through the house, and he heard the scraping of a chair as his wife put it down in the passage against the door. He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back, and at the same moment he found the monkey’s paw, and frantically breathed his third and last wish.
The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house. He heard the chair drawn back, and the door opened. A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond. The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.
FUGUES, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Vanessa Hylas ran her fingers lightly over the curve of the forte-piano, enjoying its long, narrow shape—more like a boat than a harp—even as she pondered how she would contrived to keep the two hundred-year-old instrument tuned through an entire recital. “We’ll have to have two intermissions,” she told her manager as she continued to caress the glossy wood. “And retune it both times.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” said Howard Faster, making a note on his PalmPilot. “I think people will make allowances for the instrument. This isn’t just any antique. It is the Dziwny forte-piano—the very one he…”
“He killed himself playing; yes, I know,” said Vanessa, more bluntly than she had intended. She coughed and spoke again, more gently. “Stasio Dziwny performed for the last time on this instrument. It was December 8th, 1803, if I recall the date, a pre-holiday private concert at his patron’s most important Schloss, Schloss Lowenhoff. There were about fifty people present, not counting servants, according to what I’ve read.” Her shiny, close-cropped, dark-blond hair was starting to pale around her face, the fluctuating shade not unlike the beautifully grained wood of the forte-piano’s case. At forty-three, she had grown into her angular features and was much more attractive than she had been in youth, something she recognized with a trace of humor. She held herself well, almost as if she were about to play for an audience rather than test an old instrument for the first time.
“Yes,” said Faster, fussing with his expensive regimental tie. Smoothing his thinning, colorless hair with one blunt-fingered hand, he looked around for the warehouse manager among the vast collection of pianos. “It amazes me that it’s in such good condition, considering where it’s been for the last couple of centuries, or almost a couple of centuries. It’s a miracle they found it.”
Vanessa nodded. “In an attic in an Austrian Schloss—not Lowenhoff; Schaumbach, or something like that—according to the documents; you saw them,” she said, repeating what she had been told just four days ago. “Stored away in a sealed room on the top floor. You wouldn’t think the Graf would care to keep the thing, even locked away like that, if the stories about it are true, and considering his family’s role in what happened.”
“Perhaps he wanted to make sure it never got used again,” Faster suggested. “You know, take it out of circulation.”
“If that was his intention, he did a great job with it,” said Vanessa. “It makes the provenance a simple matter.”
“Well, yes; the documents look to be authentic,” said Faster in a resigned tone of voice. “They’ve been vetted legit. All the tests have come out supporting the claim. This is the Dziwny forte-piano.”
The two were silent as Vanessa pointed to an irregular stain on the bass end of the keyboard. “Brown. It could be blood.”
“It could,” said Faster uneasily. “Or something from being stored that way, or a natural discoloration of some sort. You can bet the Graf had it cleaned.”
“A man blowing his brains out all over a forte-piano must have been messy, much more than this stain’s-worth—there’d be blood and skull fragments, and brain matter, according to what I’ve researched; those old pistols did a lot of damage,” said Vanessa distantly. “I would have expected… I don’t know: something a lot worse than this.” She pulled the bench out and sat down at the instrument, trying an experimental chord.
A jangle of untuned strings shuddered out of the forte-piano.
“Ye gods!” Faster exclaimed. “They said it would be tuned.”
“Not yet,” said Vanessa, pulling her hands back as if scalded. “There are strings to be replaced, I’d have to say. They’ll need to give it a thorough going-over before it’ll be ready for the public.”
“No kidding,” said Faster. “I’ll call Shotwell right away. This is not the sound we want; I don’t care how authentic it is. He’s got to improve it.” He pulled his cell phone out of his breast pocket and tapped in a ten-digit number, then turned away to create the illusion of privacy.
Vanessa made a point of ignoring Faster’s end of the conversation, putting all her attention on the forte-piano. She played a few of the keys, her touch unusually hesitant, and winced at the sound the ancient, neglected strings made. At last she contented herself with playing one of Dziwny’s own compositions half an inch above the keys, hearing the correct notes in her mind. Only when Faster was through did she relent, swinging around on the bench and looking directly at him. “Well? What did he say?”
“He said he’d arrange everything, since he knows you want to perform with it,” said Faster, frowning as he spoke. “You wouldn’t believe what he had the nerve to tell me.”
“He said he couldn’t get his usual restoration crew to work on it,” she said promptly.
“You overheard,” Faster accused.
“No. It’s just a guess. But you’ve read the historical material about it, and you can bet Shotwell’s crew has, too, and know about the stories they’ve told about this instrument. It’s one of the most enduring fables in the classical music world, the forte-piano that compels those who play it to commit suicide.” She laughed. “Only one suicide has ever been proven in relation to this, and that was Dziwny’s own; the instrument’s been missing for close to two hundred years, so there’s no other accounts of it doing in anyone else. The Graffin died some months later in childbirth, not at the keyboard. And it turns out now that the forte-piano was put into the attic shortly afterward, so no one else had the chance to kill themselves while playing.”
“How do you account for the stories, then?” Faster asked, interested for promotional reasons.
“Because there was so much scandal around Dziwny’s love affair with the Graffin, assuming the rumors about the affair were true: there’s no proof that is was ever anything more than gossip. Still, it was quite a occurrence. His suicide was so dramatic. The public loved ghost stories back then, and the events were irresistible. And there was that awful book that came out in 1850, turning the whole story into a complicated Byronic romance. It’s become difficult to separate fact from fiction.” Vanessa laced her fingers together and looked directly at Faster. “How long is it going to take, getting this ready?”
“Shotwell said probably a month,” said Faster.
“That cuts into the Canadian tour,” Vanessa reminded him. “But that might be useful. We could use the tour to generate some interest in this instrument.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Faster, who was in favor of anything that could end up making Vanessa, his client, more money, for he would share in her good fortune.
“Then let’s plan on it,” she said, rising. “I want to find out everything he played that night, the night he shot himself.”
“Good God, why?” Faster asked.
“Because I think it would make for a very special first concert on this instrument,” she said, running her fingers lightly over the side of the forte-piano. “Think of the interest we could generate. And the myths we could put to rest.”
The promotional possibilities began to percolate in Faster’s agile brain. “Not a bad idea, Vanessa,” he approved. “Not a bad idea at all.”
* * * *
Nicola