Three Heart Echo

Chapter Seven - Iona

Melodies of bliss and sorrow enter my consciousness. When I finally cross the line of awake and asleep into the world of the living, I find there are tears that have already saturated the pillow beneath my head.

Pulling myself into sitting position, I look around, disoriented, confused. The musty smell, the flickering candlelight throw me off balance. And the haunting music floating through the space displaces me all the further.

Pulling a blanket around my shoulders, I cautiously stand, looking around for a clock, and find one on the wall across from me.

4:23 AM.

I stared at that clock until somewhere around 1:30 before finally falling into an exhausted but restless sleep. It's still essentially the dead of night. But those sounds. They shouldn't be visiting my ears now, not at this hour.

I hesitate at the doors to the chapel, well recalling Sully's words of warning.

Don't go outside...

But he didn't finish his warning.

I don't know why I'm not supposed to leave the church. I won't, not when it's still this dark. But my curiosity...

That music. So sorrowful. So filled with pain.

Surely the player is no longer sitting at the organ in one solid piece.

This is a symphony of destruction.

Two more tears make their way down my cheek. Because this is a song I understand.

Placing my hand on the knob, I give it a twist and push.

The chapel is far brighter than it should be this time of day. A thousand candles are lit throughout the space. Along the walls, set in the broken windows. Scattered along random pews.

But most of them rest on candelabras just off to the sides of the organ.

Where Sully sits. His eyes closed, his hands rising, falling, running along the keys.

I don't think he's noticed me enter, the sound of the organ covered the alarming screech of the door opening. So I step inside, my socked feet padding soundlessly over the dirty floorboards. Hugging the blanket tighter around my shoulders, I sink into an empty spot on the second row of pews, and I listen.

Sully is talented. No. Brilliant. Gifted. No sheet music sits before him, but he doesn't hesitate as he moves from one note to the next, pouring a lifetime of emotion into the notes. Rising and rising crescendos, and then devastating downfalls.

Lover's love and lives are ruined in his music.

I let me eyes slide closed. It rushes over me in such a wave, I can't fight it. I'm taken by the undercurrent, and tossed around to its will.

My insides quiver, more tears roll down my face, and every tiny bit of self-preservation I've managed to tape myself together with in the last two months fractures.

This is power. Sully's gift is also my demise.

The symphony suddenly comes to an end, and when I open my eyes, seven long moments later, Sully is facing me. His eyes don't meet mine, they stare at the floor somewhere along the bottom of the pew in the first row. His hands are clasped together in front of him, his shoulders slumped. He looks exhausted.

And it's no surprise, considering the life he just poured into his music.

"You should know that this isn't going to be easy," he suddenly says, and I internally flinch at his rough voice. "For either of us. It's going to open old wounds for you, bring everything back to the surface. It's going to exhaust me, finding him, holding on to someone I don't know."

I don't know what to say.

It's much I'm asking.

But I'm asking.

"I'll need something personal of his that I can hold," he says as he finally looks up, meeting my eyes. "It needs to be something that had some kind of meaning to him, something he touched or used frequently."

I nod. The item instantly comes to mind. "I can get that."

Sully nods, the look in his eyes growing darker and more distant by the moment. "It helps, too, if you tell me about him first. It can be a little difficult to find them at first, if they aren't waiting on the other side to talk to us. If I know about him, it makes it easier to recognize him."

I nod once more. Something swirls in my stomach: anticipation, nerves, the old excitement he used to unleash in me. The aching. The longing.

Sully stands, rising his hulking form to its full height. He's dressed for the day already, wearing jeans once more and a button up blue shirt. Same boots as yesterday. A denim jacket with white fuzzy lining.

He crosses the space, and sits on the first row pew. Resting a hand along the back of the bench, he looks in my direction, though his eyes land generally in my lap, unfocused.

"What was his name?" Sully asks quietly.

I swallow once, my throat already tightening. Excitement prickles along my skin, the hair on the back of my neck standing on end.

"Jack Caraway," I breathe, and I swear the temperature in the church drops ten degrees.

"How did the two of you meet?"

"At my father's funeral."