Distant Music

Mrs. Gaines sat up dizzily in bed, exhaling deeply as her accordion-fold skin tightened and her sparse white hairs stood on end in the cold air of nighttime. She looked at the clock: she wanted to be able to tell those irresponsible kids next door just how late their goddamn—watch your profanity, Mildred—confounded dog had persisted in its baying through the night. “2:47,” it read. She had been laying in bed awake for just over four hours.
Up, she told her body. It groaned in protest as she shifted her legs toward the bed’s edge. She moaned softly to herself as she moved, and inside her silhouette form she felt her bones creak like an old building in the wind. She felt a yawn coming, gaping in the back of her throat, but her jaw refused to stretch as she sat trying to breathe despite the sensation. Feet down, she said to herself, and then, involuntarily, cold, so cold, as a shudder went through her. She shook her head. Now feet down, old girl, if you ever want to sleep. There now, there you go.
But the air, it was so chilling. It was more than a soft breath, more than the slight brush of a blizzard exhalation across the skin, more than the kind that spreads goosebumps across the body in a prickly spiderweb; it was bone deep. It made her feel as though her skeleton was no more than a brittle ice castle, waiting to be shattered with the most miniscule of stimuli, perhaps a slight touch or a nearly imperceptible sound. And somehow it was still cold, so cold for a summer night. A shiver shot up her spine, and in a flash the sensation was gone, the cozy summer breeze meandering across her cheeks and warming her arms. She sniffed lightly, and, in the ensuing second, felt the air go still. The dog was silent. Odd. Something must have shut him up... Maybe the little bugger’s finally run into the street and got what he—Mildred, old girl! Again, she shook her head at herself. Slowly, though, her dark hopes were struck down as the dog’s barking returned, starting at a quiet whine and then deepening to a yowl that rattled the lightbulbs in their fixtures. In a single motion, Mildred pulled herself off of her bed and to a standing position, and she turned to give her mattress a final longing look.
If only Wilson were still here… She could be in bed, kept warm by his body heat, and she wouldn’t have to sleep piled under the thick layer of blankets that made her bedframe sag so unpleasantly. Wilson would sleep with her, and he would have shut the damned dog up hours ago—to hell with propriety; they’re my own thoughts for God’s sake... And for God’s sake I wish he could be here, or that it was me, not him, who was at home when it happened.
But did she? She supposed not; the thought of him standing here, staring at their bed in her place was almost too much. She would never wish this torture on him… It would almost be better to be dead. Almost. She just wished they could be together.
Then come with me. Millie startled. It was her thought, yes, but it wasn’t hers. It was just there, as though someone else had snuck up behind her and poured it in through her ear when she wasn’t paying attention… The hair on the back of her neck prickled the same way a scorpion might brandish its segmented tail; the foreign thought made her feel uncomfortable, as though there were someone there with her, watching her, with a wire tapped into her like she was a criminal’s telephone. Mrs. Gaines didn’t like the words; it was a dark thought, a dark thought on a dark night. And she had always thought those were two things you should never mix. The thought propelled her from her bed as she walked to switch on the light.
She went to the window to peer into the yard for the mutt, but it the room was too bright, and the moonless night was too dark, and all she could see was her pallid reflection in the flawless glass windows. Muttering angrily to herself, she donned a powder-blue silk robe from the hook on her door and made her way around a corner to the landing. The walls about the stairs were plastered with photos of her and Wilson, but the light from the room faded before reaching the stairwell and so all she could see were the irregular forms of the picture frames along the walls of the hall. Unable to locate the light switch in the dark, she crept down the stairs slowly, putting both feet on each step before moving on. The staircase led out into the grand ballroom that consumed the entirety of the second floor of the large house; one more wing in the home and it could have been called a mansion. She watched the faint glare of the upstairs light drift across the glass panes of the balcony doors and her glass-windowed china cabinets, her prized porcelain inside barely visible past the glare. Other than that, the uncomfortably large room was empty, the scratched cherrywood floors bare—Mildred had had to sell much of the opulent furniture that had once lined every corridor in order to keep the house she adored so much after Wilson’s passing. Now the room was nothing but drafty and looming, and as she felt another ice wind pushing at her back, she turned left to a second staircase: Onward, old girl, onward.
