Tag: Fiction

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“The City of Dead Works” (a repost)

I guess this is as close to a tradition on this blog as I have: I re-post this story every year on this date. I wrote it within months of the original event.

“The City of Dead Works”

There is never any rest for me, the Ferryman of the Dead.

I pole my barge across the black waters and up to the pier. So many wait this time, many more than usual. I wonder what has happened, what event has sent me this many. “Come aboard,” I say. “I will take your coin for passage.” One by one they file past me, each handing to me the coin that they never knew they had. It is the coin which determines where they shall be taken to rest, its metal shaped and determined by life. The coins of these dead are gold, every one of them purest gold. Six thousand come aboard my barge, and each has passage for the farthest and greatest of destinations. In that moment I know that something truly dark has happened; the gold coins are always forged in moments of darkness. I am the Ferryman. I can give them no answers to what lies behind their haunted, questioning eyes. I can only take them on this, the last of all journeys.

When they are all aboard I take up the pole and push away from the pier. The barge always feels the same, no matter how many stand upon its decks. Whether six or six thousand, it is all the same to me. I guide us out onto the River Styx. Some of the people look worried, but there is no need for fear. This river can do them no harm. They are already dead.

This is to be a long journey, I know – it always is, to this destination. As I guide the barge through the black waters, I look on the faces of those who have come to me. As different as these people all look, they all have the same expressions of shock, disbelief, and withering sadness. Here is a man of business, talking into a cell phone. He is trying to call someone, anyone, who will tell him that it’s all a dream, that it didn’t happen, that he didn’t die in a blast of fire, smoke, glass and steel. There is a mother who is explaining to her daughter that they won’t be going to Disneyland after all. And there, a group of firemen stand together, realizing that soon they will meet all their brothers-in-arms who have gone into the infernos before them. So many now – colleagues once in business and now colleagues in death, people who have never before met but now have the gravest thing in common. As the current takes hold, I look back at the pier. There are more gathering there. There are always more. They will wait. Time does not exist for the dead.

“Please,” a young man says as he turns to me, “I have to go home to my daughters.”

“You are going home now,” I reply. “To the home where all eventually return.” Two black rocks slide past on either side, the rocks that mark the passage of the circling Styx.

“This can’t be,” a woman cries out. “My mother needs me.”

“She will be with you soon enough.”

“When?” Her voice pleads, and yet there is no solace that is mine to give.

“I cannot say,” I reply. “The Ferryman has no hand in Fate.”

The tears come then, tears from the six thousand that run over the gunwales and into the river which has been fed by tears for centuries. All tears are born in the River Styx.

“Where will you take us?” someone asks.

“To the place you are promised,” I answer. I recall the words of a poet: Will there be beds for all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.

One our left we approach the Hills of the Damned, an endless stretch of shattered lands which reach away into the blackness. The waters echo with the cries of all those who have been taken to the Hills for the agony they have brought on the living. I consider the bag of six thousand gold coins, and I realize that I will have to journey to the Hills this day. There will be a person, perhaps more, who will pay me with a coin of black tin; but not on this journey. As the hills recede behind us, the unending cries of the damned become fainter and fainter until they are drowned out by the lapping of the waters upon the sides of the boat and the marker stones that we pass. The six thousand fall silent, each realizing that it is not a dream. I would offer solace, but as ever I cannot. I am the Ferryman.

We come around a particularly dark bend, and before us lies a very wide expanse of water, as if the Styx has become an ocean – which in some sense it probably has. And beyond that expanse are the thousands of twinkling lights that I have come to know so well. One man, a fireman, sees them too. “What is that?” he asks.

“It is the City of Dead Works,” I reply. The lights of the city glow on the horizon, and every one of the six thousand turns toward them as the Styx impels us onward. As we come ever closer to the city, the glittering lights reflect off the black water.

“I don’t understand,” someone else says. “The City of Dead Works?”

“Aye,” I reply. “Behold!”

From behind us, golden light: the Sun of the Dead is rising as it always does when the dead come near the City. Above us the firmament is turning purple, then blue; soon the light of the Sun will illuminate the City of Dead Works. As the sky lightens, the true scope of that city becomes plain: it stretches away into the land, farther than any eye could see. Not even the highest-soaring raven, cavorting in the breezes and zephyrs of the dead, could take it all in. It is bigger by far than any one city ever built by the hand of men, because it encompasses some part of all of them. Perhaps it is bigger than all of the cities ever built. Now the sun’s first rays come up behind us, and the first buildings can be seen down by the water.

“That one looks Egyptian,” a woman says.

“The Great Library of Alexandria,” I tell her. “Once the greatest repository of learning the world had ever seen, now only a memory to the living and a reality only to the dead.”

A man points to a building high upon a rock. I nod.

“The Temple of Solomon,” I say.

“There are ships in the harbor,” says another. Thus for him I name the ships: Arizona, Indianapolis, Lusitania, Bismarck, Wilhelm Gustloff, Cap Arcona. And many, many others. I scan over the impossibly vast city and spot Dresden, as it was; and beside it the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And how many smaller villages, tucked into the hills beyond the City? None can say. The Sun of the Dead shines upon those hills now, and the great stone statues in the likeness of Siddhartha Gautama.

“I don’t understand,” a young man says. “Why this City? Why here?”

I only shake my head as we continue to float by the City. I do not point out the fairly small, nondescript office building that sits near the water. It is not a particularly remarkable building; nor was it, really, until the fuse was lit. The six thousand almost don’t recognize it.

Almost.

Not one word is uttered as we slide past the Alfred Murrah Federal Building. Then we turn away from the City of Dead Works, and head again down the waters of the Styx toward distant hills and the place where these people will join their brethren.

“Who lives in that city?” It is a priest in a fireman’s coat.

“No one lives there,” I tell him. “The City of Dead Works is not for people. It is for the buildings and the ships. It is for the books and the music, the sculptures and the paintings which are gone forever. It is for everything destroyed by craven people in the name of foolish wars, for everything judged forfeit in the face of transitory desires.”

The Styx takes us into the Golden Hills. Soon we will be there, and the six thousand will go where they belong. And then the Styx will complete its circle, taking me back to the pier where more dead await.

“We will be there soon,” I say. “Soon we will be at the Elysian Fields, where all heroes go – for that is what you all are. It is what you have bought with your lives, with the shaping of your coins into gold.” No one replies. We near the last bend now, and before us lie the Elysian Fields, where peace reigns and where heroes dwell; where all is light and voices are always raised in song. The Sun of the Dead shines warmly on Elysium.

But they do not see it. They, the six thousand, all gaze back behind us upon the City of Dead Works. It will soon be behind us forever as we round the last bend of the River Styx into Elysium. I know they all need one last look upon that City, and I do not grudge them that. For myself, I do not look back; the eyes of the Ferryman are ever forward. But I know. I know that the City of Dead Works is different now. I know that it has changed. I know that the people who come with me now to Elysium, the dead around me, look back on the two soaring towers of steel that now rise above the City where there had been no towers before.

I know these things.

I am the Ferryman of the Dead.

Finis.

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Letter to a Mother, Gone to Sea


Today is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, a holiday decreed by fantasy author Jo Walton in response to Howard Hendrix, a guy who views people who put their written work online as equivalent to union scabs, or something like that. I, of course, have been putting fiction of mine online for quite a while now; see the links in the sidebar (under “Notable Dispatches”) and, of course, Book One of The Promised King.

Here is a story I wrote a couple of years ago, submitted once, and then forgot about after I stamped all over the rejection slip and cursed the editor who passed on it and vowed eternal vengeance upon him and his children. (Well, not really. But I was disappointed; I rather like the tale.) If you’re a newer reader who hasn’t read any of my fiction, I hope you like it and peruse some of my other stuff.

***

“Letter to a Mother, Gone to Sea”

Dearest Mother,

Father is gone now, and I can finally come down to the Sea. The Sisters do not know that I have come here. I know that I will have to say extra penance for taking leave, but I had to come down and offer this message to the Sea. It may never reach you, and even if it does, I may never hear your reply. I know that has to be the way of it. You are from the Sea, and Father was from the Land, and there are laws governing such unions. We don’t speak of those laws, we who now serve the One God. But some of us remember them.

I have never told anyone the truth of my birth, of what my mother truly was. Anyone I told, like Father, would wonder if I belong to the Sea, or to the Land, or perhaps both. Maybe that’s the real reason I wrote this letter, and why I have braved the anger of the Sisters to come down and give this message to the receding tide. I wonder myself which is the greater part of my soul, the Water or the Earth.

My last memory of you is probably the last memory you have of me: on the morning I turned nine, you came to the side of my bed, and you kissed me and cried one tear. Then Father carried you down to the Sea, and I never saw you again. The next day Father and I left our little home by the Sea and went to the Mountains. When I asked, he would only tell me that you were gone to your true home. I saw that the question hurt him, and for that reason I didn’t ask him again. But I long wondered why your true home was not with him or with me. Part of me still wonders that.

I watched the Sea disappear behind our wagon, a little bit at a time as the hills surrounded us, until the last bit of blue water vanished behind one more hill. The moment when I will give this message to the water will be the first time in all the days since then that I have laid my gaze upon the Sea. There are times, however, when I keep vigil in the tower chapel and the wind shifts from the north and the west, and I catch the tiniest whisper of salt on the air, and I think of you. I don’t know if any of the Sisters realize if that bit of salt on the air is even there.

Father, it turned out, had cousins up in the high country, kinsmen of whom I had never known until we arrived there. He paid what little gold he had for a tiny parcel of land, and he pledged to them the fruits of his labor for the first two years in exchange for three cattle. Father knew cattle.

The days became routine very quickly, even in the colder months. There was work, always work, and there was prayer. And we read from Father’s books. He only had the eight books to read from, but how we read from them, both of us, by the light of the candles. After three years of such work, when I was twelve, Father and I went to sell our best cattle at market, and he bought two new books. Those books, perhaps even moreso than the provisions we bought, sustained us through a very cold winter. I like to think that you and he read those books together.

But even when we read the books, Father would become very sad whenever the words would speak of the Sea.

I didn’t ask him about the Sea until I turned thirteen. It was the only time he ever became truly angry. He forbade me to ever mention the Sea again, and he made me vow to never journey to the Sea until after he was dead. I feared at first that he might actually strike me, but he didn’t. He never raised a hand to me in the years we had together. I think he was always afraid to show anger toward me, and now I know why: he was afraid that I would leave him and follow you to the Sea. Even though he took me up into the Mountains, he always knew that my way would be clear, if I needed it to be. I would merely need to follow the streams and the rivers down to the Sea. Down to you.

What else of our life up there? Sometimes we gathered with other clans. The stories that we told around their fires were tales of magic, of beasts living in the mists, of mountain hollows where thieves and brigands and outlaws lived. Father knew so many tales. Is that one reason you loved him?

And one time a King’s Man actually came riding up our road. How handsome he was in his finery! But he had come only to give us news that the old King had died, and his son had been crowned the new King. Tidings came slowly to us. Wars were over before we ever learned they had begun.

Our only other connection with an outside world was through the Brothers in the Monastery and the Sisters in their Convent. Father never really trusted them, but how I loved the music that echoed through their halls, music that had been brought here from a place called Rome, on the other side of the world, and that hadn’t been changed in something like a thousand years. In that way their music is much like the song of the Highland folk. Do you have music in your world, out there beneath the waves?

Father first became sick two winters ago, and he was never truly strong again. I think he knew from the first night of coughing that he was going to die, but he never let me see the fear in his eyes or hear the sadness in his voice. That is, he didn’t think I saw those things. But I did. He tried to hide it from me, but I always saw the pain in his body and in his heart. Sometimes he would spend a long while just gazing off into the distance. I know now that he was really looking down the Mountains, down toward the Sea.

Father became weaker and weaker as the days and months went on. He called it “the Fever”, but I think he started getting truly sick when he took you back to the Sea. I could see that Father was wasting away, and I finally knew that he was never going to get stronger when he sat down beside my bed one night and, before blowing out the candle, spoke to me of you.

I think that we both wanted to speak of you many times before that, and maybe if we had, Father’s heart might have been stronger when the Fever came, and maybe I would have found my place between the Waters and the Earth. But I was afraid that speaking of you would cause Father too much pain, and he was afraid that speaking of you would kindle in me an unquenchable yearning for the Sea. And thus he would lose me, as he lost you.

He told me how on a stormier day than the other fishermen would brave, he took his nets to sea anyway, and how he was caught in a terrible squall within sight of land. He told me how his boat sank from beneath him, and how when he himself was swamped by the waves, you came to him. He told me of the strength he felt in your arms and in your tail as you propelled him forward, toward the shore; he told me that fighting the seas and the tides and the waves and the winds nearly killed you. When he pulled himself up onto the shore at last, and took air into his lungs again, he found you beside him, near death. And though he had been told throughout his childhood that mermaids are dangerous creatures – “To care for a mermaid is to lose your heart to her forever,” the fishermen say – he brought you to his cottage and to his hearth, where he brought you back to health.

He told me how you soon took the form of a human woman and exacted that fabled price from him: you laid claim to his heart. But what the legends didn’t reveal was that a man could lay claim to the heart of a mermaid in equal measure, and that you thus became his wife, and that you bore him a child…a daughter. Me.

Father began to weep when he told how you became weaker and weaker with each passing winter that you spent on the land, within sight of the Sea but never returning to it, and he told me how he finally realized that you would have to return to the waters if you were to live. Thus he sacrificed a life with his love that she might live, though it meant that he could never see her again. Even so, the memory was too painful for him at first, and that was why he brought me to the Mountains. That, and the fear that I would be more mermaid than maiden and that I would follow you into whatever realm lies beneath the waves.

