Black Static Horror Magazine #2 Read online

  But the voice that was raised first was her father's.

  "I can't draw any more, Faustine. It's over."

  Slightly embarrassed, she resisted the temptation to stare at him. It was difficult to believe that this was the father she had seen full of smiles while he added the final touch to a new drawing: the father who sometimes sang joyful tunes in the privacy of the studio, while he naively thought himself sheltered from indiscreet ears. To judge by his tone, she thought he was about to burst into tears. But what was the world coming to, if fathers dissolved in tears in front of their young daughters?

  Faustine redirected her attention to the drawings. Her toes, like the fingers that clasped her knees, were trying to twitch in time to the rhythm, moved by an innate energy. She had not come in here to listen to a confession of impotence.

  The wall was plastered with drawings, some of which overlapped for want of space. Faustine recognised some of them, but ... they were not the same. Altered. And not merely because she had seen them in other circumstances, to the sound of other music than this. All of them, without exception, had changed to varying degrees: effaced by blots or scribbles, or torn as if by invisible talons, eaten away by an acid that had spared their backgrounds.

  There was a besieged and snowbound village; a pack of wolves with blood-reddened fangs; a sword embedded in a stone; a cloud of crows; a half-human, half-fox creature standing in a boat; a crocodile standing up on its hind legs. And, at the centre of the collage, lined up side by side: four dragons—as similar as drawings traced by the same hand could be—identical to a fifth dragon enthroned in the heart of the room, isolated on an easel.

  "That one lasted a good twelve days,” Papa said. “The contagion got to them all, one by one. It all began with the zebra—do you remember the zebra? The one William wanted to hang up in his room? Completely erased in the space of three days. Imagine a skin disease that spreads like wildfire ... but one that attacks paintings. A disease that has no cure. Do you understand?"

  "You can draw them again. I liked that one—the zebra."

  "I've tried to restore the missing parts, but it does no good. The following day, everything has reverted to its former state. I can't draw any more, Faustine. There's nothing left for me to do."

  Faustine only heard the end of the sentence, because at that precise moment the song reached what she had nicknamed the ‘roller-coaster passage'—the one that she had never quite been able to make out through her bedroom wall, asking herself night after night what was hidden in that sudden silence. But the cut-off was not quite as abrupt as she had always thought. The transition was too subtle for her to be able to perceive it until she found herself at the heart of things. The whole piece built up to that moment: the progressive slowing down; the resumption preparing for the explosion, like a wild beast bracing its muscles before leaping upon its prey; the same savagery following the same cool premeditation. Faustine saw herself momentarily at the top of the roller-coaster, anticipating the moment when her stomach would turn in the intoxication of the descent. Until she heard this song, she had not known that music was able to reproduce such a sensation.

  It was necessary to concentrate to hear Papa over the music, and she had no desire to make any such effort now that she had heard it for the first time. If only Faustine could worm permission out of her parents to camp out in the studio for the whole of the following day, with that music, instead of going to school ... she had so much to discover, more than she had ever learned in a day spent on the school benches. It was there: true knowledge.

  "The music,” Papa went on. “You must have wondered about it, no?"

  Faustine pricked up her ears involuntarily. He had pronounced the key word.

  "I've always drawn to music. Do you see all those drawings, on the wall? Every one of them was born of a song. Sometimes just in the details, although I've sometimes based an entire composition on a song—but never in so perfect a fashion as with that dragon."

  This was true. Faustine's gaze had already lingered upon the dragons, entirely naturally. They were measuring one another as two creatures of the same species do when encountering one another for the first time. She thought she had made out a familiar gleam in the beast's eyes, doubtless because it seemed perfectly integrated with the musical passage. The combination of the dragons and the music, their juxtaposition, gave Faustine an impression of plenitude—at least so long as she made the effort to ignore the areas etched by the void, which ruined the perfection of the design.

