Tag: Fiction

This is a long story that I wrote a number of years ago, and which I serialized on this blog four years ago. Since it’s still my favorite of the horror stories that I’ve written, I figured I’d repost it over the eight days leading up to Halloween. I wrote this, by the way, well before someone decided that what vampires needed to be was ‘sparkly’.

Willem Schliemann extends a shaking hand toward one of his six remaining African violets. This plant hasn’t blossomed in months, and he wonders why. The truth is that he isn’t very good at this. He whispers an expletive as he hears the truck engine outside. He grabs his cane and heads for the door.

“Good morning, Senor,” Miguel says as Willem walks out onto the porch. Miguel goes around back of the pickup truck and begins unloading Willem’s weekly supplies. He puts two crates on the porch and stops to wipe his brow. “Senor, how can you wear long sleeves today?”

“The warmth appeals to me,” Willem Schliemann says with a shrug. “Though I admit that I will never truly be used to sun and heat in December.”

“You’ve been here fifty years.”

“Fifty-four,” Willem says. Fifty-four years since he last saw the Fatherland, though no one calls it that now.

“Perhaps that is why your flowers do not bloom.” Miguel grins and wipes his brow again. “I’ll see you next week, Senor Schliemann. Oh, your mail.” He hands Willem a pack of mail tied with a string, and then he gets back in the dusty old pickup and drives away down the narrow dirt road. Willem breathes in the warm breeze from the Atlantic. He thumbs through his correspondence. A few bills, letters he exchanges with people around the world – none bearing his real name, of course. Argentines don’t question such things. He finds a letter from a particularly engaging correspondent, and he smiles. Then he sees the postcard on the bottom of the stack.

The card shows a place Willem remembers with perfect clarity through fifty-four years, a lifetime, of memories. The front gates of the concentration camp at Hamerstadt. There on the left is the spot where he stood at attention that morning. The grass is green, the paint on the buildings is flaking – but it is the same place. He waits for the chill to run through him, but nothing comes. Has it been too long? He turns the card over and reads where a feminine hand has written in German, “I have finally found you.” There is no signature. One is not needed.

Old Willem Schliemann looks up at the bright morning sky. He knows that she will be here tonight. Willem sighs, puts the mail aside, and goes about putting his supplies away. As he does so he glances at his stubborn violets.

Some blossoms are more delicate than others….

***
Willem Schliemann stood at attention near the front gate. His new uniform, stiff and scratchy and at least a size too big, hung loosely on his slight frame. His head still itched from being shaved three days before. Thirty other new conscripts stood with him, waiting in the cold April air for….something. Flecks of ash fluttered down from the sky like snowflakes, ash from the great smokestack that towered above the giant foundry building that was not really a foundry. Somewhere behind them Willem could hear a train arriving.

“Attention!”

Commandant Gerhard Reger looked over his conscripts with a disgusted expression as a staff car pulled up in front of the phalanx. A man climbed out of the car’s back seat, and the Commandant turned to face him. “Herr Doktor,” Reger said. “A pleasure.”

“I’m sure,” the man said. Willem leaned slightly to one side to get a better look at this man. He was short, shorter than Willem. His black hair was slicked straight back and his thin lips were set in a tight frown. He wore a thick black overcoat with a sable collar, and a swastika-shaped lapel pin. He placed a pince-nez on his nose and looked over the conscripts. “Such a fine crop, Commandant. Our thousand-year Empire is now in the hands of sixteen-year-old boys.” He ignored the look of disgust on Reger’s face as he returned the pince-nez to his pocket and pulled out a slip of paper, which he handed to the Commandant. “This is the one I require,” he said. “I trust I have not picked a boy to whom you have formed….an attachment?”

Willem watched as Commandant Reger met the man’s gaze. He was close to the front and could hear what was being said, but even the soldiers in the very back row could not have missed the look of utter loathing in the Commandant’s eye. Reger faced the conscripts again and yelled out the name on the paper.

“WILLEM SCHLIEMANN! STEP FORWARD!”

Swallowing, Willem stepped forward and walked to the front of the line, where he returned to attention as the man, this Doktor, came down and looked him over. He smelled faintly of lavender.

“An honor,” the man said. “Please, come along.” He gestured for Willem to come with him. “You are assigned to me now.”

Willem glanced at the Commandant, who gave a single, curt nod. Willem joined the Doktor and climbed into the warmth of the staff car as a young soldier who was not much older than himself held the door open. When the driver was back behind the wheel the Doktor rapped twice on the forward window with his truncheon. The driver nodded, put the car in gear, and drove. Willem looked out the windows as they passed through the camp. There were many guards presiding over the comings and goings of hundreds of emaciated, prisoners. More than once he saw two soldiers dragging a dead body between them. The Doktor sipped from a flask and shook his head.

“Somehow I suspect our solution is not so final after all,” he said. “In the end, there are still more Jews than Nazis.”

“In the end?” Willem asked, surprising himself by speaking.

The Doktor nodded. “Italy is no longer with us. The Russians failed to oblige us by simply giving up. We have already lost France, and Hirohito hasn’t been able to command the total attention of the Americans. And, of course, the British….well, there it is.”

“There is still hope,” Willem said.

The Doktor eyed Willem suspiciously. “Fill an empty bag with hope, and you have an empty bag.” He capped the flask and returned it to his pocket. “My name is Wolf Muething. I am a physician by trade, although in recent years my work has gone in other directions.” He sighed. “I chose you because of your experience working with your uncle.”

Willem glanced sharply at the Doktor. “How do you know that?”

“He was my friend,” Doktor Muething said. “We were in school together, many years ago. I was very sad to hear of his passing.”

Willem nodded and looked away, mostly to hide the fresh tears welling up. He had been five years old when his father died and he’d gone to live and work with Uncle Gunther. Since then he had spent his days traveling with his uncle to the villages and farms all around the region. Willem had helped deliver babies, set broken bones, and tend to the dying. He had done everything that a country doktor would, and he had always supposed that he would become a physician himself.

Then, just six weeks before today, he had been at Uncle Gunther’s side, treating an elderly woman with rickets. Gunther complained of chest pains, and hours later he was dead. Uncle Gunther had been old, but he had never been sick for more than a day or two. The shock of his passing was compounded two weeks later by his conscription into the Army….and now he was apparently assigned to another physician. Looking at Doktor Muething, with his black hair and severe look that was the complete opposite of Uncle Gunther’s, Willem suspected somehow that he would not be delivering babies or setting broken bones.

Minutes later they arrived at their destination. Willem looked out the window at the small, low building. “Here we are,” Doktor Muething said. “Your new quarters will be over there.” He pointed to the dormitories across the street. These looked somewhat better than the mass quarters he had shared with the several hundred other new conscripts – if any housing in such a setting could ever be described as nice. “Come,” the Doktor said. “I would have a look at what they have built for us.” He waited for the driver to come open the door and then he climbed out, followed by Willem. He led the way up five stairs and inside.

It was a small medical laboratory. Clean, Willem noticed, definitely clean. The place still smelled like fresh paint, plywood and plaster; the stainless steel examination table in the center of the room gleamed in the sunlight that streamed in through the large windows. But as Willem looked closer he could see spots where the paint was too thick or too thin, where the wall panels didn’t fit together quite correctly, where electrical wiring was exposed. Another disposable building.

“Not bad for construction performed at gunpoint,” Doktor Muething said. “It won’t take me long to put things in order.”

Willem looked around at the rest of the laboratory, which wasn’t much bigger than the room where Uncle Gunther had based his practice. He now saw that the examination table was outfitted for surgical procedures as well. A cabinet on the right was stocked with chemicals and specimens preserved in formaldehyde. There was a packed bookcase, and between the bookcase and the cabinet there was a roll-top desk. Willem approached the surgical table. It was not as pristine as it had first appeared. Its surface was dull and scratched, and although it had been meticulously cleaned since its last use no amount of scrubbing could remove all the traces of blood from the collection grooves.

“You probably didn’t use a table like this, working for Gunther,” Doktor Muething observed.

“No,” Willem said.

“It should make you proud, having such an opportunity to help the Fatherland.” He took off his overcoat and hung it on the back of the chair in front of the roll-top desk. He was wearing a double-breasted charcoal-gray suit, and now he wore no swastika pin.

“I am honored to work for the glory of Germany,” Willem said.

The Doktor laughed, and Willem’s cheeks turned a bright crimson. What had he said that was funny?

“Forgive me,” the Doktor said. “I am an old man, and I have seen the Might of Germany plowed under twice in one lifetime.” He settled into the chair, the legs of which squeaked. “What we do here is not for Germany. What we do here, is for the betterment of Man. Out there”—he made a sweeping gesture—“the masses will not approve of what we do. They will hate it, condemn it, and some will try even to deny it. But they will benefit. We must learn what we can. Do you understand?”

Willem drew himself up straight. “You speak treason, Herr Doktor.”

“Hardly. Germany will survive; I merely question the form in which it shall be. Perhaps on that day we will be a wiser people.” He pushed himself up from the chair, walked over to the surgical table, and ran a finger down one of the blood-grooves. “Tell me, young Schliemann – are you a man of science?”

Willem shifted on his feet as he considered the question. Doktor Muething smiled.

“You are thinking,” he said. “Good. We haven’t driven you totally to automatic sentiments and easy platitudes.”

“I don’t understand the question, Herr Doktor.”

“And that, young Schliemann, is the beginning of wisdom.” Doktor Muething smiled. “There was a time, once, when the standard treatment for disease was prayer. It was thought that all maladies were caused by evil spirits, and that only God could restore health to an afflicted body. But centuries of science have taught us otherwise. What God would afflict, we can now put right.” He leaned against the table. “So much of what we have learned has come at the expense of the dead. What does this tell you, young Schliemann? What question should arise now, if you are truly of science?”

Willem thought for a moment. “Is there a limit to what the dead can teach us.”

Doktor Muething nodded. “And if the answer to that question is ‘yes’?”

The answer came as quickly as before, but Willem hesitated before saying it. “Then I would ask what we may learn from the living.”

“Precisely,” the Doktor said, and then he addressed someone behind Willem. “Are they here, Commandant?”

“Yes, Herr Doktor.”

Willem hadn’t heard Commandant Reger enter, but there he stood, waiting patiently in the doorway.

“Good,” Doktor Muething said. “Let us see them.”

Willem and the Doktor followed Commandant Reger outside, where six prisoners stood at attention under the watchful eye of eight rifle-wielding guards. Two guards would be enough, Willem thought, judging by the look of the prisoners. Doktor Muething stepped up and looked over each prisoner. There were four men and two women. Each had that sunken look of hunger, and each wore the yellow Star of David stitched to their ratty prison clothes.

“All Jews?” the Doktor asked. “No Gypsies or other undesirables?”

“All Jews,” the Commandant replied icily. “You were quite specific.”

Doktor Muething bid one of the male prisoners to open his mouth, and then he examined the man’s teeth. “Healthy enough, I suppose.”

He has a strange idea of health, Willem thought as the Doktor moved on to the two women. He very briefly looked over the older of the two, but he lingered on the younger. “Might I see your eyes, child?” the Doktor said as he lifted her chin with a single finger. As her head rose, her gaze flicked ever so briefly to Willem’s. There was no fear in her eyes, only quiet resignation. In health she would have been lovely, Willem thought. Even for a Jew.

The Doktor stepped away from the prisoners. “These will do.”

“You are truly a charitable man, Herr Doktor,” the Commandant said, making no effort to look at Doktor Muething as he addressed him.

Doktor Muething waved a hand. “Charity is hostility with an open hand,” he said. “Young Schliemann, we will begin tomorrow morning at precisely five o’clock. I assume that Gunther taught you punctuality?”

Willem nodded. Uncle Gunther had always carried three watches to ensure that he would never be late for anything. One of those watches was now Willem’s; he had inherited it along with Uncle Gunther’s stethoscope, the last proud artifacts from the life of a poor country doktor.

End Part One

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Here’s a story I wrote way back in 2003 (yikes!), and posted to the blog in 2006. I offer this because this year we have a couple of “Alternate Takes on Snow White” coming to movie theaters, and I always rather liked how this one turned out. It does assume a bit of familiarity with the Disney movie, but even if you haven’t seen that movie in a long time, I think you’ll get the gist.

“What Happened to the Huntsman?”

“You are clear on what you are to do, then?” asked the Queen, as she leaned forward on her throne.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” the Huntsman replied.

“Say it.”

“The girl’s heart,” the Huntsman said. “In here.” He held up the box in his hand.

“Good,” said the Queen. “Then go.” She rose and vanished through the doorway behind the throne. The Huntsman shuddered. Sometimes he had nightmares about where that door led.

He looked down at the box. Such a lovely thing — red cherry wood, impeccably carved and fitted together, with polished brass hinges and a clasp in the shape of…a heart. Her Majesty had been keeping this little trinket for years.

One of the guards cleared his throat, and the Huntsman turned to leave. In the anteroom, he stopped to check his reflection in the mirror.

“She’s going mad,” the Huntsman said softly, so the other guards would not hear.

“‘Tis true, I’m sad to say,” the mirror replied, its ghostly face appearing in the center of the glass. “But she’s our Queen, come what may.”

“She is our Queen,” the Huntsman agreed. “But killing girls and keeping their hearts? This is dark madness. Far worse than usual.”

“On this matter you seem conflicted,” the mirror observed. “With what doubts are you afflicted?”

The Huntsman considered the box again. He also considered the gold the Queen paid him for each item he brought her, usually for a deer or boar, though. Being the Queen’s Huntsman was a good job, no question about that. It was certainly better than being one of the Prince’s guards. What a bunch of dullards they were….

“None, really,” said the Huntsman. “I’m sure the girl’s blood runs as red as a stag’s.”

“Skin of white and blood of red,” said the mirror. “No matter, though — she’ll soon be dead.”

The Huntsman stared at the mirror. “Why in God’s name are you speaking in rhymes?”

The mirror sighed, an odd sound for a mirror to make. “The Queen requires it. She thinks it makes me sound more mystical. But it’s not easy, rhyming everything, so I was practicing. But to return to the subject, you should do what is right.”

“Does not the Queen decide what is right?”

“Her power rises,” the mirror said. “But the Fates are beyond her. Wickedness shall fail.” Suddenly the mirror’s face brightened. “Did you like that? It is called a haiku.”

“It was wonderful,” the Huntsman replied. The mirror is mad as well, he thought. And then: But I’m the one talking to a pane of polished glass. Who’s mad here?

“Fare you well,” said the mirror.

“Thank you,” the Huntsman said, and he took his leave. On his way outside, he passed by a window overlooking the courtyard. The girl was down there, singing away. She was always singing, just like that fool Prince. But not for long, he thought as he glanced yet again at the box.

***

“Oh, look!” The girl beamed. “Those look like roses!” And just like that she bounded across the field to a bush beside a path that wound into the deep of the woods. The Huntsman knew that path well. There were beasts down there which would make short work of a girl.

“The day grows short,” he said. “We should go back.”

“Now, my good Huntsman, not without berries for the pie I want to bake. It will only take a moment!” She turned her attention to the blueberry bush. Six songbirds kept fluttering around her head. She was always surrounded by songbirds.

He glanced at his horse, tethered back at the tree. He thought of the wooden box in his saddlepouch. He really needed to be on with it.

“Do you like blueberries, Huntsman?” asked the girl, her back to him as she picked.

“Umm…yes,” he said. In truth he hated them, but lying wasn’t quite as bad a sin as the little duty he was about to perform for the Queen. Get on with it, he told himself. He drew his trusty hunting knife.

“Oh, they’re so ripe!” The girl babbled on. “The pie will be so good. And I’ll have so many berries…maybe I can make a cobbler too!”

The Huntsman moved forward, holding up the knife. The blade, freshly sharpened, gleamed in the late afternoon sun. He was very particular about his knife.

“And pancakes too, light and fluffy…”

He crept up behind her. Why are you being so quiet? It’s not like she’s a skittish doe who can outrun you if she takes your scent–

The songbirds, damn them, started shrieking.

Do it now! You’re close enough! One stroke and it’s done!

The girl, alerted by the songbirds, turned then. She saw the knife and screamed.

No matter! She’ll be dead! Do it, you coward!

He lowered his arm and dropped the knife.

***

For a while, after she had run into the woods, the Huntsman sat on his horse, gazing at the box with the heart-shaped clasp. He wondered if he’d done the girl any favors, letting her escape into those woods. There were dark things down there, and if she got far enough she might wander into the mining country. If she got that far, she’d better pray she found nice miners to take her in, because the nasty ones were a lot worse, and there were a lot more of them. But that was all out of his hands. What to do about the Queen and her precious box?

He had no idea.

So he rode, taking the longest way home he could. Actually, he didn’t even care if he got home that night. The Queen could wait until morning. He rode into the river valley; as long as he was out, he might as well get a deer…

A deer…

What were the chances that the Queen would know a deer’s heart from a young maiden’s? She was no Huntress; that’s why she paid him. Surely she wouldn’t know. He’d get her a heart, then. It just wouldn’t be the girl’s. He rubbed his hands together and wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. So it was that the Huntsman wandered through the woods, looking to execute his plan.

