The Best New Horror 2 (58 page)

“Ah, Signor Hadley, we have known the real Venice . . .”

He could not afterwards recall if she had spoken English or Italian. While he smiled uncertainly she pressed some small object into his hand and swept on down the grand staircase to where a party of ladies and gentlemen waited, their faces eagerly upturned. Hadley stood wondering what he had seen. He found himself clutching a miniature fan with black lacquer sticks. It was new and unmarked but he remembered seeing its twin; opened it was not so big as the palm of his hand.

G
REGORY
F
ROST
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.

for Sycamore Hill, 1987

I
N 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.”