Across the Spectrum (16 page)

His smile broadened. “That I am. Do allow me to present
myself. In this country, people mostly use the sobriquet of Nick Scratch when
they call on me.” He held out one clean, well-tended hand.

Jenny didn’t move.

The fiddler shrugged beneath his coat. “I think you know my
friend the Reverend Mr. Josiah Cook.” He swept his hand toward the preacher.

Reverend Cook turned his face away.

“Evenin’, Reverend Cook,” murmured Jenny.

The preacher said nothing. His shoulders shuddered.

“He died about a month back.” The fiddler’s smile tightened
up into a smirk. “He was weighed with the same measure he used to weigh others
and he was found wanting. Weren’t you Josiah?” The fiddler poked the preacher
with his bow. The proud reverend yelped and cowered low.

Jenny’s back trembled and she couldn’t stop it.

Scratch chuckled deep in his throat as he turned back to
Jenny. “However, I do not believe it’s our Reverend Mr. Cook you’ve come to see
me about.”

“No,” she said, gathering her nerves again. “Have you got my
Tom?”

Scratch arched his golden eyebrows. “Your Tom? You are
mistaken, Mrs. Hawkins. He’s my Tom.” Now his smile parted his lips and Jenny
saw his white, white teeth. “He traded his soul for the ability to dance better
than a certain young lady.” Red fire danced behind the devil’s black eyes.
Jenny had to drop her gaze to the floorboards. Scratch chuckled again. The
sound traced a line of fire right down Jenny’s spine. “As I kept my end of the
bargain, Tom was obliged to keep his.”

Jenny’s stomach turned over. The corpses gathered behind her
in a reeking gaggle to listen to their master and every breath caught in her
throat.

Jenny forced her head up. “What’s your price for his freedom?”

The fiddler laid a hand on his breast. “Mrs. Hawkins, you
wound me. Do you take me for a slave trader? No, ma’am. I paid for goods of
quality, freely sold. Tom Hawkins is mine, and I will keep him.” Scratch
planted one shiny black boot down firmly.

Jenny held her ground, although she didn’t know how she
managed it.

“I hear you’re a betting man,” she said. “Will you take a
wager? If I win, Tom goes free. If you win, you’ve got my soul as well as his.”

The fiddler’s smile was like the curve of a butcher’s knife.
“You have been correctly informed, Mrs. Hawkins. I do enjoy a wager.” His eyes
glittered with their own deep, blood-red light. “And because I also admire
bravery, and sass, if I may be so free, I will wager Tom Hawkins’s soul against
your own that if you dance this night through in my dance,” he waved the fiddle
bow at the sagging mass of dead, “you will not be able to leave the floor when
the daylight comes.”

“I’ll take that bet,” said Jenny straight away.

At her words, Reverend Cook swung around. “Don’t, Jenny,” he
croaked.

“Quiet!” Scratch pointed the bow at him and the man cried in
pain. He staggered backward, his hands covering his face. The corners of
Jenny’s eyes stung with tears of pity for him. She remembered him, so tall, so
proud, so sure of himself, torn with love of her and hatred of what she was.

She bit her lip. It was Tom she had to concentrate on now.

Nick Scratch had turned back to her.

“Mrs. Hawkins, your spirit does you credit.” He bowed again.
“I hope you’ll do Kevin the honor of being his partner.” He made a “come
hither” gesture over her head with two fingers.

A stinking corpse shuffled up to her, moving like a puppet
with loose strings. It seized her hand in one dank claw. Jenny gagged as her
stomach tried to crawl up her throat. The corpse’s blue uniform, stained with
gore and grime, hung in tatters about its grey body. She fought to keep her
feet as her partner hauled her out to the center of the floor where the other
dead had squared up sets.

Think about Tom, she told herself as she looked across to
the dripping figure that was her partner, breathed in its heavy reek, and felt
its slime clinging to her hands. Think about Tom.

“Honor your partners,” whimpered Reverend Cook.

The corpses bowed. Jenny dipped a curtsey to her partner and
the Devil began to play.

The music shimmered, it glowed and flickered. It shot
straight to Jenny’s heart and made her blood race white hot through her veins.

“First couple out and swing in the middle!” shrieked
Reverend Cook.

“Shake your big feet to the tune of the fiddle!

“When you get there, remember my call!

