A SONG FOR QUIET (Persons Non Grata) - Softcover

Khaw, Cassandra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765397404 ISBN 13: 9780765397409

Verlag: Tor.com, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Cassandra Khaw returns with A Song for Quiet, a new standalone Persons Non Grata novella from the world of Hammers on Bone, finalist for the British Fantasy Award and the Locus Award, and which Kameron Hurley called "a long leap into the gory, the weird, and the fantastic."

Deacon James is a rambling bluesman straight from Georgia, a black man with troubles that he can't escape, and music that won't let him go. On a train to Arkham, he meets trouble - visions of nightmares, gaping mouths and grasping tendrils, and a madman who calls himself John Persons. According to the stranger, Deacon is carrying a seed in his head, a thing that will destroy the world if he lets it hatch.

The mad ravings chase Deacon to his next gig. His saxophone doesn't call up his audience from their seats, it calls up monstrosities from across dimensions. As Deacon flees, chased by horrors and cultists, he stumbles upon a runaway girl, who is trying to escape the destiny awaiting her. Like Deacon, she carries something deep inside her, something twisted and dangerous. Together, they seek to leave Arkham, only to find the Thousand Young lurking in the woods.

The song in Deacon's head is growing stronger, and soon he won't be able to ignore it any more.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cassandra Khaw

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A Song For Quiet

By Cassandra Khaw, Carl Engle-Laird

Tom Doherty Associates

Copyright © 2017 Zoe Khaw Joo Ee
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7653-9740-9

CHAPTER 1

The train rattles like teeth in a dead man's skull as Deacon James sags against the window, hat pulled low over his eyes. Only a few share the wide, orange-lit carriage with him. A young Chinese family, the children knotted like kittens over the laps of the adults. An undertaker in his Sunday grim, starched collar and golden cufflinks on each sleeve. Two young black women trading gossip in rich contraltos.

Stutter. Jangle. Shove. Shriek. The train shudders on, singing a hymn of disrepair. Deacon looks up as civilization robs the night of its endlessness, finger painting globs of light and farmhouses across the countryside. In the distance, Arkham sits waiting near the dark mouth of the river, a rivulet of silver crawling to the sea. Deacon sighs and closes long fingers around the handle of his instrument case. The journey had been long, lonely, marked by grief for the dead and grief for himself. Every child knows they're going to outlive their parents, but understanding is no opiate, can only mitigate. Knowledge can only propagate a trust that someday this will be okay.

But not yet, not yet.

What Deacon wishes for, more than anything else, is someone to tell him what to do in this period between hurting and healing, neither here nor there, the ache growing septic. What do you do when the funeral is over but your heart is still broken. When all the condolences have been spoken and the mourners have gone shuffling home, and you're left to stare at the wall, so raw and empty that you don't know if you'll ever be whole again.

He breathes in, breathes out. Drags the musty heat of the carriage, too warm by half, into his bones before relaxing. One second, Deacon reminds himself. One minute. One hour. One day. One week at a time. You had to take each moment as it came, or you'd go mad from the yearning. He strokes his fingers across polished wood. In the back of his head, he feels the thump of music again: hot and wet and salty as a lover's skin, begging for release.

But it'd be rude, wouldn't it? Deacon traces the iron latches on his case and the places where the paint has faded and flaked, rubbed out by sweat and fingertips. A carriage of late-evening travelers, all hungry for home. Is he cold enough to interrupt their vigil?

The music twitches, eager and invasive. It wouldn't be an imposition. It hardly could be. After all, Deacon can sing a bird from a tree, or that's what they've told him, at least. It'd be good, whispers the melody, all sibilant. It'd be good for you and them.

"Why not?" Deacon says to no one in particular, scanning the quiet. His voice is steady, powerful, the bass of a Sunday pastor, booming from the deep well of his chest. A few slide lidded gazes at him, but no one speaks, too worn down by the road. Why not, croons the music in simpatico, a miasmic echo pressing down behind his right eye. Deacon knows, although he couldn't begin to tell anyone how, that the pressure will alleviate if he plays, if he puts sentiment to sound. That he'd stop hurting — just for a little while.

