In the River Darkness (9 page)

And for a split second, I’m almost there. Warm and happy.

But then the moldy, stale smell of the stagnant winter river fills my nose. The feeling turns to dust and disintegrates in the air and cold.

What remains is only the cutting certainty: no one will come to save me. We broke our blood oath. This is the punishment. I’m on my own now.

My face is wet; I think I’m crying.

“Help me,” I whisper, but the sluggish gurgling of the river drowns out my words.

Desperately, I try to bring summer back into my head.

Today I was in good form: I made the bow dance over the strings, made the cello purr, and sing, and cry.

At first, you feel your way from note to note, stumbling, trying hard to do everything exactly right. Like a hiker laboriously making her way up a steep mountain path, you slave away at it . . . and then suddenly you’re at the peak. There you are, and there is the music. And in that moment you belong together. You look down at the landscape of sound spread out below you and recognize that it’s your own personal landscape, the one inside of you.

Only then, when your hands just do what they need to, when you reach that dream-like state where everything else blurs and becomes meaningless. When the bow is practically an extension of your hand and you don’t know anymore where your instrument ends and you begin, then you’re really making music.

Every movement is the only right one at exactly the right moment. My body dissolved. I wished I could play into eternity. Then life would be tolerable.

When the piece came to an end and I lowered my bow, I still felt slightly dazed. To clear my head, I stepped over to the open window and drew deep breaths of the air that smelled of summer. I admired the leaves of my cherry tree, moving like green silk in the June breeze.

The tree stared back at me.

I blinked. But there was no doubt—through the tangle of branches, two eyes glittered back at me!

“Aaaaaaaaaahhh!” I yelled, stumbling away from the window.

The thing in the tree screamed, too. Then I heard breaking and splintering as it fell through the tree branches toward the ground. “Ooww!” It sounded bad.

Holding my cello bow in front of me like a dagger, I crept back to the window and peered outside. Under the cherry tree, in a hail of leaves and unripe cherries torn from the tree, lay Jay! He flailed his arms and legs like a beetle that’s fallen on its back.

“What . . . what on earth are you doing in my tree, you . . . you pervert!” I screeched as soon as I had recovered enough from my shock to make a sound at all. My voice cracked, and I could tell I was close to becoming hysterical. I was shaking all over.

With a pitiful groan, Jay sat up and rubbed his back. “I’m not a . . . I didn’t mean to . . .” he stammered as blood flushed his cheeks red with indignation.

“What were you DOING there, then, dammit?” At the moment, I had a strong urge to impale him with my bow.

“Listening!” Jay blurted out. “I was just listening!”

For a moment, we were both silent in our exhaustion. Slowly, I calmed down enough that I could look at the situation more objectively. I studied Jay, all scratched up, suspiciously—and had to admit that he didn’t exactly look like a lurking rapist. Crazy but harmless.

I took a deep breath. “Maybe it would be better if you come up here so we can talk about this face-to-face.”

I went downstairs to open the door for him, and Jay limped right behind me on the way back up to my room. His eyes swept the room with curiosity and stopped as soon as he saw my cello. He literally couldn’t take his eyes off it.

“Do you like classical music?” I asked when the silence finally started to become too awkward for me.

“I guess so,” Jay mumbled, without taking his eyes off the instrument. Good heavens, had the guy never seen a cello before? “But I don’t know much classical music. My grandma always listens to easy-listening music.”

Apparently, the poor thing was growing up in a cultural wasteland!

“Is that it?” Jay asked eagerly, “Your singing heart?”

“Uh . . . that’s my cello, if that’s what you mean,” I replied, bewildered. Jay was a strange guy.

His eyes asked me for permission before he touched it. Shyly, almost reverently, he stroked the instrument as if it were a living creature.

I wanted to see what would happen—so I plucked one of the strings. I could see how the sound moved through his hand pressed flat against the wood, through his arm, and lit up his face.

“I feel it right in here,” Jay whispered, placing a hand on his heart. His face registered a fervent wonder that until that moment I had only seen in young children. As if he had never learned to pretend or put on an act, to bury his feelings behind masks.

Then Jay even laid his face on the glistening wood to feel the vibrations of the note as it faded away—without any shyness about acting like an idiot in front of me. Gaping in surprise, I stared at him as if he were a strange, exotic animal, fascinated by his apparent lack of self-consciousness as he followed his sudden impulses.

“Please,” Jay said, looking at me as if I were a magician able to weave music with her bare hands, “please play something else!”

I couldn’t help myself. I felt flattered. Even more, I felt electrified, swept up in his childish enthusiasm. “Okay, let’s see if you like this.” I put a CD in my CD player and settled into playing position. After hectically fumbling around and then finding the right notes, I pressed the play button on the remote control.

