GREGORY FROST has been favourably compared by The Washington Post Book World to J.R.R. Tolkien, Evangeline Walton and T.H. White. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he now lives in Philadelphia with a huge cat named ‘Poot’.
The author of such fantasy novels as Lyrec, Tain and Remscela, his short fiction has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Whispers, The Twilight Zone Magazine, Night Cry, Liavek, Tropical Chills and Ripper!, amongst others.
“Divertimento”, like his story in our previous volume, was first published in a science fiction magazine. However, we believe it has now found its rightful place—between the covers of a horror anthology.
IN THE CENTER OF A RING OF THIRTY or more tourists, a polished clavichord stood, solitary. Although heavy drapes were drawn across the windows all around the room, dazzlingly bright highlights reflected off the clavichord’s surfaces. The tourists cleared their throats, muttered expectantly to one another, and shifted from foot to foot while they waited. They had been told not to sit just yet. Most had little idea of what exactly they were about to see.
Their host—a stocky man with a heavy black beard just starting to gray, and wearing 18th century dress—entered the room. His name was Peter Tellier. He nodded to them, and took his place in one of two large chairs of walnut and upholstery set up directly behind the performer’s bench. At his signal, the tourists sat, too. The Beidermeier armchair beside him remained empty.
A few moments later, directly in front of Peter Tellier, a boy appeared out of thin air and walked toward the keyboard. He seated himself imperiously upon the bench. Like Peter, he wore period clothing. His red coattails dangled lazily over the small bench. He crossed his ankles. Then, with eyes glistening, the boy, Mozart, glanced over his shoulder, directly at Peter.
After the first few times he had seen these actions repeated, Peter Tellier had dragged a chair to the spot, so that their eyes—his and Mozart’s—would meet when the young composer looked around. He had hoped they would see each other, and maybe make friends. He would so have liked a playmate but had long since stopped pretending that such a thing could happen. That secret glance did communicate something wonderful, but not to him. Who was this look of pride meant for? Sister? Father? The doddering Archbishop? Peter had come to believe, having looked things up in a decrepit music encyclopedia, that it was Michael Haydn being promised something wonderful. Haydn would have had good cause to hope.
Such heavy eyelids, thought Peter. The eyes seemed too large for Mozart’s small face. His little powdered wig curled into a ridge running around the back of his head from ear to ear. Peter thought of him as a little sheep. “Safely grazing,” he mumbled, then glanced around self-consciously, but no one had noticed. His sister wasn’t going to make this performance; probably she didn’t even know what time it was. The other mismatched chairs, gathered from abandoned buildings nearby, were arranged in a half-circle that kept everyone at a distance from Peter and Susanne. “Lamb of God,” he said, almost in prayer, “sacrificed upon the altar of Salzburg.” It was a line from the crumbling encyclopedia that had stuck in his mind; it might as easily have described him as Mozart.
Mozart began playing. The sound of the clavichord was incredibly piercing. Tellier beamed at the beauty of it. He wished he knew how to play. His parents had lacked the money for lessons, and he had never really thought about it back then. Now, for all his wishing, the matter had been irreversibly resolved.
The piece Mozart played was a practice, a test, though not for the him—he had written it and knew it so well that he needed no scrap of music before him. It was a trial run for a female singer. The opening was meant to be sung by a choir, but none existed in this performance. Instead, playing off each other’s voices, the singer and Mozart would carry the opening together in a duet. Peter had hired a choral group once to see if he could draw a bigger crowd, but the cluster of singers took up too much space and blocked much of the view of the phenomenon, and he lost money. The crowds had thinned even further. He had come to believe since that the eeriness of the unaccompanied performance was what made it so riveting.
The long introduction, one day to be carried out by a small orchestra, neared its end. Tellier knew it by heart now: Regina Coeli, Kochel 127. He sat more stiffly. His hands were sweating. Mozart turned his eager young face to the side, addressing the woman no one else could see.
She began. She sounded as if she were standing just to the right of the clavichord. Her pure voice echoed like the ringing of a distant bell. Peter was pretty sure the voice belonged to Maria Lipp, wife to Michael Haydn. Haydn, so he believed, was sitting or standing right about where the two chairs were. Peter wished Maria Lipp would manifest there with Mozart, but he doubted that would ever happen. All the resurrections he’d heard of had arrived in single lumps, as finished or unfinished as they could ever be. He wished they would stop arriving altogether: Crowds this size were becoming the exception.
She sang out with Mozart: “Regina coeli laetare.” They repeated it—all of it, parts of it—weaving around each other until the line ended, as did all the lines of the piece, in an “alleluja” meant for the complete chorus.
