The Cellist - Featured in Sharing Nightmares

The Cellist - 2

He dons his favoured tailcoat: black with a crimson lining, and a waistcoat to match. His silk gloves and bowtie are the purest shade of white, perhaps having never seen a single mote of dirt. His hair is easily tousled, but it suits him that way, if I may briefly admire him so, for once a year he looks his age and not one hundred.

He has selected his four already. His cherished, chosen listeners. He selects them not for their status, their piety, their allure or profession. He appoints them their seat personally, for these people are sad – so beautifully sad – grieving and lonely. For those who say the cellist does not leave his mansion have never seen him take interest in these plain and unapparent people.

Through means I have not yet uncovered, he divulges unto them the time and venue for his recital, and though they know of Varian Stone's notoriety, they do not fail him. Always four. No more and no less, and always they come.

They are seated when he arrives on his stage, in a gentle arc before him so that he might gaze intimately upon their faces if he so wishes. His cello is clasped around the neck in his hand, polished until it shines in the dim yellow lamps set into the alcoves of the abandoned Hinkley Alley theatre.

All eyes are on him, and he is unashamed to savour their fawning. How beautiful he is. How uncanny his looks. How charming that wicked half-smile. A young man of poise and dignity and a mystery that shrouds him from the world. Of course, this is what the cellist believes, but I cannot write with any certainty it is what his audience truly thinks.

He lets them watch him for a moment longer as he sets his cello against his knee, not immediately connecting with them, he will say, so as not to break the spell he has on them. But I rather think he cannot at first bring himself to look into the eyes of those sad and lonely people for fear they might impair his composure.

He need not trouble himself, as it is then that the attention is off him and they see his cello has no strings. He flips back his hair in that graceful way he so often does, closes his eyes and begins to play. To me there is only a haunting silence. To him he hears no melody but the ones he has rehearsed all year in his mind, but to them, there occurs the most curious of phenomena.

The music is whatever they wish for it to be. The man at the far end might long for a sombre requiem in E minor, and so his wistful soul sings it to him. The lady in the middle might hear a sprightly waltz from her youth, and the other two hear well-known pieces played to utmost perfection to their ears, as if the lulls and swells are in time with their heart's desire.

It is not he who renders this phantom music, but they, and for an hour he acts, never once looking at them, but in full knowledge of the marvel on their faces as they fall for his performance. For a time they forget their sadness, their loss, their strife, but it is still not for them that he plays. The cellist plays for their souls, as I have mentioned, but in a way he also plays for his own.

When at last he bows the final note with a flourish, he stands for his applause. He hears the roar of it in his head, but the theatre is black and silent. He bows before each of them, a broad smile splitting his handsome face in two, and at last he will open his eyes and look at his chosen.

Their heads are rolled back onto their necks, to the side, to the front. Their eyes do not see into this world; their mouths hang open without breath. He bows low again before his audience of the dead and walks to the grieving man on the far right. In turn he delicately sweeps his hand mere inches from their mouths, one by one, as if he were catching a fistful of vapour.

From each he draws a silvery wisp, light as air and gentle as a candle flame. It is the soul, and he will say that it is beautiful to behold and thrums in his palm like the wingbeats of a hundred tiny birds. His portrayal is, of course, a romantic one, for he does not see the arc of corpses in front of him, slumped and pallid in their seats.

He sits again and attends to his treasured cello, and from these four souls he fashions the four strings of his instrument. The grieving man forms the thickest string – deep and solemn. The lady in the middle, the one for whom her soul had sung of a long forgotten romance, forms the thinnest string, high in pitch and mirthful once played. The other two souls he arches over the bridge and winds around the tuning pegs, at last satisfied that his work is finished.

For another year he will reside inside his mansion, almost alone except for the echoes of the past. He will play the loveliest, yet most haunted songs I have ever heard, for I know of no other who is privy to his art. Once again I will stand at the foot of the stairs and watch him from below while he does not realise it, in conflict with myself for becoming captivated with a man so flawless and yet so evil.

He has entrusted me with his secret like none other he has trusted before. And yet, I sense a flicker in his eyes that grows more sinister by the day ... My dear friend, I write to you because do not know how much longer I have before the last note of his melody will also spell my final breath...

Yours,
- - -

... So who wrote the letter?
And who is the Cellist's next victim?
What can we expect next of our secretive gentleman bachelor, Joseph Redding?

Find out soon in the second upcoming novella of The Sinister Fate of Joseph Redding. The Cellist is a short story written for the Sharing Nightmares Anthology available at The_Write_Place.

It links the first novella of the Joseph Redding series (A Man of a Thousand Pieces - available on my profile) with the upcoming second, which introduces this mysterious man of music, Varian Stone.

If you haven't yet read the first novella, head over there and check out this chilling Victorian horror!