The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“Much has been said about H. P. Lovecraft’s regrettable prejudices,” notes Michael Wehunt. “I’m not the first to find it rewarding to invert that intolerance by structuring a story around a protagonist with whom Lovecraft would have never engaged — in this case, a black female who learns to be strong in the face of long odds. What would a character with the life Ada has endured do in a cosmic horror scenario, when the stars are right and there is a Door? This story, for me, became all the more Lovecraftian through the very growth of Ada, using HPL’s influence in brighter ways, even in the darkness. Naturally, ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ informed this story, but here the music was to play a different role.”

Wehunt spends his time in the lost city of Atlanta. His fiction has appeared in such publications as Cemetery Dance, Shadows & Tall Trees, Unlikely Story, and Aickman’s Heirs, among others.

I Do Not Count the Hours

—We’ve come far.

—Through cracks.

—You could hum the last thread with ours.

—We’ve looked for you.

Whispering.

Ada has these thoughts, or they have her, as the window latch closes somewhere to her right. She turns to look but can’t see. Coming back to herself in darkness, she feels a crawling dread until she realizes the breath spreading hot across her face is her own, and tugs the sheet off. It puddles on the floor, a grayed moth-eaten black thing that’s not hers.

The door to Luke’s office is open before her. There’s a prickle along her arms, but from what she doesn’t know. The sense of a camera, a watcher, a moment it isn’t time to have. Or — something. Gone now.

She’s had some bad moments. He has to come back: this is what she remembers murmuring through the house over and over. She can hardly touch the bow to her viola since he left. The weeping of the strings in all this empty space is just too much.

And now she’s Bluebeard’s wife holding the word divorce in her mouth, the bony shape of it there, its sour ashy taste, but she can’t spit it out.

She stands at the entry to hallowed ground: his studio-slash-sanctuary. Just an unused corner room now, two more windows the nights keep peering into. But she needs some sense of him with her. Already she’s breathed his smell out of the clothes in his closet. She reaches in and snaps the overhead light on. The room stops breathing and a long shadow shrinks into the far corner.

She steps into the office and she’s only Ada, and Luke wasn’t quite a Bluebeard until recently. There’s a lot left in his office, considering he moved out the day after the Breakup, coming to the house while Ada was sobbing at her friend Regan’s place. Four weeks and two days ago.

Empty boxes wait for him just like she does. Two tripods, a dolly, some of his lights are still here. His desk. Only the one bookshelf, half filled with tumbled-over film school textbooks. He was never a big reader until this last, awful year, when his love dried up and he started eating and sleeping in here, collecting piles of books and stacks of pages from his printer. She’d catch glimpses of a huge map with pushpins clustered where the Smoky Mountains rub against the Blue Ridge, papers taped up like detective novel wallpaper. But she never came inside until now.

Gram taught her well, not to go places.

And here, this photo facedown on his desk, is exactly the reason she’s still not ready. His whole inner life, separate from their coupledom, was held in this room, and he’s chosen that inner life and left the picture of them behind. She has to gather the courage to turn the frame over. Four summers ago in Raleigh, they’re smiling into that piece of future they still have. Luke’s reddish straw hair, hazel eyes, his nose orbited by freckles, and Ada’s wide dark gaze and a face that always looks so open and sure in photos. Her forever-short hair, her tomboy angles. Their differences are what stand out, because they stood out for him. He loved them, those differences, but she used to hate it when she caught him comparing their skins when they were pressed together in bed. He couldn’t get over his fascination of being with a black girl, but she’d welcome it now, to feel him climb onto her.

Stop using the past tense with him, Ada. She positions the picture frame where it would face him if he were sitting in his chair, then starts opening the desk drawers. In the second she finds an empty journal and a sheaf of his photographs. He never let himself get serious with stills. Here’s the half-skeleton of a burned house they saw once, out near the beginning of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Luke told her once that some religious group had lived there, probably died there. Ada’s sure this is the same house, remembers the day they found it in the woods. That was a fairytale day, but he didn’t have a camera with him. She’s sure of it. On the back of the photo, in Luke’s scrawl: Still in area? Who owns this land?

Another picture slowly reveals a shadow of something hanging in the charred doorway of the same ruined house. STILL THERE is printed neatly on the back. The next is completely black, but there’s the feeling that it’s not finished, it hasn’t escaped the light all the way. She flips it over and there’s a black circle filled in with Sharpie ink. But most of the photos feature trees, the anonymous ground, no art in them, as if he went into the woods and turned in a slow circle. There’s no writing on these. In the last two a ring of narrow sticks marks the ground in a clearing.

She rifles through the rest of the drawers, all empty except the last, which is full, inexplicably, of soil. She rakes her fingers through it and stirs up several short twigs, picks one up only to realize it’s a dead caterpillar. She jerks her hand away and rubs it on her jeans. There’s something else buried there, half-risen, red plastic with a cap on one end and a keyring hole in the other. A USB drive, she thinks, brushes it off, reads the word EMMA scratched into it, penknife etchings.

Emma. He’s never said anything of a female subject, or a female friend, but this room feels full of the things he never said. The thought of another woman’s been a ghost in Ada’s mind for too long now, a ghost she’s nearly wished would haunt her. All the bitter energy needs a conduit.

She pulls the cap offand stares into the slit of the device’s mouth. Bluebeard’s wife again. Her laptop’s in the bedroom, but she brings it back into Luke’s studio, boots it and tries not to look at the photo of them while she waits. She inserts the drive and clicks its icon when it appears on her desktop.

There’s nothing on it except four small mp4 video files in a folder named found. They’re all dated 16 September, four days before the Breakup. She mouses over the first, consecrate, braces herself for a bedroom in low light, writhing movement and Luke cupping breasts much fuller than her own, hungry mouths opening onto each other. A breath, a deeper breath, who are you, Emma? She opens it.

Four figures stand in the middle distance, shin-deep in a creek whose waters in the hazy lens glare run the reddish brown of Georgia clay. They hold hands and stare into the soft current, grouped like a closing parenthesis, water stains creeping up their pants. There’s no sound and a vague tracing of video static drifts over the figures. The details of them are hard to grasp. One is taller, stooped, she thinks. Two have short hair, though as she leans closer, dragging the play bar back twice, Ada becomes convinced one of these is something like a mannequin held upright by the others. A thing limp in its clothes, faceless and without clear hands. The clip’s all one steady shot, as though from a tripod, a minute and thirty-eight seconds until she notices the blot of shadow coming out of the woods on the other side of the water. It stains a corner of the screen as it spreads toward the creek bank.