It never occurred to me, until after Father told me all this, how it must have hurt you as well. If you had decided to stay, you would have died. If you had decided to stay, you and Father would have no more been together than if you left. I suppose that Father’s choice was between you living and you dying, but to still be with you was forbidden. That is the true law of unions between man and mermaid.

Father died on the first day of Spring, as we reckoned it up there in a place where the snow still falls and ice still forms on the pools in the streams in the heights of summer. The Sisters came to us in his final hours, that he might not die unshriven, and they took me in after they buried him in the yard within their walls. They gave me sanctuary, and have asked me to become one of them. I have not yet decided. I am not certain if that is my way, or even if I shall return. I do not know what I shall feel, when I stand once more at the side of the Sea.

Father knew that I would come to the Sea, though, for his last words to me told me something that you had told him. “If you wish to speak to the mermaids,” he said, “you can only wait until one of them comes unbidden to you. But it is also said that the mermaids read the messages that are written by those true at heart, who then seal their words within a bottle and throw the bottle into the Sea. Do that, sweet Daughter. She will find your message, so long as you are true at heart.”

Father’s words are all I have now, Mother. I do not know if I am true at heart, but I hope that I am and that these words find their way to you. But you are just one mermaid, and I am just one girl, and the Sea is so very wide.

I hope that when I stand beside the waters, I realize my place. Perhaps it is beneath the waves with you, or perhaps it is amongst the hills of the Highlands. Soon I shall know. I set out for the Sea as soon as I write these last words. Perhaps you will be there, waiting for me. Perhaps.

Your Daughter

(This is the text of a letter found inside a corked bottle on a beach near Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1957. Scientific analysis suggests that the paper on which the letter is written is over two hundred years old. It has been hypothesized that the two spots of water damage on the paper are tearmarks, but residue in one of the spots suggests that this spot may not be the tear of a human.)

~Finis~

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“Elizabeth and Andrew” (a story)

I wrote this story four or five years ago. It was rejected by each market to which I sent it, probably because I now think it meanders too much — “Get to the damn point”, the writer-I-am keeps yelling at the writer-I-was — but I still like the central mystery here. I actually hadn’t thought about it until I wrote this post earlier this month, about the card I found in an old book I bought at the local library book sale. The tale is long, but I hope you’ll enjoy it all the same.

Elizabeth and Andrew

“Christian, I just don’t think you’re into this relationship.”

The words hung there in the air as Christian Andrews spooned sugar into his coffee. I’m being dumped, he thought. At least I can come up with a witty remark.

“Uh…what?” Yeah, that’s it.

“You haven’t been happy. You think that I’m stifling you. You spend time with me in the room, but not with me.” She looked down at her Italian soda. The bubbles seemed to be popping in slow motion. “And I know you think it’s partly my fault that your work isn’t going well these days.”

“Ange, that’s ridiculous.”

“Really? Do you think I don’t notice the looks you give me when your paintings aren’t turning out the way you envisioned? Do you think I don’t realize that your work used to be so good, and now you hate everything you do? I’m sorry, Christian. I wanted to be with you. But the truth is, you don’t want to be with me.” She drained her soda. “I’ll get my stuff tomorrow while you’re setting up for the show. I’ll leave a check for half the rent, and the key.” She got up and kissed him on the forehead. “Find your heart, Christian. You can’t give it if you don’t have it to begin with.”

Then she was gone. Christian just sat there. He knew that guys who have just been dumped out of the blue always have the same expression on their faces that he had just then. He knew it, and he didn’t give a shit.

***

He woke up the next morning on his couch, his hand still clutching a paint brush. His palette had ended up face down on his pants, the paint dripping down onto the floor. Luckily he kept plastic wrap on the floor and didn’t care about that pair of pants. He glanced at the canvas and saw a hideous montage of red, yellow, and green streaks. Wow, I’m glad I don’t remember painting that.

It was then that Christian realized how much his head hurt and how dry his mouth was, and how lousy he felt in general. Pain shot through his stiff joints and his angry muscles as he pushed himself to his feet. As he turned he kicked the empty bottle of rum, which had been full when he’d started painting. Well, that explained things, especially since he rarely drank.

Christian was staggering toward the bathroom when the phone rang. He normally loved that phone, with its pseudo-antique look and its real brass bells and none of that wireless shit; but its ringing sounded just now like giant church bells up close. Moving as fast as he could — which was pathetically slow — he crossed the apartment to answer it, each ring creating all new waves of pain.

“Hello?” His voice was a raspy mumble.

“Christian, where the hell are you? Are you trying to kill me?” Davis Flannigan, owner of The Fourth Muse Art Gallery, was frantic. Christian had a show there scheduled for that night. Oh, shit. He frantically looked at the clock. Oh, shit. It was after noon already. He gurgled a response, but Davis wasn’t even listening. “Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to run a show without the artist? Are you trying to kill me? You watch the way I eat and you think that you’ll drive me to a heart attack or something?” He went on like that for a few minutes, allowing Christian to grab some clothes from his closet and pull them on. Hangover means earth tones. “You’d better be here in twenty minutes, Christian, or so help me–“

“Davis, Angela dumped me last night.”

Two seconds of merciful silence. “Sorry, Christian. She was pretty, nice, and rich. Twenty minutes or I go nuts with a squirt gun full of bleach and turpentine.”

“I’m not sure you’d want to mix those.”

“Try me!” Click. Christian hung up and headed for the bathroom to see to his hair and breath.

***

He got there in eighteen minutes and walked in to find Davis steering a wealthy patron around. A very wealthy patron.

“Christian!” Davis beamed, the anger of the phone call nowhere in evidence. “Meet Mrs. Charlotte Morgan.”

Christian swallowed. Mrs. Charlotte Morgan was the wife of Michael Morgan, the city’s wealthiest citizen and foremost patron of the arts. She could make or break any artist’s career with a few carefully chosen words whispered in carefully chosen ears. Christian was meeting her unprepared, without showering and nursing a hangover. Angela couldn’t have waited one damn night.

“I was just showing Mrs. Morgan your latest efforts,” Davis said. Christian winced. He knew what his work had been like lately. This was going to be a long day. Mrs. Morgan had bought one of Christian’s earlier works, but today she pronounced his current output as “barely adequate to hang in the concourse of the new bus terminal”. Of course, she made this pronouncement when the city’s other three richest collectors were in earshot. Davis tried to contain the damage by steering her toward some other artist’s work while Christian decompressed. After the show ended, he gathered his paintings and left. None had sold, and Christian shuddered to think about what would be said about him tomorrow in the art community. The worst part, of course, was that Mrs. Morgan was exactly right: his work lately was amateurish, with none of the spark that had made him an artist to watch just a year before. He prayed that his current malaise was merely a passing phase, but deep in his heart he was petrified that it was not. He realized that without Angela to pay half the rent and most of the expenses, and with his work regressing, he might very well have to return to gainful employment.

***

There was something strange about the apartment when he returned there, and it actually took him a minute to realize that it was the disappearance of Angela’s belongings. Her rent check and key were on the desk by the window. Christian looked at the check. It was twice her usual share; he could live there a whole month on that. He put a canvas on the easel and began a new painting. Wherever his touch had gone, he would have to find it again quickly.

He didn’t find it that day. Everything Christian painted looked horrible; his abstracts were banal, his landscapes two-dimensional and dull, and he didn’t even dare attempt any type of portrait. To make matters worse, his mind kept returning to Angela. Damn her! What does she know, anyway? She was the one who broke it off, what does she know about commitment? Damn her anyway! There must be another man, someone else who’s more sane than this artist-freak. It’s probably some financial whiz who wears blue suits and votes Republican. Damn her, damn it all, DAMN THIS PAINTING!!!

He hurled paint at the canvas, but the splotting sounds brought little if any satisfaction. He threw bigger and bigger gobs of paint, then he threw the brush itself, and his palette, and finally he lashed out with his foot, kicking the easel over with a loud crash. The canvas fell off the mounting and slid onto the floor, and the wet paint began to run in slow streaks of green and yellow and red.

Christian surveyed the scene, and the post-tantrum feeling of stupidity set in almost immediately. He had made a sizable mess and maybe even broken his easel, which he could not afford to replace at this moment. Finally cursing himself instead of Angela and the world he headed for the bathroom to wash his hands and get some towels. He stopped when he entered the bathroom. There was a book that he had never seen before on the back of the toilet.

It was a library book: The Fall of Rome, by Ian Edmonds. It must have been Angela’s; she was always reading stuff like that. He felt another spasm of anger as he realized that he was now stuck with returning this book to the Owen County Public Library; either that or taking it to Angela, whom he certainly had no wish to see just then. He opened the book and flipped through its pages. As he did so something fell to the floor: a small, square envelope made of thick cream-colored paper.

Finding things in library books was hardly unusual, even for someone who read so sporadically as Christian did. He found all kinds of pieces of paper stuck in library books: grocery lists, research note cards, bookmarks, those little slips of paper the library provided for the jotting down of call numbers. But he had never found a sealed envelope, much less a nice one like this. He gave in to curiosity and opened the envelope. Inside was a folded piece of paper: thick, quality paper, matching the paper of the envelope. Unfolding it, he saw that it was a letter, written in a feminine cursive hand using purple ink.

***

To Whomever finds this letter,

I placed this letter here in hope that it might be found by a caring soul, a person whose heart is warm and not worn down by life. I know that it may not be found for many years, or perhaps it will be found next week. I am writing this on the last day of my life in the hope that perhaps in finding it you, Dear Reader, will join me on a journey that may end well for both of us.

I know that this sounds very strange, but I hope that you will allow me this indulgence. It is, after all, the only thing I have left to offer: guidance for a soul who may need it. So, Dear Reader, I ask you to do this: find the phonograph recording, belonging to the Owen County Public Library, of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, played by Andrew Dorian and the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Marx. Find this recording and listen to it.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Hannon

***

Christian read and reread the letter. The reference to “the last day of my life” gave him pause. Was this some kind of suicide note? Had this Elizabeth Hannon written it, put it in some library book, and then killed herself? What on earth was this all about? And why would she direct someone to an old record album?

Then he thought of Angela. She had checked the book out, after all; maybe she knew about this. He was pondering that when the phone rang. It was Davis, calling to inform Christian that he had arranged a show with a friend of his who owned a gallery in Gordonville, a community about an hour away from New Mowbray. Christian’s name was still well-known enough that surely his works would sell there, where tastes were less discriminating (though Davis didn’t come out and say this). Could he be there Friday morning, say ten o’clock, to help set up? Christian said yes, hung up, and went back to pondering the strange letter. The phone rang again. He answered it with an annoyed “Hello”, which didn’t help matters when it turned out to be Angela.

“Nice to talk to you, too,” she said.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not having a great week.”

“How much of that is me?”

“Some. And the show didn’t go well. My paintings are crap.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t that bad.”

“You weren’t there.”

Pause.

“No, I wasn’t,” she said, her voice colder. “No mystery why, I suppose.” He winced; had he really needed to say that? “Look, Christian, I got my stuff out as promised, but I left a library book there. Could you return it for me? I finished it a few days ago. I think I left it in the bathroom.”

“You never read in the bathroom.”

“I put it down when I was boxing up my toiletries,” she said, definitely sounding irritated now. “I forgot it. Can you return it?”

He looked at the letter that he was still holding. “Ange, did you find anything in that book?”

“Did I find anything? Christian, what are you talking about? It’s just a library book, do we have to–“

“I’ll return it, Angela,” he said, cutting her off. “Anything else?” After a frosty No he said goodbye and hung up.

She had read the book, but she hadn’t found the letter? He shook his head and went to clean up his mess.

***

The Owen County Public Library was a large three-story stone building that had been erected in the 1800s with money from an oil magnate, or railroad owner. There had been some impetus to build a new, modern library, but no one wanted to see the grand old building sold or razed, so it still housed the Library despite increasingly cramped quarters. Christian returned the book to the Library the next morning and then he went downstairs to the A-V room. They still had phonograph records and record players, though he wondered how often they were ever used. He requested the record Elizabeth Hannon had specified, and the librarian didn’t bat an eye as he went to fetch it. A few minutes later he sat down at a listening station, put the headphones on, and listened to the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto.

Christian knew next to nothing about classical music, generally preferring jazz, rock and techno. He wasn’t sure at all what he was supposed to be listening for. It was a nice enough piece of music, he supposed, but why?. He had half-wondered if there would be some kind of subliminal message, a “Paul is dead” kind of thing, but he discerned nothing of the sort.

He turned the record sleeve over and read the liner notes, which had the standard life of Rachmaninov, a few words about the work’s composition, and bios of the performers. There was nothing interesting in the paragraph about Leopold Marx, so he turned his eye to the paragraph about Andrew Dorian. Dorian had grown up in New York City, studied under Rubinstein, performed with all the finest orchestras, and married a fellow pianist named Elizabeth Hannon.

Christian stared at the name. What was this? He checked the record’s copyright date: 1955. Had the letter been that old? Surely the paper would have yellowed, or taken on the smell of the old book? For no reason he looked in the record sleeve again — and now he found a slip of paper there. It hadn’t been there before, had it? He reached into the sleeve and pulled it out. It was actually an index card. On one side was written, in the same hand as the letter, “Owen CountyRegister, October 19, 1957″. Taped to the card, under those words, was a tiny brass key. And on the reverse of the card was written, “Listen to it again.” The word listen was underlined twice. He put the earphones back on and listened again to the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto.

