The Ammonite Violin & Others (14 page)

She lives in a mostly empty redbrick building not far from the river, because looking out a window and seeing the wide gray-green river winding past usually makes her feel safe whenever she’s frightened and can’t think of a story to tell herself. Hardly anyone else lives in the building, as it’s very damp so close to the water, and the air often stinks of mold and mud and dead fish and the oily rainbow sheen that floats along on top of the river. There’s tall grass and crooked trees and all sorts of briars and bushes growing around the redbrick building, and she likes to think these things were planted to conceal her from the street and curious eyes and any people who might be passing by, the people who usually keep to the city and hardly ever come down to the river. But sometimes they
do
come, to stand out there on the bridge that spans the river and drop things into the water, or shoot their guns at the sky, or get drunk and fight among themselves. In one of her stories, the people from the city worship an enormous snake that lives at the bottom of the river below the bridge, and the things she’s seen them dropping into the water are offerings to the snake god. Long ago, after the rats made the world, but ages before she was born, the snake slithered up out of the oily river and vomited fire and lightning bolts, burning the city and killing almost everyone but these crazy men with their guns and liquor and their scabby lists. The fire seared their minds and boiled their eyes and made them insane—the few it didn’t simply kill—but not so blind or crazy that they didn’t understand that now they had to keep the snake content unless they wanted it rising from the river to spit fire at them all over again. The rats and the snake are ancient, mortal enemies. Maybe the rats made the whole universe, but they
didn’t
make the snake or all the countless wriggling children of the snake. The snake came here from somewhere else. Some other universe, perhaps, some place else where it wasn’t welcome, and there’s a story she tells herself where the brave rats fought the snake after it had burned down all the cities in the world. The rats drove the snake back down into the murky water beneath the bridge, and it has stayed there ever since, because the crazy men bring it offerings of whiskey and wine, and sing it gunpowder songs and hurt one another, bleeding to keep it happy and to keep it asleep. But today there are no men on the bridge, and she can sit alone in her room and play the magic pennywhistle for the rats who live in the walls of the redbrick building. Sometimes, they even come peeping out of the holes in the plaster and sit very still, listening to the music she makes for them. Not today, but sometimes they do. They come to hear her songs and to see that they’ve not made a mistake trusting her to keep the pennywhistle safe. If the snake were ever to get it, they’ve told her time and again, he would immediately begin to play the secret backwards song that would undo the universe, and only the rats can say when it’s time for all things to end. She plays them pretty songs and sad songs and songs that don’t mean much of anything at all, songs that are only music. Once, oil a night when the moon was full and tinted an angry yellow and staring threatfully in through her window, the rats came to her, a hundred or two hundred of them all at once. They sat and listened while she played a story about looking for crayfish and mussels along the banks of the river, about picking blackberries and pricking her fingers on the thorns. When she was done, they made small and approving rat noises, and a few even came right up to the edge of her mattress so she could stroke their fur with her fingers, the same fingers that drew stories out of the magical pennywhistle. And from that night on, she understood that the rats all watched over her and kept her safe from the moon and the fire-breathing snake sleeping beneath the bridge and from all the drunken, crazy men, just as she kept their whistle hidden safely inside her mute wooden box beneath the loose floorboard.

The night that the God of all Rats comes to see her, the moon is only an ashen sliver, and the night is not so cold that she can’t keep warm with the yellow fleece blanket she found hanging in a tree the summer before. She is dreaming about a delicious stew she’s made from crayfish and bullfrogs and fat white grubs, onions and ground-fall apples. And then something wakes her, but there’s only the thin slice of moon and the distant twinkling stars and the sky right outside her window, only the disappointment that she won’t likely be getting a second bowl of the stew. She doesn’t notice him at first, doesn’t realize that it was the God of all Rats who woke her from the dream. Then he says her name, which she hears so infrequently that there are times when she almost forgets she has one. The God of all Rats says her name, and she rolls over on her blanket to find him standing nearby, watching her with his intense black rat eyes. He is very tall, this god, and she doesn’t know if he always looks this way, like a tall man covered in the dark pelt of a rat, a man with the head and tail and sharp claws of a rat, or if this is just how he wants
her
to see him.

“Have I done something wrong?” she asks him, startled by the sound of her own voice, which she hears almost as infrequently as her name.

“Why would you ask me that?” the God of all Rats replies. “You have kept the pennywhistle safe, and ever have you been a friend to my people.”

“I know who you are,” she says and rubs at her eyes; the rat god nods his head and takes a step nearer the mattress.