“Swing to the right and promenade all!”

The music strangled the preacher’s call and swung it against
Jenny’s body. It moved her feet fast and hard, a whip on a slave’s back. She
wasn’t telling her body how to move. The music and the wailing call worked her
flesh for her while she watched all helpless from the back of her own mind.
Carried by the laughing fiddle, the preacher’s voice ordered her to reach and
circle, swing and promenade. Desperation sank further through her skin with
each touch of her partner’s shredding hands.

Pain shot up her arm as a bony finger jabbed her. Jenny
missed a beat and looked up into the face of a dead woman and saw a boundless
sorrow written there. Kevin jerked her wrists to pull her into the promenade.
In that moment she realized tears dampened his cold eyes. The music tightened
its grip. A boot kicked her ankle, and a pair of moldy fingers pinched her
cheek, leaving it sore and damp. Jenny reeled with horror and pain, but also
with pity. These creatures were not free. The music held them in its grip, even
as it struggled to hold onto her. They were not free, would never be free
again. This was the fate that held Tom, and waited for her.

Fight it, Jenny Hawkins ordered herself. Fight!

Jenny dug into her soul, past the feeling of whips to
remember the feeling of wings, to where earthly fiddle music lay stored up
alongside the love of an earthly man.

Jenny’s spirit rose. The music snatched at her, but she
swung free.

Tom’s eyes watched her from the warmth of memory. Under his
loving gaze, she felt the magic grace that possessed her when she danced to the
fiddle music back home.

Strength flowed into her limbs. Memory built her walls
against the dancers sagging beside her. In her mind, Tom’s hands swung her
round, not the hands of a rotting corpse. She recognized the dance as “The
Irish Washerwoman,” and she ordered her feet to step down and kick up. The
fiddle music circled and snarled at her, but it was Jenny Hawkins dancing the
dance. The weeping dead reached to punch and pinch her. Jenny slipped between
them like a summer breeze.

The dancing never stopped. The music slowed only to change
tunes. The air grew thick and choked with heat and sound and stench and the reverend’s
tortured calling. Jenny’s dress soaked through with grave muck and her own
sweat. Her heart labored to keep beating in her weary chest. Yet she fought
herself free from the music’s snares again and again. The dead manhandled her
between them, but she still ducked their clumsy blows. A year of memories of
Tom supported her drooping shoulders. A lifetime of dancing carried her leaden
body.

The night flowed on. Jenny’s fading strength was her only
way to mark time. The Devil’s playing squeezed, crawled, tangled and tripped.
Her bones ached with exhaustion.

The dead circled round her. Reverend Cook screamed out
Scratch’s call.

Finally, Jenny staggered. A heavy clout caught her on the
ear. Dead Kevin yanked on her sagging arm and dragged her into a new line. His
mouth moved as he did, and through her pain, Jenny saw him shape the words “I’m
sorry.” Her heart fell.

But for a moment, the music slowed. Jenny made herself look
past her partner’s shoulder, out the windows. There, a thin grey line glistened
between shadowy trees.

Dawn! Dawn! The word shouted itself jubilantly inside her
numbed mind. Sunup coming on and I’m my own woman! Hang on, Jenny Hawkins. Not
long now and you’ll stride right out those doors and Tom is free of Scratch and
all his doings!

“Hands around! First couple out to the right!” Reverend
Cook’s voice rattled with pain. Jenny stepped down the outside of the line,
barely seeing the floor under her. Dead women poked and elbowed her as she
passed. She called up the feeling of Tom’s warm hands on her back, of “The
Devil’s Dream,” this dance she danced now, the one where she first felt her
heart fly to him.

Jenny teetered into her place and looked up into her
husband’s coffee brown eyes.

“Gent leave his lady there, go onto the next alone!”

Tom. It was Tom—solid and real and hunched up in pain. He
plodded down the middle of the line, dragged by the music. All the dead watched
him, their faces sagging with regret. Once in his place, he took up the hands
of a dead woman in a soiled wedding dress. His face creased as he circled with
her.

“Put that lady on your right!” A sob strangled the
preacher’s call. “Onto the next and circle four!”

Jenny let out a wordless cry as the dead woman took Tom
still further away down the line. He glanced toward her between the dead. Tears
rolled down over his beard.

“Leave her there and go home alone!”