Now the shot cuts to black, but still with the grainy digital snow. She lets it play out to be sure, sitting crosslegged on Luke’s favorite rug. After nearly three minutes, the audio snaps on, a scrape and the low moan of a cello, a forlorn thing that chills after all the silence. The dark fades bluer and a half-moon suddenly appears, sliding around on the screen. She hears the bow wring one long final note on the cello string that bends in the middle and stops. A click, a lingering hum, then the QuickTime control panel reappears.

She doesn’t pause before clicking on the second file, titled bowl. Instant movement, the shot traveling through woods in middle-night dark, a flashlight in its dying throes drifting over a carpet of dead leaves. Tree silhouettes, hints of deeper forest. No sound again and none of the snow from the first clip.

The cone of light diffuses, the ground dropping away into a pit of some kind, something dug out of the earth. The view tips forward and Ada can see a long white hump down in the hole, the sprawl of a body, nude or clothed in white. The shot blurs for a moment, whips around to scan the woods behind, silent black cut with wedges of indigo. The camera returns to pan across the pit, and the white body is gone. A flutter, flicker, the flashlight wavers and gives up to the dark.

Again she waits the clip out. It cuts back to life — or the light’s batteries are replaced — past the three-minute mark, Ada gasping as she sees two feet in the frame, inches away. The camera is in the pit now, the electric light a degree stronger. White fabric ends at dark knobs of ankles, two dirty feet. For a rattled instant she thinks they are her own feet. Paler than usual in the yellowing light, the shape of one big toe calling to her. Chipped pearl nail polish. But as she peers closer, another figure crawls out of the background, over the body and toward the camera in one lurch. Flat coin eyes gleam and the light spins away, the video ends.

She shoves the laptop across the rug, leans over and snaps it shut. Did Luke shoot these? Are they only found footage, as the folder name might suggest? He loves that stuff. Please, the latter, but there’s nothing useful in the file information. She’s got the beginnings of a headache, but even after this last horrible video, even after those feet, she has a stubborn, vivid urge to lie down in that hole and pick out the stars caught between branches. The oaks would drop leaves curling in on themselves in death, and she’d watch them spiral briefly toward her. It wouldn’t be a grave. Her thoughts are not that lost. It only seems like it might be a closeness she could feel to him.

She won’t cry, doesn’t know if she can. She has an interview in seven hours, a steady job she needs on top of the unsteady session work, unless she sells the house. But this place is her only lifeline now, and she searches for angry thoughts to keep her here: have the locks changed tomorrow, move her music stuff in here. Get the exorcism underway. She knows better. The third video’s filename is bed, it sinks in and tugs at her but she has no space for any more. Not the aching panic that would bring, surely, seeing whose bed and what was done on it.

At the window she stares out at the masked trees, outriders of the greater woods that stretch away toward the mountains. Her mountains. She imagines again some part of her approaching the sunken hole, wherever it is. Imagines Luke appearing above her, his face hidden behind the camera. She’s learned to look around it.

Ada’s heard the word codependent, she knows what it means, started reading a book about it. It’s under the bed now, the bookmark in chapter two mocking her like a tongue. Gram would tell her she’s being a foolish child, didn’t she raise her better? But Gram and her impossible love have been gone a long time.

The trouble is, Ada’s never been alone. From the moment Ada’s parents died when she was three, there was always Gram. There was never any rest from her.

And there was always Luke, after. She’d only taken her first hesitant steps into the world when she met him in a produce aisle. He showed her the world wasn’t out to get her. He showed her how, in fact, the world seemed hardly to care. She learned she could be the only one in a room, or by herself in a car, and still be held by the one who loves her. It still surprises her, sometimes, that there are so many little things like these, things wider and deeper than she could understand for a long time, if she even understands them now.

The thought of figuring out how to do this makes her lightheaded. She leans her forehead against the window, sighs an oblong fog onto the glass. The word LEAVE blooms in it, in reverse, and she’d recognize Luke’s handwriting anywhere. She breathes all around the word but there’s nothing more. One final exhale, then she smears the E and the A into a circle and smiles at LOVE.

“Here’s what you do,” Regan tells Ada over the noise of the bar, “be an alcoholic until you get this job or you puke the last of your ex up, whichever comes second.”

Ada shakes her head. She’s never had the stomach for alcohol. “Dangerous when I’m a five-three lightweight,” she says.

Regan throws back the last of her second bourbon. She does everything this way, with quick ease. Ada’s known her for so long, even though it’s only been three years. It’s what your first friend feels like. Regan’s taller, full of the real world, with hair she can actually style and real cleavage, the jackpot of a white girl’s proportions — a long list of needless, absurd comparisons Ada still measures herself against. And now Regan’s staring her down. “Have you talked to him?”

Ada hasn’t, and she’s trying not to talk about him, though she’s worried sick. Four weeks and three days. She’s tried to put everything but her own elusive music out of her mind, but all she’s done is listen for that strange cello note in everything, the idling engine of her car, the refrigerator’s hum. It reminds her of what music directors have said about her own playing — too intense for us, Mrs. Blount, we’re sorry. The interview at Haywood — where she hopes to step foot inside a college for the first time, if only as an admissions clerk — went well, she’s letting herself think. Luke’s deleted his Facebook and Twitter accounts. She wants to respect his space, hasn’t broken down and left him a voicemail in days, and the easiest way to keep that going is to stay away from his things, his office. The rest of those videos.

“No,” she says. “Can we just — what is it?”

Regan never bites her lip like this unless it’s a new guy or a secret. “Nothing. You’ve only had the one drink.”

“I don’t want it, really. Six years, Regan. I met him when I was twenty. I’d never met anybody.” She’s doing it, taking her finger out of the dam, watching the cracks spider. “What do you do with six years?”

“You lived them. That’s what they were for. They got you closer.” Regan laces her fingers through Ada’s and squeezes too hard. “Now you file them away on the L shelf and start thinking about yourself. For yourself. The A shelf, just Ada, and screw the rest of the alphabet.”

“I just—” Ada wonders if the dam will break now and what sad clichés will spill out “—I don’t want to be some uneducated musician who has to file papers because violist isn’t a real job. Most people don’t think it’s a real instrument, even.” She breathes, she says, “But I don’t want any next phase, either. I want last year, and the year before that. There’s never been anybody but him. I want him to call. I want him to want a baby. I wish I smoked.”

