Maxim Jakubowski: The Best British Mysteries III

I couldn’t get the song out of my head. Every minute of the day and night it played, over and over again in a continuous loop tape. The pills helped up to a point, but I found my night’s sleep shrinking from four hours to three to two, then one, if I was lucky. Only with great difficulty could I concentrate on anything. No amount of external noise could overcome the music in my head. I couldn’t hold intelligent conversations. People shunned me, crossed the street when they saw me coming. I started muttering to myself, putting my hands over my ears, but that only served to trap the sound inside, make it louder.

One day in my wanderings, I found myself back in the city where it all began and retraced my steps as best I could remember them. I don’t know what I had in mind, only that this was where the whole thing had started, so perhaps it would end here, too. I don’t know what I expected to find.

Soon the landscape became a familiar one of decaying warehouses, oily river, and factories venting steam and belching fire. I saw the junkyard looming ahead beyond the crossroads and followed the path through the towers of scrap metal, rusty cars, engine blocks, tires, axles, and fenders. Then I heard it again. Uncertain as first, hardly willing to believe my ears, I paused. But sure enough, there it was: ‘The Magic of Your Touch’ played on an out-of-tune honky-tonk piano, the music outside perfectly matching the loop tape in my head.

I could see the brazier now, a patch of light at the end of the narrow path between the columns, and when I approached, the wizened old black man looked up from his keyboard with fire dancing in his eyes. Then I saw what I should have seen in the first place. The flames weren’t reflections of the brazier’s glow. They were inside his head, the way the music was inside mine.

He didn’t stop playing, didn’t miss a note.

‘I thought I’d killed you,’ I said. ‘Lots of people make that mistake,’ he replied.

‘Who are you?’

‘Who do you think I am?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You took my song,’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me.’

‘No matter. Now it’s taken you.’

‘I can’t get it out of my head. It’s driving me insane. What can I do?’

‘Only one thing you can do, and you know what that is. Then your soul will come home to me, where it belongs.’

I shook my head and backed away. ‘No!’ I cried. ‘I’m dreaming. I must be dreaming. This can’t be real.’

But I heard his laughter echoing among the towers of scrap as I ran, hands over my ears, the insufferable melody I had come to detest now going around and around for the millionth time in my head, gaining in volume, just a little bit each time, and I knew he was right.

When I got back to my hotel room, I took out paper and pen. You have no idea what a struggle it was to write just this brief account with the music, relentless, precise, and eternal inside my head, what an effort it cost me. But I must leave some kind of record. I can’t bear the thought of everyone believing I was mad. I’m not mad. It happened exactly the way I told it.

Now, like a man who can’t get rid of hiccups might contemplate slitting his throat, I have only one thought in mind. The pills are on the table, and I’m drinking whiskey, waiting for the end. He said my soul would go home to him, where it belongs, and that scares the hell out of me, but it can’t be worse than this eternal repetition driving out all human thought and feeling. It can’t be. I’ll have another slug of whiskey and another handful of pills, then I’m sure, soon, the blessed silence will come. Amen.