"I shall leave you to yourself now," said Farber, stepping down.

He strode to the door, pulled it open, then slowly turned and faced me again. "I think, Bancroft," he said softly, "I think you will agree that the improvements I have added are very much worthwhile."

Moments dragged by. As before, that same sense of uneasiness, which seemed to fill the room whenever I was in the piano's presence, stole over me. Mingled with it now was a curious impression that the pulsations of the liquid in the gla.s.s tube were following the rhythmic cadence of a human heart.

But suddenly I roused myself, and tried to guide my thoughts to the opening chords of my Sonata in B Flat Minor.

The instrument was changed, eh? Well, I would operate it once more, and then I would tell Farber I was through with the thing.

Abruptly, as the first strains of my sonata flashed upon my brain, the piano up on the shelf quivered and broke out into the familiar sounds. I leaned forward in my chair, that queer exhilaration rushing over me.

But something was wrong.

I sensed it, felt it with every nerve of my body. Something like an impalpable miasma was rising from the scarlet instrument and contamination the air about me.

It happened without warning! For a few bars the midget piano followed my thought waves and played the sonata note for note exactly as I had composed it. Then suddenly it lapsed into silence. There was an instant's hesitation. And then with a leap downward the keys burst forth into a crash of discord. The piano began again, swung wildly into the middle of my sonata, and I stiffened in horror.

It was my sonata, yes. It was my own composition, the work which I knew to be my masterpiece, and the chords were manipulated by my own brain. But oh, how changed, how different! They were rotten with malignity; they were obscene with basic evil. Like a screech from the grave they crashed into sound, searing their way into my eardrums in grinding cacophony. My sonata, which had once been an idyllic interpretation of a peaceful sea, now shrieked at me a body of despair, a dirge of horror. Quivering, vibrating, the piano pounded insane harmony, defiling the composition with music of the d.a.m.ned.

It was diabolicala"that music, befouled, sullied by every repulsive sound from the depths, played in a pitch insufferable to the human organism.

And as I sat there, the painted notes on the frescoed walls seemed to reel before my eyes in baccha.n.a.lian accompa niment. The mounted mandolins and lutes cried out in an obbligato of sympathetic vibration. On and on through the second and third movements the piano raced, faster and faster as though drunk with its power.

Trained musician though I am, with years of experience in searching through all the intricate combinations known to the laws of harmony, I was hearing now for the first time a melody from an unknown register, from unexplored octaves in black.

The third movement ended in the climax of the composition. It was here that the sonata pounded into a dramatic crescendo of booming chords, descriptive of storm waves lashing the Irish coast. And it was here that the midget piano suddenly crashed out in demoniac fury.

An instant I stood ita"no longer. Then with a wild cry I was out of that chair and lunging for the door.

Blindly through the gloom of the outer hall I ran.

I reached the door, leaped down the steps to the side walk. There I halted, trembling. My heart was pounding, my ears throbbing. And then, as the silence of the deserted street gathered to soothe me, I turned and began to walk slowly toward the Strand. But from behind, from the huge dark house to the rear, a sound swept through the night air to follow me. It was a laugh filled with mockery.

I spent the next day combing London once more in a det ermined search for Martha. I wandered through Limehouse; I visited filthy grogshops and sailors' hangouts, engaging in conversation all who were willing to talk. And I beseeched Scotland Yard to continue their hunt.

Nightfall found me plodding wearily along Ess.e.x Street, despondent after having run down the last vague rumor to a futile end. A cabdriver had reported he had driven two women, who he vaguely thought answered the description to an address somewhere in this district. But just where, he had forgotten, and the scant information was of little value.

The fog was rolling in from the river again, thick and moist. And the darkness behind it hung close upon the yellow glare of the street lamps like a curtain.

At first I walked aimlessly. But gradually there came the impression that my steps were not altogether haphazard.

I was entering a part of the city I seldom frequented.

Strangely enough, as I stopped to consider it, a distinct urge that I continue stole over me.

I was on Milford Lane, and the black bulk brooding there just ahead I recognized as number 94, the house of Wilson Farber. I shuddered as I recalled the wild events which had sent me running down those steps the night before.

There was something strangely magnet about that dark building, something that drew me toward its portals and at the same time seemed to warn me away. And then . . .

A sound emerged from somewhere in the depths of that house, a sound that penetrated the silence of the street like a muted tocsin. It was a woman's scream. And distorted though it was, I knew that voice!

