Which it didn’t seem he was to do this evening. The alprazolam kicked in, its sedative effect boosted by antihistamine. He felt a pleasantly perverse sensation-of febrile drowsiness. Emma, who had done time as a freelance chemist working with local motorcycle gangs before attending medical school and becoming a neurosurgeon, had explained to him once how the drug worked.
“These gates in your brain, the gates are on the neuronal membranes, and the Xanax, I mean the alprazolam, it closes the gate on one of these neuronal channels, and that causes a, a hyperpolarization of the postsynaptic neuron. So that neuron doesn’t fire, d’you see?”
Emma got very excited, talking about how psychotropic drugs worked; especially since Emma and Jule’s daughter, Rachel, had been killed by a drunk driver three years before. It was like listening to a recovering addict rave about Narc-Anon. “And all across your entire brain, that particular neuron doesn’t fire—it’s like a pinball game, think of it like a pinball game: it’s all about gates, gates opening and closing, so only certain balls can get through, only certain perceptions get through…”
Right now Jack felt as though all the balls were at rest. He had a disturbing momentary glimpse of them as eyeballs, the reflected sheen of falling snow upon their moist curves; but then that, too, faded. He dropped the unread manuscript upon the nightstand and within minutes was asleep.
Much later he awoke. A sound had disturbed him, but he waited to open his eyes, uncertain if he was asleep or dreaming. His various antidepressant and antianxiety drugs had an odd side effect on Jack. They made him feel curiously detached from his dreams, the emotions he experienced while asleep weirdly inappropriate, almost fetishistic, so that he would find himself being aroused to orgasm by the sight of a stone, or moved to tears by the smell of lighter fluid. Sometimes these bizarre emotions would carry over into his first waking moments. So Jack had learned to lie in bed and purge his mind of whatever strange fragments it had acquired during the night.
He was sure that he had heard something. The wind, maybe, nudging around the chimneys. He had almost drifted back to sleep when he heard it again and was shocked to full wakefulness, as though someone had yanked the covers from him.
It was a flute. No, not a flute. Something more primitive, a wooden instrument like a recorder or panpipe. He could hear the faint intake of breath between the notes, and the notes themselves, rich and plangent and somehow solid in a way that other sounds were not, rising into the air. The tune was simple, almost childish—four notes played over and over again, with a sweet refrain.
Yet for all its simplicity there was something terrifying in the music. It was like a recessional, like the subdued yet ominous tolling of a bell sounded at the end of the Latin Mass. With a muffled cry Jack sat bolt upright.
The room was still. The sound of wind had died, and the rattling gutters; but the piping music went on. Jack snatched at the bedclothes. The air was so cold he could feel his lungs tighten; he grabbed for his inhaler and sucked at it. After a minute or two his breathing eased. He shut his eyes and tried to slow his heartbeat, but it was keeping pace with those four notes—
Ba dum ba dum, ba dum ba dum…
He opened his eyes: nothing. Whatever light there was seemed to come from the veil of snow covering the floor, and from the window overlooking the lawn. As he stared the window shuddered, though there was still no wind. The sound of the recorder grew louder, as though whoever was playing it was moving slowly, and with each step drew nearer to the house.
“Shit.” Jack swore beneath his breath, shivering. He had had dreams like this: waking dreams, walking dreams. All his life he had been plagued by nightmares. But there was no comfort knowing that, because with dreams there came dream logic, inexorable and dreadful. And so he found himself sliding from bed and walking to the window.
Beneath his bare feet the snow was dry and fine as dust. The window’s pallid glow grew brighter, even as the music grew louder. But always it was a sere lonely music, the echo of another song like the echo of ice booming upon the great river.
At the window he stopped. His entire body shook with cold, so that he had to brace himself as he leaned forward to look out.
Below him the lawn shone with a dull blue gleam. Dead grass pierced the new snow, black spines like scattered bones. Overhead the glimmering showed through the cloud cover: grayish waves chased by crimson flares, an occasional burst of brilliant orange. Now and then the sloping hillside would be slashed with iridescence, like the glimpse of gold within a pocket, and though the snow had stopped, the air glittered fiercely. The piping music seemed to come from everywhere, the way the wind sounds during a hurricane.
Jack shuddered. Dread clenched his bones like grippe. His eyes watered from the caustic light, and there was an acrid taste in his mouth, a smell like wet ashes. He was backing away from the window when something on the lawn began to move.
From the tulip trees and overgrown sumac at the bottom of the garden a figure crept. A child, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. Barefoot, shirtless, wearing only some kind of loose dark trousers and clutching something in one hand. Jack could not tell if it was a boy or girl. As it stood it raised its hands before its face. Wisps of white-blond hair fell across its eyes.
“Hey,” Jack whispered. “Hey—”
It did not seem to notice the cold at all. It stood up very straight—unnaturally so, like a child in a wedding party. Then, with exaggerated slowness, the child began to pace across the lawn. Its feet left no mark upon the snow, and while the scraggy trees cast wavering shadows, the child had none at all.
The haunting music swelled. Its echoes filled the room like water filling a sealed-off chamber, and the monotonous notes inundated Jack, driving out breath and blood and matter until, with a grunt, he slid forward, his hand smashing against the window.
Dull pain shot through his wrist. He cried out and found that he could breathe again. He brought his wrist to his mouth and nursed it, lifted his head to gaze outside.
On the lawn the child still marched and played its reed pipe. Beneath the poplars something else moved. Another figure emerged, much taller than the child; then another, and another; until there were six in all.
They were men; they had once been men. Tall and emaciated and naked in the snow, so thin the glimmering washed across their pale flesh like rain. Each bore within his hands a huge pair of antlers, raised so that they seemed to spring from his skull. They moved in an awkward stooping walk, shoulders hunched beneath the weight of those great horns. As Jack watched they followed the child across the lawn, until the child stopped. The six men bowed to it, each in turn, forming two rows of three with their antlers raised above them like tree limbs, and began to dance.
It was like nothing he had ever seen. A weird loping dance, the two rows moving backward and forward, heads alternately raised and bowed so that it seemed the horns must tangle and be wrenched from their skeletal hands. And yet the antlers never touched, their bodies never touched. Their feet left no sign upon the snow, and their movements made no sound. The motions were grotesquely childlike, almost crude; yet at the same time so terribly, horribly real that Jack felt as though he had never seen dancing before; as though this was The Dance from which all others had been wrung. The music of the reed pipe spiraled and wailed, the child stood as though frozen; the horned men moved back and forth like the shuttles of a loom. Above them the antlers curved like the spires of some unearthly cathedral. And like light falling from a cathedral window the flesh began to fall from their bodies, in small bright blades of gold and green and red, until only their bones remained, unearthly white and unconquerable, moving across the snow.