“Well, honey,” Regan says, “you live in Asheville. You can busk on the street or you can move to a city with at least four skyscrapers, where they have people who listen to dead-white-guy music. Playing on kids’ records every few months is cool, the ASO’s nice to shoot for, but I don’t see this stuff taking you to great heights.”

Regan can’t feel the smallness of Ada’s world. The thought of leaving her home, the air and the mountains, is terrifying, unthinkable. And her marriage is at least half that idea of home.

She starts to explain, even thinks she’ll bring up finding herself under a bed sheet, losing pieces of time, but something drifts close behind her. Ada looks up to see Ms. Hursh, her neighbor from across the street, grinning down at her. “Ms. Hursh?” Ada says. She’s a nice enough lady, mid-fifties, but they’ve shared only waves and maybe a hundred words in Ada’s three years on Pinewood Trail. She seems even less a bar type than Ada does. But the woman just stands and grins for several long seconds — Ada has time to glance at Regan, whose face scrunches up, then back — before she winks and shuffles away.

“Okay, that was weird,” Regan says, but she’s distracted, biting her lip again.

“Never mind that,” Ada says, “spill it, what’s the big secret?”

“It’s nothing. Cheryl saw him the other day, that’s all.”

“Luke? She saw Luke.” And to skip right to it: “Who was he with?”

“Some girl, I don’t know. Cheryl only said she was tall, almost freakish tall. And white.” She catches the waiter’s attention, points down at her glass. “Look, Ada, don’t do the ‘other woman’ hang-up. Think of how long he’s been gone. Without so much as a phone call. Think of what he did that last night.”

“He’d never done that before, not all the way like that. I don’t even know why he left, Regan. Can you see that? I think he got obsessed with some cult or something. I don’t care how long it’s been. I’m worried about him.”

Regan sighs and looks away. It’s clear she doesn’t share Ada’s concern. “Okay. But don’t open that door. Easier said than done, right? But come New Year’s, your birthday, tops, you’ll start to understand this’ll make it easier, that he could be so quick with someone else. I don’t want to see you be the woman who defines herself by her man. I can’t imagine growing up like you did, hidden from the world until you’re twenty, for God’s sake. I’d be up to my neck in therapists. But you have to find your own strength sometime.” Regan snatches up her bourbon the second the shaggy-haired kid sets it down. “Lecture over. Let’s watch movies. Stay over at my place, eat those dollar pizzas I keep buying.”

The constant drone of the bar has swelled to a roar. At least she knows Luke’s alive, out there in the near world. But Ada imagines her computer screen as though it’s open on the table in front of her. The file labeled bed. She sees her finger tapping a single time, she sees a woman rising up from cream silk sheets, a long elegant back arched above the grinding hips, Luke’s reaching hands, and when she tries to turn her mind from it she sees a different woman’s feet sprawled on turned earth in a hole.

“I—” For a moment that single syllable is all she can find. Coming here, it was a mistake.

“Ada, I’m sorry. Let’s get you home.”

“I can’t. No, I mean, I can drive myself. I’ll call you. I’m leaving.”

That sound of I — it’s all she is, now — follows her out into the October cold. If Regan doesn’t know, if Luke won’t know, no one can. She wasn’t a person until she met Luke. She had only ever been a granddaughter until she met Luke.

The mountains are turning to russet and fire out there in the dark. She looks above their silhouettes, to the sky, she bites her tongue against tears wanting to brim. The sun, long slipped behind the mountains, the clouds and their shapes, the moon vague as a nickel dropped in water. All of it wavering.

She thinks of the sundial that stood behind Gram’s house. There’s no such thing as time when the moon’s awake and we’re all in shadow. She doesn’t have to count the hours. From the far edge of the parking lot a black shape watches her. When it stands up she can tell it’s not Luke. Her car chirps at her when she presses the key.

—We’ve looked for you.

—You’ll happen quickly, now.

Whispering. Ada hears the hall window closing again, the same slide and click as the other night, but when she looks nothing’s there. Just the black sheet still pooled on the floor by Luke’s office. The thumb drive’s on his rug. If she’s going to turn away it has to be now, but she scoops it up and goes into the living room, stabs the drive into the laptop’s USB port. EMMA, so loud a name, so lightly etched in the plastic. The rush of blood in her head’s like the bar noise she left behind.

She almost clicks on the last file, untitled-1. Its anonymity feels powerfully safe to her. It could be anything, a beach at sunset, something less haunted by sex or darkness. But it won’t be, and even so, she knows she’d watch it with half her mind on the other.

So she taps bed. More soundless night, of course, eleven minutes on the timer. It’s an incomplete dark, gauzy. As if lost light is nearby. The dark moves — it turns, as if to look elsewhere, and the light grows and concentrates on the left side of the frame. Ada clicks maximize and the video window jumps to fill the screen. Nothing happens for more than a minute, only that far light hanging in the black, and the dark shifts again, slow, sliding. It slithers down and off the camera like a solid thing, and she realizes it’s a covering. A black sheet, maybe. The light is a small shaded lamp to the left of a bed. A woman is sleeping on the bed. It’s not the faceless Emma she’s feared. Ada recognizes the lamp at once, because she bought it at a flea market years ago, and only moved it into the bedroom after Luke left. For a long moment she only looks at the lamp. She won’t look at the woman on the bed, the woman’s shortcropped black hair, the skin a lighter brown than Gram’s favorite quilt pulled up to her shoulder. She won’t let herself think of the camera, of who is holding it and watching her sleep.

The shot creeps across to the bed, the mattress she and Luke kept planning to replace, toward sleeping Ada, and looks down at her. Ada, too, watches herself. Eight minutes leak away, the camera just there, staring, and the lack of sound is almost the worst part, until the shot dips and the screen goes blank. The picture clicks back right away but she knows that time has passed, doesn’t want to think about what might have happened during it. Because something’s changed, more than just the steeper angle, the deeper orange of the light.

A shape moves in the back of the room, in the right corner beyond the bed. A face peers through the window, right at her, at both of her, somehow. It’s too pale to be Ada’s face, but it is, her wide eyes and her wider mouth stretching into a grin. And — it’s Luke’s face, too, his dusting of freckles on her dull cheekbones, his narrower green-flecked eyes. A somehow beautiful amalgam, or a cruel imagining of the child it’s never been time to have.

She half-sobs, lowers her hand to the computer. It gets halfway there before reaching for her face instead, checking for a secret grin there, as if to convince herself it’s an absurd mirror she’s seeing inside the film. But the face in the window just keeps grinning with Ada’s mouth. The camera slides back and away from the bed. She sees the insubstantial shape of a white arm to the right. It lifts the dark up and slips it back over the camera.

