Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/73

Rh remember was Kenny handing me a drink with his face as white as a sheet and saying over and over, "Good God. Harry—you look shot to pieces! For a minute there I thought you were going to fold up. I tell you, you've got to snap out of it, or it won't be long before you follow Alicia. Get away, take a cruise, go to Canada, do anything to try and shake off this nervous condition that's got hold of you. Otherwise—"

"'I guess I must have been still in a fog for I remember that I asked him, "But the music, Harry! Didn't you hear—the music?"

"'He shook his head. "Music? What music?"

"'That clinched it. I knew then that I had to get away. So I did. I turned my business over to a friend—I guess he'd been half anticipating that I'd do just that—and went to Canada, to a little place where I've been going every fall for years to hunt.

"'I stayed there for three weeks. I was really beginning to feel better; since leaving the city I hadn't once heard that fiendish piano playing. Then, one Saturday night, Pierre Chouinard—he owns the lodge where I was stopping—asked me if I didn't want to go to a barn dance at the village—and some devil in me made me say yes.

"'When we entered that hall the first thing I noticed was that there was a piano. An old worn-out upright on a makeshift bandstand. The sight of it gave me a queasy feeling for a minute, but the feeling passed off; there was too much noise and merriment and gaiety going on. The orchestra was a couple of fiddlers, a pianist and a drummer. They weren't bad; they played round and square dances mostly, with every once in awhile a waltz, and everybody danced, old and young alike.

"'At ten o'clock the orchestra took its intermission, and we all lined up in a row for refreshments—ice cream and cake. I was just reaching out my hand for mine—Pierre was standing directly behind me—when the music started.

"'It came from that old rattletrap on the bandstand. The piece was Dancing in the Wind, and it was Alicia playing. No matter how tinny the music was, no matter how distorted by that God-awful out-of-tune instrument with its loose strings and its dead notes, nothing could disguise that. It was Alicia playing, all right, playing that wreck of a piano to me alone. I looked at the bandstand, and there wasn't anybody there. Not even the orchestra; they had all gone off the stand somewhere to smoke and eat their ice cream. Through that hellish music I heard my dish smash on the floor at my feet, and that's the last thing I remembered, then.

"'I woke up in my bunk in Pierre's cabin, with a raging fever. Pierre wasn't in the room, and I lay there for awhile thinking and trembling. Funny thing, but my thoughts were clear as crystal. I could recollect everything that had happened since I'd left my own house back in the city, and it occurred to me all at once that I had never actually been within hearing distance of a piano in all that time—until the night of the barn dance. I had gone from my house to my train, and from that train to another train, and then I had ridden in an automobile, and then in a wagon, and, of course, in Pierre's lodge there was no piano. I tried to figure it out, figure out what craziness was in me that made me seem to hear Alicia playing, sooner or later, whenever I came near a piano. I remembered clearly that that old rattletrap had seemed to sound exactly like itself, with all its mechanical imperfections and poor tuning, not at all like our big grand. Then I began to wonder if my own couldn't conceivably have twisted its own conception of Alicia's playing to conform to the limitation of this tinny old instrument. The