William Rose - Apocalyptic Organ Grinder

The setting sun cast the city in a diffuse, honey-colored glow that seemed to radiate from the buildings and people themselves. With dust hanging in the air so thickly that the street looked grainy, Tanner Kline stood on a wooden sidewalk and watched pedestrians pass by. They were covered nearly head to foot in frilly bell-shaped dresses, tight fitting breeches, capes, cloaks, top hats, and bonnets; bows and ribbons fluttered with their passing, yet somehow they all moved as if the heels of their polished shoes were cobbled from lead. No one turned to look at him. No one acknowledged his presence. It was almost as if he were a ghost standing in a silly little bowler hat and suspenders, condemned to observe the living without participating.

By his side was something he’d only ever seen in mildew bloated books. It looked like a large, wooden box that balanced on a single, spindly leg. A leather strap went from one corner of the padded top to the other, crossing over his shoulder like the lacy bags some of the women passing by carried. On the side of the box was a metal crank and, even though the workings were hidden within the scuffed and scarred wood, Tanner knew this handle would cause a barrel within the box to spin when it was turned. The revolution would trigger notes from pins and staples embedded into the barrel, a preprogrammed song whose tempo was dictated by the turning of the shaft.

“A barrel organ,” he thought, “which would make me the organ grinder.”

At that moment, Tanner realized there was a thin-gauge, silver chain looped around his wrist. His eyes followed the shiny links as they swagged down and attached to a small leather collar. This collar encircled a throat with blue tinged skin and attached to that neck was a young boy with red hair. Constellations of freckles dotted his nose and the boy looked up at Tanner with wide, blue eyes as sunlight reflected off the brass buttons of his red, velvet jacket.

Tanner give the chain a tug and the boy’s head pulled back just enough to reveal the slit in his throat. The gash almost looked as though it were smiling up at him and Tanner found himself wishing he had some peanuts with which to distract the boy. When a search of his pockets turned up empty, he knew he had no choice: he’d have to make the child dance to keep from seeing that hideous grin again.

Cranking the handle of the barrel filled the street with a sound that was like the music of a pipe organ that had been salvaged from the bricks of a toppled building. The tempo dragged and lagged, demanding that Tanner crank evenly more quickly to bring the song up to speed.

In response to the discordant music, the boy scooped a tasseled fez from the sidewalk and walked toward the street until the chain would allow him to go no further. With a slight bow, he danced an elegant waltz with an invisible partner, swirling among the lazy dust motes as if pulling them into his imaginary ballroom. This display, in turn, led a gentlemen with a particularly shiny top hat to flip a quarter into the air. Tanner watched the coin tumbling end over end, flashing in the sunlight as everything in the background faded to black.

There was the coin. There was the music. And the void bridged them.

As he watched, the coin changed mid flip into a bloated heart. The ventricles ballooned out with built up pressure, snapping veins and arteries like taut wires, as the muscle continued to swell. Once the size of a closed fist, the organ inflated larger and larger until the over-extended heart burst into a shower of smaller organs with a pop that sounded like distant gunfire: kidneys, intestines, lungs, pancreas, brains, and liver – all fell through the perfect darkness in slow motion clarity. Every wrinkle, every strand of sinew and glob of gristle was so defined that it was like gazing into valleys of meat and tissue.

Glancing down, Tanner noticed that the padding from the top of the box had inexplicably disappeared and he could now look directly into the instrument. Instead of the pins and staples of a barrel organ, silver cylinders with tooth-like spikes gnashed against one another. The spikes clanged abrasively and polluted the tune with a metallic backbeat that bordered on chaotic.

As he watched, the tumbling viscera fell into the box, where they were chewed and crushed and shredded between the whirring mechanisms. The ground meat was then forced into a slender tube that led to a spigot on the front of the box, where it oozed out of the tap like a long, bloody feces.

And then Tanner himself was falling through the void, rushing toward the hungry teeth while the organ played on.

Tanner Kline lifted his head from the ground as his body was wracked by a fit of coughing. Water gushed from his eyes and nose with the force of projectile vomiting as his fingers clawed at his throat as if he could scratch open an airway. Gasping for breath, he struggled to sit up and realized he was shivering so violently that his teeth chattered against each other. Drenched from head to toe, his face and tattered suit were coated with gritty sand and a chill radiated from within him as if his skeleton were made of ice.

Blinking away the tears in his eyes, he looked at the world through a shimmering veil. Dark trees blurred the horizon and he heard the rushing waters of the river behind him. There was another noise as well, so faint that he at first thought it was simply a remnant of the nightmare clinging to his mind. Cutting in and out of the river sounds were the slightly off-key notes of a barrel organ, cranking through a song that Tanner’s grandfather had taught him years ago: Blue Danube.

Tanner attempted to stand but a jolt of agony blazed through his leg. With a sharp cry he fell to the ground again and lay there, panting, as he waited for the pain to subside. When he felt as if he could move without throwing up, he crawled across the shore, inching his way toward a mass of driftwood that had become snagged in the exposed roots of a tree. His trembling hands wrenched pieces of timber free until he found a forked branch that was about the right size. Snapping part of the lower half over a rock, he placed the Y-shaped crook in his armpit and used the makeshift crutch to help him to his feet.

Now that he was standing, Tanner could see lights shining through the cluster of pines up river. The organ music had stopped, but he was certain it had come from the same direction . He was just as sure that the soft glow in the distance could be nothing other than a Settler community and he gritted his teeth through the pain as he hobbled toward it.

He would have his story to tell Shayla after all. She’d undoubtedly cried herself to sleep by now, her mind inventing myriad horrors to explain why her daddy hadn’t come home. Nightmares would surely follow, but within a matter of days she would be in his arms again and he would chase all the bad dreams away.

The thought of nightmares gave Tanner pause as the image of the boy rose like a ghost in his mind. He saw the silver chain as clearly as if it had been overlaid upon reality. The velvet coat and red hair. The gash in the neck grinning up at him, mocking with smug condemnation.

He was a Spewer . Plain and simple. It had to be done. For Shayla .

He also realized that someone would have found the body by now. And they would not be happy. As he stood there, thinking about that poisonous little bastard, the entire Spewer village could be scavenging the riverbank, searching for the child murderer who’d eluded them.

It’s not murder… it was self defense.

Still, unless he wanted to risk falling into their hands again, he had to get his ass moving.

Weaponless and alone, Tanner Kline trudged toward the light.