Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

She sits down on the bed, expectant and somehow bashful. Once the viola’s out of its case and tucked beneath her chin, she plays. For her husband or for something else, she doesn’t know. She glides the bow with the old graceful tremble, lento. She plucks, pizzicato. The secret magic comes back to her. The feeling of her skin against the glossed wood feels true as ever, and the Reger suite pours out like something too long corked into a bottle. It was the first thing she ever played for an audience, two years ago. Fourth viola, the least important, feeling sweat trickle down her sides. She wasn’t invited back. The memory feels far away.

The Reger loses its form and withers into a sustained note, her concentration holding it in place like a vise. Her precise wrist sways. She plays and sometime later she wakes, muddy light and rain whispering against the house. A plate of dry toast and she starts again, Bach, Berlioz, Bartók, Mansurian. She plays until the works for viola begin to dwindle away, which is always too soon, then wades into the vast pool of music for violin, that movie star of strings. Everything she plays, every movement and measure, threads into that single note, she wanders through variations deep inside it. Soon she abandons all the music she’s learned. She opens the first video, clicks past the creek to that moonlit cello note, repeats it and repeats it. Plays on top of it, thinking of her bow as an insect leg, each of its hairs brushing the strings with its own added vibrato.

It’s past noon when her wrist seizes on her, a carpal flare that clatters the bow across the floor, and only now does she return completely, blinking out the window at the gray sky that hangs over the day.

She stares at her computer and asks herself if she wants to see what untitled-1 wants to show her. Who is this tall girl, this Emma? It seems clear, by now, that she’s being drawn toward something, drawn surely as her bow, and it’s time to stop this until she learns what Luke’s doing, and why. Or else it’s time to follow it to him, blindly. Or else it’s time to fend for herself. She doesn’t know how to choose.

But when she can’t find the thumb drive, frantic and close to tears, throwing cushions and magazines to the floor, the decision seems made. She relaxes, sighs, like a drain unclogged. It’s in her purse. The relief is so deep it’s exhausting. She gives up to real sleep, falls into a sort of cavern of it.

Night’s thickening full around the house when Ada wakes beneath the black bed sheet. There’s a missed call from Haywood College and it takes her a moment to remember the job interview. Luke’s voicemail is full. She turns on the porch light and movement projects through the quartered half-moon window in the front door. The quality of light shifts and speckles on the inside wall. She needs Luke’s height, even on tiptoes she can’t see outside, and the angle of the bay window shows her just the empty porch, the still swing.

She opens the door and sees the porch light crawling with moths. They assemble and reassemble themselves, wings pulsing in concert like a gray heart. They must have been worshiping the light before it even came on. She thinks of the drawer full of dirt in Luke’s office. The dead worms or larvae there. She thinks of the lamp beside her bed, checks the street for Ms. Hursh or the shapes on her roof. There’s nothing.

The last video is the only thing left in the house that seems to have any surety to it. Her wrist still aches, and she’s never been a singer. Gram’s old forbiddances of her voice still won’t let her go. But she senses that for the moment, some moment, at least, silence is necessary. Two laps around the living room. She inserts the thumb drive. A glass of water. She opens the found folder, sees yesterday in the Date Modified column, clicks on untitled-2 , sure that it was a 1 there before.

Dark, again. But now there’s sound, two distant violins playing the same coiled notes a quartertone apart. Close, circling the tone the cello played in the first film. Soon there’s light, too, a woman’s naked back sliding into the frame, and Ada sucks in her breath. A beautiful back, seen from the neck down, the color of rich cream with blond hanks of hair pulled forward over the shoulders. Thin pine trees bunch and crowd the background, insects trailing comet tails through the air in the slow shutter speed. The picture warps, static crumbles vertically. The back flexes, the shoulder blades stretch out like the roots of wings, and the woman bends forward, down out of the shot. A hole looms in the ground, the heads of two figures protruding, hooded or cloaked.

“ Things you see now ,” a voice whispers, and Ada jerks her head around, scanning the room. Outside the half-moon in the door, moths crawl on the glass.

She turns back to the screen and the woman has straightened again, her face still too far above to see, and is turning, full breasts swinging, there’s a symbol drawn, tattooed on the swell of the nearer breast. A gorgeous, ungodly squeal fades in from the speakers, a stretched squelch. Ada’s eyes swim and her mouth waters, like coins held under her tongue. She grunts at the sudden heat she feels in her cheeks and below, where her legs meet.

“ Things you hear now. The old place, where you told about Gram ,” the voice says, sexless, inflectionless. The film bends in again at the right edge, another image intruding into the frame, the edge of a worn building.

“Go and see us now. Bring your instrument.”

A bluer shade of blackness returns, but the sound stays in a swishing of leaves. Once more the dark is brief, the sky lights up like a photo negative, the sky has the texture of hair. The camera pans left and right and picks out suggestions of people passing through the trees. The view straightens and someone is standing in its path. Ada knows at once it’s the same woman, Emma, as if an earlier sequence has been spliced onto the first. Then the picture blurs and stutters and snaps off.

She’s reaching for the keyboard when it cuts back in, teetering on the lip of the pit. Three figures crouch in its center, in the light of a moon brushing against the Earth. They’re draped with black sheets. A fourth lies sprawled and she sees, familiarly, it’s a dummy, smoothfaced, black hair scribbled on its head. Its body is stained white cloth.

That squelch goes on. The shot swivels up, for an instant showing the trees full of white faces, and the screen’s filled by another, shorter figure, standing above the hole, having just covered itself with its own dark sheet. Ada sees the afterimage of hands fallen, tugging, below the camera’s eye. The figure stiffens, staring out of its darkness, out of the screen, then steps quickly toward the camera, spreading its arms.

The tone is severed and the toolbar pops up over the blank video player. She taps the trackpad, sure it’s just frozen, this can’t be the end. The film starts over and she lets it play again. And again. She loses count. Each time she watches it the sky changes in that moment of antilight flash, showing her strange shapes filling it through the trees, almost familiar.

In the bedroom, after she’s wiped the slick of saliva from her chin, after the shaking has stopped, she crumples the black sheet and throws it at the closet door. She’s going mad, that’s all. Luke and Ada, both caught in his undertow, like calling to like. He knew Bluebeard’s wife would find his films and try to help him.

The old place. Finally, the easy clue she’s been waiting for. Three months after they met, they roughed it at a cabin outside of Candler, on the first rises of the Blue Ridge. She remembers the afternoon hike, finding the scorched ruins of a house in the woods, the one that so fascinated Luke. This early in her life after Gram, everything still fascinated her.