“Queen of heaven, rejoice,” said Peter, sharing what he could. The crowd had fliers, in seven languages, translating the text; they didn’t need his help but he couldn’t keep it to himself. After so many performances, he had to show off just a little. He lowered his head, pretending to lose himself in the music.
The performance went on for a little over ten minutes, after which, unaware of the audience’s applause, an excited Mozart got up and dashed right at Peter. An instant before he reached the big chair, he vanished. The crowd gasped as one—Mozart had become real to them. Peter thought sometimes that he could feel Mozart passing through him on his journey back in time, but he knew he was making that all up.
The applause thinned out quickly: With the performer nonexistent, who was there to clap for? Peter, after all, had done nothing more than tell them when to sit.
The crowd rose to leave, mumbling, grabbing their coats, thanking Peter as he held open the door for them, some enthusiastically, but most with an air of doubt, as if suspecting the whole thing to have been a hoax. Did any of them, he wondered, even know the story of this house?
When the last of them was gone, Peter stood briefly at the door, looking down the narrow slush-covered street toward the snowy heights of Kapuzinerberg for a sign of Susanne; but she was nowhere to be seen. She’d be out there somewhere, not very far away. Her playtime wanderings always worried him. If something should happen while she was out there, he might never know about it. He searched for her footprints but the tourists had stamped out all traces. His breath steamed. The cold stung his face. He closed the door and headed back inside. On the way down the hall, he dimmed the lights, then drifted back to his chair. Such weariness overcame him that he thought, with a spark of fear, he might be wearing out.
In the empty circle another performance would soon begin, but no more audiences were scheduled for today. He’d had them all week, five times a day, and that was enough. Too much. But the take had been exceptional. Enough to buy more medical help for Susanne. He looked at the dark space where the clavichord would shortly reappear.
He sat awhile in the dark, his thoughts going nowhere in particular. The smell coming from the kitchen was of warm chocolate. Behind him, the door banged open and his sister shuffled in. Filthy snow slid from her black boots; snow speckled her thermal-weave pantlegs. Peter tried not to show his great relief, because it would have revealed his concern at her absence. He thought she might have grown tired of the music. But of course that was absurd—Susanne had no idea how long she had been gone. One performance was any performance to her.
She had been making chocolate lace by pouring hot caramel into snowbanks. Undoubtedly she had wandered off with her pan of caramel to find just the right pile of snow. She had forgotten the pan outside somewhere in order to carry the product in—a pile of fragile amber sheets, crisscrossed patterns lying like pages of an open hymnal on her mittened palms. The whole world for Susanne at present consisted of getting the hardened caramel to the kitchen, where melted chocolate waited to receive each layer, thereby creating the time-honored confectionery wonder.
Susanne was younger than Peter by a year and a half, but she could easily have been his mother, even his grandmother. The device that had torn Mozart out of antiquity had detonated much nearer Susanne than her brother. The particles that had passed through her had slowed and lost energy by the time they reached Peter. As a result, her genetic material had received much higher exposure. She would have been dead, a memory, except that their parents—the first ones struck—had inadvertently shielded her somewhat with their bodies. Both parents turned from tissue to dust almost instantly. Cheeks caved in, eyes crackled back into the wrinkling lids, bodies doubled over, folding like accordions to the ground, where they puffed up a cloud of brown smoke. All of this in a second or two while their children writhed in a torment of stretching bones, growing teeth, sprouting hair—human ecosystems wildly out of control. Peter could still hear his parents’ cries go creaking into oblivion and remember how in agony he thought his fingertips would pop open to let his skeleton expand.
He understood little about the “time bombs”, as the press had dubbed them. The bombs had exploded in a few places around the world, but mostly here in Salzburg. No one knew why, just as no one knew for certain their source. Experts from Boston to Beijing speculated that the creators of the bombs, themselves from the future, had no idea of the destructive capacity of these devices. They might, in fact, be early experiments in time travel, the first unmanned capsules, inadvertently creating catastrophe by hauling a bit of future matter into the present. There was talk of prototachyonic pulses, of bombardment and loops, of matter and antimatter, of fission. None of it meant much to Peter. What no one talked about was the horrible pain of being eleven-years-old and watching your parents molder in front of your eyes. No one had ever consoled him over that. They were afraid of him and Susanne—absurdly afraid that what had happened might be contagious.
Though his hair and beard showed patches of gray and his eyes were dry and pouchy, Peter Tellier had only recently turned fifteen. Susanne, with her trembling arthritic hands, was thirteen but as a result of the time bomb had jumped all of adulthood to an immediate, doddering second childhood of perhaps eighty, perhaps more. Her deterioration seemed daily more evident to her helpless brother. Her body was racing to its end. Mozart—the sole means of support for the two children—was both the eldest and the youngest in the room at sixteen.