“I thought perhaps you would. I did not think I would need to explain myself to you. You have played the pennywhistle, and you know the true stories. You are not like other human women, and you are not like human men, either.”

“Do you want to hear me play?” she asks. “Is that why you’re here?”

“I have heard you play a hundred times. You play so beautifully, but that is not why I have come to you tonight.”

“Do you want me to tell you a story?”

“Perhaps, daughter, I have come here to tell
you
a story, one you do not yet begin to suspect.”

At that, she sits up and yawns and rubs her eyes again. The God of all Rats sits down cross-legged on the floor next to her mattress and stares at her.

“But I already know so many stories,” she tells him. “Are you hungry? I have a little food and—”

“I am not hungry,” replies the God of all Rats. “I have sharp teeth and sharp claws and can find my own food when I am hungry.”

“You want to tell
me
a story,” she says, confused, still smelling the bubbling dream stew, still only just half awake and beginning to wonder if she even wants to know the sort of story a god might have for her.

“I want to teach you something and give you a gift, to show my gratitude and the gratitude of all my people for keeping the pennywhistle safe from the serpent who lives below the bridge. It will seem like a story to you.”

“I know the difference,” she says. “I can tell what is a story and what isn’t. I’m not a child. I hope you don’t think I’m a child, or that I’m insane, like the men from the city.” And she pulls the yellow blanket up tight about her arms and shoulders, because there’s something about the black, unblinking gaze of the God of all Rats that makes the night seem much colder than it actually is.

“No, you are not like them,” the rat god agrees. “But neither are you entirely sane. If you were, I doubt we would be able to speak like this, you and I. If you were sane, you would have never found the pennywhistle in the cemetery, and I would never have come to you.”

“I’m not crazy,” she says, pressing herself flat against the wall beneath the window, frightened now and wishing this were only a dream she could wake from, only a story she could stop telling herself. She looks away, no longer wanting to see the eyes of the God of all Rats, not wanting to feel them on her. “If someone told you I’m crazy, they were lying.”

Somewhere in the wild tangle of branches and vines that has grown up all around the redbrick building, an owl cries out—
boo, hoo-ooy hoo, hoo
—and now she feels like a hunted thing, like whatever it is the owl must be stalking through the tall grass and ragweed, only a trembling rabbit or a vole, a mouse... or a rat.

“Please do not be afraid of me,” the God of all Rats says and sniffs at the air. “I did not come all this way to frighten you.”

“You might not
mean
to,” she says, keeping her eyes on the loose floorboard, trying to think about the pennywhistle and not the owl prowling outside her window. “You might not mean to
hurt
me, either, but things don’t always happen the way we want them to.”

“I will not hurt you,” he says again, and again he says her name, speaking those two familiar, half-forgotten syllables, and it seems like music on his tongue. “You have my word I will not harm you, ever. Nor will I ever allow another to harm you, if I can prevent it. I am in your debt, daughter.”

“I am not
your
daughter,” she says, wanting to believe him, wishing the owl would fly far, far away, all the way down to the sea, and not spend the night perched outside her window.

“Will you accept my gift?” the God of all Rats asks, and she can tell that he’s growing impatient with her.

“Do I have a choice?”

“You do. Otherwise, I would not call it a gift.”

Slowly, she turns back to face the god, who is kneeling now before her, down on his knees and his head bowed, and suddenly she wants to cry, even though she can’t remember ever having cried before. The owl calls out again, and she wonders what sort of god the owls and hawks and ravens pray to.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said those things. I should know better.”

“Then will you accept my gift?” he asks her once more, and she tells him yes, she will. And so the God of all Rats takes her in his velvet arms and presses his wet nose to her right ear and whispers new secrets and shows her new worlds, and before the sun rises again, he slips himself in between her legs, and she shuts her eyes and thinks this must be the most wonderful night of her life. While the God of all Rats makes love to her, the room fills with his children—two hundred pairs of twitching whiskers, four hundred dewy eyes—and they watch and wait and wonder what will happen next.

