?’.
Beyond the counter guy, the cherrywood counter itself stretched away down to the end of the diner. He let his gaze travel down toward the end of it, stealthily, as if something there that might see him and run away. Occasionally he had glimpsed something down there, a brief tangle of incongruous smoky shadows defying the shiny cold primary-color gleam of the diner—a swirl blue-gray and indefinite, as if a whole packageful of Phillies were smoking themselves. Indistinct through the smoke, it might be possible to catch a glimpse of someone else in the place beyond the two of them, the hunched man, and the counter guy. There sometimes seemed to be booths down there. A few times now he’d thought he’d seen a figure hunkered down in one of them, scribbling idly and then looking up through the smoke with a bleakly speculative expression, like an self-exiled poet hunting inspiration in the blue haze. A second later this figure always looked like part of the haze himself, the mere structure of a poem with none of the detail; a moment more and even that faint manifestation would go missing again, the blue shadows dissipating in the chilly bright air of the diner as if sucked up by the ventilation system. Shortly thereafter even the booths would be gone, leaving nothing but a cherrywood counter that seemed to stretch away to infinity if you let your attention linger too long upon it.