And so it was that he found…absolutely nothing.

No track, no spoor, no trace of a deer, anywhere. That was very strange; but it didn’t bother him too much. Deer fed at night, after all, so if he found a decent tree he could wait in its limbs for a deer to come. Still easy, and he was still feeling quite confident as he tied his horse and went to hide in a nearby tree.

He was not feeling so confident when the hours went by and nary a deer came, the whole night — until he fell asleep and woke up in the morning, still in the tree and with the stiffest neck and back of his life.

There were no deer. And what was more, there were no birds singing, no squirrels, no rabbits — where were all the animals? The Huntsman swore as he climbed down, repeating every unpleasant word he knew, in the three languages he knew them in. (Huntsmen, it is little known, swear more than sailors. They merely do it alone and very quietly.) He got his horse and rode off, wondering where he’d get a heart now.

I wish that whelp Prince would stop wandering around like a damned troubadour and depose the old witch, he thought as he rubbed his throbbing back. The Huntsman was in a bad mood. He was hungry, he ached all over from sleeping in a tree, and he had no heart for that damned box. And his horse kept trying to turn in the direction of the woodlands and the Mine Country, as if the beast smelled or heard something that way. Maybe that was where all the animals had gone, but then, the Huntsman couldn’t imagine why they’d all be down there. All the animals in the forest, in a single place? It didn’t figure.

He rode half the day without seeing so much as a field mouse. Actually, he did see a field mouse, but there was no way the Queen was going to fall for the heart of a field mouse. The Huntsman despaired of ever find a heart for the box. He’d failed, and the Queen would send him to the gaoler. “The Huntsman has failed, it must be said,” the mirror would tell her. “So vile is he, that you must take off his head!” The Huntsman shuddered–

And that is when he heard the squealing of a pig.

He spun about and saw a small farmstead in the distance, near the side of the wood. There were two fields, a tiny barn, and a tiny cottage. And near the barn was a pen, inside which stood a fat sow.

The Huntsman couldn’t believe his good fortune. He guided his horse over to the fence of the pen, dismounted, and tied his horse. Then he climbed over the fence, into the pen. He stood there for a minute, studying the pig and trying to decide if its heart was the same size. Surely it would be…and the big, dumb sow just looked at him, staring. The Huntsman felt at least one pang of guilt as he drew his dagger. He always felt guilty when the animals made it easy.

It took a few minutes, but he worked as quickly as he could. A few minutes, and the pig’s heart was in his hand. He took the slimy, wet, bloody muscle back to his horse and cursed then, because he realized he’d forgotten to get the box out beforehand. He had no choice but to get blood all over his saddle and pouches and the box itself while he dug it out, but finally he got the heart inside. He was putting the box away when he heard the scream.

The Widow who lived here had found her dead pig.

The Huntsman yanked out his dagger. “Stand back, in the name of the Queen!” he shouted.

“You stand back, murderer and thief!” she flung back, her initial shock having given way almost instantly to rage. And where he had a hunting dagger, she had a giant scythe.

Ohhhhh nooooo, he thought. This woman was big and strong, large but not fat, older but not old. Her eyes were fiery, her sand-colored hair was long and tied back haphazardly, her ample bosom heaving–

She’s got a scythe, you idiot! Get out of here!

And that is what he did: he jumped onto his horse and rode away, off toward the castle. He rode through the castle gates just as the sun was setting, and was still thinking about that widow as he dismounted and only now realized that he had completely forgotten to stop at a stream to wash the pig’s blood from his hands.

***

“A pig?” The mirror was indredulous. “You put a lot of thought into this, didn’t you?”

“That was all I could find,” the Huntsman replied. “Will she discover it?”

“Not as long as she doesn’t ask me,” the mirror said. “If she does, I have to tell her the truth. But until she does, she’ll never know. She won’t use it in any of her spells, that much I can promise. That heart is too important to her — or, whose she thinks it is. But there are other ways.”

“What do you mean?”

“Surely you’ve noticed the Queen’s vanity,” the mirror said. “She’s always asking me to name ‘the fairest of them all’, ‘the fairest in the land’, and the like. It was when I reported to her that the girl had overtaken her own beauty that the Queen sent for you. Do you understand?”

The Huntsman did not. “The girl?” he mused. “With that complexion?”

“Eye of the beholder, you brute!” The mirror distorted the Huntsman’s reflection, its way of showing exasperation. “And you’re missing the important part. If she asks who is the ‘fairest in the land’, you may have a problem.”

“I see,” the Huntsman said. “As long as the girl remains beyond the borders, you can tell the Queen what she wants to hear.”

“Yes. But there’s more. The girl is now dwelling with seven miners — don’t worry, they are honorable, if a tad short — whose home lies very near the border. So near, in fact, that the border actually intersects their potato patch.”

The Huntsman winced. “So if she’s picking potatoes at the exact moment that the Queen asks….”

“He understands!” The mirror flashed its edges, and the Huntsman scowled.

“Well, I will have to take my chances,” he said. Then he leaned forward and studied his reflection. “Do you think my hair needs a trim?”

“Of course,” the mirror replied. “And you could do with a bath. Why?”

“Oh, no reason,” said the Huntsman.

***

He stopped on the crest of the hill and swallowed four times, forcing himself to face forward instead of turning back. Why am I so nervous? thought the Huntsman. I have faced wild bears with nothing more than a hunting knife to turn them aside. This, though, was far more terrifying. This was no angry bear. This was a woman.

And there she was, in her small field, working a plow behind an ox. He could hear her shouting at the animal from here; it kept trying to turn toward the forest, the same way his horse had all day. What on earth was in that forest, anyway?

The Huntsman looked at her, in the distance, and his heart sped up. He rode in closer, as slowly as he could without fully giving in to the impulse to turn away and forget it. Finally he arrived at the field and stopped at the very end of the row she was currently plowing. My God, she’s beautiful, he thought as he watched her guiding that plow, head down. Finally she was close enough, and he spoke.

“Greetings,” he said, and then he cleared his throat and said it again so that she might actually hear it.

The Widow looked up, recognized him at once, and dropped the plow. Then she drew the knife she wore at her waist. “Have you come for my ox’s liver now? You’ll have to fight me to get it! Off with you!”

The Huntsman gave the only reply that came to mind, that is, none at all. He could only stare at her, with her dirty britches and torn shirt and haphazard long hair and blazing eyes and sweating, freckled skin and…and then the clump of earth she’d thrown struck him in the forehead.

“Gahhh!” he cried out. “No, please!” And even as he threw up his hands to shield his head from the other clumps she was already lobbing in his direction, he winced at his complete lack of words.

“Begone!” she shouted. “You’ll find no more hearts or stomachs or spleens or tongues here!”

“Please!” he shouted. “My Lady, please!”

That worked, if only because she was momentarily baffled by actually being addressed as “My Lady”. She lowered her arm to a ready stance, still holding a rock. Good thing she stopped now, the Huntsman realized. With that aim and with that rock, she’d unhorse me. “I didn’t come to hurt any more of your livestock.” He held up one hand in a calming gesture, while with the other he calmed his horse.

“Then what do you want?” she demanded.

Her voice was deep for a woman’s, deep and sultry…he cleared his throat again. “To make amends, My Lady,” he said.

Her eyes narrowed. “Amends? How?”

The Huntsman reached into his pocket and drew out a small drawstring sack. “Gold, My Lady. Enough to buy three piglets when next you go to market. And…here is a gem, as well. A garnet set in a silver pendant, for your neck.”

“And when would I have occasion for such a bauble?” she said. “I don’t remember the last time I was invited to one of the Queen’s masques.”

“Well–” the Huntsman began, but stopped. He couldn’t think of anything to say to that, except to point out that the Queen never hosted any masques, which he decided was not the right thing to say at all.

“Never mind,” said the Widow. “I suppose your meaning is nice enough. And three piglets, for the heart of a sow seems fair. I would have asked for two. But I would also like to know just why you did it.”

The Huntsman sighed. “That is a long story, My Lady,” he said.

She chuckled. “Do I look like the Queen? Stop calling me that!”

Now he laughed. “No, you do not look like the Queen. In fact, the Queen is how I came to…do what I did. You see, I am her Huntsman — or at least I was.”

“You fell out of her favor?” The Widow whistled. “Now, that is a story I should like to hear. But now that I know you are a Huntsman, I can stop thinking of you as ‘Murderer-of-Pigs’.” She sighed. “And if you have lost her favor, then you are without home. You may stay in my barn, if I can trust you not to harvest my milch-cow for leather.”

He winced.

“And if you would be kind enough to fetch water and pick some berries from the bushes down yonder, that would go a long way to helping me be less angry with you. The raspberries, mind you. I don’t like blueberries.”

She doesn’t like blueberries either! “Yes, My…I’m sorry, but how should I call you?”

She told him her name, and it seemed to him that it was the loveliest name in the world. He reciprocated by giving his name, which seemed…less so, in his ears. As he rode away from her, he could hear her singing behind him: “Ho-heigh, ho-heigh, I’m plowing all the day….”

The Huntsman couldn’t help smiling.

***

The Widow leaned back in her wooden chair and folded her hands around her stoneware mug of tea. “So, you use my pig’s heart to fool the Queen into thinking that the Princess is dead?”

The Huntsman nodded. “I looked everywhere for some other beast to use, but they’re all gone.”

“I know,” she replied. “My cow keeps trying to go to the woods. I’ve had to tie her. Very strange. Why does the Queen so hate the Princess?”

The Huntsman shrugged. “Queens always hate their Princesses. It’s that way in all the stories.”

“And when the Queen discovers this, she will be angry.”

The Huntsman nodded. That, actually, was putting it quite mildly.

“And won’t she be missing you? You are her Huntsman.”

“I come and go from her castle as I please, bringing her bounty as I find it.”

“That’s a good arrangement.”

“It was.”

She stretched and yawned. “Well, I’d best be getting to sleep. Tomorrow’s an early start, if I’m to get three good pigs at market. If I’m too late, all that will remain will be the runts.”

The Huntsman bid the Widow good night, and then he headed off to the barn to bed down with the cow, which eyed him suspiciously as he smoothed out a sleeping-spot on a straw pallet. He thought of this beautiful, strong woman, living alone on her farm…and now in some danger, if the Queen were to find out what he’d done.

As he dropped off to sleep, he imagined he could hear the voice of a girl, singing, somewhere off in the distance…a song about her prince coming, someday….

***

Along the way to market the next day, the Widow told him of losing her husband two seasons before, and of her life alone on the tiny farmstead; and he told her of his life as a Huntsman: of tracking a deer in the forest, of finding its trail, of different kinds of tracks and how to tell which were fresh, and of wintering alone in a cabin deep in the heart of the wood. He enjoyed telling her of his life, and was surprised to find that he had so much to tell, but what he enjoyed more was listening to her telling him.

At the market, she traded with various vendors for provisions with a shrewd eye and a keen sense for barter. She also managed to get the three finest piglets from a litter, for a bit less than the price the man had insisted was his lowest offer. And while she was doing this, the Huntsman slipped away and perused the jewels and gold for sale. One pair of miners — two dwarves, one who kept grinning like a fool and another who apparently was a fool — had a particularly nice selection of rubies and emeralds. He would have to come back sometime with some fresh kill to barter a gem away from these two, something that would be lovely around the Widow’s neck. He blushed with the thought.

They stayed for the Singing Contest that night, which was won by the Prince, who was a surprise entry and was still the biggest singing fool the Huntsman had ever seen. After that they rode home.

“The Prince has the finest voice I have ever heard,” the Widow said. “His voice is the fairest in the land.”

The Huntsman only nodded. The Fairest in the land, the Fairest one of all….

***

A month went by, and then two, with the Huntsman living in the Widow’s barn and helping her run her farm. He occasionally desired to go to the woods and get a bear or elk, but mostly he was fascinated with the effort of coaxing a crop from the earth. Actually, he didn’t like the work itself. But he was fascinated with her.

After one day of particularly hard work, he went down to the stream just inside the woods to wash before dinner. There was a deep, clear pool shielded by some rocks that was perfect for bathing, and with anticipation he leaned over the water, looked down, and saw reflected back a face that was not his own.

“There you are!” said the mirror. “I’ve been looking all over for you!”

“GAH!” the Huntsman eloquently replied, leaping back. Then, catching himself, he leaned forward again. “Don’t do that! And what are you doing here? Since when can you appear in anything other than glass?”

“I can appear anywhere a reflection is available,” the mirror replied. “But in a surface like this, I can’t do it for long. Whatever you do, don’t drop a rock in the water!”

“So why are you here now?”

“Do you remember what I told you about the miners and their potato patch?”

The color drained from the Huntsman’s face.

“I see you do,” said the mirror. “The Queen asked, and the girl was picking potatoes. I cannot lie to the Queen.”

“You can tell the truth in a way that misleads her,” the Huntsman said. “Something she would take the wrong way–“

The mirror looked aghast. “You mean, deceive her intentionally?”

“That’s what I’ve been doing all along, you miserable excuse for a looking glass!”

“No reason to get insulting,” the mirror said. “I came to warn you, didn’t I? She asked about the heart–“

But the Huntsman was already gone, running for the farmhouse.

On the way he passed an old crone, who was hobbling along the road carrying a basket of apples. “Good day to you, Huntsman!” the crone called out. He ignored her. He had to get home and he had to get the Widow out of there, to his old hunting lodge. She’d be safe there. The Queen didn’t know where it was — or at least, so he prayed.

“Dear!” he shouted as he burst in the front door. “Dear!“

She came up from the root cellar. “What is it?” she asked.

“We have to leave. The Queen knows.”

She instantly knew what he was talking about, and sighed. “Let me get a few things,” she said.

“Hurry. She will be looking for me.”

“I know,” she replied. “I will be with you. But we’ll have food — look at these beautiful apples! A peddler-woman was here just a while ago, selling these. They’re the biggest, reddest apples I’ve ever seen. I bought one for each of us–“

The peddler-woman with the apples…the crone who had called out to him, “Good day to you, Huntsman?”

He’d been wearing no bow or hunting cloak, and his clothes were dirty from working in the field. How could she have known he was a Huntsman–

The Widow lifted an apple to her mouth.

“NNNOOOOOO!” The Huntsman sprang forward, reaching for her wrist, but she had already bitten the fruit.

***

The Huntsman was placing the last stones upon her barrow when the Herald came riding up.

“By Royal Decree of His Highness the Prince, I am bid tell you, the Queen is dead. From this day on, the Prince rules the land.” Judging by his tone, this was at least the fiftieth time today he’d recited his spiel, and he turned to go before he even finished speaking. Doubtless he had a lot of other farmsteads to get to.

The Huntsman learned the details two days later when he went to town. Somehow the Queen had been engaging in some trickery with her appearance, but had been pursued up a mountain where she’d first fallen off, then been buried under fallen rocks, and then picked apart by buzzards. A fitting demise, at least, but the Huntsman took little pleasure in it.

And the Princess had turned up, living in the woods with seven miners, just as the Huntsman had known all along. But she was now dead as well, and had been placed in a coffin of glass, deep in the woods.

I let her go, and she is still as dead as if I had cut her heart out myself. The Huntsman tried drinking himself into a stupor at a tavern, but the taste of the ale no longer appealed to him, and he finally decided to go home. To the empty farmstead, whose mistress he had brought to ruin through his own attempts at deceit.

He remained there the rest of the season, bringing in the harvest as best he could even though he hated the work and knew little of its proper execution. Lifelessly, monotonously, he did her work, in the shadow of her barrow. Then, in autumn, he traded for provisions — selling the three pigs and the milch-cow and the ox as well — and moved to his hunting lodge in the forest for the winter. At least he had never brought her there; the memories would not be so strong.

But they were, all winter long.

***

The winter was long and cold, but the Huntsman survived it all right, as much out of habit as by design. His lodge was well-stocked, and to give up simply was not in his nature. But he found no pleasure in it at all, for the wound in his heart refused to heal in the smallest measure.

But winter finally gave way to spring, as it always did, and when the roads and passes were at last open the Huntsman rode to market with some of his fresh kill, hoping to trade for more provisions. He also had to decide whether he wanted to return to the farmstead, or remain a Huntsman. The choice weighed heavily on him, and for each moment when he was certain of what he wanted to do, there was another when he was equally certain that he wanted to do the other thing.

It all changed when he asked a simple question of the first trader he met: “What news?”

The Prince, it seemed, was to marry. And the girl was to be his bride. The one the Queen had killed. The Princess.

“What an amazing story!” said some old gaffer. “The Prince undid the Queen’s witchery by kissing the girl!”

“Kissing?” someone asked.

“That’s how he did it, mark my words. The Prince finally heard about the beautiful dead girl in her coffin of glass — those miners knew what they were doing, surely enough — and at length he came to her side and kissed her. And she returned to life then, and now she will marry him!”

“He kissed her?” the Huntsman said. Absurd. This wasn’t one of the old stories.

“Yes.”

“The Prince.”

“Yes!”

“And she came back to life.”

“Just so.”

“So,” put in the trader, “what happened to those miners? Seems to me they should get a reward.”

“Oh, indeed,” said the gaffer. “They were given joint ownership of the mine, and….”

