Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (35 page)

They went to bed. Aldin read for a while
before going to sleep, but Callie was exhausted and drifted off.
"Cal?" he asked, waking her.

"Hmm?"

"You remember Homer Brooks?"

"Oh yeah, good ol' Homer. Duck Soul.
Uh-huh. How could I forget?
Used
to come have rock 'n' roll parties with
our
stuff, and we were all gonna be stars
till
he
took over music
single-handed. What about him?"

"Nothing. I was just thinking he might be
kind of excited about something like this. He always was fascinated
by that supernatural stuff."

"Uh-huh. G'night."

When she awoke, Callie yawned and stretched.
Their waterbed was a good five feet off the floor, with storage
underneath and no windows in the room, the bathroom closet carved
out to make room for two chests of drawers Aldin had inherited.
Only a narrow path ran around the bed, and now Callie hopped down
onto it. Aldin stretched and looked down at her. "I dreamed of a
song," they said to each other at the same time.

"You first," Aldin said.

"Well, it's kind of funny, because I know I
never learned this song. It has a pretty, easygoing melody that's
the kind that's so soothing you just find yourself da-da-deeing
along and don't pay much attention to the words. But last night I
heard the words loud and clear."

"So? Bet it's not the same song. Sing." She
stood by the side of the bed and began:

"This here mandolin is carved out of
pine,

It was willed to me by a hobo down the
line.

He donated this mandolin with these last
words,

'Before I pass over I'll show you some
chords. . . .' "

At this point Aldin joined in without
missing a beat and with added emphasis on the end of the first
line:

"This here mandolin is made out
of
earth and
stone
.

If the sound of the railroad makes you feel
all alone

This here mandolin takes a hobo back
home."

"So it was the same song?" she asked.

"Sure was. I never learned
it either, though I knew it was written by Michael Smith and he
wrote 'The Dutchman,'
which was also a
hell of a song. I'd never really listened to the
words to this one until last night—then something
or other made sure that I did."

"Well, Ellie did say that when the banjo was
still together, it would play them songs to communicate with them,
and sometimes they'd sort of learn the words through it. I think
we've been haunted."

"I think so. Let's see what we can get out
of the rest of the song, other than that the banjo pieces obviously
want to be a mandolin when they grow up."

"This here mandolin is sure full of sand

It only plays out of tune when there's a cop
on the train.

It can play you the rhythm of the Super
Chief

Out of St. Paul."

Callie had found a harmony now,

"That ain't all.

This here mandolin'll make a young girl open
up her window

Like a warm bed on a rainy night.

Like a hex sign on a barn

This here mandolin keeps a hobo from
harm."

"Protective powers,"
Callie said. "Very spooky. I wonder how Michael
knew
this was going to happen."
"Come on, let's keep going," Aldin urged.

"This here mandolin can play the hard
times

Play the booze and the breadlines and the
men killed for dimes.

It can play you the cry in the night

Of a jungle fire band

Deep in the heart of this land.

This here mandolin is made out of old barns
and water tanks.

If the jukebox is busted and you need an old
song,

This here mandolin takes a hobo back
home."

Aldin had a literal kind
of mind, since he was a computer
type. So
it took a while longer for them to find just the right
decrepit pine barn and steal just the right
planks for the banjo's body. The water tank wasn't too hard—stock
tanks were easy to find. Machining the metal parts of tuners and
the frets from the stock-tank metal took a while, though. Callie
suggested that the banjo already had enough magical elements to it,
but Aldin said, "It gave us a very clear message
what we were to use, and we can do it. Now then,
we have five
tuning-peg heads from the
original—if we have your potter friend in Mountain Home do us three
more, that will be something made out of earth, but as for
stone?"

"Hey, I've been sanding those barn planks,
and let me tell you, there's enough teensy grains of sand in that
wood now to qualify."

Callie liked the work, though—it was an
exciting secret to come home to. All the time she worked, her mind
kept singing the mandolin song, so that the wood came out smooth
and surprisingly beautiful. The pegs her friend made matched the
bone ones so well it was hard to tell the difference. At last the
body was finished, smooth and lustrous, with the skin head shaped
into veneer patches for the trim and the pegs in place. All that
remained was the strings.

Callie noticed when she
put the first one in her string-winder that though the strings were
longer, only the cores
remained. She cut
the first length and was trying to find a wire
fine enough to wind it with for the first string, bending
over the machine, glancing from the incredible hairlike core back
to her stock again. Her hair was down on her neck for
warmth, and it swung forward as she worked, its
long buttery
strands pooling on the table
of the string-winder. She knew
enough to
tie it back while she was working, but the machine
wasn't on. She would regulate it with a foot
pedal like an old treadle sewing machine, so she wasn't too worried
about it.

But then the core string
started whirling on its own, and a
lock of
her hair fell into the center of the machine, jerking her
head down. "Ouch, dammit!" she said. "Hold it!"
The machine stopped. She jerked her hair loose, all but a single
strand, which wound around the core of the string. "Just hold your
horses," she said to the string. "I'm not dead yet. But I get the
idea."

Aldin came running from the bathroom.
"What's the matter, Cal?"

"This thing tried to scalp
me. Remember the Two Sisters song about how he made the strings of
her long golden hair?
Well, our mandolin
isn't picky about whose long golden hair it
is, and mine's been drafted."