My room had excellent acoustics. The notes dripped, surged, and bubbled from the bare walls. Jay stood in the middle of the room surrounded by the cascade of sounds. His eyes were closed, his arms slightly raised with the palms turned upward. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he had suddenly stuck out his tongue to catch the sounds like snowflakes, to taste them.

If someone else had done that, it would have seemed fake and absurd but not with Jay. It touched me deeply. I had never seen someone listen to music so intensely, practically bathing in it with his entire body. In fact, I had never met anyone like Jay.

Only when the last bars of the piece had faded away did he open his eyes again. He said just one word: “Summer.”

“You do know it, then,” I said, a little disappointed. “You’re right, it was “Summer” from Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons.
”

Jay smiled and shook his head. “I swear, I’d never heard of it before. But it sounded like when you’re sitting in a tree in June while the wind rustles in the leaves . . . just like . . . like eating cherries!”

“Really?” I replied skeptically. Jay nodded his confirmation. “Do you play an instrument, too?” I asked curiously. “You seem to have a good feel for music.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes we sing out there on the island, Alina and I. But not with music,” he added quickly. “Just spontaneously, for us. For the river and the grass and the kingfishers.”

“Who is Alina?”

“Alina and I . . . we . . .” Jay broke off and tried to put his words together again. Thoughtfully, like someone trying to build a tall tower out of building blocks, he continued. “She taught me to sing. How to imitate the call of a kingfisher. And of course how to swim. . . . One day she just threw me into the river, and that’s how I learned. Alina taught me all of that, all kinds of things that are important!”

Jay’s eye, the green-brown one, gleamed. He leaned over toward me, as if to share a secret with me. “She’s my best friend . . . she is . . . she’s everything to me!” he whispered. “Alina is my whole world. And I’m hers.”

I didn’t know how to react to this declaration. “That . . . that must be nice,” I replied lamely.

Jay nodded soberly. “But it’s different from your music. May I . . . may I come again and listen?”

“You’re welcome to but I’d prefer if you told me beforehand. Maybe knock on the window or something so I know you’re there. And we also have a front door with a doorbell.” I was gratified to see that he blushed. “And I have another request,” I added. “Sometime I’d like to come and hear you singing. That’s only fair, right?”

Jay chewed on his lower lip awkwardly and thought about it. “Good,” he finally answered after a long pause, “it’s a deal!”

He insisted on shaking my hand.

I watched him as he trotted home with a stack of my best classical music CDs, which I had loaned him.
Encounters of the third kind,
I thought, and for some reason I had to laugh.

The next day, I had no reason to laugh. That was the day I found the dead pike in my room.

It had probably been dead for a few days already, at least judging from the smell. Its long body had been torn open and the guts were strewn across my floor. The fish’s mouth with its pointy teeth seemed to be twisted into an evil grin.

I ran down the stairs to get my mother. She was as horrified as I was.

“Peeew, is that a stench!” she groaned and pulled the tail of her shirt over her face as she stared at the remains of the fish in disgust. There was concern in her voice as she asked, “Are you having trouble with the kids at your new school, sweetheart? Is there anyone you think might do something horrendous like this?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t have any enemies, if that’s what you mean.” That sentence sounded like something that had wandered out of a mobster movie and into our lives. It scared us both.

“Someone probably threw the fish through the open window,” my mother murmured. “Don’t worry about it, Mia. I’m sure it’s nothing but a stupid stunt pulled by some country bumpkins.” It was clear to me that she didn’t quite believe what she was saying.

I didn’t, either.

The dead fish was a warning, I was sure of that. And I also knew exactly where the warning came from. But what had I done to draw the attention of the shadow that was lurking around the Stonebrooks’ house?

“It really
has
to be a prank, doesn’t it?” My mother studied me carefully.

For a moment, I considered telling her about the fish cadavers in the neighbors’ yard, and the footprints between the rows of vegetables in their garden. But the Stonebrooks apparently hadn’t thought it necessary to inform the police yet. What good would that have done? At most, they could have filed a complaint against unknown persons. After all, there was no evidence. Nothing but a few dead fish.

I nodded weakly. “Yeah, Mom. It’s definitely just a dumb prank.”

It took me hours to clean my room. The stench of decay hung stubbornly between the walls, clung to the clothes in my closet.

But that wasn’t all. It was little things. My hairbrush lay in a different place. Some of my CDs were scratched and only played shrill, dissonant melodies that hurt my ears.

Two of the strings on my cello were broken. I held my instrument in my arms for a long time and stroked the smooth, red-brown wood to soothe my nerves.

Nothing truly terrible had happened. The strings were easily replaced. Maybe I was slowly getting paranoid? It could just be a series of coincidences.

But deep inside I knew that someone had secretly been in my room. I could feel it. A presence was like a blight that defiled everything. My white walls were contaminated, as if they had become murky. The shadows from the branches of the cherry tree flitting across them seemed threatening now.