The Huntsman ignored everything said after that. His mind was too busy evolving a plan to listen to further gossip. He took the coins in his pocket from the trading he’d already done and, instead of buying new provisions, went to the silversmith to buy a mirror. This he took into a secluded alley.

“Mirror, mirror in my hand,” he said, “your presence here is my demand!”

Almost immediately, his own face in the mirror was replaced by that other, stranger one which looked vaguely disheveled.

“I come as com–” The mirror peered at the Huntsman. “You! How do you know those words of summoning?”

“I’m not just some brute who shows up every few weeks with a dead deer on my shoulders,” the Huntsman replied. “I see things.”

“Quite,” said the mirror. “Well, I must say, things are much better since the Queen took that spill of the cliff. No more required rhyming! I’ve been able to study other forms of poesy. Did you know there is a thing called ‘blank verse’? Apparently a playwright in England is doing a lot of fine things with it, and–“

“Mirror!” the Huntsman cut in. “I summoned you for a reason.”

The mirror sighed. “Yes, I figured so. What do you desire?”

“I need to know if the Prince ever leaves the Castle.”

“Well, of course the Prince leaves the Castle! What kind of question is that? Why, later this month…just what do you have in mind?”

“Never mind that,” the Huntsman snapped. “What about later this month?”

***

He should have known. It was a singing contest.

The Prince was not to compete, but he still planned on attending, presiding, judging, even performing — in general he was to add an air of royalty to the proceedings. It was to be the grandest of singing contests, with the rivalry of two of the greatest singers in the land to be at last decided and one of them to assume the position of head of the Singing Guild, or some such nonsense. The Huntsman cared about none of that. He only wanted the Prince.

The contest took place in the greatest City in the Kingdom, a day’s ride from the Castle. (The Huntsman had often wondered why the City and the Castle should not be in the same place, but even the mirror could offer nothing on this point.) The Huntsman arrived at the City a week before the contest, after making the necessary preparations at the farmstead, and managed to bribe his way onto the City Guard. He would be able to get fairly close to the Prince, then, without looking out of place. All he had to do was wait. Of course, the City was so alive with song that the Huntsman soon wanted to drive his knife through his own ears, but there was nothing to do about that.

On the third full day of the festival, the Prince arrived in the City and came to the Keep, where a full ceremony was held. The Huntsman took his place in the phalanx of guards who would escort him inside — and he nearly choked when he saw that the Prince had brought the Princess with him.

I almost killed her! She’ll recognize me! He looked around for a way out, but there was none. He had no choice but to stand there and do his duty, while the Prince and Princess greeted the courtiers. Here she came, garbed in much nicer finery than the last time he’d seen her, but otherwise looking much the same: innocent and ridiculously pale. “Fairest in the land?” he muttered as she came near…and then passed by. She hadn’t recognized him after all. He realized that he looked quite different now than he had back then. He’d shaved and trimmed his hair.

Then the Prince came by, and the Huntsman easily slipped the folded sheet of parchment into the Prince’s pocket. It was an invitation to the Secret Festival of Song, where only the greatest musicians could gather in a sort of “elite of the elite”. The Huntsman knew that the Prince wouldn’t be able to turn such a thing down. He also knew that it was false, because he’d made it up. But the Prince would believe it, and that was what mattered.

***

“Where is he now?” the Huntsman asked the mirror. They were in the garden, near the oak-and-iron door in the wall that led outside the grounds.

“How would I know?” the mirror said. “I’m not all-knowing.”

“You’re not all-helpful, either.”

“I could return to the castle, if I’m not wanted,” the mirror sulked.

“I’m sorry,” the Huntsman said. Apologizing to a mirror, kidnapping a Prince….

A pebble landed nearby, giving the Huntsman a start. But then there was another, and one more. Of course: his letter had instructed the Prince to signal his coming by throwing three pebbles, and then…

“Diddly-heigh, diddly-ho! I am not a drunkard, no, no, no!”

…singing that.

“You are a cruel man,” said the mirror.

“Shhhh.”

The Prince came around the corner. He was dressed, as instructed, for riding. The Huntsman shook his head. I hope he surrounds himself with good advisers.

“You’re one of the guards!” said the Prince.

“More than that, actually,” the Huntsman said.

“I must confess,” said the Prince, “that I am a bit confused by this ‘secret Guild’. How can I not have heard of it, when I have done more for song in this realm than anyone?”

“Yes, well, that’s complicated,” said the Huntsman. “I will explain it on the way there.”

The Prince folded his arms. “You will explain it now, Huntsman.”

The Huntsman winced. Maybe he had underestimated this man, all these years…

“Yes, I recognized you,” said the Prince. “My wife did not, but I did. She told me about what you did for her, so I owe you some gratitude; but now, I would know why you are trying to trick me into coming with you to the meeting of a secret Guild that does not exist.”

“Ummmm….” The Huntsman’s mind raced. He had not considered this possibility, not for one moment. “You did come alone, didn’t you?”

“Of course not!” snapped the Prince. “If people take me for a singing fool, it is because I wish them too. My personal guards are watching even now, and I have told them who you are. Now, I ask one last time before I call them forward and have them throw you in the dungeon: why am I here?”

The Huntsman swallowed. “Well, Your Highness, it’s like this.” He stepped forward, and lowered his voice. “I don’t want everyone to hear this, but I have a problem that only you can help me with. You see–” and here his fist flashed out, striking the Prince on the chin and sending him into unconsciousness. I may have misjudged your wits, Prince, but not your jaw.

“Are you mad?” the mirror yelled from inside the Huntsman’s pocket.

“Shut up,” the Huntsman growled as he dragged the Prince to the door. He opened it — as a City Guardsman, he’d been given the key — and then closed it behind him, after he’d dragged the Prince into the alleyway beyond. Already he could hear shouts from inside, but he had time to drop the bar (strange that the door could be barred from the outside, but the Huntsman didn’t question such things), and, for good measure, shove a stick into the keyhole to jam the lock.

“Well, now what?” the mirror asked. The door was rattling behind them.

“I’m thinking,” the Huntsman said.

“You might have given that a try before now,” the mirror said. “Thinking tends to produce better results the sooner one does it.”

“Glass breaks, you know,” the Huntsman growled. All the ruckus behind him — they’d break that door down soon — and the revelry of the singing festival in the town square, which was just down the alley….

Then he had it. The Huntsman tore off the Prince’s jacket and every badge of office he could find on the Prince’s person. Then he grabbed some dirt from the ground and rubbed it over the Prince’s clothes, and he was lucky enough to have a rain puddle nearby, so he splashed some of that on the Prince, too: the dirtier, the better. He mussed up the Prince’s royal hair and tossed his fine cap aside.

“Someone will recognize him!” the mirror yelped.

“Will you shut up!“

The guards inside were banging against the door with something big and metallic, and the hinges were straining. The Huntsman inverted his City Guard cloak, and then he heaved the unconscious Prince up and slung the man over his shoulders, as he had many a dead deer. Then he tossed the inverted cloak over the Prince and made his way toward all that revelry.

For once, luck was with him. He was taken for just another reveler carrying home a friend who had taken too much wine, ale and song. By the time the guards had the door down and were searching the square, the Huntsman had made it to the livery where he’d stabled his horse. And by the time the City Guard shut the city gates, the Huntsman was already through them and riding for the farmstead.

***

“I’ll have your head!” the Prince yelled when he awoke. Nevertheless he took the cold cloth the Huntsman offered and pressed it to his swollen jaw. “How dare you kidnap me! You’ll not blackmail me into attacking Guilder–“

“I’m not holding you,” the Huntsman said. “You’ll be free to go quite soon, actually. I’m sorry I had to hurt you. I didn’t think you’d come if I asked.”

The Prince blinked. “I’m free to go? What is this?”

“You’re almost free,” the Huntsman said. “I’ll even give you a horse to get back on. There is one thing I’d like you to do, though, before you go, however.”

“Of course,” the Prince said. “You’re an agent of Guilder, then, and you want me to sign that treaty. As I’ve told your King–“

“I am not interested in Guilder!” the Huntsman cut in. “I’m not interested in any of that. Only one small thing interests me, and it will only take you a moment. Come.”

He rose, and escorted the Prince outside. They went past the barn, past the fields, to the edge of the woods where the Huntsman had smoothed out a small clearing for a special purpose. The Prince gasped when he saw what that purpose was.

“I bought it from those miners,” the Huntsman said, almost whispering.

There, in the clearing, stood the glass coffin, and inside it lay the Widow. She might have only been sleeping — except she was not.

The Prince swallowed. “You…you mean for me to….”

“I heard your tale,” the Huntsman said. “All I ask, before you take your leave of me, is for you to work once more whatever magic resides in those princely lips of yours.”

“The Queen was here, too? Then this was her punishment for you, to take that which you loved.” The Prince sighed. “Vile woman! I will try.”

And try he did. But it did not work. The Widow did not stir, even when kissed by the handsome Prince.

“I am sorry,” the Prince said.

“Go,” the Huntsman said, his voice as dead as she. “The way back to town is clear, and the horse is in the barn. I will be here, when your men come to arrest me.”

“Arrest you?”

“I struck the Prince a blow.”

“Ah,” said the Prince. “Quite so.” He stood there a minute more, but finding nothing else to say, he left. At least he didn’t sing as he went.

***

For a week the Huntsman tended the farm. He trimmed the flowers by the coffin, and he repaired the fences as best he could. He couldn’t think of anything else to do while he waited for the soldiers to come for him, which they finally did on the seventh day.

There were four of them, all wearing the nicest finery: uniforms of white with blue and gold trim, Florian leather boots, and feathered caps. The Huntsman thought it strange that the Prince would send so nice-looking a troop to take him into custody, but there it was. He rose to surrender.

“Hail, Huntsman!” the man in front said. “I am ordered thusly by His Highness the Prince of this Kingdom!” Here he produced a parchment and unfolded it. The Huntsman sighed. Formal charges, of course. “Deliver unto the Huntsman the message below, and then escort them back to the castle for reception. The message is this: ‘You heard the tale incompletely. The magic is in love‘s first kiss.'” The man wrinkled his nose. “Now what can that mean? Ah well, no matter. Prepare to leave, please. You may bring whatever you need–“

But the Huntsman had already risen and was running to the clearing where she lay. For the Prince had not brought the Princess back by virtue of being the Prince. He had done so by virtue of being her love.

The Huntsman wasn’t aware of anything. He wasn’t aware of running through the fields. He wasn’t aware of when he stumbled and fell, nor was he aware of when he picked himself up. All of it was a blur. The only thing he was aware of, as he came to the side of the glass coffin, was the pounding of his own heart. He lifted the lid as soon as he could reach it, bent over her, and whispered “My love” before pressing his lips to hers.

And after the longest moment he could ever remember — she drew breath. Finally her eyes opened, and he took her into his arms.

“Where am I?” she asked, and her voice was suddenly the most beautiful thing he had ever heard. But all the Huntsman could say was, “Oh my love.” He just held her there, trembling, until those soldiers arrived and their stuffed-shirt leader cleared his throat.

“Excuse me, sir…my orders, you know….”

And the Huntsman broke into laughter. “Escort them back”, the man had said when he’d read his orders aloud. Escort them back. The Prince had known.

No singing fool, he.

***

“This collar is ridiculous,” the Huntsman said as he tugged at the dress collar of the uniform he’d been given.

“Well, get used to it,” the mirror said from its familiar perch on the wall in the throne room’s antechamber. “Your old clothes have been burned, and good riddance to them.”

The Huntsman sighed. He was waiting for his Wife — now a Widow no more — to arrive, when they would then be escorted to audience before the Prince and the Princess. They were to be officially made a Lord and Lady and granted the requisite lands. Of course, the tale of the Huntsman who had defied the Queen and spared the Princess was already sweeping the land in the form of a song. And not a bad one either, the Huntsman had to concede.

At last she came, with two attendants with her. He caught his breath to behold her, so wondrous was her gown and so beautiful was she in it; but no matter what gown she wore or what gems from the mines it was decorated with, she would never appear more beautiful to him than she had on that first day, when her hands and face had been dirty and his had been drenched in the blood of a pig.

“Are you nervous, my love?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Not as long as you stand beside me.”

“I’ll always be beside you,” he replied.

She smiled. “A husband for a pig,” she mused. “What a strange price to pay!”

They kissed, and then the doors were opened, revealing the throne room beyond, with the throngs of nobles filling it and the Prince and Princess on the far dais. Their names were called by the Herald, and they stepped forward. But then the Huntsman stopped. “Just a moment,” he said as he ducked back into the anteroom, leaving his bride on the threshold.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” he said, “who is the fairest one of all?”

“This I can say is true,” the mirror replied. “The fairest stands before you.”

The Huntsman glanced through the door. Through the portal he could see both his love and, in the distance, the Princess. He laughed.

“I’ve been practicing your advice,” the mirror said.

“So you have,” the Huntsman said. “So you have.”

And he went forward to take his love’s hand in his, walking toward the “ever after” that is, in the end, not reserved exclusively for Princes and Princesses.

—finis—
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I’ve actually been meaning to post this for a while, and I’m doing so now because of a post of Lynn‘s, in which she asks for stories about “alien violins”. This doesn’t precisely fit the bill, since it’s the violin that’s alien, but here it is, anyhow. I wrote this last winter.

In writing this story, I was indebted to the book Stradivari’s Genius, by Toby Faber, for factual information about the construction of violins. They’re significantly more complex instruments than many realize, and I myself suspect that genius is best able to flower when applied to complex ideas rather than simple.

Jonah Wilhelm dug his fingernails into his palms as the craft entered the steepest phase of its descent. He had never traveled by spaceplane before, and he likely never would again; he hated flying on standard jets, and the spaceplane from Dallas to Inner Beijing was like that, only worse: higher, faster, steeper, louder, and generally far more terrifying. He’d relied on a full injection of Cannabia to get him through the two hours of the flight, and he was glad that the ship had finally landed. His benefactor, Mr. Lang of Lang World Industries, had insisted on footing the bill to bring him here via spaceplane on such short notice, but Jonah had insisted on a cruise ship for the trip home, when time would not be of the essence.

The ship landed on schedule and spent the requisite forty-five minute engine-cooling period on the tarmac at Inner Beijing Starport (why the Chinese insisted on calling them “starports” was not entirely clear, since they were still a year shy of when they’d theoretically receive the first transmission from the sleeper ship to Alpha Centauri). Then, finally, the doors were opened and the passengers – all of them the very richest of the rich, the only ones other than heads of state who could afford to travel by spaceplane – disembarked. Jonah arrived at the bottom of the stairs onto the tarmac to find a Chinese worker in a Halliburton Spaceways uniform already there, with Jonah’s worn luggage in his hand. Jonah followed this fellow out to the area five-hundred feet away where the cars awaiting the passengers were all parked. One bore the famous symbol of Lang Industries, and the gray-haired driver stood almost at military attention as Jonah approached.

“Welcome to China, Mr. Wilhelm,” the driver said in impeccable English as he took Jonah’s bags from the Halliburton porter. “It is an honor to have an artist such as you with us, even for such a short time. Mr. Lang is looking forward to meeting you.”

“How long will it be before I’m taken to him?” Jonah asked as he moved to climb into the car via the door that the driver opened for him.

“How long?” The driver looked puzzled at the fact that the question had even been asked. “When Mr. Lang is looking forward to something, he expects it immediately.” Without another word he put the bags in the trunk, moved to his own door, and took his position behind the wheel. The car’s engine hummed to life, and the driver sped away from the landing field, leaving the spaceplane behind.

The drive took about twenty minutes. The car surged past common traffic and onto the roadway of privilege, which was devoted exclusively to people like Mr. Lang. Jonah looked out the window as they powered past the other roads, which were almost choked with regular internal combustion cars, heading for the skyscrapers of Inner Beijing, with the now empty skyline of Old Beijing still visible beyond, where the rising seas had claimed part of Earth’s most populous city. The departed shells of the old world, Jonah thought. No one had told Jonah why Mr. Lang had suddenly demanded his presence in Inner Beijing, but Jonah knew that there was only one thing it could be, given what he did for a living and what he knew Mr. Lang to be the owner of.

Shortly they arrived at the Lang Industries Building, a black and red needle of a tower rising almost tenderly into the sky. The driver guided the car into Mr. Lang’s private garage, where he kept his prized collection of vintage automobiles that he never drove. Then they got out and walked to the elevator, which surged upward with stunning swiftness that seemed to begin before the doors had slid shut behind them. The walls of the elevator were decorated with conceptual paintings of Mr. Lang’s most famous investment: New Beijing, which would be built on the plains of terraformed Mars. The images were striking in their vision and ambition, but Jonah couldn’t look at them. The ascent was so quick that he felt like throwing up. Mr. Lang clearly enjoyed speed, or hated slowness. Or both.

Jonah didn’t know if the ride ended at the top floor or not, but it ended nonetheless in a room that was decorated sparsely and tastefully with beautiful carpets and paintings and sculptures. Glass windows – real glass – overlooked the rest of Inner Beijing. And there, in front of it all, was Mr. Lang himself. He looked just like in the news vids: tall, graying, and utterly clean in his appearance.

