This is a story that has lived on my hard drive for almost two years. It’s not terribly deep but it was very fun to write and explores some ideas I’ve wanted to play with for a long time. I’m not sure we’re coming back to Jack and Penny any time soon but I hope you enjoy this brief adventure anyways.
The wind whistled by at a high, sour F-sharp its breathy, mocking tone accompanied by the revving percussion of his motorcycle engine. It was all Jack heard as he fell. Chunks of the Syracuse 105 tumbled into the abyss all about him, eerily silent for such heavy things. One minute he’d been driving along, trying to get to his gig at The Wreck on time, the next he was free falling. Jack had always expected he’d die of something fun, like booze or women. It was the way of all great musicians.
On the other hand, falling to his death after a bridge collapsed under him at least had the appeal of novelty. It would’ve been nice to get a little famous before leaving stage. Sample some of that booze, dance with a few of those women, write some swingers about it all. Swing was his genre, after all, not jazz. The high and mighty of Ithaca far preferred jazz, though, and Jack Antixerxes had always prided himself on picking out a tune and running with it.
The shush of falling water filled his ears. For the first time since his bike had tumbled off the end of the collapsing causeway Jack pried his eyes open. It was taking a long time to hit the ocean’s surface and now he could see why. An enormous sinkhole had opened in the bay and the surf, the bridge and all the vehicles once on that bridge were tumbling further down into the belly of the earth. Jack and his bike were already past the usual bottom of Syracuse Bay with no visible endpoint to their drop.
Stranger still, a glance behind told him the hole he’d just tumbled through was getting smaller, not larger in spite of the water rushing in. A dim memory of the news reporting collapsing shorelines and freak mudslides a few times in the last couple of months surfaced in Jack’s mind. He hadn’t given it much thought at the time. Who was playing in what bars or dance halls was far more interesting. Now he wished he’d payed more attention, perhaps there had been some clue to surviving his predicament there. Or not. It was really too late to know for sure.
When Jack realized he could finally see the ground rising up below it banished that train of thought from his mind. He’d always hoped the boys from the band would play his funeral. Turned out his last song was the roar of a motorcycle, the rush of water and the taunting whistle of the wind. Not what he’d hoped for but not terrible, either. Better than some tunes he’d heard.
Still, it was one song he wasn’t ready to vibe with just yet. He’d tucked his knees in a last ditch effort to roll with the impact, fighting the confines of a suit jacket that didn’t have much room to give, when a rumbling arpeggio rose up out of the dark below. Two beats later a sharp, high countermelody answered it. The air around the falling derbies thrummed with power and dissonance then Jack felt his momentum slow. His bike shot past, narrowly missing his skull, then it slowed too and for a brief, stomach turning moment everything hung in the air as if weightless. The ground was only four or five feet below. The motorcycle was practically standing upright on its front tire and, with no clear idea of what in Hades name was going on, Jack decided the best thing to do was unhook the bungee cords holding his case down and pull it off the back of his bike.
He’d just got his arms around it when everything remembered it was supposed to be falling. Jack landed with a heavy thud and rolled to one side to avoid his bike toppling over on top of him. The roll turned into a frantic sprint as he tried to outrun the waves of water, rubble and metal still falling. He saw one sedan crushed between blocks of cement and the cave floor. A double semi truck was its own undoing, crushing the driver’s cab under the weight of whatever cargo it had been hauling. At least one other car landed upside down.
Jack almost didn’t make it himself. Between the ankle deep water already on the ground and the sheets of extra liquid that were still falling it was hard enough to keep his feet. Add in the concrete, cars and rocks and it was a miracle he wasn’t killed outright. He might not have made it if the high harmonies he’d heard a moment ago hadn’t reasserted themselves. Once again his stomach flip-flopped and once again gravity turned strange. His feet nearly pulled clear off the ground as he ran but the rapid descent of the deadly rain turned to a lazy drizzle and Jack managed to get clear of the worst of it before stumbling and loosing all grip on the rock below.
The new melody cut out and he fell flat for the second time in the last minute. At least this time he managed to protect his case with his body. As things stood he worried the previous fall was going to leave a permanent dent in his instrument.