  "Every song has a story to tell, you know,” Papa went on. “Sometimes one accepts me into its confidence, letting me tell it in pictures. I drew that dragon—the first, the one on the easel—in a single session, in a state of grace. I've never known anything like it, and I'll never be able to repeat it. If I could just save one—that one, especially...

  "I've tried to stand guard in the studio, day and night, hoping that the contagion would cease if I remained here watching them all. One sometimes gets funny ideas, eh? But it was no good. It was then that I decided to try to copy it. They aren't as good, the four others, don't you think? I drew them to the sound of the same song, though. It hasn't stopped cycling since."

  Even from where she was sitting, at the far side of the room, Faustine had no difficulty in differentiating between the drawings, but she could not quite understand why. The four copies pinned to the wall had the contours, the colours and the textures of the original, down to the smallest details. The same proud bearing, the same positioning of the tail and the limbs, the same reflections in the complex mosaic of their scales—but the heart was no longer there. None of them truly resembled the song. None of them reproduced the spark of life that shone in the gaze of he original dragon. Their scales did not reflect the light with such precision. They could only simulate life, while the fifth possessed its essence.

  "When it began, I had the impression that the contagion spread less rapidly once I had set the song on a continuous loop. It was just enough, sometimes, to give me false hope. It was only two hours after I finished the last when they began to crumble away—all four of them, with a common accord. They'd certainly taken a rise out of me, so to speak."

  It was odd, though, that Papa had not shown her this drawing before. More than once he had erupted into Faustine's bedroom after her bed-time to show her his most recent work, as happy as only a man intoxicated by his own creativity can be. It was so very convenient, her room being so close to his studio. Then too, Mama did not give his drawings the same attention she once had: ten years as a teacher is sometimes enough to deform the most innocent gaze. And William had decided, since starting at the college, to relegate his father's drawings to the category of things associated with childhood, and hence detrimental and embarrassing—especially in front of his friends. Faustine alone still possessed an entirely virginal gaze.

  "Is that really possible—a song in the shape of a dragon?"

  Papa answered her with the smile that he gave her every time that Faustine tried to dismantle the workings of questions reserved for adults, as if to say: she understands things, my little girl.

  "In a manner of speaking. Listen carefully ... the riff, for example. Do you hear the riff?"

  "What's that—the reef?"

  By way of reply, Papa set himself to reproduce on the ground, with the tip of his index finger, the motif woven by the guitars. It was a rough approximation, but sufficient to allow Faustine to identify the designated element.

  "There it is, the riff—do you hear it? It has always evoked the image of a dragon in me. Imagine a dragon with a body as supple as a serpent's, which might undulate to the rhythm. And the progression ... I don't know how to explain it ... You've noticed that the song starts very slowly, to the sound of the bass line, and that the tension mounts progressively? I don't know about you, but I find that it speaks of an immense worm in the process of waking up."

  Faustine understood, now. The music assumed the contours of a dragon, right down to it
s colour. She did not know yet how sounds could be translated into colours, but if this song had one, it was definitely the blood-red of its scales. Perhaps, too, because the sleeve of the CD, placed next to the player, was itself almost uniformly red?

  And that was not all. There was that impression of strength, of pure energy, when the song attained its apotheosis at the end of the third minute. That was the spark in the dragon's eyes, the muscles that played behind its scaly carapace, the wings on the point of unfurling. And the stormy sky in the background. The slowness of the opening, so very restrained, suggested the step of an enormous beast making the ground shake.

  "Tell me, that funny noise you can hear at the beginning..."

  "Yes, Faustine?"

  She hesitated. How could she translate into words the subtle skimming of cymbals that she had only just noticed? For want of the right terms, she found herself reduced to reproducing it with the tips of her fingers on the wall. Papa shook his head, visibly intrigued.

  "I think one might call it the sound of talons rubbing against rocks.” Papa pointed a finger at the easel, at the rocky ground that formed a casket around the beast's taloned feet: the ground already corroded by the promise of impending obliteration. Although the dragon was still virtually intact, the scenery was beginning to crumble into fragments.