With a cry I leaped up those steps, wrenched open the door and plunged into the blackness of the inner corridor.

The way before me was steeped in silence, sounding only to my footsteps.

At the far end of the hall I came upon that door leading to the music room. A pencil of light filtered under the sill, but within was dead quiet. I waited an instant, listening. Then I grasped the k.n.o.b and pushed the door open.

The sight that met my eyes flung me backward.

The room was dazzling in its brilliance. Farber was there, bending over the lighted operating table, stretched out as in death, lay the figure of Martha Fleming!

Exactly what happened after that I cannot be sure. I remember standing there framed in the doorway, staring at Farber, who was still unaware of my presence. I remember growing suddenly sick as I saw him unfasten her dress at the throat and, bending down, mumble some words of incantation.

Then I lunged forward, leaped upon the man and struck him with every ounce of strength I could call to arm.

It was a tiger that whipped around to face me. Farber's face was contorted into a mask of rage and hate.

"So you've come, Bancroft?" he said. "Well, I expected you. Even a fool will blunder into the truth, and you had plenty of time. Had you arrived a few moments later you would have missed a very rare operation."

I seized him by the arm. "If you have harmed that girl, I'lla""

"She is in a state of hypnotic trance," he said. "But in a few moments she will be dead. I shall take her soul anda""

With a crashing blow to his jaw I closed in. Back and forth across the floor of that fantastic room we struggled, pounding each other mercilessly. There was power and physical strength in those gaunt arms, and in a moment I realized I had more than met my match.

We crashed to the floor and rolled over and over. His knee lashed out into my abdomen. And then all at once I grew faint. One of those hands seized my wrist and was slowly twisting my arm backward to the breaking point.

With a jerk he raised me from the floor higher and higher until I lay squirming in his hands two feet over his head. Then his arms shot forward, and I felt myself catapulted into s.p.a.ce. The wall leaped to meet me; my head seemed to split open with a dull roar. A wall of flame and dancing lights broiled in my vision, and I sank into a cloud of oblivion.

I was conscious that but a few minutes had elapsed when I opened my eyes. My temple throbbed, and as I struggled to rise I found that my hands and feet had been tightly lashed behind me. Two feet away stood Farber, swaying sardonically on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet.

"I have delayed the operation for your sake, Bancroft," he said. "I knew you wouldn't have wanted to miss it."

"In G.o.d's name," I cried, "what are you going to do?"

He stared at me silently a moment, then turned and pointed high up on the wall at his right. There, on the overhanging shelf, was the midget piano.

"The piano, Bancroft," he said. "I'm going to make my dream of ten years come true. I am going to do something no man has done before. As it stands the instrument will receive your musical thought waves and transpose them into the actual sound. But I want it to do more than that. I want to make it compose .

. . create. . . play music of its own making without anyone's help."

"You're mad!"

He shrugged. "Madness? It is only a relative state.

Perhaps I am mad. But if I am, so were the old alchemists of the Middle Ages. Have you ever studied alchemy, Bancroft?

The learning of those sorcerers is a lost art. They made hold out of lead, and the one necessary essence of their mixture was the soul of a young maiden.

"It is obvious no cold mechanical thing could create music. No, it must be an object of warmth; must have a woman's soul. And more than that, the soul of one who has lived a life of music. Are you following me, Bancroft?

Martha Fleming is such a woman."

He removed his coat and began to roll back his sleeves.

"When I lured her here by telling her you were taken suddenly ill in my apartment, I did not expect the Negro maid to come along. But Kari was a most interesting person. I found to my surprise that she was an obea woman from the West Indies. Obia"an admirable system of sorcery, Bancroft. The civilized world would do well to study it. I thus had two totally different yet ideal subjects for my experiment. I tried the native girl first."

"You meana""

"I mean that while Kari was not musically trained, her occult background made her worthy of the experiment. You perhaps noticed last night her heart pulsing in the gla.s.s tube in the piano. Shea""

"You murdered her!"

"In the interests of science," he said. "The piano still would not compose, but it was no longer a cold, inani mate thing. The powers of obi had been woven into it. It was that that rose up and colored your sonata last night."

He stepped across to the operating table and adjusted carefully the powerful light suspended over it.

A sense of utter helplessness swept over me. Motion less, she lay there on the operating table, face white under the glaring light.

Farber left the operating table now and moved toward the farther wall. My eyes never left him. Directly under the shelf that held the midget piano was a built-in wall cabinet, and opening the door, the bearded man drew forth a white enameled tray.