It was a small price to pay. After all, he was alive.
Jack pulled himself up into something like a sitting position and stared out at a football field’s worth of rubble and smashed cars. Far above, the last rays of afternoon light from Syracuse Bay vanished. Suddenly the only light in the cavern came from small burning oil slicks released by wrecked cars, glinting on stray bits of metal and ocean water.
Or was it? Jack dragged himself to his feet, staring into the dark just beyond the debris. It looked like something out there was flickering like a giant bonfire. He whispered, “Charon? That you?”
A hand grabbed his elbow in a vice-like grip. Jack jumped with an inarticulate yell. The hand didn’t let go but instead pulled him down into a crouch then another hand slapped over his mouth, cutting him off. Which was just as well, D-Major wasn’t really his key. Not for singing, anyway.
“Shhh.” As Jack’s eyes adjusted to the dimmer light he made out the shape of a woman who was holding a finger up and making the world’s universally acknowledged ‘be quiet’ gesture. So it wasn’t Charon, at least. When he nodded she moved her hand off his mouth and softly said, “Hesiod.”
“Jack.” She’d let go of his elbow to shush him so he patted his chest to make it clear he meant himself. “What’s going on?”
She shook her head in frustration and pointed out over the wreckage to a faint light approaching them. Jack’s eyes, still adjusting from the bright Syracuse sun, struggled to work out what it was. After a moment he decided it was a torch held overhead of a large, muscular looking man who was picking over the debris. Jack had a moment of vertigo as he tried to work out why that was off. Then he realized the man was in the process of flipping a big SUV up off its side.
The vehicle was about as long as one of the creature’s arms. That made it at least twenty five feet tall. Someone inside was screaming but that stopped once the giant ripped a door off and dragged the man out by the arm. Then it shifted its grip and bashed the man’s skull against the ground and the screaming cut off. Jack felt bile rise in his throat. When the creature raised the corpse up to its mouth and tore a limb off in its teeth Jack retched and ejected the early dinner he’d eaten before leaving his apartment.
“Hesiod mustn’t catch us,” the woman hissed, grabbing his arm again and pulling him away from the puddle of vomit while maintaining a low crouch. “Shhh.”
A last look over his shoulder as she dragged him away confirmed that Hesiod was still searching the wreckage of the cave-in even as he ate. In the flickering light of its massive torch Jack couldn’t be sure but he thought it had just one eye in the middle of its forehead. The grinding sound of its chewing seemed to fill the entire cavern. For once, not even Jack could pick out a tune from the noise. Then the creature let out a bellowing cry, something in a language that sounded vaguely like Athenian but so poorly spoken as to be gibberish.
“He sees us,” the girl snapped. “Just run.”
She suited actions to words and stood up, taking off in a dead sprint, and Jack did his best to keep up. He struggled for a moment until he realized he had to follow directly behind her. Somehow the rough terrain of the cavern didn’t hamper her footing and if he did his best to match her steps he found the path fairly smooth. The voice of the giant rose behind them in an eerie cadence. Now that he could place it Jack knew this creature was the source of the deep, rumbling song he’d heard when falling. The melody was much more monotonous than previous, less a climbing arpeggio and more a simple chord sung in a five note rotation. A low rumble created a percussive backing.
The strange woman slowed her pace a bit and took up another tune, breathier than the high pitched tunes from before but still recognizable as the same voice. The tempo of the rumble slowed, then stopped. She was clearly struggling to keep moving while singing but somehow she managed both. However a few seconds later they were forced to stop when they reached the wall of the cavern. A small opening in the wall, just large enough for Jack to push his head and one arm through, trembled in time with the conflicting songs. One moment it was closing itself off, the next opening wider. A dim light on the other side of the opening showed a tall but narrow tunnel winding off into the earth. Jack frowned. Clearly this was their escape route. Just as clearly the music was manipulating it somehow, just like the earlier song had obviously opened and closed the roof of the cavern earlier.
He had no idea how or why this was happening but Jack could vibe with it. The girl was frantically pushing at the sides of the hole, as if she could tilt the scales in her favor through sheer strength. Jack flipped his case open, took out his mouthpiece and attached it to his trombone. The key was G-Minor and the tempo was three/four time. Not ideal for swing but manageable.