Something was different this time. The music was the same, down to the pops of the phonograph needle traveling the grooves, but now Christian heard it, he really heard it. The ominous chords that opened the work led into a melody of melancholy drive. The piano moved in and out of a shimmering orchestral tapestry. Now he was hearing “color”, if that word could describe it — it was the only word he had. The gentle beauty of the second movement moved him, the third thrilled him, and his visual imagination was filled with shifting abstract images. He wasn’t merely listening to music; he was perceiving art. When the last chord of the third movement faded away he sat for a few minutes longer, contemplating the themes that still wove through his mind. Then he returned the record to the librarian, and headed upstairs to the Archives.

Christian walked up the three flights of marble stairs to the top floor where the Archives were. He went in and filled out his request slip. Then he handed it to the Archivist, a gray-haired old lady.

“Let me see now,” she said. “The Register, October 19, 1957.” She pursed her lips and looked up at Christian. He could see a question in her eyes, but she only gave an embarrassed smile before she went off to fetch the papers.

She was gone for two or three minutes, during which Christian stood listening to the buzz of the lights and breathing in the smell of old newsprint and dust. What was so personal to that librarian? She finally came back and handed Christian a roll of microfilm. The question was still in her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Christian said, “but does that date mean something special to you?”

She sighed. “Yes, I’m afraid it does. You see, I was working here.I had just started when…well, I found her.”

“You found her.” Christian had no idea what she was talking about.

She nodded. “Yes. You can read all about it; the microfilm readers are over there.” She pointed, and Christian walked over and took a seat behind one of them. A moment later he was scanning through the headlines of October 1957. It was all pretty prosaic: news on what President Eisenhower had done, reviews of movies long since relegated to late-night, gossip in the society pages. And then, there it was, front and center, the banner headline of October nineteenth.

PIANIST FOUND DEAD IN LIBRARY; POLICE SUSPECT HUSBAND

The headline hit Christian between the eyes. He stared at the huge black letters in disbelief, and then he read the story.

On the morning of October 19, 1957 the staff of the Owen County Public Library arrived to open for the day. The youngest librarian on the staff, Miss Alice Thaxton, went upstairs to open the rooms on the top floor, and that was where she found the body of Elizabeth Hannon lying atop the Library’s Steinway grand piano. Her neck bore the ligature marks of a pair of strong hands, leading the police to conclude that she had been strangled. Her husband, pianist Andrew Dorian, had appeared the night before with the New Mowbray Symphony.

That gala performance had been the talk of the town since being announced weeks before. Andrew Dorian had been a rising star in the musical world, but he had gone into seclusion for the year leading up to his return engagement in New Mowbray. That an artist of Dorian’s caliber would play in New Mowbray was amazing enough, but that he would choose this city instead of Chicago or New York for his return was astounding. And his stunning wife, who was a pianist of nearly equal repute, would be with him. It was to have been the crowning moment in New Mowbray’s patronage of the arts.

Andrew Dorian disappeared, though, almost immediately after his performance of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto #1 in B-flat minor. No one had seen him since he left the stage, refusing to return for an encore. Elizabeth, too, had vanished after leaving the VIP Box at the Gunderson Opera Hall, not to be seen again until she was found the next morning by Miss Alice Thaxton.

Eyewitness accounts of a green-eyed man being seen with the couple led nowhere, and Andrew Dorian became the prime suspect. It was unknown how Dorian had entered the library or where he had gone afterward. A manhunt began, with Andrew Dorian as the quarry. As of Halloween 1957, he had not been found. Christian spooled the microfilm back up and returned it to the Archivist.

“You’re Miss Thaxton, I presume?” he asked.

She nodded. “Mrs. Bond now, actually.”

“I suppose I should look at the November papers.”

She shook her head. “Don’t bother; I’ve read them all more times than I care to remember. On November 4, a father and son went fishing on Lake Michigan and found Andrew Dorian’s body floating near a buoy. His fingers matched closely enough the marks on Elizabeth’s neck, and the police assumed that a pianist would definitely be strong enough to strangle someone. It was ruled a murder-suicide.

“You sound skeptical.”

“I don’t know. I always thought that they might have made more effort to find that green-eyed man, but the police were satisfied with the evidence they had.”

“Did you see the green-eyed man?”

Mrs. Bond nodded. “I did. I was at the concert, you know. It was my first date with Charles Bond, who is now my husband. His family is very rich, and they owned the box next to the VIP box where Elizabeth sat. I couldn’t help but look at her and that stunning white gown of hers. Audrey Hepburn would have been proud. But then I saw him, standing in the shadows. He had dark hair, and a beard, and very bright green eyes which never left the back of Elizabeth’s head.”

“No one knows who he was.”

“No one knows,” she said. “Elizabeth and Andrew were buried together in Oromotoc, Elizabeth’s hometown. Both deaths were mourned in classical music circles. The title of Great American Pianist passed to Van Cliburn. And Elizabeth was the dutiful wife who was slain in passion. Puccini might have written an opera about it.”

“Puccini?”

“Look it up. You’re in the right place for it.” She smiled and turned to greet two patrons who had just entered. Christian left the library, thinking about the story of two dead pianists and a mysterious brass key.

***

Christian returned home to find two messages from Davis Flannigan. The show in Gordonville had gone fairly well; two of his four paintings in the show had sold. Of course, they had gone for less than what Christian was accustomed to, but it was enough that he would be able to live in the apartment for another month or two. Davis’ second message was, of course, to see if Christian had received the first.

It was a fairly warm autumn day, and he decided to take his mind off things for a while by going to McKinley Park and do some sketching. Perhaps he could even cultivate some ideas for future paintings. He grabbed his sketchbook and pencils and headed for the park. There he took up residence on his favorite bench, beside the pond, and looked for something or someone to draw. There were people rollerblading, children feeding ducks in the pond, old men playing chess and smoking cigars. There were other artists sketching in their own books; Christian knew a few of them and nodded hello to those who saw him. Then he selected his subject and began to draw.

It was an old lady wearing an overcoat of tweed. Her white hair fell about her shoulders from under a purple beret. She cradled a long slender case of red wood in her arm. Christian watched as she produced a handful of seed from her pocket which she scattered on the ground for the fat pigeons. Then she opened the case and began putting something together. Her back was to Christian, so he couldn’t see what it was at first, but then she turned back to him and he saw that it was a flute. She lifted it to her lips and began to play.

A single instrument by itself had never sounded to him so beautiful. She played with a lightness that made the unbroken line of melody as pure as anything Christian had ever imagined. In his own art he strove for purity, which he described as perfect clarity: painting that so captured the essence of the subject — even if abstract — that the viewer lost all awareness of the brushstrokes. He aspired to that ideal but rarely achieved, if indeed he ever had. Now here was this old woman in the park, as the leaves were turning and he was the only one noticing, and she was attaining that same ideal. As she played on and on his pencil danced across the page.

At first he kept referring to her, looking up every couple of pencil strokes. His inner eye, though, took over gradually and he no longer looked up at all. She finished playing as he finished the drawing, and as he touched up the shading in one spot she rose from her bench and walked past. She smiled at Christian and then she ambled off, disappearing around a bend in the curving walk that wound through the park. Christian looked again at the drawing. It was only a simple black-and-white sketch done in pencil, but it was the most satisfying thing he had produced in a long time.

“Hey, nice work, Christian!” someone said behind him. Christian turned and found a friend of his looking over his shoulder, a man named Paul who had a great deal of talent but refused to commit to his art. It drove Christian mad.

“Thanks,” Christian said. “I think I’ve got the shading right. I’m usually not very good at that.”

“You’ve been doing too many abstracts lately, that’s why. You should do this more often.”

“So should you,” Christian jibed. “You off today?”

Paul shrugged. “I have to do some work later.” He was a consultant of some sort. “I’ve been over there for a couple of hours.” He pointed to another bench that was secluded under some trees. Christian hadn’t seen him there. Paul leaned over and took a closer look at the drawing. “That’s some fine work. And from memory, even.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You did it from memory, right? No subject.”

“I had a subject. She was sitting right there, on that bench. She played the flute.”

Paul’s eyes narrowed, and he shook his head. “I’ve been here for two hours, Christian. I didn’t see anyone who looked like that. And I didn’t hear any flute. What’s with the modesty?”

Paul hadn’t seen her. What could that mean? There were several alternatives, and Christian didn’t care for any of them. He didn’t want to argue the point with Paul, either. He shrugged. “Uh…I mean, I saw her earlier today.”

“Oh, I get it,” Paul said. “Yeah, you’ve got a pretty good eye. I’ll catch you later, okay?” He grinned and headed off on his way, leaving Christian alone to ponder the drawing he had apparently made of nobody.

***

When the Owen County Public Library opened the next morning, Christian was there to research the life and times of Elizabeth Hannon and Andrew Dorian. It was the only starting place he could think of to find out what the key was for. He knew that he should probably be painting, but somehow this seemed more important.

Elizabeth had grown up in Oromotoc, a town about a hundred miles away on the northeastern shores of Lake Michigan. She was born in 1928 and was a musical prodigy, playing Beethoven’s sonatas by the time she was six. She spent the Depression giving recitals all over Michigan, and when she was sixteen she went to Chicago to play with the Philharmonic, the poor-sibling orchestra to the mighty Chicago Symphony. While attending a Symphony concert she met the other young piano genius of the day, Andrew Dorian. The two were kindred spirits, and she was in love with him before the end of the second movement of the Brahms Piano Concerto #2. He, likewise, was smitten during her delicate performance of the Chopin nocturnes. The two were married in 1951, and their union was blissful, a real-life fairy tale.

But no fairy tale is without darkness. Andrew’s interviews depicted a man of deep dissatisfaction. He viewed performing as a lesser art, devoted only to mere reproduction of other people’s art. He wanted desperately to compose, and in 1955 he announced his retirement from the stage so that he could write his Symphony #1. The musical world bemoaned the loss, however temporary, of one of its brightest stars, but Elizabeth continued to perform while Andrew composed. Thus the musical world went on.

On October 18, 1956 the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered the Symphony #1 in d-minor by Andrew Dorian. It was, however, a fleeting triumph; the premiere was a disaster. One critic wrote: “This Symphony is an exercise in banality.” Another had this to say: “Richard Strauss, at his most self-important, could not have written so pompous a work.” And from another: “Perhaps Mr. Dorian should take his compositional wares to Hollywood, where they might be put to better use then being displayed in all their shortcomings on the stage of Orchestra Hall.” But worst of all — by far — was that the audience had laughed at his work. Andrew was devastated, and he withdrew after that concert into near total seclusion. Elizabeth continued to perform, but only in the Midwest, never more than a few hours’ travel by train from the side of her husband. She granted few interviews, and in those she would answer no questions about her husband.

But then there was an announcement on September 12, 1957: Andrew Dorian would at last perform again, playing the Tchaikovsky #1 with the New Mowbray Philharmonic. For one night, October 18, the eyes of the musical world were on New Mowbray as Andrew Dorian returned to the stage, his wife watching from an opera box. The performance was electric, and no person in that audience would ever forget it. After the Concerto, Andrew Dorian left the stage and refused all curtain calls and gave no encores. Elizabeth left her opera box at the same time. No one saw them leave the Opera Hall, and no one saw them again alive.

In the course of all the reading he did, Christian learned that Elizabeth Hannon’s father had been a Catholic priest who had left the Church, and that Elizabeth had also played the flute at a high level. And her only living relative today was a niece who still lived in the Hannon family home in Oromotoc. Maybe that was where he would find an answer to the key.

Christian spent the entire day at the Library, except for two jaunts to the hot dog vendor across the street for lunch and dinner. When the Library was closing for the night, he closed all of his books, put them on the carts to be reshelved, and headed for the stairs to the first floor and the exit. He rounded the banister to go downstairs, and then he stopped cold. A woman stood in the doorway to the history room. It was the old woman from the park, whose features Christian now realized bore an amazing similarity to those of Elizabeth Hannon. She beckoned for him to come to her, and his entire body went to ice. He shut his eyes and opened them again, and now she was no longer there. Great. Now I’m seeing things. Even as he thought it, it was less than convincing. No, she had been there, and she had gestured to him. She had beckoned him into the History Room….

Elizabeth Hannon’s favorite grade school subject had been history; Christian had read that somewhere. And the letter, that first letter, had been in a book on Ancient Rome. Was there something that she wanted him to see? He took a deep breath and walked into the History Room. He half expected to see her apparition there again, but there was only a library page who was shelving books.

“Excuse me,” he said, “where are the books on Ancient Rome?”

“We’re closing, sir,” the page replied.

“I’ll only be a minute!”

“That aisle,” the page said, pointing. Christian’s urgency frightened her a bit.

Christian mumbled something and dashed down the aisle. He was able to find the Rome books fairly quickly; the Dewey Decimal system seemed to roughly follow chronological order and Rome was a popular subject for historians. He thumbed through the shelves and squinted at the titles on the spines. The light back here was fairly dim, and it was slower going than he expected — especially with the shelves so tall and packed full. He finally found where the Rome books began, and one by one he started pulling them off the shelves and rifling through the pages. He tried to choose books that looked old enough to have been in the library in 1957, but it wasn’t always obvious which these were. Christian, you’ve gone off the deep end, he thought.

“Sir?” That damned page again. “I have to ask you to leave now.”

“Just a minute,” Christian muttered. He was as annoyed at the page for interrupting him as he was at himself for engaging in such nonsense in the first place. Go home, the books will be here tomorrow! his little voice shouted. But he kept going, searching for…something.

“Excuse me, sir. You need to leave now.” It was a burly security guard speaking now; he stood at the end of the aisle and glared at Christian. “I can have you barred from this library for life, son.”