“I have been waiting for you, Mr. Wilhelm,” he said. “Did you find the
spaceplane enjoyable?”

Jonah glanced at the driver, whose face was a mask, and then he shrugged. “Not particularly,” he answered. “I don’t like flying.”

Mr. Lang smiled. “Forgive me. It is so rare to meet someone so afflicted these days, when flight has become so intrinsic to human activity that is is almost as if we were meant for the sky after all.”

Jonah smiled a bit in return. “If God had meant for us to fly….”

“Ah, but he did mean for us to fly,” Mr. Lang said. “He gave us the ability to give wings to ourselves. Come; we have business to discuss.” He dismissed the driver with a single gesture, and then took Jonah by the arm and began walking him through the lavish suite.

“You were surprised, I suppose, that I summoned you here?” Mr. Lang asked.

“Yes,” Jonah admitted. “But also no. I’d hoped to come here one day. I even have a letter to you, sealed in an envelope in my desk drawer at home.”

“And why have you not sent that letter?”

Jonah shrugged. “I never have stamps these days.”

Mr. Lang chuckled. “A paper letter. That would likely have caught my eye. I know, you probably think that there is no possible way a letter from a man such as you could reach a man such as me. I am rich beyond the confines of this world…and yet you yourself are rich too, in many ways.” He sighed. “Men such as you, who devote their lives to the practice of ancient crafts that are no longer much appreciated in this day and age when all we do is as ephemeral as a cloud of dandelion spores blown into a stiff wind, are very rich indeed. Ah, here is a case in point.”

They had arrived at a glass case which held a samurai sword. It was, so far as Jonah could tell, a nearly perfect specimen of its kind.

“Do you know how old this blade is?”

Jonah shook his head; he knew nothing about swords. “Three hundred years?”

Mr. Lang shook his head.

“Four hundred?”

“Hardly! It is actually less than forty years old. It was my first commission of an art object. I sought out the master swordmaker Sensei Yoshi of Kobe, and paid him to create the finest blade that he could craft. Money, I told him, was of no concern: I would pay whatever he needed to come as close to pure perfection in his craft as he could, and this is the result. Master Yoshi spent nearly seventy of his ninety years in this world developing his skills with sword and steel. He studied the writings of the masters from centuries before, he studied every elder blade he could find. He mastered the techniques of folding the molten metal back on itself dozens of times, strengthening the metal with each fold, and he mastered the technique of inserting into the metal a length of softer metal that would absorb the shock of impact in a duel. Master Yoshi was the finest of all Japanese swordsmiths until he died, nearly thirty years ago. Until the day he died, he had standing permission to fly to my home, whenever he wanted and at my expense, to look anew upon his greatest work.”

Jonah had been slowly walking around the glass case, admiring the sword, as Mr. Lang had spoken. “How many times did he take you up on that offer?”

“Not once,” Mr. Lang said. He ran a finger across the glass. “This blade has not been touched by a human hand since the day I locked it inside this case,” he said. “I think you now begin to understand why I have brought you here.”

Jonah nodded. “I do.”

Mr. Lang smiled. “Then come. It is in the next room.”

Jonah followed Mr. Lang past several more display cases containing fabulous works of art into another, smaller room that had no windows. This walls of this room were paneled with rich wood and a paneled wooden floor as well. One wall was dedicated to bookshelves that bore several hundred old volumes, more than a few of which Jonah recognized on sight. Another set of shelves held stacks of papers, some bound and some not. Along the far wall was a low table of ebony, where the thing that Jonah had come all the way from Dallas to see rested on a formed bed of velvet.

“Go ahead,” Mr. Lang said. “You have come a long way.”

Jonah’s breath became very, very slow as he approached the table. He’d longed for this moment for most of his adult life, and now that it was upon him he did not know what to feel. What lay on the table before him was the last object of its kind in the world.

It was a violin, the last known existing Stradivarius violin.

Jonah leaned forward, down over the table, and inhaled deeply as if to draw in the aroma of the bygone world when and where it had been made. Drawing in a deep breath of air, Jonah thought that he could almost smell the aroma of Cremona, Italy, around 1680. It would have been the aroma that he had breathed in. The air that had filled the lungs of Nicolo Stradivari as he had crafted, one after the next, the greatest stringed instruments the world had ever known, a legacy now distilled to this single last exemplar.

The violin here was, as all the Strads in the world had been, the most beautiful examples of instrument-making possible. The proportions of the soundbox, the precision in the ratios of the scroll, the flawless insertions of the purfling, the perfect color of the wood itself – all were the hallmarks of the Stradivarius instruments. Here it was, within Jonah’s reach: the last of the Strads.

“Go ahead,” Mr. Lang said. “You came all this way. There is a bow in the drawer.”

Jonah’s breath trembled. He opened the drawer and took out the bow that rested within. It was a good bow, of course, but the secret of the Strad had nothing to do with the bow; it was in the almost superhuman skill Antonio Stradivari had had in his fingers, skill with woodworking and inlaying and carving and mathematics and in capturing perfect sound in a medium of wood. Knowledge of aesthetics, of acoustics, of tone and sound and technique and probably even chemistry, for all anyone knew so many centuries after the work of the great luthiers of Cremona, centuries during which the secret of the varnish used on the violins had never been solved to anyone’s satisfaction.

Jonah held the bow in the fingers of his right hand, and, knowing that he was not worthy to do so even as he was doing it, with his left he took up the Strad violin called Messiah. He hefted it in that hand once, savoring its weight – within ounces of every violin he’d ever held, and yet somehow possessed of many times the heft, the heft of history – and then lifted it to his neck.

The varnish, even after four hundred years, still felt warm and supple beneath his fingers. The violin’s weight was pleasing, and the instrument’s balance was uncannily perfect. “Balance”, he thought, recalling the Katana blade Mr. Lang had shown him earlier. Balance, that ethereal quality that marked the greatest art objects in the world, no matter what the medium. Stradivari’s gift of balance was equal to that of the greatest swordmaker.

The wood was also warm to his skin, when he placed it beneath his chin. Jonah knew that Mr. Lang was not a player, so unless the industrialist had tried his hand with this violin in a private moment – something which Jonah found unthinkable, now having met the man – this would be the first time this instrument had been sounded in nearly sixty years. As the number of existing Strads in the world had dwindled, the days of their ownership by the musicians for whom they were meant had also ended, and the last instruments had passed into the hands of private owners until one by one even those instruments succumbed to the weight of time that not even the hand of Stradivari of Cremona could stay. He had done his work so well, made instruments so great, that they had become so highly valued that no actual musician could afford to own them. Thus it had come to pass that the sounds of the Strads had faded completely from the world’s concert stages, with the strains of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Berg being heard from those instruments no more. From there it had been nothing more than time, and decay, and in some horrible cases fire and willful destruction, that had made a memory of all the world’s Strads. All, now, but one.

Jonah felt his breath leave his body with the first vibrations of the unfingered G string. He’d tried to imagine this moment so many times, and still it stunned him, the astonishing depth and focus of the tone that came from those strings. This room was small, but even if it had been one of the largest concert halls in the world – the venerable Musikverein in Vienna, perhaps, or maybe the now half-submerged Carnegie Hall – Jonah knew that this single G would have shot through the great space of the hall to be heard by a listener in the most distant seats along the back wall. Such had been Stradivari’s mastery, his ability to craft from the same wood as anyone else an instrument that could focus sound to a level that could only be described as laser-like. Jonah collected his emotions and dutifully tuned the other strings in their turn.

Those thoughts, though, had little bearing on the matter at hand. Jonah drew another breath, and then lifted the bow to begin playing the work he always played on instruments he didn’t know, Bach’s Partita No. 3 in E for solo violin.

Jonah closed his eyes as he played, and was thus unaware that Mr. Lang had begun casually circling the room, nodding his head in rhythm with the music. The piece was perhaps an obvious choice, but Jonah had never been able to think of one better. It was, he had found, the intersection of perfection that made such a piece in such a situation so preferable; it was as if the minds of Stradivari and of Bach were being brought together through the intermediary of, Jonah well knew, an inferior mind. Nevertheless, here they were: a gentleman of Cremona making the renewed acquaintance of the master from Leipzig, with the introductions coming from a man from Dallas and being made possible by the wealthy benefactor of Inner Beijing.

Jonah wended his way through the pages of the Partita, seeing the musical lines in his mind’s eye as he played them, to the point that he even envisioned the place in the piece where, in the copy of the work that he’d learned in his student days, the page had to be turned. He played and played, and after the piece’s four minutes were over, he lowered the bow and waited for a few seconds of silence, as if allowing the echo to die away even though, in this small room, there was no echo at all.

“Wonderful,” Mr. Lang finally said. “You might have been underselling your skill as a performer, all these years.”

“I doubt that.” Jonah lifted the bow again and played the first few bars of the Mendelssohn concerto. “There isn’t much of a market for violin soloists these days. Or orchestral musicians, for that matter.”

“There is enough of one for you to have found work,” Mr. Lang countered. “Enough work, in fact, to live reasonably comfortably.”

“I have filled a niche,” Jonah admitted. “But it’s a niche that could have been filled by anyone.”

“Not so,” Mr. Lang said. He walked over to a bookshelf and pulled down an old, weathered volume. Opening it, he showed one of its pages to Jonah. It was a page of orchestral score, from a symphony, in fact; Jonah recognized it almost immediately as the scherzo from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. “Original paintings by Van Gogh sell for hundreds of millions of dollars now. So do original manuscripts of, say, William Faulkner. A Shakespeare First Folio? There are more nations on this planet that couldn’t make such a purchase with their entire annual gross domestic poduct than ones that could. And things like this violin, or the few Stradivarius cellos that still exist: all things that carry prices that render mere discussion of their merits an almost absurd prospect. But what about music? Why shouldn’t a manuscript in Bach’s hand of, say, the Brandenburg Concertos command as much a price as a Shakespeare First Folio? What is it about music that makes this so?”

“A music score is not meant for the eye,” Jonah replied. He’d often wondered the same thing. “The value of a music score, its greatness, is not inherent in its pages but in the sounds that result when the score is performed by musicians under the constraints of what the composer wished to hear.”

“But the same can be said of the violin in your hand,” Mr. Lang said. “The
violin is a tool, is it not? Is it truly an object in itself? Would not the violin be meaningless without the hand of a Heifetz, and the pages written by a Brahms to guide him?”

Jonah involuntarily glanced down a the violin in his hand. Mr. Lang was wrong, obviously. The violin WAS a thing of beauty, a thing for the eye as well as for the ear. The proportions were so precise, the instrument’s curves so feminine. Surely not everything Stradivari had done had been geared toward fashioning an instrument to be heard and not seen. That would, Jonah thought, be almost cruel.

Mr. Lang seemed to have been reading Jonah’s thoughts when he spoke again. “I suppose it seems selfish of me, doesn’t it? Keeping an instrument such as this locked away where it cannot be heard. But we reach a point, do we not, where such things become so valuable in themselves that it becomes impossible to continue to allow them to circulate in the world? That partita you just played: over this violin’s lifespan, how many times do you think its strings have sounded that exact work? Can the violin itself be said to have a memory of the music performed upon it?”

Jonah nodded. “That is not a new thought,” he said. “Berlioz once wrote something like that, in his Evenings With the Orchestra. He imagined a piano at a competition, being played over and over again by the competitors, each of whom was required to play the same concerto. Toward the competition’s end, the piano had been made to perform that concerto so much that it began to play the concerto itself, and when the piano was chopped into a thousand pieces with an ax, even the individual keys scattered across the ground still went on, playing that same concerto.”

“No new thoughts under the sun, I suppose,” Mr. Lang said. “Come, Mr. Wilhelm. I would share a drink with you, and tell you why I have consented to your coming here.”

“I was wondering that myself,” Jonah said as he placed the Messiah violin back down on its stand and returned the bow to its drawer. Mr. Lang then led him out of this room, and down a short corridor to a living area confined by a number of bookshelves arranged around a corner area of the larger room. The floor-to-ceiling windows here overlooked the spectacular skyline of Inner Beijing, which lept up to full height right at the side of the sea and extended inland almost to the very horizon. Jonah descended onto a soft leather bench while Mr. Lang poured him a glass of wine; then Mr. Lang joined him at the opposite end of the same bench.

“You have never been to Inner Beijing, I assume?”

“Never.”

“I can usually tell. The scale of this city always humbles those who see it the first time.”

Jonah drew in a deep breath. Some part of his brain was still echoing the strains of that Bach partita.

“Many violinists have contacted me through the years, imploring me to give them the privilege I have just afforded you. I have granted none of these requests…and yet, here you are, without having made any request of me at all. Do you know why this is so?”

Jonah sipped his wine again. The answer was obvious. “Because I do not play violins by trade,” he said. “I make them.”

Mr. Lang nodded. “You do more than make them, Mr. Wilhelm. Your instruments are the best now in the world today. All violinists know this. It is said that to play a Wilhelm is as close as one can come these days to playing a Strad. Although we both know that isn’t quite the case, don’t we?” He smiled and raised his glass a little, and Jonah nodded.

Everyone he had ever known in his youth had thought it foolish of him to pursue such a trade. No one still wanted handmade instruments in this day and age, not new ones, anyway. There was no market at all for new instruments, not when there were enough old ones to satisfy the needs of violinists worldwide. The making of violins had been revolutionized, as had the making of just about all things, but the onward march of technology, so much so that there were now fewer than fifty people in the world who made instruments by hand. Of these, Jonah Wilhelm was universally recognized as the finest. His instruments were the only ones of modern make that were used with any frequency at all by the very greatest of the world’s violin soloists, and ten of the violinists in the Berlin Philharmonic were now performing on Wilhelm instruments. But still, his violins were but pale reflections of the ones made four hundred years before by the master of Cremona.

Jonah Wilhelm had grown up wanting to be a professional violinist, of course. Living with his father as a boy after his mother had died very early on of cancer, Jonah had discovered music at a very early age, and his father, a repairman and in his spare time an amazing woodworker, had done everything he possibly could to encourage his son. So Jonah had practiced for hours a day, and thrown himself into his studies, and worked and worked and worked until he’d been accepted to the Curtis Institute, the nearly legendary music school in Philadelphia where, once accepted, every student attended tuition free. It would have put Jonah on the fast track to a life of musical excellence, had his train from Dallas to Philadelphia not derailed unexpectedly just outside Louisville. Fourteen people had died in the accident, but Jonah’s injuries had not been chiefly limited to his left arm in general and his left hand specifically. The hand he used on the fingerboard.

Years of physical and occupational therapy restored his finger dexterity to a reasonably normal level; he was able to play again. But he was never and would never be able to maintain the complete command over his fingers that he would have needed to be any kind of musical performer at all. The most he might be able to muster would be three or four minutes at a time before his reconstructed ligaments and finger bones betrayed him again, before his nerves went numb from overexertion. The most he’d be able to play would be something roughly the duration of that Bach partita. So he’d gone to school in Texas instead, to study music education. To be a teacher.

It was in his junior year of college that Jonah’s life had changed. For his birthday, his father had taken him to hear Josephine LaMotta, the newest wunderkind violinist from Canada, who was now blossoming into the spot vacated by the passings of such greats as Midori and Joshua Bell. Jonah had never been to hear such a luminary soloist before, and he had felt tremendous anticipation when he and his father had taken their seats in the upper mezzanine of the Dallas Symphony concert hall. Miss LaMotta had been on hand to play the Tchaikovsky concerto, one of the greatest of the repertoire’s old warhorses – but when she had emerged onto the stage, her Strad violin in hand, both Jonah and his father had audibly gasped.

Never before that moment had Jonah ever realized just how much of his father’s keen eye for woodworking he had inherited or how much of his knowledge he had gained seemingly through pure osmosis until the moment he laid eyes on Miss LaMotta’s Strad violin. Even from his distance fifty feet away, he could see the sharp tiger-striped pattern of the instrument’s back panel, the shocking striping in the maple. He was transfixed by the shimmering red of the varnish, and he could see the perfect proportions of the violin’s scroll. As Miss LaMotta took up the strains of the Tchaikovsky, Jonah found himself wondering how Stradivari had done it. And his father, he could see when he glanced over at him, was thinking the same thing.

On the drive home, Jonah asked if he could work in his father’s workshop, using his father’s tools. His father had smiled and said, “You know, they’ve been trying to figure out Stradivari’s secret for four hundred years.”

Jonah remembered nodding, as his mind already began to work through various problems, such as how he would carve the f-holes, how he would insert the purfling, whether he would create the back plate from two pieces of wood or just one. The next morning, when he had risen, he read on the Net that Josephine LaMotta’s plane had crashed on its way to Los Angeles. She was dead, and her violin was destroyed. Sick with grief over the passing of an artist and perhaps even sicker over the passing of her instrument, it was on that morning that Jonah began work on his first violin.

