Gossamer Axe (16 page)

Devi’s door was double, triple-locked. Her lights were out, and she was hiding in her bedroom, heart pounding, tensed, waiting for her doorbell to ring, for knocks, for shouting.

Halloween night was never easy for Devi. There was too much casual interaction that bordered too frighteningly upon violence. Too many people wandered about, came to her door, demanded something from her. Reaching hands, masks, faces…

Snow was falling heavily outside, and that was some comfort, for people would be less likely to venture outdoors in such weather. Nevertheless, she stayed wrapped in her covers, head buried under her pillow, listening to the muffled ticking of the alarm clock on her nightstand.

Come be my little princess
, her father had said on a Halloween night years ago. Breathless and pink-cheeked from her dash home amid the falling shadows of evening, her paper sack bulging with candy and apples, she had entered the house in gown and gossamer wings, a tinfoil wand in her hand.
Come be daddy’s fairy princess
…

She shuddered, rolled herself tighter in the blanket. Here there were no faders, no LED read-outs that she could change with a turn of a knob, no patch cords to be jerked loose and rerouted. Just herself, and a dark room, and the memories.

The phone rang, the sound shrill and sudden. She flinched and cried out, then tried to ignore it, but it continued to ring—ten, fifteen times. Slowly, reluctantly, as if putting off armor, she unwound the sheets and blankets and picked up the handset.

“Devi,” came Melinda’s voice, “how the hell are you?” She was a little drunk. The music and laughter of a party swirled in the background.

“Hey, Melinda.” Devi tried to sound calm. Just another night. No one knew about the terror-filled evenings that she spent alone in her apartment. “What’s going on?”

“What’s going on? Why, just the best fucking party you’ve ever seen. What’cha doing tonight? Why don’t you head on over?”

“I…” Searching for an appropriate lie, finding nothing. “I’m busy…”

“That’s what Christa said. And you know what? She showed up anyway. And—Jesus fucking Christ—you should see her.” Laughter. “Lisa and I look like potatoes beside her. She went out and got a haircut and a bunch of new clothes. She’s all metaled up, and she looks so damned hot—”

Faintly, in the background, Devi heard Christa’s voice. “Melinda, please.”

“Aw, come on, Chris. Flaunt it.”

There was a scuffling with the receiver at the other end of the connection, and Christa came on. “Hello, Devi.”

Devi tried to keep her voice steady. “Hi.”

“Busy?”

“Uh… yeah…”
Come be my little princess
…

A pause. Metallica was playing in the background, loud. Devi had to strain to make out Christa’s soft voice. “Is something wrong?”

“I’m okay. Really. I’m… just busy…”

Christa did not push. “All right, then. Be well. I’ll see you on Monday.”

“Sure.”

With a good-night, Christa hung up. Devi stood by the nightstand, phone to her ear, listening to the dial tone. Outside, the snow swished, and the cars that passed in the street made hissing noises on the wet asphalt.

Christa. So sure, so calm. But beneath the gentler qualities that she wore like a light summer dress was a sense of power. Devi had felt it radiating from her like heat from a stove, had heard it seething in her music every rehearsal, had seen it dissolve reality into gray mist.

Power—and violence too—melded together, balanced as exactingly as the parameters of a complex synthesizer voice.

“
If you heed to make a call, please hang up and try again
. …” The recorded voice was metallic, tinny. Devi put the receiver into its cradle and turned back to her bed.

Come be daddy’s fairy princess…

Christa had strength. Christa had control. Christa had everything. Devi hid again, wondering when the doorbell would ring, when the shouting would begin, when the hands would reach out, grasping.

Chick with a guitar.

Snow was still falling the day after Samain, and it patterned Christa’s leather jacket with white flakes as she made her way along Evans Avenue. Guitar case in one hand, cloth-wrapped bundle in the other, she pushed through the weather as though it were a bramble thicket.

Across the street was Guitar Tech, the office building a hazy blue outline in the falling snow. It was early afternoon: Kevin would be teaching. She stood for a moment on the wet sidewalk, wondering which window might be his.

She had parted from him at the turning of one day into another, giving him a kiss for luck and blessing. He had been long without a woman, long without love, and she knew now that he hoped that she might be that woman and that love. Looking up at him as she had, reaching out and touching his stubbled cheek, she herself had wondered if that might be the case—for a little while. He had blinked, his eyes a little cloudy with beer, and he had hugged her. And she had let him.

