The Choir Boats by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

Author:Daniel A. Rabuzzi [Rabuzzi, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror
Publisher: ChiZine
Published: 2010-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

Interlude: Binomials, Quoth the Char-Girl

Maggie was halfway through Thomas Simpson’s Treatise of Fluxions on a rainy Thursday, having borrowed it from Mrs. Sedgewick (as well as the additional luxury of a beeswax candle), when a bolt of silence entered her mind and smothered all thought. Maggie flung herself back against the cellar wall, trying to call out. Her mother, still sickly, cried out but Maggie could not hear her. A silence coursed through Maggie’s arteries, seeking to strangle her heart. Maggie’s fingers grasped the treatise on fluxions so hard that pages ripped.

With a soundless rush, Maggie was lifted over Bushnell’s Rope-walk and the Green Stiles, above Cinnamon Street, and Wellclose Square, whirled back past Artichoke Lane, and slammed into the alley outside her cellar. While her body slumped in the cellar, she stood in the alley, mazed.

Think, think, think , Maggie yelled inside, trying to break the silence. Sing, sing, SING!

She stood defiantly and sang about cardinal numbers in the continuum and congruent polyhedra and algebraic vortices. Gradually at first and then more quickly, the silence subsided. As it diminished, Maggie heard other voices — above all, a voice like hers. She saw the young white woman, the one she had seen before while far-walking. The white woman was singing from the prow of a ship, singing down the silence that gripped the ship and everyone on it. (How odd, Maggie thought, to see just a few white faces in a crowd of dark ones.) Maggie joined the choir, matching her notes to those of the woman on the ship. Their music exploded the silence, moonlight flashed everywhere (though the moon was gibbous that night over London), and a dolphin flew through the air. Maggie glimpsed crowds of singers on a beach, including a lean man hurrah’ing with a Wapping accent. The vision ended and Maggie sat up in the cellar, tears streaming down her cheeks. She hugged her mother, who said, “Little eagle, little eagle,” over and over.

Something had changed with the merging of voices to defeat silence outside the world. For the first time, others — closer to Maggie, almost nearby — had heard her voice, and had lifted their heads like hounds scenting prey. Her song had gone forth like a flare in the night, leaving a lingering trace. And Maggie sensed their proximity. She felt vulnerable as she walked to and from the Sedgewicks. She wrapped her old sailor’s jacket more tightly around her as a muffin man stared at her in the street. A group of boys playing marbles stopped as one when she passed them, vulpine faces tracking her movement, flickers of silent intelligence shared between them. Even the streets seemed to conspire against her, misplacing themselves, softening corners, running into courtyards that went nowhere.

“Why am I on Artichoke Lane?” thought Maggie. “I need to find Finch-House Longstreet. . . . Look up, look up, follow the rooks.”

Mrs. Sedgewick detected something amiss with her protégé. Maggie was even more distant than usual, evasive when questioned, saying only that she needed more time with this book or that book, please, ma’am.

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