Metronome

The vampire smiled at the pianist. “I like your music,” he said. “Is that Mozart or Beethoven?”

The pianist did not answer, did not even know someone had spoken, too engrossed in his playing. His fingers danced with moonlight across the ivories and ebonies, pale, slender things that moved like smoke. He heard nothing but the sweet music that swelled in his head and the rigid, relentless beating of his heart keeping time. He saw nothing but the black and white gleaming before him. He felt nothing, despite it all.

He felt absolutely nothing, even as his lifeblood slowly drained away.

 ***

The pianist found himself losing time. Beats slipped past his fingers as he held notes longer than he should. He had been too slow only by a single beat at first, then two, then three, then four, until he found himself pressing down on a single key for an hour, the sound long dead but the music still lingering in his ears.

For as long as he had played, as long as he could remember, he had had an innate sense of time, as music understood it, a gift that made the metronome but an ornament, purposeless and superfluous.

He practiced for hours upon hours that quickly turned into days that he could no longer count because time, as most understood it, had been lost to him. He practiced and practiced until the sun burnt his skin red because he no longer cared to seek the comfort of shadows when its rays shone too intensely into the pavilion and he practiced some more until his burns healed white. He practiced and practiced and practiced until his face turned pale and his eyes turned dark from hunger and thirst and lack of sleep.

Still, time refused to return.

 ***

In time, the vampire’s thirst won over the music and he wandered from the pavilion on aimless legs in search of drink. He was dehydrated and starving, besides, more wraith than substance. It had been so long since he had last drunk anything, although he could not count how long ago it had been.

Almost as much as he desired draught, he craved time, which he had lost and could not find. He had allowed himself a watch and let the ticking of its hands tell him the passing of the seconds, but, in time, it had stopped, as mechanical things were wont. He yearned for the steady, insistent pulse that would remind him always.

The sky was red when he returned to the pavilion, returned to the music, unsated because he had found nothing to drink but water.

***

In her, the pianist found the relief of a constant, insistent heartbeat and he once more found himself playing, keeping time, to her internal rhythm. She was a pretty thing, smiles and adoring eyes and the hot, sweet fragrance of breath, but those he barely noticed when the fluttering of her heart within her chest filled his ears like familiar music.

She too was a musician, different from him, but she understood his passions and frustrations. Sometimes, her fingers danced with steel strings, lively things that moved like spiders, as she softly sung, almost mumbled, the lyrics of some love ballad, and her heart beat in accelerando and his own hands would follow, too fast or too slow for his own music, and he would stop to listen. Most times, it was she who listened, perched on the railing like a colourful bird, silent and admiring, her heart always how he needed it to be, larghissimo to prestissimo.

He fancied that she came every day, but, without the hypnotic pulse of her heart to signal the passing of the seconds when she was gone, he couldn’t possibly know.