The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales Read Free Page A

like noise through my body. I can’t explain it, but these two amateurs playing sloppy chords was the scariest thing I’d ever heard.  
    I backed out of the kitchen and into a hallway off the main room. They never looked up. A trio of girls, NYU students or wanna-bes were high-stepping down the hall banging pots and pans with wooden sticks. An old lady in a cocktail dress grabbed me by the wrists, forcing me to dance with her.  
    “Which way do you see it?” she implored. “Infinitely expanding, or someday collapsing back from a lack of force, to just become another super black hole to explode and start again?” 
    “What?” 
    “The universe! The universe! We’re all tracing the steps of this dance, we just don’t know which one.” 
    “Infinitely expanding,” one of the girls said, with tears in her eyes. “I just know it.” 
    I saw an open door and stairs leading down at the end of the hall. I broke the old woman’s grasp and dashed down the stairs. 
    Batik tapestries covered crumbling brick walls. Brown water stains blended into the crude diagrams of the solar system drawn in black magic marker over the batik’s yellow and orange designs. Light filtered in through dirty cellar windows onto the forty-plus musicians sitting on folding chairs playing their hearts out.  
    Jack was there, crammed in between Roger and a trumpet player, strumming his old Ovation with the absent look in his eye I knew so well. The look that told me he’d been struggling to catch the groove and had finally locked in. His shaggy hair was a bit longer and his boyish face covered in stubble, but it was him all right. I loved him like a brother, and musical moments, like the one I knew he was having now, (fleeting glimpses of gentle true spirit, he had once said), were what we lived for. And yet I had come to bring him away. 
    A heavy reek of sweat and old guitar strings, spit and valve lubricant oil hung in the air like ozone. I could feel in my bones, as sure as the ringing when Jack and I locked pitch while harmonizing, that something was brewing here, something was being birthed in the music. I wanted to join in, get behind a piano and add the fat syncopated chords that the song was just crying out for. They belonged with Jack’s guitar part which, along with the drum and bass, was weaving a basket, tightly wrapping around the snaking cadences blaring from the mad cacophony of horns.  
    Then the player next to Jack trembled and dropped his horn. I saw the whites of his rolled up eyes as he slumped forward. In the seat behind him sat a sax player, dead and rotting, his horn still hanging around his neck. Whatever it was that I had heard in the music was gone. I dashed across the room. Song or no song, I was getting Jack out of here, now. 
    I pictured my hand closing around Jack’s wrist. I pictured myself yanking him out of that chair, pulling him across the room, up the stairs and out of this mad place, but I didn’t actually do any of these things. I couldn’t move. 
    The music went on. Dust circled like planetary rings. Jack was locked in the groove. The cadences and circling phrases deepened, widened. In my mind’s eye I pictured two serpents entwined in the double helix shape of infinity. The song was calling out for a piano part to bridge all these parts together. 
    “Noah Sol, join us,” Roger said, his voice pitched to carry over the music. “Your spirit is in this place.” 
    There was an old piano against the wall. I could sit there for a moment. Play a few chords just to see what they sounded like and then I could do whatever it was I had come to do.  
    I sat at the bench and stretched my hands across the keys, let them hover there waiting to catch the downbeat, to come in. My hands tingled, like they had been asleep and were now waking up. I thought of Noah Sol, asleep at this very piano, groggily waking up to the jamming refrains of his beloved band. 
    My hands were on the keys. A big fat chord,