Blow out the spit valve, work the slide, take a deep breath and away he went. First he just matched the girl’s song but dropped an octave. She dropped a bar in shock when the bone’s bright, brassy tone blared out and Jack realized he was playing full blast. Probably nerves. He adjusted down to half strength and added the swing, working the slide a little looser and bobbing the bell of the horn back and forth with the beat. Two bars later the opening in the cavern wall started opening again. As soon as it was wide enough the girl wormed her way through.
It took another fifteen seconds for the tunnel to open enough for Jack to get through with his trombone and, since he still wasn’t sure how this all worked, he wasn’t willing to stop playing it long enough to make his escape. It was a near thing, though. By the time Jack made it through the giant was close enough to clearly see its single glaring eye, matted red hair and wild beard in the flickering light of the torch it held overhead. Jack was expecting Hesiod to be an ugly brute but, except for his receding hairline, he was actually kind of handsome. He wore a ragged tunic made of a patchwork of fabric and a suit of scale armor that looked like it was assembled from scrap metal and car doors.
There was an army of other cyclopes marching along behind him. They were about as tall as Hesiod’s knees, larger than most people but still far smaller than the titanic creature they followed. Hesiod’s eye shifted slightly and Jack instinctively knew he’d been spotted. The giant made a gesture and the army with him burst into full chorus. The opening in the wall started to grind closed again and Jack quickly ducked further back, his shoulders scraping against the stone as it closed in.
The girl grabbed one elbow and pulled him deeper and deeper. She’d stopped singing and as soon as he was clear of the closing stone she pushed the bone’s mouthpiece away from his lips. With their music stopped and Hesiod’s blaring the tunnel mouth collapsed immediately. It didn’t stop there, either. Jack found himself once again running for his life, charging down a dimly lit corridor, trying to match the movements of the strange woman. Behind him the tunnel clamped down like a monstrous throat trying to force him into the belly of Gaia itself.
Jack wasn’t sure how long they ran but eventually the sound of grinding stone behind them stopped. All he could hear was the pounding of footsteps on stone and blood in his ears so he slowed to a stop, gasping for air. “Sorry, beautiful,” he wheezed. “I gotta rest for a few or that big guy will just eat me after my heart bursts.”
The woman didn’t really look like she was in any better shape. As soon as Jack spoke she also stopped and staggered back to him, chest heaving. It was quite distracting. “How…” She gulped down another lungful of air. “How did you know the song of the stone? I didn’t think any of the ancient songs were still known on the surface.”
“It wasn’t hard, the tune was pretty simple.” As his breathing stabilized Jack turned his attention to his bone, trying to figure out the best way to transport it. He’d left the carry strap in his case, which was still back in the big cavern, but the clip for it was still on his instrument. Jack grabbed the knot of his tie and pulled it off. “So simple I can’t believe that was all it took to move stone like magic. If we could do that in Syracuse someone would have figured it out by now.”
The girl pointed to a glowing seam in the rock of the tunnel wall that poured out dim, orangish light. “The Waymaker’s Veins no longer run all the way to the surface, the turn of the earth has cut them off. Without the power they bring the songs lack force.”
“Great.” His tie wasn’t long enough to create a comfortable sling for his trombone on its own but it supported enough of the weight he could hold it in one hand indefinitely. “So, I’m Jack.”
“You said that.”
“I was asking your name.”
“Penelope.” For the first time since he’d met her Jack had enough time to take a solid look at the woman. She wore a long, ragged piece of cloth wrapped around her waist in a loose skirt, tied down with a length of nylon rope. She’d tied pieces of tire rubber to her feet with more rags. The only thing she wore that looked like it was originally meant to be clothing was an oversized jacket with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Underneath it she’d wound more lengths of cloth around and across, using them to hold up a chest that probably would have required custom made support even if she lived on the surface. She was about six inches shorter than he was. In the orange light of the tunnel, her waist length hair looked like it was light brown. She wore it in a loose pony tail tied at the nape of her neck.