And in the weeks that follow, there do not seem to be quite as many hours when she feels alone or afraid, and it is easier to sleep without telling herself stories. She often climbs the stairwell up to the roof of the redbrick building so she has the best view of the river, and she sits there and plays the pennywhistle and hopes that the God of all Rats is somewhere nearby, listening. An emptiness inside her has gone away, some terrible hollow that she only ever half suspected and then understood not as an
absence
, but simply an intrinsic, inescapable part of being alive. The snows come, but they do not seem to bring with them as much cold or as much desolation as in all the years past. She uses the pennywhistle to find a new song in which she and the God of all Rats go down to his underground kingdom miles below the redbrick building, where there is always enough food, and never any ice or frost or freezing winds, and never the need to hide. She becomes his queen, the lost queen for whom he has spent half an eternity searching, and she spends her days in great caverns playing the pennywhistle for all their assembled court, all the creatures who live in the world’s deep, dark spaces—the moles and fat pink earthworms, the beetles and the bats and such a gathering of rats that their numbers are beyond counting. The Cod of all Rats gives her a ring spun from the blackness before creation so that she will never have to die, and she gives him a litter of beautiful children with eager grey eyes and restless pink noses.
This is the best song I have ever found,
she tells herself and wishes that he would come back to her, even though he said that he never would. She watches the comforting river and the blue sky and the bare, craggy branches of the trees and hopes that maybe he was mistaken or that he’ll change his mind, because even gods can change their minds, and one night she’ll be dreaming about a bubbling pot of stew or a summer day or maybe finding a new blanket, and there will be a sudden, unexpected sound that breaks the dream and wakes her. And it will be him, standing there in the room, and the only thing she will miss about this place is the sight of the river. But she knows that these are only fancies, and that they cannot be more than that does not lessen the peace that the God of all Rats has given her in exchange for keeping his pennywhistle safe from the snake sleeping beneath the bridge.

The plague finds the city in the raw, dead heart of winter, in a bleak month, a grim and disheartening month when dawn and twilight seem to come with nothing in between, nothing there to divide night from day but half-light and clouds. There are only fleeting glimpses of a pale and indifferent sun, and when she asks the pennywhistle if the sun will ever be warm again, it won’t answer her. She rarely leaves the redbrick building anymore, because of the things she hears in the night and the madness of the dying men and women and their children, all lost in fever and turned out to roam the streets by those in the city who have not yet fallen ill. She stops going up to the roof and must make do with what she can see of the river from her window. And then she stops looking at the river altogether, too frightened by all the frail and raggedy people clustered along its icy banks or drowning themselves in waters that have gone the color of a very bad bruise. The pennywhistle knows a song about the plague, and it tells her that the sick people believe the river can cool them and drive away the fever. But they’ve forgotten about the snake below the bridge, and they do not know that it waits there to pull them down, one by one by one, feasting and stoking its infernal belly with the very same fever they pray the river will relieve. She cannot help them. She can only huddle beneath her blankets and think of the God of all Rats, who surely has not forgotten her. There is very little food, and most of what there is has gone over, so she tries not to eat. She nibbles snow from the windowsill to quench her thirst. And then one night the city begins to burn, staining the undersides of the clouds with angry, flickering shades of red and orange, and she starts to think that this must be the end of everything, and soon the rats will ask her to return their pennywhistle so they can begin to play the backwards song that will undo the universe they created. She doesn’t know if the serpent has crawled out of the river and started the fire, or if the people have started it themselves. It hardly seems to make much difference, one way or another. Fire is fire. Maybe, she thinks, the fire is another part of the plague, that, in the grip of their fevers, the men and women of the city have begun to sweat these flames. She takes out the wooden box from its place beneath the loose floorboard and unwraps the pennywhistle from the swatch of denim and plays a desperate, keening song that is only
Come back for me, come back for me
over and over again. But if the God of all Rats hears her, he does not answer, and he does not come back for her. By morning—that lighter shade of night that has come to
pass
for morning—the sky is consumed by billowing clouds of charcoal smoke and heavy rains of black ash and soot that ruin the white snow. The wind blowing in through her window stinks of everything that is burning, and she drags her mattress across the room and out into the fourth-floor hallway, as far from the window as she dares to go. It
must
be the end of time, when men sweat fire and even the sky falls, and she almost breaks the penny whistle so the backwards song can never be played upon it and the snake will have to sleep forever in its nest beneath the bridge. She squeezes her eyes tightly shut and holds it in her hands, meaning to snap it in half, meaning to make of it something twisted and ruined and ugly, a thing that can never play another note for anyone or anything or tell another story. But she is not that brave, even if she has been a god’s lover, and if she destroys the whistle she will be utterly alone forever, for all her life, and there will only be the stories that words can make. If she destroys the pennywhistle, she’ll have betrayed the rats’ trust and there will be no hope that the God of all Rats will
ever
come back for her. So she sits there shivering in the hallway, wrapped in her yellow blanket and humming a tuneless story about the river, unable to keep her eyes off the drab smudge of daylight, and the low winter clouds, and the smoke filling up her window, and the place where the sky used to be.