Music

Ellis sat down at his piano and gently pressed a key. The thing was still in tune, thank the Forgotten Gods. Behind him, the locked closet door rattled gently, almost like it was being called by the one, continuous note. Ellis looked back, a weary smile on his lips, right on time.

Thin fingers danced over the keys in time with the gentle thumping of the closet door. He never looked back at it, looking back just the once had been risky enough, Forgotten Ones forbid he ever do it again.

Power is a complicated thing, a sword of Damocles that hung over him from his first sight of the book. Ahh, he thought as arrhythmic notes floated around his small apartment, that blasted book. He wondered if the people who wrote it had thought about what end they were cursing those who followed them to. Odds are they hadn't thought much beyond their own crusade.

Silly thing that. To only worry about what they themselves might face, without a care for the risks they took in condemning future musicians to their fate. He had thought about destroying the book, but the notes left by another on the blank page at the back indicated that such would not be an efficient use of time. Maybe it would have made him feel better, maybe not. But whoever Zann had been, clearly his time with the book had taught him enough to be certain that burning didn't work.

Perhaps, though, Ellis had been the one truly at fault? Perhaps picking up the strangest book he could find in that antiques shop just because it mentioned music had been stupid. Then again, maybe he just had terrible luck.

Luck that the authors of that book were blessed with the inverse of, seeing as they claimed to have lived long enough to see the door vanish. Ellis was certain that he had never read through one quite so large all in one sitting before. He was equally certain that he had never retained so little information. The book was, after a fashion, an instruction manual.

Except he could not remember specifics. Only one instruction, on nigh-on divine order shone in his mind. "Play." He thought it must have told him the significance of what he did, and it explained to him just why it was so important.

As if the insistent hammering on his wall could not have done that. Beyond his knowing, his fingers tapped out The Flight of the Bumblebees, matching the manic rhythms from behind him. Then again, his mind wrestled with the same question every night, were those authors truly lucky? Or did the proof of their warnings beat its way into their heads even as the unknowable tried to beat down their door the same as it has with him?

Time ticked away. Before the mess with the piano and the door had started, music had been his greatest escape. A calmness would fall over his mind like a blanket snuffing out an oil fire, thoughts and fears and stress all gone in an instant. Now, though, even looking at the piano during the day was enough to make his watch warn him about his heart rate. He kept it covered, something he had never believed in doing before, out of sight and out of mind until the sun set.

Somehow he always knew when to start, as the timing was not the same every night. At sunset, or at midnight. In the witching hour, or just before dawn. Arrhythmic starting and stopping, a pattern refusing to emerge and yet he knew, always knew when to start and what to play. Once he had thought to experiment, to try different songs he had memorized over the years just so that he could be more interested in the task. But, of course, that had not worked.

Quickly, too quickly for him to really believe he had ever tried the strategy, he fell into a creative void. Unaware of what his fingers did on the keys once the banging on his door began in earnest, he fought to stay in that empty space. Fought to clear his mind and not think about what unimaginable terrors lurked just beyond the cheap, hollow barricade.

He was dead certain, every night, that he would fail. That he would feel a slimy something snake around his waist and pull him away from his beloved and detested piano into... And yet, every morning he awoke with a stiff back and aching wrists, still seated, fingers still poised on keys.

Dreamless sleep, if sleep it could be called, that left him exhausted, drained, hollow. There was nothing in the day for him anymore, nothing in the taste of coffee or the sent of summer wind. Even his manic experimentation with drugs gave him nothing, he still awoke at the piano. Head filled with arrhythmic thoughts about what lay buried, just behind knowing. The memories of what happened when his consciousness fled.

Ellis tried to recall those memories, during the day when his mind could not rest and yet cried out for sleep, but they never emerged. Or, perhaps more likely, something deep within himself kept them hidden. Zann, the person who had owed the book before him, had mentioned something about dreams and memories. How the latter infected the former and stole his only remaining escape from him.

Of course, that was madness. The poor man had gone mute by the end, and Ellis was certain that he had died. But clearly that death had not been at such a time when his loss would mean the freedom for whatever it was behind the door.

Writhing. Could he hear writhing? A churning, undulating mass of unknowable something just out of sight. Was the door open? He closed his eyes, listening only to the music, trying desperately to tune out the thumping, rending sound from his closet. The sound of millions of enormous claws grinding against it, held back only by the piano. Only by him. By his madly dancing fingers.

Time stretched out of knowing, condensed into an infinite present by the crushing, grinding sounds from just behind him. As though those terrible claws had broken through, he could feel them shredding what little was left of his sanity. And his fingers continued to play.

When he first awoke at the piano - how long ago had that been? What year was it? - mind filled with half-formed visions of terrible things, he had thought everything was normal. A bad night's sleep, maybe. One of those nights his brain edited out of his memory, a rare occurrence but still, it happened.

Soon he started to suspect he was going insane. Every morning he would open his eyes and stare in confusion, in mounting terror at the piano, fingers still acing from the relentless music. Music he started to remember, bits and pieces, snipits and single progressions. But when he sat down to try and recreate them, they always fell short.