  It all seemed so clear now. The pulsation that breathed music into her life was the beating of an enormous heart. So much still remained to be discovered in this arrangement of sounds, so many successive layers to strip away. Every day, more of it would be revealed to her, provided that she learned to listen.

  "You know, Faustine, I've been thinking quite a lot about this all week. I've begun to ask myself whether I might have used up my capital. It may be the case that people like me only receive their gift for a fixed period, their mission being to get the best out of it. What do you think? Might it really be taken back? Because if that's the case ... how can I put it...?” Papa searched for words with the air of a good pupil caught in flagrante delicto, having no ready answer to a teacher's question. “...I've never been able to do anything else."

  Faustine did not reply. Since when did adults allow themselves to speak of confidential matters like that in her presence? Parents usually kept that kind of subject for whispering behind closed doors. Faustine was not sure that she had any desire to play the role of an outlet for secrets—not if that implied seeing her father throw in the towel. Cowardice, in a grown-up, was too embarrassing to confront.

  Anyway, that wasn't the important thing.

  If he hadn't found the solution, that was doubtless because he hadn't really looked for it. In those sounds, however, in the architecture of those voices, there was the promise of a rebirth: an amulet against the void.

  * * * *

  Faustine slept peacefully that night, cradled by the domesticated song, curled up in the hollow of its belly. A gentle warmth had taken over her body. She felt so well. Now, when the music slid under the door like a ray of light, it was a token of connivance; they already knew one another, and were learning to know one another better. Faustine could hear through walls now.

  The silence took her by surprise the following evening, as did its unexpected arrival. It interrupted the song just as Faustine pricked up her ears to catch the renewal of the roller-coaster passage in all its splendour. It was as if a horse were brutally held back in its course, unbalanced to the point of falling. The silence spread throughout the house like the contents of an inverted bottle: a thick silence that clogged the ears.

  Faustine took refuge in a corner of her room, hands plastered over her ears, and began to sing in a low voice to dispel the vertigo that was almost a drowning sensation. Silence had become alien to her body. It was unnatural, to be so close to the studio wall and to hear nothing therein but her father's footsteps echoing in the emptiness. It wasn't normal.

  An hour passed, dragging its seconds beyond the bounds of tolerability. To bring Faustine out of her torpor required another distinct sound: that of the studio door opening and closing again. It had become sufficiently incongruous for her to understand immediately what it implied.

  Faustine half-opened the door to her room and slid a timid glance into the corridor. A ray of light cut through the shadows like an accusatory arrow. Papa was abandoning his retreat. His creased clothes were the ones he had been wearing the previous evening, which he had doubtless not changed throughout the time the song had accompanied him. His face was as firm as a mask, if a mask could have contrived to grow several days’ worth of facial hair.

  Papa met Faustine's eyes and shook his head negatively before turning his back on her. The signal passed a sentence of death on the dragons. And perhaps on himself, in the longer term. Since when did adults have the right to admit defeat?

  At nightfall, the music still had not been reawakened. Faustine slipped into the studio. Under the gaze of the agonised creatures pinned to the walls, she filched the CD that was in the player. Scrupulously, she put it back in its box before carrying her booty to her room. The next step was to get into William's den without anyone seeing or knowing. As chance would have it, big brother was spending the night at a friend's house. In the battlefield that served as his lair, he would undoubtedly not notice the disappearance of his portable CD player-at least, she hoped so, given that William was inclined suddenly to discover the absence of a magazine forgotten four days earlier, under a pile of clothes. It was an eternal subject of arguments between him and mother. All she had to do was be careful not to disturb his disorder.

