And so it was I found him.
He warn’t rank no more. It had been many months since I run off. Warn’t much left of his face that the worms hadn’t ate. At his naked loins, the bone poked through the papery hide, and there was a swarm of ants. It was a miracle there was this much left of him, for there was wild dogs roaming the fields.
I set down the poupée on the chair and got to wondering what I should do. What I wanted most in life were a new beginning. I spoke to that doll, for I knew that old Joseph’s spirit was in it somehow, and I said, “I don’t know where you come from, and I don’t know where you are. But oh, give me the strength to begin onc’t more. Oh, carry me back from the land of the dead.”
Without thinking, I started to murmur the words of power, the African words I done mimicked when I watched him raise the dead. I knelt down beside the corpse of my pa and waited for the breath of the serpent. I whispered them words over and over until my mind emptied itself and was filled with the souls of darker angels.
I reckon I knelt all night long, or mayhap many nights. But when I opened my eyes again, there was flesh on my father’s bones, and he was beginning to rouse himself; and his eyes had the fire of life, for that old Joseph had sacrificed his second eye.
“You sure have growed, son,” he says softly. “You ain’t a sapling no more; you’re a mighty tree.”
“Yes, Pa,” says I.
“Oh, son, you have carried me back from a terrible dream. In that dream I abandoned you, and I practiced all manner of cruelty upon you, and a dark angel came to you and became your new pa; and you followed him to the edge of the river that divides the quick from the dead.”
“Yes, Pa. But I stopped at the riverbank and watched him sail away. And I come back to you.”
“Oh, Jimmy Lee, my son. I have seen hell. I have been down into the fire of damnation, and I’ve felt the loneliness of perdition. And the cruelest torture was being cut off from you, my flesh and blood. Oh, sweet Jesus, Jimmy Lee, it were only that you made me think on her so much – she which I killed, she which I never loved more even as I sent the bullet flying into her back.”
And this was strange, for in the old days my pa had only spoke of heaven, and of seeing the face of God, and when he done seen God he would wear me out, calling on His holy name to witness his infamy and my sacrifice. But now he had seen hell and he was full of gentleness.
And then he said to me, “My son, I craves your forgiveness.”
“Ain’t nothing to forgive.”
“Then give me your love,” says he, “for you are tall and strong, and I have become old. And it is now for you to be the father , and I the child.”
It were time to cross the bridge. It were time to heal the hurting.
“My love you have always had, Pa.”
So saying, I embraced him; and thus it was our war came to an end.
KATHE KOJA & BARRY N. MALZBERG
The Timbrel Sound of Darkness
BARRY N. MALZBERG was one of the most controversial science fiction writers and critics of the 1970s and he is the author of more than three hundred short stories and over ninety novels. A winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, he has also been a finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
The author’s many books include Beyond Apollo, The Falling Astronauts, Revelations, The Remaking of Sigmund Freud, The Destruction of the Temple, the movie novelization Phase IV, and a volume of critical essays, The Engines of the Night. His short fiction has recently been included in Alien Pregnant by Elvis, Journeys to the Twilight Zone, and Dennis Etchison’s anthologies MetaHorror and Masters of Darkness II, while his collaborations with Kathe Koja have appeared in Christmas Ghosts, Temporary Walls and Dark Voices 6.