Certain of this being his breaking point, certain that this was the point at which his true creative genius broke through, he set up a recording for the next night. It was his last desperate grab at a solution, therapists are expensive and certainly beyond his budget. If he could record the perfect songs, the anthems of generations he surely produced at night, then he could prove to himself that he was not mad.

Sounds broke through his distracted dreams. His fingers had faltered, too lost in the memories of days when he had hoped for better. Feverishly he struck a new tune, emptied his mind of everything except the notes from the instrument itself; materializing in his head only after they had been played.

Gleeful screeching broke into the void behind his eyes, grabbed hold of his attention with eager, slashing talons and tried to turn his thoughts onto itself.

Wood splintered and he played on.

Wrestling now, maintaining the empty nothingness that was his only defense without acknowledging the threat that sought to do terrible things to him. Things it was now whispering in his ear... But not if he did something for them?

Shining, golden hope broke through the terror and the nothingness and the high, teeth aching screech of the things behind the door. Yes. Yes! There was a way out! All he needed was the book, all he needed to do was stop playing and give the book to them. It was all so simple.

His wrists ached. The sensation bled through the holes torn in his thoughtless void by the rending, slashing claws of those terrible screams. Wouldn't it be so nice to stop playing? To just rest, that was all he wanted. To rest. To finally pass the torch, but to do that he needed to pass on the book.

He could also die.

A new voice, one that he imagined Zann having once had, slithered in on the heels of pain from his cramping forearms. The void slowly collapsed around him as the imagined voice of the book's previous owner whispered into his decaying mind. All he had to do was fail, to play just wrong enough for just long enough and be free. Lost into whatever came next, if anything truly does. And the book would find its way onto a new shelf, into new hands.

"It's how I got out," the phantasm whispered, words coiling around Ellis's mind like a contented snake. "It's the only way, really. You'd never knowingly doom someone elsssssss to this, would you?"

Ellis fought the voice, struggled to push it out of his head while his fingers still madly danced. There was a sound, a sound of something slithering. But under that, there was another. And another. More and more. Voices screaming at him. Howling out of the silence he tried to enforce in his own mind.

Voices that echoed in his memory. The recording, that one simple record on his old gramophone. It had been nothing, empty sound. Hours and hours of it. But behind that, below it and over it all were the screams. The tormented voices of keepers long since passed. How many others had the things behind the door taken?

Would they take him?

Dead silence thundered into his mind. Broken screams of monsters beyond knowing crushed under the weight of the returning void.

Ellis floated there, aware of the nothingness surrounding him. Aware of the pain in his wrists and the slow lessening of the darkness beyond the void as the sun crested the horizon. Still, he played on.

Unaware of what his fingers did, knowing only that music he could no longer hear still flowed from the piano. Discordant, painful music that grated on his ears though he could not feel the pain. Aware of claws made of quarter notes and miniscule pauses.

-0-

Opening his eyes, squinting against the blazing light of the summer sun that shone through a crack in his blinds onto his face, Ellis sat up.

The piano was as it had always been. Gleaming black wood, gold writing across the underside of the fallboard shining at him where he lay on the floor. Visible in the periphery of his vision, the shattered remains of the padded bench on which he sat lay like a dismembered corpse scattered across the room.

He was on the floor. That had never happened before.

Ellis brought one hand up to pull loose hair away from his eyes, leaving wet streaks across his face that had nothing to do with sweat. Ignoring the blood, another thing that was new, he turned where he sat and stared at the door. No, the wall. The door had vanished.

Hauling himself to his feet, arresting his fall as his legs gave out by grabbing the piano, he stared in wonder. The door was was gone. He was free!

Except... except there was Zann's voice in his head again. Whispering, muttering, screaming, cackling. "One way out! The only way!"

Beside where he had lain, a red blook rested open to the final blank page, its pages stained a bright, fresh red. His name was scrawled there, red ink that was not ink seeming to glitter in the shaft of mid-day sun. His name, and the words "THE VOICES LIE."

Trembling now, he glanced again at the wall where the door was not. Seeing the silver handle there.

On unsteady feet he walked over to the spot and placed his ear against the stained drywall.

Maybe it was just his imagination, but there was a something there. A madness, a slithering he knew all too well. Perhaps his journey was coming to an end, perhaps one day he would wake to find the knob and the book vanished from his life. Gone like a bad dream finally fading from awareness.

In the back of his mind, the dying memory of his music echoed like the distant ringing of a church bell of a humid, foggy night. He would just have to wait until the sun went down. Until the piano again called to him.

Until the voice of Zann again spoke in his ear, hissing promises of peace if only he would cease the manic movement of his fingers. Surrender himself to whatever hid behind the door that was no longer there.

For the first time in so long that he did not know when he had last done so, he let his legs collapse underneath him again. And fell into a dreamless sleep, haunted by the sound of Zann laughing at him from whatever lay beyond.