Aldin walked over to her
sewing center, picked up her scis
sors, and
handed them to her.

"You said you'd kill me if
I cut it. You said you'd leave me
for a
tall brunette."

Aldin shrugged. "I think
you'd look great in short hair.
And we
can't have you getting hurt around the machinery, can
we?" He waited, and when she hesitated, he said,
"Go on, Cal. It's the last thing. The final touch. Your hair will
grow
back, and I really want to hear
strings that will always stay in
tune."

* * *

Some nights, especially
when it had been stormy and nobody in their right minds would go
out, Molly Curtis had a special urge to go for a run, checking
everything out, patrolling her neighborhood, making sure the wet
streets were just wet
streets filled with
nothing more sinister than broken tree limbs
and water.

She pounded along the side of the streets,
her shoes splashing her through puddles she didn't manage to dodge,
her feet beating the rhythm on the pavement beneath her. The song
spreading was going well. Morgan Richards's computer virus had
songs being sung at high speed all over the country now, and he was
always finding applications. Writers and musicians who traveled
were taking their new repertoires with them from city to city,
infecting new audiences all the time.

LeeAnn Richards, Morgan's
wife, had complained. "It's almost too easy, Molly. Easier even
than it was before. Now you don't even have to pay to hear the
songs or have any talent or anything-—they
give
them
to you, and you're supposed to sing all the time, and even if
you play an instrument real badly, they make you keep playing.
Except for having to learn something new, there's nothing to it,
and you don't even have to learn it right. I heard one boy mess up
the lyrics something fierce, and Mark Simmons just told him it was
part of the folk process and complimented him on the lyrics he got
right."

Molly had pooh-poohed her
at the time. Although LeeAnn was usually sunny and optimistic, like
most human beings she
was suspicious when
everything was going too smoothly. Molly
knew exactly what she meant. If it was going to be this easy
to
reinstate the songs, why had the devils
ever thought they could eradicate them? Molly had been in the world
long enough to know that while there were many beings who were
hateful and mean because they had been deprived of basic needs at
an early age, there were others who were just plain rotten clear
through, and the devils the kids had
told
her about
were responsible for the
rottenness.

Molly considered herself
pretty tolerant. As a social worker
she
mostly dealt with people others would cross the street to avoid,
and she liked most of them. Of course, it had become fashionable in
recent years to patronize the homeless, but the prostitutes, even
the occasional prostitutes, had been hard-hit by both the new
diseases and the new morality. And while there was less in the way
of drugs and booze on the street because of more rigid law
enforcement, there was no less poverty and no less misery. And the
people who weren't Molly's clients seemed to her to be if anything
even more unhappy than their poorer neighbors—maybe because they
still had something to lose.

Of course, it was good
that people were trying to stay healthy and improve the
environment, but sometimes getting through the day seemed like a
grim round of spending half the
morning
asleep because you weren't drinking caffeine, not pausing for a
smoke to think, not having lunch because you were on your run or
going to exercise in some other way, not eating much of anything
because you were watching your diet, not having a drink to relax in
the evening just before not having sex with your partner because
you were both too tired from a long day of virtue. Fortunately, she
and Barry had retained some deviant degenerate impulses. Even after
the music had disappeared, they spent evenings reading and talking
about books with friends, trading and reading old books that
contained very little solid factual information or helpful hints on
the right way to live.

She liked to think that
they were marginally happier than her colleagues at work, who,
despite incredibly healthful and serious regimes, including massage
therapy and other acceptable forms of relaxing from stress, still
never allowed themselves to escape from their daily concerns and
the problems of the world around them. They had as many
responsibilities as the others, worried about Ellie and Faron, the
cats, jobs, bills, an old house, and a yard, but because those
things were not the only excitement they had or the only lives they
knew about, they didn't take it quite as
seriously
as her co-workers did. Or
so she thought. Her hypothesis was about to be tested.

The wind picked up, and the sky, despite the
darkness, seemed to boil, as if suffering from indigestion. The day
had been warm, but the breeze was cool. Molly rounded the corner to
run back toward her house.

Darkness against darkness,
columns spun crazily down
from the sky,
clearly
lit
by
the lightning strafing the churning
clouds. She had never seen so many twisters at once—six or
seven of the whirling columns, drilling the earth. They still
looked distant, but Molly picked up her feet and flew back to her
house. She felt like Dorothy from Kansas as she banged open the
screen door, unlocked the front door, and started yelling at Barry
before she burst through the bedroom door.

The sirens started as the
two of them grabbed the cellular
phone, a
flashlight, a bag of cat food, and all of the cats, who
were sleeping in the house and therefore were
drowsy enough to be cooperative, as well as the portable computer.
They got everything to the cellar in three quick trips. Molly was
still wearing the portable radio-cassette player she wore when she
ran, even though she hadn't had tapes for the cassette player in
years. She thanked God she and Barry lived in an old farmhouse that
still had a cellar, and not a high-rise condo. Faron and Ellie's
little house didn't even have a basement.

The cellar smelled like
rain and mold and slightly damp earth. They tripped over jars
washed and set aside for reuse, cardboard boxes from equipment that
might have to be returned to the factory but that had, in fact,
broken down or
been sold several years
ago. Somewhere in the mess was a pile
of
blankets, no doubt flea ridden, shelves of canned goods, mostly
jelly and green beans, and a black snake who liked to hibernate
down there.