As Mildred entered the large kitchen, the mongrel’s hoarse shouts grew louder. She moved past the stove and dishwasher and the pantry door, and threw open the small, white, country-style side door, stepping out onto the damp grass. All at once, the dog’s baying ceased, although for a split second she could hear a tiny echo of the noise fading from the night air. The lawn—more like a small field than a grassplot, really—was empty from the Gaines’ house clear to the hills, the only obstructors being the neighbors’ house and a few, smaller summer homes that sat, tiny and insignificant, farther up the country road. Not even the crickets made a sound. Cautiously, Mildred forced herself to take another step, and another, and twenty more until she reached the corner of the house, shaking but noticing that the air out here seemed warmer than it had inside.
Suddenly, she was on the ground, face covered in mud, screaming. Her lip was leaking blood onto her tongue, and she felt an animal’s furry maw ravage across her skin, teeth gripping wherever they could—although she could see nothing, she knew dog was upon her. She kicked, and tried to catch her breath; the wind was knocked out of her but somehow she was still screaming bloody murder, arms flailing in desperation. As she fought, she propped herself up on her elbows and began to crawl towards the house. As Millie crawled, she felt the creature sink its merciless teeth into the meaty part of her leg, but still she crawled; she knew it was this torture or death. She was halfway to the door by now.
As it mauled, the dog growled in an inhuman, savage way. And yet, listening, she seemed to hear words amid its rumbling tones; when it clicked and rolled its rough, pumice tongue it made consonants, and when it breathed in the back of its throat it seemed to produce eerie vowels. Come with me, it seemed to say. Come with me.
“NO! No, you BASTARD!” she screamed. But it was in her head now. Come with me, come with me, come with me… Mildred had given up using her elbows to crawl. She was clawing at the ground, digging her fingers all the way into the thick mud, still on her stomach. Trying futilely to repel the beast with her legs, she was barely keeping it from killing her, and not once did she take her desperate, flickering gaze from the door. And as the dog clawed at her, pain shot through her like fire, and yet each time the claws or teeth dug in or a paw or jawbone slammed her on the ground, the dog was so cold that it felt like nothing but ice, a spinning, biting tornado of ice.
As she made it to the doorstep, she groped around with her foot. At last managing to find the dog’s head, she kicked her heel up to the throat and then her toe down again over the top of the creature’s skull, sending it sprawling—if only momentarily—to the ground. She used the half second of time she had bought herself to grasp the round door handle and fling her body across the threshold, door swinging shut behind her; she was sure to lock it. Dogs can’t open doors, locked or not, silly girl.
And then she closed the deadbolt, too.
Just then then, the words came again. Come with me. This time it was clear that they were more than a just a dark thought: the voice was not that of her thoughts, but rather a deep one, a voice that carried with such bass that the plates rattled in their cabinets as it spoke, even though it was almost a whisper. And as it spoke, the brass handle began to twist, slowly, and for a terrible second Mildred thought that it might just twist all the way and then the door would swing open and something terrible would be upon her, be tearing at her, and she would be powerless to defend herself.
But it didn't. The lock caught the handle and the deadbolt stayed secure in its brass mechanism. The kitchen was silent for a moment, and then whatever was outside tried the handle again. Again the attempt was in vain, but there wasn’t even a breath of quiet before the knob began to shake and twist and turn—slowly at first, and then faster and faster until its little polished frame began to shake with it too, screws and all, and in time the door joined them in its frame and then the whole house in its foundation. Heartbeat pounding in her eyes, Mildred peered up at the glass window in the door to see what unnaturally powerful creature was trying at the oak panel, but all there was behind the door was the sky and its starbright pinholes. And as the deadbolted door continued to stay solid, the assault on the house slowly ceased, and Mildred got agonizingly to her feet, her wounds still bleeding and her blood still pulsing through her eyes; she could almost feel them swelling,
The band-aids and ice packs were down in the kitchen with her, but she didn't care about her wounds anymore; they seemed irrelevant compared to the amount of harm the creature that could shake a house in its foundation could do to her. Forget your scrapes, Millie, let's get away from here. Pull yourself together now, old girl, because whatever that is, it's not screwing around. And whatever that is, it's not a goddamn DOG—although I do have the impression that it rather likes to bite. There you go now, up you go.
The floor creaked loudly beneath her feet, and it felt to Mildred as though it was not the floorboards that were shifting but rather the joists beneath them. It was discomforting to her to think about how the kitchen floor had never creaked before, so she pushed the thought from her mind. She stood perfectly still for a moment, waiting for the uneasy, trembling sound to fade away, waiting and waiting and holding her breath until she could hold it no longer. But the sound did not fade, but rather maintained its volume, a quiet rumble, until Mildred was convinced that it was not, in fact, the sound of the floor at all. No, most certainly not.