And in the final seconds, it retreats farther. The same arm — it could be Luke’s, she’s not sure — reaches outside the dark to grasp the closet door and pull it shut, enclosing itself and extinguishing that sad rumor of lamplight.

The instant the video ends she closes the laptop, shoves the thumb drive in her purse and leaves. She makes it to the bottom of the driveway, the Volvo’s rear wheels in the street, before she stops.

Leave, Ada. Call the police. Call Regan. Make these calls now. She has the video but she knows everyone will think it was Luke. His camera, his storage device, his key to the house. A videographer who dabbles in the experimental genre isn’t a stretch to make a creepy movie of his estranged wife. Yes, it has to be Luke. Relief balloons inside her.

Angry confusion flushes much of the fear away as she looks up the sloping driveway at the little brick house, but what remains in the dregs of adrenalin is more a desperate sadness. A shameful ebbing, that she was here, is here, in all of here’s meanings.

She digs her phone out of her bag and calls him. It goes to voicemail, as always, a crackle of static over his warm voice. “I need to know you’re okay,” she says, and hangs up before those words can get their momentum going. In the rearview mirror she sees a group of silhouettes scuttle over the roof of Ms. Hursh’s house and vanish. “They aren’t even there,” she whispers. Ms. Hursh is, though, an irrefutable lump of shadow standing across the street next to her fading wisteria.

But what makes Ada go back is the viola. It’s her third arm, all she has of her mother, yes, but even so she can’t articulate how it pulls at her just now. She stands at the front door for several minutes, listening to the silence, the fall hush of insects dying out in the woods, watching Ms. Hursh watch her. Inside she wanders to the bedroom, deep breaths in front of the closet. Her hand reaches out to the doorknob, then falls away.

She sits down on the bed, expectant and somehow bashful. Once the viola’s out of its case and tucked beneath her chin, she plays. For her husband or for something else, she doesn’t know. She glides the bow with the old graceful tremble, lento. She plucks, pizzicato. The secret magic comes back to her. The feeling of her skin against the glossed wood feels true as ever, and the Reger suite pours out like something too long corked into a bottle. It was the first thing she ever played for an audience, two years ago. Fourth viola, the least important, feeling sweat trickle down her sides. She wasn’t invited back. The memory feels far away.

The Reger loses its form and withers into a sustained note, her concentration holding it in place like a vise. Her precise wrist sways. She plays and sometime later she wakes, muddy light and rain whispering against the house. A plate of dry toast and she starts again, Bach, Berlioz, Bartók, Mansurian. She plays until the works for viola begin to dwindle away, which is always too soon, then wades into the vast pool of music for violin, that movie star of strings. Everything she plays, every movement and measure, threads into that single note, she wanders through variations deep inside it. Soon she abandons all the music she’s learned. She opens the first video, clicks past the creek to that moonlit cello note, repeats it and repeats it. Plays on top of it, thinking of her bow as an insect leg, each of its hairs brushing the strings with its own added vibrato.

It’s past noon when her wrist seizes on her, a carpal flare that clatters the bow across the floor, and only now does she return completely, blinking out the window at the gray sky that hangs over the day.

She stares at her computer and asks herself if she wants to see what untitled-1 wants to show her. Who is this tall girl, this Emma? It seems clear, by now, that she’s being drawn toward something, drawn surely as her bow, and it’s time to stop this until she learns what Luke’s doing, and why. Or else it’s time to follow it to him, blindly. Or else it’s time to fend for herself. She doesn’t know how to choose.

But when she can’t find the thumb drive, frantic and close to tears, throwing cushions and magazines to the floor, the decision seems made. She relaxes, sighs, like a drain unclogged. It’s in her purse. The relief is so deep it’s exhausting. She gives up to real sleep, falls into a sort of cavern of it.

Night’s thickening full around the house when Ada wakes beneath the black bed sheet. There’s a missed call from Haywood College and it takes her a moment to remember the job interview. Luke’s voicemail is full. She turns on the porch light and movement projects through the quartered half-moon window in the front door. The quality of light shifts and speckles on the inside wall. She needs Luke’s height, even on tiptoes she can’t see outside, and the angle of the bay window shows her just the empty porch, the still swing.

She opens the door and sees the porch light crawling with moths. They assemble and reassemble themselves, wings pulsing in concert like a gray heart. They must have been worshiping the light before it even came on. She thinks of the drawer full of dirt in Luke’s office. The dead worms or larvae there. She thinks of the lamp beside her bed, checks the street for Ms. Hursh or the shapes on her roof. There’s nothing.

The last video is the only thing left in the house that seems to have any surety to it. Her wrist still aches, and she’s never been a singer. Gram’s old forbiddances of her voice still won’t let her go. But she senses that for the moment, some moment, at least, silence is necessary. Two laps around the living room. She inserts the thumb drive. A glass of water. She opens the found folder, sees yesterday in the Date Modified column, clicks on untitled-2, sure that it was a 1 there before.

Dark, again. But now there’s sound, two distant violins playing the same coiled notes a quartertone apart. Close, circling the tone the cello played in the first film. Soon there’s light, too, a woman’s naked back sliding into the frame, and Ada sucks in her breath. A beautiful back, seen from the neck down, the color of rich cream with blond hanks of hair pulled forward over the shoulders. Thin pine trees bunch and crowd the background, insects trailing comet tails through the air in the slow shutter speed. The picture warps, static crumbles vertically. The back flexes, the shoulder blades stretch out like the roots of wings, and the woman bends forward, down out of the shot. A hole looms in the ground, the heads of two figures protruding, hooded or cloaked.

“Things you see now,” a voice whispers, and Ada jerks her head around, scanning the room. Outside the half-moon in the door, moths crawl on the glass.

She turns back to the screen and the woman has straightened again, her face still too far above to see, and is turning, full breasts swinging, there’s a symbol drawn, tattooed on the swell of the nearer breast. A gorgeous, ungodly squeal fades in from the speakers, a stretched squelch. Ada’s eyes swim and her mouth waters, like coins held under her tongue. She grunts at the sudden heat she feels in her cheeks and below, where her legs meet.

“Things you hear now. The old place, where you told about Gram,” the voice says, sexless, inflectionless. The film bends in again at the right edge, another image intruding into the frame, the edge of a worn building.

“Go and see us now. Bring your instrument.”

