Danse Macabre
The sound began as the faintest of vibrations, the merest alteration in the still, as a flutter, a slight tremble.
The hum called to her somehow, it grew louder and more persistent, soon it was causing vibrations all over the house. The walls started to crack, and the furniture toppled over to form a chaotic pile of her worldly belongings in the middle of the floor.
Was this it? Laura thought. Was this everything?
She had told herself these things had made her happy, that she had found them beautiful, or curious, somehow, they had encouraged her to remember the past, the past was important, she tried to think of it when she found herself forgetting.
Ignoring the falling plaster and general chaos mounting all around her, Laura stared at the pile of books, the embossed letters on the covers like eyes twinkling, in challenge and reproach. Some contained written inscriptions, others were marked with observations in the margins, cryptic notions, ever-earnest declarations concerning motif, and theme, embarrassing to look at now. There were letters, postcards stuffed inside, receipts from coffees, days out, cherished words set down by loved ones, people no longer present, people who had moved on, in one way, or another.
Laura’s belongings had populated the bookshelves like creases, deep folds that marked the passing of time like aging skin. Pebbles and shells amassed on the daily walk, tatty slot machine toys, and stocking fillers, broken candles from birthday cakes, stowed away in vain hope they would be reused.
Something was wrong.
She had already spent hours, weeks, years, formulating the problem, never arriving at satisfactory answer, save that of disaster, calamity, how she had ruminated, reliving every conversation, every memory, every regret. All of it still churned away, playing over and over and over and over.
At least there was time. There was always time, grand, sweeping, moving, like the tide of the ocean, washing in and out, in and out. Some things stick in the sand no matter how much the sea washes over them, other things break their tether and are gone forever no matter how much you would have them back.
Time either erodes things slowly or kills quickly, a sharp stab creating lots of blood or a steady trickle that is difficult to plug.
Conversations, thoughts, memory, rubbish, dominated the room, deprived it of space, of air.
The cracks continued to grow, the walls began to fall away, separating the floor from the ceiling.
Laura peered through the open space the walls left behind.
Outside, it was already dark, it looked as though the moon’s light had been captured, caught there, suspended in time for another’s purpose.
In the quiet of the night Laura realised the hum she could hear was in fact the faint but unmistakable sound of a bow and fingers, quick-stepping and notching upon the strings of a fiddle.
Brash discordant notes leapt up high into the air. Laura followed them, past the convenience store that always seemed closed, and the dry cleaners, and the hairdressers, right down the length of the high street, past the shimmer of pond that was tangled with the wild meadow behind it.
She walked towards the little church that was faintly delineated by the moon in the darkness.
The music ... she drew closer to the sound ... that music, ... that irresistible, hypnotic sound coming from the graveyard. She felt the ground underneath her feet moving, undulating like a wave, her body started to move with it, to sway, the music drowned out her every fear.
She felt its vibration travel up through the gate and into her body as she pushed it open. On the other side was a tall, pale-faced man, dressed in exquisitely tailored clothes, reclining in the arms of a statue, an angel, who looked dotingly upon him.
Hugging the fiddle to his chin, the man drew the bow across the string in a motion that stretched into a single wavering note. At the creeping sound of the gate swinging back on its hinges he leaned forward placing one long foot on the ground to see who had arrived. The Stranger edged himself down from the side of the tomb and jumped the rest of the way, resuming his song without noticeable pause.
He strode off in the direction of the great yew tree, its low, intricately matted branches seemed to reach desperately across the whole cemetery. Perhaps the stories were true, that its ancient roots had burrowed deep down into all the eyes of the dead buried underground, that it was at one with them and had fed off their sorrow, their sin and sickness to remain vital. A cracked, petrified beating heart at the centre of all things that had gorged itself throughout eternity using all the spent vessels it could possess. It looked old, and dignified and sad, the very picture of mourning. To stand before it made Laura shudder, the Stranger noticed and played on.
Laura felt a ripple surge under her feet before disruption broke out all around her. The bodies of the dead, free of their eternal resting place, appeared from all sides having been summoned back to life by the Stranger’s music. Some walked through a door hidden in the trunk of the yew tree, others heaved their way out of the ground tossing up great piles of soil and toppling their rotten old coffin lids.
