Perfect Pitch
by Luc Diamant
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
Ivan snuck off to investigate the haunted basement by himself. Again.
When he’d tried earlier that night, Clay had come running after him and dragged him back up. So, after dinner, Ivan had produced a bottle of the red wine that always made Clay sleep through Ivan’s worst snoring.
The last time Ivan had been in this basement was nearly fifteen years ago, on a miserable vacation with his parents.
When their screaming kept him up at night, he had crept around the cabin, finding hidden spaces. He’d saved the basement for a night when even the thick walls of the linen closet in the attic couldn’t drown out the sound.
Inching down the stairs, his eyes adjusted to the darkness faster than he’d expected. The basement smelled of dried wood and juniper.
Afterward, he could never remember if he saw the monster right away. All he knew was that he wasn’t startled. Wary, yes. But he was wary most of the time.
The monster was about as tall as Ivan, holding an old walking cane that seemed more accessory than aid. It was covered in dark gray fur to the tips of its tufted ears and looked almost cute.
“I can help you,” it said in a warm voice.
“You can make them stop?”
“No. But I can show you the beauty in it.”
Ivan scoffed. “That’s stupid.”
The monster smiled. “Aren’t there things you love that other people hate?”
Ivan thought. “Mint ice cream,” he said. Then, “What do you want?”
“I won’t charge you anything just for trying.”
Ivan took a slow step forward, then another. Up close, he could see that the monster’s eyes were all blue, with no white or pupil. The color reminded him of a butterfly he’d kept in a jar until his mother found out and made him release it.
Ivan gave a shaky nod.
The monster touched his temple with the handle of its cane, and the sounds from upstairs morphed. He could still hear the yelling and crying. But he heard achingly beautiful string music now, too, a harmony his mother transitioned into a solo. Ivan stood transfixed.
“Is this what you hear all the time?” he whispered.
“Yes. Better. Right now it still hurts, doesn’t it?”
Ivan nodded.
The monster leaned in and lowered its voice. “I can make that go away.”
“Yes.” Ivan’s voice trembled. “Yes, please.”
“All you have to do is promise —”
Ivan yelped as his shirt collar was grabbed from behind.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” His father’s voice was a bassoon. When he grabbed Ivan’s hair and dragged him to the stairs, the sting tasted like jelly beans. He looked back to where the monster stood, unnoticed by his father.
“I’ll be here,” it mouthed silently.
His father hauled him to the car and locked him in. Soon after, he re-emerged with Ivan’s mother and three suitcases. No one spoke as they drove. Every so often, Ivan heard wind chimes as his mother’s breath hitched in the passenger seat.
By the time Ivan started high school, he played twelve instruments, and everyone knew without him having said a word that he would get a full scholarship for any conservatory he wanted.
He chose one in New York. Manhattan was full of inspiration. It was easy there to shun happy, easygoing people. They sounded unbearably dull.
His friendships and relationships were short and tempestuous. He mined them for music that no one, even whoever had most recently stormed out on him, ever seemed able to resist.
It all still hurt. Every breakup, every fight, every phone call with his mom. His pain and anger went into his music, too. Everything except his guilt. That he shoved somewhere deep and soundproof.
Three major record labels scouted him before the end of his first semester. By the time he graduated, his music was paying for an Upper West Side apartment and daily groceries at Whole Foods. Pitchfork called his first album “a startlingly evocative blend of classical and pop that will make you cry and hit repeat for a week.”
None of it made the nightmares stop.
It was a year before he met someone like him. As soon as Aston strode into the bar, just late enough that Ivan had started to wonder if he was being stood up, Ivan knew. Aston’s smile was genuine, but his pale blue eyes were cold as frostbite. Ivan noticed his pulse quickening, noticed Aston noticing it, too. Aston gripped Ivan’s hand slightly harder than necessary as he shook it. Neither of them spoke.
Aston fetched two drinks, then slid into the booth opposite Ivan. He leaned in, still silent, seeming to drink in Ivan’s nerves along with his whiskey.
Ivan downed his glass and ordered two new ones.
It was Aston who, five drinks deep, broached the topic.
“So,” he asked, “could you tell from my profile, or did you realize when I walked in?”
Ivan thought. “I didn’t think about it. But in hindsight, your paintings…” He took a sip. “You?”
Aston laughed. “Oh, I knew. It’s all over your profile.”
Ivan shrunk back a little at that. “You do this often, then?”
“Actually, no. I’ve met ones like me before, but never like you.”
He didn’t need to explain what he meant. There was no internal conflict behind Aston’s piercing gaze. The corners of his eyes had slight wrinkles that his forehead was entirely free of.
“What I want to know,” Aston said, confirming Ivan’s thoughts, “is why not go all the way? Why make it so… complicated?”
“Not a choice,” Ivan sighed, and before he knew it, he was telling the whole story. Aston listened with rapt attention. Ivan was dimly aware that he shouldn’t trust this man, but he had never been able to talk about this subject with anyone, and he found himself unwilling to stop.
When Ivan finished, Aston’s expression was one of pure delight. “Oh, that is beautiful. You can’t have the art without suffering, but you can’t have joy without suffering from the lack of art. You can’t win. And you can never do what I’m doing right now—just drink in someone else’s misery without guilt.”
“What about your own misery?” Ivan managed, feeling his pulse in his throat. “When you’re sad, or in pain, does it still feel bad?”
Aston shook his head. “The worst thing I feel anymore is boredom. And it’s hard to stay bored when there’s so much beauty. That’s the difference between us and psychopaths, you know. They don’t see what we see. Or hear, in your case.”
“I get some flavor, too,” Ivan said lamely.
Aston leaned in. “What does this conversation taste like?”
Ivan swallowed. “Mint ice cream.”
