Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/74

100 thing seemed not impossible. If my mind could make me imagine that I heard Alicia playing, it could certainly also make me imagine that I heard her playing various pianos, especially after I had had a good chance to hear each of those instruments. And I had been listening to that decrepit old upright all evening. Certainly no supernatural influence was at work. It was all in my own mind. I remembered a story I had read somewhere about a man who had imagined that a monkey was following him about. The story ended, I believe, with the man slitting his own throat. I made up my mind then and there to get back to the city and consult a psychiatrist—a good one!

HREE days later I was well enough to travel, so I returned to the city. I didn't go to my own home, but registered at an hotel instead. I was afraid to go back to my own house, full as it was of memories of Alicia—and with that accursed grand piano waiting for me in the downstairs living room. The only way I could have gone home would have been to first have that piano moved out of the house—and I was afraid to do that. Afraid of what people would think and say. The servants had heard me talking queerly, so had Kenny Coates. A hotel was the only solution.

When I registered I asked for a quiet room, isolated from the ballroom and dining room; I told the desk clerk frankly that I couldn't bear the sound of music, especially piano music. The room he gave me was all right: there wasn't a piano within a half-dozen floors of me. But I couldn't stay in that room indefinitely. The first time I came downstairs, as I got off the elevator in the lobby, I heard that devilish piano playing again, coming from the dining room. God! It followed me all the way across the lobby, growing fainter and fainter as I walked away from it; I could hear it up until the instant that I passed through the revolving doors to the street. Then I couldn't hear it anymore.

I went directly to consult a psychiatrist, told him the same story I've told you. He seemed interested as hell, told me that my malady was extremely rare, used a lot of big words and ended up by advising me that my only salvation lay in fighting the thing—

Well, I did just that. I did exactly as this man advised. I didn't go home, because of my—memories of Alicia; but for three months I lived in that accursed hotel, went to my office every day and transacted my business as well as I was able, ate my morning and evening meals in that hotel dining room every day—and listened to that ghastly music pounding in my brain every mortal day in the week! Always in the hotel dining room I heard it—not when the orchestra was playing, of course; only when they were silent between pieces. But I heard it other places, too; through an open window as I was hurrying to catch a subway, a fragment of Dancing in the Wind hitting me in the face from the swinging doors of a saloon as I walked past, even from the orchestra pit of a theatre—God!—anywhere and anytime! I haven't gone inside a theatre since, that had a piano; I haven't dared

For three months I fought it. But I couldn't beat it; I can't beat it. Two weeks ago I finally gave up the fight. I moved out of the hotel, took the room here. For one reason only, because there isn't a piano in the place. When I'm inside these walls I have peace—of a sort; it's only when I go out that I hear the music—and I'm careful about where I go, what streets and even which side of the street I walk on, so that I'm seldom exposed. Maybe the disease will go away of itself in time; I don't know. I only know that I haven't the strength or the courage to fight it any longer. That way would lead to total