ON NOVEMBER 15, 1900, one week before his death, Sir Arthur Sullivan is visited for the second and last time by the specter who had made these last years so lively for him in retrospect. The first visit came just after Ivanhoe had opened in 1893 and the news had been astonishingly grim. “Your grand opera will fail,” the specter had said, through a smile which was in no way seemly. “Your grand opera will run two hundred performances and bankrupt Rupert D’Oyly Carte and will never be performed again in this country in this century. It will fail as well in Berlin. It will not be taken up in America. It will be heard of no more. Your fate is to be remembered as the composer of the operettas. Your name and Gilbert’s will be linked through all of the decades; you will be famous and your tunes subject for laughter while your cantatas and oratorios and symphony collapse into the dust. This is the true and ageless verdict of history and of all forthcoming prophecy.” How distressed Sullivan had been! This cruel and ungiving news, delivered by a shapeless creature who claimed to be the ghost of the killer in Whitechapel, the notorious Mystery Jack himself, had driven Sullivan into a stupor of rage and futility which had not abated in these intervening years even though (or perhaps because) the prediction of the specter more and more seemed to have some basis in fact. The Golden Legend sunk, The Martyr of Antioch exhumed for the Leeds Festival only because Sullivan had insisted upon conducting it. The disaster of Ivanhoe in Berlin. Even the last two operettas with the wretched Gilbert toward which he had been driven only for the cold pounds, and make no mistake of it, had been failures, Utopia Limited lasting for only half a year and emptying out at the end (like a slopjar, like a dregged glass), The Grand Duke a disastrous one hundred twenty-three performances for the most venomous responses of his career, worse than anything even for the ill-fated Ivanhoe. Oh, he was glad to have been out of it then, but the words of the specter had stayed with him for all these years and there was – despite the momentary reassurances, the false gilt of his own devisings – no release, no release. Now in his rooms in London, arched numb against the bedclothes, feeling the true seediness and devastation of his fifty-eight years and welded to the conviction that his health had collapsed, Sullivan stared at the specter with loathing and attention, the fine features of the ghost hazy and uncertain in the weary off-light of the dawn. He had given up disbelief a long time ago. The night was filled with portents and now all of his friends were dying. Like Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd, descended from the painting on the wall in the second act of Ruddigore, the specter seemed very sure of himself, raised a hand in graceful and indolent greeting.
“And is it as I predicted?” the ghost asked, with the smile of one who is sure of his answer. “Have you any reason now to doubt what I have said?”
Sullivan looked at the anima, then away, toward the streaks of light. In Whitechapel, prostitutes had been found with their features grazed, then eviscerated; in a dingy room for copulation a prostitute, once as dingy, had been found dismembered in ways so intricate and horrifying that the police would release no details. But nothing done, no violence, no ravages perpetrated on those prostitutes could have been as thorough as what this specter had done to Sullivan’s psyche. “Why?” he said, feeling like the hapless Murgatroyd descendant, “why do you haunt me so?”
“Nothing else to be done,” the specter said. “Fills in the time, you have no idea whatsoever – but you will, you will – of how eternal eternity can be and I was, I am a man of action after all. Your reputation,” and what a twist to the word, must the ghost utilize that particular tone, “is quite secure, you know you will last through the next century, your works will be played everywhere but will be particularly popular in England and America. Your works with Gilbert, that is to say. The rest of them – well, there’s no need to review that depressing business again, is there?”
“William Shwenk Gilbert is a swine,” Sullivan said with what be felt to be a pure dispassion. He pulled the bedclothes toward him, feeling their warmth, their sheer corporeality; surely he was not dreaming this. “He is a cheap hack and a synonym for dishonor. He would have turned me into an accompanist, an organ grinder for his monkey rhymes, had I not forced him to be otherwise. And what would you have of that?”
“Very little,” the specter said. “Oh, The Lost Cho
rd will survive and Onward Christian Soldiers . . . but they will survive to be mocked, as examples of art gone bad. The Overture di Ballo will be played now and then as well. But that’s pretty much the certainty of it, Arthur. I wish I could give you better news, I know how ambitious and serious you are, but there’s no way I can manipulate the truth. You have advanced kidney failure and your heart – surely you can feel it – is in perilous condition; the extreme hydration has put terrible untoward pressure on the organ. I understand these things, you see, it is part of my insight. All part of the job.” The light through his features paler than gaslight, was it light he carried or only the treacherous dawn? “It won’t be much longer for you, I am sorry to say, but I won’t tell you the exact date or time of your death. That would be, I think – and I think you agree? – much too cruel.”