The strangest part of her appearance was the skin hugging gray glove that seemed to fit her right arm like a second skin. A strip of similar material covered her eyes. The gray was so neutral he’d mistaken it for shadows in the poor lighting of the cavern and it was still hard to pick out in the somewhat brighter light created by the veins.
Jack frowned. “Where are you from, Penny?”
“The surface, originally. When I was six I was brought down here in much the same way you were but most of the others on my bus were killed an eaten by Aresians like Hesiod.” She said it in a flat monotone that rushed by faster than they’d run from the cyclopes. “A couple of us were found by the T’ul first and they led us away to T’ultown but I’m the only one that was healthy enough to survive.”
Penny turned and started off down the tunnel again, her posture close and guarded but her pace fitted to their circumstances. With nowhere else to go, Jack tagged along, trying to pick which absurd thing she’d said to ask about first. Finally, he decided on, “Aresians? Like, creatures from Ares? The planet Ares?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if they teach it in kindergarten but Ithaca has landed automatons on Ares and there’s no life there.”
“Not anymore.”
“Sure. Okay, so there’s a bunch of Aresian cyclopes living under Syracuse.” Honestly, Jack wasn’t okay with that but he’d seen them himself so he’d have to go with the flow. “Why do they eat humans? We’re native to the third planet, not the fourth.”
“Because that’s what makes it possible for them to grow so large. Also, they hate us.”
More things he didn’t like to contemplate. He was debating whether to ask about T’uls or the nutritional value of the average person when Penelope abruptly dropped to a crouch and slipped out of the tunnel they’d been in so far. It opened out into another dim cavern, the extent of which was difficult to judge. Like the tunnel, it was lit by a pale, diffuse orange light from Waymaker’s Veins although, unlike in the cavern, the veins Jack could see were wide enough they could be sidewalks. He started to step out beside Penelope but she pulled him down into a crouch as well. “We need to cross open ground now. This is the riskiest part of the trip so try to stay low.”
“More Aresians?”
“And other things.” Satisfied with what she saw she motioned for Jack to follow her out into the new cavern. He was not prepared for what was out there. It was less a cavern and more a chasm, sloping down from the opening into the Stygian abyss far below. More surprising, the slope of the chasm they stood on was carved into terraces, each the depth of a football field, and each terrace was packed with buildings.
In the orange twilight of the veins it was hard to pick out anything particular. The city sprawled over the side of the chasm like a primordial serpent, the tops of the buildings half lit like scales. Wind quietly moaned through the abyss, a mournful, high E.
“Don’t listen to that,” Penelope said.
“Why not?”
“It’s not healthy.” That was all the explanation she offered before scrambling down the slope towards the first terrace.
Jack scuttled after, trying to keep his footing while juggling his instrument. Either marching band was further back than he’d thought or hustling through back halls and side stairs in old stadiums hadn’t actually prepared him to take a bone anywhere on Gaia like he’d once thought. “Pretty big place,” Jack mused. “Your T’ul must’ve been down her a long time.”
“Ever since the Waymakers finished their song,” Penelope replied. “This isn’t T’ultown, though. That’s deeper still, past the terraces, near the base of the chasm. No one lives here anymore.”
Jack stared at the massive city in dubious fashion. “Long way down.”
“I have a base camp I set up here after I picked up on Hesiod’s trail. It’s not far down the terrace in that direction.” She pointed off to the right to a part of the city that, if he squinted, looked like it was a little brighter than the rest. Or maybe that was his imagination.
Penelope set off along the rim of the chasm, picking her way across the rough terrain with her usual nimbleness. Once again, Jack did his best to keep up. “Couldn’t we use the streets? I can’t see in the dark as well as you can and we’d probably make better time on flat ground.”
“Maybe. But we’re better off not getting too close to the Central Gate.”
“Which is what? The way in and out of the city? Who built this place if not your T’ul, anyway?”
“Hard to say. The T’ul don’t know and they don’t like to come here on their own. The foundations could have been laid down by humans before the Waymakers came. Or the city could’ve been built by the Aresians, the Vish or any of the other peoples of the worlds that ring the sun.”
“Wait, there’s more than just Aresians on Earth? Since when?”
