The Ammonite Violin & Others (15 page)

Three nights after the beginning of the fire, she’s dozing in the hallway, not really sleeping, and certainly not dreaming, only dozing, because she’s too scared and hungry to truly sleep. And then she hears stomping feet and drums, people shouting and singing, all their many voices joined and singing the same song together—more or less together—which is something she’s never heard before. It must be a sort of celebration, she thinks, because there’s something
triumphant
in the song they’re singing. And if it’s a celebration, maybe that means the plague is over, or the fire consuming the city has finally burnt itself out, so it’s not the end of the world after all. But when she looks from the hallway across her wide, empty room to the window, tire night sky is still smeared with the colors of burning. She gets to her feet, wrapped in the yellow blanket, and goes to the window to find out what has happened. Through the bare branches of the trees growing beside the redbrick building, she can see that the street is
filled
with people. Never before has she seen so great a congregation of them, all in one place and at one time. Many of them are carrying torches, and so she guesses that maybe they’re trying to empty the city of fire by hauling it away at the ends of these long guttering brands. Some of the people have drums and some flattened pieces of metal that they’re banging with sticks or hammers or spoons or just their bare hands. Their song fills the night, though she’d have thought there was no room left anywhere for anything else, what with all the cold and the smoke and the falling ash, the light from the burning city, the wind, the filthy snow, and the low, glowing clouds pushing down from above. It’s not a song she’s ever heard before, not a pennywhistle song, and it seems to be built mostly of words and the banging, thumping, clanging sounds the people are making.
Help me, O Lord, My strength and rock; Lo, at the door I hear death’s knock. Uplift thine arm, once pierced for me, that conquered death.
And she’s delighted at this commotion, so much noise and movement, delighted at these strange new lyrics and the mystery of their meaning, and so she does not see everything there is to see, or remember how dangerous the city people are. She leans a little farther out, bracing herself against the snow and ice and soot-encrusted windowsill, trying to catch all the words and catch their meanings, too.
And set me free. Yet, if thy voice, in life’s midday, recalls my soul, then I obey. In faith and hope Earth I resign, secure of heaven, for I am thine. My pains increase; haste to console; for fear and woe seize body and sod. Death is at hand.
But then she sees that the men and women ire carrying something besides their drums and torches. There are tall poles strung with the limp bodies of dead rats. There are huge reed baskets filled with dead rats. There are wheelbarrows, and a metal cart drawn by an old mule, and bulging burlap sacks, all filled to overflowing with the corpses of rats. There are children, and they gaily dance in and out of the procession, swinging dead rats by their tails. And even as she comprehends
what
she sees, she also understands
why
they are doing this awful thing, that this must be the sacrifice that the snake beneath the bridge has demanded of them, and in return he has promised that there will be an end to the fire and the plague. For a moment, there’s only silent horror at what they’ve done, at this senseless massacre and the desecration of all the murdered rats, so many of them that she wonders if any are left alive in all the world. Perhaps they’ve even managed to slay the God of all Hats. Perhaps they found the way down to his palace underground, and his beautiful body has been carved up and tossed into one of those burlap sacks or the pieces strung from a pole. They dance and sing that strange song and whack at their drums and sheets of corrugated tin, and when at last she finds her voice it is barely even a hoarse whisper above the noise of the mob. Nothing they will ever hear, no way she can ever stop them and whatever it is they’ve marched all this way to do. No way that she can fight something so cruel and clever as the snake, and now it is too late to even try. The rats are already dead. They died while she dozed on her mattress in the hallway, oblivious to the slaughter. Caught in steel traps or bludgeoned with mallets, crushed beneath bricks and stones or poisoned with arsenic or lye or anything else that was handy, at least a thousand easy ways for a man to kill a rat, and watching the delirious, torch-lit spectacle, she imagines all of them. Even over the noise, she can hear their dying screams and squeals, can see the blood-flecked jaws and the sea of shattered bodies, the scrabbling paws and broken bones caught between the merciless teeth of cats and dogs, those feckless, mercenary servants of man. And now the people at the front of the procession have reached the bridge, and they begin setting the dead rats afire and tossing them over the side into the river, flinging them down into
her
comforting river, her river that has been spoiled forever now. The swirling, traitorous waters open wide, accepting the dead and dragging them all straight down to the waiting snake, who must surely be watching this all from somewhere far below, smiling his wicked, scaly smile, pleased that they have done exactly as he has asked. Smiling that men may be bent to his will with so simple a thing as fear, with such a common thing as death, and smiling, too, because after countless millennia he’s been avenged, the tables turned, and his old enemy has been laid low. She knows
all
these things, and she closes her eyes because she cannot stand the sight of it any longer. She sinks to the floor beneath the window, whispering futile prayers to a dead god, and she wonders how long it will be until the snake sends them to find hex and take the pennywhistle. Not long, not long at all. Just as soon as the feast is done. She covers her ears, trying not to hear their wicked, wicked song of adulation, their hymn to the serpent below the bridge, but it slips in between her fingers:
My God! My Lord!Healed by the hand. Upon the earth once more I stand. Let sin no more rule over me; my mouth shall sing alone to thee. Though now delayed, my hour will come.
And then the room seems to sway and tilt beneath her, and there’s only a moment of nausea before there’s merciful silence and blackness and nothing more.