A bluer shade of blackness returns, but the sound stays in a swishing of leaves. Once more the dark is brief, the sky lights up like a photo negative, the sky has the texture of hair. The camera pans left and right and picks out suggestions of people passing through the trees. The view straightens and someone is standing in its path. Ada knows at once it’s the same woman, Emma, as if an earlier sequence has been spliced onto the first. Then the picture blurs and stutters and snaps off.

She’s reaching for the keyboard when it cuts back in, teetering on the lip of the pit. Three figures crouch in its center, in the light of a moon brushing against the Earth. They’re draped with black sheets. A fourth lies sprawled and she sees, familiarly, it’s a dummy, smoothfaced, black hair scribbled on its head. Its body is stained white cloth.

That squelch goes on. The shot swivels up, for an instant showing the trees full of white faces, and the screen’s filled by another, shorter figure, standing above the hole, having just covered itself with its own dark sheet. Ada sees the afterimage of hands fallen, tugging, below the camera’s eye. The figure stiffens, staring out of its darkness, out of the screen, then steps quickly toward the camera, spreading its arms.

The tone is severed and the toolbar pops up over the blank video player. She taps the trackpad, sure it’s just frozen, this can’t be the end. The film starts over and she lets it play again. And again. She loses count. Each time she watches it the sky changes in that moment of antilight flash, showing her strange shapes filling it through the trees, almost familiar.

In the bedroom, after she’s wiped the slick of saliva from her chin, after the shaking has stopped, she crumples the black sheet and throws it at the closet door. She’s going mad, that’s all. Luke and Ada, both caught in his undertow, like calling to like. He knew Bluebeard’s wife would find his films and try to help him.

The old place. Finally, the easy clue she’s been waiting for. Three months after they met, they roughed it at a cabin outside of Candler, on the first rises of the Blue Ridge. She remembers the afternoon hike, finding the scorched ruins of a house in the woods, the one that so fascinated Luke. This early in her life after Gram, everything still fascinated her.

And it was the long sweet weekend when Luke took her virginity in his clumsy, quick way. When he told her he loved her. She’d never thought those words could sound like they did, like a chord, something to build a concerto around.

But it wasn’t the cabin or the burned house where he said it, it was after that, after they got back on the road home and saw an old severeroofed church in the distance. Something about its shape, or the way the forest stood guard behind it, made Luke turn down the snaking driveway. The door was not locked. Ada would have followed him into the deepest cave that day. Inside was an air of God abandoning His flock, but the place was clean and still used, no dust on the pews, which were well polished with hymnals in little cubbies along the back of each.

He needed a few minutes in one of those pews before he took her hands. I love you, Ada. She can’t even remember the name of that church. It was just the old place, when they were new people. But the thrill she has now, what makes her more Ada Blount than she’s been in months, is from his choice to mention not the I love you but what came after, when she opened up and told him what her life had been.

About how Gram had taken her in when she was three, orphaned in a car accident that had killed her parents instantly without even scratching Ada. How Gram raised a friendless and timid mouse, never let Ada out of sight. Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings to their tiny church, the grocery store on the fifteenth and the thirtieth, and the rest of it was the house, hiding from a white world in an unlocked cage. They slept side by side in the bedroom off the kitchen. The bathtub was her one privacy, the one place she would sing, always in her softest voice because Gram wouldn’t allow song. There was sin in Ada’s voice, somehow.

But the viola, Gram almost worshiped that thing, though she knew little of it. Practice after breakfast, before dinner and bed. Even the Bible lessons weren’t as strict — Ada’s mama, she was supposed to be in a famous symphony some day, but the Lord had told Gram that Ada would do even greater things. For all Ada knew, her mama had only left behind her proud instrument. Ada pretended she could smell her in the wood.

Didn’t you go to school? Luke asked, and looked away for a second, just the one second, when she told him no, she’d even learned to tell time with only a sundial. She’d learned to read by the scriptures, made her friends out of her father’s records, full of music written by long-buried men. The mountains locked the sky in with her. Gram, always right there, broad and tired and feeling stomachachy, the lines sinking into her face like a sped-up geology. That was her whole world, days strung together into a forever that could have ended sooner than it did. Ada’s curiosity was growing right along with her body. But one afternoon, she was seventeen and humming nonsense under her breath in the tub, she heard a soft thunder from the kitchen and there lay Gram on the floor, the oven door open in surprise.

Ada became less a granddaughter than a nurse. The cancer ate Gram’s bowels first before spreading its fingers into all her nooks and crannies. She refused chemo, refused hospice, had all she needed with her little Ada.

Gram lasted nearly three years. They called for a hard, dark love but Ada gave it. She sat between their twin beds and played, and Gram talked to Ada’s Grampa, who’d passed long before Ada was a dream of a thought. She wailed at that drunken Irish fool who’d killed her daughter and only spent a year in prison. She reached her hands up, her palms white as the pages of her Bible, and clutched at Ada, still trying to protect her.

Ada felt her kinship with the viola deepen in those years. She grew to understand the depth of its androgyny, in its delicate bridging of violin and cello. The notes it wrought were like pheromones.

And the pounds melted from Gram like winter. She died just five months before the day Ada told Luke about her, and it felt like minutes and a lifetime since the brash, vibrant world opened up to a girl of twenty who had only the faintest idea of what to do with it. She’d never been educated. Never known anyone her age. She stood in a doorway with no threshold.

What she didn’t tell Luke, though it pounded in her: She couldn’t even remember Gram’s funeral, or all the strange lonely quiet after. It hadn’t gone on long enough, only until she ran out of food and built up her nerve to go to the store. And there had been the answer, smiling, hazel-eyed by the tomatoes.

I love you. The second time he said it was sweeter than the first, more first than the first, somehow. And she loved him back more than he could ever know, because she had never known.

—We’ve looked for you.

Something stirs in the attic, boxes shifting, and her daze breaks apart. When does Luke need her to come? The voice in the film said now. It’s late already but the old place can’t be more than half an hour south, right inside the cusp of the Blue Ridge.

She picks up her viola. “Is he in trouble?” she asks the ceiling. The shuffling above her stops, waiting, is it breathing at her? Then one long nail of something drags across the inside of the closet door.

“Yes, why don’t you go rescue him?” a voice says from the closet, and laughs.

Ada recognizes the voice — her neighbor? “Ms. Hursh?” she says, stepping back until the bed presses into her legs.

“I’m only wearing her, dear. I’ve watched you. We’ve come far. And Luke saved you,” Ms. Hursh says, only it’s started to sound nothing like her. “He gave you a world outside of your grandmother.” It’s almost Regan’s voice now. “Like a birth,” now it’s Gram, it’s someone much, much older, “like a father.”

