Glimmering

But of course now they didn’t. After all these centuries, children finally had shaken off the yoke of inauspicious words and replaced it with whatever it was they did with their goggles and retinal implants and drugs, so many drugs even Leonard couldn’t keep up with them. Jack preferred not to know. Jack preferred to hide within the failing fastness of Lazyland and muddle through his manuscripts, waiting to die.

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.