stopped in their tracks and turned towards Lisa in unison. She was sure that they were about to kill her. Still, she continued to play. At least it would give her mother time to escape. She had started with a Jazz tune. It was the only thing that had come to mind. She loved Jazz, but was forbidden to play it in the house. Her parents only allowed her to play classical. Jazz was the devil’s music. Her mother had told her that after she’d heard about a Jazz musician who’d claimed to have sold his soul to the devil. He claimed that he could evoke Satan with his music. Lisa had listened to her mother torn between skepticism and fascination. She’d always believed that music could be powerful, even magical.
“Had that old Jazz musician stumbled on to something?”
Lisa bought his album and learned each song. She studied each note and played them whenever her mother wasn’t around. She’d even altered them, spiced them up, added notes, layering melodies upon melodies until the songs had become even wilder and more chaotic. Playing the songs frightened and exhausted her. Yet they excited her beyond words. She quickly became addicted to them. She played them every chance she got, adding to them more and more, composing an entire symphony of songs that sounded like the screams of dying stars. She would often collapse sweating and hyperventilating after attempting one of the corybantic compositions. Sometimes the room would spin, sometimes she would see things, horrible things, like the things in the room with her now. The things eating her family.
So she had played Jazz for the devils and they had come to her, but they didn’t attack as she had thought they would. They sat and listened.
They filled the room, the yard, the street as far as she could see out the shattered window. They were legion. Evidence of their carnage was everywhere bleeding down into the storm drains. She could hear the screams of her neighbors echoing from all directions. Death was all around them. No escape anywhere. So Lisa played. She went from Jazz to ragtime to Beethoven and they sat swaying as if mesmerized.
The sky looked as if it were on fire. The clouds were black like coal smoke and the stratosphere was aflame with dark reds and brilliant oranges. The sun was nowhere to be seen and a black moon had replaced the normal silvery one. The smell of burnt flesh was overpowering yet Lisa could see no flames anywhere on the ground. The heavens were the only things burning. Lisa imagined she could hear angels screaming.
“What has happened?”
Lisa stared at that terrible sky for long moments as her fingers tickled a dirge from the ivory keys. She knew now what had happened. She was witnessing the end of days. Hell had come to earth.
Lisa’s mother tip-toed through the hypnotized beasts, through the puddles of blood and gore, over to the piano stool and sat down beside her.
“Keep playing,” she whispered in Lisa’s ear and so she did. She played Mozart. She played George Benson. She played Elton John. She played Carl Orf. Music flew from her fingertips and colored the air. It masked the scent of death, the sight of blood and bodies and the hideous fanged creatures with bellies full of her relative’s flesh and marrow. Lisa played until her fingers grew numb and her forearms cramped. She played until the pads of her fingertips cracked and bled.
She studied the demons’ features as they listened entranced by the music. Their eyes were large and went from the front of their faces all the way around to the sides like a pair of wrap-around sunglasses. Their skin was red and black like the turbulent sky above them and looked wet, but that may have been from the blood they had recently bathed in.
The creatures looked both human and reptilian, like a cross between an adolescent and a Salamander. Their mouths were full of yellowed fangs streaked with gore as if they’d brushed them with road-kill and their breath stank of fetid meat like an abattoir. The tallest one stood only five feet. Tusks, antlers, and horns that looked as if they’d been stolen from other animals and grafted on by a surgeon in some bizarre sort of body modification protruded from their faces and heads. Some of them even had extra limbs, human, animal, and other, that had also been surgically attached. Some even had extra heads…human heads that stared mournfully from their shoulders without saying a word or cursed and screamed in an endless diatribe of hate. Lisa shuddered trying to imagine what it would feel like to spend an eternity attached to one of those things. She had to keep playing.
Day fell to night and Lisa lost herself in the labyrinth of notes and melodies. She played until there was no one else in the room but her and her music. Until she forgot why she had to play. Until she forgot everything. Until all memory of death was gone.