These are Ada’s own thoughts, thrown back at her. A challenge, a rite of passage. She takes the wadded sheet from the floor and holds it like a shield.

“I’ll show you how we look underneath,” that old voice says. There’s a wet stretching, a breaking-bone sort of sound from the closet, something growing, and the doorknob begins to turn. She snatches up the viola and runs outside, where the moths are boiling, parting for her like a sea of ash.

It’s remarkable, how she’s thinking about the end of her marriage from a distance now. Because she’s on her way to him, she supposes, but it seems more as though she’s just beginning to see Luke clearly, through a truer lens, one that’s her own. She can think of arguments they had, how they ran hotter than she told herself when she rewrote them the next day. And she’s playing music again, reaching deeper and deeper into her instrument. Her hands feel strong around the steering wheel. Headlights pick out the reds and yellows from the night, the trees leaning over the road, the mountains settling into the changing quilt.

Luke had been under a black cloud for days before the Breakup, and she’d had to beg him to get out of the house and just be with her. They sat in a booth in Locke’s Pub and Ada tore her napkin into strips. When there was nothing else to do with her hands, she mentioned the books Luke read in his studio, the time he spent on his computer, light bleeding onto his face at two, three most mornings. What was he doing when he hadn’t shown her any new work in months? Where did he go when he didn’t come home at night?

He got this look to him when she said something bad, it wasn’t quite often, but there it was now. “Nothing,” he muttered, the naked hanging bulb turning them both into suspects. A glass of something amber and oak-smelling sweated on the table in front of him. “Stay out of that stuff. It’s just research on this . . . group I hunted down.”

She heard the pause more than the words.

“I thought I was clever, finding them,” he said, turning his glass, a thin, circled scrape on the tabletop. “But they let me. They arranged it.”

“What kind of group?”

“Just please shut up,” he said, and glared across at her. He was almost shaking now. “I look for something. I find out it’s what I’ve been looking for all along, and it turns out I’m not . . . right for the part.” He swept the glass off the table, and all her hope seemed to follow it to the floor.

The only hard part is which section of 151 the church is set back from in the dark, but she finds it, easily as muscle memory. Or it finds her. There’s not a car in sight, but the high-peaked, planked building brims with presence. Every window bleeds light.

The stars tipped across the sky ignore her as she gets out of the car. The earth must cast a small shadow, being in the way of all their old light. The moon’s over halfway drawn, she imagines God getting a wrist cramp, like hers, and putting the pencil down on a cloud to massage His hand. She laughs at the image, is aware it’s her first real laugh in weeks. She pulls the air in. It still holds the sweetness of the morning’s rain.

A woman came over to clean up the broken glass. “What about us?” Ada asked Luke. Making herself look at him, making herself keep it together.

“Yeah, that’s the question, what about you?” he said, voice lifting toward a shout even with the waitress bending over right there. “The beloveds, people give their lives up for them, it takes years to find the pieces, line them up. They left the door cracked open, but they don’t want me.”

“The beloveds? Is this for a film you’re doing?” Ada asked, scared now by the anguish she heard, the first prickle of something bigger than she understood. “Money for a project?”

“A film, are you kidding? Since when have I ever been this—” He clenched his teeth, his fists. “You know, at first, yes, it’s how I got onto their trail, this long-form piece I wanted to do. It was that burned-out house we found, and the vibe in that church. It got me hunting, I traced them back to the nineties when they settled there. But it’s grown into . . . I’m not giving up. So I’m done with us.”

Luke stood, not looking at her, his face in shadow above the hanging lamp now. “Done with us?” she said. “Done with us?” She kept trying, she kept failing to get past that.

“Done with you, yeah. As in divorce.” He threw a $20 bill on the table, and she watched it drink the ring of water where his glass had been. She reached out and took his hand. He looked up at the exposed ceiling and growled something animal. Then she was on him, using her weight to pull him back into his seat, screaming, Don’t go, don’t go, you can’t go.

She stares at the old place as she remembers this last part, the part where he shoved her against the table, drew his arm back like he’d done twice before in their six years, only this time he hit her in the face. Red-black stars bloomed between her eyes. And she remembers coming to, the same waitress holding a bag of ice, she remembers having to breathe through her mouth from the blood, but her memory can’t quite finish. It snaps shut on her, even as the sky above is all so clear now.

The bed sheet stays in the car, and the past, too, she tries to hope. Just her viola and a new Ada, crunching gravel under her slippers, the two-thirds moon hanging above her as she walks up the short steps and pulls on the windowed vestibule door. The sound that spills out like it’s been held in cupped hands, a secret from the world, is such an unexpected thing, she nearly lets go of the door handle. She smiles. Instruments — strings warming up, muted beyond the set of heavy wooden doors inside.

She passes through the small vestibule and pushes into the wide square room of the church beyond. Fifteen or so people sit scattered in the pews, facing the pulpit. Ada stares where they are staring: Two women and a man sit in small wooden chairs, dressed in white. A fourth chair waits off to the right. She pictures them standing in a creek. The first of the women is strikingly tall, even sitting down, even with the cello clasped between her thighs. The woman’s yellow hair hangs over her chest in two thick French braids. She smiles at Ada. A wash of dizziness, this has to be Emma, she pictures her with Luke, imagines her squeezing Luke between those thighs.

At last she can look away, ignoring the red-haired woman beside Emma, the bearded man with hair shorter than her own, almost shaved, each with a violin tipped under the chin. The voice of the empty chair does not even reach her. She’s looking for Luke, her attention skimming across the audience for him.

He’s not here. She knows he’s here.

But the trio has stopped, is ready, the silence swelling to a huge thing, and each head facing them turns on its neck to regard Ada. Ms. Hursh smiles at her from near the front, looking almost exactly like Ms. Hursh. Ada slips into the back row and sits, her forearms covering the viola in her lap, her gaze still darting and searching.

Then the cellist straightens her graceful long back and dips the bow across the strings, sweeps it back, a long mourning rind peels into the room. Ada thinks of the first time she sat here, she thinks of Gram at the end, reaching for her, clutching at her like she always, always did. Such a warmth, a blanket of sound, Ada’s lost in its folds. The violins slide in and she recognizes an arrangement of Barber’s Adagio, such a strange choice for the quality of darkness coming into the tone now, that’s been there all along, she realizes. There’s dirt in these creases.