With a small shake of her head, she hitched up the bundle for a better purchase and continued on her way, her boots squishing through puddles of melt.

Like parties and feasts, lovemaking had always been a part of Samain. But she would not have been able to explain to Kevin what they did and what they celebrated; and, for him, a love consummated in an evening and then left unpursued would have been more an occasion for pain and regret than for joy.

A touch of the cheek then, one final kiss, and they had gone their ways—he to his home in the mountains, she to the rites she kept for the holyday: incense and harp, and ancient words that offered welcome to ghosts long since reincarnated.

The guitar case scraped against the doorframe as she pushed into Best’s Guitar Laboratory with both hands full, and the bell above her head rang shrilly as though it embodied the cold day. She shivered: leather and denim was not an over-warm combination. The thick wool Kinsale would have been better.

But the room was warm and dry. Familiar too: she had known Roger for over—what? She thought quickly as she unwound the scarf from her neck. Six… no, seven years. It was important to remember, for since she did not age, she had to set limits to friendships. Another year, and Roger might start asking questions that she could not answer.

“Hang on,” he called from the back room. “Be right there.”

Another year? Another year and it would not matter. The gates were vanishing. Another year, and Judith would either be with her… or that would be the end of it. Another year, regardless, and she would let time have its way with her.

Roger came out to the counter, wiping his hands on a rag. He looked at her without recognition. “What can I do for you, ma’am?”

She lifted the bundle to the counter, shook the snow out of her hair, unzipped her jacket. “Is it a stranger I am, Roger?”

“Christa?” He stared, then laughed. “Goddam… and with a guitar. What are you doing now?”

“Playing in a rock band.”

A slow smile spread over his face. “I guess I was right, eh? Anything can happen.”

“I needed reminding, Roger. About change. It’s a good thing.”

“What can I do for you then, Christa? You need a harp built?”

“Indeed not. You were right about something else, too. It’s a guitar I want, Roger.”

Her own harp had made her realize the need last night. It was a crude but sweet instrument that she had carved of willow when she had first reached the harpers’ school, but two hundred mortal years were hard on perishable wood, and she rarely played it now. Nonetheless, it had been made carefully—as carefully as skilled hands could manage—and every line of the instrument was flavored with hope and the expectation of its future use.

The Strat, though, was a production-line instrument, put together not without care, but with an objectivity that could not but affect the music she produced with it. In the fury of a final contest with Orfide, she could not afford to be playing a disinterested guitar. She needed passion. She needed energy. She needed hope.

Roger was laughing again. “This is fantastic! I’ve still got that wood in back, Christa. And I meant what I said when I told you I had something in mind.” He stopped with his mouth open, shut it, grinned apologetically. “If it’s to your taste. It’ll be your guitar, after all. If you don’t like my ideas, you can tell me to take a flying one.”

“Oh, there are a few parts of the design that I need to specify,” she said. She bent, unsnapped the guitar case, took out the Strat. “For example: this is a wonderful guitar, but Mr. Fender designed it to fit a man’s hand. The back of the neck curves too sharply for my taste, and I think the radius of the fingerboard should be different.”

“Just tell me what you want, Christa.”

“There are a few things. But most of all I need your interest and your enthusiasm. The guitar must have the right kind of energy, the right… feeling.” Here it was again: she was trying to speak of spiritual needs in a world of materialists. Roger, though, was nodding with understanding, and she went on. “I can’t build this for myself. I need you to build it for me. But I need you to build it with the same love with which I made… this.”

She set down the Strat, opened the bundle, and took out her first harp. Roger cleared away the wet wrappings and set the instrument reverently on the carpeted counter. In spite of the years, the willow was still smooth and white, and the tuning pins were firm. “It looks like a sweet little harp, Christa.”

“The first one I made, Roger. It’s been a good friend to me, though I confess I blush now at the woodworking.”

He felt the forepillar, touched a string to listen to the sound. “You should have seen my first guitar. My dad was a luthier too, and he let me make all my mistakes on scraps.” He chuckled. “I made this thing that looked like a Strat. Sounded terrible—kind of like the Wild Dog setting on a Jim Burns guitar. Totally unusable. But I loved it. I painted it with white house-paint and stuck a little American flag on the upper horn.”