When she wakes, the room is still dark, so either it’s not yet morning, or the snake has used its magic and the blood of a million murdered rats to steal away the daylight for good. She isn’t certain if she’s actually awake or just dreaming, because there’s only the sound of the wind and dry branches scraping against the walls of the redbrick building. The singing and drumming and shouting have stopped, though the air continues to reek of burning. She sits with her back to the plaster wall, counting heartbeats, and when she has reached one hundred, she gets slowly to her feet, ignoring the aches and cramps of stiff muscles, the numbness in her fingers and toes, the rumble in her belly. And, peering fearfully over the windowsill, she sees that the people from the city, exhausted by the murder they have done, by their celebration and the pilgrimage from the city, are all lying together asleep on the bridge. Some of their torches have been wedged into cracks in the masonry or tied to now-empty carts, and so there is still that wavering, wind-lashed light washing dimly across their sleeping faces.
Why have they not come for me? she
thinks.
Why has the snake not sent someone to kill me and take the pennywhistle so the backwards song can be played? And
then she wonders if maybe someone
has
already come, if one of them slipped in while she was asleep and discovered her secret hiding place beneath the loose floorboard. It may well be as simple as that, and the snake ordered them not to harm her, to leave her alive, the queen of the God of all Rats, that she will have to hear the backwards song and witness the end of all things. And then she scrambles across the freezing; floor and pulls up the loose board to find that the wooden box is still there where she left it; opening the lid and looking inside, she sees that the pennywhistle is still there, too. So it is only the snake’s arrogance that has spared her, believing he has won and now he can take the pennywhistle from her whenever he chooses, so there’s still plenty of time to sleep off his gluttony, time enough to savor the victory before he sends someone, or slides up from the river to take it for himself She glances over her shoulder at the window, and the clouds are still bloody with firelight. If the snake did promise the men and women that he would extinguish the fire in their city, he has lied to them. It occurs to her then that maybe they aren’t sleeping at all, that possibly the snake has killed them, just as they killed the rats. Perhaps they all died screaming with his venom blazing in their veins, because he had no more use of them. She crawls back to the window and looks out again, and she can’t believe that she ever found the river soothing, that it was ever anything but the black grave it has become. And then she sits down again and puts the pennywhistle to her lips. “Will you accept my gift?” the God of all Rats asked her all those many weeks ago, and she had. “And now,” she whispers, “will you accept mine?” And she begins to play, something that starts out low and mournful, remembering the time
before
time, acknowledging that age when there was only the void and the rats. But then her fingers warm and loosen with movement and the effort of playing the pennywhistle, and the song and the story tumble along, chasing one another, rushing ahead and spilling their wild magic into the night. With this old brass whistle, the rats created all that is, all that has ever been, and she knows that it still holds within it the power to create, to make something where there was before nothing at all. She has learned its ways and has wielded it to fashion the tales that have kept her company and given her joy and a few scraps of courage against the endless string of days and nights, against the yawning sky and the biting cold, against hunger and her fear of the men and women of the city. And so she plays a healing song, an awakening song, her gift to the God of all Rats, which is a song and a story that will call the murdered rats back from the murky prison of death.
Come back to me, come back for me, come back to me,
and without looking she knows that the water below the bridge has begun to seethe and roil, and already she can hear the angry, cheated howl of the snake as rat souls and mangled rat bodies slide free of his suffocating coils. She wants to look, to be
sure
, wants to
see
their resurrection with her own eyes, but then she might miss a note or only half a note, or the tune might fall flat, the story faltering as she fumbled some indispensable bit of the song. One mistake and the penny whistle’s magic could yet be defeated and undone. So she sits on the floor, and she plays. She plays as she has never played before, as she has never believed she
could
play. When her chapped lower lip splits open, her blood is blown out through the whistle and spatters on the floor, but she understands that this only makes the pennywhistle stronger. Outside the redbrick building, through the trees and weeds and down the street past sooty drifts of snow and dangling icicles and burnt-out, discarded torches, the river opens a second time, breached like clouds parting after a thunderstorm. The river splits wide, even as her lip has split, and it bleeds rats. And still she plays, because she has found a verse that will seal the snake away forever, snaring it in the waterlogged roots of a willow tree that fell and sank into the river years and years ago. She plays until there is no hope the snake will ever escape, and now she can hear the rats scrambling through the mud and muck and rushes and over cobblestones, flowing like a furious living wave across the bridge and the men and women and children whom she’d only imagined were dead. Because now they’ve begun to shriek and curse as the wet rats fall upon them, and
still
her fingers move, faster and faster, racing up and down the pennywhistle, as sure of herself as any god has ever been. Knowing now exactly how the story ends, she plays on and on and on, finishing what she’s started.