The man directly in front of her is swaying his head from side to side. It’s a comforting rhythm, an easy metronome, as though this really is church. She lets the motion anchor her, fixating on the weathered skin on the back of his neck. Something peeks out of the man’s shirt collar. Small and dark. It wanders out, finally, and she sees it’s a moth. It wanders up the neck toward the ear. Another emerges from the man’s shirt, and another. Is there a light inside the man’s clothes, she wonders, and has to bite her tongue to hold her in the pew. The music and where Luke is, that empty chair and what it means, these things are making her want to get up and do, be, though she doesn’t know what or where.

A white-yellow cloud catches her eye, drifting into the right of her vision, leaning forward halfway down the pew. Ada turns her head. A plump old woman is smiling at her, showing her teeth. She looks like a white Gram, her hair thin as ground fog, insubstantial. Ada sees moths crawling on her scalp.

She shuts the woman out, those Gram eyes. The music’s crawling, too, Ada can’t imagine Barber holding so much shadow inside himself. Somehow this trio resonates like a small orchestra, the sound like it’s kneeling, in mud and storm and blood, suddenly they abandon the Barber and cut into the middle of Ligeti’s first string quartet, the manic depressive Métamorphoses nocturnes. Here is a darkness without its cloak.

But this is all a disappointment. Ada has no patience for it, beautiful and almost unprecedented though it is. She wants it to evolve, down into that one unwound, fibrous note she’s discovered. If she hears it, she’ll know. She’ll know this is right, all of it, and she’ll stay. But if the endless tone is there, the trio cannot find it. Ada doesn’t even hear an awareness of it.

The listeners turn and look back at her. The old woman, mouth smiling too wide, rises from the pew and steps toward the aisle, but Ada’s already stumbling into the vestibule and the night outside. Quiet as December, the trees crowding in a semicircle around the church, and the mountains a towering faith out beyond the closeness of the forest.

Ada looks up to the vestibule, sees the old woman staring down at her from the door, like some creature requiring permission to leave. The woman presses a blackened palm against the glass of the door. More than anything Ada wants a needle for this compass, she assumes it’s Luke — how couldn’t it be? — but what comes will have to come from this center in which she’s standing.

She feels the answer pulling at her from the woods. Halfway along the tree line she sees an open notch of deeper shadow. He’s watching her from behind the low-hanging branch of a red maple. She goes to him, her true north. He fades back into the trees and she stops, waits. The opening looks natural, as if the forest gave itself an entrance. A sundial stands to the right, long-weathered marble, in a place where it could rarely feel the sun and its purpose. She drags her fingers around every corner, across the carved letters.

“Horas non numero nisi serenas,” she reads, remembers. And in a voice that sounds cracked to her, like Gram’s voice, “I do not count the hours when they are dark.” As a girl Ada checked the sundial every morning in the back yard, where the dawn first peeked over the Smoky Mountains at her little world. The slow swing of the blade of shadow, the way it changed its shape to a fan, the way it fell into everything else when night came. Sometimes Gram would whisper those words and Ada would think to herself that time had gone someplace where it could never find its way back to her. She’d be stuck there, forever guarded.

Looking at the inscription now, she senses that Gram might have had the translation a touch wrong, but the sentiment feels true as ever. Has this sundial always been here, or is it another sign given by Luke? She turns back to the church, the windows now filled with watchers. Two shapes crouch on the roof peak, steeples regarding her. Back to the inscrutable trees and their velvet dark, she can’t step anywhere but inside charge.

A path opens before her. There’s the shush of water somewhere close, and before long she begins to hear movement in the trees on either side of her, the shuffle and crack of leaves.

“We’ve looked for you,” someone says from her right, and overlapping from the left is another voice, a lower register, “Many have come far for you.”

Staggering, words stepping on words all around her:

“We settled here for you—”

“The light of stairs—”

“Between stars—”

“Through cracks—”

“Planted our roots for you—”

“You’re glad you’ve found us—”

Ada walks faster, calling Luke’s name and getting the same nothing back she’s gotten for so long now. But the voices withdraw, or were never there.

A clearing spreads out in the near distance, one she saw lit with flashes not two hours ago on her computer screen. No figure stands in wait and now even the light of the incomplete moon is hidden from her. The obscured mountains give everything an extra weight. And the trees open around her, uncurtaining the hole in the ground, a low and devastating sweep of strings comes from it, two violins again, one cello again. It’s nothing and everything like music. It’s the most dreadful, pristine thing she’s ever heard. The earth falls asleep in its wake, an absence of sound.

She steps forward, one of her shoes gone missing somehow, and peers over the lip of the pit, ten, a dozen feet down. The mouth of it stretches twice as long across. Three figures sit inside, draped in ragged black sheets, placing their instruments aside. The ground is shifting around them, until she realizes the carpet of leaves is alive with moths. They’ve eaten holes in the sheets. Ada looks for the mannequin, trying to complete the picture, but doesn’t see it.

“And she comes,” one of them says, the tallest, and all three chuckle. It’s a woman’s voice, but also the sexless whisper from the film. There’s the lightest modulation. “We’ve looked for you.”

“Where’s my husband?” Ada says, feeling the air pull at the hairs on her arms, smelling its sharp tang of rain on hot asphalt.

The first draped figure — it’s Emma, she thinks, even taller now, and how did she make it through the woods ahead of her? — cocks its head, says, “Ada, your marriage cannot concern us, but I understand. I remember the sentiment. He is close, so don’t fear. He’s arranged for you to be with us, as bitter as his work has become. But he’s been kept safe, as a gift.”

“What do you want?” Ada asks, but she finds there are not many questions. None burns in her with a particular heat. She watches the moths rise in brief, spiraling clouds and settle again on the leaves around these — cultists, she supposes that’s the word — and catches herself squeezing the neck of her viola, wanting, almost, to play it. “Is your name Emma?”

“It is a name. Emma. And yet we have no name. This we’ve dug is a bowl, you can see,” she says, that flat voice holding the edges of a vibration. The head tilted toward the left shoulder. “This land is a bowl, rimmed by its mountains, and they are old mountains. We are a bowl. So are you, Ada, a bell that’s waited long to be struck. It’s that tone you will wrap with ours. Bowls are for filling. You’ve known this, but now you can hear it.”

“I don’t know any of this. Or any of you. I only saw your name written on something.”

“Bowls,” the one to her left says, in a deeper but more feminine range, “it’s a matter of greater acoustics.”

“Resonance,” the third whispers.

Ada breathes out. “A door.”

