Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

She heard the pause more than the words.

“I thought I was clever, finding them,” he said, turning his glass, a thin, circled scrape on the tabletop. “But they let me. They arranged it.”

“What kind of group?”

“Just please shut up,” he said, and glared across at her. He was almost shaking now. “I look for something. I find out it’s what I’ve been looking for all along, and it turns out I’m not . . . right for the part .” He swept the glass off the table, and all her hope seemed to follow it to the floor.

The only hard part is which section of 151 the church is set back from in the dark, but she finds it, easily as muscle memory. Or it finds her. There’s not a car in sight, but the high-peaked, planked building brims with presence. Every window bleeds light.

The stars tipped across the sky ignore her as she gets out of the car. The earth must cast a small shadow, being in the way of all their old light. The moon’s over halfway drawn, she imagines God getting a wrist cramp, like hers, and putting the pencil down on a cloud to massage His hand. She laughs at the image, is aware it’s her first real laugh in weeks. She pulls the air in. It still holds the sweetness of the morning’s rain.

A woman came over to clean up the broken glass. “What about us?” Ada asked Luke. Making herself look at him, making herself keep it together.

“Yeah, that’s the question, what about you ?” he said, voice lifting toward a shout even with the waitress bending over right there. “The beloveds, people give their lives up for them, it takes years to find the pieces, line them up. They left the door cracked open, but they don’t want me.”

“The beloveds? Is this for a film you’re doing?” Ada asked, scared now by the anguish she heard, the first prickle of something bigger than she understood. “Money for a project?”

“A film, are you kidding? Since when have I ever been this—” He clenched his teeth, his fists. “You know, at first, yes, it’s how I got onto their trail, this long-form piece I wanted to do. It was that burned-out house we found, and the vibe in that church. It got me hunting, I traced them back to the nineties when they settled there. But it’s grown into . . . I’m not giving up. So I’m done with us.”

Luke stood, not looking at her, his face in shadow above the hanging lamp now. “Done with us?” she said. “Done with us?” She kept trying, she kept failing to get past that.

“Done with you, yeah. As in divorce.” He threw a $20 bill on the table, and she watched it drink the ring of water where his glass had been. She reached out and took his hand. He looked up at the exposed ceiling and growled something animal. Then she was on him, using her weight to pull him back into his seat, screaming, Don’t go, don’t go, you can’t go.

She stares at the old place as she remembers this last part, the part where he shoved her against the table, drew his arm back like he’d done twice before in their six years, only this time he hit her in the face. Red-black stars bloomed between her eyes. And she remembers coming to, the same waitress holding a bag of ice, she remembers having to breathe through her mouth from the blood, but her memory can’t quite finish. It snaps shut on her, even as the sky above is all so clear now.

The bed sheet stays in the car, and the past, too, she tries to hope. Just her viola and a new Ada, crunching gravel under her slippers, the two-thirds moon hanging above her as she walks up the short steps and pulls on the windowed vestibule door. The sound that spills out like it’s been held in cupped hands, a secret from the world, is such an unexpected thing, she nearly lets go of the door handle. She smiles. Instruments — strings warming up, muted beyond the set of heavy wooden doors inside.

She passes through the small vestibule and pushes into the wide square room of the church beyond. Fifteen or so people sit scattered in the pews, facing the pulpit. Ada stares where they are staring: Two women and a man sit in small wooden chairs, dressed in white. A fourth chair waits off to the right. She pictures them standing in a creek. The first of the women is strikingly tall, even sitting down, even with the cello clasped between her thighs. The woman’s yellow hair hangs over her chest in two thick French braids. She smiles at Ada. A wash of dizziness, this has to be Emma, she pictures her with Luke, imagines her squeezing Luke between those thighs.

At last she can look away, ignoring the red-haired woman beside Emma, the bearded man with hair shorter than her own, almost shaved, each with a violin tipped under the chin. The voice of the empty chair does not even reach her. She’s looking for Luke, her attention skimming across the audience for him.

He’s not here. She knows he’s here.

But the trio has stopped, is ready, the silence swelling to a huge thing, and each head facing them turns on its neck to regard Ada. Ms. Hursh smiles at her from near the front, looking almost exactly like Ms. Hursh. Ada slips into the back row and sits, her forearms covering the viola in her lap, her gaze still darting and searching.

Then the cellist straightens her graceful long back and dips the bow across the strings, sweeps it back, a long mourning rind peels into the room. Ada thinks of the first time she sat here, she thinks of Gram at the end, reaching for her, clutching at her like she always, always did. Such a warmth, a blanket of sound, Ada’s lost in its folds. The violins slide in and she recognizes an arrangement of Barber’s Adagio , such a strange choice for the quality of darkness coming into the tone now, that’s been there all along, she realizes. There’s dirt in these creases.

The man directly in front of her is swaying his head from side to side. It’s a comforting rhythm, an easy metronome, as though this really is church. She lets the motion anchor her, fixating on the weathered skin on the back of his neck. Something peeks out of the man’s shirt collar. Small and dark. It wanders out, finally, and she sees it’s a moth. It wanders up the neck toward the ear. Another emerges from the man’s shirt, and another. Is there a light inside the man’s clothes, she wonders, and has to bite her tongue to hold her in the pew. The music and where Luke is, that empty chair and what it means, these things are making her want to get up and do, be , though she doesn’t know what or where.

A white-yellow cloud catches her eye, drifting into the right of her vision, leaning forward halfway down the pew. Ada turns her head. A plump old woman is smiling at her, showing her teeth. She looks like a white Gram, her hair thin as ground fog, insubstantial. Ada sees moths crawling on her scalp.

She shuts the woman out, those Gram eyes. The music’s crawling, too, Ada can’t imagine Barber holding so much shadow inside himself. Somehow this trio resonates like a small orchestra, the sound like it’s kneeling, in mud and storm and blood, suddenly they abandon the Barber and cut into the middle of Ligeti’s first string quartet, the manic depressive Métamorphoses nocturnes . Here is a darkness without its cloak.

But this is all a disappointment. Ada has no patience for it, beautiful and almost unprecedented though it is. She wants it to evolve, down into that one unwound, fibrous note she’s discovered. If she hears it, she’ll know. She’ll know this is right, all of it, and she’ll stay. But if the endless tone is there, the trio cannot find it. Ada doesn’t even hear an awareness of it.

The listeners turn and look back at her. The old woman, mouth smiling too wide, rises from the pew and steps toward the aisle, but Ada’s already stumbling into the vestibule and the night outside. Quiet as December, the trees crowding in a semicircle around the church, and the mountains a towering faith out beyond the closeness of the forest.