He still had that instrument, locked away with all of his father’s belongings back on what they affectionately called “the Ranch”. He had not taken it out or looked at it in twenty years. It had only been a start, and it had taken him eight years to produce an instrument worthy of being purchased by an actual musician – in that case, the fiddler for a Celtic band from upstate New York. In his heart he considered such a use of the fruits of a luthier’s craft somewhat disappointing, but he kept those feelings in check for a sale, after all, was a sale. And now it was only a matter of time. Ten years on, he knew that his instruments were very good, perhaps among the best possible to make in this day and age. Thus was his career born, although even then he’d never believed he would become the finest luthier in the world. With every instrument he had ever made, no matter to whom it sold or how it was used, he had approached each of them the same way: as experiments in his lifelong quest to meet the mind of Antonio Stradivari, four hundred and fifty years after the Cremonese master’s death.

“It’s not the music with you,” Mr. Lang said. “It’s the mystery. You want to know how he did it. How he made them. Your pursuit has been so single-minded that you have come closer than anyone since he himself walked the streets of Cremona – but in other ways, you are as far away from him as if you were standing on the surface of another world entirely. Your appreciation of that instrument” – he gestured to the vault fom which they’d just come – “is not for what it could be in your hand, but in what it actually is. That speaks to my cybernano-enhanced heart.”

Jonah sipped his wine. “You seem to know a great deal about me.”

Mr. Lang shrugged. “I always do my research on those with whom I would do business. But even all the research in the world can lead to disaster. I had to meet you myself, to learn if I was right. And I soon realized that I was.”

“When?”

“When you played that Bach partita, instead of the Brahms concerto, or the Tchaikovsky, or the Bruch.”

Jonah laughed. “That’s it? Because I chose the partita instead of, maybe, Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending?”

“You chose a piece that would display the qualities of that instrument by itself. A concerto requires an orchestra; the partita requires a violin and a violinist.”

Jonah leaned forward on his seat. “So having passed your test, why am I here, Mr. Lang?”

Mr. Lang set his empty wine glass down on the glass-topped table between them and likewise leaned forward. “I am seventy years old, but I will live for many more years, Gods and nanocybernetics be willing. Nevertheless, I have given much thought to what my legacy on this world will be. For what will they remember Lang of Inner Beijing?”

Jonah stared hard at Mr. Lang, wondering if he was joking. “But…won’t they remember the sleeper ship to Alpha Centauri? The developments of nanocybernetics that you helped to discover?”

Mr. Lang nodded. “They will remember all those things, and more. But no man such as I is content to be remembered for just one or two things. My mark on the world must be more than just ‘who stood here’ or ‘who discovered this’. I would be as Cato, and have everyone ask where the statues of me are than why there are statues of me in the first place.”

Jonah sat still, not giving any reply. Little of this was making any sense to him at all.

“So, Mr. Wilhelm, what I would have you do is this: unlock the secret of the Stradivarius violins once and for all. Surpass them. I would be your benefactor, as you supplant the name Stradivarius with that of Wilhelm.”

Now Jonah laughed. The idea was ludicrous, totally and utterly ludicrous. There could be no surpassing Stradivari; the very notion was laughable. Mr. Lang’s expression did not change in any way, and Jonah caught himself. “This can’t be,” Jonah said.

“Of course it can. Have you never wondered just why it is that Stradivari left no successors? Why his standard of excellence did not foster a tradition of innovation and improvement? Had things gone their normal course, Stradivari would be remembered now as the one who began the journey, not the one who reached an apex that is unreachable forevermore.”

Jonah frowned. That Stradivari had left no disciples, no one to carry on his work, had indeed vexed him over the years, but over time he had accepted this, and come to his final thoughts on that matter. “Perhaps,” he said, “it is the case that Stradivari actually did reach an apex that is unreachable forevermore.”

Mr. Lang laughed. “Now what kind of manner of thinking is that for a man such as yourself? Why would you accept such a state of affairs? Why else would you have devoted so much of your life to the pursuit of Maestro Stradivari’s secrets? Why do any of it at all?”

Jonah was beginning to succumb to Mr. Lang’s insistence, but even so he did not quite want to appear just yet that he was beginning to succumb. So he pushed his line of thought even farther. “Not all of us are interested in pushing the envelope of human enterprise forward,” he said. “Some of us truly are content to learn what we can of what has gone before. Archaeologists still study the Pyramids of Giza, even though no one thinks they are trying to figure how to build better pyramids.”

“Of course not, Mr. Wilhelm. But why they are learning is still important, and in a key way it has nothing to do with how to build pyramids at all, but rather how best to learn from those who have gone before. Which is what you have been trying to do, all your life. Were you truly satisfied, you would not have accepted my invitation to begin with.”

Jonah sighed, finally conceding the point. “I am flattered that I have impressed you this much, Mr. Lang, but what you ask is beyond me.”

“Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is not. That is not for you to decide though, is it?”

“Then whose?”

“The violins. When you have hit your mark, the violin will let you know.”

***

Jonah leaned back in his seat as the spaceplane finally reached the point of cessation of acceleration. He was tired, terribly tired, and he had no idea how he was going to go about the job that had just been handed him. Mr. Lang was to pay Jonah for everything. He would have living expenses, access to the finest materials and tools, and he would have access to the latest research into woodworking techniques and other topics that might be germane to the creation of a violin. All of his expenses would be paid, every one, until he reached his goal. Mr. Lang had admitted that this was a calculated risk on his part, but he had time – nanocybernetics, after all – and he had money. Likely Jonah would be on his payroll for the rest of his life. In a perverse moment, Jonah thought to spend many years living off Mr. Lang’s largesse, producing a single violin of deeply flawed workmanship, and then delivering it to the old man when he was on his own deathbed. This plan, of course, went nowhere except Jonah’s own head. He had, if nothing else, tremendous professional pride, and, now he had lots of money. And in any case, Mr. Lang had done nothing worthy of such a treatment.

Of all the things Mr. Lang had promised would be his for the next however many years this took – it was an open-ended commitment – the one that excited Jonah the most was the wood. Jonah had never been able to shake his suspicion that the wood had been one of the most important factors in the success of the Strads, but he’d never been able to truly confirm this. It would take a fairly controlled experiment, after all, a simple comparison. All one had to do was find two violins made of different wood but by the same luthier, someone clearly in the same level of skill as a Stradivari. That was all.

Obviously it had never been done.

His production ground to a halt for more than a year, as Jonah spent that first year and a significant part of the second reading, barely touching wood at all. He was studying anew every aspect of acoustics, of the sonic qualities of wood, of the traditional varnishes of the Cremonese woodworkers – everything he could possibly think of that might have an effect on his work. Surely the perfection of the Stradivarius instruments had not been completely due to their maker, but also in some part reflective of something in the time and place from which those instruments had come. Terroir, the French called it – even though that term was used for wine, not violins or cellos.

Sixteen months after his meeting with Mr. Lang, Jonah Wilhelm walked into his workshop begin violin-making for the second time in his life. Even though he was already renowned in the music world as one of the finest luthiers anywhere, he was, for all intents and purposes, starting over completely.

As the money flowed, he found himself experimenting with exotic hardwoods he would never have otherwise been able to use, on the assumption that perhaps maple wasn’t the best wood for violin-making after all. After two years, all this study resulted in the production of a single instrument, which he allowed to cure for one month before finally testing. Its sound was penetrating, no question about it, but it had a harsh sheen that he found unacceptable. He’d had a feeling this would be the case, even as he’d been carving the backplate to shape from the mold he’d copied from one of Stradivari’s own. This violin he rejected, without even giving it a name.

The second fared little better in the sound department, which was a disappointment to him because he felt that with this particular instrument he was finally beginning to produce some very fine purfling indeed, which he now did purely by hand. In fact, as he put the finishing touches on this second violin, he was already planning to make the third completely by hand, with no power tools whatsoever. Jonah had decided that if he was going to try to improve upon Stradivari, he would have to go back in time to meet Stradivari, as closely as he could.

Thus began the third violin, as he headed into the fourth year of his work. Mr. Lang contacted him monthly, always out of courtesy and interest and never as a means of attempted influence. There was truly no pressure at all, at least not from his employer. The outside world exerted a good deal of pressure on its own.

As he was applying the second coat of varnish to this third violin, Jonah received the e-notification that his father had died. It had been expected for some time, since Mr. Wilhelm had opted to have his nanocybernetics deactivated. “They can’t keep me alive forever,” he had said, “and I don’t want to be around for the final stages when these things start going haywire.”

“No one knows if they ever go haywire, Dad,” Jonah had said, but his father had been insistent.

“Jonah, sooner or later everything that is made by human beings goes haywire. Things either break or fall apart or stop working. Hell, sooner or later we either break or fall apart or stop working. It’s the way things are.” There’d been a silence, and then: “Jonah, it’s the natural way of things that the Strads are all gone.”

Jonah had left the violin to dry as he had gone to his father’s funeral. His quest for perfection would now be carried out alone.

As he finished Instrument Number Three in the Lang series, Jonah decided that this instrument would carry a name. He would name it for his father, and as such, he would make certain that this instrument would be worthy of carrying that name. He already knew that this would be the best violin he had ever made. From this point on, every violin would be the best he’d ever made.

Even as the world awaited the first transmissions from the Alpha Centauri sleeper ship, and even as the Palestinian Republic declared war on Israel, and even as hostilities began again on the Sino-Russian border, Jonah’s pursuit was the only thing he cared about. He would go afar in his pursuit of craft, seeking to learn ever more about the working of wood in the service of his art. Jonah traveled to the tiny Amish communities in Pennsylvania, the few that were left, to watch the artisans there carve with expertise still handed down from fathers to sons even in the face of a world where the very march of aging had been slowed to a barely-perceptible crawl. He journeyed to villages on the Canadian Atlantic coast where scrimshaw was still practiced, on genetically-cultivated ivory. He journeyed to Japan to see the swordmakers at work, even though the forging of metal had nothing to do with violin making but everything to do with ancient craft. From all these pursuits and more Jonah derived inspiration and knowledge, and he realized that while he had before achieved great success on the level of his talent alone, now he was actively pushing his skills to the farthest limit he could possibly reach – and even farther. The third violin he produced he named the Michael Wilhelm, as he had promised himself all along. The instrument sold for a high price to the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and almost immediately word began to seep out among the small but worldwide community that Jonah Wilhelm of Dallas, Texas had achieved a leap in quality no one could have foreseen. The recognition in the music world gave Jonah some comfort, although he reacted harshly to an interviewer who dared call him “the new Stradivari”. Jonah knew how far short of that goal he still was, even if no one else did.

It was during his making of the sixth violin that antennae on the Moon finally received a transmission from the sleeper ship to Alpha Centauri. All the world was transfixed as the tale came in: the valiant efforts of the crew to keep the sleepers alive as they repaired their ship, damaged in the transit of Alpha Centauri’s Oort Cloud; the insertion into orbit of the system’s second planet, which was almost Earthlike in nature; the voyage via dropship onto the planet surface. And then there had been the images, sent toward Earth four years before, of the surface of an extra-Solar world. A planet of purple skies and white grassplains, of rocky mountains covered with snow as white as that on Earth (why wouldn’t it be, after all), of “forests” of great black “trees” covered with immense green leaves. Over the next months, the scientific information came fast and furious from Alpha Centauri: biological information on the flora and fauna of the new planet, geological surveys of the landmasses heretofore discovered, climate studies, analytical data of soil samples, and more. This became the golden age of planetary astronomy as the information came in a steady stream from the colony on Alpha Centauri II, a world whose new inhabitants, unwilling to wait for the United Nations to reach consensus and then for news of that consensus to travel the four years to them, named their world New Ithaca.

And through all this, Jonah Wilhelm made violins. His devotion to his hand-made craft was such that even among the musical mainstream filled with people who had never once in their lives touched an acoustic instrument, Jonah’s violins became the most sought-after instruments in the world, and beyond music some even credited him with the great resurgence in the great hand-craft movement of the early twenty-second century. But he cared about none of that, because he knew that no matter how revered his violins might be, none had yet approached the Strads of his dreams.

Mr. Lang continued to check in on him once a year, and he kept the money coming, despite the fact that Jonah could not in all honesty tell him that he was getting any closer to even equaling Stradivari, much less surpassing him. He had at his fingertips the results of every single scientific study ever performed on the Stradivarius violins ever undertaken, including some that had definitively concluded that the secret lay in the wood and others that the secret lay in the varnish – but when he tried to work based on the findings of those studies, his violins were still inferior.

Ten years became fifteen, and then twenty. Jonah’s nano-cybernetics kept him going well past the age where he might otherwise have expected arthritis to rob him of his work. Meanwhile more and more data came from New Ithaca. The colony was – or had been, four years earlier – doing very well now that the colonists had become acclimated to their new world. They had integrated their buildings, erected from the converted hull of the sleeper ship itself, into the environment extremely well, and they were even able to announce the birth of the colony’s first child. The first human being born outside the Solar System.

Jonah was now over eighty years old. He was now experimenting with different carving strategies and different woods and different varnishes. Some of his violins from this period were utterly ghastly in their sound, but even these were useful, pointing up the experimental paths that he felt sure that Stradivari must have taken as well. How many violins had the great master of Cremona himself rejected and thrown into the fires, he often wondered? And how many of the rejected violins had still been greater than the ones Jonah was now making, four hundred years later?

Jonah’s thirty-fifth violin, a masterpiece, sold to Fiona March of Great Britain for a tremendous amount of money on the same day that Mr. Lang and his fellow investors announced construction of the second sleeper ship to Alpha Centauri. Over the next few months the United Nations finally dissolved permanently over the disputed use of the Great Lakes waters, the Battle of Mecca killed thousands, and forest fires swept across Greenland. It was an ugly time on Earth, and it was then that Mr. Lang came to visit Jonah in Dallas.

“You have done well,” Mr. Lang said when he had finished his brief tour through Jonah’s workshop. This hadn’t taken long. The workshop was still what it had always been: a small room whose floor was littered with sawdust and whose tables were covered with carving tools and blocks of wood and violin templates and lengths of violin string and books on acoustics and printouts of the scientific data beamed back from New Ithaca – particularly the information on the trees there.

“Not well enough,” Jonah replied. He brushed a lock of wispy silver hair from his eye; Mr. Lang still looked as youthful as ever. Jonah had allowed for some aging from his nano-cybernetics, while Mr. Lang had opted for unending youth. “I have not equaled Stradivari,” Jonah said. “I never will.”

“Yes, you will. You have figured out so much.”

“I am an old man, Mr. Lang. I cannot do this forever.”

“You could come closer than Stradivari ever did.”

Jonah looked down at his hands – his old, weathered hands with joints that still moved smoothly and painlessly. The hands that had crafted so many violins, that had taught him so much and had seen him through so much work and trouble. The hands that could almost make a violin on pure muscle memory.

“You know you could,” Mr. Lang pressed on. “I look around this place and I see not a workshop for a craftsman, but the laboratory of a scientist. You have been crafting hypotheses based on your own observations, you have been testing them, and you have been rejecting the fruitless paths for the ones that are almost certainly those also trod by our master of Cremona. But now, I suspect you have reached an impasse, and it is not a matter of age or weariness. Am I right?”

Jonah stared hard at Mr. Lang, amazed anew at how sharp his mind was even at the age of one hundred ten. Mr. Lang glanced over at Jonah’s reading desk, tucked away in a corner, with titles piled upon it such as A History of Western Music, The Great Violinists, and Tales from Alpha Centauri.

“You have a request for me, do you not?” Mr. Lang asked.

Jonah lowered his head. He did indeed have a request, and it was why he had contacted Mr. Lang and requested to meet with him, even though he had never expected Mr. Lang to come to him. Then he lifted his head and looked around his workshop, the same as Mr. Lang had just done.

“It is the wood,” he said. “I know it is. Something in the soil or the trees of Cremona, perhaps…I don’t know if there was something special in the maple of Italy in the 1600s, or if it was his varnish, or his perfect craftsmanship, or some combination of all of that. It was probably all of those things, actually. He went as far as he could with the materials and skills of his time, and I have done the same – and I am still behind him. One reaches a point where environment determines everything.”

Mr. Lang nodded. “There is only one conclusion, then, isn’t there?”

“My craft cannot improve,” Jonah said. “But…perhaps my materials can.”

“And where would you go for better materials?”

“Alpha Centauri,” Jonah said. Mr. Lang was already nodding. “I’ve read the botanical studies of the trees there. The trees of New Ithaca have wood that is very hard, but also acoustically supple in a way not seen here on Earth. They may have the wood I need.”

“That is a great length to take on, for a hypothesis that may yet fail.”

“I have already failed, Mr. Lang. Even if I go to New Ithaca and make a violin that is the better of anything Stradivari ever did, I will have not done so here. I will not have made this world’s greatest violin – I will have made New Ithaca’s.”

Mr. Lang smiled, and leaned in close. “Then why go? There is no returning to this world. There are no sleeper ships that come back to Earth. Once you leave, you are gone forever. Why go?”

Jonah shook his head. “Because I have to know if I can do it,” he said. “I knew I had to go as soon as I saw the pictures of those trees. A whole new world with wood never carved – I have to go there and make a violin. The principles of Stradivarius, taken to the stars.”

Mr. Lang nodded. “Then you shall have a berth.”