“Yes,” Emma says, “but not in a way that will open your Earth.” She sighs, and there’s a thread of static in it. “It’s a pretty thought, isn’t it, our beloveds dreaming long under these perfect mountains, rising up from the roots of them. But no, they’re coming from older doors, through cracks in spectrums you can’t imagine. Their light swallows itself, and us into their embrace. The light we’re all seeking, even the insects are drawn to it.” Her hands creep out from under the sheet and brush across the moths. Dust coats fingers that have too many knuckles. “The three of us were found, like you have been.”

“Was that you playing in the church?”

“By some measures, yes. By others, they are our personal acolytes, our skins. A wardrobe for when we want to look, shall we say, nice. You’ll have your own very soon. But what you heard them play is very little to do with us. We are mostly silence, as you heard in the footage we made for you. We, and only we, here, have found the right note. The rest is only artifice. No name wears us, but there is a symbol, like a rune, but it’s a notation more arcane. We’ve spent lifetimes learning it. Turning it to sound. We first sequenced its true threads in a machine, in 1968, but it seems to require the intricacies of a human wrist, a human fallacy, perhaps. And since then we’ve looked for the last thread. Before, only a man named Erich Zann had come close, but he bent his studies to a different resolve. We first heard the true thread, the seed of it, when you were a child crying yourself to sleep, still smelling of your parents’ blood. Such a pure frequency, we rejoiced. And when it was cultivated, we rejoiced. You, Ada, you could even hum it over ours.”

The other two figures speak a word, a monosyllabic incantation. Their voices are perfect mirror images of one another, coupling, and the sound crusts in Ada’s ears, wet and painful.

“The name of the beloveds,” Emma says. “The very fact you can hear it means, oh, Ada, such great things. You’ll find it interesting that if one could sand offall its burrs and tongues, it might translate, poorly, as ‘grandmothers.’ Over the river and through the woods.”

Grandmothers. Ada feels no surprise, only the old confused warmth. She hears the rustle of leaves, amplified in her pressurized ears, and Luke is here at last, just inside the trees, hiding behind his best camera. It’s pointed at her, and she remembers how long he saved up to buy it. Across his shoulder is a black sheet. She recognizes it as hers, somehow, he must have gotten it from her car. Even behind the camera he’s still handsome, though he’s all sagging skin and bones, he’s lost so much weight. His face is ravaged with beard stubble.

“I’m sorry, Ada.” He crosses to her, stands there first-date nervous. “I knew you weren’t strong enough to come here unless you thought I was in trouble. So they felt you’d respond to film as a way to prepare you.” He lowers the camera to smile at her.

“Strong enough? You chose all this over me,” she says, and the dam’s barely holding now, what’s behind it is surprising her. “You chose this over starting a family. This is the past year? Two years, how many years? This is you hitting me? This is what we were?” Shouting — has she ever shouted at anything? — and somewhere the last bird in the forest screams back and bursts into a ruffled flight.

“Please don’t — at first I couldn’t stand it, that they wanted you. I’m just the glorified cameraman, your — acolyte. I should have accepted it was about you. I should have made our life about you all along.” He’s crying, she hasn’t seen him cry since his father died. “But I’m trying to get it now, it’s only you. You have such an honor. And there can still be an us, tell them that.”

She’s never wanted anything but him, almost from the moment she first found the idea of what wanting could do. Through these trees sits the old place, but she only found him here, in this older place. Gram always said she would do great things, but it’s not Gram’s voice that’s speaking to her now. Gram’s voice never let her be. This isn’t a voice at all, it’s something more atavistic and naked, tipping its head back to where the moon appears in its frame of treetops, waiting for a god to finish it. This is strength, this is what strength is.

“I came here to help you,” she tells him. In the video, this is the part where she drapes the black sheet over herself like some widow’s veil, it’s when she goes to him. What is there to mourn, now? “I wanted to be strong for you, to be not like Ada for you. That was stupid. I’ll choose what you chose, but for my music. For me,” she adds, and his eyes get wide, “not for you, and not for us.” She snatches her sheet from his shoulder, turns away from her name on his lips. She walks over to the hole and drops the sheet on the ground.

Below, the three figures pull theirs off in harmony, revealing thin, over-jointed bodies. Bleached white and hairless, heavily endowed, composed of blunt hominid angles. Their thin tongues are almost translucent. Emma’s farthest along in this anthropomorphosis, the shape of her skull in flower, the bones petaling out around the mouth. The black symbol curves up around the heave of her right breast. A beauty that could be appreciated, if given an age. Or by a grandmother, Ada thinks.

From behind comes the sound of Luke’s sobs, and another sound, like the interminable ending of a deep kiss, but she doesn’t turn. Her eyes crawl over Emma’s body, all the ripe firmness.

“You’ve grown these last days,” Emma says, “found your own mettle. We are proud. It gives our gift to you a different flavor, perhaps. Look,” and her elongated finger points.

Ada glances back now, reluctantly, to see her husband removing his skin, a costume two sizes too large. Under it there’s little blood, little muscle, fewer tendons than seems possible. He’s a weak serpent of a thing, young and gasping at the air, folding himself over his arm like a coat.

“He is your own acolyte,” Emma says. “A true one. He will be allowed to evolve into a lower form of us.”

“He is yours to wear,” the second says.

“When we visit here,” the third says.

“You always wanted him closer,” and Emma laughs.

Ada sees faces appear in the trees, at a discreet distance, most human and lit with expectance, a few sunken and bled white. Ada turns back to the hole. Now the cello is squeezed between Emma’s powerful, spindled thighs. The violins are seated under those strange chins. The three of them play, the three tones uncoil, neither major nor minor, cold nor warmth, and the ground absorbs a thick, silent thunder. The sky flashes a negative of itself, it’s filled with vast things, endless drifting strands and appendages. Arriving, converging, dwarfing the Appalachians in every direction. Immense limbs like cities, a pulsing architecture, reach down and reduce the Earth’s majesty. Ropes of sinew orbited by wan stars. The sky goes moonlit again and they’re gone. Ada feels it: that note, the one that has built in her.

The sky burns that non-white a second time, the filaments of gods hanging down from wherever their great eyes blink and gaze. She feels those eyes roll downward, each wet socket a galaxy, tipping toward her, her. Dark again, absence again, with them just behind it. They wait for the sky to stay on.

Ada lowers herself to all fours and climbs down into the hole. The finished quartet doesn’t commune. The three, waiting for her, begin threading their frequencies into a cord. She realizes she’s left the viola above her, the ghost of her mother still in its bones somewhere, and she smiles. She decides to sing instead. She cracks opens her mouth.