Tom stood right across from her. She could smell his earth
scent through all the heavy corpse stink. Her eyes burned with tears. She felt
the Devil’s music wind itself around her like a noose, like a shroud. She
couldn’t soar free. She couldn’t retreat into a memory of dancing with Tom now.
Now, Tom stood in front of her and the sorrow in his face filled her soul to
the brim.

“Meet your partners and promenade!”

She grabbed onto Tom’s dry, strong hands for a blissful
second. The music hitched itself up to the call and forced them into a
promenade. It shackled Jenny’s ankles, and where the call commanded, there she
went. She couldn’t move by her own will anymore. Even as the glimmer of dawn
broadened outside, she knew she’d lost. She could no longer move of her will.
Her body which had borne her for so long was too tired. As soon as the music
stopped, it would lay down and give up her soul. She knew that. It had been too
much and had gone on for too long. As soon as the music stopped and the dance
was over, she was done for, and Tom with her. The call swung them together and
apart again, down the endless line of dead. For one precious instant, it let
them take hands and promenade again.

“I’m sorry,” Jenny gasped to her husband through her tears.
“I didn’t mean for you to pay this price, I swear!”

Tom’s chin shook. “Paid,” he whispered. “Paid in full for
the dance and the tune. Pay it again to have you, Jenny.”

His words touched her despairing soul, and Jenny felt
something between hope and fear flutter in her breast. Paid in full, for the
dance and tune. Paid in full . . .

“First couple out to the right!” The call came down and
prised their fingers apart, but as their hands released each other, Jenny met
Tom’s eye desperately. He saw it too. Tearful hope filled his face.

When I’ve paid the fiddler, I can pick the tune . . .

“St. Peter’s March!” hollered Tom all at once. “For mercy’s
sake, Reverend! Call St. Peter’s March! Call us home!”

For one split second, silence fell like an iron bar. Jenny
swayed on numb feet and broken knees, saw the naked horror on Reverend Cook’s
face as he realized what Tom was asking him to do.

Then, Reverend Cook’s shoulders straightened themselves even
as Nick Scratch ran his bow across the fiddle strings again.

“Balance and swing!” called out the preacher. The moaning
pain was gone. His voice raised itself up the way it used to on Sundays when he
lifted his congregation’s hearts to Heaven.

The call moved Jenny’s feet for her. She spun around in
Tom’s arms. Scratch’s music drummed against her soul, but Reverend Cook’s call
sang out louder and more true.

“First gent, put that lady on your right!”

The dead stumbled, torn between the music and the call, but Tom
held her firm. She felt his hands through the pain and the fear and the horror
of the music the Devil called down with his fiddle thundering against every
inch of her.

“Head couple, sashay down the center!” commanded the
Reverend Cook.

They tried. The call gave them the strength to move, but the
shambling corpses blocked the way. Scratch rang a screeching chord from his
fiddle and the church doors banged shut.

Jenny glanced back, praying and pleading. She saw the
preacher lift up his hands and he was truly calling, calling for the kingdom
and the glory, one last time.

“Listen to my voice and heed you my call! Jenny take your
Tom and swing out the hall!”

The music crashed in like a flood wave. Jenny’s arms
tightened up and Tom wrenched her weight around with his. They careened in a
tight circle, forcing each other around, fast and faster, too fast to stop.

The wooden doors smashed against Jenny’s back, then her
shoulder and elbows. The first ray of morning caught her cheek and filled Tom’s
face.

She didn’t feel her broken, exhausted body drop. All she
felt were her husband’s arms around her as they danced free over the clean
earth into the sunshine, and into what comes after all else is done.

Now, pieces of this story made it back to Jenny’s valley, as
stories will. The ones who told the story said Heaven may not have taken her
and Tom, but Hell sure didn’t neither.

And as for the Reverend Cook? Well, they do say the Devil
got so mad, he clean kicked the preacher out and left him to fend for himself.

There’re worse things, I do suppose.

This story has probably got the most attention of all my short
fiction. It was reprinted in chapbook form by Cat Eldridge of
Green Man Review
and
Sleeping Hedgehog,
and is reposted there every year at the
Winter Solstice accompanied by a podcast of me reading the story. Gene Wolfe
said some kind words about it. The poem was picked up by Ellen Kushner for her
music blog dunnamany years ago, as well.