“Actually, man, I think your instincts are spot on.” I waved him in. He smiled and shuffled past me.
I pulled my blanket and pillow off the couch and threw them aside so we could sit down. Jimmy sat, opened his case, and fetched out his Martin 00-17—his one extravagance. His shadow fell on the sunlit square of the couch, soft edges around a cloud-grey shimmer. Vestige. It took me a few seconds to get my head around it.
Jimmy may listen to old-school punk, but the gleam notes of his shadow had the unrushed lilting quality of a Bing Crosby tune. His spots had their own unique placement, too. And what I’d always thought were handyman sweatbands on his wrists were actually bindings.
It was beginning to seem like nearly all my friends were, in a way, not really here. Not like I thought, anyway. I grabbed my guitar and sat at the other end of the couch.
As I positioned my Gibson—a nicked-up acoustic I’d had since I was thirteen—Jimmy hunched over his beautiful Martin and stared at the floor. He was usually chomping at the bit to play. Not today.
“Help me write a song,” I said.
Jimmy’s old eyes lit up. “Brilliant, w-what shall we write about?”
“I’m stuck on a verse,” I said. “Play along, and when we get there, I’ll cue you. Just riff on something from your life. Something you think about when it snows. That sort of thing.”
I showed him the chord progression, and we began. Almost immediately, “They Always Go Away” was changed. I picked over the chords as Jimmy strummed an upbeat rhythm. I’d never tried it like that.
I started to sing, and the stabbing in my head and clench in my gut began to ease. I relaxed into the song, and when the third verse came, the one about Mama, I caught Jimmy’s eyes and signaled for him to take over.
He didn’t skip a beat. In a lilting tenor—a lot like the crooners of the forties—he began to tell a story about a soap box derby and a car he’d made with a couple of his buddies named Nesbit and Hollings. There was a racing cap and the number 001, which they thought would make it fast. And their parents were there,looking on with pride under a summer sun as their soap box car sped toward the checkered pennant.
I’m not sure he sang the exact words, but I saw snow cones, smelled funnel cakes, and heard the laughter and cheers of a city finally putting the war behind them. It was bright damn happy. And Jimmy grinned all through it like it was the secret of his heart, like it made him impervious to troubles and doubt. Good old Jimmy had taken up that Martin, and where I’d expected a dirge—something drafting off Henry’s disappearance—my friend had used his music to respond to the loss in a whole different way.
I smiled and made a mental note:Memory isn’t always about regret.
This feeling, though. This was why I wanted a life in music—to share these sounds and stories with people. I wanted it so bad I ached. Not even the events of the past twenty-four hours had changed that.
Jimmy’s lesson was short. On his way out, he paused at the door and gripped my hand. “Thank you, Jack.”
“You did the cool part.” “No, sir,” he said.
He told me I had a way of helping friends see things. I don’t know if it’s true. We both felt the same way about Henry. And Jimmy had done the singing and the thinking. I’d just plucked the old Gibson. But I told
him I felt a little better, too, and invited him back for another jam the following day if he was up to it.
In his shadow, thrown across my doorjamb, I noticed a pattern glowing in the shape of a small circle with a cross through it, like the music symbol for coda—which meant new part or new music. It was another odd thing in a growing list of odd things that I couldn’t explain. After he left, I tried calling Henry again. Nothing. Whatever was going down, I hoped hewas just lying low for a while. For the moment, the anxiety inside me had subsided, and I turned my focus to the books
Church had sent me home with last night.
They sat in a neat pile next to other piles of books I had on loan from the library: history and philosophy—for personal interest and songwriting material—and some volumes on composing from Andrew Lloyd Webber, James MacMillan, and Richard Wagner, as well as a few film scores. Plus a dozen or so novels. Songwriting was storytelling, so reading decent books helped with narrative technique. I went through four or five a month. New stuff, and classics, too—Tolkien, Lehane, Dickens, Shakespeare. I’d found words had a kind of music of their own. The sunlight had disappeared into the evening, so I switched on my one lamp—a shaded, bronzed boot that had once belonged to Lemmy of Motörhead. Then I grabbed the book on top of the stack Church had given me and turned to the title page:The Precedent: Known and Ratified Laws for the Governance of Thanaturgic Actions and Disputes.
Dense reading, no doubt.
I set the book aside and scanned the next few:Calling, Binding, and Dismissing Semblances;Catalysts: The Tools of the Thanatist; andThe Effects of Common Lantern-Bow Strokes. There were a few others, as well as a pocket-sized book entitledThe New Thanatist’s Quick Reference Field Manual. Its cover and pages were coated in some kind of resin.
At the bottom of the pile was Henry’s journal. For a few moments I just sat there with it in my hands. Holding it helped me feel closer to him somehow. But I wasn’t sure I should read it. That felt like something you do after a death. Henry was still out there. That’s what I chose to believe, anyway. Church had probably included it because it might help us find our friend. But I didn’t feel ready to hear Henry’s private thoughts. Seemed likea violation of trust. And once I’d read those things . . . well, that was a gateway, too, of sorts.
So, I set the journal aside and dove into the others, scanning parts, skipping others, and sometimes reading whole chapters.
As a kid, I’d begun humming when I read. Not loud. More like the sotto voce in Mozart’sRequiem. It was an undertone onlyIcould hear. But when I did it, I could finish a book in half the time it took Chuey—and Chuey read tech manuals the way some folks read comic books—plus it gave me an echoic memory. Like eidetic, but with auditory cues. My recall on the stuff I read while humming was pretty damn good. I think I started doing it in second grade after abandoning piano lessons—my teacher got fed up with me because I’d scan a piece of sheet music once or twice while painfully humming out the notes and then wouldn’t need or use the sheet music anymore. Not that I could play a piece perfectly afterward, but I sort of had it in my fingers at that point.
So things in these books Church had sent over began to stick—like the spots I could see in a person’s shadow. They were scars on the soul known as “occlusions.” Some resulted from what Lady had called “wounds of the heart,” but others were known as “crimes against the soul.” This was all in a ledger entitledShadowmancy: Known Fragments. Apparently Shadowmancy was a lost art, with only a few extant writings.
I finished that one—fascinating stuff about people’s shadows and how to see and manipulate them—then set it next to Henry’s journal, which I picked up again. I wanted to read it. Hear the man’s voice in my head. But sometimes a person’s secrets are better left alone—they can change how you think about them. So, I put the journal back down and decided to tackle the book on Precedent Law—the rules that governed this new world I’d been reborn to.
After a few hours, I’d finished that book, too. I’d have to reread it—dense reading, indeed. I placed it in the finished pile and again picked up Henry’s journal, gently caressing the cover. Then once again set it aside.
The third book was short, but I read it cover to cover—The History and Architecture of Thanaturgy. There were three primary branches, known as drycraefts. They boiled down to: the redistribution of life forces (elanothalia), communing with the dead (xenoglossia), and the manipulation of once-living matter (classical necromancia). Some of the guys in the Hounds played RPGs, which made the third branch all sound like evil undead stuff. But it turned out—in thanatist circles—the term necromancer had evolved into a bit of a slur by the time the Renaissance hit, due to a lot of bad behavior in cemeteries. It came back into fashion in the Victorian age—such was the drift of language—but still only described thanatists who focused on the one drycraeft. In the Strata, thanatists were even sometimes called cunning folk. But it was all more than just reanimating a corpse.