...But then what was it? She listened harder and it occurred to her that she was hearing the rumble of a large group of people chatting far, far in the distance... Almost like a c***tail party. As she moved toward the stairs, the sound grew louder, and was joined by the swoon of a string quartet that was nearly imperceptible over what was getting to be a din of voices—definitely a cocktail party. Inside her house. In the middle of the night. When she reached the landing, the dull, wavering haze told her that the lights were on, and she nearly sprinted the rest of the stairs out of an unfamiliar sort of naked, terrified curiosity.
When she made it to the top, she saw that the room was once again filled with her beautiful furniture that sat with lush and vibrantly colored cushions about the edges of the room. Somehow it looked newer and brighter now than it ever had, even in the glossy, pretentious catalogue from which it had been purchased. The shiny golden ornamentation across the walls and corners of the room were newly dusted, and shone brightly even in the light of the inconsistent, primitive incandescents that Wilson had finally gotten replaced sometime in the sixties. In one corner of the room, a small bar had been set up neatly, with bottles of all kinds laid out across it, and in the other, music stands and folding chairs had been set in a semicircle for musicians. But as far as living inhabitants, the luxurious room—restored to its former glory—was empty. Still, the sounds of a party echoed from high ceiling.
Almost automatically, Mildred stepped inside. She was on home turf now; it was just one of her and Wilson's famous parties. She would tell the story about the time Wilson had rented a party yacht for the two of them without the slightest clue about what the hell he was doing and made it all the way to the mouth of the harbor before realizing what a predicament he'd gotten them into; that one always got her a huge laugh—that is, she would do that if there were anyone to talk to at all. She doubted the mahogany would be quite so interested as her husband’s investment club had been. As it was, it was all she could do to get her bearings in the ghost room.
She waited cautiously for a second as soon as she caught herself, but it slowly became clear to her that the room wouldn’t bite. In fact, it appeared quite as charming as ever, and as she waded through the churning, disembodied noise, she couldn’t help feel in her lungs an impact of nostalgia that made it a little difficult to breathe, her second one that night. Ah, the good old days… When I was young. But God knows they’re gone now. She laughed at herself as she thought it. She never felt quite so old as when she walked right into a cliche like that one; then it became obvious just how numbered her days were. It really wasn’t that funny, now that she considered it, but laughing seemed to make her feel better.
Come with me. The thought came as an aftershock of the nostalgia, again knocking the wind out of her. But this time it really wasn’t so much of a surprise; she had come to expect the haunting voice in her head whenever she thought dark thoughts. It was almost comforting, the way it’s nice to hear someone’s breathing as they sleep next to you at night, even if you can’t see or feel them. As if responding to the words, she took another step.
Suddenly she no longer felt as if she were listening to the roar of a crowd from a distance; now it seemed that she had finally joined the party. Some of the disincarnate voices seemed almost closer to her and some seemed farther away, and she could feel the atmosphere of the party taking hold of her. She closed her eyes and took a long, deep drag in through her nose, and she was met with the overwhelming scent of champagne and cologne; some of the smells came and went as she stood like that in the middle of the room, as though perhaps some of her old friends were milling by, pleasantly drunk and perfectly loud. She began to walk in the direction of the center of the room like this, in her state of euphoric delusion, and immediately became aware that she was passing by her friends now, as they stood about in their circles and shared the gossip and anecdotal treasures which they had most recently come upon or which had seemed to constantly provoke a positive reaction in the past. There was the rich voice of Dr. Pritchard, Wilson’s drinking buddy and possibly oldest friend, chortling loudly and overbearingly; in another group, a quieter one, there was Miss Stephanie, a friend who Mrs. Gaines had missed dreadfully after her passing, prattling, no doubt, on and on as a group of onlookers hushed each other excitedly.
Home again, Mildred bathed in the atmosphere of what seemed now a perfect past life, not daring to open her eyes for even a second; she knew how quickly these things liked to disappear from her grasp all too well. But something was wrong, and in the back of her mind, she knew it. Each step she took, her mind told her legs to take back. Take all of it back, she thought. The past is gone. Like it or not, you can never have it again; life is a train that only goes one direction and you can either ride it or jump off, and there is no such thing as living in the past, there is only dying. The problem she sensed the air around her. It was cold, so cold.
And the bodies, they were not there. She could not brush up against one, she could not shake its hand in greeting (or hug it if it was a friend), and it could not exude the suffocating warmth that always filled a room with a party. No, that would be impossible. They were not there. And the air was cold as death, perhaps colder. The voices Mildred heard were from bodies that now lay deep under the ground, bloated and moldy, each and every one of them that she could pick out. And she was the last of them to leave, she was the hostess.