“Since as long as anyone down here remembers. Don’t listen.” She stepped into a flattened channel that led deeper into the city. Jack wasn’t sure what she meant until he followed her into the channel and the distant moaning that made up the chasm’s white noise rose to a powerful tone that seemed to fill the world.
Penelope hurried across the channel but Jack paused. Somewhere, deep in his gut, a new thought took root. There was a tune there and he had to play it. Then Penelope grabbed him and dragged him off the path. The urge passed. “What was that?”
“The Gate. It still remembers the last song of the Waymakers. That’s why I avoid it. So do most sane peoples down here, assuming they wish to stay sane.” She started forward again.
Jack stared back at the channel for a long moment. The sound was still drifting up from the city but the power it had a moment ago was gone. The feeling that a tune was there, however…
He hustled to catch up to his guide. “Listen, I know you’re the one who knows her way around down here and I don’t want to get eaten but do you think you could just explain all this to me from the beginning?”
Penelope sighed. “Fine. It would be easier back at camp but the short version goes like this. Sometime before history begins there were Gates between the rings of the sun. Humans, Aresians, Vish and others used these gates to travel from one ring to the next – planets, as we call them now. At first the gates could only be used when the planets were aligned. Then someone figured out how to power the gates so they could be used regardless of where a planet was.”
“Who was that?”
“Everyone says it was someone else. The Vish blame the Aresians, Aresians blame the Jad and so on. The one thing they all agree on is that humans didn’t change the Gates.”
“Why are they sure of that?”
“Because Earth is still a habitable world and humans were originally the weakest children of the Sun.” Penelope pointed towards the chasm. “To power the Gates when the rings were out of step it was necessary to harvest immense power from the heart of a world. But doing that cooled that ring and it slowly became uninhabitable. No one noticed for a time but, once it became clear the other worlds were dying, the peoples of those worlds made plans for survival. Or should I say, they all made the same plan.”
Jack nodded. “They came to Earth because we hadn’t changed our Gate to travel whenever we wanted. So our planet was still habitable. So a bunch of people came here from other planets and tried to take over? It must have been a bloodbath.”
“You’re half right. This one is safe.” Penelope stepped down into another channel then turned to follow it. For a brief second Jack hesitated, the memory of the last time still painfully fresh. However Penelope looked fine and he’d already lived through at least two things that should kill him that day. What could a third hurt?
He stepped into the channel and found that nothing changed. Except the light got a little brighter. One of the wide, orange veins rose up out of the ground in front of them and ran down the center of the channel until it turned into a road. “Nice place.”
“It may have been, when people lived here.” Penelope led him into the heart of the city. “There was a terrible war when the other children of the Sun came here and humanity was losing, badly. Things changed when the Waymakers opened the Gate.”
“More people? Where’d they come from, another solar system?”
“In a sense.” Penelope started rubbing at her left wrist absently, the strange fabric of her glove shining dully in the dim light. “The Waymakers came from Earth, but not the Earth we know. There are worlds in this same place but locked away on the other side of the horizon. Their rules are different but the world is the same. Do you understand?”
“You mean like a parallel reality? Alternate timeline? Something like that?”
“Something like it. The Waymakers sought to unify all of the Earths so that a man might walk the extent of it from the dawn of creation until the end of Eternity. Or so the T’ul say. There has never been a human civilization like them before and there never will be again. They took the Gates and powered them with the might of their will then traveled to all the rings of the Sun. They plundered the other planets to replenish all that Earth had lost and they smote the other children of the Sun until the Waymakers alone were undisputed masters of the rings.” A wan smile played across her lips. “The humans of our Earth believed they had been saved. Maybe they were. But the Waymakers had one inescapable flaw.”
“They flew too close to the sun,” Jack mused.
Penelope looked shocked. Even with her eyes covered by that strange band, which Jack guessed had something to do with her supernaturally good senses, it was still possible to read that expression. “They still tell the story up above?”
“I don’t know if Icarus was inspired by your Waymakers or not although his father certainly had a gift for building things.” Jack shrugged. “Either way, it’s a mistake that lots of people still make. I take it the Waymakers’ project of unifying Earths exposed them to something that brought them low?”
