by Kris Holt
Glass chits had replaced coins years ago because these days they needed all the metal they could get. I wasn’t the sentimental type, but it was still strange for me to think that what I was holding in my hand was probably a hundred and fifty years older or more. There was a link there to a lost history, to the Old Worlders that made my pistol, to a time when men lived side-by-side rather than chasing one another through the night. With nothing else here worth taking, I made the best of things and slipped the coin case into my bag.
I was all set to head back the way I’d come when I first heard the music. It drifted in and out, on the fringes of my hearing, but the notes were clear and well-defined. For a moment, I wondered if I'd picked up some kind of music box, but on further inspection, the tune seemed to be coming from outside the house. I looked around, senses on alert, but nothing seemed to be moving in the yard. A little bit against my better judgement, I went onward.
By the time I had eased open the screen door at the back of the house, my gun was in my hand. I glanced left and right, but the sand was blowing again, and I couldn’t see a damn thing. I thought about going back to look for Jayci, but if I told her that I was hearing music from out of the air, she’d just take it as a sign that God was messing with me. Anyway, outside the house, the music was clear, too clear to be a recording.
I slid down a low bank behind the house, following the music all the time. The sandstorm continued to rage overhead, but down here the air was clearer. To my limited brain, that didn’t seem like good physics, but I was just pleased to be able to see at least a few feet and pull the scarf away from my face.
When the scarf dropped away, what I saw made sense and no sense at the same time.
In the middle of this sunken dustbowl, a man in a black jacket and tails sat with his back to me at an Old Worlder saloon piano. It was sunk into the sand, with no suggestion of how it got there. There were no vehicles around, no water bottles, nothing at all except an empty tip jar resting by the pedals. The man himself was furiously animated. His fingers flew across the keys, picking out high and low notes that conveyed a frenzy of agitation, undercut by a deep, mournful melody. His long, jerky arms splayed around, causing his parted hair to bounce around as he played.
Out of nowhere, Piano Man stopped playing and kicked his chair around to face me. His eyes and his grin were both far too wide, pitching well into the rocky terrain on the far side of sanity.
‘Phoenix!’ he announced. ‘I’m so pleased you could make it!'
Chapter 9 – Piano Man
Let's rewind a little, back to a time when grown men were small boys, and small boys were just a glint in grown men's eyes.
Back then, there was a story that was popular in Hole Town, a tale about one of the most famous legends from that magical place they call the Sands. A place where the sun always shines, where the winds always blow, and where every man ultimately finds what he's looking for.
Out of the town and into the winding lanes where the sandstorms descend, the Piano Man sits by the side of the road and plays. Day after day, a different spot each time. No-one ever sees the piano move, or works out how on earth he survives in this hellish viper pit. His hat pulled down, suit all nice, but whatever you think, he ain't playing for your pleasure, and that's the truth.
All of those that hang out in border towns laugh at the idea, but it's the truth: Piano Man is out there, right now, picking out his tune, and every lost soul that tours the Sands will know his name.
He's a short, neat man with an immaculate moustache, dressed in a white shirt, braces and coat tails, like he's playing at some goddamn concert hall or something. The song he plays is slow, a refrain, but there's an edge to it, like it's carrying a warning.
He stops; glances over his shoulder. Says to you, 'You look lost, pilgrim.'
'Well, I ain't lost, friend,' you say. 'I just don't know where I'm going yet.'
He plays again for a few seconds, high, mournful-like. 'Some would say that those two states of bein' are not mutually exclusive.'
'Some people'd say a lot of things.'
'And we can agree, can we not, that a man should be measured not by what he says, but by what he listens to?'
He has you there. Not least because you're listening, right now. You're listening good.
Sand blows around you, cocooning you from the world. He plays a single note which has all the clarity of a message from heaven itself, and every hair on your body stands upright in the aftermath.
You find yourself backing away, but with every step you take, the whirling sand becomes more painful, scratching at your face and hands. You could run, just like you want to, but you know somehow that moving further away will see the sands tearing at you, stripping your flesh from your bones. The pain is real now, very real, and you cry out. 'What do you want from me?'
The Piano Man points at the empty jar at his feet. 'When you hear the Piano Man's tune, you'd better be ready to pay the toll.'
Of course, maybe this is just a myth, another of those crazy tales that comes back to town in the mouths of madmen. Truth is like that; you can face it down, or turn your back. But whether you're believing this or not, there are two things you can't deny: the storm is definitely closing in, and your pockets are as empty as a blind man's begging bowl.
* * *
I first heard this tale in a sweat-drenched drinking hole fifteen years ago. Memory's a funny thing; it gets triggered at the strangest times. I'd asked my mom if it was real. She'd bent down to me and said, 'This is the Sands. Anything can be real here.'
The Piano Man, with his back to me, playing a refrain.
That cold, cold gun in my hands reassured me. 'How d'you know my name?'
