I set my lantern against my chest and began to play it ferociously, focusing everything I’d learned about Handel and his unfinishedMessiahinto the light, trying to wrap it all around the composer’s great scar. Brassy tones blared as the light blazed inside him and penetrated that deepest part of his shadow.
The wraith came to a sudden stop before me and stood, looking down, like a cloud of darkness in the shape of a giant man. I pulled one last stroke, peered into his shadow, and Illumination opened his Rupture to me . . .
. . . handing his father his recorder, which the man snaps before forbidding Handel from visiting any friend’s home where music might be heard . . .
. . . softly playing a sonata by candlelight on a spinet he’ d secreted into the attic on his tenth birthday, and trying to muffle the sound so it wouldn’t wake his family . . .
. . . his father dragging him away from music school across a snowy courtyard to the admission office for civic law . . .
. . . stooping over his father’s grave, eye patches over both eyes, an assistant guiding his old, trembling hand to place a copy ofMessiahon the man’s headstone . . .
I thought I understood now.
Handel was trying to getMessiahright to prove himself to his father. He might not think it was his best music, but something inside him seemed to acknowledge that it might be his only chance at a legacy that would prove his father wrong about Handel’s pursuit of music.
The wraith seemed suddenly aware of my peering and reared up, like it meant to drape me in its folds again. If it succeeded, I didn’t believe I’d get away a second time.
I needed to shine it all back at him in a new light—soften him, so that he could be turned, renew the ward.
So, I peered into his Rupture again, but this time I also sang a variation of Handel’s gleaming notes. I first voiced his “Moonlight Sonata” pattern quiet and low, to capture the fragile ache of the boy he’d been. Once I had the sound of his darkest memories, I began to brighten the song, introducing major-seven broken-chord melodies and singing pictures of crowded churches, faces flush with exhilaration, people dressed in their Christmas finest crying with joy.
The wraith’s Rupture brightened, too, and it stopped as though listening. After a few moments, into the silence it whispered, “Imperfekt,” in a vague German accent. Then its Rupture began to darken again, closing me out. The wispy folds of its long coat and ribbons of black smoke billowed up, its whisper rising to a full-throated scream.
My song faltered. My voice wasn’t enough to alter Handel’s feeling of abandonment and failure. Time seemed to stop, and I felt like the boy in the window again—like I could fight another losing battle on my own, or run away.
But there is always a third option.
And it was standing all around me. Lady, Church, and Chuey to my left. Cassius and Lakshmi to my right. Kincaid with his rods on the other side of the wraith.
These people didn’t have to be here. But theywerehere, at the bottom of history, facing down all hell with me. Just the way a family would. What’s more, they were people from so many different places, times, and paths. All of whom, I was betting, knew Handel’s famous song.
I signaled my friends to be ready and quickly returned to the dark melody of Handel’s deep wound. This time, though, I wove it forward toward his great Hallelujah chorus—the one he’d never truly finished—but singing his latest version, penned in his attic office on the Renaissance Stratum.
The wraith leveled its head at me. “Cease this!” The clouds of him roiled, thin veins of crimson and gold shooting through his billowing form like lightning. Waves of dense, freezing air rolled over me.
I spread my feet and kept at it.
There was no great ensemble to accompany the song, no expectant crowd, no performers or venues or librettists with their demands for change upon Handel’s musical heart. There was just me, giving simple voice to a refrain he’d ached for centuries to get right.
Then I gestured to my friends to join me. Chuey came in without hesitation, his terrible voice somehow lending the song authenticity.
Handel turned toward my oldest friend. “Who sings this?” “A friend from the world above,” I said. “Mexico, no less.”
Cassius came in next. He sang an octave down, giving our tune the strength of his war cry.
“From Gaul and Germania,” I added. “Centuries before you even wrote the music.”
Then Church and Lady joined in, broadening the song with tenor and alto melodies. Though unpracticed, their voices rang out with love for the music.
“Shecared for fallen soldiers, and tended London foundlings in your own time,” I told the wraith. “Andheis a man of intellect and compassion from the era of Earth’s great wars.”
Kincaid began to sing, too, coming in with the full-chested sound of an archangel. The wraith spun to look at him.
“A priest,” I said, “and caretaker in the abbey where you’re buried in the world above.”
Lakshmi sang last, almost too quiet to hear, until I realized her notes were a soft high soprano, lilting and lovely. The beauty of it like seeing a child’s first smile.
“And this voice belongs to a raptorial,” I told him, “born in Calcutta, and sworn to maintain Precedent Law above all else. Yet here she is, singing your song . . .”