The night enshrouded the entire room in a stygian veil that absorbed the devils into it so that they were invisible to her. Lisa could no longer even see the keys, still she played. She could feel her mother beside her shivering in terror as she stared at the terrible creatures. She could feel the weight of the woman’s fear and exhaustion. She was exhausted too. So terribly exhausted. But she had to keep the music going.
“Talent does what it can…”
Hours dragged by like days and still Lisa’s fingers struck the keys without pause. The sun rose back into the sky as Lisa pounded the keys to a Little Richard tune and set again as she slowly plunked out an old somber gospel melody that she’d heard once somewhere she couldn’t remember. She was thirsty, hungry, exhausted, but she let the music lift her outside herself, away from her frail body and its needs. She let it carry her up into the clouds. She played a modern composition by Arvot Part, a minimalist piece that would let her fingers rest. The beasts stirred. One of them with an extra head on each shoulder looked directly at Lisa’s mother and smiled in triplicate, then it turned to Lisa.
“You did this you know? You called us here.”
The demon spoke. Then, the melancholy head lolling stupidly on his left shoulder chimed in. It was the face of an elderly woman who looked as if she’d once been quite handsome. Now age and the endless atrocities of hell had weathered her features into wretched ugliness.
“You called them? You did this? Do you know what you’ve done? Do you know what you’ve done?” The old woman shuddered and fell silent again. A tear raced the length of her cheek. On the creature’s other shoulder sat the head of a boy no older than ten. He said nothing. His face was scarred and burned, the hair completely singed from his scalp, and his eyes were sunken deep into his emaciated skull. All the horrors the boy had witnessed echoed endlessly in his haunted eyes. His bottom lip trembled but he still did not speak, nor did he cry. He just sat there with hate boiling off of him like waves of humidity as he stared at Lisa. That’s when Lisa’s mother began to weep.
It began as a sprinkling of light tears that splashed on Lisa’s shoulder, moistening her dress. Then she began to sob violently. Her body hitched and spasmed with sorrow as her grief took her over.
“I’m sorry, Mom. You told me not to. You told me not to play those songs. I should have listened.”
“It wasn’t you, Lisa. You didn’t do this. No music did this. There’s no music this evil.”
But Lisa knew. Her mother hadn’t heard Lisa’s last composition. She hadn’t seen reality melt and fold around her as she assaulted the keys as if she were trying to scratch out the piano’s heart. She hadn’t seen the sun turn red as she reached the last crescendo, a violent rolling collision of notes like the sound of time screeching to a halt.
“I can’t hold on.” Her mother whispered to her. Then she kissed Lisa’s cheek and collapsed into the midst of the awakening beasts.
“Mom! No!!!”
Lisa heard her mother’s scream as the demon’s tore into her and began ripping her apart.
“Keep playing, Lisa! Keep playing!”
Lisa turned back to her piano and stared at the blood-speckled keys. Her tears struck the ivory turning the red splotches pink as her mother’s screams dulled to a gurgling death rattle. Lisa knew they would be coming for her next, but she wouldn’t be here when they came. She would be off with Beethoven and Mozart playing at the New York Symphony Orchestra. And her Father and Mother would be there and so would Uncle Matt and Aunt Bea and her grandmother and grandfather and they would clap for her and smile with pride as she played her heart out. Because she would play like her life depended on it. Like the fate of the world depended on it. Somehow she had to make everything right again. Her torn and bloodied fingers splayed across the keys and slowly began to carve out a tune. It was an original composition, probably the last thing she’d ever compose. To her it sounded like death. Like ripping flesh and screams. The demons loved it.
Lisa began to sing. Her voice was not lovely. It was a melodic moaning that rose occasionally to a shriek. Tears and sweat commingled with blood and decorated her face like war-paint as her sorrow and agony vibrated in the air. The demons were now crowding around the piano, listening to Lisa’s dissonant assault on the piano keys.
