The Collection (12 page)

"That is better, yes," said Dooley. He could
hardly restrain himself from asking permission right away
to try the
hautboy himself, but felt it would be wiser to wait until brandy had done a
little mellowing. He sat down on the bed.

The musician handed Dooley a huge glass of brandy; he went
back to the dresser and got his own glass and, with his instrument in his
other hand, went to the rocker. He raised the glass. "To music,
Dooley."

"To
Nachtmusik,"
said Dooley. He drank off
a goodly sip, and it burned like fire, but it was good brandy. Then he could
wait no longer.
^"
Otto, mind if I look at that instrument of
yours? It
^'
s a hautboy, isn
^'
t it?
^"

^"
A
hautboy, yes. Not many would
recognize it, even musicians. But I'm sorry, Dooley. I can't let you handle
it. Or play it, if you were going to ask that, too. I'm sorry, but that's the
way it is, my friend.
^"

Dooley nodded and tried not to look glum. The night is
young, he told himself; another drink or two of brandy that size may mellow him.
Meanwhile, he might as well find out as much as he could.

^"
Is it—your instrument, I mean, a real one?
I mean, a medieval one? Or a modern reproduction?
^"

^"
I
made it myself, by hand. A
labor of love. But, my friend, stay with the clarinet, I advise you. Especially
do not ask me to make you one like this; I could not. I have not worked with
tools, with a lathe, for many years. I would find my skill gone. Are you
skillful with tools?
^"

Dooley shook his head.
^"
Can
^'
t
drive a nail. Where could I find one, even something like yours?
^"

The musician shrugged. "Most are in museums, not
obtainable. You might find a few collections of ancient instruments in private
hands, and buy one at an exorbitant price—and you might even find it still
playable. But, my friend, be wise and stay with your clarinet. I advise you
strongly."

Dooley Hanks could not say what he was thinking, and didn't
speak.

^"
Tomorrow we will talk about' finding you a
new clarinet," the musician said.
^"
Tonight, let us forget
it. And forget your wish for a hautboy, even your wish to play this one—yes, I
know you asked only to touch and handle, but could you hold it in your hands
without wanting to put it to your lips? Let us drink some more and then I will
play for us.
Prosit!"

They drank again. The musician asked Dooley to tell
something about himself, and Dooley did. Almost everything about himself that
mattered except the one thing that mattered most—his obsession and the fact
that he was making up his mind to kill for it if there was no other way.

There was no hurry, Dooley thought; he had all night. So he
talked and they drank. They were halfway through their third round—and the last
round, since it finished the bottle—of brandy, when he ran out of talk and
there was silence.

And with a gentle smile the musician drained his glass, put
it down, and put both hands on his instrument. "Dooley ... would you like
some girls?"

Dooley suddenly found himself a little drunk. But he
laughed. "Sure," he said. "Whole roomful of girls. Blonds, brunettes,
redheads." And then because he couldn't let a squarehead square beat him
at drinking, he killed the rest of his brandy too, and lay back across the
single bed with his shoulders and head against the wall.
^"
Bring
^'
em on, Otto.
^"

Otto nodded, and began to play. And suddenly the excruciating,
haunting beauty of the music Dooley had last heard in the wine cellar was back.
But a new tune this time, a tune that was lilting and at the same time sensual.
It was so beautiful that it hurt, and Dooley thought for a moment fiercely:
damn him, he's playing
my
instrument; he owes me that for the clarinet I
lost. And almost he decided to get up and
do
something about it because
jealousy and envy burned in him like flames.

But before he could move, gradually he became aware of
another sound somewhere, above or under the music. It seemed to come from
outside, on the sidewalk below, and it was a rapid click-click-clickety-click
for all the world like the sound of high heels, and then it was closer and it
was
the sound of heels, many heels, on wood, on the uncarpeted stairway, and
then—and this was all in time with the music—there was a gentle tap-tap at the
door. Dreamily, Dooley turned his head toward the door as it swung open and
girls poured into the room and surrounded him, engulfing him in their physical
warmth and exotic perfumes. Dooley gazed in blissful disbelief and then
suspended the disbelief; if this were illusion, let it be. As long as— He
reached out with both hands, and yes, they could be touched as well as seen.
There were brown-eyed brunettes, green-eyed blonds and black-eyed redheads. And
blue-eyed brunettes, brown-eyed blonds and green-eyed redheads. They were all
sizes from petite to statuesque and they were all beautiful.

Somehow the oil lamp seemed to dim itself without completely
going out, and the music, growing wilder now, seemed to come from somewhere
else, as though the musician were no longer in the room, and Dooley thought
that that was considerate of him. Soon he was romping with the girls in
reckless abandon, sampling here and there like a small boy in a candy store. Or
a Roman at an orgy, but the Romans never had it quite so good, nor the gods on
Mount Olympus.

At last, wonderfully exhausted, he lay back on the bed, and
surrounded by soft, fragrant girlflesh, he slept.

And woke, suddenly and completely and soberly, he knew not
how long later. But the room was cold now; perhaps that was what had wakened
him. He opened his eyes and saw that he was alone on the bed and that the lamp
was again (or still?) burning normally. And the musician was there too, he saw
when he raised his head, sound asleep in the rocking chair. The instrument was
gripped tightly in both hands and that long red and yellow striped muffler was
still around his scrawny neck, his head tilted backward against the rocker's
back.

Had it really happened? Or had the music put him to sleep,
so he
^'
d dreamed it about the girls? Then he put the thought aside;
it didn't matter. What mattered, all that mattered, was that he was not leaving
here without the hautboy. But did he
have
to kill to get it? Yes, he
did. If he simply stole it from the sleeping man he wouldn't stand a chance of
getting out of Germany with it. Otto even knew his right name, as it was on his
passport, and they'd be waiting for him at the border. Whereas if he left a
dead man behind him, the body—in an abandoned house—might not be found for
weeks or months, not until he was safe back in America. And by then any
evidence against him, even his possession of the instrument, would be too thin
to warrant extradition back to Europe. He could claim that Otto had given him
the instrument to replace the clarinet he'd lost in saving Otto's life. He'd
have no proof of that, but they'd have no proof to the contrary.

Quickly and quietly he got off the bed and tiptoed over to
the man sleeping in the rocker and stood looking down at him. It would be easy,
for the means were at hand. The scarf, already around the thin neck and crossed
once in front, the ends dangling. Dooley tiptoed around behind the rocker and
reached over the thin shoulders and took a tight grip on each end of the scarf
and pulled them apart with all his strength. And held them so. The musician
must have been older and more frail than Dooley had thought. His struggles were
feeble. And even dying he held onto his instrument with one hand and clawed
ineffectually at the scarf only with the other. He died quickly.

Dooley felt for a heartbeat first to make sure and then
pried the dead fingers off the instrument. And held it himself at last.

His hands held it, and trembled with eagerness. When would
it be safe for him to try it? Not back at his hotel, in the middle of the
night, waking other guests and drawing attention to himself.

Why, here and now, in this abandoned house, would be the
safest and best chance he'd have for a long time, before he was safely out of
the country maybe. Here and now, in this house, before he took care of
fingerprints on anything he might have touched and erased any other traces of
his presence he might find or think of. Here and now, but softly so as not to
waken
any
sleeping neighbors, in case they might hear a difference between
his first efforts and those of the instrument
^'
s original owner.

So he
^'
d play softly, at least at first, and quit
right away if the instrument made with the squeaks and ugly noises so easy to
produce on any unmastered instrument. But he had the strangest feeling that it
wouldn't happen that way to him. He knew already how to manage a double reed;
once in New York he
^'
d shared an apartment with an oboe player and
had tried out his instrument with the thought of getting one himself, to double
on. He
^'
d finally decided not to because he preferred playing with
small combos and an oboe fitted only into large groups. And the fingering? He
looked down and saw that his fingers had fallen naturally in place over the
finger-holes or poised above the keys. He moved them and watched them start,
seemingly of their own volition, a little finger-dance. He made them stop
moving and wonderingly put the instrument to his lips and breathed into it
softly. And out came, softly, a clear, pure middle-register tone. As rich and
vibrant a note as any Otto had played. Cautiously he raised a finger and then
another and found himself starting a diatonic scale. And, on a hunch, made
himself forget his fingers and just
thought
the scale and let his
fingers take over and they did, every tone pure. He
thought
a
scale
in a different key and played it, then an arpeggio. He didn
^'
t know
the fingerings, but his fingers did.

He could play it, and he would.

He might as well make himself comfortable, he decided
despite his mounting excitement. He crossed back to the bed and lay back across
it, as he had lain while listening to the musician play, with his head and
shoulders braced up against the wall behind it. And put the instrument back to
his mouth and played, this time not caring about volume. Certainly if neighbors
heard, they'd think it was Otto, and they would be accustomed to hearing Otto
play late at night.

He thought of some of the tunes he'd heard in the wine cellar,
and his fingers played them. In ecstasy, he relaxed and played as he had never
played a clarinet. Again, as when Otto had played, he was struck by the purity and
richness of the tone, so like the chalumeau register of his own clarinet, but
extending even to the highest notes.

He played, and a thousand sounds blended into one. Again the
sweet melody of paradoxes, black and white blending into a beautiful radiant
gray of haunting music.

And then, seemingly without transition, he found himself
playing a strange tune, one he
^'
d never heard before. But one that he
knew instinctively belonged to this wonderful instrument. A calling, beckoning
tune, as had been the music Otto had played when the girls, real or imaginary,
had click-clicked their way to him, but different this—was it a sinister
instead of a sensual feeling underlying it?

But it was beautiful and he couldn
^'
t have stopped
the dance of his fingers or stopped giving it life with his breath if he
^'
d
tried.

And then, over or under the music, he heard another sound.
Not this time a click-click of high heels but a scraping, scrabbling sound, as
of thousands of tiny clawed feet. And he saw them as they spilled suddenly out
of many holes in the wood-work that he had not before noticed, and ran to the
bed and jumped upon it. And with paralyzing suddenness the bits and pieces fell
into place and by an effort that was to be the last of his life Dooley tore the
accursed instrument from his mouth, and opened his mouth to scream. But they
were all around him now, all over him: great ones, tawny ones, small ones, lean
ones, black ones . . . And before he could scream out of his opened mouth the
largest black rat, the one who led them, leaped up and closed its sharp teeth
in the end of his tongue and held on, and the scream aborning gurgled into
silence.

And the sound of feasting lasted far into the night in Hamelin
town.

Horror came to Cherrybell at a little after noon on a
blistering hot day in August.

Perhaps that is redundant;
any
August day in
Cherrybell, Arizona, is blistering hot. It is on Highway 89 about forty miles
south of Tucson and about thirty miles north of the Mexican border. It consists
of two filling stations, one on each side of the road to catch travelers going
in both directions, a general store, a beer-and-wine-license-only tavern, a
tourist-trap type trading post for tourists who can
^'
t wait until
they reach the border to start buying serapes and huaraches, a deserted
hamburger stand, and a few
^'
dobe houses inhabited by
Mexican-Americans who work in Nogales, the border town to the south, and who,
for God knows what reason, prefer to live in Cherrybell and commute, some of
them in Model T Fords. The sign on the highway says,
^"
Cherrybell,
Pop. 42," but the sign exaggerates; Pop died last year—Pop Anders, who ran
the now-deserted hamburger stand—and the correct figure is 41.

Horror came to Cherrybell mounted on a burro led by an ancient,
dirty and gray-bearded desert rat of a prospector who later —nobody got around
to asking his name for a while—gave the name of Dade Grant. Horror's name was
Garth. He was approximately nine feet tall but so thin, almost a stick man,
that he could not have weighed over a hundred pounds. Old Dade
^'
s
burro carried him easily, despite the fact that his feet dragged in the sand on
either side. Being dragged through the sand for, as it later turned out, well
over five miles hadn't caused the slightest wear on the shoes—more like
buskins, they were—which constituted all that he wore except for a pair of
what could have been swimming trunks, in robin
^'
s-egg blue. But it
wasn
^'
t his dimensions that made him horrible to look upon; it was
his
skin.
It looked red, raw. It looked as though he had been skinned
alive, and the skin replaced upside down, raw side out. His skull, his face,
were equally narrow or elongated; otherwise in every visible way he appeared
human—or at least humanoid. Unless you counted such little things as the fact
that his hair was a robin
^'
s-egg blue to match his trunks, as were
his eyes and his boots. Blood red and light blue.