Penelope nodded glumly. “Eventually, although it took ages. The T’ul never told me what it was but eventually their hubris undermined them, their civilization crumbled and their Gates began to sing their last song. It took a century for it to finish but when it did the Gates changed. They’re not doorways to other Earths, or even the other rings anymore. Now, they sing the Waymaker’s last song and all who hear it join in until the Gates drag them away.”
It was a solemn image, made all the more distressing by the constant drone of the Gate in the distance. At some time in the forgotten past humanity had ruled the solar system and brought the people of all nine planets to heel. Now all that power was gone but the hatred that feat had engendered remained. Penelope’s story sounded strange, although no more strange than anything else he’d seen that day. That didn’t mean he bought it. Like any other Ithacan of his generation, Jack had come of age along with the Internet. He knew anyone could tell a story. If enough people believed it that tale would never be forgotten. None of that made it true.
Although the glowing lines of magic power that you could access with music did make it seem like anything was possible.
“So the Aresians use the Wayfinder’s Veins to catch people and eat them so they grow larger, right? They open up a hole and pull people like you and me in. How long have they been doing that?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to keep track of time down here. I’m not even sure how old I am, although the T’ul tell me I’m physiologically an adult.”
He shot her a sideways look. “They taught you some pretty big words, too, unless you went to a kindergarten for the ludicrously gifted. How do they know so much about us?”
“When they decide to trust you, they can explain it to you.”
Jack opened his mouth to complain but a distant, basso profundo voice singing a rhythmic chant drifted over the terrace. His stomach did a flip-flop. It sounded like it was on the side opposite the Gate. “Is that Hesiod?”
“There must have been a speed line I didn’t know about,” Penelope hissed.
“I thought this was your home turf!”
“I’ve only been on this terrace for about a month, there’s a lot I don’t know about it!” She pulled him onto the wide, orange line and pointed to his trombone. “Can you pick up any song on that thing?”
“Anything the human voice can sing.” He moved his horn to the ready position and worked the slide a bit to limber up. “Give me a few bars and I’ll fill in the rest.”
Penelope replied by piping out a series of staccato notes with very little variance to them, a marching anthem turned up to eleven. A pulse of light rose up from the Wayfinder’s Vein and an invisible hand pushed them forward. The tune wasn’t bad but, like anything, Jack felt it could benefit from punching it up with a little swing. He blasted the notes from his bone then added that swing and their speed doubled.
This little tune had unexpected twists to it, though. Turning from one vein to another required changes to the progression of notes and the first time Penelope sang it Jack didn’t see it coming. The resulting twist in their momentum flung him off the vein and he probably would have broken something if Penelope hadn’t grabbed him with her right arm and dragged him back. For a moment he thought he saw muscles like steel cords rippling under that gray glove. The next time they turned, Penelope sang the altered series of notes twice so he heard them coming ahead of time.
At first the thrill of traveling by music banished all other thoughts from Jack’s mind. Every swingin’ musician said they could feel the music move them but at that moment Jack knew none of them had ever felt it like this. But as the initial rush faded he realized Hesiod’s cover of their song wasn’t getting further away. It was getting closer. Louder. Coming from more directions.
They were getting surrounded. Penelope was turning down one vein then another, taking them up and down the terrace. At one point they headed along a vein that eventually sloped down to the next terrace below. However there was a mob of normal sized cyclopes down there, waving torches in time to their marching tune as they shot along a parallel vein.
Penelope quickly turned them back up and towards the tunnel they’d emerged from. The sound of Hesiod’s song echoed off the stone buildings around them, getting closer all the time, but another sound was starting to overpower it. A long, moaning high E.
Penelope abruptly stopped singing. It took a second for Jack to notice and follow suit, a moment more for their momentum to fade and bring them to a stop at a major crossroad where four of the great Waymaker’s Veins met in an intersection. In three directions groups of Aresians approached at the speed of song. The group opposite the empty path was led by the towering bulk of Hesiod the giant, waving a torch the size of a small tree in the air, the torchlight glinting of dozens of sinister eyes clustered around him. He boomed out a word in his garbled Athenian and the songs of the cyclopes faded as well.
For a moment only the Gate could be heard. Then Hesiod boomed out more gibberish that had the sound of a taunting question. “What’d he say?”