Christian noted the guard’s angry stare and decided not to fight. When did library guards start carrying sidearms? He glanced at the shelf to memorize his place, where he would begin tomorrow — and a shiver went through him as he saw a book that shouldn’t have been there. The Sonatas of Beethoven. Christian snatched the book down and opened it. An envelope fell to the floor, the same thick square envelope that he had found before. His eyes widened as he picked it up.

“Sir, now!”

“I’m leaving,” Christian said as he pushed his way past the guard. On his way out he handed the book to the page and said, “This was in the wrong place.”

***

Dear Reader,

I wish I knew what kind of person you are. I hope that you are a person with curiosity, a person with dreams and a willingness to follow trails without knowing where they may lead. I hope that you will follow this trail a bit farther.

Do you have the key? Then go to Oromotoc. Sometimes we need help to complete our journeys.

Yours,

Elizabeth Hannon.

***

Christian sniffed the letter. The paper smelled new, and he could even smell the ink. This letter had not taken on that “old book” aroma, as the first one had. This one could have been written the day before. And could a book really remain mis-shelved, in the same spot, for more than forty years? Even in a library the size of the Owen County Public Library? Christian knew nothing about library procedures, but that seemed implausible. He was mulling it all over when the phone rang.

“Christian?” It was Angela. He had partly expected Elizabeth Hannon….

“Hi, Angela.”

“Hi. I’m sorry to bother you. I can’t find my slippers anywhere, did I leave them there?”

“Uh, no.”

“Oh. They must be here, then.” There was an awkward pause then, during which Christian prayed for a merciful end to this conversation.

“How are you, Christian?”

“I’m fine.”

“Well, I ran into Davis Flannigan yesterday, and he’s worried about you.”

“Davis is worried about everything.”

“This is different. He’s really worried. He thinks you’re giving up, that you’re going to do something Van Gogh might have done.”

Christian sighed. “I’m not suicidal, Ange. And I have both ears. Davis doesn’t need to worry.”

She sighed too. “He says that there’s desperation in your work these days. I think he might be right. I’m no expert, but–“

“Wait a minute. You saw my paintings?”

“Yes.”

“You went to the gallery, didn’t you.”

Pause. “Yes. Davis let me see your work; he has them out back.”

Christian was flabbergasted. Angela only went to the gallery on the first nights of his shows. She wasn’t much for visual art.

“Why did you go there?”

“It’s a free country, Christian.”

“I’m not saying you can’t go there, I’m just — well, why did you go there?”

He heard her exhale. “I wanted to see your work. I missed the paintings.” Christian had no idea what to say to that. “Look, Christian, I have to go. I’ll tell Davis you’re fine, you’re in a slump, everybody has them. Take care of yourself.”

“Bye, Ange,” he said and hung up. He looked over at his easel, with a blank canvas sitting on it. Angela missed his paintings.

I miss them too.

***

The drive to Oromotoc took a bit more than two hours. The road followed the lakeshore, winding past vineyards and woods and through one-stoplight towns. The landscape was beautiful, and Christian wondered why he had never come this way before. He had vacationed in Miami, San Francisco and New York; he had been to Chicago many times and he had even once been to Paris, but he had never simply driven north along the lakeshore. The wide expanse of water stretched off to his left, and he felt like he was driving along the side of the sea. I wonder if Cape Cod is like this? Angela had always wanted to go to Cape Cod.

He arrived in Oromotoc shortly before noon. It was a beautiful town, with white buildings and wide, tree-lined streets. In the center of town was a traditional square complete with a Civil War monument. Christian parked his car and walked around, looking for the local library. He found it fairly quickly: a stately old brick building with two stories.

The library was crammed almost completely full of books, so much so that there seemed to be no way possible for new acquisitions to be put anywhere. Behind a desk covered with an amazing amount of clutter sat the librarian, a long-haired man in sandals. He was deftly repairing the binding of a book with needle and thread, when he looked up.

“Yes?” the librarian said.

“I’m looking for information on Elizabeth Hannon. You know, the pianist?”

“Are you looking to take lessons?” the man deadpanned. Christian pursed his lips, and the librarian grinned. “Sorry, I guess that was funnier in concept. Actually, we don’t have a whole lot about her — some books, and a few newspaper articles. But I can get it all for you, if you want.”

“I’d appreciate it,” Christian said. Minutes later he was exploring the library’s materials on Elizabeth Hannon and Andrew Dorian. The librarian had been right; there wasn’t much new here that he didn’t already know. He read about Elizabeth’s collection of antique music boxes, and the cottage on the lake where Elizabeth and Andrew had spent their summers. That cottage had passed to Elizabeth’s sister Grace after her death, and Grace had sold it in 1978. Grace had died of cancer in 1984, and now her daughter Carole lived in the Hannon family home with her husband and two children, here in Oromotoc. Christian jotted down the address.

It was early afternoon when he finished his research at the library. After lunch at the local greasy-spoon, Christian decided to visit the Hannon family home, where Carole Hannon-Masters now lived. He felt increasingly uneasy as he walked down White Oak Drive, a wide street lined with massive elm trees and not a white oak in sight. As he walked he tried to think of what he could say that would make Mrs. Hannon-Masters not think he was just some crackpot hobbyist. And then he was there, 417 White Oak Drive.

Christian sighed. It was exactly the type of place that Angela had always said she wanted: a three story brick house with a circular cupola that sat on a big grassy lot, probably one acre total. The lot was bound by tall hedges, and a tire swing hung from the giant red oak tree out front. A red brick driveway led to a red brick garage. The grounds were dotted with fallen leaves, and a minivan was parked outside the garage. Take away the minivan and the scene could have been a Norman Rockwell painting. Christian drew a deep breath, walked up to the front door, and rang the bell. He heard a set of pounding feet inside, and the door was thrown wide open to reveal a teenage girl who grinned at first, but then rolled her eyes when she saw that the visitor was not whoever she had been expecting.

“Hello,” Christian said. “Is your mother–“

“MOM!” The girl bellowed as she turned away from the door and disappeared into the house. Christian stood there feeling pretty stupid until Carole Hannon-Masters came to the door. Christian stared at her. Her slight build, chestnut hair that fell gently about her shoulders, hazel eyes — he had seen those features before. She smiled.

“I look just like her, don’t I?”

“Uh — yes, you do, actually.” He felt himself turning red as she stepped out onto the front porch and closed the door.

“Cats,” she explained.

“Oh.” He stuck out his hand. “Mrs. Hannon-Masters, my name is Christian Andrews.”

“Andrews?” she said as she shook his hand.

“Yes. I’ve been researching what happened to your aunt.”

She nodded. “You do have that look. Why don’t you come in? We can talk in the study.”

She opened the door and led him inside and down a hall past a flight of stairs. The place had wood floors, paneled walls, Oriental carpets, the whole bit. She led Christian into a room on the left. It was an open, airy room that had tall windows and two glass doors that led to the backyard. There was a fireplace, and stocked bookshelves. A desk sat in one corner with a computer set-up and a bunch of papers spread out.

“I’m a freelance writer,” Carole Hannon-Masters said. “My husband is a Regional Sales Director for Paulsen-Price Pharmaceuticals.”

“Sounds lucrative,” Christian said. Paulsen-Price was a very wealthy company.

“We do pretty well,” she admitted. “Do you like my taste in art?” She gestured to the painting that hung above the mantel, and he felt a jolt as he recognized his own work. It was one of his most striking abstracts, a study in reds and vermilions and rusts that he called “The View From Olypmus Mons”. It had sold quite handsomely to….

“Patrick Masters,” he said, nodding. “I always liked this one.” Another connection!

“So did I, although I admit that I know very little about art. Or music, for that matter. Not everything runs in the family.”

“You’re a writer.”

“Freelance travel articles, local history, human interest. I’ve got a novel that I’ve been working on for a couple of years, but — I wouldn’t call myself much of an artist.”

“All shapes and sizes,” Christian said. She gave a half-smile and gestured to one of two armchairs in front of the fireplace. He sat down, and so did she.

“I’m always surprised that Aunt Elizabeth still interests people forty-five years later. And you’re not a writer or a reporter. What is your interest, if you don’t mind my asking? Why Elizabeth Hannon and Andrew Dorian?”

“It started with this.” He pulled the first letter from his pocket and handed it to her. After she read it he told her how he had found it, and about listening to Andrew’s recording of the Rachmaninov, and finding the brass key, and finding the second letter. For now he left out the apparitions in the park and the library. This was weird enough without bringing ghosts into it. That would sound so ludicrous, so utterly absurd–

“You also saw her, didn’t you?” she said. He looked up, and she nodded.

“Oh God,” he said and swallowed. In for a penny….

“I’ve seen her too.”

“You’ve seen her,” Christian echoed. He had partly hoped to learn that he was, in fact, crazy. That it had all been a series of oddball coincidences.

“This was her home, you know. She’ll appear to me there, in that corner.” She pointed to the corner where the desk sat. “That’s where her piano was.”

“And you put your desk there?”

“I guess you could say I was hoping for some kind of communion,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ve received it. The strange thing, though, is that I see her as an old woman. Do ghosts age?”

“Until now I wouldn’t have been the one to ask.”Christian glanced over at the desk in the corner, expecting to see Elizabeth Hannon there. All he saw was the desk.

“You mentioned a key?” Carole asked.

“Yes, I did,” Christian said. He pulled out the key and handed it to her. She turned it over in her hand. “Like I said, it was in the record sleeve.”

“It looks like the key to a music box,” she said.

“She collected music boxes!” Christian said. “Could it be to one of them?”

“All of her music boxes are still here in the house, and I have all the keys. Except one, that is–” A shadow passed over her. She stood and walked over to the desk, where she looked through one of the drawers. After a moment she returned and handed Christian an old magazine. It was an issue of Musical Review, dated October 1956. A photograph of Andrew Dorian graced the cover and the splash headline read “A Prodigal Son Returns”. Carole flipped the magazine open to an interview with Andrew, the last one he ever gave.

“It’s not a very long interview,” Carole said. “Just typically polite questions, and typically polite answers. What had Uncle Andrew been doing during the year out of public view, that kind of thing. It’s not a very illuminating article, except for the very last exchange.” Christian flipped to that point.

***

Q: You and your wife, Elizabeth, recently celebrated your anniversary. Did you do anything special?

A: We had a nice dinner, and we played some duets. It was a lovely time. I gave her a music box that I had made especially for her.

Q: What does the music box play?

A: I’d rather not say. It’s personal to her and to me.

***

Christian looked up at Carole. “You think that this is the key to that music box? The one he gave her right before they died?”

“If it’s a key to any of Aunt Elizabeth’s music boxes, that would be the one. I have all the others.”

“You don’t have that one?”

Carole shook her head. “It was buried with Aunt Elizabeth.”

***

Dusk was falling when Christian drove to Chestnut Hill Cemetery, the largest cemetery in Oromotoc. It occupied six blocks and was surrounded by tall fencing of wrought iron. The main gate was closed, so he parked on a side street and walked around the cemetery perimeter until he found a spot where the iron fence had been pushed out of line by the growth of a tree. He thanked God for his washboard stomach as he squeezed through the impromptu opening. Then he picked his way through the graves to the road that wound through the cemetery. There were streetlights — actually small lampposts designed to look like gaslights — so he wouldn’t need his flashlight. Not yet, anyway. He wondered which way to turn, and for no particular reason he turned left.

The cemetery was hillier than he had expected. The road looped around, in and out and up and down knolls and valleys. The winding road, paired with his general disquiet, bollixed his sense of direction. He had no idea where he was relative to where he had entered the cemetery, and he felt as if he had covered more ground than was actually possible in this place. He stopped and leaned against a tree. This is absolutely insane! I can’t believe I’m even considering doing this! He looked over and thought he saw where he had entered the cemetery. He could leave right now, leave the whole damned business of Elizabeth Hannon and Andrew Dorian behind him.

And then he heard the piano.

For a second he thought that it might be coming from one of the neighborhood homes, but even as the thought occurred to him he realized that it was not. Christian walked with purpose now, led by the strains of a sad melody and the mournful chords that surrounded it. Dense mist settled over the cemetery like a shroud as he came around a final bend. There before him stood the tomb of Elizabeth Hannon and Andrew Dorian. It was a large mausoleum of gray marble. Their names and a treble clef were engraved on the iron doors, which stood slightly ajar. Between them could be seen a sliver of flickering light. The piano music came from inside.

“Oh my God I can’t go through with this.” Christian whispered that over and over again, even as he walked forward and pulled the doors open. There was no squeak of rusty hinges, just a rush of musty air from inside the tomb. And standing before him was….no one at all. He breathed a sigh of relief, and only when he exhaled did he realize that the piano music had stopped. He stepped inside, into the flickering yellow light.

That light was cast by a guttering candle on a shelf along the back wall. There was no piano and no obvious source of the music. To either side sat the two crypts, with a walking space in between them. The lids of the crypts were covered with a layer of dust. They were marked by chiseled initials in the lids: EH on the right crypt, AD on the left. There were no other adornments save the single brass handle in the center of each lid. As Christian stepped forward his feet sent up little swirling clouds of dust, a few particles of which finally entered his nose and made him sneeze involuntarily. The sneeze echoed in the tomb as if he was standing in a cave and a large boulder had fallen nearby. He looked about wildly, certain that someone — alive or not — was soon to come find him and to ask what he was doing here. Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God…. His heart felt as though it were about to explode from his chest. He waited for the silence to settle again, and eventually he became aware of his own breathing again, and he managed to restore some calm.