***

Two years went by, and they were the busiest two years of Jonah Wilhelm’s life. He had so much to learn, so many skills to develop, which at his advancing age required more effort than on many days he thought he could exert in any meaningful way. Much of it seemed foolish to him, a waste of time. He wasn’t going to Alpha Centauri as part of any scientific team, nor was he going in any capacity as a seed colonist. He was going for one reason, and one reason only. When that reason finally hit the Net, the controversy became almost too much for him to bear. This he dealt with in the way he had always dealt with such things in the past. He buried himself in his work: his studies for the fifty-year transit, his physical regimen to prepare himself, and the carving of his final violin on Earth, the one that would carry the only name left that he had never given to an instrument. Rose. His late wife, gone now for forty years.

The Rose violin was debuted in performance by its owner, Katherine Quinn, concertmaster of the Seattle Symphony. Her solos in Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” were reported to have absolutely shimmered, piercing every single soul in the Gates Concert Hall that night. Jonah would have been there to hear, had the concert not taken place the night before his second flight on the spaceplane, the flight that would take him to Asimov Station and his boarding date on the Sagan Starship. Those last days flashed by, and they ended with Jonah climbing into his hibernation chamber. As his consciousness slipped away, Jonah heard in his inner ear the strains of Bach’s Partita in E.

***

Awakening.

He had wondered, on Earth, what awakening on a new world would feel like.

And now…he still didn’t know. He couldn’t compare it to anything. He heard voices around him, for what felt like an eternity. He felt heat where there had been none before. He felt warm air on his face, and cold air on his feet. He felt his fingers tingling with that feeling they get when you’ve restored circulation after a while, but the tingling seemed to last for days, weeks, months. He felt that to open his eyes would be to invite death, so he kept them closed.

These sensations were normal.

Jonah finally opened his eyes on a new world, a new sun, a new life, and a new home. New possibilities, for new music.

***

The trees of New Ithaca, Jonah discovered, offered surprisingly hard wood. “Wood”, of course, was something of a misnomer, since it was a different kind of entity altogether, but people were people and they used the most convenient words to describe things, and in this case, the stuff of the “trees” was best thought of as “wood”. There were probably hundreds of kinds of the stuff on the planet, just as on Earth, but in the vicinity of the first colony city – one of three now, this one called Athens and the others Sparta and Syracuse – there were mostly hardwoods. This had been a good thing for those first colonists of seventy years before, when they had needed to build their shelters from the indigenous materials, and now it was a good thing for Jonah, who was using the wood in his spare time to carve the first backplates for his violins.

Things were very different for Jonah here on New Ithaca, in ways that went beyond the obvious. It wasn’t just new stars and two moons in his sky; it wasn’t a world that was eerily quiet and a daytime sky free of aircraft contrails. The daily rhythm of his life, now that he was awake again, was now completely different. Here he could not support himself on violin making; the population of New Ithaca still stood at less than two thousand humans, and thus there was no place for someone whose only vocation was an obscure area of craftsmanship. Jonah found himself using his woodcarving skills all over the city, and during harvest time, he worked the fields as did everyone else. He even took a shift or two monitoring the colonies’ radio telescopes, but this quickly proved beyond his particular area of ability and he was relieved of any further such duties within hours of spilling his tea across the instrument panel.

In his spare time, then, he made his violins. It was an odd hobby to the other colonists, not one of whom had ever heard of Earth’s greatest luthier, but many of their own hobbies were odd in his eyes as well, and it turned out that no one much bothered to judge him on that basis. No one thought anything odd of the woman who used the new wind patterns to fly kites she’d made from fibers native to this world; no one questioned the wisdom of the man who crafted his own kayak out of native wood and tested it out on the native rivers here. And no one questioned the old violin maker who had come from Dallas to Athens, New Ithaca.

The first three violins were disastrous. The wood was too hard, resulting in instruments whose tone was terribly harsh, sounding almost as though they had been outfitted with electronic amplification. He moved from tree species to tree species, testing as he went; in this way he became familiar with all of the wood of the region around Athens, and to his dismay he discovered that it was all too hard for his needs. He would have to find another place – one of the other colony cities. They both lay south of Athens; perhaps they would have softer wood in their local forests.

The problem that now arose was that transit between colony cities was not frequent. Each colony was intended to become self-sufficient before natural trade could be allowed to begin. Jonah had to wait for a natural excuse for him to make the next journey, and that excuse came over a year later (with New Ithaca years taking roughly 1.3 times an Earth year). It was the same reason for inter-colony travel as always: illness and injury. A type of fever had broken out in Sparta, and though they had identified the drugs that would work against it, they didn’t have enough to treat everyone there. An expedition was arranged, and Jonah volunteered to go along.

The colony city of Sparta was larger now than Athens, even though it had been the second colony city established. Jonah helped distribute the medicines, and then he wasted no time in examining the wood of the surrounding region. He found that the woods here were softwoods after all – but they were too soft. If he made violins from these trees, the sound would be muddy, indistinct, ill-defined.

It was heartbreaking. Somewhere on this world, perhaps, there was wood that would be perfect for violin-making. But it was still a large world, as large as Earth, and Jonah was an old man. He went to sleep that night feeling total, utter failure. He had come across four light-years, he had left his world behind, he had imposed upon the wealth of a benefactor he never should have had, and now, it was all for naught.

He woke back up about forty minutes later, when the obvious solution finally snapped into his brain. He had already forsaken replicating Stradivari’s methods; all that mattered to him was matching his results.

Perhaps, then, a violin made not of one type of wood, but of two.

Jonah didn’t see the answer in a dream, exactly, but in one of those moments of inspiration that come in the dark, when sleep is on the verge of taking us under. He saw himself weaving strips of wood together, perhaps into a lattice form; or perhaps putting thin strips beside each other, one by one; or perhaps tempering the harshness of a backplate of hardwood with sideribs of soft. He didn’t know which would work, but he knew that he had a way to go. Had Stradivari used more than one kind of wood in his violins? It didn’t matter, Jonah realized. It was time for him to set Stradivari aside, and to fully embrace Wilhelm.

He obtained a large section of a tree from the construction crew, in exchange for woodworking services; this he used in conjunction with the hardwood he already had. Then he began carving the block. First he shaped the backplate, in accordance with the template he had brought with him all the way from Earth, the template that had yielded his best instruments. He aimed for an instrument width roughly halfway between that of his thinnest and thickest violins. He worked the woods together slowly into shape, using every ounce of his skill to mix wood as a potter might mix clay. The construction of this violin came easy to him, so easy that people who entered his workshop while he was working often remarked later that their colony woodcarver had been in some kind of trance. The fingerboard, the scroll, even the purfling – all of it came so easy to him now. But it was the fact of two kinds of wood at work that made it difficult now. He was in, so far as he knew, totally uncharted territory.

And he didn’t care. For ten New Ithaca years, Jonah worked alongside the colonists by day and in his workshop by night, experimenting with different blends of wood. He also experimented with varnishes. He found one tree whose wood was virtually useless for violin-making, but whose sap was almost a perfect varnish as far as the acoustics went, even if the varnish was a vibrant green.

Finally it all came together. Finally all of his work, everything he knew, everything he had learned by study and by effort of his own fingers, met as one as he crafted an instrument that he knew, even as he began it, would be the finest he could ever make. This one would be the final summation of everything he had ever done. It was a day he’d never dared to hope would one day come, when he finally put the strings on this, his last violin.

It was on that day that the transmission from Mars came.

Very few transmissions came from the Martian colony – in fact, none had come directly from Mars in over twenty years, before Jonah had even arrived. Almost all of the transmissions from the Solar System had originated from Earth, the homeworld, the place where humanity had begun.

The message was cataclysmic. Months before, a very large meteor had been detected on a collision course with Earth. Every attempt at pushing it onto a different trajectory had failed, and the meteor had impacted the planet with force that was off any type of scale conceivable to the mind of a human.

Earth was gone. Everything gone. Dallas, gone. Inner Beijing, gone. Venice, gone. London, gone.

The last Stradivarius, gone.

Now, Jonah was all that was last of all violin makers.

In the time that he had been on New Ithaca, Jonah Wilhelm had become famous as the man who had traveled across four light-years to find wood to make a better violin. His willingness to leave behind his homeworld in pursuit of his craft had made him a legend, and his instruments quickly became revered on this, humanity’s first world beyond the star of its birth.

The governing council of New Ithaca declared a day of mourning: a new world mourning the old. Humanity’s birthworld was gone, but the colonies of Mars and New Ithaca remained. In time there would be more.

Jonah learned of Earth’s fate while he was eating his supper of rice and wine. From his tiny chamber he could already hear the voices in the town square, raised in song, hymns of the old faiths offered in memory of the world now four years dead. He knew he had to join them, although he barely knew what to feel. He had left Earth behind. This was his world now.

He went down, in the end, to the town square to join his fellow citizens in mourning, and he took with him the new violin. He had not yet played it, but tonight would be the best time to do so, he realized. Jonah was an old man now, and he was thinking about deactivating his nanocybernetics and allowing nature – the nature of Alpha Centauri, not his own sun – to take its course. Whether or not this violin was the equal of any Strad was no longer important, but it was the only offering he could make to the planet of his birth, and in any event, he felt that he had to know.

Jonah chose to walk up to the top of the small hill that overlooked Sparta. The people followed, knowing that he was about to play his latest instrument for the first time. He had become something of a celebrity in his years here; moreso than on Earth, when he’d been known to only a tiny portion of musicians. When he reached the top of the hill, he softly tuned the violin, doing so as he always had, by ear alone.

In the valley below, the lights of Sparta glowed in the dry air, and in the sky above, the stars twinkled. Jonah had started learning the new constellations lately, the groupings chosen and named by the first generation of human children born on this world. He might have been able to pick out Sol in the night sky of New Ithaca, had he wished to – but now, it didn’t matter. Jonah Wilhelm lifted his violin to his chin, lifted the bow, and for the first time in more than fifty Earth years – since he’d been on Earth at all – he played Bach’s Partita in E for solo violin.

Thus sounded the greatest violin in the Universe, uniting again the principles of Stradivari with the music of Bach, both carried to the stars by Jonah Wilhelm. The Partita in E, played for the ending of a world, and the birth of the new.

–finis–

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[I wrote this story, oh, a little more than a year ago, if memory serves. For those who know me, well — yes, this tale delves into some dark areas for me. I post it here in its entirety. It’s not as long as some of the other works I’ve posted here in the past.

Also, New Mowbray is the fictional city in which I like to set stories from time to time. It’s located in Michigan, on the Eastern coast of the Great Lake of the same name. Basically, it’s my way of using Buffalo as a location without having to be totally true to Buffalo locales. Two stories of mine that have previously appeared on Byzantium’s Shores, “Elizabeth and Andrew” and “In Longhand”, are set there.]

“Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”
-the Talmud

Alison burst through the front entrance of Our Lady of Eternal Hope Hospital and rushed for the bank of elevators left of the information desk. Already late, she only had time to take in a whiff of the coffee aroma from the little espresso bar inside the front door. Maybe later, she thought as she jumped aboard an elevator whose doors, in her first lucky break of the day, hadn’t closed yet. She hit the button for the fifth floor, moved to the side of the car, dropped her purse and tote bag on the floor, removed her coat, tied back her hair, hooked her ID badge on its retracting cord to her waistband, grabbed her stethoscope from the tote bag, looped it round her neck, and scratched the annoying pimple on her right shoulderblade just below her bra strap. She did all this in one honed-over-many-elevator-rides motion, and only invaded the personal space of two other passengers in doing it.

At the fifth floor Alison disembarked the elevator and turned left, away from surgery and orthotics, toward the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, where she was a nurse. Even though she was late she did not run, owing to the two people shuffling along the hall in the same direction. There was such a thing as decorum, and it wouldn’t do for a NICU nurse to appear desperate before two parents whose child she’d be spending the next twelve hours keeping alive. The mother was in her hospital gown and leaned on her husband’s shoulder in the way of a woman three days past her C-section. One intern last year had described that gait as “the perp walk”. That intern’s NICU career had been brief. Parents were as important as babies, and those who failed to realize that were of no use here.

Alison swiped her ID badge through the card reader, opening the automated door into the NICU, where she dropped her stuff at the break room before joining the rest of the staff for evening shift change.

“So we’re all here now,” Dr. Franks said loudly enough to dig but not quite loudly enough to constitute a rebuke. “Shall we?” Alison fell in beside Mary Danford, one of the other nurses who would be on call this evening, as they headed toward Pod A. The NICU was divided into five “pods”, which were rooms separated by walls and glass doors, each of which containing four “beds”, only these weren’t beds at all; most were isolets, with a couple of regular cribs distributed throughout.

“You’d think ten years and they’d be done building the GRF,” Alison said in response to Mary’s unspoken question. The Gerald R. Ford Highway was a main commuter route in New Mowbray, and some part of it was always under contruction.

“There are other roads, you know,” Mary said.

“Draw me a map,” Alison replied. Her lack of direction-sense was often a source of humor.

“How about the bus?” Mary asked as they stepped aside at the door to allow the cleaning lady, a tiny Puerto Rican woman named Flor, back out.

“How about the bus?”

“I’m not carrying a car payment so I can ride the bus.”

Into Pod A they went, where Dr. Franks was getting started over at Bed 1, while his relief, Dr. Sandoz, was thumbing through the chart.

“Ashley’s had a good day,” Dr. Franks began. He’d been through twenty-four hours on duty and looked the part. Dr. Sandoz, however, bounced a lot on the balls of his feet and twirled a pen in his fingers. No doubt he was on his fourth cappuccino, at least. “She’s producing more urine now, and her respiration is a bit more regular. For now we’re still monitoring, but the ventilator isn’t really doing any of the work for her. Little David over here has had a tough day, though….” And on to Bed 2.

In the NICU, things were pretty much like any other intensive care unit. Some patients left in better shape than when they came in; others left worse and some only left in the arms of angels. What was different here was the preciousness of those patients, their frightening fragility. The most innocent of us all, some were born too early to live without help while others were born at the right time but were somehow damaged.

Alison glanced out into the corridor, where the parents she’d passed in the hall were waiting. They’d be allowed in to see their child as soon as the shift change was over. The look on their faces was the same as it always was on parents up here, no matter what afflictions the babies suffered. In the mothers’ eyes, Alison would always see the same mix of fear and love and sorrow and wonder. In the NICU, motherhood could end in mere hours, with the poor woman being escorted from the side of the only bed their child would ever know, their shoulders draped by the arm of one of Our Lady of Eternal Hope’s chaplains.

Up here, you were a nurse for an entire family.

That night there was Jessica Grey, who was doing quite well now for having been born six weeks early; she would probably go home in another day or two. Less fortunate was Michael Conrad, who’d been born at full term but had presented signs of distress moments after birth. It had slowly become clear that he had somehow suffered brain damage and faced a life of disability. Josie DiMarco was the worst case of jaundice anyone had ever seen at Our Lady. Christina King and Marcus O’Donnell were the newest of the preemies, both born just the night before at twenty-seven weeks and both hanging by the thinnest of threads. And the twins, Jason and Jacob Williams, were still hanging in there. Their problem was genetic, an accident of being born of two parents whose enduring love was impotent in the face of chromosomal biology.

In this manner the days nurses and doctors handed off the responsibilities to the night shift, and then they let the parents come back in. Alison made a cup of coffee and then went to start Brittany Murphy’s next feeding.

***

Nineteen hours later, Alison drained her sixth cup of coffee. She was sitting at the main desk, catching up on chart work when Mary came over and plopped down in the chair beside her.

“Josie’s looking less yellow,” Mary said.

“Well that’s good news,” Alison replied. “Quiet night.”

“Been a while,” Mary said. “So, did that boyfriend of yours get in all right?”

“He’s staying an extra day,” Alison said. “More meetings.”

“Gotta hate those ‘impromptu’ meetings.”

“Yeah. Oh, hi, Flor.”

Flor, the cleaning lady, was on her nightly rounds, pushing her cart of cleaning supplies. “Hello, Nurse Jeffers,” she said. “You look tired.”

Alison laughed. “I’m always tired.”

“More than normal,” Flor said. “You should take vacation.”

“Sure,” Alison said. Flor was sweet. She was working her way through night school for…something, Alison couldn’t remember what. Something that would mean that maybe one day Flor would be able to afford a vacation. “Maybe I could go to–“

She was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. As she picked it up, Flor smiled and went on her way. “We’ll be ready,” Alison replied to the person on the phone and hung up.

“Incoming?” Mary asked.

“Incoming,” Alison said. “Pod C, bed three.”

They moved quickly to get things ready for the baby who’d be here momentarily from Labor and Delivery, five floors below.

***

It had been two hours, and Ethan Bly wasn’t even close to breathing on his own. He’d been on the vent since about two minutes after he’d been taken from his mother’s belly in an emergency C-section. His Apgar score was two out of ten, and that was scoring liberally. Ethan’s skin was pale and tinged yellow. His ears looked like they were on sideways, a sign of the difficult delivery. That would correct itself in time. Everything else that was likely wrong with him? Probably not.

In the space of two hours, Ethan crashed three times. Each time they got him back. In cases like this, Alison was never sure if the babies were meant truly to live or die. When they got him back the third time, Alison happened to glance away, through the glass door of Pod C into the NICU corridor. Flor was standing there, staring back at her, her eyes wide and her face pale.