  That night, Faustine slept with the earphones securely plugged into her ears, preventing the intrusion of silence. Within the shelter of the bedclothes, the two voices now whispered for her alone, with an entirely new intimacy. Everything was in order again. She had the fugitive impression, as she dropped off to sleep, of the fingertip touch of another reality, soon out of range. Removed from the studio walls, the song became different, but it was still too soon to get fully to grips with it.

  The following morning, her decision was made. The day was as long as the anticipation-charged nights preceding the revelation of Easter eggs or Christmas presents. She could not put the plan into action until the whole house was asleep, when even the adults had gone to bed.

  It was lucky that Faustine's room was the only one next to the studio; no one would hear her go in. No one would go along the corridor to see the light gleaming beneath the studio door. If Mama and William had one useful quality, it was their total lack of unpredictability.

  An abandoned warehouse: that was what the room resembled now. The kind of place that one could easily imagine infested with rats and populated by spiders. Faustine did not remember having felt so cold there during her previous visit. Behind the mingled perfumes of paint and chemicals was an insistent reek of mouldiness. The only vestiges of her father's presence were the dirty plates and empty cans that he had not taken the trouble to remove.

  Faustine was prepared for the necessity of meeting the gaze of the creatures pinned to the wall, but almost nothing remained of it. Their degeneration had accelerated in a spectacular fashion since the music had ceased. All that remained of the cloud of crows was a swarm of grey stains scattered in a near-virginal background. What had been a sword embedded in a stone, now deprived of shape, bore no resemblance to anything identifiable. Even the wallpaper seemed duller than it had before, by virtue of some strange effect of mimesis.

  The music had reclaimed its rights—but for Faustine alone, equipped with her precious earphones. She could not run the risk of being heard.

  Choice inevitably took her towards one of the dragons, and not only because they were the only ones conserving some semblance of shape, although she could not do battle with the original dragon just yet. For her apprenticeship, it was necessary to grapple with one of the copies—but time was pressing; she only had until dawn.

  There was an arrangement, a movement. If the notes were gathering in such a fashion, it could not b
e the fruit of chance. It was necessary for Faustine to seize the collective movement and let it imprint its vibrations upon her hand—to let it run over her skin, and breathe in the dragon there.

  She began with the area where, previously, the beast's tail had coiled around its massive body. She had only to let herself be guided by the riff that bristled the crest surmounting the scaly carapace: a single stroke of the outstretched hand, quite simply; learning the textures and the colours before conceding to superior strength. It wasn't difficult to trace the scales in Crayola, to fight the void with its own weapons.

  A stroke of the crayon responded to every note, a colour to every nuance; Faustine allowed herself to be entirely, euphorically caught up by the slide towards the sonorous chorus. Nothing is more intoxicating than the impression of authority that is born when one senses life flowing between one's fingers—more privilege than power.

  The moment eventually came when she understood that the music was so securely rooted within her that the earphones were unnecessary; not until then was she sufficiently polished to attack the original drawing. Time was pressing, and this opportunity would be the first and the last. She finally understood how to give physical form to the song.

  Her fingers adapted themselves to the rhythm of the music, and even when the piece finished the transition no longer interrupted her. Faustine watched out for the notes that dictated her every gesture, her every impulse, and the two voices, each in their turn, took command of her hands. They imprinted a pulsation upon her that ran through her to the tips of her fingers, as far as the point of the crayon—and Faustine knew then what it felt like to be lifted by a dragon's wings, with the wind whistling in one's ears and the minuscule world far below.

  The roller-coaster would be definitive. It was that, more than anything else, which dictated the dragon's posture. Every time she heard it, at that precise moment, Faustine felt her heart stop beating. Time was suspended before the great dive into empty space, three sublime and terrifying seconds to tie one's guts in knots. That was the image of a dragon cocking and drawing back its head, preparing to spit fire—and the explosion of guitars that followed was a jet of flames and sparks. If she succeeded in capturing that movement, down to the colour of the flames, them Faustine would have won her victory. The burning breath of the dragon brushed her ears in a roar of overstretched guitars, and swept away everything in its path.