Reaching into his pocket, his fingers found the brass key. The music box. He had come here for the music box. He grated his teeth together and with his other hand grabbed the brass ring on Elizabeth’s lid and lifted it up, swinging it back on hinges that did squeak loudly. There, below, was the coffin. Without waiting for a count of three Christian reached in and lifted the coffin lid as well, finding it unlatched. He turned his gaze away then, but not completely; he couldn’t turn all the way away. His gorge rose, and he swallowed several times to keep from vomiting.

The body was there, after almost fifty years of rot. The hair was gray and brittle, the skin tight and shredding like dried leather, the eyes sunken. The bony hands were folded over the chest, and the clothes — a very nice suit, once — were tattered and yellowing. Those hands were clasped over something made of wood. The music box. Christian nearly vomited again when he realized that he would have to move those hands to get at it. The last words Carole Hannon-Masters had said to him before he’d left her home ran through his mind. “I won’t hold anything against you, Mr. Andrews, if you follow the trail to where it seems to be taking you. You seem to be looking for something. I hope you find it.” But could she forgive him this? He whispered the name of the Lord for the tenth time that night and reached forward, hating every second of this. He tried to tell himself that it would be just like touching a chicken, and he let out a reflexive giggle as he realized that he had made Angela do all the cooking. Maybe I can move the wrist by lifting the cuff of this suit…. And the nagging doubts in his mind crystallized.

A suit?

Oh, Jesus.

The body in Elizabeth’s coffin was Andrew.

Christian lurched backward and crashed into the other crypt. His flashlight clattered to the floor and he twisted his ankle slightly. Wincing in pain and revulsion and shock he whirled about and without thinking lifted the lid of Andrew’s crypt. There was nothing inside at all — save a thick manila envelope on the crypt’s floor. Christian reached down, leanign forward as far as he could, and picked it up. He opened it and drew out the contents. It was a sheaf of sheet music, not professionally printed but an actual handwritten manuscript on yellowing paper. Each page was signed by Andrew Dorian, and on the first was written “Sonata in A. For Elizabeth, in love. The woman who fuels my dreams.”

Elizabeth and Andrew had loved each other dearly, and here now in Christian’s hand was a physical artifact of that love. Andrew had composed music for her. He had created art for her. Christian’s thoughts turned to Angela. In the days when their relationship had been new and wonderful, she had asked him once to paint something for her, something that would be her very own, and he had promised that he would.

Of course, he never had.

He remembered the music box again, and now he turned back to Elizabeth’s crypt, and Andrew’s body. A placid calm came over him, and he easily lifted the hand aside and picked up the music box. It was larger than he had expected, and heavier; its wood was carved in musical symbols on the sides and the Greek muses on the lid. Christian set the music box on the shelf next to the candle and used the key to open it. The years had not dulled the lock at all; the box’s lid lifted open smoothly and effortlessly.

The compartment inside the music box was deeper than most music boxes, and it was filled with a fine gray powder. Christian shook his head; he had a good idea what that powder was. So, they were buried together after all. He probed the underside of the music box for the knob and wound it. There was music then, a tinkly sound that plinked out a pleasant melody. But when the melody was done, it was taken up by a piano, a single piano that played that same melody with rich harmonization. Christian glanced at the sheet music again and he realized that the piano was playing Andrew’s Sonata in A. He remembered enough of his grade-school music lessons to follow the music for a few moments until it became too complex for him, and then he simply let his hand fall to his side as he listened to it. It didn’t bother him at all, now, that there was no piano anywhere in the tomb.

Christian sat down on the dusty floor and followed the score as best he could. That music reminded Christian of sad and happy things. It turned angry at times, and then defiant; it was by turns yearning and pleading, soft and understated. And as the mood of the music changed, so did the character of Andrew’s handwriting. The penstrokes were deep and slanted during the stormy passages, as if Andrew had gouged the pen into the paper when writing them. During the tender passages the strokes became thin and delicate, the ink taking on the translucence of watercolors.

Christian turned to the last page, still following along. His eyes fell to the bottom, and he realized that Andrew had never finished this work. The music simply stopped with an uncompleted measure, and the music that sounded about him was moving steadily toward that point, where it would end without resolution. Andrew had died with this, his work of love for his wife, unfinished. The end drew nearer and nearer….and then it was there. The strains of music stopped abruptly, the melody becoming tentative and then breaking off altogether. It was like seeing a beautiful vase shatter on the floor in slow motion.

Silence filled the tomb again, and Christian wondered if he had actually heard that music, if it had played at all for him. Had he imagined it all? He slid the music back into the envelope and laid it carefully beside Andrew’s body. Then he closed the music box and put it back where he had found it. It was all there, together, in one place. He lowered the coffin lid and closed the crypt, and as he did so the candle blew out at last. It didn’t matter. He recovered his flashlight and left the tomb, closing the doors behind him. He drove home that night in silence, his thoughts on Elizabeth and Andrew and Angela. He didn’t know what it had all been for, but he felt a growing certainty that the trail had ended.

When he got home it was very late, and he was as tired as he had ever been. But still he placed a blank canvas on the easel and began to paint.

***

The last letter came a week later, dropped anonymously in his mail slot.

***

Dear Friend,

I always wanted to hear the music that you found. Andrew said that he would play it for me when it was finished. That has finally come to pass. How to explain this all to you, so you might not feel as though you were a pawn in some game?

After the premiere of the Symphony, things were very dark for us. I hope that you are the kind of person who can understand the rejection of your work, of your very life. But even darker days came just after the premiere when we learned that Andrew had cancer, and less than a year to live.

We wouldn’t give up. My father was an anthropologist, and he knew of lore that was lost to our doctors. There were ways, he wrote in his notes, of extending life if one was willing to pay the price. Andrew and I were willing. We had to have more time together. Andrew had to finish the sonata.

We put the word out, and soon a man came to visit us. He never told us his name, but he made his offer: we could have a year together, but at the end of that year he would return and exact the price, and our year would end. Andrew didn’t want to do it, but I agreed. I wish I could describe the look in that man’s eyes, his green eyes.

We lived that year in Thoreau’s quiet desperation. Andrew struggled for hours each day to finish the Sonata, testing first this theme than that, working through developments and fugues and codas. Some days went well, others not so well. There were many mornings when I came downstairs to find the previous day’s work tossed aside and Andrew asleep over his keyboard. There was so much pain in him, not all of it physical. Finally he began to break through, though, and the work began to come to him much easier. The good days at last began to outnumber the bad, and the pile of completed pages of music began to thicken. That was when Andrew’s health began its final turn, and that was when the man with green eyes came back. All he said was, “One week.” That was all we had. Andrew poured all of his strength into preparing for that last performance, which we had announced just a few weeks before. The score to the Sonata never left his side. He was going to finish it before the week was up. The only time he did not have the Sonata was with him was when he walked onto the stage for that last performance.

I wish I could have truly listened to that performance, but it went by as would a dream. When it was over I returned with my husband to our hotel. Our time, at last, was up. My dearest Andrew died in his bed, the pages of the Sonata scattered on the bed around him. My heart was torn asunder, but I could not mourn. The man with green eyes was there, to exact the price I had agreed to pay. He took me to the Library – why there, I never knew – and there, on the top floor, he whispered to me: “Please know that I find no pleasure in removing from the world beauty which it so desperately needs.” Then he put his hands around my neck.

What role, then, for you, stranger and (I hope) friend? Why a person I can never know, never thank? Because there are powers that rise above time and death. Some of these powers are dark, but some are light. You have made certain things possible. Perhaps one day you will learn how, or perhaps this will always be the mystery of your life. I can’t know any more than that. But for me, it suffices that through you, he and I are together again.

Yours in Gratitude,

Elizabeth Hannon.

***

Christian only read that letter once before he turned to his easel and put the finishing touches on his latest work. When he finally judged it complete, he picked up the phone and dialed.

“Hello?”

“Angela? It’s me.”

“Christian? Hi. I’m in a hurry tonight, I’ve got a dinner meeting–“

“That’s OK, Ange….I’ve just been painting, that’s all. And I’d like you to see it. Can you drop by after your meeting?”

Insane. There is no way. It’s over, Christian. Deal with it.

“I’d love to.”

***

An anonymous collector bought “Elizabeth and Andrew” for seventy thousand dollars, utterly stunning Christian and provoking Davis Flannigan into three days of drunken revelry. The painting was even noticed by Mrs. Morgan, who pronounced that “Clearly the work of Christian Andrews has finally taken the turn that his earlier potential suggested it might.” The three other works he had produced for the show all sold for respectable sums, but of course nowhere near what that anonymous collector had paid for “Elizabeth and Andrew”. It was Christian’s breakthrough.

Several days after the sale, Christian and Angela went for a walk in the park as the first snow of the season fell lightly from the sky.

“Look at that,” she said as they passed a newspaper machine. A headline read, “Unknown Sonata by Andrew Dorian Discovered”. Christian bought a copy of the paper and read the story. The Sonata in A by Andrew Dorian had been found by a researcher in a previously unknown box of papers the pianist had left behind on the estate. Dorian had dedicated it to his wife, Elizabeth, with the words “The woman who fuels my dreams”. Carole Hannon-Masters was quoted: “I had no idea. I’ve been through these papers so many times, I can’t understand how I ever missed this music.” Several musicologists, having examined the score, pronounced the work “remarkable”, and it would be premiered later that winter in Chicago by the great Yevgeny Moseivich.

You have made certain things possible, she had written. Christian suddenly laughed. “He finished it.”

“Who finished what?” Angela asked.

“Nothing,” Christian said as he folded the paper and put it under his arm. Angela cocked an eye at him.

“Are you OK? You seem nervous or something.”

“I’m fine, Ange. Really.” He took her hand in his. “We should get going, before the restaurant fills up.”

“Let’s go then, Mister Andrews. You could have made a reservation, you know.”

“I know,” he said. As they walked off together, Christian hummed the first melody from the Sonata in A by Andrew Dorian. He held Angela’s hand in his right, and with his left he made sure the ring was still in his pocket. Two months’ salary indeed, he thought.

***

A delivery man carried the parcel into a luxurious penthouse on West 57th Street in New York City. “Where do you want it?” he asked.

“Please unwrap it and hang it there,” the anonymous collector said, pointing to a prominent empty spot on the wall.

“I just deliver them, pal.”

“I’ll double your gratuity.”

The delivery man shrugged and did as asked. When it was done, the collector paid the delivery man and then stepped back to admire his newest painting, “Elizabeth and Andrew”. As he did so the sunlight through the windows gleamed off his green eyes.

Finis

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“In Longhand” (a short story)

(NOTE: I first posted an excerpt of this, my first completed short story, almost two years ago, and I’ve been meaning to start posting some of my older works that aren’t going anywhere to Byzantium’s Shores, so here’s the complete tale. This one was never published, obviously, although it did get the “Consolation Prize” for un-purchased stories, i.e., handwritten notes from a couple of editors on the rejection slips saying, “Keep trying, because this one was almost good enough.” Of course, reading it now, five years after I originally wrote it, I spot all kinds of clunky prose and stiff verbiage and stuff I’d do differently.

There are several autobiographical elements to this story, as my longtime readers will note. One that might surprise, though, is that I once did have a run-in with an elderly German named Karl, who would have been right about the correct age for what is depicted herein. Of course, he wasn’t what he is here; I can’t picture the Karl of my story driving a beat-up 1977 Chevy pickup truck.)

“In Longhand”

Peter Bernstein put down his fountain pen and stared at the words he had just spent four hours writing. He had resisted the feeling at first, but it had come with increasing certainty until he could no longer deny it: he couldn’t finish this story, either. He carefully screwed the cap back onto his pen and placed it in the cup with the rest of his pen collection, and then he put the story in a drawer with all the other ones that he couldn’t finish. It was never a case of not knowing how the story should end; it wasn’t uncertainty as to what to write next. It was the certainty that what he was writing wasn’t any good. Surely he could do better than this. Surely he could write something better than a mere bodice-ripper. But maybe not. How many months since he had finished a story? And how long since that wondrous first sale, which had never been followed by a second?

He glanced at the index card taped on the wall with his credo written on it with his broad-nib Parker Duofold: Nulla dies sine linea. Never a day without lines. But his lines, his writing, never amounted to anything at all. How ironic that he had become a pen collector to have writing instruments equal to his prose — and now the prose was hardly fit for a disposable ball-point.

***

Early the next morning Peter got up and went to work. His classes were scheduled so that his teaching day was always done by two thirty, which gave him ample time for office hours and his various other duties. On Tuesdays his first class was at ten thirty, so he looked through a pile of papers from his freshman comp classes. When his mind began to wander, after the third time he read some teenager’s outrage that his or her tax dollars were going to keep murderers alive, he got up and walked to the Humanities Lounge to get some coffee. Sitting in the lounge, as always, was Professor Lawrence Tatum of the History Department.

“Peter!” Tatum yelled. He said everything in a near yell. “Find anything over the weekend?” A very large man with a great shock of red hair, Tatum had his day’s work spread across one of the lounge tables; the common joke was that his office might just as well be converted to a broom closet

“Nope,” Peter replied. “I actually didn’t do any shopping this weekend.”

Professor Tatum tsked. “You should always be on the lookout, Peter! For all you know, some stranger found a pen that was destined for your pocket.”

Peter laughed. Professor Tatum was a voracious collector of antiques of all types, and he had amassed a very valuable collection over the years. He was planning to open his own shop when he retired. In fact, Tatum could have probably opened a shop now; he had some items of great value indeed that would fetch a high price at any auction. He only delayed because he still loved teaching history. Peter had actually met Professor Tatum at one of the local antique dealers, when Peter had been looking at vintage pens. Tatum knew of Peter’s pen mania, and he occasionally would acquire an item that would pique his friend’s interest.