And wouldn't that be worth it?

Why not, Deacon thinks again, a little guilty, flipping open the case, the brass of his saxophone gleaming gold in the dim light of the train. The music in his skull grows louder, more insistent.

Dock Boggs's "Oh, Death." How about that? Something easy and sad, none too obtrusive. His father would have appreciated the irony. Deacon sets his lips to the mouthpiece and his fingers to the keys. Exhales.

But the sound that comes out is nothing so sweet, full of teeth instead. Like the song's a dog that needs to eat, and he's a bone in its grip. Like it's hungry. The description jumps at Deacon, a crazed whine of a thought, before the song grabs him and devours him whole.

Raw, unevenly syncopated, the music's a clatter of droning notes, looping into themselves, like a man mumbling a prayer. Briefly, Deacon wonders where he heard it, where he picked it up, because there is nothing in the music that tastes familiar. No trace of the blues, no ghost of folk music, not even the wine-drunk laughter of big-city jazz or the thunder of the gospel. Only a hard lump of yearning that snags like fishbones in his throat as he plays, plays, plays, improvisation after improvisation, frantically straining to wrench the bassline into familiar waters.

But it won't relent. Instead, it drags him along, down, down, down, and under, deep into arpeggios for chords yet invented. And Deacon keeps playing to its tune, a man possessed, lungs jolting with every new refrain, even as the music mutates from a hypnotic adagio to a crashing, senseless avalanche of notes. Just sound and a fire that eats through him and yet, somehow, Deacon can not stop.

The lights shudder and swing, chains rattling.

And suddenly, there is nothing to stop, and it is over, and he is free, and Deacon is slumping into his seat, throat still foaming with the memory of the noise. His fingers burn. The skin is blistered and red. He knows in the morning they'll swell with pus, become puffy and useless until he pricks the epidermis and bleeds the fluids away. Yet still, the song is there, throbbing like a hangover; softer now, sure, and quiet enough to ignore for a few hours, but still there, still waiting.

He wets his lips. Growing up, Deacon never had an interest in any drug except the kind you could write into an eighth-note shuffle rhythm, but he had friends who'd succumbed to the seduction of narcotics. They'd always tell him the same thing: that when they weren't high, the longing would suck at them like a missing tooth. This new music felt like that.

Wrong.

Unclean.

Deacon shivers. All at once, he finds himself unable to shake the idea that there might be something burrowing through his skull, something unholy, voracious, a gleaming black-beetle appetite that'll gobble him up and leave him none the wiser. So vivid is the image that it sends Deacon to his feet and away from his seat, breath shallowed into slivers, all sticking in the membrane of his mouth.

Air, he thinks. He needs air. Water. To be somewhere other than where he already is, to be on his feet moving, away from the horror that clings to the hem of his mind like the fingers of a childhood nightmare. And as Deacon stumbles through the carriage, drunk on terror, he thinks he can almost hear the music laugh.

* * *

This is what Deacon sees in the windows as he weaves between carriages.

One: The landscape, blurred into protean shapes. Jagged peaks thickening to walls, valleys fracturing into ravines, black pines melting into blasted plains. In the sky, the stars swarm, an infection of white, a thousand cataracted eyes. There is nothing human here, no vestige of man's influence. Only night, only blackness.

Two: His face, reflected in the cold glass. Deacon looks thinner than he remembers, grief-gnawed, cheekbones picked clean of softness. His eyes are old from putting his pa into the soil and holding on to his mother as she cried bargains into his shoulder, anything to pluck the man she loves from the grave and put him back where he belongs, safe in her arms.

Three: Mouths, toothless, tongueless, opening in the windows, lesions on a leper's back. Crowding the translucent panes until there is nothing but smacking lips, wet throats.

* * *

"What in Jesus —"

Deacon recoils from the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tor.com
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0765397404
• ISBN 13: 9780765397409
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 106
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland