Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/72

98 people were with me, old friends who had known her well and who wanted to look at her and to look at me too and see for themselves how I was bearing up. God, it was barbaric! The casket stood between the north windows, on the opposite side of the room from the piano. Standing with my back to the piano, standing between my friends looking down into her pale wasted face, I could hear her playing there behind me. But nobody else heard. Nobody else heard! I watched their faces, and I know. To them, the piano was silent. Yet I heard it playing, three or four times that day! God! God! God! I know that once I almost fainted when I heard it; Kenny Coates had to grasp my arms and hold me up until I came out of it. He helped me upstairs and gave me brandy and made me lie down for awhile. I was afraid to ask him if he'd heard the music, because I knew he hadn't. I began to wonder if I wasn't going crazy.

"'And the next day, and the day of the funeral—it was the same. Music that only I heard—Alicia's music—coming from the damnable piano downstairs. I didn't sleep three total hours from the moment she died until they buried her. I was trying to think, trying to fathom out the thing, to keep from going wholly mad. I knew that it was a sort of short circuit in my own brain that was causing the trouble; I kept telling myself over and over that the sounds didn't really exist, or other persons would have heard them. But I knew too that if I didn't conquer the—the sickness—sooner or later I'd go stark raving mad. Part of my brain was sick already; I had to keep the sickness from becoming any worse.

'I have will power, plenty of it. But I couldn't overcome this thing. I even forced myself to sit in the living room by the piano, hour after hour, waiting to hear the music, waiting to see if the piano keys would also appear to move. I wanted to find out if my sickness extended as far as hallucination—included my vision as well as my hearing. But whenever I watched the piano, it wouldn't play. It only played when my back was turned—and always when I was in the presence of other people, never when I was alone. It was like a devil in my brain, trying to make me—act ridiculous, strange, mad, in front of my servants and friends.

day of the funeral was the worst. Right in the middle of the prayer the music began—Dancing in the Wind, again. It kept up all the way through the prayer, until the prayer was finished and the quartette began to sing; I had to bite my lips to keep from screaming. But I have a strong will—I conquered that time. Yet some day I won't—and I'm afraid that then they'll find out my secret and take me away and lock me up as a madman.

"'After she was—buried, I came back to the house and shut myself in my room. All that night I stayed awake, waiting to hear that music. But there was no music then, not a note. It was just as though my sickness had gone with the people who for three days had filled my house. But I knew that perhaps it was just waiting another—opportunity....

"'The next afternoon Kenny Coates dropped in. He's my attorney, and one of my best friends; I couldn't refuse to see him. I met him in the library, across the hall from the living room.

"'Just as soon as we started talking it began again. As always, it seemed to come from the big grand in the living room, and I could hear it plainly, though the two intervening doors were closed. Cutting right into what Kenny was saying, blotting out his words, blotting out all my senses except my hearing, blotting out everything except itself.

"'I don't know how I looked then, or how I acted, but my reaction must have been pretty ghastly, for the next thing I