Only later would Alison remember how, at that moment, Flor held her hands over her lower abdomen.

***

“Who brewed the coffee this morning?” Mary asked.

“Janet,” Alison replied.

“You didn’t warn me?”

“You didn’t notice that I’m drinking tea?”

Mary shrugged, and Alison went back to filling in more of the notations in little Ethan’s chart. He’d made it eight days now, but only through the miracles or curses of modern medical technology that could preserve some definition of life that didn’t match anyone else’s.

Today was Wednesday; it was almost eleven in the morning. In just a few minutes the two doctors who’d been on duty for just about all of Ethan’s life would be meeting with his parents to discuss their two, and only two, options: a mockery of life for Ethan, or no life at all.

“Did you see Josie’s weight this morning?” Mary asked.

“Sure did. She’s a fighter, that one.” Alison took a sip of her tea. “Gonna be trouble for the boys.”

“Oh yeah.” Mary gestured to Flor, who was gesturing into Pod C, across from the nurses’ station, indicating that it was time for daily cleaning. “Oh, go ahead, hon. The coast is clear.”

Flor nodded and went into Pod C, her cleaning towel and spray bottle of window cleaner in her hand.

“So how are Rick and Amy doing this week?” Alison asked. Mary grunted.

“Same as always. Rick’s pissed at his boss, and Amy’s not going on that ski trip if she doesn’t get that geometry grade up.”

“Still not getting the congruent triangles?”

“Who knows? I had terrible grades in geometry too, but don’t tell Amy that.”

“Sure.”

After a few more minutes of such conversation, Alison stacked up her paperwork and rose to her feet, which had only just stopped aching minutes before. “I’d better go check on the boys,” she said. That would be the three patients in Pod C: preemie Matthew Hooker, generically unhealthy though soon-to-go-home Trevor Marks, and poor hopeless Ethan Bly.

When she entered Pod C, Alison found that Flor hadn’t finished cleaning. In fact, she hadn’t even started. She was standing over little Ethan’s isolette.

“Flor?”

“Oh!” Flor jolted around with a start, nearly knocking over the supplies on the table beside Ethan’s station as she swung her glass cleaner about. “Forgive me, Nurse Forster,” she said. “I am sorry – I know I shouldn’t be here –“

“It’s all right,” Alison said. “I won’t report you. But you know that you’re not supposed to be looking at the patients.”

“I know,” Flor said. “But this one is so helpless. I can see it.”

As before, Flor drew her hands across her stomach, down low.

“You’re right, he is helpless,” Alison said. Then, not knowing why, she added: “He is in God’s hands, not ours.”

“The finest hands of all,” Flor said. “Nurse Forster, would it be all right if I said a prayer for this child?”

Alison’s brow furrowed. Such a simple request, after all, and yet she’d never known a member of the cleaning or maintenance crew to become concerned with the patients. Not that they were uncaring, of course, but that they were trained to do their jobs as quickly, quietly, and as unobviously as possible. Their jobs were to get in and get out without being seen. And yet…it was a request to offer a prayer for a sick child.

“We never discourage prayer at Our Lady of Eternal Hope,” Alison finally said. She touched Flor’s shoulder, and then she turned to look in on little Matthew as Flor began to whisper in prayer.

Something about that moment would stick in Alison’s mind for the rest of the shift. It was only when she was driving home the next morning that she realized what it was. Perhaps it was because she hadn’t heard it since taking a single semester of it in school years before that she didn’t immediately recognize the language of Flor’s prayer, not as Spanish, but as Latin.

***

The decision was made, as it always was. One of the hospital Chaplains, Father Duffy, was called in to the NICU to provide the saddest of services that a hospital Chaplain at a Catholic hospital. At two o’clock in the afternoon, little Ethan Bly’s family arrived: Robert the father, Jennifer the mother, and Hannah, the beautiful and brave older sister who was taking the day off from first grade to watch her baby brother die.

They all gathered around the isolette as Father Duffy began reading the Last Rites. Then, as tears ran hot down the cheeks of the Bly family and the nurses gathered round, Dr. Richter unhooked Ethan’s breathing tube and deactivated the machinery to which he was connected. Alison stood by, pen and chart in hand, ready to note the time of death.

But little Ethan did not die.

***

No one had any explanation for it. How could they? What possible explanation could there be? How could anyone ever explain the spontaneous regeneration of brain tissue? It wasn’t supposed to be possible. Every organ in the body could heal, every organ but one – and little Ethan Bly had been born with just enough healthy brain tissue to not die outright. Now, though, he was healthy. He cried, he began nursing, he did all the things a baby is supposed to do. And no one could figure out why. Over the next week, little Ethan Bly became the center of the medical world as doctors and scientists descended upon Our Lady of Eternal Hope from all over the world. So too did priests and clergy from all faiths. Ethan Bly, the miracle baby.

After a couple of weeks, the hospital could not find any real way to justify keeping Ethan in the NICU for any longer, so he finally went home, carried in his mother’s arms to the car, where he was nestled into his infant car seat. It was the most normal of scenes, if you don’t count the hundreds of news photographers taking shots of the least likely homecoming of all.

Of course, the news cycle moved on as it always did, but the healing of Ethan Bly was still of enormous import, and everyone connected with his case knew that it would be discussed for years to come. Alison herself did a couple of print interviews, but rejected invitations to go on Oprah or any other TV shows. Eventually the furor died down, and life returned to normal for the nurses and doctors of the NICU – except that Alison would look at Flor, and wonder just what prayer she had said that afternoon.

***

Two months later Alison arrived for her shift just in time for Dr. Franks to rush through shift change. His day wasn’t ending, after all; he had to spend the next six hours or so sitting in on meetings with doctors and researchers who had come to study the case of Ethan Bly. As soon as shift change was over, Alison went into Pod B to give little Abby Rhinehart a bath. She was doing well, and she’d be going home soon.

“I went to Mass the other day,” Mary said. She was one bed over, giving David Reisner his morning feeding. “First one in a year. My Mom’s been after me to go.”

“Moms are like that,” Alison said. “There there,” she added in a hushed whisper to baby Abby, who was squirming a bit.

“Your mom, too?”

“About some things, yes. Not about church. She gave that up years ago.”

“What things?”

“Marriage.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, don’t get yourself into any rush, because that won’t stop just because you get married.”

“I figured. There you go, sweetheart.” She was drying Abby off now; Abby was beginning to fuss. And then there was a knock on the sliding glass door.

“Is it OK to clean?” Flor asked, sticking her head in the door.

“Come on in,” Mary said. “But we haven’t really had time yet to mess things up much.”

Flor nodded, ducked out, and came back in with Windex, cleaning cloth, and a few trash bags in hand.

“Wow!” Mary said. “You’re really showing now!”

Alison glanced over, and sure enough, Flor’s belly was growing nicely. “Six months?” she asked.

Flor put a hand on her belly and smiled, blushing all the while. “Six months.”

“You’re looking beautiful,” Mary said. Flor blushed again and headed for the windows. She was looking beautiful, as mothers-to-be always did.

“So how was Mass?” Alison asked.

Mary shrugged. “I don’t know. I keep waiting for God to speak, but I guess I’m not there yet.”

Alison nodded as she put Abby’s diaper back on.

“Still,” Mary went on, “I’ve been reading my Bible again. I’m thinking that in my next confession I should tell Father Jeffries that the Old Testament makes God look bad.”

Behind them, Flor chuckled. Glancing back, Alison saw that Flor was smiling. She turned back to Mary. “Do you ever wonder why now?” Alison asked.

“Why now, what?”

“Why are you going to church now? We’ve been up here in the NICU together for six years. Why now?”

Mary was silent for a moment, and then she shook her head. “Maybe I’m getting older. Maybe it was Ethan Bly. Is there a better way to explain him, other than God?”

Alison had no reply to that, even though she’d been thinking in much the same way all along. The only difference was that so far, her own thoughts had not yet led her to God.

Flor passed by again, having finished her work for now. She was lightly caressing her pregnant belly as she exited the Pod. For no reason, Alison thought back again to Flor praying over little Ethan Bly.

A fairly uneventful week went by after that – a week which ended with the arrival in the NICU of little Rosa McKinley.

***

Lakesha McKinley had been young, bright, and pregnant. She’e been working had at a secretarial job and taking classes at night, while her new husband worked just as hard at the auto-body shop he’d opened with a generous loan from his father. Lakesha had been determined to make her baby’s life better than hers had been.

That night she had just reached the six-month mark in her pregnancy, and had gone out with some friends. They drank, she didn’t. She was conscientious. She did the right thing. She wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the precious life inside her belly.

Sometimes, though, the decision isn’t ours to make.

At 10:38 p.m., Lakesha had been on her way home when she’d made a right turn onto Wilson Blvd. It had been a perfectly fine turn, and she’d had the green arrow all the way. Seconds later Lakesha took the brunt of the impact when Chris Whitford, who’d been tying one on at the very same bar, plowed his car right into hers.

The ER had all they could do, keeping Lakesha and the two others in the car from dying. In the midst of all that, her baby came, three months early, and injured as well. The baby came up to the NICU, but it was clear to everyone that the child would die quickly, probably within hours. Lakesha was still unconscious in surgery. She would awaken to learn that her child had been born, lived, and died without ever having even been named. A girl.

Mr. Whitford, the drunk driver, suffered only bumps and bruises. He’d pay a heavy price with his driving license. Lakesha McKinley was marked to pay a different price.

It was Alison’s job to stand watch over Lakesha’s child, little Baby Girl McKinley. She was the only child in Pod C that night, strangely enough; that was rare in itself. Alison sat beside the isolette, monitoring Baby Girl’s ventilator-assisted breathing and making notations in the chart. More than once Alison found herself just gazing at Baby Girl’s wrinkled, deeply dark skin and her not-completely-formed features. So many dreams, destroyed by a drunk in pseudo-command of a ton of motorized metal.

“So beautiful,” said Flor. Alison turned with a start, having not even noticed the cleaning woman’s entrance. Then she turned back to the isolette.

“Yes, she is,” Alison said. “They all are, you know.” She glanced down at Flor’s belly, which was now becoming quite pronounced.

“She is sick, no?”

“Very,” Alison said.

Flor nodded as she fingered the cross she wore around her neck. The broom in her other hand was completely forgotten.

Alison sighed. “I wish I could understand why God touches some babies but not others,” she said as she starting notating Baby Girl’s current numbers. They were getting worse. In an hour, she’d be coding.

“We’re not supposed to understand that,” Flor said.

“I know,” Alison replied.

Baby Girl’s chest moved with the gentlest of movements as the ventilator machine breathed for her. That motion was getting harder to see. Baby Girl was weakening.

“She will die soon,” Flor said.

Alison looked sharply at the other woman. The custodial staff weren’t supposed to ask about the patients. But Flor hadn’t really asked; she’d simply stated it outright, and Flor wasn’t returning Alison’s look anyway. She was staring hard at Baby Girl.

“Yes,” Alison finally said, choosing not to chastise Flor for overstepping her bounds. “She will die soon.”

Flor nodded. “Then I will pray.”

Alison nodded, finished making her notations in the chart, and moved away from Baby Girl’s isolette as she always did when prayers were being said, figuring that encroaching on a conversation was no less rude for one of the participants being The Almighty. Flor placed her right hand on the plexiglass of the isolette as she began to whisper a prayer. Her left hand she kept on her pregnant belly.

And again the prayer was in Latin.

***

And Baby Girl McKinley lived. Somehow she held on to life until Lakesha awoke after surgery. She lived to receive her name, Rosa. Somehow she held on to life for days, and then weeks. Somehow, Rosa McKinley grew stronger and stronger, until the day Lakesha was able to take her home.

***

Alison had been in the NICU long enough to have seen many improbably recoveries, but never like this. Never so close together, and never to a pair of infants whose lives had been so close to death. Little Rosa defied longer odds than just about any child she could remember, save little Ethan, who hadn’t just defied odds. He’d defied the very definition of what was possible.

Brain tissue doesn’t heal. It just doesn’t. Unless God, or someone else, wills it.

Someone else?

Alison had thoughts about that, which she kept to herself. Two days after it became clear that Little Rosa was rebounding, in a routine shuffling of maintenance personnel Flor was reassigned to Oncology and Radiology. Alison made a mental note to keep her ear to the grapevine. Perhaps there would be a stunning recovery or two in the cancer ward over the next couple of months…but instead, she heard nothing at all from Oncology.

***

Two months. Alison ate, slept, came to work. She went on a few dates that didn’t come to anything. She thought about children: one day having her own, and about her fears that even if she eventually did, she wouldn’t be a good mother.

She thought about God and the babies He saved and the ones He ignored.

Alison worked in a Catholic hospital and every day she struggled with God. But then, didn’t everybody? Even the Chaplains? Every priest or pastor she’d ever heard sooner or later spoke of struggles with faith, although Alison wondered sometimes if that was mere rhetoric for the not-quite-yet-converted. Only one, a Franciscan from her college years named Brother Tony, had an answer that was in any way satisfying: “Faith is hard. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have needed God’s son in the first place. And it was hard for Him, too.”

Alison was thinking of those words one night when, as ever, the NICU phone rang. She answered it, listened, said “Yes, Doctor,” and then gestured to Mary and paged the other nurses and Dr. Garth, the on-call attending.

Two babies, born minutes apart, were on the way up.

***

The cases were eerily similar. Both boys. Seven pounds six ounces versus seven pounds four. Both had been distressed during labor; both likely suffered brain damage due to oxygen deprivation. And in the cruelest of strokes, both mothers suffered uterine injuries that required emergency and complete hysterectomies. Alison had seen cases like these before – they were the worst of the worst – but never two in the same night, at the same time.

Two baby boys on the brink of death, with their mothers forever unable to bear more children. Alison could not remember a night when she and the other nurses had worked harder to keep two children from dying outright. And even then the fight was far from over.

One of the babies was named Matthew. His father was a graphic designer; his mother was a graphic designer. The other baby was named Juan. No one knew anything about his father. His mother was Flor.

***

Somehow both Baby Matthew and Baby Juan survived long enough for their mothers to get out of bed and come upstairs from recovery to see them. By this time, Baby Matthew’s body was beginning to shut down as he crossed the ever-shifting, but never vanishing, boundary between medical ability and inevitable death. Matthew’s parents came up at last, in what would certainly be the last time they saw him. His mother held him for as long as she could manage it, and they stood by as Father Duffy administered the Last Rites. Standing nearby, watching the monitors the whole time, Alison brushed tears from her cheeks. It took a special blend of love and strength to be a NICU nurse, but even so, she never got used to the cases where the parents said Hello and Goodbye to their children in the same moment.

Some time later, while Baby Matthew waited in his mother’s arms to die, Flor arrived to see Baby Juan. Against all odds, he was actually healing. Alison stood across the isolette from Flor, and both looked down upon little Juan, whose tiny chest moved in gentle rhythm with ever-strengthening breath.

“He is strong,” Alison said. Flor made no reply. She only reached down and caressed her son’s face, wept, and after a time, looked across the room to where Baby Matthew was living the last of his hours.

“That one will die,” she said.

“I can’t discuss other patients,” Alison said. Flor met her eye and held her gaze, and Alison relented. “Yes,” she finally said. “He will die.”

Flor nodded, and looked back down at little Juan.

“You haven’t asked about his father,” she said. “Thank you for that.”

“It’s not my place, no matter whether I know you or not.”

Flor nodded as she continued stroking Baby Juan’s cheek. “Doctor Flynn says that he will be mildly disabled, but he should be able to have a good life.”

“You’ve been blessed,” Alison said.

“Blessed,” Flor echoed. “Truly, I have been blessed.” Again she looked over at Baby Matthew and his weeping mother.

They passed the next three minutes and fifteen seconds in silence as Flor touched her son, imprinting upon her memory the feel of his warming skin. Alison updated the charts.

It on that sixteenth second that Baby Matthew began to crash for the final time.

Alison hit the alarm button. “You need to leave now,” she said to Flor. Mary and two other nurses were already rushing in, and Dr. Flynn was right behind.

Flor leaned down over little Juan, her eyes full of tears. She rubbed her cheek against his. “Be well, little one,” she said. “I will see you again.” She closed her eyes and whispered something else, in Latin. And then, without being watched by Alison or anyone else in the room, Flor slipped out into the hallway, and from there out of the NICU entirely.

For Alison, the moments when a baby’s life was either about to end or not were always the quickest and slowest moments of all. Everything seemed to both slow down and go by so fast.

They laid Matthew in his crib. They brought out the defibrillator. They charged, and they shocked him when his heart stopped. His parents had wanted this. They had ordered the doctors to fight for every minute Matthew could possibly have. His mother stood to one side, clutching his blanket in her fingers, sobbing. He couldn’t die in her arms. Not yet.

And he didn’t.

After the second shock with the defibrillator, his rhythm returned. His oxygen levels rebounded. His color pinked up. For a few brief seconds, he opened his eyes and when he opened his mouth, he cried for the first time in his short life. In that moment, Baby Matthew’s recovery began.