While her brother looked on, Susanne hobbled out of the kitchen. Chocolate stained her mouth and fingers. Tucked up under her like a football, she carried a feather duster.
The clavichord sat glowing in the center of the room, having reappeared for another performance, and Susanne intended to clean it. Peter sighed, inwardly aching on her behalf. She had been to so many specialists but no one had helped her. They probed her, studied her, probably wore her out faster with their poking and prodding than if he’d just let her deteriorate in peace, but he still sought for some cure. He recalled the way they had looked at him the last time, unable to cope with the idea of a little boy who was in appearance their senior. They often spoke to him about his sister as they might have spoken to his father, and for brief periods he became his father, acted the way his father might have done.
A scary kind of fame surrounded the time bombs; less respectable journals wrote outrageous things regarding them. The attention brought the crowds, certainly. They had to pay a lot to get in here, and they paid it without a whimper, because nowhere else would they ever see the real live Mozart . . . unless, of course, another bomb released another segment of the composer’s life. Peter refused anyone the chance to record the event, although a few had offered him substantial money to do so. What he couldn’t understand was why some world network hadn’t come forward with millions for exclusive rights. It was what he’d dreamt of, but no one had fulfilled that dream. There were other places he might have taken Susanne, with that kind of money.
As she neared the keyboard, Susanne disrupted the image. Static sparks danced on the feather duster, traveled up her arm. The clavichord rippled. Heedless, Susanne went right on dusting. Peter could read pain in every tiny movement that she made. She was, he conceded, getting much worse.
Peter suddenly found that he couldn’t stand it any longer. “It’s time,” he called to her to let her know that Mozart would be coming out in a moment.
She turned around, shifting her weight from one hip to the other, wincing but denying it, too. She smiled at him. Half her teeth had dissolved. “What will he play for us today?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you come and sit, and find out.”
“He likes my cleaning up. He always gives me such a look before he starts, just to tell me that he’s pleased.”
“Yes, he does, doesn’t he?” They’d had almost this same conversation a hundred times. Each repetition weighed him down more; he’d end up stoop-shouldered the way his father had always said he would if he didn’t stand up straight.
He got up and helped his sister to her chair. He took an afghan from the back of the chair, unfolded it and laid it across her lap. She leaned around him to watch Mozart emerge on his way to the clavichord.
“Look, he’s going to nod to me, Petey,” she said. Peter looked down at her eyes full of delight and his face grew hot. He dodged around his own chair and walked off quickly, hoping to escape before the playing started.
At the door he snatched his coat from a peg, hastily wrestled his way into it on the way out the door.
The cold sliced under his skin. Outside, the orange haze of the sky framed baroque shadows and bombed-out buildings. In the further depths behind him, the keys of the clavichord “spanged” under Mozart’s fingers, the introduction moving into the first verse of the Regina Coeli. How lonely the tiny voice sounded. It seemed to echo through the austere environment. Where had all the tourists gone? To the hotels, no doubt, on the other side of Kapuzinerburg, the living side. No bombs had gone off there as of the last Peter had heard. Smoke and lights sparkled in the early twilight over across the river. Hardly any showed down the street here. Or maybe the tourists had gone to the Cathedral Square. He had read about a time bomb there, that killed twenty and brought to life a piece of the “Everyman” play that long ago had been performed there every year. No doubt he’d lost paying customers to that event. To him that was the real cruelty of the bombs—that they wrought their damage without purpose or plan, robbing a life and then robbing the chance to rebuild that life.
The spirit woman sang, “Quia quem meruisti portare . . .”
Peter walked away from the sound. The snow crunched beneath his feet. He pretended to be his father, engaged in conversation with him. “You are fifteen now,” the father said, “too old to play make-believe games anymore. You and your sister can hardly get along now. Where will you go when the money is gone? When the tourists stop coming altogether? You haven’t saved enough, Peter. You’re living like sick people. You have your food delivered, and you never leave the house except to take your sister out sometimes. You’ve grown up afraid. Afraid of the world.”
“I have Mozart,” Peter replied, a little scared by what he was revealing from within. “Maybe we could go with him.”
“Does your Mozart know that he’s here? Does he know that you’re here? Or Susie? No. You’re playing games, Peter. Mozart’s dead, and you and your sister are catching up with him.”
“Stop it,” Peter said. He stopped walking. The “voice” went away. It hadn’t been his father at all. He turned and saw how far from the house he had gone in just a few minutes. He had nearly reached the other end of the street and the arrow sign he had put up. From there, the house looked no different than any of the other uninhabited dwellings surrounding it. Hurriedly, he walked back toward it. Look at the place. Without the sign how could the tourists know in which house Mozart played? No wonder the crowds had thinned out. He’d been so busy with Susanne’s care that he had let the house rot around him.