Sullivan feels the arch of his mortality, a cold descending triad, then feels the hammer of that betraying heart as if it were the dead march in Yeoman of the Guard. “Oh, it is too cruel,” he says, “too, too cruel for you to come and berate me so, to confront me with omens of my impermanence and folly. You, too, are a man, were a man, are you not? I would not do the same to you if our positions were reversed.” Killer of prostitutes, he thinks, torturer of women, creature of apostasy and terror in the night, in a hundred nights and a thousand, man of legend free to create his own. What, is this my penance for deferring to Carte’s demands, Gilbert’s slimy mockery, my own helpless lust for a good tune, and the easy response of fools? I could not have done it so, he thinks. “Begone,” Sullivan says, as had Murgatroyd in the second act of Ruddigore. “Begone, specter, I will speak with you no more.” The hoots of Jack’s amusement fill Sullivan’s hot and crowded bedroom and he feels a thin and desperate clutching in his throat, some prescience or prestidigitation of doom as the light shifts within the room and he falls back against the sheets, stunned and exhausted, astonished by the force of his grief. He could not have thought of himself as such a simple and vulnerable man.
But there are vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities, simplicities masquerading as cunning complexities as Jack, Mystery Jack, Springheeled Jack himself must masquerade: through dark and light: as toff, as workingman, as doctor, as empty-eyed and smiling drunk: simple as a couplet of Gilbert’s base doggerel, come with his hands out to the prostitute herself as simple and base, smiling in the soot and blackness of the alleyways, smiling as he palped and fingered the breast, the belly, her hot and dirty dress rucked up and bare beneath and mumbling about the money first, sir all the gentlemen must pay first, but for what he seeks no payment is sufficient, no coin can be tendered or accepted; it is a gift, after all, freely given: it is legend in the making; it is art. Imagining him now – as Sullivan lies sleepless in the fretful and unforgiving light imagining his glide through streets made empty by the rumor of his passing, the surety and elegance of that passing, the shocking shape of the kidney in the box, kidne, he had spelled it, a deliberate joke, anything for a laugh. Give the people what they ask for: who in fact, is subsidizing this performance? The police? The newspapers, panting yellow journalists chasing his exploits with ignorant fervor, keeping score with the dead bodies of women? To whom does he answer, Jack with his mystery and his smiling knife, to whom must he account? Has he no partner, no collaborator? No? – in the huffing dawn, light upon light and the thin wheeze of Sullivan’s lungs like the sound of failure itself, no, there is only Jack to come before him, Sullivan in his tormented bed, to bring the news of defeats and disasters and to smile like a gentleman as he does.
Lying with Fanny Ronalds in the rut of the night, attempting to express himself to her as he never has, even in silhouette, been able to open to the common herd, Sullivan in 1884 has a vivid intimation of what Gilbert’s death will be like: seventy-five years old in 1911, he will be lying indolently by the lake on his estate, the cries of a woman visitor, some inconsequential friend of Nancy McIntosh in from London will take herself to be in trouble in the water and Gilbert, always a fool and helpless to the distressed sounds of women, will toss aside the newspaper, rush bumbling to the lake and attempt to rescue the young woman, a large and resolute bulk who floundered like a freighter atop the waters, protesting. At that moment Gilbert’s heart would give out, Gilbert would feel the empty and suddenly unmotivated coursing of the blood and then Gilbert’s ears would fill with the dull and doglike sounds of a man in real distress: that man himself. Terrified all his life by drowning, seized by images and intimations of drowning, Gilbert at last would come to pay to fate what he had so maliciously and gleefully extracted over the decades.
Fanny in his arms, crushed against him in her own swim and pallor, Sullivan refracts the panting and desperate noises of Gilbert’s breath with a roaring and coursing of his own, the sound must be so distressing in this isolate bedroom at an inn in Shepperton that Fanny clutches him and cries, “Arthur, Arthur, are you all right?” He does not know if he is all right. Truly, he can make no sense of it. I have a song to sing-o. The waters rush in and out of his brain, he is sunk, excavated, drowning, and as he clutches Fanny in the desperate baggage of his own grip he hears the Executioner’s lament in Mikado, someday a victim must be found and that villain is Shwenk. No, it is Seymour, Arthur Seymour Sullivan. He chokes, trying to drag himself to the surface through the force of his grasp of Fanny. She groans with pain and as Sullivan rises Gilbert sinks into the stinking lake, his emergent, flatulent corpse as helpless and desolate as any Whitechapel victim, riven with bubbles and dust, sea-creatures and foam, and try as he may in that flickering recession of vision, Arthur Sullivan cannot see himself amongst the mourners.