“Never a day without shopping, young man!” Tatum said with a laugh as he gathered his papers and headed off to class. He knew that Peter was a writer of sorts, and found Peter’s credo amusing.

On his way home that afternoon Peter walked through part of downtown, which he did a few times a week; he liked the variety of it, and he liked to observe people to incorporate into his stories. He walked through Chinatown, which was just a two block area with three Chinese restaurants, a Japanese place, and a couple of Asian gift shops. He loved this particular area, and he ate there at least twice a week. Today he stopped with interest at a formerly vacant storefront that had just acquired a new tenant; they had removed the tarpaulins covering the storefront just that morning. To his surprise, it was an antique shop. The front door, one of those heavy wooden doors that rattled threateningly when opened and closed, bore fresh gold lettering that read “Karl Strassheim, Antiquarian.” Below these words was a picture of Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of death, and below that, written in smaller lettering: “By appointment only.” Peter peered through the glass in the storefront and saw that this Strassheim dealt in very fine antiques. Peter doubted very much that a place like this would ever be in the price range of an English professor.

***

Later that evening Peter went to Queequeg’s, a coffeehouse in his neighborhood. The owner was a freak for nautical decor, and her favorite novel was, as one might expect, Moby Dick. The walls and ceilings were covered with sea charts, fish nets, lobster cages, harpoons, old photographs of fishermen, and the like. Peter ordered his usual, the “Captain Bligh” (double mocha cappuccino topped with nutmeg) and then took over a booth. He loved to write here, and he pulled out some paper and the fountain pen he was using that week. Since he was currently “between stories”, he wrote character sketches of the denizens of the coffeehouse. Most were younger than he, and some were even his students. He wrote about a number of these, describing physical characteristics first and then creating life stories for these people. And then a new arrival, someone he hadn’t seen before, caught his eye.

This man was elderly, possibly in his eighties. His thinning white hair was perfectly combed. A pair of rimless spectacles was perched on his slightly red and bulbous nose. He wore a white silk dress shirt under a black pinstriped jacket with a red silk handkerchief folded into the breast pocket. Peter watched the way the man very precisely measured three spoonfuls of cream into his coffee. Then he opened three sugar packets, one at a time, by flipping each one three times before tearing along a crease he folded in the top of each packet. After three sips of coffee, the man produced a leather-backed journal and began to write in it using a pen that Peter recognized even twenty feet away.

He had seem pictures of it in his pen collector’s books. It was a Pelikan M-900 Toledo. The black acrylic barrel was encased in a series of engravings in twenty-four karat gold. The manufacture of this pen, by the makers in Hamburg, required almost one hundred steps. Suddenly the vintage Sheaffer in Peter’s hand felt very inadequate. Peter was still staring at the gentleman when the gentleman looked up and met Peter’s gaze.

Peter shuddered. The man put him in mind of his Uncle Saul, who had traumatized Peter when he’d been a boy and his parents had taken him for monthly visits. Uncle Saul had been a stern man, a cold banker whose home had smelled of antiseptic and was full of things that little boys dare not touch lest they be locked in the cellar with the Beast Beneath the Stairs. Peter had no idea why a complete stranger should remind him of Uncle Saul. He gave a quick smile and then dropped his eyes back to the page again. He put his left hand across his brow, blocking his upward gaze with his fingers as he tried to refocus his attention on his writing and give off the impression of uninterruptible intensity of work. Let’s see, where was I….he took a slip of scratch paper and scribbled to restore the flow of ink to his pen.

“Here, try mine,” a voice said. The voice was foreign — Northern European. Not French. Peter looked up and found himself face-to-face with the gentleman from across the room. He was holding out the Pelikan Toledo. He nodded and smiled genially. “You may find the nib to your liking, I think.” Not Swedish or Norwegian, either….

“Thanks,” Peter stammered as he accepted the pen. It was fairly lightweight, and when he unscrewed the cap and posted it on the opposite end the balance was almost perfect. He touched the silver and gold nib to the paper and wrote a few lines in his miniscule script. The pen left behind a smooth, thin line in sapphire ink. “I prefer black,” he said as the man took the seat across from him.

“Chacun a son gout,” he replied. He picked up Peter’s pen and looked it over. “Very nice,” he began, peering at it as a jeweler would a diamond. “The Balance, made by the W.A. Sheaffer Company. Gold and palladium nib. Well preserved indeed; this pen has seen a number of caring owners. But look here: a few hairline cracks in the cap, where the clip is fastened.” Age had not diminished this man’s visual acuity at all.

“You know fountain pens?” Peter asked as he handed the Pelikan back to its owner and recovered his Sheaffer.

“I know many old things,” the man said, waving a hand of dismissal. “There is much business to be done in things that are old.”

German! Peter realized. “You’re the new antique dealer in town,” he said.

“Indeed.” The man nodded slightly. “Karl Strassheim. I am new here in town; I lived in the South for a long while, but I regret that my life has come to the point where I need the cold. It reminds me I’m alive. I could not bear to take refuge from the world behind the gates of a sterile community in the bosom of the Tropics. Don’t you agree?” He smiled throughout, saying all this in a single unbroken breath.

“Yes,” Peter said, momentarily taken aback. He did in fact prefer the colder climes.

“I thought so,” Strassheim said. “May I have your name?”

“Peter Bernstein.”

“Ah, Bernstein! Any relation to Leonard?” Peter shook his head. “Pity. I have one of the Maestro’s earliest batons in my shop. Tell me, Mr. Bernstein — may I call you Peter? I do like some informality — tell me: are you a practicing Jew, or do you merely carry the name?”

Peter’s eyes narrowed as he tried to judge this man. “I’m not what you would call religious,” he finally said.

“Not many are,” Strassheim said. He reached into his jacket, drew out a small brass case, and pulled a business card from the case. He placed the card on the table and wrote something on the back with the Pelikan Toledo. His fingers were long and fine-boned. “I may be able to help you, Mr. Bernstein.”

“With faith?” Peter stared at him.

Strassheim raised his eyebrow. “With pens.” He handed Peter the card, tipped his hat, and left the coffeehouse. Peter looked at the card. On the left was a gold-ink Anubis, the same design that Peter had seen on the door to Strassheim’s shop. Next to Anubis was Strassheim’s name and his shop’s address in raised purple ink. At the bottom, in red: “We know not for what we seek.” Peter turned the card over, to where Strassheim had written: “Monday, precisely 4:00 p.m.” His penmanship was perfect and patrician.

***

Peter didn’t go to Temple that weekend, as usual. He only occasionally felt guilty about missing Temple, but this time, in the dark of night when his bedroom was silent and the only light came from the red numbers of his alarm clock, he felt a sense of disapproval that might have been the eye of YHVH.

On Monday he went to work as usual, but all through the day he felt a certain sense of unease about the appointment he had that afternoon. He kept asking himself, Why feel this way about an antique dealer? The feeling became stronger as the day wore on.

Peter arrived at the door to Karl Strassheim’s business at precisely 4:00. Apprehension gnawed at his stomach as he entered. Bells hanging from the door rang as he entered and looked around.

The shop was immaculate. Not a single speck of dust could be seen anywhere. The items for sale included perfectly preserved furniture; paintings and tapestries; exquisite clocks and vases. There was a glass case containing jewelry, and another containing first edition books, some with Latin titles on their spines. There were no prices on anything in the store.

“May I help you?”

The voice belonged to Strassheim’s executive secretary, a woman in her mid-fifties who sat behind a cherry desk in the far corner. She wore a navy business suit that was at once unblemished and authoritative, and her silver hair was tied in a neat and severe bun. As Peter walked toward the desk he saw that she was doing paperwork. There were sheets of what looked like budget information or sales numbers, but there was no calculator on the desk, and the only computer was a laptop that sat unused on a shelf beside her. She was doing the sums in her head — very quickly, he saw — and totaling the columns in neat, precise script. In her hand was a Mont Blanc fountain pen.

“May I help you?” she asked again, peering at Peter over the top of her rimless reading spectacles. A cuckoo clock on the wall signaled the hour. Peter cleared his throat.

“I’m Peter Bernstein,” he said. “I have a four o’clock appointment with Mr. Strassheim.” He smiled nervously and held out the business card. She didn’t take it, or even look at it. She was already looking back down at her work.

“He will be with you momentarily,” she said. Nonplused, Peter turned his attention to a chess set that had been carved entirely from volcanic obsidian for the black pieces and walrus tusk ivory for the white pieces, and both materials forming the squares of the board. He leaned in to look closer at the finely carved Staunton pieces and was extending a hand to touch one of them when the secretary spoke again: “Please refrain from handling it unless you are prepared to make an offer for its purchase.” Chastised, he snatched his hand back and stood up. He folded his hands behind his back like his father had taught him to do as a boy when they had walked through museums. He glanced at the secretary; she hadn’t even lifted her eyes. Her accent was vaguely European, but not strongly so. Canadian, perhaps?

“Make an offer?” he asked. Before she could answer, a door behind her swung open and Karl Strassheim entered the shop.

“Yes, make an offer,” he confirmed, giving the same genial smile from several nights before. “None of my items has a specified price. I cater to people who know precisely what they want; they are always willing to set a price that is more than reasonable.” He turned to the secretary. “Ms. Kobayashi, please call Governor Nelson and inform him that I cannot divulge the source of the silver. I would not be in business if I did otherwise.”

Kobayashi? Peter thought. He remembered reading something about an rich Japanese businessman, founder and president of a prestigious electronics firm, who had tragically died in a hot-air balloon accident. An accident in Quebec….

“Come, Mr. Bernstein, and we shall see if I can interest you in anything.” Still smiling, he held open the door as Peter joined him and stepped through. Peter was glad to be out of the company of Mrs. Kobayashi.

They walked down a fairly long hallway which ended at an elevator, one of the old-style elevators that was open mesh on each side. With strength that belied his age Karl Strassheim pulled the gate back, allowing Peter to board. He then got in himself, closed the gate, and moved the huge brass lever that started the apparatus moving with the echoing cacophony of a giant machine operating in a huge cavern. The elevator rose past four floors that looked like stories of a warehouse. Finally it reached the fifth and final floor, where they got off the elevator and walked into what had once been a studio apartment, complete with dramatic skylight thirty feet up. But instead of the bohemian appearance Peter usually associated with studio apartments, here he found a place as perfectly tidy as the shop below, perhaps even more so. Windows along one wall overlooked the street. Two walls were lined with stocked bookshelves, and the last wall bore a number of wall-hangings that looked like medieval tapestries. A shield and spear hung above the mantle of a wood-burning fireplace. By the windows there was an immense desk of black wood, and in the center of the room was a sitting area comprised of a sofa and two chairs of matching leather the color of rich chocolate arranged around a coffee table made of the same wood as the desk.

“This is my office,” Strassheim said as he led Peter across the hardwood floor to the desk. “I only bring customers up here when they have needs that require my personal involvement. All respect to Ms. Kobayashi, but there are needs that cannot be serviced by a woman, no?” He gave the genial smile as he sat down behind the desk and looked through a sheaf of papers.

“What needs do I have?” Peter asked.

“What needs indeed?” Strassheim mused. “Please excuse me for one moment. Some business cannot be left undone, yes?” He pulled out the Pelikan Toledo and began writing a note on a piece of fine stationery. Peter glanced at the letter to which Strassheim appeared to be responding; he couldn’t quite tell but the letterhead appeared to include the seal of the United Nations. Peter turned away and wandered to the wall with the fireplace. There was a small cabinet that looked like a refrigerator; looking inside he found eight bottles of wine that were being maintained at a cool temperature. He turned his attention to the objects on the mantle. There was a silver candelabra with no candles, and what was unmistakably an Iron Cross hanging from a purple ribbon. There was also a picture of a young soldier in World War II. The soldier was smiling as he held his rifle in one hand and shook the hand of another man, an officer, with the other. The officer was wearing a long overcoat. The ground in the picture was snowy, and the two men in the picture had flecks of snow on them. Behind them was a series of long, low buildings to one side and a set of railroad tracks to the other. An inscription at the bottom of the photograph read something in German, though Peter could see the word “Doktor”. It was signed, simply, “Josef”.

He was startled by a drawer slamming shut. Turning quickly he saw that Karl Strassheim had left his desk and was walking to the sitting area. “Won’t you join me, Mr. Bernstein? We have business.”

Peter left the photograph behind and joined Strassheim, who had sat down in one of the chairs. He had opened a bottle of red wine and poured some into two glasses of fine crystal. Peter sat down on the sofa and lifted his glass. The wine was thick and sweet and strong, much more than Peter was used to.

“Never a day without a glass of Port,” Strassheim said after he had taken his first sip. Peter glanced at him. Had Strassheim meant to phrase it that way? The antique dealer put his glass down and met Peter’s gaze. “I believe in predestination and atonement, Mr. Bernstein. I used to believe in neither. To a young, foolish boy the world can seem to have no purpose at all, perhaps not even to a man such as you. I can state unequivocally, though, that this is false. We are brought to each choice for a reason. Do you understand?”

Peter was startled by Strassheim’s intensity. “I’m afraid I don’t,” he said.

“This is where my choices have brought me. Perhaps it will become clear.” Strassheim opened a drawer under the table, pulled something out and set it on the table in front of Peter. “Not the original box, you understand. Some people find that important.”

It was a jade box with trim and hinges of gold, about nine inches long, three inches wide, and two inches deep. Peter reached for the clasp and opened the box. The inside of the box was lined with red satin, and on this lining lay a pen.