“He asked if we’d like to be devoured by him or the Gate.”
Jack licked his lips, trying to think of something witty to say. He came up blank. “You have a preference?”
“I’ve been avoiding Aresians since I came down here, I’m not about to give them what they want now.”
“Gate it is.” He wet his lips one last time then put them to the mouthpiece once more. Penelope piped out the downbeat and he joined in to send them sweeping away from the giant and into the embrace of the Gate’s song. It was hard to keep track of things after that.
The high E overwhelmed every attempt he made at independent thought. As hard as it was to believe, Jack felt like the Gate was truly mourning. He had visions of crowds of humanity teeming down the streets of the terraced chasm to the Gate, pouring through it at all hours of the day. There had been purpose and possibility to their travels and, in turn, purpose and possibility for the Gate. It had looked over endless vistas in those days. Now it saw nothing but darkness. No one saw purpose in it and so its potential faded away. All it could do was sing the last song it knew and wait.
Jack and Penelope found themselves standing in front of a massive oval, partly buried in the ground yet still taller than Hesiod standing upright. The opening was… nothing. The other side did not show through it, it did not glow with the power of the Waymaker’s Veins nor was the opening black with night. When Jack looked away from it, he could not remember anything about the portal. When he looked at it he could not think at all.
“It wants us to go through,” Penelope whispered.
“I think you’re right.”
“Why?”
“Why did you try to keep Hesiod from catching and eating me?”
She was quiet for a moment. “You think it’s lonely?”
“Not quite.” Jack pursed his lips once, then twice, and raised up his trombone. “It’s been a good set, Penny. Think you can follow my lead this time?”
She laughed softly. “I never learned songs quickly but I’ll try.”
He brought the slide in and tested a note or two, looking for that high E. Once he had it he started towards the Gate and matched it’s note, mournful moan to brassy blast, and he started in on his set. The boys had planned a killer show and it was a shame to let all that practice go to waste. If the booze and the women were out of reach then playing his own way out would just have to do.
Every night begins with the dance, an explosion of joy and energy. Jack swung his way towards the gate, Penelope struggling to follow the tune as much as his steps. The Gate was unmoved. He segued into a smoky tune of desire and longing. Penelope slipped an arm through his as the Gate drew them near. Finally Jack dropped the bell of the horn low and played a soft, slow song for family left at home, sung by a soldier as he lay among the dying. The Gate stooped low to catch every note.
The song ended as the sun set on the soldier’s last breath. Jack barely breathed himself, that barest gust of wind playing the same high E he’d started with. He held it as he stepped through the opening. The Gate whisked Jack and Penelope away. For a moment he couldn’t see anything and he felt the Gate’s moaning note fade away as nothingness engulfed him. Jack pulled away from the mouthpiece and took a deep breath. The Gate thought things were over but that was its mistake. For as long as it stood in the middle of that city the song of the Waymakers had never ceased. It didn’t know that a tune could end. It didn’t know the world still turned. It just clung to that last note, wondering why no one was there to sing with it anymore.
What it didn’t realize was that if you never let go of the last note you never had a chance to hear the coda. Jack adjusted the slide and dropped from E to G, from minor to major, and played the next sunrise. The cry of a child, born at dawn of the first day of the year, a promise of life in exchange for death. Of hope after loss. Of a new song to follow the old, if you have the courage to push past the end.
The Gate shuddered. For what felt like an eternity nothing else happened.
Then it showed them a glimpse of other worlds. The red plains of Ares. The roaring storms of Dias. The sweeping oceans of Gaia. But now that the show was over Jack just wanted to hit the green room and talk over the set with his band.
The vistas vanished and the Gate went still. All Jack could feel was Penelope, still clinging to his arm.
Then a door slammed shut behind him and they were standing under a flickering florescent light, backstage at The Wreck. A battered, threadbare couch sat in the corner to his left and a mirror sat over a counter to his right. Jack felt a smile creeping across his face. Penelope tensed. “Where are we?”
He indulged a full grin. “A dance club in Syracuse City. Hopefully in time for the after party.”
“We’re not dead?”
Jack burst out laughing. “Not yet! Let’s see if we can squeeze in another set or two before they chase us off the stage.”
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