Black Heart Boys' Choir by Curtis M. Lawson

Author:Curtis M. Lawson [Lawson, Curtis M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wyrd Horror
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

It’s Sunday, and I’m at work. I still feel sick from yesterday. Sick from the feeling of blood and the vertigo of hallucination. Pain throbs from beneath the bandage on my finger. The small bite from the teeth of someone not yet fully grown, now hidden under gauze and adhesive plastic.

It’s Sunday morning, and I don’t know if black unicorns exist, or if I’m mad, or if I’m a killer. I don’t even know that one necessarily precludes the others. I have no memory of killing that family on Raylene Street, but someone did. It’s all over the news. But I did kill Gravetree, didn’t I? I can’t find his obituary online. Has no one found his body yet?

The record store is empty, a small mercy that I fully appreciate. Not even Jonas is here, which comes as no surprise. I wonder if he even opened the shop yesterday without me here. It doesn’t matter, I suppose, unless the cops come around asking questions.

Where were you yesterday, Mr. Beaumont?

I stepped into a pen-and-ink, Edward Gorey version of my old house where that family was murdered.

Did you kill them?

No, no. I simply snuck in through the basement and broke into my father’s old office to steal violent drawings marked with musical notation. I know it sounds bad, but it was at the insistence of the sixty-seventh Duke of Hell.

I shake the imaginary encounter from my head and look down at my songbook. There is nothing I can do about yesterday, but I can still figure out this damn song.

The drawings I found, the ones that mirror the photographs from my dream, are laid out across the counter. The notations written on each must fit this score somehow. I should be able to figure out where in the song they go or make a damn good guess at least. I mark down the keys above each, which allows me to place them within the proper movements.

The bar scrawled across the image of the hanging man is in A minor, same as Goetic Prelude, and it fills the final lost measure of The Madrigal’s opening. That snippet of music that I copied from the picture of the bleeding vagrant is a variation on a theme from the first movement, Black Unicorn Sonata. The bar could fit into either of the two spots still missing in the first movement, and it occurs to me that it might repeat and fill both. I pencil the notes into my songbook over both empty measures.

Next, I study the bit of music accompanying the picture of the dying drug addict. Six eighth notes make up the bar, which would seem to indicate waltz timing. That places it in the second movement. There are, however, too many missing spots on that section of the score to guess where this slice of song might fit.

I hum each of the four parts from the second movement, one measure at a time. I tap out the waltz beat on the counter, one, two, three, one, two, three.

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