And in that same moment, little Baby Juan died.

***

When Alison tried calling Flor at the number the hospital had on record for her, there was no answer, and no machine picked up, either. She tried calling Flor many times over the next few days, to the same result, until finally instead of unanswered ringing, she received the standard recorded voice telling her that the number dialed had been disconnected. Her final paychecks went uncollected, and mail to her home was returned. No one from Our Lady of Eternal Hope ever saw Flor again.

Little Juan’s body would have been dealt with in the way that all anonymous dead were dealt with, but Alison used some of her savings to pay for the cremation. Realizing that she knew absolutely nothing about Flor and thus had no idea as to what Flor would want done with the ashes, Alison had a tiny portion of them placed in a necklace for her to wear, and then on a warm spring day she scattered the rest of them into the waters of Lake Michigan.

Baby Matthew’s recovery was the last of the three miracle recoveries in six months that took place at the Our Lady NICU. Things returned to “normal”: some babies lived, others died. But the three – Ethan, Rosa, and Matthew – were the subject of much study and discussion. Some hypotheses made mention in the New England Journal of Medicine, while in other circles, different hypotheses took root. Father Duffy speculated occasionally that their recoveries were miracles performed by Father Tobias Mollander, a legendary local priest who’d been mentioned by the New Mowbray faithful for Sainthood. An emissary from the Vatican came to discuss the cases. That made the New Mowbray Times – but no one ever mentioned Flor or Baby Juan. Alison didn’t, either, although she couldn’t exactly say why.

And life went on. Alison got into a serious relationship and eventually got engaged; she also started attending church more often, albeit not every week and not to the point of commitment. She still had questions that the clergy weren’t able to answer to her satisfaction, but she took it as a sign of progress that she was willing to listen to their answers.

On the third anniversary of Baby Juan’s birth, a postcard came to the NICU, addressed to Alison. On the front of the card was a reproduction of some Renaissance painting of the Madonna and child, and on the reverse, the message – written in a female hand – read:

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, no crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

Alison kept that unsigned postcard for the rest of her life. Sometimes she would recite its words as she stood, in the NICU, over the isolette or basinet of a sick child.

Including, ten years later, her own daughter.

Finis

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Concluding a serialized novelette.

Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Old Willem Schliemann watches the sun drop beyond the Argentine hills. “It won’t be long now,” he says to no one at all, and it isn’t. The sky in the west is still violet when suddenly she is there before him. Her clothes are different, of course; fashion has advanced quite a lot in the fifty years since he’s seen her last. But she still looks the same: the gently curling hair, the unnaturally pale skin. In her right hand she holds a leather satchel that Willem has seen before, but not since that night when he last saw her. She does not smile. He wonders if she has ever smiled at all, through all the years since the Nazis came.

“I’ve brought you something,” she says in perfect German. She holds out the satchel, and he takes it. He does not look inside. “Should I call you ‘Father’? You gave me this life.”

“Life?” Willem chuckles at that. “Such as it is. You may call me that, if it pleases you. I always wanted a daughter.”

“Do you have sons?”

“I did, once. Maybe I still do.”

She sits down beside him. He hears something strange about her breath, and he realizes that she only breathes to talk. Do vampires respirate? he wonders, ever the scientist.

“What happened after the camp?” she asks.

“We went to Switzerland,” Willem says. “Doktor Muething’s brother – who controlled the money, being first-born and all that – had been quite the drunkard, which made it easy for the Doktor to steal enough of the family fortune to establish himself in Zurich when we got there. He told me then that he had no further use for me, and that I would be safer away from him in any case. So he paid my passage to Barcelona, and from there I was able to get passage on a steamer to Buenos Aires in exchange for my medical services on the journey. We were boarded twice by Allied patrols, but no one paid any heed to a German boy playing medic. I’ve been here ever since.”

“I know you have,” she says. “Except for your trips abroad. I’ve followed you everywhere. Except Cairo, of course. There is too much sun in Egypt.”

Willem only shrugs.

“I found him there, you know. In Zurich. He died there.”

Willem looks at her.

“Did you kill him?”

She shakes her head. “Heart attack. December 11, 1957. He took up smoking and became quite the drunkard as well after the war, you know. I did talk to him before the end, though. Did you know he was half-Jewish?”

Willem closes his eyes and nods, once. It is painful, even now. He still has that letter, the only one the Doktor ever wrote to him, despite the fact that it is evidence of his status as a war-criminal. “His father had a mistress, a young Jewish girl. She became pregnant at the same time as his mother – his father’s wife. The Jewish girl died in childbirth, and the wife miscarried. So they introduced the illegitimate child as both of theirs, and no one ever knew. Doktor Muething didn’t know until his father told him just before dying.” Willem shakes his head.

“He wanted to save us,” she says. “He believed that perhaps through vampirism the Jews could have power and freedom, which they had never had.”

Willem nods. The Reich is dead, and yet the hatred remains, Wolf Muething wrote in that letter. It will always remain.

“Am I to become one of your victims?” Willem asks.

“No. For something else.” She gestures to the satchel.

Willem opens the satchel and draws out a hammer and a wooden stake, one end of which is honed to a lethal point. He looks up at her.

“No balance lasts forever,” she says with a shrug. She stands and walks a few steps away from him. Her form is silhouetted against the deepening purple of the night sky. “They came for me in the dark of night. They came for us all, took us all away. They took away the world. You gave it back to me. For that I am ever grateful. But it must end.”

“I made you a vampire,” he says. “I gave you only the night.”

“It was the only way,” she replies. “There was no other. You could not give me Life after I was shot. But you could stay Death’s hand, at least for a time. I have walked the world for fifty-four years, and now I am tired. I want no more of night and dark. I want no more of blood, of corpses, of feasting upon death.” She turns to face him as a cool breeze stirs. “We are trapped in the cycle of death that they created. You can give me release. You can end the cycle.”

“That cycle never ends,” Willem says. He looks down at the implements in his hand, the hammer and the stake. Then he rises and walks over to her. She lies down on the ground in front of him, her hands at her side.

“No, I suppose it doesn’t,” she says.

He kneels down beside her and places the tip of the stake on her chest, directly over her heart. The palsy in his hands makes it shake. He lists the hammer, and then he hesitates. Tears form in his eyes, and one rolls down his cheek.

“Please,” she says.

He closes his eyes and is transported back to the night of her creation as clearly as if it were the night before. He and Doktor Muething had fled without the possibility of knowing what had become of their creation. He has known, since that very night of killing and creation, that she would someday come. And he has always been certain of why she would come, but this isn’t the reason. Not this. Never this.

“Our Father,” Willem says. “Our Father….who art….Our Father who art….” He searches for the words but they do not come. He wonders if Uncle Gunther would approve. He wonders what Uncle Gunther would say, what he could possibly say.

“Sometimes, Willem, all we can do is end the pain.”

And there, as he has done so often in his misbegotten life, Willem Schliemann finds the answer he needs in the words of his uncle. He lifts the hammer again and brings it down with all his strength. The stake drives through skin and bone, impaling the undead heart beneath. Blood, living and dead, erupts from the wound, gushing out in an impossible amount. She screams in agony and release, and when her scream ends her body ages again at last, accumulating fifty-four years in mere seconds. And then she is gone.

An hour passes as the sky darkens and Willem makes the preparations, and then he stands before the pyre as the flames consume his vampire. The words he recites are unheard by anyone, and yet he recites them just as he has practiced them for years. After all, the words are not for the living. They are for God.

A new century dawns as a Nazi says Kaddish for a Jew whose name he has never known.

Finis

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Continuing a serialized novelette.

Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

“Doktor Muething,” Willem said. His skin tingled; he felt cold all over. “You missed a variable.”

“What?” Doktor Muething said, in the listless tone of someone not really listening.

“Listen to me!” Willem grabbed the Doktor’s arm. “Uncle Gunther wrote that vampirism is balance. Life and death together. But there are other opposites that can be in balance, aren’t there? You never switched the vials!”

Doktor Muething stared at Willem, and then at the dead girl on the ground. Finally the light of realization formed in his eyes as well. “I only injected the men with blood from the male vampire….”

“And the women with that of the woman vampire! But the most reliable accounts in all your research are those of male vampires turning women, and woman vampires turning men. Vampirism isn’t just a balance of life and death; it is a balance of male and female.”

The Doktor glanced at the young woman’s body, and then turned back to Willem. “Get a syringe,” he said.

Willem sprang away and into the laboratory, where he quickly found a syringe and filled it with the very last of the blood from the male vampire. Then he ran back outside, to where Doktor Muething knelt beside the young woman’s body. Sirens and klaxons began to blare.

“Air raid,” the Doktor said. “Perhaps being out here isn’t the best idea.” There were explosions in the distance, but they were still much nearer than they had been in recent days. The Allies were coming. The Doktor lifted the woman’s arm and tapped it, looking for a vein. “And these are hardly the correct conditions…Here, I have a vein.”

Willem slid the needle in and depressed the plunger, sending male vampire blood into the young woman’s body. The Doktor then kneeled over her and began chest compressions.

“Masculine and feminine,” the Doktor said, shaking his head. “I must be blind.” He continued the compressions, forcing the vampire blood through the woman’s body.

“Get out of the street!” a soldier shouted from the sidecar of a motorcycle that rumbled past. Willem and the Doktor ignored him, for the transformation had begun.

It was less violent than the previous two. The dead woman began to slowly writhe and moan. Her flesh filled in and took on an appearance of health. The gaping wound in her back healed as though it had never been there at all. Her hair, roughly shorn by the impersonal barbers of the Reich, became long again and more lustrous. Then her eyes opened. They glowed with a pale, green light. Willem and Doktor Muething moved back as the woman climbed to her feet. She was unsteady in her stance, and her eyes flicked around nervously.

“My God, it is so beautiful.” There were tears in the Doktor’s eyes.

“What do we do now?”

“She is weak. She will need nourishment.”

Willem looked down at the woman. The look in her eyes was most definitely hunger, the same look he hadn’t been able to recognize in their previous failed experiment. How could he have missed it, surrounded as he was by hunger on a daily basis? The woman stared imploringly at Willem and Doktor Muething, but she would not come more than a few paces closer. Willem remembered the Crucifix around his neck. If not for that….

“MUETHING!”

It was Commandant Reger, who was approaching from the Officers’ Quarters with two guards in tow. His uniform was muddy and his hair was unwashed; he had obviously not been to bed in some time. Willem recognized the two guards; these two men – boys, really – had stood attention beside him on his first day in the camp.

“What is it, Commandant?” the Doktor asked pleasantly.

“You know damned well that the Allies will be here tomorrow,” Reger snapped. “It is time for you to leave – who the hell is this?” He gestured to the young woman, who was staring up at him with wide eyes. “Herr Doktor, is this prisoner troubling you? And what is a prisoner doing here anyway? I ordered them gathered and taken to…no matter, I will deal with her myself.” He unsnapped his holster and drew his Luger pistol.

“She is no trouble at all, Herr Commandant,” Doktor Muething said as he stepped forward and grabbed Reger’s arm. “Do not shoot her.”

“Get back, fool. I should shoot you as a Jew-lover.” He shoved Doktor Muething aside and raised his pistol – but then the woman was on him. His pistol dropped to the ground as he grabbed her wrists. She bared her teeth and panted horribly as she grasped at him with white fingers. Her strength was as unnatural as her new life, and it was all the Commandant could do to keep her at bay. Her eyes glowed brighter, and it swiftly became apparent that she was too strong for him. She forced the Commandant down to his knees, and terror filled his eyes.

“Shoot her, you idiots!” he screamed, and the two boy-guards awkwardly whipped their rifles around to shoot the woman. After a few seconds of handling their guns as though they were live snakes, both boy-guards fired. One rifle shot tore into the woman’s leg; the other bullet grazed the Commandant’s forehead. The woman barely noticed the wound, which healed over almost immediately. Blood streamed down the Commandant’s forehead.

“Relax, Herr Commandant,” Doktor Muething said as he stepped in close behind Reger and laid a hand on his shoulder. “She cannot harm you when I am this near to her.” As if on cue the woman shrank away, repelled by the crucifix around the Doktor’s neck.

“What have you done here, Muething?” Commandant Reger wiped blood out of his eyes with the back of his hand, and then he stared at the woman.

“I think you know,” Doktor Muething said.

“It’s not possible,” Reger said. “They don’t exist. You’re a fool and you’ve wasted your time on a fool’s task.” The woman panted even louder, and the Commandant lost his temper. To his guards he shouted, “Would you two PLEASE KILL HER!”

Willem shook his head silently. These boys had never once seen death this close. Willem had seen enough for a lifetime. They raised their rifles….

“Don’t,” Doktor Muething said. In his hand was the Commandant’s dropped Luger pistol, and his hand was steady as he leveled it at the two boy-guards. “I assure you, my young friends, I have no desire to kill the youth of the Fatherland – but I will do just that if you don’t put those guns down and get away from here.” And then he raised his other hand in a fist and brought it down, hard, on the base of the Commandant’s skull. Reger flattened to the ground, moaning. “Go, boys,” the Doktor said. “You do not want to see what is going to happen next.”

Willem glanced at the two boy-guards who stood beside him now, just as they had two months before. He remembered their names at last: Georg on his right, Herbert on his left. The young woman stared at them, eyes gleaming, as they nervously pointed their rifles at her. Willem took a quiet step back, and then two or three steps away. The woman crept closer to the two boys, and they dropped their rifles at the same moment and ran. The woman rose to follow them, but Doktor Muething called out to her.
“Don’t go, my dear. I have what you need.”

She turned back to Doktor Muething, who had tied the Commandant’s arms behind his back with the Commandant’s own belt.

“Muething,” Reger mumbled. “What are you doing?”

“She needs sustenance,” the Doktor said. There was a strange look in his eyes. The Commandant began to struggle, but Doktor Muething appeared to have far greater physical strength than Willem had ever given him credit for.

“No!” The Commandant’s eyes were wide and he kicked and squirmed to no avail. He could not get away. Willem’s flesh went to ice.

“Come, my dear!” Doktor Muething’s voice was calm, malevolent. “Your first meal awaits you.” He stuffed the Luger pistol into his belt and lifted the Commandant to his knees. Willem’s eyes were wide as he looked on. He saw the Commandant’s pants become wet inside the legs.

“Muething, no!” Reger’s voice, always so arrogant, now sounded of nothing but childlike terror. “You can’t do this to one of your own!”

Doktor Muething laughed at that. He actually laughed, a deep-throated laugh from the depths of his belly that was still harsh and without the slightest hint of mirth. “One of my own, Reger?” He stopped laughing suddenly, and his eyes glistened as he leaned forward and said through clenched teeth: “She is one of my own.” And with that, he shoved the Commandant forward. The Commandant landed with a thud on the ground just two or three paces from the woman. She looked up at the Doktor, who nodded once and then took four steps back. The woman sprang then, and Commandant Reger could do nothing but scream as she took him in her arms, pushed his head back, and sank her teeth into his waiting neck. His shrieks only blended in with the blaring klaxons, the air-raid sirens, the distant exploding bombs, the reports of gunfire from the newly-consecrated execution fields. Reger’s screams as he perished at the hands of a vampire were just one more voice in a fugue of death.

The Doktor turned away from the woman who fed on the Commandant and grabbed Willem by the elbow. “Come, young Schliemann. We will not be welcome here with either our own or with the Allies.”

Willem obediently followed the Doktor, finally managing to tear his gaze from the vampire they had created. “Switzerland?”

“The only remaining haven in Europe for men such as I,” the Doktor said. “How fortunate that I was assigned to the camp nearest the Swiss border, don’t you think? My mother’s diamonds were able to buy me that much.” A knowing smile played at the edge of his lips, and Willem understood.

“We murdered one of our countrymen,” Willem said.

“As I said before, he wasn’t entirely my countryman. As for yourself, I am sure the feelings of guilt will fade in time.”

Instead of going inside the officer’s quarters, Doktor Muething led Willem around the building to a low maintenance shed. There, under a tarpaulin, was a fully-fueled motorcycle complete with sidecar and two packed rucksacks.

“So my worldly belongings are in the end reducible to one of these bags,” the Doktor said. “Oh well. I shall start anew. It seems a good time for it, at any rate.” He pulled on a leather jacket and a helmet, and gestured for Willem to do the same. “You drive.”

Willem climbed onto the cycle, and the Doktor boarded the sidecar. Willem looked at the Doktor for a moment, and then he shrugged. “Reger was a pig,” Willem said. “The Allies would have executed him anyway.”

Doktor Muething gave Willem a squeeze of the shoulder. “Drive, Willem.” he said. “You are not so young anymore, I think.”

Willem kicked the motorcycle to life and drove off. They went unchallenged through the camp gates; there was a lot of coming and going these days. Willem knew the roads around here very well, and soon they were headed south. He took the smallest roads, the ones that wound up into the mountains and through tiny villages where he had come with his uncle to heal the sick. Eventually they came to the border, where a single guard merely nodded and opened the single wooden barrier across the road.

Anonymous-looking Germans heading to Switzerland were common enough, it seemed. Willem and the Doktor rode through the gate, out of Germany. Neither would ever return.

To be concluded….

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