Peter wasn’t sure what he had expected; perhaps a pen of solid gold or platinum, emitting a heavenly glow like that one would expect from the Holy Grail. What he saw, though, was a somewhat ugly pen made of what looked like off-white plastic. It was long and slender and its barrel had been polished to a high luster. The clip was made of gold, and there were no identifying marks as to the manufacturer at all. Gently, Peter picked the pen up. It had a good weight, but was not so heavy that it would tire his hand. He unscrewed the cap, which came off smoothly; the threads were completely unblemished. The nib bore a fine point, which would suit Peter’s tiny script well. He turned the pen over in his hand. Upon closer inspection of the pen’s opposite end, he saw a blind cap.

“Piston filler?” he asked.

“Yes,” Strassheim said. “It has never been inked. That should be done by the user, don’t you think? Take it home and test it, Mr. Bernstein. See if you wish to purchase it.”

“What if I don’t like it?” Peter asked suspiciously.

“I am willing to take that chance,” Strassheim said.

“What price?”

“You must use the pen, and then decide what it is worth to you.”

“This is very peculiar,” Peter said, feeling wary.

“I can appreciate your feelings. The customers I bring up here are unique, and I serve them uniquely. Shall you take it with you?”

Peter looked at the nib again. It was totally plain, with no pretty spiral engravings or markings. The pen itself was plain, very plain. Could he write with this thing, this ornament of mere utility?

He took the pen home with him.

***

He didn’t ink the pen right away; in fact he left it on his desk for several hours. Instead of writing, which he knew he should be doing, he washed his dishes, cleaned his bathroom, sorted his laundry. But he wasn’t merely trying to subconsciously avoid writing; he was avoiding that pen. But still it sat there on the desk, and he was constantly aware of it. As midnight drew near his eyes fell on the sign he had taped next to his desk. Nulla dies sine linea…..There was no avoiding it any longer. Peter sat down at the desk and picked up the pen.

He set the cap aside and wound the blind cap until it stopped, fully extending the piston inside the barrel. He opened his inkwell, dipped the nib in the ink, and screwed the blind cap back to its original position. All this took a surprising number of turns; the pen must have had an excellent capacity in its reservoir. When the blind cap was back in position, he primed the pen and then wiped the nib with the old cloth he kept for just that purpose. Somehow the pen now felt heavier, despite the negligible weight of the ink. The pen now had a spark, a vitality it hadn’t had before. Peter pulled out three sheets of paper and wrote his standard test phrases: a few lines from The Lord of the Rings and Casablanca.

Perhaps it was only his sense of anticipation just then, the nervous apprehension he had felt all night finally being given physical release. Perhaps. But as he began to write his usual pen-testing phrases the pen seemed to move across the page under its own power, as if it were a living thing that left a perfect line of ink in its wake. His hand danced, and for a moment he actually became unaware of his hand applying pressure to the tip of the pen. His hand danced across the page, and the pen’s action on the paper was smoother than any pen he owned, or any he’d ever tried before. Even Strassheim’s Pelikan Toledo was a generic ball-point next to the action of this pen. Vintage fountain pens were usually slightly scratchy due to the shaping of the nib by the previous owner’s hand, but this one was perfectly smooth, as if it had been shaped for Peter’s hand alone.

With a sense of mounting excitement he dug out the short story he was working on just then and started writing. He wrote, enthralled by the pen that was so smooth that Peter became unaware of it; his thought were appearing on the paper in perfect wet lines of ink. He had never written like this before…but then a dark emotion crept into his psyche, and after he had only been writing for an hour when he slowed to a stop and stared at the words, which had excited him so just minutes before but now sat lifeless on the page forming a monument to banality. Here was another story that he would not finish. He capped the pen and set it aside, and then he felt his anger building very quickly, very suddenly. He grabbed the sheets of paper and in the hottest rage he could remember ever feeling he ripped the pages into shreds and threw them into his trashcan. After he had done this, he still felt angry — perhaps even more so. He yanked open the drawers of his desk and found all of the drafts of unfinished stories he had ever written. One by one he ripped them all to pieces and threw them in the garbage, missing some of the time. Ten minutes of literary self-mutilation later, Peter sat in the midst of a confetti-strewn work environment. He was moderately disgusted not because he had destroyed all of his work, but because he would have to sweep this mess up. Telling himself that he would do it tomorrow, Peter put another sheet of blank paper on the desk and picked up the pen again to do some stream-of-consciousness free writing, an exercise that helped to clear his mind. He cast his idea net, looking for an image to write about — and there it was. Cattle being loaded onto a train to be taken to the meat-processing plant. He wrote.

They were loaded onto the railroad cars by uniformed men holding guns. There was a lot of screaming in the air and steam in the air belched out by the locomotive. Crying, sobbing, families of cattle being separated. Inside of the railroad car stinks of sweat and shit and piss and it’s hot in there, all those bodies crammed in there. Someone was bleeding.

After one o’clock Peter finally went to bed, leaving the pen and the sheet of free-writing ravings on the desk. In his dreams that night he saw blood, death, and a train moving toward an abattoir. He heard the bleating of the cows as the train passed through high fences toward a factory dwarfed by a giant smokestack. Whatever else he dreamed he mercifully did not remember.

***

The next day, Peter left the College right after his last class and went to Queequeg’s to write. Choosing a booth near the back he set out his supplies and reached into his bag for a pen. His heart skipped a beat when he saw the new pen in his bag. He was certain that he’d left it on his desk. Obviously he had grabbed it before he’d left for work that morning, but he couldn’t remember. Peter shrugged and wrote with that pen. The feeling that the pen was writing itself was even stronger now than it had been the night before, as if his hand were being pulled across the page.

I am still alive as they push me into the oven. The dead are all around me….The stink of death and decay fills my nostrils. I want to vomit, but my stomach is empty. It has been so long since I ate. I heave and spit up bile. My throat burns as stomach acid pools in the back of my mouth. I swallow it and choke for air, filling my lungs with that stink. I heave again, and the door closes. There is a great metallic slam and the only light comes through the tiny window in the door. And then there is heat. It sears my flesh. It should be over in a second, but it goes on forever. The fires scorch my flesh but I don’t die. My eyes catch fire, my ears shrivel and burn. Why won’t I die?

Peter’s wrist throbbed as it flew across the page. He both winced at the pain and barely noticed it. The images piled in his brain, faster and faster, faster than he could write. Also building was the awareness that he was no longer writing about cows going to the abattoir.

I woke up to shouts in the streets and the snarling of dogs. Through the window I see lights: headlights, flashlights, floodlights that were attached to trucks. I heard car engines, the squeal of brakes, the report of rifle fire. And shouting in a language that will haunt my dreams.

They are here. Footsteps pound the pavement, then up the front steps. Pounding hammering as the front door is smashed into a thousand pieces; the cracking of wood. Oh, my. Oh, my. Here? Here? Now!

More splitting wood. Gunfire, rifles and pistols. And they are in my bedroom now. The one in charge screams at me, yanks me out of bed and shoves me into the living room. Sascha and Helen are already there. I hug them, but we are pushed toward the hallway. Our neighbors are there. The soldiers shove us all down the hall toward the stairs. Why us? Why me?

Before I leave the flat for the last time I look back. Marta isn’t with us. She is in her bedroom. Two soldiers hold her down while another laughs and unfastens his belt.

Peter dropped the pen to the table and wiped surprising sweat from his brow. He rubbed his wrists and stared at the words he had written. His breathing was quick, heavy. He blinked, attempting to clear the images from his mind. So grim, unlike anything he’d written before — modern-day bodice rippers, magical tales of unicorns and elves in Ireland, stories of shopkeepers and their vampire lovers. Never anything like this. Peter rubbed his eyes, and only when he opened them again did he realize how dark it had become in the shop.

“Excuse me, sir?” It was one of the employees, a college-age woman who was wiping the next table. Peter was the only person left in the place, other than the staff. He had been there for nine hours. “We’re closing now,” she said.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Peter stammered as he hastily grabbed up his belongings and stuffed them into his bag. He stopped when he saw how many sheets he had covered with writing. At his normal pace it took him an hour to produce a whole page; counting these, he realized that he had produced eighteen pages — almost twice his normal speed. He glanced through those pages of tiny handwriting and saw that he had written of dark things, of death and horror and disfigurement.

Peter stuffed everything into his bag and left the shop. He was thinking about cattle as he stepped into the chilly October air. He certainly wasn’t writing about cattle. Not anymore.

***

Peter disobeyed his Eleventh Commandment for the next two days, writing absolutely nothing. He was too disturbed to go near his desk. He put the pen in its box and put the box in the lowest drawer on his desk. When he finally did write again, he confined himself to the pens that were already in his collection, and he tried valiantly to return to prior subjects for his fiction. Maybe a little Romance would quell the horrible things that haunted his dreams, so he tried that. He took refuge in the familiar. But his dreams were still terrible.

Peter’s classes went by that week fairly monotonously. In fact, his whole week was uneventful, and he thought that maybe he was getting back to normal. On Thursday he went for a walk, and before he realized what street he was on he was back in front of Karl Strassheim’s shop. There was a note attached to the door: “We shall be unavailable until further notice.” The lights were off, but the inventory was still there. Odd.

His walks had been longer than usual that week. Night fell as he headed home at a brisk pace. He wanted to get his heart beating and his blood flowing. He felt pretty good again as he came around the corner onto his own street and walked toward his apartment building. There, under the streetlight out in front of the building, stood a black figure. Probably Francis, Peter thought. Francis was an old coot of a woman who lived somewhere nearby. She always dressed in old rags and wandered around aimlessly, despite the fact that somehow she was actually quite wealthy. He headed for the door and was about to wave when he realized that this wasn’t Francis.

The person could easily have been a woman, but somehow Peter was sure it was a man. A sudden breeze came up, and Peter caught a strong scent of burned meat. He pulled the door open and stepped inside the vestibule, certain now that this person was watching him. Relief washed over him when he got into his apartment and locked the door behind him.

He spent his evening writing and watching TV, and forgot all about the strange person. When he awoke at three in the morning with a dry, cottony mouth, he rose from the bed and walked to the kitchen to get a glass of water. As he filled his glass from the faucet, he glanced out the kitchen window to the street and sidewalk below. There, in the middle of the pool of light cast by the streetlamp, the strange person still stood. Peter ducked away from the window, groping for the light switch to shut off the kitchen light. His heart pounded in his throat and his feet rooted to the floor, refusing to move. There was no doubt in his mind at all that the figure in the light had been staring at his window. After several long minutes of waiting and breath-holding, Peter hazarded another glance out the window — and the black figure was gone. He breathed a sigh of relief and went to his living room. He was now too awake to go back to bed, so he sat down to watch some late night TV and calm his nerves. About ten minutes of infomercials and lousy late-night movies was enough to make him drowsy again….and then a deep booming sound jolted him awake. His windows rattled in sympathetic vibration, and the TV stopped on an episode of “The Honeymooners”. It had been the slamming of the building’s front door.

Footsteps echoed through the hall outside his door, accompanied by creaking floorboards. Peter’s eyes shot to the sliver of hallway light that shone under his door, and he glanced up to make sure that he had, in fact, fastened the deadbolt and his two door-chains. The footsteps came closer, and then two shadows appeared in the light beneath the door and stopped. Peter held his breath and waited for cardiac arrest. While whoever it was stood outside his door, the mail slot flip-flopped and something dropped through to Peter’s floor. Whoever it was moved back down the hall. The front door slammed again, and silence descended at last. Peter gradually became aware of the sound of his TV.

Ralph Kramden was about to send Alice to the moon as Peter got up and went to see what had been dropped through his mail slot. It was a white envelope. He picked it up, walked to his desk, and then opened the envelope with a letter-opener.

Inside the envelope was an old photograph. It was a family dressed in dark heavy clothes, standing on the steps of a brownstone building in winter. One member of the family — the youngest son, who looked to be twelve or thirteen — was circled in black ink. Peter turned the photograph over, and found writing there: “Write my story.” It was signed, “Jakob Stern”.

Peter flipped the photograph back over and looked at the family again. Each member wore an armband on which was emblazoned a Star of David.

***

Peter had been in his office on Saturday for almost five hours when someone knocked on the door. Professor Tatum entered without waiting to be invited.

“Peter! What are you doing here on a Saturday?” His loud voice filled the office.

“I could ask you the same thing, Larry,” Peter said as he pushed some books off the only other chair in the office.

“Touche,” Tatum said as he settled into the chair. “Yes, I’m spending a rare weekend working. Can you believe the luck? What are you studying there?” He picked up one of the books and stopped smiling when he read the title. “A History of the Holocaust,” he said. “A grim topic for you.”

“I know. I just figured it was time I learned more. My father refused to talk about it. He said that it should be remembered, but that he couldn’t be one of the teachers.”

“Is this for a story?”

“I don’t know,” Peter said. Tatum, of course, saw immediately that there was more on Peter’s mind than simple ancestral interest in the Shoah. He lifted an eyebrow.

“Out with it, Peter,” Tatum said.

“Well, I suppose it starts with this,” Peter said as he held up the new pen. He told Tatum how he had met with Karl Strassheim, and that Strassheim had given him this pen. Peter told him about the horrible things he had written, and the dreams he had been seeing at night. And he told Tatum about the strange man outside his door, and showed him the photograph.

“That is strange indeed,” Tatum said as he perused the photograph. “Relatives of yours from the Old World?”