As if measured into focus, a single object took form in my visiona"the midget piano up on the shelf.

There was that d.a.m.nable creation that had thrown me into this well of terror. There it stood, tuned to my thought wave as on the night before.

All my loathing and hatred for it rose up within me.

Then suddenly it happened! As I gazed with utter abhorrence upon it, as my concentration increased a thou sandfold, the little bulb within the gla.s.s panel flared into orange brilliancy. The ivory keys trembled, and an electric shock swept through me from head to foot. An invisible bond seemed to connect my brain with that piano.

And somehow I understood. It was not music that was sweeping from my mind to the inner vitals of that instrument. It was hate! Hatea"and the piano was reacting to it in a manner which Farber had never dared dream was within its scope. Hatea"a thought wave a thousand times more potent than any musical fancy.

Up there on the shelf the keys were trembling violently.

Abruptly they came to a standstill. Then, with a soul rending thunder of discord, those keys surged downward in unison. The piano shook and swayed, and the strings under the open sound-top screeched forth a chord.

Farber, at the wall cabinet directly beneath, stared with astonishment.

The tray of knives slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor.

The chord pa.s.sed on, and there came now from somewhere within the piano's sides a low, humming sound, as of a distant electric motor.

Louder and louder, growing into a subdued roar, it filled the room. The ivory keys began again, quivered in rotation down the octaves. Back and forth in trembling vibration the instrument swayed, rocked on its hard-rubber base.

And thena"a single repercussion burst forth from the bowels of that piano. To the edge of the shelf the piano topped, hung there, the strings screeching that symphony of horror.

Farber came to life too late. With one mad lunge he sought to throw himself out of the instrument's reach.

The piano fell. Straight toward that upturned bearded face it hurtleda"struck with a sickening thud.

There was a single shriek of agony, a rending of wood and broken bone, and I turned my eyes away.

It is Martha, not I, who remembers the happenings of the next few moments. The death of Farber released her from her hypnotic trance. She came to her senses slowly, looked about her as if awakening from some wild dream, and then stumbled from the operating table. It was she who released me from my bonds. Then we pa.s.sed out the door and through the black corridor to the street. I looked back when I reached the walk.

There was that huge, disproportionate building with the three bulging colonnades rising to form a claw of granite before the black facade. There were the dark, eyelike windows staring sullenly.

I pa.s.sed my arm around Martha, and led her gently toward the Strand.

SLIPPAGE.

by Michael P. Kube-McDowell.

It did not begin as a time of madness.

Richard Hall tossed his rain-dampened ski cap into the nearest chair and ran his fingers back through his thinning hair. "Elaine?" he called.

She appeared at the bedroom door and moved to hug him.

"You look frazzled."

"Am," he said, face buried in her hair. "Fought half the morning with a dimwit from Human Resources who tried to tell me I don't know my Social Security number. Took the IRS's word over mine. Ha!"

"Take a short loving recharge," she invited.

"Glad to," he said, tightening his embrace.

"That's enough," she said, and pushed him back. "Choose: Start dinner or get the mail in. My hands were full."

"Mail, thank you." He took the key from her hand and the stairs to the lobby, returning with six pieces of junk mail- one promising "s.e.xually Oriented Advertis.e.m.e.nts," one bill, a letter from Elaine's mom, and a tattered copy of the Cross Creek Weekly Chronicle. Cross Creek, which was every bit as small as its name implied, had been Hall's birthplace and home for seventeen years. His mother still lived there, and the subscription was an annual gift from her, about which he had never had the courage to say, "Please don't bother." The paper came average of three weeks late, by the cheapest cla.s.s of mail, and the high point of it was frequently a list of where townspeople had gone on vacation or the weights of the 4-H sheep.

Settling back on the sofa and kicking off his shoes, Hall ripped out the staples and turned to the front page. He immediately frowned, and read quickly.

"Elaine?" he called. "Listen to this."

"If it's the balance on the Total Charge bill, I'd rather not hear it," she called back.

"Noa"something in the Chronicle. They're closing my old high school."

"Why?" Elaine appeared, bringing him a cold soft drink.

"According to this, the school board decided that they could get better value sending the students over to the new consolidated high school in Atlasburg. Cross Creek High School was too run-down and had too few students. So the last day of cla.s.ses will be"a"Hall looked at his watcha""tomorrow.

Oha"and they're going to hold an all-cla.s.s reunion as a kind of going away party."