Author: G. Gleason, Word Count 666 Words
Featured in Spooky Archaeological Story Moot: Live Stream – 2025
When all is said and done, blame me.
“At least she left me with the leash,” I was saying as we passed the mouth of the alley. It was me and (now) my incredibly overfed ginger pekingese. The dog stared at me with her solemn, dark Ewok face. I started–for just a moment in the ruddy vapor light, the beady orbs of her eyes looked like pools of flame.
As I was fumbling with the leash, unsettled, she began to waddle into the darkness. I looked up as it started to pull taut and a series of regular shapes caught my eye. Not the bulbous scrawl of some artist’s name or some lewd message in fresh Krylon but a stepped pattern of some kind. Made with skulls, with gory heads and hearts as punctuation, but a pattern nonetheless. One I recognized.
“It’s music,” I whispered incredulously to myself. Now if you have ever heard an interested pekingese, they sort of sound like hairball-coughing cats that are laughing at same time,, and the dog was trying to pull me further down the alley. I had no idea what she was interested in, but it clearly wasn’t the morbid score. So with the hacking, waddling animal trying to pull
me, I was spending a good deal of time trying not to drop my phone as I snapped pictures.
“Punkin…symbols of death,.” I muttered absently to the dog, who only snorted at me. Once I was sure I’d documented the whole of the composer’s inscription I led Punkin back into the harsh light of the street.
At home, I laid the whole thing out and printed it. There had been no volume or timing marks, or even any tempo instructions, but I figured something written in skulls and bloody organs ought to sound pretty somber, so when the first notes filled my piano room, they were dark and stately like a hymn to Satan. I think Mussorgsky would have been impressed.
After an eye-dragger of a long night noodling at the keyboard my nervous system got the better of me and I succumbed to the call of bed.
There was no abating the sudden desire I had to finish this piece. It was as if whoever had painted it on that wall had needed the interpretation of an active mind to make it real and had reached across the void between the idea and the actual. It was quite obvious that I was under the influence of some compulsion, which I suppose from the comfort of hindsight it’s possible to be annoyed about since I’m not generally that sort of person. I had worked on it for a good while with no coffee or breakfast when a dispirited honking reminded me that I ought to feed Punkin (a proper amount of) some food, so I did, and while I set about the task of studiously ignoring the stench of wet dog food (she only ate wet food), it occurred to me that Scriabin had plotted to end
the world by composing his Mysterium, and although he had never finished it, my improvisations on the alley composer’s themes tended toward Scriabin-ese.
Punkin was annoyed at her sane food portion and seemed content to look at me in such a way to let me know I had not escaped my own conviction of neglect.
The reviews for what I was with no apology dubbing my “Dark Alley Concerto” were tepid at fist, and then increasingly complimentary. Soon, people were whistling its dark melodies on trains and it was being covered by every gimmicky Youtube musician, and even the dead rose to listen. The first reports of cemeteries being emptied out started around a month after I had my first big late night interview. The first shaky vertical-video of a skeletal mariachi band performing it was “verified true” not long after that on fact-checking websites.
The dead, it seems, have come out to play. I can here them faintly even now. Celebrating.
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