The festivities began in earnest, a whole quartet arrived and set themselves up to perform upon the angel’s tomb, honoured to accompany the Stranger in his work.
So many decades, so many lives, crashing together, meeting and mixing and merging as one. The dance was a blur of powdered wigs, hob-nail boots, calf-skin gloves, evening gowns, uniforms, corsets, bowler hats, tea dresses, butcher’s aprons, blacksmith’s aprons, mourning suits, everyone ... everyone came. Laura noticed more living people arriving through the gate, they too must have followed the music here, just as she had.
She soon found herself swept up in a great reel that weaved its way around the graveyard, she looked to the left of her and there was Mr. Pritchard ... yes, Mr. Pritchard, whom she would always see putting his boxes of fruit out on the pavement every morning, Mr Pritchard who had never returned her smile. Was he dead now then? She hadn’t realised, ... he looked dead, ... when had he died? How had she not heard? All these years she had taken his existence for granted ... he still wore that same jumper... the one with the black and white zig-zags and green edging, only now, it was slowly being unravelled by a whole host of insects that had made a home of his gut including a centipede that lost its grip and fell to the ground as he moved his feet in time with the others.
After a brief pause in the music the quartet started to play a dreamy waltz, people soon broke off into pairs.
The Stranger appeared before Laura out of nowhere and took her in his arms, she had never felt so safe, so held.
She looked into his eyes and saw everything, she saw herself. It was as if she now held herself in her own arms, everything whirled before her eyes at dizzying speed, all the comparisons, all the compromises, all the regret and betrayal, the snatched moments of joy, the promise, the promises.
The crowd parted as they swirled across the cemetery dancing every inch of it until they came to a natural halt.
‘Come with me.’ the Stranger said, ‘You’re so hungry, I like hunger ... come with me.’
‘You want to stitch my life up into that tree?’
The Stranger stared deeply into his companion’s eyes. He had seen all things, seen all there was to see, he saw Laura.
‘Is this it?’ she urged, ‘Is this everything?’
‘The earth takes what it needs, that is ... everyone, eventually, ... even you. Is that not everything?’
Just then a cockerel cried, the stranger turned his head towards the sky to listen. ‘It’s time.’ He told her.
The cockerel ka’rooed a second time.
The Stranger took Laura in his arms and kissed her passionately, before the cockerel called to the revellers a third and final time, with this signal came the dawn.
‘Goodbye Laura ...’
The Stranger’s whispers lingered in the air around her, as he pulled back from her face and vanished.
As the rest of the deceased, and newly decreased started to fade, one among them came to stand before Laura.
‘Mr Pritchard?’
Laura saw the faint outline of a hand raised in recognition, and the trace of a smile, before he too faded from sight.
The sun’s light took a firmer hold upon the morning as it crept up over the brow of the hill, the church exchanged its cloak of shadow for a lighter filmy veil.
Laura recalled the image of The Dead, the sounds of laughter and joy, dancing with their trails of heavy velvet and dusty lace, their musty, earthy smell, and the trace of his kiss indelible in her mind. This was something … so many different things, profound, trivial, significant, insignificant … whatever the degree upon the scale, it meant something … it was something … a thought, a feeling ... something … change.
She made her way back to the gate feeling the statue’s scrutinising gaze upon her from across the cemetery. As she drew closer, Laura realised the angel now held the Stranger’s fiddle between her thumb and two fingers, she scrambled up onto the base of the tomb, eager to place her hand upon the instrument, expecting to find it still warm, expecting to feel it emitting that same vibration, but the world had become silent again as though the music had never been, only a lump of cold, lifeless stone, remained in its place. As she drew her hand away, she noticed a black spot forming on the back of her hand, she circled it with a finger and shuddered.
By Robyn Hunt @ 2024
Blog Image: Gavin Roberts
In Loving Memory of Garry Robson 1952 - 2024
- My friend , fellow artist and supporter. (You would laugh at the irony to be found in the posting of this particular story at such a time, it was not planned or intentional … though I have a hunch you would have appreciated it just the same, - if not more so! In any case, you understood the whims of the creative muse … ). You were loved Sir G. and will be greatly missed.
