~-o0O0o-~
I slept fitfully, my dreams troubled, not by the chamber and its incomprehensible carvings, but by a vast plain where guns roared like great drums in a blood red sky and clouds of death passed over the broken bodies of a million moaning men.
The morning found me back in the armchair by the fire, seeking solace in the comforting normality of my pipe. Roger eschewed breakfast, and came and sat on the piano stool. He lit up a cheroot and soon we were putting up a fug worthy of London on a damp evening in October.
“Did you come to a decision?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Not completely. But I intend to keep working on your puzzle. It has me intrigued.”
And that’s when I had the epiphany. Frustrated, Roger drummed his fingers on the piano, a martial beat, only a few seconds long. The piano rang in sympathy… and the answer came to me, all at once.
“It’s not a language… it’s a musical notation.”
Roger merely looked at me in astonishment as I jumped out of my chair and headed for the piano. I spread his transcribed papers over the top.
“Look. These lines, separated into groups corresponding to quavers, minims and crotchets… but it’s not music as such… there is no sense of a scale.”
Roger drummed his fingers once more, and again the piano resonated in sympathy.
I moved him off the stool and sat down at the instrument.
“So if it’s not music… it must be rhythm,” I said. “Rhythm and vibration.”
I shuffled the papers and placed them on the music stand in front of me.
“How do you know where to start?” Roger said.
“I don’t. Let us just see if I am right first.”
I picked a solid minor chord, and began striking the keyboard in time with the rhythm transposed on the pages. Almost immediately I felt the sympathetic resonance rise from the chamber beneath.
“It’s working,” Roger shouted. But I was already lost in a world of pounding chords.
Something was far wrong. I knew it at an intellectual level. But the music controlled me deeper than that, in the hindbrain where the evolutionary equivalent of a gibbering monkey hit a log with a stick and enjoyed the noise. My hands pounded the keyboard, hands clenched into fists. The beat sped up a notch and the walls shook, loose mortar falling from the ceiling.
Just as I felt I could go no further, the beat slowed, mellowed.
As it had the first time, my head swam, and the walls of the keep melted and ran. The fireplace receded into a great distance until it was little more than a pinpoint of light in a blanket of darkness, and I was again alone, in a vast cathedral of emptiness.
A tide took me, a swell that lifted me and transported me, faster than thought, to the green twilight of ocean depths far distant.
I realised I was not alone. We floated mere shadows now, scores… nay, tens of scores of us, in that cold silent sea. I was aware that Roger was near, but I had no thought for aught but the rhythm, the dance. Far below us, cyclopean ruins shone dimly in a luminescent haze. Columns and rock faces tumbled in a non-Euclidean geometry that confused the eye and brooked no close inspection. And something deep in those ruins knew we were there.
We dreamed, of vast empty spaces, of giant clouds of gas that engulfed the stars, of blackness where there was nothing but endless dark, endless quiet. And while our slumbering god dreamed, we danced for him, there in the twilight, danced to the rhythm.
We were at peace.
~-o0O0o-~
I came to lying on the floor beside the piano. The first thing I was aware of was the pain in my hands; my knuckles bloodied and torn. But my own pain was forgotten at the sight of Roger.
He lay in the centre of the room on his back, eyes open, staring at the ceiling, a broad smile on his face.
It is only now, more than fifteen years later, that I can bring myself to write about these events. In all that time Roger has never awakened. He is alive, but no longer seeing, borne away, somewhere where the green twilight flickers and the slumbering god dreams.
He is at peace.
And now, as the war drums of Europe beat once again in a quickening rhythm, I dearly wish I had gone with him.
~-o0O0o-~
AUTHOR'S NOTE
If you're looking for a taster of my work, this is who I am.
These seven short stories, all previously published in magazines or anthologies, contain magic, monsters, ghosts, history, beer, Scotland, scifi, fantasy, horror, singing, more beer and fun.
This is who I am.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of these stories previously appeared in the following venues
VARIATIONS ON A THEME - Wrongworld (US) Apr 2008
BAIT AND SWITCH - Suddenly Lost in Words (US) 2011
AT THE TRIAL OF THE LOATHESOME SLIME - Fools Motley (UK) 2003
THE WATCHER IN THE DUNES - Grotesque (UK) 1996
A SLIM CHANCE - Cat of Nine Tales (US) 2012
TANNIS - Pegasus (US) 2000
TO THE SEA AGAIN – The Harrow (US) 1996
FROM BETWEEN - Wrongworld (US) Feb 2008
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