Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/76

102 night. Through all those months his life must have been a perfect hell.

"It turned out that the three of them had met earlier in the evening, dined—at some place where there was no piano!—and come here afterward.

"Well, you know that the brother demanded that Alicia's body be exhumed, which was done—and they found that sure enough she was saturated with arsenic. Pierce pleaded not guilty on grounds of insanity, but the alienists shot his story full of holes. They examined him and they put him in rooms with pianos, and he tried to fake the malady he said he'd been experiencing all along, and they proved that he was just faking. Then he tried to say that he hadn't heard that ghostly piano-playing any more since the minute he'd confessed, and that only made it worse. The prosecution made a monkey out of him. Proved that his business had been perilously close to the rocks, that he had been inordinately jealous of Alicia because of her radio reputation and because she made more money than he did, and that he'd killed Alicia for her insurance. The jury found him guilty in half an hour, and the judge sentenced him to burn. And tonight's the night. That's why you're here.

"Oh, there's one point that I forgot. Remember I said that the reason Pierce broke when he did was one of those jokes of Fate that nobody can forsee or guard against? Well, the joke was this: that same day, while Pierce was out, Mrs. Thomas bought a piano. A little spinet. She'd always wanted one anyway for the reception room, she didn't like Pierce of course and didn't care a damn whether he stayed on or moved out on account of it; so I suppose when she saw it she merely thought, 'The hell with him,' and ordered it sent out. It came that evening, and it was put in the reception room near the door, not ten feet from where Pierce went haywire as he walked into the house.

"But the real reason I've got you up here tonight, Jerry, is this—

"It may all be imagination, but, thinking back after all the commotion and excitement that night had subsided, I can't get out of my mind the notion that, just before Pierce screamed, I heard somebody playing that piano downstairs! Just a fragment of music, just for an instant, and then the scream blotted it out. Music that had a sort of unreal quality to it, as though someone was playing loudly, but at a great distance—like the music that comes across a lake at night, like, Oh, Lord, this is a lame comparison but it's accurate—like music heard when you hold just the needle to a phonograph record, in your fingers. Diminished almost to nothingness, yet strong and powerful. Microscopic, yet full of fury. You understand? And the piece was Dancing in the Wind!

"Jerry, you're here because I believe that I heard that music, that same music that drove Pierce to confess! Maybe it was only an emanation from Pierce's own tortured brain; I don't know. But I am certain that I heard it. There have been times when I thought that I was clairvoyant, Jerry; not tremendously so, like mediums, but just a little bit. And if I'm sensitive at all to such things, I know that you're ten times more so.

"Jerry, I feel that, if it were truly Alicia's spirit driving Harry Pierce to confess through her music, we will hear her play again tonight, for the last time, when he dies. Because she knows that I know the whole story, as no other person on earth knows it. And I feel that if Alicia's spirit exists, and can communicate with us, it will try to get one last message through to me—to let me know—that it lives and that it has triumphed."

I moved uneasily at that, looked down at my glass, which was empty, and shook my head.

"Sorry, John. It doesn't necessarily