Nearing the center of the room, the sense of wrong rising in her like the urge to vomit, Mildred was now close enough to the tight circles of diners to hear the conversations, and yet it had become impossible for her to turn back, for she knew that there was no longer any going back, there was no rewriting the past. She could only walk forward, eyes closed, being pulled deeper and deeper into the sea of conversation, drowning, drowning. And as she was propelled into the mass, she could hear what the dead were saying.
There was good old Henrietta, over there, Annie. Mr. Arnold, whose clumsy footsteps Mildred could hear rolling inconsistently across the floor, was speaking in what had sounded from a distance like a poorly executed attempt at flirtation aimed an unidentifiable woman with a high pitched voice. The woman, each time the man had to pause to take a breath, was speaking to him with the intonation of someone politely declining an offer from an annoyingly persistent telemarketer. But the only slurred words that Mildred heard come out of the man’s alcohol-drenched mouth were three mumbled, terrifying syllables. “Come with me,” he was saying. “Come with me.”
His words faded as Mildred stumbled away from him into the freezing mass of bodies, telling herself that it was not true, that no, she had not heard it, no no no no no. It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t let the words twist and pervert her past, her perfect past, those beautiful memories. But it was all around her now, the people were whispering it all across the room, whispering it and not even hearing themselves as they spoke it. It rippled from the circles of quietly gossiping ladies as she passed, and it emanated from the rowdy, laughing groups of men that were moving unsteadily in no particular direction about the room. And the sound of the voices was once again one, was once again the roar of a crowd, once again the distant music of the past rather than the deafening chaos of the present. It spoke to her primitively, it spoke to her with only three words, and yet each sound was wielded with what felt like the force of a sledgehammer. And, Mildred noticed with a whimper of hysteria so complete that she could focus on nothing else, it was getting louder. No, the voices were not growing—there was no anger in them, no rising intensity, it was not that. They were turning toward her, they were moving to her, and something terrible, she knew, was about to be upon her.
Then, she felt their hands. She felt their hands and their hands felt her, cold and rough and painful on her frail body, and her eyes snapped open as if she were waking from a dream. In a way, she was. Or at least she was moving from a dream into a nightmare.
As Mildred’s eyes snapped open, the moon lit the room like a fuze. The old, flickering lightbulbs were gone from their sockets and replaced with fluorescents, which were off, and the only sources of light were the tall floor to ceiling windows that lined the south wall and the faint glimmer that was emanating from her room where she had left the lamps on. Her furniture was gone from the area around the dance floor along with the bar and the music stands, and the moonlight no longer shined on the gold leaf because it was again caked with dust. Mildred could not help but feel that she was losing it all again. She was surrounded by dead people—she could feel them—but they were not there. The words and the music echoed on.
The hands and bodies were pressing on her from all sides now, making her stumble and struggle to breathe in the empty room, and as she did, it soon became apparent that the people of the dark were pushing her in a direction. They were sending her somewhere, forcing her to walk like a corpse made into a puppet through their small Hell frozen over. She only realized where they were taking her when the back of her struggling head smashed a pane of glass behind her and the warm outside air spilled over her her bleeding neck.
“NO!” she screamed as she felt her body being cast against the wooden window framing like a battering ram. “No, Wilson you son of a b**** why can’t the past just be dead? I WILL NOT COME WITH YOU—” The glass and wood shattered as one as her voice caught in her throat, and she tumbled out onto the small faux-balcony. It groaned under the weight; the plywood platform was built purely for aesthetics and the full weight of a falling body was not what it had been intended for. There was a crack as a small beam somewhere snapped, and Mildred knew that if she stayed there another second she would fall—it was just a one story drop, but there was no doubt in her mind that it would snap her frail body. Just as another beam cracked, a pair of strong arms scooped her into the air above, and she knew in her heart that it was Wilson. It was him, and he had finally come for her.
“W… Wilson?” she managed to say. When she said it, she felt his face lean in closer to hers, his rough, frozen cheek rubbing against her face like a dog’s jowls, and she knew he had been the dog. A small amount of her hair fluttered up as cool air brushed her neck. He was smelling her, she realized. Louder this time, and more panicky, she asked, “Wilson?”
This time, he spoke to her, and it was the first time she had heard his voice in fourteen years. It was the first time she had felt his touch in years, and yet it was wrong, it was cold, so cold. Because what is dead is dead. And he spoke to his wife: “Why did you lock me out?”