Sullivan conducts The Martyr of Antioch in London. The chorus tosses him flowers, Sterndale Bennet pays him compliments, after the performance Parry and Stanford, their virginal faces dolorous with envy pay their abashed regards. Surely his music is of consequence, such triumphs cannot have been contrived – as was perhaps The Tempest or In Memoriam – upon youth and access, the oratorio is one which Mendelssohn himself would have signed. Over and again Sullivan is assured of this in the haze and glow of the performance and yet somehow he cannot bring himself to sufficient conviction; in the night wind, howling, he hears not benediction but hysterical, harsh laughter. D’Oyly Carte tells him that he is behind on his commitment; what will fill the theatre if Patience does not come in? At the reception which should have made his brilliance heat and light for the night wind within, Sullivan finds himself unable to take any comfort whatsoever. Gilbert sends him a polite note the next day congratulating him upon the triumph yet reminding him, like the tolling of a mourning bell made of lead, that rehearsals soon enough must begin. Sullivan stares at the note for a long time, the sound of his brother Fred’s voice in Cox and Box resonating through the room. Poor Fred, more than a decade passed and never, never to come again. Rataplan, rataplan.
“You see,” the specter from Whitechapel says to Sullivan most reasonably, “trying to replicate or relive your life will, in fact, change nothing. All of the choices have been made, they are as irreversible and remorseless as that skein of rope with which I dragged poor Dolly over the edge to her doom. Besides,” the specter continues, “it is not a bad fate. It is not nearly the worst fate you could have,” with the silent laugh of one to whom fate is a commodity to be delivered, not an appointment to be kept. “Your work will, after all, be remembered after a fashion and who is to contend with the judgment of history? Certainly not those abominable women of the night with whom no man of decency would ever consort, am I right?” Sullivan nods solemnly. The wretchedness from his kidneys and bowels, that new wretchedness which seems to foreshadow his eventual oblivion has coursed through him with the speed of utter conviction. Now and at the end of this, his eyes are fully open to his awful situation. “I mistreated no one,” Sullivan says, “I wrote honestly. I missed no effective deadline, not even with The Grand Duke. I always produced. Did I want too much? Were my ambitions so unreasonable?”
“You mistre
ated Fanny,” the specter says, as sternly as befits a man who has known and plumbed the secrets of women, who has flexed and griped like a raptor through darkness to ultimate light. “You led her along and gave her only what she needed to continue to bed with you. You lied to other women of affections you could not feel; you never completed your Second Symphony or another major orchestral work; you throttled the Leeds festival when you felt threatened by younger and better composers. Your sins were not great, no,” in the musing judgment of a true sinner, a liar, a killer, a spreader of chaos and blood and truly in the face of such disorder, Sullivan thought, his own sins were as nought, depressing as it might be to have them listed this way, “not great but they were recognizable. Gilbert will live only through your music; your music will live only through Gilbert’s doggerel. Could one conceive a more fitting fate for either of you, gentlemen of such persuasion and fixity? Come now,” the ghost says, “consider the alternatives. You could be one of those women, boxed gizzard, floating intestines, perfect and sacrificial teeth glinting at the horrified constable. Instead, you are going to die in your own bed and make a good job of it, too. You should have no real objection to your fate.”
Sullivan does not know what to say to this. Truly, there is nothing to say, he has indeed, as the ghost, as Fanny, as D’Oyly Carte, as Sterndale Bennet had told him, made of his fate what it should be. Victoria had predicted major work from him, had persuaded him to attempt Ivanhoe, then had not even had the kindness to attend any of the performances of the opera. There was more to this certainly than simple sloth and indolence. “No more,” he says, “I know my health is not good; I can feel that decline within me. I must rest, I must rest. I tried in life to give no hurt, if I failed it was not from an excess of passion but its deficit, that is all.”
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