Symphony of Blood, Part 2: A ghoulish performance, a thirst for blood, a fiery end

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Charlie didn’t need much dead face makeup. There was more color in her piano keys than her skin now. Deep circles rimmed her eyes. She worried people would think she’d been bruised. Still, she sat before the dressing room mirror in Inferno’s green room, caking on white foundation and rouging her cheeks to breathe a little life into her appearance.

The mirror reflected the door opening behind her. Beth stepped in dressed like a Boris Karloff Dracula: black cape, slicked hair and blood staining her mouth. The sight of Beth quickened Charlie’s pulse.

“Curtain in twenty,” Beth said.

Charlie exhaled sharply. “Thanks.”

“Full house, too.” Beth stepped close and checked her own makeup in the mirror. “Glad you’re better,” she said. “The show would’ve flopped without you.” Beth had surprised Charlie the previous day: Someone had paid to move the piano to Inferno.

Charlie locked eyes with Beth’s reflection. Her heart pounded. She resisted the desire to press against her, run a finger along her jawline, down her neck …

“Who paid to move my piano?”

Beth reached for the flask on the vanity. “Whatcha got here?” Charlie shot out a hand and grabbed her wrist. The warmth of Beth’s skin sent shockwaves through Charlie’s body. A rhythm pounded in her ears — lub-DUB, lub-DUB, lub-DUB. Beth’s heartbeat.

“Charlie,” Beth said. “Your hand is freezing.”

“Sorry.” She let go. “It’s just vodka. I can’t take any chances. You know.”

“COVID,” Beth nodded. “Right.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “COVID.”

Beth arched her hands in a vampire pose and spoke in a faux Transylvanian accent: “Bite neck tonight.”

“‘Bite neck tonight’?”

“Actors break leg.” She carried on the voice and wiggled her crooked fingers. “Vampires bite neck.”

“Chomp, chomp.” Charlie smiled, revealing her sharpened canines. She imagined sinking them into Beth’s neck, blood coating her mouth, quenching her thirst like a desert walker’s first drink.

“Cool teeth.” Beth leaned close. Charlie smelled the cabernet on her breath. “Way better than Halloween Express.”

“Beth.” Charlie bolted upright, seconds from tearing her sharpened canines into her friend’s jugular. She thought of the rabbits in her backyard, how quickly she’d descended upon them, the gushing blood.

Beth put up her hands. “Sorry,” she said. “I’ll leave you alone.”

“No, no, I’m sorry.” Charlie softened. “But really, who paid to move my piano?”

“Some guy showed up yesterday. Big stack of cash. You know someone with an Eastern European accent?”

“What did he look like?”

“Pale, tall. Don’t remember his face.” She checked her watch. “Ten to curtain,” she said in her vampire voice. “Your audience awaits.” Beth left. Charlie locked the door, opened her flask, and drank the rabbit’s blood hidden inside. The memory of a bone-white hand emerging from a darkened cloak surfaced into her mind. She shuddered.

Supermarket meat had lost its effect after a handful of Door Dash deliveries. The pain returned, and Charlie writhed in bed, Googling subjects like “iron deficiency symptoms,” “raw meat poisoning,” and “full body aches with desire for blood,” but nothing, especially the latter, accounted for her agony.

Then one night, Fang saved her. Her cat leapt onto the bedside windowsill and chittered at a rabbit in the yard. Suddenly, she was squatting over the animal in the moonlight, spitting clumps of fur through bloodied lips. The rabbit’s hot blood sparked fireworks in her body. How had she gotten outside so quickly? A terrifying reality dawned on her: She needed fresh blood.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of her illness was losing time. One minute, she’d be rehearsing for the film screening; the next, gnawing a bloodied gopher corpse in the cold grass.

Blood made her stronger. Her music for “Nosferatu” now incorporated the bizarre melodies from her dreams. The music possessed her, desperate to be heard, as if beamed into her soul from …

The phantom.

She thought of the great composers, Mozart and Beethoven and Chopin, waking with symphonies screaming in their minds, their mad devotion to give the music life. Where did those sounds come from? Then she thought of prophets, Moses and Mohammed and Jesus, receiving heavenly messages, baffled by their selections as divine conduit. What deity — divine or otherwise — could be communicating with her? And what were its plans?

One night, she woke in a fog-coated clearing beside the corpse of an enormous buck. Its pink tongue drooped over black lips, one antler snapped at the stem. Blood pooled from a fist-sized hole in the buck’s thick neck. More blood blackened Charlie’s hands, streamed down her neck and chest. In the distance, wolves stalked the skeletal tree line. One by one they craned their heads and howled at the full moon. Their eerie wails sounded like the music from her dreams.

The Inferno had reached capacity. The costumed crowd mingled around the basement bar room drinking dyed-red libations. Everyone wore capes over bloodied suits and Victorian dresses. Fake blood-stained powdered faces. Charlie blended right in with her crimson lace dress, high-collared cape brushing the heels of her knee-high leather boots.

