The sitting room at the Birkenau mansion dissolved. Karl now found himself in the Zurich Tonhalle Gesellschaft, where an expectant audience waited to hear the premiere performance of Josef Herzog’s Requiem.
That very evening. Only hours before.
Karl remembered the moment when Josef’s terrible music surpassed dread and slipped into the realms of mortal terror. It was the second movement, wherein the Recordare, a song of absolution, was overtaken by the more pitiful Lacrimosa, a plea for mercy. A male choir sounded a thunderous wall of sonic opposition to the ever-more-frenzied pleas of a feminine chorus, the brassy tenors, altos, and basso profundos of the male singers seeming to thrust savagely into the diaphonous spaces created by the female chorus’ protracted and all-too-delicate arias.
There it began. A sudden shallowness of breath. Clammy hands. His tuxedo collar strangling him.
Am I having a heart attack? he wondered.
The choirs sparred. Beneath them, strident brass opposed wailing strings, those strings struggling in vain for a higher purchase to oppose the brass. Surrounding all, the sound of trilling, spiraling woodwinds, plunging down, down into some nameless abyss—
That had been when she appeared. As the deeper strings began a feverish counter-assault on the ringing brass, flutes sighing piteously and violins weeping alongside, he saw her.
The serving girl.
She appeared near the orchestra, stage right, pale, thin, and broken. Moving with crude delicacy, as though the shock of ambulation might shake her to pieces, she shambled up the aisle, eyes on Karl, face bruised, fresh tears on her hollow cheeks. Gaps bloomed dark and vile amid her otherwise perfect teeth. Dried blood crusted at the corners of her lips. Fresh blood trickled in rivulets down her pale thighs.
Karl felt the first seizures of fear grip him then. There was a terrible, palpable pain in the center of his brain—like a steel splinter driven through his forehead—and he shot to his feet, tottering toward the aisle, eager to escape the spectral serving girl and that terrible, hideous music—