Piano Man leaned to the side, felt his way across the keys. 'I know a great many things. I know your name. I know what you're looking for. And I know you need my help.'
'Why don't you tell me what I'm looking for?' I wasn't ready to jump to supernatural conclusions yet. I knew only too well how confidence tricksters pick a rube. Give 'em rope, let 'em hang 'emselves.
'You're looking for your mother,' he called. 'Or so you think. But really, you're looking for yourself.'
'So you know my name,' I said, still not ready to bite. 'Tell me what I do.'
'You're a hick desert crawler,' Piano Man called. 'A gun for hire. You came here on a hovertrike that belongs to friends you just made. You know, for what it's worth, I'm not sure Robert E. Lee would approve of the modern world. Back in the day, a real Southern gentleman rode a horse.'
'Well, if whoever that is wants to give me a horse, I'd be mighty appreciative. It'd save me having to buy dinner, for starters.'
Piano Man was warming to his theme now. He launched into 'Yankee Doodle Dandy', leered at me and sang along to the tune. 'These southern boys are oh-so-thin, they wouldn't make a trooper, they ain't got teeth, they ain't got balls, they're all dumb as soup, sir!'
'Cute.' I was done being the butt of his jokes and turned away.
The village was gone. In its place was a wide vista of perfectly flat, empty sand, leading out to the horizon. I blinked twice, expecting that the buildings might reappear, but there was nothing. Nothing but me and the music.
When I turned back, I was almost relieved to see that Piano Man was just where I'd left him.
'What in hell happened to the village?' I said. All around us now, the terrain was the same - empty, flat. The sandstorm still howled just above our heads. 'What about my friend? Where are we even?'
He said, 'You know, for a man whose feet are so firmly planted on the ground, you don't seem to have much of a head for the gravity of your situation.'
By way of answer, I levelled my gun at his back. 'Okay, I'm bored with this now. Whatever trick you're pulling, it ends here. One way or another.'
The tune changed, without him so much as skipping a key. 'Oh, Phoenix. We're just getting started. This might be the Sands and all, but there's no need for dishonor between gentlemen. I have some infor
mation for you, totally free of charge. And if you shoot me, you ain't going to know what happens next.'
'And what would that be?' I said.
'You die,' he replied.
My fingertip brushed across the trigger and I stepped slowly away to the side. 'Say that again.'
The tune he played now was sombre, and it chilled me to the bone. 'Here's how it happens. Tomorrow evening, you're gonna be in a house you don't recognize. Don't worry about the where or why. Focus on what's important. At the wrong moment, you hesitate when you know you should act. You probably get distracted by your thoughts, or whatever.' He grinned evilly over his shoulder.
'This is a sick joke,' I said.
'You get shot down by a man in a doorway. A doorway covered by a blue curtain. Remember that curtain if you want to live.'
I laughed. Laughed even as I was shaking. 'So you know the future now?'
Piano Man's grin faded. His face took on a look of intense concentration, like he was straining to see something in the mid-distance. His hands still pounded at the keys, but his words drowned out all other sounds. 'You don't die straight away. You take a round in the stomach, and you're lying there, bleeding out. It's slow, and it's goddamn painful. You get to see everything that comes after. Your new friends burst in to try to save you. Their deaths are quicker than yours. Bang, bang...it's all done...'
My mind was whirling and my gun wasn't reassuring me any more. 'Are you for real?'
He said, 'Best believe it.'
Bad juju.
'Of course,' Piano Man said quietly, 'if you just shoot straight through that blue curtain soon as you see it, well then, events take a quite different path.'
There was an impossibly loaded silence, where I didn't trust myself to say a word. As I watched, he turned, pointed a finger at me like he was pointing a gun. The other hand continued to play. 'Bang, bang.'
'I don't believe you,' I said.
'Yes, you do,' he replied, facing forwards once again and shaking himself like a man coming out of a daze. 'But anyway. It don't matter what you believe right now. It's time.'
If I'd been a cat, my fur would have been bristling. 'Time for what?'
Piano Man snapped his head around violently with a cracking noise that sounded like the breaking of a neck. His face was a bleached skull around milky pupils.
He said, 'It's time for you to pay the toll.'
I'd already taken two steps back when the walls of the storm dropped in around me. My face and shoulders were scoured instantly. 'I didn't bring no money with me,' I yelled.
'That's sad for you, Phoenix. If it was up to me, well, I wouldn't charge you, but everybody has to pay the toll, don't you see?'
Piano Man played a dirge, one that was punctuated with sporadic flats and sharps. Every note was carefully timed to strike the nerves. I wanted to shout, to scream, to run away, but there was nowhere to go.
A last strike of the keys, and the devil hisself was playing the storm as it descended upon me. I was forced down onto my knees by the scorching, abrasive air, and was all set to give up when the coin case fell out of my open bag. On inspiration, I pulled it open, grabbed one of the five cent pieces and dropped it in Piano Man's tip jar.