Aston’s mouth tasted like mint ice cream, too, as did his pillow when Ivan bit into it. After, Ivan expected to be kicked out, but Aston offered him a cigarette. Ivan inhaled deeply.
“So how long has it been for you?” he asked after a minute.
“Three days? I don’t tend to go long without a date.”
Ivan looked at him flatly.
Aston chuckled. “About six years. Also in a cabin in the woods, as it happens.”
Ivan’s breath hitched. “Would you still be able to find it?” he asked, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice.
“Oh, yes, easily.” Aston leaned back on his elbow, insouciant as some baroness’s favorite cat.
Ivan took another long drag from his cigarette, the sinking feeling in his stomach swelling to a crescendo as the silence stretched on. The smoke tasted like rye whiskey. Finally, he slumped back against the headboard. “You’re not going to tell me.”
Aston’s grin was like a knife. “I’ll make you a painting of the way you feel right now,” he said. “You’ll love it.”
Ivan started browsing the paranormal investigation corner of the internet in earnest after that, and before long, he was going ghost-watching with a guy named Clay.
Clay, Ivan could tell, had seen things. Not the same things as Ivan, but real things. He never talked about it, just treated it as a given that they were both in this because they knew firsthand.
Instead, they talked about their childhoods, which had been eerily similar, and about whatever supernatural trail they were on that day. Ivan found his relationship with Clay very different from his other friendships. Clay, having been in the business for years, had insider information Ivan did not have access to, which meant that Ivan had to stay on his good side. Clay was still a means to an end, he supposed, but one that did not hurt either of them.
He kept seeing Aston. He couldn’t help it. The pain was too good. He had half an album’s worth of songs about it within a few months.
He never took Aston to his apartment, where Aston’s painting hung above his bed.
Clay got to see plenty of Ivan’s apartment, though never the bedroom.
Ivan, in turn, became deeply familiar with Clay’s car, an old Ford Focus that always smelled faintly of bubble gum.
Sometimes, after an overnight stakeout, he’d sit in the passenger seat looking at Clay’s manicured hands on the steering wheel, hearing nothing but faint wind chimes, and think that maybe he could get used to this kind of silence.
More and more often, he almost put his own hand over Clay’s.
So when Clay showed him an anonymous tip about an entity in the basement of a cabin in the woods, Ivan was not as excited as he would have been a few months before.
Even now, as he tiptoed downstairs, the smell of dried wood and juniper filling his nose, Ivan had not made up his mind about what he would do if the monster was still there. He found himself almost hoping it wouldn’t be.
It was, though. He had expected it to be either the height he had been at eight years old or the height he was now, but it was somewhere in between. For some reason, this unnerved him more than anything.
“You’re back,” it said, looking at him with what appeared to be mild curiosity.
“Yes.”
“You want to make a deal, then?” The monster seemed neither surprised that Ivan had returned nor perturbed that he had taken well over a decade. “I won’t ask much from you for removing your old perceptions.”
“I’m not sure if that’s what I want,” Ivan confessed. “I might want the music gone instead.”
The monster nodded. “I won’t charge much for that, either.”
Ivan froze. He hadn’t considered that both options would have a price. “What would it cost?” he asked, suddenly hoarse.
“Nothing much. Just your ability to hear music.”
“You mean—”
“No music of any kind. No instruments, no singing, nothing. You won’t even remember what it sounded like. It will feel like a memory hanging just out of reach, forever.”
Dread pooled in Ivan’s stomach. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer to the next question now, but he had to know. “And to remove the pain?”
“For that,” a voice said from the top of the stairs, “all you have to do is promise our old friend there a favor.”
Ivan did not give Aston the satisfaction of whirling around in shock. “You sent the anonymous tip,” he said.
“I wanted to see what you would do. And how he would feel, after.”
That made Ivan turn.
It was a testament to Clay’s nerves that Ivan had not heard him until that moment, despite the knife Aston was holding to his throat. Now, though, as Ivan stared at him, a strained bagpipe melody drifted down the stairs.
Ivan hardened. “Let him go. He doesn’t need to see this.”
“Oh, but I think he does. Can’t you guess what our tufty-eared friend wants you to do, after you’ve been changed?”
“Who says I’m going to be changed?”
Aston smiled pityingly. “Answer the question, Ivan.”
Ivan looked at the monster. He did know. “It wants me to make music for it.” He turned back to Aston, who was leading Clay down the stairs. “And I’d need an instrument.”
“And I brought you the perfect one. He likes you. Trusts you. He might even more-than-like you. I’m not sure, but I think we’ll find out.”
Clay’s mouth was a hard line. A chorus of violins was accompanying him down the wooden staircase, frantic and melancholy. He was staring dead ahead, avoiding Ivan’s eyes.
“Clay,” Ivan said. “Please.”
Clay’s gaze snapped to his. His jaw tightened. “You knew,” he said. “You knew what was down here.”
The stab of guilt hit Ivan the same moment the music did. It was the swell of a full orchestra. Clay’s fury and hurt. His anger at himself for trusting Ivan. His shame at how deep the betrayal cut when he and Ivan had never even kissed. His sadness that now they never would. His fear. Ivan heard harmonies he would need years to master. And floating above it all, a bright, impossible note from an instrument that had not yet been invented.
It was this sound that did it. The moment Ivan heard it, he knew he could not live the rest of his life never hearing anything like it again—and he knew, too, that he would never be able to carry the guilt he felt for producing it.
Ivan turned away from Clay, facing the monster.
“Take away the pain,” he said.
“No,” Clay called out behind him. Ivan did not move.
The creature touched the cane to his ear and a slow smile spread across Ivan’s face as Clay’s scream faded into the purest note ever to open a symphony.