From Shadows to Starlight

Unworthy

Chapter Seventeen

There’s an art in seclusion, production in depression. If a stranger turns up missing, this song is my confession. Tell the tales of the trail of dead, lovers learn from slower hands…losing self in myself…inner demons make demands. You’re sick, sick as all the secrets that you deny, sins like skeletons are so very hard to hide. --Anberlin

Unworthy

Erik passed through magnificent parks and neat, empty streets with fine buildings on either side until he came to the house down the lane across from the stone church. The house was smaller than many of the others, but it had charming architectural details, and there was a light in one of the windows. Alana was standing there, waiting for him, the whole house dark but the place where she stood. She could see him now; he saw her face brighten up even more all of a sudden, a smile spreading across her face. It was ironic, he thought, that someone like her had been waiting up for him, was glad to see someone like him.

A light waiting to meet the darkness.

She left the window, and the world grew colder until she appeared again, opening the front door. “Come inside.”

He came inside, into a well-furnished parlor with portraits and photographs of people smiling out from their frames. They seemed to tease him, saying that they knew how much he wished he could have what they had.

“I’ve been thinking about where we should have this lesson,” Alana whispered. “Everyone is asleep now, so we can’t have it here in the house. But there’s the church…the key’s by the door, and my uncle wouldn’t mind if we went over there for a little while.”

Not the church. Anything but that. “Is there anywhere else we could go?”

She shook her head. “No, unless you want to sit in the tiny stable out back where they keep their horse.”

He would choose the stable any day.

“But,” Alana continued, “the sound quality would be wonderful inside the church. And they have a grand piano and organ inside as well.”

That was tempting. Very tempting indeed. It had been many months since he’d played; his fingers itched to move across the black and white keys and play the music he loved. That was one of the two things he’d missed most since he’d left the opera house, playing the great organ he’d constructed all on his own. The other was Christine, naturally. Tonight if he could just play some of their songs on the instruments Alana spoke of, maybe he would miss her less.

Miss her less? He didn’t want to stop missing her. It proved he loved her, it proved he was alive.

Alana had the key to the church in her hands now, and was opening the front door. “Let’s go,” she said, turning to look at him, a smile on her face. Even her bright eyes seemed to smile. Erik couldn’t meet her gaze and looked at the floor as he found himself walking out into the rainy street.

Alana ran across the road to the church and unlocked the door, hurrying inside to get out of the rain. Erik followed her, but as he came face to face with the open door, paralysis seized his every limb. Everything had gone all cold, and images danced in his mind, memories of being mocked, feared, and condemned.

He was the Devil’s Child, and he had no right to enter a holy place.

“God would strike a little demon like you dead the moment you walked through the doors!”

The memory of the gypsies’ words stung like the lash of a whip. Erik closed his eyes, trying to fight off the pain.

“Erik?” Alana’s soft voice broke through his agonizing reveries. “Aren’t you going to come inside?”