Though she asked, and though she asked me three times, no, I would not go down with her. I would not follow, tagging along like Orpheus or Dante or Hermod or some other dumb son of a bitch walking into Hell. Not down those slick black November side streets and the narrow alleys and empty warehouses and steep, winding stairwells leading never up, but always and only
down,
through oases of incandescent glare, through dust and musty vales of shadow; warped doors hanging loose on bent and rusted hinges—if there were ever any doors at all—opening at last into basements and subbasements, cellars waiting above sub-cellars, a mile or so of old train tunnel, various abandoned excavations, sewers gone dry and littered with a century or two of mummified shit and rat carcasses, caverns constructed by the hand of man three or four hundred years ago. All of those forgotten, barren places beneath our feet that would serve as the necessary stations of her crucifixion.

She was gone a long time. Longer than I’d expected. I just sat at the window and watched a dirigible burning above the river, smoking cigarettes and wondering if that was the last I’d ever see of her, the last of us, too. The dirigible seemed to take hours to fall, which can’t be right, and it drifted like a wounded demon, dripping liquid fire and wreckage and charred bodies. I might have felt guilt, that I’d allowed her to go alone. But it might have only been disgust at myself, and maybe apprehension, maybe dread. I know I am a coward, and I know that she’s insane. It’s not a good combination, and by the time the dirigible finally gave up the ghost and fell like a broken, battle-weary angel, by then I’d begun to think it would be better for us both, and perhaps a few other people, if she
didn’t
come back.

Which is not the same thing as not caring what had happened to her, or wishing she were dead. It’s not the same thing at all.

And then I heard footsteps in the hallway, your key rattling in the lock, and so I lit another cigarette and kept my eyes on the window. Another hour or so and it would finally be dawn, and I was no more prepared for that cold morning light than I was for the sight of whatever the descent and the long, long climb back up to the world had made of you.