“I don’t think so,” Peter said. “My great-grandparents came to America a few years after the Civil War. We’re pretty much American now. My father isn’t very devout — he married a Methodist — and as far as I know, I don’t have any relatives who were there.”

“Meaning you probably do, but you don’t know about them,” Tatum observed.

“Well, genealogy has never been very important in our family.”

“Still, there were six million of them. You must have had blood there somewhere.”

Peter shook his head. “But I wouldn’t know where to start. I just told you everything I know about the family tree.”

“Well, someone is obviously trying to tell you something. Maybe it’s a survivor who wants you to tell his story.”

“I thought of that, but why me? Why a writer who’s never published anything? And why the dreams, and the things I write with this pen?”

Professor Tatum picked the pen up and looked it over. “In Germany, during the war, there was a great deal of fascination with the occult,” he mused. He put the pen down, and the two men stared at it.

“Are you saying that Strassheim deals in cursed items?” Peter asked.

Tatum shrugged. “I am no expert in such things, Peter. But it does occur to me that this pen appears to be made of bone.”

***

SLAM!!!

Peter jolted awake and snapped his head up from the pile of books on his desk. The footsteps in the hall had returned. He sat rigid as the person in the hall moved to his threshold, slid another envelope through the mail-slot, and then walked off, again slamming the door. Peter waited for his heart to move back into his chest cavity before he rose and retrieved the new envelope.

In it was another photograph. This was a series of low buildings to the left and railroad tracks leading to a gate on the right. It could have been a military base, or maybe an industrial park of some sort. On the reverse the same hand as before had written: “Here is where to look.” Peter looked at the photograph again. Something there was very familiar. He had seen that photograph, or the place in it, before. In one of the books!

He rushed to the desk and flipped through all of the books in the pile until he found it, knowing now what he was looking for. There it was, the exact same place — and then his mind jolted to a third photograph of the same place, but with two people smiling in the foreground where the others had no one. The photograph in his hand, the one in the book, and…the framed one above the mantle at Karl Strassheim’s office.

Three photographs of Auschwitz.

Peter’s sleep that night was consumed with dreams of walking through a lumberyard — but instead of stacks of lumber there were stacks of bodies which stared at him through sunken eyes.

***

Peter canceled his classes for the rest of that week and gave his assignments in absentia. He wasn’t sleeping; his dreams were tortured by awful things that reach out for you in the dark. He was afraid to write, because he had lost control of what he wrote. When he closed his eyes he saw the camps, the ovens, the trains loaded with people instead of cattle. He slept less than two hours a night, and by the end of the week he was paranoid and edgy. The slightest noise startled him: the creaking floorboards of his upstairs neighbor, the compressors of his refrigerator starting, a child yelling on the sidewalk outside. He did not go near his desk; he was afraid of the books that lay open on the desktop and of the words that he would write on a blank page. He knew already what those words would be: he would write of a body carried into the Doctor’s workroom, and of the leg being removed; of the polishing and the turning of the bone on the lathe. He would write of the Doctor pulling the teeth from the mouth and dropping the gold-filled ones into a crucible.

He still went for walks each evening in the early darkness, and the walks became longer and longer. On the third night, Friday night, he walked for hours and hours, barely noticing the increasing pain in his feet. He walked through parts of the town that he hadn’t seen in many months and, in some cases, years. It seemed that he was wandering aimlessly, but he gradually realized that he was, in fact, heading somewhere specific. Some force was leading him. The moon was rising when Peter arrived at the Synagogue.

The building was encircled by a wrought iron fence. Peter stood outside that fence looking in at the Synagogue. A voice inside him pushed and tugged him to go in and seek refuge, but another, stronger instinct kept his feet planted where they were.

“You do not go in?”

The voice came from behind Peter, and he turned and saw an elderly man in shabby clothes. He leaned on a wooden crutch which took the place of his left leg. He spoke with a thick accent.

“No,” Peter answered.

“You should,” the man said. “It is important that one make peace with God. We must all make peace with God, and with a world that contains evil. Why do you think he does it?”

Peter blinked. “Does what?”

“Why does God allow evil?”

Peter had no answer to this. The man shook his head and hobbled away. As he disappeared beyond the streetlight Peter noticed that the man had cast no shadow. He walked home after that, very quickly.

***

Another envelope awaited him when he got home. There was another photograph, this one of a one-legged teenage boy on crutches. He wore the dirty uniform of an Auschwitz prisoner. The face was young and gaunt, but unmistakable. It was the man from the Synagogue. On the reverse of the photograph was written “Jakob Stern, 1945”. Below this was written, “You must write.” The word must was underlined twice.

Peter looked at his desk. He did not want to sit down, but he had not written a word in almost a week. The cardboard credo seemed to be openly mocking him. Never a day? he thought. I can’t. The phone rang then, and he lethargically picked it up.

“Hello?”

“You must write, Mr. Bernstein.” The voice of the man at the Synagogue.

“Who is this?” Peter asked, his pulse quickening. He already knew the answer.

“I was Jakob Stern.” Pause. “You must write. It is the only way we can be free.”

“I am free.”

“You are not. You were chosen for this.”

“Why?” Peter said. He was sweating now, and urgency had crept into his voice. “Why me? Why was I chosen? What are you doing to me?“

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. Peter wondered if the person had hung up, but then the voice spoke again. “I did not make the choice.”

“Who made it, then?” Peter nearly shouted, his knuckles white as he gripped the phone like one would grip a branch when hanging above a chasm.

“You did.” Click.

Peter punched in the re-dial code, but the automated operator merely informed him that the call could not be completed. Peter slammed the phone down and then tried to take his mind off things by immersing himself in daily minutiae. He went through his mail and found a letter from Professor Tatum.

Peter,

I hope you are feeling better soon. Dr. Jensen taught a few of your classes, but Professor Dallay is becoming nervous. You should call him. [Dallay was Peter’s department chair.]

I further hope that this does not seem overly forward of me, but I checked with a friend of mine in Chicago about the business of the photographs. Paul Matthews is a lawyer who has done work with Holocaust survivors and their families. (I did not tell him about the pen. Some things, you will agree, should be kept private.)

From the photographs he was able to identify the family. The came from Tarnow, a town in Poland near Krakow. They were forced into the Krakow ghetto, where the father was shot by German soldiers when he stole a loaf of bread. When the ghetto was liquidated the Sterns were all taken to Auschwitz, one of few families to remain intact after that. There the mother died of typhus. Each of the children, though, was used in experiments that Paul would not describe.

He made one last discovery: the youngest son, Jakob, died in a mass firing squad execution in April 1945, less than one month before the German surrender. Sometime before the execution his left leg had been amputated. It is unknown if this was for medical reasons, but I have my own suspicions.

I look forward to your return to work. The Humanities Lounge this week has been utterly devoid of character.

Larry Tatum

Peter felt a growing sense of disgust. He removed the pen from the drawer where he had stashed it. There could be no doubt that it was made of bone, Jakob Stern’s bone. And the only way out of the madness was for Peter to write with it.

Why me? Why had the story of Jakob Stern had come to an apostate Jew who had no personal connection to the Shoah? Why the story of a boy, completely unremarkable, one of millions dead for no crime? A boy who had left no mark at all on a world that had maimed and killed him?

Why does God allow evil?

Peter picked up the pen, expunged the ink from the reservoir and filled it again, flushing the feeder system and ensuring a clean flow. His heart fluttered as he touched the nib to a sheet of blank white paper, and as before his hand was propelled by a force not its own. And as the first wet lines of ink glistened on the paper, the memories of a life not his flooded into Peter’s mind, and he gave himself to them.

He wrote for hours and hours, and the hours and hours stretched into days. He stopped only to eat a few spare meals, sleep a few hours at a time, and to restore the circulation to his aching wrist. Pages piled up higher and higher, and he consumed an entire bottle of ink. He chronicled the days of Jakob Stern, transcribing memories that were not his. He wrote of early days in a small farming town, and he wrote of September 1939 when the German armies plowed through. He wrote of a terrified boy following his crying mother and father and two siblings as they were forced into the ghetto. The pen flew across the pages as if it was telling the story itself and required his hand only for support. The memories continued to come.

The names of songs sung with two other families in a cold, two-room apartment. The soldiers leering at his older sister. The fear of troops coming in the night. The forced labor camps. The train packed with cold, smelly people. Occasionally he had to stop and rewrite passages that were marred by the tears that fell onto the page.

Finally, six days after he started, he put the pen down for the last time. His shoulders slumped, and he leaned forward to lay his head on the desk. A few minutes’ sleep would feel wonderful just now….

***

“Peter? Peter!”

Peter opened his eyes to find Larry Tatum standing over him prodding his shoulder.

“Larry?” Peter mumbled as he pushed himself upright.

“Thank God you’re all right,” Tatum said. “We were worried.”

“Worried?” What day is this?

“No one has seen you in a week! You weren’t answering your phone–“

“Ringer’s off.”

“I see that. The answering machine, too.” He eyed the stack of pages. “My God, have you been writing all this time?”

“Ummm…yes.” Peter climbed to his feet, and as he did so he realized how stiff he was as pain shot through his knees and ankles. His bones were moving for the first time in days. Bones? That’s pretty funny. He tried to laugh, but his mouth was cottony and his breath stunk in his own mouth. His hair was greasy, he had six days’ growth of beard, and he hadn’t changed clothes in who knows how long. He was filthy. “I think I’d better shower,” he said.

Larry cracked a smile. “I think that would be wise.”

“I’ll be out in a while,” Peter said as he wandered into his bedroom and closed the door. Forty-five minutes later he emerged again, feeling somehow refreshed although still very tired. Professor Tatum looked up at him from the couch, where he had been reading the story of Jakob Stern. His expression was haunted.

“Peter — this thing you’ve written–I wouldn’t have guessed you had something like this in you.”

Peter glanced at the pen, still on the desk. “Maybe I didn’t.” He grabbed his jacket from a hook on the wall. “Why don’t you drive me into the office? I think I’d better meet with Professor Dallay.”

“It would be my pleasure,” Tatum said as he stood. “We’ve all been worried, you know.” He glanced at the story. “What will you do with it?”

“I don’t know,” Peter said.

***

A week later Karl Strassheim’s shop was open again, and Peter was there at opening time the very next morning. He walked right up to Ms. Kobayashi.

“I want to see him, and I don’t have an appointment.”

Even then she didn’t look up from her paperwork. Instead she gestured to the door behind her. “He is expecting you.” He blinked, and then went through the door to the elevator, which he rode up to the penthouse office. Strassheim was there. He sat at his desk and peered at a diamond necklace through a jeweler’s glass. Strassheim removed the glass and smiled at Peter as he approached.

“At last,” Strassheim said. “I was beginning to worry.”

Peter reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the box with the pen inside. He put it on the desk. “I have decided not to buy this pen,” he said.

“Of course,” Strassheim said with a shrug. “I didn’t expect you to keep it. Not after you realized its nature.” He removed the pen to a drawer.

“Its nature,” Peter echoed in a tone of disbelief. “You were there, weren’t you?” he strode over to the mantle and pointed at the framed photograph. “You were there! Did you see what was done to him? Were you in the room when Herr Doktor took off Jakob Stern’s leg?”

“I was.” Strassheim shrugged again, but his smile was gone. “Strange thing about war, Mr. Bernstein: the side that is clearly going to lose will not capitulate until it has put guns in the hands of fifteen-year-old boys. But, there is penance to be paid. Some pay it with their lives. Others, though, pay it in different ways.” Peter stared at him, and Strassheim sighed. “So, in answer to your question, I was there at Auschwitz. I was there standing guard when the gold fillings were pulled from young Stern’s mouth and melted in the crucible. I was there for the amputation. I didn’t see him again after that. I suppose he was gassed, or shot; if not, typhus probably got him. All I know is that he never left that place alive.

“It is interesting, Mr. Bernstein: at your college the faces before you change every few months. In a place like that they change every day. Quite a thing for a fifteen-year-old boy, don’t you think?”

Peter was suddenly angry. “Don’t try to play the victim, Strassheim.”

“You should examine your definition of ‘victim’,” Strassheim said with a sigh. “Especially having never been one.” He opened a leather-backed ledger. “Now, we should discuss payment for services rendered.”

Peter gaped at the man, not sure if he had heard correctly. “I’m not buying the pen, Strassheim!” he finally said.

“I did not sell you a pen, Mr. Bernstein. I sold you a story, a story you could finish. You didn’t come here needing a pen. I serviced your true need, the need you wouldn’t acknowledge, and perhaps you won’t do so even now. But life is a string of choices, is it not? How is it that your choices have never led you to the words, ‘The End’? Until now, that is.”

Peter stared at Strassheim for a few moments as the clock ticked the seconds by. Then he nodded, and pulled out his checkbook. He wrote a check, tore it out, and handed it to the dealer. Two hundred and fifty dollars. “One half-cent per word,” Peter said. “Fair price for a story that I will never publish.”

“A fair price, then,” Strassheim said as he slid the check into a folder and wrote the amount in the ledger. “It is most definitely the smallest remuneration I have had in some time. But, no matter; I have other ways of earning money.”

Peter turned to leave, but he stopped at the door and turned back to the dealer, who was already onto his next project. “One question, Mr. Strassheim: How could you know my needs, just from seeing me once in a coffeehouse?”

Karl Strassheim looked up from his work and thought the question over. Then he smiled his genial smile and finally said, “German ingenuity.”

The answer was somehow satisfying, and Peter left the shop without looking back. When he was outside he headed toward the college for his classes. New stories were already forming in his mind. Not all of them were bodice rippers. Perhaps a few would become novels.

Tomorrow is Saturday, Peter realized. I wonder what time Temple starts.

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