It tinkled merrily around the glass, and for a moment, nothing happened. Then I closed my eyes and the world breathed out.
When I opened them again, the storm had died away and the sun was warm on my face. Both Piano Man and his piano had vanished. I was lying at the bottom of a sandbank behind the village. The screen door of the house I'd come through slapped repeatedly on its own rotten timbers.
With a soft thump, Jayci Clemence landed in the sand beside me. Her trailing onyx braids tumbled around us.
'If I'd known you were gonna take a break and sunbathe, I'd have got done quicker and joined you.' When she saw my expression, she punched me playfully in the shoulder. 'What in hell's wrong, Phoe-Phoe? You look like you've seen a ghost.'
Chapter 10 – Spoils of War
When Jayci got through her front door, Gregor pretty much pounced on her.
'Jayci! Are you okay? Do you have it? Was it there?'
'It was there, G. Just like you said.'
Watching the two of them poring over Jayci's bag was like watching kids in the fall, coming back from the Hallowfest with armfuls of candy. Despite myself, I realized I wanted to see what she'd found that made that crazy trip worth my while.
When she reached in the bag and pulled out a mass of wires and boards, Gregor pretty much shot his load. Me, on the other hand...well, let's just say I was distinctly underwhelmed.
'Wires? That's all we went there for?'
Gregor gave me the kind of look you give a dog when it pisses on your bed. 'It might look like wires to you, Einstein, but this is our key to a better life.'
I squinted at him. 'What's an Einstein?'
'I rest my case.'
Jayci stepped in before I could rest his case up his ass. 'Electronics, that's the key. It's a rare skill, and it's expensive. If your taser died, it'd cost you six weeks of bounties to replace it. If your laser died...well, that's old tech. Ain't no man alive that could fix it.'
Gregor coughed, and Jayci smiled at him. 'Even so, we still have one of the best engineering minds you could ever wish to meet on our side, and the more practise he gets with these things, the more awesome shit he can build us. The school we visited was full of old, busted up computers. I found an actual science lab last year and Gregor built us a hovertrike. Our own hovertrike, for God's sake. And that's just scratching the surface. Out in that desert, within our reach, there's old tech that's so incredible it'd make your damn eyes bleed.'
Gregor looked sideways at her. 'Once upon a time, they had military tech that actually would make your eyes bleed...'
'And when we find that, I'm going to point it at the world 'til they proclaim me Supreme Leader. But 'til then, we work with what we can find. Which reminds me...'
Jayci dived so deep into the mass of wires in the bag that only her skinny ass was left poking out. It would have been a five second job to tip the rest of her into the sack and tie a knot in the top. I entertained myself with amusing thoughts of doing just that until she came out again, holding a narrow device with a dead screen. It was no bigger than the palm of her tiny hand.
'Oh, man,' Gregor said, grabbing it from her hand and turning it over. 'A digital thermometer.'
'A what now?' I said.
'Don't ask,' Jayci said, her voice deadpan.
'It tells you the temperature,' he said.
'Hot,' I said. 'It's always goddamn hot. We live in a desert.'
'Q.E.D.' Gregor pulled that face again, like he often did when I was talking. 'It probably needs a new battery, that's all. We must have one in supplies.'
'There's more in the bag,' Jayci said. Now it was Gregor's turn to go fishing. If Jayci hadn't been there to stop me, the temptation to kick our resident engineer in his fat, arrogant butt might have been too much to resist. Instead, I leaned towards Jayci.
'That's the run done,' I said. 'I went with you, as agreed, and now you need to meet your half of the bargain. The Oasis. I need to know where it is.'
'Plenty of time for that, Phoe-Phoe.' Jayci's face reverted to her usual look of casual annoyance.
'Time for you, maybe. A deal's a deal.'
'Oh, Jesus, really? Right now? She's been gone ten years. She'll wait another day.'
'You need to stop taking the Lord's name in vain,' I said. 'And maybe my mom can wait, but I can't. You promised to help me, and good people keep their promises.'
'Since when are we good people?' Jayci smirked and then stood up before I could reply. 'Okaaaaaayy. Okay. We'll tell you. We really will. Hell, I'll even go there with you on the hovertrike so you've got someone to chat to on the way home when you find nothin'. But this has been a good day, right? A long journey, we found the treasure, and there was no bad juju whatsoever.'
Tomorrow night, a house I didn't know. A blue curtai
n. Everyone, all of us here, dead. The whole process, the bickering, searching through junk for baubles, everything we were doing now, a waste of time and fury. I was living by the Book, I had no time to witness false prophets. By tomorrow I was going to be far away, a hundred miles out in the desert.
Gregor popped out of the bag, holding up a tiny battery between finger and thumb and appraised it before slotting it into the thermometer.
'Um, guys! A little attention here?' Jayci tried to focus us, but Gregor was lost in tech and I was still halfway stuck in somewhere altogether nasty. 'Come on! We should be celebrating!'