As he neared, he could hear Maria Lipp singing repeatedly, “Resurrexit,” then both she and Mozart launched into a series of joyous “Allelujahs”.
Peter closed the door, then stood leaning against it, as if to keep something evil out. His breathing wheezed and little sparkles danced in the air. He couldn’t believe such a short run had drained him so much.
The beautiful voice floated through “Ora pro nobis Deum.” Peter thought, please, yes, pray for us to God.
He hung on there until the last “allelujah” was sung. Susanne began clapping gaily. Peter peered through the doorway at her, as Mozart came running only to vanish just before reaching her. He wondered, did Mozart know she was there? Could he, from his side of time, see a bit of the present?
Seeming to sense his presence, Susanne glanced back at him. “Hello, Petey,” she said. “Would you like some of my chocolate lace? It ought to be hard now.”
He nodded. His face had gone dull with dissembling to hide from all the fears that churned inside him. He watched her climb up to shuffle across to the kitchen, obviously in great pain. The feather duster fell from her lap but she made no attempt to pick it up. She looked more withered than when she had sat down, only minutes before. When she was out of sight, he took off his coat and hung it back in the hallway.
“We can share it with Mozart, okay?” she called out to him.
“Fine.” The word squeaked out of his knotted throat.
Susanne came shambling out of the kitchen, nearly doubled over with the effort of supporting her treat. It lay, a dark doily across her hands. Delight glistened in her cataracted eyes, senility blocking pain. “Lookit, isn’t it nice?”
Peter stared at her and saw no one that he recognized. The sister he knew had gone into the kitchen; this creature had emerged, cut loose finally from his memories of her. What had happened to his sister? “Susie,” he lamented. He walked swiftly forward, reaching out to take the chocolate.
Susanne’s brows knitted. She glanced down at her breastbone. “Bee bite,” she said. Uncomprehending, Peter drew up for a moment. Then Susanne swayed and her head went back with a look like that of ecstasy on her face.
Peter cried out and rushed forward. The chocolate lace slid off her hand and dropped. The fragile, woven strands shattered as they hit the floor, scattering fragments in every direction. Peter clutched her to him, his feet crunching on the glassy bits of caramel. “No, Susanne.”
“Petey, I’m funny,” she said. Tellier dragged her to her chair and set her down in it. “Where’s momma, she here?” Her voice had gone thick. One side of her mouth twisted up as if trying to grin.
“She’s coming,” he answered quickly, searching her softening face for a hint of the little sister he could barely remember. “Be here in a minute.”
For all the death he’d experienced, for all that he knew this would come, Peter Tellier retained a childlike incomprehension of how someone so close could slip away while he watched, while he held her.
She was only dozing between performances, he told himself. She often did that. She would be all right. He straightened her up, tucked the afghan across her lap. He found a few large pieces of the chocolate lace and placed them on her lap, too.
Behind him, the clavichord fluttered into being. He turned and stared at it as at some horrible and totally alien object. He could not stand to hear that music again. Not ever again.
He forgot his jacket but climbed down into the snow like a figure out of history himself, in lace and velvet and trousers that buttoned just below the knee. The lights of civilization lay across the water, down the hill. He wondered if he would survive the walk.
Within, the house stood silent for a time.
Dust motes dancing in the sunbeams settled on the clavichord. The girl with the feather duster skipped over to it and began whisking at the surfaces, the keys, the bench, until young Mozart in red waistcoat came marching out and angrily ordered her away. Mozart shooed her along as if herding a cow. She pranced ahead of him, smiling blissfully as if he were proclaiming undying love. Mozart vanished as she settled into the Beidermeier chair with coquettish grace. In the other chair, the ghost of Michael Haydn glanced reprovingly her way.
Mozart returned from behind the chair and headed for the clavichord. To the right of it, with both hands clasped beneath her bosom, Maria Lipp watched him for her cue to begin.
Susanne heard a little noise behind her and looked around to find her older brother closing the doors with great care. He was dressed in a wonderful costume just like Mozart’s, but he put one finger to his lips to silence any outburst she might have had, then tiptoed into the shadows. She glanced surreptitiously at Haydn but he hadn’t noticed Peter’s arrival.
Susanne leaned down and placed her feather duster on the floor. Her feet dangled above it. She gripped the arms of her chair tightly, as if the chair were about to soar into the sky and carry her away to fabulous lands. “Regina coeli,” she named herself, then closed her eyes as Mozart’s slender hands descended upon the keys.