And yet …

She waited alone in the muggy backstage room, sipping her flask of rabbit’s blood. Condensation wept from the block limestone walls. These old stones reminded her of the catacombs in Paris. Walls built of mashed bone. Cuspid and femur and cranium. She peeked out from behind the curtain separating her from the stage. A movie screen hung from floor to ceiling against the back wall. Across the room, her piano waited, decorated with cobwebs, candles and a glowing jack-o’-lantern carved like a vampire. The piano brought some relief, though not enough to remove the desire to dash from person to person, pierce their jugulars and drink their hot blood. Rabbits, raccoons, even big game — they were one thing. But humans …

She sipped her flask.

A voice rasped her name: “Charlie.” Behind her, Beth held two chalices brimming with red liquid. “Do you want to drink my blood?”

“Do I want … your blood?”

“Cabernet, silly.” Beth sipped wine. “Get it? Red wine? Blood?” She thumbed her bottom lip. “You’ve got some … red on you.”

Charlie wiped spilt rabbit’s blood from her mouth. “Makeup.”

Beth checked her watch. “Two minutes.”

“Beth.” An urge consumed her. She needed to tell Beth everything: about the bat, the phantom, the illness, the dead animals, the endless desire for blood . . . “Listen,” Charlie continued, “there’s something …”

The Inferno went black. The projector light sliced the darkness. The audience roared.

“Later,” Beth said. “It’s showtime.” She dashed into the light like a hungry vampire, baring her fake fangs and hissing at the front row. The audience loved it.

Then she shielded her eyes in the projector light and thanked everyone for making her Halloween dreams come true. More applause. “And now,” she spoke in her Transylvanian accent, “we present our blood-sucking maestro, Charlie Cole!”

The audience cheered. Charlie hurried to the piano. Dread radiated through her body as she positioned her hands on the keyboard. The ivories felt different. Warm, damp, and … vibrating? Something felt wrong.

The film began. Charlie struck her opening chord. The dissonant note cluster filled the giant room. The audience howled. Charlie played on. The audience giggled and squealed at the old movie. Her dread deepened. Still, she played on. As Count Orlock’s strength grew, so did the sound of low moaning. It rose in volume until it enveloped the room. Charlie looked up from the keys and gasped: The audience stood, wavering trance-like and singing. Piercing sopranos, rumbling basses, moaning tenors and altos joined in a hellish choir. Charlie knew this sound.

Then the piano started trembling. Slowly at first, until the entire instrument rocked, every string resonating simultaneously in sinister cacophony. Candles fell and lit up the cobwebbing. The jack-o’-lantern’s lid rolled off toward the movie screen and set it ablaze. Charlie leapt from the shuddering piano and tried stamping out the burning screen, but the edge of her cape caught fire. She tore it off. Up it went in a bright orange blaze.

More fire had spread around the perimeter of the room, trapping the audience. Their trance had broken, and they panicked, screaming and tripping, searching for an exit — until the wolves stopped them. A pack appeared from the shadows and herded everyone back into the circle of fire. Yipping and snarling, they menaced the crowd with bared teeth. The screaming rose. The wolves howled. Fire alarms wailed. The piano clanged as some unseen force slammed it against the stone floor.

This was the symphony from her dreams.

Something large and dark descended from the ceiling, blocking the projector light until fire alone lit the room. The horrible sounds faded. The wolves growled low. And there, in the center of the room, illuminated by fire, stood the robed figure, cloaked entirely in black. A voice rasped inside her mind. A burning desire filled her body. She longed for this … thing.

Another voice. “Charlie!” Beth, calling from the dark. Music surged in her ears. She turned to the piano. It rested upright, waiting for her. She went to it and began to play.

But not the music the phantom fed her. Charlie played her own music, a piece she’d been working on long before she’d ever played this devil’s piano. A piece that had also awakened her in the middle of night. One that had nearly been erased by nights of blood and howling.

A piece for Beth.

As she played, the piano began to buck and writhe. The phantom cackled inside her ears and still she played, hammering the keys, pounding them harder when they refused her touch, slamming the ivory until her knuckles ached and blood poured from her fingers. The voice in her ears laughed. Charlie didn’t care. She played while fires burned and wolves howled and people screamed. She played because it was all she had left.

A piano key cracked, fell to the floor. More broke, cracking like old bones. Piano wire snapped and burst through the ancient body.

The cackling in her ears turned to moaning, then pleading, then an agonized howl. She played until there was no piano left to play and then slammed her hands against the cracking wood, breaking it further and further, until the piano crumbled to scrap and a deafening sound filled the room, that of flapping, whooshing wings.

The voice in her mind evaporated and there was only silence and darkness. Charlie looked out into the smoking room. The fires were dead, the crowd was calmed, the wolves had vanished. The thing that had sent her to hell was gone.

“Charlie.”

Fire illuminated Beth’s face. Dirt and ash smeared her makeup. She hugged Charlie.

“Beth, I’m worried I might be …”

Beth kissed her. Blood lit up Charlie’s tongue. She felt alive.

Editor’s Note This is part 2 of the fiction series “Symphony of Blood” by Mankato writer Colin Scharf.

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