Christa rested her hand on the harp. “I was tempted to try some carving,” she said. “But then I took a good look at the instrument and decided that I did not want to torment it any further.”

Roger was lost in the harp. “Fascinating. The soundbox is just a solid block that’s been hollowed out.”

“At the time, it was the best way.”

“Damn…”

“Do you feel it though, Roger? What this harp meant to me? I was just beginning my studies, and I had… wonderful thoughts about the future.”

The day was bleak and snowy, but the willow shone like pale sunlight. She remembered a day when she was working on the harp, fitting the neck to the forepillar. Judith was near, smoothing a bronze pin, humming a slow song under her breath in time to the strokes of the file. Across the fields to the north of the school, the ground fell away suddenly into rocky cliffs, and the gray sea crashed against the stone. Beyond were the islands where the Christians had built their hermitage, and then open ocean to the horizon… or to the Summerland.

Twelve years of study lay between them and the rank of master harper, but they were confident, and they were lovers…

… and they might be lovers again.

Roger’s fingers were stained with varnish and dyes, rough with the wood and the tools that he used, but they caressed the little harp as though it were his only daughter. “I know what you mean, Christa. This meant a lot to you.”

“Can you build a guitar for me with that in mind? That it has to mean a lot? With thoughts of a wonderful future?”

Roger knew wood, and he knew instruments. He smiled softly. “I think I can, Christa. It won’t be the same. It just can’t. But I’ll do the best I can.”

Christa nodded. “There’s one other thing.” Her first harp. It had been with her at the school, in the Realm. It had wandered with her through France and across England. It had been her companion the one time she had returned to Ireland, only to find her homeland ravaged and wasted. “Can you…” She felt the tears welling up, touched the harp gently. “Can you take the wood from this harp and build it into the guitar?”

He looked up, surprised. “Why, Christa? You’re proud of this harp.”

“For that very reason, Roger. So the guitar will embody what I want, so it will be a part of everything that I am.”

“But—”

“It has to be that way. What I must do with this guitar—” She stopped, bit at her lip. “It just has to be.”

Roger pursed his lips, examined the wood thoughtfully. “There’s a lot of possibilities,” he said after a time. “If you want a through-the-body neck, I can build it up out of sections of the forepillar. The soundbox can go for stringers to either side. I can color the wood for variation —it would look sweet with brownheart and amaranth. And then there’s inlay work. I like to use a sustaining block under the bridge… I can melt down the tuning pins for that. You want a tremolo?”

“I do. A Kahler.”

“Okay. Then it’ll be more of a plate, but you get the idea. Purfling, ornament. I can use quite a bit of it, maybe all of it. You’re sure you want to do this?”

Mortal harps did not speak. But this crude harp of willow was no longer altogether mortal, for it had existed for too many years. With her hand on the soundbox, Christa sensed a faint, almost subliminal emotion in it.
I trust you
.

She wiped at her eyes. Her harp… she was going to break up her harp. Change was inevitable, but did it have to hurt so much?

I trust you
.

“I trust you too, Saille,” she murmured. To Roger she said, “I’m sure. It’s for the best.”

He was engrossed in the wood. “You say you made this harp, Christa?”

“I did, indeed.”

When Roger straightened, he looked puzzled. “Then I really don’t understand this at all. This wood: from what I can tell, it’s over two hundred years old. The harp too. There was a fellow in here once who played a fiddle with the Denver Symphony. He had a Stradivarius, and he let me look at it. It was only a little older than this.“

Christa felt her face color. “It’s the harp I made when I started school, Roger. I can’t lie to you—you’re going to build my guitar.”

He looked at the harp, then at her. “Who…” His fingers traced a faint crack in the soundboard. “Who are you, Christa?”

Kevin had asked her the same question the night before.
Who are you
? She had not been able to answer. It had been too dark. The Solstice was still weeks away.
Not tonight
, she had said.
It’s not the time. Not now
.

She lifted her eyes, met his. “I can’t tell you, Roger. You wouldn’t believe me if I did. Can you accept that?”

He had paled a little. “Okay. If you’re sure then.” He wiped at the sweat that had gathered on his forehead, composed himself, took a deep breath. “I don’t ask any more questions.”

She touched his hand. “Thank you.”